The Good Girl

It was my birthday, ten in the morning, when I got to her flat; she answered the door dripping wet, wrapped in a towel. She told me she'd only be a minute. She told me to go into the living room. So I went into...

He must have been waiting behind the door. The first I knew he was there was his hand over my mouth, pulling me hard - not violently, but forcefully - back against his chest.

His other hand was underneath my jaw, with something cold and pointed.

"The knife is sharp, wee lass," he said. "No noise. Kneel down, nice and slowly."

---

He? Who was he? I'd better start again. The truth is I never actually knew who he was. I never saw him. I know he was tall, strong, lean. He had a nice voice, calm, confident. He was calm and confident.

About a month afterwards she took me to a gig - a little local band in a room over a pub, there can't have been two hundred people. She teased me he was there. I spent most of the evening looking at men. There were about twenty who were tall enough, lean enough, strong enough... But... I mean, you can't just go up to someone and ask. I can't!

This isn't very good, is it? I'll try again. I'll tell you who she is.

Well, actually, I won't tell you who she is, because if this sort of story got out she'd lose her job, and I'd hate that. But I will tell you about how I met her. I went to a poetry workshop, in my second year of university. I went without any of the people I knew, which - well, it's brave for me. I saw her at once, smart, elegant composed. People read out their poetry. I read out a poem of mine, not very good. She praised it, looking at me in the eyes. Then, later, she read out a poem of hers, and something moved wet and warm in me. A darkly erotic poem. A tangential poem, which on the surface... But what mattered wasn't on the surface. Under the surface, it seemed to me, it was dark and powerful, consuming.

I thought it was wonderful. I told her so. I gushed.

A few days later I was in a coffee shop, an open notebook in front of me, staring at nothing. She sat down opposite me and smiled.

"Hello," she said. "You're the girl who came over my poem."

"I didn't!", I said, feeling blood rush to my face, hearing my voice go squeaky. I dropped it, carefully. "I didn't... orgasm."

She grinned. "Certain?" she asked, head on one side.

I swallowed, blinked. I shook my head, and, catching myself doing it, nodded emphatically. "I didn't!" I said. "But... I really liked it."

She took a sip of her latte, a moustache of milk-froth forming on her upper lip. She kept her eyes on mine. I tried to meet her gaze.

"Is it about..." I said, "were you... were you raped?"

That first time, she smiled a dark secret smile, shook her head, and changed the subject. But two weeks later I asked her again. We'd met three times in the cafe by then. I would go there, hoping she'd be there, and sometimes she would just appear. She looked so glamourous and confident and worldly. So sexual. We talked about poetry, about me - we seemed to talk a great deal about me, far less about her - about beauty, about the complexity of life. But that was the first time we'd arranged to meet. We met in the art gallery, there was an exhibition she wanted me to see. The exhibition was bodies entwined, the forceful and the surrendered. It left me turbulent.

---

Afterwards we strolled lazily in the park. I envied her freedom, her short dress and long legs bare to the sun, the golden down on her long freckled arms. There was a bench in the shade of a weeping willow, overlooking a pond. We sat.

I asked, again, about her poem. Had she been raped?

She looked at me hard, almost frowning.

"What is rape?" she asked.

"Being taken. By force. Without consent. Perhaps by someone you don't know?"

"Yes," she said, coolly, more coolly that I was used to her talking to me. "But which bit of it is rape?"

"I don't know," I said. "All of it."

"You haven't actually had sex, have you?"

We'd skated round this obliquely, several times before. Shamefaced, I shook my head.

"Consent isn't simple," she said. "People pretend it is, but it isn't. You could sit down in front of a judge and two witnesses, and sign in triplicate that you consent to be fucked by your lover; and go straight from there into your bedroom and discover that you don't. You can open your legs wide to welcome someone's cock into your cunt" - she knew I had difficulty with those words, she enjoyed my difficulty - "and find, when it's pounding mindlessly within you, that it's the wrong one, attached to the wrong person, doing the wrong things in the wrong way. Consent isn't all or nothing. It's fleeting, contingent, mutable - at once immanent and intangible. It ebbs and flows through the course of the act. I don't believe there's anyone, in any relationship lasting more than three hours, who hasn't, at some point in sex, wished it wasn't happening."

She put her finger under my chin and lifted my head up, until I looked back at her, meeting her eyes.

