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Four weeks in a hospital bed – it’s the longest you’ve stayed still your whole life. The river water did more damage than the bullets, well, not really. The first was so clean a through and through it lodged into Eve, the second and third glancing blows, but enough to fuck with your liver. Four months of no champagne when all you really want is to toast the insanity that you survived.
But no, the sludge of the Thames was worse. Hundreds of years of human waste down there, you should have known better. By way of exits though, it was dramatic. And effective.
You’re half grateful for the fever, the infection, the delirium. It let you skip out on most of those weeks, the deep down itch of your wounds, the horse tranquilizer like medication pumped into your veins that made your mouth taste like rotting salmon. Or maybe that was the river water. Anyway, your dreams were thick and shiny and preferable, save the odd interruption of Eve’s hand in your hair, her head by your hip. That was okay, too, to wake to.
You were half certain she’d be gone when you surfaced, from the river – though you can’t remember that – and your injuries. She always has been before. You’ll admit, to only yourself, somewhere between fever and delirium, that you’ve made it hard for her to stick around on purpose. It was easier that way, to drive her away yourself instead of having to watch her leave you. Not that you’ll ever say it out loud, not that you think you need to.
By the time the illicit, back alley doctor deems you fit to leave this perfectly legitimate hospital you’re coherent again. You’ve spent days begging Eve for good food, better drugs, and softer sheets because she’s there, you’re hurt, and all you know how to do is take.
She only snaps once as she’s helping you into a beater of a car, one hand on your un-punctured shoulder, you didn’t know she knew how to be so soft, when you plead for champagne, for real pastries and fresh fruit. She tells you to stop whining and gets into the driver’s seat. You’re asleep before the car is in second, exhausted and sweat stained from the meager steps to the car.
You don’t track where she takes you, maybe that’s naïve, but you don’t. It could be trains or ferries or planes she loads you into, shuffles you off of, it doesn’t matter. You’re lost in some kind of sea of exhaustion and pain and opioids, until you wake up in a bed, a nice one finally, memory foam and silk sheets. It’s sunny out and she’s gone but for the first time in months, maybe a year? you feel rested.
Necessity forces you out of bed to pee but you don’t bother to look around while she’s gone. The bed is soft and you lounge, dozing, in a fraction of sunlight that makes your bandages itch slightly less while you wait. You don’t worry that she’s left you, she’s brought you this far already. The air smells fresh like spring through a cracked window but you’re still too muddled to figure out if that’s right or not.
You don’t realize you’ve fallen back asleep until the door slams and wakes you. Eve’s rustling is immediately recognizable, the sounds of her carrying things, muttering to herself. You can see the shape of her through a frosted glass divider.
“Hi,” your voice comes out ragged, unused and you wonder for the first time how long you were asleep. Nothing in your body reads right anymore, especially not your sense of time.
Eve starts, then abandons whatever she was fiddling with to sit on the edge of the bed. You wrap around her like a snake, wounds pulling but not ripping, cheek against the side of her thigh, knees tucked up by her other hip.
“Hey, you’re awake.” She runs her fingers through your hair and you cringe at how greasy it feels. How crusty.
“Do you want something to eat?”
Your stomach doesn’t know up from down, hunger from nausea, so you shake your head. “I want a shower, a real one.”
There were sponge baths in the hospital, not at all as sexy as you’d like them to be and the last time she washed your hair it ended with the both of you crying. Not the finest hour.
Eve’s mouth twists into a frown. “I don’t know if you should stand for that long.”
“I’ll be fine. I’m getting better.”
“What about a bath?”
“I don’t want to sit in my own filth, Eve, come on.” You purse your lips and compromise. “What if I sit in the bath and run the shower head?”
Eve grumbles, evidence of your victory. “There’s a bench in the shower.”
You grin at her and it feels uncomfortable, unfamiliar, stitches in your cheeks instead of your back. “Excellent.” You don’t have to remind yourself to move slowly when you get out of bed anymore.
Eve follows with a hovering hand to the bathroom that you actually take notice of this time. There’s a free standing claw foot soaker tub that looks divine, not that you’ll tell Eve that yet, and a separate shower stall encased in glass, complete with a marble bench. The place is nice, you realize, expensive nice, and exactly your taste. You wonder if you gave Eve the passwords to your bank accounts while you were feverish. You’re sure you would have told her anything.
