Chapter Twenty-Nine – Fucking Everything Up

SPOV

What. A. Dick!

‘Exactly! And what a GLORIOUS dick it is! And you left it all alone! Go back! Go. Back. Right. Now!’

Shut the fuck up, Betty!

She couldn’t control me and neither could he. Who did he think he was? My daddy?

‘If he pulls our hair, smacks our ass, and asks, ‘Who’s your daddy?’ you can bet I’ll yell out his name.’

SHUT UP BETTY!!!

Up until five minutes ago I’d felt like I’d done a pretty good job today. Now I felt foolish, but not for the reasons Eric called me a fool.

It was for allowing myself to think I could do anything right where he was concerned.

It wasn’t like I’d had gobs of time to ponder how much life as I knew it had changed in the last forty-eight hours. It wasn’t like I’d always known about vampires or werewolves or every other fucking little gremlin that had been lurking around all along.

And it wasn’t like I hadn’t walked through life without using my telepathic upper hand to my advantage.

I’d listened to everyone in my range the whole time I’d been gone. I’d even scanned the area surrounding his house before I left in case anyone was lurking in the shadows of the surrounding trees. The sun was up so the vamps were down for the count. I could make out most thoughts in the snarly red heads like Fuckity Fuck’s, whatever he was. I could get a sense of emotions from the static minds like my law professors had, whatever they were. With everyone else I would’ve heard potential fuckery long before it was actually afoot, but Eric must not have thought very highly of my gift if he was so quick to dismiss it.

Or maybe he just didn’t think very highly of me at all.

Did I get that he was worried about me?

Yes.

But fuck if there weren’t nicer ways to say you care. Like with a nice Hallmark. Or even a Teleflora bouquet.

He didn’t even try to understand how new it all was to me. To think at all about how up until a week ago, as far as I knew humans were the only beings I walked amongst. To accept I had spent my whole life thinking I was the only person with a quirky ‘extra’ and that it would take time for me to consider there were other quirky people I needed to be aware of.

Instead I got yelled at for being so stupid and having an inept fairy godmother thrown in my face. He mocked the woman I now knew to be real. The woman who had protected me as a child. The woman who had saved me from the worst kind of monster.

And he had been all human.

Eric didn’t know that. He couldn’t know that because I hadn’t told him the whole story, but it didn’t make his snide comments hurt any less. And it didn’t matter to me whether he could remember anything or not. I hadn’t tolerated his shit when he’d been ‘Mr. Northman’ and I sure as hell wasn’t going to take it from Eric. In fact, he was lucky I couldn’t turn him into a pumpkin right now.

Since I was so stupid, he might end up a rabbit turd.

But most of all I was just hurt. Hurt he would lash out at me so quickly and so easily when I was doing my best just trying to keep up. Hurt that it didn’t even seem to occur to him how much he’d turned my life upside down and in spite of that fact, I was still there. That I would be there to the end, no matter how bitter it might be when all was said and done and it ended up biting me in the ass.

Maybe it was all just one big pipe dream. Thinking I’d be able to find a way to undo his amnesia. Thinking if I did he would forgive me when he could remember. What in the hell did I know anyway? I was just two weeks shy of my twenty-third birthday. For all I knew he rode shotgun with Christopher Columbus across the Atlantic.

I hadn’t even been on a dinner cruise.

What could I possibly have to offer someone like him? Why would someone as worldly as him want someone as backwoods as me when even now, when he couldn’t remember how to work a clutch, he still found me lacking in the smarts department.

So what else had he found lacking about me before he lost his memories?

We would need to talk. Eventually. Right now I could either scream my fool head off or break down in tears. Neither was an option I was willing to entertain. Not when we had to spend two hours cooped up in my car together.

And if I didn’t figure out a way to deal with it all in the meantime, they could be a very frigid and silent two hours.

As soon as I heard the shower turn on, I threw myself down onto the couch and grabbed the remote. Stabbing at the buttons like he’d stabbed at everything I’d done today. I knew it wouldn’t take him an hour to get ready, but it could very well take me a month to calm down. Thinking I could distract myself by looking for something hinky amongst the casino crowd, I channel surfed until I landed on the right camera.

First I searched through every face I could see to make sure I didn’t recognize any of them. I’d done a cursory web search earlier reading up on any murders that had taken place over the last few nights, and found nothing that couldn’t be readily explained. There weren’t any stories about anyone going missing either, so I didn’t think there would still be agents hanging around his casino when I was ninety-nine percent sure Agent Latteste was still glorying over his vampire victory.

The whole thing read like bad fairytale fiction come true. Not that he would ever know that.

