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People hear child prodigy and they imagine a certain version of her. Haughty, precocious, strutting about with her head held high, nothing in her life coming with a cost. They think she was pushed out of her mother’s womb with a megawatt brain already in place, with a built-in encyclopaedic knowledge of the Alexandrian library.
As if everything had been a smooth, effortless ride for her, as if skimming through the books once would be enough to win her an A +.
And then they actually meet her and think, oh. Huh, that’s funny. Because Victoria tends to be a bumbling mess who’s hopeless in most social interactions, who blurts out words like someone’s got a gun to her head, who’s never the most eloquent speaker in the room. Effortless?
Hell, she feels like she’s been doing nothing else but trying, all her life.
Here's a piece of advice for you, in case you’re planning on having a child, and for some reason that geneticists haven’t yet figured out, your offspring happens to be way smarter than their peers.
Everything’s relative. Meaning, your child might be incredibly smart for their age, above and beyond the top of the class, but once you put them in a classroom with kids two, three, five years older than them, they’ll struggle.
Victoria picked up a caffeine habit much earlier than she ought to have, working through copious amounts of ice americano as she competed in a curve with kids five years older than herself because just getting by wasn’t ever going to satisfy her parents.
People hear that she went to college at thirteen and think she’s some kind of kid genius. Probably, on some level. But it’s hard to feel that way when Victoria can’t recall a single day past the age of four when she didn’t feel like she was constantly paddling her feet just to keep her head afloat, while the tidal waves kept threatening to pull her down under.
So, yeah. Don’t do that to your child.
John was a stable constant in Victoria’s youth. Her brother, William, who always had plenty of acquaintances but not a lot of close friends, befriended John in his sophomore year of college.
There’s a distinct memory etched into her mind. She was sitting in front of the living room table, dangling her legs from a chair that was too big for her while she worked her way through linear algebra. At the age of eight, by the way.
She heard the door open and the house was instantly flooded with a rowdy noise of laughter. It caught her off-guard. Their house was, well, not oppressively silent, but usually politely muted. Screaming and shrieking were generally met with an arch look that Victoria knew not to cross.
“Will?” she called, pattering out bare-footed towards the doorway. William was her favourite person in the world. Which was maybe unfair to Mom and Dad, so she knew not to say, but she would whisper it into William’s ear sometimes.
He liked lifting her up to swing her around like a monkey. He cried when he watched sad scenes in children’s movies although he was a legal adult, eyes all red and watery, which never failed to make Victoria giggle a little. He called her Vic, the syllable short and snappy in his mouth, so different from the way her parents always pronounced the full four syllables without fail.
But it wasn’t just William, that day, and she shyly stumbled backwards when she found that his arm was slung around the shoulder of another person.
The unfamiliar man with black hair gelled backwards held a skateboard in his arm. Wearing a halfway smile, he looked down at her. He didn’t crouch to meet her at eye level, as some adults did, but placed a measured gaze on Victoria as if he took her seriously. She liked that.
“That you, Victory? William’s said a lot about you.”
She blinked, her eyes dark and round and much too big for her face. This was before she grew into her features post-puberty. Dragging her big toe against the cool marble floor, she steadied herself in order to say something in response instead of fleeing to her room.
“It’s Victoria,” she blurted, instantly flushing red after that. William chuckled next to them and quickly ruffled her hair.
“Mm-mm. Victory has a nicer ring to it, no? You seem like the winning type,” the man said, before introducing himself properly. “I’m John.”
That was just about it. John didn’t have much interest in his best friend’s kid sister, nor was he the type to be taken with kids like an aspiring father of a white picket fence household. It seemed like he was over at the Javadi’s at least two times a week, so they’d say hello, John would make a quick quip about whatever book Victoria’s got her head buried between, but that was it.
He kept on calling her Victory, though. Sometimes it felt like it was their little thing. No one else called her by the etymological origin of her name. And though Victoria knew all too well that he was wrong, she was never the winning type, it shot a strange giddiness through her every time he called her that.
