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She is born Oksana Mariana Astankova on a cold Friday morning in March and she is a holy terror right from the beginning.
Her parents have six children already, two girls and four boys. Their tiny house is bursting at the seams and so, by necessity, Oksana is the last, but she is certainly not the least in any regard. She fusses, she cries, she screams to let the world know she’s there. She makes her presence known.
Which is not to say that Oksana is a difficult baby. Far from it, actually. She shocks her parents by sleeping through the night, waking like clockwork at 6 o’clock in the morning to whimper a little until someone feeds her. None of the other children did that. Not even Alexei, who was born small and tongue-tied, unable to cry even if he really wanted to.
And so Oksana is unique. She is special because of that uniqueness and, somehow, in spite of it as well. Her parents think she will grow up to be a fine young woman, someone their friends and neighbors will point to and say to their own children, “Look at Oksana. Why are you not more like her?”
She is destined for greatness, her parents think. She is meant to be somebody.
*
Konstantin is not her first handler. Not by far. Oksana works her way through at least four (she doesn’t really keep track) before the Twelve assign her to him. That is, they annoy her and she kills them in some spectacular way and the organization is forced to find someone better, stronger, more difficult to kill.
Better able to handle the cataclysm that is Oksana Astankova.
At least she has a reputation. There’s nothing worse, she thinks, than no one knowing your name. Than walking into a crowd of people and finding only blank faces there. She wants hearts to race when she enters a room, palms to sweat and stomachs to churn. She wants to be enigmatic, frightening. She wants to be inevitable.
And it is to this end that she methodically climbs a ladder of handlers, more of an escalator of them, really. Because Konstantin is the one that gets her out of that godforsaken prison, yes, but the organization has other plans for her. Because the organization wants to pair her up with Tatiana and then Zoya and then Nikolai and then Anatoli and then…
Oksana has an attachment to Konstantin. He’s her savior, her knight in wool pants and a silvery beard. None of these other people rescued her from a life sentence in a cold stony fortress, so none of them have any right to tell her what to do. Who to kill and how and when and where. No, she thinks. Fuck that.
“I only want to work for Konstantin,” she tells them. And they nod and give her a look of sympathy or possibly blatant distaste (it’s hard to tell, really). And they tell her Konstantin already has enough charges to look out for and they’re sorry, really, but she’ll have to make do with someone else.
So she tells them she’ll just kill the others, clear up some room in Konstantin’s schedule. They laugh because they don’t believe her.
And then she makes good on her word. Brutally, thoroughly (and rather creatively, she thinks).They stop laughing. The poker faces turn fetid with a hint of fear. Oksana becomes Konstantin’s one and only responsibility, a captive lioness with a fondness for one particular zookeeper.
The others. The organization. The Twelve. They sit back and place bets on how long poor Konstantin has left before he’s found quartered and drained of blood on his own doorstep. It’s been nice knowing him, they say. He was one of the best.
*
Anna is the one who gives Oksana her other name. Indirectly, of course.
They’re studying poetic forms. Or, rather, Anna is patiently giving examples of sonnets and idylls and iambic pentameter and Oksana is listening to the way her quiet voice lilts over the peaks and valleys of her words. She’s speaking French today, because Oksana likes to listen to her speak French and so always mentions to Anna how much she needs to practice the language.
“What is that?” Oksana asks, pointing to a word on Anna’s list of topics.
“Oh,” Anna says, blinking as her train of thought derails for a moment. “Um, a villanelle? It’s a form of fixed verse with nineteen lines. Very musical. I find them difficult to write.”
“Hmm,” Oksana says. “Villanelle.” She pronounces it dramatically, with all the pomp and theatrics the word seems to deserve.
It is, she thinks, like sinking one’s teeth into a decadent pastry, sweet and savory and the bite of something bitter welling up on her tongue.
“Do you have an example?” she asks.
*
Oksana is not a psychopath. Really, she isn’t. Her parents took her to a doctor when she was seven, a man who specialized in diseases of the brain, her mother said. Just a checkup, her mother said. We’ve just been worried about you, her mother said.
The doctor – psychiatrist, as he introduces himself – is old and stern-looking, with glasses that make his eyes glint like her father’s do when he’s angry. The psychiatrist asks Oksana lots of questions like Do you ever think about hurting people? and How do your parents treat you? and I’ve heard you’ve been having a difficult time at school, do you want to talk about that?
