Chapter Text
“Hurry up,” Yelena says. She looks at Kate, then at her watch, then huffs as she leans close up to the mirror. “You look fine.”
“You look so fancy,” Kate counters. Her fingers are useless to whip her hair into any desirable shape, even indoors from this nasty, wintry, Ohio dryness. She should have gotten here earlier; she knew Yelena was right, but God help her if it was nearly eight o’clock in New York right now and she’d hardly eaten since lunch.
“Just leave it down, Kate.”
“I just think,” Kate says, ignoring her, “it would be easier,” she grunts, “if they had mirrors you could use to see your back.” She’s twisted around herself and arches to look at her hair in the mirror, which is attached to the bathroom wall with winding metal roses. “Right?”
“Probably,” Yelena says. She strikes her pocket-sized liquid eyeliner across her lid as she speaks. Two seconds and done. Show off.
Kate’s finger is stuck in her baby hairs. “Ow.” She rips her hand away, and Yelena swipes a cat-eye over her second lid. Done. Braid intact, a poised accessory from the base of her neck to the crown of her head and around again as the ends of her hair tapered into thin strands. Kate runs her hands through her limp hair. This is as good as it’s going to get.
“How did you learn to do that?”
Yelena shrugs. Her eyes turn to her little makeup pouch on the counter. Then, she looks at Kate’s eyes in the mirror. They soften, she cocks her head, and she looks away. Kate only nods. When the answer to Kate’s question is a shrug, the answer is actually, usually, “Widow shit.” Something bloody and horrid that Kate would dumbly blink and ask about; Yelena would reply sometimes, take her feet out of Kate’s lap and swallow her popcorn to explain a task her older sister has taken on to protect her. Or a mission she’d completed at the age of twelve in the basement of an outwardly charming bungalow in New Jersey involving a rabid ring boss and half-dead girl she’d swore she’d recognized. Or a scar she’d earned on the small of her back rescuing someone from something and dodging a sword blade. Something like that.
Here, in a country club bathroom, Kate won’t ask. She makes a face she knows that Yelena knows means she isn't going to ask, with a slumped smile and brows squeezed slightly together. Yelena doesn’t look at her. Her mascara is purple, Kate notices, as she brushes it onto her lashes.
“That’s kind of my thing,” Kate says, rummaging in her pocket-sized purse for a lipstick tube Yelena had said she’d tossed in for Kate to use.
“What is?”
“Purple,” Kate says. There’s the lipstick. Cherry-plum red, because Yelena doesn’t own anything subtler. Couldn’t, shouldn’t, would never.
“Your thing,” Yelena says, her heels clicking as she steps behind Kate and pulls at her dress, looking for the zipper, “is actually…” She pauses. “How would you say? Very long time to do things?”
“I dunno. ‘Taking forever’?”
“Sure.” Yelena laughs in her nose. “That is your thing.”
“No it’s not,” says Kate, shaking her hair out behind her shoulders. Yelena only hums.
Yelena steadies Kate’s dress with one hand and closes the teeth of the a, invisible zipper with her other. She pats Kate’s shaken mane, gathers it up, and sets it on Kate’s shoulder. "You need a haircut, Kate Bishop." Kate can see her glossy, black fingernails in the mirror before them both when Yelena pushes into her skin and pulls Kate to face her. Kate does so, and her bare toes land on Yelena’s shoe.
“That is disgusting, Kate,” Yelena says. “This is a public bathroom.”
"This bathroom is cleaner than my entire house." Kate rolls her eyes and looks away from Yelena’s red mouth. "Do country clubs even count as public? How much do your parents pay a month for this place?" Yelena's lips match her red chiffon tank top, complement her tiny black skirt. Yelena, of course, doesn’t notice Kate noticing her. Very much she does not. Surely.
"'I would have thought you'd know. Ballpark?"
Kate grunts, flopping against the counter. “Did you bring me shoes?” she asks. She hoists Yelena’s little duffel onto the counter. “This dress won’t work with Converse.”
“Kate,” Yelena says, opening the duffel as she rolls her mascara and eyeliner tubes over to Kate to put away, “you are rich.” Kate knows it, and the laundered money from her security-heiress mother’s lasting visit to federal prison surely doesn’t hurt her pockets either. She catches the makeup tubes before they roll onto the tiled floor and drops them into her purse. “So, you could buy new sneakers without these holes in them.”
“You know those are—”
“Yes, yes. Special.”
Hm. Kate sighed, something between a huff and a groan. So, she does listen. What a pal.
“Still, Katie, you could.”
“Please don’t call me that.”
“Oh, I know you like it.”
“I really don’t.” She really doesn't. Mostly really doesn't.
“Well,” says Yelena, procuring for Kate a pair of ballet flats with thick, strappy ribbons attached tying around the ankles, “I will make you.”
Kate stops to hand one shoe back to Yelena to untie the ribbons, while she undoes the other. She purses her lips. “I sort of believe you would.”
Yelena winks. “I can make anything happen.”
“That’s the spirit, Yelena.” Kate pops an itty-bitty earpiece into her better ear — the left one. The right had popped aggressively at a bar show Greer had bribed her with dirty Shirley Temples to go to three nights ago. The next morning she’d flown on the littlest plane she’d ever been into Cincinnati. Yelena was there waiting for her, wrapped in a knit scarf Kate instantly recognized as something Yelena’s doting dad had made for her — no doubt, since he’d taken up crochet.
Yelena stuffs her duffel — now full of day clothes: Kate’s double layers of shirts and leggings as well as Yelena’s own puffy coat and awkwardly denim hand-me-down sundress from her mom — onto the baby changing table. After Kate sticks on a triplet of extra-strength command strips, Yelena pushes, hard enough that her muscles pop under her thin-strapped sleeves, until the table folds back up, incognito.
