Chapter 36: Vanja rides Julian hard in the booth, her nails raking his chest as she bounces on his cock with drunken abandon, moaning 'Fuck, she'll smell you on me tomorrow' between sloppy kisses.
The bass from the main room was a distant, dying heartbeat through the concrete walls. In the back room, amidst stacked crates of vodka and stale beer, the air was thick with cigarette smoke and the sour tang of spilled liquor. Vanja leaned against a metal shelving unit, the cold seeping through her thin dress. The vodka in her plastic cup was gone, but the fire in her gut was an inferno. It had been burning since she saw him, since she watched his eyes follow Lena across the dance floor.
Julian stood a few feet away, looking less like a premier league footballer and more like a lost boy in an expensive shirt. He’d followed her back here, his own drink forgotten. The bravado he’d shown earlier was gone, replaced by a hollowed-out tension.
“You shouldn’t be here, Vanja,” he said, his voice low.
“Where should I be, Julian?” she spat, pushing off the shelves. The room tilted slightly, a pleasant, swimming sensation. “Home with my wife? The one you threw away?” She took a step closer. The anger was a live wire, but beneath it, thrumming in time with the distant music, was something else. A destructive curiosity. A need to smash the last remaining ghost of him between them.
“You don’t understand,” he started, but she was already in his space.
“You’re right. I don’t.” Her words were slurred, the edges softened by alcohol and rage. “You had her. You had that. And you traded it for… what? Some bland bitch who doesn’t know your middle name?” She brought her cup up, found it empty, and threw it against the wall. The plastic cracked, a pathetic sound. “You ruined her.”
“I know.” The admission was a raw scrape of sound. His jaw was clenched so tight a muscle jumped. “I see it every fucking day.”
“You don’t get to see it!” Vanja shoved him, her hands flat against his chest. He stumbled back, hitting the wall. The impact seemed to shatter something in the air between them. His eyes, wide and dark, dropped to her mouth.
The silence that followed was louder than the music. It was filled with years of resentment, of stolen glances at family gatherings, of a secret, poisonous fascination Vanja had never allowed herself to name. He was the enemy. He was also, in this haze of vodka and vengeance, a monument to everything she’d conquered. A trophy to defile.
“You ruined me,” she breathed, the meaning shifting, blurring. It wasn’t about Lena anymore. It was about this heat coiling in her stomach, this need to taste the poison.
She closed the final inch and slammed her mouth against his.
It wasn’t a kiss. It was a collision. Her teeth caught his lip, and the coppery taste of blood bloomed between them. He made a sound, a groan of pure shock, and then his hands were on her, large and rough, gripping her hips and pulling her into him. His tongue pushed into her mouth, aggressive, claiming, and she met it with equal force. This was a fight. A fuck with clothes on.
Her hands went to his belt, fumbling with the stiff leather. “This what you wanted?” she snarled against his mouth, her fingers finally finding the buckle, yanking it open. “When you stared at her? You wanted to be the one making her moan?”
“Shut up,” he growled, spinning them around so her back hit the cold concrete wall. The shock of it made her gasp. His hands shoved the thin straps of her dress down her shoulders, baring her breasts. He didn’t pause to look, just lowered his head and took one nipple into his hot, wet mouth, sucking hard, biting down just shy of pain.
A jagged bolt of pleasure-pain shot straight to her cunt. She cried out, her head thudding back against the wall. Her fingers tangled in his hair, pulling, not pushing him away. “Fucking bastard,” she panted.
He switched to the other breast, his hand roughly squeezing the one he’d just abandoned. His other hand shoved her dress up around her waist, his fingers tearing at the flimsy lace of her underwear. They ripped, a satisfying sound, and then his fingers were on her, plunging inside without ceremony.
She was soaking wet. The realization was a humiliation and a thrill. Her body was betraying every principle, every loyalty, for the sheer, brutal physics of it. He worked his fingers in and out of her, his thumb grinding against her clit with a rough, practiced rhythm. It was too much, too hard, too good. Her hips bucked against his hand, seeking more.
