On the way back from Mass next morning, Bernie let herself glance around at the crowds surreptitiously, just to see if she could get a glimpse of the mysterious Joe whom Cecie had spoken about. She kept averting her eyes in case she saw any immodestly dressed persons—of either species—and there were an awful lot of those.
In her bated search, she somehow got separated from Phila and Cecie. She scanned the crowds looking for her cousin and their friend, but she saw nobody in the press and she was too small to look over everyone's heads.
She came upon a raised walkway that overlooked the Plaza. She elbowed her way toward it and up the stairs that let to the vantage point it afforded.
As she walked along the overpass, looking down, she made the mistake of looking down and leaning far out over the handrail to scan the crowd below. Some drugged-out human bumped into her hard. She overbalanced.
She free fell. The crowd below parted with general outcries. The pavement rushed up to meet her.
But so did something else, or was it someone else? Someone or something held out its arms to her as she dropped earthward.
She dropped heavily into a strong but gentle embrace.
"Lucky for you that you met me," said a young man's voice, very close to her ear. She opened her eyes.
She looked up into a pair of green eyes set in a face too beautiful to be credible. She wondered at first if she looked into the face of an angel that had caught her lest she dash against the polymer.
But they looked at her with a fire her foster-father had taught her to shun.
"Let me go! Let me go! Let me go!" she cried and wriggled free of her savior's embrace. She ran, leaving him behind, kneeling on the pavement, staring after her with a mild look of confusion.
She spotted Phila in the crowd and ran up to her. Phila grabbed her by the arms.
"Why did you get lost? I could have lost you forever in this hellhole!" Phila cried, shaking her.
Cecie came up and held Phila by the arm, stopping her. "Lay off, she just had a nasty fall and a bad fright. For God's sake, you're treating her like a child!"
"What do you mean? What happened?" Phila demanded. She looked from Cecie to Bernie.
"I saw it all happen: Bernie fell off the walkway above; someone below caught her before she hit the pavement."
"You could have gotten yourself killed!" Phila cried.
"Or at least bruised up. The pavement's polymer, but that's not to say you'd bounce off it, even if it is only half as hard as concrete."
After the excitement, Phil decided it was best if they stayed put for the rest of the day. Cecie excused herself after breakfast and went out to run some alleged errands.
A light rain had started to fall; Cecie searched the doorways and porticos of the buildings surrounding Main Plaza. She finally spotted him behind a fiberglass Doric pillar supporting the marquee of the "Isola de Capri" club.
"That was you who caught Bernadette when she fell," Cecie said, approaching him.
Joe looked up; he had his jacket off and had rolled the sleeve of his iridescent silver shirt to his shoulder. The seam at his elbow was open as he made a few minor self-repairs to the miniscule pulleys and fibers within.
"I anticipated that you might wish to hear my side of the incident of the falling damsel in distress. And the ungracious damsel is also one of your skittish friends?"
"Yeah, I'm sorry she didn't thank you. I guess I should take up the slack."
"If this fear you talk of keeps her from gratitude, she would do best to release her grasp upon it."
"I totally agree. It's this fear that keeps them from feeling almost everything else. They've been trained to fear anything with…" she almost said the outdated "anything with a y chromosome". "Anything male-shaped," she concluded.
"They have a father, do they not?"
"Yes, but he's not the best father. Not that he's ever hurt them. He just chose to try to keep them from knowing the pain of disappointment in love, so he raised them to avoid anything that looks like a threat to their happiness or their innocence."
"Why would someone do that to their child?"
She shook her head. "Your logic is as good as mine."
The Mecha's wide-spaced brows pinched as he attempted to process the data. Not finding a satisfactory conclusion, he relaxed his visage and turned his attention to something he understood. He straightened his arm. The flesh stirred and closed on itself. He pulled down his sleeve and refastened the cuff.
"Orga women I shall never fully understand. But that is half of what makes them so attractive." His default expression returned as he slung on his jacket.
"Most Orga men would agree with you, and many Orga women would say the same about the other half of the equation."
