Chapter 2: Overheard Confessions in Echoing Tiles
The flickering fluorescent light in the dorm hallway cast long, nervous shadows. Ima padded back from the vending machines, a bag of spicy chips in hand, the silence of the late hour a physical weight. Then she heard it—a muffled, rhythmic sound from the men’s bathroom down the hall. A choked gasp. A low, desperate whisper.
She slowed, her sneakers silent on the linoleum. Pressed her ear to the cool, painted wood of the door.
“…please…”
The voice was unmistakable.Mike. It was fractured, breathy, layered with a shame so thick she could taste it in the air.
“Mommy…”
Ima’s breath caught. Her spine straightened. She knew that tone. It wasn’t a call for his mother. It was a surrender, a sacrament. It was the sound of a vault cracking open under pressure.
Another sound joined it—the slick, frantic pace of skin on skin, hurried and pleading. His breathing hitched, became a sob.
“Ima… mommy… please…”
Her own name. A bolt of pure, white-hot lightning shot down her spine. Her grip tightened on the chip bag, the crinkling plastic deafening in the silent hall. She didn’t think. Her phone was in her hand, the screen glowing cool and clinical. She opened the voice memo app, hit record, and slid the phone against the narrow gap at the bottom of the door.
She held her breath. Every soft, wet slap, every shattered whimper, every broken invocation of mommy and please was captured in pristine digital detail. She bit her lower lip, the sharp pain a grounding counterpoint to the furious heat blooming low in her stomach. This was wrong. This was a violation. This was the most intimate thing she’d ever heard.
And it was for her.
The sounds peaked in a sharp, stifled cry—a mix of agony and release—then dissolved into shaky, ragged breaths and the soft sound of crying.
Ima stopped the recording.Saved it. She stood there for a full minute, her own heart hammering against her ribs. Then, with a calm she didn’t feel, she shoved her phone in her pocket, knocked twice sharply on the door, and pushed it open.
The scene was exactly what she’d imagined, yet more devastating in its reality. Mike was slumped against the tiled wall next to the furthest sink, his pants around his ankles, a crumpled wad of paper towels in his fist. The air was thick with the scent of bleach, cheap body spray, and sex. He flinched violently at the sight of her, scrambling to pull his pants up, his face a mask of pure, unadulterated horror.
“I—the door—it was locked, I—” he stammered, his voice raw.
“It wasn’t,” Ima said softly. She let the door swing shut behind her. The click of the latch was final. She leaned back against it, blocking his only exit. “I heard you.”
His entire body seemed to shrink. He couldn’t look at her. He stared at the wet, grouted floor, tears of shame tracing clean lines through the lingering steam on his cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, the words dissolving. “I’m so sorry.”
Ima didn’t move. She let the silence stretch, let him drown in it. She watched the trembling line of his shoulders, the way his knuckles were white where he gripped his waistband. This was the broken thing Chloe warned her about. This was the project.
But Chloe was wrong. This wasn’t boredom. This was discovery.
“Look at me, Mike.”
He shook his head, a tiny, frantic motion.“Look. At. Me.”
It was the voice from the lecture hall. The one that brooked no argument. Slowly, agonizingly, his eyes lifted. They were red-rimmed, shattered pools of blue. He expected disgust. He expected her to laugh.
Ima’s face showed neither. Her expression was one of intense, focused curiosity. “You said my name.”
He flinched again, as if she’d struck him.
“Why were you saying my name?”
He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. His gaze darted around the room, looking for an escape that didn’t exist.
Ima pushed off the door and took a single step forward. He recoiled, hitting the wall. She stopped. “You were thinking about me. Weren’t you?”
A barely perceptible nod.
“And you were calling for me.” She didn’t make it a question this time. She stated it. A fact excavated from the rubble of his dignity. “You were calling me ‘mommy’.”
A sob broke from his chest. He clapped a hand over his mouth to stifle it, his shoulders shaking.
Ima felt a thrill so sharp it was almost painful. This wasn’t just a kink. This was a core sample of his loneliness. This was the raw, pulsing nerve she’d tapped into when she’d held his face and told him to be brave. He didn’t just want confidence. He wanted to hand over the burden of himself. He wanted permission to fall apart.
She took another step. Now she was within arm’s reach. The cheap, citrusy body spray he’d used to try and cover the smell couldn’t mask the salt of his sweat, the sterile tang of the cleaner, the musky, intimate scent of what he’d just done.
“It’s okay,” she murmured, her voice dropping to a tone she’d never used before—low, melodic, absolutely authoritative.
His eyes snapped to hers, wide with disbelief.
