A/N: Thank you so much for your beautiful comments and continued support! This is a little chapter from Eric's perspective on the relationship development. Hopefully it's fun getting into his head now and then…

Chapter 8

Eric's POV

The day apart was my idea, for me as much as for Sookie. She was still questioning what a relationship on my terms would mean, and I was having difficulty maintaining my calm. I had no desire to force her into something she had not fully considered, but my impulses toward persuasion were hard to keep in check. I needed a distraction.

I arrived at Fangtasia around 10:00pm—earlier than usual but late enough for the bar to be reasonably full—and let myself in through the back. Pam stopped me in the hall before I could reach my office, her eyebrow arched wryly.

"Is the pleasure all ours?" she drawled. I smirked at her but touched her shoulder gently as I brushed past.

"As usual." Pam slipped into the office after me.

"Trouble in sweet little blonde paradise?" she tossed back.

"Nothing I won't handle," I dismissed, leafing through some paperwork.

"Nothing I wouldn't handle either… Tell me when you get tired of her—I want a turn," she winked. The growl ripped out of me before I could stop it. It didn't matter—she felt its origins before the sound occurred anyway. There was no keeping my feelings from Pam. "Hmm," she said, more intrigued than offended, "curiouser and curiouser…"

I would not justify myself to Pam. I did not have to.

"Don't you have some humans to judge?"

"I already am—one in particular…"

"That's enough," I ordered curtly. I saw her form a sarcastic retort, though she kept silent.

"Throne?" she asked simply.

"Throne." She shrugged nonchalantly and headed off.

My throne at Fangtasia was an ironic gesture at first—a nod to my upbringing, a gimmicky theatrical display, and a place to literally hold court with other vampires—but it had morphed into an important icon for my human clientele. I knew how they perceived me when I sat in it. One does not grow to my age without acquiring a strong awareness of one's affect on others. Humans saw me as dangerous yet sedate, coolly aloof, indifferent. Although they read me as bored, they also recognized my absolute and total control—nothing was outside of my purview. Despite my frequent annoyance with my human patrons, it was sometimes soothing to sit wrapped in the knowledge of their opinion, publicly visible but untouchable. Above.

I settled into the chair and assumed my usual posture, feeling the power seep into me. It was safe, comfortable, familiar. I did not know that I actually craved the display in the time I'd spent away, that I had missed it somehow. The realization was unsettling.

After a moment, Pam came to sit beside me. She did not speak. She did not offer me a new dancer. She did not try to make things easier. She just provided companionship. I welcomed it. Things were simple with Pam. While I cared about her deeply, she did not intoxicate me with her blood or drive me senseless with her body or pluck at my heart with her words… Damn. Even surrounded by stimuli, it was impossible to push Sookie from my mind. I shifted, agitated; without a second look, Pam rose and walked to the bar to give me space.

Glancing around the room, I tried to distract myself by noticing and evaluating everything that was new—every face, every fixture, every detail. I liked new things. Sookie might have said I was obsessed with them. But she was wrong if she thought my fascination held no regard for the past.

On the contrary.

The past was always nested inside of the new—palimpsestic, inescapable. No matter where one looked, something had been eliminated, pasted over, fit inside of something else. I saw it all stretched before me, buried beneath me as endless stratigraphy—layers upon layers upon layers. Open expanses became churches became shopping malls. Streets went from twining dirt to rough cobblestone to black asphalt. Humans changed, too, though the past was always visible: traits, ideologies, and behaviors compounded into one another, altered but also traceable, spreading throughout time. I could see so many connections. I understood why attitudes and beliefs appeared in human culture when they did, whether cruel or racist or altruistic. Even when something seemed unique, there was always causation. I rarely needed to postulate or consider for long—I could easily find all the whys. I had lived through them. Everything was caught up in an endless series of links forming infinite chains of meaning. Nothing was ever new, or ever would be again.

That knowledge did not necessarily bother me—not really. Part of the pleasure I took in the present was seeking out the connections, studying what seemed to be different but was actually intimately knowable. That included physical, sensual discoveries as well as theoretical ones. They fed my power. I collected the new as it turned into the known. And then I moved on.

Sookie, though…

I inhaled roughly in an attempt to stop myself, but soon recognized the futility. I couldn't keep my mind away from her. Once I decided to indulge my thoughts they washed over me like a flood. I bathed in them.

I had tasted Sookie, I had known her, but yet she still felt…new. What were the reasons for that? Why couldn't I collect her and move on? I could have told myself it was her Fae blood or her hesitance to give herself to me completely that kept me from feeling sated, that made her seem exciting and different. But those were not the reasons, I realized. She felt new because she drew out a newness in me. I had sensed it before I had really tasted her, before I had buried myself in her. The sensations she teased out of me were always different, always novel. She pulled me apart, continually, ceaselessly. Every time.

A troubled curiosity filled me. How was it possible? I recalled my experiences with many, many others, looking for patterns, similarities, connections. I saw flashes of all the men and women I had before, each with a flood of sensations attached: the first hot liquid pulse of my youth; the ageless satisfaction in tasting my name in another's ecstatic scream; the sensual excess of drinking and fucking another into black oblivion, fangs throbbing, buried deep without remorse. I had experienced numerous physical highs in the encounters, yes, but also the pleasures of categorizing, logging away, coming to understand. And so went my effortless accrual of power.

Since my time with Sookie, though, my life felt…different. I now had feelings that went beyond the regard and respect I had felt for her after our first evening together. They were greater than the violent pleasures her body brought me while her incandescent blood glowed in my veins. Perhaps most jarringly, they surpassed even my power of absolute understanding, which seemed to lessen in certainty the longer I was with her. There was something deeper, more important stirring in me that I had not yet experienced, that I could not name. And it was not merely a blend of my competing desires for savage passion and mindful control. While those had not faded, I felt something different, something tender and selfless spreading through my chest, warm and golden and easy. Something…new.

Although Pam was across the room leaning on the bar, I felt her gaze on me as I pondered. I turned toward her sharply. In that moment and all at once, she recognized something in me I did not know was there. Her eyes widened in disbelief, her arms dropped to her sides, and her mouth spread into a slow, knowing grin. Her reaction felt like a suckerpunch. It had not occurred to me what to label the newness—or even that there was a label—until I saw her reaction, but now... Now it felt impossible to deny. It was…love.

Gods fucking damnit.