Coming Out of the Closet

Present, Ten Days Earlier

I could feel my own breathing coming back to me, slightly lower than where I exhaled it. Running along the slatted wood of the closet door, blowing over the curve of my chin. It's been nearly fifteen minutes, since I last moved. Raising my hands in the cramped space, I rubbed a bit of the numbness out of my wrists and fingers. When the time came to move, I'd have to be fast. Faster than her. Rolling my shoulders backward, I stifled the urge to sigh. She wasn't here yet, but I still kept quiet.

Inside of the closet, even to my own nose, the smell of myself was strange. My cologne was almost strong enough to be overpowering;

Dylan Blue

by

Versace

. Very different than the sticks of

Dove

I usually bought from the Shopper's Drug Mart down the street, and which I'd worn to the

Greystone Annual Charity Gala

earlier that evening. Below it, the heady scent of tar-heavy cigarettes choked me. I didn't smoke, but an hour ago I'd smoked three

Pallmall Red

s, back to back. Holding the smoking tip under my chin and around my hands, watching it play in thin lines between my fingers; replacing the smell of me with its own.

My three-piece suit hangs in my closet. I'd traded it out for a grey turtleneck, charcoal dress pants with small white lines, and a pair of black socks. I've tugged a ski mask over my head, hiding my features; I cut the eyeholes together, and the single long hole was slight ragged at the corners. A length of black rope, ten feet long and purchased specifically for this purpose at the local

Stag Shop

, is tucked into the back pocket of my pants. I can feel the top of it, pressing against my shirt and hanging down over the edges of the pocket.

Tonight, I'm going to rape my friend. More on that later. But first, maybe I should give some context. I'm a fucking monster--but I'm a very

particular

classification of monster. The worst kind. The human kind.

In a way, it all began when I met Hailey Cahalane; fourteen years ago. We'd met during the second year of high school. Second period physics. We became friends almost immediately. We both liked art and history, we both smoked a lot of weed, and we both didn't like spending much time at home. Me because my parents were usually away, and I preferred to spend time near the river than in an empty bedroom. Her because her father and uncle were usually home, and some kind of ex-IRA wingnuts. Her family had come over from Ireland to Canada a couple of years earlier, following some kind of event that Hailey didn't discuss. She didn't talk about her mother, either. I assume the two are connected. I've never pressed her on the subject.

We attended the University of Windsor. She got her Masters in financial planning and business management, while I finished a major in business and computer science before switching to accounting. We began to live together, in Windsor. There's been a couple of years, in between then and now, where one of us has moved out. Usually to live with a new partner. Somehow, we always end up coming back.

Hailey and I have never slept together. Maybe that's strange. My friends certainly thought that it was; that a man and a woman could live together for nearly a decade, and not have sex at least once. But we just... didn't. Hadn't. We'd talked about it, of course, but somehow it had never felt... right. Not the right time, not the right place. We lived together, we worked together, we liked one another a lot--if something went wrong, it was going to go

disastrously

wrong.

This, most of all. This had the potential to destroy everything. Including me.

But none of that explains why I'm standing in Hailey's closet, feeling a finger and thumb over the length of rope in my back pocket. Feeling the slightly spongy tenseness of their threads.

For that, we need to fast-forward a year. Hailey and I had been working on an accounting project for our business,

Greystone Financial

. We'd traded laptops. Comparing statements. Sitting in the living room, a half-drunk pot of coffee between us, I'd had her laptop balanced on my legs. Going through her directory, I clicked on a plain-looking folder marked '

Outgoing Drafts

'. Inside of it were dozens of documents, neatly organized into names.

"James, right?" I asked, referring to the statement we'd been discussing for the last twenty minutes.

"Yeah," Hailey nodded absentmindedly, tracing one finger down the screen of my laptop as she read. She'd had to do that since high school. Apparently it helped her eyes track, so she could read faster.

I clicked on the folder titled '

James Laurmer

'. It didn't occur to me that the last name was wrong.

