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In the end, it is nine months’ of divorce, of various therapies and ways to earn a minimum wage; it is nine months since Rome, and Eve hasn’t not thought about her.
Not even once.
+
But first, it starts — sort of like how it started the last time. Bright and shining and unbearable; a cleaver through Eve, through the mess of her. And she is more of a mess than ever, after Rome. And Villanelle, more honed.
The first letter comes with Eve’s breakfast tray in the rehab centre, one corner dipping into a concoction that, with a reach of the imagination, might be eggs. It’s marked with no less than a dozen stamps, rerouted out of Italy. The letter has come far to her hospital in Rome and then to London, following her transfer, and Eve sends it further: tossed out the slit in the window and the five storeys down below.
Caught, again. Eve forces a thought: She’ll have to do better than that.
+
Eve used to do normal things — she remembers, she is sure. She slept, she ate, she worked and played and rested.
After Rome? She decays, she heals. She aches and pains and soothes and those are all her doing words; that is all she remembers. And she barely remembers.
That cleave, though, in the thick of it:
She isn’t dead, Villanelle. Eve knows that much. But where? Eve doesn’t look. She barely does a google search — words escape her, activities evade her. She hasn’t done anything in her life, she is sure.
Funny, how the sureties come to her. Like bright lanterns, or marshlights, or — she spends a day listing things that glow. This is how time moves, after Rome.
After Rome, this time, how Villanelle will come to her; this time, Eve is sure, that it is Villanelle who will be pulled, beckoned, reeled in crank on crank.
One morning, Eve rolls her shoulder. The joint clicks like pulleys. She leaves the blinds open, but doesn’t look out.
+
The second letter is thicker. Clean, bleach-white stationery and an inked-on address. An X, under Eve, to mark the spot. Buried treasure, maybe. Or a trigger for the kill.
A moment of clarity. The second letter, Eve opens.
And drops like it’s a brand. From her kitchen floor, peering up between the folds of the envelope: two slashes like a cat’s eyes, embedded in the meat of a man’s torso and bleeding out maroon-red tears.
That address was in a nameless hand. But the contents, these are in Villanelle’s. The photograph, the autopsy report tucked behind it, this overly convenient compilation; it seems to say, Hello. Or maybe just, I see you.
Not again. Not fucking again.
Eve doesn’t venture again to her mailbox for a week, after that.
+
But there is another letter. And another. Yet more, as day by day Eve wades through muck. Day by day, Eve reaches for things, fails to grasp them; reaches and fails and flounders, falling through the top step with that bottomless feeling in her belly, but the ground never comes, and it goes and goes and she is spinning on a Catherine wheel, Eschering onto nothing, and then —
and then there is a letter. And there is Villanelle.
It is manipulation. It is a life raft, and a destination, and gravity.
It is also convenient, because Eve is not really an investigator, never has been. And her research skills come down mostly to sleeplessness, avid use of google, and the feral feeling that sits in her and gnaws.
Letter by letter, she finds her head again.
She doesn’t find leads. They find her and Eve, once caught, must gather up as much of the thread as she can. And, if she is determined enough, crazed enough, maybe then whatever is at the end of the lead will show itself to her. She has to earn it. She has to be the most of herself she can be, and then, perhaps…
So, someone is handing her Villanelle on a platter, and Eve is grateful. The process of finding was never her preferred activity. It was the bit afterwards that was her favourite, when she had all the pieces of this woman laid out before her, sitting on her bare heels on the floor with a three-day-old smell in the air, and looking, and seeing, and making up the whole from its parts…
Yes, that was her favourite. The absolute power over another human being; the construction of them. Eve said let there be Villanelle, and so she was.
(Eve’s first memory after Rome — the first letter — she didn’t start there by mere accident. Villanelle said, let there be Eve again — and so, she was.)
All this to say, whatever arrangement is currently occurring is one that works for her. Cut out the middleman, the pretence of an investigation, and there is just Villanelle and Eve, watching her.
And there is a lot to watch. The letters are frequent. Villanelle is…prolific. Someone, not Eve, might say she is on a killing spree.
Not Eve, because Eve takes these pieces (carefully found and compiled by Carolyn’s replacement-Eve, she is sure) and she lays them out, and she falls into them, and says: Villanelle is proving her worth. Her worth to the Twelve, who were this close to disposing of her — beheaded in a Roman back alley, at that. She is striving again to be valuable.
She is begging to be kept.
+
At the beginning of this whole thing, which was also the end — after Rome — Eve was quiet.
She thought little. Ate little, drank little; did nothing very much at all. Each time Villanelle rose in her mind, unbidden and blameless as a breached whale, Eve looked away and her mind went still again. She waned away days, then weeks in this sorry state. No Eve at all. It was a blessing.
There was nothing, for a while.
+
But Eve is Eve. Death could not change her, apparently, not matter how close it got; not with Villanelle to dredge her out.
