Page 90 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“How many boats?”

“Eleven. Twelve if you count a dory, which I do not.”

“Why don’t you count the dory?”

“Because it sank,” Julian says, “in the harbor, in flat calm, with me in it.”

I laugh so hard I have to grab the boathouse door, and he looks quietly delighted with himself.

There is no engine. He gets us out of the boathouse with a pole and then hauls the mainsail up hand over hand in one long, smooth pull that shuts down every useful thought in my head. I have watched men do this my whole life. A gaff main on a boat this size requires two people or one person with equipment, and Julian does it with no more apparent effort than a man drawing a blind.

I sit down on the roof of the cabin, put my hands inside the sleeves of my enormous coat, and think very clearly, I’m going to ask this man to bite me tonight, and I’m going to have to do it out loud.

We come out past the breakwater at about seven, and Black Harbor slides away behind us and turns into something I have never seen. I’ve lived here my whole life. I’ve looked at this town from Founder’s Point and from the road and from my upstairs window since I was six years old. I’ve never once looked at it from the water at night. It turns out that from half a mile out in December, my town is about two hundred yellow lights on a black hill with a church spire in the middle and the Widow’s Lantern burning at the bottom like the last coal in a stove.

“Oh,” I say.

Julian is at the tiller with his hair going sideways in the wind.

“Yes.”

“That’s Theo’s window. That’s the actual window.”

“It is.”

“Abigail Rood’s window.”

“For four hundred and eleven nights,” he says. “I used to come around the point and it was the only light on that whole shore. Bess leaves it on now for the parking lot.”

“Bess would.”

“Bess has views about the parking lot.”

I laugh and look back at my town glowing across half a mile of black water, then at Julian. He is entirely at ease. One hand rests on the tiller, his attention divided between the sail and me, and I have never seen him look this comfortable anywhere. I don’t need dates or another story tonight. I know what I’m looking at.

He’s at home.

“You like this,” I say.

“I like a great many things. You’ve simply never seen me do most of them.”

The moon comes up off the water sometime later, orange at first, and lays a shimmering stream of light across the sea. From shore, that kind of moonlight is scenery. Out here, it’s a path.

Julian anchors in the lee of the Sisters around half past eight, and the boat settles into the quieter water. The silence that follows isn’t really silence. Water knocks softly along the hull, something creaks overhead, and far out on the ledge a bell tolls twice.

Then he goes below and comes back with a hamper.

I stare at it. “What’s that?”

“Supper.”

“Julian.”

“For you,” he says, with dignity. “Obviously.”

Inside is a thermos, napkins folded with military precision, and a paper bag of Bess Kelleher’s molasses cookies, which I would recognize in the dark from three feet away, which is exactly the situation.

“You called Bess.”