It Only Happens in the Movies

  “You don’t know that for sure. I mean, the guy sat up with you until 3 a.m. to show you a romantic film. Maybe he likes you…”

  Those words. Just hearing those words was like someone had tipped sherbet into my intestines. Oh God, that wasn’t good. That’s what happens when you like someone.

  “I think he’s just intrigued by me. Because I didn’t fall for him straight away. You know?”

  Alice raised her eyebrows. “God forbid he actually likes you for you. No, according to Audrey, it’s only because you’re a challenge.”

  “But I am a challenge. Well, I was… And now I’ve fallen for him, like everybody bloody else, and now I’ve also headbutted him…” I covered my eyes again. “It’s probably a good thing. Maybe the headbutt was my subconscious deliberately sabotaging things, so I wouldn’t get hurt? It’s just a shame I have to quit my job now.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Don’t quit your job! You like it there. No offence, Audrey, but you’ve got to stop running away from stuff. Drama, us. And you have to face Harry if you want to carry on with this zombie movie, right? I mean, you’re enjoying that?”

  I nodded. I was. I really was.

  “Just be a grown-up and pretend it never happened.” Alice beamed. “Like I did with Jared. I managed to keep that up for a whole year!”

  I tilted my head at her. “I’m sorry about what happened with him. It sounds awful.”

  She shrugged. “It’s fine now. I wasn’t, like, permanently damaged. I’ve just learned to wait for a guy who makes sex feel unpressured and, dare I say it, pleasurable. Wait until I find a guy I really like, and maybe, I dunno, build up to sex with him rather than jumping into it. Maybe that’s what you should think about with Harry. Are you just repeating a Milo situation? I mean, you fell for him even when me, Becky and Charlie were warning you he was a bit of a dick. But you were so upset about your family, you just seemed to get lost in him.”

  I’d forgotten that. Forgotten that the girls had never liked Milo. Her words hit several nails on several heads. “I guess that’s what my concern is,” I admitted. “I mean, I worry Harry won’t be any different for me to how he is with other girls.”

  “Well then. Don’t go there if you don’t trust it, or him. Or do go there, but keep your eyes open. I mean, if I were you, I would go there and keep my eyes WIDE open, because, well, look at him.”

  “Alice!” I thumped her.

  “I’m just saying.”

  And, just like that, we were back. We laughed and slurped our drinks and caught up on news and the walls I’d carefully constructed around myself fell away. I didn’t even flinch when she insisted on taking ten million selfies. Because that was just Alice. Mentor and beauty junkie – capable of both incredible personal insight and brilliant knowledge of the best filters. I’d opened up to her and she hadn’t judged me. I could only do the same for her. She asked about Dad and I told her everything and she hugged me again. She even invited me to a girls’ night in they’d planned that weekend. And I found I genuinely wanted to go, even though I couldn’t as I was pulling a double shift.

  For the first time in a long time, I felt good. I felt warm. I felt less alone. It was like my hardened defences had been hacked through with the back of a spoon, like the top of a crème brûlée. We hugged goodbye before I went into lessons, and I said I’d have lunch with them. I did, and it was nice. And my afternoon lessons weren’t so boring. And I’d almost forgotten everything, until…

  …until I came home and found Harry sitting on my front wall.

  Common dates in romance movies:

  Seats in a box at the opera or ballet

  Walking around a beautiful foreign city

  Night-time picnics in empty parks

  Finding some gorgeous abandoned house that the boy fills with candles

  Common dates in real life:

  Nando’s…

  Harry held his hands up when he saw me, and pretended to duck. “Please don’t hurt me again.”

  I stopped in my tracks, heat starting in my little toes and shooting up through my body like when you shove a Refresher into a bottle of Coke. “What are you doing here?”

  He rubbed his jaw. “I’m not sure. You see, I had a bit of a thump last night and I have short-term memory loss. Where am I? What year is it? What’s my name?”

  “Your name is Arsehole.”

  He stood up, slightly blocking my path to the house and smiling apologetically. “Audrey, we are British! We MUST make a joke about something awkward happening. Otherwise we’ll combust.”

