"C'mon, Sweet, we're going out to the movies tonight!"
This was a pleasant surprise. Not that she 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.
"Wow, sure. What's playing?" She hadn't paid much mind to the local one-screen movie palace. It was a first-class throwback to the 50's judging from the exterior, but she'd never thought she'd see the inside.
When Nick handed her the paper open to the theater ad, her eyes widened. "Twilight? You sure you wanna see this one?"
The look of adolescent enthusiasm (the one that had made increasingly frequent appearances since they'd left Toronto) dimmed a bit. "Well I don't know anything about it except the title and that Angie told Doug 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 the pope – he couldn't shake the taste for True Romance, as in the old, old days. 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, did he? Well he'd been busy with his painting, and with the part time excavation jobs. He was never much into the entertainment news anyway.
"Look, Bats, trust me on this one. I don't think it's what you're expecting."
"Okay, I know, you'd rather see one of those new Westerns, right? Silly me, I forgot about your allergy to romance." He tossed the paper on the coffee table. "Fine."
"Nick, really… 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," she dragged Nick bodily to the computer desk in the den 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 IMDB. Maura moved beside him so she could get a good look at his expression, which in seconds defied description.
"Well?"
"She told him it was a love story," he protested in dismay. "This sounds like…"
"A documentary?"
His 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?" He was always coming up with new things to "develop your social skills". As if she were the one with the "immortal condition".
"Not exactly." He rose and got their jackets from the front hall. "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... you give 'necking in the back row' a whole new meaning…"