Victoria didn’t draw very often, since she wasn’t good at it the way she’s good at studying, but occasionally she gave it a shot at the back of finished worksheets. She would draw William in the very middle of the paper, big and centrefold, with herself next to him holding his hand. Mom and Dad would be on either side of them, towering over them both, though William was, in truth, taller than both their parents at this point.
And sometimes, in the background, she would draw John’s casually smiling figure, observing them all.
When Victoria was thirteen, a couple of months after she began college, John faded away from her life. Just like that, as sudden as the way he had entered it.
So by the time she enters her EM rotation at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Centre and runs into Dr John Shen, attending physician, it’s been a good seven years since their last encounter.
Her mind goes blank.
John nonchalantly sips on ice coffee amidst all the frenzy of preparation for the victims of a mass casualty event. There’s no time for them to be properly introduced, tension belying the sombre looks on everyone’s face, so Victoria does a private double-take and tries to keep her gaping mouth shut.
He looks just about the same as seven years ago. A little older, sure, and somehow even more laid-back than he had been. And good-looking, too. Victoria’s brain can’t handle the fact that there isn’t one, but two human Utahs in this very room.
Dr Robby’s giving a briefing to everyone and she tries to focus on what he’s saying. But occasionally, she can’t stop her eyes from trailing its way across to John’s side profile, still reeling from disbelief. Why did neither of her parents think it fit to mention that John works here?
Her shoulders jump like a deer startled by a loud noise when John’s gaze momentarily turns towards her. There’s a quiet beat where their gaze meets, but no flicker of startled recognition in his eyes. Victoria is—
Victoria doesn’t know how to feel about that fact.
Considering that she’d been trying so hard that day to minimise the association between her Mom and herself, perhaps it’s a good thing that John, who knows her upbringing so well, who was the hovering background of her childhood for so long, does not recognise her. But there’s a sting of betrayal in her chest too, one that she swallows down because this is not the time for that.
Then the patients start coming in, and it’s a bloodbath, so Victoria’s much too occupied trying to keep her nausea down and avoid being dubbed double-crash by Santos. John’s similarly busy outside overseeing primary triage so it’s easy enough to evade him.
It’s nearly anticlimactic, the way things are. She makes it through the shift—well, three hours past it—and leaves quietly while he’s still working on a patient.
Victoria makes it home in a cab alone because her mother’s still busy. Only once she crosses the threshold does she feel the full weight of exhaustion of the day. She throws her bag to the side and rolls herself into a ball on the floor, letting out heaving sobs.
There’s no one home to administer a warm hug or get her a glass of water. So she lets herself have it for a few minutes, dry tears not yet fallen making her eyeballs throb, and then uplifts her body to drag it over to her room. On the way, she passes the darkened doorway of her brother’s old room.
William left home a couple of years back. He doesn’t come back for a visit very often, nor does he call at regular intervals. Not even to her. A familiar hurt unfurls in her chest but she walks on by until she reaches her own room and her en-suite bathroom. She steps into the waterfall shower and lets the steaming hot water wash it all away. Scrubbing at her bare skin until the soapy suds run clear and her skin takes on a flush of red, Victoria lets out a shuddering breath.
It’s hard to fall asleep that night. The real crash comes now, when she’s even twitchier than usual, tossing this way and that. She takes a tab of melatonin but it doesn’t help very much.
John, she thinks. And then thinks about William, by association, which sucks because she’d been trying so hard to reconcile things with him in her mind at least if not in person. Victoria smooshes her face into the plump pillow and muffles a sigh.
When she finally drifts off to a stuttering, halfway state of sleep, she dreams of John.
It’s a strange fusion of dream and reality. Hearing a scuffle at the edge of the bed, Victoria opens her eyelids with a heavy squint, only to see a shadowy figure climb atop the mattress. It’s her room, her bed, the markings of a childhood still so familiar. For a dream, it’s awfully realistic, down to the art print posters peeling off her wall.
She can’t tell who’s on her bed until her eyes adjust to the darkness. But slowly the figure materialises in faint brushstrokes until she recognises that it’s none other than John.
“John?” she calls, her voice catching in her throat in a squeak. John doesn’t speak but merely smiles, before catching her lips upon his own.
