Page 66 of My Vampire Plus-One

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 shedidn’tlike 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 butterwithHot 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 emailsthat 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 beyondget to store so Amelia won’t starvewhen 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 saidWinnetka 2014 Fourth of July Fun Runin 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 thementirelyout 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.

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