by Mia Archer
No, the look on his face as he glanced around the lobby was proof enough that she’d just fucked up. Crap!
Maddie ducked into the same little alcove I was hiding in. It wasn’t much, just the little bit of hiding area before we hit the grating that kept people from getting into the old arcade, but it would have to work.
“Think fast,” I whispered.
Though honestly I was more excited than worried as we sat there trying to pull one over on her shift supervisor. This was exciting. This was the kind of thing I never would’ve done with Steve. See again what I said earlier about his idea of the perfect date.
“I said that because it’s the middle of the day and I know there’s no one out there,” she said, exasperation coming to her voice. “Now would you please go into the office and tell me if I’m scheduled for tomorrow? If you don’t I might talk to Derek and…”
I peered around the edge of our alcove. It seemed safe enough to do that. Especially if he was distracted.
He rolled his eyes, I could see that he was going to do what she said. I didn’t know who this Derek guy was, but clearly invoking his name was enough to get Keith to go ahead and do what he needed to do.
He moved to the back of the concession stand and disappeared into a door I hadn’t even noticed.
“It worked!” I squealed.
“What? Oh that was nothing. Just a little noise from the radio. I’m out driving,” Maddie said.
She turned and hit me with one hell of a look. Clearly I was the one who’d fucked up this time by getting a little too loud. Oops.
“Yeah, well I don’t care if you can’t find the schedule,” Maddie said. “I need to know when I’m working, and that means you need to get off your lazy butt and actually do your job for a change!”
I felt that excitement building inside me again. Maybe it helped that the stakes were so low. The worst that would happen was Keith hitting on me and maybe him interrupting us in the middle of our date, but otherwise…
Still. This was fun!
Maddie made a little circular motion with her hands. She started across the lobby, her eyes darting towards the theater office every other second. She actually tripped and nearly fell, and the only thing that saved her was me catching her at the last moment.
That was close. That would’ve let him know we were out here.
Finally we were through the lobby. I could hear the sound of movies playing, clearly there were at least some people who’d decided to come to the theater this early, but mostly I was focused on the sound of blood pumping behind my ears and the feel of my hand in Maddie’s.
She was still on the phone, but now that we were through she didn’t seem nearly as interested in talking to Keith.
“Uh-huh, well you’re about as useless as ever,” she said.
A pause. A grimace. Then.
“Yeah, well you go ahead and tell Derek I said that. You know he’ll agree with me,” she said.
Her tone told me the conversation was coming to an end. Whatever he said on the other end of the line she rolled her eyes and ended the call.
Yup. Conversation over. Which was just fine with me. We disappeared up the same stairway she’d led me up the last time we came in here.
“This way,” she said. “There’s not actually an easy way to get down into the theater from the hall.”
We stepped into the projector room and memories came flooding back. Some of them less than pleasant considering the last time I’d been here I was running from Steve, but then again a lot of them were more than pleasant considering I’d fled from Steve right into Maddie’s arms.
“Here we are,” she said, holding up a hard drive and grinning. “I think you’re going to like this a lot.”
She attached the drive to the projector using some weird cable and then tapped away at a keyboard and mouse attached to the thing, but every time I tried to get close enough to see what movie she was treating me to she got in the way and blocked my view.
Damn.
“I know you’re trying to be sneaky, but it’s not going to work,” I said.
Maddie turned and arched an eyebrow at me. The grin that split her face was proof enough of what she thought of that.
“Really? Because it looks to me like you’re not seeing what I have planned for you.”
I rolled my eyes and let out a frustrated groan. Not that I thought it was going to do a damn bit of good, but what else could I say?
“You’re impossible. You know that, right?”
“I might be impossible, but at least I’m doing it in the name of setting you up on an awesome date.”
I felt a shiver. That seemed to happen a lot around her. But can you blame a girl? This was all so new, and I loved it.
“So that’s what this is? A date?”
I’m not sure why the semantics of what we were doing here should matter all that much, but they did. I found myself wanting her to say it. I wanted her to make this official.
She hit me with another one of those looks that said I was being ridiculous. This time the grin was more mischievous than anything.
“Of course this is a date,” she said. “What the hell did you think it was?”
Now it was my turn to smile a mischievous smile. “But what about my boyfriend? I’m a taken woman, after all.”
This time the look she gave me said she wasn’t in the mood for my bullshit. And bullshit it was. I think we both knew how I felt about Steve. I’m not sure why I even said that outside of trying to get a rise out of her.
I felt bad about that. The only person who didn’t know how I felt about Steve was Steve. That was something I was going to have to take care of, and soon.
I wasn’t going to interrupt what was quickly becoming the best date of my life to call him and break up. That was a conversation that would drag on longer than I wanted, and I wasn’t going to mess with it right now.
