What We Did in the Back Row of the Cinema

I had been without a partner for two and a half years and, contrary to what people usually say, I wasn’t doing badly. Weekend flings were enough for me, the silent breakfasts the next morning didn’t bother me, and my bed was still the most comfortable place on the planet. Even so, one January afternoon, while I was waiting for the bus in the cold and bored out of my mind, I opened Tinder again, almost out of habit.

When I updated my profile, I discovered something that surprised me: in the preferences, I could mark “women” as well as men. The last time I had used the app, that option didn’t exist, or I hadn’t seen it. I tapped the button without thinking too much about it and started swiping.

Several weeks went by with matches that led nowhere. Conversations that died after three messages, dates that never materialized, repeated profiles. Until Renata appeared.

Brunette, long hair, thick-rimmed glasses, the kind of smile you’d see in an indie bookstore catalog. She was two years older than me and, according to her bio, worked in something design-related that sounded much more interesting than it later turned out to be. I liked her without expecting much. Ten minutes later, the match popped up.

We talked that same night until three in the morning. And the next. And the next. Soon we had a routine: she’d message me when she woke up, I’d answer her in the work café, and we’d talk again at the end of the day. We shared songs, screenshots of books, photos of ridiculous food. Nothing extraordinary, except that with her everything felt important to me.

“What if we stop texting like teenagers and actually meet?” she wrote one Saturday.

We met at a café near the cathedral square. I arrived fifteen minutes early, walked around the block three times so as not to look anxious, and even so I was the first one seated. When she came in, with a turtleneck sweater that was too big on her and her hair half pulled back, I realized the photos had not done her justice. She was prettier in person. And shorter. And she smelled of something I couldn’t identify but which clung to me for the rest of the day.

We went out five times before anything happened. Walks in the park, a mind-numbingly boring exhibition by a photographer she was a fan of, a dinner with too much red wine. On all those dates there were long looks, hands brushing when passing the salt, goodbyes that stretched out at the car door. But nothing else. I didn’t really know how to make a move with a woman. She, I later guessed, was waiting for me to do it.

One afternoon in February she texted me:

“There’s a movie I’m dying to see. I’m going with whoever. Want to come?”

It was the latest release by a South Korean director I had never heard of. I said yes before reading the synopsis. Then I looked it up: two and a half hours of slow drama about a woman returning to her hometown. Perfect for falling asleep. It didn’t matter. I would have said yes to anything she suggested.

***

We met at seven at the mall cinema. I arrived early again, this time in a dress I had agonized over and a perfume I hardly ever used. When she appeared, with a denim jacket over her shoulders and the glasses she’d worn the first day, I felt my stomach tighten in a way I hadn’t felt in years.

We bought popcorn, two large sodas we never finished, and went in. The theater was practically empty. Five or six people scattered around, an older couple in the front row, a guy alone in the middle. Renata had bought seats for the back, in the corner, the ones that are almost flush against the wall.

“Better view, fewer people nearby,” she said, shrugging with that practiced casualness people have when they actually know what they’re doing.

We sat down. The previews still had ten minutes to go. We talked softly about nonsense: how cold it was outside, a colleague of hers who had fought with his girlfriend in the middle of the office, the supporting actor on the marquee. Her arm rested on the shared armrest. Mine did too. We touched without touching, that tiny border of skin against skin that you feel more than a hug.

When the lights went out, the room fell into darkness. The screen lit Renata’s face with a cold blue glow. My heart was already beating faster than the movie justified.

At first we pretended to watch what was happening on screen. There were a couple of whispered comments about the heroine’s wardrobe, a muffled laugh when a supporting character said something ridiculous. But between comments, Renata’s fingers had slipped between mine over the armrest. I didn’t remember the exact moment we had gone from brushing against each other to holding hands. It simply, at some point, had happened.

I lowered our joined hands onto my thigh. She followed me. Her hand stayed there, on my leg, over the dress, not moving, as if waiting for permission. I, who had spent five dates not daring to do anything, felt brave that night. I let go of her hand and left it resting loose on my leg. And I placed mine on her thigh.

Her breathing changed.

***

I couldn’t say at what point I stopped watching the movie. Maybe it was when her fingers began drawing small circles over the fabric of my dress. Maybe when mine climbed, millimeter by millimeter, until they found the hem of her skirt. My hand slipped underneath. Her skin was warm and soft, and when I brushed it with my fingertips I felt her tense for a second, as if she were holding her breath.

I went higher. Slowly. Looking at the screen. Pretending that the conversation between two characters in a Korean kitchen was the most interesting thing in the world. I reached the edge of her underwear. There I stopped, waiting for her to give the signal.

Renata opened her legs a little. Just a little. Enough.

Meanwhile, her fingers had found my bare thigh and were moving upward inside, with that same calculated calm. When they reached my crotch over the dress, she pressed just enough for me to press my lips together.

“Here?” she whispered, without looking at me.

“Here,” I answered.

