Chapter 15
When Sylvia placed her down on the bed with the light touch you might expect from a ballerina, and not a vampire with blood dribbling from her mouth, Aster knew even if someone wiped her mind clean with bleach, erased every wrinkle in her brain, this memory would somehow remain.
The memory of Sylvia kissing her senseless against the window, her still-bloody palms staining the glass red; the memory of the way Aster laughed like a schoolgirl, giddy and so, so happy, even if she’d never say so, when Sylvia picked her up, her mouth still on hers, and carried her to the bed.
“This is so unnecessary. I can walk,” Aster had teased stupidly against her lips. To which Sylvia sneered, like the thousand year old frat boy that she was, “Not when I’m done with you.”
A threat she had so far failed to make good on. Like two drunk teenagers, they’d gotten as far as the mattress, and lost themselves so much in the idea of sex that they’d completely failed to do anything about it. Clothes still on, two bodies wrapped up into each other in the dark.
But Aster didn’t mind at all. Making out felt like a new magic trick they’d discovered together, as mystical as anything they’d earned through their blood rites. And just as Aster would hone her magic through study, she treated kissing Sylvia with the same reverence.
Like a rat in a pavlovian puzzle, she learned everything that made Sylvia squeak, and repeated it ad nauseum—biting her lower lip, kissing her fast, then slow.
She made mental notes of every sound the other woman made, categorized it in her brain under Do again and Don’t do again, and prayed to God—something she hadn’t done in a thousand years, since the Turning—that she’d get a chance to do any of it again, after this. After the haze broke.
But the haze didn’t break, it only dispersed.
Sylvia strayed from her face and kissed down her collarbones, her arms, to the palms of her hands.
Aster trembled when Sylvia rolled up her dress to her waist, exposing her underwear, and kissed her inner thighs.
“Gorgeous,” Sylvia whispered against them, and Aster’s center throbbed at the praise.
Sylvia’s nose nudged her right there, and—
“Please.”
Sylvia chuckled meanly. “Paciencia.”
Aster hated ever teaching her Spanish.
And then, cruel as she was, Sylvia pulled back, and traced her way back up to Aster’s face, far away from her desire.
Sylvia hovered over her, her gorgeous, erratic curls trapping Aster in a lightless cocoon.
All she could see were Sylvia’s red eyes, her half-bitten lips.
Nothing else in the room—nothing else in the world, really, bar a bomb through the window, or a bullet in the head—could breach through their bubble.
Sylvia leaned down to kiss her again, and Aster whimpered into it.
Their lips disconnected, saliva dribbling between them, and Sylvia said, with that shit-eating grin of hers that permeated even the most intimate moments, “You kiss way too decently for someone who hasn’t had sex in a hundred years.”
Aster balked. She wanted to be offended, but really the backhanded compliment only comforted her.
Because she had been scared, like a child who had heard the unending preaching of abstinence, that whatever they were doing would turn them into different people at the end.
But Sylvia was still crass and stupid, and Aster was ever-ready to let her know it.
She brought her fingers up to Sylvia’s upper lip and pinched it. “And it’s a miracle you find any women who want to kiss you when you can never shut up.”
Sylvia laughed delightedly at her rudeness, and Aster knew it was delighted because she skipped Aster’s mouth entirely, pressing excited kisses to her jaw, her cheeks, her forehead—and oh—it took everything inside Aster not to melt completely by the time she reached her chin.
Because it almost felt like there was nothing sexual at all about the kisses.
It just felt like them, like Sylvia and Aster, best of murderous friends, the them that existed before the bedlam of the last few weeks.
So why did it feel so romantic?
“Sylvia…”
Aster wasn’t sure what she aimed to say, probably something horribly unwise. To her luck, Sylvia cut her off anyway. The other woman slowly reeled back from her assault of kisses before speaking, and she had this considering, thoughtful expression on her face. That’s never good.
“It’s kind of bizarre, isn’t it,” Sylvia said quietly. “That we’ve never done this before. I mean, we’ve been friends for centuries. We’ve both been insanely hot the entire time. I’m into women, you’re into women. Murder turns both of us on like two Harleys. What gives?”
Aster felt her pulse quicken in her neck.
Of course, Sylvia wouldn’t let her lose herself to the haze for too long. She was too much of a sadist for that. She had to drag Aster through the hot coals of reality.
“Is it really that bizarre?” she responded hastily, not really ready to discuss it.
