Love in a Changed World Ch. 11

Chapter 11

I.

We'd hope to make the sunset at Mallory Square. Nadia and I hadn't gotten down there for it yet. Pudge's only trip had been, well, "eventful". It's a Key West thing that everyone has to do. The question at this point was -- would the sun wait for four college-aged girls to get themselves ready for a night on the town? We waited in the courtyard as the youngsters got themselves done up. Pudge and Nadia were ready and looked amazing.

Nadia's wore red salsa dress with a skirt that hugged that amazing ass until it disappeared into frills immediately thereafter. It had a deep "V" up the front that accentuated her gravity-adverse cleavage and split to two thin straps that tied behind her neck leaving her splendid back bare down again to her -- did I mention -- amazing ass. Of course, this dress came with its own pair of red heels that accentuated the line of her toned legs and put her height at about 6'2". Her accents were all yellow gold except for an extravagantly large ruby pendent that matched the red of her dress impeccably and a far humbler diamond engagement ring. Six months of prepping rich kids for the SAT's, a couple of cash construction jobs, and selling my paper-writing services to physics undergrads at a neighboring college sat on her lovely ring finger. That it was her least expensive and most prized piece of jewelry, made me melt whenever I saw her wear it.

Pudge, well, Pudge just dripped sex. She wore a skin-tight satiny pencil dress. It stretched over her form hugging every amazing line her body had to offer. Where Nadia's dress held snug around key parts of her body and points of emphasis, Pudge's seemed to follow every one of her delightful contours. It especially accentuated her tight muscled ass. It went up over only her right shoulder following a line that accentuated her breasts that, while smaller than Nadia's, were even perkier. She wore a black choker with a heart pendant that had a pale purple gem. It contrasted with the turquoise of the fabulous dress. It did, I recalled, go with her black senior prom dress that had purple accents. Jack had given it to her. I had cost him a lot more that he had to spend on such a thing, but he adored his little sister. For all the teasing of her we did together, so did I.

We were sitting on the patio. Manalo had mixed a pitcher of margaritas that we were sharing, He'd left an additional bottle of tequila, ice, and lime wedge as well, knowing the girls would want to augment his already strong brew. Drinks of both were flowing. We were killing time with our pregaming.

It was the first chance I had to reflect on some of my more recent harrowing experiences. Well, the harrowing experiences I didn't sign up for, anyway. I couldn't very well put my voluntarily-entered-into sexual liaisons with Nadia and Pudge into the same category as nearly being raped or threatened with rape by women and girls. Sure there were elements of being forced or non-consent in my (amazeballs) sex adventures with those two goddesses. I'd lost count of how many times in recent days I'd been fucked into unconsciousness or pushed past normal sexual limits. My body was also pretty battered. I had bruises on bruises, had dislocated a finger joint, sprained a shoulder, and my dick had been squeeze within an inch of its life. I almost thought of that as the cost of doing business. I was playing with fire there to be sure, but I knew there was risk when I lit the match. One can't expect to be in so asymmetric a physical relationship where the goal is for the stronger person to be overcome with orgasmic sensation and not expect things to go sideways.

The near-miss rapes were another thing. I had been attacked and violated on two occasions. I had maybe been threatened with another assault. While I think Beth was just trying to illustrate a point or fill some inner need, the feeling of terror I had was a hard memory to shake. Even Nadia had pressed me nearly into a wall at home and Pudge had crushed a hurt finger in situations that they would have previously just used words. These were women who loved me, but they'd made their points with their strength as a default. The realization that women in general were using physicality more and more to express themselves was worrisome. Given what is now their overwhelming physical superiority, they could easily hurt a man without even meaning to. The incredible advantages in strength and speed women now had combined with a willingness to use that power mixed in with women's rising and unchecked sexual aggression made a dangerous brew. The thought of it made me feel so unusually vulnerable.

I made the mistake of trying to talk about it. "You know, ladies, that little girl went into great detail about how she could take my delicate virtue without breaking a sweat," I'd said. "I've been nearly raped twice in recent weeks," I said, "What is wrong with women?"

"Actually it was nearly three times," Nadia retorted. "I yanked you out from between two cougars on the dance floor the other night -- you never even saw them coming. Another few seconds, and they would have been fucking that delicate virtue right out of you."

