Chapter 28
Aster woke up with strange tears in her eyes and a headache like someone had drilled into her skull. She couldn’t remember exactly why this was for a few seconds afterwards, as if her brain was an overstuffed laundry bin that had been abruptly emptied into the washer.
She winced, rolled her neck, feeling desperate for some thought to fill her up again—only to find Sylvia sitting a few centimeters away from her, cross-legged on the bed they were sharing.
Her friend was breathing heavily and her cheeks were wet, like pottery that had been soaked in glaze, or resin.
She looked so sad. Aster didn’t know why.
“Sylvia?” she said softly, like a question. The other woman blinked like a deer.
When she received no response, she slowly lifted her hand to cup Sylvia’s shoulder, trying to buy herself time to remember.
It felt like a half-shapen thought was wrestling around her mind like an aggressive tumbleweed; like when you wake up in a hotel bed and for a moment you have no idea where you are—or how you even got there.
Until you look around, at the walls, at the bleary light coming through the window, at the time on your phone, and then you remember the airplane you took to get there, you remember the yellow taxi that rumbled up to the hotel entrance on the edge of some alley-like street.
She palmed her hand around Sylvia’s neck and felt like she was that taxi—pulling up to the edge of something. Goosebumps ran up the other woman’s nape, making the fast-fading bite mark protrude more around her pulse point. Bite mark, Aster thought, and her eyes widened.
“Sylvia,” she repeated, but this time her voice broke.
Aster remembered everything at once. But not necessarily in order.
She remembered the orchestra. She remembered looking at Sylvia across from her, at her nervously bobbing leg, and thinking She must really love me if she’ll sit through this.
She remembered killing the king of Romania.
She remembered how his blood tasted—salty and sour, like raw fish—and how when she’d mentioned it to Sylvia, Sylvia had said I bet yours tastes sweet.
She remembered thinking about that—about how it would feel for Sylvia to taste her, for her to taste Sylvia—the entire time they ran away from the Poli?ia Roman?, until she was pressed up against the cold wall of some street, breathing hard, her lungs constricting, and Sylvia was doing the same.
Her head hung low, looking prettier and more dangerous than the devil, and suddenly Aster couldn’t run from the truth anymore. It was bursting out of her.
She was in love.
She was in love with Sylvia, and not for the first time.
It all started around June of their hundredth year spent together. She’d watched Sylvia, drunk and heated, press some woman against the tavern wall in a pub in the north of Ireland. Aster had thought the very simple but ultimately fatal — I wish she’d put her hands in my hair and kiss me that way.
It was a terrifying thought at first. It filled her with a fear that was worse than the day she was bitten, but like all poisons, it softened on the way down. And suddenly it was all she could think about.
And god, she felt so good finally confessing it.
Like she’d been waiting her whole life to do so.
Maybe because she had. But then just as soon as she’d emptied the poison from her chest, Sylvia had cupped her cheek, smiled at her softly, and then buried Aster’s love so deep inside of her that it only reared its head decades later.
Except that’s a bit of a lie, isn’t it?
In truth, Aster had loved Sylvia even an hour after Sylvia had tried to Suggest it out of her.
Even when Sylvia insisted on shoving herself in Romanian prison for God knows what reason—(to punish herself when no one else would, Aster could understand clearly now.)
She’d loved her year after year since, with a quiet ferocity that had no name but certainly had consequences.
Consequences like an inability to look at other women without feeling a peach pit of guilt grow inside of her.
Unable to touch other women without feeling she was ripping out her own insides.
Aster felt no attraction to anyone, except Sylvia.
Sylvia hadn’t suppressed her love for her. She’d simply removed her vocabulary. Made her unable to put words to what her body already knew.
At least, for a little while. Aster eventually found her way around to language again. I love you I love you I love you. Again and again and again, persistent like a bee.
Which meant, of course—
The suggestion didn’t work. Not in full.
Like a chicken who’d lost its head but not its will to run and squirm and make a mess of everything, Aster fell in love with Sylvia again and again and again, and Sylvia’s magic did nothing to get in its way.
And yet, Aster was not naive enough to think this was because her mind was somehow more powerful than Sylvia’s Suggestion.
Sure, Aster had the raw power of a tank, but her mind was like that of a mortal—feeble, unripe.
