Work Text:
“I’m fine.” It’s the least convincing tone anyone’s ever heard, but the thing is, Claudia isn’t particularly trying to sound convincing. She’s more trying to sound like piss off.
“You don’t sound fine,” Madeleine says, curt.
She used to be better at brushing it all off. She’s sure of it.
She likes the lesbian bars, because in the lesbian bars she’s not the only one who looks like she’s out past curfew. And nobody bats an eye at her hand resting on Madeleine’s knee—the sixteen-year-old boy-girl in the corner eyes them with something between lust and envy. Madeleine finds it amusing. She finds most things amusing, these days, drunk on life the way only those who recently started feasting on it can be. Drunk on love, too. No, nobody looks at them twice in the lesbian bars, not really. They recline on their chairs, bodies angled towards one another, drinking and talking and exchanging warm looks and blood-warm touches, and when the lights reflect on Madeleine’s eyes they look like they’re made of gold. A gold that is just for Claudia, that belongs solely to Claudia.
(She doesn’t mind if other women look at Madeleine. Madeleine’s beautiful. She oughta be looked at. Staring, though, that’s a little disrespectful. Staring gets a warning: hard eyes, her hand going slowly up Madeleine’s thigh, hitching up her skirt. Marking her territory. It’s kind of thrilling. This one’s mine, don’t go tryin’ anythin’ you might regret. Touching, now, is a whole different offense. Touching Madeleine gets you eaten.)
But the way Madeleine looks at her is terrifying, sometimes. She’s so transparent, her love and her —how else to call it?— devotion, shining out of her every time her eyes catch Claudia’s. The way she’s always looked at her, ever since that night at the dress shop: like Claudia’s the most beautiful creature she’s ever seen.
And maybe that’s why. Because when she’s with Madeleine, if she spends enough time seeing herself reflected in Madeleine’s eyes, sometimes, she can forget. In the lesbian bars, where everyone is three times older than the actual years they’ve been on this Earth, she can forget. She can just exist as herself, as she is, as Madeleine sees her.
But outside, the world keeps turning. And outside, outside of the bars and outside of the small apartment they rent a few miles out of Paris, her body still looks like the same body she’s always had. And she gets treated the same way she’s always been treated. And all the rage and humiliation she used to bottle up, to drown for the sake of Louis—and she’d gotten so good at it too, so unfairly good at it—, it gets a little sharper, a little heavier, and a little harder to ignore.
Here’s the thing: ignoring it is exhausting. And Claudia has been exhausted for such a long time.
But Madeleine, undead, is brimming with life.
Madeleine’s hands are warm with the blood of the two men she drained earlier that night when she puts them on Claudia’s shoulders, approaching her chair from behind. She’d been such a sight—she’s always a sight when she feeds: her cheeks blushed bright pink, her lips bright red, drops of blood dripping out of the corners of her mouth, and her thin fangs looking like the pins she sticks all over Claudia when she’s tailoring a dress on her. Like the pins Claudia feels all over her own body when she looks at her a certain way.
“You’re blocking your mind from me,” Madeleine says, her fingers dancing up to Claudia’s temples. Claudia brushes them off, maybe a bit too forcefully.
“Just ‘cause we share a coffin doesn’t mean you get to be in my head all the time,” she snaps. Mean, like a dog. She knows she’s being mean. Share a coffin. As if that’s all Madeleine is to her. She gets mean when she gets like this, mean and childish, which is worse. She doesn’t like it, but she can’t help it.
The first time she’d seen Madeleine feed, she’d felt those pins all over her body, and she’d shuddered. Madeleine with her pupils shaking and blown so wide you could barely see the color in them, crouching on the floor, her chest heaving. Like an animal. She’d drained the bastard dry and tilted her head up to the sky as if to swallow every last bit of blood lingering inside her mouth, and then she’d giggled. And then she’d looked at Claudia. Claudia, with her heart on her throat and all her most unsavory desires on her sleeve, who could think of nothing but Madeleine’s breath on her ear narrating her sexual encounter with the nazi boy, and of the words not yet uttered smoothly at her side. And Madeleine must’ve heard her thoughts, because she’d kept looking, wide-eyed, and then she’d leaned forward and touched her cheek with a bloodstained hand and kissed her sweetly over the still twitching body lying between them.
