for the even dirtier version. Yet.
BUT I SURE didn't feel safe in the drive-in's great outdoors.
It's not like Ric did a suck and run. He held me close, kept kissing my mouth, my face, the small damp spot near my carotid artery that throbbed and pulsed with the still-ragged beating of my heart. My head on his chest felt the echo of his own slowing rhythms. We pulled apart to let the urge to merge subside until later.
I heard a thump from the backseat and knew Quicksilver had returned as soon as the mushy stuff was safely over. Having Quick in the backseat meant we could prepare for the actual supposed point of the outing, the movie. Ric, of course, had wanted to initiate me in the proper setting all along.
Reality took over. The liquid heat at the crux of my body was major. I pulled myself together and made my first trip to the cinder-block women's "restroom." Hip boots and tongs required.
While Ric went to relieve (men have it easy) and retrieve (the menu gave fast food a bad name), I established myself back in Dolly's passenger seat. Just letting Ric drive my baby had been a good move. The whole point of this trip, I realized, was to let Ric take charge on the professional investigative turf that was his, and take care of me for a change. And did he ever.
Deep sigh. I'd grown up wary, edgy, ready to be pounced on by some vamp boy or mean girl every moment. This trip "home" was going to be a hard assignment, except for the extracurricular activities. Maybe I was being a worrywart about Ric's minor physical ... alterations and his randy schoolboy fixation on "branding" his girl. "Won't you wear my ring around your neck?" I saw that iconic fifties' song could refer to a more intimate claim. Same symbolic point. I doubted a class ring on a chain could have me nearly stroking out the way Ric's fifteen minutes of semipublic necking had.
Looking at the charm bracelet on my wrist, I realized the silver familiar hadn't given even one defensive twitch during the entire episode. It certainly was getting with the nineteen-fifties program.
I could only hope the familiar wasn't also a one-way spy-line for Snow. Now that I was getting a lot more clued into sexual subtexts, I remembered Snow's remark when we first met near his Inferno Hotel bar that our conjoined black and white long hair would look sexy in the mirror above his bed.
I'd taken it for a not-too-subtle message that he wasn't a mirror-phobic vampire - since he was phobic about being taken for an albino vampire - but I hadn't discovered my own mirror-based freaky powers then and had only just met Ric and my own libido.
Maybe the remark had been a pure come-on I was still too naive to recognize.
Maybe I can sub for you under that mirror, Irma suggested.
Maybe Lilith already had.
Good. I wanted to leave Snow as far behind as I'd recently wanted to lose Wichita. Forever.
WHILE WE WAITED for Ric's return, I shared my smaller misgivings with Quicksilver in the backseat. His ears perked and fanned forward while his eyes, glued on my every word, expressed bottomless sympathy.
"Romantic, isn't it?" I began. "I'm gonna get a cricked neck from watching a horrible, scratched film way above us. I won't hear the rotten sound over Ric's munching, and he'll probably throw you more popcorn than is good for you. We'll hear a chorus of growling tummies from ersatz snack food. And endure cramped legs from awkward petting positions. I mean ours, not yours. Oh, well. Ric's been a sick man. We have to humor him."
Quicksilver growled, leaped out of the car, and lifted a leg against the metal sound unit pillar before he vanished again for his usual nightly run.
"Right on, brother," I called after him. "I'd do that, and then make my escape if I could. You should see the women's restroom here."
Shhh, Irma warned. Ric's coming back.
Ric had returned bearing a tray holding four red-and-white-striped boxes of popcorn, enough to make up a dapper barbershop quartet, and huge paper cups of soda pop. I scooted far across the bench seat and leaned even farther over to open the heavy door for him.
"Not a lot of cup holders here," he muttered when we were back in our respective seats. "We'll have to drink fast."
Me, I was doing nothing that would require a second visit to what passed