Chapter Seventeen Reginald Amelia

SEVENTEEN

Text exchange between Reginald Cleaves and Frederick J. Fitzwilliam

REGINALD: Where does Cassie get her food

REGINALD: Also what does she eat

FREDERICK: Her food?

FREDERICK: To be frank, her taste in food is disgusting. Even if I were capable of eating human food I don’t think I would ever willingly put something called “Hot Cheetos” into my body.

FREDERICK: Why do you ask?

REGINALD: I need to get some human food

FREDERICK: I guessed as much. But why?

REGINALD: A human friend has dietary limitations that her family doesn’t respect

REGINALD: Which is total BS if you ask me!!!!!!

REGINALD: And I just thought I’d buy her some food she can eat to show her not everyone ignores her needs

FREDERICK: Since when do you have human friends?

REGINALD: I’ve always had human friends

FREDERICK: Liar.

FREDERICK: This is for Amelia isn’t it.

REGINALD: No

REGINALD: Absolutely not

REGINALD: Why would you even think that??

FREDERICK: Because you haven’t stopped talking about the Beautiful Brilliant Accountant since the night you met her.

FREDERICK: AND because you haven’t had human friends since we used to try and lure them into the Thames for sport.

REGINALD: Oh man, I haven’t thought about the Thames Games in AGES

FREDERICK: Reginald.

REGINALD: Fine.

REGINALD: It’s for Amelia

REGINALD: So what?

FREDERICK: Are you falling for her?

REGINALD: FALLING for her?

REGINALD: Absolutely not

FREDERICK: Oh so you’re just randomly thinking about someone other than yourself for the first time in 200 years, then?

FREDERICK:

REGINALD: I have better things to do than to fall for a human.

REGINALD: Also since when do you know how to use emojis

FREDERICK:

REGINALD: Did Cassie teach you how to use those?

FREDERICK: Obviously.

REGINALD: I should have known

Reginald

“I need food.”

The man behind the grocery store’s single cash register stared at me from behind owlish glasses. His yellow plastic name tag said derek . “We’re closed.”

I looked to my left, then to my right. I was the only customer, which would have implied Derek was right about the store being closed if all the fluorescent lighting hadn’t still been on and the door to the store unlocked.

“There’s no Closed sign in the window,” I pointed out.

The man’s stare turned into a glare. “How did you even get here? The roads are a mess. State police are telling everyone to stay home.”

He was right about that. On my flight there, I’d lost count of all the cars I saw in ditches or stuck in snowdrifts. If I were reliant on human modes of transportation, getting there would have been impossible.

I couldn’t tell Derek that, though. “I was careful,” I said. True enough.

“You’re a lunatic,” he said. That was true enough, too. “I’m closing now, or I’ll never make it home. You gotta go.”

I would do no such thing. If I left this store without groceries, Amelia would have nothing to eat but powdered cocoa until the snow melted. Unacceptable.

“Please,” I said. “This storm caught us off guard and there’s nothing in the house.” I pulled out three one-hundred-dollar bills from my wallet and laid them neatly on the counter, glad that I’d thought to bring along a little bribery money on this trip just in case. “I’m happy to prepay for what I buy with this. You can go now if you need to.”

Derek stared at the money, and then at me. “I’ll get fired if my boss finds out I let a customer be here when we’re supposed to be closed.”

“I’ll never tell,” I said, giving him my most winsome smile.

Derek seemed to consider that, then pushed my money back across the counter towards me. “It’ll take me another fifteen minutes to close up. You have until then to get what you need, pay for it, and get gone.”

“Thank you,” I said, feeling genuine relief wash over me. “I’ll be fast.”

But the moment Derek’s back was turned, I could no longer remember what Frederick said Cassie liked to eat. He’d once mentioned something about frozen imitation fish sticks, but had he said Cassie liked them or that she didn’t like them? He’d also said Cassie enjoyed something orange and terrible called Hot Cheetos, and I thought she also liked peanut butter. But did Cassie like peanut butter with Hot Cheetos? Or just straight from the jar? And what were her thoughts on peanuts that weren’t in butter form?

