He Made Me Ch. 08

So, although the production claimed that most of what happened on camera was fake and there was consent, the general suspicion was that they were taking advantage of desperate women and loopholes in the laws protecting sex workers to abuse them on camera. One of the worst moment of their lives recorded and sold, forever on the internet. Was this nightmare what had happened to my friend?

"Shit, baby, I've seen a clip and they seemed the scum of the earth!" I commented, hoping that she would just tell me that it was all fake.

"Yeah, I know and they are," she confirmed with a slightly sad tone. "I knew it back then too, but I was in trouble, I needed a lot of money very fast and I couldn't ask my parents. It was either them or a loan shark."

That sentence twisted my stomach: now that she had confirmed my worst suspicions, all sorts of horrific scenarios started playing in my mind.

"I'm so sorry they did this to you!" I whispered, hugging her tightly with watery eyes.

I felt her shrugging.

"It's alright, it's not like they trick you or anything. I knew what was going to happen."

I pushed her back, to see her eyes when I asked:

"So you faked. I mean, the pain was an accident, right?"

"I was supposed to, but I don't think I was stretched enough down there, so in the end the pain was all to real: it hurt to walk for a while. Look, yesterday I didn't mean to compare that horrible experience with what you wanted to do with me, I'm sorry if I offended you."

My mouth fell open: she was being so casual that she might have been talking about getting her tattoo! Besides, offending me was definitely not the point! Trying to phrase my thoughts in such a way that she wouldn't have the impression that I blamed her in any way for that ordeal, I asked:

"Didn't they give you breaks to solve the problem?"

"Yeah, one, but it didn't help, maybe because I was quite agitated, you know, for the whole humiliation thing and the cane. When I asked for a second pause they said we had to keep going, or I wouldn't get paid. Besides, the video was about painal anyway," she explained, with a matter-of-fact attitude that was so at odds with what she had just said!

"So, it was real?" I whispered out of breath, my eyes watery.

"Yeah."

"Those fucking bastards! They belong to jail with their fellow rapists!" I growled.

"I wasn't raped Jules," she replied gravely.

"But you just said…" I started confused.

"I could've left, I didn't."

Why in the world was she defending them?

"But they broke the rules! You can pause whenever and however often you want!" I objected then.

"Yeah, but they didn't force me," she shrugged.

"Well, not directly, but you didn't have a choice! You said it, painal or the loan shark, and we all know what happens if you don't repay that kind of debt back! What kind of consent is that?"

"I'm not a victim, Jules. Stop trying to frame me like one. I don't want your pity."

Even though her tone was as flat and calm as usual, I had never felt so much anger in her. This was getting ridiculous: I was on her side!

"But you are a victim! What happened to you is wrong!"

"Honestly, it's you, not them, who's making me feel like shit, and that's saying something," she retorted, getting up.

That left me speechless and very confused. Lotus in the meantime was getting dressed in a hurry.

"I'm going home now. I'm not having fun anymore."

"Wait, I'm sorry Lotus, I didn't mean to upset you!"

She turned around and when she faced me, no matter how calm and seraphic she looked, I felt like dying.

"And yet you did. Don't worry, it's not going to last long. Tomorrow it will be as if nothing happened."

"What?" I mumbled, now really at a loss.

"I never stay angry for long, a few hours tops, usually. This time perhaps it'll take the whole night, though. See you tomorrow. Maybe we could do something in the afternoon…" she said casually, headed towards the door.

I opened my mouth several times, but nothing coherent came out.

As I heard the front door close, I immediately fetched the phone and called the only person who could help me: Mikey.

After I had told him the whole story, I concluded with my closing argument:

"So, if you define a rapist like someone who knowingly takes advantage of the momentary weakness of a girl to fuck her without any regard of what she wants, these guys are rapists. Just because they didn't use muscles, it doesn't mean they didn't force her!"

"Ah, sweetie, I'm afraid that your heart is in the right place, but your head is up your ass…" was Mikey's verdict.

