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You don’t know why you came.
That’s a lie, and you know it. You’re very good at lying to yourself but you also know your own tells. In this case, the tell is when you ask Gemma where the bathroom is, and then follow her directions upstairs with no intent of using it.
You go into her bedroom. You think of how Villanelle went into your bedroom – she must have, at some point. She’s been in the house; as she toured around, there’s no way she ignored the bedroom.
You look around Gemma’s room. You sneer at her decor. You are better than her. You imagine how Villanelle sneered at your clothes, before she bought you a new suitcase full. How she sneered at your Tupperware and your leftover Shepherd’s Pie. Even when she put on a nice face, she was looking down on it. She smiles at it the way you’d smile at a child’s crayon drawing, all crooked lines and wrong colors. No aspect of your life can hold a candle to what she’s accustomed to.
But this room, it’s even more pathetic. A single woman who acts like a teenager, still.
On the vanity, a music box. A ballerina. Who has things like this at her age? At your age? The music trills like a dog whistle, making something within you snap. You do what Villanelle would do. You break it. But that’s not enough. Destruction is base. There must be an element of cleverness to make it art. To make it a gift.
You open the top drawer. What’s inside shouldn’t surprise you, because doesn’t every woman keep underwear in the top drawer? It shouldn’t surprise you that her bras are all bright, vivid colors. That tracks with everything else about her personality. It shouldn’t surprise you that they’re so fucking big, either. You run your hands through them. They’re nice, good material. What else would a single woman spend money on? So neatly arranged, too, not haphazardly shoved into a too-full drawer like yours. It’s enraging. You disrupt them.
Shit, no. Art. Where’s the art?
You look at your other hand, still holding one of her bras. Magenta and lacy. Then back at the broken figurine.
Bra. Ballerina. There’s something there. Villanelle would know…
“Eve?”
She catches you in the act, like you’ve caught Villanelle before. Villanelle feels no shame when she’s caught. She is so absurdly confident that she leaves you in doubt for even accusing her of wrongdoing. You muster that same smug smile you’ve seen before as you turn to face Gemma.
“What are you doing?”
“I was just, um…” Damn it all, Villanelle would have a clever response here. You’re failing already.
“No, I… I understand that things between you and Niko are tough, but I’d really rather you didn’t drag me into this.”
“Oh, really?” You step forward. She steps back. You step forward again. “You don’t want to get dragged in?”
You circle her. She’s terrified. She’s a mess. Her eyes are shiny, wet, and her lip is quivering. Is this how you looked, in the bathtub, in the kitchen? Not now. Never again.
You tower over her – maybe tower is too strong a word for a difference of a few inches, but it’s ecstasy, since usually you are the one stepping back, looking up. Being stared down.
“Are you scared?”
“No, of course not.” She lies. You know quite well how terrified she is right now.
And you’re feeling what Villanelle feels. This is what she came for when she came to your house. Intimidate the girl who doesn’t know any better.
She was wrong; she found that out later, with a bed and a knife.
You are not wrong. You are going to find out what all the fuss is about.
You take her, and she squeals. You silence her with a look and a breath. Niko’s downstairs, at once a threat and an extra incentive to accomplish this here and now.
You push her back. She stumbles onto the bed. Her breath is quick and shallow, now. Hyperventilation to get her enough oxygen for fight or flight. You’re familiar with the feeling. You climb on top of her. Your jacket’s still on. You don’t care. Her chest heaves, the perfect, absurdly soft curves of her breasts pressing out of the top of her shirt. Your knees end up on either side of her legs; you pull up the edge of her blue dress, and slip a hand between the sleek nylon surface of her stocking-clad thighs.
It’s your hand driving this. It’s your touch crossing the line. It’s your muscles pushing the boundaries farther and farther until they snap. But she’s not fighting it, oh no. You know very well she wants this just as much as you. Possibly more. You’ve been in her shoes – not literally, because god, those cutesy heeled boots are so not your style. You know how alive it feels to be intimidated. How freeing it is to be pursued. How euphoric it is to be taken with or without permission.
You recognize the signs, even though they’re a little different in her than what you’re sure you’ve exhibited. Surely you don’t squeal at such a high pitch like a mewling kitten. Surely your hands don’t claw at the duvet like a child clinging to her mother’s dress. But the blush on her cheeks… the sheen of sweat that builds from her neck, to her collarbone, to trickle down the valley of her cleavage… She’s so warm in her cardigan, but she wouldn’t dare ask you to stop so she can take it off. She’s enjoying this too much.
Your hand grinds up against her, over her underwear, for a while. She’s so wet you can feel it through the fabric. It’s time to stop beating around the bush. She knows it, too – her eyes have gone from the typical prey’s defense Don’t Hurt Me to the masochist’s plea Twist the Knife.
If only there were a knife, but that was a different bed on a different day. On one hand, your actions should’ve been flipped. If you ask the general public to match up the answers, they’d say Stab the Other Woman and Sleep with the Assassin… wait, no… Stab them both? No, you psycho. You shouldn’t stab anyone. And you definitely shouldn’t be slipping two fingers inside the Other Woman, but here you are and you’re both having a fucking good time, so who is the general public to judge?
