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Eve wakes in the morning with a headache like no other and her stomach in knots, that awful feeling of waking up to some as yet unidentifiable regret. In short, she feels more alive than she has in weeks. Months, probably. Closer to a year.
It’s hard to really come to terms with everything that happened yesterday. The bruise above her eye is very, obviously, real. (At the moment, it kind of feels like her only tangible tie to reality.) But besides that – well. Eve’s subconscious is doing a wonderful job of burying everything else under a mountain of concrete.
She won’t think about it. About her, about that. And whatever happened afterwards – last night after Eve got home and found that stuffed bear, a gift from someone who has no right knowing where she lives – that’s between her and herself. Thank god for her luck finding a one-bedroom flat in this city. Eve can only imagine the hell of having a roommate here to witness her slow descent into madness.
Well. Slow might not be the right word. Eve kind of feels like she’s already half-mad, maybe closer to three-quarters of the way there. If she can get past her immediate problems – racing heart, throbbing head, curdled stomach – even she can appreciate the sharp and sudden turn her life has taken in the past year, let alone in the past 24 hours.
What happened last night can not happen ever again. That’s a vow she’s determined to keep. Chalk it up to adrenaline, anger, fear – Eve should’ve just thrown that goddamn bear out the window. But god, the thought that she was in her bed, that she was here… for Christ’s sake, Eve could smell her on the sheets when she came home, and it’s left her dizzy and angry and wanting. (And what the hell was in that perfume, anyway? Eve’s never felt like this, ever.)
So, yes, maybe Eve buried her face in a pillow that still smelled like her, all power and rage and money in a too-big suit. And, yes, maybe she put that ostentatiously pink heart right next to her head so she could hear her voice so frighteningly loud and up-close it was like she was really there, in bed with Eve. And, yes, maybe she came to the sound of her breathy voice right in her ear, the way she said Eve’s name. It wouldn’t be the first time.
But, oh, thinking about that, the last time Eve let herself get caught up in a fantasy like this (You should let yourself go once in a while…) is a bad, bad idea. At once, the old feelings of shame and regret came bubbling back up, mixing with her post-orgasm tristesse in an awful, sickly mélange. This isn’t right she thought. You shouldn’t be doing this. Not again.
(I can help you…) No. (Are you having fun in Rome? ). God, stop. No. (I love you. I do.) Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.
It’s a miracle Eve managed to fall asleep at all.
This side of things, she does her very best to pretend nothing ever happened. She assumes the role of every other early morning Londoner, eating a bowl of cold cereal and chugging a too-hot, too-bitter cup of coffee as the general din of the city outside her flat rises to a dull and steady hum. She makes the commute to Bitter Pill on foot – because she needs the exercise, not because she’s afraid of taking the bus or anything nearly as pathetic. She arrives at the office damp with sweat and grumpy with the knowledge that she probably smells exactly like she’s just walked three very long kilometers instead of taking the bus like a normal fucking person.
Sitting in a creaky little swivel chair, bored out of her mind as she waits for everyone else to arrive, Eve catches sight of an article left open on Jamie’s desktop: “7 Science-Backed Ways to Get Over an Ex.” Poor bastard, she thinks. No wonder he was following her around like a lost puppy at Kenny’s funeral.
A door somewhere down the hallway slams shut, and Eve realizes she’s still staring at the screen like a creep. She very professionally pulls her gaze away and focuses instead on staring blankly at one of the dingy white walls, trying not to think of anything at all.
And yet, eating lunch some handful of hours later – a soggy egg salad sandwich that isn’t worth even half of the £6 she spent on it – she realizes she can’t stop thinking about the damn article. It’s ridiculous. She doesn’t even have an ex. She has a husband who’s somewhere in maybe Poland right now and she has an unhealthy obsession with a woman who’s killed enough people to qualify as a mass murderer. That’s it.
For the first time, Eve kind of regrets ever taking that first forensic psychology class in uni. Absolute fat load of fucking good it’s done her. Now all she does is psychoanalyze herself to pieces and get fired from perfectly good intelligence jobs. There’s no way that can be healthy in the long run.
1. Listen to sad music.
After 13 unread texts and almost twice as many voicemails, Eve’s forced to admit maybe it’s really over. She vacillates wildly between thinking Niko must have left as part of some half-baked scheme to get Eve to start paying more attention to him by seemingly disappearing off the map – in this delusion, of course, she envisions Niko watching his phone screen light up with increasingly panicked messages from his wife, his resolve crumbling with each new notification – and having horrible moments of clarity in which she realizes she’s acting like an actual crazy person.
At these times, she finds herself asking if the whole Niko situation is really her fault. Undoubtedly, says her subconscious. For the first however many years of their marriage, he remained the same kind, well-adjusted man she fell in love with. It wasn’t until she took that last, ill-fated job with MI5 that things started to spiral. That is, it wasn’t until she got caught up in the thrill of a chase and the seductiveness of living a secret double life that the life she had already built with Niko started to fall apart.
It’s hard to forget the first time she saw him after Rome, that shock of comprehension that Niko was not, in fact, the same, steadfast individual she thought he was. He was something different now, someone changed in progressively subtle ways until she hardly recognized him anymore. Eve laid eyes on him that first time after her world ended and was reminded of the old fable about a frog boiling to death because it didn’t realize the water had become so hot.
