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A flame leapt up from the Zippo—bright and alive against the dark of the loading dock. Carmilla curled into it with her cigarette and when the tip caught light she flicked the Zippo shut. The smoke unfurled from her mouth as she looked down at the bleeding man on his knees in front of her. A stained rag gagged him tightly, pulling his mouth open so that his gums shone against the moonlight falling from the grimy ceiling windows.
“I know this is a bit cliché,” Carmilla said. “Honestly, it’s not really my style.” She removed the cigarette from her lips. Her bloody knuckles stung as she examined its lit end. “But the person who hired me was very specific.” She leaned over so that her face was level with the bloodied man’s and she held the cigarette an inch from his right eye. “I think they’re a bit of a sadist.” The man’s wide eyes went from the cigarette to Carmilla’s face, strangled sounds choking their way up his throat. Carmilla held still for a moment before standing back up and turning on her boot’s heel, walking to the edge of the loading dock. The man slumped in relief.
Then, Carmilla turned and threw the cigarette onto the trail of gas on the floor. It caught alight, the flames running to the thoroughly doused man and setting him on fire.
---
The white ball hit the eight ball with a sharp clack and sent it into the right pocket of the pool table. Carmilla straightened up and leaned on her pool cue, looking expectantly at the person who’d just lost $20 to her. All of their balls still sat on the felt, while Carmilla’s had been deftly pocketed within her first turn. The person rolled their eyes and handed over the money, disappearing back to the bar and muttering to themselves.
Carmilla returned to her drink—some shitty brown liquor with a cluster of rapidly melting ice cubes. She examined the bandage around her knuckles, checking if it was still clean and dry, which was probably how she missed someone walking up to the table. The sound of a coin being put down on the pool table’s chipped veneer edges alerted Carmilla to their presence.
Carmilla had to wrestle her surprise away from her expression when she looked up. The girl barely looked old enough to be in a bar, let alone like the type to be in a dive where every surface was sticky and the lighting cast red-tinged shadows. Her honey-coloured hair was dead straight, and she was wearing a baby blue blouse that had been tightly tucked into high waisted jeans.
“Can I help you?”
“I want to play you for the table.” The girl nodded at the pool table, which still had seven red balls frozen in place around the fraying felt.
Carmilla’s grip twisted around her pool cue. “Do you now?”
“Unless you’d rather just play with yourself,” she replied evenly.
Carmilla couldn’t help but snort at that, and the girl met her ludicrous look for a moment before dropping her gaze with red-stained cheeks. She tucked her hair behind her ear before letting it loose again to hide her face from Carmilla.
“Alright,” Carmilla agreed, pressing the button for a fresh game. The pool games here were free, which worked for Carmilla because she didn’t have to deal with coins and could hold the pool table for as long as she wanted since no one managed to beat her for it. As she started to rack the next game she glanced over at the girl, who seemed to have recovered from her blushing fit and was looking for the least damaged pool cue among the collection on the wall. Once she chose one, Carmilla slid the white ball towards her. “You can break.”
“Are you sure?”
Carmilla smiled. “Go ahead.”
Fifteen minutes later, Carmilla was staring at a pool table devoid of red balls, only having gotten two of her yellow balls in, with the girl lining up a shot for the eight ball.
“By the way”—the girl looked up from the white ball—”my name is Laura.” She hit the white ball while still keeping eye contact with Carmilla and it kissed the eight ball into the pocket.
That information was useful later when they crashed through the bar’s back door into the alleyway and Carmilla’s pants were pushed down and Laura was pulled in. She was enough drinks in that when her back arched and her face tilted to the night sky she was surprised at being met with a misting of rain.
It came in handy later on too, in her stereotype of a shoebox studio apartment where the kitchen counter was only a metre from the bed. In this situation, however, it worked out extremely well. She’d have to replace the cabinet that Laura broke while scrambling to find something to hold onto, but she couldn’t think of a better way to destroy the cabinetry. The same went for the lamp, which had been knocked to the floor on the way to the bed.
The next morning, Carmilla was the one to wake first. Laura’s hair was splayed across the pillow and it shone in the sunlight poking through the half-broken blinds. Between the drinking and the dark, Carmilla hadn’t known what the girl would look like in the unforgiving light of day, but somehow Laura looked better than Carmilla’s alcohol-addled and shadow-steeped memories had alluded to. Prettier, younger, cleaner. Although, given the words Laura had poured into Carmilla’s ear last night, perhaps not cleaner.