Was it shitty of me? Probably, but at this point I’ve admitted to doing so many shitty things that I’m not going to shy away from admitting to this one.
“Enough bullshit,” Maddie said. She hit the keyboard one final time, and the projector sprang to life. Light flew out into the old theater. She turned and grinned. “Are you ready for your movie?”
I licked my lips. There was so much promise in what she said. Was I ready for my movie?
I was ready for the movie, but I had a feeling she was talking about more than a movie. I really hoped, the first time I’d hoped something like this in my life, that she was more interested in the kind of thing that Steve had always been interested in when he took me to a theater.
I licked my lips. Reached out to the hand she was offering.
“I’m ready,” I said, feeling like that meant a hell of a lot more than it usually did.
But I was ready. This was going to be fun.
23
Hot Date
Ashley Timmons says.
Making out with someone in a theater is difficult. I should know, because Steve had tried so many times to get me to make out with him.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’ve been pretty clear how I felt about Steve. More particularly I’ve been clear that I wasn’t interested in what he had to offer. I was more interested in watching the movie, usually, even if it was one of those stupid mindless action flicks he obsessed over.
I mean seriously, Steve. If you’re going to take a girl to an action movie then you should at least have the good grace to take her to a comic book movie or something. Obviously this isn’t going to work for me, but I bet most girls would get pretty hot and bothered if they spent an hour and a half to two hours looking at Chris Hemsworth wearing practically nothing.
Or Chris Evans. Or even Robert Downey Junior, if you’re into older guys.
I’m willing to admit now that I was always more into Scarlett Johansson when I was watching those things, even if I didn’t quite understand at the time why I was so interested in her.
But that’s getting away from t
he real subject of this introduction. Making out in theaters.
It’s a time honored tradition running back to the ancient Romans. No, I’m full of shit. But I’m willing to bet there are a few of you reading this who thought I was totally telling the truth there. The American education system at its finest.
Sure making out in theaters is an ancient tradition, but it only ran back to when theaters were invented at the beginning of the twentieth century. It got really big with the invention of drive-in theaters in the ‘50s when people could climb into the back seat of their boat of a car and make some life altering mistakes since birth control hadn’t made its way onto the scene yet.
But as time went on making out in a theater got more difficult. People started turning the theater into an event. You sort of have to with the prices they charge. Theaters these days were giant stadium seated monstrosities where people were packed in tight.
Not to mention it was a little ridiculous to pay forty bucks for tickets and an additional thirty to forty big ones for concessions for the privilege of not watching what was going up on the screen. It was so damn expensive to go to a movie that you wanted to watch the damn movie.
But it was all the different in the secret theater that day with Maddie. I felt like I’d been thrown back in time. I felt like I was in the theater that time forgot back in the ‘80s when the place had been shiny and new, because the theater hadn’t been upgraded since then.
I wondered if my parents had been in this very same theater watching old classics like all the greats by John Hughes. Or maybe catching a horror movie starring Robert Englund.
The point is it was like stepping into the past, and it was a past where it was just the two of us, which made for a very interesting movie.
That’s right perverts. This is the update where you’re finally going to get some of that “hot girl on girl stuff” you’ve been asking for. So enjoy it while it lasts.
So it turns out the way to get down to the old theater that totally doesn’t exist in the real world was through a second stairway attached to the old projector room.
Yeah, try wrapping your heads around that. Unreliable narrator and all that. Some of you might say I’m making shit up on the fly, but I like to think I’m having some fun confusing all of you.
We stepped into the theater and I was struck by how dingy everything was. The theater screen didn’t have any fancy curtains. It looked like somebody had splashed soda on it at some point. The seats all looked ragged and threadbare and some of them even had stuffing sticking out here and there.
“This brings me back to going to the movies with my grandparents when I was really young,” I said, smiling at the memory.
“Probably because this is what the theaters looked like before the renovation,” she said. “But that’s fine. It adds to the charm.”
The movie flickered to life and I couldn’t see the stains on the screen anymore. At least it wasn’t too obvious.
“That was a neat trick,” I said.
“I set a timer to make sure we didn’t miss anything,” she said. “Now come on. We want to get the best seats in the house!”
That seemed like an odd statement considering we were the only ones in the theater, but I went with it. Maddie led us to some seats near the middle center.
“We’re not sitting closer to the front?” I asked.
“And spend your entire time craning your neck up and getting a case of whiplash trying to watch the movie? No thanks.”
We sat down in the middle and I realized there was something else about this theater that was old-fashioned and potentially fun ruining. I frowned at the armrest between us.
Maddie looked down and seemed to read my mind which made me blush, though of course she couldn’t see my blush in the darkness.
“Yeah,” she said. “They don’t go up. It’s kind of a pain in the ass if you…”
She left the implication hanging in the air between us and I shivered again. I seemed to be doing that a lot.