Time to do to her everything that you wished Villanelle did to you on that bed in Paris. Better make sure Gemma doesn’t have a knife hidden in her cardigan… but she wouldn’t. She couldn’t. She isn’t like you. You’re trapped between two worlds. You’re Villanelle in Gemma’s skin.
Your left hand runs up her leg, tracing the smooth curve of her muscles – God, for such a short thing, her legs go on much longer than they should. Your nail catches on the fabric and makes a run in her black stocking, an open vein onto soft cream skin. Art. You run your hand over it once more. Widening, deepening. Gemma lets out a cry of protest. She doesn’t like when her things are ruined, but doesn’t she?
Her eyes lock with yours. Absolutely desperate. Don’t ruin my stocking, she says. Ruin Me.
You pull at the run in the nylon again. Her whine rises in time with the quiet rrrrrrrrrip of the fabric. She surrenders, and squirms underneath you, assisting as your hand slips under the waistband of her panties. This is your territory now. There’s no need to be gentle.
Your hand rocks into her, pressing hard into her wet heat, and Jesus, it’s pathetic how much she wants this. She’s so ordinary. She can’t fathom the idea of being taken like this. By someone special. Someone dangerous. Someone you only meet once in a lifetime. Someone like you.
You work two fingers inside her, and she lets out a puff of warm breath at the breach of her defenses. In and out, you repeat the motion. Don’t pull it: an echo of the past with every pump. Your thumb drags over her clit, and instead of the pained cry you heard the last time you penetrated a woman (penetrated, ew), her moan is all liquid. A shot of fear swirled into a cocktail of pleasure. You are the cause of that moan. You hold all the power like the hilt of a knife in your palm.
It’s not enough to destroy her things. It’s not enough to hold her literally upon your fingers. You lean over her, propping yourself up with your other hand sprawled on the duvet next to her head. You stare her in her face, cheeks going from pink to red, eyelashes fluttering. “Is this what you wanted?” you demand.
Bless her heart, she tries to form words, but you aren’t looking for a confession. As she draws in a breath, you pinch, and she keens, and she’s coming, getting all the pleasure out of this exchange. All she can manage is one word, at once strained and free: "Eve."
Your name is different in her mouth. Different than when Niko pronounces it, taking it for granted. Different than Villanelle says it, with a different meaning each time. It's jarring how normal it sounds in her voice. How long has she known your name? What meaning did she ascribe to it before she met you, when you were only an explanation given by Niko over lunch? How did it change once she saw you, and what new flawed assumptions took root in place of Niko's trite fantasy?
She’s in the midst of it, still quivering, as you abruptly yank your hand free, and she bucks, frustrated. No photo finish, she doesn’t fucking deserve that. Her cry of release peters out and she slumps, defeated.
“Something wrong?”
“I…”
“Use your words.”
Force her to participate. Force her to make a choice. You learned your lesson the hard way; there’s no sitting back and taking it in this game. She’s going to have to step up to the plate if she wants to play ball.
With great effort, she hauls herself up to a sitting position. You’re now face to face, her legs threaded between yours on the bed.
“I want to know,” she says. “Why he’d never stray.”
You’re taken aback for a moment. That’s a reasonable request. You didn’t expect her to give a straight answer. And her stupid stare is unwavering, totally honest. What the fuck? What the fuck. You stop to consider for a moment.
But she isn’t done. “Take off your jacket,” she says, leaning forward to pull at your sleeve.
You slap her hand away. She isn’t allowed to lead here. If anything’s coming off, it’s coming off of her. Her face has gone red, almost as bright as her flame-colored cardigan. You tug at the edge and tear it off from her carelessly. You’re stretching the delicate knit out of shape and you don’t care. Actually, that’s another lie: you do care and you love it.
You toss the sweater aside. Her dress is sleeveless underneath. Her arms are even shorter than yours, paler, cream, only broken up by an occasional freckle. Where you’re hard, she’s all soft, all curves. Her ample breasts straining against the close fabric of her dress, and she knows it, and the neckline draws attention to everything she’s supposed to offer the world…
She’s everything the world has always told you to be and you fucking hate her for that. Everything you’ve never wanted to be, but goddamn, wouldn’t it be easier if you were?
And she’s fucking reaching below your belt now, bending forward so her boobs are practically falling out of whatever super-secure bra she has them jammed into, and unbuttoning your pants.
She has it all and she doesn’t know it, sitting here on her spinster bed, pulling down your pants. It’s downright offensive that she checks all the boxes and she’s fighting for the chance to leap out of them.
“Do you mind?” she squeaks, looking up at you for approval. Even in crossing lines, she’s so disgustingly timid. What the fuck are you going to say to that?
You lean back onto your arms and lift your ass up for a minute while she tugs your pants down, inching them free little by little. Once they’re free she folds them in a neat little square and tucks them safely away on the nightstand. If there’s a psycho here, it sure as hell isn’t you.
