"So where do you want to go to lunch?" I asked him. I kept my eyes straight ahead, but I could see him smile from the corner of my field of vision.
"I'm not sure," he said. "I am a very easy date. I have only negative preferences."
"Negative preferences?"
"Meaning I only know what I do not want."
Oh. One of those people. "Okay. Well, we're in New York, there's really nothing in the world we can't find here."
He nodded. "What would you prefer?"
I pursed my lips and took a fearless inventory of my wants and desires. "What about... Vietnamese? This is the perfect day for pho."
He nodded and I almost smiled, but then he said, "It is, but I'm not in the mood for broth."
"Hmm. How about Lebanese?"
"I enjoy Lebanese, but it is more of a summer food. I always think of summer when I am eating food laced with lemon."
Great. "Chinese? Greek? Italian?"
"Maybe."
"That's not helpful. You're the one who hasn't eaten for two days, you tell me what you think your stomach can handle."
He appeared to think about this for quite a while, and I glanced around as we exited his neighborhood and set out toward the nearest subway station. For the first time, I wondered why he hadn't just called a car, but I thought it would be rude to ask. I didn't care about private cars or limos or anything like that, but I thought it was a little weird that a billionaire with all that money and prestige at his fingertips would instead choose to walk to the subway station.#p#分页标题#e#
Then again, a billionaire forgetting to eat and living in a house crowded with the most useless nick-knacks imaginable was not what I had imagined either. My Batman was in the middle of his soul-searching phase, it seemed. Or, since he was in his late thirties, perhaps he had simply never exited said phase. It happened to the best of them.
"I know a little Indian place," he said at last. "They make the most wonderful lamb shahi korma. I could eat it all day."
"Like pussy?" The words were past my lips before I could stop myself and I clapped my hand over my mouth, mortified.
But he just laughed. "Only yours, Sadie. Only yours."
My pussy was on par with lamb shahi korma. That was good to know. I guess.
We walked the rest of the way to the subway in companionable silence, and when I used my metrocard for both of us he didn't object. Somehow, I liked that. He was walking around with the riffraff, just as if he were people himself. When we boarded the train heading downtown, I flopped into my seat and let out a sigh of relief.
"Tired?" he asked as he settled down beside me. His knee brushed against mine, sending little shivers of heat through me, but I didn't move away. I let my leg stay there, touching his. A bit of illicit contact, right out in the open. I forged into the breach of his conversation starter with a shrug.
"I don't know," I said. "It's nice to go out to lunch, I think. I haven't gone out to a lunch that wasn't a business lunch or a hotdog on the street corner in... Jesus, I don't know how long. It's been a long time. I don't have a lot of a social life now."
He raised his eyebrows. "Now?" he asked. "I read that you and Felicia have been friends for a very long time. Is being her personal assistant really so difficult?"
I waved a hand. "Oh man, you don't even know the half of it. She's gotta do all this dumb shit to keep up appearances in society or whatever and I have to organize it all. She's huge into charity, so I'm always running around trying to get charity events up and running without letting all the rich folks know exactly what they're giving to."
He laughed at that. "Oh?" he said.
I gave him a sly smile. "Felicia fancies herself a revolutionary. She likes to give her money to anarchist groups and such. When she married Anton, he set up an allowance for her 'pet projects,' as he liked to call them, and whatever she raises for charity for a more acceptable organization she dumps an equal amount into something else. Or a large number of something elses. She's a bit scattered in her ideology, but she does good work. I can't really fault her for it. It's just exhausting running around trying to make everything all hoity-toity for the rich folks when you grew up poor in Jersey."
"Oh, you did?"
His voice was merely curious, not judgmental, but I immediately went on guard. I'd been saying too much, distracted by his knee against mine. I didn't like talking about my childhood. All that shit was over and done with, as I liked to say, and I'd spent years convincing Felicia of the same thing. She'd been hung up on her parents and fixing their lives, and it had been holding her back. Marrying Anton, though he was a rich man like her father, had been the best thing to happen to her, frankly. Me, I'd already moved on. That was in the past, and they say that place is a whole other country, and I'd probably get dysentery there.