Chapter 10
The next morning was more normal than it had any right to be.
They woke hazily at four in the morning—their circadian rhythms were on life support at this point—and Sylvia made it to the kitchen before Aster did.
A very rare thing, as usually Sylvia took an entire hour in the shower every morning.
As she put it, she was “never truly ready to face the day until she’d listened to the entirety of Beyonce’s Lemonade. ”
But Aster heard none of Sylvia’s pitchy vocals drifting out of the bathroom that morning.
Instead she heard the burbling of the coffee pot, the hiss of the burners.
Even through the dampening curtains they’d installed, Aster still felt the daylight like a sunburn as she zombie-walked towards the kitchen table. Everything felt so still—so quiet.
The exact opposite of Aster’s mind.
She couldn’t stop thinking about last night.
She was being haunted by it. Over and over, like a daydream and a nightmare combined in one, her brain sent her flickering images of Sylvia—Sylvia kissing her neck, Sylvia dipping her fingers through Aster’s lips, Sylvia groaning against Aster’s thigh—but most of all, she couldn’t stop fixating one image.
Sylvia, afraid.
Afraid not of Aster, not of what they were doing—but afraid of losing her.
It shouldn’t have felt so unnerving. It’s not like it was a surprise, was it?
She knew Sylvia cared about her.
Sylvia would always take care of her when she was sick, would cover her in blankets, press her hand to Aster’s forehead and frown, cook her blood and beef stew until the pink returned to her cheeks;
When Aster would wake up crying in the night, memories floating up of the first time she was ever bitten, Sylvia would hold her;
Hell, Sylvia had killed for her more times than she could count.
Sylvia was always just there, a stupid, ridiculous, overconfident constant in Aster’s life.
But Aster supposed, in the back of her mind, she had always expected that someday, Sylvia would leave. After all, Sylvia was a free spirit. A wanderer. She looked out for herself, and Aster didn’t blame her for that.
Her family—may they rest in eternal damnation—had never shown her any other option.
And in the beginning, Sylvia did leave, sometimes. They’d go a few years without seeing each other—Sylvia busy raining terror down in Romania, Aster taking an extended hibernation in the ice pockets of Norway and Finland.
They’d exchange letters; Sylvia would send stupid little postcards—Sending my love from Bucharest prison!—and Aster would smile too fondly at them, tuck them away into her drawer, and think to herself, I hope I see her again.
Because that’s always how Aster had felt. Like every day spent with Sylvia was maybe her last chance, and she would enjoy it to the fullest.
She realized that maybe she never stopped feeling that way.
And she certainly hadn’t considered that Sylvia could possibly feel the same.
But six hundred years was nothing, really, when it came to immortality. A blip in the timeline. Plenty of vampires had spent six hundred years together as mere happenstance, a convenient intersection of two ultimately diverging paths.
But could she and Sylvia be more than that?
Did Aster want something more than that?
Did Aster want…
Eternity?
The mere appearance of the word in Aster’s mind made her stomach lurch, and all the nausea she’d felt last night came rearing back. She groaned, holding onto the back of the kitchen chair to balance herself.
Between the light in the room and the emptiness in her stomach, everything felt hazy and bad. She should probably sit down, before…
“Whoa, whoa.”
A hand snaked around her middle, holding her steady, and Aster’s eyes snapped up.
Sylvia.
Sylvia, hair tied in a chaotic messy bun, dressed in the cheesiest apron in her closet—Don’t kiss the chef. She bites—with almost no makeup on her bare, beautiful face.
“You’ve got to be more careful,” Sylvia tutted, moving one of her hands from Aster’s hip to cup her chin, smoothing messy tendrils of hair back on her forehead.
“If you’re going to be my personal blood bag, you can’t go tearing a femur on your first day.
I like to keep my things in pristine condition. ”
Sylvia laughed at her own joke, and Aster just blinked at her, incredulous. Because of course Sylvia could take nothing seriously.
Aster was here debating spending her life with this woman, and she was calling her the equivalent of one her favorite Prada handbags.
And even worse than that, it still made Aster’s stomach do cartwheels.
She tried to seem as offended as she should have logically been. “Did you just call me one of your things?”
Sylvia’s grin just widened.
“Don’t sound so offended. You’re in very good company. Have you seen my pristine DVD collection?”
