Hello again! Right off the bat I'm going to say this was certainly the chapter you've all been waiting for. It's mature, so if you're uncomfortable feel free to merely skim the middle section. I know this is a quick update, but I want to get as much out there of this fic as soon as I can, because I'm going back to university soon and who knows what the update schedule will be like for that then. Anyway, enjoy!

With sponge in hand, I continued scrubbing swathes of grey cement off of the sides of my bathtub. The process of cleaning Eric had taken up the majority of the night before, and traces of our work still remained. I had been quite timid helping him, repeatedly using the shower curtain as a shield for his nakedness whilst he laughed, but eventually I managed to remove every last, dried crumb from his hair and nails. His nakedness was not the first of a man's I'd ever seen. In high school there had been boys who'd managed to get far enough along with me to have dropped their trousers, and I had a great uncle who had revealed himself to me on several occasions when I was little. But I saw a new beauty in Eric's body that I had never seen in another man's. Perhaps it was rooted in the desire to see it again, and more of it.

Once the beans were spilled to Sookie about Bill's original mission set by the queen, she renounced love for everyone present: Bill, Eric, and myself. Apparently knowing about Sophie-Anne's assignment—for the little time I did know—was equivalent to original sin. She even attempted to rescind my invitation to the house too, which I did not respond politely to.

"Shut the fuck up, Sookie!" I had shouted, throwing my book at her from across the room.

She'd gasped. To add insult to injury, I invited Eric inside. Upon that, she ran outside and far into the darkness which engulfed the house. From then on, it was just Eric and me. A detoxifying air moved through the house that evening, even as all my drains clogged with cement.

Sookie hadn't come back yet—even after nine hours—but I wasn't so bothered. Perhaps she was with Alcide… I did not care. It was time to not care.

As I waited for Eric to rise with the setting of the sun, I had slept, cleaned, restocked the kitchen, cooked, and ordered window blinds online. Something told me I would need them. It was a new day that dawned—or a new night that dusked—and I was ready for it. The frozen hurt done by Sookie, Russell, and Bill had been thawed by the sun, and I could breathe without my chest aching now. I wasn't lonely, pressured, out of time, manipulated, or hurting anyone who didn't deserve to be hurt. And with this new melody brought new instruments: I was not going to put up with anyone's shit anymore. Be that Sookie's, Bill's, or Eric's—be that of the degenerates who harassed me at work, Sam, or any other vampire that came into my life. This was the end of it.

I knew I would break here and there—it would be delusion to ignore natural, human dithering; however, I was going to try as hard as I could. I was going to try as hard as I could to pay attention to myself. Never in the way Sookie did, but I'd take a card or two from her deck.

I put down the sponge and turned the shower-head back on, considering my work complete. Deciding that it was time for a shower of my own, I removed the sundress I had donned upon waking up and let it slip to the floor. A floor length mirror hung up against the bathroom door, and I turned around to look at myself in it. I removed my undergarments, and realised I hadn't seen myself naked in a long time. Perhaps before I didn't pay enough attention to myself to look.

My breasts were small—that was an irrefutable truth. She don't got no meat on her, though… Not enough meat on her bones to feed even one of us… I heard the voices in my head. I ate plenty, but I didn't seem to hold any of it anywhere. Even Sookie—petite as she was—had more on her than me. I was perpetually skin and bones; I didn't look unhealthy (though I had been accused of bulimia in high school), but I looked like a girl. The only thing that betrayed this fact was my height and the mature angularity of my face. I supposed there was something in my hips, I thought, as my hands slid over the slope from my small waist to my round hips. My bottom was perhaps my redeeming quality.

I studied the bruises along my arms—endlessly present, then turned and looked over my shoulder. The scar along my back from the wears was still there. I'd had only the doctor's steady hand to mend it—not vampire blood; it was too late to use the latter to smooth it over. I would always have it, until the day I died. It was hideous—a rose tear from waist to hip of three defined claw marks that sunk like silken stripes into my subtly tanned flesh.

