Chapter 29 #2
“Ugh, fine,” Sylvia groaned. She fidgeted nervously with her sunglasses.
“You were so much easier to fool before you got your brain back. This fully functioning mind of yours is frustratingly observant. I might have to start putting garlic in your drinks to dumb you down a little so I can get away with my usual stuff again.”
Aster laughed, because this woman was unapologetically insane. “Oh, I’m so sorry. Poor unlucky you. Next time I’ll be merciful and shoot bullets into your temporal lobe instead.”
“Temporal what? You know I have zero idea what that is.”
“The memory center, Sylvia. Context clues.”
Sylvia waved her hand dismissively.
“Modern medicine is so exhausting. I stopped caring after we left latin.”
“I’m well-aware. I said I’m the one caught up on my vaccines. Your body, meanwhile, is probably on the US government’s list of possible pandemic-starters, next to cave bats and feral poultry. Drinking your blood probably set my immune system back a few millennia.”
Sylvia laughed in angry delight. “Oh, fuck you. You love my blood.”
“I never said I didn’t,” Aster laughed hollowly. “It’s all I can think about most days.”
Her mind quickly catching up to her words, Sylvia breathed in shakily. Aster expected her to go back on her implicit promise and flee right then—but instead she did something completely unexpected, and let go of the wheel completely, thrusting them into a conversational traffic jam.
“Is your bite bothering you as well?” Sylvia asked, her tone even.
Aster’s eyes widened. The question caught her so off guard that she babbled out her next words. Had Sylvia been experiencing the same thing?
“Yes. I didn’t — yours is, too?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve been feeling—”
“Yes,” Sylvia hissed, cutting her off.
A beat passed. The space between them on the couch suddenly didn’t seem large at all.
Aster could feel the pulse of Sylvia’s heartbeat as if it was her own—through the fabric of Sylvia’s light blue impossibly tight jeans, where Aster was still lightly grasping her knee.
Ask her now. Ask her now.
“Do you ever wonder,” Aster said slowly, letting her fingers spread over Sylvia’s kneecap, “If the biting has something to do with the fact that we’ve been able to get this far this time?”
She had been thinking about it all morning.
Clearly, something was different this time around.
The farthest her and Sylvia had gotten before was a kiss, and a little emotional foreplay.
Now they’d fucked against alleyway walls, made out like drunk lovers in bed, fake-proposed to each other under the guise of roleplay, and Sylvia’s little problem hadn’t triggered.
Except for when Aster confessed at the funeral.
But up until then, something had been starkly different.
Sylvia was silent for a moment. Aster wanted so badly to remove those dumb aviators from her face again so she could see what sort of thought was churning behind those brilliant eyes, but she knew that removing that layer of protection was playing with fire.
Having that wall between them might have been the only reason Sylvia had let them dance along this line for so long.
“I have,” Sylvia admitted quietly. “And it’s a possibility. A high possibility.”
Aster felt a tentative excitement bite at her like a fly. She couldn’t stop her face from brightening at the idea that maybe there was a way out of this.
A simple way.
She grabbed Sylvia’s wrist.
“Sylvia, that’s fantastic.”
“Aster—”
“No, let me finish. If that’s true, if the bite really does have some kind of effect on your condition, then if you feel the Suggestion coming on… Just bite me. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. It’s foolproof. No more accidental bullets to the temporal lobe.”
She knew it sounded naive and stupid. But she couldn’t help herself. Her brain was dizzy with desire and her neck was pulsing with want and oh god, she didn’t realize how long it had been since they’d last drank from each other until now. She ached for it.
Sylvia sighed, and wiped her hands across her face.
“Anecdotal evidence is hardly enough to call something foolproof, Aster. What if I don’t bite you quickly enough?
What if I bite you, then pull out, and the Suggestion comes back before I can bury my teeth in you again?
We’d have to get the timing down to a science.
And sex isn’t a science. I don’t want sex with you to be a science.
I just want to be able to fuck you how I want to fuck you. ”
Sylvia groaned, and Aster felt the needy sound in her stomach. She felt the entire sentence in her stomach—no, lower—unbearably lower.
“And how do you want to fuck me?” Aster whispered.
Sylvia’s pupils instantly dilated. The other woman threw her head back slowly, and whimpered. After a moment, she keeled her head back, pulled her knees up to her chest, and pressed her forehead against them, so her face disappeared behind her lazy brown waves.
“This isn’t fair to you,” she muttered, muffled by her pants.
