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“We don’t usually do this sort of thing.”
“We really don’t.”
“But Weiss—”
“But Yang—”
The two women in question exchange an irritated look across Blake, pinned between them on the therapist’s sofa. Coco Adel, psychologist to the wealthy, the needy, and apparently, the very cranky, adjusts the rims of her glasses.
“Why don’t you start from the beginning,” says Dr. Adel, crossing one leg over the other and looking down at her notes. “What brings the three of you here today?”
Dr. Adel is greeted with silence. A long, long beat of it, and then Blake sighs and breaks it.
“We’ve been living together for years. Practically married. And for the most part, we’re doing great. There’s a lot of love there. But lately, there’s no...”
“Spark,” Weiss supplies sharply.
Blake nods. “Exactly. There’s no spark.”
“This shouldn’t be happening to us,” Yang adds. “Three hot chicks shacking up? The house should be on fire.”
“Well it used to be, before you were too tired from work every day,” Weiss retorts.
“Me?” Yang looks outraged. “I’m not the one complaining about headaches every night.”
“Well, I’m not the one who grew my nails into talons. Talk about giving up.”
Both women look directly at Blake, who slinks lower in her seat and palms the delicate nail file she’d been fiddling with all session. The cat ears on her head flatten miserably.
Dr. Adel makes a little hrm noise in the back of her throat that draws everyone’s attention. “Ladies, this shouldn’t be about blame,” she says gently. “It should be about understanding.”
Weiss and Yang both look away sheepishly. Blake sits up a bit straighter. It’s a long, awkward moment, and then Yang looks back at Weiss. “You talk,” says Yang, every word coming out like a grudge. “This was your idea.”
“It was all of our idea!” Weiss protests. She looks to Blake for backup. “Wasn’t it everyone’s idea?”
“Found the therapist, called the office, cleared all three of our schedules...” Yang ticks points off on her fingers at she speaks.
Blake silences her by resting a hand on her denim clad knee. “Babe. We get it.”
Blake and Weiss share a tiny smile of solidarity. Yang clocks it, and all of the puffed-up feathers, all of the bravado, melts from her shoulders, fills her features with something impossibly fond. She covers Blake’s hand with her own, and after a quick, acceding breath, Weiss hooks her pinkie around Yang’s.
Dr. Adel watches it all play out. There’s a lot of love here, it’s plain to see. But it’s not her job to comment on that, not today. Today is the time to listen and to learn.
“From the beginning,” Dr. Adel prompts again. “How did the three of you meet?”
“Oh that.” Yang grins. “It was five years ago.”
“Six,” Weiss adds pointedly.
Yang shrugs. “Same difference.”
“A whole year is hardly the same difference.”
“Fine. Six years ago. We all met on vacation...”
--
Colombia. Five or six years ago.
Blake is sitting in a narrow booth with a gin and tonic when the blonde slides into the seat across from her. She’s not often taken by surprise — but the streets are chaos, a mill of policeman crawling down the drag like ants and questioning all the single tourists — and the blonde has taken Blake by surprise.
“Wild night, huh?” A wide, sunny grin to match the hair. “I’m Yang. Nice to meet you.”
Blake’s attention is still on the cops outside. Surreptitious, but alarmed. They’re questioning all the single tourists. And Blake — and Blake —
Her attention drifts back to Yang, an opportunity in motion. For the first time, she takes the other woman in, and is floored. It’s the quintessential oh no, she’s hot moment, and maybe Blake would be embarrassed about the cliché of it all if she wasn’t using ninety percent of her brainpower to keep her jaw from scraping the floor. She’s dressed casually, in an old Smithereens t-shirt and jeans, the sleeves torn off to reveal the well-defined muscles of her arms. Blake wonders if this is on purpose, if she dresses to show off. From the sly cock of Yang’s head, the wild tumble of her blonde hair, Blake suspects that she does all the time.
Oh yeah. Yang will do just fine. Blake leans forward on her elbows and twirls her straw in her drink. “Come here often?” She asks, one eyebrow raised.
Yang smirks. “Is that a line?”
“Would you like it to be?”