Then the door opened. I turned around rapidly to address my assailant, who I knew to be Eric before even seeing his face. I was shocked to see that a lopsided grin did not adorn his face, but instead a heavy eye of cerulean blue. With a human slowness, he stepped towards me, and eventually engulfed me in cold hands. They slid over my jutting shoulders, down the slender ride of my upper arm, then along the dip of my hips, with a thumb tracing the ribbon of my spine.

Through the corner of my eyes, I discovered the sun had set. Perhaps I had spent much longer than I thought staring at myself. After all, the humid heat of the running water had already begun to fog the vanity mirror and make my hair stick to my dewy neck. My throat seemed to clot with the heaviness of the air. Or maybe that was nervousness.

I pushed my hands against his hard stomach—surely doing nothing to him. "Leave me be. I got to shower," I said as I reached for the towel hanging on the rack. I held it up to shield my naked body from him, though I didn't feel very sheepish about it in front of him. I was merely uncertain—what did this empty house mean for us? What did he expect? What was to come of us… alone?

"I'll take one with you," Eric subtly suggested.

"You just took one," I answered.

"I'll watch you then," he shrugged, moving to sit on the closed toilet lid.

An unfamiliar grin raised half of my mouth. "Watch me?"

He nodded. "Don't close the shower curtains."

With a hesitance I pushed to the side, I hung the towel back on the rack. I extended a hand to feel the water—perhaps too hot, but maybe a flushed cheek wouldn't do me poorly here. I stepped in—long legs over the clawfoot tub's porcelain walls—and dipped my head under the water.

"In all my years on earth, I've had it all," Eric spoke after watching my wet my hair fully. "Women, men, vampire, human, young, old, black, white, brown… Still a mystery of the woman's body eludes me, haunts me. Even back in my youth. Many loves fade and renew, but I'd never lost that. The delicacy and precision, but so strong in its core. The force to bare new life but still remain so fine and graceful. You are, I think, the greatest example of this."

I looked to him through the water sloshing over the crown of my head. My hair made a copper net around my face, streaming like molten metal down my neck and face. "Were you a poet in one of your many lives?"

Eric smiled. "No," he said. "Were you?"

I laughed shortly as I reached for my shampoo and began lathering it into my hair.

"Did you have a lady friend, back then?" I asked. "Way back then?"

"Here and there," he answered.

"Kids?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"Then your family. What were they like?" I inquired as I washed the shampoo from my hair. I watched his eyes follow the lilac bubbles as they ran down my breasts and along my abdomen. "I saw them, but only that."

"My father, Ulfrik, was a chieftain. He was a good man—clear-sited, circumspect, devoted. He loved my mother, Astrid, very much; my mother was like him, but more arrogant. She was very beautiful. She was his third and favourite wife. And my sister, Yngvild, was hardly one when she died. But she had my mother's beauty, we could already see it."

"An' Godric?"

Eric cleared his throat, uneasy but prompted. "He changed with time. We all did. But at his purest—at the end of his life—he was good. Sensitive, loving, fair, enlightened. Most ironically, he was very human at the end of it. He was like you. I know he would have loved you."

I finished my shower in silence, then turned off the running water, preparing to step out and reach for my towel, but with a hazy flash I felt it being wrapped around my wet shoulders. Eric gently pulled my hair from under and wrung it out with his hands. I knew then that in these tender, domestic moments that I adored him the most. When he forgot himself—who and what he was.

I looked back at him over my shoulder. "I'd have the ol' seal of approval from him, then?"

A soft smile lightened his pink lips. "More than that."

Eric leaned to place a gentle kiss on my lips, and upon the touch a breeze ran between us. Foreign to the southern heat, it was from somewhere else. He pulled away quickly, startled by the sensation. "After a thousand years you'd'a thought you'd seen everythin'. But I can still surprise you—I like that look you get on your face."

He smiled again. It was nice seeing his face so alleviated, where the immortal hardness of his skin softened to something that resembled supple, human flesh. "What about your family?" He asked, using a towel-clad hand to wipe the pearly droplets from my arms.

"Thought you already knew enough about Sook," I commented.

"No, before that. You were adopted by your grandmother, weren't you?"

"Yes, when I was seven months old," I nodded.

"But before that?"

I pursed my lips. "Believe it or not, but I was a porch baby."

