✅ My Cousin's Keeper [NaNoWriMo 2021]

147. My Plan in Motion

It was clear pretty quickly that this was going to be a long movie. I noticed as I started it that it had markers for scenes, rather than the usual chapters; and the LED numbers flashing on the front of my old DVD player as it started let me know how many scenes there were in total; and I watched the numbers tick up at each scene change, giving me a rough estimate of how long they were. A quick bit of mental arithmetic told me that if the same average continues, the movie would likely come in somewhere around four hours long. Presumably there would be a lot of material kept back for deleted scenes, bonus material, the director's cut, and whatever else they might use it for.

My girls were talking over the movie, speculating about what they were going to see, but I don't think anyone was going to object to a bit of distraction. The guessing game was almost as much fun as the movie itself for them; and I knew that they would have a great time just speculating. They might even pause the movie, or go back to watch some moment again, making a long screening even longer.

"Imagine you're watching this, not knowing it's going to be a sequel," Spike was saying. Ffrances had got as far as seeing the outside of a bookstore before she realised what she was watching; I guessed that the name would have been significant to anyone who paid that much attention to little details. Her hands tightened on my shoulders with the surprise, which made it a little harder for me to think clearly for a second. And that was all the prompt Spike needed to say what she'd heard about the movie being released with an intentionally vague marketing campaign.

I wished I could have seen my Mistress's reaction when she realised. But I was sitting on the floor today, at her feet, and that didn't make it so easy to watch her as well as the screen.

"Prequel, actually," I chipped in. "The title's Striker." And of course that was all the hint that Ffrances needed to start working out what the movie was going to be about, and speculating which of the comic book plots might have gone into it. I tried to take part in the conversation, but her fingers on my neck were making it extremely difficult to concentrate.

Ffrances had the remote to start with, but eventually passed it over to the girls. We were all fascinated by what we were watching; even me. I found myself hoping that my current work with Claughton wouldn't just end, and that I would have the opportunity to keep on working with movie stars and creatives in the future. It was like this one project was opening up a whole new bunch of interests for me, and revealing just how exciting it could be to work behind the scenes on something like this. As I watched the different scenes pass, recorded with varying degrees of completeness, I found myself wondering how the finished version would look; and wondering how they chose how many different rehearsals they would do, with different levels of costume and immersion.

My attention was divided now, and in a way I was glad of that. I'd thought as I planned for this afternoon that I would be paying too much attention to Tess, worrying about my little girl. And that would surely have made her suspicious. But the movie was really good, even alternating between people in costume and people just sitting around with their scripts on the table in front of them. I found myself really wondering where the story was going, and trying to work out how the biker could possibly have survived. And just when I was completely focused on the screen, Ffrances's hands on my back gently urged me to move from my place at her feet. I could sit across her lap, and her teeth teased my earlobe for a second, completely demanding my attention.

Ffrances was paying so much attention to me that I might have missed parts of the movie, if we weren't so often skipping back to make sure that we hadn't missed any details. Ffrances had one hand on the remote, but I knew that if she made me miss some detail I could press the button just as easily.

"Can we pause?" Tess's voice pulled me back to reality, and I realised that for the last ten minutes, a small part of my mind had just been following the audio of the movie, while most of my awareness was dominated by Mistress's lips, and the feelings of helplessness when she bit down on my neck. With the kids around, I knew that I had to keep quiet, and somehow that just made it all the more exciting. When the movie was over, I was sure, I would already have melted completely and Ffrances could do whatever she wanted with me. But right now, I had to put those thoughts on the back burner and pay a little attention to my family.