Long in the Tooth

Cornelius Van Hoyk has been a member of the charmingly undead since 1869. Has he held a passing fancy for a target of his sanguine pursuits? Of course, but it's been years. Today's young women simply do not appeal. Youth is wasted on the young, they say, and his time is wasted on "#them." But a vampire must eat, and an attractive young man must pursue beautiful, malleable young women...

But when Cornelius meets his latest conquest's grandmother, all bets are off. Dorothy Leigh is everything Corny ever wanted in a woman: intelligent, mature, witty... experienced. But convincing Dorothy to see him for the sesquicentennial man he is on the inside and not the buff and virile stud he appears on the outside will prove a challenge. How do you woo a woman who's been around the block and knows every trick in the book?

Cornelius Van Hoyk of the Amherst Van Hoyks had tired of man-eating women even before he’d been a woman-eating man. Born to an era of social upheaval, war, and social mobility via the altar, the opportunity he’d been presented for everlasting life as a blood-sucking vampire, free of society’s constraints and the parade of paramours his mother presented wholesale, proved a fruit too ripe not to pick. Only after becoming a member of the undead did he realize that mortals had no concept of what eternity truly meant.
Einstein approached it with his explanation of relativity. “When you sit with a pretty girl for two hours you think it's only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it's two hours.”
When you suffered an evening attempting to seduce a woman assigned to you by your vampiric overlord through a diatribe of meaningless conversation and faux flattery... That was forever. It was the amount of time a self-absorbed beauty could prattle on about things immaterial and ephemeral to the point of exasperation.
Truth be told, Panthora Leigh did not impress as a bad person. The women Brutus selected for him rarely were. She was, however, possessing of a depth detectable only with a microscope. Having rendezvoused outside the doors of Terra Descura, which Panthora informed him was “vegan, organic, and all locally sourced,” Cornelius understood immediately the misfortune in store. If one intended to host a vampire, it would never be accomplished by patronizing an establishment that boasted of its lack of meat. Luckily, the menu with which Cornelius was concerned was not the one handed to him by the maître d’ in a cheap suit, but that which sat across the table from him in an even cheaper cocktail dress.
Speaking of... had mortals grown so arrogant in the face of winter winds that young woman could walk about the streets with such little clothing? In his day, any such maiden who’d presented herself as such did so only in the seediest parts of town, and never with the intention of such rags staying on very long.
Cornelius examined the limited options. “Any suggestions?”
Panthora’s menu flattened across the table. “Don’t know. Never been here before.”
An awkward smile spread across his lips. “Apologies, I thought perhaps... as you were the one who suggested it...”
Panthora cut him off by blowing a raspberry. “I can’t afford a place like this.” She resumed her study of the menu. “But Didi Filmore said the tofu tartare is to die for.”
He dropped his menu and lifted his eyes. “Sorry, who?”
“Oh, my god, you don’t know Didi Filmore? She’s just, like, the most famous vegan cuisine blogger in the country. You totally should follow her.”
“Follow her where?”
Panthora fixed him with a blank stare. “Online?”
“Oh, she journals on the world wide web.” The newly-arrived waiter leaned in to see the item on the menu to which Cornelius pointed. “Oh, yes, I’ve heard of that. I’m sorry, I don’t spend much time on the... the, um, information superhighway?—though I wholly understand the convenience of having so much accessible to you on a whim via a pocket telephone. Call me a luddite, but I still prefer my reading materials on paper.”
“Call you a what?” Panthora blinked thrice in rapid succession.
“A luddite?”
Panthora stabbed the house salad just set before her with a three-pronged fork. “I don’t label people, Corny—”
“It’s Cornelius, actually.”
“—and I don’t think the luddites think their name should be used as an insult.”
Cornelius’s face screwed up as the waiter deposited a bowl of green with splotches of purple, red, and white before him. Right, time to try a different tack. If he wanted to keep Panthora’s good humor, correcting her ignorance was hardly the way.
He picked up his fork. “Quite right. Do forgive me. I’m afraid my work in Central America has left me somewhat estranged from polite society as late.”
A sliver of her disgust sluiced away. “What work?”
“Oh, various good deeds. Most recently, I helped build a school deep in the jungle. I’m afraid I may have picked up some coarser language in the process, but a small cost to pay for doing so much good.”
He’d speculated that a person who followed the writings of a local food snoot would be seduced by humanitarian work, and it seemed he was right. The hard lines of Panthora’s face softened.
“Yeah, well...” Her eyes lost focus. “Building a school, huh?”
“The village’s first.” He leaned in. “Tell you the truth? I may have been the one there volunteering, but I’m the one who really was helped. What those children did to me with their smiles and appreciation!”
“I’m sure they really appreciated some rich foreigner coming to bleach out his guilt with some meaningless token.”
Cornelius’s sense of hearing trumped that of any mortal, but sometimes words could fail to convey understanding. “Sorry?”
Panthora fixed him with an acidic glare. “Are you seriously one of those people who think it helps the poor when someone storms into a town and throws up a few ramshackle buildings? Walls without ways! Did you learn nothing from #InstitutionalizedPoverty?”
“I’m afraid I’m not familiar with the concept, no.”
“Of course, you’re not.” She slid the napkin from her lap and covered the remnants of her salad with it, pushing it away like it had personally insulted her. “You know what, Corny—”
“Cornelius.”
“—I don’t think this is going to work. Even if you are hot, I’m not going to waste my time on an elitist bigot.”
His eyes turned to saucers. “I’m the elitist one?"