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It seemed like Eve came out of nowhere. Dropped clear out of the sky and straight onto the stage door threshold, or materialized right there on the step from bits of alley dust; a special little gift just for Margo. When Karen dragged her by the scruff of her neck like a blind kitten into the dressing room, she was delightfully pitiful—dressed in that ridiculous frumpy coat, too frayed to be much good in the rain, and that ridiculous frumpy hat, she seemed too as if she hadn’t a clue what a normal girl of twenty four should be wearing. How dear was the pathetic creature, with her big weepy eyes, who loved her so desperately. What choice did Margo have but to take her in? Despite rumors to the contrary, she wasn’t entirely heartless.
It wasn’t until a week later that Karen pointed out, practically flushing just to say it, how much Eve resembled her in her younger days: “Margo, I mean… It’s uncanny, darling.”
It was a slow-gestating seed, but it was planted. While at first Eve seemed to move like a newborn lamb, like a creature learning to control a strange body, she rapidly gained confidence. Confidence of composure perhaps, or, as it seemed, confidence of imitation. Eve began adopting her hand movements, then her gait, down to her inflections. It was something of an honor, if an unsettling one, to be a point of emulation to such a degree. She didn’t know what exactly the kid saw in her, withering skeleton that she was, but she preened under Eve’s gaze. At least she knew now that her star hadn’t faded yet. She installed Eve upstairs in the room next to Birdie. Sure, it was all moving a bit fast, but Eve was so excited. When Margo offered her the room, the hunger that flashed across her face was so familiar she could feel the jolt in her own belly. Birdie was none too pleased, the crow, and her complaints began after Eve's first week:
“Margo, I think she’s sneaking boys up there.”
“Eve? Nonsense. She’s an innocent.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure. The sounds been coming out of her room at night — they’re not human.”
“Oh you old dyke, could it be that you simply want her? Sweet young thing like that. Well, you're in good company. Karen’s been leering like Judith Anderson since we met the girl.”
“Please, she’s not my type. All I’m saying is there’s something not straight about her”
Margo couldn’t entirely blame her friends for their designs. Eve was so vital, so attentive, so eager to please; glowing with youth. She gave Eve her too-small skirt suit, just to see her in it —Margo was always prone to bouts of masochism. It should’ve fit her, would’ve fit her three months ago, and now it was too big on Eve. She took what little solace there was to be found in knowing that one day Eve too would lose her figure; time ravaged all, and she wanted to join the feast.
The suit was dark green, meant to match her own hair; now it brought the auburn out of Eve’s brown. Karen had said it was uncanny, their similarity. She was starting to see it now. Eve’s imitations had worked, and she moved in the suit like she’d been practicing, all amplified by the new glints of red in her hair, the silhouette of the suit, the softness of her jaw. Even her green eyes, it seemed, were beginning to lean blue. Margo watched, enraptured, as Eve built a self in her image.
Birdie told her, with glee and revulsion, the next morning, that Eve’s creaking bed had kept her up all night (“I wouldn’t be surprised if she was going at it in that little number you gave her,” Birdie snickered. “I’m telling you, she’s real queer about you.”) If Eve wasn’t so green, Margo would’ve bedded her in that little number herself, just to get a taste of the youth she had taken from her.
Eve Harrington was real queer about her, Margo was beginning to notice (she hated when Birdie was right). Eve slithered around the flat watching, lurking in corners and startling easily, caught red-handed for crimes invisible to Margo. More and more, Margo found her clothes shifted around in her closet, or else hastily folded in her dresser; her perfume used up too fast, her duvet untucked from her mattress. She even caught Eve once, in the wings, cradling her costume. Eve reacted as if she’d been caught doing something much worse. Margo began to look for minor disturbances in everything, Eve’s little paw prints.
It struck her one evening, when she noticed a cigarette butt missing from her nightstand ashtray: there was a stranger living in her house. There was a stranger living in her house, who wore her hand-me-downs and spoke like her and walked like her, and looked -- more and more every day -- like her. Perhaps she should’ve felt invaded. She felt fury.
Beautiful, young Eve had shown up a blank slate, and stolen Margo’s self out from under her feet. And no one had noticed, not even her. Margo could eat her alive.
Well, at least there was Karen. Karen had noticed something from the beginning, and perhaps that was the reason she was so enthralled now. After all, it had been her who caught Eve’s resemblance to Margo; and after all, she had seemed so utterly thrilled by it. Foolish, sweet Karen, who still believed wholeheartedly in Eve’s naivete even after being taken in her mouth on the coats at Bill’s party, and confessed over the phone the next day:
“What did you and that weasel get up to last night in the coat room?”
“Margo please. I don’t understand this sudden animosity. She’s never been anything but gracious to all of us.”
“Was it grace that she showed you last night? Honey you left smelling hopelessly of sex.”
