Chapter 29
Sylvia wasn’t avoiding her, exactly. That would be too obvious of a thing for her to do.
Instead she was doing something much more confusing and infuriating, which was pretending like everything was fine.
It had been approximately ten hours since Aster had come to the realization that she’d been in love with her roommate for five hundred years and counting, and, because she now lived in mortal fear of forgetting everything, she had been meticulously recording the events since in a tiny green velvet diary in her room while Sylvia, err, “cleaned.”
(The vacuum had been blasting noisily for an hour and a half, but Aster was pretty sure it hadn’t moved from its original position in the kitchen since Sylvia had plugged it in.
Further evidence for this theory was that the last time she peeked outside her bedroom door, Aster saw Sylvia lousing on the couch on Tiktok, her legs hoisted over the back, her head dangling from the cushions, like some kind of deranged spider monkey.
The pitiful vacuum was still in the same place sucking up the same morsel of food it had started on an hour before.)
But Aster couldn’t really make fun of her.
She was, of course, doing something equally weird.
Which was hiding under her comforter, blasting Joan Jett on her iPod Nano, and feverishly re-reading diary entries she’d written not even forty five minutes ago in fear that she’d already lost her memory again.
She mouthed the words reverently like she was reading the Old Testament:
8am. Sylvia told me in broad strokes about her plan to stop her compulsive suggestions.
She seems to think that there’s a vampire out there named Dr. Vey who can perform a type of hypnosis that will make her issue go away.
The catch is, he only does favors for other vamps in some pretentious association called ‘the council,’ which richard ashcroft in some way belongs to, and which she has literally never mentioned to me before now, despite it being very related to the plan we’ve had the whole time.
I can’t even be mad because at this point I should just expect that all Sylvia plans will involve secret second-layer plans that I will never be privy to until they’re slapping me in the face.
9:30am. Every time I try to get physically close to Sylvia, her whole body tenses up, and she gets so…
eerily, uncharacteristically quiet. It’s not like she outright rejects me, but it’s like she can’t let herself relax into it at all.
Even if it’s just a friendly, innocuous sort of touch like we always do – like just sitting close together on the couch while we watch the morning news.
I keep thinking about how, right before we finished the unwinding, she told me if I wanted her after it was done, I could have her.
And I do – want her, I mean. Badly. Interminably.
But I can’t understand what she wants. What she needs before she’s ready to talk to me.
I don’t want to make her uncomfortable. I’m so insanely confused.
11am. The bite is acting up again. I can’t quite explain it, but it’s like I can feel something radiate from that rough patch of skin in my neck where she bit me.
It feels so warm there, and that warmth travels through me like a poison.
Soon enough my entire body is humming, and I’m finding myself rubbing my thighs together unconsciously, trying to get some kind of relief, like some kind of horny teenager.
I suppose it’s a good thing that she won’t let me near her now, because I don’t think I’d be able to stand it.
12pm. She’s been texting someone for the past hour.
I think it’s that Sokolov woman. For some reason, the longer she sits there tapping on her phone with that dumb little furrowed brow, the more I feel vaguely nauseous and pissed off — like something is burning within me that makes me want to grab her iPhone and stomp on it.
I know Sylvia would be furious with me if I did.
She didn’t get Apple Care on the new model. Is this jealousy?
Eventually Aster set down her journal and decided to intimidate the phone out of Sylvia’s hands herself.
This was an easier task than she anticipated, as Sylvia was more than happy to stop texting Yasmine if it meant avoiding any sort of discussion with Aster.
She handed the phone to her and said “I’m done vacuuming. Handle the ginger yourself, I’m getting Starbucks,” before plucking her coat off the wall and whisking out of the kitchen like some kind of full-time employee on a lunch break. The vacuum still noisily roared in the back.
The brief conversation gave Aster such whiplash that all she could do was stare down at Sylvia’s home screen, and look at the preview of the singular text with Yasmine that Sylvia had yet to open.
ginger dracula: no im still not going to help you with your richard idea. not until you actually take my suggestions seriously. i have a number for one once you’re ready.
Aster’s mouth screwed into a frown.
A number for what?
Like most things with Sylvia, this was a question she’d only get an answer to much, much later. Beyond the point where it mattered.