“It’s okay,” she repeated. “You don’t have to hide from me.” She reached out, not for his face this time, but for the hand still clutching his pants. Gently, she pried his fingers loose. They were cold and damp. She held them in hers. “This is what you want, isn’t it? Someone to see you. All of you. Even the messy parts. Even the parts that scare you.”
He was crying openly now, silent tears streaming down his face. He didn’t pull his hand away.
“You want someone to tell you it’s okay. To tell you what to do. To take care of you.” She let the words hang, each one a carefully placed stone leading him across a river of shame. “You want a mommy.”
The word, spoken aloud in her calm, clear voice in the harsh fluorescent light of this filthy bathroom, broke him. His knees buckled. He slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor, his back against the cool tiles, a broken puppet.
Ima sank into a crouch in front of him, her knees popping. She was still holding his hand. She looked at the crumpled, stained paper towels discarded near the drain. She looked at his exposed vulnerability, not with lust, but with a profound, terrifying sense of ownership.
“You’re my project, Mike Bellweather,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “But I don’t think you understand what that means yet. It doesn’t mean I fix you and get bored.” She leaned in closer. Her free hand came up and brushed the tears from his cheek. His eyes squeezed shut at the touch. “It means you’re mine. Your stuttering presentations are mine. Your fear is mine. And this…” Her gaze flicked down, then back to his closed eyelids. “…this need is mine. You give it to me. All of it. Do you understand?”
He nodded, a frantic, jerky motion.
“Words.”
“Yes,” he choked out.
“Yes, what?”
He struggled. His mind, fogged with shock and a terrifying, dawning hope, scrambled for the right term. The title.The permission. “Yes… Ima.”
She shook her head slowly. Her thumb stroked his cheekbone. “Try again.”
He understood. The word was a key, turning in a lock deep inside him. It was a surrender so complete it felt like dying. It felt like coming home.
“Yes, Mommy,” he whispered, the words barely audible.
A slow, beautiful smile spread across Ima’s face. It wasn’t her usual bright, charismatic grin. This was something darker, more possessive, more real. “Good boy.” Chloe was wrong. This wasn’t a passing interest.
This wasn’t a passing interest. It was a revelation.
Ima held his gaze, letting the weight of the new name settle in the space between them. The only sounds were the drip of a faucet and the ragged pull of his breath. She looked down at the pathetic, crumpled evidence in his hand. A slow, deliberate smile touched her lips.
“Let’s clean this up,” she said, her voice still that low, commanding hum.
She didn’t ask. She simply reached for the damp wad of paper towels he was still clutching. He released them without resistance, his fingers limp. She peeled the mess away from his skin, her movements clinical and oddly gentle. He shuddered, a full-body tremor of residual shame and overwhelming exposure.
Then her hand, cool and sure, closed around him.
He jerked, a gasp escaping him. Her touch was nothing like his own frantic, fumbling grip. It was calm.Possessive. He was still half-hard, oversensitive and pulsing weakly in her palm. She felt him throb, a five-inch length of warm, vulnerable flesh. A white slab of meat that belonged to her now.
He watched, mesmerized and terrified, as she brought her face close. Her breath ghosted over him. She didn’t look up at him. Her focus was absolute, studying his body’s response with a detached fascination. Then she leaned in and placed a single, wet, open-mouthed kiss on his tip.
It was less a kiss of passion than a brand. A claim. His hips twitched, a helpless little thrust into her hand and her mouth. A choked sound, half-whimper, half-sob, leaked from his throat.
Ima stood up in one smooth motion, releasing him. The sudden absence of her touch was a cold shock. She loomed over him where he sat, helpless on the bathroom floor. She leaned down, her lips brushing the shell of his ear. Her voice was a secret, a dark promise meant only for him.
“I recorded your voice when you were calling for me,” she whispered. The words seeped into his brain, icy and electric. “Every ‘please.’ Every ‘mommy.’ I have it all.”
Mike froze, the blood draining from his face. The world tipped sideways.
“I’m not going to share it,” she continued, her tone conversational, as if discussing the weather. She straightened up, looking down at his devastation. “But I am going to use it later. For when I’m horny and rubbing myself.”
She patted his cheek, once, twice. The gesture was almost affectionate. It was utterly devastating.
“Think about that while you finish cleaning up.” She turned and walked to the door, her steps unhurried. She paused with her hand on the handle, glancing back at his shattered form. “My good boy.”
Then the door opened, and she was gone.
The silence she left behind was absolute. It was a vacuum. Mike stared at the scuffed tile between his legs, the words echoing in the hollowed-out chamber of his skull. I recorded you. I’m going to use it. The humiliation was total, a nuclear heat that melted his bones. Yet, beneath the scorching shame, something else writhed. Something dark and grateful and horrifyingly alive.
