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Though she wound up glad she’d done it, anyway.
Because it felt more like a reassuring sort of moment.
“Well, it doesn’t matter. It’s shocking that you like them, but cool.”
“You don’t really think it’s cool. You’re just saying that to get me to talk more.”
“If you never said another word about it, I’d still say the same,” she said, and she meant it, too. The fact that it got him anyway was just a happy side effect. Now she got to watch him taking that in, and enjoying it way too much for his own liking, before finally, finally, his gaze went inward, and she knew what was coming.
A memory of some kind.
And sure enough:
“I wasn’t allowed to watch them—usually because me dad wanted some other fucking shit on likeTop Gear, and thought they were softie bollocks only girls were meant to like. But some of them were on sometimes late at night, after everybody had gone to bed. So I used to creep into the front room once they were all tucked up, and watch them with the sound turneddown and my ear almost pressed against the speaker bit of the telly,” he said in this low rumbly way that made her really feel it. Though even without that, she knew she would have.
Because the thing was—he didn’t just like romantic movies. He’d apparentlyalwaysliked them. He’d always liked them so much that he’d pinched these small, secretive moments with them. And that was a lot more to take in than she’d thought. It almost bumped it up the list of ways in which he wasn’t the man he had always seemed to everybody, and not just because of what it said about him.
No, it was because of how it felt to her.
How familiar it was, in a way that made her ache.
She thought of a thousand daft things she’d loved.
Then all the ways she’d been denied them, again and again. All the shows she couldn’t watch, because her dad wanted the darts on instead. All the books she couldn’t read, because books were for people who thought they were better than him. And finally, there was the one the most like his.
The movies that she’d justlongedfor.
God, she couldn’t stop herself telling him about the movies she’d longed for.
“I used to save up every fifty pence my mum sometimes slipped me, until I had enough to go to Blockbuster. Then I’d rent one and watch it on the DVD player we had that barely worked because my dad got it out of the bins round the back of Argos. Sometimes you could hardly make out a thing. But I loved those bits of Julia Roberts and Robert Downey Jr. and Jennifer Lopez that you could see, around the parts that were breaking up and freezing and falling apart,” she said.
And oh, the look all over his face once she’d gotten it out.
It wasn’t even the kind of tune out she was used to from blokes like him.
It was sheer investment.
Pleasure, even.
Like he wanted to talk about this quite badly.
And already knew just what he wanted to say.
“Sometimes the freezing and falling apart saved you. I mean, who wants to know that Drew Barrymore is actually thirty posing as seventeen inNever Been Kissed? Traumatized I’d have been as a teenager, if our bullshit TV and DVD player had let me see more than half of the movie.”
“Oh shush. You saw enough of it to know.”
“Of course I did. But it was funnier to pretend.”
“It was. Plus, that movie is a load of cobblers.”
“Yeah, not one of my favorites.”
Favorites, her brain yelled.
As if this was more thrilling than the writing thing.
Which it wasn’t. But it was close. Not to mention easier to talk about.