"WHAT?!" I shouted shocked. "You are on their side?"

"Well, shouldn't I? Have I not taken advantage of you? Didn't I ask you to fuck me when you were desperate and penniless?"

Wait, what? I fumbled for a few seconds, but I soon found my answer:

"Sure, but I like it when you 'take advantage of me', as crazy as it sounds! And at the time I… I liked that I didn't like how you looked. It felt dirty and debauched… And it turned me on, a lot, for some reason."

"Yes, that's the point, Jules! You love what I do to you, she hated what they did to her. These guys… What they do is probably not forbidden by the law, that much we know, otherwise they would have been shut down. So, who knows, perhaps they are not technically rapists, but that doesn't absolve them, does it? It just means that they belong to their very own kind of abusers."

"So you do agree with me!" I exclaimed triumphantly.

"What I'm trying to tell you, is that you were so busy trying to prove the absence of consent and put a label, 'rape', on what happened to her, that you lost sight of the central point: she went through something horrible that in all likelihood traumatized her."

Feeling a little dumb, I slowly started to understand the ramifications of what he was saying.

"Nobody wants to be a victim, Jules, and when they are, not all of them cope by pursuing revenge, for example by going to the authority. Another common mechanism, especially in these gray areas, is denial. Lotus is ashamed, because she feels that it's her fault that she's the victim. So she chose to be the first to say that everything was alright. This way, she automatically ceased to be a victim and could get some sort of illusory relief."

"Shit, of course, and I just rammed into her protective wall! Instead, I should've told her that those guys were pieces of shit because they didn't care if she was hurting, right? This way I would've shifted the focus on the part of the story she accepts."

"Yes! Trust your heart, Jules. It ached for her suffering, not because what happened to her was immoral or whatever. Those are complications of the head and are good for tribunals, not real life. I never wonder too much about morals."

"Ok… But I wanted to open her eyes to help her recover! I mean, you said it yourself, denial is only an illusion of a solution!"

"Look, Jules, you can't solve a deep trauma like that in a day. She has her own path to elaborate it and it's mostly her own. There is one obstacle that you can help her with: a part of her now thinks she deserved what happened, because she took the money. Show her how precious and special she is, that she deserves love, not hatred, contempt, or shame!"

"Just that?"

"Just that? Oh, you fool! Let me give you a precious piece of advice: whenever something bad happens, the people you care about mostly need one thing and one thing only: you being there for them," he said emphatically, as if he was talking from personal experience. "Shit happens, Jules, and there's nothing you can do to prevent it or make it right, most of the time, but you can always be there."

We stayed silent for a while, long enough for me to digest his words. Then, feeling a little awkward, I lightened the mood by saying:

"You old people are so wise… Thank you, Mikey, you are the best!"

"You little brat, I'm not old!" he complained.

"Sure, Mikey, sure," I joked, ending with a very shrill and nasal "Byeee!"

After that call, I kept pacing nervously around my pole, trying to wrap my head around the whole incident. Many pieces of the puzzle were finally finding their place: her obsession with anal, the STD test done the same day she stopped having sex, her break from straight sex… And, come to think of it, her stubbornness to try anal with me: it was an effort to replace her bad memory with a good one! That filled me with anger, sadness and guilt.

A sincere apology was in order, but what was the best way to make it? One thing was sure: I wasn't going to just let time and Lotus' peculiar way of dealing with her emotions solve the problem for me. There was no choice: I had to talk to her that very night, according to her time estimate. So I got in my car and half an hour later I was at her doorstep, waving a dildo to which I had tied a white tissue.

"I ask for forgiveness, arch-dick. Instead of controlling the dick, I let the dick control me and I ended up being one!" I said when she opened.

"You don't have to do this, Jules, you could've just waited," she replied, puzzled, cocking her head sideways.

Wait, was that a trace of a smile on her lips? There was hope!

"No, I couldn't. Can I explain?"

"Ok," she shrugged.

