Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Sasha was surprised to find herself still lying in the same bed next to Vile when the next chapter began. Her head was tucked against his chest, and she was comfortable. Warm. She could get used to this. The stars above them were beautiful, even if she knew they weren’t real.
In fact, she was slowly becoming more and more accustomed with the fact that what was “real” may not “really” matter as much as she thought it did.
But as little as she’d complain to have another few moments to be there next to him, cozy as she was with a thick blanket pulled up over them, she knew it couldn’t last.
They had somewhere to be.
Some narrative to go to.
They had a game to play, after all.
His game.
“On that topic,” he began. She wasn’t shocked he read her thoughts. Or the page. Or whatever. “It’s your turn to pick which story we go to next. But how upset would you be if I were to, shall we say, make a suggestion?”
That had her pushing up from his chest to prop herself up on her elbows to watch him with an eyebrow raised.
He smiled at her, doing his very best to look innocent. Which was to say, he didn’t look innocent at all. “What?”
“What’re you scheming?”
“Nothing!”
“You’re up to something.”
“No more than you are, my dear.” That had his expression twisting into a grin. “And before you deny it, I know you and your sister are up to another plot.” He poked her gently on the end of her nose. “But who am I to judge a villain for her devious methods?”
“I am not a villain.”
“Yes, you are.” He laid his head back on the bed and shut his eyes. “You simply have yet to accept it. I can see it plainly.”
“I am not.”
“Mmhm.” He wrapped an arm around her waist under the blankets and pulled her against his side. “The question remains: will you allow me to make a suggestion?”
“You’re not choosing for me, you’re just making a suggestion?”
“That's all.” His voice was the picture of ease. “The decision is entirely yours.” Nothing to suspect here. Nothing at all.
She stared at him for a long moment, searching his face for the angle. There was always an angle. “Then why even ask? Why not just make the suggestion in the first place?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Why make a whole thing out of it?” She gestured vaguely between them, which was a difficult gesture to make while tangled up in blankets but she managed.
“Just say the thing, Vile. If it's just a suggestion and I'm the one deciding, why are we having this conversation? Why are you asking for permission to suggest?”
“Because,” he said, with the sort of patience that was designed specifically to be infuriating, “if I simply made the suggestion without first asking whether you were open to receiving it, you would have made a great deal out of me making a suggestion. Case. In. Point.”
She opened her mouth.
Closed it.
“I would not—“
“You absolutely would.”
“I would not make a great deal—”
“You could because you are. You're making a great deal out of this right now.”
“I am now, because you started it! That's completely different!”
“Is it?” He opened one eye to look at her. A single, violet, terribly amused eye.
“Yes!” She sat up fully now, the blanket pooling around her waist. She was still naked.
She didn’t really care. He’d seen and done plenty to her already.
“You led with the whole—the whole ‘how upset would you be’—that's a manipulative framing, Vile, that's not a neutral question, that's you pre-loading the expectation that I'm going to be upset about whatever you're about to say—”
“And here we are.” He opened both eyes. He looked unbearably smug. “Look at how far we've come and I haven't even made the suggestion yet.”
She stared at him.
He stared back, pleasant and infuriating.
“Fine.” She threw her hands up and let them drop. “Fine. Go ahead. Make the suggestion. Just—say it. Out loud. With your mouth.”
“Oh, so now you want to hear it.”
“Vile—”
“Moments ago you seemed to be lobbying for me not to bother with asking at all, which if that is something you were interested in—“
“I wasn’t—and that's not what I—” She pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose, beneath her glasses, and took a slow breath. He was doing this on purpose. He was absolutely, deliberately, gleefully doing this on purpose. “I am going to throw myself off a balcony.”
“We've thought about that.” He sat up beside her with a fluid grace that should not have been possible from a man who had been entirely horizontal three seconds ago. “Wonderland, if you recall. You didn’t seem to be a fan.”
“Vile.”
“I know.” He sounded absolutely tickled over the whole conversation. She really did loathe him sometimes. “Shall I make the suggestion?”
She dropped her hand from her face. “Please.”
He let a very particular moment of silence pass. Just long enough. Just exactly long enough. She watched the corner of his mouth do something she refused to call a smile.