“Hi,” she had said. (And wow, Eve, what an inane way to start a conversation). “How, uh, how are you?”
She had been briefed, per a series of polite, overly gentle texts from Kenny, that Niko was “having a rough time (don’t ask, ill catch u up later).” He’d followed these up with an address for, as Eve discovered when she tapped on it, an inpatient psychiatric facility in Broadmoor.
On the first night in her new flat, after a solid two weeks of packing up the house and touring a hundred variations of the same ugly, tiny floor plan, Kenny made good on this promise over takeaway Italian and red wine. It was one of the worst conversations Eve had ever had in her life.
“She basically just left him in a storage unit,” Kenny had said. “I don’t really know how else to say it, sorry.”
God. “For how long?”
“Dunno. A few days? He called the police, but they had a hell of a time getting a warrant to break into a storage locker. Poor guy,” he added, finishing off his glass of red like he was taking a shot.
A horrible thought had occurred to Eve. “What about Gemma?” she asked.
“Oh,” Kenny said, looking a bit sick. “Well, um. She killed her in there. So he… Niko, he…”
Eve got the picture. “Oh my god.”
“Yeah, right, so they finally find him and break the padlock and all that. And she’s… well, she’s been dead for a few days at this point. And your husband’s just in there, looking absolutely terrified.”
Kenny cleared his throat a little. “I guess they thought he’d killed her at first. I mean, that’s the way it looked. But someone from MI6 or… yeah, I guess it could have been The Twelve. I don’t know. Someone cleared all that up pretty quickly.”
“And then they stuck him in the loony bin,” Eve said. She felt like she wanted to cry or throw up or scream, a tight knot of something hot and squirmy settling in her chest.
“He wanted to go,” Kenny said. “I mean, sorry to say it like this, but he was pretty fucked up. It was this or he would probably, well. Sorry. I shouldn’t say that.”
“Say what?”
“Well, I was just going to say it was that or he probably would’ve offed himself.” Kenny started pouring himself a new glass of wine. “Sorry.”
But Eve thought maybe he was right. And then she saw Niko for the first time at the hospital, and she knew he was right. Hair overgrown and stringy in a way she knew meant he hadn’t been washing it, Niko looked exactly like a man who’d experienced something so grandly, egregiously terrible that he no longer cared about much of anything.
“Been better,” Niko had said in response to her greeting. In times past, he would’ve tacked a wry smile onto the sentence, but now his face simply twitched in a way that looked painful, and then settled back into place. Eve was shocked to see deep lines along the contours of his face where there had once been only the suggestion of future wrinkles.
In that moment, Eve had the awful thought that he already looked half-dead.
Now, staring at the proof of her inadequacy in the lines of call after call that went to voicemail, each one announced with Niko’s name in bright red lettering on her phone screen, Eve begins to feel, perhaps for the first time, truly and genuinely sad.
Sometimes she wonders if she’s cursed, if this past year and a half of life events like movie plots is the result of some horrible sin she committed in a past life. Because, god, what’s the point of it all? She’s stuck working five days a week in a hot kitchen for barely more than minimum wage, popping paracetamol around the clock because of the near-constant ache in her shoulder. Her husband’s gone, fucked off somewhere, anywhere, just to get away from her. Her best friend’s dead, thrown off a fucking roof like he was nothing. There’s a psychopathic assassin who apparently knows where she lives and what bus route she takes and, oh yeah, almost killed her a few months ago…
And what’s Eve doing? Sitting on her ass at home, still pining over what-ifs and the sickening crunch of bone-on-bone because even after all this time, Eve still doesn’t know how to actually fight somebody.
God, you’re pathetic, she says to herself. This is far too much self-pity for seven p.m. on a weeknight. And then, because it’s either find a useful distraction or get back in bed with that fucking bear, she decides to turn on the radio.
And that’s when Eve becomes absolutely convinced that she’s cursed. Because fucking of course she’s tuned to the 80s station and fucking of course it’s The Cure. Of fucking course she’s just in time to hear Spinning on that dizzy edge, kissed her face and kissed her head blast from the radio at top volume.
“I’m going to kill somebody,” Eve announces to the empty room.
And then it just doesn’t fucking stop. At the shops, trying to buy enough bread and ramen to make it through the week; pouring out from cafes and restaurants in dissonant little chunks. In the cabs she has to take to work now – because she can’t walk that far every day or her bad shoulder will freeze up entirely, and there’s no way she’s taking a bus ever again – a practice that she knows will be short-lived because she’s not the kind of person who makes enough money to take a cab to work every day. On the sidewalk, from her neighbors’ flats, on television commercials…
Never have I ever met somebody like you, used to be afraid of love and what it might do… You don’t want to hurt me, but see how deep the bullet lies… I want your stupid love, we got a stupid love… Baby hair with a woman’s eyes, I can feel you watching in the night… What doesn’t kill me makes me want you more…
It’s true, Eve muses, that you only ever realize every song is about love when you, yourself, are in love or else trying very hard not to be.
