Chapter 17: Marie's fingers work Vanja's swollen clit with brutal precision, her other hand fisted in the athlete's hair as she hisses 'You still come the same way - two fingers curling up and your hips bucking like a fucking filly' before biting Vanja's neck hard enough to leave marks that'll show through her Olympic uniform.
The neon from the bar sign bled through the bathroom’s grimy high window, painting everything in a sickly red pulse. The air was a solid thing, reeking of urinal cakes and spilled gin. Vanja braced her hands on the cracked porcelain sink, head bowed, trying to steady the whirl inside her skull. The tequila. The memory of Isabella’s couch. The hollow ache where Tilly’s trust used to be.
The door opened with a groan, then clicked shut. Vanja didn’t look up.
“Well. This is a version of you I haven’t seen before.”
The voice was smooth, confident, with a Munich accent softened by an upper-class upbringing. Vanja knew it. Marie Wirtz. Socialite. Fitness obsessive. Sister to two national football stars. A persistent, smiling presence at the fringe of her world for months, always with a perfectly timed question about her training regimen.
Vanja finally lifted her head. The cracked mirror showed Marie leaning against the door, her arms crossed. She was dressed in expensive, understated athleisure that clung to a body honed to perfection. Long blonde hair framed a face of sharp, predatory beauty. Her sea-green eyes held no pity, only a deep, analytical interest.
“Go away, Marie.”
“Why? You look like you’re about to either start a fight or vomit. Both could be entertaining.” She uncrossed her arms and took a step closer. The small room shrank. “I saw you leave with that trash from the bar. Isabella, right? Her reputation precedes her. She must be exceptional in bed to lure the great Vanja Jakobsen back into the gutter.”
Vanja turned, her back against the sink. “It’s none of your business.”
“Isn’t it?” Marie smiled, a thin, knowing curve of her lips. She moved with a feline certainty until she was within touching distance. Vanja could smell her perfume, something clean and citrusy, absurdly out of place. “I’ve watched you for a long time. The focused champion. The intellectual anomaly. The beautiful wreck.” Her gaze dipped to Vanja’s mouth. “This… this moping in dive bars? This isn’t you. This is what happens when you’re trying to fuck away a broken heart.”
The accuracy of it was a slap. Vanja’s jaw tightened. “You don’t know anything.”
“I know the Swede is in London. I know you bought a house there. I know you look like someone drowned your puppy.” Her hand came up, not to touch, but to hover near Vanja’s cheek. “Is that what you needed all along, you stupid girl? A pretty little girlfriend to play house with? It doesn’t suit you.”
Anger, hot and welcome, surged through the numbness. “Fuck you.”
Marie’s smile widened. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
Her hovering hand landed, fingers curling around the back of Vanja’s neck. She was strong. Her grip was uncompromising. She pulled Vanja in and kissed her.
It was nothing like Isabella’s calculated exchange. This was an assertion. Marie’s mouth was demanding, skilled, and tasted of expensive gin. Vanja stiffened, her hands coming up to push against Marie’s shoulders. But the fight was a fleeting reflex. The tequila and the despair melted her resistance into a hot, shameful slurry. Her lips parted. A low groan escaped her, a sound of pure capitulation.
Marie swallowed the sound. She walked Vanja backward until her shoulders hit the cold, stained tiles next to the paper towel dispenser. She broke the kiss, her breathing only slightly elevated, her eyes scanning Vanja’s face with clinical hunger.
“See? This is what you needed. Something clean. Something direct. No emotional minefields.” Her other hand slid down Vanja’s stomach, popping the button of her jeans with practiced ease. The zipper rasped down.
Vanja’s head thumped against the tile. She stared at the water-stained ceiling. “Don’t.”
“You’re soaking,” Marie whispered, her fingers slipping past the waistband of Vanja’s underwear, finding her folds slick and swollen. Vanja jolted at the contact. “Your body is far more honest than you are.”
