Living Dead in Dallas (Sookie Stackhouse #2)(50)
Author: Charlaine Harris

He was right. Liz’s family notoriously took "Neither a borrower nor a lender be" to a complete extreme.

"You are a piece of work, brother," I said, focusing on his shortcomings, rather than those of Liz’s folks. "There are so many worse things to be than g*y."

"Such as?"

"Thief, traitor, murderer, ra**st…"

"Okay, okay, I get the idea."

"I hope you do," I said. Our differences grieved me. But I loved Jason anyway; he was all I had left.

I saw Bill out with Portia that same night. I caught a glimpse of them together in Bill’s car, driving down Claiborne Street. Portia had her head turned to Bill, talking; he was looking straight ahead, expressionless, as far as I could tell. They didn’t see me. I was coming from the automated teller at the bank, on my way to work.

Hearing of and seeing directly are two very different things. I felt an overwhelming surge of rage; and I understood how Bill had felt, when he’d seen his friends dying. I wanted to kill someone. I just wasn’t sure who I wanted to kill.

Andy was in the bar that evening, sitting in Arlene’s section. I was glad, because Andy looked bad. He was not clean-shaven, and his clothes were rumpled. He came up to me as he was leaving, and I could smell the booze. "Take him back," he said. His voice was thick with anger. "Take the damn vampire back so he’ll leave my sister alone."

I didn’t know what to say to Andy Bellefleur. I just stared at him until he stumbled out of the bar. It crossed my mind that people wouldn’t be as surprised to hear of a dead body in his car now as they had been a few weeks ago.

The next night I had off, and the temperature dropped. It was a Friday, and suddenly I was tired of being alone. I decided to go to the high school football game. This is a townwide pastime in Bon Temps, and the games are discussed thoroughly on Monday morning in every store in town. The film of the game is shown twice on a local-access channel, and boys who show promise with pigskin are minor royalty, more’s the pity.

You don’t show up at the game all disheveled.

I pulled my hair back from my forehead in an elastic band and used my curling iron on the rest, so I had thick curls hanging around my shoulders. My bruises were gone. I put on complete makeup, down to the lip liner. I put on black knit slacks and a black-and-red sweater. I wore my black leather boots, and my gold hoop earrings, and I pinned a red-and-black bow to hide the elastic band in my hair. (Guess what our school colors are.)

"Pretty good," I said, viewing the result in my mirror. "Pretty damn good." I gathered up my black jacket and my purse and drove into town.

The stands were full of people I knew. A dozen voices called to me, a dozen people told me how cute I looked, and the problem was… I was miserable. As soon as I realized this, I pasted a smile on my face and searched for someone to sit with.

"Sookie! Sookie!" Tara Thornton, one of my few good high school friends, was calling me from high up in the stands. She made a frantic beckoning gesture, and I smiled back and began to hike up, speaking to more people along the way. Mike Spencer, the funeral home director, was there, in his favorite western regalia, and my grandmother’s good friend Maxine Fortenberry, and her grandson Hoyt, who was a buddy of Jason’s. I saw Sid Matt Lancaster, the ancient lawyer, bundled up beside his wife.

Tara was sitting with her fiancé, Benedict Tallie, who was inevitably and regrettably called "Eggs." With them was Benedict’s best friend, JB du Rone. When I saw JB, my spirits began to rise, and so did my repressed libido. JB could have been on the cover of a romance novel, he was so lovely. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a brain in his head, as I’d discovered on our handful of dates. I’d often thought I’d hardly have to put up any mental shield to be with JB, because he had no thoughts to read.

"Hey, how ya’ll doing?"

"We’re great!" Tara said, with her party-girl face on. "How about you? I haven’t seen you in a coon’s age!" Her dark hair was cut in a short pageboy, and her lipstick could have lit a fire, it was so hot. She was wearing off-white and black with a red scarf to show her team spirit, and she and Eggs were sharing a drink in one of the paper cups sold in the stadium. It was spiked; I could smell the bourbon from where I stood. "Move over, JB, and let me sit with you," I said with an answering smile.

"Sure, Sookie," he said, looking very happy to see me. That was one of JB’s charms. The others included white perfect teeth, an absolutely straight nose, a face so masculine yet so handsome that it made you want to reach out and stroke his cheeks, and a broad chest and trim waist. Maybe not quite as trim as it used to be, but then, JB was human, and that was a Good Thing. I settled in between Eggs and JB, and Eggs turned to me with a sloppy smile.

"Want a drink, Sookie?"

I am kind of spare on drinking, since I see its results every day. "No, thank you," I said. "How you been doing, Eggs?"

"Good," he said, after considering. He’d had more to drink than Tara. He’d had too much to drink.

We talked about mutual friends and acquaintances until the kickoff, after which the game was the sole topic of conversation. The Game, broadly, because every game for the past fifty years lay in the collective memory of Bon Temps, and this game was compared to all other games, these players to all others. I could actually enjoy this occasion a little, since I had developed my mental shielding to such an extent I could pretend people were exactly what they said, since I was absolutely not listening in.

JB snuggled closer and closer, after a shower of compliments on my hair and my figure. JB’s mother had taught him early on that appreciated women are happy women, and it was a simple philosophy that had kept JB’s head above water for some time.

"You remember that doctor at that hospital, Sookie?" he asked me suddenly, during the second quarter.

"Yes. Dr. Sonntag. Widow." She’d been young to be a widow, and younger to be a doctor. I’d introduced her to JB.

"We dated for a while. Me and a doctor," he said wonderingly.

"Hey, that’s great." I’d hoped as much. It had seemed to me that Dr. Sonntag could sure use what JB had to offer, and JB needed… well, he needed someone to take care of him.

"But then she got rotated back to Baton Rouge," he told me. He looked a little stricken. "I guess I miss her." A health care system had bought our little hospital, and the emergency room doctors were brought in for four months at a stretch. His arm tightened around my shoulders. "But it’s awful good to see you," he reassured me.

Bless his heart. "JB, you could go to Baton Rouge to see her," I suggested. "Why don’t you?"