It’s a decidedly unsexy sex dream. Victoria’s still in her pyjamas, the comfortably worn-out type, not the lacy transparent lingerie type, as the John of her dream presses himself atop of her. By some mechanic that Victoria’s not too familiar with—thanks to her status as a kind of virgin—he spreads her thighs open and pushes inside of her.
This part is sort of faint. Blurred around the edges where her mind fails to fill in with the details, though she’s acutely aware of the fact that there’s some kind of opening, an insertion, and that a strange kind of fullness in her lower abdomen feels a lot like satiating a long hunger.
She swallows the gasps and moans that inch their way to the top, threatening to spill over from her parted lips. There’s the familiar feeling of an orgasm building up and she clutches John’s shoulders tightly in response, and then she’s toppling, slipping, falling to the bottom of the pit.
When she wakes up, it’s with the phantom lingerings of an orgasm. She slips her hand into her panties and finds that her fingers come back wet.
Victoria goes into work early the next day and instantly regrets it, because there he is, John Shen, nursing yet another cup of coffee. A rush of heat pierces her from the crown of her head, sending a shuddering memory of last night’s dream down her spine.
From the way that his bag is slung over one shoulder, John is just on his way out. When his eyes land on her, his eyebrows lift up in recognition. He’s beginning to open his mouth and Victoria can tell he’s about to call her by her name, casual and familiar, perhaps even by that stupid old nickname he had for her, and she’s mortified. For many reasons.
So she cuts him to the chase.
“Um, uh, good morning, Dr Shen,” she babbles, her addled brain seemingly incapable of handling a simple greeting. But it does the trick because John’s mouth pauses mid-parting and he levels a gaze on her like a careful appraisal. He cocks his head to the side, an unreadable glint in his eyes.
“Good morning, Student Doctor Javadi,” he replies diplomatically. Then he passes her by without saying another word, whistling a tune that she’s unfamiliar with.
And she thinks that’s the end of it. Isn’t this professionalism, or something? At least John’s willing to cooperate, unlike her Mom, who seems incapable of staying away from the emergency department when Victoria’s doing a shift, a creeping weight on her shoulders.
Victoria quickly discovers that she’s wrong, the next time she has to work with John. She’s on the night shift for once. It starts off busy but chills considerably as the hours inch towards daybreak, and Victoria even has time to take a quick breather.
John catches her in the staff break room, as she is munching down a granola bar that tastes like half-cardboard and half-gravel to keep herself awake for the final couple hours of the shift.
“Wrong brand,” he says abruptly.
“Huh?” Victoria scrunches her eyebrows mid-chew, her lips slightly agape. She imagines that she gives a fairly accurate impression of a fish.
“Widen your palate from your mother’s whole organic thing, Victory. Get something with actual chocolate on it.”
Rummaging in the cupboard for a second, he pulls out another granola bar before tossing it at her. She catches it out of pure instinct before it registers in her head that he just addressed her by her childhood nickname. Victory. The three syllables that fall with a sharp certainty from his mouth, familiar and long-missed.
Her brain goes white and blank. A knot of warmth tightens in the bottom of her stomach, the memory of that dream suddenly coming back in a rush, and yes, she’ll admit it, she may have rubbed it out a couple of times in thought of it, in thought of John’s arms holding her close and whispering in her ear soothing praises. At Victoria’s sputtering, monosyllabic inability to fish out a proper sentence from her throat, John shrugs.
“What. You didn’t think I’d recognise you? I figured it out halfway through the PittFest incident.”
“You didn’t, I didn’t think—”
“I figured you didn’t want me to say anything in front of other people. It sure seemed like it.”
And, ok, fair. Victoria’s shoulders relax a tad as she manages a quick, certain nod.
“Yeah, uh-huh, thanks for that,” she mutters, all the while much too aware that John’s eyes are fixed upon her with an inscrutable intensity. She grows hot under the heat of his gaze, like a metal beam under the blazing summer sun, scalding to the touch. It’s a relief, then, when John is pulled away with his duties.
