When the Sun Finds Us

The woman at the end of the counter was murdering her coffee.

I watched her tear open a fourth packet of sugar and empty it into the cup, followed almost immediately by a fifth. By the time she reached for another, I decided some things were simply too unpleasant to witness and looked away.

"Don't judge me."

My hand stopped halfway to my cup. When I turned my head, she was looking directly at me, amusement in her eyes and a collection of empty sugar packets scattered across the counter between us.

"I wasn't."

"You were."

"I assure you, I have better things to do."

"At two seventeen in the morning?"

I glanced at the clock above the kitchen window. It was, in fact, exactly 2:17.

Well.

She had me there.

Rather than admit it, I lifted my cup and took a drink. The coffee was hot, which was the only compliment I could give it. Heat still meant something to me. So did texture and, to a lesser degree, smell. Taste was another matter entirely.

Taste had become a memory so long ago that sometimes I wondered whether I actually remembered it or merely remembered remembering it. This particular coffee smelled burnt and bitter, and once I probably would have hated it. Now I drank it because I liked holding something warm.

Across from me, the woman dumped another packet of sugar into hers.

I stared.

She caught me again.

"There." She pointed at me with the empty packet. "You're doing it."

"Doing what?"

"Judging me."

"I'm observing."

"Judgmentally."

"That's not a word."

"It is at two seventeen in the morning."

A smile threatened before I could stop it, so I turned toward the windows instead. Rain streamed down the glass, stretching the lights from the parking lot into trembling lines of yellow and white. Beyond them, the highway had nearly disappeared beneath the storm.

That was why I had stopped.

I didn't need coffee. I didn't need rest, and I certainly didn't need company. The rain had simply gotten bad enough that continuing to drive had become irritating, and after more years than I cared to count, I had learned that inconvenience was one of the few things immortality did absolutely nothing to improve.

So I had pulled into the first place with lights.

Marlowe's Diner.

OPEN 24 HOURS.

The illuminated sign outside had lost its M sometime in what I suspected was the distant past, leaving ARLOWE'S DINER glowing defiantly beside the highway. Apparently presentation wasn't a priority.

Inside, the place consisted of twelve booths, a long counter, one exhausted waitress and a cook I could hear swearing quietly every time another order came through the window. I could also hear his heartbeat. The waitress's too. The truck driver sitting three booths behind me. The elderly man near the door.

And hers.

I hadn't been listening to hers.

That distinction mattered.

There were certain things a person learned when he lived too long. I had learned how to disappear without actually leaving, how to change names without changing myself, and how to watch buildings rise where forests once stood. I'd learned to stop keeping photographs because eventually someone noticed that everyone in them grew older except me.

I'd learned how much blood I needed, how long I could go without it, and exactly how stupid it was to test that limit.

Most importantly, I'd learned not to listen too closely to the heart beating beside me.

Hers was a little fast, but not frightened. Tired.

There was a difference.

"You always this cheerful?"

I looked at her again. She had wrapped both hands around her cup as though she needed the warmth more than the caffeine. She was younger than I'd first thought. Not young, exactly, just younger than the exhaustion on her face made her appear.

Her hair was twisted into something that had probably begun the day as a bun but had since surrendered. Several strands hung loosely around her face, and a faint dark mark beneath one eye suggested her mascara had given up sometime before her hair. A canvas bag occupied the stool beside her. Her coat was wet. So were her shoes.

She looked like someone who had endured a very long day and was refusing to let it win.

"I haven't said enough for you to determine whether I'm cheerful."

"Exactly."

I looked back at my coffee.

This time, I smiled.

Damn it.

She saw.

"Oh, there it is."

"What?"

"A personality."

"I've always had one."

"Evidence was lacking."

The waitress passed behind us carrying a plate of pancakes, and the smell reached me immediately. Butter first, then syrup, warm flour and the heavier scents of coffee and grease lingering throughout the diner.

Humans rarely understood how much of the world was smell. They thought of scent as something occasional—perfume, rain, fresh bread, smoke. For me, the world never stopped announcing itself. Detergent clinging to someone's shirt. Oil beneath a mechanic's fingernails. The metallic trace left on fingers after holding keys too long.

Blood beneath skin.

Always blood.

I'd fed before leaving home. Enough that the woman beside me was in no danger simply because she'd chosen the stool nearest mine.

I was not that kind of vampire.

I had spent a very long time making certain of it.

"Do you actually like that?"

Her voice pulled my attention back to her. She was staring at my cup.

"The coffee?"

"Yeah."

"No."

She blinked. "Then why are you drinking it?"

"It's warm."

She waited as though there had to be more.

