Page 47 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“Hello.”

I kiss him. Because I can. Which is rapidly becoming my favorite thing about whatever this is.

When I step back, Julian looks at me for a moment. Then he opens his book again. I make it halfway back to the chickens.

“Penny.”

I turn.

“Yes?”

“I wasn’t finished.”

Oh. I go back.

The bet gets settled on Tuesday, in public, at the Widow’s Lantern, in front of nine people.

I’m there to drop off chowder base. Julian is with me, because Julian is with me now, apparently, and I hold the door while he carries the cooler through it.

“Penny,” says Theo from behind the bar, then looks at Julian. “Penny’s boyfriend.”

The pub doesn’t go quiet. That’s what makes it so much worse. Nine people carry on with their conversations while my life is casually rearranged around them.

“Theo—”

I turn, ready to explain that nobody has used that word, that there has been no discussion, and that repeated kissing and one extremely explicit conversation on my porch do not, technically, constitute a relationship. Julian sets the cooler down on the bar.

“Where would you like this?” he asks.

That’s all. He doesn’t correct Theo. A word has been used about him in public, and Julian lets it stand there between us like a chair someone moved.

Theo points towards the end of the bar.

“There.”

Julian moves the cooler, and I stare at his back.

“Lucy,” Theo says, looking behind me. “Twenty dollars.”

“Thank you!”

“I protest,” says Wendell Marr from the other end of the bar.

“You’ve no standing, Wendell.”

“I had money on Christmas and I want a ruling on when a thing counts.”

“It counts when I say it counts. It’s my board.” Theo takes a twenty out of the register and puts it in Lucy’s hand like a man paying a plumber.

And that is how I apparently acquire a boyfriend, in a pub, in November, without anyone asking me about it. The strange part isn’t that Theo said it. The strange part is that Julian didn’t say he was wrong. I look at him. He looks back, and one eyebrow lifts. I decide there are conversations better held without Wendell Marr taking odds on them.

This may be the first mature decision I’ve made all week.

Julian comes back to the Salt & Sage on Wednesday. And Thursday. Not for any particular reason. That’s the part I keep failing to explain to people and, more embarrassingly, to myself. He brings a book. Sometimes two. He takes the stool at the end of my prep counter and reads while I work.

Sometimes we talk. Sometimes we don’t. Sometimes I put music on and hum badly and catch him watching me over the top of a book.

Sometimes I kiss him on my way to the walk-in. Sometimes he catches my hand as I pass and pulls me between his knees and kisses me until I forget what I’m going to the walk-in for. This may explain the butter.