Work Text:
Eve dreams and starts with nothing.
Dream-nothing.
You’ve seen nothing represented before. Endless white. Void of black. Empty expanses. Narrow, swallowing spaces that fold in on themselves. Existence subtracted.
Dream-nothing — Eve’s nothing, true nothing — is none of these things. It isn’t anything, really, but before I start speaking on what dream-nothing is and isn’t, before I start labeling it (it! you see? I’m stumbling already), let me explain why any attempt to capture dream-nothing will always be failing:
Relativity.
Relativity frames understanding, perception, language. A flower is a flower because it is nothing else, and if it is big, it is only big because it isn’t small, and if it’s pink, it’s only pink because it isn’t any other color (or because its color falls closest to, of the many shades your culture sees and names, pink). A thing adopts shape and meaning only when other things, kindred or alien, stand in relief against its skin.
The problem with dream-nothing is that it cannot hold or know relativity. Relativity contradicts all the principles that hold dream-nothing together. And if all language is relative — nothing, relative to something; is, relative to isn’t; knowing, relative to not-knowing; holding, relative to not-holding — how can I, or anyone, describe dream-nothing without destroying it? To explain dream-nothing even in nots, in negations or omissions, would be cheating.
Let’s cheat. Not because it’s easy (it is easy), but because we have to. Because we have started already. Because we are relative beings — desperate to understand, to take shape, to find meaning, to dig scars into skin — and because Eve is one, too. Because there is no worse place for a relative being to be caught than in dream-nothing. Absent relativity. Absent shape and meaning. Absent any means to see or know self.
Let’s mollify dream-nothing, with our relative concepts and our relative language, if only to set Eve free. Let her find something that will rewrite its laws and split it in two.
Compare dream-nothing to nothing as it’s often imaged: a great expanse of white that echoes at infinity, or great swallowing black deaf as the unknown universe. Dream-nothing is neither of these things. Dream-nothing is a wealth of absence too withholding to be imaged.
Dream-nothing leaves you — leaves Eve — in a loop of not knowing yourself, not knowing anything around you. A soul-dead hum like the song built from: the drone of the train car you ride to a job you’re half-warm about, the sound of a spouse you like no-more-than-well-enough snoring in bed beside you, the tired buzz of an imagination that compensates for all the things you dream of, but know, as you grow older, you’ll never get to.
Dream-nothing withholds extremes and opposites. Withholds suffering and malcontent as well as it withholds pleasure and completion. Withholds sound and smell and sight and touch. Withholds so much, Eve wonders whether she exists at all. Wonders, with everything muddled out of arm’s reach, whether she is sensation absent perception, or perception absent sensation. Mind or body. Body or mind. Which came to her first, whenever she was made. Which will leave her last, whenever she dies—
Would you believe me if I told you that, of all things, it’s the concept of death that tears dream-nothing in two? I promise I’m not being lazy — choosing something powerful and natural and dreaded and celebrated and deified to do the job. I could have done it with is if I’d wanted to; I could have done it with a tricky word, one that takes on different roles and meanings depending on the part of the tree it hangs from. Death is what does it, because Eve is in question.
Death. Killing. Concepts crude and complex and choking and freeing. Finality and reinvention. Where dream-nothing lacks relativity and contradiction, death roils with it. And as it roils, it births Something.
From the center of Eve’s nothing — center, yes! relative position in space, a sure sign that dream-nothing is chipping — Something tears its way into existence. Clawing and violent and beautiful and welcome and uninvited. Something beckons, announces itself, invites Eve to take hold, despite all of dream-nothing’s withholding.
Eve does not walk or swim or float to Something. Dream-nothing, though splintering, still is, and isn’t a thing traveled through. Eve appears to Something just as Something appears to her: simply and suddenly. They come together, Eve and Something, and as they do, Eve wonders if Something — fucked-up, violent, lovely Something — has a dream-nothing of its own. Whether it’s different from hers or just the same—
Relativity springs. Rewrites the laws of dream-nothing and splits it in two as easily as Eve might snap her fingers.
Fingers! Eve didn’t have anything in dream-nothing. But thanks to Something, their meeting, relativity sprung together — Eve has fingers. She has many other things, too: she has sight and smell and sound and touch; she has means and agency and desire. And what better to do with all these havings than interact with Something? Clawing, violent, uninvited Something. Her dream-nothing usurper. Maybe it will raise scars over Eve’s skin, and maybe it will let Eve raise scars right back. One taste of having is all it takes for Eve to turn greedy and wanting. She reaches with the tips of her fingers like she wants to have Something, too.
They touch; dream-nothing decays.
Something, rather anticlimactically, is a hallway. Wide as Eve’s wingspan — not her armspan, but the precise length required of would-be wings to support her in flight. White plaster walls, white plaster ceiling, laminate flooring. Painfully unremarkable if not for the subtle curve of its spine: a bend just slight enough to
hide what lies ahead a dozen paces, to
tease the prospect of
uncoiling.
You know Eve is curious. That she lives and loves to unravel. She skims the outmost wall, the one furthest from whatever center the hallway bows around, with the tips of her fingers as she chases the tail of a thing seemingly endless. The sound of her steps is all wrong, out of place, airy and echoing, like hard soles against resin in a much vaster, much emptier space than the one that holds her. The sound of walking through a museum’s lesser-visited wing. A sound that calls attention to silence.
A sound that might not be out of place after all: as Eve rounds and rounds a corner that cannot be rounded, she catches the hard, stark line of what can only be the edge of a picture frame hung to the wall. Her steps clap in double-time.
The frame holds a painting as wide as Eve’s shoulders and precisely as long as her spine, C1 to coccyx. The painting holds her — you know who she is; Eve would know her anywhere. The revelation is a relief more than a surprise, a twist you’d both already been spoiled to. Her presence pervades Eve’s thoughts, Eve's dreams, Eve's hopes, Eve's fears. It’s a question of when, never a question of if, she will crawl out from a sulcus, spread herself, arachnoid, across Eve’s brain, then bleed herself there to coat meninges all red. Like a bad hemorrhage. The kind that subtracts speech and adds nausea and multiplies vision and divides logic until you’re vomiting — trying to sick out the pressure she put in your head. Eve’s head. Eve's dream. Turned nothing to something.
Painting-Villanelle sits in the lacy shade of summer-green trees, on a patch of grass-mixed dirt that catches light the same way her hair does, in flecks of warm autumn gold. They’ve been here before — both of them, together — but it takes Eve a second to recognize the tree-flanked dirt road for what it is: the place they first met. Not as pretty anonymous faces staring at kindred reflections through bathroom mirrors, but as Eve Polastri and Villanelle, names known.