"But nevertheless," she said, "rape is about consent. It's about desire and consent. If you desire it, and welcome it, and enjoy it, then you are not raped."

I licked my lips, feeling the pressure of her finger below my jaw. "And did you?" I asked.

"Did I what?" she said. Her voice was still cool, but her eyes were warm.

"Desire it," I whispered. "Welcome it. Enjoy it."

She grinned. "Oh yes," she said. "Oh, yes."

I closed my eyes, not able to meet her glow. "Was he," I whispered, "was he a stranger? Did he force you?"

"You make it sound as if it's only happened once," she said, a thread of teasing laughter under her voice.

"It hasn't?" My eyes were opened wide, staring at her in shocked admiration. "But... but... that poem is about one memory, one specific incident."

At last her eyes dropped. She grinned, a feral, inward grin. "That's perceptive of you."

She looked up at me again. "Yes," she said. "He was. And he did." She smiled. "It's too hot out here," she said. "Come on, lets go back to my flat."

Her flat was modern, white, sparse, high in a new block looking out toward the sea. There was a patio door out onto a balcony that she'd flung wide, letting in a cooling breeze. She'd gone through to the kitchen, and came back with two long glasses of ice and limejuice. She was naked.

I looked away, carefully... and then back. And catching her knowing smile, away again. She put a glass on the bookshelf under my gaze, her body close and warm behind me. I stared at the leather binding of an aged book of John Donne's love-poems. "Are you a good girl?" I asked her.

"Am I what?" she asked. Warm surprise in her voice.

I broke away, and went quickly out onto the balcony, looking back at her pale in the shadow of the room. "They say," I said, "that good girls dream of rape because that way they can have sex - rough, hard, fierce sex - without having to be responsible for it."

"They do," she agreed. She came out onto the balcony, too, confidently naked, but - courteously, I think - leant on the rail at the opposite end from me. "Do you dream about rape?"

I looked out to sea. It would be poetic to describe something I saw, in detail; but the truth was I didn't because my eyes were blurring with tears. "And have you seen him again? Since?"

"You must be very warm in all those clothes," she said.

I swallowed. "Have you seen him again since?" I heard a pitch of desperation in my voice.

I heard the smile in hers. "I have," she said. "He comes occasionally, without warning. He takes me by stealth and by surprise, and leaves me sore and satiated. I never know when he'll come again. The ice in your glass will be melting."

"Yes," I said. I turned to look at her. A curling arabesque of tattoo swirled out of her shaven mons, and curled away over her right hip. I gulped and looked up. She had breasts. "You're trying to seduce me, aren't you?"

She smiled. It was a beautiful smile, warm and sensuous. "I am," she said. "But I'm in no hurry."

I gulped, awkward. "Look," I said, "I'm a virgin, but I don't think I'm a lesbian. And I -" tears were flowing now, I scrubbed them angrily away. "I'm a good girl. I don't know whether I can be seduced. I don't think so. I think I'd better go now."

---

It was three weeks before I saw her again. I was in the cafe, trying to compose a difficult letter to my parents. She eased herself into the chair opposite, settling gently with fluid winces.

"I'm glad you're here," she said. "I need to say sorry."

"No!" I said. "It was my fault. I was stupid, gauche, rude. I'm so sorry."

She shook her head, her hair masking her eyes in movement. "It was hot," she said. "I hadn't been fucked for too long, and hot weather makes me..."

"Yes," I said, seriously, looking at the bright sunlight pouring over her shoulders. I took a deep breath.

"Hadn't been?"

"Oh, I have been now," she said, with a rumble of laughter. "Didn't you see how carefully I'm walking? I'm so fucked."

She looked up. "And yes, it was him. The one I told you about. Oh, God, I'm sore, and it feels wonderful."

"You're sore?" I asked, surprised, interested. "Sex hurts?"

"Sex?" she asked, echoing my surprise. "Sex as such rarely hurts much unless it's done very badly. Do anything enough, and hard enough - particularly if most of the time you don't do it often enough - and you'll hurt a bit. But he knows how to use my body, to push it. So I have muscles that have been worked harder, these last two days, than they've been worked since spring. And also -" She leaned across the table and whispered - "he whipped me."

"You wanted him to?"

"I hadn't thought of it. I didn't expect it..."

"You enjoyed it?"

She nodded, emphatically, her face radiant. "I have the most beautiful bruises," she said. She looked around, almost furtively. "I wish I could show you."