And sure, Oksana has been having a difficult time lately. Her peers are just so utterly stupid and boring. All the boys want to do is poke worms and make gross jokes and all the girls want to do is talk about clothes and show off their dolls. Oksana wants to actually listen to the teacher when she speaks and ask questions like Where do we go when we die? and What makes people different than animals? and all the other students think she’s weird because of it.
So maybe she broke a boy’s nose outside one day while they were on their lunch break. But it was only because he called her a freak and said she probably didn’t know the first thing about how to throw a punch when she threatened him. It was just defending her reputation, standing her ground. She didn’t mean to hurt him that badly. Or, rather, she didn’t really care.
The psychiatrist asks if she wets the bed and Oksana laughs. “I’m not a child,” she says. Her parents share a look.
But it’s true. Oksana isn’t a child, not really. She’s a grown up person trapped in a seven-year-old body. Her teachers call her precocious. Her classmates call her a bitch. Oksana thinks they’re all just different words for the same thing.
And the psychiatrist says there’s nothing wrong with her. So there’s that.
*
No one knows about the bird.
It’s a small thing, scrawny and angry with injustice when Oksana finds it, broken-winged, in the garden. She thinks it tried to fly into the house but crashed, foolishly, into the window. Either way, it lies in a little beige heap just below the rosebush.
Oksana picks it up and carries it to the woods behind the house. It seems a shame to leave such a delicate creature to suffer out in the open.
She follows the footpath down to the stream, cold water rippling over her bare feet as she crosses over the pebbly bottom. On the other side, she sits at the base of a tremendous oak tree, her favorite spot to sit and hide when her siblings are being annoying or boring (or worse, both). She cradles the bird in her cupped hands, watching it twist and turn in her grasp, fighting to fly away like it wants to. It pecks at her, sharp little beak poking at the thin skin between her fingers. She lets it bite her for a while, feeling the pain like ticklish little starbursts, until blood starts to well up and drip fat, red blobs onto the forest floor.
“That’s enough,” she says to the bird.
She pinches two fingers around its head, feeling the fragile tension of bone and sinew under the skin and feathers. With her other hand, she makes a tight fist around the bird’s body. Then, quick as anything, she twists her wrists in two different directions and snaps the bird’s neck, feels the crunch like old leaves as its tiny bones break in her grasp.
The bird is still and limp in her hands. Oksana marvels at the fine line, the gossamer thread between life and death. She looks into the bird’s eyes, ostensibly the same as they were a few seconds before, but obviously devoid of something important. Something vital.
She sets the bird on the ground, nestles it among the dirt and leaves and detritus of the forest. She thinks, for a moment, about burying it deep in the soil where it can disintegrate and become part of something else, but then she remembers the matchbook in her coat pocket.
She pulls it out, slides it open. There are only two matches left. There were eight, originally, but Oksana has already used the rest to make little bonfires of sticks and dry grass and watch the flames eat them up. She shakes out one of the matches, reverent, and strikes it against the box. It takes a few tries to light but once it does, the flame is bright and blinding. She lets it die down a bit, then touches it to the corner of a brown, crinkly leaf underneath the bird.
The flame catches quickly, greedily chases a path along the leaves adjacent it and, eventually, to the ends of the feathers on the bird’s tail.
Oksana watches until the fire has come and gone. She watches until there is nothing left.
*
Villanelle will do anything to not be bored.
In between her assignments – kills ordered by someone with enough money and anger to end a life by a hired hand – she fills all her time with something, anything, desperate to stave off the inevitable void that comes when it all goes quiet.
She goes out and downs shots until her eyes water and she doesn’t feel anything but numbness down to her toes. She fucks someone – a guy or a girl or herself – for hours, until her nerve endings are like wrung-out washcloths and her limbs feel like cooked spaghetti. She buys clothes and pictures and other pretty things. Things to hang on the walls of her apartment, to stuff into her suitcase and wear when she goes out to knife a man in the chest.
Villanelle doesn’t ever kill for fun. She knows other people do, professional assassins like her with too much free time and not enough self-restraint. Some of them kill for practice, some for sport, some just simply for the hell of it. But she doesn’t.
Secretly, deep down, she’s afraid that if she does – if she starts killing strangers in between jobs – that it will lose its luster. That killing, too, will become just as tedious as anything else. Villanelle doesn’t want to lose that. She doesn’t want to hate her job, lose the satisfaction of a clean, theatrical kill. Watching someone die is a beautiful thing, she believes, truly. The gasping, gurgling breaths quieted. The blood pumping sluggishly as the heart stops beating. The soul (if there is such a thing) burrowing like a termite, deep into some distant place, finding a home behind dead, glassy eyes.