“That depends.” Yang sits back in the booth, arms draped across the worn-down seat. She looks Blake up and down, slow and deliberate, and Blake feels the promise of it prick at her skin. “You got a name?”
“Blake.”
“Hmm.” Yang’s eyes flick to the side, and she flags down a server. “Cervezas,” she said, holding up two fingers, “Dos. One for me, one for my girlfriend. Blake.” Yang’s eyes slide back towards Blake, gauging how she will react.
“You move awfully fast,” Blake says lightly. “Will we be married by the morning?”
That smile again, and Yang tosses her hair. “Play your cards right, and anything is possible.”
And the air between them shimmers.
--
Should Blake have questioned it, Yang’s easy navigation of their molten tension, the way she guides them through the room, the way she rests her hand on the small of Blake’s back, lets the whole room know that they are an item, that they are a pair? Perhaps, but Yang has the uncanny effect of turning Blake’s knees to water – and Blake needs her, needs the cover that she’s providing after the botched extraction from the Taurus job.
Because oh yeah, Blake Belladonna’s day job? Assassin. Not that she’s super into labels.
“Awful lot of police around, don’t you think?” Blake asks when she’s two drinks in and feeling loose enough to press. “Someone get robbed or something?”
Blake is making conversation, but she’s also testing Yang, because of course Adam Taurus still has cronies out there – and most of them wouldn’t mind taking a shot at her, and an awful lot of them have no trouble stooping to baiting the trap with a spoonful of honey.
“Are there?” Yang shakes her mass of hair around when she looks around the room. “Guess I didn’t notice.”
As if on cue, a police officer sails through the room after she says this, and Blake looks pointedly from Yang to the cop. Blake feels herself tense up, worries that the prick of her ears will give her away despite the long years of practice at schooling them unknowable. For one anxious moment, the officer locks onto them both with narrowed eyes, but then Yang grabs Blake’s hand and squeezes it, and his attention slides away from them both.
“Hey,” Yang murmurs, her lips close to the shell of Blake’s ear. “You want to get out of here?”
Blake nods. Maintaining a cover has never looked so good.
--
And then it goes the way it so often does: One of them drags the other into a rundown bathroom stall, one of them nips at the others jaw and fumbles with the top button of a pair of jeans. Yang is loud, loud, loud when Blake sinks into her, and she’d be shushing her if she wasn’t too turned on to stand up straight. When Yang shoves Blake against the stall, the wall rattles, and when she finds skin, Blake whimpers, ready to come at a brushstroke, wet and hot and trembling between her legs. It’s fast and frantic and fucking hot, and Blake nearly forgets that she’s supposed to be on the run.
--
“We get it,” Weiss says dryly. “You had good sex.”
“Don’t be jealous, Weiss,” Yang teases. “You were good, too.”
The goofy smile that gets passed down the line of them doesn’t need any explanation; the memory is plain. What doesn’t add up is what fell away in the aftermath, what they’re missing now.
“So you two met on vacation,” Dr. Adel says, still setting down the facts. “And Weiss? Was she at the same bar?”
“Not by choice,” Weiss protests. “That place was a dump. But I needed to use the ladies.”
Dr. Adel’s eyebrows raise. “And you met Blake and Yang... there?”
“She wishes,” Yang crows.
A blush spreads across Weiss’s features. “Project, much? No. If I had walked in on you two, I would have turned around and left.”
“She’s lying,” Yang tells Dr. Adel in a loud, sotto voice. “She’s the biggest freak of any of us.”
“Oh?” Weiss asks. “I’m surprised you even remember.”
And Yang, as though suddenly remembering what they’re doing there, deflates. She looks at Dr. Adel helplessly and shrugs.
“Weiss?” Dr. Adel prompts.
Weiss looks smug. Like if she were a little bit younger, she might stick out her tongue. Like at this exact age, she might be thinking about it still. “No, we didn’t meet in the bathroom. We met in that garbage heap of a bar. But...” Weiss can’t help it; the smile slips in, like a heart skipping a beat. “I guess they have their moments...”
--
Five or six years in the future, Weiss will lie about this moment in time. She’s not looking for a bar; she’s looking for a quick way off the cop riddled streets.
