My Rival with Honey-Colored Eyes Found Me in the Locker Room

The last whistle was still ringing in Renata’s head when she stepped off the strip, like a mocking echo that refused to let her go.

She had taken off her mask, but the other one—the usual one, the one she had worn glued to her face for years—was still intact. She didn’t ache from the defeat. She ached from the look that had undone her.

It wasn’t normal for her to lose, and certainly not like that: frozen in the middle of the bout, the foil suddenly foreign in her hand, her body heavier than her will. All because of a pair of eyes.

Not just any amber, like the one so many people bragged about. They were a deep honey color, almost liquid, with golden streaks that seemed to move with the light. Too much like Daniela’s. Maybe that was why it hurt so much to hold them.

In a single flash, everything had come back: the person who taught her to love the foil, the only one who believed Renata, raised between duty and perfection, could win on her own and enjoy the journey. The only one who spoke to her about love without naming it. And also the only one she hadn’t been able to protect.

Renata yanked off her glove in anger and hurled it against the wall of the empty locker room. No one followed her. No one dared.

She looked at her hands. Hands that had learned to hold death without trembling, that had touched nameless bodies with the same precision with which they gripped a weapon. She had chosen forensic medicine because death no longer frightened her. In a city where gunshots were more common than sunrises, death was pure routine.

But there are deaths you don’t dissect, deaths that don’t fit into an autopsy report. Daniela was one of those.

And now that girl—Valeria, she had caught her name—had brushed the most hidden wound inside her with those impossible eyes. Not with steel, but with a look.

***

Renata didn’t hear the applause or the announcement of the elimination brackets. Only the heavy thud in her temples.

She was sitting on the bench, jacket open, hair still damp with sweat, staring blankly at the floorboards when a shadow fell in front of her. She didn’t look up. She didn’t care who had come.

—You came in first place —said a soft female voice, as if it didn’t want to break the silence, only slip into it—. Even though you let me beat you.

Renata lifted her eyes. There she was. Valeria. The girl with the honey-colored eyes.

Without the mask, without the foil in her hand, she seemed like someone else. More human. Less of a rival. More like Daniela. Too much.

—I didn’t let you win —Renata snapped, dryly.

—No? —Valeria barely smiled—. If that’s what you’d rather believe, fine.

There was a thick silence. The background noise kept going: shouts, names, metal against metal, life. But in that corner of the pavilion, everything was suspended.

Valeria took one more step and bent slightly, looking for Renata’s eyes without pushing.

—I don’t want to sound bold, but I’ve always admired the way you move. The way you wait. The way you read your opponent before they know what they’re going to do.

—Did you come to congratulate me because I lost? —Renata spat, with an bitterness she couldn’t keep down.

Valeria let out a quiet laugh.

—I came to tell you I hope we make it to the final together. I want to fight you for real. Not against that fog that blinds you when you look at me.

—What did you say? —Renata looked at her as if those words had touched something far too intimate.

But Valeria only smiled with a disconcerting tenderness.

—Until then, rest. —And she walked away.

Renata watched her go and felt something inside her tremble. It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t sadness. It was danger. It was memory. It was the remote possibility of feeling again.

***

The cold of the autopsy room was almost comforting. Not because of the body lying on the table, but because of the absence of demands. The dead didn’t ask questions. They didn’t disappoint.

Renata slipped on her gloves with machine-like precision and switched on the direct light over the corpse. A young man in his twenties, another number in the statistics. She took the scalpel and made the first incision, without a tremor, without hurry.

Her coach’s voice, Colonel Beltrán’s, was still echoing in her head: “Those who have talent have no right to fail.” He had thrown that at her that very afternoon, without looking at her, before threatening to send her back to the barracks if she got distracted again by “some rookie foilist.”

The chest muscles gave way beneath the blade, the sternum revealed the silence of the lungs, and it was in that stillness that the memory slipped in without permission. Valeria’s eyes. Daniela’s eyes. She shut her eyelids tight and forced herself to continue. Dissect, measure, record.

But it came back anyway: the touch of a warm hand on her wrist, years ago, before her first tournament. Daniela, hair tousled, with that voice that still lived in some corner of her body: “Don’t fight to beat everyone. Fight because you love yourself when you do.”

Renata set the scalpel aside. Her eyes were wet, but she didn’t let the tear fall. She touched the corpse’s cold face with her gloved hand.

