He waved a hand at me, dismissively. “It doesn’t matter. Even if you did get a little rough with her, a little forceful, any lawyer worth his salt can argue that she likes it that way. That she asked for it. Not to mention she was drunk as hell. Nobody watched you have sex, right?”
“Of course not,” I said. “But Mason and Gia did see her right after. They drove her home.” I repeated what Mason had said to me earlier that day about how Amber’s behavior reminded him of other assault victims, about needing to tell the truth and deal with the consequences of my actions.
“And this guy’s supposed to be your partner?” my dad said, with disdain. “What an asshole. Ignore him.”
The pressure was building inside my chest. “That’s easier said than done. I respect him, you know? He’s taught me a lot.”
“So you’re going to let him convince you to get arrested?” my dad said. “Listen to me, Son. I know I said you didn’t have it in you to go after that girl, and I’m sorry for that. You’ve got more balls than I thought.” He scooted forward in order to perch on the edge of the couch, took a sip of his drink, and then looked at me, intently. “But if there’s anything I know, it’s women. I know what they want and how they want it. Only sometimes, once they get it, they start overthinking every goddamn thing. Like those college girls who accuse football players of rape. They want to screw the hot athlete, and then, after they do, they worry about what people will say about them . . . that they’ll look like a slut, so they make up some bullshit lie to make themselves feel better. It’s a load of feminist crap. Women say no because they want us to convince them to say yes. That’s the way it works. Cavemen grabbed their women by the hair and dragged them into the cave for a reason. It’s not violence. It’s fucking biology. The natural order of things.”
I gave him a hesitant nod, though I wasn’t sure I agreed with everything he’d said. Sure, I believed that there were probably women out there who made false rape accusations because they regretted having sex, or because their reputations were at stake. But did I really think that was the case with Amber? Maybe she was worried about Daniel finding out. Maybe she knew he’d break up with her and she was afraid of having that happen, so she decided to act like she hadn’t wanted to have sex. That I’d forced her. Or maybe she already had told Daniel what happened, and he’d ended things—why else would she have been with that guy at the bar tonight? Maybe I didn’t know her as well as I thought I did. Maybe my dad was right—maybe Amber had told me to wait as a reflex, as what a “good” girl is supposed to say, knowing full well that I would keep going. Wanting me to. She hadn’t really fought me. She didn’t claw at my eyes or scream for help. She never actually used the word “no.”
Seeing that I was confused, my father spoke again. “Tell me this. Did you force her up the stairs? Did you hold a gun or knife to her and threaten to kill her if she didn’t have sex with you?”
“Of course not.”
“Did you hit her? Did you tie her up and gag her so no one could hear her scream? Did you torture her or beat her into submission?” I shook my head, and he continued. “All right, then. It wasn’t rape. You were two drunk, consenting adults, and now she regrets what she did. End of story.”
His words reassured me, even though I had never liked how he treated women. Coming here had been a last resort, but it had surprisingly calmed me. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I felt connected to my dad, and I knew, no matter what might happen next, at least I had someone on my side.
Amber
A few weeks after my appointment with Vanessa, I sat, shrunk down behind the steering wheel in my car, parked about a block from the station house where Tyler worked. It was almost five a.m. on a mid-October morning, an hour before I would need to get to the gym to meet my first client, but I didn’t want to leave until I saw exactly what time Tyler’s truck would leave the station’s parking lot. I’d been watching him for the last two weeks, trying to pin down his normal schedule, but the timing of his shifts varied—some nights he was off just after midnight, others, not until dawn—and I had discovered this was a more difficult task than I’d thought it would be. I figured if I stuck it out long enough, I could figure out a pattern and pinpoint the best time to approach him.
I wasn’t exactly sure what I was doing, or how I would do it. I just knew that, after seeing Tyler with that woman at the bar, likely about to do to her what he’d done to me, I’d gone online and researched women who had taken revenge on their rapists. I was stunned by the level of violence the victims were capable of when carrying out their plans. I’d already heard of Lorena Bobbitt, of course—the woman who famously cut off the tip of her husband’s penis after he’d come home drunk and raped her. But I also read about a woman whose little girl was raped by a man, and then, seven years later, when he saw her on the street and called out, “How’s your daughter?” the mother followed him into a crowded bar, doused him with gasoline, and lit him on fire. There were stories of women in India cutting off their attackers’ heads, of a Turkish woman who stabbed and shot her assailant in his groin, and then cut off his head, too. There was an American woman who lured her rapist into her house, tied him up, beat him with a baseball bat, and then tattooed the word “rapist” on his penis.
As I read these women’s stories, as violent as they were, part of me couldn’t help but cheer for them. I understood the desperation they felt, the reasons why they did what they did, even if I didn’t think that mutilation or murder would be on my particular agenda when it came to holding Tyler accountable. What I wanted was much more subtle than that. Less final. I wanted him to suffer, yes, but in a way that would haunt him, the same way that I was haunted. I wanted him to ache with despair; I wanted him to wake up, breathing hard, worried that his heart might explode inside his chest. I wanted him to look in the mirror and be struck with self-loathing; I wanted his life to change forever, to have everything and everyone he loved be tainted—forever altered—by the ugliness of what he’d done. I wanted him to question everything about who he was, to hate himself as much as I did, me. I wanted him to pay a steep and painful price for what he did.