Johnny yawned, his sinewy arms stretching across the broad expanse his king sized bed that took center stage of his bachelor pad above the bar where he worked. He flapped his arm around haphazardly, surreptitiously checking for another body in his bed and inadvertently causing the black satin sheets to inch slowly down his perfect, lickably translucent skin. He sighed in a mix of relief and disappointment when he realized he was alone. He opened flawless crystalline blue eyes and stared up at the ceiling, pleased that his hangover was minimal. Life had been a series of weird ups and downs since he had stumbled into a hospital in Los Angeles with no memory of who he was and severe dehydration.
Apparently he was the type of guy who was friendly and charming, because he'd made friends with the nurses and the other patients on the ward, some of whom he still kept in touch with. They were pretty much his only friends and family; one nurse in particular had gone above and beyond the call of duty to help him get in touch with a legal aid organization that helped expedite the process of getting him out of the hospital and giving him a new identity. He had jokingly chosen John Van Winkle, because he felt very much like he had woken up after drinking with the fairies to a world that wasn't his. He couldn't quite explain that feeling, but he knew it to be true.
Since he'd gotten out of the hospital, John found he gravitated towards the darker side of life. Which was odd, since he also seemed to be a nerd. A lit/poetry nerd, to be precise. Although something made his heart feel oddly tight when he saw old episodes of Star Trek. Johnny was unsurprised to find that he was also the type of guy to shrug off those types of dichotomies and just roll with the punches. Sometimes the literal punches, as he found he was almost unrealistically good at hand to hand combat.
He had rambled around in his fashion for a bit, hoping that if he traveled far enough, flamboyantly enough, he would eventually meet someone who knew him; who missed him. Plus some fairly creepy lawyer types had started poking around the hospital. Johnny couldn't trust much, but what he could trust was his gut, and his gut said everyone would be safer if he rode off into the sunset. And so he had.
He'd landed the bar job on a fluke. He'd come there trying to hustle some pool-which was apparently one of this inherent amnesia skills-but wound up putting down a bar fight which would have otherwise been fairly costly in terms of property damage. When the manager had asked how he could repay him, Spike Johnny had jokingly asked for a job. When the manager had actually given him a job, Johnny had been shocked to find that he was actually a kickass bartender.
Life had gone on fairly pleasantly after that, until the bar had been taken over by an anonymous corporate owner who had not only kept everything the same, but significantly raised everyone's salary, to a ludicrous amount for anyone in the the restaurant industry, especially for that weirdly out of the way location. The new ownership had even offered an educational allowance which Johnny had jumped on. Now he was halfway to a degree, had a job he liked, people who depended on him, who liked him even, and everything was great.
Still ,a frown couldn't help puckering his gorgeous pink lips. Something was off. It was all too easy. For some reason a flash of one of the regulars, a one eyed drunk with depression, flashed before his eyes. A really sorry sod, he always looked like the world had beat him down and kept on swinging. Johnny didn't deserve this life. THAT he felt in his gut. Something was wrong, and that certainty was like a thorn in his heart, preventing him from really enjoying life. He was seeing a therapist (the new owners also provided incredibly affordable healthcare) and he knew he shouldn't think like that, but that didn't stop the quiet, singsongy British voice that came to him between sleep and awakening, smelling of Jasmine and covered in silk ribbons and dolls hair ringlets, telling him that this wasn't right.
Johnny shook his head vehemently, trying to shake off the last niggling thoughts of wrongness. Instead he looked up into the skylight, planned out his day, a mix of studying and work, and tried to focus on the positive before he levered his glistening naked body out of bed and in the direction of some coffee.