Chapter 6
They didn’t say another word to each other until the next morning.
If given the option, they probably wouldn’t have talked for a full week—maybe a month.
Again, between two avoidant Leos, it sometimes became a competition to see who could endure the silent treatment the longest. Historically, it had been Sylvia.
Aster tended to give in first. She was just that way, a giver.
But not now. Now, she was… speechless, really.
But they didn’t have the luxury of time to wait around. They had a very important date the next morning. One they couldn’t awkward their way around.
And that was with Tommy Ashcroft.
So, in another first to add to the mounting lists of firsts between them, Sylvia was the one to break the ice.
She did it over coffee. It was five A.M, the sun was barely awake on the horizon outside the apartment, and neither of them had gotten a wink of sleep.
Aster knew this because Sylvia had been silent the whole night.
No grunts or other animalistic noises. Just the soft sounds of her head rolling back and forth on the pillow, trying and failing to get comfortable.
“Do you feel… better?” Sylvia said.
Sylvia didn’t look up at Aster when she asked it. She just whisked her coffee with a tiny metal spoon, staring into the whirlpool of brown and white.
Aster was leaning on a chair, a black robe dangling from her body, drinking her own cup.
She held the hot liquid in her mouth for several seconds, thinking of how to reply.
But nothing smart or tasteful came to her.
She’d been thinking about this question all night—about if she was healed now, if she was fixed—and still, she didn’t have an answer.
When Aster didn’t respond, Sylvia risked a glance up at her. Her green eyes settled on the re-opened bite mark, and Aster felt her gaze like an electric current.
“It looks like it’s fading.”
Look, now they were both liars.
“Maybe we fixed it. By addressing it…” Sylvia cleared her throat. “Head on?”
Aster wanted to nod and say yes, because that would be very convenient. God, she wanted so badly to nod and say yes, because then they could just put whatever this was into a corner in both of their brains and forget about it. But then she would be lying. And Aster was very bad at lying.
But she also hated seeing Sylvia look like this. Without all her usual blustering confidence.
And after all, it wasn’t like they could do it again. Doing it again meant risking doing it for real. And doing it for real was clearly a very serious thing to do—a declaration that neither of them was interested in. It wouldn’t just be stupid, it’d be beyond that.
So Aster found a middle ground.
“I think it improved things.” Not technically a lie. It had felt amazing.
“Oh. Good. That’s… good.”
They stared at each other in awkward, terrible silence.
Sylvia sighed and tangled her hands through her hair.
If it was a mess last night, today it was totally untamable.
She knew Sylvia would beat it into submission before they headed to the office, but Aster almost didn’t want her to.
It framed her face so beautifully, curled around the pale flesh of her shoulders.
Aster wanted so badly to put her hands in it.
No, she chastised herself. Don’t think things like that.
Why not? You’ve played with Sylvia’s hair tons of times. Why should it be weird now?
Because it *is* weird now.
Great, you’re talking to yourself. That bodes well.
Oh, shut up.
Aster quieted the voices in her head by just going for it. She took two silent steps forward, then slid her hand against the back of Sylvia’s neck before bunching her fingers in her hair. Sylvia went stock still, eyes like a frightened gazelle.
“You didn’t sleep much, did you?” Aster said lightly, trying to play the gesture off as friendly concern. “Your hair is a bird’s nest.”
Sylvia blinked several times, but ultimately softened into the action. She inched closer to Aster, maybe not intentionally, and brought the cup of coffee to her lips. “I did not.”
Aster hummed. She replayed last night in her head for what felt like the millionth time, and it made warmth crawl over her skin all over again. She wished so badly that she had the words to cross this bridge between them, but the bridge felt perilous, like it was made of creaking, splintering wood.
She settled on whatever thought felt the most honest.
“Being a vampire is strange, isn’t it?”
At that, Sylvia seemed to unwind just a smidgen—laughing lightly.
“I’ve never known anything different.”
“I have,” Aster said, even though it was obvious. “I can barely remember it now, but I can still feel the edges of it. The silhouette of the whole… human experience.”
Sylvia got that glint in her eye again. That sharp curiosity.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“What was it like?”
The parallel of Sylvia’s question to last night—“What does it feel like?”—was not lost on Aster. Mostly because despite the superficial similarity—the words, and who asked them—the two questions could not land more differently in Aster’s chest.
