Dangerous Liaisons

The room buzzed quietly with the low humming of various conversations and the gentle classical piece that poured through the speakers. She looked me up and down when I was first seated, and hadn’t taken her eyes off of me since. Polite exchanges ensued, though I thought I detected a hint of nervousness in her body language. A million guesses as to why she would be nervous coursed through my veins, ignoring my own pit of nerves I felt in my stomach.

She was beautiful, the kind that would take my breath away had we met tonight in any other circumstance. Long ringlets of dark hair the mimicked a combination of rich earth and amber, eyes like golden afternoon sun. I watched her carefully, this was a situation in which I couldn’t afford not to. She wore several stunning rings on her fingers, some of them were thin gold bands, others with markings etched into them, and some had beautiful crystals in them. She dipped a finger into her wine and slowly circled the edges of the glass. “It’s mesmerizing, isn’t it? The sound it makes. It seems almost like a siren’s song,” she said. “Well then, it’s very fitting for you, is it not?” She laughed in a way that almost seemed genuine. I felt a fluttering in my chest and tried to focus on the wine.

She took a sip from her glass of merlot, a small drop spilling out onto her lips, which were almost the same color. I watched her tongue slide across her lips, trying, and failing, to not let my mind wander off. “Business aside, I’m glad we finally got around to that date,” she whispered. The first day we met, which seemed eons ago now, she asked me out on a date. I promptly said yes, but there was always something. She had a work thing, I had a business trip, and we never really kept in touch. Somehow, she always knew where to find me. If she wanted to, she did, and I always looked forward to it.

For a long time, I wasn’t sure what she did when she had a work thing, but my job was dangerous, confidential, and though I wished to, I couldn’t share my secrets. One day at work, she came across my desk. I aggressively read through her file. She was lethal. Alarming. Breathtaking. So this was what she had been doing. I felt I should’ve been scared, but I wasn’t. Since then, it has been back and forth. Always chasing after one another, or avoiding, it seemed. A game of cat and mouse, though who’s to say who was who? It was my job to find her, and hers to find me, but sometimes she had something else in mind. Sometimes it felt like I was a problem that needed resolving, but other times like I was an insatiable desire of hers. I guess I could say the same for me. I knew the job, what I needed to do, but it was hard to ignore the tension between us.

“I’ve been all over Europe trying to find you,” she said. “Because of the job, or is there something else I should know?” I retorted. She gave me a look that made my chest tighten and said, “You know what I have to do. Any other...” she hesitated, “scenario just isn’t possible, I’m afraid. You know too much. You’ve gotten too close. It’s a problem for them.” I searched her eyes, which seemed to falter at her own words, begging me silently for any reason to change her mind. “Of course,” I said, “you have to do what needs to be done, just as I do. You have to kill me.”