Page 83 of The Second Chance Cinema
Drake held the rose out to her.
As Ellie took it, she noticed a feeling similar to what she’d experienced on that first night together. There was a charge runningthrough her that made her feet lighter on the ground. Here it was again—the intoxicating rush of a new beginning.
The sky rumbled above them. A storm was coming. Tonight, Drake hadn’t brought an umbrella. Within seconds, a rare winter rain crashed over their heads.
Ellie slid the rose under her leather jacket to keep it safe. Drake’s strong hands found her back, more confident than usual. He was going to pull her to safety, she figured, but then, he took her by surprise. Drake haddippedher. He wiped the rain out of her eyes with his thumbs and moved in for a kiss. It was a kiss that would’ve warranted applause if there were an audience.
Ellie was still hurting from everything she saw, and she also felt guilty herself, but it would be okay. They could still save this.
Drake straightened himself out and reached his hand toward Ellie. She grabbed it.
“I’m sorry I called Sam that night,” she told him. “I only did it because I wanted to be with you. I thought if I invited you in, I’d mess everything up. I didn’t want for us to become a one-night thing. And I’m really good at self-sabotage, as you’ve probably noticed.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Drake said. “I liked you a lot. So much, Ellie. But we’d just met. I wondered if it was too good to be true. I also felt like if I mentioned why I was there that night, it would have changed the way you saw everything.”
“Yeah,” Ellie said. “I definitely didn’t love all that. It was excruciating to watch. But now, I understand that … Melinda isn’t actually in our way. I mean, if you think about it, she set us up.”
“I wouldn’t give her that much credit. I guess I should be thanking Sam, too. If he hadn’t told you to come to Finn’s that night—”
“You and I never would’ve met.”
“Geez, Sam,” Drake said. “He’s been so nice to me. That guy should hate my guts.”
“Hardly,” Ellie told him. “The story of how we met saved thebar he loves. I think that’s a part of why he invited me there that night.”
Ellie turned to look back at the theater. She wanted to remember the way it had come to them by magic. Even though she couldn’t technically write about it, she could save every detail in her mind’s eye. She hoped to memorialize it in some way. Despite everything, it had brought them closer together.
“Okay,” Drake said. “So, now that we’ve finished watching our lives, what do we possibly do with our night?”
Ellie yawned. “You know, I’m pretty tired.”
“You want to go home?”
“I do, yeah,” she said.
“Okay,” he agreed. “Home is good. Home it is.”
So they drove home and flung open the door to the place where they lived together—a house where their life would happen. It was a house where they would fall deeper in love and have kids. They would watch as those kids grew bigger, learned to drive, and moved out. Even as life started to move faster, they would return to this place to reminisce about that past and the things they were looking forward to together.
But for now, as the sun rose, they set the future aside and lived in their firsts a little longer—their first date, their first kiss, and the first time they watched a Thursday-night monster movie at Drake’s apartment.
“I love you, Ellie,” Drake said, admiring the view outside and inside.
“I love you, Drake,” she told him. And then they both fell asleep on the couch, Nancy at their feet, a life together on the horizon.
When summer came, Ellie and Drake were the stars of a film again, but this time, it was different. They chose this spotlight. Curled under the quilt Ellie’s grandma made, with Nancy at theirside and a delicious bowl of stovetop popcorn balanced between their knees, they pressed Play and watched.
The boutique hotel had almost closed before Ellie found it, not long after their last night at the cinema. “It looks like a cake,” she’d said when she spotted the taffy-pink facade. “A cake you’d never want to eat.” Flower beds lined the windows, scaling up to a glowing sign that painted the hotel’s name in the sky: The Bernadette.
It had been named, Ellie heard on her first visit, after a rival hotelier who became the owner’s sweetheart. Guests filtered through The Bernadette’s revolving door into the rose-colored world. The now-defunct art deco elevator was set up as the altar. Marc adjusted his lift man costume from behind the podium, waiting to pronounce them husband and wife.
Drake’s parents sat with Sandra in the front row. Naomi, oblivious to her fashion faux-pas of wearing a long white dress, scooted in next to them as guests milled about waiting for the bride and groom. Each of the guests settled into their seats with help from Jen and Lola. Eager to assign himself a task, Nolan handed out the programs. Ben was there, too, by way of the photos Jen arranged next to the guest book. “Noheadshots,” Ellie had told her. Instead, Jen featured shots of the siblings in their wild Halloween costumes, one of the proms where Ben paired his tux with sneakers, and the Polaroid of Ben and Ellie at the run-down historical society house from so long ago.
Drake teared up when Ellie appeared at the start of the makeshift aisle on her dad’s arm. Ellie looked ethereal in the dress she’d bought at Melinda’s shop; her crystal-embellished heels that peeked out from the bottom of the dress; and a cranberry lipstick that stoked the fire of her hair, which was piled high in an updo. During the vows, Drake confessed that there wasn’t another person he’d want to discuss weird facts with over breakfast, and that he loved how she made him more brave and adventurous.Ellie narrated a part of her story about Finn’s from a leather notebook. Their guests laughed at the punchlines in their vows. Marc’s chuckle was louder than the rest.
The camera did a close-up on their dramatic first married kiss inside the elevator, where thousands of introductions had once happened within its opening and closing doors. After watching other people dance at a small ballroom reception and cutting their cake, Ellie and Drake skipped down the seashell-patterned carpet of the twelfth floor and rounded the corner into their suite, the lens blurring on their wave goodbye as the door clicked shut.
The television screen turned black. Ellie and Drake each took a pause to process the film until Nancy hopped down and broke the spell.