A woman emerged from the club. As she passed by, she winked surreptitiously at Joe. He winked back and stepped out after her in pursuit of computing the equation in his own way. Cecie shook her head with a different sort of smile and headed home.
"Can you keep a secret, Cecie?" Bernie asked later that afternoon, when Phila had gone to do their laundry.
"I can try if you tell me," Cecie replied.
"Don't let Phila know this," Bernie said, looking around "But I've read all the stories you've published on the 'Net."
"Your secret's safe with me. Don't tell me: she'd say I'd corrupted your little mind." She said the last in mock devious drawl.
"Why exactly do you write those sorts of stories?"
"I write them because they're closer to the universal themes of literature, which ultimately comes a lot closer to the truth than these antiseptic little edifications the whey-blood excuses for moral writers try to pass off these days."
"So you're trying to say you deliberately write about…what not to do? Is that what it takes?"
"In the line I've chosen it does. It's a lot more gratifying to the adult reader to spend an hour or five with the kind of story where a morally shaky person has to make a decision using strengths he didn't know he had, or where a morally strong person discovers the cracks in his armor that he was unaware of until it's too late."
"But why do you often have the bad guys win in the end?"
"They only seem to win, or they think they've won. Virtue may be its own reward, but it usually doesn't ensure you have a nice cozy outcome. It's much more real that way."
"It didn't really seem that real to me."
"Maybe because you haven't really lived in that sort of world until now."
"Phila's dad didn't want either of us to come to harm, especially me, after my parents died in that car wreck."
"But still, no one ever had an adventure in a safe haven. You gotta pass through the darkness first."
An idea crossed Bernie's mind. "Maybe I'd better go help Phila bring home the laundry."
"Don't talk to any strangers now," Cecie said in a facetious deadpan as Bernie got her jacket and went out.
And if she runs into any Mecha, just let it be Joe, she added to the All Mighty after the younger girl had left.
Bernie roughly knew the route from the Graceley to Our Lady of the Immaculate Heart, but from there on she had no idea which way to turn.
"Have you lost you way?" asked a suave voice with a British accent. It seemed to come from beside her.
She looked up. The dark young fellow of the first night stood there just within arm's reach, head on one side, hands on hips.
"Did you just talk to me?" Bernie asked.
"Yes, I did. I merely wanted to know if you needed a guide."
She glanced around. "I suppose I do. I'm just going to the lower level to meet up with my cousin. We only got here the night before last night."
"Then lucky for you that your path crossed mine so that I might show you the right path. You are new to Rouge City?"
"Yes, Uh, we were just passing through, my cousin Philomena and I." Realizing her lack of manners, she held out her hand to him. "I'm Bernadette. And you are?"
"They call me Gigolo Joe, but you, Bernadette, may call me just Joe." He took her hand in his and raised it to his lips, bowing over it. Before she could drive the thought from her mind, she wondered if…a real man's lips would feel as soft on her skin. An electric charge raced up her arm and down her spine. She felt her face flush up to the roots of her hair.
She meant only to glance up at his face, just to get a good look at it, but as soon as her eyes met his, she could not pull away.
Those eyes.
She tried to tell herself they were only the housings over…whatever Mechas "saw" with, but they were too beautiful for her to think of them like that. She'd never before seen a man's eyes so brilliant and so gentle, of such a curious shade of green: not a bright green, nor tainted with the murky gray or hazel that marred most green eyes. Most human green eyes, that is.
He released her hand and glanced toward the plaza. "Mustn't keep you from your destination." He proffered her his arm with the kind of graciousness she'd seen only in 2-D movies form the distant 1940s. She hesitated, but took it. He felt so natural, she wondered if this was how it felt.
As they walked, she tried to match her strides to his, but she soon found that he matched his stride to hers.
"So you're the famous Joe that Cecie told us about," she said, not knowing quite what to say.
"I am. And that must make you the damsel in distress who took the nasty spill earlier this morning."
