Romeo and Juliet
by Melissa McGinnis
I sat on the floor, legs crooked beneath me, my hand draped negligently across my knee. My attention was focused on the makeshift movie screen before me. My eyes traced the imperfect outline of the bed sheet where it had been tacked to the wall. A picture appeared and the music began. I watched as the scene was set. I panned across foggy ocean waves. A young girl’s haunting sing-song voice drifted forward from the speakers positioned somewhere on the wall behind me. “Life for me …” was the last line of the movie that I heard.
Something brushed against my dangling fingers, and I looked down to see what it was. A man’s hand was stretched across the carpet. It reached out to mine with two long, shy fingers. My eyes, now adjusted to the semi-darkness of the room, followed the trail of skin up his arm to where the rest of him lay. He was stretched across the floor, his head closest to me, and his long light brown hair spread out beneath it. He didn’t look at me, rather up at the screen; his other arm pillowed his head. He wasn’t looking at me, but I could tell that, like me, he was no longer focused solely on the movie.
My hand moved before I had given it my consent. I curled my fingers around his before he could become discouraged and pull away. He seemed as pleased by my acceptance as I was by his invitation. He teased my hand with the long nails of his picking hand and drove the butterflies in my stomach mad. Our hands were never still, always twisting and turning and ensuring that no inch of skin, from fingertip to wrist, was left unexplored. His thumbnail explored the flesh of my palm while his other fingers massaged my index finger and tested the edges of my rings. I mimicked his motions by gently digging my own benign claws into the joints of his digits. He seemed almost ashamed of the rough skin where guitar strings had brought up calluses, but I would have kissed them had he let me. The backs of his hands, however, were as soft as mine, silk on suede as we slid them together.
For over an hour, we were part of each other. In those extraordinary moments, nothing was more important than just maintaining contact. We took solace in the comfort of another’s touch. Both of us had been lonely for too long. Sometimes he would spread his fingers and let me draw circles in his palm with my pinky, sometimes I submitted to his caresses. My fingers drew slowly over the pronounced veins over his wrist and he nudged my bracelet up under my sleeve. Twice his hand touched the side of my leg, tentatively, before respectfully pulling away. Never before had I trusted a man so deeply, or felt so profoundly connected to anyone.
I wish I had found my voice to speak, to lean down to his ear and whisper the words. Shakespeare had filled my thoughts, a ridiculous recollection of lines. Instead, I just said them to myself, without him. “O, then, dear saint,” I spoke in my head, as if my thoughts could be transferred through our joined hands, “let lips do what hands do; they pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.” I wanted, so very badly, to reach out and stroke his hair, to touch his cheek and share with him all the secrets of my heart.
The room around us, full of other frequenters of the Underground, began to stir, and I noticed that the movie had been paused for a brief “intermission.” People were standing and stretching and passing around what remained of the beer. He stirred as well and our hands separated, sending a very distinct sense of loss up my arm, like an electric shock. I stood and wandered into the kitchen with the rest, a contented smile still on my lips. He came to my side and massaged my shoulders while we made small talk with a mutual friend.
Soon the group was ready to continue the movie, and they all slipped back into the darkened room to reclaim their positions on couches and chairs. I wandered down the hall toward the other door to the movie room and hovered there. I watched the others move around. I felt his hand on my hair, and I closed my eyes, savoring the touch. He pulled away, and I turned to see the front door swing shut without a sound. I hurried to follow, impeded briefly by the people standing between the exit and me. I made it out onto the porch in time to see the moonlight glinting on his long hair as he disappeared down the street into the darkness between the streetlamps.
For hours after, I sat out on the porch in the cold, staring up at the sky and at the corner at the end of the street. I listened to the sounds of the town, the predawn noises. I took great gulps of chilled May morning air. I sat out on the porch and watched the stars sparkle and wondered what they would sound like if they could sing.
I sat out on that porch and wondered if I would ever see him again.
And if he’d remember me.
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