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It’s raining in New York, raining and cold, and she doesn’t know what she expected. The lights of Times Square are reflecting in the puddles at her feet, blurred and distorted, and there’s a steady trickle of cool rainwater running under her turned-up collar and down her spine. The name on her passport is Marion Bouchard, she’s an aspiring poet on vacation in America for the first time, and she’s lucky to be alive. Only one of those things is a lie.
“Not much cover here, is there?” says the woman standing next to her. She has dark hair and darker lipstick, and a hat that covers most of her face. But her voice is familiar, and so are her hands, as she reaches up to offer Delphine a light for the damp cigarette she’s been chewing at the end of for at least fifteen minutes.
“Thought you were supposed to be laying low,” she says.
“Thought you were supposed to be dead,” says the woman, tipping her hat back, just for a second, just long enough for Delphine to see her eyes. The last time she saw those eyes, those hands, she was gasping for air, nearly dead on the floor of a Berlin safe house, and Lorraine knelt over her, checked her pulse, and then whispered one word in her ear, lips brushing against her skin: disappear.
She’d been hard to find, afterwards. Delphine supposed that made sense. She was supposed to be dead, and Lorraine was, according to her sources, under investigation and placed on indefinite leave. Also, confusingly, either a Soviet double agent or American. She has doubts about some of her sources, but standing beside the woman again herself, Delphine wouldn’t be surprised by anything. She’s the kind of person who feels like she could do anything, be anyone, if she set her mind to it, and Delphine wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Soviets and the Americans and the French and half a dozen other governments besides thought they owned her loyalty.
She wonders, a little, where Lorraine’s true loyalty lies, and then decides it doesn’t matter. She expects the answer is probably herself, and Delphine’s not so naive as to think that’s uncommon in their line of work. She can live with that, more than she ever could before, now that she’s legally dead and been written off and cast aside by her own superiors. In the regard, she really is who she claimed to be at customs: a lost tourist alone in a strange country.
She shrugs elegantly. “Sorry to disappoint you. Are you going to offer to show me the sites?”
“This isn’t my city,” says Lorraine, “but I do have an apartment, if you need a place to stay.” She looks down at Delphine again, and there’s a look that passes between them that reminds her of why she was attracted to her in the first place.
Lorraine’s apartment is, apparently, too many blocks uptown for either of them to walk in the kind of shoes they’re wearing, and they end up on the crowded subway, Lorraine holding onto the rail overhead, Delphine pressed against her, holding onto her in the swaying car, pretending she’s only doing it for balance and because of the crush of the rush hour crowd around her. When they emerge, the street is quieter and the buildings lower, though the people still hurry past just as quickly. This, Delphine thinks, would be a nice place to photograph. It was a city for meeting people, and you could see it in the streets if you knew where to look, if your camera had good enough lenses. She’d left her camera behind in Berlin, but surely she could find another in a city as big as this one. She’d said she was trying to become a poet, but photography and poetry weren’t so different. Both required patience, and an appreciation for details, and something else less easily defined that you had to be able to feel or the rest was meaningless. In that way, she supposed that espionage was just another type of art.
Lorraine’s apartment is also nothing like her hotel room in Berlin. There are no neon lights, just the glaring white-gold of the streetlights below and the harsh sterility of the single lightbulb in the desk lamp on her floor. Her mattress is also on the floor.
“In my defense,” Lorraine says, “I haven’t been here long, and I don’t intend to be.”
“Neither do I,” says Delphine.
“Then why are you here at all?” says Lorraine, taking off her coat—long and dark, like some kind of noir detective—and slinging it over the back of the single chair at her kitchen table. At least she has a kitchen table, even if all it’s holding right now is a bottle of vodka and a few cans of soup. All she’s wearing under it is a sweater and some very tall boots and a very short skirt.
“My country doesn’t have much need of me right now,” says Delphine. She doesn’t take her coat off, not yet, not until Lorraine invites her to. “There is no call for a rookie operative, dead in her first year managing a city, and even less for an aspiring poet who wants to see the world and make the most of her unexpected new-found anonymity.”
