Chapter 20
Moonlight filtered in through Aster’s blackened shades and painted Sylvia like an angel as Aster slowly dragged down the zipper of her pants. Heavenly little bouts of breath caught in Sylvia’s throat with each tiny tug, and Aster couldn’t help herself but smile at the sounds like a fool.
Sylvia looked at her through hooded lashes. “What are you smiling at?”
My wife felt like pushing it, and Aster wanted nothing less for this to end, so she pulled the fly completely undone, savored another little angelic hm out of Sylvia’s throat, and pressed a kiss to her cheek, whispering,
“May I take these off of you?”
It was formal, too formal, but whenever Aster couldn’t think straight, she’d get caught between centuries.
It was enough that they spoke five languages between them, worse even to have spoken them for hundreds of years, absorbed every manner of idiom and expression and then tossed them aside when it was no longer in fashion.
But, like sewage, it all circled the drain of Aster’s mind. So when her fingers danced along Sylvia’s underwear, a hundred different ways to beg came to mind. May I relieve thee of this? Wilt thou yield this to me? Grant me this, I beg of you. Por favor. Por favor. Por favor. Por favor.
And, as if she was feeling just as overwhelmed, “Da,” Sylvia answered, then, blushing, she translated, as if Aster wouldn’t be able to understand, “Yes.”
So, with consent taken in two languages, Aster made her way down the bed, dragging her nails down Sylvia’s skin as she traveled—watching goosebumps appear in the soft skin between her breasts, which were still covered in thin white, sheer cloth—until her fingers could curl around the expensive waist band of expensive slacks, and she pulled.
Of course, Sylvia, ever impatient, flailed her legs to get them off faster—tearing the seam.
“I thought we might be able to salvage those. How naive of me,” Aster said, rolling her eyes. “What are you even going to wear to the funeral tomorrow?”
“I’ll kill some valet and steal his suit.” Sylvia’s head canted up from the pillow, and her eyes were faintly red—a subconscious Suggestion stirring inside her. “‘Now take off your clothes before I rip them off of you with my teeth, pretty please.”
Aster bit her lip, forcing down a smile. She could feel Sylvia rising out of that sunken, scared space she’d been in before—and she welcomed it. Even when she felt Sylvia’s influence chew on her mind, telling her to take off her shirt.
Like some kind of horny teenager.
But Aster was already complying. She tugged the dress shirt off herself first, then, keeping eye contact with Sylvia the entire time, undid the back of her black bra.
It slunk to the comforter.
“Oh. Oh, wow.”
Sylvia’s lips parted as her eyes raked down, then up again. She gave Aster a look like she’d never seen another woman’s body in all her time on Earth. And Aster blushed, almost believing her.
“You’ve seen me naked dozens of times,” she said self-consciously.
Sylvia scooted up, holding herself steady with her hands pressed to the mattress.
“I know,” she said, eyes still glued to Aster’s chest. Her throat bobbed as she seemed to consider her next sentence. “But I never allowed myself to look before.”
Aster froze at the admission—and Sylvia could tell, her gaze flitting up to meet Aster’s. Her bitten lip silently communicated the same sentiment that started this all:
Don’t ask any follow up questions.
I’m not ready to answer them.
Aster swallowed. Licked her lips.
Okay.
But if she couldn’t ask questions with her mouth, she’d ask them with her hands.
Aster pressed her fingers to Sylvia’s hips, where pale hips had been reduced to just her underwear: purple lace, pricier than this apartment’s mortgage.
But instead of touching her where she wanted—where she clearly needed, telling by the deeply darkened fabric, and the way the other woman whimpered when her fingers treaded close—she cruelly ghosted over the panties, and slunk her hands upward.
And stopped just beneath Sylvia’s breasts.
They were still covered by her shirt, but Aster could see her nipples harden under the cotton.
And, to Aster’s surprise, the sight drove her absolutely insane.
Because before Sylvia, she hadn’t really cared about the bodies of the women she’d slept with. They were just that—bodies. Sometimes slim, sometimes curvy. Folds and wrinkles and skin.
Aster enjoyed the effect she had on them most, watching cloth turn moist and humid under her touch, like Jesus turning water to wine.
The human body was just not something she found particularly inviting altogether.
Even less so once it became a source of food.
But Sylvia’s body was different. It felt like more than skin.
Aster wasn’t sure how to describe it. Only that she knew with a sudden certainty that she would need to take up painting; that she'd fill sketchbooks with Sylvia’s sharp silhouette, over and over, like a mad man in a trance, until the slope of her hips and the tilt of her jaw were burnt to the very flesh of Aster’s brain, and committed a hundred times to paper in every shade of paint.
