A movie here was about the cost of a soda. I don’t even know why I argued about paying my way. If I really meant for Noah to be deterred, I should act like I didn’t care. Arguing over everything and ignoring him were obvious signs that I was trying too hard. I resolved to try to be friendlier and less bitchy. I wanted to project an“ I don’t care” attitude, not an“ I’m so hurt that I can barely stand to look at you, yet I don’t want to be away from you either” message.
Looking around, I was surprised by the number of people in the theater for a Saturday night, early on in the year. I figured everyone would be at some house party, or over on Greek Street, or in one of the campus bars.
I leaned over to a girl next to me. “What’s the movie?”
She looked at me like I was crazy. “Lust, Caution.”
“That doesn’t sound very French.”
“It’s not. It’s Chinese. Directed by Ang Lee,” She bit out each word as if I was five years old.
“I thought it was a French film with subtitles,” I couldn’t let go of the fact that it wasn’t a French film.
“You got half that right. It’s got subtitles.” With that she turned away and resumed her conversation with her friend. I think it had something to do with half-wits and how they shouldn’t even come to subtitled movies if they weren’t serious film students.
I pulled out my phone to do some quick searching on“ Lust, Caution,” but I heard a commotion and saw the three guys at the aisle, trying to get through to the seats I had picked out.
Mike led the way, followed by Noah and then Bo. When Mike started to seat himself, Noah grabbed his arm and pulled him upright.
“No, you sit over there,” Noah directed Mike to the seat I was in. “Grace, sit here.” And then, as if he thought his orders would sound better, he added, “Please.” I wasn’t planning on moving, but Mike stood there uncertainly, with Noah’s hand still gripping his other arm.
“Move, girl,” I heard from behind me. “The movie is about to start.”
I let out a loud and ungrateful sigh and moved one seat over. Everyone collapsed in their chairs, and I heard a“ finally” behind us.
Now I was in the worst position I could imagine, in a dark theater sitting next to Noah, so I leaned into Mike as far as I could without making it seem like I wanted to get intimate with him. I tied to portray a certain nonchalance over the fact that I was going to watch a Chinese-subtitled film with Noah Jackson. I probably looked like I had overused the distortion or blur tool on my computer photo-editing program right now.
“The film isn’t French. It’s Chinese,” I felt responsible for dragging Mike here, so I tried to impart what little knowledge I had.
“Oh yeah? I just heard that it had subtitles and assumed it was French,” He whispered back. I gave him the I know, right? look. Then, he offered me a drink of his soda. I moved away and gave a mini-shudder. I wasn’t going to suck on the same straw he had in his mouth. Who knew what kind of backwash Mike sent into the soda? Now, Noah’s drink? A couple of years ago I’d have paid money to place my lips around something he had touched. Cripes. Who was I kidding? I wanted to suck on that water bottle of his until you couldn’t tell where his DNA started and mine began. I sunk lower in the seat.
The nearly three hours of sitting between Mike and Noah in the dark watching an extremely erotic film was possibly one of the most uncomfortable situations of my entire life. The movie was about a female spy sent to seduce an opposition leader. It was scene after scene of sexually explicit and forbidden love. The first sex scene was fairly violent, and I could see Mike shift restlessly beside me, while Noah was stoically unmoving. I could feel myself dying of embarrassment. I tried to look at it from a filmmaking point of view, separating myself from the action on the screen and examining the angle of the shots and the placement of the shadows. It didn’t work.
As the movie played on and the love scenes became increasingly graphic, I stopped watching. I was acutely aware of Noah. At one point, he propped his arm on the armrest, and I could feel the warm cotton of his sleeve and the soft tickling sensation of his hair against my arm. I wanted to rub up against him, place my cold nose into his throat. I wanted to pull his arm around me and drape his hand on my thigh. But I remained in my own space, arms tucked close to my sides as if I was afraid that one movement might send to me lurching into his lap to try and act out some of the scenes on the screen.
A strange tension began to seep into my body as the movie ticked on. I imagined Noah lifting his hand from his own thigh and placing it on mine, moving up and down my bare leg in long sweeps, higher with each pass, until his fingers tucked right under the fabric of my skirt. The thought of Noah’s hand between my legs made me shift. Discomfited by him, I crossed and then uncrossed my legs.
My inability to sit still didn’t go unnoticed. Mike looked at me impatiently and moved away, as if I was adversely affecting his enjoyment. I clenched my hands in my lap and closed my eyes, which only made it worse, because now all I could hear were sounds of the rustling sheets, the fall of the cloth onto the floor, and the crescendo of sounds, both human and instrumental. The air felt thick and heavy around us, like I was breathing underwater. Each breath felt labored and sounded harsh to my own ears, and I wanted to stop altogether.
At the moment I thought I would explode out of my seat and flee the theater, I felt a large, warm hand cover mine. Noah’s touch was completely unexpected, and I froze. But instead of this causing me more anxiety, Noah’s hand soothed me. I unclenched my hands. The block in my throat dissolved, and I was able to take a few deep, calming breaths. Each muscle that had tensed up seemed to unknot and relax.
The movie went on, but I noticed little of it. Instead, I focused on the tendrils of warmth that curled outward from the hand in my lap like vines on wall. The hand never moved, not throughout the entire movie. I glanced to see if Mike had noticed, but he wasn’t paying any attention to me.
The heat, the dark, the sudden cessation of panic—it all made me drowsy. Noah shifted and I felt his shoulder close to my head like an invitation. I looked at him, but his eyes were focused straight ahead. It was like his arm was detached from his body. Perhaps it was mine now.
