Happy holidays!
December 5, 2014
"You know it's been exactly a year since you came into Scull while I was covering Caroline's Toys for Tots thing?"
"Really? How do you know?"
"I clearly remember thinking to myself, 'wow, all these Christmas decorations really popped up out of nowhere. Did I just lose track of time and it's like the 20th already?' And then I looked at my phone calendar. December 5th."
"And you also wrote in your journal later that night: 'Dear Diary, I met the smartest, funniest, sexiest woman today, but she's so far out of my league, however will I court her?'"
Bonnie huffs and bumps Nora's side with her hip, trying to knock her off the sidewalk, but she doesn't even lose her balance. Nora laughs and bumps her back.
"I actually was writing a letter to Elena at the time, and most certainly mentioned you, so kind of." Bonnie smirks. "And besides, I know exactly how to court a smart, funny, sexy woman: drive with her to Cincinnati, Ohio, the Midwest's best attempt at a city of love, in the middle of a blizzard."
"Foolproof."
The inch or two of snow dusting the sidewalk crunches on their feet while they walk home from the 4th St station, the quiet murmur of the few people still hanging out in Washington Square drifting out to them on in the frigid late-night air as they trace the southern border of the park on the way to the tiny one-bedroom they're renting on West 3rd and Mercer. Despite the freezing temperature and lateness of the hour, Greenwich Village is as busy and bustling as it is any Friday night, but the soft white flakes already coating the ground along with the ones drifting down from the sky to join them have a peaceful muffling effect on the ambient chatter emitting from all the bars, restaurants, and late-night bodegas.
"Do we have any alcohol at home?" Bonnie asks. "I can't remember. I want to strip off all these clothes and cuddle up with you under that big blanket and get drunk."
"We have like two more bottles of that Obvious Wine stuff you insisted on buying all the variations of."
"Oh yeah." Bonnie grins. "Great news. Do they not crack you up too? Especially nice to have here. The winos are somehow even more obnoxious."
"Sure. I just don't want us to wake up one day and realize we're one of those brand ambassador couples." Nora sticks one arm out with the other curled as if around a wine bottle and mimes a furious bout of selfie-taking.
"Well I'm hurt, because that is what I had in mind for us all along. We're hot. We could make bank." They've reached the front door of their building, and Bonnie roots around in her purse for the keys for a few seconds before Nora snaps her fingers and opens the lock.
Bonnie turns around with the keys clutched in her hand, shoves them in her back pocket, and looks at her with a playfully petulant scowl on her face. "Cheater."
"Slowpoke."
"Lazypants."
"Snob."
"Corner-cutter."
"Wanker."
"Freeloader."
"Shithead."
They continue to trade single-word insults as they ascend the creaky wooden staircase to the fourth floor, each one progressively more profane and/or nonsensical than the last, and when Nora calls her an "eyebreather" she's laughing so hard it's all she can do not to collapse onto the frayed rug that spans the length of their hallway. "What the fuck is an 'eyebreather'?" she gasps between guffaws.
"You know, like a mouthbreather. Except with your eyes instead." Nora says it nonchalantly, with no hint of mirth, even though Bonnie can spot the microscopic traces of an impending smile on her lips.
"Ah yes, my favorite universal concept." Bonnie's still chuckling as they stumble over the threshold together, and Nora immediately sweeps her arms to ignite the veritable horde of seasonal candles they've placed strategically throughout the living room, kitchen alcove, and bedroom. The multicolored lights wrapped around the miniature Christmas tree they set next to the TV also flare to life.
"Hey, I wanted to do it this time," Bonnie whines exaggeratedly, shrugging off her layers into a pile around her feet.
"Forgive me for interpreting your actions as indicators of a non-magical mood."
"Keys are cool, Nora. Why not use them every once in a while?"
"What if you lose them?"
"I haven't yet."
"Are you sure?"
Bonnie rolls her eyes and reaches into her back pocket to get the keys—which aren't there. She purses her lips, cocks her head, and stares at Nora. "Gee, where could they be?"
"I needed your corkscrew," Nora replies, holding up one of the bottles of wine just as she pulls the cork out, then reaching for the neatly labeled plastic bottle of A-negative and taking a long swig. Thanks to an extremely secretive but surprisingly friendly underground network of city-dwelling vampires, it turns out you really can get everything delivered in New York. "Corkscrews are cool, Bonnie. Why not use them every once in a while?"