I remembered from our initial getting-to-know-you emails that Amelia’s favorite desserts were pancakes and chocolate. There seemed to be plenty of chocolate at that store, thankfully, but she couldn’t live on chocolate alone until the snowplows came. I also didn’t think one could buy pancakes at the grocery store.

Or was I wrong about that?

I cursed myself for not having thought beyond get to store so Amelia won’t starve when I set out on this expedition. And for leaving my phone back at the house so I couldn’t refer to Freddie’s texts. But I was wasting time. With only a few minutes left, I ran through the store, grabbing the first things I could find that I thought maybe, possibly, Amelia might like.

Hopefully, the thought would count.

Amelia

I must have been more tired from the drive than I’d realized. It felt like one minute I’d lain down on my new bed, and the next I was waking up to the sound of someone rummaging through kitchen cupboards.

When I got there, Reggie was at the kitchen table unloading three stuffed-full grocery bags.

I glanced out the window and saw my car, rapidly disappearing beneath a growing mound of snow and barely recognizable as a car anymore. From the position of the sun, nearly touching the horizon, I had to have been asleep for at least a couple of hours.

Reggie was unpacking a supremely random assortment of groceries with focused determination. Despite the blizzard he had somehow managed to get two boxes of frozen imitation fish sticks, baby carrots, Oreos, a five-pound bag of russet potatoes, four dozen eggs, and an absolutely enormous bag of Hot Cheetos while I slept.

My stomach started rumbling as if on cue. We hadn’t stopped for lunch, so it had been a while since I’d last eaten. I wanted nothing to do with the nasty-looking fish sticks or the Hot Cheetos, but the rest looked fine to me.

“How did you get all that?” I asked.

Reggie looked up from the groceries, beaming. “You’re awake,” he said, happily. “You’d been asleep ages.”

“I guess I was tired,” I admitted. “But really, how did you manage to get to the store without my car?” I jerked my thumb behind me, in the direction of the window. “We’ve easily gotten a foot of snow already.”

Reggie went back to unpacking groceries. “I flew,” he said. “I didn’t know if any stores would be open, but I lucked out. I got there just before they closed.”

I stared at him. “You flew?”

“Yes.” He set a fourth fabric grocery bag down on the kitchen table. It said Winnetka 2014 Fourth of July Fun Run in faded letters; he must have found Mom’s fabric bag stash in the basement. And then, sounding slightly nervous, he added, “I haven’t told you this yet, mostly because it hadn’t come up before now, but I can fly.”

He looked at me, his brow creased, as though anxiously waiting for my reaction to this information.

I burst out laughing. His sense of humor was the very definition of absurd. And yet, somehow, it hit just right every single time. I thought of the snowmobile Dad kept permanently gassed up in the garage and how, when I’d been a kid, it had felt like flying to ride on it. That must have been what he’d taken to get the groceries.

“You have the most unexpected reactions to things I tell you,” Reggie said, sounding almost awed. “Every time I think I’ve scared you off for good…” He shook his head and looked down at his hands. “You surprise me.”

When he looked back at me, his gaze was full of a kind of wonder that made my heart give a hard knock against my rib cage.

Desperate to avoid eye contact with him while he was looking at me like that, I walked over to one of the grocery bags and peered inside. I gasped. “Holy shit, did you buy them entirely out of chocolate?” It certainly looked like it. I hadn’t been to the town’s single grocery store often; getting provisions on our trips had usually fallen to my parents. But if memory served, it was a tiny store not much bigger than my apartment.

Reggie’s smile was so soft when I looked back at him. And inviting. It took all my restraint not to reach out and trace its shape with my fingertips. “I remember you said you liked chocolate. When the first store I went to didn’t have much of it, I…might have flown to a second one,” he admitted, sounding almost shy.

Did he seriously remember I liked chocolate just from that one email exchange we had before Aunt Sue’s party? I swallowed around the lump in my throat. “Going out there in that blizzard was super dangerous. You didn’t have to go to all this trouble.”

