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Title: True And Everlasting
Title: True And Everlasting
Author: Hannah Orlove
Fandom: True Blood
Pairing: Jessica/Hoyt
Rating: PG
Notes: Written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
poisoninjest as a very late birthday present and as thanks for getting me into the fandom. Thanks to newredshoes for beta-reading. Title and cut-text comes from the song Countdown by Phoenix.
In the end, it was best for them that they move away. Neither of them wanted to go, but moving was better than staying, so one night they gathered their things and left Bon Temps. As far as Jessica was concerned, that was all there was to that story.
She hadn’t known where she and Hoyt would end up when they stopped moving, except she knew it would be somewhere far away from where they started. Hoyt slept in hotels or the car when she went to ground – Bill hadn’t taught her how to dig, bury herself safe, but on the first night with the fear of the sun coming up some new instinct told her what to do, how to hide herself in the earth that made her, bore her. She slept safe there, cool and safe, and when she pulled herself out of the ground Hoyt was there for her, ready to sleep after standing guard all day.
At first he slept at night while she drove and she slept during the day while he waited for night to come. Neither of them knew who or what would or might come after them, and to keep moving with someone to watch over the other made the most sense. But as they kept going, farther and farther away from where they’d come, it became easier and easier to forget to be afraid, so soon enough both of them slept during the day and drove on in the night. They joked about it, about what they were doing, until the jokes got as tired as they felt and they couldn’t make new ones.
One night, when they looked around and realized they could stop moving, it finally occurred there wasn’t a place for them to go – so they might as well go anywhere. They hadn’t planned on leaving and they hadn’t planned on where to go, so when they found themselves ready to stop, they decided they should find a place where that would be so they would know when they were done.
-
Jessica remembered she hadn’t wanted to live there, but that seemed so long ago she didn’t mind anymore. They’d thought it would be easy to settle in Vermont, since all she needed to take care of herself was Hoyt, and he knew how to take care of himself just fine. He found work on another road crew and she bused tables and hauled crates and boxes in one of Montpelier’s bigger restaurants on a night shift.
They’d known it’d be easy to live where they could get married as a human and a vampire without having to lie. They’d forgotten that even a small city was almost three times the size of the tiny town they’d grown up in, and that was almost as hard to figure out as the weather. They’d arrived just at the end of summer, as autumn came in, so almost all of Jessica’s little pay went to keeping Hoyt warm. All of his went to their future, their home paid for and owned under his name, one last little guarding force against the outside world.
As the days grew shorter, she slept less, stayed up late enough see Hoyt off to work in the mornings and got up early enough to see him home at the end of the day. She worked more hours and helped unload delivery trucks in the mornings before the sun came up, and made a show to her boss of carrying full-grown pigs into the freezer without any help. She learned how to cook for Hoyt on those smoky autumn nights, how to fill their house with good smells for him to come home to, and the first time the bacon hit the pan the sizzles and pops of the smells and sounds were just as good as she knew eating it would have been. Pulling biscuits out of the oven on her day off, with their soft yeasty smell, just in time for Hoyt to come back from work after the sun had set was almost as good as his face when he bit into one.
“It’s not my grandma’s recipe,” she made sure to say. “I got it from a book.”
“Thank God,” he replied, making them both laugh.
-
Winter came after teasing them with frost and light falls that were gone by the next night, before they were ready. When the snow was all done, all down all over, Jessica rushed out ahead of Hoyt still getting his gloves and scarf on, wearing nothing but her dress, falling down to her knees and laughing when Hoyt helped her back to her feet. The world had gone still, no sounds and no smells and everything looked blue and unreal, all soft and cold. It looked so perfect. She dashed ahead and called for Hoyt to follow, and he did, trudging up the hill after her, chasing her through the trees as she sped away again and again. She let him catch her in the middle of a field, under the clouds and stars in all the quiet and he told her how beautiful she looked, all alive and bright in the middle of the snow, how perfect she was for the woods in wintertime.
They were both sad to see the snow leave. Even when it made his job harder, Hoyt loved the sight of it falling down like slow raindrops, and even when it made Hoyt shiver and shake, Jessica missed it because she loved to fall back into a snow bank and get swallowed up in all of its soft cold. It felt so much like going to ground she made Hoyt try it so he would know that feeling, even just a little bit.
