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“Katya?,” Vivienne groaned, sleepily, as she stumbled her way through the Poppy’s Parisian safe house. She had awoken to find her girlfriend’s side of the bed empty, which was not unusual as her darling Katerina was prone to jet lag and typically slept almost as little as Nikolai did, yet something about waking up in an empty bed in such a...difficult...city for them both to be in had filled Vivienne with anxiety and prompted her to get up in search of her little spoon.
The penthouse was still and in complete darkness, save for the orange glare of the streetlights spilling through the windows and the sliver of light escaping from beneath Nikolai’s door. Usually when she couldn’t sleep Katerina would be found working her way through the novels lining the bookshelves in the common room or talking with Nikolai, as she was the only one who could understand exactly what it meant to be terrorised by one’s own dreams. Yet, given that Nikolai’s bedroom door was closed and their voices could not be heard from the hallway, Vivienne knew that she was not in his company.
Rather than immediately panicking she recalled how mesmerised the American had been by the view from the rooftop the first time they’d brought her to Paris. Katerina wouldn’t risk venturing out into the city in the dead of night without informing anyone that she was leaving, not when her allegiance to the Poppy was as common knowledge in underground circles as any other member’s was.
The rooftop was where she’d find her.
The spiral staircase that lead up onto the roof felt treacherous at the best of times, yet climbing it in complete darkness and whilst still groggy from sleep at three in the morning was an accident waiting to happen. Vivienne almost tripped in the long hem of her robe more than once as she fumbled around in the darkness, her bare feet almost freezing to death on the cold and freshly polished mahogany wood.
The winters night air was so cold that it actually felt damp the second that it hit Vivienne’s skin, the sheer red fabric of her robe providing little protection from it. Yet the cold didn’t bother her when she spotted Katerina sitting cross legged on the roof and gazing at the Eiffel Tower in wonder. After giving up her smartphone not long after joining the Poppy she had reverted back to using an old seventh generation iPod Classic to hold her vast music collection, the silver device was held in one of her hands with her earbuds attached to it. Her sketchbook and a bottle of her favourite champagne, Heidsieck 1907, were sat at her left side, yet she didn’t look like she’d touched either of them in some time, instead she was so completely lost to her thoughts and the glorious sound of Freddie Mercury’s voice on her favourite Queen songs that she actually jumped when Vivienne sat down on her right.
“I woke up and you weren’t there,” she commented as Katerina paused her music and removed her earphones. Despite the fact it felt like she was merely stating the obvious, there was a question in there that she knew Katerina would pick up on, even if she didn’t want to ask it outright. Paris was where they’d gotten to know each other and where Vivienne had begun to fall in love, yet it was also where she’d manipulated and hurt Katerina in ways that she would never forgive herself for. It was a difficult place to be. Maybe time didn't heal the wounds exactly, but it gave one a kind of armor, or a new perspective. A way to remember the heartache with a smile instead of a sob. “The bed felt far too large and too cold without you.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” Katerina shrugged. She looked as if she’d been sculpted from the cool colour of the winter night, an angel alighted on a shore that waited for Vivienne alone. “You should go back to bed, sweetheart. We both know you’ll only suffer if you attempt to stay up with me when my insomnia is being so volatile.”
“Then I’ll suffer.”
“But, Viv—“
“No buts. You are my sunlight in the dark and the ground beneath my feet, Katya, and there is nowhere I’d rather be than wherever you are,” she interjected with a kiss on her temple. “I would like to know what’s on your mind, though...you seemed pensive when I found you. You still do, in fact.”
Katerina hummed, softly, in response as Vivienne rested her head on her shoulder. Her kiss was returned in the mess of raven hair that was still tangled and slightly frizzy from hours of sleep, and then Katya rested her head against Vivienne’s. They were as close as they could possibly be without actually sitting in each other’s laps, with the heat from Katerina’s body providing comfort despite the cold. Paris was a very old city and they were both young and healthy, yet nothing was as simple there as it was other places, not their jobs, nor the sudden money their bounties always provided, not the dusky winter moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who sat beside her beneath that moonlight.