After all, they’re looking for tourists who are travelling alone.
Weiss knows that she stands out here, her pale white hair pinned into a high ponytail, sparkling in her tennis whites. She wishes she’d had time to change after planting the bomb for the Taurus hit, but her extraction had been botched, and now she was wandering the streets of Bogota dressed for the country club.
(Funny, the way commonalities line up, even when you don’t know it, even when you never will.)
She does the only thing she can think of – she walks into the first bar she sees on the street, a divey little place with a live band playing something haphazard and ignored in the corner. Right away, Weiss knows that she’s got a tail. She can feel him, as striking and unwelcome as something cold and slimy being dripped down the back of her neck. She knows she needs to think quick: Weiss beelines for the first girls she sees, a cozy looking couple snuggling in a corner booth. Another time, another planet, and she might have read the room and veered left to the bachelorette party in the club down the street, but right now Weiss is driven by urgency, and maybe, some small part of her thinks years later, she was even driven by fate.
This is how Weiss meets Yang and Blake.
“Please help,” Weiss hisses, dumping herself into the seat across from them. “I think I’m being followed. Can I pretend that I’m hanging out with you?”
Yang and Blake tear themselves away from each other’s eyes and hands and lips, and Weiss does her best to make her eyes very wide and pleading. Blake softens first, Yang a step behind at her heels.
Girl code, Weiss thinks smugly. Works every time.
Like clockwork, rigid and expected, a police officer saunters up to their table before Weiss even has the chance to take off her coat.
“Evening, Senoritas,” he says casually. “You three all travelling together?”
He says it mostly to Blake and Yang, but it’s Weiss who flashes a huge grin and leans across the table like these are her best friends in the world. “Girl’s trip!” she says brightly. If anyone here knew her, they’d spot the lie in a heartbeat. Weiss is rarely cheesy. But nobody here knows her, and the irony is that even though that’s what’s put her in this situation, it’s also what is saving her butt.
Blake and Yang catch on quickly, leaning away from the coupled intimacy of their embrace, drawing Weiss into their team. “You know how it is!” Yang adds brightly. “Sometimes you just gotta get out of town, right ladies?”
Blake giggles behind her hand and gives the officer a thumbs up. “Don’t worry, officer. The only shots being fired here are tequila.”
The police officer grunts, somehow uncharmed by their antics, but he does carry on, and Weiss’s chest swells in relief.
As soon as he’s gone, Blake fixes her with a long, pointed stare. Her eyes are amber, Weiss thinks. They nearly glow. “Some creepy guy is following you?” she asks, adding without words that she’s smelling a lie.
Weiss feels her hackles rise. “What are you, a cop?” she snaps.
“No.” Blake points at the retreating officer’s back. “That was a cop. You in some kind of trouble?”
“Honey, we’re all in trouble,” Yang jokes. Under the table, she bumps her knee against Blake’s.
“I’m not in trouble,” says Blake. “And I’d like to keep it that way.”
Yang checks Blake out with exaggerated interest. “You picked the wrong outfit, then.”
“Did I interrupt a date?” Weiss asks. Like she doesn’t know the answer to that question.
“Not exactly,” says Blake.
“So you’re just fucking, then?” Weiss asks it primly, at odds with the crude words.
It startles a bark of laughter out of Yang, and her adoring purple expression flips from Blake to Weiss and back again. “Oh, I like her,” says Yang. “Please, Blake... can we keep her?”
Weiss knows she should feel ruffled at the idea of being kept. But the way Yang says it makes it sound like a promise.
--
They get the shots of tequila, because Yang insists that they sound too good to be part of a cover, and she and Blake lick long lines of salt off each other’s hands and feed each other limes. They get the second round of shots to toast the slapdash ‘girl’s night,’ the third because the first two made them so friendly and loose; the fourth, Weiss suspects, so that Yang can try to coax Blake into licking the salt off of her collarbone instead of her wrist.
“You’re making Weiss uncomfortable,” Blake insists.
