My heart stopped when she stepped out on that runway, and not just because I had seen the first love of my life again after innumerable years. But not to put too fine a point on it, Eve was hot. The years had left us largely untouched, and when she walked out from behind the silver lame shimmery curtain, I went back to the first day I ever saw her. The sun was always shining in the Garden, even when it had to rain, and it was sunny afternoon when she stepped out from behind a tree and said “Adam, I presume?”

“Huh?” I’m always eloquent when surprised.

“You must be Adam.”

“Huh?”

“Well, obviously I’m intended to be the brains of this operation. I’m Eve, and Father sent me here to be your partner.”

“Huh?” This was taking a minute or two to sink in, obviously. It’s not like Eve was the first woman I’d ever seen, or the first woman that had ever been. That would be Lillith, and that didn’t go well. It’s not that Lillith wasn’t perfectly pleasant, but we were never partners in any real sense of the word. We occupied the same space, but we weren’t ever what you could call together.

“Father made me from one of your ribs, working under the assumption that we’d be closer that way if I were more a part of you. We’ll see. So far it looks like he took a fair chunk of your brains with the rib, even though I’m pretty sure they don’t share the same geography, as it were.”

“Look, um…Eve?”

“Yes. Eve.”

“Ok. Look, Eve. I’m sure you’re nice enough, and ‘m sure Father thinks that he knows best, but I just got out of a thing with this woman named Lillith, and I’m not really feeling the whole ‘man and woman thing’ right now. It’s nothing personal, but…” I trailed off when I saw the look in her eyes. It was the look you get when you drop your kid off at kindergarten for the first time. There was hurt mixed with shock and loss all wrapped up in a big bundle of betrayal, like the whole world has suddenly turned topsy-turvy, and not in the good kind of roller-coaster that goes through a loop kid of way.

“You don’t love me?” And those eyes brimmed with tears, and a lock of her blonde hair trailed out from behind her left ear, and she started to turn away from me, shoulders slumped like she’d just lost her only friend. Which I suppose he had, even though we’d just met.

“Wait.” I stopped her more with words than with any touch, although I did reach for her arm. “Why don’t we just sit here and get to know each other a little bit. Tell me something about yourself.”

“Well, there’s not a lot to tell since I’m about seven hours old, but I’ll sit with you and you can tell me about yourself, and this place, and all these creatures that are all around.” So we did. We sat on a rock on top of a hill and I pointed to the giraffe, and the lion, and the dog and horse and kiwi (she found the kiwi and playpus particularly amusing, and used to always giggle when the kiwi would waddle past).

We sat there for the rest of the day as I taught her the names of things, and she laughed at my silliness when I tried to ride a hippopotamus or climb a tree after a squirrel, and I found her to be witty, and open and completely giving of herself. She laughed whenever she felt like laughing, and was so moved at the beauty of the sunset that she wept, big tears rolling down her cheeks to nestle in the hollow of her throat and collarbone while she grinned a grin that kept the sun up a couple extra minutes just to bask in her light.

So yeah, we fell in love. I guess we invented it, at least among mortals. The seraphim had a whole different level of love working, what with their nigh-infinite intellect and capacity for emotion and all. But we fell in love, and we had babies, and then we had an unfortunate interaction with a certain seraphim with ambition who had managed to lose a celestial corporate takeover bid and develop a reputation as the most disgruntled of employees. You all know how that turned out. Then there was the whole Cain inventing murder episode, and things spiraled out of control between Eve and I, and that all culminated in a certain level of butterflies in my stomach as I sat in a relatively disgusting bar in New Orleans watching my ultimate first wife take her top off for dollar bills.

I should have known that there was going to be trouble. I mean, really, nothing had gone well for me since I sat down at the blackjack table in Vegas, and since I’d gone a whopping 48 hours without hitting anyone I should have known that it was too good to last. But I’m really not that smart, so I was somewhat blindsided when everything went all pear-shaped on me.

It started in the middle of Eve’s second song, by which time she had shed her top and was teasing the removal of her oh-so-brief bottoms and writhing on the edge of the stage for a passel of thick-necked fratboys in cutoff Dockers and backwards LSU caps. Eve’s first song had been some mind-numbingly fast rave thing that left her half-naked and the audience whipped into a frenzy, so when the music shifted to Chris Isaak’s Baby Did a Bad, Bad Thing they were at a fever pitch.

It was about halfway through the song when the first fratboy made his move. Eve was on her knees at the edge of the stage shaking her boobs in his face while he stuck a dollar in his garter when he reached up and grabbed a handful of breast. Eve slapped his hand, waved a playful “no-no” finger in his face, and spun away to work the other side of the runway. Unfortunately for so many of us, the fratboy decided that he wasn’t done with Eve, and he grabbed the back of her thong and yanked her backwards toward him. Eve whirled on the fratboy ready to knock him senseless, but one of his buddies grabbed her first in mid-swing.

The mood of the crowd turned ugly then, and I looked over at Cain. “Keep Emily out of this,” I yelled at him as I flung myself into the fast-developing fray. One of the bouncers had a fratboy in a headlock, but two of them were still pawing at Eve, and she couldn’t get free enough to get a good swing at them. I caught one of them by the shoulder and spun him around, dropping under his roundhouse elbow and coming up with a shot to the groin. What can I say, I’m a lover, not a fighter. So I cheat.

The first fratboy went down like 250 lbs. of dead weight, which at that moment he was, and I clocked the other one behind one ear with a beer bottle. Eve’s back was to me as his grip loosened, and I went for the dramatic pose, taking the beer I’d just clobbered the kid with and turning it up, bringing it down with a grin just as Eve made it back up on the stage and to her feet. She looked down at me as I lowered the bottle and her eyes went wide. I smiled my best saucy smile up at her (and my best saucy smile is pretty good these days) and said nonchalantly, “Hi Eve. Nice thong.”

I’m not sure what reaction I was expecting, but a crazed shriek wasn’t anywhere on the list. I saw a light in her eyes that I was not in any was happy about, and was just bringing my hands up when one of her 4” platform shoes caught me square on the tip of my jaw, lifting me off my feet and depositing me, unconscious, in the center of a table occupied by three cloud storage salesmen from Toledo. The last thing I saw before I went completely out was a convention badge reading “Stewart” in 18-point font, and a pocket protector.

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