Finding Shelter After the Storm

Anwen felt sure that she had locked the outer door to her student lodgings. The way things were in the country, and the Welsh university city where she now was, no different from everywhere else in the UKay. Those whom many thought of as illegal migrants were housed amongst residents in communities unprepared for the influx. Consent is rarely if ever given, but the flow of incomers was changing people's perceptions of what was just in straightened times for everyone.

She kept out of the arguments about the rights and wrongs, her life at the university not to be disrupted by those of her fellow students who had quite different opinions on the matter from her and others of a like mind. She wasn't one to always conform to prevailing attitudes on whatever the subject under discussion might be.

"Yes, I've locked everything," she murmured to reassure herself, brushing out her long auburn hair as she stood in front of the mirror in the cramped ensuite bathroom.

The cares of another busy day of studying had been showered away and she now made ready for bed where she slept alone. It had been that way for some time, ever since she had broken up with Gaven, a guy she didn't miss, as she had once thought that she would.

'That will do," she murmured as her glistening hair was braided into a ponytail, and all of it was swept back from an oval face, dark brownish-green eyes staring as she studied her reflection in the mirror.

She had a nice firm-breasted, trim body, a nearly flat tummy, and slender hips that flattered long legs; all of her skin tended with obsessive devotion when she smoothed in a favourite moisturizer as if it was being offered by the admiring, slow caresses of a lover. Gaven had been the first and only man whom she had 'let in', so she could hardly be thought of as the promiscuous and experienced sort that some she knew, in the faculty, to be. Compared to some of her fellow students she was a 'virgin' and only twenty-two.

'What's the rush as long as I get it right,' she sighed. Gaven had not been the right guy, after all, but she had learned from him along the way, and, of that, she had no regrets.

She stifled a yawn. The day had been intense with seminars and one-to-one tutorials and the shower had perked her up, the choice of a faux satin nightdress with lace trim to the V-neckline feeling cool against her skin. The thin straps crossed her shoulders and the garment flattered and revealed her firm, rounded breasts, the fabric sliding over her nipples like the hidden caress of a lover, the short hem revealing toned legs. She could feel good about herself even if no guy was onto her just now, but she could dream.

Lost in her thoughts, she stood there before the mirror and slowly stroked her body with the thin fabric of her nightdress, drew the hem up, over her thighs, and she imagined a man's touch; a lustful man with a strong body, toned and muscular arms, and his pants shaped like a tent, his erection impossible to hide from her gaze before she reached out to touch it. On the floor, he commanded, before pushing her down and crushing her with his weight as his hands and fingers opened the way to where he needed to be.

She was touching herself, massaged and tugged on her nipples, so hard and erect, her areolas ridged and so perfectly round on the firm flesh of her breasts. Her fingers pursued what the imagined lover would do, to touch and enter her moist heat, each caress sending ripples of longing to course through her tummy and down her spine, her pussy moist and the thin line of hair to her slit slowly parting to reveal her pink folds; the way soon open to her guarded place.

She was proud of what she had been blessed with and did not disfigure her skin with tattoos or body piercings that others, she had met over the two years of her course, boasted of and had done in answer to a dare and never to be made good.

She would not defile her body, just as she wouldn't let just any man take her.

'No, I'd never do that no matter how good-looking he may be. I need to bond with him, not just offer myself and have regrets later about what I had done.'

She roused herself from her moment's daydream and tugged on the cord to switch off the bathroom light. She was alone, for now, and not desperate to end that solitude. When that became too much to bear she could always use her nimble fingers in a way that had been practised over the years since her body had her feeling that relief had to be sought.

It was simply better if a man did that for her, along with everything else that would surely follow.

She lay under a sheet, a summer duvet far too warm, and the window in the room open on a restraining latch, just a crack, but enough to let in the soft breeze of the night. It would be closed if it became too cold for her to sleep, or her fears of what prevailed elsewhere got too much and kept her awake.

The slow caress of two fingers slowly helped her to relax...

