Chapter 16
Aster wanted to go all night. She wanted to go all morning too, and into the next day, and the next, but in reality, about twenty five minutes after she begged Sylvia to fuck her again, the two of them were absolutely exhausted.
Not from lack of libido—Aster was making up for six hundred years of unspent horniness—but from, predictably (to anyone except them), blood loss.
She started seeing little black dots at the edge of her vision, and she squeezed Sylvia’s shoulder, mumbling a “think I’m going to pass out” before falling like a ragdoll onto the mattress, and waking up five minutes later with a very worried vampire doting over her, carrying a gauntlet’s worth of blood in a red solo cup.
Apparently, their dishwasher broke during the five minutes that Aster was unconscious.
Aster rolled onto her back, accepted the cup, and failed to care when the blood dribbled from her mouth onto the sheets. They were ruined anyway, and she didn’t have the arm strength to hold it up much higher. She probably looked like an old lady on her deathbed. How sexy.
“How’d the dishwasher break?” Aster slurred, looking up at Sylvia, who was staring at her with intense and terribly endearing worry. It made her heart ache.
Sylvia looked away evasively. “I got in a fight with it.”
“You got in a fight with a dishwasher?”
Sylvia frowned, crossing her arms. “It was insisting on keeping all of the cups hostage while you were bleeding out on the mattress. Sue me for putting your safety above the sanctity of our security deposit.”
Aster smiled like a fool. How romantic.
“We don’t have a security deposit, Sylvia. This is an Airbnb.”
She could hear Sylvia pick at her phone. “Cleaning fee then?”
“Pretty sure cleaning is different than breaking. I heard glass shatter.”
The closet door creaked open, and Aster heard hangers scrape against wood. What was she up to? Wincing, Aster turned onto her stomach, and the world momentarily spun.
Her disorientation must have been obvious on her face, because Sylvia was suddenly on her again, kneeling at the edge of the bed, frowning.
The vampire lifted her hand, then pushed it across the top of Aster’s scalp, threading her fingers between loose black hairs.
Aster immediately became self conscious of how sweaty and matted it must have been—but Sylvia didn’t seem to care.
She just scratched across her head like a child raking a pile of leaves, soft and reverent.
It was so achingly sweet - and it made Aster want to say something dangerous.
“Thank you for always taking care of me,” she whispered.
Sylvia blinked several times, as if Aster had sprayed her with a light dusting of water. Her nose scrunched, and she did that thing where she opened her mouth, just slightly, then closed it.
“I mean.” Sylvia’s hand unconsciously gripped tighter to Aster’s hair. “I haven’t had many friends in my life – they tend to die prematurely in the acquaintance stage, through no fault of my own – but I’ve heard it’s one of the basic tenets of the whole agreement.”
Aster tried her best not to look like she’d been kicked when the word friends fell out of Sylvia’s mouth. But she must have done a shit job at it, because Sylvia’s frown deepened.
“And it helps that you’re easy to take care of,” she continued. “Like a cactus.”
Aster snorted, and the heaviness in her heart lifted just a bit. Although friends still felt like a knife that had been left to lodge. “That’s really the plant you associate me with ?”
The levity in her voice freed Sylvia’s fingers again, and they began to itch against Aster’s skull pleasantly.
She glanced down at Aster’s lips, seemingly considering something.
Something that looked a lot like Should I kiss her?
Which really did not match well with the knife that was friends, but why was Aster expecting consistency out of the most reliably inconsistent person on the planet?
Growing frustrated and increasingly anemic, Aster made the decision for her, pushing forward and capturing Sylvia’s lips in a quick, searing kiss. A kiss to make a point. What point, she had no clue, but Sylvia gasped when Aster pulled back, and her eyebrows arched dramatically.
Sylvia lifted her free hand to her mouth, touching her fingers to her lips.
“What was that for?” she whispered, sounding stunned.
As if they hadn’t kissed each other incessantly for the last two hours.
Aster frowned.
Because I wanted to.
No, not quite—
Because I think I might be in love with you, and I don’t know what that means, it’s my first time at all of this, so I’m scratching like a dog at the door trying to make you understand.
Aster took the coward’s route instead.
“ ‘Hungry. There was some leftover blood on your lips. Couldn’t resist.”
Sylvia looked at her like she was a liar. She was.
But for the first time, perhaps ever, she didn’t push it. She just laughed, shook her head, and returned to the closet, where she pulled out a set of clothes. They landed on top of Aster’s body a moment later: Sylvia’s old Beetlejuice t-shirt, and black sweatpants.