"Oh, yeah, I hope I didn't hurt you…uh…"
"Better that I should be damaged a little from saving a falling maiden from injury than for any other reason."
"In that case, I'm sorry I ran off like that."
"You have done me no harm. The chance to act as your guide is all the reward I need." His voice sounded so genuine, she honestly believed for a moment that he meant exactly what he said.
But at length they reached the rotunda that housed the escalator landing. She let go of his arm.
"But would you not rather have me accompany you further? Cecie has told me much about your cousin Philomena, and I would very much like to meet her."
Bernie glanced down the escalator. "Oh, well, uh, no, I can find my way from here."
"If you wish, perhaps some other time I could show you around the City?"
"Thanks, but no. We won't be staying long. I really have to be going." She walked away from him quickly, too quickly and stepped onto a down escalator.
She had to put distance between her and him; she glanced back to make sure he wasn't following her. She had started to feel things she knew she shouldn't, things her foster-father simply would not approve of. What startled her almost to tears was how pleasant it all felt. Besides, what would Phila say if she knew she'd actually spoken to this…thing?
She found her way to the laundromat, where Phila was already loading the wet clothes into a drier.
"How did you get down here?" Phila demanded.
"Oh, I had good directions," Bernie replied, innocently.
"Cecie, what's most you ever…I mean, have you ever met a man and…" Bernie sputtered after they had got back to the hotel room and Phila was out of earshot.
Cecie was filling out a credit slip, but she paused. "You mean how far have I gone with a man?"
Bernie's face went pink. "I guess that's what I mean."
Cecie looked toward the kitchen, where Phila was cooking supper. "I gotta bring this down to the manager's office; my rent is due. Why don't you come with me, we can talk on the way."
"Uh, sure."
Once they were safely in the hallway and walking down the stairs, Cecie laughed tersely. "Thank God I'm old-fashioned enough to still use paper credit slips instead of e-banking, or you'd never get a chance to talk about this subject." Bernie only smiled, too embarrassed to disagree.
After Cecie had paid the rent, they lingered on the mezzanine. "Okay, to start with: how far have I gone?" Cecie began. "I kissed one guy in college, but he thought it meant he could have more, so I gave him something else to think about."
"Like what?"
"I slapped him in the face and kneed him in the groin. Phila misunderstood the incident, so she wouldn't speak to me for a week, until a third party who'd been there finally explained to her what exactly happened. After that, I decided to keep myself on a short leash. But the thing is, unless you put that kind of promise in the hands of the All Mighty, you can end up putting your foot right where you swore you wouldn't."
"So you let someone else kiss you?"
Cecie glanced below, her eyes tracking something or someone passing by down there, out of Bernie's line of sight. "It's a little more complicated than that. This happened this past New Year's Eve; I was out, sort of hangin' around with Joe—"
"How do you 'sort of' hang around with some…thing like that?"
"You sort of hang around with someone like that if you're hanging around his usual spot, watching the crowd and making up stories from the faces passing by while he's out keeping the customers satisfied, and the two of you are chatting each other up betweentimes. Midnight came and I had no one to kiss me for good luck, so I turned to the first compliant person closest to me, albeit inorganic."
"You mean you kissed him?!" Bernie's jaw dropped in shock.
"I doubt I'd ever do it again, and I definitely wouldn't go any further. First, because he's just too good at what he does, and second, because of the repercussions that followed the New Year's kiss."
"Why, what happened?"
"Oh, nothing really that bad, except some troublemaker in the crowd, probably my friend Vautrin though I never found out if it was him, had a digital camera, and since I'm notoriously known as the local virgin, the scamp thought he'd get funny and post on the 'Net a picture of 'Virgin Cecie' chewing face with Gigolo Joe. Try living that one down! I actually avoided Joe for a month after that, but after a while, he got cute and started giving me these sad-puppy looks every time I walked by him. I tried to act as if I have less of a heart than he does, but like I said, he's just too good at what he does.
"So is there something you wanted to tell me?"
Bernie just blushed.
To be continued…