“Really, it wasn’t like that at all. She was so sweet, she just wanted to thank me for what I’ve done for her, and she was so eager. She practically begged me just to kiss her.”
“I’m sure. Was she any good?”
“Oh really Margo.”
“Do stop acting as if I haven’t heard much worse from you.”
“She… was good… Really quite good. So eager she was practically starving. And really she just seemed so thrilled and grateful for the whole thing.”
“Aw, it’s all very quaint and charming.”
“Oh, Margo”
Certainly it was amusing that Karen should find Eve so attractive, that she should risk the unassuming audience of her husband for the chance to receive Eve’s tongue. That was an interesting change in position for Karen, who herself used to beg so sweetly for Margo to spread her legs and ride her mouth. But that was so long ago, back when they were Eve’s age. Did Karen really want Eve? Or did she want Margo, 20 years younger? Was there a difference?
It was getting harder and harder to tell.
-
Margo should’ve suspected Eve would slither her way into understudy. A fitting part for her. Perhaps Margo was the fool, expecting industry people -- even her industry people -- to pay her the courtesies they had when she was younger and brighter, and hold the auditions until she arrived. Foolish she certainly was, to feel any shock at all, when Addison gleefully told her that the auditions were over; Eve was the one. The indulgent glint in Addison’s cold eyes, the giddiness in his voice told Margo that somehow, he already knew everything. And maybe that was the worst part: there was nothing that old queen loved more than a star, except a dying one. This was a death knell, and thanks to Addison, she could be sure that there would be no coming back.
Ever the charmer, Eve had managed to wrap not just Karen, but now Bill and Lloyd up in her schemes. What was this ball of fire and music that had torn through her life and swept up everything in its wake. How beautiful, how tender and attentive she must be, to have done so with such speed and such ease.
Had she fucked Bill? Had he seen her body, slender and tight, gentle curves, sloping neck, readily wet and warm and easy? Had he remembered what he was missing? She imagined them together, getting lightheaded: Eve riding him, her ribs rippling as she rolled her hips, her breasts bouncing. She was a beautiful creature, to be sure.
Margo almost felt guilty how little her concern was directed toward Bill and his feelings, the potential of his infidelity. But that all seemed trivial compared to the ways her body let her down, how her age exposed her to such threats. Defining herself in relation to Bill seemed the simplest route toward a stable identity, since she could no longer rely on her stardom to bypass that necessity. Addison and the other news vultures had always flocked to the feast that was her romantic life; her dead-in-the-water relationships and almost-marriages that she could never drag to the altar. There were only so many times she could explain that her devotion to her career, her devotion to her craft had to be prioritized. There were only so many men who were willing to understand that she could never be a wife and mother, could only ever be a worker and an artist. She had never herself considered what would happen when womanhood could no longer take the back seat; when her womanhood would demand reconciliation, when it would finally take away her career and she would have to deal with what remained of herself aftward. When she would find she had nothing but salvaged scraps of that womanhood to fall back on. She needed Bill selfishly. She needed Bill to get married.
She pressed the house door open a crack, to hear if they were still running lines. She’d seen Eve act before. Really she didn’t know if she’d ever seen Eve when she wasn’t acting, but she’d never seen Eve command a stage.
She knew it would be different, but wasn’t prepared for the intensity of feeling, the plunge her heart took into her stomach when she heard Eve speak her lines. “Exactly as he wrote them,” Lloyd had said. No. Eve said the lines exactly as Margo said them. Not an intonation, not a breath out of place. All those nights watching her from the wings had certainly paid off. In spite of the rising sick in her stomach, coming in feverish waves of fury-- in spite of the horror, she was totally mesmerized. Though she’d often wondered what exactly the experience of watching a Margo Channing performance was like, though she’d tried to seek it out (watching the rushes and screen tests of the few pictures she’d been in), it seemed entirely impossible that she should ever be removed enough to be a true audience member of herself. And yet there she was, voyeur to a performance she was not meant to see, witness to her own persona. As she watched Eve move about the stage, pantomiming and running lines, she felt a horrific, aching nakedness in the pit of her, like Eve had, in adopting her very stage presence, ripped away her mask and left her exposed and defenseless and small; and at the same time, her fury seemed to give rise to a giddy, nervous excitement that she felt hot and heady between her thighs. She couldn’t bear it.
She burst into the theatre, marched onto the stage, relishing the surprise in Eve’s wide eyes before it settled into a cool mask of anger. Up close now, Margo was less certain than ever if she’d fucked Bill (more certain than ever that she’d fucked Lloyd, but that was beside the point). Bill seemed so genuinely shocked, so frustrated at her accusations and crushed that she would ever think so little of him. But it was simply too impossible to believe that, presented with the opportunity, anyone would resist the temptation to recall the lost youth and beauty of the person they’d fallen in love with. Karen didn’t.
And Margo knew, despite herself, that if Eve presented herself to her, she wouldn’t either.
