Chapter 6: First Night in Vancouver
new rol
The words hung in the air, molecules rearranging around them. I love you too. Vanja had said them. They were out now, irrevocable, mingling with the scent of sex and sweat on the rumpled sheets. Sydney’s crying had subsided into wet, hitching breaths, her face buried against Vanja’s neck.
Vanja stared at the canopy above, the iridescent fabric shimmering with reflected city light. Her own confession echoed in her skull, a dissonant chord. It felt like a surgical error, a slip of the scalpel in her own meticulously controlled operation.
She disentangled herself, the slide of skin on skin suddenly too much. “I need a drink,” she said, her voice rough.
Sydney didn’t try to hold her. She just watched, those weird eyes luminous with tears and something worse: hope.
Vanja walked naked to the bar cart in the corner, the cold marble floor a shock under her feet. She poured two fingers of whiskey, neat, and knocked it back. The burn was a welcome distraction. She poured another.
When she turned, Sydney was sitting up, the sheet pooled around her waist, her saggy, natural tits pale in the firelight. She looked exposed, vulnerable, triumphant. It made Vanja want to slap her.
“Don’t,” Vanja warned, her voice low.
“Don’t what?” Sydney asked, genuinely confused.
“Don’t make it a bigger deal than it is. It was a chemical release. Oxytocin. Vasopressin. A biological trick.”
Sydney smiled, a small, sad thing. “You’re studying to be a psychiatrist, not a chemist.”
“They’re the same fucking thing,” Vanja snapped, taking another sip. The liquor wasn’t working. The words were still there. She could feel them clinging to her, staining her.
She set the glass down with a sharp click. “Get up. We’re going upstairs.”
“Upstairs?”
“To the roof. I’m hot.”
The rooftop was Vanja’s true sanctuary. The infinity pool glowed a luminous cyan, steam curling from its heated surface into the cool night air. City noise was a distant hum here, forty stories up. The only sounds were the gentle lap of water and the whisper of the night wind.
Vanja didn’t wait. She walked straight to the pool’s edge and dove in, cutting through the warm, silky water with a clean, aggressive stroke. She swam to the far wall, where the pool met the sheer drop, giving the illusion of swimming into the skyline itself. She treaded water, her back to Sydney, looking out at the glittering grid.
She heard the soft pad of feet, the hesitant dip of a toe, then the quiet splash as Sydney slipped in. Vanja didn’t turn. She felt the water displace as Sydney swam up behind her, not touching, just existing in her orbit.
“It’s beautiful,” Sydney whispered.
“It’s mine,” Vanja replied, still not looking at her.
A pause. Then Sydney’s voice, closer now. “Can I touch you?”
Vanja finally turned. Sydney was there, her hair slicked back, water beading on her shoulders. The underwater lights turned her skin a moonlit blue. She looked ethereal. Fragile. Vanja hated it.
“Why do you ask?” Vanja’s tone was clinical. “You never ask before.”
“I don’t know.” Sydney looked down, rippling the water with her fingers. “It feels different now.”
Vanja closed the distance between them with a single kick. Her hands found Sydney’s waist under the water, the skin slippery and warm. “It’s not different,” she said, her face inches away. “The variables are the same. You’re just attaching new meaning to them. It’s a cognitive distortion.”
Sydney’s hands came to rest on Vanja’s shoulders. “Then why did you say it?”
Vanja didn’t answer. Instead, she kissed her. It was a deep, claiming kiss, tongues tangling in the chlorinated warmth. She pushed Sydney back until she was against the pool’s wall, the cold tile a contrast to the heated water. Vanja’s knee slid between Sydney’s legs, pressing up. Sydney gasped into her mouth, arching into the pressure.
“See?” Vanja murmured, pulling back, her lips glistening. “Same variables. Same physiological response.” Her hands slid down, cupping Sydney’s ass, lifting her slightly. The water buoyed them, making everything weightless, effortless.
Vanja manifested.
The feeling was different underwater—a smoother, more fluid emergence. She guided herself, the hard length of her sliding easily through the water against Sydney’s stomach. Sydney’s eyes widened, her breath catching.
“Turn around,” Vanja commanded, her voice low. “Hold onto the edge.”
Sydney obeyed, turning in the water to face the city. She gripped the pool’s coping, her knuckles whitening. Vanja moved close behind her, the water swirling around them. She positioned herself, the head of her cock nudging at Sydney’s entrance from behind. The water provided a slick, natural lubricant, but there was still that moment of taut resistance.
Vanja leaned forward, her mouth at Sydney’s ear. “Tell me what you are.”
“Yours,” Sydney breathed, pushing back.
