Chapter 04 (The Last Chapter):
Graduation was finally closing in. Final semester exams had arrived though at this point they were little more than a formality, something to get through rather than anything that kept anyone up at night. Job offers were already in hand, the finish line was close enough to see clearly, and the classrooms had gone quiet in the way they only do when the urgency has drained out of a place and left only the shell of the routine behind.
In the months since that December night in the boys hostel, a great deal had shifted between all four of them, and most of it had shifted quietly, the way real things tend to move when they matter enough.
For Ankur and Priya, that night had been a turning point unlike anything that came before it. Not the blurred, alcohol-softened confusion of Gokarna but something sober and deliberate and electric in a way that left a mark. In the quiet of that locked room he had seen her completely bare for the first time in clear light. He had touched her and tasted her in ways that had rearranged something inside him that he doubted would ever go back to how it was. They hadn't gone all the way, but the air between them had changed so completely by the time they walked out of that room that the distinction barely registered. Ankur had fallen into something that felt exactly like love, the real kind, the kind you can't argue yourself out of. For Priya, the feelings were genuine but tangled in ways she couldn't straighten out, impossible to act on without everything else coming apart.
Som and Ritika, meanwhile, were operating on an entirely different frequency. There was nothing complicated between them and neither of them had any interest in making it complicated. They were straightforward about what it was and unconcerned with anything beyond the immediate pleasure of the moment. Som knew exactly how to make her moan. He knew the rhythm she needed, the way she liked his mouth on her pussy, the specific pressure that sent her back arching off whatever surface they happened to be on, and he used that knowledge freely and without sentiment.
But as the final semester burned down toward its end, a sober clarity settled over Priya. The heat of those December nights had cooled and what it left behind was guilt, quiet and persistent and impossible to fully set aside. Her boyfriend had reached out and broken down in front of her, admitted his faults with the kind of raw vulnerability she had never seen from him before, and asked for another chance. She found she couldn't say no to that version of him, couldn't look at him like that and walk away.
She sat Ankur down and told him plainly that she wasn't leaving her relationship. Ankur took it the way people take things they have been half expecting and fully dreading, his spirit dropping in a way he felt physically but held together on the outside. They came to an agreement that hurt in a particular way, a goodbye that came in the form of one last night in a local hotel, necessary and bittersweet and final. Afterward they made a pact. Best friends, nothing more, and no more mention of what had existed between them. Ankur kept his word without being asked twice. They laughed together, supported each other through the rest of semester, and carried the sadness of it somewhere private where no one else could see it.
Som and Ritika kept going for a while longer. They bunked classes to sneak into hotels, found corners of campus that were theirs alone, and treated the whole arrangement like a game they were both winning without keeping score. Once, a security guard's whistle nearly caught them while Ritika was on her knees giving Som a blowjob against the wall behind the engineering block. They scrambled behind a building and dissolved into hysterical breathless laughter before they even had their clothes properly sorted, which was perhaps the most accurate summary of what the two of them were.
But then Som made the mistake of developing actual feelings. He started dropping hints, little ones at first and then less subtle ones, and Ritika, who had always been entirely honest about what this was, shut each one down without ceremony. She didn't feel anything romantic toward him and she wasn't going to pretend she did. Som accepted that with more grace than he probably felt, drifted, started spreading his attention across other girls on campus with the resigned determination of someone making the most of the time left. The hookups with Ritika stretched from days apart to weeks apart and eventually faded into nothing, the heat between them simply running out of fuel at some point when neither of them was paying close enough attention to notice exactly when it happened.
Despite all of it, despite the heartbreaks and the shifted dynamics and the things that had happened behind closed doors that none of them talked about openly, the four of them stayed an unbreakable unit. That part, at least, held without being asked to.
June 2017. Graduation Day:
The campus was loud and warm with something that felt like collective pride. Parents everywhere, students walking taller than they had all semester, the smell of food stalls drifting across the lawns, decorations catching the afternoon sunlight. An era ending and everyone feeling it simultaneously in the chest, that specific ache of something good and irreplaceable coming to its close.
The paths ahead were already set. Ankur had a job in Gurgaon and was moving into a two-bedroom flat with Rishabh, his childhood best friend. Som was headed to Bengaluru, stopping at his parents' place for a week first. Priya was leaving for Germany on an internship, the first step toward the PhD she had been planning for years. Ritika was going to Bombay to start as a research analyst.
When the day wound down and the goodbyes became unavoidable, none of them could hold it together. Whatever had been messy and complicated between them dissolved in those final minutes and what was left was simply how much they had mattered to each other, how much they still did. They clung to each other and made promises about the WhatsApp group and said they would always find their way back to this, to each other, to whatever this thing between them was.
They meant every word of it. And then life happened anyway, the way it always does.
October 2018:
More than a year had passed since that graduation lawn. At first the transition had been almost seamless. The group chat ran constantly in those early weeks, all four of them sharing horror stories from their first days of work, complaining about new bosses at midnight, staying on calls longer than any of them could really afford given the early morning starts. For the first month it felt like nothing had changed except the cities.