♥

She stirred out of dreamless unconsciousness. The sheet was being pulled off her legs and she felt the rush of the cool breeze on her naked body, her nightie ruched up around her waist. She hazily remembered what she had been doing as she fell asleep.

But now she was aware of someone in her room, leaning on the bed and his skin pressed against her body as a hand clamped over her mouth.

Her scream was silenced by that rough hand and the closeness of its owner now made her squirm in panic, his weight and strength preventing her from reaching for the bedside light. She would not see her attacker only know of his presence, the smell of alcohol on his breath, the roughness of his hands as he pawed her body, pushed one hand under her nightdress, and clamped on her tits, one then the other.

"Get off me...get out!" she mumbled.

"No, beautiful miss...I go later...and when I have taken you and pleased me."

His breath smelt foul, the accent and intonation were unfamiliar. Her worst fears were to be realized. A bulky young man, of undoubted strength, was pawing her body, violating her sex with his fingers as they roughly slipped over her pussy's lips, and prodded into her cunt. All she could do was writhe and buck her hips to try and prevent further violation of her body.

"Go away!" she cried feebly, tears of fear and humiliation streaming down her cheeks.

He was already kneeling between her legs and his grip on them rendered her powerless. What little knowledge she had of self-defence was useless because of his strength and the terror that now possessed her. What remained of the fight in her was quelled by the fearsome grip of a hand on her throat as he leaned in and attempted to kiss her. She moved her head as best as she could to deny him that.

"Let it happen...then I will leave you," he snarled, before his hands trailed over her breasts, his fingers pinching and tugging on her nipples before his mouth sank over them. It was crazy, possessive. It also felt wonderfully crazy after weeks of denial. How could she be possessed by conflicting feelings about this, what was being done to her?

She would surrender as he was heard to strip off his clothes, his awkward movements of controlling her making the bed rock, and settle, as he did so. She then felt his weight crush her, the assailant naked and now caressing her thighs in long strokes of his hand that finished at her pussy, her thighs stroked and the man taking his time to take delight in the smoothness of her skin; perhaps to feel the slicked heat of her pussy that his touches, despite her denials, had aroused in her.

She imagined that he was looking down on her body, leering and licking his lips in anticipation of taking a foreign girl, and in her bed. Inexplicably and quickly, and despite her hands pushing his away from pursuing more caresses and claims to her body, the wrenching clamps on her breasts, she felt the tingle of anticipation that his touches, and thoughts of what was going to happen to her, had aroused. Her body was being made ready to be possessed, to be defiled by a stranger.

Her movements under him were restricted by the tightening wrap of her nightdress that was now gathered under her armpits, her breasts, belly, and her smooth and almost hairless mound open to his touches.

A hand closed over her mouth and she writhed, pushed her feet into the bed but her posture only opened the way into her and he did so. A thick pole of flesh, wide and long slowly penetrated her body, seared against her tight pussy's walls, and stretched her until a tamping and deepening rhythm began and she was pushed into the mattress.

Fear gave way to uncommon sexual excitement that a stranger's penis, in her young body, now aroused. It had all gone too far to cry out, to yell for help. She raged at being unable to deny what she was feeling; the pursuit of involuntary pleasure, of unprotected sex as he moved in her body, poked and prodded and tamped quickly, her labia brushed over by the girth of his tip as it left her body only to be shoved relentlessly back in. She yelped on feeling each thrust as he violated her.

The animal of a man was deep inside her young body and his actions wrecked her control, wracked her body with his long and forceful strokes, his possession of her body wildly pleasurable as she surrendered to him. Would resisting have made it all the more painful, abusive, and even more dismissive of her place in society? She didn't know or want to debate the point right now.

"You want it...from me...young one," he grunted, his breaths foul on her face as he sensed her submission to him, "don't you?"

"No! Just finish it!" she gasped, biting the fingers that sought to silence her as they were pushed into her mouth until she almost gagged.

He laughed in derision. "I do that and want to!"

