Chapter 25 #3
But like many times in both the past and the future, she was looking at nothing but Sylvia.
Who, despite the fact that she should be excited that they dug up such a prize, looked nothing but forlorn, distraught.
Lost in thought. She was staring out the small box window, looking at the full moon, with her arms wrapped around her legs.
Aster crawled toward her, sidling up to her side and putting her head on Sylvia’s shoulder. She could feel the other woman melt against her. It made Aster’s heart beat in that odd way.
“Your mother is gone,” Aster whispered. “She’s not in this room. She’s not in this castle. She’s not on this Earth. Well — that might be a stretch. Morsels of her corpse are under the ground, probably feeding a family of worms. But that’s the limit of her reach. Worms.”
Sylvia didn’t move, didn’t respond, for a moment.
The only sound was her boot tapping nervously on the floor.
Then her hand snaked up Aster’s back, pulling her in closer, so Aster was pressed fully flush to Sylvia’s side.
Aster could hear Sylvia’s blood rush under skin—faster than usual, hectic, her heart had to have picked up pace.
“How did you know?” Sylvia replied quietly.
“You’re more readable than you think you are. Did you know you always tap your foot when you’re nervous?”
Sylvia laughed quietly. “Thanks for letting me know. I’ll make sure to destroy all my tells.”
“Please don’t,” Aster said, lips twitching up. “I prefer you this way.”
“Sad?”
“Honest.”
Sylvia turned her head to look at her. Her teeth were biting harshly down on her lips, and her eyes were glassy. Aster could see the reflection of the moon in her eyes. Two full white pearls.
“I’d have to disagree. Honesty doesn’t become me,” Sylvia said, brushing under her eye with a wet laugh. “I’m such an ugly crier. Like a smudged painting.”
Aster laughed, disagreeing so completely that she said something rash — one of those thoughts that leaves you before you can think better of it.
“If you were a painting, I’d be one of those strange men trying to kiss it when the museum guards are looking the other way.”
Sylvia’s pupils darkened, and Aster heard her heartbeat staccato.
“You’d do what?”
Aster’s cheeks reddened. “I — well. You’re beautiful, Sylvia. That’s all I meant.”
“Is that all you meant?”
Now Sylvia was looking at her with a challenge in her eyes.
All of that sad apathy had melted away, replaced with this hunger — no, that couldn’t be right.
They had eaten plenty that morning, sucked a poor peasant man dry.
And yet Sylvia was turning toward her, looking at her face, then her neck, at the pale exposed skin, and back again.
“Aster,” Sylvia said lowly, quietly, “I must confess something.”
Aster blinked, and felt as if perhaps her life was about to change. “Yes?”
“I dream of biting you almost every night.”
Aster’s mouth went dry, her entire body going rigid. She could barely get out the words when she asked, “Are you starved? We can find another blood source in the nearby village.”
Sylvia shook her head slowly back and forth.
“No, not like that.” In the darkness she almost looked like a spectre, and Aster wondered for a moment if Catrina really had haunted the place, because this felt like a dream.
A dream that was slowly becoming real, undoubtedly real — because Sylvia was slipping over her, pressing her down into the wood.
“Sylvia…” Aster swallowed slowly. Her entire body was heating up like a furnace. She could feel want, no — need — pulsing from her fingers to her ankles. It rushed into her abruptly, she hadn’t even realized it was there, hibernating, but it had broken through now, full force.
Sylvia loomed over her and asked, quietly, “Do you want to kiss me?”
And when she asked it, her eyes were strangely red. A trick of the light.
“What will it mean if I do?” Aster answered.
“It means I’ll make you love to you in my mother’s attic, and forever traumatize her ghost.”
And Aster wanted to laugh, she really did, but instead her mind zeroed in on that one word in particular — love — and she trembled.
A tremble that traveled throughout her whole body, like a chill in the night, and Sylvia must have felt it, because all the confidence, all that hunger, seemed to whisk out of her like the wind, and she began to shake her head.
“I’m — I’m sorry. This was presumptuous, I…”
But Aster wouldn’t let her pull away. Something carnal took her, and she reached upward, hooking her hand behind Sylvia’s neck, and pulled her in.
And when their lips touched, it felt like a miracle.
Something blossomed in Aster’s chest. A weed that grew flowers. They didn’t need to take her clothes off for the realization to hit her like an anvil, as if it’d been dormant there all this time.
I love Sylvia, she knew already, in the same way that she knew the days of the month. I am desperately in love with Sylvia, was a revelation that was new, and terrifying, and all at once made perfect sense. All it took was hearing the other woman to make the sound —
“Oh god,” Sylvia moaned, pressing her down and tilting her hips forward into Aster’s.
They kissed like they’d been meaning to for hundreds of years, and when Sylvia withdrew to remove a piece of clothing, any piece at all, her eyes were undoubtedly red, and swirling.
They widened just as Aster’s did, and Sylvia’s fingers went up to cover her eyelids, “No — stop. Stop.” But the commands against herself didn’t work. “I want this. I want this. Please.”
But soon enough Aster was lying slack, again. Asleep.
And Sylvia was alone.
And Aster, the present Aster, stood a few feet away, a passive observer, watching her body lie unmoving on the floor of the attic.
She watched as Sylvia breathed heavily, crawling off of her in disbelief, backing away, fearful like some kind of terrified animal.
She watched Sylvia bring her knees to her chest, and hug them tightly, and cry, silently, as the moon descended into the fields.