I rested my head tentatively against the shoulder that was in my space. No one moved. I stopped worrying about what Mike would think and allowed my eyes to drift closed and my thoughts to wander into nothingness.
The noise of dozens of spring-loaded seats being snapped back in place woke me up. I jerked upright. Noah’s hand was no longer in my lap. I straightened and tried to look like I hadn’t spent the last half of the movie sleeping and holding hands with him. Too late, though, as Mike was standing up and looking down at me with a puzzled expression.
At least he didn’t look angry that he’d found his“ date” asleep on the shoulder of another guy. I wiped the sides of my mouth as surreptitiously as possible and stood up. To Mike I said, “So do you want to go to the CoffeeHouse?”
Mike looked surprised, and I heard a choked-off noise behind me. I ignored both reactions and smiled as widely as I could. Having not practiced this in front of the mirror, though, it could have looked like the joker’s grimace.
“Sure.” Mike was either baffled by my behavior or intrigued. Either way, he was willing to place himself in my company for at least another hour.
“Great,” I heard from behind me. “I’d like a coffee.”
I turned then and looked at Noah. “I’ll call you tomorrow.” I was deeply embarrassed by my actions tonight. I needed to make things right with Mike and then figure out what I was going to do with Noah.
I turned back to Mike and motioned for him to exit the theater. When he didn’t move right away, I pushed him slightly and his inertia dropped away.
I don’t know where Noah and Bo went, but when Mike and I exited the small theater, they weren’t behind us. We began the twenty-minute walk through the heart of the campus to get to the coffee house on the other side.
Summer was refusing to release its hold, and the night air was sultry instead of cool. Tall, wrought iron lampposts lit our way, interspersed with emergency call boxes.
“That’s probably the weirdest date I’ve ever been on,” Mike broke the silence as we wandered down the sidewalk bisecting the east and west sides of the campus. “Did you ask me out to make that other guy jealous?”
“No!” I exclaimed and then confessed, “I might have said I thought you were cute, and he thought he was trying to help me out.”
“So what was with the hand-holding and snuggling during the movie?”
Had I really been snuggling? “I was having a panic attack, and Noah must have known it. He was just trying to calm me down. I wasn’t snuggling. Honest.”
Mike shrugged. “I didn’t think you were interested, so you kind of surprised me.”
It was now or never. I placed a hand on Mike’s arm and stopped him. “The situation kind of got out of hand. Noah and I go way back. But I do think you are missing out on someone. Just not me.”
“No?” Mike looked adorably confused now.
He hadn’t been whipping his hair out of his face for at least ten minutes, which seemed like a new record. When he wasn’t in a group, he wasn’t insufferably trying to make himself seem more attractive by hitting on every female in a twenty-foot radius. Maybe Sarah spent a lot of time alone with Mike and this was the guy she was attracted to.
“Why aren’t you dating anyone, Mike?”
This question clearly caught him off guard, because he stammered before he defensively replied, “I’ve had hookups.”
Ugh, classic Mike response. “So are you only interested in hookups?” I needed to feel him out without throwing Sarah under the bus.
“No,” he replied slowly and then swung his hair out of his eyes. “I asked a girl out a few times in my first year, but it didn’t go anywhere. Hookups are easier, you know. Less pressure.”
I did know. My few college experiences had been drunken make-out sessions with guys equally drunk, but I didn’t think anyone truly enjoyed those experiences.
“What about Sarah?” I offered up in what I hoped was nonchalance.
“Who do you think I asked out in my first year?” He laughed but it wasn’t a funny sound.
“Really?” I was completely surprised by this. Sarah looked at him so longingly but maybe it was with regret, not unrequited love?
“Wait.” Mike caught my arm. “This isn’t a bad idea.”
“What isn’t?” I hadn’t proposed anything yet so I wasn’t sure what idea he was talking about.
“We can pretend to be interested in each other, and can make Noah and Sarah jealous at the same time,” Mike sounded enthused by this.
“That never actually works out in real life,” I pointed out.
“It was just an idea,” Mike muttered. We walked a little farther and then he asked, “So what’s the story with you and Noah?”
“I haven’t had nearly enough to drink to divulge that. How about you and Sarah?”
“She seems to only like me when other girls are into me. If I’m not dating or hooking up with someone, she has zero interest,” he said, bummed.
“Sounds like a mess.” Was I really thinking I could play Cupid or something? That wasn’t in my skill set. This night was officially a disaster. I’d fallen asleep on Noah’s shoulder, possibly drooled, and now made Mike go from enthused to sad in five seconds. I was the opposite of Cupid. Instead of shooting love arrows, I shot depression arrows.
“I thought she might have put you up to this,” Mike confessed, sounding almost hopeful.
“I wished she had,” I replied sullenly, “but instead she gave me the evil eye, so you might want to go to the library tomorrow and strike while the jealousy-iron is hot.”
“See, we should carry this on for a while. It’d be good for both of us.”
Mike was trying to be encouraging, but I had seen the light. “I have enough dysfunction in my life,” I told him.
We were closing in on the CoffeeHouse, but I wasn’t in the mood to go there anymore. I wasn’t going to orchestrate any big love connection between Mike and Sarah. I wanted to go home. “Do you mind if bail on you?”
“Nah, I might as well go home anyway.” We changed course and Mike walked me to my front door, just two blocks away from the CoffeeHouse. He gave me a big hug. “Thanks for the effort tonight, Sullivan.”
After saying goodnight, I slipped inside. It was early yet and the apartment seemed huge and empty. Lana was at her sorority house and might not be back anytime soon. I pulled out my laptop and crawled into bed. Only nineteen and I was already staying home, alone, on a Saturday night. I might as well start my cat collection.