Unlike Sylvia, her mental barriers were weak if nonexistent, made of rotten wood instead of Sylvia’s hard, impenetrable steel.
If Sylvia’s suggestion didn’t work on her, it was only for one reason.
Sylvia didn’t want it to.
Sylvia, at least a small part of her, wanted Aster to love her.
“Aster? Snap out of it. You’re scaring me.”
Aster didn’t realize she’d been so completely zoned out until Sylvia shook her back into her body.
With a sharp breath in, her senses re-awakened. She felt the needy touch of Sylvia’s hand gripping her arm, the other folded around her waist.
Sylvia was close to her but not too close. Like a fearful animal staring down the barrel of a gun, she was frozen—stock still.
“I remember everything,” Aster admitted quietly.
Sylvia’s face was a mix of relief and harrowing fear at the admission. She nodded lamely, retreating with her hands so her arm was resting against the pillow on the other side of the bed. After a moment she began to play with the ends of her own hair.
“Good.”
Aster laughed, still feeling the hazy high of knowing Sylvia wanted her. In a way she hadn’t admitted with words, but with hundreds of years of failed attempts to stop it. “Good?”
“Well, I don’t know. Not good? Bad? Very bad,” Sylvia muttered, then covered her face with her hands.
Her voice sounded so little—but still so grouchy, like an old man—when she said: “Please just get it over with and tell me to fuck off. I can thrall one of the twinks to carry my stuff out. Andrew has the bigger arms—but Tony is more tolerable to speak to—”
“Sylvia.”
“And maybe if I text Yasmine now I can get her to send me some of her —” Sylvia dropped her voice to a mocking venomous tone.
“— Billionaire money. I mean, if she won’t let me thrall the jerk myself, it’d at least be neighborly of her to lend me a few hundred thousand dollars to get back on my feet once I’m a one woman show… ”
“Sylvia.” Aster climbed over to her, and put a firm hand around her mouth. “You’re not moving out. Well, we might have to eventually, but I want — we’ll do it as a we.”
Sylvia blinked several times, her incessant lips still moving behind Aster’s hand.
“I’m not?” she mumbled, muffled. “You’re not… feeling murderous?”
Of course in practice she meant You don’t hate me now? but it wouldn’t be Sylvia Maroven if she didn’t find a creative way of removing her own feelings from the equation—sliding out from under the guillotine until someone tracked her down and put her back there.
Aster opened her mouth to speak, to say something like, No, even after all that, I still love you as much as I did in the 18th and 19th centuries, and I think I might love you an equal amount when we’re all shooting into space on rockets to Mars, but she bit her tongue.
Because she realized then that if she didn’t choose her words carefully, this could become another memory that she’d been re-awakening in a hundred year’s time.
And the truth was—she knew she loved Sylvia now, more sure than ever.
And she had an inkling that a part of Sylvia could love her, too.
But she didn’t know how big that part was, or how prickly.
If it was something Sylvia could touch, or if the act of touching it was the whole problem that began this—like original sin, Eve biting into the forbidden apple.
Sylvia sensed her hesitancy and found the worst possible way to address it, mumbling into Aster’s palm, “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
Aster’s words died in her throat, replaced by a short, gruff, disbelieving laugh.
Because of course Sylvia had been enduring six hundred years of heartbreak and yet she was still happy to avoid the subject and sweep it under the rug if it meant avoiding a difficult conversation.
She knew Sylvia would hate to hear this—but in some ways it was truly evident she was raised by Catrina.
She let her hand fall away from Sylvia’s mouth, missing the warmth of it immediately. She slunk backwards, giving Sylvia a small modicum of space.
“I want to talk about it,” Aster said as if it was obvious.
Sylvia scratched the back of her head, bowing her head. “Mhm.”
She’s shutting down.
And based on what had happened to her the past times they’d tried to talk about it, Aster couldn’t blame her. She was probably expecting her body to betray her at the last moment. And for all they knew, it still could.
As much as Aster wanted to say everything she felt in her chest—I have six hundred years of love to give you and I just want to know if you’d like to have it—she needed to tread carefully.
They weren’t necessarily at the end of their puzzle, but most possibly at the messy middle of the game, like two chess pieces caught in a stalemate.