The heat had settled in early May and by mid-July still hadn’t let go. The sun pressed down, relentless, and Victoria felt just as parched as every strand of grass crisping to brown across the hills around the Old City of Fredrikstad. The fortress blinked back at her from across the water, dry, sunlit, unmoving, as if it too had stopped breathing.

The summer of 2018 would be remembered for its un-Scandinavian cruelty: forests ablaze, rivers shrinking, water rationed, everything baking, burning, shimmering in the haze.

Nothing feels real, Victoria thought as she stepped onto the city ferry, leaving the new behind for the old.

The redhead had turned twenty-eight that spring. She had just dropped her youngest at kindergarten, grabbed a coffee from the shop where she’d first met her husband, then wandered down to the ferry station to wait.

No one could see it, but inside she was burning hotter than the summer.

This is insanity, Victoria, she told herself, taking her place at the railing, eyes fixed on the fortress still blinking back at her in the same silence. But she knew she’d been insane before. Behind the gym. In a car. On a dare. Graduation night.

Still, she expected some kind of relief once the ferry pushed off, but the air clung just as tightly, only thicker, heavier, damp with humidity.

More than nine years married to Tom — a teenage bride, already six months pregnant. And right now, he would be at his office, shuffling papers, answering emails, assuming she was pulling into the lot behind Dr. Eriksen’s clinic to slip behind the reception desk.

But she had called in sick. Again.

And it didn’t even feel like lying.

She blamed it on the sun. On the heat. On the madness that had taken hold two weeks earlier, the night she went out with her girlfriends, drank for the first time since Sebastian’s birth, and woke in a hotel bed.

Alone. Yes.

But used.

A woman wakes knowing, long before she dares to feel.

She had felt shame then, at first. Then the gasp, the horror of touching herself only to check if—

Spent condoms. Even now, crossing the water, her own pulse fucking her cunt, she couldn’t stop seeing them. On the floor. In the bed. In the bathroom. And still, she couldn’t recall a single face, nothing past that last round of tequilas.

Tom had expected her home not long after midnight.

Oh, God. Perfect Tom.

She rubbed her temple. Her mouth tasted like high school — the laughs, the bottles. The men. She remembered thinking she’d grown past that. Apparently, she hadn’t.

Her phone lay on the floor. Three texts. All from him.

Ok.

See you tomorrow.

Glad you’re having fun.

She had scrolled back then, finding her own message from the blackout the night before:

Drunkk babe. Staying at heidi’s tonit

Heidi, of course. The unmarried troublemaker. This stank of her.

Victoria had meant to call, to see if her friend could shed any light on the blackout, but the incoming text froze her where she sat on the bed, still wondering why her ass felt sore.

Unknown number. One single image.

Her. Undeniable. A cock lodged in her cheek, yes — but that wasn’t the worst of it. It was her own stare, lifted toward the one holding the camera. The hunger in it.

“Fuck,” she muttered. Then again, harder.

Another text followed.

A shame if Tom received these pictures, don’t you think?

Even as the ferry slowed and the water stilled around them, Victoria had no recollection of how she’d left the hotel, how she had walked, early Sunday afternoon, from the city to their perfect house with its ocean view stretching all the way to the Hvaler islands.

What she did remember was the taste in her mouth. Hugging her son as he ran across the lawn to greet her. Kissing Tom, hesitantly, bracing for him to taste what lingered there.

She had checked her phone a hundred times. Nothing beyond that single image. She had jumped with each new message, but that one thread, the unknown number, sat untouched.

Not until Monday morning, perched neat and pretty behind her desk at Dr. Eriksen’s office, had she dared actually to open it again.

Yes. Her. Sucking cock.

Her lips. Her greedy stare.

She refused the heat — not on her face, but lower, burning where she couldn’t ignore it. Her legs sat wider under the desk.

“Yes, Mr. Hansen, your appointment is at ten,” she said, trying to smile.

