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EVE
Under the yellow light of Eve’s table lamp, the bear could have passed for red. It was lying face-down on the floor, its little heart speaker clutched in her hand. No longer playing. At some point, not tonight, it would die out, hissing shriveled whirs each time she let her fingers press the button until at last it fell silent. A piece of junk that no longer held any meaning. She would glance at it one day and strain to remember where she’d gotten it from.
Or she might throw it in the dumpster outside and save her future self the trouble.
On her sixth birthday, her mother had gifted her a teddy bear. No frills or pretty costume like this one had. It was plain, with fuzzy brown fur and very large brown eyes. Eve carried it with her everywhere, to school and the store and the playground. She slept with it each night, and sometimes the fur would shed and she would notice clumps of it days or even weeks later, clinging with static along her bedspread or to her clothes as she skipped around the house.
Months after the gift, and hours past her bedtime, she woke from a nightmare and sprinted down the hallway to her parents’ room, which was empty. Although she knew if she got caught, she would get punished, she sneaked to the living room and peeked around the doorway. They’d been huddled together on the couch, their solemn, sad faces illumined in the glow of the television screen. It was a documentary, or maybe a movie. She couldn’t remember the details, except that it was not made for young children to see. But as she stood there watching it with them, her tiny hands wrapped around her stuffed bear, she’d trembled and felt untested emotions settle coldly in her veins: terror and bewilderment.
Eve did not make a noise. Quietly as she could, she crept back to her room, across the white carpet, into bed. She stared at the bear and listened to herself breathe in the dark. With one hand, she reached out across the vast expanse of her covers to touch it, tucking her thumb around its ear. And then, mind empty of thoughts, she dug the nails of all ten of her fingers into the soft fur of its stomach and began tearing it open and ripping out the bunched white fluff inside.
In the morning, her mother had been distraught. “Why would you do this, Eve?” she asked, and the hurt in her voice made Eve hunch her shoulders and start to cry. Harsh, shuddering tears that went on for a long time, even as her mother knelt on the floor and pulled Eve into her chest, wrapping both arms around her, kissing her hair. Eve could not look to the bear for comfort because she had killed it.
Now Eve lifted one foot forward and pressed her toes slowly down on the pink fur, then back up again. She thought of Rome and the axe in her hands, the thin splatter of blood that ran across Villanelle’s cheekbone as they spoke together in the fallen sun-dried ruins. It had been so light and delicate, so unreal crimson, it seemed almost purposeful. Like something that came out of a makeup bag, as carefully arranged as anything else about her.
Eve squeezed the heart more tightly in her right hand. She wished, briefly, that it would warp and collapse against the skin of her palm, and then she dropped it onto her pillow and stood. She walked to the kitchen, filled a glass with water, and drank until she felt the chill drop and expand in her stomach. She would not be able to sleep there.
You wish I was here. That had always been Villanelle’s problem. She thought, even deep in the tender whorls and canals of her brain, that Eve needed her; she only had to wait. It was a childish belief, fairytale-like. Everyone gets what’s coming to them. Open whichever gate you’d like, but in the end the road is the same.
Eve took the glass with her to the bathroom and brushed her teeth. When she spat and glanced up to her reflection, there were small dots of toothpaste dashed across the mirror. She stroked a finger over her eye where the bone had struck Villanelle’s face and bruised. It would get worse over the coming days, darkening and spreading along her skin; people would ask questions and she would be long out of answers that made sense to them or to her.
Somewhere in a drawer, Eve had buried the lipstick Villanelle gave her, violent red with the hidden blade, the one she’d cut herself with. That was what the kiss had felt like. One even slice along her lip, suave and quick and tangy. Something unexpected that happens and makes you think that of course it happened, it was always going to happen, and though it stings that sense of rightness sinks in until the pain is nothing, it never existed in the first place, and all that is left is the warm familiarity and the stark bright knowledge that it’s going to happen again.
It was possible Eve had some fairytale-like beliefs as well.
She wrapped both hands around the edges of the vanity and leaned forward until she could feel the tautness in her arms. A strand of hair caught in her mouth. Eve allowed herself to consider, for a moment, what Villanelle had asked her in Rome.
