I took the samovar and toasted her back, feeling almost giddy with renewed hope. Then we sat quiet for a minute, both lost in separate thought, the silent dark pooling around us like slow waters. The Bitters grounds were perfectly still, broken only by the faint calls of night birds, the shrill chirrups of daredevil bats swooping around the mansion’s many turrets and towers.
Then Talia turned from the window to look at me like some lovely harlequin, half her face submerged in shadow, the other half limned by the moon, each feature flung into cameo relief. Her pale eyes glittered like something out of a Billie Eilish song; a starlit ocean, or the sky above some frozen alien world, much colder than ours but maybe even prettier.
“Smells like rain out there,” she said, tipping her temple toward the window.
“It’s going to rain very soon,” I replied without thinking. “It already is, over by Hallows Hill.”
She cocked her head, giving me a questioning look. “And how would you know that?”
I frowned, wondering how the hell I did know. More than know, I felt it, with just the tiniest bit of effort; the surface of Lady’s Lake trembling as each droplet struck the water, the quivering of the needles and leaves of the surrounding trees as their branches shook under the chilly onslaught, even the clammy saturation of the soil itself. Even stranger, there was nothing at all odd or out of place about this extracorporeal sensation; it felt like a natural extension of my own senses, as commonplace as if I were feeling my own skin and hair drenched during a storm.
“Must be leftover mantle magic, I guess,” I said, releasing the feeling. It faded just as effortlessly as I’d summoned it up.
“Pretty weird, Emmy,” Talia replied in lilting singsong, lingering over the syllables.
“Definitely weird, Talia,” I sang back at her, my heart bucking at hearing my first name on her lips again.
So here we were once more, circling each other. And no matter what it did to my fragile peace of mind, how it compounded my already-complicated turmoil, I found I couldn’t even imagine wishing myself anywhere besides this close to her.
“Emmy,” she repeated, shifting a little in her seat, gaze never leaving mine. “You look beautiful by moonlight, Emmy Harlow.”
“Only you could deliver such a cheesy line,” I said, pretending like I hadn’t just been thinking along the same lines myself, “and make it sound like grade A game.”
“That’s because I completely mean it.”
She leaned forward, eyes intent, reaching out to delicately trace the outlines of my face. Running her fingertips over the arches of my eyebrows, the space between my eyes; then the long swoop of my nose, philtrum, and Cupid’s bow. And then finally my mouth, her fingers drifting to cup my chin as her thumb grazed over my lower lip.
“You, Emmeline Harlow,” she said, eyes locked on mine, “are so extremely fucking beautiful it hurts my soul.”
“So are you, Natalia Avramov,” I said, half sighing, tipping my head forward to close my lips around her thumb and draw it into my mouth.
She gave a sharp gasp, her eyes dropping heavy lidded. “Emmy,” she said again, in that rasping whisper I liked so much, rock candy rough and just as sweet.
Things happened very quickly after that, in a tumbling cascade I could barely follow even as I was a pretty integral part of it.
Suddenly we were standing by the window all tangled up together, tugging each other’s shirts over our heads. I could feel myself shimmer with heat everywhere Talia touched me, as if she was leaving glowing handprints like some neon rave paint on my skin. Together we half stumbled, half tripped toward the bed in a clumsy dance, awkwardly yanking off shoes and pants as we went, kissing like we would have rather swallowed each other whole.
Every so often we’d pull back a little and pause, hands still tangled in the other’s hair, to just look, and marvel, and grin dizzyingly at each other, that this was really, finally happening.
“Damn, I feel like I could eat you,” I exhaled into the curve of her neck, sliding my hands down the long line of her spine to the neat tuck of her waist.
“Then what, exactly, are you waiting for?” she whispered back into my hair, a smile curled like a secret into her voice.
When we fell onto the bed together, Talia’s seafoam sheets were just as soft as I’d expected—though nothing in comparison to the searing softness that was her skin.
I traced the smooth outline of her with my hands and mouth, my lips on her instep, ankle, and then the tender back of her knee, all the way up to the silken inside of her thighs. I nipped at her lightly before biting harder, sinking my teeth in just deep enough to draw out those moans I’d been dying to hear from her for so long.