Chapter 3
“There’s nothing to talk about,” I insist again, and Lucy shakes her head.
“You looked at that man for four straight seconds.”
“I was checking whether he needed anything.” I bang the oven door shut with my hip, which is something I do when I want a conversation to be over. “That’s hosting. That’s literally the job.”
“Penny.” She’s leaning in my kitchen doorway with her camera hanging off one hand, and she is enjoying this more than anyone has ever enjoyed anything.
“I have known you since we were twelve. I have watched you check on a lot of guests. You have never once checked on a guest like you were deciding whether to climb him.”
“Lucy.”
“I’m just saying he’s very tall.”
“He’s very broad,” I say, before my brain catches up with my mouth, and Lucy makes a small triumphant noise and goes back out to the party.
I put my hands flat on the counter and breathe for a second. I refuse to think about the way he came through my door and had to angle his shoulders. Or the way the coat came off and the shirt underneath did absolutely nothing to disguise what it was covering.
I pick up the dessert plates.
Hosting, I tell myself. You are hosting.
The tarts go out. The cheese goes out.
He refuses all of it. Beautifully.
It is very kind of you.
It’s exquisite.
Thank you.
I go back for the coffee.
By the time I come back Mabel has taken up my cause, because Mabel takes up everyone’s causes whether they’ve asked her to or not. She’s leaning across the corner of the table with her beetle brooch catching the light and her voice pitched to concerned neighbor.
“You mustn’t mind Penny fussing,” she’s telling him. “Feeding people is how she says things she hasn’t got words for. Now. Is it allergies?”
“Is what allergies?”
“The eating. My nephew’s boy is dreadful with nuts. Blows up like a life raft. There’s no shame in it. Penny can cook around anything, can’t you, dear? You did that whole meal for the Prescott girl who couldn’t have gluten or dairy or joy—”
“It isn’t allergies,” Julian says.
“Religious?”
“No.”
“Doctor’s orders?”
“Something like that.” Which is the smoothest non-answer I’ve heard all night, and I’ve been counting.
Theo sets his glass down. “I’ve got a theory.”
“God help us,” Harriet says.
“He’s a critic.” Theo points a thick finger down the table at Julian with the air of a man cracking a case. “Fancy fella, comes to town, won’t say where he’s from, eats nothing so he can stay sharp. Palate’s a tool. You lot ever watch that show? They spit the wine out. He’s here to review us.”
“There is no restaurant here to review,” Julian says.
“There’s Penny.”
“There is, indeed, Penny.” He says it without looking at me. Somehow I feel it land in the back of my knees anyway, which is a deeply unhelpful place to feel something while holding a pot of coffee.
“I’m not a restaurant,” I say.
“You’re better,” Theo says loyally. “Which is exactly what a critic would fear.”
“I am not a critic,” Julian says, and there’s the edge of that not-quite-smile again. “If I were, this town would have four stars and a very small parking problem.”
The table laughs, and I stand there refilling coffee and think, he did it again. Somebody threw him a direct question and it came back as a compliment to Black Harbor, wrapped in a joke. And I still don’t know one true thing about why the man won’t eat.
Which is, I decide, unacceptable. So I go get my grandmother’s garlic bread.
It’s not on the menu. It’s not Transylvanian, unless you count the garlic, but it’s Gran’s garlic bread.
The one with the confit garlic mashed into the good butter and the parmesan crust and the thing she did with the rosemary that I did not understand until I was twenty-eight and standing in her kitchen the week before she died.
Now I understand it and she doesn’t get to see that I do.
It’s the bread I make when I want somebody to feel held. I don’t make it for parties. I bring it out anyway, warm from the oven and torn, not cut, because that’s how she did it.
I’m three feet away when Julian goes still.
Not startled-still. Not polite-still. He goes entirely still, the way a photograph is still, and his head comes up and turns a fraction towards the basket—and then he leans back in his chair and sets his hand over his plate.
He leans away from the garlic bread so fast that, for one ridiculous second, my brain supplies vampire.
Which is absurd. Not because vampires aren’t real, but because I’m not going to diagnose a man with vampirism over an aversion to carbohydrates.
“Ah,” he says.
“It’s garlic bread.”
“Yes.”
“It’s my grandmother’s.”