Vanja thrust in. The water muted the sound but not the sensation—the tight, hot sheath enveloping her, the way Sydney’s body clenched around the sudden, deep intrusion. Vanja set a slow, deliberate rhythm, using the water’s resistance to make each stroke a deep, grinding claim. She wrapped one arm around Sydney’s waist, holding her tight against her own body, her other hand braced against the tile.
The view was staggering. Sydney was bent over, gripping the edge of a pool that dropped away into a canyon of light, completely exposed to the empty sky. Vanja fucked her with a relentless, piston-like motion, her hips snapping forward again and again.
“You’re my mediocre little cunt,” Vanja grunted, the words hot against Sydney’s wet neck. “My stupid, pretty thing. That’s all. Say it.”
“I’m your stupid, pretty thing,” Sydney moaned, her voice strained with each thrust. “I’m your cunt, Vanja, just yours…”
Vanja’s hand slipped from Sydney’s waist, sliding through the warm water to find her clit. She rubbed hard, quick circles, the water making her fingers slippery and perfect. Sydney’s moans escalated, echoing slightly off the water’s surface.
“You gave up Vancouver for this,” Vanja snarled, fucking into her harder, faster. “For getting fucked like a whore in a pool. You’re pathetic.”
“I am!” Sydney cried out, her body starting to tremble. “I’m pathetic, I’m yours, please, Vanja, don’t stop…”
The twin sensations—the deep, stretching fullness and the frantic pressure on her clit—pushed Sydney over. Her orgasm hit in a silent, convulsive wave. Her back arched, her head thrown back, a choked scream torn from her throat as her body clamped down on Vanja in a series of violent spasms.
The intense, rhythmic clenching triggered Vanja’s own release. She drove in one last, deep time, burying herself as deep as she could go, and came with a guttural shout, her body pulsing, emptying into Sydney as the city lights blurred before her eyes.
She stayed there, locked inside her, panting, her forehead resting between Sydney’s shoulder blades. The water gently rocked them. Slowly, carefully, she pulled out. Sydney slumped against the wall, boneless, her arms barely holding her up.
Vanja swam a few feet away, putting cold, liquid distance between them. She floated on her back, staring up at the hazy, starless sky. The confession from downstairs felt distant now, shamed by the raw physicality of what they’d just done. She had tried to fuck the meaning out of it, to reduce it back to biology.
“Thank you,” Sydney whispered, her voice carried across the water.
Vanja righted herself, treading water. “For what? Using you?”
“For saying it back.” Sydney turned, her face open, raw. “Even if you hate that you did.”
Vanja swam back to her, not with tenderness, but with a weary inevitability. She stopped within arm’s reach. “I don’t hate it,” she said, the words feeling foreign. “I just don’t know what to do with it.”
Sydney reached out, a single finger tracing the line of Vanja’s collarbone above the water. “You don’t have to do anything with it.”
“That’s not how it works,” Vanja said, but she didn’t pull away. “Feelings are… currency. They’re leverage. You just handed me all of yours.”
“I know.”
“I could destroy you.”
A faint, resigned smile touched Sydney’s lips. “I know that, too.”
Vanja looked at her—really looked. At the weird eyes, now soft with a devastating trust. At the body she’d just used with such brutal ownership. This wasn’t like Milan. This wasn’t a transaction with a porn star or a power play with a model. This was something else. Something that had seeped into the cracks of her control.
She leaned forward and kissed her. It was not like the others. It was slow. Deep. A silent, terrible acknowledgment.
When they finally pulled apart, Vanja rested her forehead against Sydney’s. The steam from the pool rose around them like a shroud. “You should go inside,” Vanja murmured. “You’ll get cold.”
“Okay.”
They climbed out, water sluicing from their bodies. Vanja fetched two thick, white robes from a warming cabinet and handed one to Sydney. They dried in silence, wrapped themselves, and walked back through the penthouse, leaving wet footprints on the dark wood.
In the bedroom, the fire had died to embers. Sydney crawled into the center of the massive bed, curling into herself. Vanja stood by the fireplace, watching her.
“Aren’t you coming to bed?” Sydney asked, her voice small.
“In a minute.”
Vanja stayed by the dying fire long after Sydney’s breathing evened out into sleep. She stared at the embers, seeing not glow, but the reflection of neon in a rooftop pool. Hearing not silence, but the echo of her own voice.
I love you too.
She had dissected love in textbooks. She knew its pathways, its neurotransmitters, its pathologies. She could diagnose its manifestations with cool precision. But feeling it? This messy, inconvenient, horrifying feeling? It was like a phantom limb—something she knew was hers, yet she had no idea how to use it.
It felt a lot like losing.
Finally, she walked to the bed. She slid in beside Sydney’s sleeping form. Carefully, so carefully it felt like a betrayal of her every instinct, she wrapped an arm around Sydney’s waist and pulled her close, spooning her slender body. Sydney murmured in her sleep, nestling back into the contact.