“That’s it,” he muttered, his breath hot on her skin. “You’re fucking dripping. For me.”
“For anyone,” she gasped, a last, weak defiance. “You’re just a warm body.”
He withdrew his fingers, and the sudden emptiness was a shock. He undid his fly, freeing his cock. It was hard, thick, jutting out angrily. He didn’t guide it to her. He just lifted her, his hands under her ass, and slammed her down onto him.
The penetration was a blinding, splitting fullness. She screamed, the sound swallowed by the room and the music. He was bigger than Lena, harder, a brutal invasion that stretched her to a breathtaking edge. He held her there, impaled against the wall, his forehead against hers, both of them panting, sweating.
“Still talking?” he gritted out.
In answer, she wrapped her legs tight around his waist and began to move, riding him with a furious, desperate energy. It was a punishing rhythm, each downward thrust forcing a grunt from him, a gasp from her. The metal shelves rattled beside them. His mouth found hers again, a messy, biting kiss. She could taste the vodka on his tongue, the blood, her own sweat.
“Fuck you,” she chanted into his mouth, her voice breaking on each thrust. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.”
He pistoned into her, his grip on her ass iron-tight. The pleasure was a storm surge, building from that deep, violated place, threatening to pull her under. She could feel him swelling inside her, his breath coming in ragged bursts. She clawed at his back, her nails digging through his shirt.
“I’m gonna…” he warned, his voice strangled.
“Do it,” she hissed. “Come in me, you pathetic piece of shit. Mark your fucking territory.”
The vulgar command tipped him over. With a roar that was almost a sob, he drove up into her one final, shuddering time and came, his release hot and flooding inside her. The sensation, the sheer degrading intimacy of it, triggered her own climax. It ripped through her without permission, a violent, convulsing wave that made her see white behind her eyes, her cunt milking him desperately as she shook against the wall.
He held her there until his arms trembled, then slowly lowered her. Her legs gave way, and she slid down the wall to the dirty floor, her dress bunched around her waist, his spend already leaking out of her. He sagged against the opposite wall, fumbling to tuck himself back in, avoiding her eyes. The silence returned, now heavy with the smell of sex and shame.
Sunlight was a brutal instrument. It cleaved through a gap in the curtains Vanja didn’t recognize, landing directly on her face. Her head was a solid block of throbbing pain. Her mouth tasted of ash and stale champagne. And something else. Something chemical.
She groaned, shifting on the unfamiliar sheets. The room came into focus slowly. Beige walls. A generic hotel print of a bridge. A discarded football jersey on the floor. Julian’s jersey.
Memory returned in a nauseating flood. The club. The vodka. The back room. The concrete wall. His hands, his mouth, his cock.
“Lena,” she croaked, turning her head.
The other side of the bed was empty. The sheets were cool. Not just empty. Undisturbed. The pillow was pristine, without the faint indentation of her wife’s head.
A cold, sharp terror, cleaner and more sobering than any hangover, sliced through the fog.
She sat up too fast, the room spinning. She was naked. Sticky between her thighs. But Lena wasn’t here. Lena, who had been there last night in the nursery, in their bed. Lena, who she’d spooned, whose stomach she’d held.
That had been last night.
This… this was wrong. The chronology was a shattered mirror. The tenderness of the nursery, the warmth of their bed—it felt vivid, more real than the gritty memory of sex with Julian. But it was impossible. She’d been at the club. She’d gotten drunk. She’d fucked Julian in a storage room.
The nursery… the salt lamp… the sound of the pump… Lena’s softness… it had the hyper-real, emotionally charged clarity of a dream. A desperate, beautiful, fabricated dream her mind had conjured while…
While what?
The chemical taste in her mouth. The way the room tilted not just with hangover dizziness, but with a detached, floaty wrongness. The black spots in her memory between the main dance floor and the back room.
“Fuck.”
The word was a dry crack in the silent room. Not a curse of frustration, but of dawning, ice-cold horror.
She scrambled from the bed, her body aching in unfamiliar ways. She found her dress in a heap on the floor, pulled it on. Her hands were shaking. “Julian!”