The sensations of his possession of her could only mean that he was well-endowed; hung like a horse some would say, perhaps, if she ever dared to speak of this violation of her body and the place she thought of as her 'home from home'. There was nothing to be done if she was to survive the onslaught, the crash of his body against her, the searing stretches of her cunt that his penis brought. She was his captive, the object of a man's wild and lustful imaginings and soon-to-be satisfied desire.

Worst of all, as her hands touched his body, stroked his squirming buttocks and she lifted her hips from the bed to meet his taking of her, the realization of her being unable to control her own body's responses. Her mind told her it was evil; her body's natural reaction seemed to be to accept what was happening; the primeval acts of two people seeking to reproduce, to make another of their kind. She felt so wet from her pussy producing the lubricant for his member as it slid in and out, the ferocity of his actions and the sound of squelching, flesh moving over flesh, loud in the room.

"Finish it!" she groaned as the tingling sensations returned to her aching groin. She felt on fire as the bewilderment at the pleasure that she felt and, to her horrified bewilderment, it was starting to spread through the rest of her aching body. It was too much for her to handle, but she moved to meet each of his strokes, her restraining clutches ignored as his ways with her confounded everything that she should be feeling. Her heart was beating furiously; her breaths caught in her throat as her mind and body became one and she tumbled over the edge. She clawed at his body and wrapped her legs around her rapist's waist as she felt him jerk in long shuddering wrenches as he let loose within her.

'Woman! You fuck so good!"

"What have you done to me!" she yelped as her legs gripped his body and her orgasm crashed over her like a runaway truck finally hitting a barrier. She climbed the walls, pulled free of his hold on her arms, and was able to run her hands over his hot, sweaty body, to grip fat buttocks and to keep pulling him into her aching cunt, his grunts of effort to sustain the wracking claims of his orgasm as he pounded into her at a furious speed.

Her quickening gasps of pain at the tempo of his actions, what he brought into her slender body, were transformed into moans of shameless pleasure, a man fucking her after such a long time. She was being filled, the forceful expulsions of his seed tipping her over the edge for a second time and she shuddered in her orgasmic release. She didn't care about the look of him; a man she had imagined taking her as she lay drifting into sleep now possessed her body.

What shame and degradation was now mixed with feral pleasure. She would never live this down, nor did she know how to cope with what had happened. She had surrendered to save herself from any further harm. Did that make her complicit? The student, with her critical faculties, sharpened to a pinpoint, would have been thought of in that way.

"I have no more for you," he said finally, and as his movements slowed, the domed tip of his penis, so gross and large, aroused shudders of languid pleasure as he withdrew from her ravished body. Her ordeal at his hands, brought on by this stranger's actions, was finally over. "I go now..."

She felt him search for his clothes in the darkness, the shadowy body of her assailant just to be made out.

"Yes, and never to return you beast! Fuck off. We don't need people like you here in our country!"

She stumbled from the bed and rushed into the bathroom, locking the door behind her. She felt so exhausted, emotionally and physically, that all she wanted to do was to sleep. Her body had been ravaged; she had conceded in the end. Now she had to deal with the aftermath and the tears and sobs began to stream down her cheeks and to rack her body.

The university hospital would have medication for STDs and also, perhaps, morning-after pills. She would ask.

Frantically, she twisted loose the shower head from its hose. Where he had been, so that hose would go. The warmth of the water was only mildly soothing. She sobbed out of fear and humiliation for all that had happened. She washed and washed, felt a wanton pleasure from the rills in her pussy that the water aroused, but she had to be sure as sure as she could be...that she had washed that seed out of her body. She didn't want just any man's child, but one born out of shared love and not the consequences of being impregnated by an intruder, a rapist, and a stranger. His seed and all that had been so copiously expelled into her body would mingle with the water and swirl down the drain. She was on the pill, but no chances would be taken.

Was there a pill available that would ease away her guilt at having surrendered to the man without a yell or serious fight? Others in the apartments close by were often heard at it. They would think of her to be no different.