-
On closing night, after curtain, she discovered Eve sitting at her dressing table. Through the hazy high of post-show adrenaline, Margo couldn’t be sure of anything when it came to Eve, but it looked curiously like Eve was wearing her dress. The dress she had come to the theatre in, and left hanging in the bathroom. She moved closer, trying desperately not to make too much noise in her ridiculous crinoline. Eve seemed to be in a sort of trance, enraptured by her own reflection. Narcissus at the pond, and Margo had become an unwilling Echo. Eve was putting on her stage makeup.
The emerald of her dress — Eve’s dress — her dress, that Eve was wearing — was reflecting in the mirror and refracting the light of the vanity bulbs, and lending a sickly green cast to the whole dressing room. More sickly was the smell of greasepaint and sweat that left the room feeling sticky and damp. Eve was putting on rouge. Margo couldn’t move much closer without giving herself away, but she wanted with morbid fascination to see what grotesque mask Eve was crafting in the mirror. Her heart was pounding in her ears. Watching her at all felt too voyeuristic somehow, like Eve was touching herself, rather than stealing her makeup. She might as well have been, the way her chest was heaving.
Margo couldn’t help herself. She had to see. Restraint was never her strong suit.
“Eve.”
Eve remained entirely undisturbed, leaning closer to the mirror to apply her lashes.
Margo rustled her dress. The girl seemed completely unaware of her presence. Margo looked at her, her unnatural little pet in her dress and her makeup, in her hair and her face.
“Eve” she tried again
Eve jumped. Flew up out of the seat and lurched back against the dressing table, knocking a perfume bottle off. It shattered painfully on the ground and if she thought the smell in the room was sickly before, it was unbearable now. It seemed she had momentarily forgotten her name. Margo stepped closer to examine her artistry. The makeup was applied too thick, and up close Eve looked something like a little girl who broke into her mothers bathroom. But the lines were right, and the colors were right. And underneath the foundation and the blush, Eve’s face itself, was right. She could’ve been the ghost of her youth. Except —
“Silly girl… ” the words felt thick and slow and strange in her mouth, like she was being compelled by something outside of herself to say them. “… You forgot my lipstick.”
Margo reached over and picked up the tube on the vanity behind Eve, stepped forward and firmly grabbed her chin. The moment she made contact, chills shot up her arm. She felt, suddenly, that to touch her was very, very dangerous. She had never been so repulsed, never so excited. She pressed the paint to Eve’s lips and they both shuddered. The lipstick was blood red. She dragged it slowly, forcing the color into the cracks of Eve’s lips, trying to ignore the way Eve’s wet mouth opened under her hand, how her tongue twitched against her teeth.
How fitting it was that she should seal her soul inside Eve’s mouth with her own lipstick, in her own hand. How much she wanted to do it.
They looked at each other. It was like looking in a mirror.
Eve was glowing, backlit, otherworldly. No wonder Karen couldn’t resist her. Margo could eat her alive.
“What are you?”
A smirk.
“I’m you. But better.”
“Where did you come from.”
“Oh… Y’know.”
“And this was your plan all along, to steal my life from me?”
“Yes… if you want to be morbid about it. But it's not as if I don’t care for you.. Indeed I think I care about you more than I’ve ever cared about anything before…. I like to think it’s more like, crawling inside you and taking over from there. No less cruel, I suppose, but far more fun for everyone. Don’t pretend you haven’t enjoyed yourself.”
She could barely believe her eyes, trying to blink Eve’s visage back to something more distinctive — less disturbingly familiar. Despite her efforts to readjust her gaze, Eve's face remained a dreamlike mask; slightly out of focus and yet somehow sharp enough to register the tiny light hairs on her temples. Her mind simply refused to comprehend what her eyes were seeing. She needed to affirm the warm sure solidity of Eve's skin, to make real the unearthly specter in front of her. She had to touch her. Margo moved like a marionette, unsure of her movements but wholly unable to stop them. She brought her hands nervously to Eve’s face, slowly dragged her fingers over her eyelids, her nose, her lips, her jaw. She smeared mascara down her cheeks, smeared lipstick down her chin. Eve’s mouth opened again. She settled a hand at her throat.
“Eve— ”
“Eve? Who’s Eve. Margo, look at me.”
Margo could feel Eve’s pulse thrumming in the arteries under her palm. The blood was warm under her skin. Confirmation, at least, that for whatever she was, Eve was really alive. She squeezed tighter, and Eve’s eyes fluttered, and she smiled. A shock ran down her arm when Eve’s icy hand rested on her own.
“You asked me what I am, and I answered you. Now you answer me. Who am I?”
Margo couldn’t bring herself to say the answer. What was there to do but give the girl what she was after.
Eve’s pulse leapt under her fingers when she brushed a light, chaste kiss to her lips. If she dug her nails in hard enough she could break the delicate skin there and make her bleed. She wondered if her blood would taste human. Eve yanked her hand away from her throat, leaning forward to kiss her violently.
