Page 76 of Hot Greek Summer

He looked at her as if she’d spoken a language he’d never heard before. ‘Ask me again when I’ve seen it.’

‘What?’ She stared at him. ‘You’re not telling me that you’ve never seenDirty Dancingbefore. You’re not. I don’t believe you! Everyone in the entire world has seen this movie.’

Jesse shook his head. ‘Not me. Chick shit.’

‘Chick shit?’ She repeated his jock phrase, half laughing. ‘This movie is one of the seminal romance movies of modern times. “She carried a watermelon.” I mean, who says that?’

He looked nonplussed.

‘“Nobody puts Baby in the corner”?’

He shook his head. ‘Nope. I got nothing.’

‘Oh my God, you’re so lucky to see it for the first time somewhere like this,’ she breathed, lifting her hands up at their idyllic position beside the sea. He looked like he was going to answer her, but she pre-empted him with a finger against her lips as the opening music struck up. ‘Ssh, it’s starting.’

Jesse watched Winnie as much as he watched the movie. She was shiny-eyed and rapt, and as it unfolded he could almost get why it was so beloved. Chemistry. For whatever reason, every now and then two people meet and the chemistry between them is off the scale, and if you can catch that on screen then you’re in for a box-office smash.

‘I carried a watermelon,’ Baby said, up on screen.

Winnie looked across at him. ‘See? She carried a watermelon. How perfect is that line?’

Jesse reached into the brown paper bag he’d bought with him. ‘I carried a box of olives.’

Winnie rolled her eyes but took an olive when he opened the box anyway.

‘It’s a lot smaller than a watermelon,’ she said, looking at it.

‘You wound me,’ he said, laying his hand on his chest as if he’d been shot.

‘You’ll live,’ she whispered, relaxing back into her seat with her wine glass in her hand.

Jesse ate pizza while he watched them gyrate up on screen.

‘Do you dance?’

He pretended he needed to think about his answer. ‘Never.’

She had that incredulous look on her face again. ‘Never, as in not once in your adult life?’

Sometimes it was easier to lie than have to elaborate, so he shook his head. ‘Not even once.’

‘You’re so dancing with me later in that case.’

‘I so am not.’ He really wanted a beer.

Winnie huffed, a sound that implied that he was going to get little choice in the matter, and returned her attention to the screen. She could huff all she liked, he still wasn’t dancing. Glancing around at the other cars on the beach, he found that the couple in the car to the side of him were more heavily engaged in each other than in the movie. Coming here was starting to feel like a mistake, especially when Winnie sighed and laid her hand on his leg and up on screen Baby crawled across the floor towards Patrick Swayze.

‘Careful,’ he muttered, moving her hand down closer to his knee. ‘I don’t want the curse of the killer car to strike me down.’ Personally, he thought that sounded like a much more entertaining premise for a movie than dancing, dirty or otherwise.

‘Have you had many women?’ Baby asked, comely and wrapped in a post-coital sheet up on the screen.

Winnie slanted her interested eyes in his direction again.

‘Don’t even ask me,’ he warned, shutting her down. She shrugged and turned her attention back to the screen, and for a few moments he contemplated what his truthful answer would have been. A relatively big number, and most of them since he’d moved here to Skelidos, but then that was one of the side effects of his no-hearts-and-flowers lifestyle. He was neither proud nor ashamed of the fact that he’d slept with more beautiful, interesting women than he had fingers and toes. More than four people’s fingers and toes, to be honest. Five even, six at the very outside, but then a decade of one-night stands racks up. And in all that time he’d never felt moved to give any of those women a key to his studio or picnic with them in his olive orchard, and he certainly hadn’t taken them to the movies to watch slushy films. He must be going soft in his old age.

Winnie’s fingers slipped a little higher on his thigh, light and massaging, and he wasn’t going soft at all.Fuck.Laying his hand over hers to still it, he laced their fingers and belatedly realised that what he was actually doing, for all intents and purposes, was holding her hand.

‘Romantic,’ Winnie sighed, as the strains of ‘These Arms of Mine’ drifted around the beach, and glancing to his right Jesse found that his neighbours had steamed up their windows so badly that he wouldn’t be surprised to see aTitanic-style handprint appear in the condensation.

---