  I blinked, and made myself look at him. “How’s your jaw?”

  God, I wanted to DIE.

  “It’s okay, a little bruised. How’s your pride?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “It’s okay, a little bruised. It’s my sense of judgement I’m most worried about, to be honest.”

  At that, his smile drooped. He took a step closer, and just his closeness made my heart thud against my ribs. “Okay, can we be serious?”

  I let my silence be my yes.

  “Audrey, I like you,” he said, just like that. “I didn’t think you liked me back. In fact, I was quite sure you hated me, so I’ve been killing myself trying to be polite so I didn’t get yelled at again. But your headbutt, Audrey…” I was blushing and suffocating at the same time. “Your headbutt taught me to hope in a way I’ve never hoped before.” I shook my head in disbelief and he held up his hands. “I told you, I’m being serious. So, umm. Can I ask you on a date or something? For like, now?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I felt paralysed by his words, how they made me feel. “Why aren’t you at work?” I managed to ask.

  “I asked Sunday Sam to pull an extra shift. It’s his first time working a not-Sunday since the dawn of time.”

  “Is he going to be okay?” I asked. Sunday Sam was old and easily confused. He kept complaining that he didn’t believe in this “barcode on phone thing”.

  “I don’t care,” Harry answered. “I only care whether you’re going to let me take you out or not.”

  I looked up at my house. I wasn’t sure how I felt about Harry standing outside it. I wasn’t sure if Mum was home yet, what state she’d be in.

  “You do realize waiting outside my house like this could constitute stalking?”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t think you’d answer your phone. And, if you tell me to piss off, I promise I will never sit outside your house ever again.”

  I sighed and pushed my hair back over my shoulders. “Where does someone like you even take a girl out, anyway?”

  Harry released his teeth. “Why do you keep answering my questions with other questions?”

  “Because I don’t know what my answer is, to be honest.”

  He stepped forward. “Your answer is yes, Audrey.”

  Was it? He was being very forward which I liked, even though I knew I shouldn’t. Different parts of my body had different answers – like someone had scribbled all over me with crayon, dividing me up like a butcher’s chart. I let out a huge breath, blowing my hair up off my face, not quite able to look at him. “Oh God, okay then. I think.”

  His smile was so huge that I almost fell over from the strength of it. “That’s a yes!”

  “It’s an okay then.”

  “Okay means yes.”

  “Kind of, but less definitely.”

  “Audrey, I think it’s important to be honest. Not only with me, but with yourself. You like me.”

  I crossed my arms, still smiling. “Oh do I?”

  “Of course you do. Why wouldn’t you?” He gestured down at himself. “And I’ve already told you, I like you.” He held up his hands, as if expecting another attack. “And not because I think you’re special, or different, or magic, or not-like-the-others, or that you’re going to save me from my coma of a life. Nope. You’re just a girl, with a collection of hormones and body parts and life experiences and characteristics – like everybody else. I just happen to like the particu
lar combination of those that you have, and would like to take you and your ordinariness to the seaside.” He sucked in the breath he’d used up from all his long sentences.

  I blinked at him. “The seaside?”

  “Yes, the seaside. Why not the seaside?” He stepped closer and closer, invading my personal space. Our ribs almost touching. His nearness made my body take control of the steering wheel, karate-kicking my logic out the passenger door, where it rolled onto the dusty roadside with a groan.

  “Umm. Because it’s midwinter? It will be freezing.”

  He looked me up and down, in a way that made me go even redder. “Audrey, you are wearing a coat. And I’ll let you go inside and get a hat and scarf too. That is the sort of gentleman I am.”

  I felt the twitch of the curtains from the front room. I reluctantly turned away to see Mum’s face disappear behind the netting. Harry followed my gaze. And, sensing my hardening, he stopped taking the piss, his eyes all serious when I turned back.

  “Audrey? Let me take you to the seaside. It will be fun, I promise.”