When the document opened, I frowned in confusion. It wasn't a spreadsheet. It was a Word document. Scrolling to the bottom, I looked for the spreadsheet at the end; it wasn't there, so I scrolled back up. As I did so, a word caught my eye.

Cunt.

It was strange, because even though a lot of accountants make little notes in the margins of documents, that

usually

wasn't one of them. Sometimes. Not often. I'd certainly never heard Hailey use that word. I wouldn't have used it around her, either. My eyes scanned quickly, and my disbelief only grew.

"No! Please, no!" She cried, trying to hold her legs together against the mens' hands. There was five of them, and only one of her. It didn't work, her cunt held open and glistening as the first man--James--stepped between her knees, his dark cock--"

I very nearly slammed the laptop shut. It took everything inside of me to act casual, bringing the pointer to the red

X

at the top of the document and closing it. Clearing my throat, I glanced up at Hailey.

"Sorry... What's the last name, again?"

"Uh," she was still a bit lost in her own thoughts, "James Bragg. What other--" her eyes focused so suddenly on mine that I felt like she'd stabbed me with them. The realization hit us both in the same moment; to her, that I'd opened the document, and to me, that she knew exactly what I'd opened.

"Oh no!"

Without a word, I spun the laptop so that Hailey could see that I'd closed it. A series of spreadsheets covered the screen. In fourteen years, I'd never seen Hailey blush like that. The pale skin of her cheeks, beneath the pattern of her freckles, went crimson. Burying her head in her hands, she peeked at me from between her fingers.

"Sorry, I..." she chewed at the bottom of her fingers for a moment, "It's... I..."

"No need to explain," I turned the laptop back around, typing '

James Bragg

' into the searchbar and opening the document it brought up. This time, a different series of spreadsheets appeared. I glanced back up at Hailey and found her staring at me, a bit wide-eyed, "Hey, all good. We've all got shit, right?"

"Right," she nodded slowly.

That afternoon was a bit of a slow-motion trainwreck. We both tried to concentrate on work. The moments of silence between us weren't strained, but they weren't quite the same as they'd been before. We both knew what the other person was thinking about. When the coffee ran out, around five-thirty, we finally called quits for the day. After brewing another pot, we sat at the small wrought iron table on our back patio, looking out over the fenced-in space of our yard. It could have used some work. The trees were beginning to impede, and the fence could have used a fresh coat of varnish. I didn't mind. It was home.

"Let's talk about it," Hailey said suddenly, breaking our first genuinely relaxed silence for the first time in nearly five hours.

"We don't have to," I shrugged, lifting my mug and taking a sip of my coffee. Hailey took hers with milk, while I preferred black.

"No, we should. I want to." She glanced at me suddenly, "I mean, unless you don't want... to. Talk about it, that is."

I chuckled. It was rare that anything properly tripped Hailey up. Nodding, I leaned a bit closer to the round metal lip of the table, "So, what is it?"

"It's writing."

"Obviously."

She gave me a withering look, and I held my hands up in front of me, "Sorry."

"I mean, it's

sexy

writing. Erotica, I guess. It's..." she swallowed, took a sip of her coffee and swallowed again, "It's rape fantasy." Her voice went a bit lower on that word,

rape

. Her nails clicked on the side of her coffee mug, "I don't like porn, so that's... My version, I guess."

"I figured," I nodded.

"You don't think it's..." she trailed off for the fifth time in as many sentences, "You don't think I'm weird?"

"For that?" I shook my head, "No. Not at all. In general?

Definitely

, you weirdo."

She laughed, and I saw a visible knot of tension leave her shoulders. When she leaned forward, and her brown eyes caught the fading sunlight, I knew everything was going to be alright between us. The awkwardness wasn't gone, but I could feel it evaporating like dew on sun-heated grass. Crossing her arms, Hailey studied my face.

"You

really

don't think it's weird?"

"No," I replied, honestly. "I mean, sure, it's a little out there. Not more than some of the other things I've heard about. Not as weird as those people who strictly do missionary," she laughed again, at that, "Definitely not as weird as people who like to be peed on." I cocked an eyebrow in her direction, "You're not into that too, are you?"

