It Only Happens in the Movies

by Holly Bourne

  Harry stilled, his hand between my legs stilled. He coughed. Swallowed. “Audrey, are you sure?”

  I nodded, expecting him to smile or say something cheesy, taking the piss. But he was still being all Man Harry, not Boyish Harry. He leaned out to rummage in the pocket of his jeans. He had his back to me for a second while he put the condom on. The strong rubbery scent of it hit me and it brought back a jolt of memory. Of Milo. Of that awful night. And my body tightened up again. I suddenly thought, Oh God, what if it happens again? Will it hurt? Will it hurt?

  Harry started kissing me again – his tongue going deeper. He clambered on top of me, between my legs, and I adjusted to his weight. I could feel his erection digging into my stomach. It was a shock how hard it actually was. And weird – just sticking out of his body like someone had glued it on at the wrong angle. Then he was wiggling down, positioning himself, his mouth moving to my neck and just feeling him that close made me want it. Just the tip of him slid into my body. And, there, like it was a muscle memory, I tightened up and Harry hit a brick wall. Well, not a brick wall. But you know. It suddenly hurt, a piercing tearing hurt that made me take a sharp intake of breath. I closed my eyes with shame, waiting for Harry to leap off me, or just determinedly push in further like Milo had – making it hurt more, tighten more. I waited for him to say something, knowing whatever he said would make me feel so humiliated and cringe and oh God, why was this happening to me again? I WANTED to have sex, why was my body not complying?

  But Harry didn’t do any of those things.

  He just tilted my chin up, looked me right in the eye, like it wasn’t fazing him at all that my body was literally rejecting his, and started kissing me again. My eyelids, my cheeks, my neck, back to my lips. At first I knew what he was trying to do, and that made me tighten up further. But then, his kisses and how good they felt made things go hazy again. My stomach relaxed and unfurled. I even threw my head back when his mouth moved down to my chest. And then he slowly moved in an inch further. And stopped. Kissing me again. Melting me again. Then another inch. And another. Until Harry was completely inside me and it didn’t hurt at all. I felt stretched and weirded out. Part of my brain was screaming, OH MY GOD, AUDREY, HARRY IS INSIDE YOU. YOU ARE ACTUALLY HAVING SEX WITH HARRY NOW. THE SEX. THE SEX PEOPLE HAVE. YOU ARE HAVING THE SEX. HOW WEIRD IS THIS? WHY DOES NOBODY TALK ABOUT HOW FREAKING WEIRD IT IS THAT PEOPLE DO THIS TO EACH OTHER? But then he started moving slowly, carefully, checking with his eyes that it was okay. And it felt…nice…good, even. I closed my eyes and everything slipped away and there was just the sensation of him moving with me, me moving with him, our bodies finding a rhythm, my fingers digging into his back and I could sort of see what the fuss was about.

  It wasn’t all romantic. Near the end, Harry kind of zoned out on me. He stopped being slow and caring and tender and something seemed to take him over entirely. He thrust fast and strong, kind of like a zombie when it gets a scent of brains. I looked around, for a clue as to what was going on, not sure how to handle this. Finding that, yes, this bit did hurt a little. But then he quickly let out this strange guttural groan, buried his head in my neck and well… He stilled and collapsed onto me, not using his elbows to support his body weight so I was sort of pinned to the bed by him. He didn’t talk to me or even acknowledge me for a good few minutes. So I just lay there, half-heartedly stroking his back, biting my lip, wondering if this was normal. Then he recovered, withdrew, turned his back while he dealt with the condom. Then his smile was all teeth and his eyes were so squinted they were practically closed. Our eyes met. His smile set off my smile.

  And we both started giggling.

  Annnnd ACTION:

  AUDREY

  Oh, Rosie, I love your top. Where did you get it from?

  ROSIE

 

  A shop.

  AUDREY

  Right.

