Saturday, March 9 – 10:30 AM
Maria
For the first time in as long as I can remember, I made it through the night without a single bad dream. The sun is shining in the window when I wake up, and it leaves a warm, bright rectangle on my bedspread.
I don’t want to get up, but I don’t want to go back to sleep either. What I really want is to go back to last night, to lie on the sofa and feel Owen’s arms around me again. I don’t know what happened last night, but it was magical!
I finally convince myself to get up, but I’m not getting dressed. It’s Saturday, I have lots of homework to do, and I have to remember to sign up for the spring career fair. Today is a day for flannel pajamas, I think.
The career fair is only two weeks away now, and it feels like I was a freshman only yesterday. Time flies, especially when you’re finally starting to have fun.
Tina is meditating over her morning cup of coffee when I come down to the kitchen.
“Your English muffin’s already in the toaster,” she mumbles sleepily as I rummage through the fridge, and I smile gratefully and call off my search.
“Thanks.”
“No problem,” she answers. “How’d you enjoy last night?”
“It was fantastic,” I gush as I pour myself a cup of coffee. My muffin pops up in the toaster, and I slather it with butter before joining her at the table.
“What about yours?”
She smiles slyly at me before answering.
“Are you sure you want those kinds of details?”
“Oh God, no,” I stammer, shaking my head. “I don’t want to hear it!”
The last thing I want to hear about is Tina having sex. She’s like a little sister to me, or maybe more like tiny, older sister. Either way, I don’t want to hear about it! Not now, not ever.
“I thought not,” she whispers. She sticks out her tongue at me before taking another sip and sighing contently into her coffee. A puff of steam floats out from her cup and slowly fades away.
My muffin crunches delightfully as I take the first bite. Tina made the coffee super strong again, though, and it’s so bitter that it feels like my tongue is shriveling up.
“You know... I’m really proud of you,” she blurts out suddenly. “For last night, I mean.”
I don’t know what to say to something like that, so instead I take another bite of my muffin and let her keep going.
“You have no idea how excited I was when I walked in and saw you kissing him! You’ve come so far and so fast,” says Tina, and then she adds, “Sorry about walking in on you though, I didn’t interrupt anything... big... last night, did I?”
I shake my head and I feel my face turn red.
“No worries—you didn’t. I’m happy you came in when you did, though.”
She raises an eyebrow and waits for me to elaborate.
“I... well, if you hadn’t come in when you did...” I stammer, not sure what to say.
“You were losing control?” she asks, and I nod. I’m glad she can read my mind, because I have no idea how to express what happened.
“Everything just felt so wonderful,” I whisper. “It was amazing, and I don’t know if I could have stopped myself if we went any further.”
She nods and purses her lips.
“It’s like I was lost, kind of,” I try to explain, grasping for whatever words I can find. “My brain was off in a haze, enjoying itself while it let my body do whatever it wanted.”
She closes her eyes and smiles at me as if she knows exactly what I mean. She probably does, given how she spent the evening.
“So... mind if I change the subject for just a second?” asks Tina after a long silence. Her eyes are wide and excited, and she looks like she might explode if she doesn’t tell me whatever it is that’s on her mind.
“Go for it!” I answer with a grin.
She holds up a brown manila envelope with big red letters stamped on it. “INTERVIEW.”
“The vet school!” she squeals happily, dancing in her chair. “They’re interviewing me for admission!”
“Awesome!” I shout, and she high-fives me from across the table. “See? I told you they’d be interested!”
“They only take like fifty students a year and they want to interview me?” she gushes excitedly. “That just doesn’t happen!”
“Congratulations!”
“You had any luck with your interviews so far?” she asks, and I shake my head.
“Oh well... you’ll do great at the spring career fair,” she tells me.
I hope I do. I haven’t applied anywhere since January—not after panicking during the last one—and I’m running out of time before graduation.
We stare silently at each other until Tina finally breaks the ice again.
“So... anything else you want to talk about from last night?”
“I need to figure some things out for myself right now,” I answer quietly. “A lot of my feelings aren’t making sense, and I don’t understand them.”
I should be leaping for joy right now—maybe even racing over to Owen’s place to kiss him again—but deep inside, I’m also a little nervous. I lost control of myself last night, and as wonderful as it felt, it was scary to feel myself do things I’d never thought I’d do.
“Welcome to romance, sweetie,” Tina says, reaching out and patting my hand comfortingly. “Your thoughts never make sense when you like someone.”
“Never?”
“Well... maybe they do eventually, but they haven’t for me yet,” she answers with a shrug. “When you’re excited about someone and new to all of it, well... all bets are off.”
I sigh as I listen to her. I’m twenty-two and only just now dating someone—how am I ever supposed to catch up emotionally to where I should be?
“Explore your feelings,” she continues, and then quietly adds, “Just... please be careful, okay?”
“You’ve told me that a few times now. What do you mean?”
She hops up from the table and refills her coffee before answering me.
“Good feelings can make you do very stupid things,” she explains, and now I get where she’s going with her warning. I felt the beginning of it last night—how I lost control of myself to the warm, wonderful feelings and almost let myself go completely. Even more, I remember how Tina was during her freshman year.