“What would you have eaten if I hadn’t?” he asked. “I looked through these cupboards while you were sleeping. What was here wouldn’t have lasted you more than a day.” He averted his eyes again and gave me a one-shoulder shrug. “Getting all of this was also a bit self-serving, I’ll admit. I wanted to make sure you had your favorite foods while we were stuck here. Because the truth is…”

He trailed off and closed his eyes, bracing one hand on the back of a kitchen chair as if needing it for support.

When he didn’t seem inclined to finish his thought, I asked, “The truth is, what?”

His next words sounded almost pained, as though they were being pulled from him against his will. “The truth is, I quite like making you happy.” He shook his head. “I’m frightened to think too much about what that means, because I honestly can’t remember the last time I wanted to do anything for another person, simply for its own sake. And without having an ulterior motive.” His eyes, when they met mine, were so intense I had to look away. “But for you, I would brave a blizzard just to see you smile.”

With his words, something melted inside of me. Sophie’s advice from yesterday—to stop fighting it if something real happened between us—floated into my mind. I was terrible at spur-of-the-moment anything, and from the beginning, nothing about my arrangement with Reggie had been planned. But would a short-term good time, as Sophie had put it, be such a terrible thing?

Or even something more?

I would brave a blizzard just to see you smile .

I might have been an accountant, but I wasn’t made of stone.

So I took a deep breath, and walked around that kitchen table until I stood right in front of him.

Pressing my mouth to his was a risk, but I did it anyway, thrilling at the unexpected pleasure of kissing him without an audience. His breath was cool against my lips as his entire body went rigid with surprise. For a split second, I worried I’d crossed a line, but then his large hands reached up to cup my face, and he started kissing me back like this was something he’d been wanting for a very long time.

“Just when I thought you couldn’t surprise me more than you already had,” he murmured against my lips, laughing a little. He trailed one hand lazily down my side, letting it rest on my hip. I could feel his gentle touch through the denim of my jeans. Every nerve ending in my body was alight with the need to keep kissing him. “I never imagined you would want this with someone like me.”

I frowned at that. I’d never taken Reggie as someone with low self-esteem. “What’s wrong with kissing someone like you?” I asked.

He pressed a kiss to the tip of my nose, and to the apple of each of my cheeks. I kept my eyes open so I could see the blue of his, count the light freckles that dusted the bridge of his nose. “It’s just…unexpected. All of this. You.”

“Bad unexpected?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No.” He paused, then added, “It might add some…complications. But this is the very opposite of bad.”

What did he mean by complications ? He kissed me again before I could ask, bolder now, his tongue darting out to trace along the seam of my lips. I opened for him on instinct and he groaned, placing one hand at either side of my waist and hoisting me onto the kitchen table as he thrust his tongue into my mouth. I thought back to the night we met, how I’d wondered whether Reggie kissed like the world was ending, and oh, it was exactly like that, the way he carded his fingers through my hair, tugging just shy of too hard, as he tilted his head and kissed me deeper, harder. It was like a dam had burst inside him, all the restraint I hadn’t even realized he’d been using swept away with the tide, until I had to pull back, gasping for breath in his arms.

“I want to taste you,” he murmured, his lips finding my jaw, my clavicle, pressing hungry, open-mouthed kisses down the side of my neck. “God, I’m so fucking hard, just thinking about how sweet I know you’d be.”

I froze.

Suddenly, I noticed the position we were in—me, on the kitchen table, my legs spread wide. At some point I must have done that for him. At some point, he must have stepped between them. I could feel the truth of what he’d just said, of how hard he was, just from this, pressing against me.

And now he wanted to taste me? I’d had full-fledged relationships that hadn’t included that.

This was too much. This was happening too fast.

I couldn’t move this fast.

He must have realized he’d crossed a line because he pulled back immediately. “I’m…sorry.” He squeezed his eyes shut tight and hung his head. “I just—sorry.” He carded a hand through his hair, tugging on it nervously. “Just because you’re okay with kissing a vampire…no. I shouldn’t have assumed you were also okay with my tasting your blood.”

He gave me a sheepish smile that showed his teeth.

And for the first time since I’d met him, I saw the points of what were very obviously vampire fangs.