Through her coms, she can hear Yelena double as she says, “Let’s save the day, Hawkeye.”
___
By now, they have a routine. Kate brings her fancy Barton-ian retractable bow, Yelena brings everything else, and they fall into step together. As was previously the norm, Kate rode Yelena’s heels. More often than not these past months, they’re right at each other’s hips. Almost a year ago, Yelena had signed onto contract work via Maria Hill, who — Kate only knew from snippets and half-drunk admissions on a sleepy Yelena’s part months back — had maybe known Yelena’s sister more closely than Kate or anyone else had happened to think. Kate, when she isn't Avenging, works on a similar contract. She and Yelena had started separately, and before they’d reconnected five months after Christmas the year Kate’s mom went to jail and Yelena didn’t kill Clint Barton, Kate had met Yelena’s mom. Melina rescued Widows, she and Yelena’s dad both. Kate — puppy-dog excited after picking Melina’s brain apart following a Widow extraction from a base in Staten Island which Kate had both ruined and resolved — referred them both to Maria and Fury. Yelena was on everyone’s radar then, and whatever Maria had said to her to convince her to get with the notion of this little team, Kate was beaming ear to ear that it had worked.
It had been May, Mother’s Day weekend, when Yelena had stumbled into Kate’s apartment with a pair of coms — which she and Kate would wind up using for nineteen months now — in one hand and a glowing vial of ruby-colored dust in the other.
“Kate Bishop,” she’d said, her eyes wide and mouth tilted. “You like saving the day, don’t you?”
Kate had said either “What?” as she remembered or “What the fuck?” as Yelena had. It didn’t matter, really, what she’d said. Fifteen minutes later — maybe less — Yelena’d had her legs around the torso of a nineteen-year-old girl whose eyes grew with the resurgence of her soul under Yelena’s powdered spray of ruby flakes. That was the first time Kate had seen Yelena cry. Her eyes were blackened with makeup when her mom arrived. While they spoke, Kate listened. She didn’t understand any Russian then, and she’d like to think she’d become, at least, a slightly better interlocutor in the nineteen additional months since that day.
____
This isn’t Avenging. It’s what Kate and Yelena are used to as a miniature team: a rescue mission. The country club, of which Melina and Alexei are dubiously official members, is named The Wetherington. It stands on the edge of a grand, sweeping drive and atop a field so meticulously maintained that it might be cut blade by painstaking blade. The central dining room sits in the center of a symmetrical, sea-blue building behind which the sun sets perfectly behind on early winter nights — like this one. Pristine doilies on crisp tablecloths. Napkins, matching white with ironed seams, folded into pockets in which carved silver utensils are tucked. Tonight, strewn across each table is a red or green silken runner. A tall, heavily adorned of angel and dove, flocked blue spruce had replaced the central dining table.
It is, notably, Christmas Eve.
The Widow’s name is Zara. She’s French, brunette. That is her real name; Yelena remembers her. She’s older, not by much, than Yelena herself.
“She used to sing,” Yelena had said when Kate carefully mentioned that she liked that name, Zara. Was she nice? “That was.” Yelena had paused, blinked, and smiled out the window. “Was nice, I mean.”
Melina and Alexei would wait at their usual table, close to the fireplace on the North side of the main hall, drinking coffee and dipping their spoons into little glass ice cream cups. Zara would be held, if that was what she wanted, given a file from Melina with anything she’d been able to recover about the Widow, and urged by Alexei to cry her eyes out to clean the ruby powder out of them — that, and to feel .
Yelena’s game would be tactical; in, out, easy, and efficient. It worked, usually, but Zara was probably on alert and probably started to recognize her. Maybe. Was that how it worked? Yelena would never tell her straight, but Kate had garnered over the past year and a half that even still mind-altered Widows were very much alert in their weary, wary heads. So when she sits down at the bar, a seat down from Zara, Kate isn’t surprised that Zara looks at her and smiles. Asks her name. Shakes her head every now and then as if to dump something out of her ear.
“No one with her,” Yelena reports into Kate’s ear. She laughs, then; she’s talking to someone else now. Kate can hear his voice, tinny and out of focus, as she leans her arm on the bar. Kate shakes her hair behind her shoulders to signal to Yelena: ‘Got it.’
Kate twists her hair around her finger, and Zara stares at her. Kate orders a drink, and Zara does too — the same one, without the cherry syrup Kate adds to hers. Kate laughs, and Zara tries to smile.
“‘S it good?” asks Kate.
“So so,” says Zara.
“Get her out, Kate,” comes Yelena’s voice again. Melina’s Golden Rule is that the anti-subjugation antidote only be administered out of view of anyone Melina referred to as обычный. (This meant, as Kate did remember, ‘regular.’ ‘Ordinary.’ She’d initially become a little giddy with the fact that Melina and Alexei — that Yelena, beyond what Maria Hill could convince her of with whatever Natasha-linked dominion she wielded in Yelena’s pretty eyes — trusted her enough to exclude her from the обычный.)
It takes fifteen minutes and a box of cigarettes from the pocket of Yelena’s skirt to pull Zara with them onto the patio. A nod from Yelena to her dad, and he’s at the door, blocking its hinge with his practically vibranium-enforced shoulder. Yelena reaches into Kate’s pocket, “For a lighter,” she says. Out comes the little red tube, out comes a half-screech from Zara’s cracked mouth, and just as quickly, Kate’s hand is plugging the sound and Yelena’s are on Zara’s shoulders.
Easier than some, but not as utterly simple as others. Quiet, in the end, as Melina sits with Zara on the steps of the club overlooking the golf course.