Then back to the phone. Back to the mistake of replying.

Who are you?

She convinced herself that had to be the end of it.

But the reply came: Havnelageret at seven. Or Tom gets the photos.

That was the moment she forgot how to be a receptionist. Appointments blurred. Payments misplaced. Schedules collapsed. And the more she scrambled, the wetter she grew, the more her body betrayed her.

She barely remembered Sebastian, picking him up from kindergarten. She felt grateful that Signe, soon starting fourth grade, was tucked away at Grandma’s for the summer.

She remembered cooking dinner, too. Smiling. Telling Tom she’d have to step out.

As she stepped into Havnelageret, she tasted rust and iron, her pulse hammering in her chest, climbing into her throat, thudding low between her legs. Fear, yes. Shame too. But under it all — excitement. The kind that came from memory. From hunger. From perversion. Yeah. That.

Back then it hadn’t even felt like choice. Sucking cock was compulsion; getting fucked was pastime. She’d let them finish on her face, take them raw between her legs, because it was who she was — willing, easy, insatiable. She had been wild once, a teenager running on fumes and daring. Until she fucked Tom by drunken mistake and wound up pregnant — Signe — the wedding, the settling down.

Beautiful, naïve Tom, who had known her reputation. The easy redhead. The willing cunt. The wild ride. He thought one accident in her belly would tame her. He believed it so much he married her — and then did it again. And somehow, still, decided the stories about his wife belonged in the past.

And she had let herself believe it, too. Until now. Until this pub by the docks, until Saturday’s tequilas replayed themselves like graduation night.

She slipped onto a barstool, ordered a beer. Then a tequila.

The girl behind the counter — did she know? Did she sense? Did she catch it in the order? The drinks? The smell? The way she kept shifting, couldn’t stop? If she did, she hid it well. Maybe twenty-one. Old enough to pour shots. Maybe not old enough to guess why a woman like Victoria was sitting there on a Monday night.

Truth was, Victoria didn’t know either.

Didn’t know why she was this ravenous. This wet. This horny.

Seconds dragged like minutes, minutes stretched into hours. By five past seven, she thought maybe nothing would happen. She would sit there, wet and useless, nurse another beer, but not go home. Not like this. Not to Tom. Not to the kids. She sighed, because she had to find some kind of release. Just—fuck.

The bar was less than half-full, a lazy Monday baked into silence, while outside the promenade buzzed with life — ice creams, chatter, a crowded patio in the heat. Inside, only the clinging air remained.

“You okay?” the girl behind the counter asked.

“Yeah,” Victoria lied, ordering another beer.

She let it settle in her gut, pretended it cooled her heat, her hunger. But that too was a lie. The same lie she whispered, tucking her children into bed. The same lie she’d spoken in a white dress before a full church. The same lie she fed her mother whenever she asked if she was happy.

She remembered muttering something — fuck this shit, or close enough. She had stood, gone to the bathroom, locked herself into the stall. Sat there with her panties still damp against her, forehead pressed to the wall, whispering that she should just go home. That she could still pull it back. Go to Tom. Go to the kids.

Her thighs trembled anyway, and she hated the way her hand hovered in her lap, the way she clenched it into a fist just to keep from touching herself. She decided she would leave. She had to.

But when she rounded the corner, the bar swam back into view — and he was there. Not some stranger. Not a maybe. Him. She didn’t remember his face, but his scent. The weight of him. The way his cock had filled her. And he stared at her like he’d been waiting all along.

She swallowed once, then walked toward him.

“So good of you to come, Victoria,” he said.

And now the ferry docked by the fortress. Steel gave way to cobblestone, grass, and dust as she strode ashore, her heel wobbling once before she steadied herself. Even now, the heat from that night burned inside her.

He had shown her the photos. First, the familiar one she had studied more times than she cared to admit. Then another. And another. She hadn’t even known she did anal until then, though she wasn’t surprised. It explained the way she had woken — that rawness, that ache.