Carmilla went to the bathroom and when she returned Laura was standing in front of the kitchen counter with the quilt wrapped around her, staring at the broken cabinet. “I can pay for that.” The concerned expression on her face disappeared as she turned to Carmilla and took in her naked form. Her gaze seemed to get stuck on Carmilla’s chest and Carmilla couldn’t help but smirk.
“It’s cold in here,” she explained as she continued to walk towards Laura.
Laura’s eyes jumped up to Carmilla’s face, stuttering momentarily on her mouth, and she opened the quilt. “I can warm you up.”
---
Carmilla dumped her bloodstained clothes into the kitchen sink and started to fill it with cold water. As the tap ran at full force and the pipes squealed in protest, she went over to the bureau and rooted through the top drawer. She found the plastic baggie tangled up in a shirt sleeve and retreated to her bed, setting up a line on the palm-sized frameless mirror from her bedside table.
As she snorted the line her reflection in the mirror loomed in, somehow below and above her at the same time. She felt like she was trapped in the middle of a kaleidoscope toy, on the edge of falling into the next pattern.
The water in the kitchen sink started to seep onto the ridged stainless steel drainboard, but she snapped to and turned it off before it overflowed onto the counter. She tried to scoop the water back into the sink, but it just flowed back onto the drainboard. After a few more unsuccessful attempts, she got distracted by the clothes in the sink and reached in to grasp at the material through the water, but it kept slipping through her fingers. There was a splash and she realised that she’d made the water spill onto the floor.
Her phone started to ring on the bed and she left the sink for it, wiping her damp arms on her stomach. Laura’s contact details stared up at her from the screen and her brain paused for a moment. The call ended and she saw that Laura had sent her a few messages. She was distracted by the glare from the phone screen at first, but then the words came into focus.
Laura Hollis: (20:30) Hey, are we still hanging out tonight?
Laura Hollis: (21:45) Carm?
Laura Hollis: (23:02) At least let me know you’re alive. Please?
It was half past midnight now, and the fact that it was a new day felt significant in some way. A drop of bitterness slid down the back of Carmilla’s throat.
Carmilla Karnstein: (00:35) Alive. Sorry, something came up.
Carmilla watched the green line flow across the top of the screen as the message was sent and considered what she’d sent. It seemed too empty of words now.
Carmilla Karnstein: (00:36) You free?
Carmilla fell onto the mattress, and it bounced her so hard that her neck ached but as she continued to lie there the mattress seemed to melt around her. The sheets had once felt soaked in Laura’s perfume, but now she had to chase the scent through the haze of cigarette smoke. Once she found it she focused on it, letting its warmth and softness surround her. It reminded Carmilla of the ocean, but not the real ocean—painted ones like those she’d seen in art galleries when she was very young, standing close enough to see the paint clump and smear with each brushstroke.
Her phone buzzed.
Laura Hollis: (00:45) Bar. You can buy.
Laura was waiting for her outside the front of the bar, her hair swept to one side under a beanie and hands tucked into her jacket pockets to hide from the winter’s night. She still looked severely out of place against the backdrop of the dive bar with her cashmere jacket and knee-high boots.
Carmilla took the cigarette from behind her ear to her mouth and used her Zippo to light it. Laura watched her do it, and Carmilla tried to decipher Laura’s expression as she took a long drag of her cigarette, but nothing surfaced on Laura’s face even as the smoke came between them.
“Do you want one?” Carmilla asked, although she only had two left in the crinkled packet in her back pocket, and the bitter taste at the back of her throat made her sure she’d be wanting more tonight.
“I don’t smoke,” Laura replied, even though they’d shared more than one cigarette in the times between sex.
“That’s not how I remember it.”
Laura ignored her. “Where were you tonight?”
Carmilla thought about the bloody clothes soaking in her sink. She probably should have moved those. “Something came up. I told you.”
“Things have been coming up a lot lately.”
“Work’s been busy.”
“What work?”
Carmilla flicked her cigarette into the gutter. “Let’s go inside.”
“Carm—” Laura started, but never finished the thought.
Carmilla’s stomach felt full of lead, but she didn’t dare show it. Instead, she gave Laura a tight smile. “I owe you a drink.”
Laura let out a slow breath. The condensation from it rose between them, like the smoke but cleaner, and behind it her eyes remained just as indecipherable. Finally, “You owe me more than one.”
Carmilla nodded and opened the door for Laura, following her into the bar.
