Chapter 34: Charlotte's Movie

Sheila had been working on this thing for nearly a hundred hours straight, with only a few hours of sleep in between. So it was no surprise when she told us she was just gonna make a short speech, and then head home to pass out for a week or so, leaving us to watch the final production without her. She looked a mess. Her skin was pale. Her hair was dull and clumpy, unwashed. Her eyes were dark and sunken. But she looked like she was more fulfilled than she'd ever been before. There was something about her that just looked peaceful, and that peacefulness seemed to fill the entire room.

"Well, it's finally done," she said, standing in front of us all in the living room. "It's not exactly following the script we'd originally worked out, but I think it's still good. It says what I want to say, what I think needs to be said, and that's what people make movies for anyway, right? This movie is about Charlotte and Anthony. But it's about more than that. It's about- Well, you'll see what it's about. I don't need to tell you. I'm gonna go now. I'm so tired I feel like I might die. So I'm just gonna go. Enjoy the movie, guys."

But before she left, she stooped and gave me a kiss. Just me. And then she went toward the door. Charlotte stopped her, jumping up and wrapping her in a great big hug.

"Just stay, Sheila. Just stay and watch it with us. You worked so hard."

"I can't. I don't need to. I've seen it a hundred times already. I know you guys will like it. And I'm dead, dead, dead tired."

I got up and hugged her too.

"Thanks for all your hard work, She. Thanks for everything."

She gave me another firm squeeze and then left. Steve put the DVD into the player and Charlotte hit a few buttons on the remote to get the movie onto the big screen. Janine and Mick pulled the curtains closed, dimming the room a bit. Then we pressed play.

The movie began with a black screen for about ten seconds or so, and then, in a quiet, dream-like voice, Charlotte could be heard singing in the darkness. She wasn't singing lyrics, she was just sort of humming a melody with a lot of oohs and aahs, like a nymph in the woods. It was a soft sweet melody that made you think of afternoon sunshine sparking on a rippling brook. Very pretty.

And then text faded up onto the screen:

"If this wasn't real love, I wouldn't be so scared."

"Oh my god..." Charlotte whispered. "That's that thing I wrote!"

The text faded, and there was my face. I was lying on the bed, looking up and to the left. I was looking at something that apparently held me rapt with wonder. It was somewhat slow motion, but not melodramatically so, just enough to make it seem like a memory. The whole shot looked soft and gentle too.

The camera panned over, refocused and there was Charlotte. She was sitting there reading to me, smiling, and shuffling through papers, just looking like an absolutely beautiful teenage girl, doing homework or something. (The papers she was reading was actually the script. You couldn't really see exactly what it was though.) We could only be seen from the shoulders up, but it was fairly evident that we were actually nude. I'm not sure how Sheila did it without actually showing our bodies, but somehow we just looked naked. Naked, and completely happy.

The singing continued. Then Charlotte's voice faded up.

"It's funny how someone can become a part of your very soul, and you barely remember meeting them. When was the very first time you saw them, said hello, touched their hand? Did you know then that they'd change your entire world? No. Because once your world has been changed, everything else feels like a dream..."

(That was a line from our original script, one of the first few lines on page one.)

Charlotte's voice over continued:

"But the only thing that matters now is that he's helping me to discover the real me, who I really am deep down inside, and that makes me feel more alive than I've ever felt before."

(That was one of the last lines from the last page of the script. It was supposed to be the conclusion, but Sheila moved it to the beginning. It worked perfectly.)

Charlotte, the real Charlotte beside me on the couch, suddenly broke out into tears. I glanced over at her, and then back at the movie.

Suddenly on-screen Anthony sat up, rushed forward, and kissed her. The camera blurred a bit, but then the focus reset. The kiss was deep, passionate, and dripping with obvious love. It looked gorgeous. Our eyes were closed, our mouths were open, and you could see that we absolutely adored one another. And Charlotte continued her sunshiny song far away in the distance, echoing like a memory. Then her voice-over continued:

"... he simply loves me; he makes me feel beautiful, without saying a word. He makes me feel like all the craziness inside me doesn't matter, and for the first time I begin to understand what normal is supposed to feel like."

(That was from the middle of the script somewhere.)

And then Anthony turned her and laid her down, hovering above her. The shot cut to a close up of his eyes, staring down at her with wild-looking awe and desire. Then he was kissing her again, and this time you could see a full-length shot of the two of them on the bed, him on top of her, completely naked. Her thighs parted and lifted to wrap around him, and they kissed. Her hands tousled his hair, running down his back, caressing him with loving attention to every little detail of his form.

(I still talk about it in the third person to this day because somehow it didn't even seem like me up on that screen. It was too beautiful to be me.)

Another interesting thing about Sheila's new cut was that so far she hadn't shown anything more graphic than a kiss and a caress. But now you could see Charlotte reaching down between them, taking a hold of his erection, and guiding him inside her. You couldn't actually see it go in, you couldn't even see their privates at all, but you knew it was happening. There was a change in their facial expressions that told of some shocking pleasure they suddenly felt. Their breathing quickened and their whole beings seemed to swell. The singing faded down a bit more and suddenly you could hear their panting. There was a close up of Charlotte's face. Her eyes were wide and dazzled, her mouth was open, gasping with trembling breath. Somehow you got a sense of the size of him sliding into her, stretching her around his hot ticklish penetration, simply by her reaction. Her mouth opened wider and wider, into an expanding O, and her eyes brightened, dilated, and glassed over with emotion. Then you could see his face, and he looked even more messed up than she did. He looked like he was near tears, and in complete ecstasy at the same time, plunging down into some slippery snug heaven that you could vividly imagine based on the look in his eyes.

