Chapter Text
For the longest time, Caitlyn Kiramman didn’t think she liked physical touch. She didn’t like hugs from relatives. She didn’t like to hold her father’s hand when they crossed the street. Even touches meant to comfort or encourage her were a complete violation of her personal space.
As it turned out, she quite liked to be touched. Perhaps she even loved it. It just depended on who was doing the touching.
A hand on her lower back from a man trying to get past her in the snack aisle made her skin crawl.
A pat on the head from her drunk uncle at Christmas dinner made her want to crawl under the table like she did when she was six.
Vi’s hand in hers, however, kept her grounded.
Vi’s arm around her waist as they navigated a busy venue made her safe.
The steady hand Vi currently had on her knee as she drove them back to Caitlyn’s house after a gig was a reminder that she was there. Even if Caitlyn couldn’t find it in her to speak, Vi was there.
“I felt like that one went pretty well,” Vi said, steering her old Subaru onto the exit toward Piltover.
Caitlyn frowned. Her voice was a little pitchy during “Club Tropicana” again.
“Ekko’s asking about when we can work on ‘Careless Whisper’ again,” Vi said. “I don’t think I can hold him off much longer. We might have to give in. Will you be okay with that?”
She winced. She didn’t have an arrangement of “Careless Whisper.” The busy season for a Wham! cover duo was at Christmastime when they could play “Last Christmas.” Now that the snow was melting, Caitlyn had made plans to work on her own demo. Gods, her demo was a mess.
“It’s okay,” Vi said, gently squeezing her knee. “I’ll just tell him that you’re working on your own stuff right now. He’ll understand; he knows your career comes first.”
The best she could give her girlfriend was a tight-lipped smile.
Without another word, Vi put on the hip-hop station, and they didn’t speak the rest of the way back to Caitlyn’s house.
She was so understanding. She didn’t get frustrated when Caitlyn went quiet like this. She didn’t try to force words out of her or hand her a notepad the way her high school Latin teacher did. She just let her listen to Biggie or Tupac until her voice came back… or not. She didn't mind the silence.
It was strange to imagine it, but if Caitlyn had never found her voice as a child, Vi might have liked her anyway… for some reason.
Vi clearly had questionable taste in women.
Caitlyn frequently found herself mentally preparing for the day this wonderful rug would be torn from beneath her feet.
She put the car into park and cut the engine. “Well, here we are,” she said. “Are we still on for Diddy night?”
By that, Vi meant to ask if she was still invited to Caitlyn’s to drink hot chocolate and watch the docuseries Sean Combs: The Reckoning. Caitlyn was actually never a Diddy fan. If her mother were still here to see this…
She nodded. “Yes.” She’d been looking forward to this all week. She’d planned the whole evening.
Vi smiled. “Okay. Great.”
Caitlyn opened the passenger side door and met Vi around the front of the car.
“Watch out for the-”
“Shit,” Vi swore, stepping in the muddy puddle that had accumulated at the top of the driveway. “I always do this.”
Caitlyn laughed. “You do.”
She opened the door, and everything was just the way she left it. Her Doberman, Ruby, padded across the floor to greet her and Vi.
“Hey, girl.” Vi patted the dog behind her ears.
“Kitty!” Caitlyn’s father said, coming out of the kitchen.
The private chef had been working fewer hours lately, and her father had decided this was his chance to get into cooking. Caitlyn had mixed opinions about his homemade meals. He used a lot of salt.
He wiped his hands on a tea towel and asked, “How was the show?”
“It was good, sir,” Vi said. “I think they’ll want to have us back sometime.”
“Excellent! And where was this?”
Caitlyn said, “Vi and I are going up to my room to watch the Diddy docuseries.”
Still in the middle of taking her shoes off, Vi froze.
Caitlyn’s father frowned. “I… see.”
“It’s about the legal battle,” Caitlyn said. “It’s very interesting. The episode we’re on is going to talk about Tupac and some theories about his death.”
“That’s wonderful, Kitty,” her father said.
“Just watching TV, sir,” Vi said, standing up straight. “We’ll leave the door cracked if you want.”
He made a slicing gesture with his hand. “No need, Violet. You girls, have fun.”
“Thanks,” Vi said.
Caitlyn grabbed her hand and tugged her girlfriend the rest of the way up the stairs, Ruby in tow. “I have the whole night laid out,” she explained. “I thought we could perhaps end with hot chocolate and Diddy.”
