(This person described in this story is 18)
One Halloween, I dressed up like Merida from Disney's Brave. I wore a hand-me-down, hand-sewn, ill-fitting cosplay outfit. It was tight and baggy in all the wrong places. The cape was too big and too thick. I myself was in a very awkward, un-princess-like phase of adolescence.
After school, some friends and I had to kill time before a Halloween party later that night, so we walked to the movie theater. It was eighty degrees out, and I was unbearably hot in my costume, especially in the cape. I wasn't wearing anything at underneath the dress, and the cheap polyester fabric was itchy and rough on my bare, sweaty skin. I felt disgusting.
To make it worse, when we got to the theater I realized that my credit card had fallen out of a hole in the costume's badly sewn pockets. Luckily, I knew someone at the theater and she snuck me in, but I was mortified.
Of the movies playing the multiplex, I wanted to see Blue Is the Warmest Color, but all my friends wanted to see Thor: The Dark World. I was in such a bad mood, I snuck in to see the French movie by myself, even though I had no idea what the movie was about, other than it was in French and didn't have superheroes (Marvel's not my bag.)
There were only two other people in the theater, a middle-aged couple. I sat far away from them, sulking in the second row. I took off the absurd cape and piled it on the armrests. I slouched in my chair with my popcorn.
The first part of the movie bored me to tears. The acting was good, but it seemed slow and pretentious. The central romantic relationship between two young girls took such a long time to develop, I didn't realize that was what the movie was about. Impatient, I thought about leaving and sneaking into Thor to join my friends.
But then...
There came a scene in which the main character masturbates while fantasizing about the other girl. I had never been to an NC-17 movie before and the scene was SO explicit, I was embarrassed to be in a public place watching it. Out of nowhere, I suddenly felt very aroused by and attracted to the character played by Adèle Exarchopoulos, and that freaked me out.
Before this time, I had had two very minor, same-sex experiences, just kissing and fooling around, but I had never been aroused by a female character in a real movie before. In some ways the scene seemed more like porn to me, and watching porn was something I only did VERY privately and secretly, so seeing something that graphic in public made me very uncomfortable. The older couple must have felt the same way, because when I looked back, I saw that all the other seats were empty.
When I looked back up at screen I saw an extreme close up of Adèle Exarchopoulos's lips. I took a deep breath, and I decided to stay. As the film went on, there was an incredibly intense and romantic scene with the two characters in a public park. When they kissed, my skin tingled. I was both embarrassed by what I was watching on screen yet I couldn't look away. I was enraptured. The images were both achingly sweet and shockingly intense. No porn had ever been that emotionally raw.
Almost unconsciously my hand slipped into my costume, and through the hole in my pocket onto the bare skin of my belly, creeping lower. My legs were spread wide, but even if someone had been sitting next to me, the cape and the baggy dress would have hidden what I was doing.