The room is cool and tiled. Eve stands by your hip and helps you get your t-shirt, bland and boring but worn in and soft so it doesn’t catch on your bandages, over your head.
It’s clinical, the way she touches you now. Not so much a coldness but a distance. Like a pair of latex gloves that she uses to change your bandages but all the time, even when it’s her bare skin to yours. That’s what makes you nauseous, you think, or it’s the painkillers, the antibiotics. You want back inside her skin but there’s a barrier there now that’s never been before. Not even when you first met and she kept herself under lock and key. Then, she’d touch your cheek, the back of your hand, barely a glance of her skin against yours and it would feel like she was reaching inside you and tugging at your organs. Now, she doesn’t even meet your skin.
You tug at her clothes in return, neglect to help her with your own, and she shoots you a glare.
“Eve,” you whine.
“Villanelle,” she returns, stern. No nonsense. All business. Boring.
“Come on.” You slip your fingers up her stomach beneath her shirt, ignoring the business of your hip propped up against the bathroom sink, supporting most of your weight. “Get naked with me.” You’re breathless though, and not in the sexy way.
It’s pity, you think, that allows you to pop the snap on her trousers and push them to the floor, but that’s not quite right. You don’t know another word for it. For the pinch of her expression when your breath catches on a hit of pain, for the detachment when she pulls off soiled bandages and airs the bullet holes marked into you to the light. There’s a temptation in you to call it love, but even though you’re miles from Rome, you won’t make that mistake again. You tell yourself still that you can’t possibly know what that looks like.
You catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror. Your roots have grown out, your cheekbones hollow, sullen, the bags under your eyes blue and purple like a punch in the face. That’s just your face. You turn away before you can see the rest of your body, don’t want to know how it’s changed.
Eve’s changed too. She looks tired, older. Stunning like she always does, no shortage of fire in her eyes or bounce in her curls, but there’s a weight to her that she’d always resisted carrying.
Or what do you know. In the past year you haven’t even had two full conversations with her. Still, you’re pretty sure.
Eve turns the shower on. You drop your underwear and watch her try not to look. It lacks a certain level of appraisal though, is again more clinical. You wonder if she’s trying to calculate how much weight you’ve lost, if she wracks her brain, pulls forth memories of that bloody camper van to compare the muscle tone of your thighs, the rolls of your stomach. You don’t have any of that anymore. Your bones are so sharp they stab, same as when you were a little girl who never had enough to eat.
Hunger doesn’t claw at you now like it did then, doesn’t consume your every thought and action. Most of the time, you don’t even notice it. Does that count as growth or destruction? Loss or gain?
You peel your bandages off, quick so the tape pulls all at once.
The water’s not as hot as you usually like it but your wounds are raw still, tender still, the fresh skin can’t take the heat. It’s still close enough to perfection as you duck your head under the spray. Your abs burn, and your back, your thighs and calves, all the muscles that aren’t used to supporting your weight alone, but they hold you even though it hurts. That’s enough.
Eve hovers, shirt tossed aside, just as naked as you are, a foot outside the spray, watching with an eagle eye, like she could catch you if you fell. Except she probably could now. She’s certainly stronger than you. Her own injuries were superficial; the infection didn’t get into her.
She’s bad at this, at taking care. You knew it long before that shitty hotel in Margate and it’s only become more obvious. It’s in every word you speak to each other and each one you can’t manage. There in how lost she looks when you stumble.
She can still see more of you than you wish she could, than you mean for her to. There are things you don’t tell her, how your spine has started aching to compensate for all the weird ways you have to move around your wounds, how sometimes when you’re speaking the word slips right off your tongue, not just in English but in French and Italian and every language you’ve ever known a word of, all the way down to Russian, and you can grasp at it but you can’t find it again, how much it hurts when you wake up in the middle of the night, between doses of painkillers.
She knows anyway. All of it. How? She’s Eve.
So when the pain ramps up to an eleven but you don’t let your muscles quiver Eve still holds out a hand and guides you onto the marble bench. Her palm on your elbow is the closest thing to intimacy.
“Let me wash your hair, properly this time.”
The heavy smell of roses joins the steam in the air. You let your eyes fall shut and focus on regulating your breathing while she scrubs shampoo down to the root of your hair with the pads of her fingers. It’s not nearly the grossest thing she’s done for you in four weeks.
