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Eve isn’t sure what has possessed her to cancel her flight back to London. She supposes that it is the same instinct that led her to Paris, so many months ago. It’s the same instinct that’s led to now, to her following Dasha from the bowling alley back to a lavish home in the heart of the city.
She supposes some would call it reckless or impulsive. Eve just knows there is a feeling, something that says that this is what she has to do. She doesn’t question it, and it’s gotten her into trouble before, but she doesn’t care.
Dasha clearly doesn’t expect Eve to follow her, stalking her through the city like a mountain lion hunting its unwitting prey. Dasha underestimates her, and Eve takes full advantage of it. The woman doesn’t look back even once on the walk to what Eve assumes is her home.
When she arrives, she has to pause for a moment to take it in because of course, Dasha would have money, working for the Twelve. Working with Villanelle.
She is perfect killing machine.
Eve waits until Dasha has gone in before she creeps closer to the home. There are windows open in several places, and she wonders if she could climb in through one. She isn’t sure what she’s expecting to find.
She knows what she’s hoping to find. Who she wants to find.
She hates that she’s let herself come here, but she isn’t about to turn around now.
She hears voices and freezes in place. Dasha, insistent, and someone else… muffled, Eve can’t make it out. She waits a bit longer. Then, incredibly, she hears footsteps coming towards the front door. She ducks behind a wall and hopes she isn’t noticed. Dasha struts out the front and away down the street.
Eve considers following her again. That’s what she was doing when she left the bowling alley. She was following Dasha for a reason, to see what she was up to, to get answers, to find something useful. She had come to Barcelona for Dasha.
She pulls away from the wall and looks at an open window. She grits her teeth and climbs in.
Once she’s inside, she doesn’t bother sneaking around. Maybe that’s foolish of her, but she finds that she doesn’t care. Her heart is beating a thousand miles a minute, thrumming like the wings of a hummingbird, pulsing its rapid beat through her veins. She pauses in a hallway and looks up. There is an ornate chandelier. She wants to reach up and touch it. She almost does, and then a broken sob sounds down the hallway, and any thought of chandeliers is forgotten. Eve moves towards the noise.
She registers that it’s a bathroom, where this noise is coming from. The door is ajar, and Eve is pretty sure she knows who she’ll find but she can’t help but hold her breath anyway as she pushes the door open.
Villanelle sits on the floor, back propped up against what is probably a glamorous bathtub. She’s in a black tank top and tight, black pants that look so good it should be criminal, and yet Eve almost doesn’t notice. Her eyes trail over the woman, her head tilted back and her throat bobbing with the effort of not letting out another sob.
Eve stares at Villanelle. Villanelle stares at the ceiling.
“Eve.”
No hi . No you found me. Eve isn’t sure what to make of it. She moves into the room slowly, like she is trying not to startle a hare, and Villanelle makes no move to acknowledge her presence. Her gaze stays fixed on the ceiling. Eve wonders what she sees, up there, amongst patterns and dust. Eve is much more focused on what’s on the floor. She notices the stab wound in Villanelle’s arm as almost an afterthought, but she uses it as an excuse to move closer.
“You’re hurt.”
She shrugs off her jacket and lets it fall to the floor. She kneels down, eyes Villanelle warily as if she might bite. Villanelle doesn’t move. Eve sits next to her so that she can look at the stitches. The skin is red and puckered and angry. She thinks about touching it. She resists.
“What are you doing here, Eve?”
Eve glances to the side, trying to understand this new version of Villanelle that she’s never seen before. The other woman still stares upwards. Eve can see the evidence of crying; faintly glistening tear tracks and red eyes. Her heart breaks, a little bit, even if she doesn’t quite understand why.
“I came to find Dasha.”
“She just left.”
“I know, I watched her go.”
Villanelle doesn’t react to this, but she closes her eyes and keeps them shut, and Eve watches new tears slide down her cheek. She doesn’t know what to do. She settles for something being better than nothing .
She places her hand softly into the crook of Villanelle’s arm, just below the wound. “Do you want to talk about this?”
