Many of you guessed correctly who Sookie's visitor was going to be - congratulations!

Disclaimer: is it kidnapping if they come to you willingly?

This story is betaed by Breathesgirl.

Previously:

"What did you promise me, Eric?" I finally dared to whisper the question.

Suddenly he was right in front of me and he was looking in my eyes.

"I promised to look after you," he said.

When he said it that way it sounded fairly simple for something that supposedly included 'many things', not to mention things which were not always possible to fulfill. I might not be the most educated person but it seemed to me that Eric didn't tell me exactly what he had said.

He scrutinized me with his unreadable eyes for a few seconds and then he was gone as if he'd never been there. Eric loved to make a grand exit.

I groaned loudly and covered my face with a pillow. I had already discovered, and almost accepted, the fact that my dreams about Eric weren't a fluke. No, they were the beginning of a series. Since that first one, I'd had many others, all set in a similar mood. They usually started as memories, only to stray from the original scenario as they went on and turned into lusty fantasies.

I'd never dreamed of Eric before, even though I'd always found him attractive (in Eric's case such a statement wasn't a matter of individual taste or personal opinion – it was a statement of fact), so it lead me to assume that it had something to do with my lost memories. Honestly, the phenomenon was making me feel confused and highly embarrassed but I had no idea how to stop it. I worried about whether I would be able to keep my wits about me the next time I faced Eric in the real world with all those images popping into my mind. Staying indifferent in his presence was hard enough as it was, I didn't need to add sex dreams into the mix!

My subconscious was latching onto the smallest details and using them as excuses to show me much spicier versions of past events.

Our trip to Jackson wasn't the only recurring motif used by my imagination. The night before, for example, my sleeping mind decided to treat me to a remake of the infamous orgy that I had taken Eric to as my bodyguard. Oh, believe me, I found out that there were many ways my imagination could get creative by showing me many working variations of that specific story.

I hoped that maybe the dreams would just fade at some point. As it was, they were coming to me every few nights. I had to limit my shower-time, too, and lower the water temperature, because for some reason every time I tried to use bathing as a way to relax my thoughts just tended to drift in an… inappropriate direction. I forced myself not to dwell on whether there was any truth to those visions that kept haunting me, because, well… Holy Moly!

Meanwhile, if not for my dream-dates, I would have been on the best track to sweep the whole thing under the rug.

During the two weeks following my memory loss my life got back to its normal, boring but soothingly familiar rhythm. Except for the brief phone chat with Pam, in which she fed me the official version of the events that took place during the Witch War (that's what they started to call it), constructed and approved of by all interested parties, that we were to stick to in case any questions came from the authorities

I had no contact with the Fangtasia vampires other than that one time. I couldn't help but ask myself if it was a coincidence that Eric delegated the task of informing me about it to Pam, or if maybe he was avoiding me.

The only vampire I was seeing during those nights was Bill because of his frequent visits to Merlotte's.

He was coming to the bar to integrate with the local community – or at least I think that's why, because I did not see any other reason for him to be there. Our interactions were strictly limited – usually we exchanged a few words when I was taking his order, proving how poor my acting skills were by trying to appear indifferent. I was mainly concentrating on giving him civilised responses while he was acting in a surprisingly polite manner.

He was using conventional conversational forms to make remarks on the weather and local gossip, mixed with how-de-do's and such: I wished he would stop.

There was nothing in his behavior that I could hold against him. He always had a soft smile and conventional compliment for me. When I talked with him he always looked me in the eye with this gentle gaze which was supposed to let me know how sorry he was. What unnerved me a little was that he was keeping his eyes trained on me even after I left his table.

Bill was up to something.

However grateful I might be for my temporary reprieve from dealing with supernatural affairs, that peaceful state of things had one serious flaw I had to keep in mind: it was, by definition, temporary. Its expiration date was due that very evening and marked by the impending arrival of the full moon. During the weeks leading up to the full moon I did what I could to keep myself from pondering too often over the grim meaning this lunar phase was probably going to become to me and worrying in advance, but that day I had full right to be concerned – I was driving Jason to Hotshot.