It was too much teeth, too much tongue, the ferocity overwhelming and the sensation sickening. She didn’t expect anything less from the creature.
Margo pulled away. A thin bead of saliva gathered on Eve's lower lip.
Briefly she considered the dangers of putting her fingers too close to Eve’s mouth, excited more than fearful, at the possibility that Eve would snap like a caged beast and devour them clean off. She again felt her arm moving in spite of herself, her body acting before she had time to command it, and when she brought her finger to wipe the spit away, Eve chased it with her tongue. She needed inside. She could almost feel the squirming of Eve’s tongue already. Margo barely hesitated to press two fingers past Eve’s lips into her waiting mouth.
Eve’s tongue was overexcited, revoltingly eager and quick to trap her fingers against the hot roof of her mouth, sucking violently all the blood down to her fingertips. Eve was incredibly skilled at maintaining composure, but more and more Margo witnessed these flashes of abandon, where Eve seemed to lose command of her senses, forget her training, and become animal again. Margo couldn’t tell yet whether they delighted or disgusted her more. She needed to tame her, unfold her, open her up and burrow inside and find the true quivering soul of her. And then break it like a horse.
Margo watched Eve’s eyes shine and her cheeks hollow with a dim sense of awe, and a much stronger sense of unease. “You’re unreal,” she murmured.
She pressed deeper till Eve’s teeth hit her knuckles, coaxing her throat open, making her eyelids flutter prettily. Eve’s throat trembled, her tongue rolled, as she tried and tried to keep herself from gagging. Margo jerked her fingers up to hit her soft palette, and Eve convulsed, rejecting her fingers and lurching forward. A spark of triumph flickered in Margo’s chest at the terribly human, terribly vulnerable state of her. When Eve looked back up, her eyes were watering. The look on her face was feverish and euphoric, though, and her mouth fell back open eagerly. Margo’s flash of pride quickly turned to an unsettled ache in her stomach and between her legs, as Eve dared her to do it again. Margo pressed back down into her throat; and then pulled forward, working her way under the tongue, pulling down, prying Eve’s mouth wide and holding it there. Eve looked so, so beautiful. Margo could eat her alive.
Instead, she leaned forward to lick, slowly, down into her mouth. Eve was beginning to fidget, her tongue searching, as Margo continued long deep laps. Spit crept down between her fingers. Soon Eve pushed her head away, smug. Margo thought she’d held the power just then. Now, seeing the haughty glint in her eye, she wasn’t so sure. If Eve had planned everything from the beginning, surely she planned this to.
Pried in place by her fingers, Eve’s mouth gaped, red and sticky and repulsive. Her blue eyes flashed dangerously with want. And Margo felt a great rush of emptiness; an ache to be full, overflowing. Her mouth watered. She was starting to lose the ability to tell which feelings were hers and which were Eves. Did she ever have it?
She pooled saliva at the front of her mouth, leaned forward, and spit right on her tongue.
Eve made a noise she had never heard a person make. A strangled, agonized bay that twisted knots of nauseous disgust in Margo’s belly. Then she lunged again.
Eve kissed like she wanted to suck the life out of her, like she wanted to crawl down her throat. Biting and gnashing. The intensity left her utterly breathless. She broke away suddenly, ripping her lip out from Eve’s teeth, cutting herself.
Eve’s grin was unnatural, wolfish. Her eyes narrowed in on the blood pooling at Margo’s lip. Margo promptly licked it away.
“Karen said you were ‘practically starving.’ Good god. I think even that might be an understatement.”
Eve smirked but said nothing for a beat. Her jaw was tense, like if Margo got too close she really would bite. Then she spoke.
“What about you? You’re not dying for it?”
She was dying for it. She was dying to rip that dress off her, and finally see her body. Young and slender, skin taut and breasts perky. The body she once had. A body that people wanted. She could imagine it in obscene clarity, under her dress.
She deflected the question with another: “But then why all the deception? Why did you wait so long? You asked Karen, you could’ve asked me.”
Eve laughed low in her chest, a gravelly harsh sound. “Don’t be foolish. You know as well as I do that it wouldn’t have been like this. You weren’t ready-- you didn’t even know who I was.”
Eve's words were pointed but her eyes were distracted, as she reached out to stroke at Margo’s dress. Her hands were unnervingly gentle, almost unconscious, running up and down the length of her sides, and threading through her skirt. Now that they had touched, it had become almost uncomfortable to be apart, the contact becoming compulsive. Margo felt it too, letting Eve grab at her if only to ease her own hungry, itchy hands. She wanted to sustain this suspension, to catch her breath and make her head stop spinning. She continued with questions she already knew the answers to.
“Was it like this with Karen?”
Eve picked up her right hand and pressed her tongue flat against her palm, worming it in between the valleys where her fingers met her knuckles.
