Page 54 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“I have to go,” I tell Lucy, “before you say anything.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“You were going to say something.”

“I was going to say,” Lucy says, walking me to the front door with her hand on my elbow like a coach sending a fighter out, “that if you don’t marry him, I will.”

“You don’t even like men who own cuff links.”

“I’m revising my policy.”

He raps his knuckle lightly against the door frame, twice, the way you’d wake someone gently.

I open the door.

Julian looks up at me, and whatever he was about to say doesn’t happen. He simply looks. I’ve been looked at before, but not like this, not by a man who is already still and finds somewhere further to go. I feel the red dress in a way I didn’t feel it in my own mirror.

“Penny,” he says.

“Hi.”

“You look—” He actually hesitates. “There isn’t a sufficient word.”

“You could just pick an insufficient one.”

“Extraordinary,” he says.

Oh.

Behind me, Lucy gives a muffled gasp.

Julian helps me into my coat and holds out his hand. I take it, and his fingers close cool and sure around mine. He walks me down my steps as though I might otherwise forget how.

“Have her home by midnight,” Lucy calls from my doorway.

Julian glances back. “I make no promises.”

Lucy screams. I get in the car before she can do it again.

The Maritime Museum is in the old granite warehouse at the foot of Water Street, and it is always colder inside than out, which everyone knows and no one has ever fixed. A forty-foot whaleboat hangs on steel cables at a threatening angle over the punch table in the main hall, and no one would dream of straightening it. Tickets are ninety dollars. It’s for the roof. It has been for the roof since I was in high school.

There’s a valet tonight, which in Black Harbor means the Pelletier boy in a borrowed vest running back and forth between cars with the frantic dignity of the recently employed. Julian doesn’t hand him the keys. He parks the car himself, a little apart from the others, and comes around to open my door before I’ve found the handle.

“You don’t trust the Pelletier boy,” I say, taking his hand.

“I don’t trust anyone with a manual transmission and something to prove.”

The silent auction runs along the west wall, and I will read every sheet of it before the night is over, because I am my mother’s daughter. Ardith Peavey has donated a quilt to it eleven years running and bought it back every single year, and last year she got into a bidding war with herself and paid three hundred and thirty-two dollars for her own quilt.

Julian helps me take off my coat and then his hand arrives at the small of my back as we walk in. It’s the oldest gesture available to a man walking a woman into a room, and I have had it done to me by an insurance agent. Julian is not an insurance agent. His palm is cool through the silk, cool and steady and completely motionless, with no drift and no thumb doing anything conversational about it. It rests there for the length of the entrance hall, five seconds, maybe six, and my whole back goes warm underneath it. Every thought I had prepared for tonight walks out of my head and down the hill into the harbor.

I can hear my own pulse, in a public building, at a fundraiser for a roof. I want him to move that hand about four inches, and I want it so specifically that I have to look at the floor and concentrate. I’m a grown woman and I am concentrating on a floor.

Then his hand comes away, and the warmth goes with it inside of a second, and I spend ten minutes quietly furious about the architecture of entrance halls.

“Penny,” says Mabel Libby, materializing next to us. “Julian. That dress.”

“Thank you.”