Notes: I haven't a clue what possessed me to write a fic about Summer at 4 in the morning but here it is.

Contextually this takes place during season three after Hoyt rejects her offer to give up her virginity.

I'm curious to hear what people think about this.

WARNINGS: include minor religious and adult themes.

Buttermilk Biscuits

I know that God wants girls to wait.

That's what momma says, as she sits at the kitchen table and stares at the garden. I always ask her if she was glad that she waited for my poppa and she always smiles at me and her smiles are full of something I don't understand. When I ask my Grandmomma about it she gets a faraway sad look in her eyes and teaches me how to make biscuits or cookies or pies.

Mrs. Fortenberry promises me that biscuits will make everything better. There is something angry in her. There was something angry in Hoyt too. Angry somethings that I think will take more than buttermilk biscuits to fix.

I remember what it felt like when I held his hand to my breast. My heart beating like a drum, and me having to call him Bear because I couldn't say his name out loud without making it all too real. But his hand lay there limp like a dead thing. But it was so warm and heavy, and for a moment I can imagine that I felt him touch me tenderly there. Almost like my hand is touching me now.

I know that God wants girls to wait.

Sometimes when Grandmomma is teaching me a new recipe I feel the age in her hands. I feel like she's trying to tell me something about the world with buttermilk and flour and raisins. My momma teaches me the bible though, and my pastor says that there is nothing in the world that I can't learn from there. God lives in the Bible, and there is no life in people without Him. When we sing in church it makes me feel like I'm full of life. Just that feeling doesn't always stay like I wish that it would.

My room is dark, and it smells like it always has, like rose water and linen and old wall paper. But my jacket smells like beer from the table at Merlotte's, and like the inside of Hoyt's truck, which was pine air freshener and dirt from his boots and motor oil from the machine he uses at work. The sleeve is stained where I got ketchup on it on our first date. I pull it over my body so that its warm weight and its alien smells can cover up my childhood. My other hand rests low on my belly where I burned with nerves and a different kind of aliveness that I can't describe.

I believed Mrs Fortenberry when she told me that I could save her Hoyt. Grandmomma says sometimes that I saved my momma when God took Poppa away from our family, and we came to live with her. The dead almost stole the life from my Momma. It isn't right that they get to go and keep stealing the life from people even when they are gone.

I know that I'm not supposed to notice, but sometimes I do. I know it's not right to think about this. But I see them watch me – men that is. I see things. I hear things. I know that what God wants and what men want isn't always the same thing. My Momma won't outright and say it, but I know that it is true, even when she tries to silence my aunt Lorraine when she says that they're only after one thing. I thought Hoyt wanted that too – ever since the first day that I learned that there might be more than one way to feel alive.

My hand drifts lower on my belly. What would it have been like, I wonder, if that vampire hadn't stolen that life from him. I touch my lips. How would he have kissed me? My friend Deborah says that it's supposed to hurt. From others I hear it's like a duty. I let the pads of my fingers trace the waistband of the shorts that I wear to sleep, and I wonder what is true. I think that Hoyt knows what the truth is.

I said the right words. Even though God wants girls to wait, I knew that biscuits and homemade strawberry jam wouldn't be enough for him. I could see it in the way that he walked, in the way that he moved and the way that he touched things. The way that he saw things, like he could look under my clothes and see my skin in his mind if he wanted.

I could see it in the way he looked at that dead woman. Vampires don't have any life in them like I know it. They haven't got the sun or the clouds or baking. The oil and dirt smell on my jacket presses against my nose and I want to know what life they have that I don't.

I curl my hand around my breast and feel the beating of my heart and the rise and fall of my chest, and suddenly I want to cry. I feel like I have been left out of a great big secret. Like if I knew what it was, I would understand Momma's sharp looks and Grandmomma's sad old hands. I would understand why a dead girl has more life in her than me, and why, as I try to imagine Hoyt's big, rough hands gliding across my skin, all I can feel are my own.

Sometimes I wonder if there is more God in Grandmomma's buttermilk biscuits than there is in Mrs. Fortenberry. Or if God doesn't live in either of those places but somewhere else all together.

I know that God wants girls to wait, but as I let my fingers brush underneath the cotton covered elastic of my shorts, I wonder what for.