A/N: I just couldn't stay away from this story. A little more of the last evening from Eric's perspective. Lemons…

Chapter 5

Eric's Outro

The moon had changed angles, sending a silvery afterglow through the open window. The clock on the wall gently ticked out the time. I lay beside Sookie, stretched out, naked, but not sated, not content.

I was waiting.

She slept. Vulnerable and soft and brave. I knew what it meant for Sookie to let her guard down around me—it was more than just exhaustion from our activities. It was trust. My chest swelled.

I was aware of every part of her. Her hair tumbling over my shoulder. My thumb against the pulse of her inner wrist. Her knee splayed across my thigh. I still wanted to take her—her blood, her body, her sense of self—but for all my riotous desires, I managed to stay still. My senses were saturated, full to bursting. Instead of urging me to act, though, they kept me in suspended animation, hovering at the edge of reckless abandon.

Again, I was struck by a wild equilibrium between raw desire and tender regard. It was a tense balance—the next moment always unpredictable, in question, requiring vigilance—but I loved it. It was a challenge to maintain, and I wanted to push myself. This was the true sublime—the place between the ecstasy of dominant possession and the terror of destructive loss. I would stay in it as long as I could.

As if she felt my thoughts, as if to test me further, Sookie turned in my arms, rolling to her side. She pressed back into me with the uninhibited sensuality that comes in sleep, and I shifted, resting my erection in the small of her back. I could feel her blood thrum through her body, sending a cascade of sensations into me—hot violet, pounding ocean—and a wave of lust almost overreached my tenuous control. My fangs descended. I lay still and breathed into it, accepting and denying the potent desire to puncture.

I felt the growl rumble out of my chest before I heard it. It reverberated against Sookie's skin, and she stirred against me, gradually gaining awareness.

"Lover. You're back," I smiled.

She shivered, arching into me, pulling at my hands so they encircled her waist. I knew she found this pose comforting; I found it pleasurable, too. But after laying awake for hours, throbbing in silence as the sun's approach neared, I did not want more tacit calm, more gentle stillness.

I wanted her.

Since our relationship changed, I had yet to drink from her. I'd only tasted her exquisite, superlative blood through small sensual cuts that fed my arousal instead of sating it. I wanted to know if I could handle more, if I could keep my balance while still giving myself over to pleasure. I knew earlier in the night she had been testing her own boundaries—how far she was willing to follow her desires, however dark—and I had enjoyed watching her explore her experience as well as my reaction to it. Now it was my turn to push the limits, to feel out my new partner.

Instead of caressing her, I stroked my hands firmly down her sides, awakening her desire. I felt her pulse increase, her breathing turn erratic. Soon her response stirred me as well, and my hands went to tease her breasts without a conscious command. Her soft gasps nearly set me ablaze, and I rolled so that she was stretched out across me on her back, rocking into me, showing me her need. My hands now had free reign to explore her, and I stroked every part I could reach. Curling my head to the side, I pressed my fangs to her neck.

Though I thought she was beyond words, I heard her whisper distinctly, "This is what I want." She brought her hand to the back of my head, and pushed me insistently into her.

I needed no further encouragement. Gripping her hips in both my hands, I readied myself. I teased her skin briefly with the sharp points before I sank my fangs into her.

What came next defied belief.

I was accustomed to feeding on the living—in my millennium of experience, I had tasted many variations and logged away all of my responses. Depending on the quality of the blood and the surrounding circumstances, feeding could trigger a frenzied impulse, a violent insatiability that struck me ravenous and threatened the life pulsing in my arms. Sometimes it caused a sensuous ripple to spread through me, urging me to take my time and savor the moment. Still others evoked curiosity, prompting me to drink deeper, to determine the source of the flavor. Over the years, I had come to expect all of these impulses, to recognize the desires and respond appropriately to manage the situation. It had been hundreds of years since I had a response I was not aware of, that I could not control.

Vampires pride themselves on sensual awareness, even inside of experiences of extreme pleasure. I had grown exceptionally good at it. Even my synaesthetic responses did not alter my detailed awareness of the physical world.