Yang turns her attention to Weiss. “Am I?” her voice drops octaves lower the more she drinks, curving somewhere close to husky. “Are you uncomfortable, Weiss?”
If Weiss is uncomfortable, it’s only because the twining heat in the pit of her stomach is growing achingly familiar, impossible to ignore. Yang fixing her with that heady purple gaze, hair spiraling over her shoulders, ragged t-shirt stretched tight across her chest – it isn’t helping.
“Um,” Weiss says dumbly. She licks her lower lip. It still tastes like salt, and Weiss thinks about what it might be like to taste that blend on Yang’s skin.
“See!” Blake protests. “She can’t even string a sentence together. Leave her alone, Yang.”
That’s the last thing that Weiss wants, as her attention wanders from sunny Yang to Blake, her sultry other half. Yang is so obviously hot, like a freight train screaming towards you, but Blake has that kind of ineffable sex appeal; her dark hair has grown messy, falling into those incredible golden eyes, and the more she drinks, the redder her mouth becomes.
Sure, Weiss is uncomfortable – but only because she is so completely, excruciatingly turned on.
“How long have you two been together?” Weiss asks. Anything, anything to remind herself that these women have their eyes trained elsewhere before she loses herself to something that she might regret.
To Weiss’s surprise, Blake and Yang look at each other and laugh.
“Five hours?” Yang guesses.
“Six,” Blake replies.
“What?” Weiss hears the shrill note in her voice and blushes. “I thought you two were like – not together together – but –”
Yang shrugs. “Lotta cops around tonight.”
“Got something to hide?”
“No.” Yang fixes Weiss with a level look, one that makes Weiss catch her breath. “I just don’t love cops.”
“Who does?” Blake wonders aloud.
“So you two—” Weiss points between Blake and Yang “—aren’t any kind of couple at all?”
“I mean. We did fuck in the bathroom,” Yang says thoughtfully.
“Yang.” Blake drops her head helplessly into her hand, but her shoulders shake with silent laughter.
“Nah,” Yang says, after sparing a quick grin at Blake. “We’re in the same boat as you. Odd threesome, huh?”
Weiss’s blush deepens at the word threesome. Yang’s grin grows wolfish, and for the first time. Weiss starts to wonder if she’s not the only one trying to untangle the wires of sexual tension twisted together in a heap on the table in front of them.
Yang waves her hand without looking away from Weiss, and another round of shots are ferried to the table. Yang takes Blake’s hand, turns it over, presses her mouth to the inside of Blake’s wrist, sprinkles it liberally with salt. She holds Blake’s arm towards Weiss like it’s something precious, like it’s an offering. “Might as well make it official, huh?”
Yang watches Weiss hungrily. Blake stares with raised eyebrows, flushed cheeks and burning like coal. Weiss lowers her head, and tastes skin.
--
“And how did things go from there?” Dr. Adel asks. She taps her pen against her notepad, a circling nervous habit.
Yang smirks. “How do you think? What do you want, a play by play?”
“If you think that will help.”
Yang is taken aback, unsure of what buttons to press against this placid front.
Blake sweeps in, ever the quiet pulse to Yang’s flame, to Weiss’s scathing defiance. “We went back to Weiss’s place. And it was—”
“—Hot.” Weiss blurts. She looks briefly embarrassed, and then glances around like she’s expecting a challenge. “What?! It was.”
“It was,” Yang admits. “Mind bendingly hot.”
“It was like, it had been good before, but with Weiss we felt whole,” Blake adds. “I don’t know how to explain it."
“And your sex life now?” Dr. Adel asks mildly. “Still hot?”
“It’s...” Yang trails off.
“Not like it was before,” Blake says politely.
“It’s dead in the water,” says Weiss, ever the blunt force of the three of them behind her deceptively delicate looks.
“What do you think changed?” asks Dr. Adel.
Weiss, Yang, and Blake looks around uncomfortably. The truth is, they don’t know what changed. But it’s nothing like it was before.
--
All three of them are drunk by the time they make it to Weiss’s hotel room, drunk and laughing, Yang making grabs at them both and Blake leaning close into Weiss’s side. When Weiss fumbles with the key to her room, Yang crowds up behind her and kisses the back of her neck, right behind the hinge of her jaw, and she’s pressed in close enough to feel the tremble that shudders through Weiss’s whole body.