She doesn’t ever want to lose that – the fascination of it all. So she does anything she can to kill time. Except killing.
*
Villanelle has been soaking in the bath for hours and the water is starting to become too cold for comfort. It’s alright, though. The feeling of goosebumps prickling along her skin makes her feel more real. Solid. More like a person than a thing.
She’s been feeling like a thing rather a lot recently. Sometimes there are whole days when all she can do is sit on her bedroom floor and pinch herself just to feel something, just to see the blood rush to the surface and turn her skin – elbows, forearms, the space behind her knees – pink like the setting sun. Villanelle doesn’t like feeling like a thing. A machine of parts and pieces working for some greater purpose than she can understand.
She doesn’t like feeling like there are things she doesn’t understand.
Control is important. Villanelle likes to be in control. Always.
She sinks down a little lower in the bath, lets the water lap over new, previously untouched bits of her body, and embraces the chill. It reminds her, vaguely, of home, of being a child in some cold, dark country. But that thought is dangerous, unwanted, and she flicks it from her mind like a piece of fluff on a sweater.
The water closes over her head, sucks her down into the depths of the tub. Almost immediately, Villanelle has to fight the urge to breathe, to float back up to the surface. She forces herself to stay where she is, shoulder blades flush against the ridged porcelain. She keeps her eyes and lips firmly closed and wonders what it would be like to die like this.
But her body is a machine, try as she might to force it to be anything else. And so her lungs remain stubbornly inflated, her diaphragm tightly contracted. It burns, the lack of air, but she savors it, the tight, unyielding pain of it – and it makes her feel alive.
Villanelle knows that the human body can only go a minute or two without oxygen before it passes out. She knows (from experience) that it takes a little longer for the body to actually die, for all those neurons to send out their final distress call and then blink out, one by one. She knows, given enough time under the water, her brain would stop being a rational bit of blood and tissue and become sluggish and stupid. She knows, given enough time, her body would try to breathe anyway.
She’s drowned people before. It’s not her favorite way to kill somebody – it takes far too much time and requires both brute strength and a water supply – but she’s done it. She knows how it’s done.
It’s sick, but she finds herself insatiably curious about how it would feel. Would it hurt? Would it be peaceful, in the end? Would it be like baptism, in a way? If there is a God out there, would she forgive her?
The world starts to go a little fuzzy. Even with her eyes closed, Villanelle can feel the darkness creeping in at the edges of her vision. The pulse of fluorescent lighting behind her eyelids begins to lose its puissance. Her lungs spasm violently with all the breaths she’s not taking, trapped like fluttering birds behind the cage of her ribs. Please, they seem to say. Pleasepleasepleaseplease p l e a s e.
She comes to the surface with a gasp – gulping, gaping, shaking, shuddering.
*
It’s hot and bright and they’re wandering through the ruins and Eve just killed a man with an axe. Villanelle is just talking, blabbering really, about their future – about Alaska and dinner and how they can run away together now and be happy and together and normal.
And Eve is clearly still a bit out of it, but she’s agreeing to Villanelle’s wild, stream of conscious, train of thought plan, so that’s okay. Villanelle can take care of her. Because that’s something she can do, something other people – normal people – do for the person they love. They take care of them.
She can do that now. She can take care of Eve.
It’s all going to be okay. It’s all going to work out. Villanelle feels, for perhaps the first time in her life, the stirrings of some strange emotion. Hope, she thinks.
And then it all goes to shit.
*
Villanelle’s been living in her Paris apartment for three months before she realizes that it’s become more of a home than a safe house for her. It’s not supposed to be, of course. It wasn’t even supposed to be some place she ever went back to after her assignment was finished, the hit carried out (seventy-something year old businessman with a wife and three kids and a decades-old smoking habit – she does like the breathy ones after all). But she’s the darling of the organization – or, at least, that’s what Konstantin promises her – and she likes the flat and the surrounding neighborhood. So she stays.
The old lady down the hall likes to watch her. She thinks she’s being subtle but Villanelle isn’t stupid, so she lets the woman believe she’s getting away with it and tries to put on a show for her when she can.