But Sookie was different.

As her blood trickled into my system, I almost immediately lost consciousness. Any sense of my concrete surroundings was utterly gone. I was suddenly floating—naked, empty, and free—in a gray, bottomless sea. I felt water, warm and inviting, lapping at my skin, and golden rays of the sun filtering hazily through a silver sheen of clouds. I breathed in and felt tiny salt crystals bloom in my lungs, bobbing weightless and content upon the surface of the water. A beach of white shimmering sand stretched out endlessly to one edge of the horizon, while the sea continued on infinitely to the other. I had no desires. I had no needs. For the first time I could remember, I felt true balance.

Everything came roiling back with a vengeance a moment later when I felt Sookie grasp my cock and slide it languidly against her sex. Instantly I snapped into the present, my physical arousal, impossibly, stronger than it had been before the feeding. The surge between absolute calm and reckless desire was disorienting, unsettling. Maddening, even. Taking Sookie had never felt like a more desperate necessity.

She was still on her back stretched across me, writhing softly. She had no idea what had happened, where I had gone. I felt instinctively, as I never had before, that she was something different, something more, something I had to wrap myself around and pull into me, to chain myself to forever.

With one last ragged drag at her throat, I grabbed her to me aggressively and flipped her forward. She rose onto her hands and knees in anticipation. I circled her hot silk before burying myself in her fully.

"Eric!" she screamed out, as though summoning me, dragging me out of myself and further into her. She tightened, and I felt myself fade from the present again.

There was no quiet, peaceful sea this time. I just felt red—hot, wet, pulsing red, swirling around me, filling my nose, flooding my tongue with an indescribably delicious essence, increasing instead of quenching my thirst. I gasped inside of it, desirous and unhinged. It was as though I had fallen into Sookie's blood where I would gladly stay, thrusting, drinking, and drowning until the end of time.

Piercing through my unconscious, I heard Sookie's cry of overwhelmed pleasure, and I returned to the moment just in time to feel her climax around me. I wanted to cry out from exhaustion at the multiplicity of total-body experiences she had me careening between, but I also needed to regain and assert my control. For her, perhaps, but mostly for myself. I gripped her hips in determination, and drove into her hard and fast until I lost myself.

I collapsed back onto the bed, bringing her with me, shattered and shaken. She laughed playfully, charged by the experience. It took her a minute to notice my dazed state.

"Eric? Everything ok?" I shook my head to clear it.

"Everything is…unbelievable." She glanced at me somewhat skeptically.

"You look exhausted. Where's this legendary stamina I've heard so much about?"

I gave her a long look before crushing my mouth to hers, releasing my pent-up angst and exhaustion, as well as my increasing devotion and desire. Though taken aback, she soon hummed into my mouth, opening to my tongue. It was not long before we were entwined together again.

"Wow. I should goad you more often," she laughed afterward, staring up into my eyes, warm and dazzling. A sudden rush surged through my chest. I wanted to tell her everything, to explain what happened when I drank her and took her—how I fell into her, how she swallowed me up and enveloped every part of me, and how I wanted to do it again and again, every night for the rest of my existence.

But daylight was coming. I kissed her, softly this time, and reluctantly unwound her limbs from my body. Some uncertainty returned to her eyes.

"Tonight...?"

"It's mine," I answered quickly. "You couldn't keep me away."

She beamed at me, and kissed me with a force that threatened to pull me under again. I broke away from her and walked to the window.

Despite the impending danger of sunrise, I couldn't quite bring myself to leave. Everything I wanted—desire, turbulence, balance—was still in the room. I turned back to her with a bemused, uncharacteristic grin and shrugged helplessly. She seemed to understand, and broke into a full, long laugh. Her joy finally propelled me forward. Just as I shot out of the frame, I heard her utter a single word. My word.

"Lover."

It reverberated through me, strong and warm and resonant, as I rocketed through the lightening sky.

She was. I was. We were.