Page 58 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

The sentence goes through me from the throat down, and I wait for the fear, because there is supposed to be fear. There is an entire shelf at Harbor Books that says so.

It doesn’t come. I check twice, the way you check a pocket for your keys. What comes instead is my grandmother’s kitchen in the middle of winter with the wood stove blazing. It is the feeling of coming in out of the weather to somewhere safe and warm.

Then the second thing arrives, and the second thing is worse.

Weeks. Weeks of the far end of my kitchen. Of holding a cocoa he could not drink because it gave his hands something to do. Of I have encountered roofs, and those are different statements, and enough—one flat, quiet word about every person he has ever lost, given to a woman who was crying about her own parents and never once asked him a question back.

He has been lonely in my kitchen four evenings a week and perfectly gentle about it. The ache that arrives with that is so enormous and so entirely the wrong feeling for this cold gallery that I have to hold on to his arm to stay upright.

“Penny,” he says. “You’ve gone somewhere else.”

“I know.”

“Where?”

“Nineteen fifty-eight,” I say. “The Pratts gave this museum a painting and it ended up in the corridor by the buttons. That’s the saddest thing in this building and I include the whaleboat.”

Something happens at the corner of his mouth. Then he says, “Come and be warm. Mabel is going to auction the roof plans if no one stops her.”

I put my hand back through his arm and walk out of that gallery beside him exactly the way I walked into it, which is the hardest work I’ve ever done, and I’ve catered a hundred and ten covers with a broken oven.

He drives me home at eleven in a car that smells of nothing at all, and I talk the entire way because that is what I do when a room has too much space in it. This car has centuries in it, and I’m the only one in here who has just found that out.

At the turn onto Point Road, I run out.

“You stopped talking,” Julian says.

“I’m tired.”

“You are never tired. You are occasionally horizontal.”

“Those are the same thing.”

“They are different statements,” he says, and I have to look out the window at nothing at all for a while.

When we reach my cottage, Julian walks me up the steps. I have spent the entire drive trying not to think about the fact that the man beside me is a vampire, which turns out to be excellent preparation for standing under my porch light while that vampire puts one cool hand against my waist.

“Thank you for tonight,” he says.

“You bought that ticket from Mabel with the door open.”

“I did.”

“On purpose.”

“On purpose.”

I look at his face. The face from the painting. The mouth from the painting too, more or less, except I know considerably more about what this one can do.

“Tomorrow,” he says.

“Tomorrow.”

Then he bends and kisses me.

This has happened enough times that it should be familiar. It is familiar—that’s the problem. His mouth is cool against mine, the way it has always been cool, and his hand settles at my waist with the same deliberate care he uses every time he touches me. I know the pressure of his fingers. I know the small tilt of his head when he wants the kiss deeper. I know that if I put my hand against his chest I will feel no heartbeat under my palm.

Now I know why.