It takes three rounds of scrubbing and rinsing but finally you can start to feel the texture of your hair again. The marble is heavy, or maybe you’re heavy, as you sit down onto it. You lean your head back against Eve, hair wet on her stomach, and sigh. She runs her hand down your cheek, past your jaw, over your neck, and rests it where the muscle meets your shoulder. She doesn’t touch your wounds, doesn’t even look at them.
“Just let me detangle it a bit, then you can lie down again.”
She steps away, leaving with a hand held out to ensure you’re steady, to grab conditioner you suppose, but it leaves you cold, even with steam billowing, the shower stall filled with it. It makes you shiver, to have her two feet away instead of one.
She comes back with the bottle. You press your open mouth into her belly just to feel something, or something other than the thick thud of your over exerted heart and the rivers and floods of pain that carve through you. She tastes like warm water, a bit metallic, and soap.
“Will you lay with me?”
You feel her lips meet the top of your head. “Of course.” She holds onto your bones, fingers always just a little too tight. “Ready now?”
What else can you do but nod? But raise your head and meet her worried eyes? You try out a smile you think might be encouraging. It’s so different. From two months ago, or six, or a year and a half. It couldn’t be less similar.
“Yeah,” you say, “ready now.”
She combs conditioner through your hair, tugging at knots, splitting ends, but compared with the way she usually yanks through her own it’s gentle. Still, as you rinse you both come away with handfuls of dirty blonde. Strands wrap around your fingers, biting, little nips of easy pain, and you rinse them away to get clogged in the drain.
You toss a towel over your shoulders and limp back to the bed, muscles quivering from exhaustion. A shiver wracks up your spine away from the humidity of the bathroom, deep and trembling, that makes your breath catch in your throat and the room spin deliriously from pain. You try your best not to collapse and do a mediocre job.
She follows rather blindly, slathers an ointment over all your wounds, disinfectant maybe, or maybe not; you don’t ask. Medical tape sticks badly to your damp skin, she presses it on anyway, too hard.
You touch the scab on her collar, muddied red and dry. It looks like it’s getting ready to fall off. Humans heal from the outside in, skin crusting over first, then layers of muscle and connective tissue, inefficient, but certainly less gross. Your wounds don’t gape open to the air while you wait for your body to remember how to stitch itself back together. That would be worse for her, you think. Maybe better for you though, if you could watch it all seep out of you in puss and blood, if you could spray saline through the hole in your shoulder and rinse yourself of that night, watch, as the weeks drag on, as the tissue reforms and the light stops passing right though you.
But no, you’re all stitches and scabs. Itchy, but you can’t scratch. There’s a trust you’re supposed to have in your body, in its ability to heal, and you’re not sure when or where you lost it.
You resist the urge to pick at Eve’s scab, but it’s poor and your desire obvious. She takes your hand in one of hers and uses the other to press harder on the texture of the tape. It hurts but it doesn’t really hurt, not when most of your pain is from exhaustion. One shower and you could sleep again for ten hours.
She holds your hand against her sternum, between her breasts.
“Does it still hurt?”
She shrugs. “A little, not really.” The bullet missed bone and arteries, lodged in her muscle, shallow, velocity spent after passing through you.
You nod, your head feels too heavy. You tug her back into the mess of sweaty sheets and pillows, wincing as your clean skin hits them, but you don’t have the stomach to suggest changing them.
Eve little-spoons you, she always does. You think again and again that it should be awkward or uncomfortable since she’s so much smaller than you, but it’s not. She wraps an arm around your waist and a leg around your hip, tucks her chin into your shoulder.
“Do you think you can eat something? You should before your next painkiller.”
You sigh. You want to kiss her a little, but you’re not sure if she’d let you. Her bare breasts press into your back and you can feel her pubic hair on your ass, but you’re not sure if she’d let you. It’s a weird time.
“In a minute.” You tug her arm tighter around your waist. There’s a whole schedule that you don’t know of meals and painkillers and antibiotics. She might even be counting your calories. Her way to help, her way to cope. You can acknowledge that – that’s growth, you’re sure – but still just want her to lay in bed with you.
She strokes the skin of your stomach, mostly undamaged, even though you can feel her practically vibrating with the need to do something, to help somehow. You don’t know how to get it through her head that this is helping.
“You haven’t asked many questions.”