____
An hour, then two, and Zara is driving a car Alexei jumped in the far corner of the parking lot to a condominium in Milwaukee. Melina’s reconnaissance had found a brother a handful of years older than Zara allegedly was, who lived there with a husband and a son of his own.
As she goes, Kate and Yelena and her parents watch from the side entrance to The Wetherington, planted on the wooden steps overlooking a parking lot to their left and a golf course entry to their right. The sun has set; the stars are bright, silvery buttons on a velveteen sky. Headlights come and go, though more are going now. Home. The music on the loudspeakers inside the dining room is faint, but Kate can hear it well enough to tap her heel on the downbeats. A wind catches her hair, and she shivers. Fireflies in miniature armies flash like charms across the parking lot, mostly congregating in the evergreen trees that Yelena’s chin is tilted towards across the rows of scattered cars. She gazes at them.
“She will have a Merry Christmas now,” Alexei says, maybe of Zara — but not wholly. He’s stood behind Kate with his arm around Melina. Melina’s dark hair blends into the sky. “You girls did a good job. Very good, да?” Melina hums, the way Yelena does, too, to nod agreement.
“Yeah,” says Kate. She’s sitting on a step higher than Yelena, who says nothing.
Melina crouches beside her. Her bony hand rests on Yelena’s knee, and when Yelena’s eyes come down from the trees and look toward her mother’s, Kate can’t yet be sure whether it’s the light or something else entirely casting a shallow, shimmering glaze over them.
“С Рождеством, детка,” Melina whispers. She kisses Yelena’s hairline. “Я тоже скучаю по ней.” There, Yelena seizes. She blows air out of her mouth as if she were blowing into a thin, long straw. Melina nods onto her forehead. Yelena nods back, and her shoulders fall. Alexei’s hand on Melina’s shoulder makes Yelena look up. Not a trick of the light, Kate could tell now. Her eyes were veiled in a gentle curtain of tears. When Melina says, “Я тебя люблю,” Yelena smiles weakly, swiped with her wrist just below her eyes, and sighed. (‘I love you.’ Kate knows that one.) Yelena mutters a low reply, sighed, and gazed back at the trees.
“Kate,” Alexei says, “Merry Christmas.”
Melina tells her they’ll be inside; there are going to be Christmas-themed desserts. Alexei leads her in, and Melina’s flowing sleeve allows, just enough, her hand to poke out and wave her fluttering fingers towards the girls.
Kate smiles at them, watching as they walk behind the glass doors and turn down the hall. Now, it is only the two of them, Yelena and Kate, sitting in their sleeveless outfits and staring up at a row of trees Kate was almost bored of focusing on. When she hums air out of her nose, it's warm on her chest;. On the step below hers, little hairs that had fallen loosely from Yelena’s braid were sticking to her lip — and her cheek. A tear, only one, fell from the corner of her eye to the corner of her mouth.
Awe. Damn, it’s hard to watch her do that.
“She’ll be okay,” Kate offers. A fresh wind shakes the top of the tree she’s looking at. The fireflies she’d seen in it just before flicker out. “Your mom has her totally covered.”
Yelena sighs. Her breath is a rickety flute. She says, “No.”
Kate starts to smile at the ends of her mouth, but furrows her eyebrows. “She will,” Kate argues. “She—”
“No,” Yelena said. “I mean—”
“She will.”
“Kate Bishop,” Yelena says. Kate looks at her. Loose hairs are blowing around her shoulders. “I know. I do, and I believe it. I…” she begins, then laughs up at the trees another time, rubbing at her wet cheek with her palm. “I not crying about that.”
“Oh.”
Yelena sniffs, shakes her head, and crosses her legs in front of her. Elbows leant onto the step Kate is sitting on, her nose pointed right at the moon. Her red top is scarlet in the dim porch light. Her makeup, sharp as knives, is untouched by the oceans that pool and spill over the creases of her eyes.
Kate, with her arms crossed over her legs, folds her fingers together. It’s shit to see anyone who means something to you hurt, no matter what the capacity is that you have to understand their reason for hurting. It’s another thing entirely to see Yelena, in her lively, stoic, brash image, cry. Kate’s heart knocks on her ribs as she slips down to the same step as Yelena, but she does it anyway.
“Penny?” Kate asks.
“What?” Yelena looks at her through the bangs that have fallen almost all the way out of her braid now. Her eyes are out of a movie: round and pretty and painful.
Kate bends her neck low when Yelena’s gaze drops to Kate’s shoulder. “For your thoughts,” she says.
“I hate speaking American. I really hate it a little bit.”
“Sorry,” Kate says, “but I won’t understand you if you don’t.”
And then Yelena is looking at her again. She stretches her lips into a gentle smile in hiding. She keeps that look on her face the whole time her eyes study Kate’s hands folded together in a meager attempt to keep warm.
“The Widow,” Yelena said, “her brother.”
It's all she needed to say for Kate to get the gist.
Somewhere between the onset of frostbite Kate was starting to feel root at the tips of her fingers and the shuffle Yelena did to pull the hair out of her eyes, Yelena’s pinky finger has looped around Kate’s.
The first time Yelena had done that had been to keep track of Kate in a crowded bar, weaving through a clot of sweating dancers somewhere south of Reno, Nevada. There had been other times: Kate’s buzzed attempt to coerce Yelena into choreographing a secret handshake with her, half-hearted attempts on Yelena’s part to yank Kate up from the sofa after watching a movie neither of them had particularly enjoyed, signals of ‘I’m here, next to you, so you can punch this goon in the face now’ in both overt and covert rescues, pinky-promised bets on Melina’s friendly pig races. Yelena’s finger in Kate’s was a jolt; she ran warmer than Kate on good days but smoked her out of a shared hide-a-bed in a European hostel on others.
