He was a frequent diner—that man with the black hair and fast car.
Joyce had seen him come and go at every hour of the day, the bells above the door signaling his arrival less than the sound of his engine in the parking lot. RJ's was open twenty-four hours. Joyce wouldn't have found his comings strange, but everyone else in town ran like clockwork. Artie at nine for his morning cup of coffee. Kathleen and the kids at noon on their way to her mother's. The high schoolers at three fifteen for sodas after class. They were dependable.
The black-haired man was an anomaly. Joyce never knew when he'd come, only that he'd come, and she waited for him.
"What do you think he does?" she asked Irene. It was nearly four pm, the diner noisy with the after-school crowd, but calm for the staff in the wake of filled orders. The black-haired man was seated at a booth dead center. Joyce had great view of him from behind the counter.
"Who? What? The guy? Your guy?" Irene replied, her voice loud to be heard over the milkshake machine. She finished the order, wiped down the glass, and slid it across the counter to the waiting customer—some teen in a letterman jacket with varsity patches—then leaned into Joyce to get a better look across the restaurant. "You mean besides a little backseat bingo?"
Joyce laughed. "Yeah, besides."
Irene studied the man a moment more, then shrugged. "Beats me. Must be something big, though. With a car like that."
She moved off to clean the counter as Joyce's mind tried to imagine the black-haired man going to work at the office, or the hospital, or the bank, but she couldn't. She couldn't picture him in a job so ordinary. Though she had conjured up plenty of images of him in his own varsity letterman jacket kissing her neck under the bleachers in a fantasy where she hadn't dropped out of school.
"Joyce."
Irene's voice called her back.
"RJ's gonna be real peeved if he gets in tonight and food's not prepped for the dinner rush."
Nodding, Joyce pulled herself away from the counter and headed toward the kitchen. She'd miss the black-haired man's departure, but there was always tomorrow.
He came during her shift without fail, no matter the hours between which that shift fell. She'd never spoken to him, never served him directly, but they knew each other the way someone knows the strangers who ride the same morning bus. Joyce was as familiar with his face as she was with her own.
She'd asked once if the black-haired man came to the diner on days she wasn't working, but no one, not even RJ, the owner, had been able to give her a firm answer. Nobody could remember seeing him, but that didn't mean that he hadn't been there.
Joyce didn't have a firm answer herself until she agreed to cover Angela's graveyard shift while she was out with the flu, and the bells had jingled at three am and she'd come out from the back to find the black-haired man in the doorway. She hadn't even heard his car on the lot.
"Sit anywhere you'd…like."
She came to a stop as she recognized him, brought him a menu when he sat at the counter. After that she balked on what to say or do, so she stood and watched him take a pack of Pall Malls out of his jacket, light one, and blow the smoke into the air.
"Hi," he said, for an instant sounding like he'd spoken underwater. "What do you serve this late at night?"
"Anything you like," Joyce answered.
He smiled, glinting and glorious, then took a long draw off the cigarette. The burning embers in the ash of the tip matched a flicker in his eyes. Smoke billowed in a stream from his lips when he said, "Great."
Without opening the menu, he ordered a specialty sandwich, added a side of fries, and just as Joyce started to walk away to turn in his ticket, he reached out to stop her, gently touching his fingertips to the back of her hand.
"Add a Coke," he said.
"Sure," Joyce whispered.
It was the first time she'd noticed that his fingernails were black.
She lingered in the kitchen after giving the night cook the order, watching the black-haired man through the circular window on the swinging door, watching his long fingers with their black nails stub the cigarette out in an ashtray. Her heart pounded, excited, in her chest. She was certain now that he came to the diner for her.
Grabbing a glass, Joyce pushed through the door, filled it with ice and soda, and set it down in front of the black-haired man. He didn't touch it, observing her across the counter instead.
"I'm Sebastian," he said.
"Joyce."
"I know."
She started. He laughed, tapping the place on his chest that mirrored where her nametag was pinned to hers, so she joined his laughter, but hers was breathy and nervous.
"We should all wear nametags," she said.
"Mm. Make it easier to lie."