"A porch baby?"

"Y'know, swaddled up and delivered at the front door with nothin' but a note pinned to your blankie?" I tried to laugh. The mystique shrouding my cradle were something I tried to laugh about, but couldn't. Most girls and boys could spout that they were one-sixth French or that their great-great-granddaddy struck the motherlode in the California Gold Rush. I had nothing. I didn't even know what my parents names were.

"Really?" Eric looked at me with raised brows. "I thought people stopped doing that fifty years ago. Where's the note?"

I shrugged in response. "I didn't ask Gran too much about it. I mean she kept me—I owe her everything. I guess some people are just good like that."

Leaving the bathroom, I felt a sweep of air follow then pass me; when I entered my room, Eric was sitting in the bed. "Do you know if she would have kept the note?"

"Probably," I answered. "Don't got no idea where she'd keep it, though."

"We should look."

I sighed loudly, wrapping my robe around me shortly after dropping my towel so as to conceal my nudity quickly. "An' make the house into another trainwreck? Why do you even care so much?"

"Because I want to know what you are," he softly explained.

"Yeah, that sounds familiar," I huffed, as I discreetly slid a nightgown up beneath the robe. "But when you find out, you'll keep it from the world to save my secret. I haven't heard that before—it's only the Bill Compton-Sookie Stackhouse theme song? Maybe I don't want to learn! An' as long as I don't want to, then you don't have no damn right learnin' for yourself."

I left the room after sliding on my slippers and heading toward the staircase. Quickly padding down the stairs and making my way to the kitchen, I felt his quickening presence behind my every footfall. I could feel the familiar suspicion heating in my chest. Even though I knew he said he would turn me to keep me, something about his prying really jabbed my between my ribs and into my heart. I though we could forget about pasts—the present was all we had now with Bill Compton and Russell Edgington taken care of. I was certainly hoping nothing more would arise, but here was Eric—already with a shovel digging at the hole that had been long refilled and planted over.

I was glad he didn't try to stop me until I stopped myself, reaching the fridge to grab a beer. Without closing its door, I opened the bottle and took a long sip. After a refreshing swallow of gilded bubbles, I looked at him standing behind the refrigerator door. He hadn't said anything, which was quite unusual for him. I reached in and took out a TruBlood for him, to which he grimaced but took from my extended hand. My fingers brushed his, and their coldness reminded me of what I had overheard:

"So you'd be willing to drain her of all that special juice she's got just to be with her? 'Cause she isn't going to have that once she's dead."

"Yes," Eric answered.

We would never be a Sookie-Bill relapse because Eric's selfishness was lined and laced with a love more true than Bill's, it would seem. Bill wanted Sookie forever for her sweet, sunny blood, but Eric wanted me forever for me, with or without my blood and beating heart.

"Would you turn me right now?"

Eric blinked, perhaps out of habit, but answered reluctantly: "If you wanted, yes."

"I don't," I finally closed the fridge. "But I appreciate the sentiment," I shared a small smile with him, before boldly raising myself to my toes and placing a warm kiss on his lips. His hand ascended to my neck, smoothing over my wet hair and dipping along my hairline. As his lips moved to my chin and following the downward angle of my jaw, my stomach rumbled loudly.

"Sorry," I laughed. He put his hand to his stomach too. "What?"

"That's an old feeling. I feel… hungry, too," he puzzled, brow furrowed. He then took a sip of his TruBlood, drinking through the pained expression on his face. "It must be yours."

"Catchin' every feeling of mine," I teased.

"That would probably make sex really great."

Much to my distaste, a blush rose to my cheeks, painting rosy pink between faded freckles. I turned away from him towards and walked to the counters. "Stop talkin' like that," I shook my head, pulling few red onions from the ceramic bowl beside the sink. As my fingertips brushed the glaze, I envisioned my paintbrush pressing blue dollops into the jagged rips of the bowl when I painted it in grade school. Gran kept it all this time. The scent of wet pottery paint tickled my nose.

Eric watched me as I began to peel and chop the onions on top of the cutting board. My eyes watered and my nose clogged at the perfumes that arose from the opened root, but I resumed until finished. I proceeded with olives, garlic, lemons, and chicken breast, all whilst working through a beer and several glasses of wine.

