COVERT AFFAIRS

V. Florian

The first time we meet, she pistol-whips me across the back of my head, bursting out of a dark corner of a safe house I thought was empty.

I’m angry when I come to again: she has me zip-tied to a chair, the back of my head hurts like fuck and it’s been seven hours and four time zones since my last cup of coffee.

We’re in Paris, or at least a suburb of Paris. I stare at her in the stark light of the bulb above our heads, the night just as stark black outside, but she’s not looking at me. She is carefully cleaning a gun. We are in a dingy kitchen, strewn with dirty dishes from meals stuffed down by god only knows how many covert operatives who have made this their refuge for a few, uneasy hours. I’m not sure she knows I’m awake until she says: “I’ve another one in my lap, so don’t try anything.” Her accent is English. The rich kind, all sharp consonants and nasal vowels. I don’t answer, and she looks up at me. She’s blonde with sharp features, thinner than covert operatives usually are, pale to the point of being anemic. “I’m sorry. Do you speak English?”

“Why don’t you get me the fuck out of this chair, and I’ll tell you what languages I speak,” I spit at her.

“You’re CIA?”

“I could be with Santa Claus for all you should care, this ain’t your safe house,” I say. It’s hard to tell when she’s sitting down, but she looks a few inches taller than me. She is at least ten years older than me, though, and I have fifteen pounds of muscle on her. I could take her. “Who told you about this place?” I ask, as if we were making conversation. Behind my back, I’m carefully finding weak spots in my constraints.

“Someone owed me,” she says, and starts putting her gun back together. “Someone didn’t say you’d stop by though.”

I could stay and make conversation, but I think better of it. While she’s looking down at her work I make a break for it, overturning my chair and the table with it, splintering the back of that fragile old wooden chair and hightailing out of there. She takes a shot at me, but it’s halfhearted, whistling through the air a fair few feet above my head.

I cut my zip-ties on a piece of broken rebar on an abandoned lot and spend the night rattling back and forth in the artificial light of the metro.

The second time we meet, she’s all dressed up. I’m posing as a security officer at the American embassy in Ljubljana, and she makes me the second she gets in line for the metal detector. I ask her to get out of the line for additional questioning and sure, I’m being a bit rougher than strictly necessary when I pull her into the adjacent room. My head hurt for weeks after our first get-together. The sharp light and bare white walls in here make a stark contrast to the lush, luxurious rooms outside.

“What are you doing here?” I ask her. She doesn’t answer. I have her pushed against a table, my gun between her ribs. “I’m going to pat you down and you’re not going to move a single fucking muscle.”

She won’t have a gun on her. If she needs one she will have stashed it somewhere inside the embassy, or had someone stash it for her. But that’s not what I’m looking for when I upend her purse, rummaging among the lipstick and pressed powder and the thin wallet containing only bills and a good, but fake, Norwegian ID, when I kick her legs apart and drag my hands along the expert, expensive seams of her dress. It’s information. Something letting me know who she is and why she keeps turning up. I find nothing. I make her take off her shoes anyway—she’s still taller than me in her stockinged feet, even though I’m wearing boots— and I run my hands up her legs. Her stockings have seams in the back. They are perfectly aligned with her legs. My hands slip easily up the black material. She’s gripping the end of the table now, looking down at me. The look in her eyes does something to me, but I carefully push the feeling away.

“Maybe a little higher,” she breathes. I stand up and step back.

“You should know shit could go down here tonight,” I say. “So tell me.”

She folds her arms. “We could stand here all night and lie to each other. I won’t get in your way.”

She doesn’t. When we move in, she’s nowhere to be seen. Whatever she was doing there, she got out quickly.

The third time, I’m bleeding. Another safe house, in South London this time, and we have done something necessary but incredibly illegal. Our country would disavow us if we were caught, and the memory of what I’ve done is carefully tucked away in the place in my mind where I put these things.

I’ve been patched up in a different safe house, where they removed the bullet from my shoulder, and where I slept sedated for four hours. Then we had to leave, Derrick and I. We’re not even supposed to be in the UK. But here we are.

Another day, another shabby apartment with frayed wall paper and a kitchen from the 1970s, at best. Derrick dumps me there. He needs to get new papers to get us out of the country and I need to change the bandage on my shoulder. I get some help from a junior British agent—MI5 or MI6, I’m not sure. I’m not sure it matters these days. He has gentle hands. I’m careful not to get any blood on my black fatigues, because I only brought the one pair and I’m not sure when I’ll get a chance to change again.

Somewhere in the apartment a phone rings, and he disappears. When he comes back, he’s pale.

“Someone’s coming in,” he says. “I’m supposed to go. I’m sorry.”

I’m supposed to wait. I find instant coffee in the fridge and boil water in an electric kettle made of yellowing plastic, and then I sit there, listening to the water come to an excruciatingly slow boil, for several long minutes. A wall clock ticks. The burner phone that’s only been in my pocket for a couple of hours beeps with a message. It would be unreadable to anyone but Derrick and me, but the gist is: hang tight, the UK is arranging an airlift. That is unexpected, but then again I’ve learned that covert operations are never as covert as they are supposed to be.

