Chapter 22
If Aster thought being Sylvia’s wife in bed was torture enough, nothing — not solitary confinement, not years in federal prison, not being sliced open and knit back together with a sewing needle — prepared her for the way she’d feel when she woke up the next day, and Sylvia hadn’t taken the wedding ring off.
Not even during breakfast, her hands messy with olive oil, or in the shower, her hands wringing wet hair dry.
Not once.
She wants to keep it on, her foolish mind told her.
Or she can’t be arsed to take it off.
The funeral was a few hours away, after all.
Aster propped her elbows up on kitchen island as Sylvia rounded the corner from the bathroom, hot, humid steam wafting in, clouding the kitchen like the view outside an airplane window.
Her roommate (or, in the dark crevices of her wishful mind, her wife) was more stunning than Cleopatra in just her towel, dew droplets of water collected on her bruised, bitten shoulders.
She looks so gorgeous like that.
Covered in bite marks.
Sylvia failed to notice her there, so Aster watched her silently, like the moon watches the sun, as Sylvia plugged in their coffee machine, and toyed with the edge of her ring as it booted up.
Sylvia’s lips twitched up into a sly smile.
“I can feel you watching me, you know.”
Aster startled, blushing.
She swore she hadn’t noticed her.
“I wasn’t watching you.”
Liar, liar, liar.
“Right, just like you didn’t kill Tommy Ashcroft,” Sylvia chuckled, amused, as she slowly punched in an elaborate amount of custom settings into the feeble Keurig machine, which whined like a baby at the terror she was inflicting on it.
After a moment, she looked up, toward the fridge, then frowned gravely, as if disgusted.
“God, I caught sight of the thing again. Are you sure we can’t burn it? ”
The thing was a portrait of Andrew and Tony’s cocker spaniel that looked like it was painted by someone going through a psychotic episode — its eyes were the size of golf balls, and the color palette was red and pink and yellow.
Sylvia had hidden it partially behind the refrigerator, but you could still see the creature’s snout poking out if you caught it from the right angle. And she had apparently found that angle.
Aster was just grateful for the change in topic. Anything to distract from the fact that she had woken up with Sylvia’s arm slung tightly around her stomach, Sylvia’s mouth pressed in a barely-there kiss to her neck.
Anything to prevent the creeping feeling that something was building between them, like a boulder might teeter at the top of the cliff, before ultimately diving into a chasm.
She turned the corner around the island, then leaned casually against the kitchen counter, so they were facing each other, trying to project confidence she didn’t have.
“Let’s not do that,” she breathed. “I like this apartment, and I’m not even sure your Suggestion is powerful enough to get Tony to forgive us if we put that thing into the trash.”
Sylvia waved her hand dismissively. “Oh, let the twink hate me. He’ll have to get in line behind everyone else.”
Aster laughed sharply. “Twink? You are getting way too much mileage out of a word that you absolutely could not define if I asked you to.”
“Of course I could define it.” The coffee burbled noisily as Sylvia licked her lips, staring at Aster as if she might find the answer in her face. “A homosexual man who is… in my business.”
Aster wanted to kiss the stupidity out of this woman. “Absolutely not.”
Apparently Sylvia was thinking the same thing, because her eyes dipped down to Aster’s lips, and she bit down on her own.
Aster’s chest clenched, and last night replayed like shots of film in her head.
“You should listen to me less.”
They looked, and looked, neither of them moving. The coffee began to pour into the drip tray, but there was no mug there to catch it. Sylvia didn’t seem to notice. Aster could hear the other woman’s heartbeat in her throat.
“I can kiss you? Outside of sex?”
“Whenever you want.”
Whenever you want.
That was permission, wasn’t it?
As close to a get out of jail free card as Sylvia could give her.
But because Aster was good, too good, and cowardly, too cowardly — she decided to give her an out. One chance to backpedal.
“Your coffee’s spilling,” Aster said. Because it was.
Sylvia’s eyebrows rose ever-slightly, but she didn’t look away from Aster’s gaze. “Oh, is it?”
Neither of them moved an inch, the tension like a taut rope. Aster looked at the marks of her own teeth on Sylvia’s neck; the imprints of her nails on Sylvia’s exposed collarbones.
And because Aster was still Aster, she couldn’t help herself.
She warned her, “I’m going to kiss you again.”
And Sylvia looked at her as if she was the most ridiculous person on Earth. “Well, I fucking hope so. Or else I just wasted a perfectly good latte.”