“You ask me why I waited, and yet you’re playing games even now. Don’t you know I’m waiting for you to admit how much you want this.”
Eve switched to her left hand, sucking and biting at the veins of her wrist.
“Admit how much I want you to take over my life? You must think I have a death wish.”
“Don’t you?” Eve smiled up at her.
Certainly now she couldn’t deny, as much as she’d always tried to, just how much she wanted. If Eve had modeled herself after Margo, her ravenous greed could not be the exception. Certainly she wanted youth. She wanted beauty, and fans and adoration. She wanted love, which she was now considering may be something altogether different than she’d conceived of before. And certainly, looking at Eve, who was all mouth all over, she wanted nothing more in all the world than to twist her fingers deep into her hair and yank her right to her chest. She did always want so much so often.
Her admission was simple, but felt eviscerating, utterly devastating. “Yes,” she said.
She expected an immediate reaction, an attack from Eve that would shock her out of the feeling of exposure, of inexorable collapse; but received instead an agonizing silence. Eve pulled away completely and eyed her up and down, indulging shamelessly in Margo’s ultimate self-sacrificial humiliation, watching the horror wash over her with satisfaction.
The lull lasted only a moment, before Eve lunged to claw Margo’s dress down, nursing the blood out of the tear in her lip til it throbbed. She was violent, erratic, overwhelming her senses as she sucked harsh bruises into her throat — gnawing there with her teeth till broken blood vessels rose in her skin — as she tore at the laces on her stays, tugged at her chemise wildly. Margo grabbed a hold of her hair and yanked, making her yelp. Eve's eyes were frantic, ravenous, and totally primal as she snapped and mouthed for contact. She walked Eve back to sit on the vanity chair, keeping her hair pulled taut and her head back. When she sat, she was perfectly chest level.
Eve strained against her grip to get at her chest, reaching around her hips to pull her flush, and Margo took the moment to indulge in gratuitous shame. She knew Eve was watching her look down at her breasts with loathing, but the shame was unbearable. What with the way her breasts sagged, limp and old and scarred with stretch marks, she wouldn’t be surprised if Eve fled in disgust. She had to know what Eve looked like, how her body glowed with youth.
She was not left long to her fancies, before she was overcome by the sharp warm pleasure of Eve's mouth sucking hungrily at her nipples. Eve seemed completely unbothered by the signs of aging on her chest, her eyes now glazing over as she sucked herself silly. She was overwrought and obscene, making herself gag as she tried in vain to take everything into her mouth. Eve’s hunger seemed all-consuming, uncompromising of her own physical limitations and the physical flaws with which Margo so concerned herself. She wished Eve would indulge her masochism for a moment, twist her unyielding animals maw into a grimace — something, anything to realize her fears. Otherwise the extremity of Eve’s desire was too much to bear.
Margo hadn’t let Bill so much as see her without a bra on since she turned 35. But now Eve was biting her nipples into swollen, painful, raw red points like her life depended on it, and she had truly forgotten how much she loved a mouth on her. She tightened her fist in Eve’s hair once more and ripped her head back. Margo’s stomach twisted, to see her own face looking up at her with so much reverence.
Margo released Eve’s hair, but the knot in her stomach worsened as Eve lifted her gown, caught her gaze, and slid down onto her knees. Words or sounds or sick kept rising in her throat and getting caught on her tongue. She wanted to say something, anything, to bring some levity; at least make an effort to stop the creeping sense of cataclysm. The dread was only matched by the longing, the hunger she had been suppressing since meeting Eve. Fucking Eve would mean apocalypse, but oh it would be delicious. She wanted it.
And her fate was already in motion, as Eve pulled her costume off the rest of the way, and pressed a line of sticky open-mouthed kisses down her stomach to her pelvis. Those big eyes looked up at her and for just a moment, the old Eve flashed in them. A sweet girl with a puppy crush getting everything she ever wanted. As any real actress knows, there’s a part of you in every role.
But just as quickly as it appeared, it was gone with the first long, firm stroke of Eve’s tongue on her. Soon she had her entire face buried up between Margo’s thighs, her nose obscured by unruly dark hair, making profane slurping sounds as she sucked and sucked and sucked. Eve had always known exactly how to worship her. Actually, she seemed to oscillate between predation and worship so deftly, Margo was beginning to wonder if they weren’t, in fact, the same thing.
Maybe this was all she’d wanted, in the end — Eve on her knees for her. For there was no pretense now, no mask, no saccharine naïveté. Finally, Eve, just as she was: A hungry little parasite, feeding on her.
More than she wanted now to come, Margo wanted to see Eve pull back, that face coated in her own wet, pearlescent and glistening from nose to chin; wanted to see her lolling tongue lap up all the flavor on her lips. The perversity of it all made her shiver, made her rock against Eve’s face so hard she was certain Eve couldn’t breathe any longer.
Surely Eve hadn’t eaten Karen like this, with her own kind of death wish. Surely this kind of voracity was reserved for her alone.