Then she enters. She’s taller than I remember.

“Hello, Emilia,” she says. It’s her way of letting me know what she knows.

“Florence,” I say, showing part of my hand. Two can play that game. “Want some coffee?” She declines. I rummage through the cupboards for a cup and pick a cracked white one with the Royal Air Force logo on the side. I’m not sure Florence is her name—it’s the one name she uses the most, as far as I could find after our run-in in Slovenia.

“Well done today,” she says, leaning against the fridge. She’s cut her hair since then.

“Not sure what you’re talking about,” I say, stirring water into the instant coffee. The spoon clinks against the edge of the cup. This is why we’re lonely, we spooks. It’s layer upon layer of lies. I know people who have been married, briefly, pretending like they are traveling three hundred days a year on business. But it wears you down, lying to someone who trusts you with everything. It never lasts.

That is why we’re drawn to each other. It’s easier with someone who never asks, because they don’t want to tell.

I’ve looked her up by now, and apparently she’s looked me up. Her file is sparse, the kind of blankness that lets you know somebody is well above your pay grade. But I’ve managed to find out some things. She’s grown up rich, in one of those families that can trace its roots to before gunpowder reached Europe. I am none of those things, a child of immigrants who died too soon, grown up in rural Texas. She’s calm, icy cool. I’m rash and hot. But we have things in common too: she was an officer in the British army for years, reaching the rank of captain before turning covert. I was a Marine before disappearing into black ops. We both have notes from worried psychiatrists in our files. If either of us some day becomes less good at what we do, those notes will come into play. Right now, they need us too much to care.

She stands there, arms folded across her chest, watching me sip my coffee.

“You want something from me,” I say. It’s not a question.

“What I’m supposed to do here is make sure you leave the country safely. Nobody really wants a loose cannon on the streets right now,” she says in that crisp accent that manages to annoy me and turn me on at the same time. I let my gaze glide down her clothes, far less revealing this time: a gray blouse of some soft material, black pants, black shoes. They fit her like they should—draped so that you can just see a hint of round breast, a hint of round hip. She falters for a moment, noticing me looking, but continues: “Your colleague is already en route to a suitable airfield. We figured it was safer to transport you separately. A jet will be ready for you in two hours. We need to leave in a little over one.”

That’s not really what I meant, and I won’t let her get away that easily. “You couldn’t task that to the errand boy who was here before?”

“I know what you can do, Emilia. Paris, Ljubljana, Dresden and Beirut last year, Saint Petersburg the year before. Those were all you and your crew, right? I’m not going to leave you with someone green.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. So you’re the muscle?” I shrug. “Fine by me. What did you want to do for an hour?”

“Let me look at your shoulder.” She comes closer. I hold my cup like a shield between us.

“It’s okay. I just changed the dressing.”

She’s close enough that I could grab her and pull her against me. I put my cup down.

“Well, then I just don’t know what we should do,” she smirks.

I grab her.

The door to the bedroom creaks dangerously when we crash into it. Her fingers dig into my neck and her teeth are sunk into my bottom lip. The taste of her kisses is suddenly tinged with iron.

Florence pushes me down on the bed, trying to pull my tank top off, but gives up when faced with the bandage. She pushes it up instead, along with my bra, cool air manifesting as goose bumps on my skin.

She is curiously gentle when touching the shoulder where I’ve been shot. I want to ask her to prod it, push it, push me—I want pain to rush to my head again, make me dizzy. But then she makes me dizzy, her teeth leaving a trail of smarting skin from the side of my cheek down my chest. She lingers at my breasts, blowing cool air at my nipples, twisting them, biting them. I arch my back, pressing against her, tearing at her clothes.

When she looks up at me, her eyes are dark with need.

I take that moment to relish the reality of this situation. I’ve dreamed of this ever since I had her pushed against the table in that little room in Ljubljana. Maybe since Paris. She’s been on my mind during late nights in cold beds where I’ve tried and failed to sleep.

I was never a good sleeper.

She tugs at my belt and I reach down to pull her up again. I want to feel her, but she won’t let me. “Please,” I breathe, and she shakes her head.

“Soon,” she says, and the promise makes me tremble.

I never fucking tremble.

But when she has peeled off my pants, she comes up for a kiss. She pushes my good arm above my head, holding it there with more force than is strictly necessary. It’s going to leave a bruise, and I’m already looking forward to prodding the sore skin on my transatlantic flight.

“Are you going to be good for me and not move when I let you go?” she asks.

“No,” I say. She digs her free hand into my ribs and I yelp at the sudden pressure. “Fine. Maybe.”

And then her mouth is gone again.

My body protests, but when I feel her teeth on the inside of my thighs, her nails scratching my hips, it settles.

Her mouth is soft and wet and harsh at the same time, her tongue painting sweet circles around my clit, the reverberations of every move ripping through me like thunder. I want to touch her, but I promised to behave.