No, the guilt was for her to live with, and also the need to deal with the aftershock, the post-coital trauma that would surely follow.

She pondered on how to ask for help and hoped that the man, she now thought of, would understand the turmoil she would have gone through if there was a delay in speaking out about what had happened to her.

Her study bedroom was empty and the curtains wafted in on a lazy surge and fall, carried along by the cool breeze that came through the fully open window. She now shut and locked it with a clattering noise.

The rapist had gone. The legacy of the night remained and only with her, she was certain of it as she got under the sheet and fell into a long and far-from-dreamless sleep.

♠

It was all kept secret from those she knew on her course, even from her mother with whom it was often difficult to talk of personal matters, about the most intimate of subjects. She had been wounded by going through an acrimonious divorce and it had only been in recent years that Flynn Morgan had filled the space in her life that Bryn Kendrick had brought upon her by leaving them.

The people in the university's med centre were told, but she resolutely refused to give consent to the matter being reported to the police. What good would that do when she had been ravished in the darkness of her room and her assailant unidentifiable? She knew what she had taken into her body, had heard his poor English, and breathed in the feral smell of an unwashed body. Strength and the threat of violence that might become more than a hand covering her mouth, or around her throat, had persuaded her to concede. Then it became an act of bringing the man's taking of her to an end, on whatever terms she could achieve and with minimal physical harm.

What would play out in her mind was quite another matter.

Her mother Catrin, and Flynn, who was like a stepfather to her in his encouraging and concerned ways, had not been told, and in the hope that she could deal with what had happened in her own time and ways, as best as she could.

The only too physical pain on the insides of her thighs and the bruises on her breasts, also to her body's most sensitive place, had healed or were on the way to doing so. No, it was the mental scars, however, that remained as raw as ever, and most of all her submission to what had happened and the longer her ravishment had continued. When did the assault upon her cease to be rape and become consensual, just to save herself from further harm? Had she become complicit and thus deepened her sense of shame for what had happened to her?

The authorities wouldn't act if there was the slightest suggestion, or as her responses to questioning might make clear, that she had been the victim of rough sex and nothing more.

She remained troubled by it all and she went through with her studies as if she lived in another body, but she needed someone to talk to and to recover her sense of worth.

A few days, which would pass for a half-term in the summer semester, would be the time to get away and go home; there to talk to her mother and Flynn.

She held her iPhone to her ear as the number rang.

"Hello Anwen, darling....it's my girl," she heard her mother tell Flynn. "How nice to hear from you!"

"I had to call as I need to talk to you, or to you both. Something's happened that I cannot deal with on my own anymore...or I would do so, as you know by now."

"Whatever's happened?" Catrin asked, doubt clear in her still heavily accented voice. Years of them all living in Bristol had not lessened that trait in her.

"I want to come home, over half-term, and talk to you," she said hesitantly, the rest of her confession on the tip of her tongue. "It's serious and I want to tell you about it face to face, mother."

"Tell me now, please! I have to go away for three days of business from the end of the weekend!" Her mother's voice had become shrill.

"And I can't be free of seminars and lectures until Friday! Then I'll catch a bus to you!" They were both shouting, unnecessarily.

'No, you won't," Flynn intervened, his voice calm and his face, which had a reassuring smile for her to see, framed in one corner of her iPhone's screen. "I'll come and collect you."

"That would be so helpful," she answered in a low voice and on the verge of tears. "I cannot tell this in any other way. I was raped, nearly two weeks ago, and I can't handle it. I need to feel loved again."

♥

Flynn had rung her to say that he had arrived and was parked out in the street only a few steps away from her door. The day was bright, but breezy, with the clouds scudding and billowing in unseasonal weather for the time of the year. Now he stood on the step of the front door, common to all in the house, and she saw his outline through the frosted glass set within it.

"Your carriage awaits," he teased on taking in her appearance, Anwen's undoubted loveliness that she had inherited from her mother. "And you look like a princess."

He was being kind and understanding she thought, and blurted out the first thing she could say in reply to that. "Make me feel like one again."