Carmilla and Laura

by S.D. Simper

After nineteen years of silence, my life hardly felt like a living, breathing world, but a bubble of time, the passage shown only in the graying strands of my father’s hair and my own growth from child to young woman.

“Goodnight, dear friend.” Carmilla squeezed my hand and left me with a kiss upon my jaw. I wanted to follow; I wanted to run.

The thought of a male companion seemed such an odd and foreign thing, some strange and negligible dream I had given little thought to. Should a man wish to pursue me, he would have to dare and climb my tower, as Carmilla had so strangely called it.

But here and now, with the speckles of moonlight from the trees against her fair skin, with the breeze in her hair and the closeness of her breath, it frightened me so. “And I shall never be in love with anyone, I think,” she continued, and then she leaned in and whispered, “unless it be with you.”