Page 13 of The Devil We Crave
#GoPrivateers
#Blessed
My mouth thins to a cold line.
I'll give you a hashtag: #DieInAFuckingDumpsterFireYouPieceOfShit
I drop my phone into my lap and slump back against the headboard, gazing up at the ceiling.
Dammit.
Again, planting criminal evidence on someone who didn’tcommitthat crime to frame them for murder is, objectively speaking,evil.
But so is getting a girl drunk, drugging her, locking her in a room, and then covering her mouth when she says no while you…
I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to shove the memories back into the little iron box that sits in the back of my mind.
What’s the difference?
I grimace as the needling little voice in my head sneers the same question it’s been sneering since the madness of last night: what’s the difference between the predator who assaulted me this past summer, and the masked man last night?
The answerused to bethat the difference was reality versesfantasy.
But after last night, the answer to that question has become exponentially more complicated, because that fantasy is no longerjustfantasy.
It really happened.
A man in a mask, wielding a knife, chased me around in the dark, pinned me down, ripped my clothes off and quite literally ignored the word “no” as he put his hands wherever he wanted.
Actually, I guess the easy answer to how last night is different from what happened over the summer is that last night, despite my “no” and “stop” being ignored, I did have a way out.
“Remember your safe word.”
Okay, so I promptlyforgotthat safe word. It would be so easy and convenient if I had permanently forgotten it. But that’s not the case.
It came back to me.
Right there in the middle of it all, with his fingers inside me…
My face heats, and my thighs clench at the visceral sense memory of his firm hand prying my legs apart, sliding beneath my panties, and then sinking his fingers into me as I shivered in dark ecstasy.
I swallow and take a shaky breath.
Ididremember that safe word.
…And yet, I didn’t use it.
I could have stopped it all. And for reasons I don’t quite understand, I think he would have, had I said it.
I guess that’s the big difference. This summer involved an actual predator. The man last night was merely roleplaying one.
Okay, he was roleplaying at a Daniel Day-Lewis level. But clearly, hewasthere to “play” with someone, and he thought that someone was me.
Ignoring "no" and "stop" were clearly part of the game, given that it was obviously consensually non-consensual—thank youGalina and yourderangedbook recommendations for teaching me that my fucked-up kinks have a name.
So, yes: the difference is, last night was a fantasy that went off the rails, if it even had rails to begin with. This past summer was assault, pure and simple, and no safe word in the world would have stopped it.
And last night…
