The Laugh
Cassian
I had been bored for forty-three years.
There had been interruptions, of course. Financial crises Sebastian found inexplicably entertaining, wars that unfolded on television instead of battlefields we were expected to stand on, several regrettable decades of fashion, and the arrival of the internet, which had occupied Sebastian for considerably longer than I thought healthy. We had travelled, moved houses, collected art, sold art, bought companies and occasionally ruined people who deserved it. None of it changed the underlying problem. After two hundred and fifty-three years, very little felt new.
Lately, even Sebastian and I had begun running out of ways to tolerate each other. We had been friends since before either of us had fangs, which sounded romantic when people heard the story and was considerably less impressive when one had actually spent more than two centuries sharing houses, businesses and an increasingly unreasonable number of opinions with the same man. That morning we’d argued for twenty minutes because he’d moved the keys to my Aston Martin.
He claimed he’d moved them because I’d left them on his desk. I maintained that his desk occupied an unreasonable amount of the library and therefore anything placed on it became communal property. The argument had deteriorated from there until Eleanor informed us that if we’d survived two world wars only to murder each other over car keys, she would refuse to clean up the blood.
I’d left the house shortly afterwards.
That was how I ended up sitting in a café I didn’t particularly like, drinking an espresso I didn’t need and watching humans go about their afternoon. People were still mildly entertaining when observed in small doses. A young man at the table nearest mine had spent the last ten minutes explaining cryptocurrency to a woman who clearly regretted agreeing to meet him. An elderly couple near the window were sharing a slice of cake with the concentration of diplomats negotiating an international treaty, while a toddler had discovered that dropping a spoon onto the floor produced an adult response every single time.
His mother retrieved it five times. On the sixth, she stared at it for several seconds, looked at her son and accepted defeat.
I almost smiled.
Then the café door opened and a woman walked in.
There was nothing remarkable about the entrance itself. The bell above the door gave its irritating little jangle, damp September air followed her inside, and she paused long enough to close an umbrella before joining the queue. Nobody else seemed particularly interested in her.
I was.
My attention settled on her without invitation, and for several seconds I couldn’t have explained why.
She was attractive, certainly, although beauty alone hadn’t held my attention like that for a very long time. She looked to be somewhere in her forties, with brown hair that turned lighter where the overhead lamps caught it and a few silver strands visible near one temple. Rain had made the ends curl around her shoulders. She wore black trousers, ankle boots and a dark green blouse beneath a coat that had clearly been chosen because it kept out the weather rather than because anyone had recently modelled it in Milan.
I noticed her mouth next.
That was irritating.
There were thousands of attractive mouths in this city, yet I found myself watching hers while she read the menu board. She frowned at it for several seconds, stepped forward when the queue moved and ordered a large Earl Grey with milk on the side.
Tea.
In a coffee shop.
I should have taken that as evidence of serious character flaws and returned my attention to the doomed cryptocurrency date.
Instead, I continued watching her.
The girl behind the counter offered her a pastry. She declined, hesitated, glanced at the display case and changed her mind.
“And the cinnamon roll, please.”
Her voice was warm and slightly tired. English, although there was something in the pronunciation I couldn’t immediately place. Perhaps she’d lived abroad. I listened for another sentence, but she’d already paid.
This was embarrassing.
I had been alive for more than two and a half centuries, yet apparently my afternoon had reached the point where I was analysing a stranger’s choice of baked goods.
I deliberately looked away.
The cryptocurrency enthusiast was now explaining decentralised finance. His companion had begun looking toward the door with the desperate expression of a hostage trying to calculate the distance to freedom.
That held my interest for perhaps thirty seconds.
When I looked toward the window again, the woman had taken a small table there. She removed her coat and placed a leather folder beside her handbag before setting her phone next to her tea. Papers protruded from the folder, and even from where I sat, I could identify the format.
A résumé.
She’d probably been at an interview.
That explained the clothes, although they weren’t especially formal. It also explained the tiredness in her face when she sat down. She looked at her phone, sighed, then placed it face down on the table as though it had personally disappointed her.
I could have read the screen from where I sat before she’d turned it over. My eyesight had been considerably better than human eyesight since 1798, and distance rarely presented a problem anymore. I resisted.
There were still limits to what even I considered reasonable behaviour.
