Carmilla almost felt bad. Almost. Because she had explained their sudden sexual activity away as Laura who needed the reassurance; Laura who needed something to distract her from their impending doom; Laura who was essentially using Carmilla for her own selfish reasons. As if that was the real reason. As if Carmilla didn't want it just as much as Laura—if not more.
She had mostly wanted Laura to stop overthinking it when they'd kissed that first time. And yes, she'd wanted her power back; make her seem like the aloof vampire she was before she met Laura. Not free of desire, but certainly free of a feeling so mundanely human as love—especially when it pertained to Laura. But most of all, Carmilla was afraid that if Laura started overthinking it too much, she'd put a stop to it. And Carmilla didn't want it to stop. Because having Laura back in her arms after so many months, having her lips back on hers again, hearing the sounds of her hitching breath, her breathy moans, the way her heart jumped in her chest whenever they touched… If Carmilla had needed to breathe, it would've felt like oxygen.
It was getting hard, Carmilla admitted, to keep in her obvious adoration for the little human. To hold back her hand when it strained to brush back a lock of her hair (the only moments she dared was when Laura was sleeping); to stop herself from staring at Laura like she was the center of the Universe; to keep her skin from buzzing whenever she felt Laura's presence in the room… If she was being honest with herself, her newfound closeness with Laura only made it more difficult for her to keep in her other—decidedly non-sexual—shows of affection. As a centuries old vampire with so much experience, Carmilla should've known when it was okay to touch, to stare, to feel. But she couldn't. Because Laura unhinged her in the best way possible, and if she was being honest with herself, she knew she was just as needy for Laura's touch as Laura was for hers.
Maybe it was the fact that Laura had given up all her principles and her desire to save the school for saving Carmilla by killing the old man. Maybe it was the way she visibly atoned, every day, for the mistakes she'd made, suddenly insisting that she had been responsible for Mattie's death, Danny's death, and the mess they were in now. Carmilla wasn't sure whether she liked Laura overcompensating on her guilt; after all, none of the things she now blamed herself for were solely her fault. But it made it difficult not to feel her chest squeeze sometimes, knowing the weight Laura carried on her shoulders every day. Maybe it was the way Laura had just cracked the puzzle on the talisman mystery, opening Carmilla's door to freedom with a dismissive shrug of her shoulders, as if it was no big deal. Carmilla hadn't been able to stop herself then from letting her admiration slip out then. (You're amazing.) And when Laura had gushed about how they could go to Paris and live in a crappy apartment, then hastily retracted with a line about past disappointments, Carmilla had been unable to hide behind her usual sarcastic comebacks or dismissals. She'd run away. She hadn't been able to hide how much Laura's speech had affected her. How much she ached to have that future with the little human.
But Laura had convinced herself that any relationship they could have together was doomed, and so Carmilla took anything she could get. She could already hear Mattie's voice in her head, reprimanding her for being so sentimental and foolish. Because deep dow, Carmilla knew that any relationship she could have with Laura would inevitably reach its expiration date. Even if they could work through their differences now, and even if they survived her Mother's apocalypse, she was still a vampire, and Laura was still human. She would live forever, while Laura would age and die. And even if Carmilla had been able to turn Laura, she wouldn't have wanted to. Carmilla couldn't imagine Laura as a vampire. It seemed wrong on so many levels. Carmilla knew that for once, Laura Hollis was right about things, and she was the one in denial. Even though she knew a relationship between them would ultimately fail, she didn't want to acknowledge it because she still loved Laura with more love than she'd ever thought her undead heart could give. So she submitted willingly whenever the sexual tension rose between them, and Laura had fucked her on the desk with a desperation that Carmilla had never felt from her; she lured Laura into her bed and returned the favor after an honest-to-goodness game night—which should've been entirely non-sexual; she forced herself to stay up all night after Laura had fallen into a sex-induced sleep to watch over her, not knowing when she'd ever have another opportunity.
Telling Laura before that she'd better leave when her Dad came to get her was the hardest thing Carmilla had ever had to do. But as a friend, she knew it was the right thing. To get Laura out of harm's way, the way she'd always tried to do back when she first got involved in Laura's crazy schemes. As more than a friend? Of course she'd wanted Laura to stay—to stay and never leave her side. But that was the head-over-heels selfish part of her speaking, and she knew it wasn't right. She wanted Laura back, but she couldn't. So instead, she'd set her free. And then Laura suddenly had a change of heart (and Carmilla couldn't pretend that she didn't inwardly cry with relief when she heard it) and that was the moment the Laura she knew and loved started to tentatively come back. When they had their desperate impromptu make-out session not soon after, Carmilla felt like she could finally breathe again, knowing that they'd moved passed this ridiculous let's-just-be-friends idea, even though neither of them knew what they should be instead. But it was enough for now. And so Carmilla held on. She held on for dear life.
