Chapter 28 #2
“Sylvia,” she said, and risked inching closer. The other woman looked up, momentarily terrified, but softened when Aster slipped her hand around her knee, and squeezed. She lowered her voice to a whisper when she said, “I’m not angry at you. And you’re not alone in this anymore.”
Sylvia stared back at her like she’d just said something impossible. And maybe to Sylvia it felt that way. Her eyes were big and dark and desperate.
“You’re really not angry at me?” Sylvia said. “After everything I did to you?”
“No. I’m not,” Aster said, squeezing her knee again. “And honestly I reject your phrasing. Because what exactly did you even do to me? None of it was your fault.”
Leaving her knee, Aster trailed her fingers down to Sylvia’s hand, and entangled their fingers in the softest way she could manage, like an extended olive branch.
One full of six-hundred years of adoration.
Sylvia took it as Sylvia typically took gestures of kindness—with, at first, shock, then a fistful of skepticism.
“I don’t know, Aster, what didn’t I do?” Sylvia laughed dryly, miserably. She withdrew her hand. “Let me see.” She began counting on her fingers mockingly. “Fuck your brain up for the past six hundred years. Force your own words back down your throat. Leave you choking on your own feelings—”
“Unwittingly.”
“Okay, great. Unwittingly choking on your own feelings,” Sylvia all but shouted, with an almost manic laugh.
Distress seemed to overwhelm her and she lurched out of the bed, shaking her head in disbelief that this was actually happening, and opened her closet door.
“If I was actually a good person, a sane person, I would have left you be.”
Aster stared after her from the bed. She muttered, “Left me be?”
“Yes, Aster. Left you be. Because when you first start noticing that you’re brainwashing someone into— well, being interested in you— the moral choice is to step back and maybe give them some space.
Like hundreds of years of space. But I didn’t do that.
I’ve just…” The closet door clashed loudly against its hinges as she began picking mindlessly through her clothing.
“Strung you along. Because I can’t help it.
I enjoy your company. Fucking sue me. Or hate me.
Hate me at the very least. It would be the dignified thing to do. ”
Her voice had gone quieter at the end, but she refused to look back. Instead she was mindlessly sorting through her dresses, organizing them like that was something important.
It was so distracting that Aster almost failed to process what Sylvia had just said.
“You think I–” She began to laugh, because it was actually, in a morbidly sad way, hilarious. “You think you brainwashed me into…”
She stopped, falling short of into loving you. Even if she wanted so badly to say them, she didn’t want to trigger an episode.
Aster pinched the bridge of her nose and rephrased. “Not to sound dense — I sort of just arrived at this multi-generational disaster — but didn’t you do exactly the opposite of that?”
Sylvia’s foot tapped against the floor. Aster couldn’t see her face, but she could hear her lips opening then closing several times, before ultimately huffing, “Either way you look at it, it's not great.”
Aster rolled her eyes.
“Okay, sure, but there’s like a mostly correct way of looking at it, and then an absolutely incorrect way of looking at it. You can’t just present those two as equal options.”
That tore a slight laugh out of Sylvia, which warmed Aster’s chest like a soft cloud.
She stopped her machinations on her clothing for a moment, and paused in thought.
“Look. I’m not trying to invalidate your…
feelings,” Sylvia said, still refusing to turn to her.
But Aster could see a fragment of her face in the mirror, and she was blushing.
“That’s explicitly what I’m trying not to do.
I’ve just had a very long time to analyze the situation.
And my reading of it is that, well, I inadvertently Suggested your subconscious into… feeling… some type of way. About me.”
Aster blinked. She means with the initial suggestion? When she’d put me to sleep anytime we came close to having some kind of… intimate moment?
“Are you implying that you think you did to me what those McDonalds commercials did when they interspliced ‘You really want a Big Mac’ in every other frame of their advertisements?”
Sylvia snorted at that, then promptly covered her face, annoyed that she’d let herself laugh, and shook her head. She looked both mildly delighted and absolutely defeated by Aster’s humor about the situation.