When I realised the clock had struck twelve, I set down my glass. Eric sat next to me at the table, with a hand languidly draped across my chair and toying with the frill of my nightgown's bell-sleeve. A droopy smile hung on his lips which spoke of an inexplicable inebriation; he said I was a wrung-out-sponge drinker—the kind that emanated their giddiness so everyone absorbed it. It also probably had something to do with that elusive golden thread that seemed to run between us, sharing the warmest and coldest of feeling that ran between us.

Three-quarters through a bottle of red, the worry that I had forgotten nagged at me: "D'you think Sook is okay?"

"She is probably fine. At Bill's or Jason's, maybe."

"Yeah," I sighed, pushing my empty plate further from me. "I'm stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey. You hungry?"

Eric's eyebrows raised sharply. "Sorry?"

"Right, I forgot. You're just comin' off human to me right now. I don't know why. Want another TruBlood?"

"Not at all," he shook his head.

"Well, how long's it been?"

"You, about a day ago. I'm fine," he reminded me.

"Oh, yeah. I forgot. How'd I taste?"

His chest sunk with an airless breath. He retracted his arm from my shoulders and moved to take my right hand in his left. The tart taste of wine left my tongue and filled with the most savoury flavour I had every before encountered—rich and sweet like sun-baked figs, dense but delicate like the golden, sugared crust of Gran's apple pies; ripe as fresh-picked plums and as intoxicating as one of Grandpa Earl's brandies sitting in the cellar. And riddled along the edges of this flavour was a rumbling arousal that couldn't be explained. I'd heard before that the hunger and lust of vampires were closely tied. "Like—" Eric began, but I stopped him.

"You don't have to tell me," I laughed. "I just got a bit for myself."

"What? How?"

"I can't begin to explain it now!" I giggled, licking my lips. He raised his hand and the taste diffused back into the stain of the wine left on my tongue. "Gone now."

"Incredible," Eric shook his head. "You're incredible."

"Hey, it ain't anything I got control over—" I started, but soon felt Eric's lips on my mouth. I melted into him within moments like butter in a cast-iron pan, beginning with bubbles that popped right in the bottom of my belly. His tongue granted me a whisper of that taste of… me, I guess. And the warmth that was swirling inside of me felt in me and out of me, because I could feel him right there before me: heated, frothing, alluring. Messing his hair, I ran a hand up his neck and settled my palm in the nape, toying fingers with the soft, golden hair. He released a sigh into my mouth, spreading kisses down my cheeks and along my jaw, until settling at the thumping inch of soft flesh beneath my ear. I heard a click, one I was familiar with now, and could lightly sense the tug of a fang against my skin, not yet breaking skin but certainly wishing to.

"Hold on," I managed, pushing him away. I let out of loud exhale and picked up my plate and glass, bringing it to the sink. The porcelain sounded as I placed them inside, feeling his presence just behind me. I wanted to, I knew that. This was the feeling of it: dark pink, growing hotter by the second, sprouting from my hips and blooming as dark and amorous as a maroon carnation.

I turned around, drying my hands on my dress, and nervously looked up to him. Fangs still low and present, I decided:

Now.

I took him in my arms as tightly as I could, lowering his neck manually so his face could meet mine. I sunk into him, and he bent his knees to scoop my thighs into his large hands, holding them at his hips as he began to clumsily manage to leave the room at his high speed. On the way up the stairs, I hit the railing a few sloppy times, but managed to hit the soft, folded duvet of my bed without any major injuries.

My dress was removed slowly but surely, leaving my in only a pair of somewhat lacy, nude knickers. When I pulled his shirt just inches up his smooth back, it was off him before I could realise. With our bare chests pressed together, an unfamiliar ache became present between my legs. I was unsure of it—desire? It actually hurt with wanting, and I groaned in frustration. The only remedy to it in my mind was him. But I wanted to give him something else first.

"Eric," I breathed loudly, and he lifted him head from his delicate work along the tops of my breasts, which now bloomed a soft pink with his kisses.

