Blood Orange

The juice from the orange is dripping down your chin. You should have grabbed a napkin from the cafeteria. You should have done a lot of things that you didn’t do. You should have said no to this plan, for example. It’s stupid, of course. That’s no surprise. It’s as bad as when you hired Villanelle to kill you. It’s worse than when you traveled to Rome. Carolyn is still playing puppeteer, pulling the strings and watching you dance. You hate dancing. Except that time you danced with Villanelle. Back when you thought that you might like to comfort her, might enjoy trying to make her smile. It seems like a lifetime ago. Maybe it is. Lives have been lost since then, after all. Not yours though. Not hers. You could take some credit for that if you wanted. If you had any interest in taking what you want.

Villanelle is your prisoner now. Her Majesty’s prisoner to be more precise. Or nobody’s prisoner. Except her own. She demanded your presence from her cell, her one condition for joining this farce of fake escapes and traps and captures. She would be bait, if you would be fisherman. Together, you would reel in Hélène. After all that has happened, Hélène would not be able to resist. What about you? Would you?

The orange doesn’t look normal. It doesn’t taste right either. Blood orange maybe? You thought it would be sweeter, like a satsuma. It definitely doesn’t look like blood. You wipe your face with your sleeve and toss it into the bin as you leave the cafeteria, heading for the van outside. You weren’t even hungry. It was just a way to pass the time. 

---

Villanelle had let herself get caught, of course. She had walked right up to you at the end, fallen to her knees in the early morning snow and it wasn’t exactly the scene you had imagined, as she placed her hands behind her back, waiting for the cuffs to come. She had leaned forward, forehead pressing into your stomach, so close to where she had been hours before, and she breathed you in, smells to remember for the duration. There was blood, of course, on the snow, between your legs, soaking wadded white cotton red. Traces on her fingers too, so soon after she had left your body. You had betrayed her, maybe. Sometimes it was hard to tell. She hadn’t seemed to mind either way. She would walk into any trap one thousand times if it would tap into time with you.

“I can smell you,” she had said as her last words of freedom and it wasn’t just the smell of your laundry detergent or your Evian skin cream or the perfume that she had given you that sometimes you wore but not on that day. She didn’t need to say it – cunt – or inhale with open mouth so smells would settle on her tongue. You knew it then. You knew it after. The scent on your fingers, early morning, damp in your underwear, late at night. You. Her. Always her. Psychopathy doesn’t have its own smell. But if it did? 

---

She looks beautiful today, eight months later, all shackles and fake submission, as the late afternoon sun shines through the police van window, striping shadows onto her skin through the bars of a cage. And you remember. She is tiger, always circling, even when she is on her back, even when she is in a cell, bolted to the floor of a vehicle, making its way down a country road. Especially then, perhaps. 

The road is bumpy with potholes, created by ice and sustained by austerity. The backs of your thighs thud up and down on the wooden bench lining the side of the van. There’s an armed guard next to you, shotgun at the ready, strapped on phallics that cannot compete. Not with her. You stare at her warily, taking in the scene of confinement, the body restraints that stop her escaping, the mouth guard that stops her from ripping out throats. Somehow she wears it like seduction. You want to reach in and take take take whatever you want, whatever that is. You want to pretend she will never break free, never break you, whatever that means. She greets your stare – meets and murders – as if she is already boiling the water, tasting the marinade, testing the tenderness, bringing out flavors, savoring the salt of your skin.

You let her eat you once. Somehow you made it out alive. Taste acquired and let go.

When the van bumps again, harder this time, it shocks your cunt, jolting the tampon you put in this morning. Somehow you’re always bleeding around her. The head restraints hide her mouth, but you know that she chews her lip. The van engine masks her sounds, but you know that she swallows hard. Her dick isn’t anywhere close, but you know that she ghost-rides memories of how you gagged and exhaled and opened when she claimed your throat as her own. You squeeze your thighs. Avert your eyes. You look towards the police car ahead of you, the other behind you, counting the convoy as a distraction. One, two. No use. Your mind, your body, are still here, in the middle, sandwiched together with her.

“Use me.” You had said it that evening. Terrified that you might say it again.

---

A gunshot stops everything. Freeze frame. Another restarts it. The world accelerates, tilts sideways, sequence obscured. The police car in front of you flips and ignites. Another crashes. The van you ride in swerves into a ditch. And you? You slide. Down the bench, onto the floor, into the bulkhead, under the agent with the gun.  Villanelle is held steady – caresses and captures – by restraints and the side of her cage. Your eyes never leave her body. Familiar feeling of vomit rising.

