Page 89 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

So on Saturday, I’m going to ask.

CHAPTER 18

I’ve written it down. Not on a card, because I have some pride. On the back of a prep list, in pencil, at four o’clock on Saturday afternoon, between check walnut order and call Loretta re: ham, AGAIN. Nine words. I looked at them for a while and then put a line through them and wrote seven different words, and then I turned the paper over and did the walnut order instead, because I am thirty-two years old and a professional and I have catered a wedding on two hours’ notice with a broken oven and a bride in the walk-in.

I have never in my life been this frightened of a sentence.

The trouble is that there is no polite way to ask a man to bite you. I checked. I spent Friday morning in the back of the shop with a bowl of shallots and ran through every version I could think of, and they are all either a medical inquiry or a proposition. One of them came out sounding like I was offering him a snack. I said that one out loud to the shallots and had to sit down on an upturned crate.

So at six on Saturday I drive up the hill with nothing written down and nothing in my hands, which is twice this week, and I am beginning to think the man is doing something to my personality.

He opens the door before I knock. He’s not in a sweater. He’s wearing a heavy dark jacket with the collar turned up, and there’s a canvas bag over his shoulder.

“You need to wear something warm,” he says.

“I am wearing something warm.”

He frowns at my green wool coat. “Warmer than that.”

“Julian, this is a good coat.”

“It is a beautiful coat and it was designed for a person standing next to a building.” He is already holding out a second coat, an enormous oiled canvas thing that smells of tar and salt, and he settles it over my shoulders before I have agreed to anything at all. The sleeves come down over my hands. “There’s a hat as well. You will hate it.”

“Where are we going?”

“Out.”

“Out where?”

“Penny, you’ve spent a week telling me I answer only the exact question.” The corner of his mouth moves. “I am attempting to make you enjoy the experience of not having one answered.”

“You developed a personality that hoards information.”

“And now I’m renovating. Come on.”

The drive continues past Blackthorn House. I didn’t know that. I have been up this hill often enough that I was convinced it was the end. Instead the drive keeps going around the north shoulder in three switchbacks that are so steep my van would need a talking-to and that Julian’s car simply purrs through, before reaching a boathouse built into the bluff.

The boathouse is made from the same dark stone and weathered cedar as the main house. There’s one lamp over the door and a slipway going down into black water, with the tide making that soft slapping sound under the timbers that I have heard my entire life from outside a dozen different boathouses and never once from inside.

“You have a boathouse.”

“I have a boat. The boathouse came with the arrangement.”

The boat is thirty-six feet of black hull and polished wood with a gaff rig and not one single thing wrong with it. It is so well kept that it looks unused, which I know from working in other people’s kitchens is the opposite of what it means.

And there is nothing on the transom.

“It doesn’t have a name.”

“No.” I open my mouth, but he answers before I ask. “Because names are recorded. I stopped naming them in the nineteenth century.”

Then he goes right on coiling the line over one arm as though he has not just handed me a piece of himself I didn’t ask for.

I don’t say anything about it.

Thursday night I stood in his hidden room and told him I was tired of being handed only the corner I happened to point at. He told me he had never had to tell anyone before and didn’t know the order it went in. Now, two days later, he’s standing at the foot of his own bluff giving me nineteenth-century boat registries while coiling rope.

If I make it a moment, he may never do it again.