Page 61 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

He watches me sit. He’s still braced. He’s waiting for the second part, the part where the realization turns into the door and the car and never again.

“Say it,” I tell him.

His expression changes.

“Penny.”

“Out loud. I need you to say it. Because if I say it, I’m going to turn it into a joke, and I’ve been trying not to do that since Sunday.”

He watches me for a long moment. Then he says, very quietly, “I am a vampire.”

Nobody in the room is breathing, including me.

“You knew,” he says finally, and it isn’t a question. “At the museum. The portrait.”

“The portrait, and the bell, and your chin, which is a very specific chin, whatever you say about 1816.” I take my hand away from my mouth. “And the fact that you have never had a heartbeat, which I noticed the very first time I put my hand on your chest and then decided not to have noticed, because I’m a coward and I liked you.”

“You are not a coward.”

“I diagnosed you with vampirism in October and then talked myself out of it because I didn’t want the dinner parties to stop.” I look at him. “Which one of us is the coward, exactly?”

He doesn’t answer that. He’s looking at me the way Dr. Cardoso looked at that bell, like something has appeared in front of him that he can’t quite make match the record.

I point at the table. “Sit down.”

“Penny—”

“If we’re doing this, I need you not to loom.”

He sits. He pulls out the stool across from me and sits, and the sheer ordinariness of a vampire settling onto a kitchen stool because a caterer told him to stop looming nearly undoes me.

“Ask,” he says. “I can see you are going to. Better it happens all at once.”

“Are you sure? Because there’s a lot.”

“I have a great deal of time.”

“How much?”

He gives me a look, and I give it right back.

“I don’t know precisely.”

“How can you not know precisely?”

“Birth records in seventeenth-century Eastern Europe were not maintained with your future curiosity in mind.”

I stare at him. “Seventeenth century.”

“Yes.”

“You’re almost four hundred years old.”

“Approximately.”

“Approximately four hundred.” I sit up. “You said forty years isn’t very long, and I thought you were being weird about your midlife crisis. Four hundred.”

I shake my head, and then I ask questions. God help him, I ask.