-
In the middle of January, when one of the students graduated and moved away, one of the full-time chefs asked her if she could chop onions without crying. As soon as she’d said yes she moved from clearing tables and unloading trucks to the kitchen itself as a line cook.
By the time spring properly arrived, the mud finally gone off the roads and flowers blooming on the trees, she’d learned how to drink Tru Blood. Hoyt had been sick and coughing and fevered and she hadn’t been able to drink from him, and when she stared at the bottles she’d bought – she was so hungry, so empty, she knew better than to let herself near him – she’d remembered having a sip of her daddy’s coffee years and years ago from a mug he’d forgotten that had cooled on the counter. It hadn’t burned her tongue and hadn’t tasted as bad. When she tried the same thing with a bottle, not bothering with the microwave, it was the same; still bad, but not as bad, not bad enough she couldn’t keep it down. She kept some bottles in the fridge at work after that, and learned that if she poured it into a big black mug and nobody looked too hard, it looked like she was drinking coffee and acting like a regular person. Even if they knew what she was drinking, the way she drank it looked like something a human could be doing. And everybody could go ahead, be comfortable, lying to themselves with everyone sharing the same lie.
-
Jessica sometimes wondered what Bill would say about her mainstreaming, but never for long. Summer had arrived and she’d lost any time to wonder. She’d loved summer in her long-ago days of life because it meant short nights, hours outside in tall grass and other kids out of school, huge happy gatherings filled up with smoke and sauce and smiling faces. Long days meant short nights, which meant less time inside asleep and still and more time outside playing. Summer still meant short nights, and now more than anything else, they meant busy nights in the kitchen, which meant there wasn’t time to think about the past, just the present.
There was still time for baseball games, that same sort of excitement that she and Hoyt remembered from home football games and leagues, everyone coming out and cheering. Night games were wonderful, and when she had a night off and if he wasn’t too tired they turned it into a couple’s night out.
Their first game was their first time going out as a couple. Knowing it was safe to walk the streets together didn’t mean they’d looked for reasons to, lessons learned all too well years ago; they’d been fine together, they were still fine together, but they both knew they couldn’t rely on each other to be the whole world. Hoyt had taken her hands in his, so rough and hard even with the creams she bought him on his birthdays, and whispered he still loved her more than he could stand and didn’t want to see them driven crazy because they never spoke to anyone else.
“I talk to people,” she tried to say.
“No. You talk to me. And I don’t talk to people, I talk to you, and we can’t go on that way.”
So they spread a blanket out on the grass and huddled together alone in the crowd, still lonely even with each other. It felt like summer back in Bon Temps, and Jessica realized for the first time she hadn’t thought of it as ‘home,’ just Bon Temps. Something deep inside her suddenly shook loose and let itself go, and she whipped her head to scan the crowd like she might find it. When she couldn’t, she tried to watch the game and couldn’t see it, just all the people, all around.
When the game was over and she was folding up the blanket, waiting for Hoyt to finish up his business, a small ‘hello’ came her way and she returned it without thinking. Ruth was about as tall as Jessica, quite a bit older and softer, with a friendly, round face and hair in a tight bun, ready and happy to talk to someone she hadn’t seen before.
“Nate and I come to all the games we can, and if I haven’t seen you at any, you’ve got to be new.”
“It’s our first one.”
“You had a good time tonight, I hope?”
“Yeah, yeah we did.” She smiled, wrapped the blanket around her arms. “Except the mosquitos.”
“Terrible little things.”
“I know. I kept slapping them away, I get so –”
“Possessive?”
“Yeah, like they shouldn’t get – what?” She realized what she’d said and looked to Ruth, suddenly afraid and then aware there wasn’t a reason to be: Ruth was smiling with her fangs out.
“It’s a little selfish of me, but I don’t want to share my husband with anyone, especially some buzzing insects.”