I started over the fabric. I traced her shape with my fingers, feeling the heat through the cotton, the dampness already beginning to show. She moved a millimeter forward in the seat, giving me more space. I pushed the fabric aside and found her already soaking wet.

My fingers slid through her folds with a ease that surprised me. I started at the top, over her clit, with slow circles. She bit the inside of her cheek. I caught it out of the corner of my eye and almost laughed from the sheer tension of it all.

Her hand, meanwhile, had found its way under my dress. She pulled my underwear aside with a skill that betrayed she had done this before, in other cinemas, with other women, in other lives. Her fingers traveled up and down me, gathering my wetness and spreading it everywhere, until all of me was one exposed nerve.

The guy alone in the middle laughed at something. The two of us froze for a second, fingers still but not withdrawn, as if the scene on the screen had stolen our attention. It hadn’t stolen anything. When I made sure no one was looking at us, I moved again.

Renata slid one finger inside me. Just one, all the way in, without warning. I bit the sleeve of my sweater so I wouldn’t make a sound. The theater filled for a moment with the sound of a sad piano, and I silently thanked that South Korean director whose name I will never remember for choosing a soundtrack that covered my breathing.

I put two fingers into her at once. She gripped my wrist for a second, as if she wanted to stop me, but then she eased. I began to move them slowly, curling them inward, searching for that spot that takes time to appear and that, once it does, there’s no mistaking for anything else. I found it on the third thrust. I knew because her head tilted toward me and sank into my shoulder, and because her nails dug into the fabric of my dress at the hip.

“Don’t stop,” she said in my ear, without a voice, only breath.

I didn’t stop.

***

What came after was a blind choreography. Each of us trying to focus on the other without losing control of herself. I looked at her to ask her to loosen up, to go slower, because I was about to moan in a movie theater and that was not going to look good in any version of my biography. She obeyed. Then it was me who sped up. We took turns without agreeing to it, as if we had been doing it that way for years.

Renata finished first. I felt it because her body went rigid beside me, because her hand closed around my wrist with a strength she hadn’t shown in five whole dates, and because something warm and wet covered my fingers. She pressed her lips together, closed her eyes, and let out a sound that, between the cinema soundtrack and my own breathing, seemed to me the most intimate noise I had ever heard.

When she finished, I didn’t pull my fingers out. I stayed inside her, feeling how she relaxed in small waves. And then she, still trembling, increased the rhythm in my body. Her fingers moved faster, never abandoning my clit, with a thumb that knew exactly where and with how much pressure.

I held out as long as I could. When I came, I did it with my face buried in her neck, biting the fabric of her sweater, my legs taut as guitar strings and my other hand gripping the edge of the seat. It lasted longer than I expected. Maybe ten seconds, maybe twenty. When I came back to the room, the characters in the movie were crying at a kitchen table and I had no idea why.

***

We stayed still. Both of us breathing deeply, trying to return to a normal pulse. Renata slowly pulled her fingers out, brought her hand to her mouth, and sucked her fingertips shamelessly. I looked at her, not daring to do the same, and let out a nervous laugh that almost gave us away.

We cleaned up what we could with the popcorn napkins. We straightened my dress and her skirt. When the movie had been going for twenty more minutes, she rested her head on my shoulder and I stroked her hair, pretending we were two normal girlfriends on a normal date.

We waited for the lights to come on. We waited for the older couple in the front row to leave, the guy alone in the middle, the other three people. When only we were left, we stood up. Renata’s seat was wet. I saw it and didn’t know whether I wanted to laugh or die of embarrassment. We did nothing about it.

We walked through the mall corridor without saying a word. The neon from the still-open shops hit our faces. She took my hand for a second when we stepped out into the parking lot. She said nothing, and neither did I. It was the kind of silence that feels like a conversation.

She drove me home. She said goodbye with a long kiss at the car door and left.

***

The next day we met for breakfast. I had slept terribly, replaying the night scene by scene, with a mixture of pride, vertigo, and a sadness I couldn’t explain. She arrived looking like she hadn’t slept either.

“We need to talk about yesterday,” she said before ordering coffee.

And we talked. We were both thinking the same thing, though neither of us had said it until then. That we had gone too fast. That we had skipped over the five dates before it with a single night at the movies. That the heat of the moment had clouded our judgment and that there was nowhere for this to go, because she was moving away in three months and I wasn’t willing to start something just to watch it end.

It was hard for me to accept. More than I had expected. While she spoke with that serenity of someone who has already made the decision before sitting down, I was discovering, in horror, that I had fallen in love in five dates and one movie screening. I nodded a lot, said almost nothing, and paid the bill so I wouldn’t have to keep looking her in the eye.

We saw each other twice more, as friends. The third time she didn’t show up, and I understood it was over. I have nothing bad to say about her. She was a beautiful, intelligent woman, with that rare mix of shyness and brazenness that only women who have been wrong many times learn. I hope she is happy. Even if it isn’t with me.

Sometimes, when I pass in front of that cinema, I still think about the back row. And about the South Korean movie whose title I never bothered to learn.