Not one man. Not two. She counted five different faces. Five distinct cocks.

“Uh,” she had said, but it came out dry and half-swallowed.

“Indeed,” he had answered.

Then she met his eyes.

“What now?” she asked.

Victoria noticed the scrape of her heels on the stone. Not reluctant, not hesitant — just pronounced, each step louder than it needed to be. She nodded to the waiter at the corner restaurant, and he smiled back as though they were old friends. She walked past him, ignoring the posted hours, while he went on setting tables for the day’s first sitting, still an hour away.

Inside, the restaurant lay dark and still, yesterday’s voices and meals lingering in the air.

She slipped through the door marked Employees Only, not toward the kitchen but up the narrow staircase she knew she would find.

“Now we fuck,” he had said, and Victoria’s only answer was a nod.

But the words lingered between them, somehow heavier than she expected. She hadn’t argued, hadn’t asked why, because it was obvious.

“Yes,” she remembered saying.

He took her back to the same hotel. Not long after they arrived, there was a knock at the door. Faces she recognized from the photos stepped in, and she knew why they had come.

Strangely, neither Tom nor the kids crossed her mind. Only the heat between her legs, still burning from the bar.

And somehow her body slipped back to before marriage, before forced adulthood, and found again its familiar shape of want. Need. Naked, as if it had forgotten the years between eighteen and twenty-eight. Forgotten the weight of two children. Forgotten the efforts of a husband who had tried, but never touched the core of who she was.

On her knees, sucking cock like it was graduation night all over again under the gymnasium stairs. The burn of them fighting over her mouth, until they gave up and turned her over, gave her ass their attention, slid into her cunt, made her feel whole again.

She couldn’t remember how she’d climbed into his lap, or sunk down, or when she’d begged them — fuck my ass, fill my mouth, make me stupid.

She remembered the first orgasm. After that, blur.

No guilt. Not even later, slipping back into her own home. Lights out, kids asleep. Tripping over a teddy bear, hissing when Lego bit her foot. Tom’s coffee mug left on the table. Dishes rinsed in the sink.

She sighed, picked up Sebastian’s teddy, tossed the Legos into their crate, slid the mug into the dishwasher — the small, annoying rituals of holding the home together, of being mother, of being wife.

Then she caught her reflection in the dark window above the sink. Still flustered. Still hot. Fuckable. She leaned against the counter, steadied herself with her left hand. The pulse between her legs was still there, nagging. Screaming.

Bent over the sink at first, her hand slipped into her pants, unzipping, letting them fall. Rubbing until her knees went wobbly, until they gave, until she sank onto the floor, grinding herself into another orgasm, biting her lip to keep quiet.

Later, brushing her teeth, she stared into the mirror, not sure who looked back.

And then, slipping beneath the sheets beside Tom — still wet, still sweating, their hands still burning on her skin.

“Late,” he mumbled.

“Yes. Sorry,” she whispered.

And now, climbing the wooden stairs, she knew they would be waiting. Her day theirs, her body theirs. No thought of dinner. No thought of return.

She wanted only this — to stay. To be used. Filled. Taken. Again and again.

Like she had spent every day since that Saturday. No thought of work. Barely able to drop Sebastian off at kindergarten. Barely registering Tom at all.

He must have noticed her drift, her uselessness to him. His equal uselessness to her.

She had even tried to fuck him, desperately. The night before now. But her hunger had stalled him, spooked him, made him afraid of her lust. Her fire. Her pale skin and burning hair. The way she pinched her nipples before sinking down on him. The way she rode him like intimacy had never existed.

Sex had been fine once. Sometimes even great. But always lacking. Now it was futile — the same cock, over and over again, as if reruns could ever fix a broken script. And the more he tried, the more foreign it felt, like different languages across the same bed. She had spoken the language of parking lots, sweaty palms, cocks pulled from jeans. Willing, they had called her. Easy. Tom never understood that tongue.