After that night, whenever she and Hoyt went to a game, she always packed little meals and a thermos of lemonade for him and a chilled thermos of Tru Blood for her, and slapped away the mosquitos before they could land on Hoyt. Sometimes they spread a blanket out on the Rec Field’s fence and snuggled together while the game went on and sometimes they sat on the stands and cheered along with everyone else when the home team scored a run. Some nights they didn’t make it home until late, when it was almost morning, because they got to talking with somebody they’d just met or someone else they’d ran into and had to catch up with. Montpelier was huge compared to where they’d grown up but it was still a small town at heart. That was one of the things they loved to tell people, how that made it so much easier for them to get used to living here than if they’d gone to a big city like Memphis or New York or even Pittsburgh.
“Not that Pittsburgh’s very vampire friendly,” she told Thomas, a vampire who had voted for the first President Adams and married his human Janice the moment he could and still admired Jessica’s chilled thermos idea. “But it still seems like a nice place.”
“I’ve been through there a time or two. You’re right, it is pleasant. And they like their baseball.”
“You really like your baseball.”
“Mike and Otis like it too. We could start a league.”
After she stopped laughing, Jessica had to admit it didn’t sound too bad, even if it might only be a way to meet other vampires since there wasn’t a place like Fangtasia around. She told him to tell her if anything happened, since she couldn’t promise anything – she was so busy she barely knew what would happen one night to the next. As fast as she could go, there were always plenty of things she needed to be doing all at the same time, and if she still needed breaths she wouldn’t have a moment to draw even one. There was never a moment free to complain, and Jessica knew even if there was she wouldn’t take it. She liked the work, the busy business, the precision and the improvisation. She’d never been a part of a large group like this, even when she’d been alive with her family, even when she’d been a member of her family’s church; nothing had ever been this joyful or this close, teasing and laughing and working side-by-side. She’d never been close enough to be able to enjoy it, or know how. The flickering seconds when she stopped to see where she was, maybe at her station cutting up a tomato fine as you please or pouring herself another cold mug, always reminded her why she was so happy to be here.
-
It was Hoyt’s idea that she ought to go to school to learn what she already knew.
“It’d be a waste of time,” she protested.
“You’ve got more of that than me,” he said, and that was the end of that.
When the admissions staff asked Jessica why she should attend, why someone who didn’t eat wanted to cook, she thought about the smell of fresh basil, how cutting old garlic cloves felt different from dicing fresh ones. Bread fresh from the oven filling up the room, how to make something look as perfect as she knew it could be. All the little reminders, and how they were enough. She looked down at her hands, still seventeen years old, then looked up at the staff and told them, “There’s more to food than just eating it. I cook for my husband, and it’s cooking for me too. Even if I can’t eat it, I can still make it, and smell it, and making it’s plenty.”
When she told them about baking a chocolate cake for Hoyt’s birthday, and taking her slice and crumbling it in her hands to taste it with her fingers, the woman on the end nodded – and Jessica knew she was in.
-
The VRA had finally passed, and with it the classification of vampirism as a disability. She made sure to use that to get into the classes she needed when she could, taking some of them out of order because of when the sun rose and set as the year moved on she couldn’t make it to them on time. One more thing she couldn’t do anything about.
She cut back her hours at the restaurant and made big cups of coffee for Hoyt to stay awake so he could help her study for the exams, who promised her he didn’t mind that she’d graduate college when he wasn’t going to. When she went to her classes, she always brought her thermos and made sure everyone knew what was in it. She could say she only fed on her husband, but that wasn’t good enough to make some people comfortable. They had to see she could work on the fake stuff to relax and smile with their eyes when they said hello.
After Jessica graduated and they hung her diploma, she went back to work full-time, putting her strong hands to work making delicate pastries and soft breads. She’d already found out she liked talking to people and getting to know them, and did her best to make friends. People liked talking to her, too, and after a while, started to come from long ways away to have conversations with her, just for the strangeness a vampire chef. The head chef didn’t mind, since it meant more people read about the restaurant. Her co-workers didn’t mind, since it gave them something to tease her about.
She minded a little bit because it felt like none of the interviewers read each other’s stories, so she had to answer the same questions almost every time. But she still had fun posing for the photographs.
-
Jessica would never forget Eden’s face – her little sister older and younger than she was, who’d picked up the magazine at a doctor’s office on a whim and opened it to the right pages to see the pictures – when she walked in the door. She’d asked for Jessica, who’d wiped her hands and walked out to a sister who’d recognized Jessica immediately – and it took Jessica a moment to recognize who Eden had become since she’d seen her last.
