Chapter 17
Julian walks back into the library and goes to stand in front of the windows looking down at the town.
“I do not particularly like Black Harbor all the time,” he says when I join him, which surprises a laugh out of me. “I want to be clear about that. You have a tendency to make things romantic after the fact.”
“I do not.”
“You do.”
I sigh and admit it. “Fine. A little.”
“I have watched this town be foolish and small and occasionally cruel. I have watched it burn. There is a family on Water Street I have disliked for four generations on principle.”
“Which family?”
“I am not telling you.”
“Julian.”
“They know what they did too.”
I am laughing now, which I suspect was his intention. Then he looks back towards the hidden room.
“But I know this place. I know what stood where the pharmacy is now. I remember when the road below this house was mud. I remember the winter the harbor froze beyond the Sisters. I remember which roofs came off in which storms.”
“And you keep paying for them.”
“Not all of them.”
“But you paid for the reading room. And the customs house.”
“They were going to demolish it for a filling station.”
“And the Finches.”
His eyebrow goes up, and I tap the 1809 journal.
“You wrote about sending them coal.”
“That was not meant to be an enduring arrangement.”
“How long did it last?”
“Two hundred and ten years, approximately.”
I stare at him, and he gives a half-shrug.
“After the coal it was oil. Later there was a fund.”
“A fund they think is a state program.”
“It is administered through the state.”
“Funded by money from you.”
“Yes.”
I put my hand over my eyes.
“What else?”
“The fish co-op.”
“Of course.”
“They needed the building.”
“Anything else?”
He considers this. “The reading room was not entirely me.”
I give him a look, and he adds, “But I paid for the majority of it.”
“And wouldn’t let them put your name on it.”
“No.”
“Why?”
His expression makes it clear he thinks the answer is obvious.
“A name can be compared to another name.”
Right. Of course. I look through the open door at shelves containing centuries of everyone else’s names.
“You’ve been the caretaker.” He goes very still, but he doesn’t say anything. “That’s what you’ve been doing. Looking after Black Harbor the way somebody looks after a house that belongs to someone else. Fixing things. Paying for things. Remembering everybody who lived in it.”
“Penny—”
“And then every thirty years you leave before anyone notices you’re not getting older, and when you come back you act like you’re the new tenant.”
His face doesn’t change, but I know him well enough now to know what that costs him.
“This is your town,” I say.
“That’s a complicated statement.”
“No, it’s really not. You’ve been here longer than the library.”
“That is not the usual standard for residency.”
“You’ve been here longer than Maine has been a state.”
“That is also not—”
“Julian.”
He stops.
“You’re allowed to be in it.”
A complicated expression crosses his face.
“That has not always been available to me.”
“I know.” And I do. It’s the part I couldn’t have understood before tonight.
“But some of it is now. Theo hands you things because he expects you to help. Peg Halloran moves down the bench to give you room. Eunice Ballard will tell you about Walter’s green Buick until one of you dies, and unfortunately for you, it’s probably going to be her. ”
“Almost certainly.”
“Mabel knows,” I say, and his gaze sharpens. “I don’t know how much. But she knows enough to take a photograph out of my hand before I can ask the wrong question.”
“That sounds like Mabel.”
“Arthur knows something too. He just thinks it’s none of his business.”
“That also sounds like Arthur.”
“They’ve been making room for you.”
Julian looks away.
“And so have I.”
His eyes come back to mine. For a moment neither of us says anything.
Then he says, “Yes.”
Just that. But this time it isn’t a little thing. I can hear the rest of it. I step closer and take his hand.
“There’s something else.”
His fingers close around mine.
“Of course there is.”
“You said this is the only place you’re not a guest.”
“Yes.”
“Is that why invitations matter so much?”
His fingers tighten. There. I didn’t even know I was looking for it until I found it.
“Partly.”
“Julian.”
He sighs. “A private dwelling is different.”
“Different how?”
“I cannot enter one without an invitation from someone who lives there.”
I stare at him. He waits.
“You’re serious.”
“Yes.”
“Like actual vampire rules.”
“I am an actual vampire.”
“I know, but some of the rules are ridiculous. You already told me that crosses and running water and mirrors weren’t a problem.”
“No.”
“But invitations?”
“Yes.”
I stare at him for another second.
“How does it work?”
“The invitation has to be genuine. It must come from someone who has a right to offer it. Once given, it remains unless it is withdrawn.”
My brain goes backwards through the last few weeks so fast it practically leaves skid marks. The storm. Julian standing on my porch, soaked through, the wind trying to rip the shutter off the house. Let me in, Penny. Before your door does the same thing as the trellis.
“You couldn’t come inside.”
“Not until you invited me.”
“You said, ‘Let me in.’”
“Yes.”
“You were asking me to invite you.”
“I was asking you to let me in.”
“That is the most Julian answer you could possibly have given.”
His mouth moves, and I point at him.
“This. Again. Still working on it.”
“I am beginning to understand the scope of the project.”
I remember stepping aside and telling him to come in without thinking about it at all. And then I remember Tuesday night.
“You can come in now.”
“Yes.”
“Whenever you want.”
“As long as the invitation stands.”
I don’t know why that does something to me, but it absolutely does.
“I’m not taking it back.”
Julian looks at me, and the humor disappears from his face so quietly that it takes mine with it.
“I know,” he says.
And suddenly I understand something else. The engraved card in October. The empty chair. You invited me. The way he said it as if it explained everything.