But the silence crept in slowly, the way it always does with distance and time and the sheer weight of separate lives. Daily updates became weekly. Weekly became monthly. The inside jokes started feeling like artefacts from another lifetime, requiring too much context to land the way they once had. The last group call had been almost five months ago and not everyone had joined, and the empty names on the participant list had said more than anything spoken in the conversation itself.
Life had simply happened to all of them. Different cities, different pressures, the grinding exhaustion of figuring out how to be adults in the world rather than students in a campus bubble. There had been no falling-out, no argument, no bitterness. They had just drifted the way good things sometimes drift, quietly and without anyone meaning for it to happen.
Ankur's life had settled into something steady and largely solitary but there was a new thread in it now. He had started dating a girl named Simran. They had met on a dating app, a beginning that felt worlds away from the visceral chaos of his college years, and in the months since they had grown into something genuinely serious. She was in Noida and because of the distance they saw each other once a month. Those visits had become the fixed points his calendar organised itself around, charged with a particular quality of longing that made the hours together feel more vivid than regular time.
He hadn't mentioned Simran in the group chat, hadn't even hinted at it. It wasn't that he was hiding her, more that the intimacy of the group had changed shape so completely that sharing something that personal felt strange, like speaking at full volume in a room that had slowly gone quiet without anyone deciding to stop talking.
He was sitting with his phone one evening, not doing much in particular, when it buzzed with a message from a name he hadn't seen pop up privately in a long time.
"Hey! Just wanted to let you know I'm coming to Gurgaon for a few days. Company conference at the Gurgaon office Thursday and Friday." Ritika had written.
Ankur typed back immediately. "Hi Ritika Di! Oh wow, seriously? When are you getting in?"
She told him Thursday, that her office had already arranged a hotel. He read that and didn't hesitate for a second.
"Di, forget the hotel. Crash at my place. It'll be easier and we can actually catch up properly in the evenings."
"That would be amazing actually!"
He felt something shift in him, a genuine warmth that he hadn't expected to feel so immediately. Then he pushed a little further.
"Also, since you're already coming, why not stay through the weekend and leave Sunday night? Way more fun."
"I actually love that idea. I'm in. See you Thursday." she replied.
He put his phone down and sat with the feeling for a moment. He was genuinely happy, genuinely excited in a way that surprised him with how strong it was. He missed her. On the surface it was completely straightforward and he still thought of her as his elder sister, still called her Di without thinking about it.
But underneath the surface, something else had been living there since Gokarna, quiet and persistent and entirely unwilling to be reasoned away.
He had never been able to stop seeing it. Som's mouth on Ritika's pussy. Her nipples between his lips. The way she gripped the sheets when the orgasm broke through her and the sound she made, that broken unguarded cry she hadn't been able to swallow in time. Ankur had been lying three feet away with his eyes barely open, pretending to be unconscious, and he had watched every second of it and carried every second of it since. He had lost count of the number of times he had lain in the dark thinking about it, about being the one between her thighs instead of Som, about what sounds she would make with his mouth on her. The image was so detailed and so persistent that it had taken on a life of its own inside him, vivid and stubborn and completely immune to guilt.
Ritika arrived Thursday morning but went straight to her conference from the station. It was early evening by the time she finally appeared at his door and Ankur pulled her into a tight hug the moment she stepped inside, holding on for a second longer than a simple greeting required because it had genuinely been over a year and the weight of that year was in the hug.
"Can't believe it's been this long." he said, pulling back to look at her properly. "You haven't changed at all, Didi."
"Stop it." she laughed. "I feel like I've aged a decade."
Rishabh was already in the living room and stood up when she came in, grinning at finally meeting someone he had heard about for the better part of two years.
"The legendary Ritika!" he said, reaching out to shake her hand. "I was starting to think Ankur invented you."
"Nice to finally put a face to the name." she said, and shook it.
The three of them settled in for dinner, food already ordered and spread across the table with a bottle of dark rum open in the middle of everything. The conversation came easily, full of old stories and laughter mostly at Ankur's expense and the particular comfortable banter that only happens when everyone in the room is genuinely relaxed. Then Rishabh, who had the special talent of making any secret feel immediately public, leaned toward Ritika with a conspiratorial look.
"Has he told you about the new woman in his life? Our boy is finally off the market."
Ankur rolled his eyes but smiled. "Thank you for that, Rishabh." He turned to Ritika. "Her name is Simran. We met on an app, she's in Noida. It's going well."
Ritika's face opened into a genuine smile. "Ankur, that's wonderful. Honestly I'm just relieved you've moved past everything that happened with Priya."
Ankur nodded, then asked after a moment, "What about you? How are things with Shubham?"
Her smile dimmed slightly, not dramatically, just a small honest flicker crossing her face. "Still together. Long distance is hard though. We have our moments. Just trying to make it work."
They stayed at the table long after the food was finished, the rum doing what rum does to an evening, loosening everything, making the hours feel generous and unhurried. It was past midnight when they finally registered how late it had gotten.
Ritika stretched and looked around. "I should sleep. I'm fine with the couch."
Rishabh shook his head firmly. "You're a guest. Ankur's room is yours. He can handle one night on a floor."
