Page 28 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

Eunice laughs once, and then she has to look down at her plate.

I’ve heard people talk to Eunice about Walter for years. They tell her he was a lovely man. They tell her how much everyone misses him. They say all the kind things people say about the dead, and they mean every one of them. No one asks what he drove.

Lovely man is a thing you say. A green Buick is a memory.

Julian went straight past the sympathy and into the driveway and gave her six weeks back for the cost of one question.

I look at him. He feels it, and his eyes come back to mine.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

That isn’t true, but I’m getting better at letting things be.

The mayor tries to draw him into a discussion of the church roof. Wendell asks him something about wooden hulls. Mabel waves a fork at him from three seats away and says she has questions about the Historical Society archives.

Julian answers everyone, and then he turns back to me. Every time. That’s the part I can’t explain away.

He’s good with people. Better than good. He gives whoever is speaking the sense that for the next thirty seconds there is nowhere else in the world he needs to be. But with me, the thirty seconds don’t end.

He doesn’t eat. Of course he doesn’t eat. Peg loaded a plate for him before I could stop her, and it sits there while the evening goes on around us.

For the first time, I don’t care. I don’t mean I don’t notice. I notice everything about this man. I notice the untouched food and the glass he never lifts. I notice the coolness coming off him along my whole left side. I notice the line of his wrist where his sleeve pulls back.

I just don’t need to solve it tonight. Because he doesn’t eat, and he’s still here.

He’s sitting on a hard wooden bench at the loudest, most casserole-scented table in Maine, listening to me explain why Fern Tibbetts cannot be trusted with a piping bag. His whole attention is focused on me as if I’m the only lit thing in the room.

Somewhere between the ham and the pie, I stop keeping track of the alibi. I just stop. I let the room get loud around us. I let Mabel argue about the roof fund and Wendell tell a story everyone at this table has heard twice. I let Julian’s low, careful voice wash over me while he asks a follow-up question about a catering job nobody else would remember I mentioned.

I look at his mouth when he talks. I look at the corner of it that moves when he’s amused. I look at his hands six inches away from me. I am having a serious problem with his hands.

I finally realize Lucy has been watching me from across the table for an unknown amount of time. She doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t have to.

Oh, no.

Because I’ve been telling everyone we’re just friends. I’ve told Lucy and Theo and Mabel and half this town, over and over, with total conviction. And I can’t say it anymore. Not the just part.

Julian stays through coffee. He stays through pie. He stays while half the room leaves and the other half begins stacking chairs. Eventually I look at the untouched plate in front of him.

“You didn’t eat anything.”

“No.”

“You’ve been here three hours.”

“Have I?”

“On a hard bench.”

“It is not the worst bench I have encountered.”

“You listened to Mabel talk about roof flashing for eleven minutes.”

“She feels strongly about it.”

“Wendell told you the lobster-pot story.”