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Jonathan

I wake with a start to see Eva standing over me. I feel this warmth ooze through me, as if I can be fully in love with her only when I am half asleep. Reality has not quite settled in to breathe the truth that will separate us.

I start to smile. She goes for the gun. It happens so fast. Her pillow passes over my face. I do not understand why until I feel the muzzle of the gun pressed to my temple, then hear that sound—not a bang but a click .

I am off the bed so fast. I ram her back against the wall, then feel bad about how hard we both hit, until she stabs me between my second and third ribs.

Holy shit.

It is the strangest thing that has ever happened to me in a very strange life. I grab her hands around the knife before it goes too deep, and I force it out.

“What are you doing?” I say, as if all this could be an accident. People say stupid things when they are in shock.

She has dropped the gun in the heat of the stabbing, probably assuming the gun was not loaded. She assumed wrong.

I launch her off the wall. She staggers to catch her balance. I scoop up the gun. I point it at her head.

“I always leave the first chamber empty,” I tell her calmly. “For situations like this.” It is an old trick, in case someone happens upon your abandoned gun. I should not be telling her this. I should kill her, but I do not want to. I do not understand why she wants to kill me. “Why are you trying to…” And then it hits me. “Oh.” She did not appear in the Hall of Mirrors by accident. She did not appear on the train by accident either. There was a reason she gave me a fake name. She has been after me all this time. I was looking for her, and she was looking for me for a very different reason. “This is about Andrew.”

Somehow she found out I killed him, and she followed me. That is why she arranged for the hotel room at Versailles, why she sucked my cock in the Hall of Mirrors. She does not want me. She wants me dead. And yet I take a step toward her, feel my hands reaching for her, as if I want to comfort her for failing to murder me.

She blinks in surprise. As if she cannot believe my reaction.

“I have to go,” she says abruptly, charging for the door.

I want to go after her. I want to convince her not to kill me. I want to beg her to forgive me. I want to persuade her to love me. It is this last urge that stops me, more than the fear of my own death.

Dying would be easy, so much easier than loving someone. So much easier than being loved.