Two fingers slid inside her without ceremony. Vanja gasped, her hips bucking forward involuntarily. Marie’s fingers were long, clever, curling instantly to find a spot that ignited a shocking bolt of pleasure. It was disgustingly good. A betrayal of every tender moment she’d ever shared with Tilly.
“That’s it,” Marie murmured, her lips against Vanja’s ear as her fingers began a ruthless, steady rhythm. In and out. A cruel mimicry of care. “Just feel it. This is simple. This is just physics. Friction and release.”
Vanja’s eyes screwed shut. She saw Tilly’s face in the gym, tear-streaked and furious. She saw her own reflection in the airplane window, fleeing. She felt the exquisite, degrading skill of Marie’s hand. Her own traitorous body clenched, seeking more.
“Open your eyes,” Marie commanded, her thrusts deepening. “Look at me.”
Vanja forced her eyes open. Marie’s gaze was locked on hers, sea-green and utterly focused. This was a transaction. An exorcism. Vanja felt the coil of an orgasm, unbidden and brutal, beginning to tighten low in her gut. She didn’t want it. She craved it.
“Come on,” Marie goaded, her thumb finding Vanja’s clit, pressing hard circles. “Come for me. Let it out. All that Swedish drama isn’t here. It’s just my fingers in your cunt.”
The vulgarity, the sheer detachment, was the final trigger. Vanja’s back arched off the wall. A ragged, broken cry tore from her throat as the orgasm ripped through her, violent and joyless. It was a seizure of pleasure that felt like punishment, wracking her body as Marie’s fingers worked her through it, relentless, until the sensations sharpened into over-sensitivity and pain.
She sagged, panting, spent. Marie slowly withdrew her glistening fingers. She brought them to her own mouth, her eyes still on Vanja’s, and sucked them clean with a deliberate, obscene pleasure.
“Better?” Marie asked, her voice calm.
Vanja felt empty. Hollowed out. The temporary noise was gone, leaving the silent scream intact. She fumbled with her jeans, pulling them up with trembling hands.
“Come home with me,” Marie said, not a question. A statement of inevitability. “My place is clean. Quiet. You can shower. Sleep. No ghosts.”
The offer was a lifeline thrown from a ship Vanja had no desire to board. But the alternative was returning to Daniel’s silent apartment, to the echoing proof of her own decay. To the phone with its pathetic, scheduled texts from London.
She nodded, once.
Marie’s apartment was a minimalist masterpiece in Maxvorstadt, all polished concrete, floor-to-ceiling windows, and muted designer furniture. It was the antithesis of the London house—calculated, cold, and utterly sterile.
Vanja stood under a scalding shower in a bathroom bigger than her cousin’s bedroom. She scrubbed at her skin until it was pink, trying to erase the smell of the bar, the feel of Marie’s hands. It was futile.
She emerged in a borrowed t-shirt and sweats. Marie was in the living room, pouring two glasses of water. She had changed into silk shorts and a tank top. Her body was a sculpture.
“Feel human?” Marie asked, handing her a glass.
“No.” Vanja took the water, drank it.
Marie watched her, then nodded toward the spacious, untouched bedroom. “The bed is yours. I’ll be out here.”
Vanja didn’t move. The silence of the luxurious apartment was worse than the bar’s din. It had room for thought. For memory.
“Why?” Vanja asked, the word scraping out. “Why any of this?”
Marie leaned against the kitchen island. “Why not? You’re extraordinary. You’re in pain. The combination is… compelling.” She tilted her head. “And I don’t want anything from you that you can’t give tonight. It’s refreshing.”
It was the most honest thing anyone had said to her in weeks. Vanja walked into the bedroom and closed the door. She didn’t sleep. She lay in the dark, staring at the precise geometry of shadows on the ceiling.
Her phone, charging on the nightstand, lit up. The screen cast a blue glow.
A message from Tilly. Right on schedule.
Made it through. Pitches sharp today. Hope training was good. Night.
Vanja read the words. They were careful. Distant. A report from a separate planet. She thought of the raw, screaming honesty of her body against the bathroom tile, of Marie’s clinical assessment. This is what you needed.