Three days after she had been arrested, you had stood at the entrance to an underground station, fighting back the need to throw up. You could still feel her on you, despite the showers, despite the betrayals. She was stuck in your head, lodged in your cunt, and if she were with you – what were you thinking? – you would use her fingers to peel off the bruises, use her teeth to rip off the fingerprints pressed into bone. Three o’clock in the afternoon. Daydreams of being skinned alive.

You had turned her in to stop those feelings. They hadn’t stopped.

Your throat had been dry and sore and empty. A station vending machine took your money and kept your soda and incited your rage. You shook it fiercely and shouted loudly until people moved away, muttering. Fucking psycho. When the can fell, you opened it quickly, shocked as it spurted over your shirt. Darker and stickier than you expected.

Blood spurts over the windshield as bullets enter men’s skulls. Darker and stickier. Brains spurt over your jeans. A man you don’t recognize enters through the van’s rear doors. He takes keys from a dead guard’s belt and unlocks the cage, tossing them to Villanelle. He turns to you, as afterthought, gun raised.

“No, Arturo. That one’s mine.” 

Words of possession. Not protection. Consonants thick in her throat. Fear and lust bind together in your stomach.

Arturo shrugs lightly. He exits the van and drives away. Villanelle steps outside. Handcuffs dangle from her wrist as she squints into the dying sun. 

“Look, Eve.” She gestures to the scene before you, the dead bodies, wrecked cars. “All for me?”

You wonder who fishes now, who is bait, who is quarry. You wonder if you care. Her hands were in your underwear once, finding your wetness, summoning shame. All for me?

There was blood then. There is blood now, smeared across the windshield of the vehicle that pulls up beside you, Villanelle at the wheel. She leans over the seat and opens the passenger door for you, as if she is a gentleman and you are her lady. She pushes a dead cop onto the ground.

“Are you coming? We need to get there before Hélène, okay?”

“Where?”

She does not owe you any answers. She gives them regardless. “A safe house, Eve.” You have never felt less safe.

The officer at your feet is ugly – his children would be ugly too – and you reach down for the gun at his belt and claim it as your own. Villanelle watches, as you check the bullets and check off memories of weapons that have passed between you.

You should arrest her now.

“Eve?” She says your name as if she tastes it.

You should walk away and leave.

“Eve?”

Text MI6. Call this in.

“Eve!”

But she is bait and you are biting, the fishhook piercing the roof of your mouth. You feel its tug, the flood of saliva.

“I’m coming,” you say before you can stop it.

You step on the dead cop’s body, breastbone cracking, take your seat, and buckle in. You feel the crunch of rubber on bone as Villanelle backs up – “oops” – turns the wheel and enters the road.

“I am glad we get to do this, Eve.”

She steers the car up a mountain road.

---

You don’t know why you are surprised that she can drive. You should be used to it by now, all the ways that she is unexpected. She has shown them to you often enough. When she let you go on the bridge. When she walked away from the Twelve. When she relented and went back to them, turned on Hélène in a failed bloody coup that killed Hélène’s family, left her murderous, led Villanelle – distraught – to your door.

“I fucked up, Eve.” Blood had dripped from a cut by her eye, a gash in her leg, leaving trails down the garden path. The smell of paraffin on her clothes. “It wasn’t my fault but it doesn’t matter. Hélène wants me dead. She gets what she wants.”

You had let her in. She had taken off her jacket and thrown it carelessly over the bannisters, pacing up and down. You had noticed the duffel bag at her feet.

“I’m leaving, okay? It’s over. I’m dead.” 

And then she had turned on you quickly. You hadn’t retreated. You had let her crowd you against the wall. She had looked scared for a moment, but fear could be slippery, morph into violence. Your fear too, it could morph into sex. Her hands were on you before you could ask her.  “Let me,” she said. And you did. 

The sex had been desperate. Overdetermined. She had fucked you as if she thought she were killing you. You had come as if you thought that she had. Unrelenting. Fucking deranged. And then you knew that you would never be satisfied, never stop wanting it, never stop chasing her, never stop wondering if she were dead. Obsession intensified with every orgasm. She had gripped your cunt like you were property. Gripped your jaw to make sure you watched. You had wanted it more that you could admit. You had needed to steal yourself back.

You couldn’t have her. You couldn’t lose her. You turned her in instead.

At least you always knew where to find her.

And here she is, by your side, driving your traitorous ass to their safe house. Her hands haven’t left the wheel. You wonder if she plans revenge. You wonder again if you care. She pulls into a gravel driveway. You get out of the car first.