"I won't come back to your flat," I said. "I'm sorry. You're beautiful, and sexy, and fun to be with, and I admire - oh, I so admire - but... I can't."

"Something's happened." There was concern in her voice, certainty.

"My parents want me to go home next month for my birthday, to see my grandma. She has cancer, she's dying."

"For your birthday? How old will you be?"

I shrugged. "Twenty one," I said.

"You don't want to go," she said.

I looked up at her. "They want me to marry a cousin. He's an accountant. I've looked him up on LinkedIn."

"I see," she said, with inward laughter. I saw she did.

"What will you do?" she asked.

"I won't go."

"What will you do on your birthday?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said. "Stay here. Mooch."

"Maybe we could do something together?" For once it was she who sounded shy.

I looked at her directly. "I don't want to sleep with you," I said. "That isn't my dream."

---

I turned over in bed, and reached out to the phone again. The fifth time, sixth time? This time I found the courage to press the green button, and heard it dial.

"Hiya?" she said, "what's up?"

"Listen," I said, "I'm sorry, I'm really sorry, I know it's late. I need to understand. You said - the first time - you said he was a stranger."

"Oh!" she said, her voice thin and metallic on the line. "Yes, we hadn't met."

"Then how could he know you consented?"

"OK," she said. "Look, that's complex. Can we break it down a bit?"

"I don't understand," I said.

"How we met. We got in touch on the Internet. You can find anything you want on the Internet. We agreed I'd be in a particular picnic place in the forest from ten o'clock to midnight on a particular night. We agreed what I'd be wearing. And I sent him photographs so he could recognise me."

"You sent him photographs? Did he send you photographs?"

"No. I wanted to be surprised."

"Oh. I see."

There was a pause.

"You're very quiet," she said.

"You agreed in advance that you consented?" I asked.

"No," she said. "How could I? How could I know whether I would consent? All I agreed is that, whatever happened, I wouldn't complain to the police. People call it 'consensual non-consent'."

"I thought people agreed a safeword?"

There was a gurgle of laughter. "You have been reading up about this."

"Yes," I said.

She laughed again, a happy, contented laugh. "No," she said. "We didn't. I know - at least, I understand - that people mostly do. And that you definitely should, that it's really irresponsible not to. But I wanted it to be as real as it could possibly be. As raw."

"Yes," I said. "I understand."

"Have you been dreaming again?" she asked.

"Yes," I said. "I have."

---

So, anyway - I haven't told you about the gloves, have I? The hand over my mouth wore a thin leather glove. I froze. I felt enraged and exultant and terrified and emergent and betrayed - mostly by her - and also at the same time grateful. A bit of me was outside myself like a third person narrator. I was frozen and trembling and at the same time melting inside and opening like a flower... my body... my body's response... I felt... I felt proud - proud and excited - that my body could be so completely, wantonly. The response of my body - the excitement of my body - excited me more, and something hysterical imagined me liquifying away completely into a puddle of fluids in a perfect feedback loop of desire.

"Kneel down," he said, his voice confident and calm. "Nice and slow."

I knelt. I heard a click from the knife as he folded it away, and his left hand took a firm grip in my hair, my head held rigidly between his two hands so I couldn't turn it at all. He eased me down, face down, onto the carpet. It was about this time that I realised I could have struggled, that - even if only for the form of the thing, I should have struggled - but it was already too late. His knees came down on the carpet either side of my waist, tight to me, compressing me, and the weight of him settled on my upper thighs.

"You're a good girl," he said. "I'm just going to make you secure."

His right hand came away from my mouth, but it didn't help because the left was still firm in my hair. There was a moment of small movements. Then something metal - but not cold - came around my right wrist. His hand squeezed it, and a rachet clicked. I made a noise then - more whimper than word, arousal and need and fear. He changed hands in my hair, careful to allow me no moment of movement, and stroked my cheek, gently. He reached for my other wrist.

I don't know why, but I buried it underneath me, seeking to evade him.

There was a pause.

"Look, wee lassie. You are going to do everything I want - every single last thing I want - until I'm finished with you, and I am going to force you anyway. I don't mind if you resist, I enjoy a bit of fight in a woman. But I am going to take everything I want, anyway. Do you understand?"

As well as I could with his hand in my hair, I nodded, vigorously.

"So are you going to co-operate?"