“The fireflies?” Kate says.
“Every time.” Yelena nods. Her wrist rested on Kate’s knee. “Every damn time.”
“Well,” says Kate, knocking her knuckles into Yelena’s, “good. She can’t just go away. Those little guys are everywhere.” Yelena sucks her lower lip between her teeth. Kate catches a tear on Yelena’s cheek, and Yelena looks askance. Kate says something about her dad, something she remembers about popsicle sticks he’d save so they could build something together. “We never did,” she admits, “and I kept the popsicle sticks until I lost them.”
“You lost them?” Yelena asks. She sniffs again.
“Oh yeah,” Kate says. Her mom had packed everything up, cleaned her room out, and Kate hadn’t left any indication as to what things should stay to be a part of her new ‘teenage-approved’ bedroom and what things could go out to the trash pickup on the side of the street. “Maybe that was it,” Kate says, “since everything is my mom’s fault.”
Yelena’s laugh is pronounced.
They sit with their pinkies wound together for minutes, probably, while Kate is quiet.
“I do, though,” Yelena says, preceded by nothing but whatever it was she was thinking. “I do really miss her.”
“I know,” Kate says.
A beat. Then: “I know you do,” Yelena says.
Kate looks at Yelena then. Yelena is already looking at her. Kate searches her eyes and comes up empty.
“I met you two years ago,” is all Yelena says then.
“Shit,” Kate says back. “Already?”
“Somehow.”
Yelena’s gaze flicks down to Kate’s lips. Kate notices; she knows that Yelena knows that. But Yelena does it anyway. Kate can’t dwell; it is so damn cold out here, and the wind has picked up again, blowing the scent of Yelena’s flowery shampoo into Kate’s face.
“She’d like you,” Yelena says.
“No,” Kate snorts. “Your sister?”
“Да,” says Yelena, “my sister.” Has Yelena gotten closer? Kate, in earnest, cannot not tell. It’s dark, a chocolate bar night. Winter of the Midwest. What time is it? “You are a pain in the ass,” Yelena is saying, “but a charming one.”
“Back at you.”
“Katie?” asks Yelena.
Kate stops. She isn’t sure what she’s been doing — breathing, maybe, or rubbing her knees together under her thin, dumb dress to generate a little bit of heat — but she stops, stilled. Yelena says nothing else. She only looks, eyes set to aim.
As she has before, Kate says, “I hate that name.”
As she has before, Yelena says, “You will like it.”
Yelena’s eyes, still wet with a thin layer of residual tears — for her sister, for the fireflies, for the holiday, for Widows, and for everything else Kate couldn’t imagine was spinning in a wheel on her head — close as she leans down. Her pinky’s grip on Kate’s is stronger now, threatening, accidentally, to break bone in the event of Kate’s movement. Kate won’t, can’t move.
Yelena’s lips are a ghosting trail. Feathers, light as lichen. Yelena’s nose pushes Kate’s hair away. Yelena’s chin bumps Kate’s shoulder as she slinks her lips like marionettes across Kate’s goosebumped skin. Her mouth is slow on Kate’s neck.
Kate inhales, a long, sharp breath. Her eyes have closed, though she can’t be sure of when. Breath in and out of her nose, in and out of her mouth. She turns her head, revealing her neck to Yelena’s lips like a runway to be paraded down. And, oh, how Yelena parades. When Yelena presses her lips into a true, pressured kiss in the center of Kate’s neck, fireworks might be exploding beneath Kate’s skin. Maybe cannons. Her arm moves, languid, to find Yelena’s and hold her by the elbow. Kate only gasps; she doesn’t, can’t speak.
Another kiss under her ear. A third kiss in her hair. Breathy now, on Yelena's part. Yelena’s cheek brushes Kate’s own when she pulls only an inch, maybe two, back from Kate’s skin. Kate’s eyes open, a crack in the hood of her eyelids, and Yelena’s are already looking at her. Kate is breathing like she’s come up from swimming; she breathes hot and fast and Yelena swallows the air as soon as Kate breathes it out. Kate’s eyes are closed before she notices she’s being kissed — that Yelena is kissing her lips — and by the time she realizes she has just been kissed her eyes are open again. It’s light. The familiar peony-rose shampoo smell Kate knows as her own, the one she uses because Yelena had bought it, is light. Yelena’s thumb across Kate’s is light. Yelena’s lips graze Kate’s, barely, and Kate can feel the crackled lines of lipstick on her red mouth.
Yelena tips up her chin to kiss her again, and Kate’s throat rings with a low, guttural hum. Kate’s mouth moves against Yelena’s instantly, parting her lips and closing them again, humming and breathing right between her lips.
“Kate,” Yelena murmurs.
“Mm,” Kate murmurs back.
Someone opens her mouth first and someone else follows suit; their two tongues slip against one another. Kate pulls Yelena’s arm and Yelena pushes forward into Kate’s heaving chest, knocking her back only just. Yelena catches her with a hand in Kate’s hair, and she pulls it. Kate’s mouth opens, she sighs, and she licks into Yelena’s mouth until she has to turn her head to continue. Yelena doesn’t miss a beat; when Kate’s head turns one way, her’s dips the other. When Kate breaks for a breath, Yelena does, too. She dives in and out, hard and soft; Kate pulls at her sleeve, kissing her like she’s trying to keep her lips for herself. Kate’s hand on Yelena’s neck is what tips the boat.
The bone of Yelena’s upper lip knocks into Kate’s and, her fingers clutching the neck of Kate’s dress, she groans. Kate’s core flips.