-
Hoyt wasn’t going to invite Pam in until Jessica was willing to vouch for her. He glared at her from the porch, then went back inside. Jessica grabbed two bottles of O-negative from the fridge, stopping halfway through the house to go back and warm one up before joining Pam in the garden.
They sipped quietly, not talking until most of Jessica’s bottle was done.
“How’d you get here?”
“Flew.”
“You chartered a plane?”
She laughed. “Bill really didn’t teach you much.”
“Others could’ve taught me better, but he was mine.”
Pam took another sip. She wasn’t here on Eric’s business or her own pleasure, and wouldn’t say more than that, not even how she found them.
“You didn’t tell him about the blood.” It wasn’t a question.
“No,” Jessica whispered.
“You fed him, and fed from him, and didn’t know.”
“Yes,” she said even quieter.
“I see.”
“I loved him before.” Jessica looked back to the house. “I swear I did, it was real and I loved him –”
“Doesn’t matter much now.”
-
She cooked Hoyt breakfast and dinner every day, no matter how busy her work was, and always stayed with him while he ate – those little moments of just being with him the best things she could imagine. They’d talk about repainting the cabinets and porch, how fennel and leeks were the big things this season, what movies they might see this weekend and all sorts of boring, normal things. Things like what he wanted for dinner.
“Pancakes,” he said with a laugh.
“You had pancakes for breakfast.”
“And I’d like them for dinner.”
“You don’t want - maybe mushroom tortellini? What about duck stir-fry?”
“Pancakes, blueberry pancakes, with extra syrup.” He crossed his arms and smiled, defiant.
She smiled. “One batch of blueberry pancakes with extra syrup up in a minute.” It didn’t take her long to measure and mix the ingredients, the protein and vitamin powders with the kefir and oatmeal all spun together in the blender, a nice thick glop that would go down easy. There were a few blueberries left from yesterday’s dinner and she threw those in too, watching them turn everything purple. Having a little truth in the lie helped it go down easier. She sat down next to Hoyt and he nodded, meeting her eyes, and let her in.
“They’re fresh pancakes, Hoyt. Right off the griddle, nice and warm, the blueberries were picked today and they’re bursting in your mouth, you know how they do that, the syrup’s real maple, dark amber, and it’s running down the fork, I used more butter than I needed and that’s all over your tongue, you can feel it, there’s even cinnamon in them.” She spooned the smoothie into his mouth, a little at a time so he wouldn’t spit up over himself. It’d gotten so hard for him to eat solid foods this last year that this was easier, and every meal together she told him what he was tasting so he didn’t have to know what he was eating.
She sometimes thought about Ginger, so far glamoured she’d forgotten where she lived and on bad nights forgot her own name, and wondered if Hoyt letting her in this way was why he wasn’t losing himself that way. His mind was still clear, his love for her clean as fresh snow. It was everything else that was falling away from him.
She still remembered Maxine’s face their last night in Bon Temps, the night they ran away so many years ago, the horror in her eyes when Jessica forced her to meet her gaze, pushed inside Maxine’s head and told her your son is dead, you killed him, no one will miss you when you’re gone, no one will ever feel sorry for you again. She didn’t want to, but had to hold onto that night. It was a reminder, a keepsake, of what she wished to never do again. Maybe when Hoyt was gone she’d go back. Maybe then, when she was alone in a house all over again, she’d go back to see what had become of the place they’d left. If he’d ever wanted to go back, he’d never said and she’d never asked, just like he’d never asked her if she’d wanted.
When he was done, she wiped his mouth and carried him into the bathroom, wiped him clean after he did his business, laid him into bed before getting under the covers herself.
Mornings like this were what she wanted to hold onto. Just Hoyt being there for her, her being there for him, being present – she was starting to learn what living forever meant and that Hoyt wouldn’t know. She couldn’t ask him to share forever with her. She couldn’t be that cruel. At their wedding, she’d promised to love him for as long as she lived. It was on mornings like this, when she listened to him breathe with more and more trouble and hoped she was there when he stopped so she was there to say good-bye, she knew exactly what she’d promised.