2. Reflect on your breakup.
At some point, Eve has to admit she can’t just repress her way out of this whole thing forever. She’s been masturbating to the sound of her voice on that fucking heart-shaped speaker so often the batteries are starting to wear out. There’s a glitchy little sound on the word wish now and sometimes the thing stutters over her name, Ev-v-v-ve. Eve’s worried it’s going to stop working altogether any day now, and she’s almost positive you can’t replace the batteries on those things.
For now, in an effort to delay the inevitable, Eve only lets herself push down on the button when she’s closecloseclose, so it’s the last thing that sends her over the edge.
So, yeah. Maybe it’s time to process some things.
There wouldn’t be anything wrong with Eve being attracted to her if this were a normal situation. If anything about them was normal. If she had met Villanelle at work or on the Tube or just by accident in the line at the coffee shop, this would all be different. Of course, within that caveat lies another caveat, which is that, in any of these theoretical scenarios, Villanelle would have to also not be, well, Villanelle.
The actual logistics of these scenarios also fall victim to Eve’s own quirks. Eve hates coffee (unless she’s exhausted or hungover), and she makes it a rule to never date colleagues. And her typical response to people who try to strike up conversations on public transport begins and ends with a tight smile and a sudden interest in the sky outside.
Fucking public fucking transport. Fucking Villanelle. Ha, she thinks. That’s a hell of a phrase.
The thing is, it’s just so hard to organize her emotions neatly enough to actually start the tedious task of analyzing them to pieces. On one hand, she’s angry with Villanelle in such a fiery, profound way that it honestly scares her. And on the other, she wants nothing more than to go back in time and construct a different path for the two of them.
The anger is, of course, more concrete and therefore easier to work through. Villanelle has taken and taken from her, a best friend and a husband and full range of motion in her left arm. She backed Eve into a corner in Rome, until she had no choice but to kill a man, then had the audacity to beg Eve to run off with her. It’s insane; she’s insane. In what fucking universe would the two of them ever be able to have a normal conversation, let alone anything else?
But anger is tiring, and Eve is older than she’d like to admit. Thinking about the other thing, the thing that lives in her chest and burns with pure want, feels like succumbing to the inevitable, and it is as easy as falling asleep.
What did she want after Rome? What did she expect? That Villanelle would just fuck off and die somewhere and Eve could safely close the book on the most exhilarating chapter of her entire life?
Eve’s an intelligent woman. She knows how she feels about Villanelle, how she’s felt about her since the beginning. It’s easy enough to confuse desire for simple intrigue. But the thing is, Eve was married. She’d made a commitment until death do them part, and she wasn’t going to throw that away for some twenty-something-year-old assassin, no matter how beautiful and mysterious she was.
Villanelle could have killed her at any time. She could’ve kissed her at any time. So why didn’t she?
Because she wanted you to give in, Eve thinks to herself. She wanted you to be the one to lose the game.
Maybe that’s unfair. But Eve could have kissed her in Rome. They were so close, closer than Eve had ever been to anyone she wasn’t about to kiss. She could have, and then she probably wouldn’t have gotten shot. And then what?
Well, Eve supposes, then they would be off living in the wilderness somewhere with only each other for company, driving an hour into town once a month for groceries. It wouldn’t be a bad life, necessarily, but she’s not sure it would be a good one either. She and Villanelle, they’re too volatile to live in a world populated by just the two of them – even though it sometimes feels like that is the world they’re living in.
Hi, Eve, Villanelle had said. Like nothing ever happened. She was so sure of herself in that moment, confidence radiating off her like the heat of the sun. (It’s only later that Eve wonders how much of that was actually bravado.)
Eve’s not sure why she chose to pick a fight, some ancient instinctual part of her brain making the decision for her before she even realized what was happening. In her memory there is only the moment of recognition, looking up and directly into those catlike, calculating eyes, and the moment of impact, her hands slapping weakly at any part of Villanelle she could reach.
I’m not here for you, Villanelle had said, all shock and outrage.
But that didn’t make a difference, as far as Eve was concerned. The barely-suppressed rage she’d been carrying for months had already reached a fever pitch and she wanted nothing more than to make this pretty bitch bleed.
When Villanelle got a fistful of her shirt and started manhandling her to the back of the bus, Eve had the briefest, barest Oh, shit thought that she might actually be about to die – for real this time. But then there wasn’t much time to think, because Villanelle had her pinned on her back and between the angle and the way Eve’s heart was pounding, there was so much blood pumping to her head she thought it might burst.
Smell me, Villanelle said, and Eve took an unconscious sniff before she could think better of it. What do I smell of to you?
Power, Eve thought. And, god, if anyone knew how to distill that down to a scent, it was Villanelle.
And then, well.
And then Eve experienced a dizzying number of complex thoughts in the space between two heartbeats. Having Villanelle this close to her – again – was intoxicating. Also, her bad shoulder was killing her and she needed to find a way to get Villanelle off her before she started screaming with pain. On top of that – more than it, even – Eve wanted nothing more in that moment than to shock Villanelle, to pull the rug from beneath her feet for once.