The distraction worked. As my concentration grew, my anger waned just like my confidence had after our fight. I’d been too focused on the faces on the screen to have noticed how much time had passed or when the water had been shut off. But it was impossible to not notice Eric when he suddenly appeared in front of me.

Because not only was he rudely blocking my view of the screen, he was also naked.

And happy.

At least below the waist he was. He could have had a smile on his face too, but I wouldn’t know. My eyes hadn’t gotten that far.

Pointing the remote at his pointer and stabbing the buttons like I could turn him off, I slammed my eyes shut and my thighs together while yelling, “Eric Northman, you giant vampervert! You go put some clothes on right now!”

I refused to be tempted by him when I was still feeling hurt.

And I would hurt Betty if she didn’t fall in line.

“I prefer it when you call me your god.”

I hated the playfully sexy lilt in his voice. I hated how easily he could get my defenses to drop. And how quickly my panties wanted to follow suit. So with my eyes still shut, I lifted the remote and aimed it towards the sound of his voice to turn that off too, warning “I mean it! You go get dressed right now or else that’ll be the last time I do any praying with you.”

‘LIES! They’re all LIES!’

Betty decided she gave not a single fuck about my warning and whipped out her rosary in the next second, quickly whispering her Hail Fairies while I did my best to ignore what her necklace was made of.

Those pearly white beads hadn’t come from any oyster.

“Lover…look.”

“No!” I snarled while squeezing my eyes shut even tighter. For all I knew he wanted to make me go cross-eyed by making the sign of the cross on my forehead using his Cain. Which would make me Abel. So I needed to be able to resist his naked ass because according to the Book of Fornication in my Sacrilegious Scripture, there was a strong possibility he would fuck me to death.

“Pants. Now.”

That’s what the sight of him naked had reduced me to.

A monosyllabic moron. A blasphemous one at that.

It was only seconds later when I felt him take my hand and before I could snatch it back to cover my unholiest of snatches, I felt the denim covered tree trunk he’d placed underneath my palm.

I was ninety-nine percent sure it was his leg.

Betty wasn’t convinced.

‘Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb…JESUS, MARY and JOSEPH HE IS HUGE!’

Go directly to hell. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.

She had officially cost me any chance I had of getting into heaven.

‘Heaven shmeaven. I’d rather take a ride on the Northman Railroad and pass the ‘Big O’, collecting fluids from his two ballers.’

She followed up with a ‘Woo Woo!’ train noise and snapped her teeth, wanting a bite of his forbidden apples.

Dante had gotten it wrong. There was a 10^th circle of hell and it was named Betty.

Resolving to find a church at some point so I could dunk my ass in a vat of holy water, I slowly peeled my eyelids back and saw he was now dressed.

Thank Christ.

Amen.

I figured he was going to try and sweet talk me. Or at the very least try to blind me with orgasms so I would forget I was upset with him, but instead he pointed at the screen and said, “Look.”

My blind attempts at turning him off with the remote somehow managed to not only switch the camera view to the outer office where Mr. Fuckity Fuck’s desk sat, but it also appeared to be rewinding the video footage.

Either that or the people in Eric’s employ were some moonwalking mother fuckers.

I assumed the system was digital since the last time I’d seen a videotape Harrison Ford was on it duking it out with Columbian drug lords who were a clear and present danger. The time and date stamp sat in the bottom right corner of the screen, so I kept an eye on it and let it go unfettered until the video had reached three nights earlier. The image of Eric eventually came into view about an hour before he’d shown up on the highway.

“Hey, you’re wearing a shirt!” I remarked, distracted once more by the screen and noticing the difference in his appearance that night immediately. Not only were his killing jeans kill-free, his demeanor hadn’t escaped my notice either. He looked just as barky with Mr. Fuckity Fuck as he’d been with me earlier.

So maybe I wasn’t as distracted as I thought.

“Is there a way to go forward?” he asked, before looking back at me. “To try and follow where I went from there by using the different cameras?”

Between Betty and our spat, my emotions were all over the place, so I only shrugged in response and pushed the button to make the video play forward in real time. He seemed to be giving Fuckity Fuck orders given the scared, ‘Yes sir. May I have another verbal ass whipping, sir?’ look on his face. It was likely the moment Eric had told him about emergency medical attention and how not to need any. So when he stalked off of the screen, I paused the video to flip through the channels before I found him and pressed play again.

Only so we could watch him stand at the open doorway to my suite and stare at the empty room for exactly twenty-two minutes.

In real time.

But what did it mean?

What was he thinking?

Had he still been mad?

Sad?