It would be easy for Yang to say she’s not thinking clearly, the booze and the night and the women running through her veins until her judgment runs murky – but the truth is, a part of Yang is always thinking clearly. When you’re an international assassin, the consequences are deadly when you drop the ball.
(And Yang is still wondering how she managed to botch the Taurus hit so badly, still wondering who the hell else was there, because obviously someone else was contracted to take the shot. Adam Taurus is dead, and Yang’s hands are clean. Her mind is turning.)
But look – if the police are looking for single tourists, what better way to throw them off than by hooking a beautiful woman onto each arm? This is what Yang tells herself when Weiss finally gets the door open, when she pins Weiss to the wall and her arms above her head and kisses her breathless, when Blake comes up behind Yang to cup her tits and kiss her neck.
Nobody will suspect a thing, Yang thinks, as she’s kicking off her jeans and letting her head fall back as Blake and Weiss spread her legs wide and crawl between them. She may have botched the hit, but her cover is far from blown, and oh god, when Weiss’s tongue flicks out like that, Yang can’t stop her hands from scrabbling into Weiss’s hair, yanking hard on her ponytail and letting the mewl Weiss lets out carry the jerk of her hips.
It’s just business, Yang tells herself when Blake urges Weiss to crawl up Yang’s body until her knees straddle Yang’s shoulders and Yang can grab Weiss by the ass and grind her cunt against her face. An alibi, at the very least, Yang insists, licking Weiss to the sight of her and Blake exchanging wet kisses above her until Weiss comes apart in her hands.
Honestly, Yang thinks sleepily when they all pass out in a pile, the sweat and the sex of it all drying on their naked skin, her bosses should be proud of her. Grateful, even. She wraps her arm around Weiss’s waist and feels Blake snuggle against her back. Yang is just doing her job. It’s not like this is love.
--
But this, of course, was love. It takes Yang weeks to realize it. It takes Weiss even longer. It takes all of them moving into an apartment together, exchanging rings and brewing coffee and making eyes over the morning paper, to realize that this is love, and that they’re not going anywhere, the three of them, for a very long time, as the weeks turn into months turn into years (five or six, anyway).
Is this where the passion starts to fade? Is it the quiet intimacy that killed it, the domesticity, the lull? Blake, Yang, and Weiss will tell Dr. Adel exactly that. They’ve lost the spark, they’ve grown complacent. In the cozy glow of a therapist’s room or Weiss’s office at home or over one of Blake’s lovingly brewed cups of chamomile tea, they can even all believe it.
At work, they tell a different story.
Intimacy, Blake thinks as she throws a knife at a wall, is hard to maintain when your partners don’t know huge swaths of your life. If Weiss and Yang don’t know she’s a contract killer, they may never really know her at all. They know her heart, but they’ll never know the source of the shadows.
It’s hard not to think of someone as a patsy when you’ve managed to hide something this monumental for five years, Yang realizes, tearing down the road on her motorcycle somewhere in a ragged desert. Even the loves of your life. Especially the loves of your life. How do you wake up with someone every morning and not see the capacity for murder in their eyes?
When those walls are up, it takes a lot to bring them down, Weiss knows. She mulls it over during hand-to-hand combat practice with Pyrrha, and ends up eating mat when her mind wanders. It seemed like the perfect set-up for so long – none of them asking about each other’s jobs, all of them living in the now – but that has to take its toll, right? Sex was the first thing to go, though it took them all an awfully long time to notice it.
“What changed?” Dr. Adel asks again.
And the truth is, they all know what changed: Nothing. That’s the problem. The years grew shorter, the commitment deeper, the life more settled and sure, but nobody ever dove deeper. Nobody ever asked why Yang sometimes needs to scrub blood out of her clothes, how Blake knows how to walk silently, why Weiss sometimes comes home smelling like gunpowder and smoke. The walls that they’ve built are impassive, crawling with ivy and nettle.
It would take a killer to tear them down. Maybe two. Maybe three.