I turned to the movie screen in a bid to calm myself down and ignore the implication of what she was saying.
It’s one of those funny things in life. I know I keep talking about the funny things in life, but I keep discovering new funny things in life. At least I kept discovering new funny things in life when I was going through this fun journey of self-discovery and that’s what these posts are all about so you’ll listen to my gems of self-discovery and like them.
The funny thing I noticed this time around was that stakes really made a difference. When I was in the theater with Steve I was always so annoyed that I didn’t have time to be nervous or wonder if things were going to go well or go bad.
They always went bad from my point of view.
I’m sure his heart was pounding out of his chest the first time he reached out to grab my hand, but for me it did nothing.
It was all different in that abandoned theater, though. There was a beautiful girl beside me, and I was into her. Really into her. And even though I knew she was into me as well, at least I assumed she was into me based on all the evidence so far, there was still a part of me that worried I’d screw this up. That she’d decide she wasn’t as into me as she thought she was and that would be the end of our date before it had even really started.
I wondered if people who’d been together forever ever felt this way. I wondered if there were old married couples who still got butterflies when they held hands watching a movie. Assuming that watching a movie was something old married couples did.
The only example I had of an old married couple was my parents, and they spent most of their time trying their best to avoid spending any more time with each other than they absolutely had to.
Music filled the theater. Music that sounded like…
An old Nintendo game? Playing Take Me Out to the Ballgame? What the hell was…
And then it hit me. I’d mentioned this movie the first time we chatted. It was my absolute favorite movie and my absolute favorite book, even though the Princess Bride was a ridiculous movie and book for me to obsess over considering the central thesis of that whole thing was true love really exists.
I’d pretty much lived my entire life under the thesis that true love was a lie that people told each other to sell stuff and to get into each other’s pants.
But there was something about this movie that always made me feel warm and fuzzy. Besides, Robin Wright was fucking hot. Is fucking hot. Did you see Wonder Woman? Even today she’s hot, but back then…
Well it’s no wonder they got her to play the most beautiful girl in the world. Am I right? Me. Ow.
And I was so excited that Maddie went to the trouble of getting the Princess Bride and playing it for me that I didn’t even think about it when I squealed and reached out to grab her hand. At least I didn’t think about it until after her hand was in mine, and then I thought about it a whole hell of a lot.
I looked down at the spot where our hands came together. Then I looked up to Maddie.
I knew what sort of look was plastered on my face. Pure surprise. Plain and simple.
I hadn’t been expecting that. Then again I hadn’t been expecting this movie either. I hadn’t expected her to be so thoughtful that she’d remember something I’d told her in an offhand remark the first time we met and turn that into a perfect date.
It was so considerate. It went beyond anything I’d ever had with a guy before. And that’s not talking about the difference in genders. No, we’re just talking about basic consideration and a sense of romance in a relationship.
Not that it was really a relationship yet. We were two girls meeting and having some fun in a theater, but I could see this becoming something more. And that filled my stomach with a warm and fuzzy feeling that was exactly like everything they were always selling in the movies.
In that moment I understood that maybe love could be real. Maybe it was more than a lie people told each other to sell stuff.
The old grandpa had made his
appearance. The guy from that old detective show. So rather than dealing with the shock of holding Maddie’s hand, literally a shock as her touch was electric, I decided I was going to take refuge in my favorite movie instead.
And this is where some of the genius of Maddie’s choice of movie comes through. I had my favorite movie to concentrate on, and so I didn’t have to worry about concentrating on other things. I could relax and lose myself in the old familiar lines that I knew so well. Old familiar shots that had become a part of me over the years.
Concentrating on all that meant I didn’t have to worry quite so much about how incredibly terrifyingly different it was holding someone’s hand and feeling a pulsing running through my body.
Because damn.
Of course Maddie had no intention of leaving me alone. No, her finger started stroking along my own hand.
It was so simple. Such a small gesture. But every time her finger moved across my hand it sent a thrill running down my spine and a shiver running through my body.
I had a feeling she knew exactly what she was doing, and that she was enjoying the hell out of making me completely miserable by doing it.
Miserable in the best possible way.
I tried to concentrate on the movie. We made it all the way to the point where that kid from the Wonder Years asks the grandpa from that detective show if this was a kissing story when I felt Maddie’s breath on my ear. I shivered again, and it was way more powerful than anything I’d felt with just her finger.
“It’s a good question,” she said.
I licked my lips. Turned to face her. I wasn’t sure how to handle this. I knew what I wanted, and it was terrifying and exciting all rolled up into a nervous ball of stress that settled in my stomach.
“Well you have to be asking yourself. Is this a kissing movie?”
I laughed. A nervous laugh. She was really messing with me now.
“Of course it’s a kissing movie,” I said. “You’ve seen this before, right?”
“Well yeah,” she said, leaning in closer.