"Then you're not Sebastian?" she asked with a coy smile.
He returned the expression. "I have been."
The order-up bell in the kitchen rang. Joyce jumped. Sebastian chuckled at her, so she gave him a playful scolding expression and went to grab his food. Once she'd set the plate down in front of him, though, she was at a loss again. Angela had said that she usually left any late-night diners alone to eat, but as Joyce started to follow the advice, those gentle fingers set down on her hand again.
"Joyce."
His voice made the hair on her arms stand on end.
"Stay with me."
It seemed to her to have been an invitation for the rest of her life. Swallowing, Joyce nodded. She fell back into place behind the counter in front of Sebastian, but it was only a matter of moments before he'd coaxed her around to the front and into the stool beside his, shooing away her worries about work in saying that he was the only one in need of it, encouraging her to stay in asking about her life.
She talked while he ate, words she had dreamed of speaking to him a thousand different times in a thousand different settings now flowing so easily from her tongue. To each of her statements he nodded, questioned deeper, and nodded at those answers, too, like he had already known them. At the end of his meal, he lit another cigarette and let it burn for a moment before he put it to his lips to smoke.
"I talk too much," Joyce said.
"Not at all," Sebastian replied.
He reached toward her, looking like he planned to put a hand on her leg, but the ash fell from his cigarette and landed on her skin. Joyce yelped, instinctively rising and brushing the ash off, but Sebastian beat her to it and she fell back against the stool, startled, his hand wrapped tightly around her knee.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"It's a-all right."
Her heartbeat thrummed in her head and her chest, and she went dizzy with adrenaline and the feeling of his cool fingers on her skin, brushing across it as he let go and stubbed out the second cigarette. She didn't realize she'd been holding her breath until she let it out.
"I didn't burn you."
"No."
"Good."
The stool squeaked on its spinner as Sebastian rose. He stood close to Joyce, still braced somewhat against her own stool, and she found herself straightening and leaning intuitively toward him. She was only eighteen, but far from inexperienced, so it came as no surprise when he closed the gap between them to put his mouth to hers. She kissed him back, but it wasn't how she'd imagined—it was hurried and forceful and over before she wanted it to be.
"When are you off?" he asked, his face close and his breath warm.
"Five," Joyce said.
"I'll wait. If you'd like…"
Joyce grinned, pressing another kiss against his lips. "I'll meet you out back."
She floated through the remains of her shift, serving coffee and donuts to the early risers who came in at four thirty, grabbing her jacket and purse when Irene arrived half an hour later to trade her out.
"Where are you off to in such a hurry?" Irene asked.
Joyce grinned. "Backseat bingo."
Sebastian was out back liked they'd agreed, leaning against the wall next to the door from the outside into the kitchen. Joyce took one look at him and his car in the rising sun and decided then and there she'd stay with him forever. He pulled her into his arms as she came through the door, and was already kissing her before it had swung fully shut.
He pressed her against the wall and she wrapped her arms around his neck, falling into the intense embrace though it was almost unnatural. His lips moved to her neck and she thought for a moment she could feel the wool sleeves of a letterman jacket, the carpeted texture of varsity patches.
"I'm yours, baby," she breathed. "Body and soul."
"Great…"
His lips found hers, but this time there was pain instead of pleasure—pain Joyce could not put a name to because she'd never imagined it before. A pain that started inside her mouth and flowed down her throat throughout her body. A pain like every agonizing nerve had been switched on all at once. A ripping pain, like he was tearing her soul out of her.
Sebastian pulled back, and his eyes were red and glowing like the end of a drawn-on cigarette. He smiled, and the glint came from a set of fangs. Joyce didn't have the breath to scream.
"Not the best meal I've had, but what can you expect of a small-town diner?" he laughed, drawing into his mouth the smoke-like vapor that billowed from hers. "It'll get me to the next at least."
"What are you?" she gasped as he let her go, the last of the smoke gone. Her limbs were weak and she fell against the side of the building, then to the ground. Black haze closed around the edges of her vision.
Once again, his voice sounded underwater. "You know what I am."
He was a frequent diner.