So she kissed her. All it took was one simple movement to bridge those last impossible few centimeters between them – a line they’d never crossed. Eve kept her eyes open like a threat, wondering if she’d be able to actually see shock flit across Villanelle’s gaze, an almost imperceptible crack in her carefully- and expensively-constructed armor.
It was at that moment, the breath between the end of one kiss and the future ghost of another, that Eve’s rational mind caught up to her instinctive one, and she slammed her head into Villanelle’s with all her might.
The force of it shook her for a moment, and just like that Villanelle was off the bus and down the street, staring up at Eve like she was from another world. Smaller and smaller, until the bus rounded a bend in the road and she was gone entirely.
And now Eve can’t stop thinking about it, no matter how hard she tries. The way Villanelle smelled, the feel of her lips against Eve’s own. The feeling of finally, so strong it drowned out almost everything else – the rumble of the bus and the clamor of the other passengers – but not the soft gasp Villanelle made when she realized what was happening.
Eve realizes now that as much as she ought to be furious with Villanelle, as much as she wants to make her pay for all she’s done and all she’s ruined, she wants nothing more than to see her again.
3. Hang with your BFF.
The thing is, if this were a typical relationship (as if the words “typical” and “relationship” belong in the same country, let alone the same sentence when it comes to Eve and Villanelle), Eve would be hashing it out over wine and chick flicks with one of her friends.
Except Eve hasn’t had those kinds of friends – emotionally intelligent, if a little ditzy – since maybe uni. And as for the friends she has made since that time, well… Bill’s dead, and Kenny’s dead, and Elena hasn’t answered Eve’s calls in the better part of a year. After much consideration, Eve’s been forced to realize she’s become one of those sad, friendless adults she once swore she would never become.
Well, shit. Maybe this is something she’ll just have to deal with on her own, then.
It’s not like she doesn’t try, okay? The next time she rolls into Bitter Pill to see if Kenny’s colleagues have found anything particularly useful yet, she answers Jamie’s perfunctory, “How are you?” with an, “Actually, I’m kind of going through something right now,” instead of her typical, “Fine.”
Jamie’s obviously caught off-guard by this, but has the decency to pretend like Eve was making a joke. “Oh, right,” he says with an uncomfortably casual laugh. “Aren’t we all.”
Eve’s torn between taking the gracious route and letting the matter drop, and potentially making Jamie, herself, and perhaps the entire population of this office building excruciatingly uncomfortable by continuing the conversation. In the end, she takes the coward’s way out.
Later that night, after a late shift at the restaurant that’s left her smelling like raw chicken and old grease, Eve goes about her nightly routine – shower, microwave dinner, sorting through the daily sheaf of electricity bills and junk mail – knowing all the while that she’s going to end this night as she’s done every other for several weeks now, one hand around the heart speaker and the other down the front of her sweatpants.
She’s just heading over to bed, picking her way through a minefield of tissues and old wine bottles by the light of the bulb over the microwave, when she almost jumps out of her skin at the sound of a very familiar, Admit it, Ev-v-v-ve. You wisszzssh I was here.
“Oh, fuck.” Eve drops to her hands and knees to search for the speaker she’s sure she tossed somewhere onto the chaos of the floor in a fit of shame last night.
“Well, you’ve certainly made good use of this,” Villanelle says from somewhere in the darkness.
Eve’s heart stutters wildly. “No,” she says. “Nope. No. Get out of my house.”
She can distinctly feel Villanelle’s pout from across the room, even though she can’t see her. “Really? We’re still doing this?” She sighs. “Eve, you kissed me on a bus.”
The way she says it is so uncannily, frighteningly similar to the way she’d once said, With an axe – all unabashed, raw pride – that Eve can’t help but shiver.
“I didn’t mean to,” Eve says. “I wasn’t thinking straight.”
Villanelle laughs, high and clear. “No, I know you weren’t,” she says.
Yes, Eve remembers quite clearly now why she’d felt like punching Villanelle as soon as she saw her on the bus. She takes a few slowish breaths, and then gets up to turn on a proper light.
The sudden brightness has her blinking back a headache and Villanelle scoffing, “Eve, why do you have fluorescent bulbs?” like it’s a personal affront. Once her eyes adjust, Eve can see that Villanelle is wearing pajamas with little hearts embroidered all across some shiny, silky fabric.
“Those make you look like you have chicken pox,” Eve says. Because she can, and because she knows Villanelle is incredibly fond of the clothes she wears.
As expected, an expression of childlike hurt flashes across Villanelle’s face before it’s replaced with her standard impenetrable mask. “That’s not very nice,” she says. “I picked them out just for you.”
Because this is what they do, Eve realizes. This is how they communicate – in words and actions like chess moves, all part of some inane power struggle – because the alternative is actually talking about their feelings like proper adults. But that would be too easy, too much like giving in. In that moment, Eve feels the day settle over her like a heavy blanket and realizes that she’s really just so very tired.
“Please,” she says, a thread of exhaustion creeping into her voice. “Can we just… stop? Can we just talk like real people for a moment?”
“How do real people talk?” Villanelle asks, like she really doesn’t know.
“Tell me about your day. Ask me about mine. Talk about – ” any of the dozen elephants in this room.
“What do you want to talk about, Eve?”