"Touché." Bonnie grins and takes the amply filled glass that Nora offers her, then raises it. "To, uh, I don't know. Being alive and actually living a semi-normal life for once?"
"I will certainly toast to that. Even though I'm undead, technically. But that's just semantics."
"Yeah, but we've both died. Multiple times. That's why I said 'semi-normal'."
"Ah. Well then, yes. Cheers, or whatever."
The wine feels warmer than room temperature as it courses through Bonnie's still-chilled chest and she closes her eyes to savor it, then sets the glass down and leans forward to press her forehead to Nora's, their ice cube noses creating a miniature feedback loop of heat as the tips meet.
"See, isn't this wayyy better than still being in that loud, steamy bar, getting more drunk, then having to wait god knows how long for the train?" It's a rhetorical question, because Bonnie knows the answer. When she opens her eyes she sees the green of her own irises the slightest bit reflected in Nora's paler ones, bordered by a brow furrowed in sheepishness.
"I just wanted to meet your friends."
"I know. And you're the best. But one, you did, and two, they're not even really my friends. We were just forced to be close because Boettner's forensic anthropology class is impossible. But I don't really vibe with them. I mean, you remember what Kate said. And what the fuck was that bar? And Cleo and her boyfriend saying they hang out there every weekend?"
Nora breaks the contact to laugh loudly. "How have we not talked about this yet. To be fair, that look we gave each other said everything that needed to be said. But . . . what? I couldn't even name half of the animals they had mounted on the walls. Are they even real? And that shot we did . . . you asked for vodka. I feel like she did not give us vodka."
Bonnie shudders at the memory. "It tasted like gin tossed with something . . . unspeakable. I'm fine with gin, occasionally, if I know that's what I'm drinking. But if not, ew."
"This is pretty much exactly how our conversation played out silently in my head." Nora smiles at her. "We're good at looking."
"Yeah, we are." And they demonstrate this for the next fifteen seconds or so, before Bonnie closes the gap and kisses Nora with both strength and softness, savoring the way the contours of their bodies fit together vertically—and every other way, really—as they lean against each other over the border between the carpet and the white tile floor of the kitchen. Bonnie feels every little cell in her body break from its tethers and rise through her as one piece of a microscopic swarm of bubbles, just like they have every other time they've kissed, and she briefly thinks once more about how she keeps waiting for the "honeymoon period" to ease or falter like everyone always says it does, but after all this time it hasn't, and doesn't seem to indicate it ever will.
"You don't need to do any finals studying tonight, do you?" Bonnie asks as they finally pull away.
"What? No, it's Friday." Nora almost looks offended. "Do you?"
"Hell no. I'm mostly done, anyway. ForAnthro was the hard part. And I kicked that test's ass. At least I think. Don't quote me on that." Bonnie takes another sip (more like a gulp) of her wine, sets it down on the peninsula counter, wraps her arms in a careless loop around Nora's waist that somehow, with and without heels, is always at the perfect height.
"So, we're still going back to Mystic Falls after the semester wraps up, right?"
"That's the plan," Bonnie says with a huff. Planning a trip back to Virginia had been more trouble than she'd anticipated. They'd eventually settled on a short but annoyingly expensive flight there and then a road trip back with Caroline, Valerie, and a few pieces of furniture still collecting dust in Bonnie's dad's old house just in time to have a girls' night in the city for New Year's Eve—though preferably not, as Caroline had joked, crammed in with thousands of sweaty, delirious tourists strapped up with adult diapers for maximum endurance. "It'll be kinda weird, don't you think? What if I just feel bad about leaving all of them?"
"Our friends may be biologically young, well, some of them anyway, but Bonnie—they're fine. I'm sure they miss you, but people move. They leave. It happens. Life doesn't stop for anyone. Even when they live forever."
"Yeah, I know. If only my guilt-o-meter did, too. But thanks. It's always good to be reminded." Bonnie still has her hands at the small of Nora's back, but now she's moving her fingers a bit more, lightly pressing her thumbs at the top of her girlfriend's ass while her other fingers reach downward. Their fronts instinctively start to move closer together and gyrate in loose, hazy rhythm, and suddenly their conversation seems less like something of importance upon which to dwell and more like a mundane prelude to the good stuff.
"What else do you like me to remind you of?" Nora breathes the question in barely audible gasps, hot and softly steaming against Bonnie's neck and left ear, the temperatures of which suddenly seeming to climb more than fifteen degrees. She pants as Nora eases her back against the island, and then her butt is firmly planted at the edge of the faux-marble countertop with Nora's nimble grip dropping to Bonnie's hips and her thumbs hinting toward the place that Bonnie's body and soul and whatever else are all burning for her to touch.