Vanja lay awake, her golden-green eyes open in the dark, holding the object of her confounding new diagnosis. The city’s eternal light seeped around the curtains, painting them both in relentless, waking truth.
The city’s eternal light seeped around the curtains, painting them both in relentless, waking truth. Vanja did not sleep. She felt the rise and fall of Sydney’s ribcage under her arm, the faint scent of chlorine still on their skin. Her mind, usually a palace of ordered corridors, was a riot of static.
When dawn bleached the sky from black to a tired grey, she finally untangled herself. She stood by the window, watching the city wake, a silhouette against the growing light. The silence felt different. It felt shared.
“I can feel you staring,” Sydney’s voice was a sleep-roughened murmur from the bed. “It’s creepy.”
“You’re used to people staring,” Vanja said, not turning. “It’s your job.”
“Not like this.” Sheets rustled. “You’re not staring at the actress. You’re staring at the ruin.”
Vanja finally looked at her. Sydney was propped on an elbow, the silk sheet pooled at her waist, her hair a tangled mess. She looked utterly conquered. And yet, there was a clarity in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. It was unsettling.
“You’re not a ruin,” Vanja said, the words tasting strange. “You’re just… exposed.”
“Same thing.” Sydney sat up fully, the sheet falling away. She didn’t try to cover herself. “What happens now, Vanja? Now that you’ve said it and you can’t take it back?”
Vanja walked to the bed, her steps silent on the plush rug. She sat on the edge, the mattress dipping under her weight. She reached out and took a strand of Sydney’s fake blonde hair between her fingers, studying it with a clinical detachment that felt like a lie.
“You got a new role,” Vanja said. Her voice was flat, a transaction.
“What?”
“Main one. That Game of Thrones spin-off. The one every bitch in this town killed for.”
Sydney blinked, the clarity in her eyes fracturing into confusion. “What are you talking about? My agent said they’d already screen-tested–”
“They did. And they picked someone else. A girl from New Zealand with better cheekbones.” Vanja dropped the hair. “She’s out. You’re in. The offer comes today.”
Silence pooled between them, thick and heavy. Sydney’s breath hitched. “You did that?”
“I made a call.” Vanja shrugged, a minute lift of one shoulder. “The producer owes my family for keeping his son out of a Swiss prison. It wasn’t a difficult call.”
Sydney stared, her mouth slightly open. This wasn’t gratitude on her face. It was horror. A slow-dawning understanding. “Why?”
Vanja’s gaze traveled down Sydney’s body, lingering on her breasts. “You look the part. Plus the tits.”
A hollow laugh escaped Sydney. She looked down at her own body, then back at Vanja. “I thought they weren’t anything special. Your words, on that first night. ‘Nice, but nothing spectacular.’”
Vanja leaned in, her golden-green eyes capturing Sydney’s weird, watery ones. “Compared to mine,” she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “But compared to the rest of Hollywood’ starving, silicone-injected rack? They’re pretty fucking spectacular.” She closed the final inch, her lips brushing Sydney’s. “And now that they’re mine,” she murmured, her breath hot, “they’re perfect.”
She kissed her. It wasn’t gentle. It was a reclamation. A re-staking of a claim that had felt dangerously blurred in the pool. Vanja pushed Sydney back into the mountain of pillows, following her down, her mouth never leaving Sydney’s. Her hand slid between them, palm rough against the soft swell of Sydney’s breast, thumb circling a nipple until it pebbled into a tight peak.
Sydney moaned, a soft, surrendering sound into Vanja’s mouth. Her hands came up, not to push away, but to clutch at Vanja’s shoulders, her short nails biting into skin.
Vanja broke the kiss, trailing her lips down Sydney’s neck, across her collarbone. She took a nipple into her mouth, sucking hard, lapping at it with a focused, wet intensity. “Mine,” she growled against the flushed skin, her teeth grazing the sensitive peak. She moved to the other breast, giving it the same brutal worship, her hand sliding down Sydney’s quivering stomach.
Her fingers dipped through coarse curls, finding her wet and already swollen. “Fuck,” Vanja breathed, a smirk in her voice. “You love this, don’t you? You love being my little project. My bought-and-paid-for cunt.”
“Yes,” Sydney hissed, arching her back, pushing herself onto Vanja’s seeking fingers.
Vanja didn’t enter her. She just rubbed slow, maddening circles over her clit, feeling the hardness beneath the hood. “Say thank you.”
“Thank you,” Sydney gasped, her hips jerking.
“For what?”
“For the role. For–for everything.”
“Wrong.” Vanja removed her hand entirely, hovering above her. Sydney whimpered at the loss. “Thank me for remembering you’re just a set of holes I happen to enjoy. That’s all this is. The rest is noise.”
