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I thought back to the chapter in Sense and Sensibility when Mr. Dashwood has just died. Marianne and Mrs. Dashwood are overcome by grief. They gave themselves up wholly to their sorrow, seeking increase of wretchedness in every reflection that could afford it, and resolved against ever admitting consolation in the future. This leaves Elinor to deal with their grasping relatives. Elinor isn’t given the chance to grieve because she’s able to handle all of the grunt work.
I was definitely an Elinor, minus the quiet dignity … or the sense. But I was dependable, overly analytical, and unable to shirk excessive responsibilities. So I gathered the coffee cups and bit my tongue.
“I’ll just take them into the kitchen,” I muttered. “And join the other scullery maids.”
I hefted the tray with one hand and nearly ran smack into my high-school crush, Adam Morrow, a blond, dimpled, and ridiculously clean-cut veterinarian.
“A-Adam!” I stuttered. “Hi!”
At least one thing had remained constant since my living days: I still couldn’t find anything to say to Adam Morrow. While contemplating the back of his neck in sophomore English, I had daydreams where Adam suddenly realized how luminously beautiful I was, inside and out. He would finally realize that I was more than the brainy gal jocks wanted to be paired with on group projects. He’d ask me where I’d been all his life. There was also an imagined prom-night scenario that I won’t go into. And now, all I could do was gawk at him and keep a death grip on a tray of dirty coffee cups.
“Hi, Jane,” he said, smiling broadly. “It’s nice to see you again. It’s been a while.”
“What are you doing here?” I blurted. Woo-hoo, a full, unstuttered sentence!
Adam was carrying a carefully Tupperwared seven-layer salad, though how anything involving hard-boiled eggs, bacon, mayonnaise, and sugar could be considered salad, I have no idea. “Mama sent me over with this. She had dental surgery this afternoon, and she’s still laid up on the pain pills. She’s sorry she couldn’t make it.”
“That was very thoughtful,” I said, accepting the bowl with my free hand. “And heavy. How much bacon is in this thing?”
“Just enough.” He laughed, bottomless cerulean eyes twinkling. “What about you? Are you doing something different with your hair?” he asked, staring at me closely. “Because you look different. Great but different.”
He was staring at me again, as if I were a puzzle he was trying to solve. Apparently, word hadn’t gotten around to Adam about my undead status. So, for reasons I didn’t quite fathom yet, I lied through my pointy teeth.
“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.
