Page 22 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

I do the last quarter mile in second gear, beneath massive oaks that turn the light an underwater-green. This time the gates are open. The drive curves up past old roses gone woody and enormous, box hedges taller than me, and a stone urn with lichen so thick it looks upholstered. The hedges have been trimmed this year. The roses have not, and I’d put money on that being an argument somebody lost.

Most of the town thinks this place is haunted. Standing in the drive with my basket, engine ticking as it cools, I understand why. It’s not frightening. It’s just—old. Old in a way the rest of the town isn’t. Old the way a church is old, where the quiet has weight to it.

I’m still nine steps from the door when it opens.

Julian is in a charcoal sweater with the sleeves pushed up—I need to have a word with him about the sleeves, I really do—and no shoes, just socks. There is a great deal of forearm, pale and smooth, and the sweater does nothing whatsoever to disguise what it’s covering, which is a chest and a set of shoulders on a scale that has no business standing in a doorway in Maine.

My breath goes and doesn’t come back for a second. There’s a warm hard pull low in my stomach that I haven’t felt about anyone in four years. I want to put the basket down. I want not to put the basket down, because the basket is the only thing keeping my hands honest.

I forget the entire speech I’ve prepared.

“Penny.”

“I have too many cannoli,” I say, which is not the speech.

He looks at the basket. Then at me. Something moves at the corner of his mouth.

“You’ve driven cannoli to my house.”

“I know you don’t eat these. I had leftovers and apparently I’m incapable of visiting another human being without bringing food, so here we are.” I hold the basket up between us like a shield or a peace treaty, I can’t decide which. “I’m not asking you to eat them.”

“Good.”

“I’m asking you to have them. Those are different verbs.”

That earns me a look.

“They are,” he agrees.

Then he steps back from the doorway and puts a hand out towards the hall behind him, palm up, and says it properly.

“Will you come in?”

It’s an ordinary thing to say. People say it constantly, in doorways, all over the world, usually with a phone in the other hand while already walking away. He doesn’t say it like that. He says it like a sentence with a load-bearing wall in it.

“Yes,” I say. “Thank you.”

Blackthorn House is not what I expected. I expected cold. I expected dust sheets and a smell like a church basement, because that’s what this town decided years ago and I have never once questioned it. Fern Tibbetts has dined out for thirty years on a light she saw in the third-floor window in 1994, and she describes it, every time, as baleful.

It’s nothing like that. It’s lived in. Deeply, strangely, permanently lived in.

The entrance hall is dark-paneled and smells like beeswax, but underneath it is the scent of the sea, as though the house has been breathing it in for centuries. A long-case clock ticks somewhere out of sight. There’s a coat stand of black wood with, incongruously, a very ordinary modern rain jacket hanging on it next to a caped wool coat that belongs in a museum.

“You can leave your shoes or not,” he says. “The floors are original. They’ve survived worse than shoes.”

I leave my shoes at the door. It feels like the kind of house you take your shoes off in.

“Come through. I’ll—” He glances at the basket, and I watch him decide something. “I’ll put these in the kitchen.”

I follow him through. And what gets me isn’t the antiques, although there are antiques. It’s how they’re used. A nineteenth-century marquetry side table by the stairs with a phone charger on it. An antique Chinese bowl on the hall shelf with keys in it.

The library stops me in my tracks. It has two stories, a spiral iron stair, more books than the Harbor Books shop and the town library put together, and half of them so old their spines have gone to that soft brown suede that means leather and time. It holds a wing chair I’d put at two hundred years old, the arms worn pale down to the wood, a book lying face down on the seat with the spine cracked.

There are four other chairs in that room. Not one of them has a mark on it.

I look at that for slightly too long. Five chairs and one of them worn through to the wood. I don’t say a word about it, and I couldn’t tell you why, except that it feels like walking in on something. There’s a soft ache starting up behind my ribs that I don’t want to examine in front of him.

The kitchen is beautiful. Someone has spent real money in here. There’s a slate floor, a huge scrubbed table, an imported French range, and a modern fridge humming quietly in the corner.