Painting-Villanelle does wear the blue scrubs, though, which is weird only in a way that’s expected of dreams — married memories, no regard for space or chronological time. The shirt is just as Eve remembers — stiff collar rimmed white, sharp creases at the sleeves — excepting the stains splattered down its front. She always did wonder what Villanelle had looked like after killing one third of a hospital floor. Whether she’d kept clean, or let her costume ruin. She looks at the red now on Villanelle’s scrubs, then at her face. Villanelle smiles.
She opens her mouth, speaks, but the sound is muted by paint that starts to warp with the stretch and press of her lips. The movement ripples, around her face first, then far enough to touch at the leaves — fallen ones she sits on, mixed with the earth, as well as fresh green ones high out of reach. Colors bubble up off the canvas, roil like skin with a nightmare disease, and as they infect other colors adjacent, the whole painting starts to… sweat? ooze? bleed? No — It secretes. Every stroke or glob left by brush multiplies, thickens, until the whole canvas beats and breathes.
When Eve touches the mess Villanelle shares a frame with, a chill runs up her spine and puckers her skin. Her palm sinks into the paint with a wet, wet squelch. And the worst part is — it’s warm. Warm like a body. Warm and wet like mucus, blood, and spit, and come. Eve makes a face, but presses forward with all of her weight. Slips inside.
Inside.
Inside, her hand is clean. Inside, she isn’t warm or wet with body. Inside, Villanelle stares at her from down the road, where she’s still seated, locked if not patient. Inside, there is no viscera canvas stretched between.
“Eve.”
Eve realizes she hasn’t heard her name, hasn’t really given it thought, since stepping into this space of nothings and somethings. Villanelle gives it to her like she has been hoarding it, delighting in the challenge of keeping it still on her tongue, cutting the inside of her mouth with it, loving the taste so much as to struggle between freeing it from the cage of her teeth — and swallowing.
Eve wants to smack her upside the head, just to see if it’ll fly out like a bird.
Eve wants to pry her mouth open with her fingers, just to see if she hides it beneath her tongue, or against her hard palate, or between gum and cheek.
Eve wants to press their lips together, just to see — just to see if she can breathe her name, out of Villanelle, back into herself. If it’ll taste forever different for having known the inside of Villanelle’s mouth.
“Eve,” Villanelle said, was willing to part with, so Eve presses her luck while Villanelle sits in gold speckled shade.
Pressing her luck looks like: one step that should close no more than three feet closing dozens instead. Little cheating, the way you can only cheat in dreams. Little cheating, like Villanelle might not notice. Little cheating, like a knife in Eve’s pocket—
Not yet, not yet.
Villanelle notices. Something does, at least. Something hits the top of Eve’s head.
Above her, trees melt. Lose parts of themselves and drain out colors on droplets of paint. Green splats against Eve’s cheek, sticks in her hair, dots her arms before running thick vine-like veins down her skin. It’s hot. Warm like the canvas, the inside of body she pushed through to get here. When blues and golds and browns join green, she realizes it’s not just the trees, but all of this world that is melting.
She worries, suddenly, for Villanelle. For her melting.
After Eve’s little cheating, they’re no more than several paces apart, but several paces is distance enough to keep Eve without the worst of the rain, and Villanelle, within it. It pelts her in thick globs, pushes her down by the shoulders and beats at her back. She struggles to stand. It sticks to her body and drips tackily down her skin to collect in a puddle at her feet. The puddle grows quickly. Viscous, multicolored molasses. She falls to it on hands and knees, battered by liquified chunks of sky and tree, by the melting of the inside of the painting of the hallway of Eve’s dream.
Eve reaches for her. Villanelle looks at her through the swallowing mire, and Eve reaches for her. Wants to, needs to, pull her out before the paint leaks into her mouth and runs up her nose and clots thick in her lungs. But her feet are rooted. The dirt path has melted and sucked her down to mid-calf. She tugs. She panics. She catches Villanelle, still staring, still waiting, still sinking, just like her, and cries out.
“Villanelle!”
It flies out like a bird.
Eve has been hoarding, too. Keeping Villanelle’s name on her tongue, cutting the inside of her mouth with it, loving the taste of it, too scared to swallow, too afraid to open.
It flies from the cage of her teeth, and between two flaps of its wings, large enough to obscure her field of view, she catches Villanelle one last time: smiling with her eyes and laughing high in her head, delighted at the revelation of her name held so clumsily in Eve’s mouth. Held no longer. Held for only a moment. A wing beat covers Villanelle like a curtain, and when it rises again, she is gone. The puddle is gone, too, and the bird escapes between a hole in the trees, no longer melting.
The dirt road folds Eve away. She falls or rises or blinks — returns to the hallway. The walls catch the sound of her breathing, throw it around, amplify it. Make her feel like she is listening to her lungs from the inside of her own body. She looks at the painting, absent Villanelle, then leaves it quickly.
Around the bend, another frame. Whether it would have been regardless of expectation, or if Eve’s hope for it — for who she might reencounter within — is what hung it to the wall, is impossible to say. Dreams birth from want, among other things, regardless of want being conscious or subconscious. Eve’s want lies somewhere in between.
In-between wanting leads to knee-jerk disappointment when she finds her second painting to be a blank canvas. Not blank, exactly. The frame holding it is white, and contrast, relativity, lets her realize a couple of things: first, that the hallway’s walls are off-white — closer to cream, actually, than to eggshell — (she swears they weren’t, when the hallway first came), and second, that the canvas’ pores are clogged by a subtle coat of semi-transparent silver paint.
Eve studies it from top to bottom, line of thread by line of thread, which takes a while, because this painting, while narrower than the first, more than rivals her in height. She searches for something, anything, an inconsistency in the weave of canvas or in the spread of paint, but soon finds herself crouched at its feet, nothing in sight and in hand. She braces herself against the frame to push herself back to standing, and when she does, startles to see the top half of the painting overtaken by black. Startles to see a wide pair of eyes — floating, bright, staring at her from depth of dark.
Eve’s heartbeat quickens. The eyes are unsettling, faceless and unblinking. But it’s the suggestion of what the space surrounding them holds, the dark and the unknown, that makes Eve’s blood thump too-loud in her ears. She wouldn’t be surprised if the eyes could see it — her pulse — beating out, threatening rupture, against the thinner parts of her skin. She imagines the shape of Villanelle’s body, tries to discern a silhouette in the dark. The attempt is not only failing, but gives way to a realization perhaps all the more unsettling.
The eyes are off-center. If they are indeed attached to a body, that body stands just close enough to the edge of the canvas to suggest something else might be standing beside it. Should be standing beside it. With a sick thrill, Eve realizes that the space is hers. That it was made for her, that it’s just the right size, that it waits to be filled by her body.
