Part 4
From up by the bar, I watch Evelyn dance with her brother. She almost clobbered him earlier during the fast song, having a bully time of it, not caring who saw her.
A girl like that, you know doesn't have a vampish bone in her body; it doesn't even occur to her to play games. She's the most truly honest soul I've ever met. Which is probably why I can't figure her out.
"Hello." A devastating beauty in a red dress glides up to me. She's got a Spanish accent like ocean waves and chocolate eyes. Her leg is pressed against mine.
I glance quickly in Evelyn's direction as a hundred situations run through my mind – maybe she won't mind . . . or find out – before reality descends like rain on a campfire.
"Sorry, sweetheart," I tell the magnificent stranger, "I'm here with someone."
"¿Es la verdad?" She pouts her luscious red lips.
"She drives me up the wall sometimes, but she's something special and she's the first girl to think the same about me. So if I want to hold on to her," I say reluctantly, "I gotta behave."
Miss Señorita Devistina catches the drift and slinks away to some guy with better sense than me.
After another song, I head back down the stairs to reclaim my girl. Jonathan turns his roving eye to the many unattached lovelies decorating the edge of the dance floor. There's more drinks and dancing, and music and fun, before Evelyn's nose is glowing and she says her shoes are killing her.
We find Jonathan – surprisingly, attached to the same woman he found over an hour ago – and Evelyn presses a promise for lunch out of him before we say goodbye. And then we're out in the cool night, walking because the cabbies knocked off an hour ago, me half carrying Evelyn because those dumb shoes are rubbing holes in her feet.
"Did you have fun?"
She looks up at me, shining face framed by messy hair. "It was wonderful," she says.
*
Continued in Intermission