Chapter 4: Waterproof Confessions
The hallway lights hummed, a sickening fluorescent buzz that seeped into Vy’s skull. They walked, legs shaky, back to their own dorm, the phantom impression of Katy’s bed sheets and Celena’s cold eyes imprinted on their skin. They didn’t cry. They felt hollowed out, scraped clean by a spatula. Their phone stayed dark. No follow-up. No excuse. Just the echo of that final, definitive click.
Two days passed in a blur of highlighted textbooks and tasteless dining hall food. Vy attended lectures, took notes, stared at spreadsheets until the numbers bled into meaningless symbols. Tower 3 became an exclusion zone, a monument they couldn’t look at directly. Every tall figure with dark hair in the library made their breath catch, then released it in a dull ache of disappointment. It was always someone else.
The text came on the third night, just after eleven. A single line from Katy.
My roommate is at a conference. The door is unlocked.
Vy stared at the words. An instruction, not an invitation. No apology. No context. The hollow space inside them filled rapidly with a toxic cocktail of anger, hurt, and a longing so acute it felt like a physical sickness. They shouldn’t go. Celena’s words, the wounded betrayal in her voice, were the sane, correct path. This was the mistake.
Vy put on their shoes. They walked.
Tower 3 was quiet. The door to Katy’s single was, as promised, slightly ajar. A sliver of warm, lamp-lit darkness beckoned. Vy pushed it open and slipped inside, closing it softly behind them.
Katy was at her desk, her back to the door, bathed in the glow of her laptop screen. She didn’t turn around. She was wearing a thin, worn t-shirt and gray sweatpants. Her hair was piled in a messy bun.
“You came,” she said, her voice flat.
“You knew I would.”
Finally, she swiveled in her chair. Her face was drawn, shadows under her eyes. The confidence was gone, sanded away into something weary and stark. “Celena hasn’t spoken to me since. Not a word.”
Vy said nothing. They just stood there, clutching their own elbows.
“She’s right, you know,” Katy continued, as if stating a mathematical proof. “About the power thing. About the optics. About all of it.” She stood up, taking a slow step toward Vy. “But when she said to end it… all I could think was that I hadn’t even started.” A broken smile touched her lips. “I hadn’t even had you in my shower.”
The shift was disorienting. From somber confession to raw intention in a heartbeat. Vy’s mouth went dry.
Katy closed the distance. She didn’t kiss them. She grabbed the hem of their shirt and pulled it over their head. Her hands were rough, impatient. She unbuttoned their jeans, pushed them down their hips. “I can’t do this with the lights on,” she muttered, more to herself. She took Vy’s hand and pulled them wordlessly into the small, adjoining bathroom. She flicked the switch. The room was illuminated only by the faint green glow of a nightlight plugged near the floor.
The familiar scent of lavender body wash hung in the cool, damp air. The calligraphy poster—“The world is a book…”—was a pale spectre on the wall. Katy turned on the shower. The spray erupted, loud and percussive against the porcelain, and within seconds steam began to fog the glass door.
She stripped off her own clothes, a series of efficient, unceremonious movements. In the weird underwater glow, her body was a landscape of long limbs and sharp angles. She opened the shower door, a cloud of billowing steam swallowing her. She reached back, her hand finding Vy’s wrist, and pulled them in.
The water was scalding, a shocking, liquid pain that immediately pinkened their skin. The stall was cramped. Their bodies collided, slick and hot. Katy pushed Vy back against the cool, slick subway tiles, the shock of the contrast making them gasp. The hot water sluiced over their heads, plastering hair to faces, rushing into mouths and eyes.
Katy’s mouth found Vy’s, a desperate, searching kiss that tasted of tap water and despair. She wedged her thigh high between Vy’s legs, pressing up against their clit with a firm, insistent pressure. Vy groaned, their hands slipping on her wet shoulders.
