Chapter 2

Chapter 2- Almost doesn’t count, not even on a halfways

Coffin Bait Productions was housed in an old restored movie house in downtown Wilmington, three blocks from the Riverfront.  Part screening house, part club, the building also housed CBP’s vampire executive suites, and it certainly looked the part.  There was a neon gold mock coffin extended at a rakish angle off the side of the building, and a red velvet rope loped around the entrance.  The overall effect was Hollywood does Vegas, but I couldn’t help admitting (to myself at least), that the set up had some charm.  From the crowd lined up and snaking around block, I wasn’t alone in thinking it.

It had been three days since the incident with Franklin ‘Grabby Hands’ Mott, and I’d spent most of it thinking about Godric’s job offer, and what it would mean for my future.  I wasn’t under any illusions that my telepathy would stay a secret for long under his watchful eye, nor was I ignorant of the potential dangers surrounding the fact.  My inability to hear vampires would work in my favor, I knew, just as I knew that once I let the knowledge to air there would be no going back.

The thought should have scared me, but I was gradually coming to grips with what it was that had sent me running from the town of my birth, from the Gran I loved and the only home I’d ever known.  Something had darkened in me on discovering my parents dead off my mother’s obsessive violence.  I was still friendly-faced Sookie Stackhouse, the telepathic barmaid with an ever-ready smile and on-hand good cheer.  But on the shadow side that no one saw, I was steadily losing ground, steadily slipping deeper and deeper into the darkness.

Godric had honed in on my shadows within minutes of our meeting, and took them as I was searching for more.  He was close to right: I did need more, but that wasn’t why I was about to cast my full lot in with the vamps.  No, the real truth was somewhat more desperate: I simply couldn’t bear to face the darkness alone, not for one more night, not now that I was finally offered another choice.  Even if it meant a world of ever-ready violence, a lifetime of bloody nights, and a head full of sanguine secrets.

Even if it was likely to mean my dead-end.

So I’d called the number on Godric’s card after my shift the night before, and had been pleasantly startled when I’d heard his soft voice on the other end.  He, in turn, had been quietly delighted to hear from me, and offered to set up a meeting for the very next night.  He had explained that there was to be a midnight premiere of their newest Compton film, Dances with the Devil, but that he would leave word at the gate that I was to be shown directly in.  I had accepted, and hung up on growing flutters of anticipation.

Now I was standing on the sidewalk in front of Coffin Bait Productions feeling like a whale dropped out of water onto the middle of a high-end runway.  All around me were nip-tuck figures in outlandish Vogue-esque outfits, tossing five hundred dollar hair-dos and teetering artfully around on sharp-heeled stilettos.  A glance down at my own curvy figure underdressed in a yellow sundress and white ballet flats was almost enough to make me turn tail and run back to the hopeless simplicity of Bon Temps.

Almost.

So self counseled, I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders and headed to the front of the line as Godric had instructed.

“Hi there,” I said, smiling kindly at the thin, carrot topped man holding the clipboard.  “I’m Sookie Stackhouse.  I’m here to see Godric.”

“You’re not on Eric’s list,” he sneered dismissively without so much as a glance at his prop board.  I quite rudely dove into the ruder man’s thoughts, and found that his resentment was an all around sort of attitude.  He resented that Godric ignored him.  He resented being forced to shuffle crowds when he had errands to run for Eric.  He resented blond bombshells with big tits.  I guess that was me.  Huh.

“Maybe you could just double check,” I tried again.  “I have an appointment.  For ten o’clock?”

“You’re not on Eric’s list, you’re not getting in.”

Who was this Eric that he could extend such confidence even through a lackey?

“Really Bobby?” I said sweetly on lifting his name from his snooty skull.  “Your attitude must be why you’re not on Godric’s.”

Bobby’s eyes widened on hearing his name unsolicited, then narrowed on hearing my underhanded jab.  He opened his mouth to snark some nasty reply, but was promptly interrupted.

“Sookie Stackhouse,” came a silky timbre of a voice.  “Is most definitely on the list.”

We both turned as one.  Bobby look chagrined.  I think I might have looked like a clueless child for my wide eyes.

Talk about blond bombshells.  This guy would make Fabio look shabby in a lineup.  He was tall, easily the tallest thing next to the building, and dressed, much to my amusement, in jeans and a t-shirt.  Long blond hair fell to his shoulders, with four thin braids worked intricately at each temple.  His skin glowed like a moonlit pearl, his blue eyes shone like a snapshot of a summertime sky.  His eye sockets were gently bruised, giving him a harrowed look that contrasted surprisingly well with his almost-boyish masculinity.

He had such a swagger to him, I thought as he cat walked towards us.  A casual sort of confidence that I suppose only an absolute knowledge of immortality and self possessed good looks can give you.

I was trying my hardest not to drool.