Eve swears the eyes grow eager. The effort it takes to keep her hand from shaking as she presses it to the void that calls, as she’s watched ever-harder, makes her sweat. She doesn’t dare blink, but it doesn’t matter, she misses it anyway — the moment the painting swallows her.
Swallows her with arms wrapping around. The weight of a body presses into her back. The room is dim, but not so dark that Eve can’t see the mirror facing her. Facing them. It’s precisely the size of that near-silver canvas turned black. Villanelle watches their reflection from over her shoulder, so close, Eve can feel the warmth of skin beside her cheek and the flutter of breath through her hair. She can see the shape of her body, now, but not as well as she sees her own. Hers takes the brunt of warm light, whatever and wherever its source, while Villanelle’s stays obscured in half-dark.
Except for her eyes, of course. They are bright, too bright, too prominent, too big, too much, too seeing. Perversely intent. They are, in Eve and Villanelle’s shared reflection, an inescapable focal point. Two wells with their own gravitational force, pulling Eve’s gaze in harder than she can swim it out. Eve isn’t sure she wants to. Because, she tells herself, it would be foolish to close your eyes to a thing that looks inches away from swallowing you. Not because, she tells herself, she wouldn't miss the swallowing for anything.
“Fits you perfectly,” Villanelle says against the shell of her ear.
Perfectly, Eve’s body fits in Villanelle’s arms. Perfectly, Eve’s body fits in negative space. Perfectly, Eve’s body fits in a black-and-white dress.
Villanelle holds her at the waist, right where the dress’ seam hugs tight. She traces that line with her fingers, then strays up to splay her hands across the lower rungs of Eve’s ribs. In the space between, the white of the dress ends in a point at Eve’s sternum. Villanelle follows that point, drags her touch up between Eve’s breasts and pauses, finally, beside her heart. Eve feels the thud of it, everywhere.
“Don’t be scared,” Villanelle says.
Before Eve can answer, the dress splits around Villanelle’s fingers, and Villanelle’s fingers split into her skin. She gasps. Villanelle shushes her — it’s okay. And it doesn’t hurt, not at all, when Villanelle pulls lightly to stretch her open. When, through a long slit held wide by Villanelle’s fingers, Eve sees her heart, live and beating.
She looks away. But in the mirror, there is littlewhere else to look than at Villanelle: at her fingers stained red, at her well-hungry eyes aimed at the inside of Eve’s chest. She catches Eve looking, or not-looking, and smiles. She leans closer, so that Eve can feel her breath on her neck, and doesn’t once look away when she touches her lips to Eve’s pulse.
Eve’s heart jumps — again and again as Villanelle’s mouth grows busy beneath her jaw. Villanelle watches its every quickening beat. The way it seizes when she skims Eve with teeth, the way it flutters when she kisses, pumps harder when she uses the tip of her tongue. What a traitor Eve’s heart is. Shame, arousal, and Villanelle’s unnerving stare make her flush.
She closes her eyes. She has to. But even her mind’s eye won’t let her escape this. Crow’s feet and creased brow, all the muscles of her face moving in, moving center, shutting tight, spare her for only a moment. She knows her eyes stay closed, feels the strain of keeping them shut, but sees, still sees. Sees differently from before. The angle is too low, a head lost in height, and the colors are too warm, cornea covered in a sticky film of rose. Villanelle is no different.
“Whoa,” she says, eyes on Eve, dead center. Surprised, a little breathless, elated. “Look.”
She uses both hands now to hold open Eve’s chest, fingers hooked around the edges of skin. Creates a perfect, pointed ellipse to peer through. Eve follows her gaze, inside, and sees — her mind’s eye. Single and wide, it blinks at her from between two chambers of her heart.
“You are full of surprises.”
Villanelle dips her hand into the cavity of Eve’s chest to cradle her heart. It pulses, wet and hot in her palm. Eve doesn’t understand why she isn’t dead yet.
“Don’t squirm so much,” Villanelle says, like she’s read her mind, “I don’t want to hurt you.”
Villanelle’s fault, in holding Eve’s heart, is that she covers with her fingers the eye running along the ridge of her coronary artery. That her gaze loses focus, that she forgets to look up, that her looking gets trapped where they join. That her hand becomes caught in the cage of Eve’s ribs.
Slowly, Eve grows flesh around Villanelle’s wrist. Slowly, Eve stitches herself back together. You’ve heard horror stories of retained surgical items — a doctor who leaves a needle between two organs. Eve leaves Villanelle’s hand around her heart. Villanelle notices only once it’s too late, only once pulling out would mean killing Eve in the process.
“What do you want?” Eve asks as her chest sucks Villanelle deeper, as flesh rearranges to better hold her in place.
When Villanelle looks up, Eve reads in her eyes a sticky mess of emotion that she half-buys, half-questions. It’s all the warning she gets before she’s turned around and pressed to the mirror’s surface.
When did the ends of her hair grow wet? When did the lights come on? When did the homey smell of microwaved shepherd’s pie combine with the dangerous smell of that heady perfume on her neck?
At her back, the refrigerator hums. Magnets click as they crawl, closer to her body, to stick her down.
At her front, Villanelle’s hand presses inside. Then pulls out all at once.
Eve screams.
The sudden movement and the resulting absence around her heart tear her out of the scene. Back to the hallway.
The mirror-painting is filled-in now, with Eve’s likeness pressed back between Villanelle’s arms. Villanelle’s fingers hold the core of her open, spread her wide for visual dissection. She takes a step backwards and almost stumbles. Palms at the phantom ache in her chest.
The hallway has grown since Eve last saw it, by several feet at least. The added height allows square windows, about as large as record sleeves, to line the walls, high above the paintings. Each looks to a pane of distant sky: one, pale and clear, another, dark, and studded with stars, another still, grey and raining. They are uncountable and undeniably interesting, but Eve pays them little mind in favor of pressing on to find her next painting.
Her next painting is no painting at all. It’s a pencil drawing — no, a lithograph. A small thing in a small frame that she has to stand but inches from to appreciate in detail. It’s what you would call an impossible figure, an optical illusion. One of those worlds with Penrose stairs that don’t properly start or end, doorways that hang illogically, and objects that don’t abide gravity. An Escherian parody — did you know Escher titled one of his most famous figures Relativity?
Eve’s Relativity depicts a stunning Parisian apartment, deconstructed and rebuilt like a labyrinth of too many dimensions. Each room — a bedroom peeling yellow from its walls, a bathroom tiled salmon pink, a living room catching sun at all angles — rests on its own floating platform. These platforms, though islanded, are impossibly interconnected by curving steps borrowed from the building’s central stairwell. Villanelle is nowhere, but her things are everywhere, and when Eve wishes herself among them, the wish is enough to make it so.