"Three. Three times. A guy can't even walk down the street anymore," I said. I was alarmed to find out I'd been in danger without even knowing it almost bothered me more. Of course, I hadn't come out much better -- having been ground into unconsciousness between these two. There was certainly an element of being forced; I could still feel myself being helplessly smashed between them Somehow, that was different. I mean, I leapt into that Simon-smasher willingly at least.

"It's because you're an idiot," Pudge offered without remorse.

I took mild umbrage at that, "That sounds a lot like victim blaming There's no way you'd let a guy say something like that about a woman rape victim." Of course, there really hadn't been much of any female rape victims in the last couple of years. Really only the rare female-on-female rape. Not unheard of, but nothing like the volume of male-on-female rapes they replaced. Men who chose to try to rape women in the first months after the change became statistics of another kind.

Female on male rapes certainly happened -- a lot from what I'd recently encountered. These attacks though were hardly ever reported. Even when they were, the reports rarely resulted in arrests. In cases where there were arrests, there was pretty much never a prosecution. There wasn't really anything like a male rape kit for any hard evidence, and no prosecutor wanted to try to convince a jury that the 110lb little girl had thrown the 200lb male victim against a wall and fucked him against his will.

"No," said Pudge, "You just don't know the rules. Don't park in a dark area. Never walk alone. Act like you're talking on your phone."

Nadia continued, "Don't dress too provocatively. Walk up to strange women and act like they're old friends when a strange guy is following you. Give the Uber driver the address two doors up. Go to the bathroom in groups." It was painful to hear how women grew up learning these things.

"Okay, okay, I get the picture," I said raising my hands. I'd always felt myself to be an ally of women, but in that moment, feeling vulnerable as I did and angered at that state, I lashed out. I believe I've mentioned I can be pretty dumb at times. "But come on," I retorted from my unstable soapbox, "You're talking hypotheticals. I was attacked for real. Twice. I could have been raped either time."

The looks I got from Nadia and Pudge made me regret the words even as they still hung I the air.

II.

Pudge turned in her chair and spoke first. "Josh Schmidt," she said followed by a long pause. Tears formed in her eyes, but she went on, "My sophomore year of college -- we'd gone on a few dates. Captain of the lacrosse team -- why is it always the lacrosse players?" Pudge threw her hand up at that.

She stood, and continued, "We knew to be careful with guys from the lacrosse team. The whole campus knew. But I had to be all big and bad, and was like, 'No guy is going to pull that shit with me.' God. I was a dumb as you." She paused and walked towards me and the lounge chair I was in. "We were at a party. I had been drinking. We went off to make out. He starts getting handsy. Puts his hand up my shirt and I said 'No', but he just keeps, doing it. I told him 'No', but I was pretty drunk. He just kept on going." Pudge drew closer; she was now standing straddling me. She bent down and put her arms on my shoulders, "Next thing I know he's on top of me. His hand is up my skirt pulling off my panties. I keep saying in 'No', but he pinned me down." She lowered herself onto me and pressed my shoulders into the chair.

She was so damned strong. I grabbed her arms almost out of instinct. I strained against her just a little to establish my predicament. Pudge responded by grabbing my hands -- she moved faster than I could see. She forced my hands together at my right side and held my arm down with her left hand. Then she put her right forearm across my chest and pushed me deeper into the lounger -- forcing some air from my lungs. I struggled just a little in response, but it was clear that I was pinned -- helpless. Pudge looked me in the eyes and spoke, "Are you scared now, sport? Because I know I sure as shit was." I didn't believe Pudge would hurt me -- at least not intentionally. But the feeling of defenselessness was scary unto itself. I nodded rather than trying to speak.

Having established the scene, Pudge went on, "Next thing I know he's in me. He thrusted for a few minutes, and it was over. He pulled up his pants, and you know what he did?" I shook my head, and she answered, "The fucker asked me if I came. You know what I did?" She didn't give me a chance to answer, "I lied. I said I did." Pudge shook a little with that. She released me as though she was worried that she might hurt me accidentally if she maintained her hold. She stood and went back to her chair.