“I’m just – ” Eve sits down hard on the edge of the bed, her back to Villanelle. “I’m just so angry with you.” It comes out as a whisper.
“For shooting you,” Villanelle says.
“Yes. And for… everything else. You ruined my life, you know?”
“Am I the only one to blame for that?” Villanelle asks.
Eve wants to snap back at her with something sharp and angry, but it’s a fair question. She knows she’s at least partly responsible for the shambles her life has become. She has a sudden memory of Kenny begging her, Don’t go to Rome.
“No,” she admits.
She can feel Villanelle rustling around behind her, and then the soft thump as she flops down on her back. “Maybe I just gave you permission to be the person you always wanted to be,” she says.
Eve turns to look at her over her shoulder. “When did you become so philosophical?” she asks.
“I am always like this,” Villanelle says, a smile in her eyes. Eyes that Eve now knows are ever-so-faintly freckled right around the pupil. “You would know this if we hung out more.”
“I can’t,” Eve says.
“Why?”
“I just… I just can’t.” She turns away from Villanelle again, puts both hands up to her forehead. “This is crazy,” she says, more to herself than to Villanelle.
“Lie down, Eve,” Villanelle says, voice low. “We can talk about this later, when you’re not so upset.”
“I’m not going to kiss you again,” Eve says, staring pointedly at Villanelle so she knows she’s serious. “I’m not.”
“I didn’t say you had to,” Villanelle says, with that comically wide-eyed look she adopts when she’s trying to hide a more personal emotion. “But while we are on that subject – ”
“No,” Eve interrupts her. “Don’t even start.”
“You don’t have to be embarrassed,” Villanelle says, too perceptive for her own good. “I liked it.” She smiles. “You surprised me.”
“Like hiccups,” Eve muses.
Villanelle laughs at that. “Yes, exactly.”
It’s moments like these, Eve thinks, that make her so endearing. It’s the reason Eve keeps coming back again and again, heedless of all the terrible things Villanelle’s done – anything for the moments in which Villanelle truly seems, for a brief time, entirely human.
Eve gets up to turn off the light, but then thinks better of it. “Promise me you’re not going to try and kill me in my sleep,” she says. “You said you weren’t here in London for me but still… just promise me.”
“Promise,” Villanelle says. “Anyway, I’m only here because your flat is cheaper than a hotel. I could take or leave the company.”
“Since when are you interested in being frugal,” Eve laughs.
Some time later, feeling the covers rise and fall against her chest with Villanelle’s breaths, Eve works up the courage to admit it out loud. “I liked it, too,” she says.
“I know,” Villanelle says, her voice a lovely whisper in the quiet.
“But I still can’t.”
Villanelle doesn’t reply, and in the morning Eve wakes up alone.
4. Focus on the positives of the split – then let yourself grieve.
So that’s it then. They’ve had their last hurrah and Eve ended it, and now Villanelle is gone again. For good, Eve doesn’t admit, because just the thought makes her stomach twisty with regret.
There’s a part of her that feels silly for being so worked up over everything. For fuck’s sake, she’s too old for this. This part of her argues that she needs to just buck up and get over it, stop thinking about her and start focusing on important things. Like, oh I don’t know, solving Kenny’s murder, maybe?
It’s this part of her that has Eve tossing the heart speaker in the dumpster one Tuesday morning. It’s a much more embarrassing part of her that starts stress-crying over this decision later that evening. It’s only when she crawls into bed, sinuses clogged and eyes scratchy, that she realizes she can still hear Villanelle saying, I liked it, the memory having left its indelible mark when she wasn’t paying attention.
The evening spirals from there. She doesn’t want to talk about it.
There are a few upsides to the whole thing. With her thinking-about- her time relegated specifically to the hours between 8 and 10 p.m., Eve’s free to start rebuilding her sad little life during all the not-thinking-about- her hours left in the day.
She starts making regular physio appointments for her shoulder, for the first time since she left the hospital in Rome, and is shocked by how much better she feels – and by how much money she’s saving on painkillers. Weekdays are neatly organized into shifts at the restaurant and visits to Kenny’s old office – visits that are becoming shorter and shorter as any leads they’ve had start to dry up. Weekends are spent more generally, Eve channeling her obsessive tendencies into an acceptable outlet: Niko or Kenny or whatever the fuck Carolyn Martens has got going on.
So it’s not as though things are bad, per se. But there’s still the unsettling feeling that something is absent, a missing step in Eve’s chest that she forgets about until she tries to put her foot on it.
Even Kenny’s colleagues start to notice. The one they call Bear – and, poor guy, Eve always promises herself to find out his real name, and then just as quickly forgets – corners her one morning, after offering her a handful of whatever he’s snacking on.
“You look rough,” he says.
Oh, Eve is well aware of that. “Thanks.”
“Oh, no. I didn’t mean – I just meant, you can talk about it if you want.” He smiles at her. “I’ve been told I’m a good listener.”
“Look,” Eve says. “I appreciate the offer, and I swear this isn’t just a line. But it’s really, really complicated.” She laughs, a dry, mirthless chuckle. “I literally wouldn’t even know where to start.”
“That’s alright,” Bear says, easygoing as ever. “Just know you can talk about it if you want.”
