Page 21 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

But I can’t say what comes next, because Mabel’s calling my name and Theo’s thumping the counter for attention. Something that might be regret moves in Julian’s eyes.

“I should let you return to chaos,” he says. “Thank you again.”

He steps through the door, and the room gets dimmer.

Damn it.

CHAPTER 6

“Ihave too many cannoli,” I announce, hoisting the basket onto Lucy’s kitchen counter. “This is a genuine crisis.”

“You have exactly the number of cannoli a person has when they’ve decided to drive them somewhere.” Lucy doesn’t look up from the negatives she’s holding to the window. “Say the somewhere out loud.”

“I over-ordered on the shells because a woman who runs out of dessert at a baby shower never works in this town again, Lucy. That’s not a joke. That’s Deirdre Fanning’s mother, 1991, and people still bring it up. So now I have extras and I hate waste. It’s a moral position.”

“Penny.”

“What?”

“Say the somewhere.”

I fuss with the basket. I’ve lined it with a linen cloth, which is more effort than a neighborly gesture strictly requires, and I’ve picked out the best of everything—the cannoli, four of the little almond tarts, a half dozen of the rosewater shortbread that came out perfect this time. It looks, if I’m honest, less like leftovers and more like an offering.

“Blackthorn House,” I say.

Lucy sets the negatives down.

“It’s neighborly,” I say, before she can. “He came to two of my things. It’s basic manners to reciprocate. With baked goods. That’s how the town works. You know that’s how the town works. Mabel brings people zucchini they didn’t ask for.”

“Mabel is seventy-five and brings zucchini to everyone. You’re thirty-two and you’ve lined a basket with your good linen for a man who doesn’t eat.”

I open my mouth, then close it again, because that’s the crack in the whole neighborly-gesture story, and Lucy’s put her thumb right on it. He doesn’t eat. I’ve watched him decline everything through two meals and a coffee shop. I’m driving a basket of pastries to a man who has never, in my presence, put food in his mouth.

“He doesn’t eat,” Lucy repeats, with enormous patience. “That’s the one confirmed fact about this man.”

“Then he can look at them.”

Lucy softens, which she does about four times a year and never when I’m ready for it.

“Pen. What are you actually doing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yeah you do.”

“Fine.” I lean on the counter. “He sat at my table for five hours and wouldn’t take one thing off it, and he stayed until midnight and washed my grandmother’s glasses, and then he walked two miles home in the dark on his own. And I’ve thought about that a lot since then. It’s not a crush, it’s—” I hear how it sounds. “It’s that he won’t eat anything I make and he still stays.”

“I want pictures,” Lucy says after a long moment. “Do it for journalism.”

“There’s no journalism happening.”

“Do it for me, then. Because I’m nosy and I love you.” She points the lens at me and clicks before I can duck. “There. That’s the before. You, on your porch of poor decisions, holding a basket.”

“This is your kitchen.”

“Emotionally it’s a porch.”

The road up hasn’t improved.