So I owed him my body at least. And if he was rougher than I liked… well. It was my fault I never came when we had sex. My fault I was so dry for him.
I only said I didn’t want to—tostop—a couple of times…and he kept going anyway.
Maybe more than a couple.
Who kept track of these things?
I told myself that story for all those years, and it worked fine, mostly.
It worked until the dream in this house two nights ago showed it to me with edges.
Until I watched her—me, but small, so desperately small and young.
And I watched him tip the cup to her lips when she stopped taking it herself. And I watched her go under, and I watched him check that she was out before he did whatever he wanted to her unconscious body.
If a friend told me that story, I wouldn’t call it bad sex. Just like I wouldn’t call bad sex what happened later in the relationship.
“I don’t want to use that word,” I whisper.
“I know,” Kira says. “We don’t have to use it today. But I want you to notice what happens in your body when you consider it.”
I notice my throat closes up.
My hands are gripping the duvet so hard my knuckles have gone white, and I didn’t realize I was doing that until just now.
There’s a weight on my sternum that’s pressing down and inward like I’m suffocating, and I think it was there every time he touched me. Subconsciously screaming even though I always pushed it away because I didn’t think it was logical. I was a woman giving him what he deserved as a man.
“When he locked me in that closet and then held the gun on me and Bruiser, I was so angry. I was furious, and I thought—Ithoughtthatwas the worst thing.” My voice gets squeaky at the end as tears crowd my eyes.
“And now?” Kira says.
“Now I think that it’s not the worst of it,” I say, the tears flooding down my cheeks. “And that’s too hard to sit with. Itrustedhim. He was theoneperson I trusted.”
Kira nods. She doesn’t rush to reframe it or make the bad things smaller. She just nods, which is the only response, and I’m unexpectedly grateful for it.
“Can I ask you something?” I say after sobbing for several quiet minutes, finally wiping my nose.
She hands me a Kleenex. “Of course.”
“Caleb—” I stop. I try again. “When Caleb touches me, it’s?—”
I look at my hands. “He always asks. Or he waits until I make the first move. He never pushes into space I haven’t opened. I knew I liked that about him, but I thought it was just—how he’s built, the way he was raised, you know?”
I dare a quick glance up at her, then away again. “But now I keep thinking that maybe my body knew something my brain wasn’t ready to name yet. That’s the reason his asking felt so—” I search for the word. “Soenormous—so out of proportion—is because I haven’t been asked in a very long time.”
Kira is quiet for a moment.
“That’s a really profound observation,” she says, and she means it. I can hear she means it. “Our nervous systems can keep score even when our conscious minds aren’t watching. The contrast with Caleb wasn’t just pleasant. It was information your body had been waiting for someone to give it.”
The thought lands and keeps landing, reverberating deeper each time.
This is why every time with him has been so destabilizing.
For the first time in longer than I can accurately remember, the wanting felt so clean and uncomplicated that it showed me by contrast exactly what the ten years before itwasn’t.
I wasn’t ready to see it.
I still might not be ready.