Villanelle shakes her head slightly. Eve takes a deep breath and moves her hand upwards. As gently as she can possibly manage, she leans across the woman so that she can reach behind her head, forcing her fingers between the lip of the bathtub and Villanelle’s skull, trying not to pull at her hair. Villanelle gives a little, an inch, a fraction of an inch, and Eve can slide her hand where she wants it. She uses the new position to tilt Villanelle’s head up, to force her to look at Eve. If she ever opens her eyes, that is.
Eve moves her hand down from the back of Villanelle’s head, ghosting over her ear, before settling along her cheek. She thinks of how she’d done the same, in her old house, months ago. She wonders if things between them will ever cease revolving around and around like a carousel, and actually begin to move forwards. She finds that she wants to move forwards.
Eve lets her thumb brush a tear that has stalled on Villanelle’s cheek, wiping it away messily. “Do you want to talk about this?”
She watches as Villanelle swallows hard and opens her eyes. They find Eve immediately and they are sad and hopeless and heartbreaking. Eve had once thought that those eyes looked lost. That had been nothing compared to now. Villanelle is drowning in an ocean. Eve wonders how many people have passed by and decided not to throw her a rope.
Villanelle doesn’t answer her immediately. She stares, emotional, and it startles Eve to realize that for the first time that she can ever remember, she feels patient around Villanelle. There is no need to rush, there is no hurry to this conversation. No attempt to kill each other, or someone else, and no attempts to flee the scene.
Villanelle holds her gaze until she is ready. “I killed my mother.”
Eve takes a moment to register the words, and then she feels something snap into place. A piece of a puzzle that is by no means solved, but the whole picture is a little clearer with this new addition.
“When?”
“Last week. In Russia. I went home to my family and I-” she swallows. “I had to kill Mama.”
Eve lets her thumb stroke Villanelle’s cheek as she talks. “Was it hard?”
Villanelle tries to scoff but it comes out as a watery kind of choke. “No.” She pauses. “Yes.” She frowns. “No.”
Eve bites back a smile, but even then she feels her lips quirk slightly. It isn’t funny, but it is endearing. Eve is sitting across from Villanelle on a bathroom floor in Barcelona, cradling her jaw as she tells her how she murdered her mother. And she finds it all endearing.
She can tell that Villanelle doesn’t want to give out more details about Russia just yet, so she moves her other hand to rest it near to the freshly stitched-up wound. “And this?”
Villanelle shakes her head and scowls, turning her gaze to the cut. “Stupid man. A politician, he did not know when to quit. But I still got the job done because that is what I do. It is all I am good at.” Her voice cracks at the end.
That’s all she knows.
Eve looks at Villanelle, some kind of shattered, looks down at the wound, and then looks back. “I don’t think so.” She says it with the same assurance as when she’d said it to Dasha. The same conviction.
Villanelle looks up at Eve. “You what?”
“I don’t think so,” Eve echoes. “I don’t think it’s all that you’re good at. I don’t think it’s the only thing you know.”
Villanelle’s eyebrows knit together. “You hardly know me, Eve.”
Eve smiles a sad smile and drops her hand from Villanelle’s face. She sees fear flash in her eyes for a split second, worry that Eve will abandon her like so many others, but Eve simply readjusts so that she is sitting side-by-side with Villanelle, and although this means she can’t look into her eyes anymore, she brings an arm up between them and rests is across the back of Villanelle’s shoulders. She lets her hand push ever so gently on the side of Villanelle’s head. The young woman caves, and then she is resting her head on Eve’s shoulder.
“That’s not true,” Eve breathes the words serenely. She thinks that she has never felt so calm in her entire life. “I know you are Russian.”
Beside her, Villanelle scoffs for real this time. But small, just for show, hiding pain underneath. Eve continues.
“I know you can speak at least five languages. I know you are creative, it shows in the way you work. I know you like being in control. I know you want to spend your money on fancy things. Clothes, perfumes, weapons. I know you loved Paris. I know you loved Anna. You didn’t love Nadia. I know that when you thought you’d killed Konstantin, you felt something like sadness, if not quite the same thing. I know you wanted to kiss me before I stabbed you in Paris. I know you wanted to kiss me in Rome. I know you weren’t the one who tried to kill Niko. If you did that I would never forgive you, and you care too much about how I feel about you to risk it over him.”
“Moustache is dead?” She says it while facing into Eve’s shoulder, her face buried in the material of Eve’s turtleneck.