Now, Madeleine hesitates behind her for a moment, lowering her hands and resting them on the backseat of the chair, away from Claudia. Silence, for a beat, two, three, but for the sound of Claudia’s nails scraping against the vanity table she’s sitting at, back and forth. Then, the sound of Madeleine’s heels against the wooden floor, walking away. Clack, clack, clack. Good fucking job, Claudia thinks to herself quietly. This is why everybody gets sick of you.
(She doesn’t look at herself in the vanity mirror. She doesn’t want to deal with the image she’ll see staring back at her. She looks good —she always makes an effort to look good, and Madeleine’s got her looking particularly dashing lately, because she’s a good fucking dressmaker. Claudia likes how she looks, these days. She likes how she looks with Madeleine at her side. It’s like she walks different. Moves different. But looking in the mirror gets her thinking too much sometimes. Not just about her body, the childish line of her shoulders, but about everything else she carries, as well. Frankenstein’s vampire, an approximation of a person made up of dead parts, made on a whim, built wrong, and set loose.)
But Madeleine doesn’t walk out the door. Instead, Claudia hears her sitting down on the edge of the bed that sits in the middle of their room. More silence, and then some shuffling, and Madeleine taking a deep breath.
“Claudia,” her voice, steadfast but tender, breaking through the quiet. “ Mon amour, look at me.”
So she turns around, reluctantly, and meets Madeleine’s gaze. Those golden eyes, bright and alive and beautiful as nothing else, staring right at her. Madeleine reaches towards the back of her head, not breaking eye contact, and unpins her hair, letting wild red curls fall over her shoulders. She leans back on her hands, parting her legs.
“Come here,” she calls.
Claudia does.
She crosses the room slowly, at human speed. Step by step. Their gazes do not break until she’s standing in front of Madeleine, slotted between her knees, looking down at her, frozen like a woman hypnotized. She might as well be. She doesn’t even realize her hands are just hanging by her side until Madeleine gently reaches towards them, holding her wrists with the lightest touch to redirect her fingers to the buttons of her blouse. Claudia’s breath flutters.
“Go on,” Madeleine says.
She pops the first button, and the second, and the third, and the fourth, pushes the slip down too until Madeleine’s bra peeks out from beneath her hands, and Claudia finds herself transfixed by the expanse of her skin, her pale undead chest rising and falling despite not needing to, her clavicles peppered with almost invisible freckles that Claudia knows extend towards her shoulder and back, if you care to look closely, which she does, she always does. Her hands shake, only a little, as she pops the last remaining buttons and slides the blouse off Madeleine’s shoulders, and just like that her mind goes quiet, the boiling cauldron of emotions ever bubbling inside her replaced by simple, easy hunger.
Madeleine smiles knowingly. She wraps her arms around Claudia’s waist, dragging her closer towards her, and Claudia nuzzles their heads together, like cats, fangs sliding out of her gums involuntarily. Breathes in the smell of Madeleine’s hair—perfume, and dirt, and blood, and softly, underneath all of those, the faint trace of flowers.
“If I bite you now, I ain’t letting go,” she warns. Madeleine giggles.
“Whatever shall I do?” she whispers. “Hmm, but you’re right. Not yet. Do you think you can kiss me without—”
Claudia’s lips clash against Madeleine’s with enough force to send them both tumbling back onto the bed. Her mouth doesn’t leave Madeleine’s as she crawls on top of her, intertwining their fingers above her companion’s head and holding tight. She kisses her hard, like she’s trying to bury Madeleine into the mattress, like she could crawl inside Madeleine through her mouth and make a little nest between her lungs and never come out again. Madeleine, soft and warm beneath her and meeting her right where she’s at, tilting her chin up, chasing Claudia’s mouth.
Claudia breaks the kiss just for a brief moment: she straightens up, hovering above Madeleine, and pushes her knee between Madeleine’s legs, driving it in little circular motions. Madeleine’s mouth falls open in a breathless moan. Her lipstick is smeared all over, completely ruined. Her lips are swollen and shiny with spit. Her skirt is all bunched up, almost high enough to see her panties. Her blouse is gone. The top half of her slip hangs around her torso, leaving her in nothing but her bra. Vampires don’t breathe, but still Claudia feels breathless, for a moment. It's the kind of picture that makes her regret not taking one of Louis’ cameras with her. But the thought is fleeting. She wouldn't have the patience to take a photo, anyway—it’s all she can do before she's throwing herself at Madeleine again.