“This is fucked up,” Katy growled against their mouth, her hands sliding down Vy’s back to grasp their ass, pulling them harder onto her thigh. “We’re fucked up.”
“I know,” Vy panted, grinding down, the friction a bright, obliterating spark in the haze.
“She’s right about me.” Katy’s teeth grazed Vy’s collarbone, not a love bite but a claim, a punctuation of anger. Her hand left their ass and slid between their own bodies, fingers pushing roughly through wet folds. She found Vy’s entrance and plunged two fingers inside in one brutal, unyielding stroke.
Vy cried out, a sharp sound swallowed by the roar of the shower. Their head thumped back against the tile.
“You’ll take what I give you,” Katy hissed, her mouth at Vy’s ear, her fingers curling, fucking in and out with a hard, piston rhythm. The slap of wet skin, the slick, filthy sound of her hand working, echoed off the porcelain. There was no tenderness, no art. It was necessity. A purge.
Vy’s legs trembled. Their hands scrambled for purchase on the slippery wall. Pleasure coiled, tight and punishing, deep in their gut. It was too much, too hard, a violation that felt like the only truth left in the world. They were so close, teetering on an edge that felt like oblivion.
Katy seemed to sense it. She fucked them harder, her breath ragged gusts against Vy’s neck. “Come on,” she snarled. “Come for me. Let me have this one fucking thing.”
It was the raw need in her voice, the crack in the armor, that undid Vy completely. Their orgasm ripped through them, a silent, seismic convulsion that clenched viciously around Katy’s driving fingers. Their body went rigid, then boneless, held up only by Katy’s body and the unyielding tile at their back.
Katy held them there, her fingers still inside, until the last shudder passed. Then she withdrew, slowly. She turned Vy around, facing the wall. Her hands on their hips were possessive, directing. Vy braced their forearms against the wet tile, forehead resting on them, utterly spent.
They heard the tear of a foil packet, amplified in the steamy chamber. A moment later, they felt the blunt, rubber-tipped pressure of Katy sheathed inside her own strap-on, pressing against them from behind. They had never done this. The thought was distant, drowned.
“Katy,” Vy whispered, a question, a plea.
“Shhh.” Katy’s voice was a ragged whisper. She pushed.
The stretch was immense, a burning fullness that stole Vy’s breath. Katy didn’t pause. She pushed until she was fully seated, her hips flush against Vy’s ass. She stayed there, buried deep, her body trembling. Vy could feel the harsh gusts of her breath on their back.
Then she moved. Long, deep, dragging strokes that filled Vy utterly, that pushed sound from their throat with each impact. It wasn’t pleasure, not exactly. It was excavation. Each thrust felt like it was scouring out the hollow hurt of the past few days, replacing it with a brutal, overwhelming fullness. Katy’s hands gripped their hips tight enough to bruise, holding them in place as she took her own satisfaction from their body.
The water began to run lukewarm, then cool. Neither of them noticed. The only reality was the join of their bodies, the slap of skin, Katy’s increasingly ragged grunts. Her rhythm frayed, became erratic, desperate. With a final, deep plunge and a choked-off cry that was more pain than pleasure, she stilled, her forehead pressed between Vy’s shoulder blades, her whole body shuddering through a climax that seemed to offer no release.
They stood like that for a long time, as the water ran cold. The steam cleared, revealing the bleak, clean lines of the bathroom. The green nightlight cast long, distorted shadows.
Finally, Katy pulled away, disposing of the rubber with a dull, clinical motion. She turned off the water. The silence was deafening, broken only by the drip of the showerhead and their ragged breathing.
She passed Vy a towel without looking at them. They dried off in the oppressive quiet, the rough terrycloth feeling alien on their sensitized skin. Back in the dark bedroom, they dressed in silence. The fairy lights were off. The room felt like a tomb.
Vy stood by the door, their hand on the knob. Katy was sitting on the edge of her bed, head bowed, a silhouette of defeat.
