Vampires Never Get Old - Zoraida Cordova Page 0,86
fingers two tubes right, to a deep shade, neither red nor blue nor purple. She turns over the tube, reads the label on the bottom.
HEART-STOPPER.
Elinor takes the lipstick and applies with it an expert hand. When she’s done, she pulls back, head tilted like a marble sculpture. “There.”
Juliette studies her reflection.
The girl in the mirror is striking.
Hair falling in pale waves. Blue eyes ringed black, the sharp cut of the outer edge making her look feline. The dark lip, something more feral.
“How do I look?” she asks.
Her sister’s smile is all teeth.
“Ready.”
* * *
There’s a sign on the door that says COME ON IN, but Ben still has to pull her over the threshold.
Parties are everything Juliette hates.
They are loud music and crowded rooms, food she can’t eat and booze she can’t drink, and all the trappings of the normal life she’ll never have. But she drank a full cup from the coffeepot before leaving, and at least the sun’s gone down and taken the worst of her headache with it. The world is softer in the dark, easier to move through.
Still, the only thing that makes her go inside—besides intractable, impossible Ben—is the idea, the fear, the hope that Calliope is somewhere in this house.
But there’s no sign of her.
“She’ll show up,” says Ben, and she wants to believe him, and she wants to go home, and she wants to be here, and she wants to be more, and she wants to take a shot from the bar, wants to do something, anything to calm her nervous heart.
She purses her lips, tasting the dark red stain called Heart-Stopper, and agrees to stay. Maybe she will find someone else, maybe it doesn’t matter, maybe a first is just a first.
Ten minutes later, a dozen of them have migrated to an upstairs room and Ben is leading a game of Truth or Dare, and she doesn’t know if he’s doing it for her or for himself, because he looks pretty sad when Alex picks truth, and then he picks dare, and now he’s drinking a beer while doing a handstand, an act that defies the laws of physics, and Jules is laughing and shaking her head when Calliope walks in.
And when she sees Jules, she smiles. It’s not the bright smile of friends meeting in a crowd. It’s something sly and quiet, there and then gone, but it leaves her heart pounding.
She stops a few feet away, so they’re on the same side of the room, side by side, and that’s better because Jules doesn’t have to look at her, doesn’t have to weather the force of the other girl looking back.
Ben finishes and holds up his hands like a gymnast dismounting to a room full of applause.
And then he looks at Jules and smiles.
“Juliette,” he says, eyes dancing with power, and she knows what he’s going to say, knows the shape of it at least, and she wills him not to, even as her heart pounds.
“I dare you to spend sixty seconds in the closet with Calliope.”
The room whistles and whoops, and she’s about to protest, to make some quip about not being in the closet anymore, that if he wants them to kiss, they can kiss right here, in front of everyone, in the safety of the light. But there’s no time to say any of that, because Calliope’s hand is already closing around hers, pulling her forward out of the crowd.
“Come on, Juliette.”
And the sound of her name in the other girl’s mouth is so right, so perfect, she follows, lets Cal lead her into the closet. The door swings shut, plunging them both into the dark.
Dark. It’s a relative thing.
Light spills beneath the bottom of the door, and Juliette’s eyes steal the sliver, use it to paint the details of the crowded closet. The coats taking up 90 percent of the space, a pile of boxes around their feet, the hangers knocking into the back of her head, and Calliope—not the back of her head or some stolen sideways glance but right here, the slope of her cheek and the curve of her mouth and those steady brown eyes, somehow warm and sharp.
“Hi,” she says, her voice low and sure.
“Hi,” whispers Juliette, trying to sound like her sister, with her airy confidence, but it comes out all wrong, less like a breath and more like a whistle, a squeak.
Calliope laughs, less at her, than at this. The crowded closet. The closeness of their bodies. And, for once,