“You’ll look good in these,” she said with a vacant edge to her voice, and then she was heading for the door, an urgency in her step. “I’m going to take a shower.”
***
It quickly became obvious that Sylvia was not, in a word, alright.
First off, the shower became more of a marathon of wasting the Airbnb's hot water supply. It went on for at least an hour and a half—all of Lemonade played, and then looped—before Sylvia stepped out in a steam cloud, avoided Aster’s gaze completely, then trapped herself inside her bedroom to change.
Which, Aster could admit Sylvia took her time with her outfits, but forty minutes of opening and closing drawers was getting pathological.
“Sylvia. Are you… good?”
Aster had rapped at her door several times, even tried the handle, but it was locked. She couldn’t remember the last time Sylvia had locked a door. Maybe the sixteenth century.
“Dandy,” came a sharp reply from the other side when Aster knocked again.
“Can I come in?”
There was no reply for a moment. When Aster tried the handle again, Sylvia sighed heavily.
“I’m busy.”
Aster laughed incredulously. “Busy? Busy with what?”
Another pause. Then footsteps thundered towards the door, and it whisked open. Sylvia leaned out with her damp, beautiful hair hanging around her toweled body. In those forty minutes, she’d somehow failed to put a single item of clothing on.
“You might not realize this, but one of us has to actually plan the thrall scheme,” she said coldly.
“The funeral is in two days, and events do not crash themselves. Also, our bank account is in the red. And – I just checked the application, app, whatever the fuck – and apparently we’ve overstayed in the Airbnb and they’re coming by tomorrow from out of town to kick us out. ”
Aster’s mind reeled at that tornado of information. But mostly, it reeled at the sharpness in Sylvia’s voice. Sylvia was rude, and callous, and crass, but she was rarely cold. This was Sylvia with her hackles up, a cat one wrong move away from scratching up your arm.
Aster had no problem with Sylvia scratching up her arm, or her hands, or her legs—Sylvia could destroy every inch of her, if she so wanted to—so in absence of a survival instinct, Aster furrowed her brow and said, “Why are you acting like this?”
Sylvia scowled. “Acting like what? I’m not acting like anything.”
“Yes you are. You’re acting like a bitch,” Aster laughed hoarsely.
“Which is a bit concerning to me, given that we just had – well – sex for the first time in six hundred years, and your response to it is apparently to flee to the shower, and then lock yourself up in your room, and now you’re yelling at me about things we both know neither of us care about. ”
She could see Sylvia partially deflate, called out so thoroughly, her scowl dipping into a more modest angry frown. But this was still Sylvia, so she wasn’t going to flip over on her belly without a fight first.
“I’m being a bitch because I care about us being homeless tomorrow?”
“As if we wouldn’t just Suggest our way into some idiot’s living room for the night.”
“That doesn’t resolve the funeral problem. I need a plan. We need a plan.”
“Sylvia. I—” Aster pinched her nose, and breathed out.
Get it together. “You already have a plan. You came up with it the minute you saw Tommy dead on the floor. Also –” She raised her eyebrows commandingly when Sylvia moved to interrupt.
“– You’ve talked my ear off about it all of yesterday.
We show up at the gates without an invitation.
Pretend to be some rich, connected, oligarch-money lesbian couple from Bucharest who forgot it in the mail.
I kill Yasmine, you hunt down Ashcroft. The end.
My memory might be bad, but it’s not dementia bad. ”
“No I– That’s not–” Sylvia spluttered. “Fuck. Well I need to revise that plan.”
Aster propped a hand on her hip and laughed coldly. “Liar.”
Sylvia’s face was growing red. Her fingers were twitching by her sides, and she looked like she wanted to grab Aster and throw her against something. Not that Aster would complain.
“Fuck,” Sylvia growled. “Fine.”
She violently turned away and paraded into her room, throwing her phone onto the mattress before sitting on it and burying her head in her hands. She stroked through her own hair and sighed dramatically. When Aster didn’t immediately come in, she looked up at her and scowled.
“What is this, eleventh century vampirism? Do I need to invite you in or do you know how to use a door without me walking you through it first?”
Aster ignored her rudeness, and stepped through the precipice. She got a sense that Sylvia would probably jump like a startled cat if she sat next to her on the bed, so she lifted Sylvia’s CD collection—exclusively Fleetwood Mac albums—off a nearby stool, and then dragged it to face her.