Now, she is something else; blanched and evil, sodden with want. She is watching Niko sign his half of the divorce application, tracing longer flourishes, thinner fingers with her mind’s eye. What is it called when they kill you, and you need them anyway? Abuse, probably. Stockholm syndrome. A line crossed — a whole host of lines, the whole web of her slashed through the centre.
But she’s never subscribed to these concepts, only distantly aware of them.
The letters aren’t helping; tantalising, terrible morsels. Temptations.
Now, she is rolling her shoulder, clockwise, anti-clockwise. There is something erotic about it, or she’s just insane. The round, complete motions, spinning on an axis. The stretch, the pull. The point. Her wound lashes out pain; the rest of her cringes. She thinks she’d kill to move again. She’d kill just to arch her back.
Stretch, nineteen, and stretch, twenty. And she is done for the morning. Her physical therapist loves her — Eve always does her homework, on time and well. It’s hard to forget the exercises. Not because of the pain, though that is constant, but because of Villanelle, who is. And for her, Eve will need to be ready. She’ll need her body back.
+
In Madrid, a man with a bouquet of roses. Stuffed in a fistful down his throat. His poor girlfriend — cum-fiancée, very nearly — swore the alleyway mugger was a woman. Well, duh.
Apparently when they removed the roses, one by one for the coffin showing, the thorns ripped his oesophagus to shreds.
She has been getting creative. Mostly out of necessity — it appears they are sending her on multiple jobs a week, now, earning her worth back, and Eve imagines this leaves little time to plan. Probably, she has less support from the Twelve, too. Less funds, weapons, transport. She is more alone and thus more herself, and what she is is a frantic thing, an animal on its back that seeks the nearest and dearest path to fight its way out.
Whether that be: the shards of a window pane, speared through a man’s soft throat; hanged in a closet with one’s own silk scarf; to be torn open by kitchen scissors from neck to navel. The roses were fresh, the proposal planned.
They were probably just a coincidence.
+
At work, Eve holds down a shoulder with her good arm, hacks at it with the other and a cleaver. The joint separates with a slick of cut tendon. In the pot, the meat will fall off the bone.
The dishes boy secretly texts his girlfriend from the pocket of his apron. Eve brushes him with as she passes, knocking his phone into the dirty dishwater. Better he learn the lesson now.
+
She is worse at night; she is better, too.
One of the painkiller dreams, months ago, has stayed with her. She dreams it again, even sober, even now. In it, she grows tall as a mountain. She apexes, she hones for a million years. In it, a bird alights on her tip, and starts to peck. And peck. And wear Eve down.
She wakes in sweat and a tangle of sheets, head and legs throbbing. It is all she can do to grasp her thighs and press her skull back into the mattress, waiting ‘til morning for the pain to subside. Something like a breeze tickles between her legs, but she is still and grounded as the mountain, and she waits.
This, every night. Until
+
She wakes in sweat and a tangle of sheets, head and legs throbbing. Before she can get her grip, the pain spikes. It grows so thick and fast it must escape her body, its surface area blossoming out above her skin’s sheen. Her teeth clack together. Something groans outside, an animal — no, that was inside. That was her.
She wants to bend over, curl into a protective ball, huddle and hug herself over where it hurts most. But she is stuck fast. Her vision clears slowly — she is not alone.
The figure in the corner of the room could be a coat, tossed carelessly over the wardrobe door. It could be a shadow frankensteined from curtain and desk chair and the oak tree outside. But Eve swears it is neither.
And the pain, it isn’t really pain.
Eventually, she falls back asleep, lulled somehow by the soothe of helplessness. In late morning, she wakes to true pain, and a missed shift at the restaurant. Her shoulder aches like a gong.
The room is empty. Fuck, if it goes on like this — something might break, and it might well be her.
+
That morning, a beheading in her mailbox.
It’s all too much — or not enough. Subsequently, Eve makes a call. Sits with palms splayed across her kitchen table, framing the photograph, as it dials. All the ways that the inside of a neck looks different to the diagrams.
“Never a clean break with you, is it?” Carolyn greets.
Eve purses her lips. “You aren’t exactly making it easy.”
“I hope you aren’t taking that attitude into your divorce. Trust an old hat: do it quick and cauterise.”
No point, really, questioning how and why Carolyn has kept tabs on Eve’s personal life. “Stop sending me mail.”
There’s a pause. Then, carefully, “Eve, I haven’t sent you any mail.”
Eve sits, stares.
Carolyn says, “I have a new team on the investigation. If Villanelle is —“
Eve hangs up. It was never about the investigation.
+
So, it’s worse. Worse than flaunting, worse than begging. It’s Villanelle’s version of texting your ex.
Instantly, this person — this thing that she has been, it feels like Eve again.