—You don’t feel anything anymore —she murmured—. How enviable.

It wasn’t cruelty. It was confession. She did feel, even if she couldn’t admit it, and that was her real defeat.

—Talking to the clients again? —Mariana’s voice broke the silence.

Her lab colleague, also a sabre fencer on the team, slight and calm, the closest thing to a friend Renata tolerated. She pulled on her gloves and approached the table with ease.

—Who was it? —she asked after a moment.

—Who?

—The one you saw when you looked into her eyes. Don’t tell me it was the girl who unmade you. Not you, and not like that.

Renata didn’t answer.

—In two days it’s the elimination round —Mariana said before leaving, taking off her gloves at the door—. If you draw her, look at her properly. But this time, defend yourself.

***

The bracket matched them up, of course. Fate had a sense of humor.

This time Renata didn’t let herself drown in the fog. She attacked, waited, read every feint from Valeria the way she read a body on the autopsy table. The bout was long, even, full of touches neither of them yielded easily. When the score closed in Renata’s favor, both ended up panting, soaked, breathing tangled beneath their masks.

Renata retreated to the locker room before anyone else. She needed silence. Adrenaline was still running down her thighs, mixed with something hotter and thicker, when the door opened again.

It was Valeria, still in her white uniform, open down to the navel, her skin flushed from exertion, a thread of sweat running between her breasts.

—You defended yourself —she said, and came closer slowly—. Finally.

—I won —Renata corrected, without conviction.

—I didn’t come for that. —Valeria stopped a hand’s breadth away. She looked her in the eyes and didn’t let her escape—. You’ve spent three days looking at me like I’m a ghost. I want you to look at me. Touch me. Fuck me, if you’re up for it.

Renata opened her mouth to answer, but Valeria had already put a hand on the back of her neck and was kissing her. It wasn’t a timid kiss. It was a claiming kiss, her tongue going in whole, hungry, answering the tension of three days in one fierce thrust. Renata resisted for a second—just one—and then let the mask she had worn glued to her soul for years fall away and bit Valeria’s lip until she drew a gasp.

She shoved her against the metal lockers. The impact rang hollow in the empty locker room. Valeria laughed against her mouth, and that laugh lit something in her belly, a low, wet pull impossible to ignore.

—Lock the door —Valeria panted—. Lock it and come break me in two.

Renata slid the bolt without taking her eyes off her, and when she came back she tore her jacket open all the way in one hard yank. Underneath she had nothing but the breastplate half removed and a sports bra already giving way. Renata ripped it off over her head. Valeria’s breasts bounced free, small and firm, her nipples hard and dark, pointed at Renata’s mouth. Renata didn’t need to be asked twice: she bent down and took one whole nipple in her mouth, sucking hungrily, biting until Valeria cursed under her breath.

—Fuck… like that, like that, don’t stop —she moaned, burying her fingers in Renata’s wet hair—. Bite the other one, go on.

Renata obeyed, dragging her rough tongue from one nipple to the other, while she squeezed her tits with both hands, coating them with saliva, leaving them shining. The hands that held scalpels without trembling ran over her ribs, her flat stomach, her belly rising and falling in sharp breaths. Every time Valeria held her breath, Renata felt like she was recovering something lost, and she bit the skin a little harder, marking her.

She unbuttoned Valeria’s uniform pants and pulled them down her taut thighs along with her soaked panties, which ended up hanging on one ankle. Valeria’s cunt appeared before her, shiny, swollen, with the hair trimmed and the lips parted by arousal. The smell hit her full force, sour and sweet at the same time, and Renata felt her own sex throbbing inside her pants.

—Look at you —she murmured, running two fingers through the slit, dragging the wetness up to the clit—. Soaked. All that saintly face and you’re dripping.

—For you —Valeria panted—. I’ve been like this for three days because of you. Eat me out already, don’t make me beg.

Renata knelt on the cold locker-room floor, hooked one leg over her shoulder, and buried her face without ceremony. The first lick was bottom to top, long and flat, taking all the wetness in one sweep. Valeria folded forward with a moan she tried to smother by biting her wrist.

—Not here… they’ll hear us —she whispered, without any conviction at all, while pressing Renata’s head against her cunt—. Fuck them, let them hear, don’t stop, don’t stop…

Renata answered by picking up the pace. She drew slow circles over the clit with the tip of her tongue, then fast ones, then sucked it whole, pulling it between her lips, reading every shudder like she read a bout: when to press, when to wait, when to drive in the hit. She pried Valeria’s lips open with two fingers and thrust her tongue inside, fucking her like that, feeling the walls tighten around the tip.