Sylvia snorted, because Aster had answered a question with a question. Evasive maneuvering 101. She’d stolen the technique shamelessly out of Sylvia’s handbook.
Like, her actual handbook.
(Who do you think wrote How To Make Friends and Influence People?)
“Oh come on, Aster. Don’t be coy.”
But before Aster could decide just how coy she wanted to be, Sylvia dipped her head to Aster’s neck, and licked her tongue along it. Goosebumps immediately cropped up Aster’s body.
“I just never thought you were interested in me like—well,” Sylvia mumbled against her skin.
She stalled for a second, as if considering how to end her sentence, and in place of finishing it, she let her fingers trail down to Aster’s underwear, thumbing against where she was wettest. Aster let out a surprised gasp and squirmed, and she could feel Sylvia grin greedily against her. “Like that.”
“Oh god.”
Sylvia grinned gleefully. “I’d prefer you use my first name.”
And before Aster could punish her for such a stupid, stupid joke, Sylvia’s hand slipped beneath her underwear, and her fingers spilled across Aster’s center. Aster whined disastrously.
“Tell me,” Sylvia said lowly in her ear, demanding.
Aster had only ever heard her use this voice during Suggestion, but she could tell that wasn’t what was happening.
This was another Sylvia entirely; one Aster hadn’t been privy to until now.
That thought made her buck up involuntarily.
“Did it all really start with the first bite? Have you ever—before—”
Sylvia began to drag slow circles around Aster’s clit, and Aster saw stars. She began to thrust slowly upward, into Sylvia’s palm, but Sylvia made a tutting noise, and pressed her down into the mattress, so she couldn’t buck against her.
“Answer first.”
“Answer what?” Aster moaned. “You didn’t even finish your own question.”
“Did you ever want to touch me before I bit you?”
Sylvia met her gaze, and Aster could tell from the narrowing of her eyes that she was serious.
This was both a game and a genuine question.
So, with reluctance, Aster thought back.
Because even if Sylvia was torturing her, it was torture Aster was maddeningly curious about herself—when had the inciting event really started?
Had this been festering for longer than that?
It felt naive to say it was only now. It felt silly and terminally human to insist it was since forever.
She thumbed across Aster’s clit just once, and Aster whined.
“You’re cruel.”
“Tell me,” Sylvia repeated. “And then I’ll be plenty nice.”
“God, Sylvia. I don’t know,” Aster confessed.
“I think… I think it did start with the bite. I never really—” And because Sylvia could never let her finish a sentence, she started pleasuring her again, her thumb sliding up, down, up.
“Fuck. I’ve just never been that much of a—” Sylvia left her clit alone for a mere second, then dragged her fingers down near Aster’s entrance. “Fuck. Please.”
“You’ve never been a what, Aster? Use your words.”
“Fuck you,” Aster whined. “Fuck me.”
“Tell me first. What were you going to say?”
“A sexual person. I’ve never been much of a sexual person.”
And at that, at the juxtaposition of Aster begging Sylvia to slide inside her to that completely earnest confession, Sylvia cackled meanly, and for a moment Aster hated her, in that way where hate was actually love disguised, where someone is so terrible and endearing and terribly endearing that you lose track of which came first, and soon enough you’re smiling at them with murder on your mind.
But then Sylvia softened. Something in her expression looked genuinely pained, conflicted. It made Aster immediately uneasy. Had she given her the wrong answer? Had Sylvia hoped for something different? And then, like being cut with a razor, it hit Aster—
Just how long had Sylvia wanted to touch her?
Any answer except never, until recently, conflicted heavily with Aster’s recollection of events, which looked something like this: Sylvia had bit her, awakened something in Aster, then she pitied her and tried to take care of it.
And through the course of doing that, Sylvia had actually started to find Aster attractive—perhaps she’d found Aster good-looking before, but not in a way that was accompanied by any urges—and now here they were, fucking because they both wanted it.
Well, fucking with the disclaimer that Aster certainly, quietly, wanted something more, something she still barely understood, but would probably kill her in the end—but certainly Sylvia was only here to get off.
She’d never seen the other vampire date.
She wouldn’t even bring home the same woman twice, for fear that she’d be too clingy.
“That’s what bothers me,” Sylvia said, finally. And Aster gave her a confused look. “That I’ve known you for six hundred years, and you’ve taken someone home, I don’t know, four times?”