Chapter 3: Trouble at the Movies
About the time that Cathy was wondering if the trio of men would cause them any real trouble, real trouble started. Already she had gone much further than she had meant to, and she couldn't say exactly when things had gone off the rails. Only that Evan being there had thrown her off balance, and then all the attention had gone to her head.
But now these drunk and horny movie crashers had zeroed in on her tits. It was flattering, in a way, and Jason seemed more dumbfounded with every passing moment, which pleased her. But drunk, horny guys in groups had a way of making bad decisions together, and these guys were apparently no exception.
After some kind of argument back and forth, one of them finally stood up.
He grabbed the hem of his own shirt and pulled it over his head in one rough motion, tossing it to his friend. Cathy understood. He was shirtless, like she had her tits out. Tit for tat. A drunk guy haha. But they were going to draw too much attention. She decided to ignore them. There was still a chance they would go away. But still she noticed him. He was an athlete, it looked like, or he worked out at the gym a lot at least. His torso was a defined map of muscle, with actual abs and pecs.
Cathy was wrong about him, though. He did not just 'go away.'
He did the opposite.
He sauntered down the row toward them with the loose-hipped confidence of a drunk on a lark.
Beside her, Jason’s body locked, a cold flush washing over him. Cathy forced herself to breathe evenly and focus on the screen, for as long as she could. But that wasn't very long. Soon, she couldn't help but notice him. The shirtless man loomed over Cathy, and over Jason. The smell of sweat and vodka was thick around him. He didn’t speak, just stared down at her exposed chest with a blunt, appraising intensity, his friends’ snickers a relentless soundtrack. He had on the strangest smile. Like a challenge and an invitation. He wasn't an ugly man, Cathy realized. Handsome, even, with a square jaw. Despite herself, her breaths came in quick, shallow pulls, her ribs fluttering like a panicked bird’s; she was nearly hyperventilating, tits out, her gaze fixed on the screen as if pleading for a cut to credits, or at least for the moment to pass. She didn't cover herself. It seemed irrelevant now. And like an admission of guilt. She could still say, 'No, I had no idea,' if she really had to.
But the jackass hovered there for a full minute.
That one minute felt like an eternity in the dark, the projection’s colors washing over his skin and her pale, frozen form, staring at her tits and glancing at her eyes sometimes. He seemed to ignore Jason entirely, and Jason said nothing.
Then, with a soft, contemptuous snort, he turned and walked to the far end of the row, dropping into a seat with a thud.
The relieved breath Jason exhaled was audible, but Cathy’s attention was pulled to the left. The Asian woman was no longer pretending to watch the screen; her face was fully turned toward them, her expression an unreadable blend of shock and stark assessment. Her boyfriend beside her was statue-still, his earlier hunger replaced by a kind of horrified fascination.
A hot wave of some unnamed lust, sharper than any humiliation from the drunk men, washed over Cathy. She told herself that pulling the shirt up now would be a surrender, a public admission that this had been a mistake all along, and she found she couldn’t make her hands move. It felt like conceding in a game whose rules had been written in a language she’d never learned. The cold air of the theater needled her skin, but the weight of all those silent eyes felt infinitely heavier.
"You can warm up if you're too cold," Jason whispered to her. "If you want."
"I'm fine," she hissed, sharper than she intended. She exhaled gently. "Just, watch the movie." She wasn't going to let these movie crashers win. But she didn't want to say that out loud, in front of dating couple that was watching the two of them under an open microscope. "It's gross but you picked it."
Jason nodded like that made sense and fell silent.
Cathy’s eyes scanned the row where the trio had been sitting. A cold prickle travelled up her spine. The third seat was conspicuously empty. The man on the row behind them was missing, though his two friends still sat, one at either end of their row.
She felt a shift in the air behind her.
Then she caught the faint, familiar glow of a phone screen illuminating the darkness just over her right shoulder. Cathy understood. He had moved to the best possible vantage. He was over her shoulder, in the dark; he was recording her breasts from up above.
Or taking photos.
Cathy stayed still. Plausible deniability was her only option, now. The Asian woman and her date were turned away now, their attention given back to the movie. As long as she didn't look up at the camera, it would be fine.
Cathy fixed her eyes on the screen where a zombie was now clumsily eating a prop heart, forcing her own breathing to slow to match the actor's feigned agony. She wondered if Jason, sitting rigid beside her, could feel the intrusive hover of the phone over them or if he was too lost in his own tangled thrill. "The makeup is so bad," she murmured, aiming for a casual tone that cracked on the word 'bad.' A droplet of condensation from her drink traced a path down her rib cage, a sharp contrast to the heat flooding her cheeks.
The guy without his shirt was back.
He'd snuck over, while she was distracted, and now suddenly he was there, standing over them again.
This time he had added a new detail. His pants were unzipped, and he had unfurled himself.
He was obviously proud of himself. It hung there, heavy and obscene in the erratic light, a blunt and heavy intrusion into the already charged space between the rows, thick and hard and pointed directly at her forehead, hardly a foot away.
Jason made a wet, strangled sound beside her, his glasses reflecting the pale flesh now hovering at Cathy’s eye level, but the couple in front of them remained dutifully turned away. Now, of all times, they turned a blind eye.
He said nothing. The man standing over them was silent. He gave himself a slow, deliberate stroke, his gaze fixed on Cathy’s frozen face. His friend at the other end of the row was a silent statue.
Cathy’s mind emptied of every rational thought, every clever justification she’d crafted since her shirt first slipped. The cold air wasn’t on her skin anymore; it was inside her lungs, icy and paralyzing. Jason finally moved, a stiff turn of his head, his wide eyes darting from the man’s face to his cock and back again, his own arousal now utterly consumed by a nauseating wave of panic. But he said nothing.
Cathy understood.
The man had an impressive cock, and Cathy knew Jason's secret.
"You wanna touch it?" he asked finally, looking down at her. "I know you do."
But Cathy never got a chance to answer.
Finally, security showed up. A flashlight caught the looming man in the face, and he turned in surprised, instinctively pulling up his pants. His friend at the end of the aisle turned to leave, but there were two security guards in uniform at the end of the aisle, and two more waiting on the other side of the theater. That didn't stop the man with his dick out from running. But someone tackled him, a heavy looking guard who was surprisingly agile, and the two of them fell over a seat and into the empty aisle, right as a zombie head exploded on screen.
The other two men went meekly.
None of the security gave Cathy or Jason a second look, which surprised them both. Cathy realized that in the commotion she too had pulled her shirt up instinctively. The couple in front of them noticed but said nothing, though the woman's eyes glittered with something like jealousy, or contempt, or pity. Cathy didn't know or care. She was just relieved that her little flutter with danger had ended so well.
They sat in silence through the unremarkable resolution to Dawn of the Damned II, which promised no sequel. The theater cleared up out of people, but Cathy sat with Jason and read the credits, as if the credits mattered.
"You're kind of amazing," Jason said. "I can't believe that happened."
"I didn't think it was that great a movie," Cathy said. "But I'm glad you liked it."