I wasn't capable of thinking about anything else, even vampires, from the moment I woke up that morning.

Concern started eating at me long before we met with Calvin Norris at the town limits of Hotshot and he promised me that they were going to take care of Jason; long before I looked into my brother's normally blue eyes to find them alight with a strange, yellow blaze; even before Jason arrived at my house that afternoon and I read the same tension in his mind, that I'd last experienced when the young women had started going missing in Bon Temps and he had been the main suspect of murdering them in the ongoing investigation – not just the one conducted by the local police force but also in the minds of our neighbors.

I knew that Jason would shift long before he himself acknowledged the possibility; his changed brain signature told me as much. Now all that was left for me to do was to survive the night with my own thoughts and hope that my brother would come back to me the next day with a sound body and mind.

It was too early to sleep so in a vain attempt at focusing on something other than my worry for Jason, I changed into some comfy clothes, made myself some hot cocoa and curled up on the sofa with an old blanket and a book. I managed to read two chapters before I heard knocking.

My already not-so-good mood soured when I saw Bill standing on my porch.

Huh. I knew he was up to something.

"Good evening, Sookie," he greeted me, using the most velvety voice he had in his repertoire and, much to my dismay, sending a slight habitual shiver down my spine.

"Hi, Bill. What's up?" I asked quickly.

I had no intention of inviting him inside if the only reason he came was to cast a look full of melancholy on me. My emotional life was complicated enough as it was.

"I wanted to talk to you."

I sighed. Gran raised me too well – I didn't want to talk to him through the door, so I gave in.

"What about? Come in."

I stepped aside to let him in.

"I'm sorry, I'm afraid I'm out of True Blood."

He nodded.

"Eric hasn't been here for some time," he noted. He confirmed his observation in a hardly discreet way – he inhaled deeply.

Both his remark and the sniffing irritated me: None of his damn business!

I made a heroic effort and managed to squash the childish urge to snap at him and tell him that I seriously doubted Eric drank bottled blood during his stay at my house.

"If you're looking for him, it would be easier to call Fangtasia," I replied sweetly.

What can I say? I had to keep the balance between my manners and my displeasure.

"I'm not here to talk about Eric."

Thank God for small favours.

"I'm here because I'm worried about you."

Oh? I raised my eyebrow, waiting for him to continue.

"Sookie, I have to ask, why you seemed surprised that night when you saw me at Merlotte's? I know it wasn't a coincidence. It was out of character for you; you don't generally forget that kind of thing. I wanted to make sure everything is fine."

Of course he did.

"When?" I asked innocently.

Pretending to be dumber that I was never hurt me before.

Bill sighed: I noticed offhandedly that Bill sighed quite often.

"When I got back from Peru."

I pondered my options. I could flat out deny everything but it would be very easy for Bill to uncover my lie by asking me a question connected to that forgotten by me conversation that we had had when I met him at Pam's before the battle with the witches (I figured as much by putting together the pieces of information provided by Pam, Eric, and unintentionally by Bill himself). I thought that maybe it would be better to give him something so he would let me off the hook.

"I don't remember anything from that night," I admitted.

Bill looked at me with a suitably stunned expression.

"Nothing?"

I shook my head.

"It's probably a side-effect of Pam forcing Hallow to remove the curse she cast on Eric," I explained using my serious voice.

I was proud of myself; I didn't lie.

My logic was a clear indication that I was spending too much time with vampires.

"But you do remember everything else?"

Damn. For a moment I forgot that Bill too was a vampire.

"Oh, believe me Bill, there are things in my life that I wish I could forget. Unfortunately, no such luck," I tried another avoidance tactic, this time looking at him pointedly, since some of said things were closely tied to his person. "I'm sorry, I don't feel like talking about that."

