“Oh!” I say. “Ok! Wow. Ok.” Small, stupid words. When he takes my wrist and guides my hand to it, I say them again. “Oh! Ok!” He closes my fingers around it, and I know that I’m meant to do the up-and-down stuff, and my hand immediately starts pumping away, dutiful as a robot, disconnected from my brain. It’s loose skin sliding over a column of muscle, but rough, halting. It’s like a dog hacking up garbage that’s been sitting in its stomach for days, that violent, full-body gag.
“Slower, baby,” he says. “A little slower.” He shows me what he means, and I try to keep the pace even though my arm is starting to cramp. I want to tell him I’m tired, to roll over and never look at the thing ever again, but that would be selfish. He said me naked is the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. It would be cruel for me to counter that with disgust. It doesn’t matter that my skin crawls from touching him. It doesn’t matter. It’s fine. He did that to you, now you do this to him. You can handle a few minutes of this.
When he guides my hand away from it, I worry he’ll ask me to use my mouth next and I don’t want that, I can’t do that, but instead he says, “Do you want me to fuck you?” It’s a question, but he isn’t really asking.
I can’t wrap my head around the change in him. Now I’m not even sure if he really said, We won’t go further than that for now, or maybe “for now” meant something totally different from what I assumed. Do I want him to fuck me? Fuck me. The crudeness of it makes me turn my face into the pillow. His voice doesn’t even sound the same, haggard and rough. I open my eyes and he’s positioning himself between my legs, brow furrowed in concentration.
I try to stall, tell him I don’t want to get pregnant.
“You won’t,” he says. “That’s impossible.”
I move my hips away. “What does that mean?”
“I had an operation, a vasectomy,” he says. He holds himself with one hand and steadies me with the other. “You won’t get pregnant. Just relax.” He tries to push in, his thumb digging hard into my pelvis. It won’t fit.
“You gotta calm down, honey,” he says. “Take a deep breath.”
I start to tear up, but he doesn’t stop, just says I’m doing great as he keeps trying to get it in. He tells me to breathe in and out, and when I exhale, he thrusts hard and pushes a little farther inside. I start crying, really crying—still, he doesn’t stop.
“You’re doing great,” he says. “Another deep breath, ok? It’s ok if it hurts. It won’t hurt forever. Just one more deep breath, ok? There we go. That’s nice. That’s so nice.”
Afterward, he gets out of bed, a flash of belly and butt before I shut my eyes. He pulls on his underwear and the elastic band snaps like a whip crack, like something splitting in two. As he walks to the bathroom, he coughs hard and loud and I hear him spit into the sink. Under the blankets, I’m raw and slick, my legs slimy all the way down my thighs. My mind feels like the lake on a calm day, glassy and still. I’m nothing, no one, nowhere.
When he comes back into the bedroom, he looks like himself again, dressed in a T-shirt and sweatpants, his glasses on. He slides into bed, curls his body around mine. He whispers, “We made love, didn’t we?” and I gauge the distance between “fuck” and “made love.”
After a while, we have sex again and it’s slower, easier. I don’t come from it, but at least I’m not crying this time. I even like the weight of him on top of me, so heavy it slows my heart. He comes with a groan and a shudder takes over his body, radiating from his core. The feel of him trembling on top of me makes my muscles contract and squeeze him even tighter inside, and I understand then what people probably mean when they say that stuff about two becoming one.
He apologizes for finishing too quickly, for being clumsy. He says it’s been a while since he was last intimate. I roll the word intimate around in my mouth and think of Ms. Thompson.
After we have sex the second time, I go to the bathroom and peek in his medicine cabinet, something I wouldn’t think to do if I hadn’t seen women in movies do it when they spend the night in a strange man’s home. His cabinet is full of the usual Band-Aids and Neosporin, over-the-counter digestive stuff, plus two orange prescription bottles labeled with names I recognize from commercials, Viagra and Wellbutrin.
On the dark drive back to campus, the streetlights flashing yellow, he asks how I feel. “I hope you’re not too overwhelmed,” he says.
I know he wants the truth and that I should tell him I didn’t like being woken up by him hard and practically pushing into me. That I wasn’t ready to have sex this way. That it felt forced. But I’m not brave enough to say any of this—not even that I feel sick to my stomach when I think about him guiding my hand to his penis and don’t understand why he didn’t stop when I started to cry. That the thought I want to go home ran through my head the entire time we first did it.
“I feel fine,” I say.
He watches me closely, like he wants to be sure I’m telling the truth. “That’s good,” he says. “That’s what we want.”
2017
Text from Mom: Hey you. Listen to what just happened. Middle of the night, I can’t sleep, heard something outside, went downstairs and turned on the porch light, and there was a BEAR going through the garbage can!!! Scared the crap out of me. I screamed and ran upstairs and hid under the covers lol. Watching that British cooking show now to try to calm down. Lordy. Not much other news here. That woman Marjorie who lives on the other side of the lake has lung cancer. The one with the goats. Anyway, she’s on her way out. Very sad. My car got recalled because of that thing with the door. Going to take 8–12 weeks. They gave me some piece of shit rental. Ugh. Horror after horror. Anyway, just checking in. Call your momma sometime.
Bleary-eyed and still in bed at ten a.m., I try to make sense of the text. I have no idea who Marjorie is, or what’s wrong with Mom’s car door, or what British cooking show she’s talking about. Ever since Dad died, I’ll wake up to texts like these. This one, at least, has regular punctuation; others are rambling stream-of-consciousness thoughts linked with ellipses, incoherent enough to make me worry.
I close the text, open Facebook, and check Taylor’s profile for anything new. I type into the search bar names I’ve looked up so many times they pop up with the first letter: Jesse Ly, Jenny Murphy. Jesse lives in Boston, does something in marketing. Jenny’s a surgeon in Philadelphia. In her photos, she already looks middle-aged, deep wrinkles around her eyes, brown hair laced with gray. Nothing posted about Strane in their profiles, but why would there be? They’re adults living actual fulfilling lives. They have no reason to remember what happened back then, or even to remember me.
X-ing out of Facebook, I google “Henry Plough Atlantica College,” and the first result is his faculty profile with the same decade-old photo of him in his office, the beers he and I would later drink together unopened on the bookshelf behind him. He was thirty-four then, only a couple years older than I am now. The second search result is an article from the Atlantica student newspaper dated May 2015, “Literature Professor Henry Plough Receives Teaching Award.” It’s a prize given every four years, the recipient decided by a student vote. Junior English major Emma Thibodeau says students are thrilled with the result: “Henry is an incredible professor, so inspiring and you can talk to him about anything. He’s just an amazing person. His classes have changed my life.”