There was no way to tell and since he couldn’t remember, there was no way to know for sure. When he got into the private elevator next to my suite’s door, it took a moment for me to search for the right camera. There were literally hundreds of them. It was a casino after all, so it took some time but as soon as I found it, I hit play again.

Not long after we watched Eric climb inside, the doors opened again to what looked like the parking garage. But I had barely noticed, having been too busy analyzing that Eric and comparing him to the one now at my side. They were identical except for their eyes. My Eric’s eyes were light. Happy. The other Eric’s eyes weren’t darker, but heavier. Full of the knowledge he carried with his memories. Whatever horrors he’d witnessed or even had participated in over however long his lifetime had been. I couldn’t imagine all that he’d seen and done, but looking at him I could almost convince myself there was an extra sadness in them that hadn’t been there before I left.

But I knew better than to try and think about what it could possibly mean.

No more pipe dreams for Sookie.

I didn’t have long to ponder anyway when my eyes took in what happened next. And my mouth immediately fell open just like the elevator doors as though someone had said, ‘Simon Says’.

“It would seem the label of killing jeans was an accurate one, lover.”

Seconds.

A full minute tops.

One minute that Stonebrook woman was blocking his way from exiting the elevator.

And the next she wasn’t.

Because after Eric pressed the button on the elevator’s intercom and said a few words into the receiver, her body had fallen to the ground a second later when he ripped her head from her shoulders. He only stood there for a moment longer before he literally flew out of the elevator and I assumed up the I-10.

Had that been it?

I didn’t see how Eric killing her would’ve caused his amnesia. She’d barely had the time to say hocus pocus before he’d ripped her head off, so maybe whatever happened to him happened after that?

I didn’t know what to say. What to feel or what to think. So I just silently watched when a few moments later the head of his security team arrived with two others. No one looked surprised by what they found and together they had the mess cleaned up within minutes.

Talk about the quicker picker upper.

“At least now I know who I should try to listen in to,” I remarked, pointing at the head guy.

“He is a vampire,” Eric replied while staring at the screen. “They all are.”

Well shit. Would anything ever go in our favor?

I tried to recall what little he’d said about her that night. It hadn’t been much, but I remembered the fact her thoughts were snarly like Fuckity Fuck’s, so I assumed she must be some sort of supernatural too.

And morbidly, I rewound the video so we could watch the Freakality TV show all over again. It maybe would have bothered me more if Callaghan’s attack wasn’t still fresh in my mind. Or maybe it had more to do with my protective instincts where Eric was concerned. In any case, it did make me wonder about other things.

Like maybe Betty wasn’t the only reason I was going to hell.

“You’d said she smelled like fish.”

I’d assumed he’d been making a jibe about her cooter box cleanliness, but maybe it was a supernatural reference that went over my head instead?

But I knew all too well how much he enjoyed jibe talking.

“You know her?” he asked. “Who is she? Why would I have killed her?”

I’d paused the video once more while my eyes studied the crime scene I’d read nothing about in the online news and answered, “I only know her last name is Stonebrook.” The longer I stared at her, the more that night came back to me, so I added, “She had an appointment to meet with you on my first night working for you. I don’t know what she wanted exactly, but her thoughts were snarly and red. So I assume she’s like Mr. Fuckity Fuck, whatever in the hell he is. All I really got from her thoughts was that she wanted to fuck you. A lot. And she wanted your money. A lot. Which probably could’ve been said about the majority of the women in your nightclub that night. But with her there was more to it. Like maybe she had something to hold over you. A trump card? Blackmail of some sort? I couldn’t ask you about it at the time, but she worried me enough that I asked you to come to my room within minutes of her arriving. All you told me was that she’d made a preposterous proposal. Not what the proposal was though.”

I wasn’t about to tell him what I’d done in order to get him to come to my room. He could just wait and remember that all on his own.

Hearing me say I’d been worried about him made a tender look appear in his eyes, but still feeling off over everything that happened when he woke up, I ignored it and asked, “Can you tell what she is by looking at her? I assume she’s not just plain old human.”

After all, who was these days? With the way he’d gone off on me earlier, one would think humans were the minority.

He turned to look back at the screen and had me rewind the footage to where her head was still attached. Studying her face for another moment, his head began to shake as he said, “No. I know she is not vampire. I would need to scent her to be sure, but I would guess her to be either a witch or a Were.”

“Would sniffing your killing jeans help?” I asked. I hadn’t found a laundry room to do a load and just put our dirty clothes into the empty bag I’d gotten when we went shopping for food. Not finding a washer or dryer in his house wasn’t all that surprising considering I couldn’t picture Eric with a Tide stain stick in his hand.