I looked over at Nadia as Pudge got up. It was clear that Nadia knew this story. She went over to Pudge's chair and put her arm around Pudge. Her sophomore year. I remember NCAA's that year. It was held near where I was in grad school, so I went. She fell from the beam and missed a planned element in her floor. It was a bad performance, but it was her misses on the vault that stood out in my mind now. She never missed a vault. Ever. If she fell out bed in the morning, she'd do a handspring and stick the landing. It made more sense now. I wish I had known then.

"I reported it the campus cops," Pudge went on, "Yeah, that did a lot of good. Next thing I know I'm sitting with the dean, the provost, and the athletic director -- all men. I didn't even know how I ended up there. I went to the cops, not the dean. But the campus cops work for the school. Sure, they were totally ready to go forward with the charges, if I wanted to. The athletic director asked if it was true that I had been drinking -- I had tried to be as truthful as I could in the report." She wiped her tears, "The fucker looks at the provost, and says, 'She'd have to go to the review board if that came out, right?' The provost nodded, observed that I was underaged and then asked the AD if I was on scholarship. The AD nodded. It was pretty clear. If I went on with the charges, my scholarship would be in jeopardy."

She didn't need to go on. We came from working class people. No way she finishes school without the scholarship. It was probably the easiest hard decision of her life. She dropped the charges and that was that. She carried the burden. It cost her a medal. It cost her a piece of herself. But it didn't cost her the future. I sat up and opened my mouth to talk.

"Don't say anything. Just. Don't. You'll screw it up," It was Nadia. She was right.

There was a silence; Pudge turned and looked at Nadia.

"Oh no," I thought.

Nadia came over, sat on the foot of the chaise lounge, took my hands, and said only, "My Uncle David -- from when I was twelve to when I was 15. Then one last time when I was 17."

She didn't need to explain. An early springer twelve-year-old, she'd told me how she'd drawn attention of adult men from the start of adolescence -- a thought that bothered me more than it seemed to bother her. I understood why now -- the leering was bad, but nothing compared to being child raped. In a family like hers there was always opportunity for a predator. Big sprawling vacation homes. Offers to travel. I could see it in my mind, "Sure, Little Nadia can summer with us in The Hamptons". Days on the beach were fun. Nights in a remote guest room were hell.

Her Uncle David has died last Summer. Suddenly. Fell off a ladder changing a light bulb or something, and broke his neck, I recalled. Old guy probably didn't have a lot of experience up on ladders. None of her family ever didn't much work around the house.

Oh my god.

"Millie." I said out loud.

"You didn't really think that asshole changed the lightbulbs himself, did you?" Nadia asked rhetorically. Millie was Midge's little sister. She'd stayed with us two weeks at the last Summer -- came right from a stay at Uncle David and Aunt Miriam's beach house -- right "before" his "accident". Didn't even go home in between. She was headed off to some super-exclusive all-girls boarding school in Europe -- Switzerland, I think. It seemed crazy to me, sending a 13-year-old girl to another continent for junior high school. The girl didn't seem to want to go. I even suggested to Nadia that Millie could come to my school and live with us. Nadia cut me off. That was odd. We always talked things out. And she loved her cousins. I didn't know until now. The family was getting young Millicent out of the country while things were figured out and tempers cooled.

"Uncle Frank called me." Uncle Frank was Midge and Millie's father; Nadia filled in the details as the broad strokes became clear, "He was insane with anger and guilt. He had no idea Uncle David had been molesting family girls for years. He told me he would have killed him himself if he'd known. He said we had to get Millie out of play while the Dragon Lady set Aunt Miriam straight. I suggested St. Ives (the boarding school) -- mom had once wanted to send me -- I rebelled and wouldn't go. We agreed she could stay with us until the term started."

"Little Mille?" I asked. Mille wasn't tall like her sister, cousin, and a lot of the women in Nadia's family. Taking after her father's side, she was only 5'2" or so. Maybe 95lbs tops. "She. She killed him?"