It’s not that desire is a new feeling for Claudia. Sometimes she feels like all of herself is made of desire. All she does is want, want, want. Stomped down, most of those wants—out of necessity, out of the need to protect herself or protect those around her. But she wants, and she wants so much, and she wants hard, with all of herself. It’s just that, this —the kind of desire that she feels for Madeleine, she’s never felt anything like it before. Charlie had made her feel wanted, made her feel like a girl, and she wanted to be a girl so bad, and his body felt good, too, and so she wanted him, she did, and so she had called it love, and it was, in a way, but God, it wasn’t this. It wasn’t anything even close to this. Madeleine moans into her mouth and it makes her feel like she’s losing her mind. It’s maddening, it’s intoxicating, it’s all-consuming. She wants to make her feel good. She wants to feel her body because it is her body. Madeleine had bled through in front of her and unlocked some part of her she didn’t even know existed and left her dizzy with realization in the middle of that lonely dress shop, staring at her reflection in shock, in fear. Stomp it down, down, down. Ravenous monster in the body of a little girl. She’d wanted to drag her tongue up the woman’s leg and lick the blood clean, all the way to the source, and then some—make a friend for the first time in forever, and the first thing her treacherous body demands is to have her, eat her, hurt her, as if to say: Remember that you’re dangerous. Remember that you’re a devil. But they’re both monsters now, so this time she really does fall to her knees and drags her tongue all the way up Madeleine’s leg, up the inside of her thigh, sharp canine teeth catching on her pretty underwear. And Madeleine throws her head back and grinds into her face, whispering Allez, allez.
Claudia mouths through the fabric, pressing down and feeling the shape and the heat underneath her lips, sticky reddish moisture already darkening the white cotton. The smell alone makes her a little crazy, promising later an even richer taste on her tongue.
There is a hand on the back of her head suddenly pulling her up. Madeleine stares at her through half-lidded eyes, holding her face firmly between her hands.
“I want you to fuck me in the coffin.”
Claudia nods, and God above, she might as well start drooling.
Their fumbling in their haste to get up is graceless. Almost human, even. As much as she’d love to carry her woman away as creatures do in the movies, she has to settle for helping Madeleine up by the arms—they almost topple over in their rush, giggles and kisses being dropped on pale shoulders before clumsily walking hand in hand toward their shared resting place.
Madeleine strips out of her remaining clothes and sits down in her underwear inside the old coffin—she’s almost childlike, knees up and arms holding onto the sides, looking up excitedly as Claudia rummages through the bedside drawer for her strap-on. There’s still, despite everything, a brief hesitation at the reminder of her would-be-naked body, the immediate dread that comes with the idea of it, were she to bare it. But it’s alright. Claudia quickly takes off her dress, secures the strap-on on top of her slip’s shorts, and gets into the coffin, closing the lid behind her.
The bliss is immediate. The outside world ceases to be, everything ceases to be except for the body sprawled underneath her and the pair of eyes glowing ever so faintly in the dark, where nothing, not the rules of the world, not other vampires, not even Claudia’s body, exists. It’s just Madeleine, Madeleine, Madeleine, red hair falling around her head like a halo, looking up at her in wonder, like Claudia’s the most beautiful creature she's ever seen.
The first man she ever killed called her a devil, and the first and last boy she ever loved called her an angel. In their coffin, Claudia’s eternal companion and love of her life looks up at her and simply thinks Claudia, Claudia.
Claudia kisses her slowly, thoroughly, not like before—just reveling in the simple friction of their bodies moving together, squeezed as they are inside the slightly-cramped-for-two coffin. Madeleine holds her face between her hands and arches into her, and her breath catches when her breasts press against Claudia’s chest and her cunt against Claudia’s strap. Claudia presses back against her, teasing. Little high-pitched, breathless noises fill the quiet around them, nicer than any piece of music to her ears.
The noises get louder as she squeezes and drags her claws over Madeleine’s brassiere, scratching over the nipples without actually touching them.
“Tease,” Madeleine whines. “You should rip it off me with your teeth.”
“You’d run out of bras in a week,” Claudia smiles.
She complies, however, reaching behind Madeleine and unfastening the metal hooks, pulling it up and off Madeleine’s body. She can’t tear her eyes away when Madeleine’s breasts fall. Their weight, the way they sit on a woman’s chest—Claudia’s always been a little obsessed with it. The first time she’d seen Madeleine topless had made her feel like a teenage boy. Now, she cups them in her hands, feeling them, fondling them slowly, bringing her head down to nose at them, leaving wet, open-mouthed kisses between them. Her sharp nails and her sharp teeth tease the nipples gently, circling them, then dragging the pad of her thumb over them. And then, she bites—earning a small yelp of pleasure above her.