You’re lying back towards the end of the bed, leaning on your arms, legs extended, and suddenly she’s bent over, kissing your calf. Your calf?! Your calf. Her lips are softer than a goose down pillow, and you hate the fact that you’re imagining what they’d feel like on your lips. The soft pecks start to trace up your leg, to your knee – she stops to get the other knee, too – before proceeding to your thighs, starting on the outer edge and working their way inside.
“Why?” The word escapes your mouth almost like a cough, unexpected but impossible to suppress.
She pauses, her arms around your thighs now, and tilts her chin up to give you a quizzical look. “I could ask you the same.”
“He’s downstairs.” Even as you supply this, you’re not quite sure if it’s a warning, or an answer to the question she deflected back to you.
She doesn’t say anything, but her thumb begins tracing a tiny figure-eight where your thigh meets your hip and it’s rudely ticklish and now is not the time to let out a laugh.
As more seconds pass, you realize she’s waiting for your go-ahead. You’re in charge; fuck, you’re in charge, and that’s why you started this whole thing, but it’s still weird, because you’ve never been allowed to go on this long. Usually by this point you’ve been shot at or tricked into taking mock cyanide and your carefully cultivated power evaporates in an instant. Now that it’s still there, you hardly know what to do with it.
What would she do?
Hard to ask, since you’re you and Gemma’s… who the fuck knows, now, because you really thought she wasn’t but she’s on this bed with her stocking ripped and her head between your legs and Niko’s downstairs. You’d never let her get this far with you. Why not?
That question is not one you want to deal with now, or ever, so you reach out and dig your hand into her silky auburn hair and you pull her close. Her hands are gentle, much gentler than yours as she pulls your underwear aside, and places her mouth on you.
Then, the softness stops. She’s not violent, but she is desperate. How on earth is she so bold, her first time? It occurs to you that perhaps you should not assume it is her first time. Perhaps other assumptions you’ve made about her are misguided, too. But you don’t want to examine your own internalized misogyny right now, because holy hell, if this isn’t women coming together, what is? Her tongue teases devilishly around your clit, then sweeps back and forth, around your entrance, and you bite your lip to keep from making a sound. You don’t want to give her the satisfaction.
Gemma can tell, though she isn’t smug about it. She presses into the sides of your hips, angling for more, and you lean back to help her. She reaches a new angle and you let out a guttural gasp in spite of yourself. You want so badly to reach for her tits, her stupid giant tits that look softer than her lips, but that’s too far, so you slip a hand underneath your own sweater and squeeze your own chest. You feel your nipples start to harden under your touch, and your whole body is growing warm. Not warm, boiling. You wish for a moment you’d relented and taken this jacket off but on the other hand you’re glad you didn’t because that would make this real.
It isn’t real. It’s a fucked up fantasy. You’re Niko, trying to understand what he sees in Gemma. You’re Villanelle, trying to understand what she sees in you. You’re a bad actor playing a part no one prepared you for and you can’t shake the feeling you were miscast, but no one ever fucking asks your opinion, do they?
She’s sucking and you’re coming, harder than you have with Niko in a long time. Almost as hard as that night after dinner when you splashed La Villanelle on your pillow and touched yourself and felt like a monster. But still, this orgasm’s more blissful than it it has any right to be, and you’d ride the naive indulgence for a lot longer, if you didn’t hear the creak of heavy footsteps coming up the carpeted stairs.
Gemma picks up her head and she’s terrified. Eyes shining, lips shining too. She's looking to you for orders. Shit, how is this solely your fault? You shove her away and reach for your pants. Don’t bother with underwear, shove it in your coat pocket. You swing your legs over the side of the bed and shove them into your pants, threatening to tear the hems in your haste.
You’ve just buttoned and gotten up again, and Gemma’s still yanking her sleeves of her cardigan over her arms, as the footsteps draw close, and the door creaks open.
He walks in. Gemma shrinks into herself, arms crossed over her chest, bending her left leg to hide the run in her stocking.
It doesn’t matter, much, because Niko’s not good at picking up on the little things. Or the big things. Or if he does pick up on them, he never has the balls to say anything.
He looks to Gemma first, then to you. You look away. You can’t stand to face either one of them right now.
“Eve, what are you doing?”
“What are you doing, Niko?”
“I’d like you to apologize. Gemma is my friend.”
She cuts in, trying to stop him. “No, really, it’s fine–“
“There’s nothing going on here,” Niko says.
“You’re right,” you reply, and for the first time, your voice comes out with the exact cutting confidence you’ve always wanted it to. “There’s nothing going on here.”
This is how she feels when she gets the better of you. And it feels fucking fantastic.
When you make it home, you finally take off your jacket. A shower is in order. Time to clean up and think about what you’ve done. Take your fucking time because you have the house to yourself, that is, unless there’s an uninvited visitor. Know that you’ll probably end up curled on your side in the too-big bed, rubbing one out to stave off the self-loathing when she doesn’t come to see you.
First things first, before you forget, gotta throw the evidence in the laundry. You reach into your coat pocket, and pull out your underwear…
You hold the scrap of fabric up to the light, and squint to make sure, even though it’s pretty damn obvious.
They’re not yours.