"It was self-defense," Nadia closed the case, but gave all the details, "It was up at that fucking beach house." That "fucking beach house" was a ridiculous ocean-front mansion that Uncle David and Aunt Miriam occupied every Summer. The family -- parts of the family -- always went for 4^th of July. Nadia went on, "That old fucker and his silent bitch wife offered for Millie to stay after the 4^th. Millie told me the fucking bastard had come to her room the night before and did "things" to her but didn't rape her. He told her he'd 'come back for the rest later.' I - mean 'she' - was terrified." Nadia paused. That was no mere slip of the tongue. It was clear to me, what was being described as happening to 13-year-old Millie had happened to twelve-year-old Nadia. I looked at Pudge; it was clear the young roommates had shared this story too -- probably over several tear-laced bottles of wine in their old place.

Nadia went on, "The stupid old fucker hadn't kept up with the times -- he and Miriam only have boys. He just assumed it would go like it always had. It didn't. He came back the next night, crawled into bed with the Mille and pulled off her panties. Millie said she hadn't thought about resisting until then, but somehow found the courage to. She pushed him off the bed - hard. He hit the far wall. She thought that would be the end of it, but he got up enraged. He came at her, called her- and I quote 'a little cunt whore' and put his hands around her neck to choke her. She broke the hold easily," Nadia made a chopping motion with both hands. "He came at her again. This time she leapt on him, put her legs around his neck and threw him down. Legs still around his neck she, grabbed his head and twisted," she punctuated the last part with a pantomime of the hold. "Snapped his fucking neck like a twig," a smile escaped Nadia's serious visage for just a second and then she caught herself, "It was a quicker death than he deserved."

The rest was clear. They made up the cover story. Shuttled Midge off to us then Europe. The Dragon Lady showed up in her Rolls Royce and probably spent all of ten minutes laying out to Aunt Miriam two ways it could go. Miriam could wear black, rage at the old fool for climbing ladders at his age, and otherwise play the mourning widow and supportive mother or she could press the case. In the latter scenario, the Dragon Lady would have told her daughter, everything would come out -- all of it. Every adult woman in the family that David had abused as a child would come forward. Every girl that was still a child would give testimony. They would go into great detail about what had been done to them. [Shame be damned -- everyone did what the Dragon Lady told them to do.] The case for Millicent having acted in self-defense would be open and shut. All that Miriam would accomplish would be to embarrass her sons, sully the memory of her dead -- asshole - husband, and shame the family as a whole. If that wasn't sufficient deterrent, the Dragon Lady would have made it clear that Miriam and her sons would find themselves cut off from the family, its financial resources, and its connections. It probably took Miriam most of a full minute to decide.

"I'm sorry," I said to both girls. "I didn't know."

"That's the point. You don't. And it's so many women and girls," Nadia said, "So many that we grew up learning how to live in a world where we had to do things to protect ourselves. You haven't had to practice them as a twelve-year-old or know you had to have them down pat by college. You didn't do any of that, so you are way more vulnerable than we ever were."

"Like I said, 'idiots'," Pudge said putting it in her usual blunt way. "You guys are like dodo birds. You evolved all fat, dumb, and happy in a world where nothing ever tried to hurt you," Pudge went on, "Then someone introduces wild dogs to your island, and you have no defenses -- none at all. In this case, like the Dodo, you get fucked, except literally."

She was painfully correct. I never before thought about my safety when out in the world alone. I had always taken it as a given. I'm a man I could stand up for myself if something were to happen. In the changed world, it was all an illusion. I was easy pickings -- most guys were. We'd grown up in a world with nothing to fear. Now that world was populated by predators. Predators that were sexually overwrought to the point of being remorseless about how they satisfied their need. Moreover, there was virtually no consequence for taking by force what they wanted from a man.

Also those predators were so much stronger and faster relative to their prey that it made any pretext of defense laughable. I heard a story at my old university. A forward-thinking male professor convinced the school to offer a self-defense class for the male students. They brought in a martial arts instructor and everything. The class had been running three, four times a week for eight weeks. A female professor wanted the funds for something at the campus women's center. To demonstrate the pointless nature of the expensive program, she brought her 15-year-old daughter to the class one night and invited the dean of students and the bursar. There were 20 college-aged male students in the class who had been training for eight weeks. Not one of them was judged to have successfully defended himself against the untrained teen girl for more than 45 seconds. The class was cancelled, and the funds reallocated. Having been immediately outmatched by two slightly built women in the last few weeks, I could believe the story. Beth was being generous when she told me that I wouldn't had stood a chance against her.