Page 22 of My Big Fat Vampire Wedding
“What about you?”
“I like the stuff we play at the coffee house. Coffee-house music, I guess. Singer-songwriter stuff. It’s great background music for reading.”
“What is your go-to coffee or tea order?” Victor asked. “Since you already know mine.”
“I like chamomile tea.” She didn’t mention that the calming effect of it worked wonders when her vampire urges were getting a little out of hand.
“Chamomile. Not a caffeine addict, then?”
“Sometimes, but I’m sensitive to it.”
“Working the overnight shift can’t be good for your sleep cycles either,” he said, nodding. “Caffeine would only exacerbate that.”
“Yeah. So, what else should two engaged people know about each other?”
“Do you have any idols?”
She nodded. “Basically, anyone who can actually write. I tried once. I felt like I was typing for ages and ages. I was sure there were five thousand words. At least.”
“How many was it?” Victor asked, lips twitching.
“Two hundred.”
That got an actual laugh out of him, dimple and all.
“I also admire artists,” said Victor. “I have no artistic skills myself. But I often wish I did.”
“OK, what else? Do you drive?”
“I can drive, but I don’t have a car right now. You?”
“No. Pet peeves?”
“Open-mouth gum-chewers,” Victor said with the kind of immediacy that said he really couldn’t stand that.“People who dog-ear pages in books that don’t belong to them. Close talkers. People who stop suddenly on the pavement, then act like you’re the problem for ramming into them. Interruptions when someone is clearly in the middle of something. Group projects. Meetings that could have been emails or texts. Too much?” he asked when he caught Pandora smiling at him.
She couldn’t help it, she was charmed by his curmudgeonly nature.
“Not at all,” she said.
“What about you?” he asked.
“I guess people who are always thinking things were better in the ‘good old days’,” she said, thinking of her parents, of how inflexible they were to new ideas or customs. Especially when it came to human–vampire relations.
“Your parents.” Victor assumed correctly.
“Yeah.”
“Well, in a way, this is you rebelling against that mindset,” he said.
“That’s true,” she agreed. “If we get away with it.”
“Having doubts?”
How could she explain to him that she had a mind full of all of the failed fake-dating plots in the books she’d read? That she could immediately come up with over a hundred ways it could go wrong. And she wasn’t even factoring in the secret-vampire element.
She turned to look up at him, ready to give him assurances she didn’t feel. Which was how she missed the cyclist swerving to avoid something in the cycle lane, making him veer right toward her.
Victor’s arm grabbed her around the lower back, curlingher toward him, out of the way, but right up against his body.