Victoria lets out a long breath she’d been holding in from god-knows-when. Throwing away the half-eaten organic granola bar, she unwraps the one that John had tossed to her. She bites into it, the chocolate shell cracking open neatly under her front teeth, and it tastes sweet and nutty. It’s sticky, too, clinging onto her gums for a good while after.
When she leaves the breakroom and sinks herself back into the rhythm of the emergency department, she senses that something has shifted. Between herself and John, to be exact. Gone is his previous professional detachment. Now, although he maintains the cover in the eyesight and earsight of others, he keeps catching her off-guard by acting with familiarity.
“Good work, Victory,” he says under his breath when she succeeds in a chest tube, which makes Victoria hiss at him not to call her that between gritted teeth, after checking that no one else has heard him. John shrugs lopsidedly in an utterly insufferable way.
“What. You’d prefer Crash?”
There’s something a little mean in the way he says it, as if he knows that he’s getting to her. And he gets to her, alright, because there’s a prickle of humiliation in her eyes as she doggedly avoids looking at him.
“What?” she asks, pretending she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Fuck you, Trinity. You are definitely not getting that recommendation letter.
“Santos said that’s what everyone’s calling you.”
“That is not what everyone’s calling me.”
“Huh. Okay.”
Victoria is unsure how that conversation then prompts him into trying out a whole carousel of nicknames. Vic, he tries at first, which reminds her so much of her brother that Victoria feels like crying and quickly puts an end to. Vicky? He suggests, and Vicky sounds like a peppy teenage girl with bouncing curls and a bubbling giggle, everything that Victoria is not. So not that either.
Tori, he proposes triumphantly, before adding that Tori means bird in Japanese. Which, not an association that Victoria’s all too flattered by, so she gives him a proper Javadi-glare.
And then it’s all the more infuriating because in front of everyone else, their patients, their coworkers, John is still so good at calling her by her last name and title. It’s as if he’s insistently carving out a pocket of intimacy between the two of them, where there should be none, because the more he goes at it the more flustered she becomes.
She feels a little faint. And not because of a particularly gory injury this time, but because of John.
Who knew a night shift could be so exhausting; not because of the hours, not because of the patients, but because of a particularly aggravating attending who’s committed to calling her by anything but her proper first name.
It’s raining heartily by the time she gets off. She didn’t bring an umbrella and the rain means everyone else in the city is presumably also calling an Uber, so she’s kind of stuck. There’s no public transport that conveniently leads her back home, which is a mansion type further away from the city centre intended for rich people who could always rely on the comfort of a private car.
Said rich kid, Victoria, currently stranded at work, rubs her face in irritation as she lets out a garbled argh kind of sound. She’s tired, she wants to go home, and she wants to ignore the wet tangle of feelings expanding inside her chest.
After getting cancelled on an Uber for the sixth time, she starts walking. It’s a stupid idea, the smart part of her brain is telling her, but the voice is quiet after having been overworked for twelve hours straight. The animal part of Victoria, the part that wants to scream into the rain and dash down the pavement, is hyperactive.
The raindrops soak her body in an instant. It’s not as cleansing as a hot shower, but it’ll do. Victoria walks forward with a stubborn set to her lips, her eyelashes damp with wet and her hair dribbling down water inside the back of her scrubs.
She hasn’t even made it very far down the street when an unfamiliar car stops by her. The window rolls down, revealing John’s head craned towards her. He just looks at her, whereas some may look at her like she’s crazy, out of her mind, or with pity, but John just looks. Like always.
“Need a ride?” he asks.
Victoria never felt less like her name, never felt less like the winning type, so she concedes defeat and crawls inside the warmth of John’s car.
She thinks of the last time she’s seen John. Seven years ago, on William’s birthday dinner. It wasn’t William’s actual birthday, no, that was going to be four days later. But Mom and Dad wanted to do a get-together with the whole family and a couple of John’s close friends and that was the most convenient day amidst their parent’s busy schedule.
William was quiet, all throughout dinner. Their chef made a beautiful birthday cake that had rose petal-shaped icing on top, earl grey chiffon layered by lemon yoghurt cream, but he barely went at it despite his usual love for sweets. Victoria knew that he’d been fighting with Mom and Dad a lot the past year or so, mostly owing to his dropping out of university.