The bathroom door opened. He stood there, dressed, looking pale and wrecked. “Vanja…”
“Lena’s not here,” she said, her voice terrifyingly calm. “The nursery. Our bed. It wasn’t real. None of it was real.” She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. “The drink. My last drink. It tasted… off. Metallic.” She looked at him, the full reality crashing down. “Someone tried to drug me. I need to go to the DR. Now.”
He didn’t argue. He saw it too—the panic that wasn’t about their betrayal, but about something far more sinister. He just nodded, his face grim. “My car’s out back.”
The ride to the Doctor’s office was a silent blur. Vanja stared out the window, the beautiful, detailed dream of Lena and their son already fading, being overwritten by the sterile, growing certainty. It had felt so real. A lifeline her brain had thrown her into, away from the poison.
At the clinic, she gave terse, blunt answers. The nurse’s face grew professionally neutral. They took blood. They asked about symptoms. The floatiness. The vivid dream. The amnesic gaps. The chemical taste.
An hour later, a doctor with kind eyes confirmed it. “Your bloodwork shows traces of a potent sedative-hypnotic, often used in drug-facilitated assaults. The dosage was significant. The intense, narrative dream you described is a known side effect. You are very lucky, Ms. Jakobsen. Your constitution likely fought off the worst of it. But someone certainly tried.”
She sat on the paper-covered examination table, the words washing over her. Lucky. Someone had tried to drug her. To what end? To rob her? To assault her? Julian had been the one there. Julian, who she’d then…
She looked at him, standing awkwardly by the door, his guilt now layered with a new, horrible context. He’d had sex with her while she was under the influence of a date-rape drug. The lines blurred into a grey, sickening murk.
But that was a horror for another moment. The only clean, sharp thought was the one that came next, ringing with a clarity the drug could never touch.
She needed to get home. She needed to see Lena. She needed to touch her, to smell her skin, to feel the real weight of her in their real bed, and erase the perfect, poisonous ghost her own mind had created.
The clinical smell of antiseptic was still in her nose as Julian’s car pulled up to her building. The silence between them had calcified into something heavy and unbreakable. Every bump in the road had sent a fresh wave of nausea through her, a mix of the drug’s lingering echo and the searing, graphic memory of what they’d done. What she’d initiated. While poisoned.
He put the car in park but left the engine running. “Vanja,” he began, his voice gravelly.
“Don’t.” She fumbled for the door handle, her fingers clumsy. “Just don’t. We’ll never speak of it. It didn’t happen.”
“But it did happen. And you weren’t…” He trailed off, unable to say the words.
“I wasn’t in my right mind?” She let out a sharp, brittle laugh. “Tell me something I don’t know, Julian. But you were. You were sober. You knew.” She finally got the door open, the chill morning air hitting her like a slap. “So who handed me that drink?”
He stared straight ahead, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. “I don’t know. I swear. I saw you looking unsteady near the bar. Some guy was talking to you. I just… I followed you to the back to make sure you were okay.”
“And then you fucked me against a wall.” She said it flatly, a statement of fact more devastating than any accusation. “Your heroic intervention.”
She slammed the door before he could answer, the sound final. She didn’t look back as she walked into the building, her body moving on autopilot. The elevator ride was an eternity. All she could think of was the salt lamp’s glow, the soft ping of milk in a bottle, the feeling of Lena’s stomach under her palm. The dream. The beautiful, cruel dream.
Her key scraped in the lock. She pushed the door open, expecting the warm, familiar silence of their home, the scent of Lena’s lavender detergent and the faint, sweet smell of baby.
The apartment was dark, the curtains drawn. It was cold. Still. Not in a sleeping way, but in an empty way.
“Lena?” Her voice echoed slightly in the space. No answer. No soft shuffle from the nursery. No creak of the rocking chair.
A prickle of ice traced her spine. She moved quickly, flipping on lights. The living room was tidy, sterile. Too tidy. There were no discarded baby blankets, no burp cloths draped over the arm of the sofa. She rushed to the nursery and threw the door open.
