Page 85 of What Happens at Nightfall

“Not according to my kids.” Adam looked at her patiently. “Jess, I live in a cemetery. There are graves in my front yard. I know all the words to Into the Woods. When no one is looking, I talk to trees.”

“Yes, but do they talk back?”

“Only on alternate Tuesdays. Oh, thanks.”

Jess didn’t remember ordering a third round, but one seemed to have appeared. Adam was having some difficulty navigating the stem of the glass.

“You wanna know the truth?” Adam leaned his elbows on the table. “It’s not just alternate Tuesdays. I hear the trees all the time. Occasionally the odd shrub, but mostly the trees.”

“Um . . .” Jess had no idea what to say to that. A week ago, she would have labeled that as crazy, but she was rapidly revising her definition of sanity. “Are they good conversationalists?”

Adam snorted punch up his nose. “It’s not like that,” he said, when he could talk again. “I don’t really hear words. It’s more impressions and feelings.”

“Have you always had this?”

“You mean, was I born with it?” She could see him thinking about that. “I don’t know. I grew up in an apartment and my mother wasn’t a potted plant sort of person. The first time it happened—the first time I noticed—was my freshman year at Yale.”

Jess raised a brow. “While you were singing bare-chested?”

“I’m never going to live that down, am I?”

Jess raised her glass. “One of these days I expect to see pictures.”

“Ask your friend Kimmy.” Adam frowned into his punch glass. “We had a science requirement at Yale. Group IV. You had to have a certain number of credits. So I figured I’d knock one off by taking this class called Local Flora. It sounded undemanding. You just wandered around and looked at plants. But the first time I got out there—something changed.”

“The plants were calling to you?” Jess bit her lip, hard. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

Adam grinned crookedly at her. “You’re not entirely wrong. I just—it felt right. It felt like I’d come home. And everything changed.”

Like walking into Adam’s kitchen that night. Feeling like she’d come home. Like everything had changed.

Jess stared at Adam, at the floppy hair that kept falling into his eye, at the base of his throat where he’d loosened his tie. Home. He was home.

She was in love with him and she had no idea what to do about it.

“Wait, why are we talking about me? We were supposed to be talking about you.” Adam blinked a few times. “Or maybe your grandmother.”

“Another round?” The waitress popped up next to their table.

“Can we have the check, please?” Right now she was tipsy; one more drink and she’d be declaring her feelings. Or prone. “My mother said she thought there might be some of my grandmother’s things with my grandfather’s stuff. She said she’d go through it for me. I didn’t tell her why, though.”

“Probably too much to hope for a memoir entitled My Life As a Demon Fighter,” said Adam. He started dancing from the waist up. “Everybody was demon fighting . . .”

Jess burst into laughter. “I’m cutting you off.”

“I never could hold my liquor,” Adam admitted. “How are you so small and yet so sober?”

“I may be small, but I have a high tolerance,” said Jess proudly. “Also, I’m seeing two of you right now. Or possibly one and a half, depending on the angle.”

“Is it my good half?”

Every half was his good half. All three of them.

“Stop that, you.” Jess wasn’t quite sure how it had happened but somehow she was holding his hand across the table. Hastily she released it and tried to push back her chair, only to remember that she was sitting on a banquette built into the wall. “I need to get some water into you before I send you home. Oh, wait. We need to pay.”

She reached for her wallet, but Adam waved her off. He stuck his card into the black leather holder. “My treat.”

Jess managed to squeeze herself out from behind the banquette. “Is this like a date and stuff?”