Arlene came into the women’s room with me. “Listen, Sookie, I got to ask. Are vampires all everyone says they are, in the lover department?”
I just smiled.
Bill came into the bar that evening, just after dark. I’d worked late since one of the evening waitresses had had car trouble. One minute he wasn’t there, and the next minute he was, slowing down so I could see him coming. If Bill had any doubts about making our relationship public, he didn’t show them. He lifted my hand and kissed it in a gesture that performed by anyone else would have seemed phony as hell. I felt the touch of his lips on the back of my hand all the way down to my toes, and I knew he could tell that.
“How are you this evening?” he whispered, and I shivered.
“A little . . .” I found I couldn’t get the words out.
“You can tell me later,” he suggested. “When are you through?”
“Just as soon as Susie gets here.”
“Come to my house.”
“Okay.” I smiled up at him, feeling radiant and light-headed.
And Bill smiled back, though since my nearness had affected him, his fangs were showing, and maybe to anyone else but me the effect was a little—unsettling.
He bent to kiss me, just a light touch on the cheek, and he turned to leave. But just at that moment, the evening went all to hell.
Malcolm and Diane came in, flinging the door open as if they were making a grand entrance, and of course, they were. I wondered where Liam was. Probably parking the car. It was too much to hope they’d left him at home.
Folks in Bon Temps were getting accustomed to Bill, but the flamboyant Malcolm and the equally flamboyant Diane caused quite a stir. My first thought was that this wasn’t going to help people get used to Bill and me.
Malcolm was wearing leather pants and a kind of chain-mail shirt. He looked like something on the cover of a rock album. Diane was wearing a one-piece lime green bodysuit spun out of Lycra or some other very thin, stretchy cloth. I was sure I could count her pubic hairs if I so desired. Blacks didn’t come into Merlotte’s much, but if any black was absolutely safe there, it was Diane. I saw Lafayette goggling through the hatch in open admiration, spiced by a dollop of fear.
The two vampires shrieked with feigned surprise when they saw Bill, like demented drunks. As far as I could tell, Bill was not happy about their presence, but he seemed to handle their invasion calmly, as he did almost everything.
Malcolm kissed Bill on the mouth, and so did Diane. It was hard to tell which greeting was more offensive to the customers in the bar. Bill had better show distaste, and quick, I thought, if he wanted to stay in good with the human inhabitants of Bon Temps.
Bill, who was no fool, took a step back and put his arm around me, dissociating himself from the vampires and aligning himself with the humans.
“So your little waitress is still alive,” Diane said, and her clear voice was audible through the whole bar. “Isn’t that amazing.”
“Her grandmother was murdered last week,” Bill said quietly, trying to subdue Diane’s desire to make a scene.
Her gorgeous lunatic brown eyes fixed on me, and I felt cold.
“Is that right?” she said and laughed.
That was it. No one would forgive her now. If Bill had been trying to find a way to entrench himself, this would be the scenario I would write. On the other hand, the disgust I could feel massing from the humans in the bar could backlash and wash over Bill as well as the renegades.
Of course . . . to Diane and her friends, Bill was the renegade.
“When’s someone going to kill you, baby?” She ran a fingernail under my chin, and I knocked her hand away.
She would have been on me if Malcolm hadn’t grabbed her hand, lazily, almost effortlessly. But I saw the strain show in the way he was standing.
“Bill,” he said conversationally, as if he wasn’t exerting every muscle he had to keep Diane still, “I hear this town is losing its unskilled service personnel at a terrible rate. And a little bird in Shreveport tells me you and your friend here were at Fangtasia asking questions about what vampire the murdered fang-bangers might have been with.”
“You know that’s for us to know, no one else,” Malcolm continued, and all of a sudden his face was so serious it was truly terrifying. “Some of us don’t want to go to—baseball—games and . . .” (here he was searching his memory for something disgustingly human, I could tell) “barbecues! We are Vampire!” He invested the word with majesty, with glamor, and I could tell a lot of the people in the bar were falling under his spell. Malcolm was intelligent enough to want to erase the bad impression he knew Diane had made, all the while showering contempt on those of us it had been made on.
