Chapter 9 #2
“About the politics, probably. As a piece of filmmaking…” Harrison shook his head, small and certain.
“There’s a shot of the workers moving into the factory at shift change, and they walk in lockstep, heads down, and the geometry of it, the way Lang frames the stairs and the bodies, it’s…
” He stopped, balled his fists for a moment like he wanted to tackle the right string of words down to use them.
“You can’t look away. Even knowing what he’s doing with it, even knowing it’s manipulation, pure visual rhetoric, you can’t look away because it’s so precisely constructed that it becomes true in spite of itself.
” He returned his hand to the frame like he missed touching it.
I looked at the still nearest to me. The workers, their faces tipped toward the floor, the machinery rising behind them like a cathedral built for the wrong god. Somewhere down the hallway, far behind Harrison, a girl with long, curly hair stepped inside with one of her friends.
“You’ve seen it a lot,” I said, my heart hurrying. He was so relaxed now, so given to the topic that I just couldn’t break this moment. He’d been like this last night, later on, but today, all I’d seen was this devastating tension, this unbearable anticipation stringing him ever tighter.
“Four times in a cinema.” He said it without embarrassment, which surprised me a little.
“Once in Berlin, in a theatre that was there when the film came out. Different seats, same room.” He looked at Maria’s face on the panel, the real one, her eyes open wide, caught in the moment before something terrible.
“There’s something about watching a film where it was meant to be watched.
The scale is different. You stop being a person sitting in a chair, and you just…
” His hand dropped from the frame. “You’re just inside it. ”
I kept my gaze on Harrison because he was looking into my eyes as he spoke.
Even so, I could see the moment when Emma touched her friend’s shoulder, made up an excuse, and turned toward us.
I could see her beginning to cross the room, could see the intention to greet Harrison because they kept crossing paths by fate’s design and Harrison’s, and could see the hopeful look on her face.
Hopeful for what? That they might work out a way to remain friends? That he was happy with someone else?
That they could get back together?
As Harrison uttered the last words to me, I panicked. We still had nearly two weeks planned together. It was too soon, and we hadn’t done enough, and Emma didn’t look even remotely jealous, only amused and a little happy. And I wouldn’t see it end so quickly.
My hand went to the lapel of Harrison’s coat, and I pulled him in.
Abort! Abort! What the hell are you doing, you absolute idiot?
Yet I kept pulling him in, leaning closer to him, until I could see the surprise on Harrison’s face shift into something completely different, something warm and only a little startled and so full of relief that my heart ached.
My lips touched Harrison’s gently as our bodies came together. The warmth and softness of Harrison’s mouth on mine sent a tingling sensation from the back of my head down my spine.
As my hand on Harrison’s lapel tightened into a fist, my other hand moved to the back of his neck, holding him facing me, facing away from Emma, who quickly faded from my consciousness as the kiss deepened.
Harrison stood still for a moment while I kissed him, then moved his foot between both of mine, leaning in and kissing me back as the scent of his spicy cologne wrapped around me and pulled me into him. My skin tingled where his mustache met it.
He tasted like mints and strawberries and something indescribable, something that was so unlike anything else I’d ever tried to recognize.
His hand lightly brushed against my hip, fingertips grazing the fabric of my pants, and then he pulled back from me. “Wh—what was that?” he whispered, inches away from my face.
Heat rushed into my head so quickly I nearly lost my balance. “Trust me,” I whispered back. “Tell you later.”
I wished I could tell him why, could tell him that he could actually trust me, but all the words had just tumbled into the abyss of my subconsciousness, and I was speechless, dizzy, high on adrenaline, and so heated on the inside that all my clothes chafed me wrong.
When I remembered to look over Harrison’s shoulder, the room was empty again.
“Tell me about Maria,” I said, letting go of his coat.
Harrison cleared his throat, unblinking, his cheeks afire and his lips slick as he licked them. “I trust you.”
My teeth clenched, and I nodded, but it was a small, jerky gesture because all my muscles were tense, and I had only a vague sense of control over my body.
I really needed to take my jacket off, maybe have a cold plunge, maybe climb the tallest mountain and shout from the top of my lungs, though I didn’t have any words I could shout out.
I didn’t know words that tricky and big and impossible.
Instead, I listened to Harrison as he stumbled over a few words and began to tell me about Maria.