Unfortunately, Aster very much had. Sylvia had forced her to lug it around to every new apartment they’d gotten since 1995.
With a groan, Aster tried to push the other vampire off of her, but Sylvia didn’t let her; she instead took Aster’s hands and pinned them childishly behind her back.
“You’re insane,” Aster muttered at her.
Sylvia laughed softly.
“You bring it out in me.”
Aster thought this was another of Sylvia’s little quips, but Sylvia’s expression said something different.
She didn’t have that mocking rudeness of her usual jokes—her lip was frowning slightly, her eyebrows creased.
You bring it out in me. Aster was only left to wonder what other things she brought out in Sylvia.
Her blood certainly brought out a modest amount of lust—that one was getting hard to debate—but was there anything else?
God. Aster felt like her mind had been split in two.
One side of her wanted nothing more than to just go back to normal. To focus on the practical reality of their life—finding a place to live and money to pay for it, for one. While the other side wanted to sit Sylvia down, and…
And do what?
She forced her mind to play out the scenario.
“Yes, hi, Sylvia, friend and roommate of six hundred years. I’ve been thinking.
Are you free next Tuesday? To do what, you ask?
Oh nothing too big. Just figure out how to properly execute the whole mating soul-bite-ritual thing, like, *for real*, and pair off for life?
Bite each other deliriously until death do us part? How does that sound?”
It took everything inside Aster not to laugh.
She could be naive, but she wasn’t that naive.
Sylvia staying by her side as friends was one thing, but going, like, exclusive?
Sexually exclusive?
There was no chance in hell. That woman saw everyone as potential food.
And then, of course, there was the other, much scarier thing.
“Hey.” Sylvia tapped Aster on the cheek, a soft, concerned look on her face that made Aster want to crawl up into a ball. “Where’d you just go?”
Aster tried to contort every thought in her head into a digestible sentence.
She failed.
“A lot on my mind, I guess.”
Sylvia fake-gasped. “You? Overthinking?”
“Oh, shut up, you wingbat.”
Sylvia smiled brilliantly at the insult, her nose scrunching adorably. Adorably. When did she start thinking Sylvia did things adorably? Oh god, had she always…?
Aster was starting to, frankly, panic.
Panicking because of the aforementioned “other, much scarier thing.”
She refused to put a name to it, but that didn’t stop her from thinking about it.
And the terrifying truth was, Aster had never been in—well—it.
And she had no idea what it was supposed to feel like.
Before now, she had assumed she wasn’t capable of it. She’d vocalized this idea to Sylvia plenty of times, when the other vampire would ask why she’d never dated. She’d just shrugged and said she wasn’t interested. That she just wasn’t built for that sort of emotion.
Or maybe she was, once—but just not anymore.
There’s a certain sort of cold distance one develops towards other people when you’re born human, and then become a beast; when the life you know and the people inside of it slowly grow old and die, and you stay in place.
It’s like becoming an inanimate object, in a way. A rock, a stone. Life does not happen to you, but around you.
And in that way, Aster had always been envious of humans. The shortness of life creates an urgency around it. To find one’s purpose—one’s career—one’s, well…
It.
Vampires, with their perpetually renewed lease on mortality, can afford to never consider the big questions at all.
That was the great irony of it.
The more life you’re given, the less motivated you are to live it.
But meeting Sylvia had been like the Tin Man meeting Oz. Sylvia was so alive in a way that made Aster realize she’d been dead for a very long time. Everything Aster had done up until she met Sylvia was for the purpose of revenge—of enacting some kind of cosmic justice.
Sylvia just did things for fun. For pleasure.
Aster felt like a fearful goldfish witnessing, for the first time, a vibrant, grinning shark.
That grinning shark looked at her now, and Aster realized, with growing fear, that perhaps the problem was not that Aster was incapable of it, but that she had been in it the entire time.
Sylvia sighed, and squeezed Aster’s hand. She gave her a pitying look.
“Wingbat is a terrible insult. I mean, come on, do better,” she laughed before disappearing toward the kitchen, where something was burning on the stove.
“Now sit down. I made breakfast for you. I know, me, cooking, unbelievable. A full British, eggs and black pudding and everything. Will probably never happen again, so you might as well cherish it now.”
Aster’s legs shook as she took a seat. She forced a smile onto her face.
“I will,” she said, and never meant anything more. “Cherish it.”