Her grin flashed. ‘Scared?’
‘Terrified.’
‘Good. Now we’re even.’ Delighted to be on level footing, she leaned in and kissed him. ‘Now you can worry about what I’ll be wearing on the big day for the next few weeks. Gotta go.’ She patted his cheek. ‘I’m meeting her in twenty minutes.’
‘Eve.’ Roarke grabbed for her hand. ‘You wouldn’t do something ridiculous?’
She tugged her way free. ‘I’m getting married, aren’t I? What could be more ridiculous?’
She hoped he stewed over it all day. The idea of marriage was daunting enough, but a wedding - clothes, flowers, music, people. It was horrifying.
She zipped downtown on Lex, braking hard and muttering curses at a sidewalk vendor who encroached on the lane with his smoking glide cart. The traffic violation was bad enough, but the scent of overcooked soydogs hit her nervous stomach like lead.
The Rapid cab behind her broke the intercity noise pollution code by blasting his horn and shouting curses through his speaker. A group, obviously tourists, loaded down with palm cams, compumaps, and binoks gaped stupidly at the whizzing traffic. Eve shook her head as a quick-fingered street thief elbowed through them.
When they got back to their hotel, they were going to find themselves several credits poorer. If she’d had the time and a place to pull over, she might have given the thief a chase. But he was lost in the crowd and a block across town on his air skates before she could blink.
That was New York, she thought with a faint smile. Take it at your own risk.
She loved the crowds, the noise, the constant frantic rush of it. You were rarely alone, but never intimate. That’s why she’d come here so many years ago.
No, she wasn’t a social animal, but too much space and too much solitude made her nervous.
She’d come to New York to be a cop, because she believed in order, needed it to survive. Her miserable and abusive childhood with all its blank spaces and dark corners couldn’t be changed. But she had changed. She had taken control, had made herself into the person some anonymous social worker had named Eve Dallas.
Now she was changing again. In a few weeks she wouldn’t just be Eve Dallas, lieutenant, homicide. She’d be Roarke’s wife. How she would manage to be both was more of a mystery to her than any case that had ever come across her desk.
Neither of them knew what it was to be family, to have family, to make a family. They knew cruelty, abuse, abandonment. She wondered if that was why they had come together. They both understood what it was to have nothing, to be nothing, to know fear and hunger and despair - and both had remade themselves.
Was it just mutual need that attracted them? Need for sex, for love, and the melding of the two that she had never thought was possible before Roarke.
A question for Dr. Mira, she mused, thinking of the police psychiatrist she often consulted.
But for now, Eve determined that she wasn’t going to think about the future or the past. The moment was complicated enough.
Three blocks from Greene Street, she seized her chance and squeezed into a parking space. After searching through her pockets, she found the credit tokens the aging meter demanded in its moronic and static jumbled tones and plugged in enough for two hours.
If it took any more than that, she’d be ready for a tranq room and a parking citation wouldn’t bother her in the least.
Taking a deep breath, she scanned the area. She wasn’t called this far downtown often. Murders happened everywhere, but Soho was an arty bastion for the young and struggling who more often debated their disagreements over tiny glasses of cheap wine or cups of cafe noir.
Just now, Soho was full of summer. Flower vendors burst with roses, the classic reds and pinks vying with the hybrid stripes. Traffic droned and chugged on the street, rumbled overhead, puffed a bit on the rickety passovers. Pedestrians stuck mostly with the scenic sidewalks, though the people glides were busy. The flowing robes currently hot from Europe were much in evidence, with arty sandals, headdresses, and shiny ropes swinging from earlobes to shoulder blades.
Oil, watercolor, and compu artists hawked their wares on corners and in storefronts, competing with food vendors who promised hybrid fruits, iced yogurts, or vegetable purees uncontaminated by preservatives.
Members of the Pure Sect, a Soho staple, glided in their snowy, street-dusting gowns, their eyes glowing and their heads shaved. Eve gave one particularly devout-looking supplicant a few tokens and was rewarded with a beatific smile and a glossy pebble.
‘Pure love,’ the devotee offered her. ‘Pure joy.’
‘Yeah, right,’ Eve murmured and sidestepped.
She had to backtrack to find Leonardo’s. The up-and-coming designer had a third-floor loft. The window that faced the street was crammed with fashions, blots and flows of color and form that had Eve swallowing nervously. Her taste leaned toward the plain - the drab, according to Mavis.
It didn’t appear, as she took the people glide up to get a closer look, that Leonardo leaned toward either.
The clutching in her stomach came back with a vengeance as she stared at the window display with its feathers and beads and dyed rubber unisuits. However much pleasure she would get from making Roarke wince, she wasn’t getting married in neon rubber.
There was more, a great deal more. It seemed Leonardo believed in advertising in a big way. His centerpiece, a ghostly white faceless model, was draped in a collection of transparent scarves that shimmered so dramatically that the material seemed alive.