Then she manifested.
She didn’t guide it this time. She let it spring thick and heavy from her body, pressing the leaking tip against Sydney’s soaked entrance. Sydney’s eyes flew open, wide with a familiar mix of fear and craving.
Vanja pushed in with one brutal, shearing thrust. Sydney cried out, a sharp, broken sound, her body stretching to accommodate the sudden, unforgiving girth. Vanja buried herself to the hilt, staying there, letting Sydney feel every inch, every vein, the unbearable fullness.
“This is the deal,” Vanja panted, her voice strained with the effort of holding still. “You take the role. You become their star. And you come back here, to this bed, and you remember who you really belong to.” She began to move, a slow, deep withdrawal followed by a punishing drive back in. “You remember who owns this greedy, Hollywood cunt.”
She fucked her with a methodical, grinding rhythm. Each thrust was a declaration, a punctuation mark. Sydney’s cries were muffled by the pillows, her body pliant and accepting. Vanja wrapped a hand in her hair, yanking her head back, exposing the long line of her throat.
“You’re going to be famous, Syd,” Vanja grunted, her hips pistoning. “They’re going to put your face on buses. And you’re going to know, every time you see it, that you’re just a puppet. My pretty, fuckable puppet.”
The obscenities, the raw physicality, the sheer dominance of it—it broke something open in Sydney. Her third orgasm ripped through her with a silent, seismic intensity, her body clamping down in a vice-like series of pulses that milked Vanja’s own release from her. Vanja came with a choked, guttural roar, slamming home one final time, her vision whiting out at the edges as she emptied herself deep inside.
She collapsed, her weight crushing Sydney into the mattress, her face buried in the sweaty hollow of Sydney’s neck. They lay like that for a long time, a tangled, breathing mess. The transaction felt complete. The balance of power, however fragile, restored.
Three weeks later, the scent of jasmine and amber in the penthouse was replaced by the sterile, lemon-clean smell of a film set. Sydney had been in fittings, in rehearsals, living on cold brew and adrenaline. She stood in Vanja’s bathroom, a cheap plastic stick in her trembling hand, staring at the result.
Two lines.
The world didn’t tilt. It simply emptied of sound. She walked out, the stick held loosely in her fingers like a dead thing. Vanja was at her desk, staring at a dense psychiatric textbook, a highlighter poised in her hand.
“Vanja.”
She looked up. She saw the stick. The highlighter dropped, rolling across the page, leaving a neon pink smear.
Sydney’s voice was a ghost. “I didn’t know I could.”
The silence that followed was absolute, a physical weight. Vanja’s face, usually a masterpiece of composed indifference, went through a rapid, minute series of shifts: shock, calculation, disbelief, then a grim, dawning acceptance.
“Get pregnant from me,” Vanja finished, her own voice strangely hollow. She leaned back in her chair, the leather creaking. “Yeah.” She ran a hand through her dark blond hair.“Sorry. I thought you were on the pill.”
Sydney paled, the blood draining from her face so completely she looked like a marble statue. The stick slipped from her fingers, clattering on the floor. “You… thought?”
Vanja stood up, the movement slow, deliberate. She approached Sydney, who stood frozen in the middle of the room. “We’ll do whatever you want,” Vanja said, her tone low, each word measured. “Whatever you need. I have doctors.The best. It can be quiet, safe, anywhere in the world. Or…”
“Or?” Sydney whispered, her eyes searching Vanja’s for an anchor.
“What do you want?” Vanja asked, turning the question back on her, a psychiatrist’s tactic.
“I asked you first.” Sydney’s voice gained a shred of steel. “What do you want?”
Vanja didn’t look away. She reached out, her fingers gently tracing the line of Sydney’s jaw. A gesture so uncharacteristically tender it made Sydney’s breath catch. “I want us to keep it,” Vanja said, the words leaving her as if pulled by force. A profound, shocking vulnerability flickered in her eyes, there and gone. “But,” she added, the steel returning to her voice, a protective layer snapping back into place, “it’s on you.”
Sydney stared at her. The woman who had woken her by force, who had bought her a career, who had just days ago reduced her to a sobbing, owned thing in this very room, was now giving her a choice. It was the most terrifying thing she had ever witnessed.
A sob welled up, raw and ragged, tearing from her throat. She cried harder than she had in the pool, harder than she ever had on any film set pretending to feel. The tears were for the confusion, the fear, the monstrous impossibility of it all, and for that tiny, terrifying flash of want in Vanja’s eyes.
She stepped forward, closing the distance, and kissed her. It was a salty, desperate kiss, a seal on a fate she couldn’t begin to comprehend. When she pulled back, she left the taste of her decision on Vanja’s lips.
She didn’t say yes.
She didn’t have to.