Prologue
Carmilla can see Laura standing on the dock from her window, barely lit by moonlight and stars and distant street-lamps. Long strands of golden-brown hair and thin white fabric twist and flutter on the sea breeze as she remains, stiff and motionless and overlooking the water. She imagines her toes curling over the edge of the dock’s rough-hewn, wooden planks; she imagines the faraway look her eyes must hold. She imagines the twin trails that silent tears trace down her cheeks and drip-drip-drip onto the cold wood and down, down further to mingle with the waves.
She presses her forehead to the glass and huffs out a sigh. Us against the world is a lot bigger pill to swallow when the world decides to take a swing, she thinks.
FOUR YEARS EARLIER
They’re fourteen when she first promises Laura.
They’re sitting cross-legged on Carmilla’s bed, and her window is cracked half an inch to let the warm summer breeze in, carrying with it the tang of salt that seeps into everything in this goddamned town.
And Laura’s eyes are wider with fear than she’s ever seen them.
“Laura, just tell me,” she muffles out behind the hands over her face. “Unless you’re hurting yourself or doing some illegal shit, I won’t care.”
She parts the fingers covering her eyes to look hard at Laura, sincere in the way she rarely is. “Us against the world, remember?”
And Laura, daughter of the town pastor, honey-blonde angel incarnate, the biggest goody-two-shoes Carmilla’s ever known, squeaks out, “I’m gay!” and buries her face in her hands, hiccuping out a half-sob.
Her heart decides now is a good time to leap directly into her throat, and her mind backs this decision, because Laura fucking Hollis is gay, and Carmilla’s dead, she’s so dead. She’s never lied to Laura about being gay herself; never properly came out but that never mattered because Laura knows she’s about as straight as a circle and has never thrown her father’s words at Carmilla for it. And everything had been fine.
But now Laura’s joined her disappointing-the-family club and she doesn’t know what the fuck she’s supposed to do about it. She knows what she wants to do, but that’s a different thing entirely.
She shrugs off these thoughts for now, however, because Laura is crying on her monochrome sheets and that’s something she won’t stand for. Crawls forward on her knees and pries Laura’s hands from her face, voice going soft when she asks, “Cupcake, of all people, you thought I would be bothered by you being gay?” Soft, like her voice has only ever gone for Laura.
“I know, I know, it’s stupid,” Laura says, voice choked, “but it’s really really hard to say it. It took me so long just to say it to myself.” All of a sudden, she’s shaking her hands from Carmilla’s grip and flinging arms around her.
She stiffens, but the mental image of Laura sitting in front of her mirror and choking on those three words over and over, trying so so so hard just to say them to herself while, down the hall, her father slumbers next to the book he uses to tear down people like her, is enough to send her hands moving to splay across Laura’s back and thread through her hair softly. Cool tears bleed watery circles onto her shirt, some bold-printed proclamation of one band or another, but she doesn’t really care.
When Laura’s chest stops heaving, Carmilla pulls back to look her in the eyes, fingers curled around her shoulders. Brown, earnest eyes stare into bleary red ones. “We’re gonna get out of this shitty town one day, I promise. Together.”