A weird direction

We’re at the cinema. She’s gorgeous. She’s wearing a flowery skirt and her long black hair in a ponytail, and I like long black hair and flowery skirts. In the film, faces are smashed, brains blown out, legs chopped off, and there is a moment when I could kiss her, when she leans over to me and asks, Are you tired, and I jump because I’m so fixated on the guy with the butcher’s knife who’s looking to cut up the young blonde chick that I can’t do anything except say No and then she leans back in her seat and I spend the rest of the film thinking if only I’d kissed her, and when Bruce Willis says, ‘An old man dies, a young woman lives. Fair trade,’ and then shoots himself in the head, I want to shoot myself in the head after saying something cool as well. After the film we go for a drink, she plays with her long black hair and is out of reach. Between us is the table, and on it a white wine spritzer and a wheat beer.

We go to an ice-cream parlour, our arms hanging down on either side of our bodies, our hands not touching. We’ve known each other for a long time, but not in the necessary way. We enter the ice-cream parlour. There’s a free table. We order tall, complicated ice-cream sundaes with lots of whipped cream, even though I don’t like cream, or tall, complicated sundaes, or ice cream, but she wants us to have ice cream, and so I want that too.

We’re standing outside my door. We’ve gone out a few times in the past couple of weeks. Once I was half an hour late picking her up because I had run out of petrol. I ran to the petrol station, a kilometre, as fast as I could, I bought a jerry can and filled it, and ran back to the car with the jerry can full of petrol, I sweated and cursed and shouted: Why does this stuff always happen to me? We’re standing outside my door because she doesn’t want to come up, but she’s got some DVDs I’ve asked to borrow, and I say, Why don’t you come up, and she says she’s got the feeling things are moving in a weird direction. I say, I don’t think the direction is weird at all, and then she says that she does, and I at least manage to convince her not to leave right away, so we go to the playground across the street where there are ping pong tables set up under the tall beech trees. It’s dark. We are sitting next to each other on a ping pong table and she says she doesn’t want to get hurt and that I haven’t got the best reputation and I’m annoyed that she’s heard that I sometimes go home with random women and I say, But I’ve never enjoyed spending time with a woman like this before with no ulterior motive, and it’s true, I know that for certain, because I’ve never spent time with a woman without having an ulterior motive. We talk a while longer and at some point she jumps down off the table and stands right up in front of me, and then we kiss, and she says, Don’t let me go, and we hold each other tight.