My name is Andrea, but I will only answer to Andi. Seven years ago, when I was eighteen, I was raped. I had a date with a man, I don't even remember his name now, though maybe I've just blocked it out. Anyway, he got me drunk and took me somewhere quiet and then simply didn't hear the word 'no' even when I was screaming it. God, he hurt me so much. It was the most devastating experience of my life, and whatever you might hear to the contrary, rape is not fine, it's awful. It's frightening, humiliating and utterly demoralising, as well as extremely painful. Show me a woman who say's she enjoyed being raped and I'll show you a liar. I was a virgin then, and it was years before I let a man get near me again. This is the story of how I eventually managed it.
I didn't tell anyone about my rape. I just walked home, crying all the way and being ignored by the people that passed me, then I got in the shower and scrubbed myself raw. I wanted to clean every bit of the dirty bastard's contamination off of me, every bit of skin that he might have touched, every possible atom that he might have left behind. I felt so unclean, so polluted by him, defiled and degraded, and, silly as it sounds, I felt guilty about it as well. I just wanted to put it behind me, but that was wishful thinking.
The physical bruises soon went, but the mental hurt remained and I went into a period of depression and agoraphobia. I couldn't even face opening the curtains some mornings, let alone going out and facing the world. Needless to say the company I was working for soon got fed up with a continually absent employee who couldn't give a reason, and they decided they could do without me altogether. That was the worst period of my life; the arsehole was still beating up on me inside my head, pushing my nose into what he'd done. He'd probably forgotten the quick shag that he'd had to fight for from a petite, naive teenager, but I could never get it out of my mind. That time lasted for a full year before I began to take heed of the bastard's words as he pushed me out of his car.
"You've just been fucked, that's all. Get over it."
So I did get over it. I used his words as my mantra and I fought my way back to reality, making some sort of viable life for myself. I'd been working at a graphic design studio, and I figured that I could do that from home without having to go out into the world. I wasn't ready for exploring the world again then, not that I am now, really. I studied online, and found to my delight that I was good at it. Eventually I began to take commissions, small at first but then bigger and better. Now I have my own clientele, including a couple of names that you'll find along the High St, and my bank balance is looking better and better.
But I was still not over it altogether. I didn't go out if I didn't have to, I'd still never had another boyfriend and my circle of friends was just one -- my lifelong buddy, Linda, who was by then married and lived too far away just to pop round for a coffee. Even she knew nothing about my experience; she thought I just preferred that kind of existence. I don't think she realised how much I looked forward to her occasional visits, when she would drive over to spend a day with me.
Okay, I was lonely, unbearably, unendingly lonely, not just for company, but bizarrely, for physical intimacy as well. I think nature intended me to be a passionate woman with a strong libido, because although I couldn't let myself have a man, I frequently felt horny and I often masturbated frantically just trying to keep my urges under control. I needed someone in bed beside me, someone I could reach for in the night, someone to make me feel wanted, and someone to satisfy my needs. I'd even thought of going to bed with a woman, but although the thought of the human warmth appealed, the package it would be wrapped up in didn't. It was just not my thing. Basically I needed a man, even though my brain wouldn't let me have one.
But it's strange how fate intervenes, isn't it, and it intervened for me just at the right moment. I'd steeled myself for the umpteenth time to the idea of rejoining the dating game to prevent myself from drifting irreversibly down the path that leads to old maids, but before I could actually do anything about it, David wandered into my life.
David was sent around by a software company that I deal with, to reinstall and debug a new software programme that was giving me problems, and I figured that I would take advantage of him. No, I don't mean take advantage of him in that way, I wouldn't dream of doing that to anyone - for obvious reasons. What I meant was that I intended to try out my conversational skills on him, just to see if I could get into a friendly chat with a stranger of the opposite sex.
To look at David was quite ordinary - tallish, darkish, and slimish, you know what I mean. He suffered from having the scarring left behind by bad acne, but on the plus side he had lovely blue eyes, as pale as my brown eyes are dark, and a ready lop-sided smile.
As he worked I kept him well supplied with coffee and with my own version of light conversation. It must have sounded a bit forced, but I made the right sort of inane comments about what he was doing, cracked a couple of silly jokes and asked him a few questions about himself. He wasn't the most communicative of people and so I accepted the challenge and kept chatting, until finally I'd managed to get him to laugh and to give more than monosyllabic answers.
He was twenty-two, lived alone apart from a tank full of fish, and didn't have a girlfriend. No, he wasn't gay, he told me, taking my light-hearted, jokey question seriously, he just didn't have a girlfriend. There was something about the way he spoke. The 'please don't probe to deeply' way he tried to fend off talking about his love life rang a bell with me, and so, of course, I did just that.
It was late afternoon by the time, thanks to my hindrance, that he'd got my computer up and running with the new software and, for some reason I'll never figure out, I impulsively asked him to stay and eat with me. I'd come to the conclusion, purely instinctively, that I could probably trust him and that here was a fellow traveller, and anyway, I'd felt a slight but unmistakeable bond grow up between us. Perhaps he had felt the same and perhaps that was why he accepted.
Slowly but surely, as the meal progressed, he came out of his shell, and slowly but surely I felt safer in his company. In the end I asked him bluntly how come he didn't go out with girls, and he responded by turning the question around and asking why I didn't go out with men. We came to an arrangement. If he told me his reasons, then I would tell him mine.
So that is what we did. A bit hesitantly at first on both sides, but then more and more honestly as we found out more about each other, until in the end we were discussing our problems quite openly.
David's story was almost a mirror image of my own. It seems that he had made a mess of trying to deflower his first girlfriend, who by way of retaliation had taunted him unmercifully, and when they inevitably split up she had then put it about the neighbourhood that he couldn't get it up. That rumour had turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy and now he was an impotent virgin, sexually active only between the ears, just like me. His fun, like mine, relied purely on his hand. He'd tried, but as soon as he was faced with taking the sexual initiative with a girl, his erection disappeared like grilled snowflakes. At least I knew that I was safe in his company, a man who couldn't get a hard on was hardly a potential rapist, now was he?
I was also impressed with his non-judgemental acceptance of my own tale. Not once did he comment on my stupidity for allowing a first date to end in a lover's lane, nor ask if I'd led the guy on at all. He took what I said at face value, as I did him.
"Not an easy thing to break out of, is it?" He observed after we'd both confessed to feeling imprisoned by our experiences.
That chance remark turned both of our lives around, certainly it did mine and I think the same applies to David. It led to our discussing how we could break out of our past bonds and under what circumstances we could see ourselves sleeping with a member of the opposite sex. In its turn that discussion led to the most unexpected and outlandish arrangement I've ever heard of.
As we discussed our needs it slowly dawned on us that we were two sides of the same coin. I was scared shitless by the idea of an aggressively active partner, while David believed he could only respond if he didn't have to 'do' anything. But neither of us believed that we would ever meet the right someone who corresponded to our individual requirements, until David unwittingly pointed out that we already had.
"What I need." He told me. "Is someone like you, someone who would be happier to be the 'doer' than the 'done to'. Then I could probably relax and let them."
