Silent Partner

I watched in rapture.

The auburn hair that bounced in rhythm to her low-key cool, the lithe, mature whisper by which she expressed herself, and those long, elegant legs, the ones that moved about me in service of some flimsy situation I can't even recall.

Overwhelmed...I ejaculated.

"What were you thinking about?," she asked - not the beauty who'd been busy mesmerizing me from the screen. My girlfriend, the one whose head, all that time, had been busily bobbing in my lap.

"You," I lied.

We left the theatre, had a bite to eat. We conversed - books, friends, current events - while I probed her eyes for some sense that she was on to me, that she knew that it was not her talents alone that had gotten things done; that there had been an accomplice: JoBeth Williams.

Nothing. Those eyes were as pure as the water she was drinking.

By evening's end, as I walked her to her apartment in the student district, all was as it had ever been. I knew it by her traditional sign-off: a passionate kiss, a squeeze of the hand, and that sweet, innocent smile - the combination by which she assured me that her love for me was incorruptible, her faith complete.

Still...I never got sex in a movie theatre again.

She went on to a happy life, one that included a solid career.

JoBeth, the glamour girl, didn't fare as well.

She made a fatal Hollywood mistake. She hadn't slept with the producer or the director.

She slept with the audience.