She gets lost and unlost. She follows stairs and pathways that loop infinitely onto themselves. She rummages through drawers and closets like she is looking for the logic holding Villanelle’s world together. She picks apart like she expects to unearth some great secret. Instead, she finds, in such an impossible apartment, just what you’d expect of a twenty-something year old girl living all alone — plus or minus a dozen deadly weapons. But even the weapons are housed within normal: bullets beside tampons, poisons next to perfumes, guns in shoe boxes, subtle knives in jewelry drawers. You know which of these Eve slides in her pocket.
They meet in the bedroom.
Villanelle waits for her. She is tired and bloody and a bit too pale. When she sees Eve, a smile tears the cut on her bottom lip open, and her gaze dips pointedly to touch Eve’s hand. Eve looks. First, at Villanelle’s mouth, then down at what’s taken her interest: fingers wrapped tightly around a neck that once belonged to a now-smashed bottle of champagne. Its glass teeth drip fizzling droplets to Villanelle’s nice hardwood floor.
“You like destroying my things, Eve?”
“How else can I understand you?”
Villanelle clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth. What an insolent sound. She cocks her hip and rests both hands at her waist.
“I’m dying for a drink.”
Wrong line, wrong line. It seeps in from sometime else, from a crack in the ceiling.
The neck in Eve’s hand looks like a flute, and it fills with bubbling liquid gold when she holds it upright. Villanelle steps forward to take it from her, but Eve jerks it away. It spills over jagged rim and onto her fingers.
“I need it first,” Eve says. “Sit.”
Villanelle sits. So well behaved! So abiding for a thing that lives in a place lacking even the most basic laws of physics. It gives Eve the courage to raise the flute to her lips. She drinks between two sharp points of glass that press dangerously into her cheeks. What runs down her throat is most certainly not champagne, and refills instantly, even as she is drinking, so the neck of the bottle may never grow empty.
She smacks her lips. The not-champagne is thin and a little bit sticky, and it loads her tongue before loosening it.
“I think about you,” she confesses, and gets stuck there. “I think about you. I think about you.” Stairs that never begin, stairs that never end. A glass never drained. “I think about you.” She wants to say so much else, but the only thing that comes out when she opens her mouth is, once again, “I think about you.”
It’s a little embarrassing.
It makes her feel almost-free and it makes her feel naked. It makes her feel like she’s skipping beneath a needle carving ever-deeper grooves into her skin. Her circling draws Villanelle in. Maybe Villanelle is the needle. One step, then two, she closes the distance between them.
“I think about you,” Eve says, and when Villanelle makes contact to hold her hand, is finally able to finish, “all the time.”
Villanelle takes the glass from between her fingers and Eve hardly notices. Expert prestidigitation. Fitting of this illusory space. She holds it, full, between their bodies. She is flattered. She is softened. She presses her lips against the place Eve’s mouth has been, and drinks. She tastes all the words Eve has left unsaid, and drinks them greedily, until the liquid spills from the corners of her mouth and runs down her chin.
When she finally lowers her hand, parts with the flute, she gasps for breath.
“What do you want?” Eve asks, like the answer isn’t dripping indecently down Villanelle’s face. She thinks of dangerous things slotted in Villanelle's life. Bullets next to tampons, poisons next to perfumes —
a knife in her pocket.
“Normal stuff,” Villanelle says, and they fall into bed. “Someone,” she says, and runs the tips of her fingers carefully from Eve’s temple, to the apple of her cheek, to the corner of her jaw.
“Like this?” Eve asks, and it comes out with a click, in time with the switchblade that she presses to the soft of Villanelle’s belly, precisely at the moment when Villanelle leans in for a kiss.
This time is different from birds in mouths and hands around hearts. This time, Eve has her. She can taste it on the smell of not-champagne on mixing breath.
“You can’t,” Villanelle challenges, underestimates, leans in — offers her guts to Eve’s knife, her lips to Eve’s lips.
Eve can, and does, and once again, gets stuck. She gets stuck on the moment flesh breaks. On the moment Villanelle gasps. On the moment Villanelle rolls onto her back. On the moment she straddles Villanelle’s body. On the moment Villanelle’s blood gushes hot over her fingers. Again and Again. The sound Villanelle makes, replayed. The feeling of sinking inside, on loop. Without beginning, without end.
With each repetition, Villanelle looks a little more hurt, a little more betrayed, a little more impressed, a little more flattered, a little more angry, a little more enamored. It’s in catching these little changes that Eve manages to escape the cycle, though perhaps not in exactly the way she expects.
The next time Eve presses in, Villanelle is warmer, closer, and wetter than before. The knife is gone, turned into her fingers. Villanelle’s reaction changes, stops looping, but Eve’s fingers don’t. And now — well, now Eve is just fucking her. She doesn’t need to look down to know. Villanelle likes it. She makes pretty sounds, gruff sounds, and all kinds of sounds in between. She smiles — at Eve, one second, into her mouth, the next. Eve fucks her harder, and Villanelle likes that, too. She likes every single thing she makes Eve do to her. Every want in Eve she inspires.
It feels good, to know Villanelle from the inside, Eve thinks. Better than any sex she’s ever had, than anything she’s ever had, if dream sex is to be trusted. It’s the sentiment, she thinks, more than the feeling.
Villanelle rolls her hips, down into her hand, and — okay, maybe it’s the feeling, too. Eve meets her the way she wants, presses in deeper and rocks into a rhythm and curls her fingers to see what reactions each of these will draw out. The wet sound Villanelle makes against her knuckles is lewd and loud. It makes Eve flush and makes her do it again, with the weight of her hips behind her hand, this time. It sounds like pushing into a canvas of warm dripping body. Villanelle cries and it falls somewhere between pleasured and pained.
Eve feels sick. For liking this. For hurting her. For not wanting to stop. For wanting to stop, and not knowing how to. She starts to think she’s made a mistake.
She withdraws her hand. Finds the knife in her fist, and Villanelle’s stomach painting red between the bracket of her thighs.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” she should be saying, but Villanelle says it instead. Because, absurdly, Eve is the one who needs to hear it.
Eve leaves Villanelle’s lithographic world, without ends or beginnings, on the next buck of her hips. She falls, kneeling, to the hard floor of the hallway, which might not be a hallway at all anymore. Might never have been.
When did benches appear? Long ones without backs, the kind found in museums. The little windows, she remembers from between painting one and painting two, but the doors below each of them are entirely new. They’re closed, and plain, but the implication is clear: they lead to whichever world pours light into the hallway from the window directly above them. Her hand stills on a knob that sits beneath an evening sky of bloody pinks and bright golds and sad blues. One turn away from peeking inside, she spots the next painting three doors down. Leaves for it at once, cuts deeper into the hallway — which really must be renamed at this point. Eve's Gallery of paintings and doors.