“It’s honestly offensive how relaxed you’re being about this,” she muttered.
She shut the closet’s sliding door, and quickly identified the next victim of her nervous manhandling — it was the bootleg Da Vinci art that was hanging on the wall. She began to fruitlessly adjust the frame to make it ‘more straight.’
“I’m honestly not feeling very relaxed,” Aster said, feeling her heartbeat rise in her neck as she watched Sylvia tilt the picture frame further and further from its point of origin.
The action was a very appropriate metaphor for their ongoing conversation.
“I’m trying to tell you that I — that everything I said, every single time I said it, has been true.
From the very beginning, until now. And you’re telling me that it’s somehow a delusion. ”
Sylvia froze, her fingers stilling on the wall. Aster’s vampiric hearing picked up on the stutter in Sylvia’s heartbeat. How her blood rushed to her head then down again.
“Don’t say things you don’t mean,” Sylvia whispered coldly. As in — Don’t tell me you love me. “You’re still coming out of the haze. It’s all fresh.”
Aster clenched her jaw. She was begging to feel furious. A fury she felt in her fingertips, then traveled down to her arms, legs, and suddenly she was getting off the bed, turning the corner, and stalking right up behind Sylvia where she stood adjusting the picture.
She took the woman by the hips, and turned her around.
Aster was still remembering the controls to her body, so the movement was harsher than she meant it—Sylvia spinning around clumsily in her grasp, her eyebrows raised, her face flushed.
Aster steadied her with two firm hands, drilling an apology into Sylvia’s skin with her fingertips.
“Don’t tell me what I mean, Sylvia.”
Sylvia breathed in for one count, then two—looking deeply, fearfully, into Aster’s eyes, then down at her lips.
Making the sort of face she made back in Bucharest.
But this time—Aster cupped her cheek, not the other way around.
“Don’t panic,” Aster said softly. “It’s okay.”
“Aster…” Sylvia whimpered. The sound sent a shock through Aster’s whole body. “It’s going to happen again.”
“No,” Aster insisted shakily. “It won’t.”
She looked down at Sylvia’s lips. How they were bleeding from Sylvia chewing nervously on them. Aster wanted to run her tongue across them and make it all better. Suck them into her mouth and dissolve every stupid thought and theory from Sylvia’s Rube Goldberg Machine of a brain.
She inched closer, the intention filling her brain like a singularity. Pupils blown, her eyes looked to Sylvia’s for permission.
“Don’t kiss me,” Sylvia said instead, trembling. “Please.”
Aster froze. Arctic-cold water dumped over her. She dropped her hand like it’d been burnt.
“I—I’m sorry,” Aster stuttered, feeling terrible. Guilty. Bad. “I won’t.”
Sylvia sensed her turmoil and frowned. “Fuck—I don’t mean it like that. I just. Wait.”
Sylvia broke them apart and stalked angrily toward her set of drawers.
She squatted, yanked the bottom-most one open, and fished to the very bottom of a bunch of clothes to find a black blindfold.
Aster’s mouth hung open as she watched Sylvia tie it around her own face, then wobble back up, using the drawers to steady herself.
“Sit on the bed,” Sylvia instructed, using her hand to guide herself to the right side of the mattress. “On the opposite side, facing away from me.”
“Sylvia, this is…”
“Ridiculous?” Sylvia scoffed. “Yes, Aster. It is ridiculous. But you know what’s even more ridiculous? The idea of me experiencing again what I just went through in the last forty-eight hours. That is much more ridiculous. Now sit.”
Feeling thoroughly chastised, Aster complied. She sat on the opposite side of the mattress, and then scooched in, so her and Sylvia’s backs were pressed to each-other, looking away.
But she still allowed herself the small gamble of reaching for Sylvia’s hand. Sylvia made a small, wistful sound, but she let Aster hold it, in the small space between them.
“Okay,” Sylvia said, letting the back of her head rest against Aster’s. “This is better.”