Villanelle hasn’t had a real home in so long she can hardly remember what it’s like. She has to realize all over again that having a home means she can buy things and make it look pretty. That she has to clean and mop and dust and vacuum every now and then so the accumulations of her existence there don’t start to build up. That she can paint the walls, if she wants. That she can change the taps in the bathroom from some ugly, old, rusty things into shiny, new, gold ones from the antique shop up the street.
That she’s allowed to let her guard down, just a little.
It’s nice to have someplace to come home to after a job. Nice to slump in, tired and bloodstained, and pour herself a glass of champagne from the fridge before sliding, naked, under her silky sheets and sleeping for fifteen hours straight. She never lets anyone else in, except for Konstantin – but only sometimes and never for more than an hour.
It’s good, she thinks, to not always be on the run. She never liked living out of a suitcase or having to dress in borrowed clothes (the Twelve never really shared her idea of fashion). Villanelle likes knowing how the birds sound outside her window. She likes being able to count the hours and minutes by the big, booming sounds of the church bell down the street. She likes watching the little square of light in her kitchen every evening as it creeps along the floor until the room is covered in shadow. Sometimes, she lies on the hardwood floor and lets it meander a path along her skin, turn her limbs hot then warm then cold in slow succession.
She can talk to herself, here. She can turn on her radio and sing along to French songs she hardly knows. She can dance barefoot across the floor, going from room to room like she’s entertaining one crowd after another. She can feel alive in her own skin, bask in the gloriousness of uninterrupted alone time. She can measure her days by the rhythms of her own being, not by anyone else’s timetable, and she can live inside other people’s lives whenever she wants, just by watching them outside her window.
There’s no place like home, Dorothy says in The Wizard of Oz. Villanelle watches the picture flicker across her TV screen and clicks her own heels together. One, two, three.
*
Oksana is fourteen when she realizes she really and truly is different from everyone else. It starts innocently enough, just her and about twenty of her closest not-quite-friends at a birthday party for one of their classmates. Oksana is only here because Natalya (her one and only maybe-actually-friend) asked her to come and she has a strange compulsion to do anything Natalya asks of her.
They’ve been here maybe an hour, lounging around someone’s living room, and Oksana is already planning her escape route. There are family pictures hanging up on every wall and scattered across the mantel above the fireplace. She thinks maybe she can “accidentally” bump into something hard enough to make one of the picture frames fall, then even more “accidentally” cut herself on a shard of glass. Most fourteen-year-old girls are frightened of blood that isn’t their own, so Oksana figures it will be a good enough excuse to head home early.
Her desire to leave only deepens when the other girls (predictably) turn their meandering conversation toward the topic of boys. “What is something you like most about a guy?” one of them asks.
“Ugh, his arms,” replies the girl seated next to her.
“I like his laugh,” says another.
“His smile.”
“His voice, especially if it’s really deep.”
When it’s Oksana’s turn, the others look at her expectantly. She opens her mouth to say something, but draws a blank. What does she like about the boys their age, the ones in their classes who like to call her weird and freakish, but also look at her with a dark sort of hunger in their eyes? I like when they shut the fuck up, she wants to say. I like when I glare at them and they look frightened.
“His eyes,” she says instead. The other girls aww and move on to other, more frivolous topics.
Oksana spends the rest of the evening with her own thoughts. Something has changed tonight, she thinks, something deep and innate inside of her. She’s different from all the other girls, she realizes. But how?
As the conversation keeps edging back into boy-territory, discussions of crushes and ranking of their male classmates and endless gushing about Dmitri or Pyotr or Vladimir, Oksana starts to put the pieces together a little more snugly.
The thing that makes her different, she discovers, is that she doesn’t feel that way about other people. Not the way these other girls do, prepubescent and head-over-heels for some boy they hardly know outside of school. Oksana tries to conjure up an image of one of their classmates in her head, trace his features in her mind’s eye. She imagines kissing him, touching his face, holding his hand as they walk home from school. The image, when it comes, makes her feel unstable, vaguely disgusted.
She’s always known she’s not a romantic, but it seems that she hardly wants to be around a boy at all. Or anyone, for that matter. People are loud and obnoxious, too full of themselves, emotional and irrational. She hates them, all of them. The anger rises sudden, unbidden, in her chest. Bubbles of disgust float up, effervescent, in its wake.