Her thumbs hovered over the screen. A canyon of unsaid things yawned between them. The truth would be a bomb. A kindness, maybe, but a destructive one.
She typed the only safe, awful thing she could.
Training was solid. Glad to hear it. Sleep well.
She sent it. The blue light faded, plunging the room back into a dark so complete it felt like drowning. She had traded a minefield for a vacuum. She wasn’t sure which was worse. The only thing she knew for certain was that the silence in this clean, beautiful room was the loudest sound she had ever heard.
The only thing she knew for certain was that the silence in this clean, beautiful room was the loudest sound she had ever heard. It was a pressurized hum, filled with the ghost of Tilly’s text and the visceral memory of the bathroom tile against her spine. She couldn’t stay in the bed. The sheets were too crisp, too anonymous.
She pushed the door open. The main room was dark, lit only by the city’s sodium glow filtering through the vast windows. Marie was on the sofa, a silhouette, watching her.
“You’re like a caged animal,” Marie observed, her voice a calm scratch in the dark. “Even now.”
Vanja walked to the window, pressing her forehead against the cool glass. “I should go.”
“To where? Another bar? Back to Isabella?” Marie’s question held no judgment, only a stark logistics. “Stay. At least here the liquor is top-shelf and the company understands you.”
“You don’t understand me.” The protest was weak, automatic.
The sofa creaked as Marie stood. Vanja heard her bare feet on the polished concrete floor, approaching. She didn’t turn. Marie’s reflection appeared in the glass beside her own, blonde and blurred.
“I knew you had a crush on me before,” Marie said, her statement simple, devastating. “Years ago, at that sponsors’ gala. You were eighteen, all that talent and terror wrapped in an awful dress. You watched me all night. I liked you back.”
Vanja finally turned, her back against the window. Marie was close, her sea-green eyes capturing the ambient light.
“But Flo forbade me.” Marie gave a slight, elegant shrug. “My brother. He said you were a rocket, that you didn’t need the distraction, that you’d be terrible for me. He said, ‘She doesn’t need that now.’” A sharp, humorless laugh escaped her. “I guess he was fucking wrong.”
The confession unlocked a dusty box in Vanja’s mind. The memory surfaced—the crush, a faint, starstruck thing, eclipsed by training and the sheer scale of her own ambition. Marie had been this unattainable figure of polished confidence. And now she was here, in the dark, offering a twisted form of sanctuary.
Marie was beautiful. Not in Tilly’s hopeful, sunlit way. This was a carved, impeccable beauty. The first girl Vanja had ever liked, truly liked, from a distance. And she was here, now, in the wreckage.
“I don’t want you to go to Isabella next time,” Marie said, her hand coming up to cradle Vanja’s jaw. Her thumb traced the line of a cheekbone. “Or to anyone else in some filthy bathroom. Come to me.”
Their lips met again. This kiss was different. Slower. Deeper. An acknowledgment of shared history and present damage. Vanja felt a surrender so complete it bordered on annihilation. She kissed back, her hands fisting in Marie’s silk tank top. The need was a physical wave, drowning out the silent scream.
Marie walked her backward, away from the window, through the dark apartment to the bedroom. She pushed the borrowed t-shirt up and over Vanja’s head. Her mouth was on Vanja’s neck, her collarbone, moving down with a focused hunger. When she took a nipple into her mouth, sucking hard, Vanja’s knees buckled.
They fell onto the bed, a tangle of limbs. Marie stripped Vanja’s sweats down, then her own shorts. Skin met skin. Marie’s body was all taut muscle and soft, perfumed curves. Her “perkiest pair of tits” brushed against Vanja’s as she rolled on top, her thigh slotting between Vanja’s legs, applying a firm, grinding pressure.
“Let me see you,” Marie whispered, her hand sliding between them. Her fingers slid through Vanja’s wetness, gathering it, then circling her clit with a ruthless precision. “I want to watch you come apart for me. Properly.”
But Vanja was done being a passive recipient. The confession, the history, the raw need, coalesced into a surge of desperate agency. She flipped them over, pinning Marie beneath her. A low, shocked gasp left Marie’s lips, her eyes widening with delight.