The room was bare. The walls were a neutral beige. There was no crib. No changing table. No stacked diapers or pastel mobiles. The salt lamp was gone. The rocking chair was gone. It was a spare room, filled only with a few unopened moving boxes.
Vanja’s breath left her lungs in a rush. She staggered, gripping the doorframe. No. This is wrong. This is the drug. This is still the drug.
She turned and ran to their bedroom. Their bed was made, the duvet smooth. She yanked open the closet. Her clothes hung neatly on one side. The other side was empty. No flowing dresses, no soft sweaters, no rows of shoes. Just bare, polished rod.
Her heart was a frantic, caged bird slamming against her ribs. She stumbled to the bathroom. One toothbrush. One tube of moisturizer. One razor.
“No, no, no,” she chanted, her voice a thin thread of sound. She pulled out her phone, her fingers trembling so badly she misdialed three times. She found Lena’s number and pressed call.
It rang once, then a robotic female voice stated, “The number you have dialed is not in service.”
Vanja stared at the screen. She scrolled through her contacts. Lena’s name was gone. She searched her messages. Their long, threaded conversations, the photos, the goodnight hearts—all vanished. She opened her photo gallery, scrolling back through months. There were pictures of the track, of her teammates, of landscapes. There were no pictures of a dark-haired, soft-eyed woman. There were no pictures of a baby.
A high, thin sound of pure panic escaped her throat. She called the only person who could possibly anchor her in this disintegrating reality.
Julian answered on the second ring, his voice tense. “Vanja? What’s wrong?”
“Lena,” she gasped, the word tearing out of her. “She’s gone. Everything’s gone. Her clothes, her things, the baby’s room… it’s all gone. Her number is disconnected. Julian, what the fuck is happening?”
There was a long, static-filled pause on the other end of the line. When he spoke, his voice was cautious, confused. “Vanja… who is Lena?”
The world didn’t just tilt. It shattered. The floor beneath her feet became insubstantial. She slid down the wall of the empty, hollow bathroom until she hit the cold tiles.
“My wife,” she whispered, her mouth dry as dust. “Lena. My cousin. Your ex-fiancée. You left her. For Stephanie. We… we have a son.” Even as she said it, the words sounded insane. They felt true in her bones, in her marrow, in the phantom memory of milk on her tongue, but saying them aloud made her sound utterly deranged.
Another pause, longer this time. “Vanja, listen to me. You never had a wife. You’re not married. You don’t have any cousins here. I was engaged to a girl named Steph for two years, we broke up six months ago.” His voice dropped, strained with a concern that felt more terrifying than any anger. “The doctor said the drug could cause confusion, vivid hallucinations. You’re hallucinating. You need to come back to the clinic.”
“I’m not hallucinating!” she screamed, the sound raw and desperate in the empty apartment. “She’s real! I feel her! I tasted her!” The explicit memory, the one from the dream-nursery, flooded her: the slick heat, the tight clench, the sweet salt on her lips. It was more real than the tiles beneath her. “We were together last night, before the club. She was pumping milk. I touched her. I fucked her.”
“Vanja, stop.” Julian’s voice was firm now, the voice of someone handling a crisis. “You were alone last night before the club. We talked about it. You said you were doing a solo training recap. There was no one with you. There is no Lena.”
She began to rock slightly, her arms wrapped around her knees. The conviction in his voice was an abyss. It yawned beneath her, threatening to swallow the last solid pieces of her mind. The detailed, textured reality of the last year—the pregnancy, the birth, the sleepless nights, the overwhelming love, the raw, messy sex in their shared bed—collided with the physical, empty evidence of her apartment and the sincere bafflement in Julian’s voice.
One was a lie. But which one?
The phantom sensation of a baby’s weight in her arms made her muscles twitch. The ghost of Lena’s kiss burned on her mouth.
“Where is she?” Vanja whispered, not to Julian, but to the uncaring air of the bathroom. The question wasn’t just about location anymore. It was about the fabric of her own sanity.