Between a breath and a sigh, Kate says into the sky, “Holy shit.”
“Yeah,” Yelena says. She grins, mouth open, just enough to be noticeable. “Holy shit.”
Kate is in good shape. She’s barely twenty-four years old, both a freelance agent of rescue ops under an ex-S.H.I.E.L.D. exec and a hopelessly reckless Avenger. She is, perhaps, in the prime shape of her little life. Still, with Yelena on her left and a dovelike ringing in her head, she cannot catch her breath.
“So,” Kate says, “what was th—”
“Do you want to have sex?”
Kate exhales. “What?”
Yelena is looking at her, eyes wide, more pleading than preening but more hungry than hopeful. Her mouth is smeared with lipstick, probably both her own color and Kate’s, but it’s too dark to tell where one ends and another begins. Maybe, though, there isn’t any difference. Like paints on a palette, where Kate ended and Yelena began were one and the same.
“I—” Kate starts. “Here?”
“Bathroom,” Yelena offers. Kate felt that one, right between her legs.
“You—” Kate starts again. “Your sister won’t mind, will she?” Fuck. What?
“Kate Bishop,” Yelena says. She pushes on Kate’s knee to stand up, then holds her arms, wiggling her fingers to say, ‘come here.’ “It is Christmas.”
“Yeah,” Kate says, “exactly.” She’s already dug the hole; now, Kate buries herself in it. “Didn’t she, like, love Christmas?” Kate can picture the stories; little girls, presents under a plastic tree, a red-headed doll bought with a tiny, dancing Yelena’s own chore money presented in a tin cigar box.
The door shuts behind them in the west entrance hall, buzzing locked as it did.
“Да,” says Yelena, “she did.” She doesn’t knock, just barges open the bathroom door. “And the fireflies?” Kate whips around to push the lock into the doorknob. And just like that, Yelena is in front of her, lips a mess and one strap of her top hanging off her shoulder. “These are good,” Yelena says. “She’s good.”
Kate’s face splits into a grin. “Huh.” Well, if Yelena was going to fuck her in this fancy single-stall bathroom at the handsomest country club in Hamilton, Ohio on Christmas Eve, why couldn’t it serve to ensure the good standing of Natasha — Yelena’s favorite human being to walk the earth — in all of this?
“Good,” Kate says.
And, oh God, yes. Yelena is going to fuck her.
Over Yelena’s shoulder is the changing table, folded up, housing Yelena’s duffel. The rest of her luggage was back in her little room off the kitchen at Alexei and Melina’s house; the duffel, though, was enough to remind her. “Hey,” she says, “I got you something.”
“You did?” Yelena takes a step closer. Kate nods. In heels, she’s taller than Yelena by a half a head or so. When Yelena wears heels and Kate wears flats, they’re about even. Yelena’s eye’s are right on par with Kate’s, then, as she whispers, “You can give it to me later, maybe.” A kiss, then, on Kate’s jaw. “Yes?”
“Mhmm,” Kate mutters.
“Want to go and sit on the counter?”
Kate's heart hurts, a little, a mallet under her bone. She pulls a proverbial string. “What for?” she asks, feigning modesty. She hiccups on the words. She knows.
Yelena doesn’t play. She runs her hands up Kate’s clothed stomach, all the way, until she stops at her ribs to push Kate’s breasts up by their undersides. As Kate sighs, Yelena says, “Can I finger you…” she pauses to kiss Kate’s neck “…Katie?”
Kate, nodding secretly, pulls her closer and kisses her lips, quick and peckish. “Yeah.”
Then, Yelena’s walking forward as Kate walks sideways and back. Yelena’s hands are on her thighs, pulling, and the pair of them work to wiggle Kate into a seat on the tiled countertop; it’s smooth and even through her dress. Yelena stands, pushed against the counter, her the outsides of her hips touching the insides of Kate’s knees.
“Can I touch you?”
Kate huffs. She hadn’t meant to. She hadn’t realized she was breathing at all.
“Yes,” she says. She licks her lips and opens her eyes. “Please, yes.” When exactly she had closed them, Kate cannot say. “You can — oh, shit.” Kate pauses then, tucks her hair behind her ear, and keeps her hips against the circles Yelena has begun to paint over Kate’s underwear.
“It is safest to ask,” Yelena says.
“Yeah.” Kate nods. She keeps rocking her hips, now in a rhythm, her underwear against Yelena’s hand. “Yeah,” Kate says again. “It’s — you’re right. That’s a — it’s a good idea.” Kate swallows. Gulps down a lake’s worth of spit and leaves her hollow cheeks sand-dry. “To ask. Nice of you.” Yelena kisses her cheek. Kate tugs at her chiffon. The dry sand catches fire.
If the notion of getting it on with the hottest blonde the Midwest would ever see in the public bathroom of the fanciest place she could think of in this whole damn town had been on Kate’s radar, maybe she wouldn’t have worn a pair of stained Target-brand underwear tonight. But, then again, Yelena already knew that they were stained and Target-brand and fraying and even paisley-patterned, because Yelena had brought them to Kate in the shower that morning, when Kate had forgotten them herself.
“Ah,” Kate whispers. She sucks in a breath, cold in her wet mouth. She slings one of her arms around Yelena’s shoulder, drawing her in. Her other arm Kate tucks between her chest and Yelena’s. The strap of Yelena’s red top has fallen further, and Kate can feel Yelena’s bare breast pressed into her arm. Kate rocks her shoulders. Moves her arm once more. Yelena’s bare breast is, then, pressed into Kate’s hand. Her nipple is hard, cold and button-little in Kate’s palm.