A cabin in Alaska, a sky flowing with stars. No one else around for miles. Her own head resting on Villanelle’s breast as they reclined in bed, and Villanelle’s fingers running through Eve’s hair as she sang to her. The happiness bubbling in her voice until she was laughing, and Eve was laughing with her and tilting her head back to look at the smug softness narrowing Villanelle’s eyes. Eve taking Villanelle’s face in her hands and coaxing her down to kiss her again, kiss her just like she did on the bus, but open and easy and heated. The thousandth time, not the second.
Eve let go of the sink.
“I wish you were here,” she said, dully. It was alright to admit it just once.
She ran a cloth under the faucet and wiped the toothpaste from the mirror. She filled her glass again. And then she picked up the bear.
In bed, as Eve lay on top of the sheets, she reached out and clutched the pink fur, tucked her thumb over the ear. In the morning, she would toss it. She would find a way to take some other road. Tonight she thought of what she’d seen on Villanelle’s face when she pulled back. Awe and fear. Eve had put it there. She had done that to her.
VILLANELLE
Once Villanelle had left letters for a woman she thought she loved, but she hadn’t really loved her. It was something she could laugh at now. And she did laugh as she lazed on the floor of her hotel room, spooning three flavors of half-melted ice cream into her mouth.
The time hadn’t been wasted. It had made her wiser. Villanelle ran the tip of her tongue over her bottom lip, catching spare chocolate and still tasting Eve there, the pride and delicious fury of her. Villanelle thought she’d lost her chance, been reckless, more reckless than she’d meant to be. But she’d been given another shot. They were even now; they’d both killed the other, and they’d both come back to life again.
Villanelle set her ice cream aside, licking the leftover traces from her palm. She climbed up onto her feet and, with arms spread wide open, fell back on the bed so that it bounced with her weight and she cackled, chest heaving. She had been kissed. Often for Villanelle, kissing was something she did because others wanted it, and because she was curious. Everyone did it a little differently, and it felt nice enough. Rarely did she seek a kiss just to seek it. And today she hadn’t even needed to, because Eve did it for her.
She would have found the bear by now. Villanelle smiled into the duvet, cheeks hurting with it, wondering how it might happen. Eve would walk into her apartment and hear Villanelle’s voice right away, yanking open her bed and looking around in frustration, wondering when it had been left there. Or another image: Eve curling up in her blankets to sleep and only noticing it then. Smiling, like Villanelle was smiling now. Keeping it by her side to listen to Villanelle speak as she nodded off, just as she had done in Italy.
When Villanelle first told Anna that she cared for her, Anna had looked back at her with drawn brows and sorrowful eyes and said, “Oksana, I’m not sure you can care for anyone. Not in the way that matters.” It had hurt then and it still hurt to remember now. But Anna was wrong. What Villanelle felt was no small, trifling burst of joy or satisfaction, easily crushed in a new minute or forgotten with the next job and kill.
The love she had for Eve was like some vaulted jewel Villanelle hadn’t realized she’d locked away. It was daring and obscene. It sat heavy in her hands and slipped away like water when she loosened her grasp. It ran to her and away from her, mercurial, but it never fully disappeared from her field of view.
She hadn’t ever wanted anything like this before. She wanted it so much that she knew, in her heart, she could give up all the other parts of her life that made it worth living. Clothes and house and money and blood. She could give it all up and somehow be more content as long as she could keep this, keep Eve, that love that people told her she wasn’t built for and would never be able to have.
After the kiss, the smooth fine wetness of Eve’s lips unsticking themselves from hers, she had blinked at Villanelle with eyes wide, and all Villanelle could think of were the times they could have and should have kissed. At the ruins, the two of them whispering to each other so gentle and close, when Villanelle had lifted a hand to brush her face. In London when Villanelle thought she’d been sent as Eve’s murderer, and instead Eve asked for help, and she’d grasped Eve’s waist and felt her relax into the touch, pliant and stubborn at once. Or on Villanelle’s bed, back in Paris. Before the knife.
It nearly didn’t matter that they hadn’t. Villanelle could close her eyes and imagine they had. She had the feeling now, the physical and hungry sensation of it; she understood what it was to be kissed by the woman she loved.
Laughing again, Villanelle turned over onto her back, staring up at the ceiling. Spider-thin cracks ran over the textured paint and met in webs, spiralling outwards.
Eve had said no to Alaska, but perhaps it was for the best. They could go anywhere. Patience was not a friend to Villanelle, but she held no qualms about leaving Eve the time she needed to decide. She could give her that kindness.