Then I heard his voice come into the movie. It really was surreal, because it didn't sound like me. Do I really sound like that? Apparently I do.

"Love makes you wonder about things you never wondered about before. Love makes you inhale the fragrance of the world like a flower you never even knew was there, right in front of you. You think that maybe it's that love that's all the beauty in the universe, but it's not. It's just that love woke you up, and now you're actually seeing the world for the first time, and it's beautiful. Everything's beautiful."

(This was from the script of course, and it was supposed to be dialog I was having with the Jen character as we made love. Sheila had altered the context a bit and suddenly it was me talking to the audience.)

The shot cut to a view from behind him and above them. It was an odd angle, sort of beside the corner of the bed looking down at his body moving on top of her as they kissed and cuddled. Once again, it showed nothing more graphic than his butt and Charlotte's knees rocking up and down on each side of him, her little feet sliding up and down the backs of his thighs, but somehow that made it a thousand times hotter. You could hear Charlotte moaning now too, louder and more energetic. Not whorish or anything, not screaming like a porn star, but obviously really, really enjoying his thick hard cock deep inside her. You could tell it was deep, deep down inside her by the way his back arched and his ass tensed each time he thrust. And she moaned like she had something very hard, very deep inside her too. I got chills from the sound of her voice. Goosebumps rose on my flesh and I shivered. She sounded so damn hot it was almost scary.

"Do I really sound like that?" Charlotte whispered on the couch beside me.

"Yes. You do," I said. "But somehow it sounds even more... real."

The love making continued. Different angles were shown, but the majority of the shots were all of their faces, their hands, close ups of their eyes and their mouths kissing. The pure eroticism of it I realized, the thing that was turning me on the most, was not having super close-ups of his dick plowing in and out of her, all graphically shoved into the camera. It was the reaction shots, the looks on their faces as they enjoyed each other's pleasure. It was the motion of her rocking back and forth on the bed beneath him. You could see his dick thrusting in and out of her without being shown. You could see that it was big and hard and deep, and pumping steadily, hitting all the right spots and making her moan and shiver and shudder and tremble beneath him. You could see that her pussy was wet and tight and hot and squeezing on him by the way he smiled that drunken happy smile every once in a while and suddenly closed his eyes and he tensed above her. It was the most graphic, hardcore, dirty, sexy thing I'd ever seen, and Sheila hadn't even shown a single flash of genitals. It was deliriously hot.

I looked around the room at everyone's face and saw that I wasn't the only one who was amazed. Every single mouth was open, every single eye was wide and staring, every single jaw was dropped, and I can only assume that every dick was hard, and every pussy was wet, and every mind was humming with desire. And yet it wasn't raw lust like you get from porn, the base need to fuck something as soon as possible. It was desire and awe. The two on the screen weren't using one another like objects. They weren't pumping and bumping and moaning like actors. They were actually enjoying the sheer bliss of sex purely for its own sake, feeling every sweet tingling ecstasy from every little inch of motion against one another's flesh, and expressing it in their reactions.

I barely even remember that moment; it seemed so long ago and far away at that point, after everything that had happened since, but there I was, making love to Charlotte, the girl I'd been hopelessly in love with at the time, and she with me, and we were stroking on, apparently oblivious to all the world except one another.

There was another shot of Charlotte's face, over my shoulder. Her eyes were closed, her mouth open in sweet rapturous pleasure, and I finally understood what Charlotte had been telling me all along about how when I have sex with her, I'm actually making love to her. It took Sheila showing me myself in the act before I finally understood what that really meant from an outside point of view. It was beautiful.

And then they were coming. He went first. You saw something change in his gaze, in his rhythm, and suddenly he was simultaneously the most powerful man and earth, all muscle and tension and thrusting power that ground hard into her as he peaked, and he was as weak and helpless as a little baby at the exact same time. And then she was coming as well, and she clung to him like he was all the universe, grinding up against him as though she needed to devour him, his very soul, with her motions, as though she were somehow touching his very life force and that was the source of her ecstasy, and he was all hurricanes and earthquakes and thunder and chaos coming inside her, and she was just hanging on for dear life, in absolute ecstasy. It was all over her face ... so beautiful...

And yet I don't even remember shooting that scene. When did we do that? All I remembered was pulling out and coming all over her every time, trying to get good, well-lit shots of my ejaculations onto her hot blushing flesh. When did we shoot this one?

But there it was, on the screen. I stared in awe and suddenly realized I was squeezing someone's hand. It was Charlotte. She was holding my hand as she watched. She was squeezing my hand as though she would blow away in a storm if she didn't hang on for dear life.

The motion slowed and the panting faded to a heartbeat sound. Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump. The shot zoomed slowly in to Charlotte's face pressed into his shoulder, her hair all a mess and yet somehow still gorgeous, looking all fucked and rumpled like she'd just had the orgasm to end all orgasms. And then the scene blurred to a wash of flesh color and the suggestion of sexual motion in the background. It looked like Charlotte rolling him over onto his back in slow motion and going down on him, but it was so blurry it could have been anything. The heartbeat sound continued and words appeared on the screen, fading on from the blur of intimacy:

The truth is, though I seem confident on the outside, and I try not to let gossip bother me, deep down I'm as insecure as anyone else.

Those words faded out and were replaced with a second block of text:

I'm just a scared little girl in a woman's body. I know I've made mistakes in my life, but you proved to me that I can be loved fully and unconditionally...