She pictures the boy again, envisions snapping his neck like a twig. She imagines the light petering out behind his eyes, the telltale markers of life leaving his body. She thinks about other ways to kill him, instead. Perhaps a knife in between his ribs, pulling it out and letting the blood drip heavy and syrup-like down his chest. Or else a gun, her fingers wrapped around cold metal, eyes closing briefly, reflexively as she pulls the trigger, a wound blossoming bright and vermillion from the center of his forehead. Maybe she would strangle him, wrap a length of rope tight around his throat and –
“Oksana?” Natalya is looking at her, head tilted to the side. Oh. Oksana has retreated too far into her own head.
“Yes?”
“I asked if you were ready to go home.” She looks around the room sheepishly, at the groups of girls in twos and threes having several variations of the same conversation with one another. “Parties aren’t really my thing.”
Oksana amends her previous statement. Perhaps she does like some people, just not in the same way they do. Does that make sense? She’s not sure.
“Yes,” she says. “Let’s go.”
*
Villanelle meets Eve Polastri in a hospital bathroom and everything changes.
She’s not thinking about much of anything when it happens. One moment she’s sitting in a bathroom stall, tucking knives into her stolen hospital scrubs and gearing up to kill the only witness left to one of her recent jobs before the British intelligence services can get anything out of her, and the next she’s walking the six feet from stall to sink and coming face to face (or, rather, face to hair) with the most beautiful woman she’s ever seen.
It’s not often she’s rendered speechless, but Villanelle suddenly finds herself stopped in her tracks, unable to do anything but stand dumbly at the sink and watch this Asian woman with amazing hair attempt to work the curly, dark strands into an updo of some sort, watching herself in the mirror with a focused but faraway look in her eye. It’s not until the woman turns to look at her and ask if she’s okay that Villanelle is shaken out of her reverie.
She walks to the door – bumbling, clumsy, entirely unlike her – and wonders if, perhaps, this is what people are talking about when they mention love at first sight. She pulls the door half open then thinks better of it, stops, turns around.
“Wear it down,” she says in a soft voice, accentless, allowing herself one last look at this strange, beautiful woman before slipping into the hallway to find the witness and tie off that loose end.
She’s distracted the whole time she’s carrying out the job, knifing a nurse and a guard and god-knows-who-else as an endless litany of Who are you? Who are you? plays over and over in her head.
Villanelle goes home that night to the tiny London safe house and falls into bed still covered in blood-soaked polyester. She lies flat on her back and thinks about the woman in the bathroom, hazy glimpses of memory flashing behind her eyelids. She fucks herself with two fingers in a deep, punishing rhythm, imagines pulling the woman’s hair and biting the space where her neck meets her shoulder.
She comes thinking about the look in the woman’s eyes as Villanelle left the bathroom, some odd combination of confusion and curiosity – Do I know you? and I want to know more.
*
Anna is, by all accounts, an outlier. Oksana knows by now that most people live day-to-day with emotions that consume them, feelings and flirtations that fill their days and bodies and every waking thought. She knows, too, that the emotions she experiences, in comparison, are ghosts, shadows at best.
So when she looks at Anna one day and feels something richer, deeper, more than just a stirring of lust or longing or curiosity, but rather a robust, sickening affection, she’s (it’s safe to say) a bit alarmed.
It’s not like Anna’s even doing anything out of the ordinary. They’re both just sitting at her kitchen table, in the domestic little apartment she shares with her husband, Anna reading over Oksana’s latest essay, pen scratching notes and corrections in the margins. Oksana is doing what she usually does as well – studying Anna’s face out of her peripheral vision while she pretends to be working on another assignment.
But in the space between one moment and the next, something shifts. Oksana looks at Anna’s familiar face and feels a strange, all-encompassing pull in the space behind her bellybutton, the heavy, leaden thump of something falling into place.
Just then, Anna looks up at her. “Are you going to actually get anything done today?” she asks with a laugh. “Or are you just going to keep staring at me?”
Oksana blinks, caught-out and caught off-guard. “Oh,” she says dumbly. “Um.”
“What, do I have something on my face?”
“No,” Oksana says. “I just.”
And she’s never been very good with her words, no matter how many languages she can speak them in. So she does what she does best (better) and lets her actions speak for themselves. She leans across the table and kisses Anna right on the corner of her mouth.
The pull in her stomach becomes stronger, more intense, and she gives into temptation, lets herself kiss Anna more deeply for a moment before pulling back, tongue brushing against the seam of her lips as she goes.
“Oh,” says Anna after. There’s a blush starting high on her cheeks, staining her skin a delicious red.