Painting four is a window. It’s not of a window, because the window, its frame, is made of wood and affixed to the canvas. The painting is of what is found within the window — within the reflection held by its panes. The shapes you see on glass when there is too much light on your side, and too much dark on the other. They are muddled, indistinct, muted colors. Without thinking, Eve cups her hands around her eyes and leans close, as though this will let her peek through paint.
A street, at night. Empty and cordoned off by many criss-crossing lines of police tape. Not at all what she thought she would find. When she leans back from the glass, she has left the Gallery, left for the tiny room that lives on the other side of the canvas.
A near-naked single bed is kept from full-naked by a fitted sheet and a lonesome pillow. It occupies two-thirds of the room. Just past it, across from its head, is what looks like a corner of a bathroom, cutout from where it belongs and grafted here, tiles and all. A freestanding sink. Tissues, makeup, a razor, all sit on the shelf above it to look at their doubles in a cheap square mirror. Two commercial wall-mounted dispensers, one for soap and one for paper towels, hang, diligently-filled, beside them. Finally, in what little space is left between underdressed bed and transplanted bathroom corner, there is a plastic chair. Atop it, a towel, and atop the towel, a long and thin beaded dildo.
Don’t get any ideas. It won’t be put to use.
It’s just one piece of the puzzle Eve builds to put together that she’s in a brothel. The biggest piece is the building across the street (also a brothel), if not the noises that leak through the walls.
This painting makes her itch, makes her restless, makes her longing. She tries the door but finds it locked. She hears the squealing of pigs out the window. She lies on the bed and finds something hard in the pillow: a tube of lipstick hiding a thin blade that cuts through her lip. Cleaning herself up keeps her busy.
As she runs her tongue against the cut, after dabbing lipstick and blood away with wet paper towel, she feels it. A presence on the other side of the door. There’s a peephole there that wasn’t, moments ago. She should be on the right side of the door to look through it — out, rather than in — but she isn’t. Being watched without being able to watch back makes her hair stand on end.
A man and a woman fuck loudly in the next room over. Once, she might’ve found this exciting; now, it’s annoying at best. Criminal for keeping her from hearing what she swears is breathing, stilted (as in, on stilts, close to tipping or falling), against the other side of the door. She could gut the fuckers like swine. She reaches for the handle, forgetting it’s locked, pulls at it violently, and doesn’t stop.
“Open the door,” she says desperately over the rattle, over the couple’s coupling.
Villanelle’s voice is quiet, but she’s sure she hears it, “You have to open it.”
And maybe she’s right. Maybe Eve has to invite her monster in. But doesn’t Villanelle know that she can’t? That the door won't open?
She forces it harder and hopes the thing will drop right off its hinges. On the verge of giving up, she hears a click. Like a lock turned back, or picked. The air grows still and thick. The fucking couple goes quiet. Her grip around the handle loosens. She bites her lip hard enough to taste copper from her new cut all over again. She opens.
Behind the door is someone she forgot.
Behind the door is her husband. And he’s fine, he’s fine, but he makes her remember far-away dream-nothing. It creeps up behind him. Swallows space. Threatens the relativity Eve has found through…
The cut on her lip is a scar. She runs her tongue over it as she grabs the edge of the open door. She thinks of the line she raised over the soft of Villanelle’s stomach as she slams it shut. Slams dream-nothing and her husband away. Slams herself back into the Gallery.
There are many doors in the Gallery, now, but she’s had enough of doors and of what might be hiding behind them for the moment.
Painting number four is a much-needed marvel. A massive, messy, impressionist scene that imposes recoil — knocks Eve several steps back so she can appreciate its scope — then lures its audience close — drags Eve several steps forward so she can inspect the melding of brushstrokes. It lets her breathe before closing hands around her neck. It chokes her until she sees clear through threat of death, then makes vision blur when air grows too scarce.
It’s a fun painting, and a lively one.
On rolling hills, pairs of figures dance. She and she, all of them. Faces indiscernible, essences clear. Eve recognizes their movements, especially. As they play, they shift and streak colors carelessly across canvas.
At the crest of the highest hill, Villanelle spins Eve in circles and wears a long funeral dress. Eve holds her close, then pushes away, and all the while, whispers her promises. Every other pair rides some variation of this carousel. Fond and barbed. Close, then far away. Soft and then cruel.
Eve touches the canvas so as to step inside. Nothing happens. She presses in with her palms and traces lines with her fingertips, but no matter how she tries, nothing happens. The scene won’t let her in. She finds a bench and sits and watches. So close, and so far away.
Her favorite pair sits in the quiet shade of a drooping, covetous tree. Villanelle leans against the trunk, wearing a pretty silk robe, legs spread just enough that Eve takes the space between them as invitation to scoot closer. Takes and takes and Villanelle lets her. Outside-Eve wishes she could hear what Villanelle whispers, what words she uses, what parts of herself she gives, to keep inside-Eve between her thighs, close enough to kiss.
Eventually, she leaves them — their many, little, closed-world selves — on legs soft with nostalgia and guilt. Walking gelatinously, she hopes, above all else, that the next painting she finds won’t shut her out of herself.
The Gallery grows more doors than ever before — even doorways without doors at all. She looks through these, but doesn’t stop for them yet. They gape into hallways, or onto little terraces or balconies or sprawling fields or darkened rooms. The implied choice is overwhelming. She stays her path.
In a sick twist of fate, the next painting is of a hallway lined with doors — lined with forced choices. It isn’t hung as the others were, but to a freestanding wall centered exactly over the Gallery’s eternally curving spine. It’s the size of a door, of course, and the canvas bends easily as Eve pushes it open.
She hears the cry immediately. Laced with distress that makes panic bright, makes her stomach drop, makes a fist clench around her heart. Her body forget its rhythms. Forgets how to breathe or swallow right.
“Eve.”
It’s a weak thing with an ephemeral lifespan. Eve thinks of a butterfly and shredded wings.
The cry bounces like a stone infinitely skipped across water, echoes all around, so that Eve can’t begin to guess at its source. She tries the first door, because what else is there to do than try every one? She’ll try a hundred if she has to.
Before she can open it more than a hair, a specter of Villanelle appears — ghostly, only half of her, like a piece of the whole chipped away — and forces it closed, hand over Eve’s hand. The touch is cold and the look of her, in dim light that weakly flickers, startling.
“Not here, Eve.”
The Villanelle she assumes corporeal continues to cry, so she listens without question. Tries the next door.
“Not here,” says another specter. “Not here,” yet another. Each looks less complete than the last, and Eve feels the changes between them like the tick of a clock through her bones.