Kate turns her head and tastes Yelena’s breath. She kisses blindly ahead of her, and her lips crash partway into Yelena’s and partway into the hot skin of her cheek. Yelena’s laugh scratches the air in the bathroom.
“C’mon,” Kate says, “I’m trying to kiss you.”
Yelena fans Kate’s face with her eyelashes. “Okay. Then kiss me.”
One more breath from Yelena’s mouth into hers, and Kate does it.
Kate pulls Yelena closer to her, gripping her neck with sticky fingers. She squeezes, then flattens her palm against Yelena’s breast, and does it all again. Again, harder. Yelena whines between open-mouthed kisses, and Kate feels it on her lips.
Within the same second, Yelena is at work pulling Kate’s dress up to her knees with her one free hand. Kate drops Yelena’s hair and breast to help her; she tucks up the hem under her knees and yanks out the slack with abandon.
Yelena’s chest — half bare and half clothed — is against Kate’s when Yelena takes back her lead, pressing her mouth to Kate’s for a wetter, harder, louder kiss. Kate’s fingers find Yelena’s hair again. Yelena’s fingers pull at Kate’s underwear.
“Yes,” Kate says into Yelena’s skin.
She lifts her hip, and Yelena pulls. Other side, then. Yelena laughs against her as Kate wiggles. As Yelena gives a final tug with her finger looped around Kate’s wet underwear, Kate falls hard back to the counter. When she looks up, Kate sees that Yelena’s grinning cheeks are pink; likely, Kate’s are, too.
“Oh, Kate Bishop,” says Yelena. Her eyes look between the two of them, then back into Kate’s.
Yelena smiles her little smile, a soft smile like they’re on Kate’s couch at home eating a soup Yelena wanted Kate to try that sounds like compost but ends up like heaven. Like they’re at a bar, Yelena tolerating Kate’s singing along to songs she didn’t know well. Like they’re undercover at a farmer's market and Kate's just kept everything wildly under control when the plan goes sideways.
The tile marble countertop is cold under her thighs, and so are the tips of Yelena’s fingers tracing vines between Kate’s legs. Maybe tracing electrical wires — because every time Yelena moves, Kate jolts.
“Yeah,” Kate grunts. Then, whining: “Oh, damn.”
She’d had sex. She’d done this. Hell, she’d listened to Yelena talk about sex. She knew that Yelena had had sex. But Yelena had never had sex with someone she loved. She’d told Kate that months ago, at a park. It had been sunny, sweaty. And Kate wasn’t sure she had either, which she remembered telling Yelena. (Then, Kate’s tongue had gotten stuck to a frost-bitten popsicle that Yelena had melted off with a thermos of beef stroganoff and a plastic knife.)
Now, Yelena looks at Kate through her eyelashes and her bangs, her mouth open. Kate looks back. She shifts her hips slowly. Cold marble and warm fingers slide against her. Yelena groans, her lips parted.
Kate inhales harshly, then exhales a whimpering, “Oh.”
Kate is wet — dripping wet and hotly keen on Yelena. Her eyes. Her hands. Her breath. Her damn strappy top. Yelena keeps looking at Kate. Kate keeps wanting Yelena to touch her. Yelena does, over and over. Kate lets her mouth hang open. She doesn’t look away from Yelena’s eyes until she squeezes her own shut, whimpers, and rocks a little bit harder onto Yelena’s fingers as they start to move, just gliding through the pool between Kate's legs they're skating on ice. Kate leans again, but Yelena's fingers stay outside. Her free hand strokes Kate’s lower lip, tracing.
“Yelena.” Kate pulls her stuck skin from the countertop, spreading her legs that much further apart. “Don’t tease.”
“I am not teasing,” Yelena says. “I am feeling you.” With her hand on Kate’s neck, Yelena leans in and kisses her. Kate bites at Yelena’s lip and moans when Yelena’s fingers roam millimeters deeper. In a voice that tastes like caramel and electrocutes Kate with a shiver in her stomach, Yelena adds, “You feel good.”
Kate falls forward, her whole body.
Yelena starts off tame, gracious. She pushes two of her fingers into Kate slowly. Kate grips Yelena’s shoulders. If Kate’s lacquered nails in Yelena’s skin hurt her, Yelena doesn’t make any show to say so. Her fingers push, slowly, then pull, slowly. Yelena pushes, then pulls, pushes, then pulls. When she pushes, Kate leans down, pushing Yelena deeper into her. Yelena sighs, pulling on Kate’s bunched up dress; Kate tosses back her head.
“Oh, fuck,” Kate whimpers. Her hair falls in her eyes when she looks forward again. “Yel—” she starts. When Kate opens her eyes, blonde bangs and messy lipstick on a gaping mouth greet her. Yelena's tucking back Kate’s hair for her, then pulling back the slipping skirt of Kate’s dress. “Yelena, fuck,” Kate says, looking right at her.
“Good?” Yelena is breathing in low, quick sighs.
“Yes, it’s good.” Kate nods. She kisses Yelena’s cheek and stutters a breath. Yelena’s fingers hit her hard as she rocks forward. “Oh my God. Shit. Yelena, holy—” again, just where she needs them, Yelena’s fingers scratch somewhere deep inside of Kate and she whimpers, “oh, fuck.”
Both of Kate’s arms, melted from the heat, fold around Yelena’s shoulders. She’s got a hard grip now, and she uses her leverage to fuck herself with Yelena’s fingers impossibly deeper. It’s Yelena who groans as Kate holds her harder and rubs her whole body against Yelena’s. It’s Yelena whose tongue dips into Kate’s mouth. They move in a pattern — Kate rocking down and Yelena pushing up into her — until Kate pulls back to sigh.
“Ready, Kate?”