“Not quite,” Eve replies, and she knows she should feel guilty for the levity with which she speaks of Niko’s attempted murder, but she doesn’t find it in herself to care.
“I would never.”
“I know.”
“You do know.” Villanelle tilts her head up and gazes across the bathroom, refusing to look at Eve. “You know more than I gave you credit for. I…”
Eve stares across the bathroom, too. She resists the temptation to turn and look at Villanelle. She thinks that if she did, she might spook the woman away from whatever she is going to say.
“I don’t want to do this anymore.”
Eve listens. Eve remembers. Those words spoken in the dim light of her kitchen, sitting across from Villanelle with leftover shepherd’s pie. This, now, feels lightyears away, with a different version of Villanelle. A different version of Eve. Eve might actually believe her, this time.
“Can you get out?”
Villanelle sighs. “Konstantin has a way. I do not trust him but it is my only option.” Villanelle turns so that she can look at Eve. Eve senses the movement and turns to look at her in kind. “He says when I go I have to leave everything behind.”
The money, the clothes, the lifestyle, Eve supposes. And then-
Oh.
“Oh.” It sounds lame. Eve wishes she knew what to say.
Villanelle has nothing better either, it would seem. They sit in silence for a few moments. A heaviness settles, something to do with the unexpectedness of this reunion, the rawness of the emotions, and the fact that Villanelle may actually leave her for good, this time.
Villanelle breaks the silence. “You kissed me.”
Eve swallows and nods. It wasn’t what she expected, but she almost wonders if it is the natural conclusion.
“Can I kiss you?”
Eve doesn’t swallow. She nods. And then- “Wait.”
Villanelle hasn’t moved yet, but Eve says it urgently. This is wrong. She has learned things, tonight, and they change how she views this. Villanelle is always the one who wants. She wants attention and reassurances and some form of love that Eve isn’t sure anyone on earth could know exactly how to give. But she thinks she knows how to take the first step.
“Can I kiss you ?”
Villanelle’s eyes widen and Eve knows she’s hit the mark. “Yes,” she breathes.
It is different in every possible way from how Eve had kissed her on the bus. She weaves her hand back up to settle on Villanelle’s jaw, and they are both facing forwards so they are craning their necks to look at each other. Eve leans in slowly, watches Villanelle’s eyes strain to flutter shut but the other woman doesn’t seem to feel confident in letting them. Eve realizes now more than ever that being with Villanelle is a game of sacrifice. She closes her eyes.
For one second it is nothing more than a kiss. A press of lips. But whether by the shock of Eve actually kissing her, or the emotions of her entire night, Villanelle can’t remain unaffected for long. She gasps against Eve’s mouth and Eve feels the air move against her. She wonders if she should pull back, reassess, but Villanelle hasn’t moved away and Eve finds she doesn’t want to. She presses back in again, insistent.
Villanelle is surprisingly pliant, at first. She really doesn’t seem to believe that Eve has kissed her. That Eve keeps kissing her. She lets Eve drag her fingers from her jaw to the hair behind her ear, lacing her fingers through and anchoring them tight. Villanelle places one hand on Eve’s thigh, turning her torso now in earnest, desperately wanting to get closer.
It is soft and chaste until it isn’t. It is all of Villanelle’s breathy gasps and sighs that have tied Eve into knots. They are vulnerable in a way that she hadn’t expected, but they are sexy too, and she feels herself fighting against a long-buried instinct. The same that had led her to fuck Hugo in a hotel room. The same that had told her to keep the audio recording from the teddy bear. To put on the perfume, to wear that black dress. It claws at her, trying to get out, and Eve tries with all her might to keep it locked in. This is not about passion. This is intimacy of another kind.
Until Villanelle pulls back, and Eve opens her eyes. The other woman looks at her with parted lips and searching eyes and flushed cheeks. Eve wishes she could freeze the moment and request a portrait. She wishes they were in a bed.
And still, the vulnerability is still there. The hurt and sadness and lost look to Villanelle that Eve had first seen when she’d entered the bathroom. Those things are still there, and she doesn’t want to do something that they will regret.