Of all the ways that Laura imagined—and she'd imagined it in embarrassing detail—she'd get back together with Carmilla, random hookups due to excessive sexual tension (that are never talked about again) had not been it. She'd always imagined something a bit more romantic, a bit more cathartic; a moment when they'd both admit their mistakes, and then they'd fall back into each other's arms like she'd always known they would. She would be lying if she said this whole friends with benefits thing wasn't hot as hell, and the knowledge that they shouldn't be doing it made it so much hotter. But it wasn't right, and even though Carmilla was clearly trying very hard not to make a big deal out of it, Laura knew the vampire long enough now to know that she was affected by it too.
Carmilla had tried to explain it away the first time by saying it was just Laura's way of getting rid of her anxiety. A sexual release to let go of the tension that riddled their everyday lives these days. Laura had even accepted that explanation; it seemed reasonable enough. She could almost imagine the recipe:
Take your crippling anxiety about having to save the world again, knowing that your friends' lives (as well as those of many others) depend on it;
Add your hot vampire ex-girlfriend for whom you obviously still have feelings, and with whom you're forced to live in cramped quarters;
Blend together with the right amount of teasing, flirtation, and suggestive looks.
And while Laura was enough of a grownup to realize that this blend of circumstances was a dish best served with a cold cold shower, Carmilla wasn't making it easier. If anything, the vampire seemed to encourage it. Which ultimately meant that while there was certainly enough tension in their everyday lives, the kind that drove Laura into Carmilla's arms was not so much of the regular, and more of the sexual kind that was solely associated with Carmilla.
Laura had tried to make it right. After LaF's intervention she'd felt decidedly mature as she explained to Carmilla that there were obviously still feelings, and that they should acknowledge that those feelings were there, but also that a relationship between them would never work, and that they should just be friends. From that moment on Carmilla had been visibly skeptical and huffy about that agreement, and Laura had a niggling feeling that maybe their recent hookups were her way of protesting it. The thought had made a cloud of butterflies erupt in her stomach, because maybe that meant that Carmilla still wanted her too, as more than just friends. And though she couldn't see how a relationship between them could possibly work, Laura felt a flicker of hope that maybe Carmilla could.
More than anything, Laura felt her chest constrict whenever they were entangled in each other and Carmilla would look at her (usually post-orgasm) in a way that carried so much love, that for a moment Laura couldn't breathe. Because she'd never accepted that Carmilla could actually love her. Whenever the word 'love' was mentioned in relation to her and Carmilla, Laura had always opposed it. When Mattie had first mentioned that Carmilla had "fallen in love with one of the marks again"; when Danny had first come back, disdainfully talking about the "vampire who fell in love"; even when Carmilla herself had first uttered the words "I love you." At the time, Laura thought it had been merely a reactive utterance, and since they had broken up immediately after, she didn't feel particularly confident that Carmilla's words carried much truth. And now, after finally realizing how big of a mess she'd made of things, Laura felt even more strongly that Carmilla couldn't possibly feel anything more for her than a casual attraction. If anything, their recent hookups (as well as Carmilla's insistence that they didn't mean anything) made Laura believe that she didn't mean anything more to the vampire than one of her various "study buddies" back in the day. Laura didn't even feel bad about it. Though she'd tried fighting it initially—telling herself that they'd only been dating for a month, and that something as momentous as whether she 'loved' Carmilla was only something she could evaluate after at least a few months—Laura couldn't deny it to herself anymore: she loved Carmilla. But Carmilla loving her?
Even though it was Laura, and not Carmilla, who denied it whenever the vampire was accused of loving her, Laura could not believe it. Someone like Carmilla loving someone like her was surely impossible. And so she kept quiet whenever Carmilla looked at her in a certain way, and filed it away as lust or desire. She tried not to think about their random hookups, opting to simply enjoy the heady intoxication of sex with the vampire. She tried not to think about them becoming a common occurrence. About how they became less desperate and more gentle—tender, even. Laura tucked away the little details and let them stay in the darkness. She couldn't think about it, because the thought of Carmilla loving her—the kind of capital-L-for-better-or-for-worse-unconditional-head-over-heels Love—was too much for her to handle.