The phone rang less than a minute later.
She looked at the name and smiled before answering. “Hello, traitor.”
A female voice laughed through the speaker. I couldn’t make out every word without concentrating, although that required very little effort.
“No, I’m not being dramatic,” the woman said as she pulled apart a piece of cinnamon roll. “You told me this one looked promising.”
Her friend said something.
“Yes, well, promising apparently means spending forty-five minutes being interviewed by a man who looked young enough to have a paper round.”
I glanced toward her résumé again.
The woman on the phone replied, louder this time.
“No, Claire, he wasn’t twelve. I checked for adult teeth.”
A laugh escaped me before I expected it.
The woman didn’t hear. She was still listening to Claire, amusement already pulling at her mouth as she took another bite.
“And then he asked whether I felt comfortable adapting to a fast-paced digital working environment.” She rolled her eyes and waved one hand in exasperation, apparently forgetting that Claire couldn’t see her. “I wanted to ask whether he thought I’d spent the last twenty years communicating by carrier pigeon.”
This time I smiled openly.
She was funny.
That alone shouldn’t have mattered. I’d known funny women. Clever women. Beautiful women. Dangerous women. I’d known women who could make an entire room laugh and others who could reduce a man to silence with one carefully chosen sentence.
The woman by the window was still simply a stranger.
Except my attention no longer behaved as though she were one.
“Apparently my experience is impressive,” she continued. “Which is corporate language for we’d rather employ someone cheaper who doesn’t remember dial-up internet.”
Claire responded, and the woman’s expression softened.
“No, I’m fine.”
She wasn’t.
I heard the shift in her heartbeat when she said it, subtle but unmistakable. Her breathing changed too, and the muscles around her mouth tightened before she covered it by taking another sip of tea. Human bodies were inconveniently honest. Words lied very well. Blood rarely did.
She was worried.
That irritated me.
I frowned at my untouched espresso.
Why should I care whether some woman I’d never spoken to was worried about a job interview? People lost jobs constantly. They found new ones. They failed interviews and complained to friends over coffee. Whatever problem she had would continue whether I sat there analysing her heartbeat or went home.
Claire apparently wasn’t prepared to leave the subject alone. She spoke for several seconds, and the woman shook her head.
“Oh, absolutely not.”
Another response came through the phone.
“No.”
Claire persisted.
“Because I’m unemployed, Claire. I’m not dead.”
Her friend said something that made her eyes widen. “You’re disgusting.”
Then she laughed.
I went completely still.
The laugh wasn’t delicate or restrained. She didn’t cover it immediately or glance around to see whether anyone had noticed. Her head tipped slightly back, her eyes closed and the sound escaped her without any apparent concern for whether it was attractive.
Warm. Rich. Alive.
The noise of the café seemed to recede while I listened to it.
Her heart beat faster. Blood moved beneath the skin of her throat, and a flush of colour appeared across her cheeks as Claire apparently said something even worse.
Lust hit me hard enough to be annoying.
That part, at least, I understood. Lust was familiar territory. I’d wanted women before, sometimes intensely, and eventually the feeling passed. Desire had never required explanation.
This did.
Because I didn’t only want to touch her.
I wanted to know what Claire had said.
I wanted to hear the laugh again. I wanted to know why she’d lost her job and whether the interview had actually gone badly or whether she was simply assuming it had. I wanted to know why she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring when the faint indentation on her finger suggested there had been one there for years.
The amount I wanted to know after less than ten minutes should have disturbed me more than it did.
“I’m not joining another dating site,” she said.
My attention sharpened further.
Claire argued.
“No. Absolutely not. Have you seen what’s out there?”
Another pause followed before she added, “I’m forty-five.”
Forty-five.
I stored the information immediately.
“Exactly. I don’t want some twenty-five-year-old asking whether I’ve ever considered being someone’s older woman.”
My mouth twitched.
Interesting.
Claire said something that made her nearly choke on her tea.
“You’re revolting.”
The laughter came again.
I sat back and studied her.
Forty-five. Unemployed. A friend named Claire. Recently wearing a wedding ring, although apparently considering herself available enough for Claire to discuss dating.
That was almost nothing.
I wanted more.
The thought arrived so naturally that I barely questioned it.
Sebastian could find her.