When he nodded, I went to retrieve the bag, but he stopped me by putting his hand on my arm and saying, “You are still angry with me.”

Was I?

“Not really,” I hedged while searching for the right words. “Disappointed, maybe? And hurt.”

I didn’t offer any resistance when he took a step closer to wrap his arms around me. He pressed his lips to the top of my head, saying, “I am sorry, lover. I spoke harshly out of my fear for your safety, but I realize it is my own fault for not educating you to begin with. I should not have expected you to understand the danger you were in when you are not well-versed in the supernatural world. That was my error. One I will correct. And while I agree it would be nice to know all that happened to make me lose my memories, you are my only concern. You are all I truly care about and I humbly ask for your forgiveness.”

My heart wasn’t the only thing puddled by his sweet words. I still felt a little gun shy with him, but Betty was positively swooning, so I wrapped my arms around him and said, “I’m sorry too. I shouldn’t have taken that jab at you about not being able to remember anything. It was a low blow.”

“I’m willing to let you make it up to me by blowing low on my body,” he playfully offered. “Your sword practice was interrupted earlier.”

“How noble of you,” I chuckled nervously.

It was too soon for me to want to jump right back into practice. My confidence had taken a major blow and my heart was still wrapped up in an ace bandage.

His cool body pressed against mine was a nice ice pack though.

I totally expected him to try and make good on his offer, so I was surprised when he pulled away and said, “Perhaps later, though. For now, I want you to practice how to kill a vampire.”

Huh? Should my codename be Buffy too?

I’d seen just how formidable an opponent a vampire could be and highly doubted I could do much damage to one.

If my Beretta couldn’t, how was I supposed to?

Sensing my hesitation, he pulled my chin up to look into my eyes as he said, “I will always do everything in my power to keep you safe. But in the event you are forced to defend yourself, I want you to be prepared.”

How horrifically sweet of him.

“Okay.”

What else could I say? Hopefully he didn’t expect me to have some latent superpower, like being able to shoot deathly sunrays out of my hands.

As it turned out, he didn’t. I only knew that because he sped over to the antique looking wall table perched underneath his rack of swords and returned a second later with a handful of wooden stakes.

“Seriously?” I asked, not expecting the Dracula matchy-matchyness.

Instead of answering me he put a stake in my palm and moved my hand, placing the tip over his heart as he said, “This is where you want to drive it in. A stake through the heart will end a vampire instantly.”

Vampires didn’t have a monopoly on that fallibility. It would kill us part-humans too. But hearing him say it made me pull the pointy weapon away from his body since the last thing I wanted was to unexpectedly sneeze.

Not with my track record of fucking everything up where he was concerned.

I noticed some of the others had shiny metal tips, but the one in my hand was all wood. Inspecting the sharpened end for a moment, I finally looked back at him and said, “I hope you don’t expect me to practice by lunging at you. And where am I supposed to hide something like this?”

And how did a piece of wood turn them into vampfetti, but a bullet did jack shit?

“Somewhere close,” he shrugged.

Before I could thank him for his lesson in stating the obvious, he vamped away and back again, only this time returning with a black velvet pouch containing an array of knives. All shapes. All sizes. Some tarnished and others shiny.

“Are they all silver?” I asked, spotting the familiar discoloration right away. I’d spent many a day helping Gran polish the family silverware before I figured out I shouldn’t gripe about being bored with nothing to do.

“Yes. I detected the scent yesterday when reaching for my sword.”

In the next moment he reached down and touched one of the blades with his fingertip. Smoke immediately started to rise and his only tell that it hurt him was his fangs snapping down. I briefly recalled him telling me he had an aversion to silver at the end of my job interview and now I knew he hadn’t been exaggerating one bit. But instead of traipsing down memory lane, I wrenched his hand away from the blade, yelling out, “Eric!” and did what came naturally.

I stuck his finger in my mouth.

It was the same way I’d treated my own burnt fingertips thanks to possessed curling irons, so I hadn’t thought twice about it. At least not until Eric had me pressed against the wall, with the stake in his pants trying to spear me several inches lower than where my heart was.

“Ehlwick?” I asked with his finger still in my mouth.

See what I mean about fucking up?

It didn’t take long to figure out I had inadvertently poked the horny vampire and I would’ve removed his finger, but he seemed to have other plans for it. Plans that involved his fingertip rubbing along my tongue just like he’d used his tongue to rub other parts of me the night before.

In fact, I could practically feel it in those very parts right at that very moment.

