Georgie, All Along (53)
It’s real fucking cute.
There’s something sweet about watching this movie with her, and that’s because I never had this kind of night—sitting in the dark at a girl’s parents’ house, pretending to watch a movie while I think about how much I want to kiss her. By the time I was old enough to be interested in girls, I was the kind of kid parents didn’t want in their houses, no matter my pedigree. I feel like I’m fifteen years old, so I’m starting to think there’s some kind of magic about Georgie’s list and how well it works at going back.
“Oh no, oh no,” Georgie says, squeaky again, and this time she doesn’t slam her eyes shut. Instead she scrambles for the remote, spilling cider on her top and the robe in the process, but I don’t think she notices. When she’s got it in her hand, she’s pressing buttons hard and haphazard, not having much success at stopping the movie at all. I reach out and take it from her, ignoring the brush of her soft hand on mine.
I turn the remote the right way around and press pause.
“That what you wanted?” I say, trying to keep the laugh out of my voice.
“Oh my God,” she says, dropping her head back and placing a hand over her chest. I can see it rising and falling quickly, and suddenly this is no longer easy. Her head thrown back, her breathing hard . . .
It puts me in the mind of things other than movie watching. “This is stressful,” she adds, laughing at herself and rubbing that hand on her chest back and forth, as though trying to soothe her heartbeat.
Mine, mine, mine, I think, like an animal.
I sit forward and set my hard cider on the coffee table, concentrating on the sound of Hank in the other room. He went to bed a half hour ago, huffing in annoyance at me, and Georgie teased me about how I was staying up past my bedtime. Hearing his gusty dog-snore at least brings me back to my own humanity.
“You think you could’ve handled this in high school?” I ask her, gesturing at the screen, now that I’ve got a semblance of control again.
She laughs again. “Probably not. I would’ve pretended for Bel and then I wouldn’t have slept for three weeks.”
I lean back again, but things have changed in the couch environment—now that the movie’s paused, Georgie’s unwound herself, stretching her legs out so that the tips of her bare toes graze along the outside of my thigh when I settle in. This would absolutely count as an erotic experience for a fifteen-year-old.
I clear my throat, desperate for a distraction. “Somehow I figured you’d be pretty immune to movie magic.”
She furrows her brow in confusion.
“Because you worked in movies, I mean.”
She nods, wiggling those bare toes. “I didn’t, not really. I mean, aside from the fact that I didn’t work for anyone who made this kind of movie”—she looks toward the screen, winces, and wiggles her toes again—“my job was more about . . . not-movie things.”
She falls silent for a minute, looking down at where her toes have set to rest against the outer seam of my jeans. The me who is very nearly in my midthirties can’t feel anything through the denim, but the me who is still a little bit fifteen definitely can.
“Honestly, sometimes I wonder if the work was wasted on me,” she says, and I turn my head toward her. “I mean, so many people in that town, they live and breathe movies. So many people outside of that town, even! Like, tonight, Oliv—”
She breaks off, closing her lips tightly, her face flushing in embarrassment, and it doesn’t take me but a second to realize why, to realize whose name she was about to say.
My sister’s.
I flush a little, too.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and I give her credit for not trying to pretend she was going to mention someone other than my sister. I may not have seen or talked to Olivia in a lot of years, but I’ve got no trouble believing she’s as interested in movies as she was when she was a kid. It used to drive my dad crazy, the way she’d rattle off film trivia at meals. For her ninth birthday Evan and I pooled our allowances and got her a VCR off eBay so she could watch a box of ancient tapes she found in our grandma Sue’s house. Olivia barely left her bedroom for a week. When she finally came out she spoke in quotes from some old movie called Moonstruck for days. “Snap out of it!” I remember her shouting periodically for months afterward.
I clear my throat again, but this time it’s to swallow the ache in my throat. It isn’t as if I don’t ever hear about my brother and sister, but mostly what I hear is the big stuff—Liv running the spa at the inn, Evan splitting with the wife I never even met. Somehow it hurts worse to hear something small, that my sister still loves something she loved back when I knew her.
“It’s all right,” I say gruffly, and wait to get angry the way I did that first night. But I don’t, not now. Maybe it’s because I know Georgie better now, or because it’s been so easy here with her tonight. Maybe it’s because of her magic list and how it lets me go back, lets me be a version of myself who wouldn’t have minded a mention of my sister.
“I didn’t tell her I know you,” she says softly. “I didn’t tell any of them.”
My family, she means, and to anyone else, that probably wouldn’t be much of a compliment. It might even be an insult, me a dirty secret that she can’t speak of to her new employers. Instead, I get that flare of possessiveness again, an unearned glory. It’s a feeling I don’t get that often—like there’s something that’s only mine around here, something that’s not about my reputation or the way I’ve had to rebuild it.