She worried about her brother. It was like he was a kindling determined to go out. The William of her childhood was fading away and she didn’t know what she could do to stop it. He holed himself in his room and cut ties with most of his friends, didn’t swing her around or watch movies with her like he used to, smiled painfully like it took him too much effort. There was an odd sense of lethargy to him, one that their parents hated and one that made Victoria want to cry.
The tension was palpable at the dinner table and everyone seemed to notice. Mom and Dad were ignoring it, the way that they’re very good at doing. Victoria was trying to fold her frame into herself, hoping that no one would notice her because she was thirteen with lanky limbs and her skin was starting to get all greasy, and no matter how long she spent in front of the mirror in the morning she felt so ugly and childish compared to the eighteen-year-olds she went to school with.
The only person who was acting like normal was John. He wasn’t dense or insensitive; he knew plenty well that the whole dinner was a mess. Victoria could tell from the way his eyes were ever so slightly more narrowed than usual, as if in constant observation. But he was throwing subtle jokes, making conversation with Mom and Dad, nudging William in the side in a conspiratorial way.
It helped that Mom liked John, because he was in med school and therefore ‘good influence,’ whatever that meant. She brought it up at the dinner table, actually.
“So, John, did you hear that Victoria got into college? She’s going to be pre-med, actually, so it’s med school after—like yourself.”
Mom’s face was beaming with pride. Victoria tried to manage a half-hearted smile but failed because she didn’t want to go to college, she didn’t want to be a doctor. She wanted nothing else but to lie in her bed like an unmovable rock and stay there asleep for the rest of her life, because she was so tired all the time.
John’s eyes fell on her with a gentleness that made her heart skip a beat.
“Wow, Victory. You must’ve tried really hard.”
Something caught inside her throat. Wet and hard and hot. Not a lot of people told her that, either because they were Mom and Dad and trying was the given, the natural state, not worthy of praise or recognition, or because they were taken aback that she was so young and yet smart enough to get into college that they thought hey, look at this kid genius. She’s got it easy.
And maybe she does, maybe they’re right, and she has no right to complain. But she couldn’t swallow anything else that evening and dismissed herself early from the table under the pretence of getting more hours of study under her belt before getting to bed. Dad nodded approvingly.
She was chewing on the end of her pen as she worked through practice papers when she heard a ruckus downstairs. It sounded like the cacophony of multiple voices, shouting and yelling from one, stern admonishment from another, someone else chiming in intermittently. It was all muffled from the distance and pressing her ear upon the door didn’t make much of a difference.
But she definitely heard it when the front door slammed shut.
Victoria was still awake at 2 AM, long past her parents having gone to bed, though her eyes were starting to feel leaden. She heard someone enter the house. After a moment of contemplation, she left her room, pattering down the hallway and down the stairs. William was standing hunched over the kitchen island, nursing a glass of water in his hand.
He looked dishevelled, his eyes red, and he reeked of alcohol. The lights weren’t turned on, so in the dark of the night, he was a towering, shadowy figure with two glinting eyes. Victoria took a couple of steps back. Never before in her life did she feel afraid of her brother. But in that moment, she was, and perhaps he had noticed.
When William turned his eyes on her, there was something dark inside them. Like a nocturnal wild animal trapped in a cage, its night vision glaring back at the source of light.
“You know, I’ve always been a disappointment to them.”
His voice was slow, slurred, dragging its feet like even saying the words were draining the energy out of him. William ran his fingers through his hair, stumbling over to sit himself down on a chair. He nearly dropped the glass in the process of doing so.
“...Will?” she asked, her voice wavering.
He was looking at her, but not really looking at her, his Vic, who told him he was her favourite person in the world, who used to hold his hands everywhere as a child. Something twisted meanly in the corner of his mouth.
No, this was Victoria, child prodigy, the badly bruised apple of their parent’s eyes.
“I think you were a second chance for them, when they decided by the time I was ten that there was no way I was going to be a doctor. Too fucking dumb for that.” William let out a curt laugh. “And hey, guess what, the second time’s a charm. Good job, Victoria. Good job.”
