Page 52 of Lucy Undying (Dracula #1)

52

London, October 7, 2024

Iris

I kiss Elle back too fast, too hard.

It’s been so long since I’ve felt anything like this. Since I’ve trusted that the person I was with wouldn’t run, or take my mother’s money, or betray me.

Elle dances like she’s trying to exorcise a demon. She looks sad when she doesn’t catch herself and school her expressions. She wrinkles her nose when she laughs. She’s funny and smart and beautiful and kind, and she’s here now, with me. By choice. Unlike in Whitby, I don’t want to consume her. I don’t want to use her to quiet that ache inside for a few stolen minutes. It’s not about me and what I need. I want to celebrate her. To connect with her. To worship her.

I pull away and put my lips against her ear. Linger there for a few breaths to get myself steady. Then, keeping my voice as soft and low as a purr, I say, “Ask me to kiss you slowly.”

Elle goes still against me, like a rabbit about to flee. I’ve ruined the moment. I’ve blown it.

Then she whispers, “Kiss me slowly. Please.”

I trace my lips along her jaw, letting the magnetism of her mouth draw me back in. I wasn’t wrong to compare her lips to a rosebud. They’re velvet-soft, blooming beneath my own. I weave my fingers into her hair, cradling the back of her head, not grasping or grabbing. Careful, careful. Tender.

Forehead-to-forehead, we stop and breathe in sync. I’m about to brush her hair away and move to her neck, to capture her butterfly pulse in my mouth, but she puts a hand against my cheek, holding me there, keeping me still.

“Ask me to take my dress off,” she says, her voice unsteady.

“Take your dress off…please,” I add, the word curving out of my mouth like a smile.

Her fingers tremble as she undoes the buttons. I want to help her, but the waiting is delicious. The seconds stretch taut between us. She slides her dress off her shoulders and it falls to the floor around her feet, pooling there like she’s a myth rising lovely and impossible from a pond.

I trail my hand down her throat, lingering at the place where neck becomes shoulder. Then I rest it, palm flat, in the center of her chest. I stretch my thumb and pinky, brushing the soft fullness of her on either side. She’s so beautiful that looking at her is a hook in the center of my chest, tugging on something painful and yearning.

But still, I linger. I go slowly. I ask, and she asks, and we both answer.

It’s a gentle, aching unearthing as we peel off layers. We experiment with touch and taste, pressed against the wall, then on the couch, eventually making it to the bed. Elle is a garden, subtle and beautiful and surprising, and I am as serious about making her bloom as I’ve ever been about anything in my life.

When she navigates my body, her lips against the curves of my breasts, her small hands somehow everywhere, it’s like she knows what I’m responding to before I do. Like she can hear the swell of desire and instantly divert into the wave, riding it for as long as possible.

We move together until at last we’re spent, lying diagonal across the bed, our legs still tangled. Elle turns on her side to look at me. For once I’m not self-conscious of how exposed I am. It was clear in the exploration of her hands and the press of her mouth that she loves the soft fullness of my belly, the place where my thighs kiss against each other. That in my softness she doesn’t find weakness or failure, only pleasure. Only tenderness.

She cups one of my breasts, no urgency in the motion of her thumb brushing back and forth over my nipple, only idle enjoyment.

“Ask me,” I say, trying to keep a straight face, “if my little butter chicken has replaced actual butter chicken as the best thing I’ve ever had in my mouth.”

She snorts an inelegant explosion of laughter and grabs a pillow to throw at me. I take it and put it behind my head, absolutely spent and absolutely content.

“But seriously.” I want to be sincere. I want to tell her what that meant to me, how it felt. “I—”

“Ask me if I know what you mean without you saying it,” she whispers.

I lean my head close to hers and she brushes my curls away from my eyes. I close them, wanting to exist infinitely in this moment. No past, no future. A line of Emily Dickinson dances through my mind. “ Forever is composed of nows, ” I quote, needing only this now and nothing else.

But now can never last. The past is always with us. And on us, in my case, as Elle is discovering.

“These bumps are scars, aren’t they?” Elle asks, running her fingers down my arms.