“So is this it?” Vy asked, their voice unrecognizable to themselves. “The start and the end?”
Katy looked up. In the dim light from the window, her eyes were black pools. “I don’t know how to do this,” she said, the confession stripped bare. “I don’t know how to want you and be good for you. They feel like opposite things.”
Vy understood. The equation had no clean solution. “Then what am I doing here?”
A long pause. “I needed to not feel like the villain for one night,” Katy whispered. “But that’s all I feel like now.”
There was nothing left to say. Vy opened the door. The hallway awaited, cold and empty.
“Vy.” Katy’s voice stopped them. They turned. She was just a shape in the darkness. “I’m sorry.”
They weren’t sure what she was apologizing for. The rough fuck in the shower. The silence after Celena. The inevitable heartbreak still forming on the horizon. Maybe all of it.
Vy nodded, though she probably couldn’t see. Then they stepped out, pulling the door shut on the dark room and the tangled, impossible girl inside. The walk back was colder this time. The hollow feeling was back, but it was different now. It wasn’t empty. It was packed with the heavy, saturated weight of something that could never be simple, and the certain, chilling knowledge that they would go back again. They would walk right up to the edge of the mistake and leap, because the freefall, even into ruin, was the only place where Katy Guo existed for them.
A single, crumpled condom wrapper, washed into the corner of the shower drain, glittered in the faint green light.
A single, crumpled condom wrapper, washed into the corner of the shower drain, glittered in the faint green light. Vy saw it every time they blinked for the next forty-eight hours. It became a persistent, accusing glyph superimposed on econ textbooks, on the speckled ceiling of their dorm room, on the back of their own eyelids during sleepless hours. The memory of the scalding water and Katy’s hollow apology was a chemical burn on their psyche.
They functioned. They attended a statistics review section, their pen moving automatically across graph paper. They ate dinner with their roommate, Luna, laughing at a story about a disastrous chem lab while inside, a silent scream stretched tight. The normalized routine of campus life felt like a bizarre pantomime. Everywhere were couples: hands linked on the path to the Science Center, heads bent together over lattes in the café, obvious in their uncomplicated affection.
Vy wasn’t a simp. The word, crude and decisive, clanged in their head. Celena’s warning about power differentials and reputation curdled into something else in Vy’s mind: an excuse. A patronizing blanket thrown over something real because it was messy. Katy’s fixation on the three-year gap felt less like protection and more like vanity. A status thing.
The anger arrived on the third morning, a clean, sharp blade slicing through the numbness. It wasn’t the hot, frantic anger of the shower. This was cold and crystalline. Vy sat bolt upright in bed as dawn bled grey light into the room. They grabbed their phone.
Their thumbs flew over the screen, text appearing in a furious, unbroken stream. They didn’t pause. They didn’t edit.
But there’s isn’t a rule that says upperclassmen can’t date underclassmen. People date all the time. Celena is just being unreasonable and feeling is all it matters. It not like they need to end their relationship because of that. 2 yrs apart is not even much. Katy if you really think there’s a difference level between us then ig you’re focusing on status. If you really think that im not at the same level at you then we can broke things off between us. I dont want to feel like a choice or something that boosted your ego, because im not a simp and someone who need someone to cling to. Yk that im an independent person and know what I want, so whatever you’re thinking xuejie Katy. If you cant fight for what you want and have feelings for then it’s better to be apart.
They hit send. The whoosh sound was a valve releasing. A dangerous clarity settled over them. They dressed with purpose, pulling on dark jeans and a simple black sweater. They didn’t wait for a reply. They knew where Katy would be.
The library’s fourth floor was deserted at eight in the morning. Vy’s footsteps were the only sound as they marched past the stained-glass window, past the very carrel where Katy’s fingers had been inside them. Katy was there, at their usual shared table, but she wasn’t working. She was just sitting, staring at her locked phone screen, which was face-up on an open copy of The Wealth of Nations. She looked wrecked.