You shrug, a calculated move of your good shoulder only, it doesn’t hurt much. “I guess I trust you.” Is that new? Or have you trusted her this whole time? Blind faith put in her hands, dripping like a freshly excavated lung. Over and over again, no matter how many she dropped or tossed aside.
But you gave her what? Really, be honest. Words, threaded with lies more often than not. Your body, yes, but what value is that to you? You gave just to want in return. It was transactional, but who can blame you when your whole world existed like that. Not anymore.
“You really don’t care where we are?”
“Not really.” Another shrug. “Unless we are in Antarctica or something, then I will be pissed.”
She snorts, an ugly sound made pretty. “I don’t think you’re allowed to just go to Antarctica, you have to be a scientist or whatever.”
You ease onto your stomach, everything so slowly, slowly, slowly that you want to scratch through your skull down to your brain. It’s worth it to look at her. “Well, I don’t know, maybe one of your soldier boy’s friends does penguin research or something.”
She rolls her eyes. “Jealous.”
“That was the point, wasn’t it?”
She blushes, or almost. Her eyes skitter to the wall behind you. It’s agony but you reach out and touch her cheek, feel the warmth there, bring her back.
“I guess, yeah.”
Your hand drops and you pant a little but you don’t let it damper your smugness. “You really didn’t have to work that hard at it, I am always jealous with you.”
She looks pleased with that. How very Eve of her.
“Kiss me?” You know you can’t reach out and pull her in, that you would only hurt yourself, that she would only pull away to check you’re okay.
Her smile softens, you share in the knowing, but she cups your cheek and presses your lips together. It’s soft. Too soft.
You want her the way she was in the middle of the road somewhere outside of nowhere. Taking and taking and reaching for more. This doesn’t feel like Eve, but rather whatever mask of self-control she always wears. You’ve never liked it when she wears it with you.
You bite down on her bottom lip, hard enough to feel the skin split, to taste it too. She moans, a choked, aborted sound, that you swallow down to keep tucked between your ribs.
“Vil,” she complains, half breathless, pulling away. You wonder what her heartbeat feels like, covet a piece of it for yourself.
It thrills you a little every time she calls you that. No one’s ever given you a nickname before, you’ve always had to come up with them yourself.
“You’re too gentle with me,” you protest, knowing it will get you nowhere.
“You were shot three times in the back.”
“Still,” you say, “I’m not dead.”
She cuts into you with a glare, the little heat behind it thrilling. “I know that.” She doesn’t like it when you talk about dying.
“You’re not going to break me.”
Her grip on the back of your neck tightens. “I know that too.”
“Do you?” you scoff.
“I-“ she turns her head to stare at the ceiling. You twist your neck and bite the meat of her forearm. Dig in with your teeth until you see her wince, then you pull back and soothe over the impression of your bite with you lips.
“I don’t want to hurt you again.”
“You’ve never had any trouble before.”
She winces, but doesn’t deny it. It might be a little cruel of you to say it, when you both know exactly how true it is. That doesn’t stop you though.
You touch the hollow of her throat and feel her breath, then the mark on her arm that’s wet with your spit. She snags your hand and pulls it into her chest. She’s thinner too, you think. Stress. All the rest of it. She’s so much worse at taking care of herself than she is at trying to take care of you.
“What food did you buy?” you offer, a reprieve.
She makes a face, dramatic, your style. “Your options are still pretty slim.”
“Come on,” you whine. “I haven’t thrown up in like a week.”
“Four days,” she reminds you, unnecessarily, puking might be the thing that kills you. It hurts enough to.
“Well, maybe if I was eating foods I like I wouldn’t be sick.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works.” She gets out of the bed. Your face falls into a pillow.
“I want good wine and a fresh baguette and nice cheese.”
There are tears puddling in your throat and you don’t know where they came from. They feel ridiculous, you feel ridiculous, to cry over food. You close your eyes and swallow hard, count your breathing so it stays even.
Eve tucks your hair, damp and falling into your eyes, behind your ear. She rests her hand on your cheek.
“I’m so tired,” you whisper. Your voice cracks, the tears shimmer through.
“I know.” She kisses the corner of your mouth. “It’ll start getting better soon.”
You don’t really buy it, but you’ll trust her anyway.
“Will you kill me if it doesn’t?”
She laughs. “Yeah, sure, Vil.”
You don’t believe her at all.