When Sally’s muscles could move and she could breathe normally again, she realized that Lavinia’s body still felt warm.

She looked up into violet eyes in a face that looked healthy olive brown again. The nose was still flattened, but it wasn’t broken open anymore and the ribbon of split skin was gone.

She hardly dared to look too closely at the hope she felt. She floated on the edge of a cliff, longing to hurl herself off and say take me! But she couldn’t; Lavinia was dangerous.

Maybe.

Carefully she asked, “What just happened here?”

Lavinia gave her a look that might have prefaced words like “I honored our agreement, what are you on about?” But her face came apart into a shocked confusion instead.

“We weren’t just fucking, were we? I, I heard you say stop, and I stopped, like I promised. But…” Her mouth closed and Sally saw her lips ripple as she ran her tongue over her teeth. “Aw fuck,” she said weakly.

Outside, voices clamored “Let us in, let us in, you cheat, you slut, you bitch, you got in, let us in, let us in.” The camper rocked gently back and forth.

Sally sat up and ticked off details for Lavinia to confirm. “In all that ecstasy, you forgot you were a vampire. The sun charged you up somehow and once you could move again, all you knew was we were having sex.” She raised her eyebrows.

Lavinia wrapped her arms around herself and nodded miserably. “Till you asked, I was in a kind of glow.” Like a child mourning a lost kitten, she said in a tiny voice, “I felt so good.”

“Baby you are good,” Sally interrupted, responding to Lavinia’s mood rather than the literal meaning of her words. “Dear God in heaven, what you’ve been through, and you keep fighting to stay you.”

The passion Sally had suppressed poured into her speech. “You’re so brave, and you’re my beloved and I want you and I will keep calling you back if you need me and during the day you didn’t try to bite me, maybe you couldn’t but still, you didn’t.

“And,” she went on, mind dancing from scene to scene, “you chose our home! I’m sure you got in because you stayed yourself, not because some Norse god put magic in your jacket! And you fought your way back when you woke up, this afternoon.

“And here’s something I just thought of! Last night, when you were pulled out of my arms and you were outside, you didn’t call to me. If you had, I’d have come to you. I know why you looked confused when you said you tried everything to get the living food inside: you knew you could have tried that and you didn’t.

Lavinia looked shocked, then looked down with a flush of pleasure. “Tell me more, kid, you’re saving my life here.”

Sally felt some wonderful realization about to dawn. It swept away the lingering uncertainties.

Voice trembling with feeling, she took Lavinia’s warm hands and said “You are my beloved, you are the love I’ve wanted my whole life. I don’t care if you’re a vampire. I don’t care that you’re 52 and I’m 27. I don’t care that you’re a Jewish atheist and I’m a …whatever the hell I am, and I don’t care about the homophobia we’ll face. I would marry you if you’d have me.”

As the word “marry” blossomed at the peak of her outpouring, her heart hammered as hard as when she’d faced her death.

Positioning herself in front of Lavinia, who looked up at her with surprise, and holding Lavinia’s hands, she said in a voice husky with emotion, “Lavinia Starr. Will you. Be.” She took a deep breath and then hurled herself off the cliff. “My wife.”

The word “wife” sounded scarier on her tongue than the word “vampire” but it thrilled her to the very core. Same-sex marriage was now legal in all but two states; the vampire plague had at least given the haters something to fear worse than two people loving each other. This woman, looking down and blushing in front of her, could be her wife.

Was she crazy? Getting married wasn’t something Sally Yan did, that was something other people ….

Blushing? Flushing with pleasure? But to do that, didn’t you have to have –

And suddenly she realized why lying against Lavinia’s breast had felt so normal. She’d heard a heartbeat!!!

Eyes wide as a kitten’s, she said, “Lavinia,” in a breathless voice.

“Yes,” Lavinia said quietly.

Sally was about to tell Lavinia what she’d discovered when Lavinia looked up and met her eyes and Sally realized she had answered her question. She had said yes.

She repeated it now. “Yes, baby. Yes to all of it.” Her face crinkled somewhere between laughing and crying. “Anybody who can put up with all this deserves to be stuck with me.”

They melted into a slippery, passionate kiss. Sally felt Lavinia’s hands on her face. She pulled Lavinia’s face close, their tongues sliding. As they kissed they made hungry sounds deep in their throats.

Outside, the voices still called, you are one of us, let us in, let us iiinnnn….