And when she came — wet, obscene, grinding on his cock — he didn’t follow her into ecstasy. He softened. Recoiled. Turned off, as if her body, at twenty-eight, was meant only to be taken pretty, bred, mothering. As if cumming like a slut were shameful.

She had felt small then, judged, cast into a role that wasn’t hers. Watched him roll onto his side, his quiet dismissal seeping under her skin.

At first.

Then came the temptation — to fuck his face, to ride his skull. And when the shame curdled into rage, she had gone down to the kitchen, yanked his mug from the dishwasher, and squatted on the tile. Fucked herself raw against her own hand, knees slipping, piss hissing into the cup before she even thought to stop.

She’d dumped it, yes. Slammed the mug back into the rack. Felt filthy. Stupid. Then ashamed. Then, finally, satisfied. Because in the end she pulled it out again and left it perched beneath the coffee maker for morning — his morning.

And here, finally at the top of the stairs, she wondered if she would ever sigh in true fulfillment — not just in chasing more.

More.

More, more, more, she had begged, until they were spent.

Tom could never be enough. She was built for something else, not for motherhood.

The fiery hair, the green eyes, the hungry mouth — they weren’t made for glossy family portraits or quiet family dinners. She hadn’t been given her appetite only to starve in it.

Her pale skin. The birthmark on her shoulder. The tattoo from nineteen. Her tits, round and stubborn-nippled. They weren’t made for caress, or awe, or feeding. No. They were for use.

Her cunt, shaved soft again, and Tom never noticing. It was made to be stretched, filled, pounded. And her face wasn’t for beauty.

In the hotel mirror the other day, cum smeared and beautiful, she had seen it clearly.

Her body had one purpose now. To be stuffed. Three holes. Banged.

They say life flashes before your eyes before it leaves. So as she touched the door, she chose to end it. Not in death — but killing the slow suffocation that pretended to be living, the one that would have killed her anyway. The pretty boy Tom. The family dinners. The sour taste of bedtime stories she never believed in. Parent–teacher meetings that meant nothing to her. The desk at the doctor’s office. The pretense of being someone’s daughter.

A life with no reward. A life where she had never been used to her limit.

But here — devoted, consumed — they could push her past it. Open the void. Let her fall.

She texted her job—I quit.

Tom’s mother—Pick Sebastian up today.

Her husband—Goodbye.

She dropped the phone, crushed it beneath her heel, and pushed the door open.

God, they were grotesquely hot. Hung. Horny. Waiting.

And the only promise they’d given her was to sell her off like an item on the menu downstairs.

And she liked that. It felt like flattery, like appraisal. Finally, something she could recognize. Something she could believe in.

So she let her clothes fall. Crawled to their feet.

And said only one thing:

“Fuck me.”

The relentless heat hardly registered. The old brick and stone house claimed her now, made her theirs — whoever they turned out to be.

She was already burning. Set ablaze in a hotel room two weeks earlier. Determined now to burn out on her own.

She came fast, fueled by the soccer-themed mug left on the table in the corner. Not Tom’s, but close enough. The kind he left out every night, and she collected, loaded into the dishwasher, and readied for him every morning for almost a decade. The one he had drunk her piss from that morning.

And still, her cunt throbbed.

“Again,” she hissed. “Make me cum again.”

And if they put a baby in her, she wouldn’t work around it; she’d embrace it. She remembered wishing Tom had taken her then — belly swelling, tits aching, cunt throbbing — but he had barely dared to stick his cock in, only making every ache worse.

She deserved it. To be fucked full. Pregnant. Taken again and again.

Yeah. Let them fuck a baby into her. Maybe then she’d reach it. The top. The drop.

And when she found what waited down there, she wouldn’t need another life to bind her. Adulthood could wait forever. Until she was useless to them, at least.

And maybe then, revived.

Or not.

The heat would burn regardless.