Dead Until Dark

sure.
    “Here, I’ll leave,” I said and slid out of bed, bending to retrieve my clothes. Quicker than I could see, he was off the bed and taking the clothes from my hands.
    “Don’t leave me now,” he said. “Stay.”
    “I’m a weepy ol’ thing tonight.” Two tears trickled down my cheeks, and I smiled at him.
    His fingers wiped the tears from my face, and his tongue traced their marks.
    “Stay with me till dawn,” he said.
    “But you have to get in your hidey-hole by then.”
    “My what?”
    “Wherever you spend the day. I don’t want to know where it is!” I held up my hands to emphasize that. “But don’t you have to get in there before it’s even a little light?”
    “Oh,” he said, “I’ll know. I can feel it coming.”
    “So you can’t oversleep?”
    “No.”
    “All right. Will you let me get some sleep?”
    “Of course I will,” he said with a gentlemanly bow, only a little off mark because he was naked. “In a little while.” Then, as I lay down on the bed and held out my arms to him, he said, “Eventually.”
     
     
    SURE ENOUGH, IN the morning I was in the bed by myself. I lay there for a little, thinking. I’d had little niggling thoughts from time to time, but for the first time the flaws in my relationship with the vampire hopped out of their own hidey-hole and took over my brain.
    I would never see Bill in the sunlight. I would never fix his breakfast, never meet him for lunch. (He could bear to watch me eat food, though he wasn’t thrilled by the process, and I always had to brush my teeth afterward very thoroughly, which was a good habit anyway.)
    I could never have a child by Bill, which was nice at least when you thought of not having to practice birth control, but . . .
    I’d never call Bill at the office to ask him to stop on the way home for some milk. He’d never join the Rotary, or give a career speech at the high school, or coach Little League Baseball.
    He’d never go to church with me.
    And I knew that now, while I lay here awake—listening to the birds chirping their morning sounds and the trucks beginning to rumble down the road while all over Bon Temps people were getting up and putting on the coffee and fetching their papers and planning their day—that the creature I loved was lying somewhere in a hole underground, to all intents and purposes dead until dark.
    I was so down by then that I had to think of an upside, while I cleaned up a little in the bathroom and dressed.
    He seemed to genuinely care for me. It was kind of nice, but unsettling, not to know exactly how much.
    Sex with him was absolutely great. I had never dreamed it would be that wonderful.
    No one would mess with me while I was Bill’s girlfriend. Any hands that had patted me in unwanted caresses were kept in their owner’s laps, now. And if the person who’d killed my grandmother had killed her because she’d walked in on him while he was waiting for me, he wouldn’t get another try at me.
    And I could relax with Bill, a luxury so precious I could not put a value on it. My mind could range at will, and I would not learn anything he didn’t tell me.
    There was that.
    It was in this kind of contemplative mood that I came down Bill’s steps to my car.
    To my amazement, Jason was there sitting in his pickup.
    This was not exactly a happy moment. I trudged over to his window.
    “I see it’s true,” he said. He handed me a foam cup of coffee from the Grabbit Quik. “Get in the truck with me.”
    I climbed in, pleased by the coffee but cautious overall. I put my guard up immediately. It slipped back into place slowly and painfully, like wiggling back into a girdle that was too tight in the first place.
    “I can’t say nothing,” he told me. “Not after the way I lived my life these past few years. As near as I can tell, he’s your first, isn’t he?”
    I nodded.
    “He treat you good?”
    I nodded again.
    “I got something to tell you.”
    “Okay.”
    “Uncle Bartlett got killed last night.”
    I stared at him, the steam from the coffee rising between us as I pried the lid off the cup. “He’s dead?” I said, trying to understand it. I’d worked hard never to think of him, and here I thought of him, and the next thing I heard, he was dead.
    “Yep.”
    “Wow.” I looked out the window at the rosy light on the horizon. I felt a surge of—freedom. The only one who remembered besides me, the only one who’d enjoyed it, who insisted to the end that I had