Collide. Megan Hart
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with the hum of conversation and the click-clack of keyboards as people took advantage of the free Wi-Fi. I liked the hum. It made me conscious of being there, present. In the moment. This moment.
“She didn’t try to hit you up for some sort of cream-cheese spread today, huh? Maybe she got the hint.” Jen offered me a fork, and though I wanted to resist, I couldn’t help taking just a taste of her brownie.
“I actually like Spicefully Tasty stuff,” I said.
“Pffft.” Jen laughed. “Get out of here.”
“No, I do,” I insisted. “It’s expensive but convenient. If I ever really cooked, it would be even better.”
“You’re telling me. All that money for a bunch of spices I can buy two for a buck at the dollar store and mix together myself. Not that I do,” Jen added. “But I could.”
“Maybe next month.” I sipped more rapidly cooling coffee, savoring the richness of the cream. “Once I get some bills paid off.”
“You’ll have better things to … oh. Niiiiice. Finally.” Jen’s voice dropped to a murmur.
I turned to look where she was staring. I caught a glimpse of a long black duster, a red-and-black-striped scarf. The man carried a thick newspaper under one arm, which in these times of smartphones and webnews was a strange enough sight to make me look twice. He spoke to the girl at the register, who seemed to know him, and took his empty mug to the long counter where all the self-serve carafes of coffee were.
In profile, he was gorgeous. Sandy-blond hair tousled just so, a sharp nose that wasn’t overpowering. Crinkles at the corners of his eyes, the color of which I couldn’t see but suspected were blue. His mouth, lips pursed in concentration as he filled his mug and added sugar and cream, looked just full enough to be tempting without being too lush.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Girl,” she said in a low, breathy voice. “You don’t know who that is?”
“If I knew, would I be asking?”
The man in the black coat passed us so close I could smell him.
Oranges.
I closed my eyes against that second wave of scent, the taste of coffee so strong on my tongue it should’ve blocked out everything else but didn’t. I should’ve smelled coffee and chocolate, but I smelled oranges. Again. I bent my head and pressed my fingertips to the magic spot between my eyes that worked swell for headaches but did nothing for fugues.
But no swirling colors seeped around the edges of my vision as I opened my eyes again, and the scent of oranges faded the farther away he got. I watched the man in the black coat take a seat facing away from us. He shook out the paper, spreading it open across the small table for two, and put his coffee down to take his coat off.
“You okay?” Jen leaned forward into my range of vision. “I know he’s fucking hot and all, but damn, Emm, you looked like you were going to pass out.”
“PMS,” I said. “I get a little woozy this time of month.”
Jen frowned, looking skeptical. “That sucks.”
“You’re telling me.” I grinned to show her I was okay, and thank God I was. Not a hint of even a minor onset like the one that had hit me earlier. I’d smelled oranges because that man smelled of them, not because of some misfiring triggers in my brain. “Anyway. Who is he?”
“That’s Johnny Dellasandro.”
My expression must’ve been as blank as I felt, because Jen laughed.
“Garbage? Skin? The Haunted Convent? C’mon, not even that one?”
I shook my head. “Huh?”
“Ooh, girl, where’ve you been? Didn’t you have cable TV growing up?”
“Sure I did.”
“Johnny Dellasandro was in all those movies. They showed them a lot on those late-night cable shows like Up Past Midnight. They were slumber party standbys.”
My mom had always been too nervous about me spending the night at someone else’s house. I’d been allowed to go to the parties so long as she picked me up at bedtime. I’d had slumber parties at my house, though. “Sure, I remember that show. But that was a long time ago.”
“Blank Spaces?”
That sounded a little more familiar, but not enough. I shrugged and looked over at him again. “I never heard of that one.”
Jen sighed and looked over her shoulder at him, then leaned forward, lowering her voice and prompting me to lean closer to hear her. “Johnny Dellasandro, the artist? He had that series of portraits that became famous back in the early eighties. Blank Spaces. Sort of like the Mona Lisa of the Andy Warhol era.”
I could maybe have picked out a Warhol painting in a museum if it had been lined up alongside a Van Gogh, a Dali, a Matisse. But other than that … “Was that the guy who did the soup cans? Marilyn Monroe?”
“Yeah, that was Warhol. Dellasandro’s work wasn’t quite as kitschy, but it did go a little more mainstream. Blank Spaces was his breakout series.”
“You said ‘wasn’t.’ He’s not an artist anymore?”
She leaned forward a little more, and I followed. “Well, he has a gallery on Front Street. The Tin Angel? You know it?”
“I’ve been past it, yeah. Never been inside.”
“That’s his place. He still does his own work, and he has a lot of local artists there, too.” She gestured around the Mocha, hung with samplings of local art, some of her pictures among them. “Better stuff than this. Every once in a while he has some big name in for a show. But he keeps it real low-key, low-profile. At least around here. I guess I can’t blame him.”
“Huh.” I studied him. He was flipping pages of the paper so slowly it looked like he was reading every single word. “I wonder what that’s like.”
“What?”
“Being famous and then … not.”
“He’s still famous. Just not in the same way. I can’t believe you never heard of him. He lives in that brownstone down the street, by the way.”
I tore my gaze from Johnny Dellasandro’s back and looked at my friend. “Which one?”
“Which one.” Jen rolled her eyes. “The nice one.”
“Oh, shit, really? Wow.” I looked at him again. I’d bought one of the brownstones on Second Street. Mine, though it had been partially renovated by a previous owner, still needed a lot of work. The one she was talking about was gorgeous, with completely repointed brickwork, brass on the gutters and a fully landscaped yard surrounded by hedges. “That’s his place?”
“You’re practically neighbors. I can’t believe you didn’t know.”
“I barely know who he is,” I told her, though now that she’d been talking about it, the title Blank Spaces sounded more familiar. “I’m not sure the real estate agent mentioned him as a selling point for the neighborhood.”
Jen laughed. “Probably not. He’s a pretty private guy. Comes in here a lot, though I haven’t seen him lately. Doesn’t talk a lot to anyone. He keeps to himself.”
I drank the last of my coffee and considered getting up to take advantage of the bottomless refills. I’d have to walk right past him, and on the way back I’d get a full-on view of his face. Jen must’ve read my mind.
“He’s worth a peek,” she said. “God knows all of us girls in here have made a trip past him a few times. So has Carlos. Actually, I think Carlos is the only one he’s ever talked to.”
I