She looked at Ankur, uncertain. "Are you sure? I don't want to push you out of your own room."
"I've slept in worse places than a mattress in Rishabh's room." he said. "It's not a problem at all."
She relaxed into a smile. "Thanks, guys. Goodnight."
Friday moved quickly, full of separate commutes and long hours and everyone getting home at different times and in different states of tiredness. By the time evening arrived they were all ready to stop. The table filled up again with kebabs and tandoori starters, the rum reappearing as if it had never left.
The conversation drifted back to college the way it always did when the three of them were together with a drink in hand. Old stories surfaced one after another, the night-outs and the near-misses with campus security and the particular genius they had all developed during those years for getting away with things they absolutely should not have gotten away with.
Rishabh had gotten started before anyone else, knocking back rum with the commitment of someone who had already privately decided where the evening was going. By the time the food arrived he was noticeably somewhere else, louder and slower and glassy-eyed in the way that is always obvious to everyone except the person themselves. Twenty minutes later he stood up abruptly, went a particular shade of pale green, mumbled something unconvincing about being fine, and stumbled toward his room. He barely made it through the door before the sound of him being violently sick drifted back through the wall.
Ankur half rose from his chair. Rishabh waved him off from behind the closed door. Then came the sound of a lock clicking and shortly after, the deep committed rhythm of serious snoring.
Ritika raised an eyebrow at the closed door. "I think that's his night done."
They waited a few minutes to be sure. No movement. The snoring continued without interruption, the kind that means a person is genuinely gone for the night.
The sleeping arrangement had rearranged itself without anyone deciding it should. With Rishabh locked in and unconscious, Ankur's queen-size bed was the only sensible option for either of them.
"You can take my room." Ankur said. "We can just share it. There's plenty of space and it's better than either of us ending up on the couch."
Given everything they had been through together over four years, the countless night-outs and nights on corridor floors and cramped train berths, this felt entirely natural. Neither of them registered any awkwardness in it.
"Sounds good," Ritika said. "I'm exhausted anyway."
They settled onto the bed and the room fell into a warm hazy quiet around them. The rum still hummed pleasantly through both of them, not heavy, just enough to soften the edges of things. Ritika lay on her back looking at the ceiling. Ankur lay on his side facing her. The room glowed amber in the dim light from the desk lamp, the shadows long and easy.
"This brings it all back." Ankur said, his voice coming out quieter than he intended. "Everything we had together. I still miss Priya sometimes. I really loved her."
"I know." Ritika replied, her eyes still on the ceiling. "For a while I genuinely thought you two were going to be the ones who actually made it. Life had other plans."
The rum had done something to Ankur's usual caution. He lay there for a moment in the warm quiet and then let out the question that had been sitting inside him for two years.
"When did you and Som actually start? The hookup thing. When did that begin?"
She smiled at the ceiling. "The sports fest night-out. That corridor."
Ankur let out a quiet laugh. "So this was going on way before Gokarna."
At the mention of Gokarna something shifted in Ritika. She went quieter, and when she spoke there was a trace of embarrassment in it that he had almost never heard from her before. "I'm still mortified that you were awake for that. I genuinely had no idea."
Ankur's voice dropped. It came out lower and slower, the way voices get when they're carrying something that has been kept back for a long time. "It wasn't just the kissing I saw, Ritika di. I saw Som eating your pussy. I saw you pulling his hair while you were coming. I saw everything."
The silence that followed was dense and charged with something that hadn't been in the room a minute ago.
"I was completely turned on." Ankur continued, his voice barely above a murmur. "I lay there the entire night wanting to be him. Wishing it was me between your legs instead."
Neither of them spoke for what felt like a long time. The only things in the room were the amber light and the quiet and the weight of what had just been said. He could feel his cock pushing against his boxers already, just from saying it out loud after carrying it for so long. Ritika lay still with her eyes closed, not moving toward him and not moving away.
He reached across slowly and rested his hand on her stomach. He pulled her gently toward him, his heart going hard and fast, and held his breath.
She wasn't asleep.
After a few long minutes Ritika shifted. She turned her body toward his and wrapped her arms around him in a slow deliberate embrace, pressing herself against him, her face near his, the heat between them immediate and unmistakable. Because of the angle his face was close to the curve of her neck, his nose barely grazing the top of her chest. Her scent came through the thin cotton of her t-shirt, warm and specific and deeply familiar in a way that made his head go slightly sideways.
They stayed like that, neither of them moving, the tension pulling itself tighter with every minute that passed. He pressed closer, his body flush against hers, his face against her collarbone now, their breathing falling into the same unsteady rhythm.
Then Ritika let out a soft breathy laugh against his skin.
"Ankur." she whispered. "I'm not Priya. And I'm not Simran either."
She tilted her head and pressed a single unhurried kiss to his forehead.
That was enough. He had been waiting for two years and now he was done waiting.
He pulled her properly against him with no more hesitation left in his body and pressed his lips to the sensitive skin of her neck. He kept them there, warm and deliberate, and spoke against her skin. "And I'm not Shubham bhaiya."