Through the green humidity Margo remembered she could see herself in the vanity mirror. Eve was too low now to be caught in the reflection, so all she could look at was her own splotchy, heaving chest and her breasts, and the way her loose skin rippled as her muscles strained to hold her body upright. And she should’ve been revolted, very nearly was. But more than that, she was taken with the bite marks and bruises that were blooming all over her skin, glorious red rings scattered across her breasts and her chest and her collarbone and her neck. Her immediate instinct was toward rage. But hearing Eve’s pathetic, convulsive tries for air even as she continued to work her tongue, content to die if only inside her as deep as possible, Margo realized: someone really wanted her. Someone wanted her, so much that they destroyed her life for it. Not even the fervor of a rowdy audience felt like this.
It was so good.
Margo pressed down on the patch of burst blood vessels on her throat, thrilling at its deep throb, just as Eve gave a suck so hard and painful her knees buckled, and she came, bucking against Eve’s face, gripping her head and forcing her so close she could no longer even move her tongue.
When Margo settled back and released Eve’s head, the poor thing fell back onto her heels, gasping. She looked dazed, euphoric, rapturous with her cheeks flushed and her hair matted and her mascara running down her face in drops of sweat, as if she’d been crying. Margo hoped she had. And that mouth of hers was hanging slack, puffy and shining, tinged pink from the lipstick that had long since smeared off. What a glorious ovation this was.
With glassy unfocused eyes, Eve raised her hand to wipe the wet off her mouth. Margo felt a sudden jolt of need, shockingly strong, and lunged to stop her.
“Don’t. And don’t close your mouth. C'mere”
She pulled a limp Eve up to standing and lapped the fluid from her lips.
When they kissed, the taste of herself on Eve’s tongue rendered Margo now wholly unable to quiet the mania in her chest, a frenzy that Eve had sown in the core of her on that first day, and had been on the brink of busting through her ribcage. She could have Eve’s youth and Eve could have her talent, and they could, if Eve kept kissing her like that, consume each other until there was nothing left. When the real Margo was gone and only Eve remained, no one would be able to tell the difference. Through Eve she could be young forever.
Margo moved forward again, grabbing Eve this time by the waist to pull her close. She yanked down the shoulders of Eve’s dress and tugged at the collar to finally get at her breasts.
Eve’s breasts were just like she knew they would be; smooth and soft, her nipples were pert and pink and high. When she brushed them with her thumbs she felt her own skin prickle. She would be sensitive there; Margo was sensitive there. Eve’s skin was so thin and so pale she could see her veins, green Lichtenberg figures creating stark strange lines from her shoulders to her breasts. It was disturbing, something out of a horror picture. She leaned forward and traced them with her tongue, following them down her chest and firmly taking a nipple into her mouth, delighting in the sensation of its hardening on her tongue. She was almost lulled by the repetitive motions: rhythmically sucking and tugging with her teeth, feeling the heel of Eve's hand firm against her head. It was heady, the feeling of such youthful flesh in her mouth.
She was startled out of her trance by a small dark birthmark under Eve’s left breast. It was exactly like one she had. Exactly. She bit down hard on the spot, wanting to hear Eve yelp, to feel the skin surrender and the warm rush of blood on her tongue. But Eve didn’t yelp, didn’t even flinch. Did she not feel how close Margo was to breaking skin? She just chuckled and sighed and leaned into Margo’s teeth. Margo promptly broke away, repulsed; buzzing with an urgency that infected her nerves and muscles, made it so she felt like she would burn up from the inside if she didn’t see, right now, just how wet Eve was inside her dress.
She half expected to find that Eve had put on her panties too. She reveled briefly in her own perversity, refracted off Eve: she imagined Eve finding her panties alone in her dressing room and smelling them. Licking them, maybe. Certainly getting off on wearing them, touching herself through the fabric like she had with the gifted suit, so she could come where Margo had discharged.
But when she lifted Eve’s dress off and pressed a firm palm to her, she found — to her dismay and delight — not lace but coarse hair. With no barrier there she must have been slimy down her thighs. Margo turned her around so they were both facing the mirror, and Eve leaned back onto her, allowing her legs to part slightly.
In the mirror Eve wore a hazy smile — glad, unlike Margo, to admire herself. How exciting it must be to perform pleasure on a borrowed face, for yourself as audience. Margo rested her chin on Eve's shoulder, and they stared, motionless, into the mirror. Eve was thin and taut, the ghost of her ribcage rippling with her breathing, the dark hair between her legs shocking against the translucent skin of her hips. She wondered again how Eve could bear to look at her, let alone to want her with such abandon. Perhaps, she admitted, it was just as heady to see what your body would look like in twenty years, as it was to see what your body had looked like twenty years before.