"Georgina?" He asked quietly, lapping a sweet tongue at the swell of my breast.

"Bite me."

As his brow rose in question, it then set in a lustful determination. He raised himself back to my neck, kissing it lightly. "Sure?" He murmured against my skin.

Before answering, I sunk my fingers into the waist of his black pants and underwear, seeking to push them downwards. He assisted until they nearly flew across the room, leaving him even more bare than myself. Accomplished, I answered: "Yes."

He pressed himself against the inside of my thigh, which I had wrapped securely around him, and the aching worsened as I was confronted with his hardness. Then I felt the teeth sink, piercing but delightful, breaking through the skin and soon sucking at the blood that issued dark and rich from the wound. The acquainted sensation ripened by my neck; tingling, light, deep. A sharpened breath left my mouth at the closeness of threat intermingled with the presence of pleasure. He seemed to know when my heartbeat had faltered to reluctantly pull himself away, kissing at the wound until it closed. His mouth kissed back upwards until it reached mine, and I could taste myself on him, but this time is only tasted like blood—salty, metallic, heavy. What I tasted earlier only seemed to be how it felt on his tongue.

"Jesus Christ—"

"Don't—"

"Sorry, but that's the best I've ever had," he started laughing, and I saw him mouth and teeth red with blood. "I feel almost… drunk."

"What?"

"I don't know," he shook his head with a loopy grin.

"Can you still…?" I asked, but he just smiled more widely than I'd ever seen him smile.

"Don't worry, Gee," Eric chuckled as his lips began to work back down between the valley of my breasts, leaving blood-stained kisses along my fair skin. He reached my thighs, lightly dragging the fangs up the reactive insides of my legs. Then he played me with his hands like a harp. Sookie had girlishly talked about these kinds of things before, that I had only ever seen in movies and read in books. The ache simultaneously subsided and worsened, making my neck strain and the crown of my head dig into my pillow.

Then the snow began to fall. The walls melted into violet dusk sneaking between tall figures of pale-barked Birch. It wasn't cold, but sweet snow like sugar falling around us in thick flakes. My bed and our lovemaking was kept warm in a diaphanous bubble, but pale moonbeams still fell upon us. I didn't know if Eric could see it, for he kept working fine ministrations upon my centre, making my stomach clench and my lungs heave. And quickly enough the lightly-foliaged trees seemed to part with the wind and expose glittering stars. See stars, Sookie had once told me of these sensations when you shared a bed with someone, but here I was literally seeing them. And I'd bet all my money that Eric could see them too.

As my body reached finale than diminuendoed into a tickling bliss, Eric's mouth moved up my ribcage and breasts and eventually found solace upon my lips. I felt his smile against me, and he pulled his face centimetres back.

"Can you see it too?" He asked.

"Uh-hm," I only managed, still weak and lightheaded.

Eric coaxed me back into another rising sequence with kisses and gentle caresses, ensuring I wasn't too sensitive for the next phase. He entered and moved inside of me with gradual caution, which admittedly brought stinging pain somewhere deep inside my core. He promised me the pain would subside, and with easy, slow pushes inside of me, it did. It didn't take long to bring me back to the stars, but this time I got the sun instead. And I swear that when we came, the sun shone on us, and the jumbled outpour of elation and emotion and sunshine made my whole body feel like it lay on a cloud. For a moment I couldn't breathe, and Eric's eyes—as I saw them above me—were pained as he poured into me. He bit me inadvertently, in the dip of my collarbone, after his throat produced a guttural groan; in the midst of his climax he could hardly even lap at the blood that swelled like a pool along my neck. As I loosened my lungs and my body allowed them to take in air, the sun seemed to disappear behind a thick cloud, and the trees and snow faded away into my ordinary, off-white bedroom walls, as Eric eventually closed the wound and swallowed what he'd accidentally spilled.

Eric collapsed next to me with pink-rimmed eyes and parted lips. With a click, he retracted his fangs into his gums. "The sun…" he began, killing off his own thought as he couldn't finish it with words.

"Yeah," I simply stated. "Was it nice?"

"The best I've ever had."

"I meant the sun, silly."

"Like you wouldn't believe."