Author: Hannah Orlove
Fandom: True Blood
Pairing: Jessica/Hoyt
Rating: PG
Notes: Written for
poisoninjest as a very late birthday present and as thanks for getting me into the fandom. Thanks to newredshoes for beta-reading. Title and cut-text comes from the song Countdown by Phoenix.In the end, it was best for them that they move away. Neither of them wanted to go, but moving was better than staying, so one night they gathered their things and left Bon Temps. As far as Jessica was concerned, that was all there was to that story.
She hadn’t known where she and Hoyt would end up when they stopped moving, except she knew it would be somewhere far away from where they started. Hoyt slept in hotels or the car when she went to ground – Bill hadn’t taught her how to dig, bury herself safe, but on the first night with the fear of the sun coming up some new instinct told her what to do, how to hide herself in the earth that made her, bore her. She slept safe there, cool and safe, and when she pulled herself out of the ground Hoyt was there for her, ready to sleep after standing guard all day.
At first he slept at night while she drove and she slept during the day while he waited for night to come. Neither of them knew who or what would or might come after them, and to keep moving with someone to watch over the other made the most sense. But as they kept going, farther and farther away from where they’d come, it became easier and easier to forget to be afraid, so soon enough both of them slept during the day and drove on in the night. They joked about it, about what they were doing, until the jokes got as tired as they felt and they couldn’t make new ones.
One night, when they looked around and realized they could stop moving, it finally occurred there wasn’t a place for them to go – so they might as well go anywhere. They hadn’t planned on leaving and they hadn’t planned on where to go, so when they found themselves ready to stop, they decided they should find a place where that would be so they would know when they were done.
-
Jessica remembered she hadn’t wanted to live there, but that seemed so long ago she didn’t mind anymore. They’d thought it would be easy to settle in Vermont, since all she needed to take care of herself was Hoyt, and he knew how to take care of himself just fine. He found work on another road crew and she bused tables and hauled crates and boxes in one of Montpelier’s bigger restaurants on a night shift.
They’d known it’d be easy to live where they could get married as a human and a vampire without having to lie. They’d forgotten that even a small city was almost three times the size of the tiny town they’d grown up in, and that was almost as hard to figure out as the weather. They’d arrived just at the end of summer, as autumn came in, so almost all of Jessica’s little pay went to keeping Hoyt warm. All of his went to their future, their home paid for and owned under his name, one last little guarding force against the outside world.
As the days grew shorter, she slept less, stayed up late enough see Hoyt off to work in the mornings and got up early enough to see him home at the end of the day. She worked more hours and helped unload delivery trucks in the mornings before the sun came up, and made a show to her boss of carrying full-grown pigs into the freezer without any help. She learned how to cook for Hoyt on those smoky autumn nights, how to fill their house with good smells for him to come home to, and the first time the bacon hit the pan the sizzles and pops of the smells and sounds were just as good as she knew eating it would have been. Pulling biscuits out of the oven on her day off, with their soft yeasty smell, just in time for Hoyt to come back from work after the sun had set was almost as good as his face when he bit into one.
“It’s not my grandma’s recipe,” she made sure to say. “I got it from a book.”
“Thank God,” he replied, making them both laugh.
-
Winter came after teasing them with frost and light falls that were gone by the next night, before they were ready. When the snow was all done, all down all over, Jessica rushed out ahead of Hoyt still getting his gloves and scarf on, wearing nothing but her dress, falling down to her knees and laughing when Hoyt helped her back to her feet. The world had gone still, no sounds and no smells and everything looked blue and unreal, all soft and cold. It looked so perfect. She dashed ahead and called for Hoyt to follow, and he did, trudging up the hill after her, chasing her through the trees as she sped away again and again. She let him catch her in the middle of a field, under the clouds and stars in all the quiet and he told her how beautiful she looked, all alive and bright in the middle of the snow, how perfect she was for the woods in wintertime.
They were both sad to see the snow leave. Even when it made his job harder, Hoyt loved the sight of it falling down like slow raindrops, and even when it made Hoyt shiver and shake, Jessica missed it because she loved to fall back into a snow bank and get swallowed up in all of its soft cold. It felt so much like going to ground she made Hoyt try it so he would know that feeling, even just a little bit.