  Annnnnd ACTION:

  AUDREY

  Hey, Rosie? I was wondering if you could help me

  with this scene. You see, you’re so good at zombie law

  and…

 

  Annnnnd ACTION:

  ROSIE

 

  Oh my GOD, do you remember Leeds Festival last

  year? Harry, I still can’t believe you made us all zip

  our sleeping bags together.

  HARRY

  That was one of my most brilliant of ideas, I have to

  say.

  ROSIE

  Yeah, apart from I woke up with your erection

  poking into my leg.

 

  ROSIE

  Oh sorry. Audrey, we were all asleep in the same

  giant bag. It didn’t mean anything. Don’t stress out.

  AUDREY

  I’m not stressing out.

  HARRY

  Audrey…

  AUDREY

  I SAID I’M NOT STRESSING OUT.

  Annnnnnnd ACTION:

 
  Harry eats Jay’s brain but they’re laughing too hard

  because they’re all stoned – bar Audrey>

  ROSIE

 

  Those are my boys.

  AUDREY

 

  Do you have any, like, friends who are girls?

  ROSIE

  What’s that supposed to mean?

  AUDREY

  I was just asking.

  ROSIE

  Well…no. For some reason girls don’t like me. I’ve

  always got along with boys better. There’s just less

  drama, you know?

  AUDREY

  …

  Once Harry and I started having sex, we didn’t really do any activity that wasn’t having sex if we could possibly help it. Whenever we managed to squeeze in alone time together, the whole thing was just an elaborate game of pretending we weren’t going to have sex. It started raining one day and didn’t stop for three weeks, postponing the filming. So we had a lot of sex. I even got over my aversion to going to his flat. Which showed just how much I wanted to have sex, because the place was disgusting. The toilet bowl was more skid mark than porcelain, the kitchen sink unreachable through the tower of dirty dishes, and don’t get me started on the pubes in the shower. But Harry washed his sheets and the bed was the only part of his flat I was interested in.

  The sex was sometimes good, sometimes bad. Not yet great. I made Harry get an STI test. “This must be serious, if I’m getting a giant cotton bud shoved up my willy hole for you,” he’d grumbled. And then we had to wait until my period started before I could begin taking the pill. In the meantime, Harry bitched about condoms and, once, when he’d picked me up from a late shift, stoned off his brain because he’d been with Rosie, he’d lost his erection trying to put one on. I was mortified and started crying, “You don’t fancy me,” while he just laughed hysterically, patted me on the back and said, “Of course I fancy you…it’s just I’m high and I hate condoms… Can we go out and get some pizza?”

  I found I couldn’t orgasm through sex, which Harry seemed miraculously unfussed by.

  “You should let me go down on you.” He shrugged. “You will then.”

  I turned purple at the thought. “No, I’m too shy.”

  “About what?”

  I buried my face deeper into his blue sheets and mumbled.

  “What was that, Audrey?”

  I pulled the sheet down so only my eyes were showing.

  “I said…I’m not sure I want you so close to…there. I’m worried it’s…it’s…ugly.”

  He grinned before he laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s not ugly. It’s fine. It’s sexy! You’ll like it. I’m good at it. Hey, where are you going?” …As I buried deeper under the covers to hide my mortification. But then, one night, after a particularly gruelling shift, LouLou had said, “Screw t
his, we’re drinking,” and let us go mad on the cinema’s bar. Back at Harry’s, I was just drunk enough to not feel too shy about letting him try. He was right. He was good at it. And I did. He was also such a smug prick about it afterwards I had to thump him.

  “Stop puffing your chest out.”

  “I’m not. This is just what Sex Gods do with their chests.”

  Another thump.

  Leroy sauntered over while I was having lunch with the girls and smacked a ripped poster onto my table. “Tell me you love me.”

  “What’s this?” I picked it up. “Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama…” And put it down again. “Why are you giving me this?”

  He pulled up a chair and made the girls move down. “Read it! I stole it off the Drama noticeboard. We don’t want Milo seeing it. Not that he’d have a chance after missing that high note in ‘Luck Be A Lady’.”