Vanja’s body thrummed with a specific, focused intensity. Between her legs, a familiar pressure gathered and solidified, her cock forming from will and need and sheer animal impulse, thickening and lengthening until it stood rigid against Marie’s stomach.
Marie looked down, her breath catching. “Oh,” she said, a pure sound of want.
Vanja reached for the nightstand, yanking the drawer open. She found a bottle of lube, slicked herself with a rough, hurried stroke. She positioned the broad head at Marie’s entrance. Marie was already so wet, her “tightest pink pussy” yielding to the initial pressure.
“Look at me,” Vanja growled, echoing Marie’s command from the bathroom.
Marie’s gaze snapped up, locked onto Vanja’s. There was no clinical analysis now, only raw, unraveling need.
Vanja pushed in.
She sheathed herself in one long, slow, devastating stroke. Marie’s back arched off the mattress, a choked cry torn from her throat. She was impossibly tight, a hot, slick vice that threatened to undo Vanja immediately.
“Fuck,” Marie moaned, her nails scoring Vanja’s shoulders. “You’re tearing me apart. Fuck.”
Vanja began to move. Her thrusts were deep, measured, and powerful. Each withdrawal was almost complete, each drive home a deliberate re-claiming. The slap of skin, the wet, filthy sounds of their joining, filled the sterile room. She could feel every internal ripple, every clench of Marie’s body around her.
“Is this what you wanted?” Vanja panted, her rhythm starting to fracture, becoming harder, faster. “The first crush? All grown up?”
“Yes! God, yes!” Marie screamed, her heels digging into the small of Vanja’s back, urging her deeper. Her body was trembling, a bowstring pulled taut. “Don’t stop, don’t you fucking stop!”
Vanja felt the tension coiling at the base of Marie’s spine, the frantic fluttering around her cock. She leaned down, capturing Marie’s mouth in a searing kiss, swallowing her cries.
“Fuck, I’m going to squirt,” Marie gasped against her lips, her words a frantic warning. “Fuck!”
Vanja drove into her once more, hilt-deep, and held there. Marie’s body shattered. A guttural, broken wail was muffled by Vanja’s mouth as her orgasm erupted, a hot, surging rush of liquid that soaked Vanja’s thighs and the sheets beneath them. She squirted all over, the contractions around Vanja’s cock rhythmic and intense.
Vanja kissed her through it, deep and consuming, as Marie’s body convulsed beneath her. Only when the waves subsided into tremors did Vanja allow her own release. A few short, brutal thrusts and she came with a ragged groan, pumping her own release deep inside Marie’s clenching heat.
They collapsed, a mess of sweat and spend and tangled limbs. The room smelled of sex and perfume and salt. Vanja lay beside her, staring at the ceiling, her cock already receding, leaving a hollow, spent ache.
Marie turned onto her side, propping her head on a hand. She studied Vanja’s profile, her expression unreadable. She reached out and traced the line of Vanja’s eyebrow.
“So,” Marie said, her voice husky. “Now we’ve done that.”
Vanja said nothing. The silence had returned, but it was different now. Filled with a new, complicated weight. She had come to Marie, as asked. She had fucked the first crush into oblivion. And the silent scream, for now, was finally, mercifully, gone.
And the silent scream, for now, was finally, mercifully, gone.
Vanja lay still, the city’s glow painting her skin blue. Her breathing evened. Her mind was a blank, numb slate. Marie’s fingertip traced her eyebrow, her jaw, the pulse point in her throat. The touch was proprietary, but not unkind.
“He was right, you know.” Marie’s voice was quiet in the dark. “Flo. You would have been terrible for me. Back then.”
Vanja turned her head on the pillow. Marie’s expression was soft, open in a way she hadn’t seen before. The clinical sharpness had melted.
“Why?”
“Because I would have wanted to keep you,” Marie said, simply. “I would have seen that talent, that fear, and I would have tried to put it in a box on my shelf. To preserve it. You would have hated me. You would have run.”
