AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I’ve been working out,” I told him, smiling brightly. His interest seemed to perk up even further at the display of teeth. “What have you been up to? How’s the clinic?”
He shrugged those wide shoulders. “Oh, you know, patients who bite me and pee on themselves. It’s a living. How about you?”
I grimaced. “Well, I’m sure you heard that I’m no longer working at the library.”
His cheerfully blank face gave me the impression that he was too polite to acknowledge that I was being gossiped about behind my back. I continued, “I’m actually working at a bookstore over on Braxton Avenue now. I really like my new boss. I’ve never really done retail before, but I get to work around books again, so it’s great. I’ve sort of moved on to another phase of my life. A phase that does not include Story Time and sock puppets.”
Adam chuckled, winking his dimples at me. “You should keep your options open. You never know what might come up.”
Like a bullet wound and an old guy willing to gnaw on my neck to save my life. That was a surprise. At the thought of Gabriel, I felt a little twinge of guilt. It felt very wrong to do anything even remotely resembling flirting. And even worse when Adam blurted, “It’s been—I—I’d like to—would you like to meet up for coffee sometime?”
Well, there went a bigger twinge.
I did a bit of a double-take, sure I’d heard him wrong. “I’m sorry, could you repeat what you just said?”
“Coffee.” He laughed. “Would you like to have a cup of coffee sometime? Catch up, talk about old times, share embarrassing memories, that sort of thing.”
“You mean like when I used to follow you around at middle-school dances, trying to work up the nerve to ask you to slow dance to ‘End of the Road’? Oh, crap. That was out loud. I have to stop doing that.”
“Don’t worry.” Adam laughed. “It’s kind of flattering.”
I laughed, too, but more as a defense mechanism than out of actual amusement.
“So, coffee?” Adam asked pointedly. “Yes?”
There it was, everything I’d wanted as a human laid out on a platter before me. If you’d asked me when I was a teenager, “What would fulfill every romantic hope and dream in your obsessive adolescent heart?” Adam Morrow asking me out would do it. As much as I’d tried to embrace my vampire lifestyle, it was difficult to let that go. It actually pained me when I had to say, “I appreciate the offer, but I’m seeing someone.”
Adam clearly wasn’t used to being turned down. It took him just as long to process the fact that I’d said no as it did for me to realize that him asking me out wasn’t an auditory hallucination.
He finally said, “Well, you can’t blame a guy for trying. I’ll see you around, Jane.”
After watching a deflated Adam making his way through the funeral crowd, I busied myself gathering dirty plates and forks. I’d made it halfway to the kitchen when a sharp poke to my side made me squeal and fling cutlery. Panic and my vampire reflexes had me plucking the falling pieces out of the air.
“Fast hands,” said my uncle Junior, the one who finds sneaking up behind me and startling me the height of hilarity.
“That just gets funnier and funnier every time you do it,” I retorted, poking through his paunch at his ribs.
“Aw, honey, he doesn’t know any better,” Uncle Paul said, shaking his head. “Mama dropped him a lot when he was baby.”
Paul and Junior were Dad’s brothers. I liked both of them, but when I was growing up, they were always so busy with their big, strapping sons, Dwight and Oscar. And they actually managed to move a whopping forty-five minutes away from Half-Moon Hollow, so I didn’t see them except around holidays.
“How’s my shortcake?” Uncle Paul asked.
“You’re seven feet tall, everyone’s shorter than you,” I said, kissing his cheek and following our usual “comedy” routine. “Just wait until old age catches up with you, we’ll see who laughs last.”
“Your mama told us you’ve had some health problems,” said Uncle Junior, who hugged me hard enough to crack mortal ribs.
“I guess you could call it that,” I said, suspicious thoughts beginning to churn in my brain.
“Those deer ticks are everywhere,” Paul said, clucking and shaking his head. “That’s why I duct-tape my pants legs around my socks when I go turkey hunting.”
Had I accidentally walked into a French film? It was as if they were having a totally different conversation. “Yeah …”
“But there are treatments nowadays, aren’t there?” Junior asked. “It’s not supposed to affect your life span or anything, is it?”
“No, quite the opposite,” I muttered.
“That’s great, sweetie,” he said, chucking me under the chin. “I’d hate to think of my niece keeling over from Lyme disease.”