"Ew! No!"

"Hey," I gave her a joking, sharp glance, "You're the one who wants five guys to hold you down and rape you. We don't kink shame in this household."

Hailey laughed, but it was impossible to ignore the way that her cheeks went a slightly darker shade of pink that they'd been a moment before, or the way she adjusted herself on the padded iron bars of the chair. It was that word, again. It made something inside of Hailey go tense, somewhere between fear and excitement. She blinked a couple of times, looked up at the leaves overhead, and then back at me. The sunlight made her eyes look like the bottom of two rock-bottomed ponds.

"It's not usually... that intense. That one is a bit different. There's usually just

parts

of the stories, that I like. That's why I save them. I name them after my favorite characters, so it's a bit more innocuous."

"Maybe a bit

too

innocuous," I suggested.

"Yeah," she agreed, "Maybe." She looked out over the yard. When she spoke again, her voice was so close to inaudible that I wasn't sure whether she was still speaking to me, or herself, or the empty space of the yard, "Not five guys. But maybe... one."

And that, right then and there, watching Hailey's lips purse slightly around the word

one

, was where the plan began to come together. Now you understand why I'm standing in the closet. Now you understand my particular brand of monstrosity.

Present, Ten Days Later

In the room below me, I heard the telltale sound of a door opening. The sound of it was familiar to me. The slight rattle of the loose lock, which I'd promised to fix a couple of days ago but hadn't gotten around to because of work... or so I said. Really, it was an alarm bell. I heard the quiet, far-off jingle of Hailey's keys, as she hung them on the small pegs beside the laundry room door. Just like she did, every day. Two muted thumps, one a couple of seconds after the other, told me she'd kicked off her high-heels. Then her now-bare feet were coming up the stairs. A brief pause, and a slight change in the sound of creaking wood, told me she'd stopped on the landing and leaned against the railing. Probably looking down at the kitchen.

Her feet went back down the stairs, and frustration made me close my eyes. The unseen sound of her travelled over the floorboards below me, and I heard the sound of a faucet running. Then they were back on the stairs, slightly faster than before. There was a warning, as the sound disappeared; Hailey's feet going from the top step to the carpeted hallway. The bedroom door opened, and there she was.

I held my breath for a moment, as she walked into the bedroom. Trying to judge, by the sounds alone, what she planned to do. I readied myself to act quickly, if her hand pulled open the door of the closet. But she didn't. Instead, I saw Hailey's figure cross the room. The bottom of a glass of water

clunked

on the top of her wooden dresser.

It was strange. Despite all of my planning, and what I knew I would do in just a few moments, it was

this

that felt like a true invasion of privacy. Maybe because this wasn't something that I'd seen before. A woman simply... being a woman. I watched Hailey take her tucked-up hair, pressing her palms to either side of her head and turn it back and forth in the mirror above the desk. She sighed, and I couldn't tell whether the sound came from simple tiredness, or disappointment.

The sound was so unearned that it almost made me angry. Could she not see how beautiful she was? When her fingers released the clasps in her hair, working the elastic over her fingers and wrist, her hair spilled down them. A straight sheet of dark blonde hair; darker toward the back and roots, and almost luminescent near the sides, where it caught the light of the bedside lamp. Unclipping her earrings, she left them near the corner of the dresser. Then, ducking down for a moment in a way that hid her face, from my position, behind one of the slats of the closet door, she pulled open one of the drawers of her dresser. I could hear her hands rustling through fabric. When she stood once more, she was holding a pair of sleeping shorts and a shirt. Underwear peeks out from between the folded squares of fabric.

As her purple-grey gala dress falls to the floor, the back of her body is revealed. I've seen Hailey in a swimsuit before, plenty of times, but somehow I never thought about the fact that the cheeks of her bum might have the same freckles as her back and shoulders. I watch them move, as she strips away the garter she'd worn and pulls on a more comfortable-looking pair of lilac underwear. When she unclasps her bra, the sound of her exhale is explosive in the otherwise quiet room. She takes a step closer to the dresser, picking up the glass of water there and taking a sip. I know she's been drinking champagne all night, but I also know Hailey; she drove there and home, and she's careful. She'd have drank just enough to be lightly buzzing, but not enough to be drunk.