“I was just thinking about how different my life is now than it was on my last first night in Paris,” Katerina said, eventually. “It’s amazing how much can change in less than two years, isn’t it? Like, day-to-day not all that much seems to change but looking back everything is different.”
“It is,” Vivienne agreed, as she nuzzled her cheek against her shoulder. Part of her wanted to bottle how safe she felt in that very moment, so she could take a drink of it later if loneliness and fear ever left her feeling parched. “As much as I usually detest change when it happens out with the realms of my meticulous planning, I will admit that my life is now a good sort of different that I couldn’t have anticipated back then.”
People had called Vivienne impetuous for as long as she could remember. And then as she’d grown it’d become rash and reckless. In her time with Katerina, she had grown up enough to see the truth of it. From her earliest memory, she had always acted first and thought about consequences of her actions later. Perhaps it was because she'd felt alone for so long. No one had ever been her sounding board, her best friend. Until meeting Katerina she really hadn't had someone with whom to strategise or truly work through any of her problems.
If there was anything that Vivienne had learned in her time with Katerina it was that: in love people find out who they want to be; in chaos they find out who they are. As a girl she had always thought it was what she wanted: to be loved and admired. Now she thought that, perhaps, all she’d really wanted was to be known as deeply as Katerina had come to know her. Thoughts — even fears — were airy things, formless until one made them solid with their voice and once given that weight, they could easily crush the heart, yet Katerina knew every one of Vivienne’s thoughts. She knew her like no one had ever known her. She made her feel whole.
It seemed like every time she left France she managed to forget how gently time passes in Paris. As lively as the city was at all times, there was a certain sort of stillness to it that one couldn’t find in any other city in the world, a peace that managed to lure everyone in. Everyone who ended up there had two stories: the life before Paris and the life they lived there. If one wanted to pray to an obscure god or live in a renovated bus or wander around in barely functional couture fashion, no one in Paris was going to say crap about it. In Paris, with a fine bottle of champagne to share with a loved one, one could just be. It reminded her how fragile life was, how fragile they were. She may have had a strong-as-steel exterior, but it protected a candyfloss heart.
Love.
It was the beginning and the end of everything, the foundation and the ceiling and all the air in between. It didn’t matter that she was twisted and healing. Her darling Katya loved her and she loved her back. She saw what she really mattered. She knew love, and she had been blessed by it.
“I know we have frequently discussed what happened here before but ever since we landed I have felt sickened by guilt,” Vivienne confessed, quietly, before taking a long sip of the open bottle of champagne. Liquid courage, as it were. “When I woke and found your side of the bed empty I immediately thought the worst.”
“The worst being what?”
“That you couldn’t sleep because the trauma lingering in that bedroom was too much for you to bear. That you’d finally become sickened by me.” She sighed and adverted her eyes toward the dimly lit city streets below them. The street lamps gave off an eerie radiance that stained the trees and silvered the frosty road. Relying on people for comfort had never felt natural to her. The last thing she wanted was to give someone else the power to hurt her. Self-preservation was the one life lesson she’d learned from her mother, yet with Katerina it felt like it was the most natural thing in the world. She trusted her in ways that she had never trusted anyone else. “You can run away from your life and your past, but there’s no way to distance yourself from your own heart...and mines started doing a number on me.”
“Wounds heal. Love lasts. We remain.” The artist brushed her fingers against Vivienne’s jaw, gently coaxing her so that they were once against looking in one another’s eyes. “I promise I’m not up here breaking whilst you’re sound asleep. That wouldn’t do any of us any good, would it?”