“Diddymentary…” Vi said quietly.
“What?”
“Like, documentary and Diddy,” she said. “Sorry, the plan. Hot chocolate and Diddy later.”
“Yes.” She led Vi to the sofa they usually sat on to watch movies. She took a seat, Vi’s hand still in hers, fingers cold from the brisk evening.
Vi did that thing she liked when she rubbed Caitlyn’s palm with her thumb. “And before we watch the Diddymentary?”
Oh, it was a pun. Caitlyn had never really been one for puns.
“I was thinking,” she said, leaning in closer and lowering her voice. “Maybe we could make out for a while?”
Vi’s face turned pink. “Uh, yeah! That sounds great! I like making out with you.”
“That’s good.” Caitlyn had no idea she’d enjoy being touched as much as she enjoyed being touched by Vi. Kissing scenes in films always made her uncomfortable; she couldn’t imagine wanting that with someone. She wanted it, of course, in theory, but when she really thought about the mechanics of it…
Well, kissing Vi sort of made her realize the appeal. She liked to think she’d gotten quite good at kissing Vi.
Vi glanced between Caitlyn and the door.
This is the part where she usually kissed her.
“What are you waiting for?” Caitlyn asked.
“I…” Vi scratched the back of her neck. “Maybe… maybe we should wait until after watching Diddy?”
“Why would we do that?” She had a plan. She always wanted to cuddle after kissing, but they usually saved the making-out part for after watching television, and then Vi had to go, which meant they couldn’t cuddle properly. This plan was efficient.
Vi lowered her voice. “I think your dad’s afraid I’m going to take advantage of you.”
“How so?” she asked, drawing her legs onto the sofa so she could rest her chin on her knees. Vi had a good heart. She wouldn’t hurt Caitlyn.
Vi’s face turned almost as red as her hair.
“You’re blushing,” Caitlyn noted.
“Yeah,” Vi said. “Um, he… I think he’s just scared I came over to try to have sex with you.”
“Oh.” She found a spot on the carpet to focus on. “Is it because…”
“No!” Vi said. “I mean, I don’t think so. He’s probably just being overprotective; you’re his only daughter.”
“I’m an adult.”
“It’s not…” she stammered. “Okay, let me start over.”
“Sorry,” Caitlyn said.
“No, you’re fine,” Vi said. “It’s my fault for not being direct. It’s just a little awkward to talk about, I guess.”
Caitlyn didn’t know. She didn’t talk about sex much. She didn’t talk about it ever, really. She just made vague references to it in her music and hoped nobody would be able to tell that she’d never had it.
Vi took a breath. “So obviously, you’re an adult, and the choices you make are yours—not your dad’s—and you’re fully capable of consent. Not just to sex, but to anything you and I do together.”
“I understand that.”
“Your dad probably just still sees you as his little girl or whatever, and the thought of you doing adult things like… like having sex… probably makes him sad because it reminds him you’re an adult.”
“Why would that make him sad?” she asked.
Vi shrugged. “I dunno. Sentimental, I guess? I wish I had a dad to worry about me like that.”
Caitlyn frowned. “My mother wouldn’t have worried.” Her mother probably would be disappointed to know that she still lived in her childhood bedroom and ate home-cooked meals. “My father is silly for that. I am perfectly capable of telling you what I do and don’t want.”
“Right,” Vi said, “but I think it’s less about you being in a relationship with a neurotypical person and more about him loving you.”
“Vi, that’s ridiculous.”
“Maybe a little.”
“If he loved me, wouldn’t he want me to do whatever I please with my girlfriend?”
“It might be a little weird for him if he knew we like to stick our tongues in each other’s mouths, don’t you think?”
She laughed. “I suppose so.”
Vi didn’t laugh along, though.
“I’m sorry,” Caitlyn said. “Was that not supposed to be a joke?”
“No, it was,” she said. “Just… while we’re on the topic… is that something you would want to do?”
Caitlyn laughed again. “I do like putting my tongue in your mouth, but it isn’t very romantic when you put it like that.”
She did laugh at that one, but her smile quickly faded. “I mean, making out is great—don’t get me wrong—but I have been wondering, would you want to have sex?”
Caitlyn didn’t think she’d get this far.