Kate’s arms let Yelena go. She tucks her hair behind her ears, grabs Yelena’s face, and nods as she kisses her. “Yeah.” Yelena’s fingers are moving again, pulling, but not pushing. “For — wait, for what?”
With Kate’s fingers in her hair, Yelena’s knees hit the ground.
“I am going to eat you out now.”
“Oh my God.”
“That is okay?”
Does she need to open her knees more? Wider? It doesn’t matter; she’s already doing it. “Oh, Yelena, please,” she sighs.
Yelena kisses her thigh, but only for show. “Breathe, Kate Bishop.”
“Oh, you’re—” Kate breathes. She does. In and out and then Yelena’s tongue is inside her. "Shit,” she groans, “that feels so good. I mean really — mmm — really good.”
“Yeah?” Yelena says in between Kate’s legs.
“Uh-huh.”
Yelena sucks. Kate’s head falls back.
“Merry Christmas, Katie,” Yelena says. Kate’s eyes slam shut as the spitty, tongue-out kiss Yelena delivers lands directly on Kate’s clit. Oh, fuck her. The nickname is hot. Damn it.
If she’d been a show off a thousand minutes ago when she’d been applying her eyeliner for the night, Yelena certainly was one now. Kate on the counter and Yelena before her; Kate rocking on tides and cursing like a sailor. She pulls on Yelena’s hair. She can feel Yelena’s humming; she can feel how wet she is. There’s a holiday going on. Yelena’s parents might be looking for them. There is music, still piano, faint but there.
But screw it all, because Yelena is right there and Kate says, “I’m close." Yelena's fingers push up, up, up. "Oh, Yelena.”
And Yelena is fucking Kate in this dumb-fancy bathroom in this dumb-fancy dress as if she doesn’t do it right now she’ll never get the chance. Maybe she wouldn’t have. But, Kate’s hardly thinking and Yelena always knows something Kate has to learn down the line. So, with Yelena’s fingers inside her and Yelena’s mouth on her clit, Kate groans a harsh, “Ohmygod, yeah! ” and she’s cumming on Yelena’s face.
____
“You know, Kate,” Yelena says. “I cannot make a habit of this.” Kate’s fingers are shoved inside of her, curling forward before reaching to capture the dripping mess of Yelena, digging at a live wire, and her mouth is on Yelena’s chest. Yelena’s voice is battered. Her hair is spread over her pillow like a fan. A sheet, wrapped around Kate’s naked back and under Yelena’s heel, keeps them pinned together. Yelena croaks, “Mm.”
“Okay,” says Kate. Yelena’s breasts hovering above Kate's clavicle and shoulder; her nipples press deliciously into Kate’s skin each time she rocks, riding Kate's coaxing fingers easy as anything. “Of what?”
“Oh,” Yelena says, indistinguishably a moan or the beginning of her sentence — likely both, “this," she gasps, "at my parents’ house, on Christmas Day.” Her mouth falls open and she grabs Kate’s neck. She whines; what Kate hears, maybe correctly through her panted sighs, is, “Like that, Kate, like that.”
A habit.
Maybe she won’t, Kate knows, make a habit of this. She doesn’t do this, Kate knows, not really. This, being: any of it. People she knows meeting, knowing, or dining at the damn country club with her parents. People fighting — or rescuing, or even, sure Avenging — with her interest stuck like a note into their back pocket. People understanding, somehow, what fireflies mean to her.
It matters inconsequentially in the moment whether or not Yelena can see the inevitable future: the two of them naked in this guest bedroom off the remodeled kitchen with Kate Bishop’s fingers stirring into her, bobbing like the golden pole of a carousel horse. Between the girl she is and the girl she knows Yelena to be, Kate doesn’t see it either.
Yelena’s breaths come in quiet noises, mouth open, nodding into Kate’s.
“Ohh — ah! ”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
____
Everyone is gathered to unwrap presents by noon, and while no snow greets them through the gaping window-wall overlooking the backyard, the whipped cream mountains on four cups of Yelena’s “famous” caramel hot chocolate suffice as substitutes. There’s a flame, electrically mobilized, burning under an arched fireplace opposite the window-wall. The tree is a blue spruce, like the one at The Wetherington, but shorter than both Melina and Yelena, modest. Ornaments that a pair of eager sisters in braids hand painted and glued over several years hang from the thickets branches. Mirrorballs and novelty shapes from Moscow mules to cereal boxes to glittery, tutu’ed giraffes are scattered between them. One is a snow globe, a little diorama of the Eiffel Tower — Alexei and Melina’s honeymoon destination of choice.
Yelena’s feet are in Kate’s lap. This is usual. Her hair is brushed down, wet from a cold shower she’d run before going out to hug her parents from the bedroom she hadn’t intended to share with Kate on Christmas Eve. This is less so.
She’s wearing her new necklace, a silver charm without any bells or whistles or fuss, attached to a cable chain. It’s in the shape of an N. Kate had picked it weeks ago in a little shop on Fifth Avenue she’d hopped inside to relieve an increasingly irritated Lucky from the onset of rain. The charm was the size of her pinky nail. Kate had seen it and knew, in her wet boots with her ponytail stuck to her neck, who it belonged to.
"Красивая," Yelena had said. The first box she'd opened that morning. She'd translated, her eyes sympathetic as she leaned toward Kate: "Beautiful."
Kate beams when Alexei fires up a rickety CD player; she’s nothing extraordinary when it comes to carols, and her — and Alexei’s — favorite. Yelena and Melina cook a quiche of pork kielbasa and vegetables whose names Kate has neither heard or seen; it smells like barn but tastes like pretty heaven. They speak, low, in the kitchen. Kate feels their eyes in glances. She knows they aren’t biologically related, sure, but the personality of Yelena’s eyes exactly matches that of Melina’s.