"Incredible. And I see the sun everyday."

He looked me in the eyes and started laughing.

Eric had been chuckling at the photo of me from my sophomore year of high school for two minutes now, brushing his thumb over the Led Zeppelin t-shirt and badly-dyed black hair I'd donned.

"It was a phase!" I exclaimed, trying to flip the page but finding his hand placed upon the parchment immovable.

"I love how humans do this," he laughed. "They think piercing their lips or wearing boots everyday changes them."

"You know what," I puffed my chest and folded my arms. "It was hard bein' the sister of little-miss-perfect Sookie Stackhouse, with her blonde hair and her big ego and her… boobs."

"I'm sorry," he lifted a hand to smooth a hand over my cheek, a genuine smile breaking through the laughter. "Maybe you're not perfect, but you're closer to it than I've ever seen in another human. I promise."

"Please. If I was any better, maybe I'd've had boys hangin' over me like her. Too bad I'm not fucking bubbly," I sighed. "But I guess at least I don't got a list of boys willin' to kill themselves over me. That's just plain stupid."

"I think it's cute," he looked back to the photo.

"Eric Northman thinks something's cute? Well fry me in butter and call me a catfish! You ain't as dusky and tough and intense as you try and come off!"

"Oh, I'm plenty of that, too," he snarled, pushing the scrapbook the floor and diving at me.

"No, not again!" I squealed between gasping laughs as he pressed strangling kisses into my mouth and along my neck.

"Yes—again, and again, and again," he said between pecks. "Because you're so warm and soft and sweet and… good."

"Yeah, but I got to sleep too," I smiled, as I met his eyes. He pressed a long kiss to my lips.

I heard the front door open loudly and looked into the foyer, where Pam stood. She wore a candy-stripe corset of magenta and black, her hair faultlessly curls into gilded ringlets and her feet elevated by a pair of six-inch stilettos. She stood like a beacon of the twenty-first century in my Antebellum home.

I shot up, grateful I was wearing my nightgown again—unlike Eric, who chose to go wholly nude—and straightened my posture.

"Well I could have guessed," Pam said slowly with an unamused face. Eric stood eventually, shameless before his progeny. "You couldn't have rung?"

"I've been busy," he answered, abandoning the endearing tone he used with me and returning to his typical stagnant, domineering voice. Her eyes darted to the various photo albums covering the living room floor.

"Scrapbooking?"

"Something like that."

"Yeah, I think I'm familiar with that something. I can even smell it on her… A little less sweet," Pam grinned widely, then turned her head to me. "Georgina, I was sad to see you gone when the sun went down. You left us with Sookie. And you both know how I feel about her."

I shared a small, knowing smile and went off to the kitchen to make myself a cup of coffee. At Eric's rate, I wasn't going to be sleeping until well after he'd gone to sleep. I reached into the cupboard to retrieve the grounds, then looked to Pam—who was naturally already sitting at the kitchen table with Eric. "Want a TruBlood?"

"Sure," Pam answered. "Where's that little menace gone off to now anyway? Bill Compton's?"

"I'm not sure," I shrugged. "It's been a while since she stormed off. Maybe to Alcide's?"

"Wouldn't be surprised. She can't manage ten minutes without spreading her legs for whatever new man—be it vamp, wolf, or human—who's willing to massacre a damn army for her."

"Sometimes sacrifices must be made for the people we love, Pamela," Eric reminded her.

"Yeah, but," I pursed my lips, feeling a nagging statement at my lips that I needed said. "The ends of the earth Bill Compton goes to… It's insanity. He'd kill himself for her, his progeny, and everyone that's ever been kind to him. That's not sacrifice, that's selfishness. If you ever tried to kill yourself for me Eric… Not that you would—"

"I would."

"God damnit, no you shouldn't!" I exclaimed. "That's cruel and unfair and selfish. I ain't Sookie, Eric. I don't expect or want any idiot killing themself for me. Don't you ever do that. Don't you ever kill yourself or Pam or anyone else whose ever been good to you to save me."

Eric looked from me then to Pam, who smiled and said: "This is why I like her more."

"Forgive me, Lord," I repented—belatedly.