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“I have a request,” Florence says.
Svetlana turns over in bed to look at her. Florence is looking at her with her pretty, dark eyes. “Yes, love?”
“You have a pistol.”
Svetlana nods. “I do. You’ve seen it.”
Florence has seen it. Well, she’s seen several. Svetlana has amassed quite an array of weapons during her time in the KGB. She doesn’t use all of them and certainly doesn’t carry all of them with her regularly, but she has them. Just in case. Svetlana wouldn’t call herself paranoid, but she wouldn’t call herself not paranoid. In her line of work, it’s better to be a little bit on edge — it can work in her favor. She would rather be afraid than dead.
“Can you teach me how to shoot it?”
Svetlana smiles slightly, a little bit teasingly. “You don’t already know how?”
“I learned how to, a while ago, but I don’t want to get hurt because I forgot something. I just want to be confident that I know what I’m doing.”
“Of course, love. I’ll teach you.”
Svetlana stands up, and starts redressing. Florence looks at her, somewhat surprised. “Right now?”
“No better time than the present, no? You ought to get dressed, dear, your lingerie is pretty, but you’ll be freezing.”
Florence shrugs. She gets out of bed, too, and starts putting her clothes back on. Svetlana stops what she’s doing, which is putting her things back in her pockets, to look at her. She’s beautiful. Even with her makeup smudged all over, she looks radiant. Svetlana is in love.
They bundle up into their coats and go outside. It’s a cold October night, and they only have to walk a short distance to be where Svetlana practices shooting. She’s lucky to not live in an apartment building, it’s much easier to do things like this when there aren’t people breathing down her neck. As they walk, they hold hands. Florence’s hand is cold, even though they've only been outside for a little while. Svetlana, on the other hand, is always warm. They fit.
When they finally stop walking, Svetlana takes her pistol out from where it was hidden under her jacket. Florence looks at it, an emotion that Svetlana can’t understand in her eyes.
“Can you show me?” She looks almost afraid to ask.
“Of course, love.”
Svetlana slowly aims the pistol at the target nailed to the tree. “You hold it like this. See how I’m holding it?”
Florence nods. She looks scared, now, but not of her. She doesn’t think so, at least.
Svetlana continues. “And you have to have a steady stance — it makes it easier to aim. When you aim, you use your dominant eye to focus. For the pulling of the trigger itself, you have to squeeze it — don’t do it too quickly, or it might jerk the pistol out of alignment. And there will be recoil, but if you have a proper stance you should minimize the effect. I’m going to shoot now.”
Florence preemptively tenses, and Svetlana shoots. The shot rings out, and then there’s another hole in the center of the target. “Right on the target. Do you want to try?”
She holds the gun out to Florence. Florence, she realizes, looks both terrified and incredibly turned on. “Oh, my God, Sveta. You’re good at that. Have you had to… do that a lot?”
“Yes,” Svetlana says. She doesn’t want to get into it.
“You didn’t even shake.”
She doesn’t reply. She doesn’t want to tell Florence about how many times she had to do that before she could do it without shaking. She doesn’t want to tell her about the first time she hit a moving, living target and cried so hard she threw up afterwards.
She hands Florence the gun.
“Be careful. You don’t want to hurt yourself with the recoil.”
Florence aims the pistol shakily at the target. After taking a deep breath, she shoots. Her form is poor — her shot barely nicks the edge of the target. She makes a noise of pain, the recoil must have been more than she expected. “That’s hard.”
“You did wonderfully, love. Would you like to try it again?”
Florence shakes her head. She rolls her wrist a couple of times, wincing, and inspects it for any sort of injury. When she looks back up at Svetlana, there’s a familiar look of fervor in her eyes. “Kiss me.”
Svetlana pulls her into a kiss, cupping her face with her hands. She’s cold, but Svetlana is warm. She’ll warm her lips up in no time like this. Florence kisses like she’s hungry for it, and Svetlana loves it every time.
She could stay here with her, in this moment forever, out in the dark, kissing her, but she gets antsy, being exposed like that. “Flo, darling, we should go home.”
Florence wipes her mouth and smiles in an incredibly self-satisfied manner. “Okay, love.”
They walk back home arm in arm. It’s getting chillier as it gets later in the evening, but they’re warm together. They don't see anyone else. When they’re together, it’s like they’re the only two people in the world. They may as well be the only two people in the world, for all Svetlana cares. When they’re together, Svetlana doesn't have a husband, or superiors, or anyone else. Just her, and the warm, adoring feeling that comes with being with her.
As soon as they get back in the house, Florence kisses her again lightly. “My Sveta. You’re so handsome when you’re doing things like that.”
Sveta smiles slightly. “Thank you, dear.”
She wants to tell her that she loves her. She doesn’t doubt that Florence reciprocates, she would be shocked if she didn’t, with the way she acts. Svetlana wants to tell her. She’s never been more sure of a positive emotion in her life. They usually get all muddled together, if she feels them at all, but she can feel this love as clearly as she feels fear. But that’s exactly the problem — fear. Svetlana is scared that if she loves Florence, she’ll lose her. Svetlana has lost every good thing in her life except for Florence. If she loses her, too, she’ll have nothing left.
She can’t tell her any of that, so she helps her get ready for bed. She likes to help Florence with that, it makes her feel like she’s doing something good. She helps her out of her day clothes and into her pajamas, washes her face for her while they lean against the countertop. Svetlana caresses her face with the washcloth, smiling at her. It’s closer to happiness than she’s been in years. Svetlana isn’t usually a sweet woman. With Florence, she can be sweet. She kisses her cheeks before they get in bed, making her laugh. Florence wraps her arms around her as soon as they lie down, pulling her close to her. It feels so nice to be held by her that Svetlana almost cries. She doesn’t, though. She hasn’t cried in years - decades, actually. She won’t cry just from a gentle arm around her waist. It’ll take more than that to make her crack.
Svetlana won’t admit it to herself, let alone anyone else, but she’s cracking already. She wakes up screaming almost every night. Florence holds her, and kisses her face, and runs her hands through her hair until she can fall into a hopefully - but never - dreamless sleep. She’s trying to hold onto anything that’ll keep her above water, keep her from losing her mind completely. During the day, she’s cool and collected. At night, she can barely close her eyes without being gripped by fear. Fear of pain, of death, of the monsters that are real. Fear of herself. Svetlana is nearly forty years old, and she doesn’t know how she’s stayed alive for this long. Her life has been nothing but pain and the attempt to numb it. She has become very, very good at numbing her emotions. There was a time where she didn’t feel anything at all. But she’s cracking now. Svetlana is in love, and she feels that. With that feeling, everything she should have been feeling for the past two fucking decades rushes back to her, all at once, and she can’t handle it. She was never able to handle it alone back then, and she certainly can’t handle all of it alone now. She still can’t make herself cry, no matter how hard she tries to produce tears.
Svetlana is not alone. She has Florence. Florence has her, more accurately. She loves her so much that she feels like her heart will burst. Her heart! After all these years. Florence can pull her back from the brink every night and won’t leave her in the morning. Svetlana will do anything to repay her for her love and her care. There isn’t anything that matters more in the world for her. She needs to give her her love that’s already overflowing out of her heart.
Svetlana is self-destructing and she knows it. What is one to do with a lifetime of pain? She doesn’t know what to do with herself. Every day she fights the urge to fall apart completely.
Florence is there. Florence can save Svetlana from herself.