interlude

The weeks following that rain-slicked Friday blurred into a grueling, silent routine. What had initially felt like an emergency state had quietly hardened into daily life—an existence suspended between submission, manual labor, and a brittle public facade. These were the final true summer holidays of my youth, drawing ruthlessly to a close. In mere weeks, the winter semester would begin; my letter of admission for human medicine at the Charité had already arrived. By rights, it marked the threshold of an exciting new chapter, something to take pride in, yet the prospect filled me with nothing but dull dread. How was I supposed to survive between dissection labs, lecture halls, and clinical rotations when every waking minute was dictated by someone else?

The stainless-steel cylinder had long since fused into my perception of my own body. The freezing metal, the unrelenting constriction, and the dull, throbbing frustration accompanied every breath just like the early morning scrubbing of the floorboards. Loona had honed her domestic regime to absolute perfection: before the first drop of coffee brewed, I cleaned the bathrooms, did her laundry, and set out her breakfast. On the mornings she demanded it, I knelt by the edge of her bed until my jaw ached, driving her to climax purely with lips and tongue—while my hands remained locked flat behind my back and my sealed groin received not the faintest spark of relief.

Then there was Vanessa. My father remained away on long-term construction projects, and his wife treated her spare key as an open invitation. She would turn up unannounced in the middle of the afternoon, drop her handbag onto the console table, and sink into the sofa with an exhausted sigh. To her, I was the attentive, ideal boy around the flat. At every turn, she kicked off her pumps or sandals, rested her stockinged or bare feet across my lap, and openly relished having her arches and toes worked over. She flirted without thinking twice, letting slip suggestive remarks about her isolation and basking in my compliance—entirely blind to the fact that beneath my sweatpants, a rigid padlock held my flesh in an iron grip.

And then there was Nadja. We had met twice since that afternoon—a walk around Mauerpark, a hurried lunch near the campus. Every smile from her, every fleeting brush of her fingers carved itself straight into my chest. She was drawn to my quiet demeanor, my restraint, never imagining that this composure was merely the byproduct of total dispossession. Every time I looked into her eyes, guilt threatened to crush me; every time, my thumb hovered over a locked screen, mindful of the countdown Loona kept breathing down my neck.

While Timo had returned to his studies in Leipzig, the physical distance was a hollow comfort. He made the trip back to Berlin nearly every weekend. In his eyes, I remained the dependable mate who kept the spare room spotless and handed him cold beer with a grin, while in the adjacent room he took Loona—raw, loud, and with an effortless certainty that tore me apart anew every single time.