It was dizzying to see herself side by side with Eve. In the low light of the dressing room; with the mirror bulbs shining into her eyes, it looked like they were merged, or dissolving into each other. The effect was only heightened by the heat of Eve's body against hers, as she wrapped her arms around to find the mess of hair between her legs; from this angle she might very well have been touching herself.
Just as she’d expected, Eve was so wet she ought to have been embarrassed; it made Margo shudder. It was nearly pitiful, quite nearly sweet, how quickly and completely she’d been reduced to a wild thing in heat. Eve shifted slightly, her ass brushing against Margo’s cunt, and the instant rush of heat she felt was a regretful reminder that she too had no facade left to hide behind.
There was no need to wet her fingers; Eve was slick enough as it was. And yet it seemed only fitting that she should take the opportunity to first taste Eve off her fingers, then spit forcefully into her hand, and delight in the resulting blush of Eve’s cheeks.
Her voice came out a shaky whisper when she said, a wave of sick nervous pleasure rushing through her, “You taste just like me.”
With her right arm draped across Eves shoulders, Margo pulled her head back by her forehead, holding the hair off her face, keeping her close.
Eve looked wicked in the glass: smug, knowing
“Play with your breasts”
Margo watched Eve tug at herself in the mirror, completely transfixed. Eve's fingers seemed punishing, twisting fast and thoughtlessly. She was sure Eve could feel her own nipples growing hard against her back. Maybe that was the point.
When she settled her hand against the length of her, they both sighed. It was something like relief, a momentary quieting of the intoxicating urgency to get inside and tear apart that had left Margo with angry crimson blotches all over her breasts and Eve nearly suffocated and drooling down her neck.
Eve’s body heat against her was unbearable, nauseating; where Margo was leaning her temple against Eve’s, sweat was building uncomfortably, making her itchy; as Eve rolled her hips and sent another wave of dizzy pleasure through her body, Margo felt like she was melting. With each bead of sweat that gathered, with each circle of her fingers, she felt herself disintegrating in atoms.
Any distance between them now seemed a torturous rending; an untenable, a gaping incompletion.
Margo strengthened her hold on Eve's forehead, keeping her head back where it was surely uncomfortable to breathe, and pushed forward til Eve had to slam her hands down on the table to keep herself from crashing headlong into the mirror. She touched Eve in familiar ways, making the kinds of hard fast circles she liked to do to herself. The whines escaping Eve's mouth sent shivers down her spine, and told her that Eve liked to be touched just the same.
Using the hand on Eve's cunt to drive her ass more firmly against herself, rubbing at Eve in time with her grinding, it was like she was touching herself through Eve. She could feel every aching twitch of her palm on Eve straight through her own core, the sensation somehow more heightened, more visceral because it was first concentrated through Eve.
All the times Eve had delighted in Margo’s torment, when really Eve's pleasure could have been hers, and hers Eve’s.
Though perhaps, she admitted to herself —fuzzy in the midst of her exertion — she had taken a warped pleasure at her own demise; leaping at the chance to play the maudlin woman scorned, the injured child, the pitiful spinster. It felt good, darkly seductive to watch herself become the person she felt she must truly be, when she was not Margo Channing: Actress, Goddess, Star. Eve brought that real, hidden Margo out of her, and each time she tugged at the thread it felt like a release. In discovering the real Eve she’d discovered the real Margo, and it was a climax like she’d never experienced before.
Margo was startled out of her musings by Eve’s arm snaking its way behind her to claw deep into her thigh.
Eve’s voice always had a husky, hungry gravel in it, rough perhaps from trying to mimic the depth and grit of a woman’s voice twice her age. Her voice was even more delicious now, ragged and breathless, when she said “Margo. Look at me.”
Margo hadn’t even realized she’d closed her eyes. When she opened them she was thrilled anew at their reflection, overwhelmed with the queasy, dizzy feeling of collapsing in on herself. The itchy feeling in her hands was back; she was no longer satisfied just to touch. She pulled her fingers away from Eve, bringing her arm around to enter her from behind.
The horror, which had dissipated for a moment, returned forcefully as she slid easily inside. Eve’s intense slick heat was shocking somehow, and Margo was left for a moment motionless, feeling suddenly like a 16 year old virgin. All her years with Karen and her playful nights with Birdie-- none of it counted; she’d never done this before. She pushed deep inside, in spite of herself, and Eve’s loose muscles accommodated her fingers so naturally it seemed they were meant to be there.
“Eve” she gasped, dropping the arm holding her head up to wrap it around her waist, to get her somehow closer still. Eve was making pathetic little grunts and growls, looking an absolute mess in the mirror, and Margo was certain this was the first time she had ever seen the creature when she wasn’t acting. She curled three fingers inside her, groaning at her oozing, copious wetness, the way Eve's cunt seemed to draw up her fingers and tighten to keep her there.
“Don’t call me Eve.” Eve breathed, without a trace of her earlier smugness. Now her eyes were nothing but pits of urgency. Margo hoped when Eve came she would crumble into pieces.