It was a body worthy of devotion.
And Aster was about to make a shrine with her mouth.
She tilted her head up towards Sylvia, who was looking at her through hooded lashes.
Aster pulled at Sylvia’s collar. “Any last words to this shirt?”
“Good riddance,” Sylvia murmured.
And Aster ripped it with her teeth.
Sylvia moaned as the fabric was tossed aside, shucked to the floor without a second glance, and Aster’s mouth wrapped around her nipple.
And god, god. The sounds out of Sylvia’s mouth when her tongue pressed flat to it, when she hollowed her cheeks.
She sucked on it like she would any fresh wound—and found it just as pleasing when Sylvia squirmed beneath her.
“La dracu,” Sylvia shouted when she bit down, so loud the crows would flee the trees, her hand coming to wrap around Aster’s head, pressing her deeper into her. “That feels—fuck—your mouth. I should have been shutting you up like this for centuries.”
And before Aster could really let that idea settle into her—of her and Sylvia spending years like this, of Sylvia pulling open her shirt every time she wanted Aster to stop talking—Aster felt a need to distract herself, so she gilded her free hand down Sylvia’s midriff to dip beneath her underwear, sliding almost instantly through wet folds to find Sylvia’s clit.
“Oh—oh. Oh god.” Sylvia bucked instantly against Aster’s fingers. The desperation in it almost made Aster’s vision color white. “Inside, Aster. I— I need you inside.”
And if anyone was greedy, it was Aster. Insane, terrible her, for saying, cheekily, because she couldn’t stop herself—“Ask your wife nicely.”
Sylvia’s eyes snapped open, her breath ragged in her chest as she paused her whining. Aster’s cheeks colored in embarrassment and lust all at once.
I said too much.
She’d pushed too hard. She could see it now, the water bucket full of ice ready to wash over her and bring her back to reality. Sylvia was holding it just above her.
But the water never came. Instead, Sylvia opened her big, beautiful mouth.
“Your wife,” she said quietly, again, like she couldn’t believe the sound of it. “Right.”
That’s the game we’re playing, Sylvia’s expression said. I’d nearly forgotten.
Aster dared not repeat the word. She just licked her lips and nodded.
“I wish you had a wedding ring,” Sylvia mumbled suddenly, urgently. Like it was an idea as powerful as the atomic bomb. “So I could feel the cold metal once your fingers were deep inside me. So you’d know when it was enough.”
Aster’s mind screeched to a halt.
She must have looked as dumb as she felt in that moment, just blinking like a slowly dying machine. She could tell her deadened expression must have started to scare Sylvia off of it, because she could see the woman’s eyebrows furrow, her mouth moving to reel all the words back.
Aster couldn’t let that happen.
“Okay,” she said with a curt nod, and began to lift off of Sylvia.
Sylvia’s eyebrows furrowed as Aster rolled off. “Wait, okay? What do you mean, okay—”
Unsteadily, Aster made her way to the set of drawers on the other side of the room. If she thought about it too hard—much like any of this—she’d grow cowardly, so she yanked open the top drawer without thinking, her full strength escaping her fingers, and the wood cracked.
The drawer nearly collapsed out of the set before she caught it.
“Damn it,” she cursed, placing the drawer on top of the table beside her. “Where are they?”
“Aster.” Sylvia’s voice had dropped back into that unsettled, unsure place. The one where she pretended to sound confident, but the tremble betrayed her. “I was just fucking around. It was just a stupid horny thought—I have hundreds of them every minute. Come back here.”
But Aster wasn’t listening.
She was instead curling her fingers over two rings, plucking them from the soft tissue she’d wrapped them in hundreds of years ago.
They were made of a soft silver, made by an Italian jeweler back in 1768. A snake was carved on each, and embossed in Italian in tiny lettering was part of a poem:
La vera storia d'amore è stata quella tra Eva e il serpente.
The real love story was between Eve and the serpent.
She sat aside Sylvia and held one out to her, breathing shallowly as she watched Sylvia’s eyes trace down to the ring, then, lips parted in disbelief, back up to Aster.
“Okay, what the fuck,” Sylvia said, a humorless laugh leaving her. She looked almost… agitated? “Who were you planning to propose to?”
Why did she sound so jealous?
“No one,” Aster laughed. “They’re not engagement rings.”
“Then why do you have two of them?”
Aster shrugged.