1. Ryan #2
I wonder often how much of this is my fault.
If I’d only tried harder to be the person Paul needed—wanted?
expected?—maybe the two of us would still be able to hold a conversation that wasn’t an endless negotiation of terms. Maybe I wouldn’t have learned to anticipate a fight every time he opened his mouth.
Maybe sex wouldn’t feel like a test of how much I can give up without unmaking myself.
It was easier, in some ways, to just go along with whatever Paul wanted, because saying “no” didn’t mean the conversation stopped.
It just meant the conversation got more complicated, and the ground under me got less steady.
Sometimes I think about leaving. I even tried once, packing a duffel bag with enough clothes and a couple of ratty paperbacks, walking down the block to the convenience store, and then sitting on the curb with nowhere to go and no concrete plan.
I lasted forty-three minutes before Paul’s car pulled up, flashing headlights at me in the near-empty lot.
I got in without a word, and Paul didn’t ask why, where, or even if.
We drove around for an hour, ended up at a Taco Bell at two in the morning, and ate three chalupas each in silence.
The next morning I unpacked the bag and put the books back on the shelf, but left the duffel hidden beneath my underwear and socks in the dresser drawer, just in case.
I’m not ready to leave yet. Not when Paul still feels like the sweet, caring guy I love sometimes.
* * *
The bedroom is dark when I wake.
Not the gentle dark of a room I’ve known for years; I can tell something is wrong before my eyes are even open. My body knows before my mind catches up, the way it always does when danger crawls beneath the surface of sleep.
There’s a weight on top of me.
Too hot, heavy, and moving.
My pajama bottoms are gone. I don’t remember taking them off. I don’t remember a lot of things because I was asleep, and now I’m not, and Paul is—
He’s inside me.
The realization hits like ice water thrown across my face. I gasp, and the sound is small and pathetic in the dark.
“Shh.” His breath is hot against my ear. One of his hands is pressed flat against my sternum, holding me down. The other is gripping my hip painfully hard. “It’s okay. Go back to sleep.”
“Get off me!” The words come out strangled. My hands fly to his shoulders, pushing, but he doesn’t budge. He’s twice my size, and he’s using all of it. “Paul—stop—”
“Just let it happen, Ry.” His voice is so calm it makes my stomach turn. He rocks into me slowly like he has all the time in the world. Like this is something we agreed to. “You need this. You’ve been so tense.”
I can’t breathe. Every nerve in my body is screaming, but I’m trapped beneath him, and I know—I know—that fighting is only going to make it worse. I’ve read enough—heard enough from therapists, from survivors—to know that sometimes the safest thing to do is endure.
Just get through it.
Let it be over.
So I go still.
My body goes limp beneath him, and I feel the exact moment he registers it. His rhythm changes. He makes a soft, satisfied sound against my neck, like a man settling into a warm bath.
Just get through it, I tell myself. Just let him finish, and then you can leave. You can figure out leaving. You just have to survive this first.
I close my eyes and try to disappear. I’ve gotten good at that over the years—the art of being somewhere else while my body stays here. It’s a skill I learned long before Paul, in a different house with a different man’s voice.
But then I feel it.
The absence of something I should feel.
There’s no latex. No thin barrier between his skin and mine. Just heat and wetness and the terrible intimacy of skin against skin.
My eyes fly open in the dark, the dissociation shattering like glass. “Are you—” My voice breaks. I try again. “Are you wearing anything?”
Paul doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to. The absence of anything between us is its own answer, and it sends a bolt of pure, animal terror through me that overrides every instinct toward compliance I’ve ever built.
“No—no, no, no—” I’m thrashing now, my hands scrabbling at his shoulders, his arms, his face. My knee connects with something—his thigh, his stomach, I don’t know—and he grunts but doesn’t stop. “Get out of me—Paul, you’re not wearing anything, get out—”
“Stop fighting.” His voice hasn’t changed. It’s still calm, still reasonable, like I’m the one being irrational. His hand on my sternum presses down harder, pinning me flat and restricting my breathing. “It’s okay, Ry. It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay—you can’t—” I’m crying now, I realize. The tears are hot and useless against my temples. “I don’t want this—I don’t want a baby—you know I don’t—”
“You don’t know what you want.” He’s breathing harder now, and I can feel him getting close. “You’ll see. This is what we need.”