She pictures Villanelle standing over her latest hit, snapping pics from precise angles with her new iPhone. Arranging limbs like a Renaissance painting. Later, getting them printed all glossy, picking out matching stationery under the quivering gaze of the shop attendant.
She pictures Villanelle: desperate. Wanting. Stark fucking naked and baring herself in a most blatant, pathetic way — that makes Eve shiver with disgust, that thumps pity in her groin.
Maybe this performance makes Villanelle’s new pattern of work — the frequent, low-level jobs — more bearable. Maybe she just can’t help herself. Maybe she still likes Eve. Maybe she still — no, Eve stops herself, refuses to think the thought.
Eve wants to tell her to use your words but when have either of them ever been good at that? And what use are words – if they do no good.
+
She thinks about sex, a lot. Who doesn’t? Well, not Eve, not before this — not really.
She always wanted sex – practically, not abstractly. She liked it when it happened and missed it when it didn’t, but she cannot say she ever dwelled upon it, wildly elaborated in her fantasies; she can’t say she ever really thought.
Her heart knocks between her legs, wanting out.
She thinks —
A knock at the door. Eve jolts, then stills — it will be Niko, here to collect the rest of his things. There isn’t much left: his mother’s leather armchair, some family photos, a stack of records. Eve arranged it all in the hall like a summoning.
But with every step she takes, tiptoeing around the Billy Joel, she feels fire. Lightning. A natural fucking disaster at her fingertips. This afternoon she awoke bleary-eyed from a nap, from another one of these dreams.
“Hi,” Niko greets.
Eve nods.
This is what they are now. Before this, they weren’t much better — but they had some things. They had in-jokes and smiles for each other and sex that was more than decent; something living.
She stands aside to let him gather up his things, piled up against the walls. Watches mutely from the end of the hall. It’s about the way he moves, lanky and janky — no, that’s not it. The way he talks, maybe, or the way he breathes. There must be something bad about him, some small thing she can find and cling to, hold against him.
She stares and stares and finds nothing.
After he’s carted the last armful of stuff out to the car, he comes back in, for some reason - Eve can think of none - and finally returns Eve’s gaze.
“That’s it, then,” he says.
Eve shrugs. “That’s all there is.”
He sags, then, and Eve doesn’t like this part but she reaches for him anyway — for a hug that feels like she’s an overladen coat rack. They extricate themselves from it quickly.
But as he turns to leave, he’s leaning down to kiss her cheek — though his moustache bristles at it — Eve tips forward and it catches the corner of her mouth. She grips his coat and they are kissing; familiar yet grating, ordinary and yet…she has never felt quite like this.
Why is he kissing her? She doesn’t care, she can’t care. Here is a warm body that has never meant her harm. Eve chases unshaven skin. At some point, she came to pushing him against the door frame. Is he trembling? It doesn’t matter. Not one for a clean break.
Eve pricks Niko’s wrists with her nails, and he jolts but doesn’t stop, or push her away. She presses harder, opens wider, and — she can’t stand him. She cannot stand to be here.
She snaps like a twig and she needs him gone — herself, gone. Breaks the kiss and pushes him, red faced and bewildered, toward the door and out of it, slams it all shut behind him, but even this isn’t quick enough for whatever is left of her. That the world never shapes itself to what she wants, at least never as easily and instantly as she can want it — and cease wanting it.
The door is cool, but not quite cool enough, against her forehead. She was never this bad before — now, she is worse.
+
Not all days are like that. Some are boring, some are nothing. She isn’t even Eve; she doesn’t try. Some days, she goes to work. Breaks bones in the kitchen; goes home and breaks some more. Drinks, and drinks again, and thinks, tomorrow.
Tomorrow.
+
Tomorrow, a knock at the door. Then another. Then a third, harder, which echoes a little through the empty house. Eve is already halfway to the door before the last knock can fade out. Should she play like she wasn’t waiting on the stairs, staring out the marbled glass in vain hope of — something?
No point; it will be obvious. Villanelle can take one look at her and pinch her heart between two fingers. Better just to let her.
She should probably feel some sense of fear, or at least anticipation, Eve thinks, just as she touches the door handle. After weeks, after Rome, this is finally Villanelle in the flesh — Eve knows it, somehow. And not only because she has nobody else left to knock on her door. And yet, she is calm. A still pool at the pit of her stomach.
She opens the door.
And Villanelle is there, like a creature of old. All hair and skin and limbs, stretching tall as a shadow in sunset.
And she just looks at Eve.
Eve says, “Are you wanting to come in?”
Villanelle slants her mouth, then her head, as if weighing her options. As if each of them haven’t already shown their hand, like this: by coming to the door, by opening it.
“Don’t they say something,” Villanelle says, and the first sound of her voice is a shock. The last Eve heard in that same voice: I love you, I do. There’s no love here, now. But there is so much else left behind. “About vampires?” And she is coming in. Eve steps back too quickly to allow her room.
