ANYTHING YOU WANT

Content Warning: Descriptions of sexual violence 

My boyfriend lays on top of me – he’s bigger than me, more muscular, weighs more – he pins me to the bed, we’re both naked. Our breaths come laboured, hard, I catch the look in his eyes and the glint of sweat on his upper lip, I tell him, “You could do anything you wanted to me right now,” in my softest, sultriest voice. He looks at me with that familiar little, wicked smile – looking like he wants to eat the meat off my bones and lick his fingers when he’s done. I imagine it this way – myself the passive seductress, he the tempted Adam, forced to wrap his hand around my wrists and hold me still. 

When he first puts his fingers inside me I cry. We’re both religious, and attend Church where we’re taught we shouldn’t have any form of sex before marriage – this is not why I cry. I cry because we’re kissing in my bed, drunk, and I’m alone with him and he’s bigger than me and he’s holding me so tightly. It’s comforting until it isn’t, until he reaches into my trousers and I’m drunk, too drunk, but his fingers are inside me and I gasp because it feels good and I love him but I didn’t ask for it, I don’t want it. Do I want it now that it’s there and inside me? He says, “Is this okay?” when he undoes my trousers, when he reaches under my pants, when he slips his fingers in – I nod to everything but I’m too drunk, I realise, when I start sobbing. I try to relax but I’m scared because he has his arms around me and now I have to let him do what he’s doing. I’m shaking and I don’t know why and he stops and he holds me – tells me to tell him what’s wrong, if I can, and I cry into his shoulder. He gives me my clothes back and lays there holding me and rubbing my back while I cry. I tell him he did nothing wrong – he didn’t – I know this. I come up with reasons for my tears but none of them feel convincing. 

I keep looking away from him when he tries to kiss me for the first time. I’m shaking. He says, “I like that I make you nervous.” I giggle and my teeth chatter and he asks me, “Can I kiss you?” because he keeps doing that pre-kiss guy-stare and I keep turning my head. Not for lack of wanting – I want him more than anyone else I’ve ever wanted, but I like him and I’m scared and I don’t know why I’m scared. 

After we break up I am in my sociology class where we are learning about structural violence. We talk about sexual violence and the words feel awful. They feel awful and familiar when my professor says them, in the readings we discuss, in the paradigm of consent my professor lays out. There’s infographics about consent, about drunkenness, there’s paragraphs upon paragraphs of interviews with women making the same excuses I’ve made for months. 

I step outside the classroom briefly, the coil of anxiety tightening in my stomach, I stare at the sterile white wall for two minutes and step back in.

I text my friend after class. I ask her if I can lay out a hypothetical. “Sure,” she says. “Okay,” I say. 

Say you’re 20 years old, and you are just having fun as a sexually liberated woman who finally has her own space. It’s early March, it gets dark at 6pm, you are in your first year of university and you drink vodka squash out of a cat-shaped mug your friend got you for your birthday. The guy you’re planning to hook up with brings over wine. He looks at you like you’re too good for him – maybe you are. You share the wine. He smells like Dior Sauvage and shampoo. His dress shirt is too tight around his arms, his chest, his shoulders. He’s the same height as you but you don’t care. He’s twenty-five but that’s kind of hot.  You turn on an animated movie in bed and talk about nonsense and drink the wine, and things get heated. You’re tipsy and he tells you to finish the bottle – he’s fine, sober, he’s bigger than you and he’s drank a lot less – you say no, I’ve had enough. He says come on, I won’t kiss you unless you finish it. You finish it. He kisses you. 

He tries to put it in without a condom. You stop him. He goes for your ass next, and you stop him. You have sex. He holds open your mouth and spits in it, and you’re so drunk. He makes you call him daddy, or do you say it because you want to? You remember him asking and you saying no, but the drunker you get and the more he asks, it just slips out of you because you want him to stop asking. 

You don’t remember blacking out, but you remember waking up and something is inside you. 

“No, no,” you say, “put a condom on.” Your words come out slurred, your vision is blurry, you’re trying to move but your body is heavy.

“It’s just my fingers,” he says, “It’s just my fingers.” 

You don’t quite believe him, but you’re so drunk and it’s ridiculous. He takes his fingers, his dick, whatever, out of you, and you laugh. You keep laughing. He’s not laughing. He has a strange look in his eye.