My black bush obscures most of her face. Florence moans and her lips vibrate against me while her tongue grows more insistent in smaller, tighter circles and she has me where she wants me, has me bucking against her, has me surrendering, has me coming in her mouth while she licks up every drop of it.

I want a cigarette after, even though it’s been years since I stopped. I started because it felt suitable for someone like me. I stopped because I decided I could. The craving is a cliché, like the room around us: impersonal enough to be revealing. But Florence is no cliché, resting her head against my thigh, wiping wetness off her chin.

I cock my head. “Come on,” I said. “You promised.”

“How are you going to fuck me?” she says, a teasing smile growing on her face. The word sounds all the more enticing when pronounced with that proper accent. “You can barely move your arm.”

“I have two arms.”

“I would rather have your mouth.”

The words rush through me like the swell of another orgasm. I close my eyes. “You can have it,” I whisper.

I hear the rustling of her clothes as she undresses, probably folding them neatly beside the bed. Then the bed sinks again, as she makes her way up it. I open my eyes and she’s on her knees beside me, gloriously naked. If we had time, we could compare our scars, brag about the people who have tried to kill us and failed. She’s got a big one on her thigh. It looks like some kind of shrapnel. I want to reach out and touch it, but that is a level of intimacy beyond what we are doing here. Maybe the fourth time we meet.

“You okay?” she says. I nod. “Let me know if something doesn’t work with your injury.”

“I like the pain,” I say, as if she didn’t already know. “Let’s not get blood on the mattress.”

She carefully positions her knees on either side of my head, and then the sweet, heady smell of her hits my nose and the taste of her hits my lips and I’m gone. I carefully trace my tongue through her folds, starting with big, slow licks. I savor her. She moves her hips slowly, bracing herself with one hand against the wall.

“Fuck my mouth,” I mumble and let my tongue be a little sharper, a little more precise. She reaches down to thread her fingers through my hair and holds tight as she thrusts against me. The sting in my scalp makes my eyes water and I’m licking, sucking, making a mess. My face is wet and droplets are running down my neck.

When she comes, she shudders and goes tense, her fist tightening in my hair. I gasp and my mouth fills with her flavor.

Florence is shaking when she climbs off me, leaning against the wall, chest heaving. I smile up at her.

“How long do we have?” I ask. She leans over to look at her watch.

“Enough.”

“You should get on your back.”

“Should I really?” she drawls. “I have you on your back already, and the view is wonderful.”

“Yeah, but I can never come twice. I wanna fuck you though.”

“I always did fancy brutish Americans,” she smirks, but she pushes me out of the way and lies down on her side. I pull her close and kiss her deeply, tasting me on her lips and letting her taste herself. I push my thigh between her legs and she grinds against me, digging her nails into my back.

“Brutish but efficient,” I say, reaching down to push my fingers between her slippery folds and my thigh, already wet from her pushing against it. Two fingers fit easily, but my shoulder is starting to hurt in an unpleasant way, so I nudge her to get on her back as I arrange myself between her thighs.

I get better access like this, pushing two fingers inside her, curling them until I hit the right spot. Her eyes flutter shut and she moans, louder the harder I fuck her. Her hair is rumpled, her cheeks are flushed and she’s gripping the sheets.

Another finger, and I can feel her stretching around my hand, accommodating me. She reaches down to touch herself, swiping at the wetness where I’m pumping in and out of her. She is gentle with herself, a stark contrast to what we have done to each other, exploring her hard clit and soft skin. I slow my pace to match hers but she shakes her head.

“Don’t stop,” she breathes. “Fuck me like you mean it.”

I fuck her, and I do mean it. When she comes, she clenches around my hand, her tight, wet pussy contracting and contracting. She grabs my wrist, pushing me deeper inside her, all the while convulsing with closed eyes. Watching her come for me again goes straight to my head like cheap booze. She shudders one last time and then her whole body relaxes. She’s still gripping my wrist when she opens her eyes and smiles a sleepy smile at me.

“I wish we could have met under more civilized circumstances this time,” she muses.

“The things I could have done to you then,” I say. My words make her shudder again, and I pull my fingers out, licking them clean while she watches with parted lips. I settle myself beside her on the bed, both of us on our backs. Not cuddling, but close.

We lie like that for a few minutes, in silence, just breathing. It’s a rare moment in my life.

Then it’s back to business.

She looks at her watch and clicks her tongue. “Ten minutes,” she says. When we are dressed, she sits me down at the kitchen table and checks my bandages, deeming them good enough for now.

“Tell me the plan,” I ask, tying my boots. She’s eyeing them in a way that I file under things to remember.

“You’re flying out of Northolt.”

“Who is flying me?”

“Her Majesty’s government, on paper. Your people, more likely.”

I don’t ask if I’ll see her again. I don’t ask for a number, or even her real name. When the call comes, I take my jacket and my gun and step into the unmarked car pulling to a stop outside the house. The man in the driver’s seat doesn’t speak during the ride north, and neither do I. I touch the bruise that’s already forming on my wrist, my scalp still tingling, my pussy still wet, and the last thing she said before I left rings through my head: “Maybe next time we can spend the night.”