“Dracula.”
She blinked.
The word sat there in the still, starlit dark between them, round and ridiculous and deeply, deeply unhelpful.
“No.”
“Now, Sasha—”
"Absolutely not." She was already sliding to the edge of the bed. “No. Fuck no. I won’t do it. Forget it.”
"You haven't even—"
“Dracula is the single most overdone story in the entirety of the Western canon!” She turned to look at him with an expression she hoped communicated the depth of her feelings on the matter.
“There is nothing original left to do with Dracula. Nobody can do anything new with Dracula. It has been done. It has been done to death. It has been done to death, resurrected without its consent, and done to death again. There is no angle—”
He laughed.
It was not his theatrical villain laugh. It was a real one, sudden and bright, and it creased the corners of his eyes in a way that was profoundly unfair given the circumstances. “That is funnier,” he said, when he could, “than you can possibly know it is.”*
She did not ask him to explain. She had learned, over the course of however many stories, that asking him to explain the things he found funny was a one-way door into a room she might not come back out of.
“It doesn't matter,” she said. “The answer is no. We're not doing Dracula.”
“But here's the thing, my dear.” He shifted to face her more fully, tucking one knee up.
The starlight caught the planes of his face at a terrible angle that made him look like something from a painting in a haunted gallery.
“You're never going to complete that arc anyway. That whole conceit of you ‘coming up with a unique story to both get out alive?’ It’s never going to happen. You know that. I know that. The reader—” he gestured upward, or outward, or wherever it was he gestured when he was talking about them, “—probably knows it too.
You're not going to walk out the other side of Dracula having written your thesis and tied a bow on the whole thing. You never do.”
“That's not—” She stopped. “What?”
“You don't finish arcs.” He said it pleasantly, the way someone might observe that the weather was nice.
“You start them magnificently. You get into them.
And then something happens, or something interrupts, or I kill you, and off we go to the next thing.
The arc doesn't need to be completed for the story to be worthwhile. You, of all people, should know that.”
She opened her mouth to argue and then found, to her profound irritation, that she didn't have a direct counter to that. She was a librarian. She knew better than anyone that a story didn't require a tidy ending to leave a mark.
That didn't mean she was going to say so out loud.
“Then what,” she said slowly, “is the point?”
“The point isn’t to ‘do’ Dracula.” He reached over and grabbed her ass. “The point is to do Dracula.”
She yelped and jolted sideways. “That's not a—you can't just—” She pulled a sheet up between them as though it were a fortification.
It was not. It was silk. It was completely useless as protection.
“That's not an argument, Vile, that's a deflection in the shape of an argument with a side of an invasion of personal space, and you know it—”
“I know no such thing.”
“You grabbed my—“
“Making a point.”
“With your hand—“
“Would you have preferred I made it some other way? I have other things I can use.”
She stared at him. He looked entirely too pleased with himself. He looked like a man who had, in his estimation, already won this conversation and was simply waiting for her to catch up to the result. “I’m not going to be Mina,” she said.
“Who said anything about Mina?”
“You were going to.”
“You brought up Mina,” he said, tilting his head. “I was simply going to make the suggestion of Dracula.”
“You already have!”
“And a very good suggestion it was.” He looked serene about it.
“No, it isn’t.” She pointed at him. “We both know exactly how this goes. I am not going to be some swooning Victorian woman getting neck-bitten and turned into a pawn in a conflict between men.” She crossed her arms. “I’m going to wind up being Renfield.
We both know how this is going to go. The architecture of who we are guarantees it. ”
A beat.
“So?” he said.
“So?”
“Renfield is a fascinating character.”
“Renfield eats flies! And spiders!”
“In the original text, yes.” He waved a hand. “Stoker was going for something quite specific there. A man stripped of his own agency, consuming life in incrementally larger quantities in the hope that it would accrue to something—it's actually a rather pointed commentary on—”
“Vile.”
“—the nature of borrowed power and the tragedy of—”
“I am not going to eat flies.”
He paused. "I wasn't suggesting you eat flies."
“I know what Renfield does.”
“So you have read it.”
“Of course I've read it.”