Aster’s eyes widened. But before Sylvia could tease her more, Aster shoved the Keurig to the side, the machine wheezing against the granite, coffee spitting onto the floor, and lifted Sylvia up onto the kitchen counter.
The other woman let out a gasp, and Aster quieted it with her mouth, the kiss harder than she’d meant it to be, more forceful than she’d intended —
“Sorry.” Her words were messy and smudged against Sylvia’s incessant lips.
Sylvia’s shower damp thighs curled around Aster’s sweatpants. “Don’t.”
Aster withdrew, breathing slowly. Sylvia’s pupils were already blown. Her hair already a mess even though Aster had barely raked her hands through it. The perfect picture of desire. Like last night hadn’t ended at all. Like they were right back there, Aster’s fingers curling inside of her.
But I want more.
The realization toppled over her like a ton of bricks. She no longer felt satisfied to settle for what a week ago would be more than enough. Like a naive addict, she’d ridden the hedonic treadmill to the top of the hill, and now she was greedy and desperate at the top of the cliff.
Because the longer Aster looked at Sylvia, the more she wanted to pull away completely. Not because she didn’t want this, the inside of her thighs already told her otherwise, but for the opposite reason —
She wanted so desperately for them to just be able to kiss for the sake of kissing. She wanted them to kiss like it was punctuation; kiss and then eggs, bacon, waffles; kiss and then get dressed; kiss and then go on with their day. Kiss hello, goodbye, good morning.
Kiss like mortals do.
But then Sylvia said, breathless, nails scratching into Aster’s shoulders, “Fuck me.”
And Aster blinked. Re-evaluated.
She was as weak as she was anemic.
“Are you sure? The granite might be kind of —”
“I don’t care.”
“But the funeral —”
Ignoring her, Sylvia asked quietly, “Do you still have the wedding ring on?”
Their eyes met. Aster’s heart clenched.
“Yes,” she breathed.
Aster watched Sylvia’s throat bob. Like she was swallowing something down.
“Fuck me with it one more time,” she said. “Before this is all over.”
Before this is all over felt like a knife, serrated, cutting into her and leaving nothing left. But Sylvia was starting to open her legs, the towel parting at her abdomen, and she looked like every goddess humanity had dreamt of, and smelled like her shower oil. Olympian pink.
And who was Aster to refuse Aphrodite?
***
By miracle, they still managed to leave the house on time.
Sylvia hired an Uber Black, and it fit right in with the procession of darkened limousines crawling across the streets towards the funeral. They borrowed two black suits from Zara minutes before meeting their driver, clipping the tags out in the backseat as alarms rang back at the mall.
“Forty-two dollars?” Sylvia scoffed, holding the limp white paper in her hand. “What a rip-off. This isn’t even real cashmere.”
“Is it really a rip-off if we didn’t pay for it?”
“It’s about the principal of it, Aster.”
Aster laughed, and she was grateful to laugh — because if she wasn’t laughing, she’d be dwelling.
Dwelling on the fact that Sylvia couldn’t seem to kiss her without fucking her afterwards.
Which made sense, of course, because that’s all this was.
Fucking. All this was for Sylvia, at least. What this was for Aster was a slow, torturous death.
A slow death that involved fucking Sylvia until the countertop chipped, and the walls shook, and that terrible painting fell to the floor, behind the fridge, where they could never find it out again; until she was panting in Sylvia’s ears, “come for me, come for me, come on the ring, baby, I know you want to be mine, show me what that looks like,” and it was those last words that did it — Sylvia careening over the edge as silver slipped inside of her.
And for as much as Sylvia was the actress between them, it was Aster who felt like the real performer as time went on.
Aster the one pretending like she still cared about this plan, about the Ashcrofts; cared about having money, or even a place to live.
She felt like a liar through and through, a method actress auditioning for a movie without a name.
Is this how Sylvia feels all the time?
That harrowing idea carried her through the suburbs, bright green tree canopies flying by, summer in its full, resplendent blush.
Everything looked so joyous. Aster felt like a walking corpse on its way to a funeral.
Death consuming her thoughts, her mind drifted, for the first time that morning, to the plan.
“Are we still planning on —” She took note of the driver, and decided to soften her wording. “ — taking care of Yasmine?”
Sylvia rapped her perfectly-red acrylics on the side of the car before turning to face her with a sly expression. “Why? Are you getting soft on me?”
Aster’s gut twisted unpleasantly. She took those words in a way that she knew Sylvia didn’t mean them. But she felt embarrassed anyway.