The analysis was disarming. Accurate. Vanja said nothing.
“But now?” Marie continued, her hand sliding down to rest over Vanja’s heart. “Now you’re the one who’s shattered. And I find the pieces far more interesting than the whole statue ever was.”
It wasn’t a romantic declaration. It was a statement of fact, more intimate than any ‘I love you’ could be. Vanja understood it completely. She was a problem to be solved, a broken system to be studied. It was a relief.
“Your Swede,” Marie said, the word a gentle probe. “She wanted to fix you. To put you back together like you were. That’s impossible. The cracks are the interesting part.”
“I love her.” Vanja heard the words leave her mouth, flat and toneless. A read-out of data.
“I know you do.” Marie shifted, rising up on one elbow. Her blonde hair fell across Vanja’s chest. “Loving someone and being good for them are different countries. You and I? We’re the same country. It’s a bleak, beautiful place with terrible weather.”
Vanja almost smiled. It felt like a crack in her face. “You’re a poet.”
“Only about ugly things.” Marie bent her head, her mouth finding Vanja’s nipple. She licked, then bit, just hard enough to make Vanja gasp. “I watched you for years. After Flo told me no. Every race. Every interview. That stupid anthropology thesis abstract you published online. I read it.”
The confession stunned Vanja into stillness. Marie’s mouth moved lower, tasting salt and sweat on her stomach.
“I knew when you bought the London house. I have a contact at the agency.” Her words were murmured against Vanja’s skin, between open-mouthed kisses. “I knew when you flew back. I was in that bar tonight because I knew you’d end up there. You’re predictable in your chaos.”
Vanja’s hands fisted in the sheets. This wasn’t chance. This was a calculated intervention. She should feel anger, violation. All she felt was a profound, sinking recognition.
Marie’s tongue dipped into her navel. “You need a curator, Vanja. Not a cheerleader. Someone who appreciates the damage.” Her hands pushed Vanja’s thighs apart. “Let me show you.”
Vanja was still wet, sensitive from before. Marie’s mouth was a hot, merciless brand. She didn’t start slow. She licked a broad, flat stripe through Vanja’s folds, then zeroed in on her clit with sucking, focused pressure.
“Christ,” Vanja hissed, her hips lifting off the bed.
Marie’s hands clamped down, holding her in place. She ate her with a singular, devoted intensity. There was no performance in it. It was study. Consumption. Her tongue fucked into her, then circled, then suckled. She moaned against Vanja’s cunt, the vibration tearing a raw sound from Vanja’s throat.
It was too much. The over-sensitivity blossomed into a new, sharper wave of need. Vanja’s heels dug into the mattress. “Fuck, Marie, right there.”
Marie added two fingers, curling them up hard on that tender spot inside. The dual assault was relentless. Vanja’s world dissolved into pure sensation—the wet, sucking sounds, the pinch of fingers, the coil of pleasure winding tighter, tighter.
“Come in my mouth,” Marie ordered, her voice thick. “Let me have it. All of it.”
The command tipped her over. Vanja shattered, a white-hot silent scream this time, her body bowing as the orgasm electrocuted her. Marie drank her down, working her through every shuddering pulse until Vanja collapsed, boneless and gasping.
Marie crawled back up her body, her mouth gleaming in the low light. She kissed Vanja, letting her taste herself. The kiss was deep, possessive.
“See?” Marie whispered, resting their foreheads together. “I don’t want to fix you. I just want to have you. Exactly as you are.”
Vanja closed her eyes. The numbness was back, but it was a warmer numbness. She understood the transaction now. It was the most honest thing she’d been offered in months.
Her phone buzzed again on the nightstand. A second text. Tilly’s schedule was breaking down.
Vanja didn’t reach for it. She turned into Marie, burying her face in the clean scent of her neck. The silent scream was gone, but in its place was a new, quiet hum. The sound of being known, and being collected. It wasn’t love. It was something darker, and for now, it was the only thing holding her together. She wrapped an arm around Marie’s waist and held on, anchorless in a calm, deep, black sea.