Burning Time Read Online Free

was dark and smelled powerfully of popcorn. Jason chose a row in the back and put his suitcases on the seat beside him. The film had already started. The camera pulled in tight on a girl sitting on a couch with her legs crossed. She was tracing patterns on her bare thigh withher index finger. A man sat behind her watching on an angle, so that he could see what she was doing but she could not see him. Jason frowned. He didn’t want to see a story about a psychiatrist. No one ever got them right.
    He drummed his fingers on the grubby armrests.
    For some long moments there was no sound on the screen and nothing else happened. There was some shuffling and coughing as the movie audience became impatient. Then, just as the stagnation on the screen reached the point of being unbearable, the woman stretched out her legs and leaned back, arching her back slightly. She had been an attractive woman, but suddenly she was dazzling. Her presence in the film took ordinariness, a simple story of corruption, and gave it a dark little twist that sent it spinning into a kinky sexual corner that was scary, erotic, and disturbing.
    The story was of a pretty, vulnerable woman slowly drifting into a relationship with a vaguely sinister young man with a hard empty face and very little in the way of a life. They were shown taking a number of aimless walks in various New York parks, and sitting in restaurants. The only relief from walking and restaurants came when the woman was with her therapist.
    He was a paunchy, unattractive man who managed to be both passive and sexually menacing at the same time. The audience couldn’t hear what they said to each other. The patient’s lips moved, but only the sound of flushing toilets, of cars in the streets, a radio from next door, could be heard. The scenes looked like they had been shot through a keyhole, as if someone could imagine how therapy looked, but not how it sounded. And it looked like an unsavory seduction.
    The woman sat up or lay down, turned on her side, used various kinds of body language that became more andmore provocative. The psychiatrist responded in kind. Without words there was no way of knowing what the content of the scene between the two really was. Jason became tense and anxious at the thought of having to watch the code he lived by violated.
    Then suddenly the scene changed and she was naked with the other man. The young hoodlum was wearing jeans and a leather jacket with a zip front. It hung open. He leaned over the woman and rubbed the zipper back and forth across her flawless neck and breasts. Then he sank to his knees on the floor in front of her.
    Jason did not want to see what he was going to do, or what she was going to do. He wanted to be magically out on the street and miss the rest. He didn’t like a second of this, didn’t like it at all. But the woman was mysterious and unusual, mesmerizing. He couldn’t leave.
    She leaned over the arm of the chair, arching her back as she had earlier in the psychiatrist’s office. Her rich wheaty hair hung down, and her head was bent back in that way that never looked right in films because most people couldn’t do it in life. Her legs were very long. The man buried his face in her lap. She clasped him with one bare leg around his back, then the other.
    Jason swallowed and looked furtively around. He could see that the men in the audience were aroused, as he was himself. Every man wanted to be that character, that aimless hoodlum making love in his black leather jacket. The shirt that had been under it was suddenly gone. Jason’s unease reached the stage of extreme discomfort. He crossed his legs the other way.
    Then the scene changed. They were back in the psychiatrist’s office. The woman was talking with no sound. Jason’s heart beat faster still. He didn’t want to see her naked now with the shrink. Perspiration broke out on hisforehead as the screen went white and a hum filled the soundtrack. It was unbearable. What was