“Maybe. I’ll let you know when you tell me what happened next.”
“Well, like I said, I’ll tell you one story. We were both really drunk. I mean way over the line. He was lying on top of me and had his face pressed hard to mine, and I could feel how his whiskers were chafing my face, but that felt good, too. I was staring at the spinning ceiling, that lone bulb turning in its socket, and I was trying not to feel sick.
“And that’s when he started talking to me, though it was almost like he didn’t care if I was listening. He told me we were downtown, late at night, walking hand in hand. We’d seen a movie, and we were going back to the car, and I was wearing tights and a short black skirt. And that the whole time we were watching the movie he’d been sliding his hand up the tights and under the skirt and fondling me, so the cloth between my legs was already damp. And as we were walking, he was holding my hand, only he was also using his fingernail to lightly scratch the skin on my palm, which is something he knew I liked. And we wanted each other, he said. So badly that even though we were only a few blocks from the car, we slipped into an alley between buildings that had a closed end. He told me how he pinned me against a wall, pushing me hard, first, so my head hit the bricks, and then he’d yanked my tights off of me, and lifted me up and then I’d wrapped my legs around him while he flattened me against the wall. He was pulling my underwear to the side so he could enter me, he said. And just as he was about to do that three other men turned into the alley and caught us there.”
She stopped and found herself listening again. She imagined she heard footsteps, but it was only the story. Something like a soft pellet struck the asphalt outside the truck where they were parked.
“Did you hear that?”
“Yeah,” Genevieve said. “I think it’s a raindrop.”
“Did you feel any yet?”
“A couple.”
“Do you think we should go inside before the skies open up?”
“I don’t think they’re going to open up.”
Just then a raindrop hit the roof of the cab.
“You sure about that?”
“No, but I think we can wait. Keep telling your story.”
Claire lay flat on her back and waited to feel the rain on her face, and continued. “So Seth kept talking to me as he was pushing inside me. He told me that the men were drunk, just like we were. And he told me they were laughing when they came into the alley, but as soon as they saw how he had me pinned against the wall they went completely silent. They stood there watching me, he said, and that I was still breathing hard because I couldn’t help myself, and he said he was frozen there with his body against mine, and he told me how the three men were standing there, and how you could see the veins in their arms, the same way that I liked to trace the veins in his arms with my fingertip, and even from where he was standing he could see in their veins their pulses quickening. And then he said he slowly let me down, let my back slide against the wall until I was on my feet, and he turned to face the men, but they were already on him, and one had slammed his head with a broken piece of brick, and almost knocked him out, and he was slumped down at the base of the wall opposite me, his head bleeding, and barely conscious, and the other two men were already on me. They’d forced me to the pavement between the alley walls, and they were holding me down on my hands and knees, and when I struggled to get away, one had slapped me open-handed hard against my face, and this had made me go still, and one of the men was holding my hair tight to the base of my scalp, and the other was tearing at my skirt and panties, and he told me, Seth told me, that they both entered me at the same time, one of them in my mouth, and one of them from behind, and that the man who had knocked him almost unconscious with the brick had taken hold of Seth’s bloody hair and was forcing him to watch as the men did this to me. He told me how the men were getting more and more excited, how the stones and broken glass in the alley were cutting my knees as they thrust against me, and when he started to tell me how they were coming inside me, Seth himself came so hard that he knocked me off the edge of the mattress and onto the wood floor, and it was ten seconds before he could say, ‘Sorry! Sorry! Sorry if I hurt you.’”