She had heard him at his most broken. She had taken his most secret need, held it, named it. And she had kept it. She wanted to keep it.For herself.
He finally moved, his limbs heavy and uncoordinated. He cleaned himself with fresh paper towels, the rough texture a stark contrast to her soft, devastating mouth. He pulled his pants up, his fingers fumbling with the button. His reflection in the mirror was a stranger’s—pale, tear-streaked, eyes hollowed out with a wild new knowledge.
He splashed water on his face.It didn’t help. The phantom sensation of her hand, her lips, was etched into his skin. The phantom sound of her voice, whispering its terrible promise, was looped in his mind. He had begged for a mommy. And she had answered, not with a gentle hug, but with a recording and a kiss that felt like a sentence.
He left the bathroom. The hallway was empty. His own dorm room was dark and silent, his roommate asleep. Mike lay on his bed in the dark, staring at the ceiling. His body was drained, but his mind was a riot.
He replayed it all. The lecture hall. The press of the desk. The way she’d swept his hair back.The coffee. Chloe’s warning.She collects people. Then the bathroom. The feeling of being seen, truly seen, in the midst of his ugliest act.Her calm ownership. Her kiss.
His phone, lying face-down on his nightstand, buzzed.
A cold dread slithered through him. He didn’t want to look. He had to look.
He flipped it over. The screen glowed in the dark. A single notification from a messaging app he barely used.
It was from Ima. No text. Just a sound file. The timestamp was from twenty minutes ago.
He didn’t press play. He didn’t need to. The title she’d given the file was enough. Two words, in all lowercase: my boy.
He put the phone down, his hand trembling. He placed it screen-down again. He stared at the dark ceiling. The shame was still there, a hot coal in his gut. But it was now surrounded by something else, something terrifying and potent. It was the thrill of being chosen. Of being owned. Of having his deepest, most pathetic whisper become her secret.
He was her project. Her good boy.
His phone buzzed again, once. A second later, another notification.
This one was a text. Just three words.
Ima: Go to sleep.
The two words glowed on his screen, an order etched in light. Go to sleep. It was impossible. His mind was a fractured thing, replaying the cold tile, her warm hand, the shocking wet heat of her mouth. The phone weighed a thousand pounds in his hand. He stared at the other notification, the sound file labeled my boy.
His thumb hovered. This was the ledge. Playing it was a leap into a different kind of air, one he might never breathe out of again.
He pressed it.
The tinny speaker pressed against his ear made it somehow worse, more intimate. He heard the distant hum of the hallway, the rustle of his own movement. Then his own voice, muffled and desperate, seeped into his skull. “Mommy… please, Ima mommy…” A soft, wet slap. A hitched sob. Hearing it from the outside was a psychological car crash. He was a spectator to his own unraveling. The raw need in his voice was a physical ache.
It went on. Every pleading syllable, every frantic stroke, every broken whimper was cataloged with brutal clarity. He heard the moment she’d pressed the phone to the gap under the door—the sounds becoming crisper, more damning. He heard his own climax, a strangled cry that sounded like pain. Then the shaky, post-release crying.
He played it again.
And again.
The shame was a molten core, but it was now wrapped in a strange, paralyzing fascination. She had this. She had chosen to capture this. She wanted it. The third time through, he didn’t flinch. He lay perfectly still, listening to the pathetic, yearning creature in the recording. Her creature. A terrible calm settled over him. The chaos had a director. He had a name for the helpless pull in his chest. It was obedience.
When his phone buzzed with an actual call, he jerked so violently he almost dropped it. The screen flashed Chloe. Panic, clean and simple, sliced through the weird trance. He let it ring four times, scrambling to assemble a persona, before answering.
“Hello?” His voice was sandpaper.
“You sound like death warmed over.” Chloe’s tone was its usual dry crackle. “Did you actually drink that entire mocha? I told you it was liquid anxiety.”
“No. I just… didn’t sleep.” He closed his eyes, the sound file still echoing in the silence behind his eyes.
“Yeah, well, rally. We have the Hendricks study session in the library in twenty. Don’t make me come drag you out of your cave.”
“I’ll be there,” he mumbled.
“You better. And for God’s sake, Mike, wear a different shirt. That one has a varnish of existential dread on it.” She hung up.
The library’s third floor was a tomb of forced concentration. Sunlight streamed through high windows, illuminating dancing dust motes and the deep grooves of stress on every student’s face. Mike found Chloe at a carved-up oak table, her notes spread in a militant grid.
She looked him up and down as he sat. “So. You saw her after I left.”
