I lay beside Eric and felt his phantom pulse. His hand lazily stroked the top of my head. I didn't know what time it was, but I guessed it was after 4 a.m. I struggled to keep my eyes open.
"Is there anything I could do or say to make you stay?" he asked into the silence.
I considered the question carefully.
"No," I said and, bizarrely, added, "no, thank you," as though he'd offered me sugar for my tea.
He stretched and I felt the muscles of his chest move beneath my fingers.
"I will miss you," I said.
"I will miss you, too," he replied.
"Will your blood wear off?"
"Eventually," he said.
"So until then, I'll ... feel you? Even across the ocean?"
"Probably," he said.
It was the worst break up ever: a bruised heart plus a blood bond that would just have to wear off. Eventually.
"Dawn is coming," he whispered and pulled me close. His mouth found mine and we kissed again, his fingers raked my back gently to show me what he wanted, as if my hips didn't already know. I lay back and let him move over me, grabbing a hank of blond hair to pull his head down so I could hide my face in his neck. I had made the right decision, I was certain of that, but as he pushed inside me I couldn't help but doubt my own certainty.
It made no sense at all.
Xxx
Eric stood at the door in the predawn gloom. A trickle of blood ran from his ear.
"Get inside," I hissed.
"I'll wait till you've left," he said.
"I'm capable of waiting for a taxi on my own," I said, looking towards the eastern sky where the first faint rays of light were climbing the horizon. "Please, Eric, go inside."
He hesitated and I bounded back up to the house to plant one more kiss on his cheek.
"Go inside," I insisted and gave him a gentle shove, pulling the door shut before returning to the sidewalk. It felt like I was the only living creature around: no birdsong, no insects, in the chill December air. The only thing I could hear was the sound of a rattling car coming around the bend in the road. Barely believing my eyes, I saw Sookie Stackhouse draw up at the curb.
She rolled down her window.
"Well?" she called. "You getting in?"
I turned to look at the house but there was not even a twitch of the curtain to indicate that Eric was watching what was going on. Nonetheless, I made a "What the fuck?" face at the door before rolling my case to the trunk of Sookie's little car and, with great difficulty, shoving it in.
I got in on the passenger side. There was a little child strapped in a car seat, blond as her mother, sucking earnestly on a pink pacifier. She looked at me curiously.
"Maggie, meet Adele. Adele, meet Maggie."
The child removed her pacifier and said, "It's dark."
"It is," I agreed.
"I take it Eric didn't tell you I was coming to pick you up," she said curtly. The car tore off down the road of the gated community at a speed much higher than the demure 20 miles an hour demanded of its residents.
"Eh, no," I said. "I asked him to book me a taxi."
"Yeah," she said. "One thing you gotta learn about Eric is that he's a sneaky b-a-s-t-a-r-d."
Like I didn't know that already.
"Why did he ask you to pick me up?" I asked. Sookie was looking straight ahead, not making eye contact with me, just checking on her daughter in the mirror.
"So I could put in a good word for him – you know, persuade you to stay on here in Louisiana and be his queen."
She injected a lot of disdain into that last word.
"Why you?" I wondered.
"He thinks we're friends," she said. "Dumb vampires don't understand the complexity of human relationships."
It nonetheless seemed a bit tactless to me, even for a vampire. Eric was smart, and all inability to understand the workings of the human female aside, even he would understand how weird it was to make me have this conversation with his ex-lover, what with all of their complicated history.
"But why you?" I repeated. "You, you of all people seem to be last person who would want me to be with Eric Northman."
"Why do you say that?" she snapped, momentarily taking her focus off the road and swinging around to look at me.
"Because you still want him," I said. There, I said it. It hung in the air between us, like something that could be swatted, batted away.
"I don't," she said finally. "I told you that already."
"Doesn't seem like that to me."
"I have a lot of his blood," she said. "It could take years till everything ... fades away. You'll know what I mean."
I said nothing.
"I don't want him," she said resolutely. "But his blood has left something like a fingerprint on my heart. It takes time to get rid of it. Do you know what I mean?"
"Yes," I admitted. I was not looking forward to living with the Viking's big bloody fingerprints all over my heart.
She indicated and the car swung dangerously to one side.
"Wheeee!" cried Adele.
"We're nearly at the car hire place," Sookie said, all business. "So I gotta pitch him to you. He's offering you a great opportunity. That's what he told me to tell you."
"Whoa," I laughed, breaking the tension. "You're really selling it, girl!"
Sookie smiled. "What can I say? There was a time I would've given anything to spend a lifetime at his side. Sure, it was a very short time, but nonetheless. I think of him as a friend, at the end of the day, and I think you should reconsider his offer. "
She pulled up outside the car hire office, a place with a single lit window and a lonely clerk inside.
Sookie grabbed my arm.
"I can hear what you're thinking," she said. "I know how you feel. But he likes you and he will be loyal to you, we both know it – if you don't mind him snacking around, that is. You would be good for him, you'd be a good balance to his worst excesses. He needs someone to control him and God knows, Pam will only egg him on for her own amusement because she doesn't like the political animal he's become. I'm afraid that without you, and without all the protection your fancy-schmanzy connections brings, he's a sitting duck in Louisiana."
I hadn't thought about it like that.
"I know you hadn't thought about it like that," Sookie said.
Damn, she was spooky.
"I know I'm spooky," she continued, "but just listen to me: Eric Northman is my friend and I want him to be happy. More than that, though, I want him to be safe. So if that means you have to stick around and help him rule Louisiana, that's what you gotta do. Get me?"
She leaned over me and opened the door.
"The handle sticks," she said but we both knew she was booting me out.
"You're weird, Sookie Stackhouse," I said. I knew she could hear me think it, so it might as well be out in the open. "But I still kind of like you, nonetheless."
She grinned back, a gappy grin, one of the rare smiles she gave me that had any real warmth.
"Back atcha, Maggie Kennick," she said and I slammed the door shut.
The car pulled away and the little girl waved at me from the back seat. I waved back and went inside to get my car.