Last night, Aster’s mind had painted a picture of Sylvia that she’d never seen before.
It was one colored completely by hunger—plain, feral, foreign hunger.
She’d experienced a connection with an ancient, primal part of herself that she wasn’t really sure how she felt about yet.
Like meeting a relative that you didn’t know you had.
But now, her hands in Sylvia’s hair, smoothing it softly, Sylvia drinking her coffee, the smell of burnt mocha in the air, she was reminded of who they actually were.
Who they’d been for six hundred years.
Friends.
And she didn’t mean that diminutively. She meant it with all the love in the world.
She sagged into Sylvia, placing her forehead on the other woman’s neck.
“Honestly?” Aster whispered into her skin.
She felt Sylvia shiver, but didn’t say anything about it.
It was probably her breath—cold as ice. “The pain is really what I remember most about it. The little cuts and bruises. The way my arms would ache if I slept on them wrong. The human body is so weak, it’s like carrying around a paper bag in a storm. ”
Sylvia snorted. Aster loved that stupid little sound.
The other vampire pulled her in close, tugging her arms around her back.
“Tell me more,” Sylvia hummed.
So Aster did.
Aster told her every memory she could recollect.
Most Sylvia had heard already, like about Aster’s parents, two faceless farmers with tan skin and wrinkled hands.
Others she hadn’t, like about Aster’s village friends.
Other girls who worked the fields, who would make bracelets out of grass and flower stems and tie them around Aster’s wrists.
Aster wasn’t sure how long she talked for.
She just let herself sink into Sylvia’s touch, let the other vampire carry her full weight.
They talked about everything but last night—everything but what had irrevocably changed between them—and somehow, that made it feel like nothing had changed at all.
The four alarm fire of panic in her brain had dulled to a quiet smoking flame.
She must have fallen silent, because Sylvia’s fingers itched across Aster’s scalp.
“We’re okay,” she whispered into Aster’s ear. “Yeah?”
“Of course,” Aster said, trying to imbue her voice with confidence she didn’t really have.
“You’re right. Being a vampire is fucking strange. So I bit you twice. And? Sometimes desperate times, desperate measures,” Sylvia laughed then, and it didn’t even sound forced. “God knows we’ve endured stranger things than a little shoulder-sucking.”
Aster’s face burned, but she still found herself grinning.
“You mean this wasn’t as weird as that time you had to sow my arm back onto my body?”
“Please. That was nothing. Remember when we killed those two stockbrokers and then dressed them in tutus for the police to find?” Sylvia all but cackled. “Oh my god.”
Aster nearly buckled over in laughter at the memory.
“Remember the statement the police gave the next day?” She wiped a tear from her eye.
"Of course I do." Sylvia dropped into her ridiculous impersonation voice. “The bodies of respected businessmen Alexander Howard and Wesley Smith were found in rather unusual circumstances.”
Aster cut in, “Naked, afraid, and dressed like… ballerinas?”
The taut string of comedy burst. The two of them laughed like schoolgirls, holding each other for balance.
By the time they finally caught their breath, tears were streaking down both their faces.
Aster’s grin had never been wider as she looked at Sylvia then—at her smeared mascara, her black eyeliner wet and smudged. Wrecked, but beautifully.
She raised her thumb to wipe under Sylvia’s eye.
Aster chuckled. “You’re going to have to fix this…”
It had been a completely organic gesture, something she’d done millions of times before, but the reaction on Sylvia’s face was nothing ordinary.
As Aster’s thumb brushed gently against her, Sylvia’s lips curled up in unbearable softness.
Her eyes creased happily. It was an expression that said, I feel safe in your hands.
She doubted Sylvia even knew she was doing it.
It took everything inside Aster to not react.
Had Sylvia always looked at her this way?
Aster couldn’t be sure now. It was like she was an actor on a set, and someone had moved around the lighting. Everything had a different shadow to it now.
Sylvia opened her mouth to say something, but then her Apple Watch began to ring.
“Damn it.” Sylvia groaned. They both realized it at the same time. “Work.”
The two of them separated slowly, then all at once.
The soft intimacy they’d sank back into had left as quickly as it arrived.