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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
     

    H allucinations 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