Henry
As I listen to Grace getting drinks in the kitchen, I try to imagine where she’d want me to sit, like an exercise in failed telepathy.
She was so casual just now when she told me the kids were gone.
It’s safe for me to assume, then, that she felt casual, right?
Like she couldn’t care less where I sat?
My palms are starting to sweat again as I subject myself to a brief flashback of a junior high party during which I was shoved into a closet with my classmate Alicia Reed during a game of Seven Minutes in Heaven. I didn’t know what to do then. I don’t know what to do now.
Grace appears with our drinks and gives me a weird look because I’m still just standing here in the living room like I’ve come to sell her aluminum siding.
Finally, I take a breath and choose the couch. Grace does, too, and now we’re settled against our respective armrests.
Instead of pushing Play on AMC and dealing with commercials, we find Edward Scissorhands on demand for $3.99.
“Treat yo’self,” Grace says and takes a swig of her beer.
It takes longer than I remember for Winona Ryder to appear—a full third of the way into the movie. She arrives home early from a camping trip, scaring the shit out of Edward, who’s sleeping in her bed. Grace and I laugh when Edward destroys the waterbed.
Grace sets her phone next to mine on the coffee table, then puts her feet up. Fluffy socks again, like always. The yoga pants, though, are different, and I’m briefly unsure where to point my eyes.
She laughs, startling me to attention. Edward, accidentally drunk on what he thinks is lemonade, face-plants at Winona’s feet.
“I haven’t seen this since I was a kid,” Grace says. “Has it always been this funny?”
“Careful,” I say. “It starts out as a comedy, but it ends up dark and sad.”
“I think you just described my thirties,” she says.
Her right calf flexes and relaxes as she crosses her legs at the ankles.
We’re at the part now where Edward accidentally cuts Winona’s hand, and the neighbors come after Edward because they think he’s dangerous.
As he runs away and hides, I sneak a glance at Grace’s legs.
Then I notice our phones. They’re side by side on the coffee table.
Our cases are scratched, our screen protectors smudged and chipped.
Her phone is crooked while mine sits straight.
I put a little mental frame around this image—modern-day domesticity as art—because if Grace and I were a couple this is how it’d be: our phones side by side.
On the TV now, Edward returns, and Winona is there, alone, waiting for him.
“Where is everybody?” asks Edward.
“Out looking for you,” she replies.
They gaze into each other’s eyes. Winona asks him to hold her, and Edward says, “I can’t.” He walks away, but Winona goes to him, opens his arms, and eases herself between them—scissorhands be damned.
I’ve never touched Grace beyond shaking her warm, small hand, but I wonder now what it’d feel like to touch her leg—the expanse of her thigh, maybe, before her hips vanish beneath her sweater.
I look at her again—at her body beside me—because I can’t seem to help it, and I’m surprised to realize that I’d like very much to kiss her.
“Um, mind if I pause for a sec?” she says. Her voice sounds rushed, almost urgent.
“Oh,” I say, flustered. “Yeah, are you—”
“Bathroom break,” she says.
“Cool,” I say, uncoolly. I’m worried that she caught me looking at her body just now and that she’s quite reasonably skeeved out. I tell her that I’ll get some more rosé. “Do you want another beer?”
Grace stands, steps into her Crocs. “No, I’m good. Or, yeah, maybe. I don’t know. I’ll be right back.”
And then she runs up the stairs, leaving Harry Styles and me alone on the couch.