—Oh, you bitch, you do that so well —Valeria panted, her head thudding against the metal—. Put your fingers in me, put your fingers in me now.

She worked two fingers in slowly, curling them, searching for the rough spot inside, and Valeria arched, her nails digging into Renata’s shoulders, the white uniform finally sliding to the floor. Renata fucked her with her hand at the same time she sucked her clit, going in and out, feeling the cunt close tighter and tighter around her knuckles. She added a third finger and Valeria let out a hoarse cry.

—Yes, yes, like that, harder, break me…

The name she panted wasn’t anyone else’s. It was Renata’s, repeated like surrender, between insults, between pleas.

When Valeria’s body went taut as a bow and then unraveled in tremors, soaking her chin and hand with a warm spurt, Renata stayed still, her forehead pressed against the warm inside of her thigh, pulling her fingers out slowly, licking them one by one as she looked at her. Listening to her catch her breath in broken gasps. For the first time in years she didn’t see a ghost. She saw the real woman trembling over her, her legs still open and her cunt pulsing.

Valeria hauled her up from the floor by the hair and kissed her again, this time without haste, tasting herself fully in her mouth, sucking the lips that shone with her own slick. Then she inverted the roles, pushing her against the lockers with a smile that no longer had anything innocent about it.

—Now it’s my turn to read you —she said—. And I’m going to be a bitch.

She ripped off her jacket in one tug, pulled down Renata’s pants and panties in a single motion to her knees. Renata was left braced against the metal, her ass bare, her thighs already gleaming from how wet she was.

—Look at yourself —Valeria whispered, sliding her open palm over her cunt—. The ruthless forensic doctor, turned into a soaking bitch for me.

Renata moaned, unable to keep quiet. Valeria’s hands knew an athlete’s body; they knew where tension lived and how to unmake it. She opened her lips and drove two fingers into her at once, all the way to the hilt, and Renata let out a choked gasp, biting her forearm.

—Hush, hush, they’ll hear us —Valeria laughed into her ear, beginning to fuck her with her hand, hard, pulling out and pushing in with an obscene rhythm that made the wetness slap—. Though you’d love it if they came in to watch, wouldn’t you? To see you getting fucked against the lockers.

—Shut up and keep going —Renata growled, pushing her hips against the hand.

Valeria laughed and knelt herself. She spread Renata’s ass cheeks with one hand and with the other kept working her fingers inside while she drove her tongue into her clit from behind, between her thighs, licking it from below. Renata, who spent her life controlling everything, discovered she couldn’t control a thing. She clung to the cold edge of the metal with both hands, her knees trembling, her mouth open against her shoulder so she wouldn’t scream.

—Faster —she panted—. Deeper, please, deeper…

Valeria slid in a third finger, then ran her thumb over her asshole and pressed without quite entering, and that pressure was what undid her. She closed her eyes, and this time, behind her eyelids, there was no fog. Only honey color, and a hot tongue, and fingers that knew exactly where to curve.

The orgasm shook her in silence, biting her lip until it bled so she wouldn’t cry out, her knees on the verge of giving way, her cunt clenching in spasms around Valeria’s fingers. She came with a long tremor, soaking her hand, leaving her wrist shining. Valeria held her against herself until she stopped shaking, pulling her fingers out slowly and putting them in her mouth.

—You taste like surrender —she murmured, sucking them while keeping her eyes locked on Renata’s.

***

Afterward they sat on the bench, their uniforms a wreck on the floor, their shoulders touching, their thighs still sticky, their heart rates slowly coming down.

—The colonel is going to kill me —Renata said, and for the first time in years she smiled for real.

—Let him try. —Valeria took her hand—. You know? You reminded me of someone the first time I saw you.

Renata looked at her. The honey eyes were still there, but they no longer weighed on her like a slab. They weighed differently. They weighed like the future.

—I thought you were a memory too —she admitted—. Turns out you were something else.

—What something?

Renata didn’t answer right away. Outside, the shouts, the names, the metal against metal, life, kept going. But for once she wasn’t in a hurry to return to it.

—A reason to defend myself —she said at last.

And she kissed her, slowly, without a mask.