I stomped on his instep with every ounce of weight I could muster. He showed his fangs at me. The people in the bar blinked and shook themselves.
“Why don’t you just get outta here, mister,” Rene said. He was slouched at the bar with his elbows flanking a beer.
There was moment when things hung in the balance, when the bar could have turned into a bloodbath. None of my fellow humans seemed to quite comprehend how strong vampires were, or how ruthless. Bill had moved in front of me, a fact registered by every citizen in Merlotte’s.
“Well, if we’re not wanted . . .” Malcolm said. His thickmuscled masculinity warred with the fluting voice he suddenly affected. “These good people would like to eat meat, Diane, and do human things. By themselves. Or with our former friend Bill.”
“I think the little waitress would like to do a very human thing with Bill,” Diane began, when Malcolm caught her by the arm and propelled her from the room before she could cause more damage.
The entire bar seemed to shudder collectively when they were out the door, and I thought I better leave, even though Susie hadn’t shown up yet. Bill waited for me outside; when I asked him why, he said he wanted to be sure they’d really left.
I followed Bill to his house, thinking we’d gotten off relatively lightly from the vampire visitation. I wondered why Diane and Malcolm had come; it seemed odd to me that they would be cruising so far from home and decide, on a whim, to drop in Merlotte’s. Since they were making no real effort at assimilation, maybe they wanted to scotch Bill’s prospects.
The Compton house was visibly different from the last time I’d been in, the sickening evening I’d met the other vampires.
The contractors were really coming through for Bill, whether because they were scared not to or because he was paying well, I didn’t know. Maybe both. The living room was getting a new ceiling and the new wallpaper was white with a delicate flowered pattern. The hardwood floors had been cleaned, and they shone as they must have originally. Bill led me to the kitchen. It was sparse, naturally, but bright and cheerful and had a brand-new refrigerator full of bottled synthetic blood (yuck).
The downstairs bathroom was opulent.
As far as I knew, Bill never used the bathroom; at least for the primary human function. I stared around me in amazement.
The space for this grand bathroom had been achieved by including what had formerly been the pantry and about half the old kitchen.
“I like to shower,” he said, pointing to a clear shower stall in one corner. It was big enough for two grownups and maybe a dwarf or two. “And I like to lie in warm water.” He indicated the centerpiece of the room, a huge sort of tub surrounded by an indoor deck of cedar, with steps on two sides. There were potted plants arranged all around it. The room was as close to being in the middle of a very luxurious jungle as you could get in northern Louisiana.
“What is that?” I asked, awed.
“It’s a portable spa,” Bill said proudly. “It has jets you can adjust individually so each person can get the right force of water. It’s a hot tub,” he simplified.
“It has seats,” I said, looking in. The interior was decorated around the top with green and blue tiles. There were fancy controls on the outside.
Bill turned them, and water began to surge.
“Maybe we can bathe together?” Bill suggested.
I felt my cheeks flame, and my heart began to pound a little faster.
“Maybe now?” Bill’s fingers tugging at my shirt where it was tucked into my black shorts.
“Oh, well . . . maybe.” I couldn’t seem to look at him straight when I thought of how this—okay, man—had seen more of me than I’d ever let anyone see, including my doctor.
“Have you missed me?” he asked, his hands unbuttoning my shorts and peeling them down.
“Yes,” I said promptly because I knew that to be true.
He laughed, even as he knelt to untie my Nikes. “What did you miss most, Sookie?”
“I missed your silence,” I said without thinking at all.
He looked up. His fingers paused in the act of pulling the end of the bow to loosen it.
“My silence,” he said.
“Not being able to hear your thoughts. You just can’t imagine, Bill, how wonderful that is.”
“I was thinking you’d say something else.”
“Well, I missed that, too.”
“Tell me about it,” he invited, pulling my socks off and running his fingers up my thigh, tugging off the panties and shorts.
“Bill! I’m embarrassed,” I protested.
“Sookie, don’t be embarrassed with me. Least of anyone, with me.” He was standing now, divesting me of my shirt and reaching behind me to unsnap my bra, running his hands over the marks the straps had made on my skin, turning his attention to my breasts. He toed off his sandals at some point.
“I’ll try,” I said, looking at my own toes.