“You really care about being invited.”
Julian is silent long enough that I think he may give me another exact answer. Then he doesn’t.
“More than I probably should.”
I look at this ridiculous man. This ancient, impossible man who can hear my heart from the driveway and lift furniture one-handed and remember the name of a child who died in 1809.
A man who has spent centuries quietly keeping pieces of a town alive while repeatedly removing himself from its memory. And I hold out my arms.
“Come here.”
He comes without a moment’s hesitation, which is the part that gets me.
I wrap both arms around as much of him as I can, which is not all of him because he is absurdly large, and press my face into his sweater.
For one moment he stays perfectly still.
Then his arms come around me, and something in him gives. Not breaks. Just gives.
He bends over me, his face against my hair, and I feel him take a breath he does not need. It shakes.
“You keep making room,” he says.
His voice is rough enough that I close my eyes.
“What?”
“At the table. At your house. At the end of your prep counter.” His arms tighten. “Every time I think I have reached the edge of what you’re offering, you provide more space.”
My eyes sting.
“Well. You take up a lot of room.”
A sound goes through him that is almost a laugh. I hold on tighter.
“I don’t want pieces anymore,” I say into his chest. “That’s what I came here to tell you.”
“I know.”
“I don’t mean I need every terrible thing that ever happened to you by Tuesday. I don’t need four hundred years of weather reports.”
“That’s fortunate.”
“I mean I don’t want you waiting for me to accidentally stumble onto the correct question.”
His hand moves once over my back.
“All right.”
I pull back enough to look at him.
“All right?”
“Yes.”
“You’re just agreeing?”
“You have spent the evening objecting to the precision of my answers. I am attempting to improve.”
“Good.”
“Is it working?”
“Marginally.”
His eyes are warm now. Not red. Not supernatural. Just warm.
“I don’t know how to do this, Penny.”
And this time it’s not an answer to a question, but something he volunteered. I reach up and touch his face. “That’s okay.”
“It may be extremely tedious.”
“I read thirty pages about salt.”
“Twenty-eight.”
“See? Tedious.”
His mouth finally gives in, and I kiss him.
It isn’t a desperate kiss. It doesn’t turn into Monday night or Tuesday night or what happened against my kitchen counter yesterday when Julian discovered that putting groceries away can apparently become an erotic activity if you are sufficiently committed to the task.
It’s just a kiss. His hands settle at my waist. Mine stay on his face.
When we separate, I look through the open doorway at the journals.
“There’s not one line in there where anyone wrote you down.”
Julian’s gaze follows mine.
“No.”
“Mabel said something this morning.”
“That is generally dangerous.”
“She said you don’t keep a friendship going on the big things because there aren’t enough of them.” He waits. “I have a calendar hanging beside my refrigerator.”
“I’ve seen it.”
“Your name is already on it.” His eyes come back to me. “Twice before Christmas. Three times if you count the Ellises, but technically that was work.”
“Penny.”
“I’m going to keep putting it there.”
He says nothing.
“In ink,” I add. “You’ll have to live with it.”
Something crosses his face. I’ve seen that expression before. Over Gran’s garlic bread. In the kitchen beside Marguerite’s pans. This time he doesn’t put it away.
“Thank you,” he says, and I kiss him again.
I stay until almost eleven. I read another twenty pages of 1809 while Julian sits in the front library with a book of his own.
Eventually I move my chair out there because the hidden room is too small and because I don’t actually want to be alone while I read his life. He doesn’t watch my face. Mostly.
At ten-thirty I close the journal.
“I should go.”
“Yes.”
Neither of us moves, and I sigh.
“I have work in the morning.”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to be late for work if you keep looking at me like that.”
He raises an eyebrow. “I’m sitting in a chair.”
“You’re doing it provocatively.”
“I was unaware that was possible.”
“Everything you do is provocative now. It’s extremely inconvenient.”
That earns me the small real smile I was after. He walks me to the car without a coat. I get two feet away before I turn around and come back.
“Penny.”
I kiss him because I can. Because he knows he’s welcome.
Because I know exactly what that means now.
His hand slides to the back of my head and I forget about Mercy Rood and the customs house and four hundred years of carefully erased names for a very solid thirty seconds. When I pull away, I remain against him.
“Go home,” he murmurs. “You are working in the morning.”
“That is a horrible thing to say to a woman.”
“It is nearly eleven.”
“I know.”
I don’t move. Neither does he. There is something I’ve been thinking about since Monday night. Something I asked about before I understood enough to know why he answered the way he did.
Feeding from a person is not a meal.
What is it?
It is intimate.
And later, when I asked what it felt like:
It is not unpleasant.
The phrase he had chosen and intended to keep. I smile against Julian’s collar, and his hand stops moving on my back.
“That expression concerns me.”
“What expression?”
“The one you’re making right now.”
“You can’t even see my face.”
“I don’t need to.”
I pull back.
“Are you busy Saturday?”
His eyes narrow.
“Why?”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No. I am not busy Saturday.”
“Good. Then you’ll spend it with me.”
He gives me a look. “Penny.”
“Goodnight, Julian.”
I kiss him once more, get into my car, and leave him standing in the drive looking suspicious.
Everything I have ever gotten from that man, I got because I asked. Dinner. Coffee. A kiss. The truth. Tonight, the whole basket. There is one more thing I want. And Julian is never going to offer it.
So on Saturday, I’m going to ask.