“Eric,” came Bobby’s tuned-to-please tone.  “I was just telling Ms. Stackhouse here-“

Oh, it was Ms. Stackhouse was it now?  I gave what I thought was a discreet eye roll, but from the eyebrow Eric the Epically Gorgeous was tilting my way, it hadn’t been discreet enough.

“-that no one gets in without being on your list.”

Bobby might as well have not even spoken.

“Come Miss Stackhouse.  Godric is waiting.”

There was no missing the softly threatening censure behind the last words.

Bobby was suddenly scrambling in motion, nearly dropping his clipboard in his fumble to unclip the velvet rope.

“Thanks, Bobby,” I said, smiling kindly on the lie as I stepped past.  I could hear the brain buzzing jealousy of the girls still waiting their entrance, but ignored them off a lifetime of discipline.

We didn’t speak as we walked up to the building, and I was too busy concentrating on not hearing the premiere crowd to really worry about being sociable.  But all the voices faded to dim as I stepped past Eric into CBP’s foyer.

My breath caught on sheer opulence of it all.  It had been restored to look like an old opera house, with a few vampiric twists.  The floors were a deep red marble waxed to sheen like wet blood.  The walls were covered in crimson silk and what at first glance I took to be tiny black flowers, but on closer inspection revealed themselves to be miniature stakes.  There was a massive white marble rendition of the Rape of the Sabines, only this time the Roman wore fangs and the Sabine woman wore puncture marks.  Above it all, it was the ceiling that stole the show.  It arched up in a shock of pure white, and was painted in a startlingly accurate reproduction of the Sistine Chapel, with one very noticeable difference: all the angels had sets of fangs to accompany their wings.  If any of it had been less well executed, a little more campy, a lot less breathtaking, I’d probably have hated it.  But the combination of pun and patient artistry just… did it for me.

“Evil angels,” I murmured, lips quirking in appreciation on the wit.  When my voice rose up and floated away as I imagined it might in some grand cathedral, the quirk turned into a full-fledged grin.

I spun around in my happy excitement to find Eric Northman watching me with a calculating curiosity.  His blue eyes were glowing on a slow trip down to my toes before flashing back to my face.  I ignored it and the accompanying flutters, as I’d decided off the bat that my method of dealing with vampires was going to be a whole lot similar to my dealing with telepathy.  Smiles, manners and pleasantries until one of them did something inexcusable.  And then… well, I’d cross that grave when I came to it.

“I take it you approve?” he asked in a deceptively soft voice.

“It’s fabulous,” I cheerfully confirmed.  “There’s sure nothing like it in Bon Temps.  Heck, we all felt lucky when we got the Wal-Mart.”

His left eyebrow flicked up questioningly on my last bit of babble.  Good going, Provincial Sookie.  Oh well.  I was who I was, and I’d be damned before I let him spoil any of this for me.  If he was too jaded to share in my excitement of new discovery, that was his sadness.

“The offices are this way,” he said with a bemused sweep of hand.

“Alrighty,” I agreed easily enough, though I cast a brief wishful glance at the double doors leading into the screening area.  I followed him up one of two wide-stepped black marble staircases that flanked the foyer, past a beefcake vampire guard, and through a gold leaf door that opened into an elevator.  I watched with some fascination as he lazily pressed the bottom button, once again fashioned as a miniature coffin.

“So you’re the infamous Eric Northman,” I said by way of stepping into the awkward silence.

“So you’re the daring-do Sookie Stackhouse,” he lilted back.  “Is it true you nearly took a tray to Franklin Mott’s head?”

“He put his hand up my skirt,” I admitted on a stubborn smile.  “I wasn’t gonna put up with that, vamp or no.”

“I see why Godric is so taken with you,” he said as the doors dinged open onto a plushy carpeted corridor.

Eric didn’t even bother taking his eyes off my face, and I was more than a little baffled by his reaction.  In Bon Temps I couldn’t get a man to look at me twice without teasing, and here I had two vamps showing interest.  One, apparently, who was ‘taken’ with me, and the other who from all appearances wanted to… take me.  I was starting to feel like a Twinkie on a fat farm, the way Eric was staring at me like he wanted to gobble me up.

“Oh, well…” I murmured shyly on skirting around him to exit the elevator.  “That’s nice.”

“Not used to compliments?”  He sounded almost sarcastic now as he followed me out.  My eyes flashed to his face and found it close to mocking in his disbelief.

“Don’t assume ‘cause you’ll live forever you’ll understand everything when you see it,” I said quietly.

Eric’s face didn’t go uncertain.  It just went… dead.  As in absence of expression, absence of life, absence of intention.  I had a desperate moment of wishing I could hear his thoughts, but that notion dropped off just as sudden as it began.  The air around me began pulsing with energy, power pushing at my skull like a fist trying to punch through water.  I could feel it, but it just passed right on through.