Later, once it all settles in, she will be cross with Oksana. She will rage and tell her off, say things like I have a husband and You’re my student and We can’t do this. Oksana will have to dig her proverbial heels in, push harder and dial up the charm until she gets her way. Eventually, Anna will give in and let Oksana destroy her, love her until she burns her up. Oksana will go to prison and Anna will think she’s dead until Eve tells her otherwise, until Oksana shows up at her house with Konstantin’s unbelievably annoying daughter and Anna blows her own brains out onto the ceiling.
But for now, Anna is flustered and dumbstruck and Oksana just grins at her, feeling (for the first time) a piece of her heart that wasn’t there before.
*
By comparison, kissing Eve for the first time is a surprise. With Anna, it always felt inevitable. Even before Oksana started to feel things – real-people feelings – for her, she always knew, eventually, that something would happen between them. Had to.
But with Eve, Villanelle is so used to the longing, the aching, all-consuming desire to kiss her, hold her, just touch her, that it’s started to feel old-hat. She wakes up every morning thinking of Eve, falls asleep thinking of her, eats and showers and cleans thinking of her. It’s exhausting, unbearable. It’s disgusting.
There have been so many close calls, but each time she thinks it’ll happen, that finally, finally, this is it… it doesn’t happen. There was that time in Eve’s kitchen, pressing her up against the fridge with a dull kitchen knife nestled at the base of her throat. There was that time in Villanelle’s apartment in Paris (God, she misses that place), curled up like two quotation marks on Villanelle’s bed, her thumb stroking back and forth (finally) along the curve of Eve’s cheek. There was that time in Eve’s kitchen (again), holding her against the sink, scythe-like knife poised just above the spot on Eve’s own abdomen where she’d stabbed Villanelle.
Paris. London. The Forest of Dean. Rome.
And here they are, finally, at the end of all things. The proverbial dust has settled, the disagreements hashed out, the misunderstandings mended. They are friends, or something approaching friends at least. More importantly, they are both free. Eve – from her marriage, from MI-6, from enemies in the shape of friends and colleagues. Villanelle – from the Twelve, from her past, from the pressures and suggestions of polite society.
They are together again in this liminal space. It’s not such a bad life, Villanelle thinks, being normal. She used to scoff at such a thing, look down her nose at normal people with their normal lives and think, That will never be me. But it is now, she and Eve travelling the world as they please, Villanelle continuing to track down and take out the targets Konstantin assigns to her and Eve courteously looking the other way.
And life is good. Really, it is. Villanelle is content for perhaps the first time in her adult life. Settled. So it comes entirely as a surprise when Eve turns the tables on her.
They are in a bathroom, because of course they are. That’s where all the most pivotal moments of Villanelle’s life seem to happen. She’s standing at the sink, soaping up her hands over and over and trying in vain to scrub the vestigial traces of blood out from underneath her fingernails. Eve is “helping” her, nervously hovering at her shoulder and holding out the bottle of foaming hand soap whenever Villanelle needs it.
“Do I want to know?” she asks.
“No, I don’t think you do,” says Villanelle. “It got messy.”
Eve laughs. “I can see that.”
Villanelle rinses her hands one last time and turns off the faucet with a huff. “This is useless,” she says. “I’ll just cut my nails in the morning.”
Eve passes her the hand towel.
“Thanks,” Villanelle says, then turns to face her. She never gets tired of looking at Eve.
“Oh,” says Eve. “You’ve got – ” she points to her own temple. “Hold on, let me just.”
Eve flicks back on the faucet and wets a clean washcloth. She folds it up into a manageable square and brings the damp cloth up to Villanelle’s face, dabbing at the skin just above her right eyebrow. “There,” she says after a moment. “All clean.”
But then she stays right where she is, their faces inches apart. Villanelle doesn’t move either, hardly dares to breathe. She gazes into Eve’s eyes and waits for her next move. “You okay?” she asks.
“God,” Eve says. “You’re so…”
But Villanelle never learns how that sentence ends because Eve kisses her instead.
It’s sudden and intense, a little sharp as Eve’s teeth snag on her lip. Villanelle gets her hands on Eve’s face, angles her head until they’re kissing a little more comfortably, and then it’s just wet and warm and fucking perfect.
They pull apart after a moment, needing to breathe and, more importantly, turn off the faucet before the sink overflows. “I’m sorry,” Eve says, flushed and breathless and luminous. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
“Do it again,” says Villanelle.
So she does.