Victoria couldn’t recognise him. She wondered who had taken her brother away and replaced his place with this unfamiliar man, who spoke like black tar was dripping out of his gums, who injected venom into his every word. She blinked, wet welling up in her eyes, while William made a strange, strangled sound before carrying himself over to the couch and dropping dead asleep atop it.
In the dark, Victoria stood there, shuddering sobs climbing her throat. A breath of fresh air, she thought, and she wobbled her way out of the front door while caught in a dream-like fugue. The chill of the night air washed over her, as did the rainfall that she did not notice inside the walls.
Rain wet her face but it made no big difference, for her face was already plenty wet from the tears rolling down her cheeks. She buried her head inside her palms and let out hiccuping sobs, thinking about William who was sprawled on top of the leather couch.
A warm hand clasped over her shoulder. She let out a yelp, jolting, momentary panic flooding her as all the anti-kidnapping warnings and PSAs she was brought up on came back to mind. But when she looked properly, it was John, just John, whose hair was equally wet as hers and who wore a concerned look on his face.
His car was still parked in front of their house. Victoria figured he’d been the one to bring William home.
“Victoria, what the hell? You should be asleep,” he said, his characteristic calmness finally a little shaken. He tried to lead her back to the front door but she lodged her feet in place, unmoving, all the while rain dribbled coldly down both of their necks.
In the end, John let her take cover inside his car. They were both shivering so he turned on the heating to the maximum, which made things a little better. John didn’t even ask but somehow Victoria found herself giving him a tearful rundown of everything that happened.
After listening quietly with a strained look on his face, John massaged his temple like his head was hurting.
“Shit, I’m sorry,” he apologised. He paused for a moment, before continuing. “Look, William’s working through some shit right now, alright? I’m not saying you should let him off the hook or anything, just that it’s not your fault.”
Victoria didn’t understand. It was probably something grownup and hidden from her, because apparently she’s smart enough to go to college but not smart enough to understand, she’s just a kid, only when it suits the adults though.
But she nodded, quietly, because John looked so sincere and for the first time in a while she felt perfectly safe. The rain was still falling outside, hitting the car windows and dripping in long streaks. Her eyes traced the trajectory of a raindrop while her breathing slowed to the beat of the pitter-pattering.
“Woah,” John said, holding up her drooping head with one fingertip to her forehead. She didn’t notice when she lulled off to a doze. Embarrassed, she pressed her lips into a thin line.
This time, she remained docile as John walked her to the front door. The exhaustion was finally catching up to her. Holding the front door open for her, John made brief eye contact with her. He was still so much taller than her, not so much as when they first met, but he still wore that halfway smile like the nineteen-year-old he used to be.
“Hey,” John said. “It’s going to be alright, Victory.”
Then he turned away and walked back to his car. Victoria watched as he left, headlights washing against the wet cement in a flood of glittering light, and tried to believe him as best she could.
That was the last of him. For seven years.
So this, right now, feels like the weirdest full circle she could come back to. Victoria’s unsure how well John remembers that night, though. Sure, for her, it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing because she was thirteen and reeling from the emotional shock of her brother lashing out at her for the first time. But maybe John dealt with hysterically crying kids in the rain all the time. Maybe.
She’s acutely aware that she’s dripping water over his leather seats. John glances at how soaked she is and hands her a sports towel after rummaging one-handed in the compartment between the front seats. Squishing the water from her hair the best she can, Victoria’s too aware of how pathetic she looks right now, like a little rat drenched in water.
“You still live in the old place, huh?” he asks, the sudden break in silence startling her into a flinch.
“Yeah. Yes, I do. William doesn’t anymore, though. He’s moved out. Around four years ago?” She knows she should stop talking, offering up tidbits of information that he does not care about, but her mouth doesn’t seem to know how to stop. “And, uh, this car is new, right?”
Victoria’s pretty sure John used to drive a red Nissan around; this car is definitely not red and is much fancier than a Nissan.