“I see,” said Lorraine, holding her arm out in a mockery of chivalry. “Suppose I’d better take your coat.”
Delphine hands it over gratefully, not unaware of the way Lorraine’s eyes follow her movement, flicker up and down her body and her clothes that maybe show a little more skin than strictly necessary, and she lets herself smile, slow and suggestive. Lorraine’s fingers brush against hers as she hands over her coat, and Lorraine smiles back.
“I have to wonder, though,” she says, “why I am able to pass through the world so unnoticed. I know that you must have told your governments, whichever ones those are, and my own, that I am dead, but what I do not know is why.”
“Do you really need me to answer that?” said Lorraine. She sits on the mattress, leans back against the wall, gesturing for Delphine to do the same.
“I can probably make an educated guess,” Delphine says, sitting next to her, her weight causing a dip in the mattress and letting gravity pull them closer together, “but I’d like to hear your explanation.”
Lorraine is silent for a moment, fingers tapping against the floor off the side of the mattress, like she’s itching for a cigarette but not desperate enough to stand up and search for one. “I’ve given everything to this life,” she says, finally. “I’ve lost people, lost myself, in the service of government and ideals and causes, and I’ve betrayed all of those things in the name of duty. Maybe I thought that you should have the chance that I never had, to make it out with a little bit of your soul intact.” She puts her arm around Delphine’s shoulders, tentatively, and Delphine moves closer to her, resting her head on her shoulder, encouraging her. “Or maybe I just didn’t want to lose anyone else I cared about, and that seemed like the easiest way to protect you.”
She sighs, shakily, after saying it, and Delphine remembers what she’d said before, about the truth getting her killed. It can’t be easy for her, being vulnerable like this, and Delphine is grateful to her, not only for their time together but also for giving her a way out. She wanted to help her country, to protect her people, and she still does, but she’s starting to realize that maybe this isn’t the kind of service she thought she was offering, that maybe this life asks for more than she’s willing to sacrifice. She wants to keep her soul. She wants to love, and love without fear of betrayal or the belief that this kind of emotional vulnerability is a weakness.
She closes her eyes, her face nestled against Lorraine’s neck, one arm slung across her torso, her hand splayed carelessly across Lorraine’s stomach. “Thank you,” she says.
Lorraine presses a kiss to the top of her head. “Don’t mention it,” she says. “You saved me, too.” That makes Delphine sit up, positioning herself so she can look Lorraine in the eyes. “The picture you left me,” Lorraine says. “It saved my standing with MI-6, made them buy my cover story.” Delphine raises an eyebrow, and Lorraine sighs again, reaching out to stroke Delphine’s cheek, to let her hand come to rest buried in Delphine’s hair. “I didn’t realize I could care about anyone anymore,” she says, slowly, quietly. “I thought that part of me had died. And then you came along and reminded me what it was like, to feel this way about someone.”
When Lorraine kisses her, it’s soft and apologetic, nothing like the way they kissed in Berlin, shoved against walls, pinned down on a bed, all teeth and tongues and reckless energy. Lorraine’s lips taste like rainwater and ash, and her hands drift across Delphine’s back like a whisper, a sigh, a question. A question that Delphine answers, fairly definitively, by pressing her body closer to Lorraine’s, her hands working their way up her sweater, and she feels Lorraine shiver. Maybe it’s because her hands are still cool from the rain outside, cold against the warmth of Lorraine’s skin, and maybe there’s something more to it than that.
When Delphine wakes up the next morning, she’s not sure where she is. It’s not an unfamiliar feeling; she’s woken up in more stranger’s beds in strange cities than she’d care to admit. But this time when she looks over, she sees Lorraine laying beside her, the morning light streaming in through the crooked window shades and casting a halo around her tousled hair. She’s still sleeping, her face open and relaxed and peaceful, an extension of what Delphine saw in her eyes when she told the truth, and she’s the most beautiful woman Delphine’s ever seen, let alone woken up next to.
There will be more questions to answer soon, questions about the futures, which will not be solved so easily, but for now, Delphine pulls the covers back over her head and rolls closer, their bodies curving to fit together on this mattress meant for one.