Alexei, in a pair of slippers Kate had selected from the Brookstone front in the Cincinnati airport before she'd wandered outside to find an awaiting Yelena, is smiling at her. He tells her about his own mother. Kate doesn’t catch her name, but the way he pronounces it is sharp around the edges. About Melina, the way she talked to him when they met and the ways it’s the same now. About the week or so they met a three-year-old blonde who would become their own baby.
“Even then,” Alexei answers, “oh, especially then Katya,” when Kate asks, “She was always this smart? She’s really annoying with that.” Alexei takes a sip from his cocoa, and his moustache catches whipped cream. As Yelena would, he says into his cup, “Да. Я знаю.” Kate remembers what that means: ‘I know.’
Melina looks at her when she sits back down in the living room, in the chair that mirrors Alexei’s. Yelena resumes her seat on the sofa, feet in Kate’s lap, and tosses her a package small enough to rest in her hand without worry of it tipping. It’s light, thin. Kate looks up, and Yelena is nodding at her. The little present is bound in newspaper and tied with a purple piece of Alexei’s crocheting yarn.
“Я думаю,” Melina says, blowing into her cocoa mug as she leans into her chair, “ты была права, любимая.” Kate understands ‘I think’ at the beginning.
“О, да, сладкий.” Alexei says. He clears his throat and tips his mug towards a rock-faced Yelena. “Они грохнули.”
Kate gets none of that. Yelena gets it all.
Kate’s fingers are wrapping the little yarn ribbon of her package around themselves in slow circles. She looks up, wide-eyed, as Yelena sucks in a breath and bites her tongue hard between her teeth. She holds her cocoa mug like a cocktail, by its rim, and spits, “Я тебя ненавижу. Вы оба.”
Alexei only laughs. Melina keeps talking, sympathetic mama voice turned up to ten along with her gesturing manicured hands, and Yelena… purses her lips into a smile. She runs a hand through her wet hair, and Kate can feel her own face beginning to flush.
“Is everything—?”
“It’s nothing. It’s—” Yelena says. She cuts herself off to laugh in her nose. “They are придурки.” Huh. Kate knows that one, too. One of her favorites: ‘assholes.’
Yelena retracts her feet from Kate’s lap and leans onto her hip, towards Kate. “Open it,” she’s saying. Kate looks directly over her own shoulder, and her hands clam while her stomach and her heart trade places in a rendezvous. Right there on the couch with a hand burning a hole through the thigh of Kate’s sweatpants, Yelena kisses her. She doesn’t taste like caramel or chocolate or whipped cream. Her lips are warm. She’s smiling against Kate’s mouth. She tastes like warmth and smells like vanilla from the guest bathroom shampoo; it’s all Kate can register.
There’s a little smack when Yelena pulls away. Alexei’s arm extends, mug in hand, for a cheers. Rolling her eyes behind a blink, his daughter obliges.
Kate looks at Yelena. I’m sorry?
Yelena looks at Kate. Do not worry about it.
They know?
Yes.
Oh. Damn.
It’s fine.
Maybe that’s what Yelena’s saying when she pushes the little bundle into both of Kate’s hands, again. It is, Kate’s pretty sure. Yelena crosses her knees over Kate’s. She really does run warm; shorts on Christmas Day in Ohio? Bold.
Kate unwraps the string with ginger fingers; tucks it into her pocket despite Yelena’s insistence that, “That’s not the present, Kate Bishop.” She rolls it out, and the newspaper package reveals a golden bracelet, because if Yelena’s color is silver, it stands to convenient reason that Kate’s would be gold; and that is the case. It’s got a small, circular plate attached to the littlest chain links Kate has ever seen. The plate glistens in the glow of the fire to her side. It’s engraved with a tiny arrow on one side and three words on the other when Kate flips it over.
“World’s Greatest Archer,” she breathes out, half in a question and half in a jolt of pleasure. Yelena is smirking at her, totally shit-eating, because of course she just knew she’d win with this. She’s rubbing her thumb and finger around the edges of her new necklace.
“Is that true?” Melina asks. Kate is holding up the charm for her to read it. She can’t, of course; it’s too small.
“Probably not,” Yelena admits. She winks. Kate shakes her head. She beams.
“My Yelena,” Alexei says, pronouncing her name in quite the way Yelena does, “tells truth, Katya. Not a liar.” He teases and Yelena bites him with something in Russian that leads to Melina giving him a pat on his beefish shoulder while he mimes crying.
Yelena is a daughter, one who takes after both parents and after a sister that Kate thinks she knows, two years into knowing Yelena, even if she can’t meet her. Yelena is a hero. She’s warm and she’s a total crier and she coos at dogs like they’re infants and she pets infants like they’re dogs. Somehow, both preen under this affect nine times out of ten. She brings everything to every mission, and if Kate’s somewhere across the world, she keeps in touch with shitty burner phones without fail. Maybe — probably — she’s Kate’s hero.
“Merry Christmas, Katie.”
Kate will get her back one day for making that stupid nickname stick. One day, but not today. Yelena clasps the bracelet onto Kate’s wrist. To the magical prechoral, “And this song of mine, in three-quarter time…” dances in Kate’s ears while cocoa tickles her throat. There’s nowhere to be but here. No mission, no plan, no route. At nine years old, Kate had given up any hope or plan for normal. Several times in the years since, she’d given up again and again the same notion. She’d never have normal.
But, if this could be her version of it, even just for one day — Yelena’s hands in her hair, pulling it back to kiss Kate’s chapped lips again, so gentle and so unbelievably slow that Kate truly melts like hot whipped cream — then Kate would, indeed, be the merriest.