---

The house is perched at the edge of a cliff.

Villanelle walks up behind you, hand on your shoulder. In some other life, you might have been girlfriends, wives even, taking your honeymoon at this house, remote, together, in awe of the view. But her fingers brush where the bullet entered and mark the edge of the realm of forgiveness. The place from which there’s no return. Sorry baby doesn’t cut it. You know that you cut her first. Her fingers guide you towards the edge, or maybe that’s your imagination.

“It’s leaving us, Eve.” She gestures to the drop before you. “The bluff is eroding. There was much more land when I came here with Dasha and she tried to kill me. Less land when I returned with Hélène and she threatened to kill you.”

You stopped caring long ago. About the Twelve. About your value. Did you ever stop caring for her? Her actions in defense of you?

“You thought I went back to them because I was bored?” Her fingers tighten on your shoulder.

You thought she went back because she’s a psychopath. You don’t say it. What’s the point?

This is dangerous ground, you know. On the edge. You kick the gravel and watch it fall. Waves below beat at rock, eat up land, swallow whole. Newlyweds kiss elsewhere.

“Are you going to kill me?”

She ignores it.

“The bluff is still eroding, Eve. Look at us! Suspended over the roiling ocean. Dangerous, hmm? Exciting too.”

She shoves you lightly. Pulls you back. Consummate dickhead. “Don’t worry, baby.” You hate it when she calls you baby. You hate her breath against your ear, the way heat travels from body to body. “Soon all of this – the rocks, plants, you, me – will be lost to the sea.”

Her hand leaves your shoulder. You wait for it to thud at your back and push you over. You wait for it to tug at your waistband and pull you close. You wait for death or sex or both, fantasies of two together, falling apart in a hail of bullets that will come as fast and sure as you.

Whatever happened to karaoke, reading in bed, after-work drinks with friends?

Her touch is gone. You ache at its absence. She skips over to the front door. She locates a key beneath a stone and enters the house, leaving you standing. The sunset streaks the sky orange. You stare until your vision blurs, eyes streaming. You follow her inside.

---

“Make yourself at home, Eve. I’m going to find some different clothes.”

There are dust covers on the furniture. A pair of muddy boots by the door. Somebody’s been here. You grab a bottle from an antique wine rack and open drawers in search of a corkscrew.

You startle when Villanelle returns. She wears new clothes. Simple stuff. Top. Bottom. Light. Dark. You take in their fit, the body beneath them. The arc of a tricep. The dip of an armpit. The deepened hollow of collarbones. Months of prison deprivation.

She takes some milk out of the fridge. Sniffs it, returns it.

“Villanelle. Why are we here?”

“Their plan was shit. You know that. I’ve got something better now. Hélène says – ”

You don’t want to worry. Not for her. Not for you. Feel things around her. But you do.

“Hélène wants to kill you!”

“Old news, Eve. Besides, we are all professionals. Things move quickly. Allegiances change. But you know all about that, don’t you?”

A smoke alarm chirps in a different room. Testing the battery?

“Why am I here?”

“Excellent question. You tell me.”

You knew the answer once. You wanted purpose. You wanted excitement. You wanted to bring down the Twelve. Possibly. Maybe. Now it sounds stupid. You wanted her. Always. Only.

“I’m still trying to figure that out.”

Villanelle smiles sadly. She looks older somehow, proud and wistful and tired. She opens a drawer and removes a corkscrew.

“Were you looking for this?”

You reach out, but she snatches it back.

“I like you Eve, but I’m not stupid. You’ll stab me while you figure it out.” She slips in and out of your accent. Hers for the taking. A second skin. “Maybe I should stab you first?”

“You wouldn’t.” You aim for defiance. It sounds like regret. She lets it slide.

“You’re right! I wouldn’t.” Villanelle laughs as she opens the wine. “My feelings for you are so annoying. But you?” Something hardens in her voice. “You never let your feelings get in the way.”

“Feelings? Ha! What are those?”

“Eve! You are such a bad liar. I know you, remember?”

You both remember. It hangs between you.

“What happens when you stop pretending, Eve? What does it say, that voice in your head?”

The smoke detector chirps again.

You could tell her, maybe. You could tell her about that bolted door, that locked box where you’ve always stuffed it, decades of hatred and hunger and craving. You could tell her about that place in your mind, that memory palace of unacted impulses, stillborn desires, smothered before they did any harm. You could tell her about the constant torment, how it eats you, how you long to let it unspool. Spilling out like lengths of intestines.