Aster didn’t expect that. She wanted to disagree on principle, or rather because she wanted Sylvia more than she wanted to be treated well, but at the end of the day she wanted an insight into Sylvia’s mind more than anything, so she asked simply:
“What do you mean?”
Sylvia slowly rose her head again.
“Because I’m a coward. Against my will, I’m a coward,” she said, and slowly removed her sunglasses.
Setting them aside, she fixed Aster with a meaningful look.
“Every time I try to tell you something real, my body clams up like a fucking shell. Every muscle inside of me is petrified I’ll say something to trigger the Suggestion, and we’ll be back to square one.
And yet I still want to touch you so, so badly, as if I have any right to, when I can’t have an honest discussion with our clothes on.
I might be a toxic, murder-happy narcissistic, but even I can spot that double standard. ”
Aster pressed down on Sylvia’s knees, pushing away the shield that they represented.
Behind them all that was left was the small, tender presence of a woman who had lost such complete sense of trust in her own body, that the only thing she could think to do with it was to cower in fear like a turtle, her head ducked inside her shell.
“Sylvia,” Aster said. “I have an idea.”
Sylvia looked at her with a hardness Aster knew was a front.
“What?”
“Don’t talk.”
Sylvia laughed mirthlessly. “Oh, hilarious.”
“I’m serious.”
Aster cupped her face, and leaned into her, so her thighs were bracketing Sylvia’s legs.
“I understand why you’re scared. You can’t trust your own mouth. I won’t ask you to. I want you to… tell me how you feel with your body instead. Have a conversation that way.”
Sylvia’s mouth parted as if she was genuinely considering the idea—before promptly closing, her expression hardening again.
“Let me get this straight. You want me to… convey… my emotions… by fucking you… without talking? Like some kind of Suggestion-curse loophole?”
“Pretty much. Don’t tell me you’re afraid of a little creative thinking, Sylvia.”
Sylvia laughed incredulously. “I’m not afraid of — oh my god. You're insane.”
“Am I?” Aster breathed, kissing the side of Sylvia’s face, then her neck, before she could think better of it.
The woman groaned underneath her. “You can wear the blindfold, too, if that makes you feel better. Or the ridiculous sunglasses. You can have your wall, Sylvia. Whatever that looks like. Just let me in another way. I’m clawing at the doggy door at this point. ”
“Fuck — fuck this. Fuck you.”
Sylvia seized her by the hair, and pulled her up into a sudden, needy kiss. White exploded behind Aster’s eyes, and Sylvia was whimpering into it like she’d been gagged—and Aster only realized afterward that she was practicing to see if she was capable of shutting up.
After three long, wonderful seconds, Sylvia proceeded to drag their lips apart with a similar intensity, as if she was being forced to kiss Aster instead of forcing Aster to kiss her, her fingernails raking across Aster’s scalp. Her eyes were red, but not swirling, when she demanded:
“Fine, you idiot. I won’t speak,” Sylvia breathed. Her eyes were beginning to go faintly red—but they weren’t swirling. Thank the devil for that. “We’ll — have a conversation.”
Before Aster could nod, and kiss her again, Sylvia interceded,
“Go get the blindfold. And the strap in my underwear drawer.”
***
Aster had not breathed since Sylvia said go get the strap from my underwear drawer.
Since she had been busy subconsciously pining for her friend for five hundred years, Aster had not gotten very explorative in the bedroom. Scratch that, she had not gotten explorative at all.
In the past few weeks she had remedied that by daydreaming of Sylvia in practically every position. Fucking her from just about every angle. Teeth in, teeth out.
But she hadn’t let herself think about this.
She wasn’t sure why.
Rummaging through Sylvia’s expensive clothes like they were piles of trash, careful not to break her dresser completely, Aster contemplated this question. The answer she came to was shame.
Shame because she wanted it so badly, it made her squirm.
And that was the strange thing about desire, wasn’t it? That the more you wanted something, the more shameful it seemed? Like desire in itself was deserving of punishment?
With great annoyance, she pushed aside the haunting remnants of her Spanish-Catholic guilt, and found the toy moments later, wrapped in several layers of black lingerie.
It didn’t seem like Sylvia to keep something like this so tucked away, which made Aster wonder if she, too, wanted it so badly that it became a sort of depravity.
“I wasn’t sure if you wanted me to wear it, or if you wanted to wear it, so.”
Aster licked her lips awkwardly as she put it between them on the couch. It was five inches and black, the attachments sitting next to it, pushed up on the cushion.