Vivienne whispered her name and leaned in to kiss her. It was a kiss that, once begun, never really ended. Interrupted, yes. Paused, certainly. But from the very moment that their lips had first touched without any poisonous lipstick in the way, Vivienne had seen the whole of her life as only a breath away from kissing Katerina again. On that night on their chilly rooftop in the middle of Paris, it felt almost as if they were performing the delicate task of binding their souls together, creating a whole comprising their two separate halves. At her kiss, something opened up inside the once scraped and empty interior of her heart, it unfurled. Her mushy romantic novels made all the sense in the world, she realised that the landscape of a woman's soul could change as quickly as a world at war could.
The small pocket sized sketchbook that went everywhere with her was pressed into her hands. It was more than a decade old and she was continuously scribbling in it, yet Vivienne was the only other person alive who was allowed to peruse the pencil masterpieces held within its spiral bound pages.
Her hands trembled slightly as she flicked past snapshots of small town Florida life that she hadn’t been apart of, past the faces of interesting strangers and people she’d heard stories about whenever her girlfriend talked about her time at art school, past interesting pieces of architecture that existed in New York, past the skylines of the cities she had visited since joining the Poppy, and past candid portraits of their friends that had been drawn amidst the daily hilarity that always seemed to occur in the common rooms of their safe houses throughout the globe. The truth was that her sketches were an extension of who she was, what she thought, how she felt. It took perfect concentration to capture the exquisite pain of personal happiness or tragedy on paper. One had to be there one hundred percent, in the moment.
The very last page that had been filled up was an image of Vivienne, only she was seeing herself like she never had before. She was fast asleep with her messy hair concealing most of her face as she hogged the majority of the blankets on the bed. Wearing nothing but a pair of panties and her favourite rings, her face was completely free of the cosmetics she usually wore whenever she acted as the artist’s muse. She wasn’t posing. She wasn’t pretending to be something she wasn’t.
“It is beautiful. You drew this just now?,” she whispered.
“You looked adorable, so I sketched the outline in the bedroom and then came up here to work on the shading,” Katerina replied. “I do all my best shade work whilst a little bit drunk.”
Heat rose to Vivienne’s cheeks and she buried her face in Katerina’s shoulder with a groan. Her compliments were nothing short of witchery as far as she was concerned. “You thought I was adorable?”
“That’s surprising?”
“Listen, I have been called everything under the sun by drunken straight men who are too dimwitted to realise where my attention is drawn but no one has ever called me adorable before,” she said, unable to fight the smile pulling at the corners of her lips. “Probably out of fear of being poisoned and whatnot...but that is not the point. The point is your compliments always make me happy.”
“The fact that being called adorable had you this flustered only makes you even more adorable in my eyes.”
Vivienne giggled a little louder than she meant to, her high pitched flustered shrieks of joy practically echoing in the stillness that surrounded their safe house. Being that she was so dominant and concerned with exhuming the essence of self control at all times, she had never been the type to act like such a teenager...even when she was an actual teenager. Yet the embarrassment that would come had anyone else to see her completely defenceless never came. Life was impossibly fragile, she had learned much earlier than the average person. Being that she was lucky enough to have a loving partner, she intended to hold onto her with infinite tenderness. Yet, what she hadn’t known until Katerina had come into her life was how love could erupt into existence like the big bang theory and change absolutely everything in you and everything in the world.
Katerina was the one treasure she had managed to procure without actually setting out in search of. A relationship like the one she had with her, couldn’t be gone in search of. It simply had to be waited for. Sort of like the weather. One could look on the horizon and see a bank of black storm clouds. That didn’t necessarily guarantee rain the next day. It might just as easily dawn bright and clear. There was no damn way to tell. All you could do was keep moving and live your life and hope you found it.
“When did you draw this one?,” Vivienne asked, whilst turning to the pages before her most latest drawing. An image of Jett and Remy running a muck in a bridal boutique was glaring back at her. A ridiculously detailed lace veil was over Remy’s head and Jett was standing behind him, posing like Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio on the bow of the Titanic.
“On our last day in Milan while you and Niko were finalising coming here,” Katerina replied, before taking a sip of the champagne. “I think we got banned for life from that little boutique...but Remy is a beautiful bride, don’t you think?”