-
In the middle of January, when one of the students graduated and moved away, one of the full-time chefs asked her if she could chop onions without crying. As soon as she’d said yes she moved from clearing tables and unloading trucks to the kitchen itself as a line cook.
By the time spring properly arrived, the mud finally gone off the roads and flowers blooming on the trees, she’d learned how to drink Tru Blood. Hoyt had been sick and coughing and fevered and she hadn’t been able to drink from him, and when she stared at the bottles she’d bought – she was so hungry, so empty, she knew better than to let herself near him – she’d remembered having a sip of her daddy’s coffee years and years ago from a mug he’d forgotten that had cooled on the counter. It hadn’t burned her tongue and hadn’t tasted as bad. When she tried the same thing with a bottle, not bothering with the microwave, it was the same; still bad, but not as bad, not bad enough she couldn’t keep it down. She kept some bottles in the fridge at work after that, and learned that if she poured it into a big black mug and nobody looked too hard, it looked like she was drinking coffee and acting like a regular person. Even if they knew what she was drinking, the way she drank it looked like something a human could be doing. And everybody could go ahead, be comfortable, lying to themselves with everyone sharing the same lie.
-
Jessica sometimes wondered what Bill would say about her mainstreaming, but never for long. Summer had arrived and she’d lost any time to wonder. She’d loved summer in her long-ago days of life because it meant short nights, hours outside in tall grass and other kids out of school, huge happy gatherings filled up with smoke and sauce and smiling faces. Long days meant short nights, which meant less time inside asleep and still and more time outside playing. Summer still meant short nights, and now more than anything else, they meant busy nights in the kitchen, which meant there wasn’t time to think about the past, just the present.
There was still time for baseball games, that same sort of excitement that she and Hoyt remembered from home football games and leagues, everyone coming out and cheering. Night games were wonderful, and when she had a night off and if he wasn’t too tired they turned it into a couple’s night out.
Their first game was their first time going out as a couple. Knowing it was safe to walk the streets together didn’t mean they’d looked for reasons to, lessons learned all too well years ago; they’d been fine together, they were still fine together, but they both knew they couldn’t rely on each other to be the whole world. Hoyt had taken her hands in his, so rough and hard even with the creams she bought him on his birthdays, and whispered he still loved her more than he could stand and didn’t want to see them driven crazy because they never spoke to anyone else.
“I talk to people,” she tried to say.
“No. You talk to me. And I don’t talk to people, I talk to you, and we can’t go on that way.”
So they spread a blanket out on the grass and huddled together alone in the crowd, still lonely even with each other. It felt like summer back in Bon Temps, and Jessica realized for the first time she hadn’t thought of it as ‘home,’ just Bon Temps. Something deep inside her suddenly shook loose and let itself go, and she whipped her head to scan the crowd like she might find it. When she couldn’t, she tried to watch the game and couldn’t see it, just all the people, all around.
When the game was over and she was folding up the blanket, waiting for Hoyt to finish up his business, a small ‘hello’ came her way and she returned it without thinking. Ruth was about as tall as Jessica, quite a bit older and softer, with a friendly, round face and hair in a tight bun, ready and happy to talk to someone she hadn’t seen before.
“Nate and I come to all the games we can, and if I haven’t seen you at any, you’ve got to be new.”
“It’s our first one.”
“You had a good time tonight, I hope?”
“Yeah, yeah we did.” She smiled, wrapped the blanket around her arms. “Except the mosquitos.”
“Terrible little things.”
“I know. I kept slapping them away, I get so –”
“Possessive?”
“Yeah, like they shouldn’t get – what?” She realized what she’d said and looked to Ruth, suddenly afraid and then aware there wasn’t a reason to be: Ruth was smiling with her fangs out.
“It’s a little selfish of me, but I don’t want to share my husband with anyone, especially some buzzing insects.”