She thinks of all she would lose in losing Villanelle. She thinks of forest roads raining paint, of looking and seeing through mirrors, of knowing Villanelle from the inside, in a world that allows knowing so scarcely. She thinks of a presence she feels even in absence, has felt long before real meeting, through devoted study and incessant wanting. She thinks of playing and dancing, pushing and pulling, a game of seeing who will fall and who will follow — the worst or best trust exercise ever conceived. She thinks of bruises and scars, an odd sense of humor, a lonely apartment, young freedom in capture, and the sweet sound of a breathless voice in her ear.
Eve would try a hundred doors to save Villanelle, but as it turns out, she’s forced not to try any. The phantoms rise, coax her down the hall, shut her out from any alternate possibility and — Eve sees her. Villanelle dying, turning blue. Her life spills out — long, iridescent wisps that flow from her mouth, linger in the air, spread out on the floor like bright patches of flowers — a beautiful thing that Eve wants to bouquet, collect in her hands and water forever.
“Would you help me, Eve, if I couldn’t help myself?”
Villanelle’s specters gather behind her. All of them. Half a dozen, at least. They close in, each with its own missing piece. One has no mouth, another, an eye bitten out, another still, a hole through its chest. One manages without the entire left side of its body. They point at the man, the great lump of flesh, that suspends Villanelle by the neck.
“Would you stop denying yourself, if that’s what it took to keep me?” the specters ask, partly in chorus, partly completing the question in turns.
They handle Eve’s hands like porcelain, cold touch everywhere, turn her palms to the ceiling, and lay there a long wooden handle. The axe is heavy. Eve’s fingers curl, hold it inexpertly.
“You pretend you don’t want me—”
“You try to act like you don’t—”
“You say we’re different—”
“But we’re the same where it counts—”
“You want like I want—”
“And you would kill for it—” someone else, herself if she has to.
“Stop it,” Eve pleads.
The great lump of flesh turns to look at her. Underestimates her. Villanelle, half-lifeless, doesn’t. Two-thirds-lifeless, doesn’t. Eve raises the axe, feels cold hands helping, then drops its weight hard into his shoulder.
All of Villanelle’s scattered life pours in reverse. The wisps in the air, their flowering at Eve’s feet, even the phantoms tugging at Eve’s strings, those ghostly half-formed apparitions, rush back into her body when she takes in a breath. When Villanelle speaks, she holds all of their voices, round and warm and full where theirs were sharp and icy and broken. A shattered pot-bellied kettle glued back together.
“Do it,” she says.
The great lump of flesh writhes on the carpet. It tries to drag itself away, but Villanelle is there, on him, keeping it still. Keeping him still. Eve sees his face for a second before it bubbles and smoothes away.
“Do it,” Villanelle says again. The life in her is so much, so strong after near-emptying, and Eve’s taste for this is so much, so strong after ever-bridling, that Eve’s body rattles from the inside. Hands shaking, head spinning, stomach seizing. Overdose after withdrawal. Eve hacks into him like this will set her right again —
“Again.”
And again.
Villanelle is beautiful in the afterglow, covered in Eve's staged decision. Red-faced, red-handed.
Eve falls and Villanelle follows.
Villanelle wraps herself around her body, clings close as Eve falls back through the carpet, drops through a long and dark tunnel, lands, light as a plastic bag pulled by wind, on a cold stone floor.
The full weight of Villanelle keeps her pinned. Above them, a high crumbling ceiling held up by severed columns offers a gaping hole to peer through. It’s a beautiful day in Rome. The sky is gorgeous and clear. Water whispers nearby. Wings flap and doves coo. Villanelle breathes close to her ear.
“The game is done, Eve. Isn’t it?” she asks, hopeful and happy. The sound of her voice makes Eve shiver with warm.
“I guess so.”
Villanelle lets their cheeks kiss on her way to rising. She doesn’t pull back too far — just enough to study Eve’s face. Her eyes, her nose, her mouth, the soft lines in between. She smiles stupidly.
Eve splays her hands below the wings of Villanelle's shoulders to press her down, to close their embrace. Villanelle’s eyes are soft and wanting, and her cheek is splattered a violent shade of red. The contrast is endearing. Their noses brush.
Eve trails her touch down Villanelle’s back. Feels her arch a little when she reaches the sensitive bend of her spine. Feels Villanelle’s breath hitch against her lips when she slips her hands beneath her shirt. Feels Villanelle freeze when her fingers find cold metal hiding quietly at the small of her back.
Eve pulls the gun from Villanelle’s waistband. Villanelle takes Eve’s hand in her own.
“It’s nothing,” she lies.
When she leans in to kiss Eve’s mouth, Eve turns her head to catch her lips with her cheek. Beside their faces, their hands lie clasped, gun in between.
She doesn’t look at Villanelle, but knows, from the waver in her voice alone, that she breaks. “You would have done it, some time or another. Aren’t you glad that you did it for me? For us?”
“You didn’t let me choose,” Eve spits. Hot tears collect in the corners of her eyes, tickle down her nose, drip over her lips and chin.
“You didn’t choose in Paris?” Villanelle counters, and catches the wet on Eve’s face with her lips, then with the tip of her tongue. “You didn’t choose when you sent me your name? When you dressed me up?” She licks again. “When you kept me in your ear all night?”
“That’s different.”
“When you made me torture that woman?”
“I asked. You said yes.”
“All of our playing wasn’t you asking?” Genuine confusion. Her grip tightens around Eve’s fingers holding the gun. “The game is done now, Eve. You love me.” Eve shakes her head. “I love you,” Villanelle tries again, and again, Eve shakes her head. The red stain on Villanelle’s cheek grows and brightens. It cries and drips down to mark Eve’s skin, little tears. “You’re mine.”
Their hands holding the gun stay linked as Eve turns in Villanelle’s arms to make her escape, to army crawl herself out from under her weight. Their arms bend and twist in ways that should break — to keep from separating, or to keep the weapon. They merge in a jumble that makes it impossible to tell whose finger rests on the trigger when Eve feels the metal barrel digging into the notch of her left shoulder blade. Or is it Villanelle’s shoulder blade?
She’s never getting out of this. The realization comes like wisdom teeth pulled on local anesthetic — numb, still alarming, pain postponed. The ruins help her. The floor opens up, cut gums, beneath her body. It turns half-liquid, and promises to quicksand her away. Villanelle must realize this, that Eve is sinking out of her reach, one second after Eve does, because one second is exactly the length of time Eve spends choosing to let stone swallow her, to let the earth suffocate her over belonging to Villanelle, before Villanelle pulls the trigger.
Ah. Villanelle’s finger, Eve’s shoulder blade.
The pains is searing. Eve cries, and hears the sound split from Villanelle’s mouth. Villanelle disappears, a weight off her back, missing like clipped wings. The ground turns red as it sucks her away.