But before that, Sylvia got home, vanilla latte in one hand, and one of those cookie-croissant-things in a bag for Aster in the other. She placed it on the coffee table like one would a peace offering, then went to go wash her hands in the kitchen.
It was truly a testament to just how deprived Aster was of Sylvia’s affection that the fact that she had gotten her a random trendy gimmick dessert had Aster swooning like a middle schooler.
And, sure, having her heart flutter over something so minuscule would be humiliating if she could feel humiliation anymore, but she’d long forgotten that impulse.
One thousand years of living taught her to operate life under dog-begging-for-treat logic: the canine tenet that desperation wasn’t something to be embarrassed of, it was the only thing that ever landed you what you wanted.
This was the delusion she fed herself when she tried to sit next to Sylvia on the couch for the fourth time that day.
And her theory felt very validated when Sylvia, for the first time, did not instantly get up like she’d been bitten by a wasp, and insist she had to suddenly “do the laundry” or something equally ridiculous that Sylvia would never do.
But no, Sylvia did not get up. She sat there, and Aster felt powerfully victorious for it.
It probably only happened because she was too consumed with something on her laptop, but Aster took it as a win nonetheless—she sat there, and ate her croissant, and got crumbs on her shirt, and watched her roommate with a doctorly focus, all the while feeling like she was that woman who observed monkeys from up-close.
Jane Goodall?
Much like an adorable chimp, Sylvia took a long noisy sip from her latte as she reached for her credit card on the coffee table.
Her laptop screen was currently housing four different windows—one for Google Flights, another with the map of Europe, a third featuring some encrypted Signal conversation with a shady document-forger that Sylvia was speaking to in Romanian, and the fourth a Youtube drama podcast that she kept randomly clicking on.
Aster knew this much: Sylvia was in the process of getting them new fake ID documents for a trip across the pond.
This suspicion came from the fact that an hour ago she’d forced Aster to pose for a passport photo in their bathroom, and Aster had tried her hardest not to kiss-slash-bite the living shit out of Sylvia when the other woman had tucked Aster’s hair behind her ear, readjusted her part with a comb, and stared at her longingly for a little too long afterward.
But because she was nothing if not patient, Aster had refrained from doing any of those activities (kissing, biting, throwing herself out of the nearest window), ignoring the incessant pulsing in her bite-mark and convincing herself to care about Sylvia’s plan.
Which, let the record show, she really did not.
“Are you going to tell me where we’re headed,” Aster began, once she had thoroughly mutilated her croissant, and its gore was sitting in pieces all over her shirt. “Or am I going to find out on the plane?”
Sylvia’s head lazily turned to her. The vampire’s hair was a mess of adorable bedhead, half-up, half-down, and she was wearing sunglasses inside, causing her to squint horribly at both the screen, and now at Aster.
It made Aster’s heart wrench. And because she was high on the fact that Sylvia was letting her this close, she did something foolish.
Something foolish like touching her.
“We have blackout curtains, you know,” Aster said, sliding her hand delicately over Sylvia’s cheek and slowly removing the raybans, earning a very displeased frown—and immediate, panicked goosebumps—from the other woman when Aster set them aside on the table.
“Also, I’m not sure the Suggestion cares about your UV filter. ”
“It’s better than a blindfold,” Sylvia muttered, putting the sunglasses back on almost instantly. But notably she did not spring off the couch and flee, so, progress.
“Neither of which I think are necessary.”
Her hand had made it to Sylvia’s knee without thinking. Despite being unable to see her eyes, Aster could still see the way Sylvia swallowed—throat bobbing.
“Aster…”
“Don’t get up and leave again. If you’re not ready to talk about all of it, fine. But it’s dickish of you to avoid me like I’m carrying the plague. I have all my vaccines, Sylvia. You can touch me without succumbing to disease.”
Sylvia let out a long, chastised breath. One she punctuated with a frown.
“I haven’t been avoiding you.”
Aster glared at her, unamused.
“Okay, second request. Stop gaslighting me over things that are patently obvious. It’s only endearing up to a certain point.”
Sylvia stared at her a moment, as if weighing how seriously to take that allegation.