6. The Theft
THE THEFT
Before the notebook, there was the thing I did to Todd, and I'm not going to skip it, because I come out of it badly and because it's the reason everything after it happened the way it did.
The twenty-eighth of February. I'd had four weeks of the rule. Mr. Duszak's people had walked through the house with a clipboard and said the word potential, and there was a lockbox on the front door now, and everybody was fighting about the stairs.
I'd stopped sleeping well.
I want to describe the state properly, because "horny" doesn't cover it.
It was closer to being hungry in a house with food in it.
I was getting fucked four or five times a week by two men I liked, competently, on demand, in a way that ninety-nine percent of the people I know would have thrown a party over, and I was climbing the walls.
So I made a plan, and the plan was theft.
Todd was the mark because Todd was the easiest. Todd got lost. He'd go somewhere behind his own eyes about two minutes in and stay there, and I'd been paying attention.
I went into his room at half past eleven on a Friday and I got on top, which I never did, and he was delighted about it. He put his hands behind his head. He said, "Look at this. It's like Christmas."
He'd rolled the condom on. That was the problem, and I'd thought about the problem for four days, and my solution was pathetic and I knew it at the time.
My solution was that I'd get him close, and then I'd stop and take it off and put him back in before he understood, and once he was in and bare he wouldn't be able to stop, because I'd never met a man who could.
I got about halfway.
I did stop. I did get it off him. And he was so far gone that he let me, up on his elbows, breathing hard, saying, "Wait, what are you," and I sat back down on him bare and the feeling of it, God, the feeling of a man with nothing between us, that first slide of skin on the inside of me after five months, nearly ended me on the spot.
It was so much hotter. It's not close. It was another act entirely.
And I locked my ankles behind his back.
That's the part. Not the condom. The ankles. I crossed my feet at the base of his spine and I gripped, and I looked down at him and I said, "Don't."
And Todd Ruzicka, who was two and a half minutes from coming, who weighed two hundred and thirty pounds and had a girl on his lap who had given him blanket permission in front of a bowl game, got both forearms under my thighs and lifted me straight up off his cock like I weighed nothing at all.
Ankles and everything. My whole body went up six inches and he held me there.
That was the second the balance of that house moved, and it did not move in my favor. I'd spent five months organizing my life around being taken, and it had never once occurred to me that any of them was strong enough to take me off.
He set me down on the bed beside him. He wasn't rough about it. He was breathing like a horse.
He got his own hand on himself and finished about four strokes later, and it went up my stomach and over my ribs, a lot of it, and some on my tits and one streak on my chin, and even then, even furious, I was aware of every rope of it landing on the outside of me where it did no good to anybody.
Then he lay back and put his arm over his eyes and said, "That wasn't cool, Ange."
I said, "I know."
He said, "Like, that really wasn't cool."
"I know."
"I said no to that, and you did it anyway."
I lay there with his come going cold and tightening on my stomach and my hip cramping from the angle I'd been sitting at and I said, "I know," a third time, and it was the only honest thing I'd said in that room.
He told Scott and Aaron in the morning. He was right to.
There was no second house meeting. Scott just came and found me on the porch and stood there with his arms folded and said, "That thing you did to Todd. Don't."
I said, "I'm not going to."
He said, "I know you're not, because he's not going to give you the chance and neither am I." And then he went to class.
That was the sanction. That was the whole thing.
Nobody stopped using me, which I think was deliberate on their part and which was more generous than I deserved, but from the first of March the coffee can moved to a shelf I couldn't reach without a chair, and neither of them ever let me get on top again, and Todd started holding both my wrists, not as a game.
I had run the campaign for six months. I had won everything I'd asked for out loud.
I had a house full of men who used me at will and thanked me afterward and did not require me to be anybody's evening, and every one of them had been immunized against the one thing I actually wanted, and the last of them wouldn't be in a room with me.
On the eleventh of March I had a headache and no aspirin and I went into Aaron's room to look in his desk, because Aaron was a pharmacy student and Aaron's desk was the pharmacy.