She doesn't drink, because she wouldn't be able to stop if she did, but she nibbles all over Madeleine’s tits until they're covered in bruises and Madeleine is squirming, her little moans beginning to sound broken, a little agonized. It’s delicious. That’s the only word her mind can conjure up. I could eat you up, she thinks.
“You did, remember?” Madeleine smirks, breathless. “Your brother helped. Ow!”
Claudia bites down with a bit more force that time. “Don’t fuckin’ bring up Louis while I’ve got my mouth on your tit.”
Madeleine laughs. “Do you think he can feel my pleasure through the bond, all the way in Paris?” she insists, wrapping a leg around Claudia. She's a fucking menace. Claudia loves her so much.
So she sticks three fingers inside Madeleine’s mouth to shut her up. “Bite.”
It works immediately: Madeleine chokes on them at first, taken by surprise, then starts sucking on them with enthusiasm, her tongue sliding between them, tracing the sides, teeth pressing down softly on the pads. Moaning around them like a whore, drooling down the corners of her mouth. Claudia shivers, resists the urge to ram her hand down that lovely throat, see how deep she can get it, if she can touch her insides. But not yet. Madeleine gets her fingers soft and wet, first, and then she starts biting down on the tips of Claudia’s nails, one by one, until they're no longer sharp. She spits out the tips, to which Claudia rewards her with a kiss, deep and thorough. Madeleine’s lips are red and shiny when she comes back up.
“Look at you,” Claudia says, mesmerized and so fucking horny she could burst. “Aren’t you pretty.”
She leans down over Madeleine again, pressing her whole body against her, one hand slowly traveling down Madeleine’s waist. She can hear her breathing against her ear, picking up the closer she gets to between her legs. Waves of lust, washing over her. A stuttered, high-pitched sound when she gets there, heaving as Claudia drags her now-blunt fingernails over her underwear. Back and forth over her clit and her labia, contact muffled by the damp fabric.
“Please,” Madeleine begs, desperate, trying to arch into her touch. But Claudia pins her down.
“Tell me how much you want it,” she whispers in her ear.
“I want it.” She clutches at Claudia’s back, nearly ripping her shirt. “ Please. Je t'en prie. Je veux tes doigts. Je veux ta bite. Je veux que tu sois en moi. Je te veux. I want you .”
Claudia kisses her temple lovingly. The whole thing’s an indulgence—she knows, she can feel it, but it's always nice to hear it too. To be needed badly enough to beg, and to know that Madeleine will beg, every single time. I want you. Pure and true. It makes Claudia’s heart sing and flutter, and it makes her want to give Madeleine everything she’s got, fill her with so much pleasure she goes blind with it. “Good girl,” she hisses, and finally pushes Madeleine’s panties down.
She’s so wet she’s practically dripping. Claudia drags her fingers down, collects some slick, and drags it up to Madeleine’s clit, rubbing circles over it slowly while kissing her throat. It vibrates underneath her lips with each of Madeleine’s soft and lovely moans, which get less soft and even lovelier as she changes up her rhythm, her speed, applies pressure over her clit, and then lets go. Slow, fast. Feather-light, hard enough to border on painful. Slow again. She can feel how mad it’s driving her companion, the unpredictability. She can feel, inside Madeleine’s mind, her orgasm building like a musical note going up, up, up; like an elastic band being pulled and stretched to its limit, tensing more and more with each second. Breaths getting impossibly quicker. The hands on her back clutching tighter, scratching. Claudia, Claudia, oh, oh, OH—
The band snaps.
Claudia lifts her fingers to her mouth and licks the sticky blood coating her fingers, hungrily, as Madeleine catches her breath. Her breasts, little bite marks all over them, bounce slightly as her chest goes up and down. Pretty is underselling it. Knowing Claudia’s the source of it— the pain, the pleasure, intertwined—... There’s nothing like it. One could survive on just this, she thinks, and the feeling that suddenly bursts inside her —something like pride, and satisfaction, and possessiveness, and yes, lust, of course, and boundless love— gets a little whine to crawl out of her chest into the space around them, like a bird.
