I am alive, Helania thought to herself. Right now, I am not dead.
So it was about time she started living, wasn’t it.
“Yes,” she heard herself say. “I would like to eat with you. Where, though? Here?”
Boone’s eyebrows popped, as if her acceptance of the invite had surprised him. Except then he rushed on. “The doggen are busy in the kitchen serving the folks here. But I know a great place to take you. You’re going to love it.”
The Remington Hotel was a Caldwell fixture, a throwback to the Roaring Twenties that had somehow survived the modernization of downtown. Surrounded by skyscrapers, the thirty-floor, bi-winged building was a gracious grande dame in the company of robots, its courtyard the kind of thing that was in every tourism ad for the city. It was the sort of place where people had Sunday tea in their dress clothes, and couples got engaged in the formal dining room, and there were suites with plaques on the doors pointing out that President Taft had stayed there in 1911 and Hemingway in 1956 and President Clinton in 1994.
Boone rematerialized in the alley beside the hotel, and for a split second, as he stood in the cold alone, he wondered whether Helania was going to change her mind and reroute in her molecular form to somewhere else.
But then she was beside him. In the flesh.
“I’m dressed casually,” she said as she indicated her parka and jeans.
He nodded down at his set of leathers. “As I am. That’s why we’re going to Remi’s.”
As he motioned to the head of the alley, they walked together toward the cars that were passing by on East Main Street.
Say something, he thought. Say . . . anything—
“You mean the movie?”
Boone shook his head. “What?”
“Say Anything. You know, with John Cusack?” When he gave Helania a blank look, she said, “It has that classic scene with him holding the boom box over his head and Peter Gabriel playing. What made you think of it?”
Okaaaaaaaaaaaay, he must have spoken that out loud. “Ah, sure . . . it’s one of my favorites.”
“Mine, too.” She laughed a little. “Cameron Crowe’s best, in my opinion. I also like all the John Hughes movies from the eighties. I had a crush on Jake Ryan forever—you’re really limping, by the way.”
Was he? He couldn’t feel his face, much less his legs—and talk about pop culture refs. Thank you, the Weeknd.
“How were you hurt?” she asked. “Were you fighting?”
“Yes.” With a down pillow that had had a helluva ground game, as it turned out. “The enemy nearly got the best of me.”
Helania stopped dead. “Oh, my God. Are you serious? Did you see a doctor—”
“I’m sorry, no.” He held up a hand. “Look, I want to impress you. And if I tell you how it actually happened, you’re going to think I’m the biggest planker on the planet.”
“I don’t even know what a planker is.”
As she stared up him, with those big yellow eyes filling her heartshaped face and the wisps of her red and blond hair teased on the wind and that bright flush on her cheeks from the cold . . . she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
All of the aristocratic females in all of the ball gowns in the world couldn’t hold a candle to her.
“Do you mean ‘dweeb’?” she prompted.
“I haven’t heard that word in a million years.”
“Well, to be fair, you brought the eighties into this first.” That slight smile, the one he loved so much, tilted her mouth again. “Tell me how you got hurt. I promise I won’t judge. I mean, come on, I am the most socially inept person you will ever meet. I have lived a whole life through movies that I watched at home. I can quote you a hundred thousand lines from a thousand rom-coms, but you ask me to talk to someone I don’t know? I freeze solid. So I am in no position to judge.”