Chapter 7: Frame Club

On Sunday afternoon Isla held what she called Frame Club.

Thirty people came, which she said was a good turnout, and sat in the front rows with tea in paper cups.

I stood at the back by the exit, where a person could leave.

"Every week I show one clip and we take it apart," she told them.

"Today's is a modern one. Some of you will say it isn't cinema."

"Is it Demi and Wyatt?" a woman called out.

There was a ripple of laughter.

"It's Demi and Wyatt," Isla said. "Episode thirty-one. The kitchen."

She hadn't told me she would pick that one.

The lights went down.

The screen filled, twenty feet wide, with the loft kitchen I had built out of a rented space and four lamps.

It was raining on the window.

I had put a hose on the fire escape for that.

A grip had stood out there with a bucket and been soaked through by the end.

Demi stood at the counter in a grey sweater and burned pancakes.

Wyatt came in, laughing, and said something I'd written about a smoke alarm.

I knew every word.

I mouthed them in the dark without meaning to.

Then he took her face in both his hands and kissed her.

I had told him where to put his thumbs.

On the huge screen the kiss went on, longer than I remembered, and Demi's eyes closed, and she held onto his shirt.

I made myself look at it the way I would have looked at a stranger's footage.

It was good.

It was warm and slow, and the window lit the side of her cheek.

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Wrote Their Love Story, So I Wrote Myself Out from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.