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“C’mon, Sweet, we’re going out to the movies tonight!”
This was a pleasant surprise. Not that Maura didn’t love snuggling on the sofa in front of a good DVD, but there was a certain extra rush to snuggling in the dark with a hot date. Or she suspected so, anyway. She and Nick had never ventured outside their own living room for a movie. She'd never checked out the city's multiplexes, and figured they never would.
“Wow, sure. What’s playing?”
When Nick handed her the paper open to the theater ad, her eyes widened. Bugged out, actually.
"Twilight? You sure you wanna see this one?”
His expression of adolescent enthusiasm dimmed a bit.
“Well I don’t know anything about it except the title, and I heard a few folks at the precinct say it was supposed to be a great love story, almost classic type, not the anonymous sex crap that usually gets cranked out.”
Nick was a little old-fashioned when it came to love stories. While he could get as mindlessly horny as the next guy – okay, he could make Casanova look like a monk – he couldn’t shake the taste for True Romance. As in the old, old days. Hearts and flowers, undying love, waves crashing on the beach. He’d have worn their copy of Wuthering Heights to bare plastic, and Maura’s patience to ruin, if she hadn’t locked it up for rationing.
But hadn’t he heard of this one? Omigod, Maura realized, he really didn’t know anything about it. Well he’d been really buried in some nasty cases with Schanke, who had time for small talk? He was never much into the entertainment news anyway.
“Look, Nick, trust me on this one. I don’t think it’s what you’re expecting.”
Nick humphed in disappointment.
“Okay, I know, you’d rather see one of those new Westerns, right? Silly me, I forgot about your anaphylactic allergy to romance.” He tossed the paper on the coffee table. “Fine.”
“Nick, really… I'm telling you that you wouldn’t like it. More to the point I’d be hearing about all the many ways you didn’t like it, forever.”
He wasn’t buying it. “Even I can’t tell the future. Why don’t you just say you don’t want to go out and leave it at that?”
“Fine, if you're going to have a snit about it,” she dragged Nick bodily to the computer desk and shoved him into the chair. ”Google it.”
“Huh?”
“The movie, Mr. Ebert, Google it!”
Tappety-tap on the keyboard, and he clicked on the first link for Twilight on IMDB. Maura moved beside him so she could get a good look at his expression, which in mere seconds defied description.
“Well?”
“They said it was a love story,” he protested in dismay. “This sounds like…”
“A documentary?”
Nick's brow tightened in a smirk. “I was going to say Gothic Chick Flick.”
He seemed so disappointed, Maura almost felt guilty for having rained on his parade. Then he brightened.
“I have an idea. Why don’t we go anyway… we’ll treat it as a mission.”
“Er, a mission? You mean like mastering another way to mix in?” Lately he'd been coming up with new ideas to “develop her social skills”. As if she were the one with the "immortal condition".
“Not exactly.” Nick rose and got their jackets from the rack. “My mission will be to ignore everything that I’ll want to criticize.”
She put her jacket on but remained puzzled. “I don’t get it. How will you do that in front of a forty-foot screen?”
Nick wound an arm around her waist and drew her toward the door. “That’s where your mission comes in…”
“Which is?”
His eyes pulsed gold for a second and he purred in her ear, “To distract me.” He grabbed one of her silk scarves from the coat hook as they passed, and draped it around her neck. “You’re going to be needing this.”
“Ooooh, Bats..." she purred, "you might just give 'necking in the back row a whole new meaning…”