In the Gallery, her hollowed out shoulder continues to sting. She searches for the bullet’s point of exit beneath her shirt, but her skin is smooth and only imperfect in the ways she is used to. She wonders if Villanelle has raised a scar on her back. The mirror from four paintings ago pokes at her memory, goads curiosity. She entertains the idea of revisiting it, of using it to study the part of herself Villanelle has reached into. But the Gallery has morphed, turned to something she doesn’t trust herself to backtrack through — hesitates, even, to keep following lest she get lost, lest she find Villanelle, lest she never find her again.
A stupid worry, that last one. You’ll see, and she’ll see.
The Gallery used to be, though without perceivable beginning or end, always with a clear set path. One axis to move along. Backward to forward. A lane built by parallel walls ever curving. The Gallery, as it stands now, is made of walls that curl to meet each other, and is capped by a circular vaulted ceiling. It is a vestibule, a massive dome of a chamber lined with at least two dozen exit (or entry) points — some, closed doors, some, open doors, some, archways, each, unique. It is a room, as all circular things are, without perceivable beginning or end, and, given so many doors of relatively equal prominence, without a clear set path.
Eve assumes one of these portals leads on to the rest of the Gallery proper — the tallest archway is a good candidate, what with the room it leads into resembling the Gallery she’s come to know, but she can’t be sure, because a couple others lead into scapes similar. The rest must lead, as she’s surmised of previous doors crowned by little windows, to different times or different worlds.
She tries them, finally.
Some doors, like the one that looks like the front door of her house, or the front door of Villanelle’s apartment, or the door of a hotel room in Rome, lead her to universes that feel close to her, if a little off in ways she can’t immediately pinpoint. They take her into the past or into the future, branching paths off from the familiar. Realities alternate to the one she knows.
Others take her to places much farther, worlds she never knew she could concurrently inhabit, lives she never knew she could concurrently lead. Universes she never knew existed. She visits cities she’s never been to. She sees herself as a doctor, as a bartender, as an artist, and sometimes, as a creature not entirely human.
The common thread, aside from the consistency of her character — a comfort, to know that even across so many worlds, she remains recognizably herself — is Villanelle. She is always there, and it is always them, and they are always doing to each other. Eve sees herself change by Villanelle’s hand thousands of times, and thousands of times, sees Villanelle changed by her hand in turn.
It’s awful, the thing they do to each other. It’s inescapable. And it’s the best, the loveliest, the most important thing she’s ever known.
Opening doors becomes an addiction. When she finds the one that leads on to the rest of the Gallery, she’s glad to see they don’t stop appearing. She can’t believe she ignored them before, laments all she might have missed.
The paintings make their return, of course, and Eve continues to pay them great attention: Villanelle surprises her on the top deck of a bus, swaggers and fans out her feathers, wearing a suit that barks worse than it bites, but she bleeds all the while and smells like hurt, so Eve tells her she knows, that they are both wrong and right at the same time, and that a hole through the shoulder and cruel words that hit heart aren’t so big as the things that hold them together; in a ballroom, they rest, but they don’t say enough — Eve has visited worlds where they say far more, where they speak after Rome and learn how to love, and she wishes she had time, as they dance, to tell Villanelle as much; in a fishtank they swim, and Eve feels angry, but in all the wrong ways and for all the wrong reasons, so she leaves this painting and its cold water quickly; multiples of herself make selfish decisions, and for each of these, Villanelle suffers an arrow through her body, and though Eve cares for her, though Villanelle lets her, Eve’s mouth is sewn shut, and this frustrates her so terribly, she tears her lips open and doesn’t care that the canvas tears, too, in the process.
The final painting hangs after many doors, and before many more still. It’s of a bascule bridge with both leaves closed — to span, absurdly, not a river, but an isolated road. When Eve steps inside, she finds herself at one of its ends, facing the wrong direction to know Villanelle stands mirror to her at the other. But she knows. She feels her presence with such force, their backs may as well be pressed together.
“Leave me if you want,” Villanelle says, sincerely. “I will let you.”
Eve smiles because she has seen behind doors.
When she turns, Villanelle turns with her, two ballerinas synced in the shell of a music box, and the distance between them is not the length of a bridge, but the thin sliver of dead space afforded by a single sleeping bag holding two bodies. Little cheating. Eve looks at Villanelle, at the softness of her in an oversized sweater. Behind her, there is a window that looks out onto the bridge. Eve realizes they are in the middle of that isolated road, and that the window belongs to a camper van.
Villanelle is still, and quiet, and watching. She takes Eve’s hand and guides it beneath her sweater, doesn’t let go until Eve’s touch rests between the dip of her waist and her navel. There is a thin line there, raised hard over the perfect softness of Villanelle’s skin. Eve runs her fingers over it and watches Villanelle tense on held breath before relaxing on an exhale she can taste, that brushes her lips.
Villanelle asks for her turn with a gentle push to Eve’s hip. Eve obliges. She rolls over and lets Villanelle see and feel what she has done to her, the scar she has raised over her skin. She touches her lips to Eve’s shoulder so lightly, Eve wonders if she’s imagined it, the wing of a dream-butterfly skimming her cheek, until Villanelle kisses her, chastely but longly, right where the bullet bore into her body. Her mouth is not claiming, exactly — some part of it has to be, for how hers the mark is. Mostly, it is devoted and thankful and cherishing.
By the time Villanelle is done, the sun sits low in the window, low in the sky, and melts colors of ripe beautyberry and thick fox fur between flat white clouds. Eve turns to face her again.
“We’ve learned a lot, haven’t we?”
Villanelle has learned, in this world and in others, all throughout their Gallery, that loving and having are not one and the same. This doesn’t mean that she can or is good at letting go. Eve knows they don’t part well or easily. Eve has learned, in this world and in others, all throughout their Gallery, how to give and how to take through her wanting.
“We can learn more,” Villanelle suggests, with a waxing smile that isn’t shy, but certainly not self-assured.
And Eve thinks she is right when she learns what it’s like to kiss her in the peace of a getaway car, of an endless road, of a golden sun. They kiss like they have all the time in the world and not a thing better to do with it. Villanelle moves with hunger but not with hurry, and the part of her mouth invites Eve to stay there, between soft with a wet tongue, for as long as eternity. Eve kisses her to panting, then eases up for the pleasure of being able to build her back to breathless. Undoing doesn’t have to hurt. Villanelle rolls her onto her back, and when Eve offers her pulse, she readies her with the pass of spread lips and probably too much spit, and bites a little. Bites a lot when Eve likes a little enough to make a warm sound Villanelle surely feels through her chest. Undoing doesn’t have to hurt, but it often does, and it can if Eve wants. She has learned, through Villanelle, how to navigate want.