She smiled and brushed her fingers over the photorealistic image, humming quietly in agreement. “You’d be a beautiful bride, I think.”
At that, Katerina practically choked on her champagne. It was oddly satisfying to see her so unduly flustered. “Says the woman who scoffs at every wedding we happen to wander past—“
“Every straight wedding, my darling. The Church of Lesbianism strongly advises against such things...and as I am an avid follower of said religion it feels like my civic duty to whisper snarky comments. I look at people who aren’t us and I automatically hate them, I just can’t help myself,” she shrugged, unable to hide the smirk that was working it’s way onto her face. “In all honesty, though, I think if it were you in the veil and white dress the Earth itself would stand still.”
“You think so?”
“I know so.” Vivienne took a deep breath to steady herself. Even with all the risks they took within their daily life, love still felt like the most exhilaratingly dangerous choice of all. Yet the one thing she knew now was that some chances came and went, and if you missed them, you could spend the rest of your life standing alone, waiting for an opportunity that had already passed you by. She wasn’t going to miss any where Katya was concerned, even if she was a little afraid to put some things into words; that fragile, impossible hope of hers, and even more afraid not to. “Theoretically speaking, if I had to steal the most magnificent diamond ring the world has to offer and then asked you to marry me...what would you say?”
“Theoretically speaking,” Katerina teased, lightly, “I’d say yes...even if you didn’t pull off the jewellery heist of the century beforehand.”
“I don’t do things my half measures, darling. If I’m asking you to marry me you will absolutely be gifted with a ring to wear that’ll show everyone who dares look at you that you’re spoken for by someone they could never measure up to...theoretically, of course,” Vivienne beamed as her heart rate began to quicken. She felt like she had to fight every one of her natural instincts to keep from shrieking with glee at Katerina’s answer. It was the truest fact of her world. She loved everything about this woman, her smile, the way she often mumbled nonsense in her sleep and giggled when she got nervous and sang beautiful renditions of Queen songs in the shower. She wanted her to be her wife. Every part of her was screaming about how she needed it.
“You’d really ‘theoretically’ want to marry me?”
“Theoretically, I wouldn’t want to marry anyone but you. Is that really so unbelievable?”
“I just...I never imagined that anyone would ever want to marry me. I never thought that I’d be that for someone, you know?”
“Everyone else in the world is an idiot.”
“Everyone, save for you?”
“Everyone, save for me— well, maybe you— no, no. You want to marry me so you’ll have a lifetime of handling my flare for dramatics and temperamental nature...I’m not sure that’s a sign of sanity,” she teased, adoringly, with a kiss on the bridge of her nose. “I love you...and it feels like I've loved you forever.”
“I love you, too, Vivienne. I love you so much.”
“I never knew it could be this way...that love could catch you when you fell.”
It was the Magic Hour, the moment in time when every leaf and blade of grass seemed to separate, when the distant sunrise, burnished by the wintery mist and softened by the coming morning, gave the world an impossibly beautiful pale golden glow. Vivienne felt wiser than she’d been before. She knew how fragile life and love were. She would love Katerina until she was an old, old woman. She was the love of her life and in this terrible, frightening world, she knew she had stumbled into something incredibly unexpected. And she would not ever let her go again.
Her smile was far more radiant than the slowly awakening city, though. It was one of the few smiles that Vivienne knew was only reserved for her. The sort that made her skin glow and her eyes twinkle as if she had flecks of golden glitter woven throughout her warm amber irises. The sort that continued to knock the air from her lungs and weaken her at the knees. Because of her, Vivienne knew what mattered most, and it was not what she had lost in this life of hers, it was not getting revenge on all who had wronged her, it was not the millions of shiny trinkets and priceless masterpieces that she’d acquired over the years. It was her memories, her family, her love. Like Katerina had told her: wounds heal. Love lasts. they would always remain.