“What movies do you like?”
“Oh, yes, that.” I’d almost forgotten what we were talking about. “The Kissing Booth,To All the Boys. . .,The Princess Swap, you know.”
“Sorry, never heard of any of those. Who directed them?” he returned quickly.
“I don’t know, they’re on Netflix.”
“Aaaah,” he said and then tutted.
“What does ‘aaah’ mean?”
“We don’t have those here. We have real movies.”
“Those aren’t real?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“I like TV series too?” I added.
“Like what?”
“YOU,Stranger Things,The Witcher, but mainly only for Henry Cavill, you know?”
“Not really.” He looked at me blankly over the rim of his glasses. They did give him quite an intellectual look. Young, sexy-professor vibes.
“Are those all Netflix shows too?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Before Netflix, what kind of movies and series did you watch?” he asked.
“Before?” It was hard to imagine a time before Netflix. A time where you had to wait to watch the next episode or something archaic like that. Or where you actually had to leave your house to watch a movie.
“I watchedPretty Womanonce,” I remembered. “It was sweet. I like Julia Roberts.”
“So, classic romance?”
“Yes. I like romance, well . . .” I tailed off as an image of Kyle came into my head.Bastard!Breaking up with me like that. Maybe romance wasn’t such a great idea right now.
Video Store Guy leaned in and seemed to inspect my face. “Not romance then?”
“I don’t know. Should you watch romance if you’ve just been broken up with?” I asked.
He seemed to consider my question. As if he was really taking the time to think it over. “Watching romance after a break-up is probably the best time to do it.”
“Why?”
“Well, isn’t that when you need to believe in love again the most?” he asked.
His question caught me off guard because . . . Something about the word “love” struck me as odd and I couldn’t really connect with it.Wait. . . A semi-thought started bobbing about in my brain. Had Kyle and I ever actually said we loved each other? We had said it online, on our platforms.
Hanging out with my #love.
Love my #bae
Happy #valentinesday love
But had we actually ever said it to each other IRL? With our mouths? Words and vocal cords? I wracked my brain. I wasn’t actually sure, now that I thought about it. Was it weird to not know if you’d told your boyfriend you loved him, and vice versa? My sister had certainly thought so. She was always implying that our relationship wasn’t real, despite all my assurances to her that it was. Despite me telling her that just because we were public figures, that we had a carefully constructed personal brand and that we worked hard on it together . . . it didn’t mean it wasn’t real.
