Collide

“Watch what you’re doing! You spilled my coffee.” I say this in a thick accent, not my own voice, but it doesn’t feel put on. It feels right on my tongue and teeth and lips. It feels sexy.

“Sorry, ma’am.” The waiter dabs at my thighs with a white towel. His fingers brush too close to my belly, linger too long. “Lemme get that cleaned up for you.”

“I think you need to compensate me.” I say this with a straight face and flip my thick, dark hair over my shoulder.

“Ma’am?” He’s not stupid, this young man in the white waiter’s coat.

The train rocks beneath us.

“Come to my cabin later tonight and make sure you’re prepared to adequately compensate me for the ruin of my slacks.”

His only answer is a smile. I finish my meal with my own smile, making it difficult to enjoy the food. I’m not hungry any longer, anyway. Not for dinner.

In my cabin I wait for the knock at the door, and when I open it, there he is. Not in his waiter’s uniform now, but a pair of dark trousers and a yellowed white poet’s shirt. Peasant wear, but I don’t care. Peasants make great lovers.

“Just look,” I say, pointing to the dark stain on my white slacks. I’ve deliberately done nothing to clean them. “See what you did, you clumsy man?”

“I can pay for them, ma’am… .”

“That won’t do at all. These pants are pure silk, made by my personal designer. They’re irreplaceable.”

“Then what?” He’s properly challenging.

He has long, thick, dark blond hair clubbed into a tail at the back of his neck. When I loosen it from the tie, it falls over my fingers and hands. It’s rougher than silk.

“Clean them.”

With a sullen look he pulls a handkerchief from his back pocket and, with a flourish, pushes me a few steps until the backs of my knees hit the edge of the bed, which has been turned down for the night. He swipes at the stain on my pants without looking away from my eyes. I shudder at his touch.

“No,” I say, low and throaty. “Use your mouth.”

He goes to his knees so slowly it’s like watching butter melt. He’s smiling, but his eyes are hard. He closes them just before he puts his mouth to the stain.

I can feel the heat of his breath through the thin cloth, and I shudder again. My knees want to buckle, but I put my hand on the wall to keep myself standing. I can feel the train’s vibration in my fingers and palm.

His hands move up to grab my ass and hold me still. He looks up at me, his face inches from my crotch. I wonder if he can smell me.

“That good enough?” he says.

“No,” I tell him. “Not nearly good enough.”

His fingers grip and pull. Silk shreds. I’m suddenly bare from the waist down, my slacks torn and dangling in his fists. I have only a moment to react before his mouth is on me again. My bare flesh this time. My pussy. He sucks at my clit, nuzzling, and I cry out. He slaps my ass lightly, and I don’t know if it’s to keep me still or make me cry out louder. Then I’m on my back and he’s over me, his cock pressing my lips.

“Take it,” he says. Brutish and cruel. My cunt throbs and I turn my face. He grabs my hair, holds me still. Then, gently, softly, he rubs his cock over my pressed-closed lips. “Take it.” And I do.

All of it. Thick and hot, hard. Down the back of my throat. I suck him in, greedy for it. I suck and lick and stroke, and he fucks my mouth like it’s my cunt, and I swear I get as much pleasure from it.

He’s not even touching my clit and I feel the buildup there of pleasure. Like electricity. Like fire. I’m pumping my hips and moaning around his cock. My hair is in my face and he strokes it back, then grips a handful of it to set a slower pace.

I want him to touch me but I don’t need him to touch me. I’m going to come in a minute or two. I can feel it. And then he’s pulling away, stealing that delicious cock from me, and I do more than moan, I cry out.

“Lookit you,” he says in a voice full of triumph and yet tender, too. “Lookit you. Begging for it. Such a whore.”

I love the way he says it, like it has two syllables. Suddenly, I don’t know why we’re on a train, why he’s a waiter and I’m some sort of … countess? Or duchess? Some sort of rich bitch with too much money and an itch. Everything that made sense when this started is now a jumble.

All I know for sure is that I don’t want this to end. His hand comes down to caress my cheek. His thumb slips between my lips and I suck it gently before biting. He laughs, pulls me up, settles me onto his cock like I weigh nothing. Now there’s nothing between us and he’s inside me, all the way.

The train rocks us. He rocks us. His hands, strong hands, grip my ass and move me. His mouth takes mine. We kiss for the first time, and I want to drown in the taste of him. His tongue strokes mine. Our teeth bump. He laughs again.

“You like that?”

“I like that,” I tell him. I don’t have an Italian accent anymore.

When I look in the mirror, I don’t see my face. I don’t even see our reflection, fucking so prettily on this sleeping-car bed. The mirror is more like a window, only it doesn’t look out to the passing scenery. Instead of mountains, I see walls. I see a woman.