All evening she’d been too frightened to say it, but now it was the only word she could think of.
“Margo,” she whispered.
The name ripped through her body, making her convulse, making her hips thrust against Eve so hard she almost smashed her into the vanity. Never in her life had she ever been so close from so little. It was unbelievable that she should really be getting off like this, but that made it all the better.
Eve let out a deep ragged groan, and Margo could feel her clench around her fingers. She watched in the mirror as Eve’s eyes rolled back in her head, the whites of her eyes sending another flash of disgust through her stomach that made her knees buckle. She flexed her fingers hard against Eve’s front wall. With her hand buried inside Eve, each time she thrust her hips she hit her own cunt with the back of her palm.
“Say it again” Eve snarled, her head falling as she panted.
She pulled her fingers out, smeared the fluid all over her cunt and her thighs, and firmly drove now four fingers in. Eve gasped.
“Margo,” Margo snapped. “Look at me.”
Eve shot her head back up. Their eyes met again and they came together, Eve’s arms buckling over the table, and Margo folding over onto her.
Margo stood, out of breath and lightheaded. Eve crumbled to the floor, and looked up at her with huge wet eyes. They were still for a moment, just looking at each other. Margo didn’t feel real. She looked down at her fingers, glistening and milky, her fingertips starting to prune. Surely she hadn’t been inside her for that long….
Then Eve shifted to her knees, bowing all the way over to press a gentle kiss to her foot.
The gesture was too intimate. Margo almost kicked her in the jaw.
But then Eve was kissing her ankle, her shin, her knee. By the time she got to her thigh, the kisses had turned open and sloppy. She pressed Eve’s head away.
How was she not sated, when Margo felt wrung out and high? How could she still want her so badly, even after the fury had been quelled? It still seemed too unbelievable that anyone should build a whole existence out of desiring her.
Exhaustion struck her suddenly, and she let herself collapse onto the chair. Eve was still on her knees mouthing at her; now cleaning herself off of Margo’s fingers, now sucking sweetly at her nipples; but Margo could barely feel it. She wished Karen or Bill or anyone would walk in, to witness them, to make an abrupt end to what she knew would be for the rest of her life. Eve lifted her head up from licking the sweat off her chest, grabbing Margo’s chin and pulling firmly to make Margo look at her.
Eve’s blue eyes shone even more wickedly than before. Triumphant and joyous at her victory, at her reducing Margo into what she was. Or maybe she looked simply content. Either way, Margo’s heart was slowly sinking back into her stomach.
“Say it again” Eve grinned.
Margo would be stuck with her forever. She hated the way the thought of it excited her. She hated how her legs fell open and how she weaved her fingers through Eve’s auburn hair, and the immediate thrill of satisfaction at Eve’s hungry, hungry mouth sating this new, violent, ceaseless craving in her.
“Margo…” she said, making herself shiver. “Margo, I need you inside me.”
As Eve pushed her hot tongue inside with a delicious groan, Margo let herself sink in the chair, resigning herself to the knowledge that this was all she would ever want again.
-
She knew that none of them were expecting her to show up to Eve’s premiere. She hadn’t planned on it. She could handle questions from the press, inquiring if this was her olive branch after Eve’s betrayal. After all, Footsteps on the Ceiling was written for her, and how generous it would be for her to publicly give Eve her blessing to play Cora. But she could not tolerate the sincere confusion and care with which Karen would inevitably take her to the ladies room during intermission to ask her why she had shown up; could not tolerate Bill’s frustration at her arrival despite his very generous allowance that she need not come just to support him (she had opened enough shows with him already); could not tolerate Lloyd’s condescension.
Really she had no intention of going at all. But the idea of seeing Eve up there on the stage, in full costume, under the lights, acting the way Margo had taught her, was irresistible. She recalled the feeling she got when she first saw Eve act as her understudy; the awe, the exposure, the arousal. She had neither the willpower nor the desire now to deny herself. Eve was all that mattered.
She dug out a box from the closet in the guest room: Eve’s old things, that she abandoned when Margo gave her new clothes. She donned the old coat and the old hat, and turned to look at herself in the mirror. With the brim down, her face was obscured. Surely no one would recognize her; especially not if she got standing room instead of a seat. They wouldn’t have any idea she was there.
This must have been how Eve felt, irrepressibly giddy at the mere prospect of being in the same theater as her, and seeing her right there, not 15 feet away.
At the play, Margo was painfully impatient, dreadfully anxious every time Eve wasn’t on stage. When Eve would come on again, she was struck with overwhelming voracity; it took every last ounce of self control she retained to keep herself from jumping Eve on the stage, instead dragging herself outside to wait in the shadows by the stage door for the show to end. When Eve invited her in in her bathrobe, she had a smug smile on her face. She didn’t say a word, just gave Margo a knowing, mocking smirk, and locked the door behind them.