She wasn’t naive; she knew it was something most women her age did. She knew she was fundamentally behind when she had to sleep in the common area the first weekend of freshman year so that her roommate could have sex with a boy she met at a party. She’d forgotten her good blanket, and she woke up to someone needing to use the icebox every hour.
She knew people were doing it the day she downloaded a dating app out of curiosity and immediately deleted it when the algorithm showed her a profile for someone whose sexual fantasies were listed in her About Me section.
Caitlyn had heard some of the things people said about her.
High school classmates experimenting with their bodies for the first time wanted nothing to do with a girl whose head was a magnet for every stray basketball in gym class.
Girls who left the prom not even fifteen minutes after it started didn’t get invited to the after party, where even the weird kids found someone to sneak home with.
Nobody wanted to talk to the girl who wore her earbuds to the mixer for the freshman production majors.
By the time the college activities fair came around, she’d decided to stop being sad about it. She threw herself into schoolwork; every production and composition assignment was done better and faster than anyone else in the class because she’d taken her dinners to go instead of sitting in the dining hall, if she even ate at all. Her free time was spent practicing piano. She didn’t even sleep that much; she worked night shifts at the college radio station. She’d forgotten her RA’s name. She didn’t bother to put up any decorations in her room or find a project group for the composition midterm. She had become an island.
Living with her father and focusing solely on her music after graduating sort of allowed her to forget about the fact that sex wasn’t—and most likely never would be—in the cards for someone like her.
Caitlyn had taken any sexual and romantic thoughts she’d had before she turned nineteen and put them in a little locker in the back of her mind—the top locker, with the combination she kept written on a sticky note in the bottom of her backpack. She would never think of those wants ever again. She’d never remember how desperately she once wanted to be desired.
At least, that was until Vi came into her life.
Of course, thoughts about Vi—her lips, her arms, her soft abs Caitlyn could see whenever her shirt rode up—somehow fell out of the locker, as if the door had started to loosen. A heart next to someone’s name in her phone. Peanut butter cups just because. Hugging and kissing and making out. Some of what she had compartmentalized so well that she’d managed to forget about altogether was becoming within reach.
She’d thought it was done. The locker couldn’t open anymore unless she put in the combo, and surely this would be taken from her before she could find where she’d written it.
And here Vi was, turning the dial like it was nothing.
And maybe Caitlyn wanted Vi to turn that dial. After all, she’d never had a high libido until they became girlfriends, and now she really liked it when Vi intertwined their legs and pressed her knee against Caitlyn’s core. She liked sitting on Vi’s lap. She liked the taste of Vi’s lip balm. It made her feel something tingly and warm and altogether pleasant.
“Caitlyn?” Vi asked. “You there?”
“Yes,” she said quickly. She’d been lost in her own thoughts again. Vi probably thought she’d gone quiet. “I’m sorry,” she added.
“It’s fine,” Vi said. She took Caitlyn’s hand. “We don’t have to if you’re not ready. I’ll wait as long as you need.”
How was she supposed to explain this to Vi? How was she supposed to tell her she was a virgin? That she didn’t know what an orgasm felt like?
But she wanted this, she realized.
She thought about the first few lonely nights at the college radio station, playing love songs nobody was listening to and pretending they were for a girlfriend. How sad she’d felt when she remembered there wasn’t anyone who would hold her when she finally allowed her body to rest. There wouldn’t ever be anyone for a loser like her. She’d be a virgin for the rest of her pathetic life.
With Vi, she almost wasn’t a loser. She was just Caitlyn.
And Vi wanted to have sex with her.
“Yes,” she said. “I would like that.” To prove she meant it, she smiled.
“Really?” Vi asked. “Wow, that’s… That’s great! I can’t wait. I mean, I can, obviously, but… wow.”
“Yes, I’m… looking forward to it,” Caitlyn agreed. She liked making out with Vi. Sex wouldn’t be that much different, right?
Besides, she was ready to get it over with. It would be like ripping off a sticky bandage.
Vi kissed her, a short peck on her lips. “Okay,” she said. “We should… we should make a plan. I’ll let you know when Powder won’t be home, so we can have privacy. Gods, she’d probably complain about the noise anyway.”
“Alright.” Noise?
“I’ll, uh…” Vi began to drum her fingers against Caitlyn’s leg. “I’ll wash the sheets on my bed before you come over. I have a second set for after, so don’t worry about that.”
“Alright.” Would this be very messy?