“Undress me.”
Now that I could do. I unbuttoned his shirt briskly and eased it out of his pants and off his shoulders. I unbuckled his belt and began to work on the waist button of his slacks. It was stiff, and I had quite a job.
I thought I was going to cry if the button didn’t cooperate more. I felt clumsy and inept.
He took my hands and led them up to his chest. “Slow, Sookie, slow,” he said, and his voice had gone soft and shivery. I could feel myself relaxing almost inch by inch, and I began to stroke his chest as he’d stroked mine, twining the curly hair around my fingers and gently pinching his flat nipples. His hand went behind my head and pressed gently. I hadn’t known men liked that, but Bill sure did, so I paid equal attention to the other one. While I was doing that, my hands resumed work on the damn button, and this time it came undone with ease. I began pushing down his pants, sliding my fingers inside his Jockeys.
He helped me down into the spa, the water frothing around our legs.
“Shall I bathe you first?” he asked.
“No,” I said breathlessly. “Give me the soap.”
Chapter 7
T
HE NEXT NIGHT Bill and I had an unsettling conversation. We were in his bed, his huge bed with the carved headboard and a brand-new Restonic mattress. His sheets were flowered like his wallpaper, and I remember wondering if he liked flowers printed on his possessions because he couldn’t see the real thing, at least as they were meant to be seen . . . in the daylight.
Bill was lying on his side, looking down at me. We’d been to the movies; Bill was crazy about movies with aliens, maybe having some kindred feeling for space creatures. It had been a real shoot-em-up, with almost all the aliens being ugly, creepy, bent on killing. He’d fumed about that while he’d taken me out to eat, and then back to his place. I’d been glad when he’d suggested testing the new bed.
I was the first to lie on it with him.
He was looking at me, as he liked to do, I was learning. Maybe he was listening to my heart pounding, since he could hear things I couldn’t, or maybe he was watching my pulse throb, because he could see things I couldn’t, too. Our conversation had strayed from the movie we’d seen to the nearing parish elections (Bill was going to try to register to vote, absentee ballot), and then to our childhoods. I was realizing that Bill was trying desperately to remember what it had been like to be a regular person.
“Did you ever play ‘show me yours’ with your brother?” he asked. “They now say that’s normal, but I will never forget my mother beating the tarnation out of my brother Robert after she found him in the bushes with Sarah.”
“No,” I said, trying to sound casual, but my face tightened, and I could feel the clenching of fear in my stomach.
“You’re not telling the truth.”
“Yes, I am.” I kept my eyes fixed on his chin, hoping to think of some way to change the topic. But Bill was nothing if not persistent.
“Not your brother, then. Who?”
“I don’t want to talk about this.” My hands contracted into fists, and I could feel myself begin to shut down.
But Bill hated being evaded. He was used to people telling him whatever he wanted to know because he was used to using his glamor to get his way.
“Tell me, Sookie.” His voice was coaxing, his eyes big pools of curiosity. He ran his thumbnail down my stomach, and I shivered.
“I had a . . . funny uncle,” I said, feeling the familiar tight smile stretch my lips.
He raised his dark arched brows. He hadn’t heard the phrase.
I said as distantly as I could manage, “That’s an adult male relative who molests his . . . the children in the family.”
His eyes began to burn. He swallowed; I could see his Adam’s apple move. I grinned at him. My hands were pulling my hair back from my face. I couldn’t stop it.
“And someone did this to you? How old were you?”
“Oh, it started when I was real little,” and I could feel my breathing begin to speed up, my heart beat faster, the panicky traits that always came back when I remembered. My knees drew up and pressed together. “I guess I was five,” I babbled, talking faster and faster, “I know you can tell, he never actually, ah, screwed me, but he did other stuff,” and now my hands were shaking in front of my eyes where I held them to shield them from Bill’s gaze. “And the worst thing, Bill, the worst thing,” I went on, just unable to stop, “is that every time he came to visit, I always knew what he was going to do because I could read his mind! And there wasn’t anything I could do to stop it!” I clamped my hands over my mouth to make myself shut up. I wasn’t supposed to talk about it. I rolled over onto my stomach to conceal myself, and held my body absolutely rigid.