She starts again before Madeleine can recover, removing the other woman’s underwear at once with one quick motion and throwing it at some corner of the coffin, and then positioning herself to grind the head of the strap against her cunt, sliding it from hole to clit, back and forth. Madeleine groans brokenly and throws her head back with a thunk.
She does that for a while, getting Madeleine riled up again with each roll of her hips, just delighting in the sight underneath her. When she does bend down, their kissing is sloppy—at this point, their lips are more dragging against each other than actually locking together. Claudia relishes in the way Madeleine grinds against her, chasing friction. She pushes her down with a hand on her hip and finally pushes a finger inside of her, opening her up. One, then two, thumb dancing around Madeleine’s still twitching clit and fingers curling against her inner walls. She’s so warm inside. So soft, so pliant. Madeleine hums, half-content, half-overstimulated. She chokes on her own moan when Claudia suddenly punches her fingers inside with force, fucking her fast and hard only for a few seconds before slowing down once more—a taste, but enough to satisfy.
“You will kill me again,” Madeleine protests, trying to push into Claudia’s fingers and being denied.
“Only a little,” she laughs, adding a third digit and getting something between a whine and a laugh in response.
Patience is a virtue Claudia excels at when she's got an objective in mind, and this objective is one she's really set on achieving. And so they keep up this game for a bit, Madeleine chasing pleasure and Claudia giving her just short of what she wants, then stopping, then starting all over again. She could stay here, with her fingers nestled inside Madeleine, for hours, and would not mind—driving her lover halfway to madness until the sound of her begging could barely escape her lips. Madeleine, however, is younger and more impatient, so it's not long ‘til her hands fly to Claudia’s hips, pushing insistently. “ Allez, on y va. ”
“Say pretty please.”
She pushes herself up to plant a little kiss on Claudia’s lips, just a peck, and then she raises her leg, hooking it behind Claudia’s thigh, encouraging. “With a cherry on top.”
And so, obediently, Claudia enters her.
It's slow, at first. Gentle. The rubber cock practically slides in, with a squelch, and it might not be her own member, but God, does it feel good anyway. It’s like it goes right to her brain. She puts her hand sideways over Madeleine’s mouth for her to bite as she pushes in, then out, getting deeper each time. Crimson slick falls out of Madeleine with every thrust, dripping down her thighs and her ass onto the coffin floor. Deeper and deeper, muffled whines against Claudia’s skin. She bottoms out.
“Alright?” She breathes out.
Madeleine spits out her hand, giving little kitten licks to where her fangs have penetrated Claudia’s skin. Her pupils are so blown up you can barely see the gold in them. She pushes Claudia against her, impossibly closer, and nods, hazily.
There are nights where they're in an adventurous mood, nights where the game consists of discovering what makes each other tick, cataloging each of the ways their bodies respond to every possible stimulus—Madeleine’s usually on the physical side, Claudia’s more on the… psychological. Madeleine had caught on to Claudia’s discomfort with her own body pretty early on, with being touched in certain ways, certain places that reminded her of things she’d rather forget and aspects of herself she found hard to eroticize—and the thrill of forgetting them all, just for a moment, lost in the single-minded pursuit of her lover’s pleasure. It was a mutual understanding, embraced as a boundary and not a limit. Because even within these boundaries, Claudia will have Madeleine in a hundred different ways: eating her out in the dingy bathroom of a lesbian bar, music blasting loud outside the door; fingering her against the wall in a dark alleyway, surrounded by fresh kill and garbage; humping on the damp dirt, surrounded by half-buried corpses and flowers. And here, within the walls of their temporary apartment, inside a stolen coffin they’ll probably burn down in a couple months, catch a ride to their next destination, drain the drivers, fuck in the back of a stolen vehicle, on a train wagon, underneath a ship, wherever the fuck the wind takes them. Together.
A litany of French curses graces her ears as she starts thrusting into Madeleine again, just the way she likes it—hard, confident. Because there is comfort, too, in the intimacy of knowing exactly what they like and freely giving it. Claudia digs her nails under Madeleine’s thigh and pushes her leg up, slamming into Madeleine at the exact right angle that makes her practically wail—it almost sounds like some of their victims, the ones that hurt more and take longer to die. Drawn-out cries. Her hands scramble to hold onto anything: Claudia’s back, the walls of the coffin, her own knees. She settles for the back of Claudia’s head, and grabs a handful of curls almost tight enough to yank them off. Her tits bounce deliciously with each thrust. Claudia’s mouth waters. She feels Madeleine’s legs start shaking, almost at the edge, holding back, squeezing in every last bit of pleasure—and just at the right time, she leans down and sticks her fangs on Madeleine’s neck.