Vi looked at her hand and stopped drumming. “I should put in an online order too…”
Caitlyn nodded. She didn’t know what kinds of things Vi apparently needed to get for this. If she asked, Vi would know she was a virgin.
She wanted to know about the mess. Would it really be so much that they’d need to change the sheets?
And what about the noise? Were there noises that Vi expected her to make? Were there noises that Vi wanted her to make?
Vi couldn’t find out she was a virgin.
So she wouldn’t ask. She could figure it out later. She’d have to figure it out later.
“Are you good?” Vi asked.
“Hm?”
Vi smiled and held Caitlyn’s face in her hands. “You just look like you have a lot of thoughts in here right now.”
“This is cutting into kissing time,” she said.
Vi pressed her lips to Caitlyn’s forehead. “You’re right. We’ll plan later.”
She leaned in, and their lips met. Vi always took care to apply just enough Chapstick so that Caitlyn could taste the flavor, but not so much that it would stick to her lips.
Caitlyn, on the other hand, chewed her lips so much that they sort of looked like one of Ruby’s rawhide toys.
Strong hands wrapped around Caitlyn’s waist and pulled her onto Vi’s lap. She gasped, and Vi seized the opportunity to taste the inside of her mouth.
She locked her arms behind Vi’s neck and let her legs rest on either side of her lap so she wouldn’t slip off the sofa. But Vi wouldn’t let her fall; her grip was firm. The security was nice. Reassuring.
Vi pulled her closer so their bodies pressed against each other. “This good?” she murmured.
“Yes,” Caitlyn said before going back in for more. Vi’s abs brushed against her center, and she felt a warmth that meant she would definitely need to change her underwear before bed. It was incredibly inconvenient, but the tingling in her body made the extra load of laundry worth it.
Vi’s kisses moved from her lips to her jaw to that spot behind her ear that she liked. Her teeth sank into her bottom lip when Vi pulled her earlobe between her teeth and sucked.
“You like that?” Vi asked.
She nodded.
The hands on her waist slipped onto the small of her back.
Vi kept sucking at her earlobe. She really liked that. How did Vi always know just what to do?
Caitlyn felt her body rise as Vi adjusted, and then suddenly there were hands on her butt, and she didn’t really know what she was supposed to do now, and it was so new, and-
She slid backward off Vi’s lap and onto the other couch cushion.
“Sorry,” Vi said.
One time in middle school orchestra class, Caitlyn had tried to squeeze through a row of music stands and ended up knocking a few over with just her butt.
“Was that too much?” Vi asked.
That was the day she’d learned whatever pills her psychiatrist prescribed had some… unwanted side effects.
“I’m okay,” Caitlyn said.
She’d flushed those pills down the toilet and filled the bottle with Tic-Tacs, but it didn’t slow her body from growing every which way. The damage was done.
“I just want to take this silly jacket off,” she assured Vi.
The other kids had stared.
“Good point,” Vi said, helping her out of the neon bomber jacket she wore for their Wham! gig that evening. She winked. “Guess it’s starting to heat up.”
“Vi, will you…” She bit her lip. “Will you do the, erm… I don’t know the correct term for it…”
“I’m sure I’ll figure it out if you describe it.”
“The… the knee thing?”
Vi snorted.
“It’s not funny!”
She cleared her throat. “I’m not laughing at you, Cait. It’s just… that is what it’s called.”
She raised an eyebrow. “The knee thing?”
“Yup.”
“Well, then,” she said, leaning back against the armrest. “Will you please do the knee thing?”
Vi leaned forward so she now hovered over Caitlyn. The gold chain she wore dangled between them. “I’d love to.”
And their lips were together again, and her knee was between Caitlyn’s legs, and everything felt good—so good that she almost forgot about her sex dilemma, and by sex dilemma, she meant her never-had-sex-before dilemma.
Would it feel like this? In theory, it would feel like this but better, right? And Caitlyn would finally learn what an orgasm felt like.
Vi’s kisses moved to Caitlyn’s neck, sucking and licking, and her leg between her thighs sent a jolt through her body each time it hit this one spot…
And then Caitlyn’s alarm went off.
Vi groaned as she sat up. “Is kissing time over already?”
She rushed to adjust her t-shirt, which had ridden up. “I told you that conversation was cutting into it,” she said, reaching for the television remote. “Don’t you want to know what Diddy had to do with Tupac’s murder before you go?”