“I have an autoimmune disorder. It’s similar to cold agglutinin disease, which you’ve never heard of because it’s rare, and our version is even rarer. It’s so unusual they nicknamed it after my family. Gold agglutinin disease. Cute, right? If I get too cold, my body starts attacking my blood cells. I’m mildly anemic on a good day, dangerously anemic on a bad one.” I brush my arms where old IV scars linger. “When I was growing up, I had weekly blood transfusions. They’d pump out all my gold blood and pump in regular blood to replace it. But it never made me feel better, so as soon as I got away, I stopped doing it.”

“Are you okay now?”

I shrug. “It’ll kill me eventually. But not today, which is good enough for me.”

She lets out a noncommittal noise. “And what happened here?” Elle traces the scars on both sides of my abdomen. I’m surprised she noticed them. They’re little white crescents, like someone pressed a thumbnail too hard against the skin.

This time I’m tempted to lie, or kiss her, or deflect. But I told Elle I wouldn’t try to protect her from monsters.

“My mother was obsessed with progeny,” I say, using her word for it. Not “children.” Not “families.” Progeny. “She was always bitter she only had one child, angry with me for taking so long and ‘ruining her’ on my way out. Her phrase, not mine. I’m aware neither is my fault. But she didn’t feel that way. She made it clear she was owed more than she had been given, and it was my responsibility to pay that debt. I didn’t think too much of it growing up, because it felt nebulous and far away.”

I don’t turn on my side, don’t look at Elle. I need to say this part without watching her reaction, because it might break me. “When I was sixteen, she had me visit a special doctor. Even though I felt fine and had hit puberty like a lineman tackling an opponent—”

“What?” Elle asks.

“Sorry, American football reference. Hard. I hit it hard,” I say, laughing. I squeeze my boobs. “These heavy babies were already D-cups by the time I was fourteen. Anyway, this special doctor told me I had a hormone imbalance that needed to be corrected. My mother gave me shots every day. Which was weird for many reasons, but mostly because she was doing it herself. Taking care of me with her own two hands, not via a nanny or tutor or any of the various employees she’d paid to raise me. Then my stomach got tender and swollen. I told her something was wrong. Like usual, I expected her to dismiss my pain. But she was gentle and attentive. And I gobbled it up. I reveled in it. At last, I’d cracked through her ice. She loved me. Appendicitis, she said. She took me to a private medical center. Held my hand as I was wheeled into an operating room.

“When I woke up in recovery, she was gone. She wasn’t even waiting for me at home. No one would tell me how the surgery went, whether my appendix had burst, anything. So, I researched appendicitis. The symptoms didn’t match up. I’d been lied to, and I didn’t understand why, or what they were lying about.

“But my mother had made two very big mistakes in raising me. The first was assuming I wasn’t paying attention when she entered passcodes into locks. And the second was giving me elocution, public speaking, and acting lessons so I could become charismatic and commanding like her. I broke into my mother’s office and used her phone to call the doctor.”

I hitch my voice up so it’s higher, smoother, colder. I flatten my affect, every sentence delivered without life or inflection. “?‘ I’m calling to follow up about my daughter’s procedure. She’s complaining of pain in her shoulder. Are we concerned? ’ The doctor reassured me that referred pain from the swelling was to be expected. And then he informed me that he had been correct—the procedure was a success. Six viable eggs retrieved.”

“What the fuck ?” Elle says.

“Yeah. That’s what I thought, too. But this was my one chance. I stayed calm and told him, still in my mother’s voice, that I had changed my mind. A surrogate couldn’t be trusted. I wanted the eggs destroyed. He protested, but my mother never allowed anyone to question her decisions, so neither did I. I told him to call me back as soon as it was done. Then I sat in my mother’s chair in her pristine office and waited until I had confirmation that what had been stolen was out of my mother’s reach forever.

“They’d lied to me, drugged me, operated on me, and literally taken part of me away. That was when I knew: Everything I’d thought I’d seen and overheard over the years—the nightmare glimpses, the creeping suspicions? They were all correct. My mom was a monster, and so was everyone who worked for her.