There wasn't.

"That's it?"

"That's it."

"That's depressing."

"You put six packets of sugar in yours."

"Five."

"Six."

Her eyes narrowed. "You're counting my sugar?"

"You made it difficult not to."

She looked down at the empty packets and began counting them. One, two, three, four, five.

Six.

"Huh."

I raised my cup slightly. "Vindication."

"Don't get cocky."

"Wouldn't dream of it."

Her laugh was quiet and completely unremarkable.

It shouldn't have mattered.

Yet something in my chest tightened—not my heart. Contrary to an astonishing amount of human fiction, mine worked perfectly well. This was something else. Something old and neglected enough that I hadn't noticed it was still there until a stranger laughed beside me in a roadside diner.

I turned toward the windows.

The rain had worsened.

Good.

Weather was uncomplicated.

"You headed north?" she asked.

I should have ignored the question. There was no reason to continue a conversation that would end the moment the storm did, yet I found myself answering anyway.

"Eventually."

"That's mysterious."

"It's a direction."

"Eventually is not a direction."

"North is."

She took another sip of her coffee. "You're difficult."

"So I've been told."

"Recently?"

"No."

"Because nobody talks to you?"

I looked at her.

She smiled into her cup.

There was something deeply irritating about this woman, and I hadn't yet decided whether I disliked it.

"Do you interrogate every stranger you meet in roadside diners?"

"Only the suspicious ones."

"And what makes me suspicious?"

She turned slightly on the stool, and for the first time since she'd spoken to me, she actually studied me. Not flirtatiously. Not nervously.

Curiously.

That was worse.

"You're sitting alone in a diner in the middle of nowhere at two in the morning drinking coffee you don't like."

"So are you."

"I like mine."

"You've replaced it with syrup."

"Sugar."

"At this point, the distinction is philosophical."

She laughed again.

There it was.

That strange tightening.

I set my cup down.

Enough.

I had stopped because of the storm. The storm would pass, and then I would leave. That was how nights like this worked. People crossed one another's lives constantly without consequence—a conversation, a laugh, a face remembered for a week and then nothing.

That was one of the mercies of humanity.

They forgot.

I had never been afforded that luxury.

"What's your name?" she asked.

I stared at the rain. "No."

There was a pause beside me.

"No?"

"No."

"You don't have one?"

"I have several."

The words were out before I could stop them.

Silence.

I closed my eyes.

Brilliant.

Absolutely brilliant.

I had survived wars, epidemics, fires, revolutions, economic collapses and the invention of social media, only to expose myself because a tired woman with ruined mascara had asked my name.

"Several?"

I turned toward her. She was watching me now, and I considered lying. Lying was easy. I'd had centuries of practice.

Instead, I chose one that had belonged to me longer than most.

"Gabriel."

Her expression changed, though only slightly. "Gabriel."

"Yes."

She seemed to test the name silently, as though deciding whether it suited me. I disliked how much I wanted to know her conclusion.

"Okay."

I frowned. "Okay?"

"It works."

"What does that mean?"

"It means you look like a Gabriel."

"What does a Gabriel look like?"

She considered me again. "Like you."

Infuriating woman.

"And you are?"

She lifted her cup.

"No."

I stared at her.

Her mouth twitched.

"That's not funny."

"It's a little funny."

"I told you mine."

"After refusing."

"Briefly."

"Still counts."

"You asked first."

"And you said no."

I leaned an elbow against the counter. "Are you always this annoying?"

"No." She took another sip. "Sometimes I'm asleep."

I laughed.

Actually laughed.

The sound startled me enough that I stopped, but she didn't react as though she'd accomplished something. There was no triumph in her expression. She simply smiled at me, and for one impossibly stupid moment, the diner seemed to go quiet.

Not literally.

I still heard everything. The refrigerator compressor beneath the counter. Rain hammering against the roof. A fork scraping across ceramic somewhere behind me. The cook dropping something metal and swearing. The waitress pouring coffee. Five human hearts.

Hers.

Mine.

But something inside me had gone still.

I knew better than to romanticize moments. Most moments were nothing. Memory made them important later. We polished them with hindsight until coincidence became destiny and ordinary decisions became inevitability.

I had lived long enough to know the difference.

So I didn't mistake that moment for fate. I didn't look at the woman beside me and imagine forever. I didn't know her name. I didn't know where she was going or why she'd been driving alone through a storm after two in the morning.

I didn't know that I would remember the exact sound of her laugh years later.

I didn't know that one day I would stand in sunlight for her.

I knew only that the coffee was terrible, the rain was relentless, and for the first time in one hundred and eighty-three years, I didn't want the storm to end.