‘Well, then I’m not judging you. But if you were one of those guys, then that would be a completely different story and I’d have to break up with you immediately.’
‘Well, lucky I’m not then.’
‘You have a good physique though. Not that I’ve seen it properly. Barely seen it at all – not that I’m looking, either – but what I have seen is good so far.’
‘Thanks.’ He smiled at me; I smiled back. Mine was a natural smile. I wasn’t mirroring his facial features to seem more normal, or natural. This wasmysmile, no pretending, no imitating.
‘What time does your shift end?’
‘Graveyard shift,’ I replied, even though I thought that to be one of the oddest expressions yet. I was only saying it because that’s what everyone else called it. The expression seemed to imply that graveyards only existed at night. That you couldn’t do a shift in a graveyard during the day. Did they magically disappear in the day, like vampires supposedly did? I don’t think so. ‘I love working at night. It’s so much quieter.’
‘I’m sure that will be a welcome relief after my house.’
‘YES!’ I gushed, and then stopped abruptly before offending him. ‘I really enjoyed it though.’
‘Leroy took a shine to you today. He doesn’t usually like people.’
‘I don’t usually like people either. Like cats who find people who don’t like them, we people who usually don’t like other people tend to gravitate towards each other.’
‘I hope you liked the rest of my family, just a little bit?’
‘I like them! But there are a hell of a lot of them, aren’t there?’
‘I’m afraid human culling is looked down on,’ Andrew said, his smile growing.
It took me a while to get it, but when I did, I laughed so hard my shoulders shook. My laugh was so loud that it reverberated around the underground parking lot. And once I started laughing, I couldn’t stop.
‘That was so funny.’
‘I gathered that,’ he said, in between his own laughs.
‘So dark. So funny. How do you do that? I’m so useless at being purposefully funny. People find me accidentally funny.’
He grinned at me. It was leisurely and long, almost as if the smile was taking its time to fully form on his face. ‘I think being accidentally funny is much better than being purposefully funny.’
‘Maybe,’ I mused, but I wasn’t so sure of that. There had been many times in my life when I’d tried to join in with the jokey, witty banter and failed miserably. In fact, all my attempts at purposeful humour were met with very blank stares, and in some cases, people actually backed away from me.
‘My family loved you, by the way,’ Andrew said, pulling me out of the memory where some girls had all been joking about the hickies on their necks and I’d chimed in and said that a guy that likes sucking on necks should be called a neck-romancer, a play on words that I’d thought was really clever, actually. ‘That’s so gross,’ one of them had said, and then they’d all ‘eew’ed together.
‘I liked them too.’ And I actually meant it.
‘Thanks for doing this. It was really helpful.’
‘Well, that’s what our arrangement is for,’ I said, and then gave him a small wave and started backing away from the car.
‘Wait!’ he called after me. ‘You asked me a question earlier today, about my birthmother.’
‘You don’t have to tell me. I shouldn’t have asked.’
‘You just caught me off-guard, that’s all.’
‘Sorry,’ I said softly.
He closed his eyes for a moment, or was that a long blink?
‘She was young. Really young. Fourteen.’
‘Oh my God. What happened?’