Actually, she’s been inside his old car another time as well, when she was running late for math tuition, her Mom was suddenly getting pulled away for an emergency surgery, and John offered to drive her instead. She has a faint memory of John driving, William next to him at the front, both of them singing along to a stupid song blasted above the healthy level for human eardrums. She was curled up in the back, smiling to herself despite the aching fatigue she felt.
John laughs.
“Well, it’s two years old, so not very new, but sure.”
“Are you still in touch with Will?”
There’s a beat of silence and Victoria wants to shove something in her mouth. Her chronic inability to keep her mouth shut is truly astounding, coining her embarrassment after embarrassment all throughout her life.
“No, uh, no, I’m not. I haven’t seen him in a good while. We’re still friends, I guess, just not like before.”
“Yeah,” she concedes. “Things change, I guess.”
John’s gaze meets hers through the rearview mirror. He cocks his head to the side in a halfway nod.
“You did too, Victory.”
Victoria covertly bites her tongue inside her mouth to distract herself from the flutter that went up her chest from her stomach. There’s something low and appreciative in John’s voice, not intense enough to be creepy, but with a note of flirtation on it—unless she’s delusional about the whole thing, actually.
It’s difficult to believe that guys are attracted to her. Guys five years older than her usually had no interest in who they saw as a snot-nosed kid, so up until around her senior year of college, she cruised by without an ounce of male attraction. A blessing, somewhat, but also a curse.
She’s maybe had one fumbling relationship-adjacent thing with a guy in her first year of med school. But that barely counts.
On some distant level of her logical mind, she knows that she’s not an eyesore, and when she occasionally deigns to put some mascara and eyeliner on she does feel a little sexy, like a real adult, but she certainly doesn’t feel that way right now. Sopping wet, her hair clumped together into an unappealing mass, and wearing her dirty scrubs.
So when John’s car smoothly makes its way through the driveway and parks in a familiar spot in front of Victoria’s home, her heart is thumping. The house is probably empty, right now. Her parents are usually early morning people, off to somewhere at all hours, and William’s left her behind in the suffocating and familiar embrace of the white-walled, marble-floored opulence of their childhood home.
She knows that she should thank John politely for the ride, call him Dr Shen if she’s really trying to drive a point home, and get out of the car. Make it through the rest of her rotation on civil terms at most, keep it together, and try her best to tread the path she’d already travelled too far down to escape from.
It’s just that she’s tired of trying.
Instead of turning away from John, Victoria turns toward him. With a calm, level-headed certainty that was thus far unbeknownst to her, she leans in to clumsily mash her lips against his.
It feels effortless. It feels like giving in, unforced, and a thrill shoots up her back when there’s not even a beat of hesitation until he starts kissing back.
He tastes salty and wet with a hint of coffee. A bit like rain, too, though that might be because a wet hair strand is dribbling water down her face still. Coaxing her lips into a gentle part, he pushes his tongue in and laps against her own.
It takes a moment for Victoria to realise that she has let out a pathetic little whine, but he only chuckles at that and she can feel the vibration of his laughter thrumming against her lips.
“Huh,” he says, as he pulls away. An anxious terror coils inside Victoria’s throat, a fear that he’s going to pull the oh, I didn’t mean it thing that men of all ages seem very fond of. But John only puts his palm against her cheek, cradling it, his thumb rubbing circles on her skin.
“I really shouldn’t be doing this,” he says, but he speaks it with the simple finality of someone who knows that he will go through with a bad idea. It’s not a guilty non-committal, but an honest acknowledgement of how things are. John’s a straightforward guy. Victoria had always liked that about him.
So she pulls him into the house—there’s a beat of terror as she imagines a horrifying turn of events where her parents decide to come home at the most inopportune moment—and into her room. There’s a giddy lightheadedness to the way her body floats through the air, all the right motions, for once her mind is clear of the nagging voice of anxiety.
Perhaps it’s because she has already done a test run of this in her dream. This is the reenactment.
Unwilling to bring her dirty scrubs onto the bed, she starts stripping them off her body until John’s hands take over. In one smooth motion, he lifts her top over her head and helps her shimmy her way out of the bottom. Only then does she realise that she’s not wearing matching underwear, but she doesn’t care, she couldn’t care if she tried to.