  I watched this amazing documentary once, called Man on Wire, about a tightrope walker who pulled off a huge feat to tightrope walk from one tower of the World Trade Center to the other. There was this bit where he talked about the moment he had to step off the ledge, onto the tightrope. He had one foot on the ledge, and one foot on the wobbling rope. All he had to do was shift his balance and he’d go from safety, to the potential of plummeting head first.

  I looked into Harry’s eyes, searching for answers I knew I didn’t have. Can I trust you? Will you break my heart? Am I really stupid enough to think you will treat me differently? Are we going to do this? Is it going to be worth it?

  Then I sighed again, shifted my centre of gravity and stepped out onto the rope. “Let me get my stuff.”

  Mum was in the kitchen, pretending she hadn’t been spying on me.

  “Oh, hi, Audrey,” she said, chopping up a butternut squash. “You here for dinner?”

  I smiled at her, as my entire body seemed to be smiling for some reason.

  “Umm, actually Harry’s outside, I’m going out with him tonight.” I rummaged amongst the coat hooks in the hallway, looking for my hat and gloves, pondering whether to be honest with her. “It’s just for this movie thing,” I said, deciding against it. “We’re doing some filming.”

  She smiled at me as I returned fully bundled up. “Just for filming then?” She raised an eyebrow. “Of course.”

  We laughed at each other and I felt a warm pang in my body. For this small moment. Where she was acting like a normal mother and me a normal daughter. Both of us pretending the heap of emotional debris scattered over the house didn’t exist.

  “Well, have fun. I’ve got Sandra coming over tonight anyway.”

  “You have fun too.”

  Harry was smoking when I re-emerged, but when he saw me, he chucked the cigarette over his shoulder where it landed, still lit, in the middle of the road. “And she is a vision of layers.”

  I stopped and twirled on my garden path, like I was on a catwalk. “And you can’t even see my incredibly sexy thermal underwear.”

  He laughed until it turned into a heavy smoker’s cough and he had to bend over on himself. “Please don’t talk about your underwear on a first date.” He coughed again before straightening up and leaping off the wall. “We are in the beginning stages, Audrey. Even your thermal underwear will do it for me.”

  I blushed so much I was glad practically all my face was obscured by winter clothing, and followed him as he started walking down my road. He wore only his aviator jacket over his jeans and shirt, and a grey beanie hat, and I wondered how he wasn’t dying of cold.

  “The beginning of what?” I asked, just as we stopped outside Tad’s car. Harry must’ve borrowed it for the evening. He ignored me for a moment – clambering in to unlock the passenger door from the inside. He opened it with a hard yank, his face appearing in the gap.

  “I’ll let you be the decider of that,” he replied, and I climbed in.

  The car stank of stale weed and leftover McDonald’s, like it always did. I noticed it wasn’t quite as filled up with crap as it usually was. Harry must’ve cleared out the piles of polystyrene boxes that normally hid under the seats. I was just putting on my seat belt, when I found his face right in front of mine.

  “Woah, hi, Harry,” I said, the tip of his nose almost touching mine.

  “Audrey, it’s important we get something out of the way.”

  “What is it?”

  Harry just gently grabbed my face and kissed me.

  My thigh was wedged into the gearstick. And when Harry’s hands moved down to my neck, I almost jolted because they were so cold. But, generally, I just melted. Of course he was good at kissing. Of course he didn’t slobber or dishwasher or tongue-dart or do any of the things that sound horrid but, actually, would be remarkably useful when it came to nipping this potentially dangerous liaison in the bud. Alas, when he leaned away, my mouth almost followed his, wanting more.

  He started the car and pulled off, like nothing had ever happened.

  “You grabbed my head,” I said dumbly.

  “I did indeed. I didn’t stroke your cheek though. As I said – much too awkward to pull that one off in real life.” He indicated and revved out onto the local A road.

  I wanted to touch my lips, to check they were still warm from his. To check it was real.

  “The thing is, Audrey…” He put the car into fourth. “Is that yesterday, you headbutted me.”

  I was about to blush but he leaped on.