Vi took off her own neon bomber jacket and pulled the throw blanket from the back of the couch over them both. “Yeah, I guess I do.”
Caitlyn pushed play and then nestled into Vi’s embrace. “This is nice.”
Vi kissed the top of her head. “Anything’s nice when I get to do it with you.” Her eyes narrowed, and Caitlyn followed her gaze to-
“Oh, that’s nothing,” Caitlyn said, grabbing the marble composition book from the coffee table before Vi could get to it. She flipped through it. Bad lyrics, worse lyrics, lyrics that didn’t make any sense. “Just some lyrics I’ve been meaning to throw out.”
“Why would you throw them away?” Vi asked. “They can’t all be bad.”
“They’re all bad,” Caitlyn declared, standing up to toss them in her garbage bin. There. Gone. Now, she had space in her bedroom for new notebooks she’d fill with better lyrics.
More likely, she’d fill them with more bad lyrics, and then they’d follow the other notebooks to wherever bad lyrics went to die.
Vi looked like she wanted to say something, but she didn’t, so Caitlyn pressed play again on the documentary.
***
Caitlyn took a shower so hot that her feet looked like lobsters by the time she got out. She didn’t mean to spend as long as she did standing under the water, but she couldn’t help it. In the shower, she couldn’t be guilty for not replying to text messages or be reminded of her inability to write lyrics good enough for her demo.
And sure enough, as soon as she wrapped her towel around herself and checked the song on her playlist, she saw a text from Vi.
Vi <3
you don’t have to reply to this right away
but
powder is spending next weekend with her girlfriend in demacia
she leaves friday night so you could come over after the open mic?
Robotically, she responded.
Me
Sounds great. (:
She went ahead and changed the playlist as she’d originally meant to do, but when she set her phone back on the counter, she caught sight of herself in the mirror.
Caitlyn didn’t like to be perceived. That was why she wanted to become a producer and not a performer. In middle school and high school, she changed in the bathroom stall for gym class instead of in the locker room with the other girls. She didn’t want to be a bug under a microscope with her bony body on display for the other girls to whisper about.
She didn’t want to look at herself either, she thought as she stared at the fuzzy bath mat again. She didn’t even use the mirror anymore; she knew what her hair felt like when it was combed through and how much concealer to apply whenever she felt a pimple on her face. She could step into her pajama pants without looking for the holes to put her legs through. There was no reason for her to perceive herself, and it was just how she liked things.
Still, Vi would perceive her. Next week, she’d be stripped bare, unable to cover everything she’d spent years hiding from herself.
How would she let Vi see her if she couldn’t even see herself?
Caitlyn forced herself to meet her blue-eyed gaze in the mirror.
One…
Two…
She dropped it again. Had her face always been so… angular? And her nose wasn’t even symmetrical.
“I’d fuck Kiramman if she wore a paper bag over her head.”
She’d overheard a boy in her math class say it. She was sixteen. He was one of those football jocks who was taking the sophomore math even though he was a senior.
No amount of makeup could change the structure of her face, so she didn’t bother trying most days.
It wasn’t that she wanted male validation. She didn’t. That boy had to retake math again the following year. He was an idiot.
But it didn’t take a genius to see that Caitlyn wasn’t a sexually desirable person.
Her phone buzzed against the counter.
Still clutching the towel to her chest, she turned the phone back over and read the text from Vi.
Vi <3:
can’t wait!
doing some online shopping as we speak
The next text message was just a string of winking faces.
What was Vi buying? Had she lied about having an extra set of sheets? It would be no problem for Caitlyn to lend some to her so long as they were the after-sex sheets and not the during-sex sheets.
Caitlyn didn’t need to look in the mirror to know her face was red from more than just the hot shower. Did she also have pre-sex purchases to make? Where did one shop for their sexual needs? She sincerely doubted there was a Sex Mart.
She gripped the edge of the counter and took a deep breath.
She wasn’t that useless. She would figure this out.
Where did someone buy things for sex? Surely she had at least overheard something about it. You overheard a lot of conversations when you were alone in a crowded room.
Spencer’s!
The memory fell out of the locker in the back of her mind.
The mall. The cool kids. Camille.
She’d been at the mall with her mother; she’d gotten a good grade on a big test, so she was allowed to pick out a new set of headphones. The popular girls were at Hollister, and for some reason, Camille invited her to join them. For some reason, her mother let her.