“Let yourself, Eve. You’ll survive it, I swear.”

Your eyes dart to the shape at the window.

“Somebody’s here.”

---

There is time, until there isn’t. The is life, until there’s not.

You hear the gunshot. The window breaks. The wine bottle shatters. Dark red liquid stains her shirt. The shock of intrusion throws you through time. You feel your elbow slam through glass. You smash champagne bottles in her flat. You watch her blood soak through bedsheets. She hits the floor, holding her stomach. Her insides are all over your hands.

“I got you,” you say, but it’s all wrong. There’s no room for repetition or reparation. Hélène walks in through patio doors, déjà vu undone.

Villanelle groans softly, drenched in blood and new betrayal. “Don't run,” Hélène cautions, turning the gun in your direction. There’s no need. If I killed everyone who betrayed me? 

“Hélène.” Villanelle speaks from the floor. You couldn’t run away if you tried.

“Villanelle. You are far too easy.”

Hélène keeps the gun on you, as she unpacks a tripod and camera. “Set it up, please.” You follow her orders, noting assassins and their good manners. A detail that your textbooks neglected. 

“I'm going to film your death, Villanelle. Motivation for new recruits.”

“And I am going to eat your liver.”

You have never shared a meal with her. You have never argued about what to order or grabbed the last French fry off her plate. You have never watched her talk with her mouth full or slap your hand away or asked her to wait until you finish your dinner before starting dessert. You have watched her eat lunch with a couple of others. And once you drank a cup of coffee while she sat opposite, sipping iced water through a straw. But you do not know if she closes her eyes when she swallows oysters, licks her fingers when sampling marrow, prefers ice cream in a cup or a cone. You want to get drunk with her in the afternoon and eat kebabs on the way home and fuck in an alleyway as she pulls stray meat from your lips with her teeth. You want to watch her skin a chicken, grind the meat, and fry it fast in heated oil that crackles and spits in her eye.

Hélène unpacks her weapons. You have a weapon too. But as you reach for the dead man’s gun, she has already turned, already struck. Apparently, you are too easy too.

---

You taste it before you feel it before you realize what has happened. You think it is Hélène’s fist until the metal scrapes your teeth and you register the blade was outside and then in. Your blood is down your throat, down your chin, as Hélène drives the knife through your cheek and kicks you backwards through glass doors.

You struggle to stand, you struggle to breathe, spitting blood onto stone. You crawl and slip on hands and knees, as Hélène moves closer, a crowbar in hand. Villanelle watches – she always watches – and you shouldn’t think of other surfaces, other scrambles, other times you searched through windows for eyes that mirrored your own. 

The crowbar hits your chin. It snaps you back, your head, your senses.

“You have always been such an annoying – ”

Hélène doesn’t finish the sentence. Villanelle crashes in. You’ve seen her murderous, seen her monstrous; you’ve never seen her like this.

“She’s mine!” she screams, jumping on Hélène’s back and biting off half her ear and you wonder how you ever doubted those were words of love.

Hands that gripped your wrists one evening struggle for purchase on Hélène’s throat. Hélène throws Villanelle off easily, like she’s a child. “You have no idea what you’re dealing with.” Villanelle lands near a pile of wood, a well-used axe.

Somewhere, newlyweds build fires, toast marshmallows, have sex on the living room rug.

You’ve lost the gun. Not the girl. A knife is still lodged in your face. You pull it free and is this freedom – is this fated – as you stab Hélène in the back? You don’t care. You’ve never cared. You jerk it back. Watch. Wait.

The axe thuds halfway through Hélène’s calf. Her knees buckle and Villanelle grabs her from the ground, pulling her down onto her lap. She will break Hélène’s neck in seconds.

You get there first. On your knees between their legs, you stick the knife in Hélène’s stomach. This time, you don’t scare too easily, pull out quickly. This time, you drag the blade down and cut a woman apart.

Once there was a postcard of bodies like bacon, opened like pussy, packaged like art, where Villanelle had called you darling. A crime scene staged as an invitation, a love letter, to accept an apology you never gave. You never received it – ripped it up or slept with it beneath your pillow – but now you write her one in return, Hélène’s body as your canvas.

The knife sticks. Organs. Clothing. You grunt, you saw, lower lower. Hélène’s innards tumble out. Villanelle holds her steady – all for you – and comes undone by your hand. She leans back on bloodied stone, Hélène following, split to the sky. Villanelle says your name, over and over, voice ragged, slurred with desire. Eve Eve cut me cut me gut me Eve. You lean into her words, her wanting, opening wounds as a portal to closeness. You buck your hips against your hand that holds the hilt against Hélène. Again. Again. And then you let yourself go. Losing yourself. Finding yourself. Drenched in soon-to-be useless blood.