“Paul, please—”
His rhythm falters, stutters, and then he’s pressing deep—as deep as he can go—and I feel the hot, wet pulse of him finishing inside me. Every nerve in my body recoils. My stomach heaves.
And then he doesn’t pull out.
He stays there. Still inside me. Still on top of me. His full weight pressing me into the mattress, his hand flat against my stomach like he’s already imagining something growing there.
I retch.
“Stay still,” he murmurs. “Just stay still for a minute.”
No.
No.
NO!
The word tears through every layer of learned passivity, every carefully constructed wall of survival. Something primal and ancient and furious erupts out of me, and I am no longer the quiet boy who endures. I am something feral and cornered.
I buck beneath him with everything I have. My hips wrench sideways, my knees drive up, my nails rake down his forearms hard enough to draw blood—I feel it, warm and wet beneath my fingertips.
“Stop—” Paul’s composure finally cracks.
His hand clamps down harder on my stomach, fingers digging into the soft flesh below my navel as if he can physically hold his seed inside me.
His other hand releases my hip and grabs my wrist, pinning it to the mattress.
“Ryan, stop moving—you need to keep it—”
The word keep sends another wave of nausea through me. I twist my free hand toward the nightstand, fingers scrabbling blindly across the surface. A phone charger. A glass of water I never finished.
My fingers close around something heavy and cold—the ceramic base of the lamp.
I swing.
I don’t aim. I don’t think. My body does it for me, the way animals fight when there’s nothing left but the desperate, screaming need to survive.
The base connects with the side of his head with a dull, wet thud that I feel all the way up my arm.
Paul makes a sound—not a word, not a yell, just a short, surprised grunt—and his entire body goes slack above me. The hand on my stomach loosens. His weight shifts sideways.
I scramble out from under him like something crawling from a grave. My bare feet hit the carpet, and I’m already moving, already running, already reaching for the dresser drawer where I keep the duffel bag I’ve packed and unpacked a dozen times in my head over the past few weeks.
The bag is real. I actually first packed it after the second broken condom, when something in my gut told me to be ready. I’d shoved it to the back of the drawer and told myself I was being paranoid. Told myself that the man I loved wouldn’t—
Well, he did.
I yank the drawer open. The duffel is there, exactly where I left it, stuffed with clothes and my medication and the cash I’ve been slowly pulling out of our joint account twenty dollars at a time.
Behind me, Paul makes a low, groaning sound. I don’t turn around. I grab the bag, grab my car key, grab my phone and its charger, and pull on the first pair of shorts my hands find.
And then I’m running.
My pajama top is still on, twisted and damp with sweat, and I’m about to be dripping Paul’s cum through my shorts, but I don’t care.
The front door.
The lock turns. My hand is shaking so badly I have to try twice.
Behind me, I hear Paul’s voice—muffled, distant, like he’s speaking through water. “Ryan—wait—”
I don’t wait.
I wrench the door open, and the cold night air hits me like a slap.
It’s December in Pennsylvania, raining, and I’m barefoot on the asphalt of the parking lot, but I don’t feel it.
Not the cold, nor the wet, nor the rough bite of gravel under my soles, and definitely not the wetness between my thighs that I’m refusing to think about.
My car is three spaces down. I throw the duffel into the passenger seat, yank the door open, and slide behind the wheel.
My hands are shaking so badly I can barely get the key into the ignition.
The engine turns over—a horrible, grinding sound that makes my chest seize—twice, and then catches on the third try.
I don’t look at the apartment.
I don’t look at the window where the bedroom light might flick on, or the front door that might swing open, or the shape of the man I thought I knew stumbling out into the dark after me.
I just drive.
I pull out of the parking lot faster than I mean to, the tires shrieking against the cold, wet asphalt as the car slews sideways in the dark.
The fishtail jolts me, a brief lucid terror slicing through the numbness, and for a second I’m certain I’m about to hit the streetlamp at the edge of the lot.
It doesn’t happen. The car rights itself, tires finding traction, and I’m rocketing down the access road, then onto the four-lane, then the on-ramp that spills me onto the pulsing, sodium-vapor artery of Interstate 83.