Her mother made her promise to meet her at the Macy’s in an hour.
“You’re so quiet,” Camille’s friend asked. “Are you like, shy or something?”
“I think Yasuo likes you, Caitlyn. Do you like Yasuo?” one of the other girls had asked.
Why did they care if she liked him or not? He was one of the only other Ionian kids in school. He sat beside her in English class. He folded her an origami swan, once. He seemed nice enough, she supposed.
She had no reason not to like him, so she supposed she did.
She wasn’t sure why that was so funny, though.
And then the girls had gone into some store she’d never heard of. The darkness and tightly-packed shelves made Caitlyn claustrophobic. She didn’t usually go into the clothing stores at the mall; she wore a uniform to school and didn’t have time to change before her therapy appointment on Tuesdays or her piano lessons on Mondays and Fridays. On the weekends, she mostly just wore her pajamas around the house while practicing piano or listening to music.
She hadn’t really any concept of what it meant to have a distinct style, but stepping into Spencer’s for the first time, she knew hers wasn’t the black t-shirts stacked floor to ceiling.
And it definitely wasn’t the mug shaped like one singular breast. Caitlyn sipped her tea from a mug with her family’s crest on it.
And then Camille’s cold hand wrapped around her wrist and tugged her deeper into the overstimulating caverns of Spencer’s Gifts. The music was loud, and it wasn’t what she normally cared to listen to. The other girls were laughing.
When Camille came to a stop at the back of the store, she stood proudly in front of the wall of items Caitlyn had never seen before, hands on her hips as if she’d personally curated the display.
Caitlyn remembered gulping. She remembered her hands sweating and knowing she shouldn’t have been there. She remembered wishing she hadn’t left her mother-
One of the girls giggled. “This one is sparkly!”
“Ribbed for her pleasure,” another girl snorted.
Redfaced, Caitlyn looked at the wall of sex toys. Words like “lubricated” and “edible” made her wish she’d never learned how to read.
Camille took a box off the wall and thrust it into her shaking hands. Caitlyn usually wore her jacket in the mall since she was never there for long, but now she wanted to take it off.
“Do you know what that is?” Camille had asked.
She shook her head. Per usual, she couldn’t speak.
“That’s what lesbians use to have sex. One of them wears it…”
She couldn’t help but hang on to Camille’s every word.
Caitlyn was a lesbian. That was the word that described what she was. It was clear as day.
But that… That didn’t seem enjoyable. That couldn’t be true.
She couldn’t even open her mouth to ask. Surely, there must be more out there, some other way to be intimate with another person.
If there wasn’t, then what did that make her?
She cried herself to sleep that night. She’d told her mother that she was just tired.
The truth was that she didn’t know if she’d been crying from fear or exhaustion.
And it didn’t even occur to her to be embarrassed until after it happened.
Back in the present, in the bathroom with the fan whirring and the overhead light in desperate need of a new bulb, a shiver crept down her spine.
Right. She’d been standing with only a thin mat between her bare feet and the cold tile. Her hair dripped down her chest and into the soft fibers of her towel. She was cold.
She grabbed her pajamas off the counter and shrugged them on, the cotton of her pants soft against her legs. She’d been getting hot in the night, but she didn’t like to wear shorts to bed. Or at all.
She screwed open the orange pill bottle from the cabinet and flushed one down the toilet. Her father had stopped giving her the pills with breakfast long ago, so she didn’t need to replace them with mints anymore. She could just throw them away. They wouldn’t fix whatever was wrong with her if she did take them.
She put on her fuzzy slippers and trudged into the bedroom, somehow not feeling as refreshed as she usually did after a long, hot shower.
Would Vi want to use a silicone dildo on her like the one at Spencer’s? She’d have to if they were going to have sex, right?
The thought made her lightheaded. Her stomach felt hollow.
Caitlyn was afraid to use a tampon. How was she going to go through with this without Vi finding out?
She needed to lie down.
So she did. She got in bed, slippers and all, pulled the plush duvet over her head, and closed her eyes. The darkness was a comfort after standing under the harsh bathroom light for so long. If she just didn’t breathe, she could keep herself from falling apart.
She balled her hand into a fist and bit her knuckles. Hard.
This wouldn’t help. It held off the outburst, but it didn’t make the problem go away.
That’s what her mother used to call them. Outbursts.
