The Princess Diarist(18)

“Here we are, folks! Esmond Court!” This was punctuated by the sharp sound of the pulled brake. “That’ll be five pound ten please.”

Harrison reached around to retrieve his brown beat-up wallet from his back pocket. I pulled my bag from the floor and into my lap, saying, “I could—”

He looked at me indicating that what remained of the sentence I had started would be less than welcome. I may have become a blush factory, sending southerly blood to my northerly face for a visit. It now occurred to me—belatedly, I admit—that Harrison wasn’t just dropping me off, but that we were very likely going to be having what my friends and I referred to as a sleepover. What if he—if we—and then—oh God—then he would leave me with my new slutty sense of myself established in one fell swoop—a fallen woman flat on her face, swooping for all she was worth . . . Leia would never get in a situation like this . . .

Actually she probably would, but not until the sequels. This was sequel behavior. Oh, but what if she did get into the backseat of a taxi with a smuggling married actor? If she did happen to do that, she wouldn’t just go along with things like a leaf on a rushing stream. C’mon! She’d be able to come up with something more unusual . . . maybe not poetic but . . . Why was I so obedient? What would Leia do? Obviously it would be different than following Jesus’s example. Jesus would hardly—well, it’s no use pursuing Jesus’s lead when it came to dating. And is that what this was? Dating? Oh, Leia, where are you when I need you? Oh, Jesus, if you’re watching, please don’t let my stomach look other than flat if it should get to that.

“Cheers, mate,” the cabbie said as Harrison paid the fare. He then drove off, leaving us in something better than a lurch.

“You wanna come up?” I asked absurdly.

He almost laughed. “Sure.”

I reached in my bag for my keys. Leia found them and led him into the building to her apartment, and Carrie spent the rest of the night making sequels with her future cinematic husband. How would it all end? Would it all end? And how would I look when it did?

? ? ?

it’s difficult to recall with any kind of clarity details from that weekend. Even if I could, what are we talking about here, soft porn for hardened sci-fi fans? I can’t remember events from yesterday, or earlier tonight when I put away my credit cards for safekeeping. Now for the life of me I don’t know precisely what safekeeping is.

What I do know about that weekend is more along the lines of what didn’t happen. I know we didn’t have any in-depth conversations about anything. So if we didn’t spend a bunch of time talking or playing Monopoly, then we must’ve done more physical things. Long walks, waterboarding, things of that nature.

Oh, but why be coy or discreet? We had a sleepover—you know, like we made a fort with pillows after we had a really big pillow fight, then we called his mom and got permission for him to stay overnight, but we couldn’t stay up too late, because we had school on Monday, and besides which we were in the school play. All I can remember after he followed me into the apartment and turned on the hallway light was that I meant to show him around my little flat, only now our fumbling was not in a moving vehicle, driven by a knowing spectator. We were once again practicing for our cinematic snog.

The bedroom couldn’t get dark enough; even with the lights off I still wanted to turn the lights out. I didn’t want him to recognize me from the movies. “Hey! Weren’t you in . . . that scene we shot today? Don’t I know you from . . . Cloud City?”

Okay, so now we’d spoken together with our words, we’d bantered together using George’s words—now we were exploring the outer reaches of no speak, of memorizing the bottom of each other’s faces with our mouths. If you’d told me that morning when my bed was being used for other purposes that—well, if I didn’t know Star Wars was going to be that big of a hit, how could I have predicted that the stars of Star Wars would find themselves in bed together?

I don’t believe people are across-the-board confident. If they are . . . well, they’ve misjudged the situation where there’s an arrogant result. Mostly people have those few things they do well and hope those things make up for the other shit.

Why am I telling you this? Partly because with my combination of insecurity and inexperience I was paralyzed. Scared to say anything that might make Harrison leave me in the lurch that had all too recently been Riggs’s apartment. A tiny part of me felt like I’d won the man lottery and here I was both counting and spending the money. Our skin agreed. We pressed our luck—first his, then mine, then ours—until we had smoothed our way into the thick of it, until nothing else was possible except to get through to each other, in and on through each other, until we eased into the other side.

I looked over at Harrison. He was . . . God, he was just so handsome. No. No, more than that. He looked like he could lead the charge into battle, take the hill, win the duel, be leader of the gluten-free world, all without breaking a sweat. A hero’s face—a few strands of hair fell over his noble, slightly furrowed brow—watching the horizon for danger in the form of incoming indigenous armies, reflective, concerned eyes so deep in thought you could get lost down there and it would take days to fight your way out. But why run? It couldn’t really be a hardship to find yourself lost in such a place with all that wit and ideas safely stored there. Hey, man! Wait a second! Share the wealth here. Give the face to one man and save the mind for another and both would have plenty. But no! This was the ultimate living example of overkill. So how could you ask such a shining specimen of a man to be satisfied with the likes of me? No! Don’t tell me! The fact is that he was! Even if it was for a short while. That was way more than enough. It would eventually get to be exhausting trying to measure up, or keep up. I was a lucky girl—without the self-esteem to feel it, or the wherewithal to enjoy what there was to enjoy of it and then let go. Only to look back on it forty years on with amused, grateful, and all-but-puffy eyes.