Chapter Nine
Banks
“Prepare, Vixen, for thebiteof your life!”
Banks grinned from ear to ear, watching the goofy, high gloss, over the top antics on the screen and painfully aware that, right next to him, Harper was beaming as well.
The vampire hunter, all decked out in a frilly pirate blouse with poofy sleeves and a swashbuckling hat to match, waved a tinfoil cross at a slinky vampire temptress wearing a gauzy nightgown, for some apparent reason.“Silence, Tramp.The walls of this ancient castle harken not for thee!”
They both snorted at the over-the-top dialogue, the lavish set design, the ham-fisted acting and not for the first time.With the vast theater all to themselves, and the garish 1970s technicolorVampire Virgins from Mars 5spilling out on the screen before them, all go-go boots and high collars and pale breasts and hairspray galore, they felt free to both admire and heckle the cult classic openly.
And, of course, never less than charitably.Banks could hardly believe his good luck.Not just to have Harper all to himself, and this impromptu private screening of a low-budget, B-movie gem, but to have finally discovered someone to share his passion for “so bad they’re rad” movies with.Why he’d never bothered to stick his neck out and try and find someone to share his love of movies before was beyond him and, yet, at the same time perfectly understandable.
“Perfect,” Harper murmured with glee, nibbling the last of his popcorn between big, poofy, gleaming lips.“Just.Perfect.”
“Why are they in a castle again?”Banks felt the need to lean close to Harper to openly whisper, despite the rows of empty seats in front of them.There was something so much more intimate about doing it that way, his lips close to Harper’s softly blushing ear, dusted with the wisps of his dirty blond ponytail.
Harper rolled his eyes, as if perhaps Banks had asked him what popcorn tasted like instead.“The only way the vampire virgins can get back to Mars is with the Lithoneum crystals buried deep beneath the castle vault, remember?”
Banks chuckled.“How could I forget something like that?”
Harper met his eyes, so close in the flickering darkness of the intimate theater they might as well have been peering into his very soul.“Probably because you’re so infatuated with the vampire virgin’s boobies, that’s why.”
As if on cue, the vampire hunter tore the dress of the main vampire, her big, flouncy, poofy white breasts bursting forth and filling the screen as the director zoomed in on them, soft pink nipples 70-feet high on the screen in front of them.He admired them the way he had all the different breasts he’d encountered in high school—perfunctorily, like a chore to be done or an assignment to be turned in, part of the social contract of remaining under the radar while secretly scoping out all the hunky, sweaty guys on the football field or, in particular, the locker room afterward.
He was aware that Harper was watching him, and so he gave a slight little “meh” face accompanied by a telltale shoulder shrug, as if forcing himself into a place he’d never been before.Then he glanced from the wiggling, jiggling breasts on the screen to Harper’s blah reaction right next to him.“So, you’re telling me, those do nothing for you?”
Harper snorted, setting his popcorn bucket aside and wiping his salty, greasy hands on the sides of his off-white linen pants, the ones that went so well with his casually wrinkled, plum colored button-down shirt, loose and breezy and untucked, as if just waiting there to be unbuttoned, one slow, sensual button at a time.
“Those breasts in particular?”he teased, sliding a last Red Vine from the crinkly package on Banks’s lap and waving it at the giant, voluminous, bulbous breasts currently onscreen.“Or, you know, any breasts?”
“Both?Either?”
Harper met his gaze curiously, nibbling thoughtfully on the Red Vine before answering.“No, Banks.Is that...going to be a problem?”
“Never?”Banks was undeterred.“Not even a little?”
Harper cocked his head, still nibbling.His lips were shimmering in the flickering light from the scene playing on the screen high above, the very one they no longer seemed interested in.“Not even remotely, Banks.”Banks nodded, but Harper’s eyes still searched his for something more.“Does it do something for you?”
Banks was going to issue his usual jock response of, “Duh!Fuck, yeah!Tits!Ass!Booyah!”But then he remembered: he wasn’t back home drinking beer around some bonfire with his bro buds.He was here, with Harper.Sweet, beautiful, wounded Harper.They were alone, in a new place, on a new campus, starting a new life far, far away from the old one and sitting there, quietly, in an empty theater.Just the two of them.No one else around to hear, or see, or judge, or snort or laugh or give him a wedgie—or far worse than that—if he answered the wrong way.
He lingered too long before replying, which he knew to be an answer in and of itself.“Do you want the honest answer?”he asked, turning slightly as if they were back in the Campus Café’ and not witnessing a pseudo-sexual fight scene between a topless vampire and her pornstache sporting vampire hunter.“Or the one I’d give the guys back home?”
“I already know the one you’d give the guys back home,” Harper said quietly.“I want the answer you’d give to the guy who wore aPrideshirt to freshman orientation and waited four years to do it.”
Banks nodded, heart pounding more than it had when they’d walked into the empty theater and he knew he’d be sitting next to Harper for the next two hours.“I...I think you already know the answer, Harp.”
“I guess I want to hear it from those lips of yours,” Harper said, both flirtatious and challenging at the same time.