Villanelle removes her jacket and hands it to Eve prematurely. “No?” she asks, and Eve realises she hasn’t said anything. “Once you invite me in, you’re mine.”
“This isn’t the first time,” Eve points out. She hangs Villanelle’s coat over her own on the rack. Villanelle is kicking her shoes off, proving Eve’s point. “I think I already broke the spell.”
“Maybe,” Villanelle allows. Jacketless, she bares way too much skin for Eve’s continued sanity. Glows far too white. “Or maybe I just have permission to kill you twice.”
It’s rude. It’s pointed. Eve lets it slide right on by. “I have fried rice. Yesterday’s takeout. Would you eat that?”
Villanelle shrugs. She will eat anything.
Eve leads her into the kitchen. Not the faintest idea where this is going, where the night might end. But when it comes down to it, the steps of their dance are easy, and come naturally. If she thinks too far ahead, she’ll look down to see nothing but air beneath her feet.
So. Step by impossible step.
“Bread?” Eve offers. She has some loaf ends in the freezer. “Water?” She keeps forgetting to pay the bill. That was Niko’s job. They may or may not have shut off her supply. “Wine?” Of this, she has much.
Villanelle rolls into the living room and straight to the couch, where she falls like a picture of Victorian dramatics, and waves an errant hand. “I’ll take it in the lounge.”
+
The couch is risky, it is dangerous; Eve had hoped for the zoo-enclosure-like safety of a kitchen table in between the two of them. Hard edges and things, solid things, in the way.
She makes do by pointedly placing a cushion in the middle of the couch, and then the steaming plate balanced atop it. Two forks. She fills two wine glasses to the brim and sets them by her feet with the bottle — if anyone wants to cross the gap, they’ll have to move the food and drink, or tip it over.
Eve doesn’t feel optimistic about the future of the shag rug.
“How’s work?” she asks, settling into the couch and starting to dig in. A bit of egg falls off her fork and down into the depths of the couch.
It’s an ordinary question. It’s something she’d ask Niko, not caring about the answer. So it pleases Eve, now, to give the question an entirely different flavour. She adds, “You’ve been busy.”
A flicker passes through Villanelle — annoyance, frustration. “I don’t want to talk about work.”
“Really?” Eve schools her own body language. It’s only dinner. “You’ve kind of been making it my problem.”
If a person can pick up a fork petulantly, Villanelle does so. “What is it they say? Show, don’t tell. I’m tired of your question and answer routine, Eve. We’re past that now. Don’t you think?”
“That was a question.”
“Can you smell me yet?” Villanelle fires out, quick as anything on the draw.
Eve is very interested in the fried rice. “That…was also a question.”
“Yes. But you don’t have to answer. You always tell me everything I need to know.”
Eve stuffs a few more forkfuls in her mouth then washes it down with most of her glass of wine. Because the thing is, she has. Almost since Villanelle walked in. She’s gone without perfume, or any other masking scent — so Eve gets only what’s just hers: a rough, round whiff of body odour, not unpleasant; and underneath, the deep cut of what is unmistakeably arousal.
“I am trying to be more honest,” says Villanelle. “More open. It is what they say to do.”
“Who are they?” Eve asks, not looking at Villanelle’s crotch.
“Horoscopes. Relationship counsellors. Priests. I tried them all.”
“I don’t think those people can help us.”
“Then what? Eve, I have tried everything. I know you like watching me, I make it easy for you. I make it look good. We have that, now. I write letters. That is what they used to do. I give myself to you even when I’m not here. And I come to you, and I take my shoes off at the door without you having to ask. I am being so good, at all of it. I am giving you things you want.”
Watching Villanelle, then, through all of this — the slouch in her neck, the blankness behind her expression — Eve realises: she is desperate. She is stripped to the bone over this.
That moment of losing, when Eve thought Villanelle was dead, and she to blame — it was like suicide. Now, Villanelle knows that moment, too.
Still, resistant to the end, Eve asks, “How do you know what I want?”
Villanelle reaches out and moves the bowl of fried rice to the coffee table. Fuck. How easily Eve’s barriers are torn down.
“You tried to kill me,” Eve says quickly. Tries to put up another, different kind of wall.
“I know,” says Villanelle, and she sounds like she regrets it. Real or no, Eve feels it like an ache in her own gut. “I know.”
Villanelle is slipping low against the back of the couch, looking up at Eve — it’s orchestrated. Weaning out pity. Eve looks forcibly away.
She is aware of Villanelle slumping further, closer, ostensibly to collect her glass and drain it before setting it aside along with Eve’s.
Pathetic, really, how insurmountable Eve thought these things might be; the food and the wine, things in between. But when Eve sets down a boundary, Villanelle may simply move it.
“You tried to kill me,” Eve says again. It is all she can think while she puts her foot down and finds nothing but air. “You tried – to kill me – “
At this, Villanelle slips fully off the couch, to kneel upon the rug. Her cheek is tucked rather sweetly against the couch cushion, just shy of Eve’s knee.
