Chapter 27 #3
“Sylvia,” Aster said. Her voice was uncharacteristically shaky, and her fingers around Sylvia’s middle curled in a little too tight. “I’ve been doing a bit of thinking.”
“That’s never good. Avoid it if you can.”
Air left Aster’s nostrils, but she didn’t laugh. Dread began to build in Sylvia’s stomach.
“I think maybe I do want to be in love.”
And oh. Nothing could have prepared Sylvia for the way that landed on her chest. Her heart ached in a way it never had before, like it was trying to kill her.
“You—what?”
Aster looked down shyly, smiling at nothing particular. “I don’t know. The music makes me theatrical. It’s just… When you asked me many years ago if I desired anyone. If I wanted to date.”
“I recall.”
“Well, I think I do.” Aster shrugged, with that casual certainty she brought to everything. “I want to experience whatever it was that made Tchaikovsky write this. And, well, I looked up the word for serenade in the dictionary before tonight—”
Aster reached into her pocketbook and pulled out a small note. There were a few lines of text scrawled into it with ink. She furrowed her brows in determination and began to read from it.
“A piece of music sung or played in the open air, typically by a man at night under the window of his lover,” Aster read as though it was scripture, and Sylvia was grateful for the dim lighting, because she was borning like a torch.
“I’m not a man, and I’ve never had a lover—but I do like the idea of singing something under someone’s window. ”
Sylvia felt suddenly completely unprepared for this conversation.
Completely unprepared to say anything except Why not my window, or I’d like to sing under yours, because her selfish mind could only position the conversation in those exact two dimensions—Aster loving her, her loving Aster, nothing in between, no other person, alive or dead, skull and bones, dead dead dead.
She’d kill anyone who even dared. Yes, she’d like to murder them, and bury them beneath the ground—
Oh. This wasn’t good.
Aster had never given Sylvia the opportunity to be jealous.
Now that she felt a glimmer of it, it was clear this was going to end horribly.
“Have you ever been in love?” Aster asked Sylvia when she didn’t reply. Sylvia refused to call Aster's eyes hopeful because that would mean admitting something else.
Sylvia quickly swallowed down the rest of her drink, and felt it corrode the inside of her throat. She took Aster’s hand and kept her eyes trained on the King, who was getting ready to take a break for the Intermission.
“Yes,” she answered because anything else felt like lying. “Let’s go.”
***
They killed the King.
It went spectacularly well, except for one small detail.
They were seen by half of the Romanian guard, and were now running for their lives.
Luckily, vampire legs, when you really put them into gear, carried faster than even horses.
And vampire eyes could see through the night’s darkness unusually well, so they could scramble around in the trenches and the alleyways even with no candles.
Soon enough they were breathing each other's air in the darkness of some alleyway, horse hooves clopping by in the distance, the police frantically running in the opposite direction, batons twirling through the air.
Sylvia’s chest heaved against Aster’s, and the adrenaline—and the visinata—made her forget herself completely. She pressed a sloppy kiss to the side of Aster’s face, giggling.
“Oh, that was so fun.”
Aster’s breath hitched in her chest. But then she laughed it out in a choppy breath. “Do you think we’ll get to keep the castle?”
Sylvia pulled away and palmed over Aster’s pocket, which was notably empty. “Not if you forgot to grab the keys.”
Aster smirked slyly, and opened her pocketbook. The same one holding the definition from before. Lithe fingers removed an entire ring of keys—silver, copper, bronze—and jangled them in Sylvia’s face. Sylvia could see her own reflection in them, and she looked much too happy.
She took them hastily from Aster so she didn’t have to look at herself much longer.
“It’ll be a chore, thralling every soldier who comes to reclaim it,” Sylvia said, stepping away from Aster to press her back against the cold wall next to her, so they were side by side, gazing into the dark streets.
She could practically hear Aster’s smile—and feel it, too, when she touched her hand to Sylvia’s, and then held it tightly, interweaving their fingers.
“Everything is a chore to you,” Aster laughed.
“Not everything.” Not you. “But most things.”
Aster laughed again, turning toward her on the wall, because Sylvia could truly never escape her. The light from the gas lamp cast a hazy ghost on her face, allowing her to see Aster’s fangs, still faintly red. She was always forgetting to wash the blood off of them.
“You’re going to get us caught,” Sylvia sighed, pulling a handkerchief from her pocket and stepping closer. “Let me…”
She grazed her thumb across Aster’s lip.
The other woman stilled, her eyes going minutely wider in surprise.
Sylvia panicked and nearly withdrew, but then almost as quickly as Aster’s surprise came, it faded.