“You won’t be getting what you want that way, Mr. Northman.”

“Interesting.”  Never in the history of the English language has a word so owned the sound of its definition.

Eric stalked two steps forward.  I scurried four steps back.

“Hold it right there, buddy,” I ordered, putting out my hand like a flesh colored stop sign.

He stopped on courtesy more than command, wide blue eyes alight with amusement.  His perverse humor was back now, and with it a ramped up sexuality I was at a loss to handle.  Scary vamp compulsions smacking at my brain?  Sure, okay.  Power drunk vamps with itchy fingers?  I’ll deal.  Lusty eyed heartthrob vamps with guileless blue eyes and smiles like the devil?

I was sunk.

“Do I make you nervous, Miss Stackhouse?”

“Yes,” I blurted desperately.

He grinned wickedly down at me, looking for all the world like a horny lion happy to play with a bit of string.  I had an absurd urge to reach up and scratch under his chin to see if he would purr for me.

“But not afraid.”

“Not for the reasons you mean, no.”

“What other reason could inspire such a reaction?” he lilted, gaze razing over my fingers like he was imagining licking each one individually for sport.

“Have you even ever looked in a mirror?”

“Not as of late.”

“How do you do your hair then?” I asked, genuinely curious.

He flashed me a gobstopper of a smile, and my heart jerked sideways in my chest.

“A millennium of practice.”  I was sure to the ground he wasn’t talking about his hair anymore.

“Oh,” I murmured shyly, dropping my eyes to his feet.  Flip flops?  My eyes shot back up, startled, and I saw that his sensual smile had turned boyish with bemusement.

“Not what you were expecting?”

“It depends.  Are they Gucci?”

“Men’s Big and Tall.”  My eyes dropped to the gutter of their own accord, and there was no mistaking the sizable bulge under his second-skin jeans.  Oh my.

“Exactly what you’re expecting,” he purred proudly.

“I’ll just bet,” I smirked snottily.  Lord help me, I was inadvertently flirting with a thousand-year-old playboy.

“I’d be more than happy to provide you with whatever proof you need.”

I snorted.

“Thanks, but I’m lust proof and I plan on sticking with it.”

Eric’s eyes flashed from humor to hunter on that not so insignificant remark.  Uh oh.

“That is not something you should tell a vampire, Miss Stackhouse,” he warned softly.  “And certainly not a vampire such as me.”

“I’m not afraid of vampires,” I said defiantly, determined to make my early stand.

Turns out it was the wrong stand to take.

Eric had me up against the wall in a velvet steel flash, stopping me just short of contact before shoving me the rest of the way back and caging me in.  His big hands were braced on either side of my head, his fanged snarl inches from face.  It had all happened in a matter of seconds, him moving me so fast the oxygen failed to keep up.

“I’m here for Godric,” I breathed airlessly into his face.  I could feel every hard inch of him pressed provocatively against me, and I struggled on convincing myself it was fear I felt, and not something scarier.  Like lust.

“And while that most definitely matters to me, there are others to whom it will not.”

Despite the fang show, there was a controlled look in his eyes that convinced me I was in no real danger.

“You’ve made your point.”

“Have I, I wonder?  Glitz and glamour aside, this is not a fairytale, Miss Stackhouse.”

“I’m not one much for glitz, and I’ve already proven myself glamour proof.”

His gaze dropped with threatening lust to the top swell of my breasts.

“And how are you with nightmares?”

Eric’s blue eyes rolled lazily back up to mine, but there was no mistaking the serious warning behind the cruel dare.  Watch your neck, Miss Stackhouse.  What he didn’t understand was that I already used to surviving monsters of my own.

“You’d be hard pressed to claim the worst of mine,” I quietly defied.

He pulled back abruptly, fangs snicking up into his mouth on a humorless smile.

I smiled back at him serenely as I was smoothing down my sundress and patting reassuringly at my hair.  He watched me with a self depreciating smirk.

“Under all that sweetheart, you really are a rock, aren’t you?”

I shrugged offhandedly.

“Stackhouses are built sturdy to last.”

He studied me for another long, dangerous moment.  The hallway was full of my accelerated breathing and his deadly consideration.

“Godric is waiting,” was all he eventually said.

I breathed a shaky sigh of relief as I followed.  I couldn’t help staring below the belt as I trailed after his wonderfully sculpted butt, just as I couldn’t help squashing the feeling that’d I’d gotten a temporary reprieve, not a total pardon.  Even in the silence there were continued sparks.

No, I thought stubbornly, trying desperately to talk my erratic heart down off its cliff.  There wasn’t going to be anything between us.  I was here for Godric, and a job, and that was going to be the total sum of it.  After a moment or two I’d steadied enough that I almost believed it.

Almost.