“I ran to my dad. He’d been my ally sometimes, or at least a place where I could retreat for ice cream and movies and a few hours where nothing was expected of me. But when I told him what she’d done, he wasn’t surprised. He told me it was best not to fight her. He wouldn’t even—” My voice at last breaks.

Elle moves closer, draping an arm around my waist, holding me tight.

I clear my throat. “He wouldn’t fight for me. He was old and tired and broken by her. That was the first time I ran away for more than just the night. It wouldn’t be the last. It was an ongoing war where I lost every skirmish. I tried to tell the police what Goldaming Life was up to. She had me committed to an involuntary psychiatric hold. I tried to live on my own. She paid landlords to evict me, friends to throw me out, girlfriends to dump me. She even donated a new library building to my college so they’d disenroll me and all my student loans would come due at once. I did what I could to carve out independence, but it was impossible. She was inevitable. I knew one day she’d break me.”

I sigh, running Elle’s soft hair between my fingers, marveling at the shades of red. Elle is like light. Subtle and changeable depending on what she’s filtered through. Right now, it’s a bedroom haze of satisfaction and vulnerability, so she’s all glowing gold.

“And then my mother died.” I don’t try to hide the smile in my voice. The truth of this next part I keep to myself, though. As much as I trust Elle, there are still some things I should never admit. Like how I knew that my mother used Ambien every night and slept like the dead. Like how I used her passwords to hack her home automation controls and set the middle-of-the-night thermostat as low as it would go. Like how I attacked her with cold, triggering her autoimmune reaction over and over again until her body couldn’t make enough blood cells to replace what she was losing. I can’t know for certain if it was what killed her, but I do believe it sped up the process, and I’m glad.

When she died, I flew with her body on the private jet. I threw a fit and demanded Dickie and the other Goldaming Life ghouls take a different one. For once I got my way. When the flight attendant was preparing my meal, I had a few precious moments alone. I lifted the lid of Mother’s casket. There she was. As cold and lifeless in death as she had been in life. It was easy to imagine she might open her eyes. Easy to picture a red gleam in them.

I had a present for her. A piece I’d made in the metalworking class I’d taken before she got me expelled. I had to pick up so many extra shifts to buy that much silver, but it was worth it. It was surprisingly hard to drive my clumsy knife between her bones, and alarmingly loud. But it was worth it. She left permanent marks on me. I left one on her, too.

My mom is dead, and she’s staying dead. I worked hard to create this shot at freedom, and I can’t blow it.

“Anyway,” I say, turning on my side to face Elle. “That’s my mother. Who she was and what she represents. This is my one chance to get away forever.” It’s apology and explanation. I want to stay with Elle and get to know her better. To see if we have a chance. I hope she gets that in any reasonable world, she’d be enough to hold me here.

“Iris,” Elle says. “Do you get seasick?”

It’s so far from anything I expected her to say in response to all my trauma that I laugh, shocked out of my morose self-pity. “No, I don’t get seasick.”

“How would you feel about being on a boat for a long time? I mean a long time. A month and a half, maybe two months. Not a nice ship, either. A cargo ship.”

“Am I in a box in this scenario?”

She smiles, dimples dipping into existence and then disappearing just as quickly, like a mirage of happiness. Then Elle gets serious. I don’t think I’ve seen her deadly serious before. As petite and delicately beautiful as she is, there’s something threatening in her narrowed eyes. Her voice lowers as she says, “Give me three days to arrange things, and I’ll get you somewhere they can never touch you again.”

I should ask how. Instead, the question that comes out of my mouth is, “Why?”

Why is she helping me? No one else ever has. Even when they believed me, they didn’t dare go against the power of my mother and Goldaming Life.

Elle doesn’t blink. She holds my gaze with her lightless ocean eyes. I could sink to the bottom of them and be secret and safe forever. “Because,” she says, “so many girls deserve help, but I can’t help them all. I can save you, though. Ask me to save you. Please.”

I kiss the tip of her nose, then her forehead, then her chin. Her lips I merely brush, a promise. She takes it as me accepting her offer and buries her face in the curve of my neck.

I don’t believe she can actually save me. It’s cruel of me to let her think it’s possible. But for today, in this precious, dreamy now, we can live in that fantasy.