Carmilla was smiling up at me, and everything was perfect.
She was home. She was safe. She was alive and, more than anything else, she was mine.
It was like everything just fell away, and nothing else mattered but her lips on mine and mine on hers. One kiss turned into two and then into twenty and then there were so many that there was no way of counting them and why would I be counting them when I could be kissing my girlfriend instead.
Before this morning I'd never put much stock in kissing. My first kiss took place in someone's parent's bedroom when I was sixteen, with a boy my friends told me I should like. Dry lips, too-wet tongue and an awkward patting-down of my torso set the tone for what I thought kisses were meant to be. There had been kisses since, of course, from too-confident boys with reaching fingers and nervous girls with shaking hands, but none had ever come close to how Carmilla had kissed me.
Every touch was like the first – tender, hesitant, and soft, with an explosive undercurrent of eager anticipation bubbling just below the surface. She fit into me like I was made missing a piece, and her hands sat so securely on my waist that it seemed that they must have always been there. It was as if she were destined to hold me and I her, and I knew, of course, that that was not how the world worked, so when was it that I fit her in? When did we make room for each-other in our hearts so completely that I'm not sure mine could continue beating without hers.
There was love in every caress and every kiss, and it made my head spin to feel and taste the emotion flooding off of her in waves. It was heady and meaningful, and yet the thrill of excitement, and giddy sense of complete and total newness were unmistakeable. There was teeth knocking and head bumping and kisses that were barely kisses we were smiling so much.
It was beautiful. Everything was so beautiful. Nothing that beautiful was ever made to last.
One second Carmilla was drawing lazy circles on my hip bone and pressing soft kisses to my neck, and then all of a sudden she wasn't. At first I thought she fell asleep, and then something happened and the places where her warm body curved against mine went cold.
She was so cold. It was the kind of unnatural cold that chilled you to your bones and didn't let go for days, and it felt so wrong coming off of someone who shone so bright that I can barely remember anything else. Of course, I could never be so lucky so as to forget the nauseating shade of blue-purple that marbled her pallid flesh, or the white that glazed her eyes and rendered them vacant and unseeing. Nor could I forget the scream, a half-scream, half-sob of pure unadulterated agony, which I was later informed had ripped from my own lips.
She was there, and then she was gone.
My fingers had, not five minutes earlier, been tracing the shape her lips made when she said my name - and then they were grabbing at a body and a face and a being which wasn't there anymore. The lips were the same lips but all of a sudden they weren't hers and no matter how many times I pressed my own against them, wet and salty with tears I didn't know had fallen, they didn't move, didn't yield, didn't do anything at all.
And somehow it was worse than before – so much worse than I could ever imagine. Everyone keeps telling me that I should be thankful for the time we had together but I've tasted the air from her lungs and now I don't understand how I'm meant to breathe without it. Without her.
She knew it would happen. She must have known. The blade of Hastur - meant to consume anyone who wields it. A vampire who has lived and loved and hurt so unimaginably much is somewhat harder to consume, however evidently not exempt from the rule. It was stupid of me to not question it, but she was alive and she was kissing me and I just didn't want to think about the bad anymore.
And now there are mountains of brownies and baked goods and I don't know how much time has passed but I know that Perry could not have been able to bake this much alone. It should mean something to me that people cared and were trying to help but all it did was serve as a reminder that Carmilla was dead and it was all my fault. LaFontaine said I had to eat – something about blood glucose and neurotransmitters, and I know that she's right but it's just occurred to me that the last thing I tasted was her kiss and I'm not ready to give that up just yet.
I'm not ready to give her up yet.
I'm not sure I'll ever be.