“I am certain that it is superb.”
“You haven’t tried it.”
“No,” Julian agrees, and for the first time all night, something moves in his face that isn’t manners.
It’s fast. Half a second, maybe less. But the courtly wall goes down and behind it there’s something I recognize, because I’ve seen it on the Prescott girl and on every person who ever sat at my table pretending they weren’t starving for something that had nothing to do with food.
It’s longing. Naked, ancient longing, and it’s aimed at a torn piece of garlic bread in a napkin-lined basket.
Then it’s gone, folded back up behind the polite dark eyes so completely that I half wonder if I invented it.
“Your grandmother,” he says quietly, “taught you well.” He takes his hand back. “I wish I could tell you how much I wish I could eat it.”
And that should be another non-answer. It should be more of the same smooth deflection I’ve been chewing on all night.
But it isn’t. It’s the truest thing he’s said since he walked through my door.
I know it’s true because it costs him something to say it.
I can see the cost cross his face like a shadow over water, and I don’t push.
For once in my nosy, relentless, question-until-it-makes-sense life, I don’t push.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay?”
“Okay. But I’m leaving it near you. In case.”
The corner of his mouth does the thing. “You are a stubborn woman.”
“You should see me when I’m trying.”
That gets me the real smile again. The whole one. It lasts a second and a half and I feel it in my chest.
What I don’t expect is that he stays. I figured a man who won’t eat leaves the second the coffee’s poured. He makes his excuses, thanks the host, and vanishes back up his gravel road into the dark. That’s the polite version and Julian is nothing if not polite.
He doesn’t leave.
He stays through the coffee and through the mayor’s second telling of the lobster story and through Harriet Coyne falling asleep sitting up and waking herself with her own snoring and blaming the fire.
He stays while the Ellises argue their way out the door and while Doris carries her grandson to the car with Horse clutched to his chest and the wooden foreleg sticking out from under a small fist. He stays while the room empties out in that slow, warm, satisfied way a good party ends.
He stays while everyone hugs me twice and tells me it was the best one yet, which they say every year, which is the whole point.
And when it’s just Lucy and Mabel and Theo and forty guttering candles and a war zone of a kitchen, Julian Volkov takes off his coat, rolls his sleeves to the elbow, and starts stacking chairs.
“You don’t have to do that,” I say.
“I know.”
“Guests don’t clean up.”
“I ate nothing,” he says, hoisting two chairs at once like they weigh nothing, which, for those forearms, they may not. “I owe you labor.”
I open my mouth to argue but Mabel catches my eye over a stack of dessert plates and gives me a look that says, plain as print, let the man be useful, dear, it’s the only way some of them know how to say thank you.
So I let him. I let him carry chairs and gather goblets.
Then he starts on the dishes, standing at my sink in his rolled sleeves with the candlelight going gold on the water.
He washes my grandmother’s good glasses one at a time and sets each one down like it might shatter if he breathed on it wrong.
He’s careful with everything. I notice that. The way he handles the glasses, and the way he returned that wooden horse with both hands. A man used to being stronger than the things around him. A man who’s learned to hold the world gently on purpose.
I dry beside him and this is where I discover that Julian Volkov with his sleeves up is a genuine problem for me.
His forearms are…substantial. Pale and smooth and corded with muscles that move under his skin every time he turns a goblet in the water.
I am standing eighteen inches away with a dish towel, and all my years of professional composure have left the building.
“You have gone quiet,” he observes.
“I’m concentrating.”
“On the drying?”
“It’s precision work.”
“Mm,” says Julian, and hands me another goblet, and our fingers touch.
He’s cold. I knew that already, but knowing it and feeling it are different things.
His hands have been in water hot enough to make me wince this whole time, and they’re still cool.
Not clammy or unpleasant, but cool and dry and smooth, like the inside of a stone church in summer.
My body registers it before my brain does.
I nearly drop the goblet.
“Careful,” he says. His hand comes under mine, steadying me, and for one second we are both holding the same piece of my grandmother’s crystal. He is close enough that I can see that his eyes are dark brown and faintly, impossibly red, like the last inch of wine in a glass held up to a candle.
Then he lets go.
“Ten,” he says.
“You’re counting the glasses?”