His eyes were hooded while he stared at my mouth in a trance-like state before saying, “If just the thought alone didn’t make me want to kill everything in my path, I would suggest you use your mouth on any future foe. It slays me without even trying.”

Funny. His murderous words were doing a pretty good job of slaying Betty too.

“Ehlwick. Thith ithn’t helffing.”

I found he was surprisingly well-versed in full-mouth speak. And then I immediately banished every mental image from my brain that could explain how he’d come to be that way. He slowly removed his finger from between my lips, hissing softly when I sucked on it a little to keep from drooling, and took a slight step backwards to give us both a little breathing room. All the while I appeased myself with the knowledge his sword/snake/stake was mine for the time being and I would cut a bitch if they came near him.

I even had a whole pouch full of knives to work with.

But guessing he might have plans for them that didn’t involve me going on Puncture Pussy Patrol, I asked, “What are the knives for?”

His eyes had yet to leave my mouth, so when a full minute had passed and he hadn’t answered, I decided to get his attention. Pulling one of the blades from the pouch, I aimed it at the loaf of bread I’d left on the table and threw it. The movement and sound pulled him from his stupor with him turning to look at the hilt of the knife sticking out of the center of the loaf now lying on the floor thanks to the forward momentum.

“You have done this before?” he turned to me and asked, looking impressed.

I couldn’t help but grin as I replied, “When I was eleven the circus came through town. Jason and I were mesmerized by the knife throwing act and when we got home, we immediately started to practice. We propped up a few of my dolls against trees in the yard and threw knives at them. When we felt we weren’t hitting them all that much anymore, we decided it was time to be each other’s assistant. Gran found us just as Jason was getting ready to let ‘em fly. I didn’t see her coming since he’d blindfolded me and we both got it twice as bad when she saw we were using her good steak knives to practice with. My ass is still sore.”

He laughed and asked, “Shall I heal it with my mouth, as you healed me with yours?”

I knew he was joking. Mostly. And before our little spat, I would’ve easily bantered right back. But now…now I felt apprehensive. Full of self-doubt because really…

What in the hell does he see in me?

“What is this?” he asked softly and reminding me yet again he could feel my emotions by adding, “You feel…uncertain?”

“I…I…” I stopped and started, trying to figure out what it was I wanted to say. “I guess I just feel a little vulnerable still. I mean I get why you’re with me right now. I’m all that you know, so of course you’d be attached to me. I’ve had your blood so you can feel my affection for you. But I don’t know anything about you. What you’ve seen or done. I don’t know anything about your world. I don’t know that I won’t do something wrong. Say something wrong to the wrong person and fuck everything up.”

Now that the words were tumbling out I couldn’t seem to stop them and the rest of my insecurities came out with, “I don’t know if the old you just enjoyed the chase and if I’d given in, you wouldn’t have moved on to someone new. I don’t know why you would want me otherwise. I’m just a nobody from nowhere Louisiana and you’re you even if you can’t remember who that is. I just don’t know…”

Anything.

The list was endless, but who in the hell wants to hear all of it much less admit it all out loud?

“This is my fault,” he said looking dismayed. “Lover, I am sorry for yelling at you. For making you doubt yourself or what you mean to me. You’ve done so much for me already. You’ve put your life on hold in order to help me. You’ve shared not just your body, but your blood with me. You’ve given me reasons to smile and laugh. You continue to do and to give when I’m not in any position to give back. All I’ve done is take from you and instead of thanking you, I made you feel inadequate. I am truly sorry.”

I only knew the tears had started falling when he wiped them from my cheeks before pulling me against his chest. “I’m afraid,” I admitted to his shirt.

Afraid I would fail. Afraid I would succeed. Afraid of what would change with either outcome.

“I will protect you,” he mumbled into my hair.

But who will protect me from you?

As if I’d said the words out loud, he only hugged me tighter and said, “I have given us much more work to do than I had initially planned for. I will explain to you all that I can remember about the supernatural world. I will show you how to defend yourself against any and all opponents. But my most important task will be to instill within you the absolute certainty that you are all I want or need. That I am the fool in this pairing to have let you go the first time and it is not a mistake I will repeat no matter what memories resurface.”

Hearing him voice my biggest fear out loud made my eyes dart up to his. Seeing the anxiety in mine made him try to ease it away by playfully adding, “You will learn that I am undeserving of you, but you will overlook that and stay with me regardless. You own me, lover. Be certain of that.”

I smiled at his little added order, so when he leaned down and kissed me with a tenderness that completely contradicted everything we’d watched him do on the video, I tried my best to at least meet his request halfway.

I couldn’t be so bold as to think I owned Eric, but I could maybe be convinced I had leased him with the option to buy.