Charlaine Harris - Dead Ever After

We parted better friends than we’d ever been.

It was twilight when she left, and I began to think of eating supper. I heated part of Michele’s enchilada casserole in a bowl and dumped salsa on top. It was good, and I ate the bowlful.

The minute it was full dark, Bill was at my back door. I was very tired by then, though I hadn’t done a damn thing all day, and I shuffled slowly to the door toting the rifle with me, though I was sure from the—well, from the feeling of the hole a vampire’s head left in my other sense—that this “hole” represented Bill.

“It’s Bill,” he called, to confirm his identity. I let him in, undoing the locks with one hand, and stood aside to let him pass. With this much traffic, I was going to need a schedule to keep up with all my callers. Bill stepped in and gave me a sharp once-over. “You’re healing,” he said. “Good.”

I offered him a drink, but he looked at me and said, “I can get something myself, Sookie, if I need a drink. But I don’t right now. Can I get you something?”

“Yeah, actually. If you wouldn’t mind pouring me another glass of tea, I’d sure appreciate it.” The pitcher was pretty heavy to deal with one-handed. Gripping anything with my left hand made the shoulder hurt in a most unpleasant way.

We sat in the living room, me curled up on the couch, Bill in the armchair opposite. He smiled at me.

“You’re cheerful,” I observed.

“I’m about to do something that gives me intense pleasure,” he said.

Huh. “Okay, have at it,” I said.

“Do you remember what Eric did to me in New Orleans?” he said, and nothing could have surprised me more.

“You mean, what Eric did to us? By telling me that instead of you being spontaneously smitten with me, you were ordered to seduce me?”

It had hurt then. It hurt now. Of course, not as badly.

“Yes, exactly,” Bill said. “And I’m not ever going to explain again, since we’ve said all this out loud and in our heads so many times. Even though I can’t read minds, like you can, I know that.”

I nodded. “We’ll take all that as done.”

“That is why it gives me intense pleasure to tell you, now, what Eric has done to Sam.”

All right ! This was what I had waited to discover. I leaned forward. “Do tell,” I said.

Chapter 18

When he had finished, he left, and I called Sam at the bar. “I need you to come out to the house,” I said.

“Sookie?”

“You know it’s me.”

“Kennedy’s not here, so I have to stay at the bar.”

“No, you don’t. You’re not supposed to talk to me or come see me. But I’m telling you I want to talk to you now, and I expect someone to take care of the bar for you while you get yourself out here.” I was very, very angry. And I did something so rude that Gran would have choked. I hung up.

In thirty minutes I heard Sam’s truck. I was standing at the back porch door when he walked up. I could see the cloud of regret around him as clearly as if it had been a tangible thing.

“Don’t you tell me how you’re not supposed to be here and you can’t come in,” I said, though it took me a minute to stoke my fire back up after seeing his unhappiness. “We’re going to talk.” Sam hung back, and I reached out to take his hand the way he’d taken mine at the hospital. I pulled him closer, and he tried to stay away, he really did, but he couldn’t bring himself to do anything rough. “Now, you come sit in the living room and you talk to me. And before you start making up a story, let me tell you . . . Bill came by and he had a very interesting tale to tell. So I know everything, though not all the details.”

“I shouldn’t. I promised not to.”

“You don’t have a choice, Sam. I’m not giving you one.”

He took a deep breath. “None of us had enough money for your bail. I wasn’t going to have you spend any more time in that place than you had to. I called the bank president at home to ask him about a loan on the bar, but I got turned down.”

That, I hadn’t known. I was horrified. “Oh, no, Sam . . .”

“So,” he bulldozed over me, “I went to Eric the second it got dark. Of course, he’d heard you’d been arrested and he was totally pissed off. But he was mostly angry that I’d tried to bail you out on my own. That vampire, Freyda, she was sitting right by him.” Remembering, Sam was so angry that his teeth were bared. “Finally, she told him he could go on and bail you out, but with conditions.”

“With her conditions.”

“Yeah. The first condition was that you never see Eric again. Or enter Oklahoma. On penalty of death. But Eric said no, he had a better idea. He was trying to let her think he was doing something bad to you, but he was really doing something bad to me. He agreed to the part about you not entering Oklahoma, and he agreed that he would never be alone with you again, but he tacked on another one she wouldn’t have thought of. It was that I could never tell you I’d asked Eric to put up the bail. And I could never try to . . . court you.”

“And you agreed.” I was feeling about five different emotions at once.

“I agreed. It seemed to be the only way to get you out of that damn jail. I confess that I needed sleep bad and my thinking may not have been real clear.”

“Okay. Let me tell you something right now. As of this morning, the assets of Claudine’s bank are now unfrozen, and I can post my own bail. I don’t exactly know how to do it, but we can go to the bondsman tomorrow, and tell him I want to give Eric’s money back and put mine in its place. I’m not real sure how all that works, but I’ll bet it can be done.” Finally, I had a coherent picture. Eric had been angry at losing control of his own life. Further, Eric was convinced Sam was waiting in the wings to take his place in my bed. There were some implications that I’d store away to think about later.

“So, are you mad at me?” Sam asked. “Or do you think I’m wonderful for getting you out? Or a fool for making a deal with Eric? Or lucky that Bill told you the truth?” His head was full of optimism, pessimism, and apprehension. “I still don’t know what to do about the promise I made Eric.”

“I’m just relieved that you’re okay now. You did the best you could when you thought of it, and your whole reason to agree to such a stupid thing was to get me out of a terrible situation. How can I not be grateful for that?”

“I don’t want you grateful,” he said. “I want you mine. Eric was right about that.”

And my life turned upside down. Again. “Either there was just an earthquake in here, or you said . . . you wanted me to be yours?”

“Yeah. No earthquake.”

“Okay. Well. I guess I have to ask, what changed? I was the last person you wanted to see while you were . . .”

“Getting over being dead.”

“Yeah. That.”

“Maybe I felt then like you’re feeling now. Maybe I felt like I’d come so close to forever-death that I’d better step back and take a look at my life. Maybe I didn’t like a lot of what I’d done with it so far.”

This was a side of Sam I’d never seen. “What didn’t you like?” I knew he wanted to move on to the issue that sat between us like an elephant, but I had to have some answers.

“I didn’t like my choices in women,” he said unexpectedly. “I’d been picking women who were on the far side of acceptable. That didn’t even occur to me until I knew I didn’t want to take Jannalynn home to meet my mother. I didn’t want her to meet my sister and my brother. I was scared for her to play with my niece and nephew. And that made me ask myself—why was I dating her?”

“She was better than the maenad,” I said.