He similarly undresses himself and Victoria swallows a gulp. An incredibly horny gulp, by the way, because under the shapelessness of the scrubs he boasts a well-toned body, subtly lined with muscle in a way she had only imagined. She numbly runs her fingers against his lower abdomen and he laughs quietly.
John presses his lips against her collarbone and grazes his teeth against her skin. Suddenly everything’s sensitive, everything’s alight, as if her nerves are crackling with a newfound energy at their core. Limbs tangled, they lie on the bed, John’s body a warm weighted blanket on top of Victoria’s.
When he brings his fingers down inside her underwear, she twitches, blinking furiously because she knows that she is already soaked.
“You seem ready,” he comments, his characteristic candour barely masking the subtle hunger in his voice. Victoria has never felt so open and empty before, she’s this close to resorting to a humiliating round of begging, so it’s a relief when he pushes not one, but two fingers into her at once, as if he knows that she’s able to take it.
There’s a tight tension down there as if her body has been stripped down to its core, a pulsing, thrumming need that Victoria cannot mask as she pants open-mouthed. John gently nips at her lower lip as he slowly strokes her inner walls, curling his fingertips into a spot that feels devastatingly good.
She can’t take it anymore.
“Now, um, please,” she pleads, blindly waving her left hand to grasp at John’s groin, hard and leaking under his briefs. He’s about to oblige her, follow through, and she’s thinking yes yes yes until he stiffens.
“Do you have condoms? Or an IUD?”
Victoria blinks. No, she doesn’t, because why would half-a-virgin like herself have any form of contraception lying around. The stupid animal part of the brain is about to tell John that she doesn’t care, she just wants to be fucked, but he is already shifting his body backwards ever so slightly.
So she tells him to wait.
Throwing on a spare cardigan to cover the barest of her modesty, she half stumbles down the hallway. She stops in front of William’s room. The dark doorway looks like the gaping maw of a creature, its jaw open wide in a swallow.
Like every younger sibling, Victoria has plenty of experience secretly rummaging around in her brother’s room. And thus she knows that he always keeps a box of condoms inside the bottom drawer of his bedside table.
She wavers, momentarily, as she takes in the sight of the familiar room cloaked in an unfamiliar darkness. His old skateboard, lying uselessly in the corner, his books piled atop of each other in perpetual danger of toppling over, a photo of both of them when Victoria was seven and he was eighteen.
What the hell is she doing, she thinks, about to fuck the estranged best friend of her estranged brother with a condom borrowed from her brother’s room.
But maybe she deserves at least one bad decision. After all this time.
So Victoria takes out a condom and heads back to her room. She doesn’t mention the source, since that’s one very creative way to kill the move, so John doesn’t know any better as he rolls the condom on and slowly pushes himself inside her.
That feels good. She’s still tight, which she can tell from the straining pain down below and from the crease between John’s eyebrows, but it’s a pleasant kind of ache, not much different from pressing on a bruise.
A moan rolls upwards through her throat tract that she’s quick to swallow, but John is observant as ever. He takes a thumb to her lower lip and applies gentle pressure until her mouth parts open, no longer able to conceal the heated sounds coming from somewhere guttural and deep inside her body.
“Fuck, you’re gorgeous,” he groans, and for once Victoria can take a compliment because the way his hips are moving is proof of his sincerity.
There’s a spot that he is hitting inside of her that makes her insides go all warbled and warm, and it does not take her long to let out choked, staccato moans as she trembles in an orgasmic haze. His eyes darken then, spurred on by whatever primal instinct his body is responding to, and it doesn’t take John much longer until he too is shuddering in orgasm.
Later, they are lying in bed together, Victoria huddled by his side as John’s arm is wrapped around her waist. Her body weight is pressing atop his arm so it must start cramping soon, but neither of them is bothered to move anytime soon.
“So, have you decided on what you’d like me to call you?” he asks.
It takes a moment for her to figure out that he’s referring to that stupid rotation of nicknames. She rolls her eyes fondly, a phantom smile upon her lips.
“Victory suits me fine,” she says.
And for once, her name rings true.