“Hey! You can’t run into traffic like that!” she yelled at me.
“I’m fine,” I reassured her.
From beside my arm, my bride rubbed the side of her face. “Nico, sweetie, I don’t see any taxicabs on this side street. Let’s take my car. It’s parked just another block this way. I should move it from the paid garage anyway.”
“All right.”
I followed her as she broke through the crowd and then turned onto a smaller side street, with me fluttering off her arm like a ribbon she trailed in her wake.
Maybe vodka should be my drink of choice. Everything my bride said seemed like a splendid idea.
Or maybe that was just her.
I was definitely absolutely trolleyed, and I was enjoying it a lot.
We stepped into a frightfully old elevator that creaked and groaned its way to the second floor of the parking garage while my bride muttered about how I might have killed myself on the concrete stairs. That old beast might have become our double-wide coffin if it had wedged itself in the elevator shaft. The metal-on-metal scrape squealed as it rose, but the doors parted to the hot desert night on the second level.
Her car was an older model with threadbare upholstery. My foot missed the doorframe twice as I tried to paperclip-fold myself inside, but I clutched the car door for my very life and succeeded on the third try.
My bride wrenched herself around and retrieved a package from the rear seat. She pulled large baby powder-scented tissues from it and wiped the white and black greasepaint off her face and arms, revealing stripes and then swaths of pinky-tan skin and the sweet shape of her face.
Oh,she was pretty, and my heart lifted more as the statue-makeup fell away and she became human beside me like Galatea.
Which made me Pygmalion. I snickered at the thought.
She dug the cash and my wallet out of her busking hat, wadded the paper money into the wallet, and opened my suit jacket to shove the whole mess into my inner breast pocket.
So organized. I liked her already.
Her vehicle ground its gears as she started it, but the car adequately conveyed us through the cement parking structure. The headlights glowed on the gray beams overhead. Its tire-thunks echoed in the concrete cave.
Once we were outside and driving on the street, crowds swirling on the sidewalks as we drove past, my bride shot me a side-eyed glance. “You’re not going to throw up, are you?”
“Of course not. How ill-bred.”
Light bulbs glowed and flowed up the towering walls of the casinos and reflected on the windscreen’s dirty glass.
“There are water bottles in the back seat. Why don’t you drink some water?” she suggested.
“Excellent idea.” I twisted under my seat belt and found a tepid bottle on the floor behind her seat. I was parched. The lukewarm water was divine on my tongue. “Thank you, my bride.”
“Yourbride?You are so unserious right now.”
“Yes, my bride. You agreed, and you’re my bride.”
Her exaggerated blink with those luscious eyelashes seemed shocked. “Yeah,okay.I guess I’m your bridefor now.”
She deftly parallel-parked on a downtown street, an excellent skill that I had pulled off once and only once during my driving test so many years ago,so many years, over ten years,and I staggered out of the car.
The Clark County courthouse was a tall red brick building sporting a glowing sign that readMarriage License Bureauin fat 1950s-style script font on the ground-floor office.
How clever. How retro.
Hownotroyal and sophisticated.
I was vastly amused by it. “Absolutelyperfect.”
CHAPTER 17