Vy stopped at the edge of the table. Katy’s eyes lifted. They were red-rimmed. She had seen the text.
“Vy,” she started, her voice a ragged thing.
“No.” Vy’s voice was quiet, flat, final. It cut through the dusty silence. “You don’t get to ‘Vy’ me. You read it. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.” They pulled out the heavy wooden chair opposite her. The screech of legs on floor was violent. They sat. “So? What’s it going to be? Am I your embarrassing freshman mistake, or am I a person you’re into?”
Katy flinched. She looked around, a paranoid glance for listeners, but the floor was a tomb. “It’s not that simple.”
“It is.” Vy leaned forward, forearms on the table. “You’re making it complicated because you’re scared. Of Celena. Of gossip. Of your own transcript looking imperfect. But that’s your shit. Don’t dress it up like you’re doing me a favor.”
“You think this is about my transcript?” Katy’s whisper was fierce. “You have no idea what this could do to you. Rumors. Whispers in department offices. People thinking you got your TA grade because you fucked me.”
“Let them think it!” Vy’s control snapped, their voice rising. A few heads turned from aisles away. They lowered it to a venomous hiss. “I know what I earned. My work stands for itself. You’re the one who doesn’t believe that. You’re the one who sees a hierarchy where there isn’t one.” They gestured between them. “This is a two-year gap. Not a fucking chasm.”
Katy stared at them, her mouth slightly open. The rehearsed lines of mentorship and responsibility seemed to evaporate in the face of Vy’s blunt, furious truth. She had no script for this.
“You called me xuejie,” Katy finally said, the Chinese honorific for an older female student hanging between them.
“Because you are. In seniority. Not in worth.” Vy’s eyes burned. “So fight for it, or don’t. But stop hiding behind your own supposed superiority. It’s insulting.”
The challenge lay there, naked on the table between the textbooks. Vy watched Katy’s internal war play out across her face: fear, shame, defiance, and a dawning, terrifying hope. Katy’s hand, resting on the table, twitched. Then it moved. Slowly. It inched across the polished wood until her fingertips brushed Vy’s.
The touch was electric. A current snapped the tense silence. Vy didn’t pull away.
Katy stood up abruptly. The chair groaned. She began shoving her books into her bag, movements jerky. “Not here.” She slung the bag over her shoulder and looked down at Vy, her expression stripped raw. “My room. Now.”
This wasn’t an invitation shrouded in darkness or steam. This was a direct order in the harsh morning light. Vy stood, their heart hammering against their ribs. They followed.
The walk to Tower 3 was silent but different. The air felt charged, crackling. Katy didn’t look back. She held the door for Vy, her arm rigid. The moment the dorm room door clicked shut, the careful composure shattered.
Katy didn’t push Vy against the door. She grabbed their face with both hands and kissed them with a consuming, sober intensity. It was a kiss of surrender and decision. Her tongue delved deep, claiming, answering. When she broke away, both of them were breathless.
“You’re right,” Katy gasped, her forehead pressed to Vy’s. “About all of it. It is a status thing. A coward thing. I was fucking scared.” Her hands slid down to clutch the fabric of Vy’s sweater. “I am scared.”
“Be scared with me, then,” Vy whispered. “Not for me.”
A sound escaped Katy’s throat, half-sob, half-laugh. She kissed Vy again, softer now, her hands moving to the hem of their sweater. “Off.” It was a request, not a command.
They undressed each other there, in the middle of the sunlit room, without ceremony. No frantic tearing, no defensive roughness. It was slow, deliberate. Katy knelt to help Vy step out of their jeans, her lips brushing the sharp bone of their hip. The morning light fell across Katy’s bare back, illuminating the curve of her spine, the faint shadow between her shoulder blades.
Vy touched her there, tracing the line. “You’re beautiful,” they said, the words simple and true.
