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"You are old enough to know you don't come in someone's house without knocking on the door and having it answered. Besides, when did I ever invite you inside?" I had to have extended the invitation, or else Eric couldn't have crossed the threshold.
"When I stopped by last month to see Bill. I did knock," Eric said, trying his best to look wounded. "You didn't answer, and I thought I heard voices, so I came in. I even called your name."
"You may have whispered my name." I was still furious. "But you acted bad, and you know it!"
"What are you wearing to the party?" Eric asked, effectively changing the subject. "If this is to be an orgy, what does a good girl like you wear?"
"I just don't know," I said, deflated by the reminder. "I'm sure I'm supposed to look like the kind of girl who goes to orgies, but I've never been to one and I have no idea how to start out, though I have a pretty clear idea of how I'm supposed to end up."
"I have been to orgies," he offered.
"Why does that not surprise me? What do you wear?"
"The last time I wore an animal hide; but this time I settled for this." Eric had been wearing a long trench coat. Now he threw it off dramatically, and I could only stand and stare. Normally, Eric was a blue-jeans-and-T-shirt kind of guy. Tonight, he wore a pink tank top and Lycra leggings. I don't know where he got them; I didn't know any company made Lycra leggings in Men's X-tra Large Tall. They were pink and aqua, like the swirls down the sides of Jason's truck.
"Wow," I said, since it was all I could think of to say. "Wow. That's some outfit." When you've got a big guy wearing Lycra it doesn't leave a whole lot to the imagination. I resisted the temptation to ask Eric to turn around.
"I don't believe I could be convincing as a queen," Eric said, "but I decided this sent such a mixed signal, almost anything was possible." He fluttered his eyelashes at me. Eric was definitely enjoying this.
"Oh, yes," I said, trying to find somewhere else to look.
"Shall I go through your drawers and find something for you to wear?" Eric suggested. He had actually opened the top drawer of my bureau before I said, "No, no! I'll find something!" But I couldn't find anything more informally sexy than shorts and a tee shirt. However, the shorts were some I had left over from my junior high days, and they encased me "like a caterpillar embraces a butterfly," Eric said poetically.
"More like Daisy Dukes," I muttered, wondering if the lace pattern of my bikini underwear would be imprinted on my butt for the rest of my life. I wore a matching steel blue bra with a dipping white tank top that exposed a lot of the decoration on the bra. This was one of my replacement bras, and Bill hadn't even gotten to see it yet, so I sure hoped nothing happened to it. My tan was still holding up, and I wore my hair loose.
"Hey, our hair's the same color," I said, eyeing us side by side in the mirror.
"Sure is, girlfriend." Eric gri
"Don't you wish you knew?"
"Yes," he said simply.
"Well, you'll just have to wonder."
"I am," he said. "Blond everywhere."
"I could tell as much from your chest hair."
He raised my arm to check my armpit. "You silly women, shaving your body hair," he said, dropping my arm.
I opened my mouth to say something else on the topic, suddenly realized that would lead to disaster, and said instead, "We need to go."
"Aren't you going to wear perfume?" He was sniffing all the bottles on top of my dressing table. "Oh, wear this!" He tossed me a bottle and I caught it without thinking. His eyebrows flew up. "You have had more vampire blood than I thought, Miss Sookie."
"Obsession," I said, looking at the bottle. "Oh, okay." Carefully not responding to his observation, I dabbed a little bit of Obsession between my breasts and behind my knees. I figured that way I was covered from head to toe.
"What is our agenda, Sookie?" Eric asked, eyeing this procedure with interest.
"What we're going to do is go to this stupid so-called sex party and do as little as possible in that line while I gather information from the minds of the people there."
"Pertaining to?"
"Pertaining to the murder of Lafayette Reynold, the cook at Merlotte's Bar."
"And why are we doing this?"
"Because I liked Lafayette. And to clear Andy Bellefleur of the suspicion that he murdered Lafayette."
"Bill knows you are trying to save a Bellefleur?"
"Why do you ask that?"
"You know Bill hates the Bellefleurs," Eric said, as if that were the best-known fact in Louisiana.
"No," I said. "No, I didn't know that at all." I sat down on the chair by my bed, my eyes fixed on Eric's face. "Why?"
"You'll have to ask Bill that, Sookie. And this is the only reason we're going? You're not cleverly using this as an excuse to make out with me?"
"I'm not that clever, Eric."
"I think you deceive yourself, Sookie," Eric said with a brilliant smile.
I remembered he could now sense my moods, according to Bill. I wondered what Eric knew about me that I didn't know.
"Listen, Eric," I began, as we went out the door and across the porch. Then I had to stop and cast around in my mind for how to say what I wanted to say.
He waited. The evening had been cloudy, and the woods felt closer around the house. I knew the night just seemed oppressive because I was going to go to an event personally distasteful to me. I was going to learn things about people that I didn't know and didn't want to know. It seemed stupid to be seeking the kind of information that I'd spent my life learning how to block out. But I felt a sort of public service obligation to Andy Bellefleur to discover the truth; and I respected Portia, in an odd way, for her willingness to subject herself to something unpleasant in order to save her brother. How Portia could feel a genuine distaste for Bill was simply incomprehensible to me, but if Bill said she was frightened of him, it was true. This coming evening, the idea of seeing the true secret face of people I'd known forever was just as frightening to me.
"Don't let anything happen to me, okay?" I said to Eric directly. "I have no intention of getting intimate with any of those people. I guess I'm scared that something will happen, someone will go too far. Even for the sake of Lafayette's murder being avenged, I won't willingly have sex with any of those people." That was my real fear, one I hadn't admitted to myself until this moment: that some cog would slip, some safeguard fail, and I would be a victim. When I'd been a child, something had happened to me, something that I could neither prevent nor control, something incredibly vile. I would almost rather die than be subjected to abuse like that again. That was why I'd fought so hard against Gabe and been so relieved when Godfrey had killed him.
"You trust me?" Eric sounded surprised.
"Yes."
"That's . . . crazy, Sookie."
"I don't think so." Where that surety had come from, I didn't know, but it was there. I pulled on a thigh-length heavy sweater I had brought out with me.
Shaking his blond head, his trench coat drawn close around him, Eric opened the door to his red Corvette. I would be arriving at the orgy in style.
I gave Eric directions to Mimosa Lake, and I filled him in as much as I could on the background of this series of events as we drove (flew) down the narrow two-lane. Eric drove with great zest and élan—and the recklessness of someone extremely hard to kill.
"Remember, I'm mortal," I said, after going around a curve at a speed that made me wish my fingernails were long enough to bite.
"I think about that often," Eric said, his eyes fixed on the road ahead of him.
I didn't know what to make of that, so I let my mind drift to relaxing things. Bill's hot tub. The nice check I would get from Eric when the check from the Dallas vampires cleared. The fact that Jason had dated the same woman several months in a row, which might mean he was serious about her, or might mean he'd run through all the available women (and a few who shouldn't have been) in Renard Parish. That it was a beautiful, cool night and I was riding in a wonderful car.