She jumped in the lamplight, spilling a dollop of milk as she did. “You scared me!” she cried, anxiously looking down at the stain spreading over the plush carpeting.
Malik laughed. He was lounging back in an emerald green chair, watching an old black and white movie. He looked down at the mark on the carpet and slowly reached for the remote, pausing the film.
With a smile he stood and moved towards the kitchen. “I’ll get it.”
Within moments he emerged with a dishtowel and wiped up the spill, giving her a teasing smile.
“What!” she laughed. “You scared me!”
“My apologies for my terrifying… watching in silence,” he laughed again and returned to his seat.
Amie sat down on the sofa across from him and set her plate down on the coffee table before her, letting out a tired laugh as she did. She sighed unevenly as she started ripping the pita bread apart and dipping it in the hummus.
Malik watched quietly as she picked at her food, the faux-couple sitting in silence until he resumed his movie.
“Anyone ever tell you it’s not polite to stare?” she said through a mouthful of food.
“Anyone ever tell you it’s not polite to raid the entire contents of a host’s fridge?”
“Here, I thought you were my husband,” she said mockingly.
“Fiancé,” he corrected.
“Then what’s yours is mine!” she joked, stuffing her mouth with baklava. “What? You said help yourself!”
They both smiled sleepily, sitting quietly for a moment before Amie pointed to the screen and asked, “So what are you watching, anyway? You’re into old movies?”
“Why do you say it like that?”
She laughed. “Like what?”
“With shock and horror,” he grinned. “Not your cup of tea?”
“Old, outdated, before my time,” she shrugged. “Uninteresting.”
“All right, Amie Shaw, I believe it’s about time we had our first pre-marriage debate,” he said, leaning forward in his chair and taking a sip from his water glass. “I take your argument and will raise you a counter to every point you make.”
Amie leaned forward playfully, cupping her hands together. “Perfect!” she said with a grin. “We betting on this debate?”
He laughed. “Do you have money to bet?”
“No,” she said bashfully. “But I heard I have half a million dollars coming my way if I pretend to be marrying this cute guy.”
Cute guy? She clenched her teeth. Why, oh why did she have to admit that to him? Joking banter aside, you probably shouldn’t call your boss cute, no matter how, well, cute he is.
If he thought her comment was out of line, he didn’t say so. Instead, he made a suggestion. “Okay then, we play for bragging rights.”
“Perfect,” she nodded. “All right, my first argument. Old movies are… old. No CGI, no special effects, just… black and white.”
He nodded and scratched his chin as if considering her point. “Counter,” he said quickly, “Black and white films have better acting and better storylines because there’s no fantastical computer-generated scenes to distract from the story. Back then, if your actors were incredible, then your film was incredible, too.”
She pursed her lips in an over-exaggerated manner and attempted to mimic how he’d scratched his chin. “Fair enough,” she concluded finally. “Second point: these fantastic storylines you just raved about may have been great at the time, but they deal with things which are now irrelevant to our culture. We simply can’t relate to the stories or scenarios anymore.”
Malik extended his hand to the movie on the screen and shook his head. “I see them as historical portraits. Fascinating little time capsules for us to look back on. What better way to see an accurate portrayal of the 1940s than to see a movie made in the 1940s, by people who actually lived in that time period? The stories were full of substance, because they had to be. They had little else to fall back on.”
“Okay,” she conceded with a groan. “But can you relate to them?”