  “And I thought maybe you’d be embarrassed about that. Even though you shouldn’t be. Because that headbutt showed me I may actually have a chance with you. So I thought I’d exorcize the memory of the headbutt, so we can move on with our day. Our date.”

  Harry was speeding and I tugged at my seat belt to make sure it was still tight. “So it was a tactical kiss?”

  “Oh, yeah. No meaning to it whatsoever.”

  I rolled my eyes when he wasn’t looking.

  It was about a thirty-minute drive to Brighton, probably quicker because Harry drove too fast. My hands clenched onto my kneecaps as he soared down the A23, gabbling about how the filming was going.

  “So, well, we’re almost there. I just need to film the scenes between you and me, which I was putting off due to you totally having a go at me.”

  “With good reason.”

  “Yeah yeah, manic pixie. Anyway, now you’ve made it abundantly clear you have no qualms about kissing me. Which, can I just say, I totally called when we first met… Woah…don’t try and hit me when I’m driving. I almost crashed the car!”

  But, when he wasn’t shamelessly winding me up, he was so into his film that it was intoxicating. “I mean, I want to change the way we see zombie films, and I’m hoping this will do that. The Walking Dead and World War Z have helped a lot but they’re too glossy. They’ve lost all the hilarious bits of B-movies. Zombies can represent so much, you know? So, like, I’m hoping I can take this to the London Film Fest. Hopefully get it shown? You never know, it may even win something. And, like, your acting. I mean, I know I’m obviously trying to impress you today, let’s not even pretend otherwise, but also, like, it’s quite clear I don’t need to impress you, judging by how much you’re hoping I’ll kiss you again and…woah, seriously, Audrey! Do you want us to crash and die? Ouch! That hurt.”

  We were soon creeping along the traffic-clogged road of Brighton seafront. We pulled into an underground car park and Harry reversed into a tiny space, almost smashing a wing mirror. Then the engine was off, the handbrake yanked up, Harry was smiling and, pretty quickly, Harry was kissing me again.

  This kiss was more aggressive. His hands dug quickly into the back pockets of my jeans, squeezing my arse. The sort of kiss where you can only kiss back. It was heady and tongue-filled and overwhelming and also really, really great, and just like that, all my logic
and defensive barriers were obliterated, crumbling with each mouthful of him.

  Again, it was Harry who broke off. “For Christ’s sake, Audrey, stop kissing me!”

  “I…”

  He was out the car door before I could even object, running around to open my passenger door. “Do I get points?” He bowed as I stepped past him.

  I shook my head, feeling a little dazed. Being around Harry was like being plugged into a tornado. “Umm…” I didn’t even have time to process the joke. He was off ahead, jaunting his way through the dank car park towards the steps.

  “Audrey, hurry up. The rides close at seven.”

  Rides?

  I caught up with him and he slung an arm around me, casually, like he’d been allowed to put his arm around me for years. We pushed through to the stairwell, which stank of urine and I put my sleeve over my mouth as we climbed two flights of steps and emerged into the black, wintery night of Brighton.

  Every part of me was instantly freezing – the harsh wind blowing us sideways. Brighton seemed dead. Only office workers clogged The Lanes as we stumbled through them.

  Harry pulled me closer, tucking me into his jacket. “So, whatcha fancy, Audrey? The rickety rollercoaster that makes you think you’re going to fall into the sea? The loop the loop? The ghost train? Don’t say I don’t offer you the world.”

  I could hardly hear him above the wind. When we left the cosy alleyways of The Lanes, it hit us even harder. I actually thought it was going to blow us over.

  “There is a reason people don’t come to Brighton in winter.”

  “Piffle,” he declared, though his eyes were watering. “Where is your sense of adventure?”

  “Did you just say ‘piffle’?”

  “Shh, Audrey, I’m concentrating on not letting you fly off into the sea.” He grabbed me around the waist and began nuzzling my neck. I squealed and laughed. But this was too fast. I felt it was too fast. There’d been no build-up. No romantic prolonged eye contact. But…but…my arms flung themselves around him and I surrendered into it.