Truth time. After many rehearsals, I had found the best way to put into words what Mikey had helped me understand:

"I'm truly sorry for what I've said. You know better than anybody how hard it is to express feelings and my words have made a terrible job. What I've felt and should've said is that I hate with my every fiber that you've had to go through something so awful. It doesn't matter whether it was rape or not, I can only say that, when you were telling me about it, my heart ached terribly. I also hate that I can't do anything to magically undo it. All this pain made my brain overheat and mess it all up. Please believe me!"

Lotus stared at me enigmatically as usual.

"To me you are not a victim or anything really, you are just Lotus, my best friend, who I love and I never wanted to hurt!" I added pleadingly.

"Ok."

Yeah… Now what? From her face it was impossible to understand how she felt.

"Are you, er, still angry with me?" I asked tentatively.

"I'm kinda trying to understand that myself…" she replied, pensively. "Wait, let's try this."

She stepped forward and hugged me for a brief moment, as if she was measuring something.

"No, I'm pretty sure that I'm not angry with you anymore. Wanna come in and watch old Saturday Night Live sketches?"

A few minutes later we were lying on a beanbag each or rather sinking into its fluffy comfort, eating liberal amounts of chocolate fudge and laughing like idiots, while Lotus' laptop played sketches on YouTube, its screen the only source of light around us. As I soon realized, my friend really loved the show, of which she had an encyclopedic knowledge. At a certain point, not without a certain struggle, she silently got up and sat down snug on my lap, while I caressed her head.

"This is kind of my happy place," she confessed, causing a certain guilt on my part, but also warming my heart because she was sharing it with me.

"Yeah?" I prompted her, wanting to know more.

"Laughing is the closest thing to happiness I feel, I think."

That sad fact explained why she joked all the time. I hugged her tightly and kissed her forehead, when I had an idea:

"Have you ever considered doing improv? Or, you know, being a comedian or something?"

She turned around and looked at me in the eye, seriously as usual:

"I'm not that funny, Jules."

"Well, first of all, I bet that no one is at the beginning. Second, you clearly enjoy performing beside watching sketches, so who cares if you don't rise to fame or whatever? You can still have fun doing improv! You are in L.A., for crying out loud!"

"Ok, but if improv turns out to be a cult like they say, I'll be on your conscience."

This said, she burrowed deeper in my arms.

"Hey, if I tell you that I'm still very hurt by your words, will your guilt keep you here, say, to cuddle me to sleep?" she asked some time later.

"Absolutely," I replied, glad that she wanted me to stay, because cuddling was exactly what I needed too.

"Good, I hate your guts Jules, and I wanna go to bed" she said, getting up and extending a hand to help me up too.

"Please, Lotus, I'm so sorry! Let me cuddle you to make amends!" I jokingly begged.

"Fine…" she conceded.

After a quick trip to the bathroom, I found her naked on the bed.

"You sleep naked, right?" she asked.

My answer was to shed all my clothes too and crawl into her bed.

"And you don't get to fuck this, because you've been bad," she added, pointing at her stunning body, as I caressed her breasts.

"Tonight," I specified, with a chuckle, kissing her neck.

It was okay: most of all, I wanted to feel her warm skin against my own. As I spooned her, I whispered in her ear:

"By the way, from now on, this is how we make things right after a fight. Just because you almost don't have feelings or you can get rid of them overnight, it doesn't make it okay to hurt them."

Lotus never answered, but she squeezed my hand against her chest, where her heart beat peacefully.

Afterword

Regarding what happened to Lotus:

1. That is NOT why she is so detached from her own feelings. One might even argue that the causality link is the other way around.

2. It is vaguely inspired by real events, but should not be considered as a commentary on them (I do not know the details).

3. It's a complicated matter. What I wrote here is just personal feeling about it. It should be noted that in this website non consent stories, as far as I know, still require that the "victim" ultimately enjoys what happens. Therefore, they do not fall in the same category as Lotus' experience.

The next chapter will be in Fetish.

My first language is not English, so please let me know if you spot any mistakes. As usual all feedback is welcome, especially if you didn't like my work.