After her mother forgot her, Tina did everything she could to make connections with other people and replace the family she’d lost. She went through guy after guy during her freshman, and she always told me about whomever she was sleeping with. I always thought she was bragging about her conquests and hated listening to her until the night she finally broke down and started crying up in her top bunk. She’d been screaming for help—begging for someone to care about her—and I hadn’t been listening.
She’s worried that I’ll end up like she was.
Tina excuses herself to go study. I really should do the same, but I desperately need to take a shower. My hair feels gross and greasy, and I know I’ll never be able to concentrate like this.
I let the water warm up while I grab my bathrobe and towel from my room and the air is thick with steam by the time I undress and step into the comforting heat of the shower.
I close my eyes and lean back against the shower wall, enjoying the mixed sensations of hot water and cold tile. My imagination immediately goes back to last night—back to memories of Owen’s body pressing against mine and the incredible feeling of his fingers against my skin. I’ve never felt that good before.
I wonder what would have happened if Tina hadn’t walked in on us. Where would we have gone next? My imagination immediately tries to answer, nearly burying me in a cascade of delightfully dirty ideas. A relaxed smile spreads across my face as I lean back with my eyes closed, imagining all the things Owen and I could have done last night.
I slowly run a hand up my leg as I imagine laying in Owen’s arms as he does the same to me. In my mind, his hand gently touches me between my legs. A shiver runs through me as I touch myself with one finger. Would I really have been okay with him touching me like this? I think so... it’s hard to tell now. My mind starts to wander off into a pleasant haze as I slowly drag my finger up and down, feeling each wonderful tingle grow a little stronger than the last. Over and over, groaning as I feel the heat growing inside me, Owen matching pace in my mind all the while.
A sharp burst of pleasure shoots up my spine, and suddenly I’m not having fun anymore. The burning pleasures are still growing inside me, but the dark place in the back of my mind is growing even faster. An old fear flickers to life deep inside me, reminding me that I’ve felt this all before.
I try to focus on Owen’s hand against my leg, how he touched me, how his body felt pressed against me, but even remembering the glorious feelings of last night can’t stop the terror bursting to life in the back of my mind.
Owen’s beautiful smile and gray eyes are gone, replaced instead by Darren’s cold, triumphant sneer.
All I can do is lie on the bed, eyes wide with fear, as he yanks my skirt up around my waist. He doesn’t even bother holding me down anymore. He knows I’m not going anywhere, that my body has abandoned me and left me defenseless against everything he’s doing to me. Fear has completely paralyzed me. I can’t even scream. God, I want to scream so badly.
Why is this happening? Why is he doing this to me?
I can feel myself breaking apart as he pushes into me. I want to scream in pain, fear, humiliation... every nerve in my body wants to scream out loud, but I lay on the bed in silence. It hurts so much that I feel like I’m dying. My mind curls up in a little ball inside me, crying in misery the way my body ought to be right now.
Instead, my body is betraying me. It’s not enough for it to stop me from fighting... now it wants me to believe this is fun. Impossible feelings are bursting to life inside me—feelings that my body claims are pleasures but my mind knows are nightmares—and all I can do is lie here and take them.
I want to die.
I yank my hand away and curl up on the floor of the shower, hoping that the sound of the water masks my sobbing. I lean my head against the cold tiles and close my eyes as the steaming-hot water pours down on me. I need another shower now so I can wash away the invisible filth on my skin.
I can’t escape. It’s been seven years and Darren still controls me.
––––––––
“Maria? Are you in there?” calls Tina from the hall. I’m sitting on the floor, still dressed in my white bathrobe as I write feverishly.
“Give me ten minutes,” I yell back to her, not looking up from the book of nightmares. It’ll be more than ten minutes, but I have to write this down. Someday, the book will swallow all the bad memories and I’ll be free.
I remember the pain as he pushed into me, and even worse than that, the terror and helplessness as my body betrayed me.
I couldn’t move. I wanted to struggle—my mind screamed for me to fight back—but I couldn’t move a muscle. I could barely even breathe.
It went on and on, and my body started reacting to what he was doing to me. I’m lying on the bed, screaming in silent terror while my body takes him in and acts like it’s enjoying itself, but all I want to do is cry. I’ve never felt more alone in my life than when that happened. I was trapped inside myself, forced to watch and feel everything that happened like it was all a sick joke.
My body betrayed me and then had the nerve to try to tell me it was fun.
Everything I read tells me this is normal—that my body only did what it was programmed to do, and that most people freeze up just like I did—but it’s the worst thing I’ve ever felt. It’s as if my own body hated me and wanted to hurt me just as badly as Darren did. It let him take me without a fight, let him violate me, and then kicked me while I was down.
I hated it! I hated every f*cking second of it! How am I supposed to ever be with Owen now, when all the things I want to do with him are broken, when even the idea of feeling good is bad?
The nightmares will come back again. How can I risk leading him on and letting our relationship get stronger when I know what will happen if we ever take that next step? I don’t want to hurt him.
“I’m so sorry, Owen,” I whisper. “You deserve a normal girl, and I’ll never be that.”