Page 22 of Summer at Croftwood Cinema
‘That’s true, I would have come straight over and helped you with your sprockets,’ she said with a lighthearted tone so as not to let on that she was upset. It was hard not to be offended that he seemed to have been avoiding her on purpose.
‘Haha, see? I’m not going to be able to look at a sprocket in the same way again.’ He grinned and Patsy softened a little.
‘So how have you got on?’
‘Do you want to see?’
She nodded and he led the way up the stairs to the projection box. ‘Anyway, what were you doing here, loitering in the dark?’
‘Counting chairs. We’re going to sell them and it turns out they go for a fair bit more than we realised. I was greedily working out how much we might get.’
‘Right. So you texted Oliver to say you’re be here alone, did you?’
‘Well, no. But it’s different.’
‘No it isn’t. What if it wasn’t me lurking around? It’s so quiet in the park no-one would have heard you scream.’
‘Alright, Ed! That’s basically all you need to say to make sure I never come here by myself ever again. You make it sound like I’m one step away from being in a horror movie.’
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Let’s take your mind off things with some good old-fashioned manual labour.’ He handed her a cloth. ’If you could start with cleaning these,’ he said, pointing to some of the parts she’d carefully laid out the last time she was there, ‘that would be great. Really shine them up, get into all the tiny gaps. They need to look like the ones in the projector at Uni.’
’These will never be as shiny as those,’ said Patsy, choosing one that didn’t look too bad to begin with.
‘They will. Challenge extended.’ He looked at her with a quizzical raised eyebrow and a lop-sided grin that made Patsy’s insides quiver.
‘Challenge accepted.’
She made herself comfortable on the floor so that she could watch Ed work as she cleaned. He was cleaning the projector itself, now that it was empty of all the moving parts. He had a bottle of water that he poured into a dish and dipped a toothbrush in before gently using it to brush the dirt off. He’d laid a sheet on the floor which was gradually being covered with debris as he cleaned.
He was lost in his task and Patsy was lost watching him. He was quite sexy and she never thought she’d think that of a man who only wore an unending supply of hoodies and jeans. She’d thought her type was a less cultivated version of Oliver. Someone a bit more comfortable-looking but with his sense of style and attention to grooming. But she’d been wrong. Ed was a contender. There was something about him, maybe a culmination of lots of tiny things that added up to make him attractive to her. On Friday, she’d been sure that they were on the same page. Tonight, she wasn’t so sure. Or rather, he didn’t seem so sure. He was a man of relatively few words, she had come to realise over the past couple of weeks, and a man who was tentative and unsure about sharing his feelings. But on Friday, he’d shown that given a bit of time he could make the moves she was hoping for.
They had started something that she’d thought they both wanted to continue and as she watched him examining the inside of the projector as if there was nothing more important in the world, she smiled and hoped that at some point that gaze would fall on her again. And she could wait if that’s what she had to do.
The next day, Patsy mentioned the enormity of the chair selling task to Jess when she called in for a well-earned coffee once the Haberdashery had closed for the evening.
‘There are more than four hundred chairs. I mean, when we decided to sell them, I thought there would be a couple of hundred but it’s deceiving when you see them set out in rows like that, you’d never think it was as many.’
Jess nodded sympathetically. ‘It is quite overwhelming, but four hundred chairs, that could make such a lot of money, I bet they’ll go like hot cakes.’
‘Hopefully. I’m going to try and get the Gazette interested, that might help shift them. We’re going to need to get them out before the builders start on the inside.’
‘And how’s it going with you and that projectionist guy? Oliver said you had a date on Friday.’ Jess looked eagerly at Patsy as she took a sip of coffee.
‘He did not tell you that,’ said Patsy, mortified to hear that Oliver had actually said it was a date, when it hadn’t started out that way at all. ‘It wasn’t really a date, he asked me if I wanted to watch him project the film, for research purposes.’
‘It sounds like a date in disguise,’ said Jess perceptively.
‘Well, I do like him but I think I’ve come to realise that he’s a slow worker when it comes to relationships. Honestly, I thought there was something between us and then on Friday, he made his move but then last night when we ran into each other at the cinema it was as if that had never happened.’
‘Hmm. Maybe he’s not very practiced at that kind of thing?’
‘So Oliver’s told you his theory that he’s a nerd who doesn’t know what he’s doing when it comes to women?’
Jess giggled. ‘Not exactly in those words. Look, as long as you’re happy, nothing else matters, does it? Just make sure he doesn’t mess you around.’
‘Thanks. To be honest, Ed is the first guy I’ve been interested in for such a long time that I’m quite rusty on the protocols myself. But at the risk of sounding like a fourteen-year-old, I did think we were probably going out with each other after Friday night.’
‘In that case, maybe you should tell him that,’ said Jess gently.