  Milo missing that note was the happiest day of Leroy’s life.

  I pushed the poster further away, my heart aching. “Leroy, I quit Drama. They’re not going to let me into an acting school with a D in Geography.”

  “OH WILL YOU JUST READ IT ALREADY,” he shouted, before turning to the girls, and apologizing.

  Alice, Becky and Charlie just grinned at him. The more we’d all been hanging out, the more they’d got used to his theatrics.

  Leroy turned back to me and punched the page with his finger, almost ripping it. “Look. They’re doing VIDEO auditions this year, Auds! To show how with-the-times they are. All you have to do is send in a clip. You have a clip! You can send your zombie bride stuff!”

  I looked down, the words blurring with excitement. “Don’t you have to apply through UCAS to go there?” I asked. It was a question I’d already learned the answer to, when I’d stayed up late, clicking through the apply pages of uni websites, cursing myself for dropping Drama.

  “Yes,” Leroy said. “But this is for two special places, SEE.” He jabbed at the page again. “They want a diamond in the rough! Not someone doing the Macbeth soliloquy for the eighth time in a row. Surely you should at least TRY and send something in? Harry will give you some footage, won’t he? Make you a showreel?”

  I shook my head, my mouth open. “I…I guess. But I’m not exactly a diamond in the rough.”

  “They don’t have to know that!”

  I looked over at Alice and the others. “What do you think?”

  Becky rolled her eyes. “Erm. Are you stupid?”

  “But what about uni?”

  Alice reached out and took a chip from our shared bowl. “You can still send off your UCAS form for Media, but enter this too.”

  “I’m WAITING for you to say thank you.” Leroy crossed his arms. “You’re lucky I’m choosing to focus on IT-related world domination rather than Drama-related world domination, otherwise we’d have to fight each other for this.”

  I leaned over and hugged him. “Thank you. I’m sure I won’t get in…” Everyone started protesting. “…but thank you. It’s worth a shot, I guess.” It felt like someone had shoved a valve into my belly button and started pumping hope right into me. I shook my head to dislodge the thoughts. I wouldn’t get in anyway. I mean, there’s “edgy” and then there’s playing a feminist zombie bride in an overtly B movie in some shit local woods.

  “You are very welcome, now givuss a chip.” Leroy leaned over me and grabbed a handful from the bowl, ignoring Alice’s attempt to slap his hand.

  We all started chatting but I kept looking down at the scrap of paper. Thinking…wondering…hoping… Until Leroy said, “Your mum keeps going to church with my mum. It’s weird.”

  I sighed. “I know. It’s her new thing.” I still couldn’t figure out if this new thing was a good thing or a bad thing. It was certainly different, but it appeared to be stemming the drinking at least.

  “Does that mean she’s hanging out with Harry’s parents too?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so. She grumbled about trying to talk to his mum, apparently she was rude.”

  Leroy nodded. “Sounds like Harry’s mum. She’s a big cheese there. Not a fan of hanging out with the Babybels.”

  I didn’t like the thought of them meeting. From what Harry had told me, I wouldn’t like his parents. They were strict, cold, too religious to see straight, judgemental. It worried me too that Mum had randomly found God. We’d never been a religious family, not even at Christmas. But it seemed to keep her calm. And Leroy’s mum was there to look out for her. I was willing to hope on anything when it came to Mum at the moment.

  “Argh, I don’t know what to do, Leroy,” I said. “I’m worried about ever going away to uni and leaving her. She’s so…lost.”

  Leroy squirmed in his seat, never that comfortable with me talking about the deep and meaningful. “It ain’t your job to find her, babe.”

  The Relate counselling office was probably the most depressing building ever.

  It had a tiny door with a broken intercom, sandwiched between two bins and at the back of a badly-lit car park. I half expected to be mugged as I knocked and knocked at the door.

  If your marriage was failing, this really wouldn’t help inject the spice back into it, I thought, shivering in the cold.