After that night, whenever she and Hoyt went to a game, she always packed little meals and a thermos of lemonade for him and a chilled thermos of Tru Blood for her, and slapped away the mosquitos before they could land on Hoyt. Sometimes they spread a blanket out on the Rec Field’s fence and snuggled together while the game went on and sometimes they sat on the stands and cheered along with everyone else when the home team scored a run. Some nights they didn’t make it home until late, when it was almost morning, because they got to talking with somebody they’d just met or someone else they’d ran into and had to catch up with. Montpelier was huge compared to where they’d grown up but it was still a small town at heart. That was one of the things they loved to tell people, how that made it so much easier for them to get used to living here than if they’d gone to a big city like Memphis or New York or even Pittsburgh.
“Not that Pittsburgh’s very vampire friendly,” she told Thomas, a vampire who had voted for the first President Adams and married his human Janice the moment he could and still admired Jessica’s chilled thermos idea. “But it still seems like a nice place.”
“I’ve been through there a time or two. You’re right, it is pleasant. And they like their baseball.”
“You really like your baseball.”
“Mike and Otis like it too. We could start a league.”
After she stopped laughing, Jessica had to admit it didn’t sound too bad, even if it might only be a way to meet other vampires since there wasn’t a place like Fangtasia around. She told him to tell her if anything happened, since she couldn’t promise anything – she was so busy she barely knew what would happen one night to the next. As fast as she could go, there were always plenty of things she needed to be doing all at the same time, and if she still needed breaths she wouldn’t have a moment to draw even one. There was never a moment free to complain, and Jessica knew even if there was she wouldn’t take it. She liked the work, the busy business, the precision and the improvisation. She’d never been a part of a large group like this, even when she’d been alive with her family, even when she’d been a member of her family’s church; nothing had ever been this joyful or this close, teasing and laughing and working side-by-side. She’d never been close enough to be able to enjoy it, or know how. The flickering seconds when she stopped to see where she was, maybe at her station cutting up a tomato fine as you please or pouring herself another cold mug, always reminded her why she was so happy to be here.
-
It was Hoyt’s idea that she ought to go to school to learn what she already knew.
“It’d be a waste of time,” she protested.
“You’ve got more of that than me,” he said, and that was the end of that.
When the admissions staff asked Jessica why she should attend, why someone who didn’t eat wanted to cook, she thought about the smell of fresh basil, how cutting old garlic cloves felt different from dicing fresh ones. Bread fresh from the oven filling up the room, how to make something look as perfect as she knew it could be. All the little reminders, and how they were enough. She looked down at her hands, still seventeen years old, then looked up at the staff and told them, “There’s more to food than just eating it. I cook for my husband, and it’s cooking for me too. Even if I can’t eat it, I can still make it, and smell it, and making it’s plenty.”
When she told them about baking a chocolate cake for Hoyt’s birthday, and taking her slice and crumbling it in her hands to taste it with her fingers, the woman on the end nodded – and Jessica knew she was in.
-
The VRA had finally passed, and with it the classification of vampirism as a disability. She made sure to use that to get into the classes she needed when she could, taking some of them out of order because of when the sun rose and set as the year moved on she couldn’t make it to them on time. One more thing she couldn’t do anything about.
She cut back her hours at the restaurant and made big cups of coffee for Hoyt to stay awake so he could help her study for the exams, who promised her he didn’t mind that she’d graduate college when he wasn’t going to. When she went to her classes, she always brought her thermos and made sure everyone knew what was in it. She could say she only fed on her husband, but that wasn’t good enough to make some people comfortable. They had to see she could work on the fake stuff to relax and smile with their eyes when they said hello.
After Jessica graduated and they hung her diploma, she went back to work full-time, putting her strong hands to work making delicate pastries and soft breads. She’d already found out she liked talking to people and getting to know them, and did her best to make friends. People liked talking to her, too, and after a while, started to come from long ways away to have conversations with her, just for the strangeness a vampire chef. The head chef didn’t mind, since it meant more people read about the restaurant. Her co-workers didn’t mind, since it gave them something to tease her about.
She minded a little bit because it felt like none of the interviewers read each other’s stories, so she had to answer the same questions almost every time. But she still had fun posing for the photographs.
-
Jessica would never forget Eden’s face – her little sister older and younger than she was, who’d picked up the magazine at a doctor’s office on a whim and opened it to the right pages to see the pictures – when she walked in the door. She’d asked for Jessica, who’d wiped her hands and walked out to a sister who’d recognized Jessica immediately – and it took Jessica a moment to recognize who Eden had become since she’d seen her last.