5. Consider the rebound.
Eve does think about it. She gets as far as Googling “therapists near me” in the bathroom before realizing she’s never going to be able to explain her gamut of issues without being arrested, institutionalized, or both.
Maybe there’s another way to get through this. Eve’s never been one for casual sex, but things had pretty much dried up with her and Niko – save a few choice encounters – even before everything really went to shit. Eve’s not going to think about the fact that the only times she’s had sex with her husband in the past year and a half were instigated, wholly or partially, by someone she’s very seriously trying to move on from.
Still, Eve has needs, desires. The same old fantasies and an array of new, complex wants. Unfortunately, her options are limited – she doesn’t understand the appeal of Tinder, and she feels far too old and ungainly for nightclubs. Short of just chatting up a stranger, Eve’s not really sure how to make this work.
You had a young, attractive woman in your bed, her subconscious supplies meanly. She wanted to fuck you and you told her to leave, you absolute moron.
Which – fair. But the situation’s a little more complicated than that.
Eve’s at the bar after work, pondering all of this over her second gin and tonic of the night, when a woman slides onto the stool next to her and orders a White Russian. It feels a little, cruelly, on the nose. Like the universe knows she doesn’t have her shit together enough to do this on her own so it has to spoon-feed it to her, like Here, dumbass. Figure it out.
“Hi,” Eve says.
The woman is younger than her, somewhere around thirty, and she’s pretty without trying to be. She doesn’t look a thing like Villanelle and that’s just perfect. “Hi,” she says. “Having a good night?”
And if Eve’s learned anything from Villanelle, it’s how to get what she wants. “Not really,” she says, staring at her glass and adopting what she hopes is a vacant, defeated kind of expression. “Got stood up, and she doesn’t even have the decency to text me back.”
“Oh,” says the woman. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” Eve sighs. “Dating is just so hard in this city, you know?”
She’s worried she’s laying it on too thick, but then the other woman slides a hand on top of Eve’s, and actually, this is almost too easy.
“I hope this isn’t too forward,” she says, “but do you want to come back to my place?”
Really? she can hear Villanelle saying. You’re going to sleep with someone who orders milk in their alcohol?
Eve looks up into her eyes and smiles. “Yes.”
6. Try something new.
It’s not until they’re in bed, kissing slow and deep, that Eve thinks to ask for her name. “I’m Nicole,” she says, like Eve’s life isn’t ironic enough already.
“Eve.”
“So, what do you like?” Nicole asks, sucking a tender little bruise into the skin under Eve’s ear.
“I don’t – I don’t really know,” Eve says. “I haven’t been single in a long time.”
Nicole laughs. “Do you want me to be on top, then?”
Eve thinks about Villanelle on top of her, pinning her down in the bathtub, against the bus seat. “Absolutely not,” she says.
She turns Nicole’s head to the side and scrapes her teeth lightly down the curve of her neck. She smells like something Eve would recognize from the women’s section of the shampoo aisle – sweet and floral, like the perfume Eve used to wear as a teenager.
Eve knows she has to do something soon, pick up the pace a bit. The kissing is enjoyable enough, but it’s not what either of them came here for. The thing is, she’s not really sure how to push this forward. She wasn’t lying when she said she doesn’t know what she wants – so much of her physical relationship with Niko was about him that Eve hasn’t really thought about her own desires in a decade or so.
Villanelle would know what to do, she thinks. Which is really, really not helpful but is, unfortunately, all too true. She can almost hear Villanelle whispering in her ear. Come on, Eve. You wish I was here. So show her what you want to do to me.
Slowly, feeling sort of like she’s in a dream, Eve curves her hand around the base of Nicole’s throat. Slowly, deliciously, she lets herself push it down.
That’s it, Villanelle whispers in her ear. Let yourself go.
Nicole opens her mouth like she wants to say something. Eve bends her head down to her ear and bites at the shell. “Shut up,” she says. “Unless you’re going to beg for it.”
Make me, Villanelle says. So Eve pushes down, down, down, until she can feel Nicole’s heartbeat pulse up her entire arm. She’s started making these gaspy little sounds, and Eve is more turned on than she’s been in years. “I want to make you bleed,” she whispers dreamily.
And then, all of a sudden, the left side of her face is warm and painful, and Eve realizes Nicole’s just slapped her. “What the fuck!” she says. “Are you fucking crazy?”
Eve feels like she’s just been abruptly woken up from a very deep sleep. “What,” she says dumbly. “Why did you hit me?”
“Because you’re a complete psycho who just tried to choke me, what the fuck!” Nicole starts throwing Eve’s clothes back at her – jeans, shirt, jumper, each one hitting her in the chest with an indelicate little flump.
“I didn’t mean – ” Eve starts, her mind kicking up a mantra of ohgodohgodohgod.
“Yeah, I don’t care. I need you to please leave my house before I call the police.”
Eve starts to redress herself as quickly as she can. “Yeah, yeah. God, I’m so sorry.”
Nicole’s still whispering to herself, Eve distinctly picking up the phrase crazy bitch, in conjunction with several other less-than-flattering epithets. What an absolute disaster. This is what she gets for being so horny she has to pick up strangers in bars. Maybe she is a psycho.