Katy looked up, her eyes luminous. She stood and guided Vy backward onto the bed. She lay over them, skin to skin, the full, hot length of her body a grounding weight. This time, the kissing was exploratory, rediscovering. Katy’s mouth traveled down Vy’s neck, over their collarbone, lower. She took one of Vy’s nipples into her mouth, sucking gently, then harder, her tongue circling the taut peak until Vy arched off the bed with a sharp cry.
“Tell me what you want,” Katy murmured against their stomach, her breath hot.
“You. Just you. However.”
Katy’s path downward was a slow burn. She kissed the inside of Vy’s thighs, nuzzling the coarse hair. Then she settled between their legs, her hands spreading them open. She looked up, meeting Vy’s gaze. “Watch me,” she said, her voice low.
Then her mouth was on them. There was no tentative probing. Katy licked a broad, flat stripe through Vy’s soaked folds, then circled their clit with firm, relentless pressure. Vy cried out, their hands fisting in the quilt. Katy ate them out with a focused, devouring hunger. She used her tongue to fuck into them, shallow and fast, then sucked their clit into her mouth, applying a rhythmic vacuum that made Vy’s vision blur.
“Katy… fuck… right there, don’t stop…” The words were a broken chant.
Katy didn’t stop. She added a finger, then two, crooking them deep inside, finding that spongy spot and pressing in time with the suck of her mouth. The dual sensation was overwhelming, a coiling tension that burned through Vy’s bloodstream. They could feel themselves clenching around Katy’s fingers, could hear the obscene, wet sounds of her mouth working them.
“I’m gonna come,” Vy gasped, a warning, a plea.
Katy’s response was to redouble her efforts, her fingers pumping harder, her mouth sealing tighter. The orgasm detonated, a silent, white-hot explosion that ripped through Vy with terrifying force. Their body bowed off the bed, muscles seizing, a raw, guttural sound tearing from their throat as they pulsed against Katy’s relentless mouth.
Katy rode it out, gentling her motions until Vy collapsed back onto the mattress, utterly spent, trembling. She kissed her way back up Vy’s body, her mouth and chin slick. She kissed Vy deeply, letting them taste themselves.
Vy, still humming with aftershocks, rolled them over. Now they were on top, looking down at Katy, whose hair was fanned across the pillow, her lips swollen, her chest flushed. “My turn,” Vy whispered.
They kissed down Katy’s body, mimicking her path, but with less certainty. They spent time on her breasts, learning what made her gasp. When they reached the junction of her thighs, they hesitated for a fraction of a second. Katy’s scent was musky and strong. Vy licked, experimentally.
“Yes,” Katy hissed, her hands tangling in Vy’s hair. “Just like that.”
Vy dove in. They learned Katy’s rhythm by feel, by the tensing of her thighs and the pitch of her moans. They licked and probed, finding her clit and focusing there, mimicking what had felt good on their own body. Katy’s hips began to roll, fucking their face. Her pleasure was a palpable force in the room.
“Vy… god… a little harder…”
Vy obeyed, adding a finger, sliding it into Katy’s dripping heat. Katy was so tight, so hot. The feel of her internal muscles fluttering around their finger was intoxicating. Vy curled it, stroking, while their tongue worked in circles.
Katy’s orgasm was a crescendo. She didn’t cry out. She went perfectly still, her whole body locking for a breathtaking moment before a series of violent shudders racked her. A low, continuous moan vibrated through her. Vy kept their mouth on her, gentle now, until she pushed their head away, oversensitive.
They crawled back up, lying beside her. Both were slick with sweat and come, breathing in ragged unison. Sunlight painted bright rectangles across the floor, across their tangled legs. Katy turned her head. Her eyes were clear.
“I’m fighting,” she said, her voice hoarse. “It’s messy. And I might suck at it. But I’m in.”
Vy laced their fingers with hers. The green glow of a nightlight in a shower drain was gone, replaced by the uncompromising morning. The path ahead was uncharted, and undoubtedly difficult. But for the first time, they were looking at it together, from the same level.