The next day Carmilla woke up to a pounding migraine and an empty kitchen sink. It didn’t occur to her until much later that she couldn’t remember draining the sink, or drying the clothes, and she definitely didn’t remember putting them in a neatly folded pile in her drawers.
After that, it took two weeks for Laura to give up on trying to get a response from her. Carmilla read each message that came through and listened to the drunken slurred voicemail more than once as some sort of masochistic penance, because she knew she could never see her again. Carmilla’s life was too fucked up, and she was nowhere near careful enough to manage having Laura around without getting her into trouble in one way or another.
It turned out that never seeing Laura again only lasted about a month until Carmilla turned up at her place bleeding, unable to feel her face, and with two possible broken ribs. She couldn’t remember getting there but that didn’t seem important when Laura answered the door wearing flannel pyjamas and the smell of food and warmth swept out of the apartment. The combination of Laura, food, and heat clashed with the cold, pain and exhaustion inside her, making Carmilla’s legs give way and her world go black.
She came to on one of the softest beds she’d ever been in, surrounded by clean sheets that made her forget how much pain she was in, until a moment later when she tried to sit up. Her pained breath alerted Laura, who appeared by her side with a bowl of warm water and a cloth. As Laura started to clean her facial lacerations Carmilla watched her through the steam. Laura didn’t meet Carmilla’s eyes, instead focusing on everything else with a stubborn determination that made it clear she knew Carmilla was staring at her.
Laura dabbed at Carmilla’s cheek a little too hard and Carmilla hissed, recoiling from the cloth. Laura accidentally made eye contact, sympathy in her eyes, before she blinked it out and sat back with the bowl of water and cloth in her lap.
Carmilla felt a sudden hot shame at the selfishness of appearing at Laura’s door and that, paired with Laura’s expectant look, elicited a guilty, “Hey.”
“Hey,” Laura replied. Her hands kept shifting along the edge of the bowl.
“Did I interrupt—?” Carmilla caught sight of the thrown aside blanket on the couch and TARDIS mug on the coffee table.
“I was having a night in.”
Carmilla’s stomach turned and she pushed herself up into a sitting position, biting back as much of the resulting wince as she could. “I shouldn’t have come.”
Laura sighed and stood, causing the bed to shift, which Carmilla felt through her ribcage—something she could have definitely done without. She was about to try and leave when Laura said from the kitchenette behind the bed, “Stay there. I’m getting something for your ribs.”
“My ribs are fine,” Carmilla lied. She peered over her shoulder—gingerly, because even that hurt—to watch Laura move around the linoleum-tiled strip of kitchen. Laura moved with an easy efficiency, gathering a first aid kit the size of a toolbox from underneath the sink and an ice pack from the freezer.
Laura dropped the first aid kit onto the bed and held out the ice pack. “You’re a terrible liar.” Carmilla accepted the ice pack grudgingly and as she pressed it to her ribs, Laura went to the bathroom to retrieve a bottle of pills that she dropped into Carmilla’s lap. “Take two of those.”
The label had been ripped off the bottle and Carmilla peered at the pills inside. “What are they?”
“They’ll help,” Laura said. “Trust me.”
Carmilla took them.
Soon, the aching had eased into a vague fuzzy memory and Laura had cleaned all her wounds and wrapped what she could with the large stock of bandages in her first aid kit.
“Is there any point asking what happened?” Laura asked as she put the first aid kit back under the sink and washed her hands. The sound of the tap running was comforting to Carmilla, although she couldn’t pin down why and when she tried to find the reason it slipped through her fingers like the clothes had in the water.
“Probably not.”
Laura returned to stand next to the bed and Carmilla looked up at her. The light was catching Laura’s face just so, making her skin glow in a way that could only be described as angelic. Carmilla felt like she was sinking deeper into the bed. Her limbs were like cotton candy, weightless and floating, attached to her by delicate threads instead of bone and muscle and sinew and cartilage.
A phone rang from what seemed like miles away and Laura moved away from the bed to answer it. Everything felt colder instantly. Carmilla turned her head sloppily to follow Laura across the room as she picked up her phone from the couch and had a brief conversation on it. Carmilla didn’t recognise Laura’s voice. It was harsh, every syllable covered in sharp icicles and delivered with a steel dagger tongue. She spent so long trying to find Laura’s voice within this new voice that she lost the meaning of the sounds it made.
Laura’s face was back in view, leaning over her. Something hard and cold was pressed into her hand. Her phone.
“I have to go do something. If you need help just call me, okay?”