He still didn't look convinced as he mulled something over in his head.

I had no desire to confess anything to him. As I said: not his business.

"So you didn't talk about that with Eric, either?" he asked trying a different angle.

Jeez, some people just don't get hints.

"I don't feel obligated to report to you about my talks with Eric," I replied sternly: He forced me to do it. I tried a nicer approach first but it didn't work. "and honestly, I don't want to discuss it at all."

Suddenly a light-bulb went off in my head – Bill was jealous. You'd think that of all people Bill was the last one to want to talk to me about Eric, but in that second I realised that he was trying to feel me out.

Bill knew that something had happened between me and his boss and he had suspected that something was wrong with my memories. This whole game was about finding out if Eric hid the change in our relationship from me and if he kept had in touch after returning to Fangtasia. What I didn't understand was what Bill planned to do with that information: did he want to pretend that he knew nothing about it and let me think that he was still the only man in my life? Or maybe he wanted to wait for the opportune moment to reveal the truth and shock me? I also realised that one of the possible reasons why he waited so long to confront me might have been that he did it in the hope that Eric would satisfy any interest he had in my person and leave me alone: It wasn't a pleasant thought.

Summarising, unless Bill was just jealous for the sake of being jealous it seemed that he was trying to determine whether I had moved on with my life and if there was any chance of fixing things between us. Now I had to ask myself a question about how I felt about that.

I wasn't not going to pretend that I didn't miss him, because I did, and that some small part of me didn't secretly wish that things could go back to the way they had been before – but the other, bigger, part of me was telling me that that was exactly the one thing that was never going to happen. No matter what I decided to do and whether I gave him another chance or not it was impossible to erase the past.

Bill had hurt me and even though, from what I gathered, he didn't have much choice in answering Lorena's call since she was not only his lover but also the same vampiress who had turned him once upon a time, (there was some kind of mystical connection between a vampire child and its maker that no one ever bothered to explain to me in detail, but I knew that it forced the younger vampire to obey their maker) and even though I knew that he wasn't fully in control when he attacked me in that trunk in Jackson (another interesting episode in my biography), it didn't change the fact that I got badly hurt as a result and that he was the one who hurt me.

I'd never had the opportunity to give voice to the feelings of betrayal and anger that grew inside me in the aftermath of that whole situation.

At first Bill just wasn't there, and when I finally found out why I couldn't confront him because, as I learned from Pam and Eric, he was already out of town. Then, when I found him, he was unconscious and mangled by the very same Lorena (charming woman) so talking wasn't really an option.

Maybe we could have had a chance for that when Bill woke up if not for the fact that by then Debbie Pelt had managed to push me into the trunk with his starved self. Let's just say that an injured vampire and a young woman in a small enclosed space don't mix well – at least from the woman's point of view. After barely avoiding death by my ex's hands (or rather fangs) I was so exhausted and so focused on (unsuccessfully) avoiding any further injuries that I had no energy left for a real confrontation. Then Bill left and I wanted to put it all behind me.

I used to be happy when we were together because I finally wasn't alone and I felt loved, though it was only later that I started to realise that it could have been perhaps at least partly an illusion. And now… I believed that my suffering wasn't something he wanted. That didn't mean, however, that I was ready to trust him again. Maybe it wasn't his fault. I didn't know. I wasn't sure what to think. No matter what the truth was, logic is not always something you can apply to matters of the heart.

Maybe someday I'll forgive Bill: maybe – one day – but not that day. It was still too painful for me to think about, let alone actually speak of.

We continued our conversation for some time, avoiding the sore topics, but once Bill realised that I wasn't interested in a neighborly chat any more than I was in answering his inquiries about my whereabouts at the beginning of January he finally gave up.

When he was leaving I was fairly sure that he knew my secret but neither of us admitted it out loud.

Ahh, he's gone, at least for now.

Next time: we're setting up the stage.