“I count most things.” He turns back to the sink. “It is a poor habit and I have had a long time to acquire it.”
Theo leaves at eleven with the promise of broth and an actual handshake, gripping Julian’s hand like he means it.
He shakes it like Julian’s a normal guy who came to a normal dinner, which I think might be exactly why Julian shakes it so seriously back.
Mabel leaves at half past, pinning me with a look on the way out.
“He didn’t eat a thing,” she murmurs.
“I noticed.”
“It’s eleven thirty and he’s still here.”
“I noticed that too.”
Mabel’s eyes flick past me to where Julian is carefully returning the dried glasses to the wooden armoire. Something works behind those cat-eye glasses, some old, sharp thought turning over.
“So did I, dear.”
Lucy leaves last, her camera bag over her shoulder, and she doesn’t say anything at all, which from Lucy is a whole paragraph.
She just looks at me, and looks at Julian putting away the final glasses.
Then she looks back at me, and raises one eyebrow so high it nearly leaves her face, and lets herself out into the dark.
“Can I ask you something,” I say after she leaves, “that isn’t about food?”
“You may ask me anything.” A pause. “I make no promises regarding answers.”
“That’s the least reassuring sentence anyone’s said in this building.”
“It is honest, though.”
“That’s worse.” I hang the towel over the rail. “Why did you come tonight? Really. You’ve said no to Mabel three times, and Mabel is the single most difficult woman in this county to say no to. She once got a state senator to reshelve nonfiction.”
Julian is quiet for long enough that I think I’ve stepped over something.
“Because you brought it yourself,” he says at last. “In the wind. And stood there and talked to a slot in a wall for some minutes, and did not know I could hear you.”
Every drop of blood in my body relocates to my face.
“Oh my God.”
“You explained that the soup had a name.”
“Oh my God.”
“It was,” Julian says, “the most extraordinary thing that has happened to me in a very long time.” He pulls the plug, and the water goes down, and he stands looking at the empty basin. “People do not knock, Miss Harrington. As a rule. Not on that gate.”
“Penny.”
He turns his head.
“Penny,” he says, like he’s testing whether he’s allowed to say it, and something in my chest turns right over.
He pulls his sleeves back down, and shrugs his coat on, and becomes once again the impossible, immaculate man who filled my doorway four and a half hours ago.
“Thank you,” he says. “I don’t—” He hesitates, and I get the sense he’s choosing words the way I chose the tart, wanting to place the exact right one in front of me. “I haven’t sat at a table like that in a very long time.”
“You didn’t sit at it. You didn’t eat.”
“No.” His eyes hold mine, and in the dying candlelight the reddish brown of them seems to glow. “But I was at it. That was the part I’d forgotten I missed.”
And that’s it. That’s what I believe about tables, what I’ve never managed to say out loud without sounding like a greeting card. This cold, careful, secretive man just said it back to me like he learned it somewhere I’ve never been.
“You could come again,” I hear myself say.
“I do these all the time. Not always the vampire thing, that’s annual, but there’s harvest suppers and the solstice one and I do a thing in February that’s basically just an excuse to use up preserves.
You wouldn’t have to eat.” I’m babbling.
I know I’m babbling. I cannot stop. “You could just—be at the table.”
Something crosses his face that looks almost like hope before he buries it.
“You’d invite me again.”
“Of course I would.”
For a long moment he doesn’t say anything, and then he inclines his head in a way that’s almost a bow.
“Thank you. Good night, Penny.”
And then he’s at the door, and out of it. He’s gone into the darkness towards two miles of bad gravel, on foot, in a cold he doesn’t seem to feel.
I stand alone in my beautiful ruined room staring after him.
Then I blow out the candles one by one. I wrap the leftover tarts.
I stack the last of the plates. And it isn’t until I’m turning the key in the lock, with the harbor sighing at the bottom of the hill, that it fully hits me what I’ve spent the last five hours doing.
I ran a party for twenty-four people I love. And I thought about exactly one of them.
I pull my coat around me. The gravel road up to Blackthorn is a pale scar on the black hill, and I can’t see him on it. He’s already gone, swallowed up by his big dark house and his big dark secrets. And the truly appalling part isn’t that I spent the whole night thinking about him.
It’s that I already know I’m going to invite him again.
And I’m already planning the menu.