“I’m not sure about that,” Aster laughed hollowly. But the feeling of Sylvia’s skull resting on hers—of any part of them touching, even in the slightest—was enough to make her body warm.
“Everything is relative, you asshole,” Sylvia muttered, but there was nothing sharp about her words. “I’m going to talk now.”
Aster wanted to make some stupid comment at that—something like, haven’t you been talking this entire time already—but she could sense Sylvia’s hesitance from the long breath she took in.
So she stayed quiet and still, and waited for Sylvia with the patience of a saint.
“First of all, I’m sorry for trying to tell you what you feel. But in my defense, it’s sort of my specialty. And I’m really good at it.”
Aster laughed, and that laugh must have spurred Sylvia on, because Aster could feel her sag into her—her body weight being held by the firm muscles in Aster’s back.
“I’m just. Terrified. Frankly. For many reasons. Some of which should be obvious, but the more pernicious one is that I’ve had a thousand years of living with these powers, and I still don’t understand them. I pretend that I like them, that I enjoy using them, but I don’t. They terrify me.”
Sylvia spread her free hand across the covers, prodding her sharp nails into the fabric of the comforter. Aster watched her red acrylic trace a line like it was a stream of blood.
“You know how I feel most days?” Sylvia laughed hollowly. “Like one of those giants from the German fairytales. The ones that are always stepping on people with their big murderous toes.”
“You did kill a man with one of your heels once. Twice.”
Sylvia rolled her eyes in amusement. “Hm, yes, I did—I must be subconsciously feeding my own narrative—but nonetheless. You never see any media, any poetry, about the feelings of giants. No one ever asks the giants how it makes them feel to spear those little village people through the chest. And rightfully so. No one cares.”
Sylvia speared the comforter with her nail, stretching its threads like the innards of a beast, then sighed, retracting it.
“There’s simply no playbook for being the bad guy.
And if there was, it would have one page — one page that just said Feel awful about everything and then do it again.
Because that’s exactly what I’m doing. I have no other setting.
I’m a giant and I step on people. I certainly don’t go to therapy and wax poetic about how it felt.
So I certainly don’t know how to have this conversation.
I don’t know what to say because I’m scared if I say the wrong thing, I’ll just—”
She made a slow swirling motion with her fingers on the mattress, imitating the Suggestion eye movement. And Aster’s chest ached for her, so much so that before she could open her mouth again, say another word, Aster squeezed her hand and cut her off—
“You’re not the bad guy for being a victim of something out of your control.”
Sylvia stilled. Aster could hear her knees rising to her chest, her voice breaking slightly when she whispered, “That doesn’t change the fact that I can’t control it.”
Aster shook her head adamantly.
“But there has to be a solution for that, Sylvia. We can find it.”
Sylvia hummed, then let out a long, exhausted sigh.
“Your kindness towards me is ridiculously persistent. And annoying.”
“It has to work extra hard to beat your stubbornness.”
Aster could practically hear Sylvia’s smirk just from the way the back of her head moved. And for a moment afterward, they sat in a small bubble of easy silence, as if nothing had changed.
The wind rattled the creaky shingles on the window outside, and Aster felt a question burning the back of her throat like bile. And, like bile, it eventually found its way out.
“Is it selfish of me to ask if you feel the same way?” she whispered. “The way I did… back in Bucharest?”
There it was again — that ferocious thump, thump, thump in Sylvia’s neck at the question. Her entire body went rigid against Aster’s, like a cat with its tail straight in the air.
“Azaleas.”
Aster stilled. Not no. But, instead, I don’t feel safe to answer.
“Okay,” Aster said, and squeezed her hand. “It can wait.”
For you, I’m happy to wait forever.
But also—if I can help it, I want to get to forever as fast as I can.
“So,” Aster said, redirecting their ship towards safer water. “I assume you have a plan.”
Aster felt Sylvia’s bones relax against her again. The other woman turned to her, still with the blindfold on, but with one of those stupid smiles that Aster would spend eternity with.
“Of course I do.”