Caitlyn needed confirmation. She needed to conduct research. If she wasn’t well-prepared, Vi would find out she was a virgin, and…
She didn’t want to think about what would happen if Vi found out she was such a loser that nobody in her entire life had ever wanted to have sex with her.
She threw the covers off herself, recoiling at the cold for only a minute, and sat up, reaching onto the bedside table for her laptop. She usually watched music videos or jotted down lyric ideas before bed.
She typed in her account pin and opened an incognito window—not because she wasn’t allowed to research this stuff. She was an adult. She could find out what exactly qualified as lesbian sex if she wanted to.
Maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as she had made it seem in her head.
In one week, she wouldn’t be a virgin anymore.
She needed to be ready.
Ruby hopped into the bed next to her and whimpered, pushing her head under Caitlyn’s hand to ask for pets.
Man’s best friend, Caitlyn supposed. She caved into the request and typed with one hand. Her face turned red at the sight of the words coming from her own fingers.
She clicked the first link that came up. A little yellow icon. A jingle played, and she rushed to turn her volume down a few clicks.
Ruby sniffed the keyboard as if she didn’t realize what Caitlyn was about to search for, and to be fair, Caitlyn didn’t really know what she was getting into either. People probably didn’t make tutorials on this. It wasn’t like she could type into the search bar HOW TO HAVE SEX FOR THE FIRST TIME—I AM AFRAID.
So she typed the next best thing.
LESBIAN SEX STRAP-ON.
She gulped at the first thumbnail. That seemed like just the thing she was looking for.
Ruby nestled her head into Caitlyn’s pillow, so at least she wouldn’t be completely embarrassing herself in front of her dog. Ruby could be judgmental when she wanted to be.
She took a deep breath and hit play.
There was no plot. Just two women in lacy underwear.
Caitlyn tried to look anywhere on the screen but at the actors. She couldn’t, though, since they took up the entire frame.
One of them was completely topless.
Caitlyn pushed pause.
How could she be so unprepared? She needed a notebook and a pen if she was going to retain any of this for future use.
She reached for her backpack and retrieved the necessary materials. The notepad she got for free when she opened up a credit card last month would have to do.
SEX NOTES, she wrote at the top. She underlined it for good measure.
FIRST OBJECTIVE: BUY LACY UNDERWEAR.
Was Vi expecting her to wear lacy underwear? She didn’t know, but she couldn’t have sex for the first time and not wear something special. She didn’t want to look back on the moment with Vi someday and have the whole thing spoiled by the memory of her beige cotton panties.
She’d look up some websites where she could purchase lacy underwear later.
She pushed play again.
The two women on the screen were… sort of shaped like her? They had large breasts like hers—goodness, there was no plot to this—but they weren’t so bony in their arms.
They closed the gap between them, breasts squishing together. The brunette’s bra magically unclasped and fell open, the fabric hanging loosely between the two of them.
She pushed pause again, grabbed the neck of her oversized t-shirt, and pulled it out a few inches so she could look at herself.
Her nipples did not look like that. Did most people have pink nipples? Hers were brown. Did Caitlyn need to see a doctor? She hadn’t gone to the gynecologist since the Pap smear incident.
She pushed play again.
The women made out on screen. Caitlyn knew how to do that. She liked that. Doing it without a shirt on wouldn’t be much different.
She puffed her chest out like the blonde woman in the movie. Her mother had always been adamant that she have good posture, but she didn’t care to show off her body. Putting herself on display was unnatural for her. What was the point?
She dropped her shoulders, shrinking in on herself again. She rested her pen between her lips and nibbled the cap while the women lost more of what little clothes they had, and-
She didn’t know why she was surprised when she saw the strap-on, but she hit pause anyway.
She hit play again.
No! Pause.
There wasn’t a pause button in real life. Vi would worry if she told her to stop.
She pressed the space bar, and the video resumed.
“Ah!” said the brunette on screen, stroking the strap-on the blonde wore.
It was… enormous. Caitlyn wasn’t sure she had that much space inside her. She couldn’t imagine even putting a finger in herself.
Perhaps the tip of her pinky when she was a hormonal teenager and desperate to be normal, but that didn’t even compare to what the actress on her screen wore.
“Mm…” The blonde leaned over the brunette, pinning her to the bed. At some point in her disarray, Caitlyn had completely missed the part where the women took off their underwear. Or maybe it just magically disappeared; this didn’t seem like a particularly high-quality film.