Villanelle doesn’t get that memo. She pushes herself off the bathroom floor and climbs over Eve until she straddles her. She plants both hands on either side of Eve’s head, along the edge of the bathtub. She leans down and kisses Eve and Eve feels something tear in her chest because it is soft . It is so soft.
Villanelle pulls back and hovers mere inches away. “I… want you to touch me.”
“What?” Eve knows she sounds stupid. Villanelle doesn’t seem bothered.
“I want you to touch me. We don’t have to do anything else, I just want-”
Eve presses forward and kisses her. She doesn’t want to hear Villanelle try to explain it. She thinks she understands.
They keep kissing while Eve fumbles with the clasp of the pants she had hardly noticed before. She manages to get them undone, then abandons them to put one hand along the back of Villanelle’s neck and the other hand to steady at her waist. Villanelle kisses her earnestly, like Eve might vanish at any second. Eve tries to ground her, to reassure her that she won’t.
Eventually, she does remember what Villanelle asked her to do, and she pushes a hand beneath the fabric settled along her hips, beneath it all, until her fingers find a bit of slickness, and she pulls her lips back from Villanelle’s.
“Are you sure?”
Villanelle nods. Eve doesn’t argue and kisses her again. With her hand, she lets her fingers press through wetness with a more confident touch, and Villanelle shivers on top of her. Eve drags her fingers back upwards until she feels Villanelle tense, and gasp, and Eve circles that point, watching as Villanelle shudders with pleasure.
Eve forgets to kiss her. She is entranced. And then Villanelle tilts her head forward more and whispers, “Inside. Please.”
Eve doesn’t hesitate to comply. She lets her fingers slide downwards again, and then she pushes into the other woman, and Villanelle’s head falls back and Eve thinks that, no, this is the moment where she’d like to freeze time.
Villanelle stays like that for a few moments, moving with Eve as she pushes in and out, breathing heavily and ragged. Then she swears once, ‘fuck’, before she hinges forward and chases Eve’s lips again, needing something more before it’s over.
“Eve.” It comes out against Eve’s lips, whispered with a reverence that Eve thinks should be reserved for something more sacred than pressing inside of Villanelle on the bathroom floor. But it sounds so good, and so she doesn’t argue.
“Eve. ” She says it again, and then “ I’m- oh.”
She moans against Eve’s lips and it is high-pitched and breathy and vulnerable. Eve watches as she screws her eyes tight shut and her body stills over her even as Eve keeps moving her inside her. A broken kind of gasp escapes Villanelle’s lips, like the air was cut off halfway through, and she slumps forward against Eve’s chest, spent.
Eve lets her other hand find Villanelle’s hair, and she strokes it as she lets Villanelle recover against her. She knows she should be thinking about a million other things, but instead she focuses on the body pressed against her. A body she’d hardly explored, really, but that was never what this was going to be about.
Eventually, Villanelle sits up so that Eve can pull her hand from between her legs. She breathes in sharply while Eve does it, and Eve thinks that if they were normal people, on a normal night, this would be the catalyst to round two.
Instead, Eve drops her hand to Villanelle’s thigh and knots the other into her hair again. “Come here.” She tugs the woman down to splay against her chest again. It can’t be very comfortable for either of them, but the comfort that they needed has been earned through other means, so neither of them really mind.
Eve knows she will have to go soon. She knows she will have to leave and think about all the things she is refusing to think about. She doesn’t know if this is the last time she will see Villanelle. If Villanelle can get out… she could be gone for good.
A selfish part of her might not want that, but she stamps it out. She remembers Villanelle’s tears, her hopeless eyes, and she knows that if the woman can manage to get out, Eve would actually be happy for her. Would that happiness come as a faintly lit halo around a hole left in her heart? Maybe. She doesn’t dwell on it.
Instead, she asks a question that she thinks she is allowed to ask, given what’s just happened.
“I just want to know if you did that… if we did that because you are trying not to feel other things? Because you are running from those feelings from before?” Eve doesn’t need to say which ones. They both remember her choking sobs from earlier.
Villanelle shakes her head against Eve’s chest and when she speaks it comes out muffled, but sincere. “No, Eve. It is just that you are the only thing I want to feel.”
Eve accepts that, and then remembers.
I feel things when I’m with you.
She thinks of a carousel. And around and around they go.