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It was the third vow of my long life. The first was to my mother, and I broke it. The second was to Sabine, and I have kept it. I made this one to a young man who was at that moment walking across a parking lot with a pastry in his hand, and had no idea that I had made it.

I put my palm against the cold glass.

“A yes,” I said, to the empty room. “Only a yes. Not a look, not a nod, not a moment when you are tired or drunk or afraid. A yes you can take back in the morning. If I have to wait a thousand years, I will wait.”

The room did not answer.

But on the desk, on top of the bread I had bought and no one had eaten, the small paper bag had begun to give off a faint warm smell in the sun. Yeast, and honey. It was only bread. It was only a coincidence of the bakery.

I stood there and breathed it in for a long time.

Chapter 8

LEX

Two Shots

Iwant to state, for the record, that I do not get drunk.

I am a professional athlete. I have a nutritionist. I have a physio who screams at me if I so much as look at a soda. In the regular season I have four drinks a year, all on the same night, at the same party, and I stop at two because of what happens after that.

What happens after that is this: my face gets warm. My mouth, which is already the most dangerous part of me, comes completely off its leash. And by the time I’ve reached number three, I’ve told a stranger in a parking garage that he has “kind hands.”

So when Jason plunked two shots of Jäger on the bar at the Blue Line at four o’clock that afternoon, I said, “No. Absolutely not.”

And then I drank them both.

“Atta boy,” said Jason, grinning.

The Blue Line is a narrow, warm, ugly bar two blocks from the guest house with dartboards on the walls and a jukebox that only plays songs from the year 2003. It is where every team in the tournament goes to be miserable together. Nobody hit anybody. The bartender, a big woman named Roz with forearms like a quarterback, kept a whistle around her neck for emergencies and had never needed it.

We’d been there two hours. Jason had told me about his ex, who he called “the Tornado,” and about his mother’s plan to move to Florida, and about a dream he’d had in which a goose was elected mayor. I’d nodded and made noises. I’d eaten four donuts from the tray, then a burger, then most of a basket of onion rings. I felt like a rubber band that had been stretched and dropped.

I had not told him about the vampire.

I’d promised. It’s a strange thing, to keep a promise to somebody you’re afraid of. It made me feel sneaky and sick and, in some deep-down place that I did not want to look at, weirdly proud. Like I was the only one in the world who had been trusted with something.

“You’ve been weird all day,” Jason said.

“I’m fine.”

“You just ate a napkin.”

I looked at my hand. There was a napkin in it, with a bite gone.

“It was a light lunch,” I said.

“Lex.” He put his elbow on the bar and turned to face me. “It’s me. What’s going on? Is it the Russian?”

“What? No.”

“You asked me this morning to find you a different room, with a face like somebody kicked your dog. Chip’s swapping with you tomorrow for two hundred bucks, and he cried.”

“That’s not because of Maksim.”

“Then why?”

“Because he’s… weird, “ I said, and heard how flat it sounded. “He’s weird. He doesn’t sleep. He leaves at night. I don’t like him.”