It wasn’t a question. Mike’s throat tightened. He focused on unzipping his backpack. “Who?”
“Don’t ‘who’ me, Bellweather. Your entire aura is screaming. It’s like you got hit by a truck named Ima. What happened?”
“Nothing.” The word was too quick, too flat. He pulled out his notebook, the pages blank. “We just talked.”
“Talked.” Chloe leaned back, crossing her arms. Her gaze was a laser. “You ‘talked,’ and now you look like you’ve seen the divine and it terrified you. What did she do? Give you another pep talk? Tell you to stand up straight?”
Mike flinched, the memory of her hands on his shoulders a brand. “Sort of.”
Chloe watched the flinch. Her eyes narrowed. She opened her mouth, then shut it, shaking her head. “You’re a terrible liar. Just… be careful, okay? She’s my friend. I love her. But she’s a force of nature. You don’t build a house in a hurricane’s path.”
Before he could formulate a response, the hurricane arrived.
“Sorry I’m late! Grey was having a full-system meltdown over the Braniff case. It was not cute.” Ima slid into the chair next to Mike, not Chloe, dumping a colorful tapestry bag on the floor. She smelled like coconut and sunshine. She wore a burnt-orange sweater that made her skin glow. She didn’t look at him.
She just placed her forearm next to his on the table, a casual, warm line of contact from elbow to wrist.
Mike stopped breathing. The simple touch sent a jolt through his nervous system, a direct line to the recording, to the kiss, to the word mommy hanging between them in the digital ether. He was statue-still, hyper-aware of the point where her skin met his.
Chloe’s eyes flicked down to their arms, then back to Ima’s face. “You’re contaminating the study zone with your vibes, Jones. We’re focusing on post-war municipal tax structures.”
“Boring.” Ima flipped open a notebook with a flick of her wrist. She finally turned her head toward Mike. Her expression was all polite, academic interest. “Mike. Explain the Holden v. City of Mercerville ruling to me. In your own words. And use your outside voice.”
It was a test. A brutal, public test in the quiet library. Chloe stared, confused by the specific demand. Mike felt the weight of both their stares. His mouth was desert dry. He felt the warmth of her arm, a steady, silent pressure.
He cleared his throat. “The… the ruling established that municipal blight statutes couldn’t be applied retroactively to homeowners who had purchased before the zoning shift.” His voice started thin, then gained substance, filling the space between them. “It was a protection against… against predatory asset seizure by expanding city councils.”
He finished. He hadn’t mumbled. He’d looked at Ima’s chin, then, gathering a shred of the courage she’d stolen and given back, at her eyes.
A slow, dazzling smile spread across her face. It wasn’t the dark, possessive smile from the bathroom. This was her campus smile, brilliant and approving. It was somehow more devastating.
“See?” she said, turning to Chloe as if they’d just witnessed a minor miracle. “He knows the stuff. He just needs the right motivation.” She leaned closer to him, her shoulder pressing into his. Her voice dropped, just for him, a private thread in the public space. “Good boy.”
The world dissolved into a hum. The words, the exact words from the bathroom, spoken here in the sunlight, surrounded by the smell of old books and floor polish, short-circuited him. Praise and ownership, wrapped in one. A shudder he couldn’t suppress ran through him.
Chloe saw it. She saw the shudder, the way Mike’s pupils dilated, the way Ima’s smile didn’t quite reach her eyes, which were watching Mike’s reaction with predatory satisfaction. Chloe’s own face went carefully, coldly blank.
“Right,” Chloe said, her voice clipped. She gathered her pens, aligning them with sharp taps. “Well, you two clearly have your own… study method. I’m going to go grab a coffee from the cart. Do not touch my notes.”
She stood and walked away, her posture rigid.
Ima watched her go, unbothered. She turned back to Mike, her arm still resting against his. She picked up a highlighter with her free hand and began idly marking a textbook, her touch as casual as if they did this every day.
“You did well,” she said, not looking up from the page.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
“I have practice later,” she continued, as if discussing the weather. “The poli sci study group ran long, so I’m behind. I’ll be in the dance studio in the basement of Creighton Hall until around ten.” She finally glanced at him, her eyes dark and unreadable. “The door at the far end of the west corridor. It sticks. You have to shoulder it open.”
She went back to her highlighting, the yellow streaks bright and violent on the page. It wasn’t an invitation. It was an instruction.
Mike sat beside her, the point of contact between their arms burning. He looked at the door Chloe had exited through, then down at the dense, incomprehensible text in his own book. The sound of his own begging played on a loop in the back of his mind, now synced with the rhythm of her breathing beside him.
He had until ten.