"Whatever you feel is . . . important," Bonnie whispers in response, the pause before the final word not really a bit of rhetorical drama so much as a lapse in rational thought as Nora's lips start to graze the exact right spots below her trembling jaw.
Nora's deft kisses switch to the other side of Bonnie's neck, "Did I already tell you how hot you looked tonight?" The pads of her thumbs are moving now, gently back and forth between the space under Bonnie's belly button and the sides of her upper legs, teasing at the hem of her pants, and at this point Bonnie is almost fully convinced she's about to explode. They've both been so busy with school the past week, their normally harmonious schedules forced out of sync by study sessions or group project meetups at odd hours and lengthy due-at-midnight essays put off for far too long, and of course they're always too tired by the time they get to bed to make the most of it, and so aside from a quick hallway smooch here, an impromptu desk dalliance there, it's been a while since they've taken it nice and slow like this. Which is lovely and all, but the pent-up tension has the obvious effect of making Bonnie a little impatient; she starts to scoot farther back onto the counter and pulls Nora against and on top of her, needing to feel her weight, her presence.
"I think you may have mentioned it, once or twice." She can barely get even semblances of the words out.
"What about how I've been absolutely dying to fuck you since we woke up this morning?"
Some other night Bonnie might have answered with a witty but still sexy comeback, something like "I tend to have that effect on people" or "and I've been dying to fuck you since Sunday" or even something simple like "so do it," but she's so worked up, every bit of heat in her body coiled into a taut spring compressed to its limit, that she just quietly sighs Nora's name into her ear and greedily tugs her even closer—and it is at this incredibly inopportune time, of course, that all hell elects to break loose, so to speak, because to complete the aforementioned motion Bonnie inches backward the exact distance required for her back to hit the half-full wine glass she had carelessly set down at the edge of the counter and then forgotten about.
It seems to at once last forever and be defiantly over in the fraction of a second it actually takes: Nora, with her lightning-fast vamp reflexes, snaps to action and reaches behind Bonnie to save the tipping glass, which she grabs and holds in front of her triumphantly, but this all happens in a an inhuman microsecond during which Bonnie, still processing what's happening, is turning her head around to try to see the glass that is no longer there and sitting up at the same time, and Nora moves her hand again, but this time in a forceful jerk upward, and then they are both being showered by a miniature downpour of red wine. Like Carrie, but way lamer, Bonnie would think later. It takes them both a few more seconds to come to terms with what has just occurred, a few more after that to look at each other wide-eyed and bewildered, and then finally who knows how many to laugh until tears of mirth are the next thing to run down their faces.
"I'm telling you," Bonnie finally says, wiping the unlikely mixture from her eyes and brows, "this is why we need to set up cameras or something. NO ONE is going to believe us that this happened."
"Who cares? The only person who has to know are the ladies at the laundromat, and God knows they've seen weirder messes from us." Nora, still chuckling, turns around and half-sits half-leans on the counter next to Bonnie, wringing out a lock of hair that got particularly splashed.
Bonnie just looks at her for a minute, almost forgetting everything else for that tiny shred of a moment. "Do you know how much I love you?"
Nora stares back at her. "Exactly as much as I love you."
They kiss, slow and languid, Bonnie giggling a bit against Nora's pursed lips as she feels the stickiness of the half-dried wine on her neck.
"At least it didn't get on the carpet," she remarks when they pull away. "And we're both wearing black. Could've been way worse."
"And you're the one who's always telling me to be careful." Nora shakes her hair out a bit and then gracefully pulls her damp shirt over her head, Bonnie watching in awe as if it's the first time she's witnessed this motion and not the thousandth. "Fancy a shower, my beloved?"
Nora's dated Britishisms have been gradually tempered by the diverse linguistic patchwork of the city along with modern Brit slang from all the BBC shows and Simon Pegg movies they've been watching, and to Bonnie her lexicon has never been more adorable. "I'd be right chuffed."
As Nora leads her by the hand to the bathroom, playfully stripping each other's remaining clothes off along the way, and then later in the shower with her head buried between Nora's writhing thighs, Bonnie's brain, for the briefest of flashes, asks itself the often irrelevant and even more often unanswerable question of whether she's ever been happier. Tonight, and many nights after, the answer is a joyous yes.