I shook my head. The hand in my hair was tight.

"Very well." His voice was amused.

There was a moment of movement I couldn't interpret, and then he was doing something with my hair. Something cold - metal - touched my back. And then, quickly, he pulled a leather hood over my head and face. He pushed a strap through under my throat, and buckled it on the right hand side of my neck. Then he reached under my throat again with both hands, grabbed the front of my shirt, and pulled it apart so that the buttons popped, pulling it over my shoulders and down my arms. I know I whimpered again then, and that was fright.

As he pulled my shirt off, of course my hand came out from under me - and he caught it, and then I was cuffed.

I whimpered, and he stroked my shoulder gently. "You are a good girl," he said.

That click again. Something cold and narrow pushed under the waistband of my jeans, at the back. The purr of rent canvas.

I didn't understand. And then, cold air. And then I was I was angry - they were good jeans! And then...

And then I was wet.

Something tugged at each of the shoulder straps of my bra, briefly, and then they fell limp. My knickers, at each hip.

I was shuddering, shuddering. There were hands on the clasp of my bra. And then it was dragged out from under me, left to right, pulling painfully on my stiffened nipples...

My knickers.

One of his hands held the chain between the handcuffs, his knuckles pushing me down into the carpet; the other bunched in the back of my knickers.

And pulled upwards, sharply.

The cloth pulled deep into the cleft of my... groin.

The thing that I'd pretended hadn't happened at the poetry workshop, happened.

I clenched, gasped, squealed.

He laughed.

"You are a good girl," he said.

---

"You know what is going to happen now, don't you?"

My body was still boneless, my mind a mass of lassitude and sensation.

I knew that I should say something.

I whimpered.

"If there's anything you want to say about it, now's the time."

Well, of course. But I couldn't say I wanted him to, could I? And if I said I didn't want him to, he might not do it...

For a moment there were no hands on me. I heard the sound of his zip, and a movement of clothing.

"I'm using a condom."

No, no, I thought, that wasn't right. A rapist wouldn't have consideration for me. A rapist wouldn't use one.

"Not a condom!" I thought, and realised, horrified, that I'd said it aloud.

"Are you sure?" His voice sounded surprised. Calm, but surprised.

Of course he should wear a condom! Of course he should! If he didn't I could get pregnant! I could get diseases!

I had to say 'no'. I had to say 'I didn't mean it'. I had to say 'please use a condom'.

I didn't.

I whimpered.

"You are a good girl," he said again. I felt warm.

He lifted me by my hips so that I was on my knees; with my hands cuffed behind me I could support myself only with my cheek on the carpet. And then...

Blunt pressure.

The moment when I tore, virginity gone, a distant awareness of loss and pain.

The first slow, smooth, sure, slick slide of a man within me.

Another heart beating between my legs, to a foreign rhythm.

The unanticipated size of it, deep within me, my belly adjusting itself liquidly to make space.

The remorselessly gathering pace, and then...

I had thought - I had read - I had understood - that when a man and a woman have sex, they have sex and then the man ejaculates and that's it. Sometimes, I'd read, the woman also has an - an orgasm - but mostly she doesn't.

In bed, alone, at night, when I touched myself, I would touch myself until... it happened. And then I would stop, and usually quickly fall asleep.

It had happened when he'd torn my knickers away. Not... big, but it had happened. I didn't expect it again.

But when... the pace gathered, no longer gliding gently but driving deep, it happened again. And when it happened, he would slow, taking long, deep, gentle strokes, the whole length of... him... sliding smoothly in until I was full, until he almost stopped my heart, and then slowly, smoothly out until I was hollow and bereft, and in again, steady, smooth, slow, calming.

My tumult would gradually still, my breathing steady, and then the remorseless pace would build again.

He was brutal. He did hurt me. I did cry, inside the leather hood. His weight was sometimes on the back of my head, sometimes on my hips. Sometimes he would hold me still and pound into me, sometimes hold himself still and drag me backwards to be impaled.

He hurt me. I wept. But I also... orgasmed. Came. Three times that I can remember, but my mind was blurred in the darkness of the mask, in the torrent of sensation. There were more. I don't remember how many.

But then, the last time, this I remember: it happened again and the rhythm didn't slow, but built, accelerated, a jack-hammer tearing me apart. Too big for me, too deep, too ungentle. Weeping, weeping, the leather damp with snot and tears. And then...