-
Hoyt wasn’t going to invite Pam in until Jessica was willing to vouch for her. He glared at her from the porch, then went back inside. Jessica grabbed two bottles of O-negative from the fridge, stopping halfway through the house to go back and warm one up before joining Pam in the garden.
They sipped quietly, not talking until most of Jessica’s bottle was done.
“How’d you get here?”
“Flew.”
“You chartered a plane?”
She laughed. “Bill really didn’t teach you much.”
“Others could’ve taught me better, but he was mine.”
Pam took another sip. She wasn’t here on Eric’s business or her own pleasure, and wouldn’t say more than that, not even how she found them.
“You didn’t tell him about the blood.” It wasn’t a question.
“No,” Jessica whispered.
“You fed him, and fed from him, and didn’t know.”
“Yes,” she said even quieter.
“I see.”
“I loved him before.” Jessica looked back to the house. “I swear I did, it was real and I loved him –”
“Doesn’t matter much now.”
-
She cooked Hoyt breakfast and dinner every day, no matter how busy her work was, and always stayed with him while he ate – those little moments of just being with him the best things she could imagine. They’d talk about repainting the cabinets and porch, how fennel and leeks were the big things this season, what movies they might see this weekend and all sorts of boring, normal things. Things like what he wanted for dinner.
“Pancakes,” he said with a laugh.
“You had pancakes for breakfast.”
“And I’d like them for dinner.”
“You don’t want - maybe mushroom tortellini? What about duck stir-fry?”
“Pancakes, blueberry pancakes, with extra syrup.” He crossed his arms and smiled, defiant.
She smiled. “One batch of blueberry pancakes with extra syrup up in a minute.” It didn’t take her long to measure and mix the ingredients, the protein and vitamin powders with the kefir and oatmeal all spun together in the blender, a nice thick glop that would go down easy. There were a few blueberries left from yesterday’s dinner and she threw those in too, watching them turn everything purple. Having a little truth in the lie helped it go down easier. She sat down next to Hoyt and he nodded, meeting her eyes, and let her in.
“They’re fresh pancakes, Hoyt. Right off the griddle, nice and warm, the blueberries were picked today and they’re bursting in your mouth, you know how they do that, the syrup’s real maple, dark amber, and it’s running down the fork, I used more butter than I needed and that’s all over your tongue, you can feel it, there’s even cinnamon in them.” She spooned the smoothie into his mouth, a little at a time so he wouldn’t spit up over himself. It’d gotten so hard for him to eat solid foods this last year that this was easier, and every meal together she told him what he was tasting so he didn’t have to know what he was eating.
She sometimes thought about Ginger, so far glamoured she’d forgotten where she lived and on bad nights forgot her own name, and wondered if Hoyt letting her in this way was why he wasn’t losing himself that way. His mind was still clear, his love for her clean as fresh snow. It was everything else that was falling away from him.
She still remembered Maxine’s face their last night in Bon Temps, the night they ran away so many years ago, the horror in her eyes when Jessica forced her to meet her gaze, pushed inside Maxine’s head and told her your son is dead, you killed him, no one will miss you when you’re gone, no one will ever feel sorry for you again. She didn’t want to, but had to hold onto that night. It was a reminder, a keepsake, of what she wished to never do again. Maybe when Hoyt was gone she’d go back. Maybe then, when she was alone in a house all over again, she’d go back to see what had become of the place they’d left. If he’d ever wanted to go back, he’d never said and she’d never asked, just like he’d never asked her if she’d wanted.
When he was done, she wiped his mouth and carried him into the bathroom, wiped him clean after he did his business, laid him into bed before getting under the covers herself.
Mornings like this were what she wanted to hold onto. Just Hoyt being there for her, her being there for him, being present – she was starting to learn what living forever meant and that Hoyt wouldn’t know. She couldn’t ask him to share forever with her. She couldn’t be that cruel. At their wedding, she’d promised to love him for as long as she lived. It was on mornings like this, when she listened to him breathe with more and more trouble and hoped she was there when he stopped so she was there to say good-bye, she knew exactly what she’d promised.
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