The woman is me.

She is there, I am here; we’re the same and I look into the eyes of my lover, this waiter whose name is …

“Johnny.”

I came out of the fugue with his name on my lips and the smell of oranges so thick and cloying in my nose and mouth I leaned over the sink and gulped water straight from the tap. I stood, heart pounding, eyes wild, face dripping. I looked at the mirror, but all I saw was myself.

Chapter 03

Hallucinations weren’t new. When I was a little girl, in the first few years after the accident, I’d had a hard time differentiating between the fugue world and the real world. I could tell when I was dreaming, but not when I was having a fugue.

It didn’t help that no matter what doctors my parents took me to, none of them could figure it out, either. The brain is still a vastly underexplored landscape. I wasn’t having seizures, though in the worst fugues I did sometimes lose motor control along with consciousness. And I didn’t have pain, except for the rare few times when I fell during one of the blackouts and hurt myself.

As I got older, I learned to tell when a fugue was coming on. I never learned to notice inside of one if I was hallucinating or not, though I did learn to tell what had been hallucination once I came out of it. And I always came out of it, even if I didn’t always hallucinate. Sometimes I just stayed blank, unblinking, unmoving, for a few seconds while the world passed around me and whoever I was talking to thought my mind had wandered.

Actually, that was how I felt about it. That my mind wandered, while my body stayed behind. I’d learned to catch up quickly in conversations with people who didn’t know me well enough to realize I’d gone blank for a few minutes. I’d adapted.

Most of the time, the hallucinations were boldly colored, often loud. Often a continuation of what I’d been doing as the fugue hit, just slightly off. I could spend what felt like hours inside the fugue and come out of it within a minute, or spend a much longer time dark and have no more than a few seconds’ worth in the dream state.

I’d never, until this early morning, had such a vivid, intense hallucination of such a sexual nature.

I was taking a little time to recover. Wallowing in my bed on a Sunday wasn’t out of the ordinary, but the fact I’d grabbed my laptop and brought it under the covers with me was. Normally I kept my bed a sanctuary, a place for sleep, not work, and though I loved my laptop like it was the conjoined twin I carried in a basket after our cruel separation, I preferred using it at my desk or on the couch. Now, though, I used the track pad to scroll through another list of search results. Johnny Dellasandro, of course. I had the fever. Bad. He had a current website for his gallery. The only mention of his acting past were the three words, “independent film star” in his bio along with a rather extensive listing of his more recent professional accomplishments. There were store hours, a list of upcoming events. A photo of Johnny, smiling into the camera and looking for all the world like he wanted to fuck whoever was on the other side of the lens … thud. Be still my little horny heart.

There were other pictures of him, too, most of the handshake variety. Johnny with the mayor, with a local radio DJ, with a president of some museum. And then, a little more surprisingly, of Johnny with celebrities. Row after row of clickable thumbnails enlarged into shots of him next to some of the biggest movie stars of the sixties and seventies. Rock stars. Poets, novelists. A bunch of familiar faces next to his. In most of them, they were both looking at the camera, but there were a few more candid shots, and in those, whoever he was with invariably looked at him like they wanted to eat him. Or be fucked by him. I couldn’t blame them.

Maybe he wasn’t so ashamed of his dingle-dallying past, after all. More searching turned up a half dozen interviews done on blogs that didn’t appear to have very many readers. Not that I was surprised. Any monkey with a computer can make a blog, and even though Johnny might’ve achieved a certain level of notoriety, it was still within a fairly small realm. He didn’t sound like he regretted anything he’d ever done, at least not in the interviews he’d done in the past few years, and while those had focused more on his current work, inevitably a few questions would slip in about his early movie-making days.

“I don’t regret any of it,” Johnny told me from a video clip taken at some awards show I’d never heard of.

The film was shaky, the sound bad, and the people walking past in the background looked a little scary. Whoever was filming also asked the questions, their voice androgynous and too loud in the microphone. Johnny didn’t seem terribly interested in being interviewed, though he did answer a few more questions.

I settled back onto my pillows, laptop on my knees. Wikipedia did indeed have an entry on him, complete with links to dozens of articles in magazine and newspaper archives. Reviews of the films and entire websites devoted to discussing them. Links to places his art had hung, or was hanging. There was literally a day’s worth of research collected in this one webpage alone. If anyone Googled me—and I did myself a few times a month just to see what was out there—the only thing they’d find would be a list of accomplishments belonging to some other woman with my name. The question was not why there was so much information available about him, but how I’d lived for more than thirty years without being aware he existed.