When she speaks, it takes Eve a moment to realise it is not in a language she understands. “Comme un animal fort qui surveille une proie. Après l'avoir d'abord marquée avec les dents.”
“What?”
“I talked to the poets, too.”
Eve is definitely aware of Villanelle’s hands, hooked around her ankles and slowly, slowly inching up her calves. She only acts like she isn’t, needs to get them back on track, back on the couch with firm lines in between them, saying steadily, “Are you not hungry?”
Villanelle blinks at her, hands wedged behind Eve’s knees.
“I meant — for dinner — it will get cold —“
A sudden move — far quicker than they have moved thus far tonight, which has the most part been slow, deliberate. Now, Villanelle strikes like a rattlesnake. She guesses — correctly, if unfortunately — that Eve does not give a shit about the fried rice. When she lowers to kneeling, feet kicking out to give herself room, the coffee table is shoved back and the rice topples to the rug.
Eve inhales sharply — loudly, the sound breaks the room and both of them hear it. A signal. “Villanelle, please don’t —“
But she is already here. Nosing Eve’s legs open, pressing kisses to the seam of her trousers; a hand tugs beneath her thigh, urging further. Villanelle looks so small down there, is what Eve thinks as soon as she can force her eyes back open. Her feet tucked beneath her. Expression closed and tranquil, as if in prayer.
Then Villanelle plants her face, hard, to Eve’s crotch, and inhales, and Eve’s eyes roll back into her head. She has a death grip onto the couch, but the cool of the leather does nothing to soothe her. It’s only cool as Villanelle might be cool, her delicate fingers, the aftermath of her tongue; only smooth as Villanelle might be, if Eve could touch her. If Eve would touch her.
Eve wants. This is not new.
What is new, she realises in a vicious flash, is that she wants specifically. She wants to grip Villanelle by two fistfuls of her hair and tug, tug just as she bucks herself up into Villanelle’s mouth. God, Eve wants to use her. Wants to make her.
This is what hate feels like.
This must be what it feels like.
“No,” Eve is saying, “no, no, no, no, no…”
“You did this,” says Villanelle, a gargoyle clung to the crook of Eve’s hip. “You did this to yourself.”
Eve chokes.
+
Not much happens after that. This, Eve has learned: sometimes a moment is just that; a moment, and when it is over it is over. If she stabs someone, then they will be stabbed. If she kills someone, they will be killed.
And if uses her foot to shove Villanelle to the floor and hold her there, ball of her foot pressed to Villanelle’s sternum and both of them staring as if at a ghost - then it will happen just so.
After a moment, Villanelle wipes her mouth boyishly with the back of her hand, where she has salivated just a little bit.
“Tomorrow,” Villanelle says, and stands to go. “I’ll give you the day.”
“For what?”
“To get yourself together.”
+
Eve spends a lot of time looking at herself. Not in a vain way, though there is admiration in it; moreso, wondering at the capability of her body, her chest, her own two hands. The things they have done. The things they have yet to do.
She sticks her fingers inside herself (her mouth, her cunt) and to soundtrack the act, she wonders free.
You see, there’s a mess. A hole, a gap, or its opposite; a tangled mass of everything. Either way, she finds it difficult to form a thought around it.
Maybe, then, she won’t. If she doesn’t think, she can’t hesitate, or ruminate, or suffer.
She sets herself some rules. Number one: no thinking. Number two: try not to kill or be killed by her, this time. At least not until after the sex.
Because what would really kill her, she thinks, is not having tried it — even the once.
+
A knock at the door. Same as the last time: two soft knocks, then a harder one. Eve finishes washing the rice first — just a moment, honey, but really she just needs the prep time. Plants her feet in the ground and rolls the grains around her hands, swilling until the water clouds white.
Another knock, same again. Eve shakes her hands dry and gets the door.
On the stoop, sharpened by the streetlight, Villanelle is all curves. A deep-red dress that hones her silhouette down to nothing more than her body. Low dip at the neck, and shadow there. Her hair looks particularly soft in light waves beneath her chin, and all this Eve notices — prolonging the moment that she’ll have to meet Villanelle’s eyes or, worse, focus on what she is holding up to the light.
At first she assumes it’s a pair of heels, dangling from a finger. But Villanelle’s smile is soft as the rest of her, and it’s unnerving, Eve wonders — where is the point? Villanelle never shows up without some sharp edge.
Oh, Eve thinks, squinting at the strange thing in Villanelle’s grip. There it is. She’s seen them before, in porn, in sex shops. One of the straps hooks around Villanelle’s little finger; the rest hangs low. This one is replete in black leather, shiny silver hardware, and then here is the point: a deep, gem-red dildo, smooth and thick and curved to a slow barb.