Julian was still talking, his words urgent through the phone. “I’m coming back over. Don’t move. Just stay there, okay? We’ll figure this out.”
She let the phone drop from her hand. It clattered on the tile. She stared at the pristine, singular toothbrush in the holder.
A perfect, poisonous ghost her own mind had created. Or a reality someone had stolen. The line between them had not just blurred; it had been erased completely.
She was drowning in the erasure.
The key rattled in the lock just as the trembling in her hands reached a fever pitch. Julian let himself in, his frame filling the doorway of her sterile, lonely apartment. His eyes scanned the empty spaces, the lack of life, before settling on her crumpled form on the bathroom floor. He didn’t speak. He just walked over, the sound of his shoes on the hardwood too loud, and knelt in front of her.
“Look at me,” he said, his voice low.
She lifted her head. Her vision swam, his face blurring with the imagined face of a woman who left no fingerprints, no hairs in the brush, no scent on the pillows.
“There is no Lena,” he stated, each word a hammer strike on the fragile shell of her memory. “You live alone. You have for two years, since you moved here for training.” He reached out, his thumb brushing a tear she hadn’t felt falling. His touch was startlingly real, an anchor point in the dissolving world. “The drug they gave you… the doctor said it can create entire narratives. Full, vivid stories to fill the gaps it creates. It hijacks your loneliness, your wants.”
“It felt more real than this,” she whispered, her voice cracking. She gestured to the barren second bedroom. “I can feel the weight of my son in my arms right now. It’s a phantom limb. How do you amputate a memory?”
“With the truth.” His hand moved to her shoulder, warm and solid. “And the truth is, you were vulnerable. Someone saw that. Someone at that club, probably a rival hoping to sabotage your season, slipped something into your drink. I found you before they could. But the chemical was already in your bloodstream, cooking up a fantasy.”
A rival. The word landed with a dull thud. It was plausible, horrifically so. The competitive world was a dirty one. She had enemies on the track who would love to see her stumble, fail a test, lose her focus. This would do it. This was doing it.
“And you?” The question was a venomous thread. “You found me. And then you fucked me. Was that part of the rescue?”
He flinched, his hand dropping. Shame flooded his features, raw and unmistakable. “No. That was me being a selfish, fucking bastard. You were looking at me with those wild eyes, saying those things… and I wanted you. I’ve always wanted you. So I took what the chaos offered. I’m no hero, Vanja. I’m just the guy who got there first.”
His confession hung in the cold air. It was ugly. It was honest. It matched the gritty, degrading feel of the memory against the wall. The hero narrative dissolved, leaving only this complicated, flawed man who desired her.
She pushed herself up, her legs unsteady. She needed to move, to break the static panic. She walked past him into the living room, drawn to the large window overlooking the grey city. “Who was I talking to at the bar? You said you saw someone.”
He followed her, standing a pace behind. “A guy. Tall, blond. I didn’t get a good look. He was gone by the time I pushed through the crowd to you.”
A tall, blond man. The description meant nothing and everything. It could be anyone. It could be no one. Her mind, treacherous and slick, tried to form a face, but it slipped away. The only face it wanted to conjure was Lena’s, smiling, sleepy, with milk on her lip.
Vanja turned to face him. The morning light cut across his worried expression. The same lips that had bruised hers. The same hands that had gripped her hips. He was a tangible fact in the conspiracy of her unraveling. He was also, she realized with a jolt, the only person who had seen her break. The only one who knew the depth of the fracture.
“Prove it,” she heard herself say.
“What?”
“Prove she wasn’t real. Prove I’m alone.” The challenge was reckless, a dare flung at the universe. “Show me my own life.”
He stared at her for a long moment, then gave a slow, grim nod. He pulled out his phone, scrolling, then turned the screen to her. It was a social media page. Her page. She took the phone. Her profile listed her as single. Her photos stretched back years—training, races, friendships with teammates. There were no hidden albums, no tagged photos with a dark-haired woman. She searched her own messages with trembling fingers, finding nothing but logistics with her coach, jokes with friends, polite exchanges with family abroad. No wife. No son. A vast, digital silence echoed the silence of the apartment.