She can’t believe she was ever scared of Villanelle holding her in her mouth. Of Villanelle spreading her open and sinking in to feel the way she beats inside. Of letting Villanelle have her. Villanelle keeps Eve still on her tongue while Eve keeps Villanelle’s name still on hers, and they love the taste, and they swallow. What Eve wants is to keep learning and having — this, always.
Dream-nothing returns when they are cradled together, skin sweaty, hearts returned to resting. Eve sees it through the window, falling like night as the drawbridge rises. She fears it until she finds with her fingers the scar she raised over Villanelle's belly. Until Villanelle finds, at Eve's back, the scar she raised over her shoulder. Dream-nothing comes closer, taps at the glass, but inside, together, they are safe from nothings that threaten self through never-knowing.
They are safe until the water comes. It floods the floor of the van and rises insidiously, so that Eve only notices once it’s impregnated the mattress. Once it laps at her sides with a terrible cold. Villanelle is freezing.
Somehow, Eve knows how this ends. She knows that water wants to drive her out, wants to take this away, wants to push her back into dream-nothing. She knows that a hatch in the roof is their only escape. That by the time Villanelle muscles it open, they will be wading through water as high as her shoulders. That when Villanelle boosts her up, gives her the leverage she needs to grip the rim of the hatch, she will pull the weight of herself and the weight of water out of the van, then flop gracelessly onto the roof. She knows that when she turns to help Villanelle out after her, the water will have risen to spill out of the hatch, and Villanelle will be gone, will be out of reach — and then, dream-nothing will find her.
Eve takes Villanelle by the hand, leads them to the door, which should be impossible to open, and together, they do everything in their power to force it off its hinges. When kicking doesn’t work, they beat their bodies against it, in turns and together — once, and it groans, twice, and metal dents, three times, and Eve thinks they might actually manage.
One last time, they throw their combined weight.
Something splinters, shatters, bursts like a star. Like countless universes ended and birthed all at once.
Eve wakes.
Eve wakes, and, for several moments, sees the whole of the Gallery and all its many realities in afterimage. She worries dream-nothing has caught her — until she sees the foot of her bed and the covers bunched over her lap. Until she hears her own breathing and makes a conscious effort to slow it. Until she feels cold at her shoulders, slightly clammy with sweat. Until a hand comes to rest at the small of her back.
“Are you okay?”
Villanelle’s voice is a groggy, beautiful relief. Eve looks at her over her shoulder. At her sleep-heavy eyes, her pillow-creased cheek, her hair catching sun from the open window in flecks of warm autumn gold.
“Yeah,” Eve half-laughs, exhausted, then plops back into her pillow. She rests in the cloud of her hair, thinking fast about paintings and doors and worlds and which of them she liked, which felt true, which didn’t. Thinks, all of them have made her, made them.
Villanelle’s hand slides into hers. They fill in the gaps between each other’s fingers.
“What did you dream?”
Villanelle’s voice is quiet and curious and unexhorting. Her words fill the air to give Eve space. Her question hangs like a fruit that wishes to be picked, but wouldn’t mind ripening on the vine if Eve chooses.
She lies on her side, one arm pillowed beneath her head. Eve reads in her eyes, patient and expectant, a soft mix of emotion that she buys without question.
Which Villanelle is this? And which Eve is she? Enough pieces coalesce — Villanelle’s eyes and Villanelle’s voice, their shared bed, their shared room, their shared home — to know this Villanelle has seen her want and want well, if messily. To know they are past push-pull carousels and forced-choice doors and love confused for having. Most of the time and in the ways that matter, anyway.
Eve props herself onto one elbow. Villanelle helps her move her hair away from her face, out from between them, behind her ear, baring the warm column of her neck.
“Us,” Eve gives.
Villanelle grins, takes it, lets it go to head and heart. Something flicks its tail, teasing, in the shifting chameleon colors of her eyes, and Eve smiles back. Conversation made without words, the way they’ve always known how.
“Tell me,” Villanelle says, because she wants to know, and knows Eve wants to share.
Eve shifts a little on the mattress, looks out the window to collect her story, and once she’s found it, speaks with hands and hair moving, words bouncing and trailing, attention devoted and passion contagious.
Villanelle listens about the Gallery and its painting and doors. She listens as Eve explains visiting all facets of them — in as many times and places as Villanelle could imagine. She listens to Eve’s romanticism, her lost nihilism, her musings on fate. Eve unfolds her dream, and Villanelle grows heavy and light at all the right moments.
“What was I?” she can’t help herself asking. “Behind some of the doors?”
Eve rattles off, “A thief, a lawyer, a florist—”
“I have already been all of those things.”
“Passed for all of those things.”
“Stealing your suitcase was fake-thieving?"
“Hobby thieving. You were a full-time thief in this one."
Villanelle hums. “My dream-brain would have done better,” she says, just to give Eve a hard time.
“Drag king?”
At this, Villanelle raises her arms to lace her hands behind her head. Eve looks, not for the first time, at her breasts. Back to her face. Villanelle smiles the way she did when she saw a bird fly out from the cage of Eve’s teeth. “You dream of me in drag?”
Eve wants to smack her with the pillow tucked beneath her side as well as she wants to catch that smug smile with a kiss. Villanelle is quicker to speak than Eve is to pick — pillow or kiss.
“Keep going. Another fun one.”
“A castaway,” Eve says, finds the least glamorous version of Villanelle she can think of. “I find you in oyster water.”
“Is that a euphemism?”
She’s insufferable.
“A gladiator,” Eve gives in, indulges. Because Villanelle indulges by listening. “You fight for your freedom. For a life with me.”
“And I succeed?” Villanelle tips up her chin, proud of a life she’s led without knowing.
“You do.”
“I’m a good fighter?”
Eve remembers. “The best.”
Villanelle, whetted and unsated, asks, “What else?”
“A monster.”
Villanelle doesn’t know what to make of this. Apprehensive, thrilled, undecided, she asks in a hush, “What kind of monster?” — and hopes she will like the answer.
“A dramatic one,” Eve smiles fondly, honest and reassuring. “A romantic one.” Gently, she laces their hands together. “I love you terribly.”
“As a monster?”
“As all of them. All your versions. One way or another.”
“And I’m romantic,” Villanelle scoffs, tries to sound a little disgusted, but the sound trips in her throat inelegantly. Eve sees her swallow, thick, feels her breathe in, tight, when she presses their bare chests together, and catches the way the corner of her mouth dips, half a twitch, before they kiss.
Behind closed eyes, Eve relives a dream and she relives nothing. She summons afterimages of memories and lives that brighten with every minute movement of Villanelle’s lips against her lips. Plays them together. Listens to their soul-bright hum, the song built from: different minds, different frames, the love that inspires them; the self she finds against Villanelle, two scars dug against skin, a heartbeat against the flat of her palm. Eve opens her eyes.
Eve wakes and ends with everything.