Well. Somehow, through all the mid-life Sapphic fantasies, she had never imagined this. In her dreams, Villanelle used her fingers, her mouth or her fist. Sometimes she fucked Eve with her own cock of flesh and blood.
But this? Never. It’s almost too technical. Surely, in the time it would take for Villanelle to strap the whole contraption onto herself, Eve will have already come to her senses.
“That’s —“ Eve starts.
Villanelle whips the thing behind her back. “A surprise tool that will help us later.”
Eve bites the tip of her tongue. She takes Villanelle’s coat — she didn’t offer, it is simply handed to her — and puts away her shoes, too. Her toes are painted a mottled green just barely visible beneath dark pantyhose.
Pantyhose. It’s strange, the things her mind gets stuck on now. They were always an annoyance to her. Only worn when she forgot to shave her legs and didn’t have clean trousers. But they draw Eve’s gaze to the shape of an ankle, calf, thigh…
She tears her eyes away. Her face is up there. Villanelle is smirking and holding out the — thing.
Strap-on. Whatever, Eve knows what they’re called.
She takes it in the same way she took Villanelle’s coat and heels. It’s lighter than she thought it would be.
“Has this been in other women?” she blurts.
“Only me.”
“Is that hygienic?”
“I ran it in through the dishwasher.” Villanelle pauses in the hall, curling back to look at Eve for just the barest second — “Besides,” she says, before turning away, “there’s no need to put it anywhere it hasn’t already been.”
“Oh,” says Eve. “I thought —“ Then remembers she isn’t supposed to be thinking.
“We have the whole evening to ourselves.” Eve suppresses a twitch at this — perhaps the most terrifying thing she’s ever heard. “Anything could happen.”
Villanelle leaves her there in the hall, holding the damned thing like a hot potato. After a moment of consideration, Eve hangs up the strap-on, right there among the coats.
+
Instead of depositing herself on the couch, like last time, Villanelle circles the room. Her gaze and her hands flitting over objects — what little Eve has left, after Niko took his half. The back of the couch, leather stroked like skin. A picture frame somehow turned erotic beneath her touch.
She stops at an old chessboard, stacked atop some books beside the window.
“This is nice,” she observes. Her index finger traces a line between the squares.
“I guess.” Eve hadn’t really thought of it. In fact, she thought it was Niko’s; hence why it’s sitting out in the living room instead of forgotten in a cupboard. He had to remind her it was her own father’s, actually, don’t you remember?
“Do you play?”
Eve looks at her. “Do you play?”
“Of course.” Villanelle tilts her chin left, in that aristocratic way — Eve wonders where she gets it, all these trappings of a sheltered, well-bred type of life. Were they modelled for her? Or was she born to them, royalty from the mould.
Villanelle takes the chessboard into the kitchen, because this, apparently, is what they are doing now. Villanelle plays black. Eve plays white. She chooses not to read into this.
She moves a pawn as she sits, sighing, because what is the alternative? Villanelle sets the games, Eve plays them. To do anything else would require a directness that Eve can barely think about. It’s as if there’s a block in her brain, a blank space that she skirts around. It’s not that she won’t name a thing for what it is, or not just that; it’s more that she doesn’t know how.
Even now, feeling blindly around that negative space, she feels herself seize up and quickly retreat.
In turn, Villanelle takes her lead pawn back one space.
“They don’t move that way,” Eve says automatically.
“Don’t they? They do, when I play.” Villanelle rests a fingertip atop the offending piece, rocks it back and forth, around and around as if stimulating it. “What are you thinking?”
“Nothing,” says Eve, too fast and caught-out. She moves her knight somewhere, anywhere, and Villanelle quickly counters.
“What are you not thinking?”
That she is about to lose a game of chess. No mind for strategy, she always just took the best moves as they came.
Eve takes one of Villanelle’s bishops. It feels good.
“I’m thinking that it would kind of suck,” she admits, because though it would like her to break both her rules it would still be poor form, “if you were to kill me. Or I, you — I guess — before we could…”
“Mmm.” Villanelle loudly sucks her bottom lip between her teeth. Eve should have put some music on — perhaps it would drown out all these little sounds which are torturing her. The rustle of Villanelle’s pantyhose when she crosses her legs. The sighs and clicks and wet sounds around her words, that overworked mouth.
Villanelle says, “It would. It would kind of suck.” Somehow it sounds dirtier, on her lips. Her queen makes a bold cross over the board. “Shall we make a pact?”
“That sounds — I don’t know. Can I trust you?”
A shrug, hands spread. It was a stupid question and they both know it. “Can I trust you?”
Eve mirrors her shrug.
“So, then,” concludes Villanelle, and takes Eve’s errant knight.
“Very cold war of you.”
“What?”
“Mutually assured destruction.”
Villanelle sticks out her pinky finger and wiggles it. Jesus Christ.