London being London, it’s started raining by the time she gets outside, a steady, dreary downpour that has icy water running down Eve’s spine before she even realizes she’s halfway across the city from her flat with no umbrella. “Goddamn it,” she hisses.
“Need a ride?” says a very familiar voice from behind her.
Villanelle pulls to a smooth stop against the curb. She’s driving a sleek little four-door Audi, windshield wipers flicking rain off the glass as casually as a model tossing her hair over her shoulder.
Eve walks around to the passenger side without a second thought. “Do I even want to know how the hell you found me?” she asks. The interior of the car is just as expensive-looking as the outside, and the air conditioning has goosebumps trailing over Eve’s arms.
Villanelle tips her head up to the rearview mirror as she waits for a break in the slow-stream weeknight traffic. “She’s very pretty,” she says. “I didn’t know you had it in you to pick up pretty girls at bars.” She puts the car in drive and slides her gaze over to Eve. “Seatbelt.”
Eve clicks it into place, then throws her head back against the seat as Villanelle maneuvers them onto the road. “That was a complete mess,” she says.
And the whole situation is just so absurdly funny that she starts laughing, an embarrassed chuckle at first that very quickly morphs into something bordering on hysterical. “Oh my god,” Eve gasps out, tears trickling down her cheeks. “Oh my god.”
“Should I be worried about you?” Villanelle asks. Her eyes are still on the road, but there’s an edge to her voice that makes Eve look up. Her jaw is tight in a way that would scare Eve if she didn’t know any better. (And, quite honestly, should probably scare her still.)
“No,” Eve says. “I’m just a colossal idiot.”
Villanelle scoffs at that, and flicks on the blinker to turn right at a stop sign.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Eve asks. Then, when Villanelle doesn’t answer, she turns her whole body in her direction. “No, hey ! What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know, Eve,” Villanelle says in a mocking, sugary tone. “Did you fuck her?”
“Are you actually jealous?” They pass under a streetlight and Eve gets a better look at her face under its yellowy glow. “Oh my god, you are.”
“Stop it.”
“No, you’re jealous! You’re jealous of me!” She laughs again. “That’s fantastic.”
“Stop.”
“How did you even know I was there? Have you been following me?”
“Stop it. I mean it.” Villanelle takes the next turn hard enough that Eve is tossed back into her seat.
“I will if you admit it,” Eve says. She adopts a girlish Russian accent. “ You wish you were there.”
“That’s a terrible impression,” Villanelle says. “I don’t sound anything like that.” And then, taking her eyes off the road for the first time to meet Eve’s, “How many times did you listen to that bear, hmm?”
What’s funny, Eve thinks, is that Villanelle still thinks she has all the power here. What’s funny is that she hasn’t realized she lost the upper hand as soon as Eve kissed her first.
“Enough to nearly give myself carpal tunnel,” Eve says. “One time I came three times in an hour.”
Villanelle – careful, masterful driver that she is – hits the brakes so hard Eve has to catch herself against the dashboard before she flies through the windshield. The cars behind them begin to beep in angry unison.
“I could make it five,” Villanelle says, voice gravelly and dangerous. She looks like she wants nothing more than to throw Eve in the backseat and have her way with her right there.
“Well, that’s very promising,” Eve says, trying to tamp down the heat rising in her stomach. “But my night has been absolute shit and all I want to do is find something on television and go to bed.”
Another car swerves around them, honking up a storm, and Villanelle throws up a middle finger without looking away from Eve. “I could pick a movie,” she says.
It’s an olive branch and a question, Please, can I stay? Please, can we keep trying? Eve decides she’s feeling generous.
“As long as it’s not horror,” Eve says.
“Eve,” Villanelle says, with genuine distaste. “I would never choose a horror movie.”
7. Give yourself time to process.
There are a lot of things Eve did not expect to experience in her forties. Getting hired – and then subsequently fired… twice – by MI6, for one. Getting shot in a foreign city, then nearly dying on the operating table, for another. Not to mention being such a terrible wife that her husband not only stopped talking to her, but also ran away to bumfuck, Poland just to get away from her.
And hell, if someone had told Eve five years ago that before long she would be lusting after a professional Russian assassin, twenty years her junior, a woman responsible for the deaths of Eve’s best friend and her husband’s sidepiece (as well as the aforementioned shooting-Eve-and-leaving-her-to-die thing) – she would have thought they were full-on crazy.
Maybe lusting is a strong word. Honestly, it would be less embarrassing for Eve if everything she felt for Villanelle was only sexual. As it is, she has just as many fantasies about nauseatingly domestic things like watching her sleep or cooking her breakfast as she does about railing Villanelle against a doorframe.
It doesn’t help that last night – after weeks thinking she’d driven Villanelle away forever – she’d fallen asleep halfway through the movie Villanelle picked out for them, and woke up to Villanelle softly stroking her hair.
“I have to leave soon,” Villanelle says this morning over a breakfast of slightly stale pastries from the bakery down the street.
“Okay,” Eve says.
“I have – ” Villanelle pauses, choosing her words, “business in Spain. Once that’s dealt with, I’ll try to find a place in London.”