The blonde lined the dildo up against the other woman’s very wet, very pink entrance.
She leaned forward a little more as the camera zoomed in…
Caitlyn pushed pause again.
Would something like that make her bleed?
If she bled on Vi’s sheets, then surely she would find out that Caitlyn was a virgin.
She blushed again. It wasn’t even happening, and already, she was ashamed of her future self.
She lay back into her fluffy pillows and scratched Ruby between her ears.
It felt silly to think about it. Her head told her that, of course, Vi would want her even though she was a virgin. Vi wanted her whenever she went quiet, and even though she cried after slipping on the ice patch outside The Last Drop, and when she ate her chicken wings with a fork and a knife. Why should being a virgin make any difference?
But it did make a difference, her gut told her. Alarm lights went off in her brain, begging her not to go through with this… this sex date. It would only lead to heartbreak. She’d bleed on Vi’s sheets, and the fantasy would be over. Vi would want someone more experienced. Someone more universally wanted. If nobody wanted Caitlyn before, why should Vi want her now?
Or maybe none of it had been real in the first place.
To Caitlyn’s understanding—not that she understood it well—there was this game some of the kids would play in school. At the lunch table, in the courtyard, and during class, whenever the substitute teacher left them with a worksheet and their own devices.
She didn’t understand the game part, but she remembered that there was a loser, and the loser had to do something so utterly embarrassing while their friends snickered from a distance.
Caitlyn was that embarrassing thing, she supposed.
She’d learned that whenever someone asked her on a date or to be their girlfriend, they never meant it. It was all part of a joke.
Caitlyn didn’t have much of a sense of humor. She didn’t see what was funny about it, but the other kids certainly did. They especially laughed the first time when she thought Ashe actually meant it.
How foolish she was to believe that someone would have feelings for her.
She hovered her fingers over the space bar, ready to press play again.
“Kitty?”
Caitlyn jumped and slammed her laptop shut.
Her bedroom door squeaked open, and her father stuck his neck through the space.
“Goodness, Kitty, are you running a fever?”
She shook her head.
“You just look a little warm, that’s all…” he trailed off. “Can I come in?”
She pressed a hand against her flushed face. “I’m going to bed,” she said, keeping a firm grip on her laptop in case it decided to spring open and broadcast the lesbian horror film she’d subjected herself to.
Her father then said, “Doctor Reveck’s office called.”
She waited for him to continue.
“They said you missed your appointment on Thursday.”
“I’m fine, Father,” she said.
“It doesn’t hurt to go,” he pushed. “You haven’t been since before…”
And by that, he meant to say that she hadn’t gone to therapy since before her mother died. But she hadn’t been going before that, either, and she was perfectly fine.
“I know you were comfortable with Doctor Medarda, but I think you should give this new doctor a chance. She’s willing to meet you virtually, and-”
“No,” Caitlyn said. “Thank you.”
“I’m just worried about you, Kitty.”
“Worried?” she asked. She was better than she had been. She had a girlfriend. She’d graduated from university. Wasn’t this what her father always wanted for her?
“I just think it might be good for you to talk to someone other than Vi or me,” he said.
About what? Her impending loss of virginity? That was what the lesbian porn was for.
“You hardly ever mention Jayce anymore…” he trailed off.
“I don’t need a babysitter,” she said, gritting her teeth. Jayce had texted her to wish her a happy birthday a few months ago. Didn’t he know she didn’t like celebrating her birthday?
“It might be nice to meet him for tea,” her father prompted.
Caitlyn yanked off her slippers and tossed them onto the floor. “I’m going to bed.”
“Goodnight, Kitty…”
Ruby hopped off the bed and followed him to one of the guest bedrooms. He hadn’t slept in the master bedroom since her mother died.
“Traitor…” she muttered, opening the laptop back up. She pressed the power button, deeming that she’d had her fill of research for the evening. Tomorrow, she’d buy something to wear. Maybe she could read about lesbian sex; that felt less scary.
As tired as she was, when her head hit the pillow, she found herself restless.
She’d tried therapy. She’d done it for years until her parents told her Doctor Medarda wasn’t meeting her needs.
If Doctor Ambessa Medarda couldn’t fix whatever was wrong with her, then there wasn’t a licensed professional in the world who could.
She was utterly unfixable.