Also, this doesn’t answer your question, but guess what? I got a job interview today! There’s probably no chance in the world I’ll get the job but it’s still exciting.
Cassie
Dear Cassie,
Wonderful news about the job interview! Why do you think you would not get the position? If it were up to me, I would hire you in a heartbeat (if you will excuse the figure of speech).
Thank you for answering my question about your favorite foods. That helps my understanding of what humans in their 30s enjoy eating in the early twenty-first century. My question for today has to do with color. Specifically: What is your favorite color?
FJF
Dear Frederick,
That’s very kind of you to say you would hire me in a heartbeat. But you can’t mean that. You don’t even know what the job is! It could be something I have zero qualifications for. In fact, it is.
I have two fave colors: carmine (which is a specific shade of red) and indigo. How about you? Do you have a favorite color?
Cassie
Dear Cassie,
This is probably extremely cliché, but my favorite color is red.
And I meant exactly what I said. I would hire you in a heartbeat. For any job.
I still need to think of a good daily question to ask you, but in the meantime I want to let you know that last night while you slept I visited an all-night cafe with Reginald called “Waffle House.” I think you would be proud of how well I managed to order our food and beverages without either mishap or drawing undue attention to ourselves. I daresay even Reginald was impressed with how fluidly I managed to extract my new credit card from my wallet and pay for everything. (As you may have guessed, impressing Reginald is nearly impossible.)
We did get a few stares from the table of young people adjacent to ours, but I suspect that may have been a side effect of the substances I could smell on them and not due to anything anachronistic Reginald and I were doing. In either case, I am eager to travel to another cafe soon to practice my fledgling skills.
Given that I would not have been able to order that chocolate chip and peanut butter waffle last night without your unending patience with me I wanted to let you know. I couldn’t eat it of course; but it still felt like a small victory.
Yours,
FJF
I picked up the pen that now lived permanently on the kitchen table and pondered what to write in my note back to him.
Sam had just texted me earlier in the day to invite me to a party he and Scott were throwing on Friday evening. Maybe Frederick could come with me. He could practice interfacing with people in public there.
I dashed off a quick note to him before I could talk myself out of it.
Hey Frederick,
Great job at Waffle House. Yeah, I’m sure those kids were only staring at you because they were high as hell (though I may be projecting a little from my own teenage years).
Unrelated—my friend Sam is having some people over Friday night. Do you want to come with me? It could be another opportunity for you to practice your talking with people skills around someone other than me and Reginald.
cassie
I read over my note, torn between leaving it on the table for Frederick and tearing it into a thousand pieces.
In truth, bringing Frederick would probably make the night more fun for me, and could be a great distraction from all the awkward questions I would inevitably get about what I did for a living from Sam’s law school friends and Scott’s English department colleagues. I’d have to pay attention to him, and possibly run interference if things went sideways and he tried to pay for something with gold doubloons or something.
And the more chances Frederick had to put it all into practice, the better.
It was normal for roommates to invite each other to things, right? Just like it was normal for roommates to tell each other about job interviews and their favorite foods, and to semi–feel them up outside a Nordstrom dressing room when they needed new clothes.
But then, a small part of me wondered—would falling for him really be so bad? Sure, there was the whole drinking blood thing, and the whole hundreds-of-years-older-than-me-and-also-immortal thing. But he was being really good about keeping his promise to never eat in front of me. And I’d dated guys with much bigger strikes against them than immortality.
Before I could talk myself out of crumpling up my note, I sketched a quick picture of the two of us, dancing, amidst a sea of floating musical notes. I drew the cartoon version of him with a smile on his face—because he really did have such an incredible smile.
I left the note on the kitchen table before I left for my evening shift at Gossamer’s, not sure if I hoped he’d say yes to the invitation or turn me down.
* * *
When I got back home at midnight from my shift, Frederick was at the stove, his back to me as he stirred something that smelled suspiciously and deliciously like chicken soup.
This was the first time I’d seen him so much as stand in the kitchen since my first night there, when I’d gone on that futile search for cookware. I’d certainly never seen him cook anything. I didn’t know why he was doing it now; his food preparation routine was, as far as I knew, limited to cutting into bags from the blood bank.
He didn’t seem to notice my presence, so I decided to just stand there in silence and watch him for a while. He really did have an incredible build for men’s T-shirts. And an amazing ass for jeans.
Taking him to the mall and getting him new clothes hadn’t only been a favor to him. It had been a favor to humankind.
“Frederick?”
He whirled around at the sound of my voice, a wooden spoon with something dripping from it clutched in one hand and a sheet of paper in the other. He wore a black apron over his clothes with the words This Guy Rubs His Own Meat in large white Comic Sans lettering.
I huffed an involuntary laugh, momentarily forgetting what I’d been about to ask him. “What are you wearing?”
He looked down at himself, then back at me. “It’s an apron.”
“Yes, I can see it’s an apron, but . . .” I managed to convert the giggles threatening to escape me into a cough, but barely. “Where did you get it?”
“Amazon.” He set his wooden spoon down on the stove and smiled at me, clearly proud of himself. I made a mental note not to let Frederick navigate Amazon on my laptop without supervision anymore. “I saw this apron and immediately thought, This message conveys competence in the kitchen. Which is exactly what I’d hoped to convey as I prepared your meal.”