Blockbuster

I took some time away from the office. I went here, I went there, but mostly I spent a lot of time in the dark, sitting in the tilted knit seats of the cinema while the sun shone outside. I watched Tom Hanks in The Davinci Code, and I watched Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 3, back to back. Six straight hours of blinding hollywood summer blockbuster fantasy. By the time I walked out of there I didn't know who I was, the streets seemed muted and quiet compared to the constant explosions I had been exposed to all afternoon. I couldn't stop, the next afternoon I found myself thumbing through my own collection of movies and managed to dig up a copy of Minority Report. Every movie that Tom is in he's always running that run that he does, urgency on his face, fire in his eyes. Always running. It was almost over when Frannie called, she always has that lovely sound in her voice when she calls me from her desk. I imagined her in a skirt, one calf crossed over the other. Her foot running up and down her ankle while her shoe rested somewhere under her desk. "What are you doing? Let's go and get drunk tonight." she said in an almost vulnerable tone, "I'm out of here in an hour and can pick you up."

Before long I was standing on her balcony with a Riedel glass in my hand, she changed outfits three times. With each outfit she stood in the doorway to the balcony and shifted her hip to one side and cocked her head to the other, "How about this? Or do you think it's too low cut?" she new exactly what she was doing, knowing full well that the wine, mountains, and a woman trying on clothes for me was something that would eventually knock me under her control. Her boyfriend, did she even have a boyfriend anymore? She didn't say, but wherever he was I was without doubt a fill in, someone to make her feel beautiful on a lonely summer evening, and who was I to complain anyway, I was just as lonely. Instead of answering I took a long draw of the wine I had just poured for myself and felt a prickling sensation at the back of my neck. The kind of feeling you get when the message from your taste buds gets lost en route to somewhere more important and winds up exploding at the base of your head, a wasted signal of pleasure. I told her to wear whatever she wanted, because I was pretty certain we wouldn't be going anywhere.