The hands in your hair tug hard. They sting your scalp. It could be Hélène fighting you, holding on to the life she’s losing. It could be Villanelle holding you, fighting for the love she’s won. You fall forward. Villanelle rises. Hélène gasps, trapped between you.

Villanelle bites out her throat.

Slick and spent, you slide sideways. Villanelle pushes Hélène aside.

An almost-corpse lies between you. You could watch blood spurt from wounds, or watch life drain from eyes, but Villanelle crawls towards you, licking lips, swallowing hard.

Your blood remains in your mouth for now; it does not stray into hers.

---

She stands first and reaches down. Together on the edge of the cliff. You take her hand and think of other edges, other drops. Beg, she had said that night, as she had taken you to the edge of orgasm, brought you back, taken you again, brought you back, teasing, taunting, until you had said the words she had wanted, until she had relented and who cared if she broke your back or broke your fall. You hadn’t expected her to whisper baby. You hadn’t expected her to smooth back your hair. To kiss your mouth for the first time all evening. The only time that you asked her to stop. The only time that she shook her head “no.” The only time that you shook and cried as she took you again, far too gently. Her tongue in places where nobody entered easier to process than that. Too much like innocence. Too much like losing. The tenderness that had followed her violence. Harder for you than violence itself.

Yours. You had said it and meant it. And fuck her if she had tucked you in and brought you a glass of water. Fuck her if she had laid beside you and wanted to stay. And fuck you if you had played with fire and wanted blisters and never bothered to learn how to heal.

You look at the carnage around you now.

“It really does look black in the moonlight.”

She had told you this months ago, when she deigned to answer one of your questions, speaking through a handheld receiver, behind reinforced bullet-proof plastic, when she wanted to reach you in a way that you would recognize as love. You had hated her then for loving you still in the wake of betrayal. You do not hate her now.

Now you say it back to her, the same words and same intention. The blood on the ground, black in the moonlight, the blood in your mouth, thick on your tongue, coating teeth. You think of how she will moan when she tastes it.

How to live with her? How to live without her? Wrong questions all along. How are you going to live with yourself?

You take in the bloodshed. You take in the violence. Yours.

“This is what I wanted – ” she begins.

“No, this is what I wanted.”

“ – for you, Eve. For both of us.”

“It's beautiful.”

You are on your feet but you stumble a little from your injuries. She catches you and you fall against her shoulder and her arms tighten around your back. She radiates heat and you thought it would end you, dissolve you like sugar in rolling water. But you swell to meet her, exceed her. You kiss and blood slides.

There are sirens in the distance and you jump back from her tongue and her hunger as you remember that this is how it ends. Hélène is dead. You are not. A job well done.

A new van will be here soon, new guards, new cage. Villanelle will return to her cell, stripped and stuffed into institutional overalls. She will receive inmate privileges for her assistance. She will ask for moisturizer. She will get a stack of magazines. You will visit when you can. Your cuts will heal and scar and fade. The waves that roar beneath the cliff, inside your skull, between your legs, will crest and break and leave. Eroded rock and puckered skin. All that will remain.

You sway in her arms and maybe you’re dizzy or maybe you’re dancing, on the brink of impossible futures. You take a step towards the edge. She does the same. Remote, together, in awe of the view. Mind reading. Double daring.

No way down this mountain road.

Car doors slam. Boots approach. “Eve?” They cannot see you here, not with her, not yet.

Soon.

---

It will end. One way or another. Bullets or chokeholds or boredom or axes. Fires raging and chasing you here, to the edge of encroaching oceans, where lovers leap and lands end.

There are worse ways to go, you imagine. There are worse ways to survive, you know.

To stand at the edge of the world with your woman.

If you lead, you know she will follow. If you lean, new space will emerge. Beneath you, around you, within you, with her. Slick warm blood is streaming between you. Between you all that matters now.

Suspension bridges over rivers. Suspended lovers over oceans. In-between spaces. Uncertain landings. Falling – lovelike – into the sea.

Should you die, it will be together. Should you survive, it will be in her arms.

“Eve, you’re being so dramatic.”

“You want me to stop?”

Her answer is packaged in laughter, swept skyward by the wind, over the cliff, out of reach. No matter. You already know.

You lean. You fall. You hold. You hold.

You wait for waves to come.