Dead Until Dark (20 page)

I followed Bill to his house, thinking we'd gotten off rel-atively 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 lasttime 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 himstraight when I thought of how this—okay, man—had seen more
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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 shiv-ery. 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, myhands 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."

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THE NEXT NIGHT BILL and I had an unsettling conver-sation. 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 he 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 con-versation had strayed from the movie we'd seen to the near-ing parish elections (Bill was going to try to register to vote, absentee ballot), and then to our childhoods. I was realizingthat 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.

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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 actu-ally, 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 everytime 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.

After a long time, I felt Bill's cool hand on my shoulder. It lay there, comforting.

"This was before your parents died?" he said in his usual calm voice. I still couldn't look at him.

"Yes."

"You told your mama? She did nothing?"

"No. She thought I was dirty minded, or that I'd found some book at the library that taught me something she didn't feel I was ready to know." I could remember her face, framed in hair about two shades darker than my medium blond. Her face pinched with distaste. She had come from a very conser-vative family, and any public display of affection or any mention of a subject she thought indecent was flatly dis-couraged.

"I wonder that she and my father seemed happy," I told my vampire. "They were so different." Then I saw how ludi-crous my saying that was. I rolled over to my side. "As if we aren't," I told Bill, and tried to smile. Bill's face was quite still, but I could see a muscle in his neck jumping.

"Did you tell your father?"

"Yes, right before he died. I was too embarrassed to talk to him about it when I was younger; and Mother didn't be-lieve me. But I couldn't stand it anymore, knowing I was going to see my great-uncle Bartlett at least two weekends out of every month when he drove up to visit."

"He still lives?"

"Uncle Bartlett? Oh, sure. He's Gran's brother, and Gran was my dad's mother. My uncle lives in Shreveport. But when Jason and I went to live with Gran, after my parents died, the first time Uncle Bartlett came to her house I hid. When she found me and asked me why, I told her. And she believed me." I felt the relief of that day all over again, the beautiful sound of my grandmother's voice promising me I'dnever have to see her brother again, that he would never never come to the house. And he hadn't. She had cut off her own brother to protect me. He'd tried with Gran's daughter, Linda,
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too, when she was a small girl, but my grandmother had buried the incident in her own mind, dismissed it as something misunderstood. She had told me that she'd never left her brother alone with Linda at any time after that, had almost quit inviting him to her home, while not quite letting herself believe that he'd touched her little girl's privates.

"So he's a Stackhouse, too?"

"Oh, no. See, Gran became a Stackhouse when she mar-ried, but she was a Hale before." I wondered at having to spell this out for Bill. He was sure Southern enough, even if he was a vampire, to keep track of a simple family relation-ship like that.

Bill looked distant, miles away. I had put him off with my grim nasty little story, and I had chilled my own blood, that was for sure.

"Here, I'll leave," I said and slid out of bed, bending to retrieve my clothes. Quicker than I could see, he was off the bed and taking the clothes from my hands.

"Don't leave me now," he said. "Stay."

"I'm a weepy ol' thing tonight." Two tears trickled down my cheeks, and I smiled at him. His fingers wiped the tears from my face, and his tongue traced their marks.

"Stay with me till dawn," he said.

"But you have to get in your hidey hole by then." .,

"My what?"

"Wherever you spend the day. I don't want to know where it is!" I held up my hands to emphasize that.

"But don't you have to get in there before it's even a little light?"

"Oh," he said, "I'll know. I can feel it coming."

"So you can't oversleep?"

"No."

"All right. Will you let me get some sleep?"

"Of course I will," he said with a gentlemanly bow, only a little off mark because he was naked. "In a little while."

Then, as I lay down on the bed and held out my arms to him, he said, "Eventually."

SURE ENOUGH, IN the morning I was in the bed by myself. I lay there for a little, thinking. I'd had little niggling thoughts from time to time, but for the first time the flaws in my relationship with the vampire
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hopped out of their own hidey hole and took over my brain.

I would never see Bill in the sunlight. I would never fix his breakfast, never meet him for lunch. (He could bear to watch me eat food, though he wasn't thrilled by the process, and I always had to brush my teeth afterward very thor-oughly, which was a good habit anyway.)

I could never have a child by Bill, which was nice at least when you thought of not having to practice birth control, but...

I'd never call Bill at the office to ask him to stop on the way home for some milk. He'd never join the Rotary, or give a career speech at the high school, or coach Little League Baseball. He'd never go to church with me.

And I knew that now, while I lay here awake—listening to the birds chirping their morning sounds and the trucks beginning to rumble down the road while all over Bon Temps people were getting up and putting on the coffee and fetching their papers and planning their day—that the creature I loved was lying somewhere in a hole underground, to all intents and purposes dead until dark. I was so down by then that I had to think of an upside, while I cleaned up a little in the bathroom and dressed.

He seemed to genuinely care for me. It was kind of nice, but unsettling, not to know exactly how much. Sex with him was absolutely great. I had never dreamed it would be that wonderful. No one would mess with me while I was Bill's girlfriend. Any hands that had patted me in unwanted caresses were kept in their owner's laps, now. And if the person who'd killed my grandmother had killed her because she'd walkedin on him while he was waiting for me, he wouldn't get another try at me. And I could relax with Bill, a luxury so precious I could not put a value on it. My mind could range at will, and I would not learn anything he didn't tell me.