You don’t remember anything else until you wake up again and throw up. You throw up on the sheets, and you take the sheets off while he’s asleep and throw them in your laundry basket, you go to the bathroom and throw up again in the toilet. You come back out and collapse next to him and he asks you, “Are you okay?” You nod. 

The next thing you remember is waking up and he’s on top of you. He’s bigger than you, a lot bigger and a lot stronger. He’s kissing you so you kiss him back. He has his fingers inside you, he didn’t ask. He asks to put it in without a condom. You say no. He begs. He’s on top of you and you’re drunk and tired and he’s a lot stronger than you so you let him, because he’s already there, almost inside you, you can feel him. You don’t want to make a big deal of it, and you’re so drunk. It can’t be that bad just to let him do it. He says, “just three times.” He makes you count them. He pushes inside you and you’re too drunk, and he says, count for me. One, two, three. After he’s done he pulls out and pulls up his trousers and shirt and gets ready to leave. 

“You’re not staying?” you ask. 

He says, “No, but you stay here and rest.”

“Okay,” my friend says, “if that happened to you, it’s really bad. Did that happen? Are you okay?”

“Yes,” I say. “It happened eight months ago.”

 I hooked up with him after that. And I didn’t think about it. The next day I was fine. I emptied out my bin with the one used condom. My ass hurt and I was so scared that he tried to do something to me while I was passed out, but I didn’t think about it. We didn’t speak about how drunk I got that night, or the fact that I threw up, or the fact that I woke up to him inside me. Thinking about it now fills me with dread. 

“I never got that drunk around him again,” I tell my friend. “And every other time we did anything he always made sure I was okay, asked for my permission explicitly.”

I remember one time he fucked me while I was crying, but I don’t mention that. It feels stupid to admit that I offered myself for him to hurt me over and over. I didn’t just let it happen, I asked for it to happen. I asked him to come over, I sucked his dick, I let him fuck me, over and over and over again. And we never spoke about that first night again, and I never thought about it. When my friend told me about how she broke up with her boyfriend who assaulted her while she was sleeping, I remained calm and strengthened my cognitive dissonance by thinking but it was different, it was different with me.

“Maybe he thought you just wouldn’t remember,” my friend says. Maybe.

I call my best friend back home after my sociology class. I’m in public and I’m on the verge of tears, it’s kind of hard to breathe. I tell her the story and I say, am I overreacting? Am I overreacting? She tells me I’m not but it feels an awful lot like I am, that moment where you’re standing outside your body and it is following the expected script of what you’re supposed to do. Isn’t this what happens in all the movies and books and TV shows? Except if this was TV you’d find out someone took advantage of you and you’d be sure of it, you’d be sure that it was wrong and they’re a bad person and you didn’t deserve it and weren’t asking for it, and you’d cry on the phone with your friend and their reassurance would help you. 

My boyfriend and I break up over his support for a man convicted of sexual assault. I tell him, on that cold little bench in that dark park with rattling fences and wind blowing through the dead trees, I say: “I’m so lucky that that hasn’t happened to me.” It hasn’t happened to me, I’m not a victim. It happens but it can’t happen to me. It wasn’t some random man on the street who grabbed me and took hold of me, no-one held me down while I screamed and clawed at their face, no-one abused me. I’m not a victim.  

I take the memory of that drunken night and though I acknowledge it after my sociology class, I keep it to one side of my vision, not daring to look at it fully. I talk through it with my friends but, despite writing this, I don’t think I can look it dead in the eyes. 

I liked being passive when I had sex with my boyfriend. I liked it when he held me and when we made love because I trusted him and I felt safe around him. I knew that I would never wake up to him inside me, I knew that he would never beg me, half-unconscious, to put himself inside me without a condom. He could do whatever he wanted to me, but he never would. Even when I was saying yes, drunk, in tears, my boyfriend stopped. When I said no, when I was unconscious, when I was asleep… was it different? 

What do I do with all of this, now? After I have learned this, after I have dared to steal glimpses of that night in the dark corners of my vision? There feels as if there should be some great reckoning. Some life-shattering, life-altering diversion in the expected path of my life – there feels as if there should be something to rebuild, something tangible to place my finger on. I don’t think there is. All I can do is live with it. 

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Rape Crisis helpline: https://rapecrisis.org.uk/get-help/want-to-talk/

Edited by Roxy-Moon Dahal Hodson