  The door eventually opened and a youngish funkily-dressed lady appeared in the frame. “Hey, Audrey? Sorry, this door has been broken for ever. Come inside.” I tried to shake her hand but she was already disappearing down a narrow corridor of scratchy grey carpet. I pulled the door shut and followed her, past children’s drawings tacked to the wall that said things like, Daddy was home late again last night. I really miss him.

  Jane – Mr Simmons had told me her name was Jane – pushed through a tiny door to the right and sat herself down.

  “Er. Thanks for seeing me,” I said as she gestured to one of the two chairs facing her.

  “Please. Sit. I’m happy to help.”

  I dumped my bag down and rummaged through it to get out my notepad, while Jane crossed her legs. She wore a pinafore dress with yellow tights and these really cute maroon Mary Jane heels. She couldn’t have been older than forty and all her blonde hair was piled up in a giant bun. She smiled. “I’d offer you a cup of tea but the machine’s turned off for the night. I can get you a glass of water?”

  I shook my head. “I’m fine, thanks.” I took out my phone and held it up to her. “Is it okay if I record this?”

  “Yes, of course.” She smoothed down her dress. “So, how can I help? Jack told me you were doing a project for school?”

  Jack? I realized she must mean Mr Simmons.

  “Umm, yes. It’s about romance films,” I explained, hitting record on my phone and setting it on the small table between us.

  She smiled and recrossed her legs. “Ahh, yes. Those old chestnuts.”

  I explained my project to her, flicking my pen around my fingers with nerves. “So, yeah, it would be really good to get your take on them. How useful they are, how problematic. And, yeah, anything you could add about relationships and what you see here would be great?”

  There was a silence. “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t quite know what the question was.”

  “Oh, yeah, right. Umm, I’ve never done this before. So, well, what do you do, I guess? We can start there.”

  God I wanted her yellow tights. I wanted them so much I didn’t quite hear her begin. “Well, we offer counselling to couples and individuals who want to explore their relationships.”

  I made a note in my book. “And what sort of people come in. And for what?”

  She blew out some breath. “All sorts, I guess. I mean, we mainly get married couples, in their middle age I guess, but it’s not definitive. We have a lot of couples come in because one of them has had an affair. Or because they want to get divorced but they don’t want to upset their children. We get younger couples in too though. And lots of individuals who just want to break patterns in their relationship behaviours that aren’t making them happy.”

&nb
sp; I had a sudden thought. Would Mum and Dad still be together if they’d come and seen Jane? Would it have made a difference? Would he still be at home, waiting for me to get back tonight?

  “You must see the very worst of love then, right?” I asked.

  She smiled again, a small one, through tight lips. “You see good stuff too. You see couples fall in love again. You also see some couples who, after counselling, learn that actually the best thing is to walk away.”

  “So, what’s your take on romance films?”

  Her smile grew tighter. “Lots of people find them enjoyable. I guess the word I would use for them is…” She looked to the ceiling tiles for inspiration. “Unhelpful?” she offered. Then she broke into a wider smile. “How about you give me some famous romances, and I’ll try and offer my professional opinion on them?”

  I sucked on the end of my pen lid. “Er, okay,” I said. “Umm, Romeo and Juliet?”

  She laughed and clapped her hands. “A good start! Oh, where do I begin?” She leaned forward in her chair. “Well, let’s see. One of the issues I have with romantic movies is they always tend to end way too early. The movie either ends when the couple gets together, or someone dies before you can see the relationship develop. So you only see this perfect idea of this couple. You don’t see the niggles that can become cracks and how those can become giant crevices over time.” She leaned back again. “I mean, in Romeo and Juliet they both die. But, if they hadn’t, my professional guess is that the warring families would really have caused issues between them over time. It may seem romantic to fight against your family for True Love at first, but, well, your family plays a huge part in how you understand your relationships. Plus you shouldn’t ideally ask your partner to reject their entire family just for your love. Where would they spend Christmas? Who would come to the christening of their first child? How would Juliet cope with Romeo making underhand digs about her parents all the time? It would definitely cause conflict.”