Carmilla wanted to ask Laura if she thought cotton candy fingers would work on a phone, but instead she gave a half-nod, and Laura was gone again. Then she drifted off, letting herself sink so deeply into the bed that she was sure she’d fall right through it.
Carmilla woke to a cold and dark apartment. It felt like her ribs had been wrapped in a vice that squeezed painfully with each breath. It was dark, although the moonlight was coming in thickly through the window by the bed (which: terrible placement for a window). Carmilla followed the spill of moonlight into the rest of the apartment, all the way to its fingertips pointing at Laura on the couch.
“Laura?” Carmilla would have moved to sit up if she could have, but instead she just weakly pushed the blanket down as if it would give the illusion of her having moved further up the bed.
Laura turned to her and Carmilla realised that she was suturing her arm. Laura smiled lopsidedly and Carmilla recognised the careful way she arranged her features so as not to tug at the sore muscles. She couldn’t have missed it; she made that expression enough times to know it like the back of her hand, even when it was on Laura’s face.
The coffee table in front of Laura was covered in first aid paraphernalia, a ripped shirt, and a semi-automatic gun. For some reason seeing a semi-auto next to Laura’s TARDIS mug didn’t throw Carmilla. Maybe it was the painkillers wearing off and leaving everything with distinctly sharp edges, but Carmilla felt like she was seeing Laura properly for the first time in the moonlight soaked room.
She got out of bed, despite the pain in her body and despite Laura’s protests, and took each step with deliberate intention. Laura’s eyes didn’t leave her as she sank into the couch cushions.
“Let me see that,” Carmilla urged, gesturing at Laura’s arm. The wound was only half-stitched and the needle and thread hung from it, swinging gently as Laura turned to face Carmilla fully. Carmilla examined the wound; it wasn’t worryingly deep or long, but the edges were jagged and it definitely needed stitches.
Carmilla opened her palm for the tweezers so that she could continue the sutures.
“I can do it,” Laura said.
“I know you can.”
Carmilla held Laura’s gaze steadily until she caved and handed the tweezers over. As Carmilla sutured Laura’s wound she could feel Laura hold her breath, but couldn’t tell if it was from the pain or the intimate vulnerability of it.
Carmilla had never stitched up someone else. When she’d first started getting wounded on the job she used to go to a vet surgeon who would fix her up and get her painkillers for a price, but after he’d been arrested she had to start doing her own sutures. It had taken hours of YouTube videos and practicing on oranges and a few botched attempts that left her with thick scars, but eventually she’d gotten better and now was fairly proficient at it.
She finished the sutures and tied them off. “Scissors?” Laura handed them to her and Carmilla cut off the extra thread. She leaned back, but watched her handiwork carefully to make sure it held well.
Laura broke the silence. “You’re good at that.”
“I am,” Carmilla agreed mildly.
“The intern I usually get to stitch me up wasn’t answering her phone, so I came back here, but I’m really bad with my left hand and... Thanks.” Laura moved to stand. “You should get more rest.” Before Laura could move far, Carmilla put a hand on her uninjured arm. She didn’t have to say anything for Laura to reply, “I’m fine. Seriously. You know how people always say ‘you should see the other guy’? Well, you should really see the other guys. Plural.”
Carmilla didn’t doubt that, but that wasn’t the question she had wanted to ask Laura.
“Do you know who I am?”
“Do I know who you are?” Laura repeated. “Or what you do?” Laura asking that answered Carmilla’s question, and what she said next confirmed it. “They’re not the same thing.”
“Is that what you tell yourself?” Carmilla asked, because they now both saw each other plain—as the people who were left bloody and broken after doing the jobs that no one else wanted to do.
“I didn’t know,” Laura replied to Carmilla’s first question, ignoring her last. “Not right away.” Laura sat back down on the couch and gently tugged the neck hole of Carmilla’s shirt down to her shoulder to show one of the badly-healed scars that bubbled across her collarbone. Carmilla flinched, expecting Laura to touch it, but Laura just skirted the edge with a gentle touch. “I figured it out.”
“So what happens now?”
Laura’s hand fell and the air that replaced her fingertips felt like an icy blade on Carmilla’s skin.
“What do you want to happen now?”
Carmilla considered Laura, gathering the emotion in her eyes that she still couldn’t name, but which felt like a careful shadow of something growing in her chest.
“Honestly?” Carmilla asked, and Laura nodded. “Bed.” Her ribs ached in a ripple of static. “Painkillers.” She stared openly at Laura, who was struggling to meet her eyes. “You.”
Laura’s eyes snapped to Carmilla’s. She smiled. “That can happen.”