Madeleine shakes violently as she comes, and Claudia gulps down her blood, insatiable, tasting the whole thing for herself.
She’s never mastered the “little drink” thing—if Madeleine were human, she’d drain her dry just about now. As it is, she comes back to her senses when she bites into Madeleine’s thin, long fingers, which she’d stuck in Claudia’s mouth after yanking her back from her neck. Claudia spits them out and dives down to kiss her again, spilling some of Madeleine’s own blood back into her mouth, slowing her hips down into lazy rolls as Madeleine comes down from her orgasm. With the last of her strength, Madeleine tugs Claudia down on top of her and finally goes limp with a sigh—still twitching.
Claudia hopes that, in a hundred years, they’ll know each other even better, to make love like this.
“I’m still inside you, baby,” she chuckles, nuzzling into Madeleine’s now damp neck.
“Mm,” she gets in response. “Yes, stay here for a minute.”
“Alright.” She is so fucking weird. Amused, Claudia leaves a little kiss over where her teeth just were. Vampiric sweat isn't as salty as human sweat, but it's still pretty good. Though maybe it's just because it's Madeleine’s. There’s still the faint smell of perfume and dirt and blood and flowers.
It still hurts a bit where Madeleine was yanking on her hair, but it's worth it for the feeling of her gentle fingers soothing Claudia’s scalp now, scratching just right, sending shivers down her spine. Her other hand ghosts over Claudia’s back, back and forth over cotton, softly, as if she was just delighting in the feeling of her lover existing under her fingertips.
She lays her head on Madeleine's chest, pillowed by her own curls, and basks in the bliss of stillness—no sound but for Madeleine's soft, almost inaudible breath, and no noise in her head, only the feeling of her own weight on top of her lover's body. She supposes, if Madeleine were alive, she would hear her heartbeat now, thumping like a drum beneath her ear. But it's silent, and, Claudia's monstrous self having been nursed on undead bosoms, she finds that silence comforting. It means, on the inside, where it matters, she and Madeleine are the same. Equals in the quiet dark.
She drops a kiss on Madeleine’s chest, right over her undead heart. “Thank you.”
Madeleine smiles, with a touch of smugness. “Why? I think I should be thanking you .” And she stretches a little, for good measure, to make her point. Like a cat after a fat meal.
Claudia giggles. Props her chin on Madeleine’s chest, staring her down. “You know what you did.”
“ Oui, I secured myself a couple of great orgasms.”
She rolls her eyes goodheartedly, letting the mood stay light. Her hands dancing over Madeleine’s skin, little marks all over except for her face. She's so beautiful, she thinks. Like a painting—but one only Claudia’s allowed to see.
Madeleine does know, of course. She can read Claudia like an open book. Not because of the mind thing, or because she's read her diaries—she just pays attention. Meets Claudia where she's at. Not like she's putting up with her, but like… something else. Maybe that’s what companionship is meant to look like. I’m not easy to be around sometimes, Claudia had told her once, head in Madeleine’s lap, after they’d had a fight. Not an apology, exactly, just… an acknowledgment, she’d thought. I know that. You don’t flinch, you don't walk away. Even when I piss you off. I appreciate it. Madeleine hadn’t replied at first, lost in thought for a moment. But then she’d said: Claudia, you are… my everything. You know this. She’d paused before continuing. You are strong all the time. Claudia had stared at the ground. I have to be, she’d replied, voice small. Madeleine just shook her head. Yes, but not with me. You can be weak with me.
Her fingers keep dancing over Claudia’s back, her nails keep scratching Claudia’s scalp. She’ll want to go again in a few minutes—there’s her shifting her weight, raising her legs to rub against Claudia’s, all the little tells Claudia’s learned how to read by now. Sometimes they're at it all night, after hunting, until the sunlight starts to seep through the boarded-up windows. Insatiable, her Madeleine. Her Madeleine. Claudia’s Madeleine. It’ll never stop amazing her. For all she seems to have been missing Madeleine all her life, she still finds it hard to believe, a little. But it's alright. Someday there'll come a moment where Madeleine will look at her some way, and then she’ll finally know for sure.
In the meantime, Claudia lies in her lover’s arms, where neither the outside world nor the light of the sun can touch them.