Eve hooks her own finger around Villanelle’s, and, eyes meeting, they shake; and it is the first time they’ve touched, skin to skin, since Rome.
For some reason, it takes them a while to let go.
+
Eve loses. In the spirit of her famous lack of sportsmanship, though, she leads Villanelle’s queen on a goose chase about the board before finally admitting defeat.
Villanelle is up and out of the room before Eve can even shake her hand.
“Leaving already?” Eve trails her into the hallway.
“Just looking for another game.”
“Erm. I think we have Cluedo — “
Villanelle spins around, and she’s brandishing a knife.
Eve freezes. “Where the hell did you pull that from?”
“Do you know what it is?”
“Of course I do, it’s a fucking knife. I thought we had a pact.”
“It isn’t just a knife.” Villanelle holds the blade up to the light, turning it slowly so all its edges shine. “They called it Mercy. You see how thin it is, how sharp? It’s not for fighting. It’s for finding your enemy already wounded, mortally, and giving them a final kindness. The death blow.”
“Fascinating,” Eve tells her. “For God’s sake, put it down.”
“Are you scared?”
“Are you insane?”
“Don’t worry. I just want to know, which one would look better on me?” And with this, she hooks the strap-on off the wall and dangles it side by side with the knife. “Or in me? Time to choose.”
“That is really fucked up.”
“I’m just speeding things along. Don’t you get tired of this? Bored, restless? Plus, I bet you love a metaphor.”
“It’s a little heavy-handed. Shakespearean.”
“I don’t know any other way.”
“Have you read him?”
“In French. Stop stalling. I can count, too. Ten, nine…”
“Oh, stop being such a brat,” Eve finally spits, and snatches the duller object out of Villanelle’s hands. It’s weirdly warm; her fist wraps about it easily.
A grin spreads like a stain across Villanelle’s cheeks. “Perfect. Now, we can duel.” She whips the knife through the air, making whooshing noises with her mouth. “No? Well, to bed, then. Lead the way.”
+
The sight of her marriage bed brings with it not second thoughts, but a terrible clarity. The next few minutes (or hours, if all goes well) of her life stretch before her to infinity.
Perhaps Villanelle had a point about — well, about getting to the point.
Villanelle half-skips to fall atop the bed, and bounces once. Eve follows with weaker knees.
Sex with Niko made a certain kind of sense. A tessellation of wants that aligned, generally, in unspoken symmetry. Eve would not talk. Niko would not try. She liked it when he went down on her; she’d rub herself against his facial hair like it were a bed of nails, hold him by the back of the neck and — usually — come in a span of sweet seconds.
He didn’t like blowjobs, at least not to the degree that other men did. It was usually missionary; what he did like was eye contact, kissing, closeness. And Eve, or whatever she was then, had liked it too.
For the first time, Eve wonders — what does Villanelle like? and is briefly humbled.
Although only briefly, for this is when Villanelle chooses to shuck her dress off like it’s rags and not couture.
The floor has never seemed so interesting. Also, Eve is strangely disappointed, for she’s been thinking about that dress — about the hem of it — about working it up Villanelle’s thighs with her own two hands.
But it is not the utmost concern.
“Where did you put it?” Eve grunts out.
“Put what?”
“The knife, God.”
“Nowhere on me. Look!”
Eve looks and, sure, she’s right. In amongst all that lace and silk and nylon and…skin, there’s not much room for packing heat.
Her fingers itch — actually itch — to touch the strip of bare skin at the top of Villanelle’s thighs. Villanelle looks like she knows everything.
“Do you need help putting it on?”
“Yes,” Eve chokes out. Because she is wearing it, now it is obvious she is wearing it; dead certain she’d die without having this. “But is this — are we — just like that?”
“Oh, baby,” Villanelle puts on, voice going high in a mockery. “Do you want to kiss first?”
Not what Eve meant. But — “Yes.” Actually. “Yes.”
It’s like something drops behind Villanelle’s eyes. Eve follows the pulse of her throat. “Then — come here.”
Eve drifts across the room without thinking to take a single step. When her knees hit the mattress, she drops the dildo and half-falls into Villanelle’s arms — she would like to say she was pushed — and finds her hip, her shoulder, her mouth.
It is open from the get go — the kiss, and everything else — so that falling sensation follows Eve even as gravity halts. And warm. Softer than she could have expected. Wet like the inside of a body.
Villanelle goes straight to Eve’s hair and pulls, wraps lengths of it around her hands. Eve goes for her thighs, her waist, her jaw; she can’t decide. The way her flesh gives way. She can press her thumbs into Villanelle’s throat and both of them will groan, as if in pain.
And it does hurt. Eve would swear it; real pain, real suffering. Quite suddenly, she wants to make her happy. Or, if not just that, to make her feel.
She wants to know what Villanelle wants, exactly what she wants, and then to give it to her.
She withdraws. Villanelle follows, craning into her mouth — it makes Eve ache.