The evidence was absolute. It was a cage.
A sound escaped her, a half-sob, half-gasp. The phone clattered to the floor. The last pillar of her imagined world crumbled into dust. She was not a mother. She was not a wife. She was a world-class runner who lived alone and had been chemically tortured for a medal, for a ranking, for someone else’s petty ambition.
The void where Lena had been was suddenly filled with a torrent of something else. A white-hot, purifying rage. It burned through the confusion, the grief, the horror. It demanded an outlet, a physical combustion.
Her eyes met Julian’s. The fear and concern in them had shifted, tempered by a darker, answering heat. He saw the rage ignite within her. He understood its language.
She didn’t move towards him. She simply reached for the hem of her dress, the same dress from the club, and pulled it over her head in one furious motion. She stood naked before him in the cold living room light, her body a weapon, a testament, a lie-detector. “You want me,” she stated, her voice stripped of all emotion. “You’ve always wanted me. So want this. Take the thing that’s here. The real thing. And erase the ghost.”
He crossed the space in two strides. There was no pretense of tenderness now, no blurred lines of intoxication. This was a pact, a violent confirmation of reality. His mouth crashed down on hers, a conquest. His hands were rough on her bare skin, mapping the territory that belonged only to her, pulling her against the hard proof of his arousal through his jeans.
“Here,” she panted against his mouth, her own hands tearing at his belt, his zipper. “Fuck me here, in the truth. Where she never was.”
He lifted her, her back scraping against the cool window glass, the entire city a blurred backdrop behind her. He freed himself, his cock springing out thick and urgent. He didn’t guide it. He just positioned her and slammed her down onto him.
The cry that was ripped from her throat was one of brutal validation. This was real. This stretch, this burning fullness, this hard pane of glass against her spine—this was undeniable. He held her there, impaled, his breathing ragged. “This is what’s real, Vanja,” he growled, his eyes locked on hers. “My hands on you. My cock inside you. This. Nothing else.”
He began to move, pounding her against the window with a rhythm that felt like punishment and absolution. Each thrust was a hammer driving a nail into the coffin of her fantasy. She clawed at his shoulders, her legs locked around his waist, meeting each jarring impact with a sharp, guttural gasp. The pleasure was acute, a sharp edge cutting through the numbness. It was a feeling. A raw, filthy, present-tense feeling.
“Tell me you feel this,” he demanded, his pace relentless. “Tell me you feel me ruining you.”
“I feel it,” she choked out, the words breaking as he hit a depth that shattered her coherency. “I feel you. Only you.”
Her orgasm built not from tenderness, but from a furious need to be emptied of everything else. It clawed its way up from where he filled her, a seismic wave of release that had nothing to do with love and everything to do with survival. She came with a silent, shuddering scream, her cunt convulsing around his driving length, the sensations blinding, absolute.
It triggered his own finish. With a final, deep grind, he spilled into her, a hot, claiming flood that seemed to seal the transaction. He stayed buried in her, his forehead damp against the window beside her head, both of them spent and shaking.
Slowly, he lowered her. Her legs wouldn’t hold her. They slid down the wall to the floor, a pool of discarded clothes and trembling limbs. He sank down beside her, his back against the wall.
The silence stretched, filled now with the smell of sex and sweat, the most real scent in the world. The ghost of lavender and milk was gone, burned away.
“I think I would have known,” he said quietly, his voice hoarse, “if I had dated someone for years. If I had been engaged to some cousin of yours.” A faint, exhausted laugh escaped him. It held no humor. “Vanja, I have been in love with you ever since we were eighteen. That’s the only long-term relationship I’ve been in. A one-sided, fucked-up thing with a woman who never saw me. Not until last night. Not until right now.”
She turned her head to look at him. The confession didn’t bring comfort. It was just another fact, another stone in the foundation of this new, bleak reality. He loved her. She was hallucinating families. Someone had tried to destroy her mind.