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“You made this for me?” Esther asked.
“Do you like it?”
“Oh, Ashley.” Esther tucked her head under Ashley’s chin, hiding her face. “It’s beautiful.”
Ashley wrapped her arms around Esther and kissed the top of her head. She led Esther to the blankets and pulled her down beside her. “I wanted to give you that quiet time you were hoping for, and I thought you might like this. It’s a little cold, but the stars were so bright tonight.”
“It’s perfect. Thank you so much.”
“Oh! I nearly forgot.” She reached into the pillow pile and pulled out a thermos and two mugs. “Cocoa?”
Esther laughed. “Yes, please.”
She poured the mugs, and they sipped in comfortable silence. “So, I didn’t mean to wake you up earlier.”
Esther snort-laughed into her cup of cocoa. “I didn’t mean to be asleep earlier.”
“Could this have something to do with our string of late nights?”
“Surely not,” said Esther, taking a sip.
“Esther, talk to me.” Ashley hadn’t meant to say it so sharply. Sometimes, it was hard to get Esther to share her feelings instead of keeping them all bottled inside. It must be exhausting. “I know you don’t like to demand or even speak up for yourself,but I care about you. I don’t want to dance around landmines, trying to avoid unknowingly stressing you. You’re not going to hurt my feelings.”
Esther lowered her mug. “It might be too many late nights.”
She mumbled so quietly it was only with Ashley’s enhanced hearing that she caught what Esther said. Ashley kept forgetting how much work Esther had to do. Ashley’s weekly workload could all be finished in a couple of hours on the weekend, and they were really just for show. Passing her classes wasn’t a requirement for getting into the Family. But Hannah and Claribel had hinted it would piss John off if they could brag about her grades, so she should at least try.
“That’s no problem,” Ashley said. “We can cut back to once a week. We could actually sleep at night.” They didn’t have anthropology anymore, which only made Ashley more desperate to see Esther during the week. She needed her Esther fix. But she wouldn’t keep Esther back from her dreams either, and graduating—and graduating well—was important to Esther, so it was important to Ashley too.
“I highly doubt that will happen.” Esther chuckled, all too aware of how difficult it was to keep their hands off each other. “It’s not just the sleep though. We don’t have any privacy. I have my uncle and Jason, and you have all the vampires. The only place we can find some privacy is here at August’s place, and this isn’t even that private.”
“What are you talking about?” Ashley gestured around them at the empty darkness. “We have plenty of privacy.”
The door to the roof smacked open, and August poked his head up. “Hey, Ash. Have you seen Uther’s bag? He said you might have moved it.”
“Do you know how to knock?” Ashley demanded. “I could have been topless up here?”
“A nice set of tits never scared me off.” August winked.
Ashley threw a pillow at his stupid face. “Get out of here before I drown you.”
“Hey, August. I found it.” Uther popped up through the hole beside August. “Oh wow. It’s so cute. Why haven’t you shown me up here before?”
“Because it’s literally freezing outside,” August said, “and only a cold-blooded narcissist would make their date freeze to death for the sake of some stars.”
Ashley stuck out her tongue, and he returned the gesture.
“I’d sure like to go somewhere warm.” Uther ignored their antics. “We should go somewhere for spring break. All of us. We could split the cost.”
“That would be perfect, actually,” Esther said. Ashley hadn’t expected this level of enthusiasm from Esther. Not when her schoolwork was building up. “It gives me something to work toward while buckling down on my final project. Something to look forward to besides graduation.”
“Graduation high five.” Uther and Esther air-fived across the roof.
“And it would be an escape from schoolwork and your uncle,” added Ashley. “Did you have any place in mind?”
“It’s a little last minute to be reserving stuff.” Uther already had his phone out and was scrolling. “People reserve beach houses months, sometimes a year in advance. And we only have a month now.”
“Actually,” said Esther, “I have an aunt with a beach house in South Carolina. I bet she would let us borrow it for the week. She’s almost never there anymore.”