“Tell me,” she pants — breathless like a stitch in her side — “tell me what you wanted. Want. What is it?”
Their noses knock together, then their teeth.
Villanelle draws back to squint at her, apparently skeptical. “What for?”
Eve presses back into her mouth. Presses her back into the mattress, her arms framing Villanelle’s face. She imagines having this from the beginning — but, no. It wouldn’t have been the same.
“Because you’re stupid,” she mumbles, tasting Villanelle’s neck — and Villanelle clutches at her skull and presses her there. “Because you make dick jokes, and I didn’t know that. You read Shakespeare in French, and beat me at chess, and you shot me, and I still want to kill you, mostly, and you have to tell me what you want. How you want it.”
Then, because apparently that wasn’t terrible enough, she adds, “Please.”
Villanelle stills. Her hands tight in Eve’s hair, her thighs tighter around Eve’s waist.
Eve blinks her eyes open and stares at a patch of Villanelle’s skin, slick with her own saliva. Then she meets her gaze.
Rome and all its aftermath hits Eve with sudden, timeless force. Her foot misses the top step, falls, and it keeps going, and going, and going and —
“I’ll show you,” says Villanelle.
+
“I didn’t think you would want it like this,” Eve admits. Her clothes lie discarded about the floor. Villanelle is circling her with a hawk’s eye, adjusting the various straps to fit snug.
“I want many things.” Villanelle’s voice comes from behind her, fingers sneaking beneath leather to palm over Eve’s hip. “In all sorts of ways.”
“I didn’t think it would happen more than once.”
Villanelle circles back around to face her and, without preamble, grasps the strap-on at its base. “What do you think now?”
“I think —“ Villanelle does — something — with her hand — and feeling jolts from Eve’s groin straight to her head. “Fuck.”
“Yes,” Villanelle says, nodding, “lots of that. Now lie down.”
Eve hesitates, and that’s enough for Villanelle to take her by the shoulders and walk them back to the bed until they’ve tipped onto it. Their teeth knock again. There wasn’t this much kissing, in her dreams.
Eve is strangely content to stare at the ceiling, hands fisted in the sheets, while Villanelle works her way down.
“You just didn’t want me to forget you, didn’t you,” Eve thinks aloud. “That was what the letters were about. The photographs, reports and things - you did my job for me. You took care of me.”
Villanelle pinches at her side just as she takes a nipple in her mouth — Eve sighs.
“I mean, you’re essentially insecure,” she goes on. “Most psychopaths are, in a way. If you even are one. Not that it matters. Anyway, I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I didn’t. And —“
“Eve?”
Eve looks up; Villanelle is glaring at her from behind the dildo. God, the thing felt less stupid a minute ago, now it just looks like it’ll get in the way.
“Yes?”
“Shut up,” says Villanelle.
“Alright.”
“I need you to watch this.”
And Villanelle puts her lips on her — on the dildo, Eve corrects herself mentally, but fuck if there’s a difference because her hips jolt up from the bed and she feels it right between her thighs. That wet mouth.
“Oh, my god fuck.”
Her eyes slam shut but she can still hear it — loud and performative and obscene. A firm hand at her abdomen keeps her from bucking up into Villanelle’s mouth.
Her brain drops to her toes, she swears, then settles down between her legs, and strains, and every time she manages to open her eyes she sees only Villanelle with her swollen, mirror-pink mouth and flash of tongue, bobbing determinedly up and down the length of the strap-on like it’s something real.
It may as well be, for Villanelle’s thumb finds her clit beneath the harness and that is all it takes for Eve to see white and black and red all at once, and she groans out a sound she’s never heard before, finds the knot of muscle by Villanelle’s neck and grips it hard.
She’s left gaping like a fish for several seconds after it dies down. Villanelle releases her with a smack of the lips.
After some time: “Come here,” Eve croaks. Villanelle does.
+
When the night is thinnest and most weak to morning, Eve wakes.
Her body aches. She still feels it; that phantom limb. Instinctively — it’s the masochism in her, no doubt — she tries to put her pieces together, she grasps for Eve — she reaches for the top step, expecting the fall — and finds —
She finds — something. Some solid ground at the base of her. She’s landed.
She lies there for fifteen minutes exactly, measured by the blinking alarm clock. Then — thoughtfully — she stretches past the crick in her shoulder. Past Villanelle. The tips of her fingers find something cold, and smooth, and definitely not meant to be there.
Ever so carefully, and watching Villanelle’s soft mouth all the while — slow breaths, as in sleep — Eve tugs the object out from underneath her pillow.
It’s that knife. She tests the blade with a fingertip; freshly sharpened, it could have sliced her open if she’d handled it wrong. A stiletto. Made not to slash or cut or graze, but to stab. To go deep, to leave behind nothing but a hole.
Eve slips the weapon back where it came from — she isn’t worried. She knows what she’s about.