Aster opened up obediently, and Sylvia schooled her face toward something she hoped looked doctorly or professional or at the very least platonic, before taking Aster’s chin with her other hand, and running the cloth delicately over her teeth.
During the entire procedure, Aster looked at her as if she was holding the secrets to the universe.
It should have told Sylvia that this was too much, too close, but Sylvia couldn’t help herself.
Aster’s lips were as soft as fresh linens and she smelled so good and her teeth looked so sharp—and Sylvia might never get this chance again.
That was something she told herself very often, despite never knowing what a chance exactly was.
“Sylvia,” Aster inhaled.
Sylvia paused, realizing only then how intimately close their faces had gotten. She had to back away ever-slightly to see Aster’s beautiful brown eyes in full.
“What?” she said breathily.
“I think,” Aster swallowed. “I think I would like to be in love with you.”
Sylvia wasn’t sure what happened to her, hearing those words.
She’d never felt a tangle of emotions so powerful since.
It felt like opening a present on your birthday and getting exactly what you wanted, and then suddenly having it taken away from you, locked in a closet, shot behind the barn.
She gasped, her heartbeat in her ears, panic crawling around the hem of her vision.
Aster could sense her shock and she seemed to immediately withdraw. But because she was Aster, not without a fight first, or at least a pointed question—“Am I not to your tastes?”
She could see Aster’s mind evaluating itself, searching for faults. And for as much as Sylvia was a selfish, self-sabotaging creature, she could never, ever let Aster believe that.
“Darling, you define my tastes,” Sylvia muttered quietly, and quickly, so that she didn’t have to register it on her own ears. “You are the most infuriatingly gorgeous creature on Earth. It is torture not to press you against the walls of most restaurants and bars and opera halls.”
Aster’s eyes widened, and there was that hope again.
Sylvia wanted to drown in it. She wanted so badly to kiss those swollen, blood-stained lips and have this be easy. But she knew what would happen when she did. And that knowledge cratered into her like a disease, making her hang her head.
“But you should pick someone else to be in love with, because my love is no good,” she said, hoping to sound casual but precise. “It’s tainted with snake oil.”
Because if you fall in love with me, you’ll never get the chance of actually staying in it.
It was the truth. The aching truth. And at least, maybe this way, if she just told Aster instead of kissing her and making her learn the lesson—she could at least live with a version of Aster who loved her once. Who remembered how it felt to love her and not have her mind wiped clear.
Aster huffed out a breath that sounded nearly offended.
“Sylvia,” she said seriously, taking the other woman’s shoulder and squeezing it. “Even if your face was doused in poison, I’d kiss you like drinking a cognac. We’ve known each other for hundreds of years, do you really think I don’t know what I’m getting myself into?”
Sylvia looked up, realizing that the aching pit in her stomach was forming into something as embarrassing as tears. Tears which she tried hastily to wipe away, but Aster saw first.
Her cocky smile immediately dropped from her face and she rubbed the pads of her thumbs delicately across Sylvia’s cheeks, holding them there.
“Sylvia. Please let me try and love you,” Aster said softly. “I promise it won’t hurt.”
Sylvia laughed wetly. The utter kindness in Aster’s voice made her want to crawl in a hole. “That’s the kind of promise someone makes before the other shoe drops.”
Aster cupped her cheek, still smiling at her. “Let it drop, then, and knock me out cold.”
Sylvia shook her head, exasperated. “Do you ever give up on anything?”
“Not when it matters to me.”
Sylvia knew then that Aster would never stop pursuing her, year after year, even if she forgot it every single time. Because Aster was not a person, she was persistence personified.
So Sylvia stared at Aster’s lips—and for a moment, she let herself be greedy.
She cupped both hands around Aster’s jaw, holding her like a captain might have held onto the ledge of a sinking ship, and pressed her mouth to Aster’s with a soft whimper.
Aster immediately threaded her strong hands through Sylvia’s hair and smiled into it, laughed into it, and for a single moment in time Sylvia laughed too, feeling like everything was going to be okay.
But then she felt it.
That familiar stirring behind her eyes.
No, no, no, no.
Despair like no other filled her stomach, and she knew then that she had a choice to make.
She could either do this again and again, lifetime over lifetime, or she could end it now, feel the pain now, and let it scar over. It would heal terribly, like an infected wound; it would be the worst thing she’d ever do, but it would at least make it so she wouldn’t have to do it again.
She had to change the Suggestion.
So she pulled back, tears in her eyes, and said new words:
“Aster,” she said gently, her heart breaking. “You are not in love with me.”