Eve brushes a flake of croissant off her fingers. “You know, I know ‘business’ just means a hit,” she says.
“Not this time it doesn’t.”
“God,” Eve laughs. “What have you been up to?”
“Getting married,” Villanelle says. “What have you been up to?”
Eve chokes on the croissant. “ What? ”
“What do you mean, what? I thought I’d killed you. I had to – ” hand wave, “move on.”
“You can’t be serious.”
Villanelle cocks an eyebrow. “Of course I am. But don’t worry, I’m legally dead, so it doesn’t really count.”
Eve does some quick math in her head. “It’s been, like, eight months. When did you even meet him?”
“I met her at the airport after Rome,” Villanelle says. “It was very quick.”
“Sounds like.”
Villanelle shrugs, like whirlwind marriages are just casual events in her life. Which, to be fair, they probably are. “So,” she says, eyes alight with mischief. “How come your date last night didn’t work out?”
Eve laughs. “Because I choked her and said I wanted to make her bleed.” Saying it out loud like that makes it sound even more insane. “Jesus. And then she called me a psycho bitch and kicked me out of her flat.”
“Eve,” Villanelle says, sounding darkly serious. Eve looks up into her wide, unblinking eyes and is startled by their intensity. “That woman is an idiot for turning you down.”
Desperate to escape the force of her stare, Eve looks down at the table and focuses very hard on the repeating grain of the synthetic wood. “I don’t know,” she says. “I felt so stupid. Like,” she taps a knuckle against the table, “I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m too old for this.”
“Listen to me,” Villanelle says. “You should never feel embarrassed for going after what you want.”
“I shouldn’t have kissed you on that bus,” Eve says. She’s been lost in her own head and doesn’t realize she’s said it out loud until Villanelle goes very stiff on the other side of the table. Eve looks up just in time to catch a raw flash of pain on Villanelle’s face before it’s replaced by a cool, aloof mask.
God, she’s really fucking this whole thing up. “No, no,” Eve says. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant, I should’ve done it differently. Not like that.”
“Like what, then?” Villanelle asks, cautious.
“Somewhere without as many people,” Eve says. “For a start.”
“If I kiss you now, will you headbutt me again?” Villanelle’s lip pulls up into a grimace. “Because I had a very ugly bruise for two entire weeks.”
Eve laughs. Her own bruise had been awful, too. “No,” she says. “No, I don’t think so.”
Villanelle stands up from her seat and Eve is reminded for perhaps the hundredth time just how tall she is. She stops in front of Eve and looks her over for a moment, appraising. Eve feels her gaze in the waves of goosebumps that prickle up over her arms.
“You’re very beautiful,” Villanelle says.
Then her hands are on Eve’s face, one thumb stroking soft lines over her cheekbone. “So beautiful,” she says again, and dips her head down to kiss Eve on the lips.
Eve closes her eyes this time, and is overwhelmed by the way that changes everything. Villanelle smells delicious, not bathed in perfume like she was last time, but softer, more natural. She smells like herself, Eve realizes, the way everyone smells different in the morning before they’ve had a chance to cover themselves in some other combination of scents. Eve wonders how many other people have gotten to smell Villanelle just like this. She wants to kill them all.
She opens her mouth a little – because, yes, it’s nice to be in control, but sometimes it feels just as good to give in – and Villanelle responds with a tentative brush of tongue. Eve bites down on it ever so slightly.
“I have to be on a plane in an hour,” Villanelle says, pulling away. “Otherwise I would ask for a demonstration of whatever you had planned for that woman yesterday.”
Eve leans back in for another quick, sloppy kiss, enjoying the way Villanelle tastes like salt and jam. “To be fair,” she says, “an hour is a very long time.”
Villanelle shivers, just a little. “God, Eve.”
“Is that a no, then?”
“For now it is.” Villanelle smiles at her, in a way that lays Eve bare. “I’m sure you’ll find something to keep you occupied here.”
“Oh, god.” Eve shakes her head, a horrible thought having just occurred to her. “Please, please, promise me you didn’t kill Kenny.”
“Who?”
“Carolyn Martens’s son. I’m sure you’ve met him.”
Villanelle thinks for a moment, then nods slowly. “He always wore those really ugly shorts.” She shakes her head. “No, I didn’t kill him. I’m so sorry, Eve. He was your friend, yes?”
“Yes.” Even now it hurts to hear someone talk about him in the past tense. “He was – he was a really nice person.”
“If I hear anything, I will let you know.”
“Thank you, that’s… Thank you.”
“Anything for you, Eve.” Villanelle puts a finger under Eve’s chin and tilts her head up to look her straight in the eyes. “Anything.”
She kisses Eve once more, a sudden peck that has Eve’s heart racing all the same. “I have to go, but I’ll see you very soon.”
“I think I might miss you,” Eve says.
Villanelle smiles, and heads to the bedroom to collect her things. “I’ll send you a postcard,” she calls over her shoulder.
Three days later, Eve finds a postcard in her mailbox, tucked between a utilities bill and an advertisement for a new pizza place. Greetings from Barcelona! it says on the front in a garish bubble font. Wish you were here! On the back, Villanelle’s written, very simply, Miss you, baby x.