Page 100 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“Julian—”

“You will want it within the hour,” he says. “And my coat is on the bedroom floor where you threw it. I would like that on the record.”

Then I laugh and he gets the cookie and I don’t even care that I’m getting crumbs in the very good bed.

CHAPTER 20

After that night, Julian starts walking through my front door without stopping.

I realize it two days later, standing in my hallway with one boot off and my keys still in my hand. He comes in behind me in the middle of a sentence about Wendell Marr’s grandfather, hangs his coat on the hook that used to be my mother’s, and keeps talking as he heads for the kitchen.

He used to pause.

Not because he had to. I know that now. The invitation I gave him the night of the storm still holds and will until I take it back, which I have no intention of doing. But every single time he came to my house, there used to be a tiny half-beat at the threshold. Nothing anyone else would have noticed. Nothing I noticed until it stopped.

Some old careful part of him was checking. Making sure he was still wanted on this side of the door. Now he doesn’t. Now he’s certain.

“Penny,” he calls from the kitchen. “Your kettle has a fault.”

“My kettle is fine.”

“It boils, and then it thinks about it, and then it boils again.”

“That’s not a fault. That’s a personality.”

I come through with one boot on and stand in my kitchen doorway, looking at a vampire filling my teapot with his back to me. There’s a book on the table that isn’t mine, a hardback about the Newfoundland cod fishery with his place held by a strip of till receipt. It’s been here for four days. Yesterday I moved it four inches to get at something underneath and then put it back exactly where it had been, which is the sort of thing you do with a book that lives somewhere.

There’s also a hideous black toothbrush beside mine upstairs. His name is on my chalkboard calendar under Thursday: J.—dinner @ mine. There’s an apron of mine hanging in the Blackthorn kitchen and a hairbrush in the bathroom off the north bedroom that I did not buy, which means Julian did, although he has refused to discuss the matter.

This is what December looks like now.

Some nights he comes to Salt & Sage and sits at the end of my prep counter with his book while I work. He has learned where the sheet trays go and will carry anything I point at, although he refuses absolutely to touch my knives.

“They are yours and they are sharp and I am strong,” he told me when I finally asked why, in the tone of a man reading a warning label.

I had to go into the walk-in for a minute.

He volunteers things now, too. Small things, usually, slipped into other conversations as though they cost him nothing. The name of a ship that used to moor where the ferry does now. The fact that he once tried to make his own ink and ruined a carpet he apparently still remembers with irritation. His opinion that the dock repair Theo made without him will not survive spring.

Feeding has settled into our life the same way everything else has. It isn’t a summit meeting anymore. Sometimes it happens because his mouth is already at my throat and we both want it, and afterwards the gold still hums through me while I fall asleep with his cool arm heavy across my waist. In the morning there is sometimes a mark I hide under a scarf. Mabel notices anyway and says nothing, which for Mabel Libby is an act of heroic restraint.

It’s easy. Settled. Ordinary in the best possible way.

And Julian has stopped pausing at my door. I open my mouth to tell him I’ve noticed. Then I don’t. Because I have learned some things about this man, and one of those is that the surest way to make him self-conscious about doing something is to announce that I have caught him doing it.

He looks over and sees me watching him. “What?”

“Nothing,” I say. “There’s shortbread.”

Damn it.

I’m going to have to marry him.

Lucy blows into Salt & Sage three days later on a gust of cold air with her camera bag over one shoulder and her phone already held out in front of her.

“Okay,” she says. “Don’t panic, but Black Harbor is about to be famous.”

I look up from a bowl of cranberry-orange filling. “Define famous. Famous like the time the paper ran that photograph of Theo holding a lobster the size of a toddler, or⁠—”