The Boy Who Never Ordered Anything

Okay so. The cafe. I work the late shift at a 24-hour cafe called The Owl, which is exactly as glamorous as it sounds, which is not glamorous at all. It's me, a coffee machine that hates me, and like four customers between midnight and 6am. Mostly taxi drivers and one guy writing a screenplay who has been writing the same screenplay for two years. And then there was the boy. He started coming in about a month ago. Always after 1am, always alone, always sat at the same table by the window. And here is the weird thing, the thing I noticed before I noticed anything else: he never ordered anything. He'd come in, he'd sit down, and he'd just... be there. For hours sometimes. And when I'd go over to take his order he'd get this panicked look, like I'd asked him a trick question, and he'd order a black coffee and then never drink it. Like, not a sip. I'd clear a full cold cup off his table every single night. My manager would've thrown him out. But my manager is never there at 3am, and honestly? He wasn't bothering anyone. And also — I'm just gonna be honest because this is my story — he was really, really cute. Pale, dark hair, this old-fashioned way of dressing, like he got his clothes from a vintage shop and then a SECOND vintage shop. He looked like a sad painting. In a good way. So one night, slow night, screenplay guy had gone home, just me and the boy and the coffee machine that hates me, I went over and instead of asking for his order I just sat down across from him. "You never drink it," I said. He looked at me like I'd caught him doing a crime. "The coffee," I said. "You order it every night and you never drink it. So either you really hate coffee, or you don't actually want coffee, you just want to sit somewhere that's open and warm and not be alone. And if it's the second one, that's fine, you don't have to keep buying cold coffee, you can just sit here. I'm Lily, by the way." He didn't say anything for a really long time. Long enough that I started to feel embarrassed. Then he said, "Theo." And then, "It's the second one." And then he smiled, just a little, and I swear the whole cafe got warmer. So that became our thing. He'd come in, I'd bring him a free coffee he wouldn't drink, and we'd talk. And he was SO easy to talk to, but also — okay, here's where it gets weird — he was also really weird. Lovable weird. But weird. Like. He didn't know what a smartphone was. I thought he was joking. He was not joking. He held my phone like it might bite him. He used words nobody uses. He said "motorcar." He said a movie was a "moving picture." He once described something as happening "last autumn" and then went really quiet like he'd said too much. He flinched at the sunrise. Every time. Around 5:30 the sky would start to go pink and Theo would stand up really fast and say he had to go, every single night, like clockwork, like the sun personally owed him money. And his hands were cold. Always. Even holding a hot coffee cup, ice cold. I'm not stupid. I want that on the record. I'd watched the shows, I'd read the books, I had a theory pretty early. But it's one thing to have a theory and it's another thing to actually say it to the cute sad boy in your cafe, so I just... didn't. I let it be a fun secret theory. Until last night. Last night it was raining and Theo came in soaked and shivering and I made him a hot chocolate instead of coffee, and I said, "Just hold it, you don't have to drink it, but at least your hands —" And I took his hand to wrap it around the mug, and his hand was cold the way it always was, and I looked up to make a joke about his terrible circulation — — and the streetlight outside caught his face, and his eyes weren't brown anymore. They were doing this thing. This glowy red thing. And his mouth was a little bit open and I could see that his teeth were not, strictly speaking, normal teeth. I did not scream. I'm pretty proud of that. I just held his cold hand a little tighter so he couldn't pull away, and I looked right at him, and I said the bravest and dumbest thing I have ever said in my life. "Theo. How old are you actually?" And he looked back at me, terrified, this 300-year-old boy or however old he was, terrified of ME, a nineteen year old in an apron who can't even work the coffee machine. "Please don't run," he whispered. "You're the first person in a very, very long time who asked me to stay." So I didn't run. That was probably the moment my life got extremely complicated. But the cafe was warm, and the rain was loud, and his hand was cold in mine, and honestly? I've never once regretted not running. Everything AFTER that, though. Everything after that I have regretted at least a little. Because it turns out dating a vampire is hard. Like, genuinely, surprisingly, hilariously hard. And I'm gonna tell you all of it.