I was counting on it.

Through the slats of the dresser, my eyes follow Hailey's movements. She pulls on a pair of shorts, slips a grey-pink nightshirt down over her shoulders; tight around her chest and strappy around the top of her arms. Then she moves her glass of water from the top of the dresser to the nightstand beside her bed. I watch, my heart nearly beating out of my chest, as she pulls back the thin sheets and crawls beneath them. Hailey, in all the time I've known her, has never slept with a comforter. Just a collection of thin sheets, about six of them. That, and nearly as many pillows.

For a moment I only stand there, watching. She turns over a couple of times. My eyes follow one of the sheets, which spreads open over her legs and twists slightly around the rise of her hip; for some reason, I can't move them from the foot that pokes out from beneath it. Maybe it's the smallness of it, or the bareness. It makes me acutely aware of exactly what I have planned--and who I have it planned for. In bed, Hailey sighs; the sound is enough to make my balls go tight between my legs. The sound innocent and private. I know, in that moment, that if I don't step out of the closet right now that I'm going to end up standing here all night, simply watching her sleep.

When I move, it's not fast. I simply push open the doors of the closet and step out from inside of them. My body, having stood perfectly still for nearly twenty minutes, protests slightly at the sudden movement I ask of it.

In the bed, Hailey sits up ramrod straight. I can see the split-second hesitation; on her face, in the way she holds her body. It takes me three steps to cross the space. By that time, she's made it nearly out of bed; her sheets hinder her slightly. My hand hinders her far more. Maybe she tries to cry out for help, or maybe not. If she does, the sound of it is smothered by the pillow that I push her face-down into. My pulse hammers against the side of my neck. An erection strains against the fabric of my pants. I know she can feel it, as I step onto the bed and position myself between her legs. Feel the slightly rounded weight of it, settling on the cheeks of her bum, through her shorts.

No going back now

.

What surprises me the most?--How easy it is. It's not a matter of who wants it more, in opposite directions; it's not a matter of desperation, or whose moving more, or whose faster. None of the dozen things that I'd considered, over the last ten days. It's a series of unimportant questions, with meaningless answers. I'm bigger than she is--taller by nearly six inches, heavier by nearly eighty pounds. And I'm stronger. Almost unbelievably so. I'd always thought that I'd just never

felt

a woman fight, with all of her strength; now, as I hold my hand around the back of Hailey's neck and press her body into the sheets, I realize I'm wrong.

She's strong, for a young woman of her size. It's inconsequential. If I tried--

really

tried--I could have picked her up by the back of her neck and held her off the ground. I wasn't just stronger. I was... unstoppable.

At that realization, a weight settled into the bottom of my chest. Before this moment, there'd been a little nagging doubt in the back of my mind;

what if I couldn't do it

? Not just mentally. I'd gone through that hurdle days ago. But what if, when it really came down to it, I simply couldn't handle Hailey?--

Physically

handle her. Now, as I leaned over the side of the bed and held her face-down with one hand, I realized just what a stupid concern that had been. I couldn't just handle Hailey; I could

manhandle

her.

It was easy.

In her position, she couldn't get her hands at me. Not properly. For a moment, they tangled in her hair and clawed at my wrist. When that failed, she placed them palm-down on the mattress and pushed up with all of her strength, bending her back in a way that pushed her hips into the sheets and her neck into my palm. Her legs flailed, heels kicking into the back of my thighs and the bottom of my bum. I could feel them connecting, but the kicks came from her knees; it was a dull thudding, cushioned further by my pants and underwear. I'd wear bruises the next day, I knew, but it didn't matter. It didn't

hurt

, so I simply let it happen.

"Hands behind your back," I growled. For a moment, she stiffened--I thought she'd recognized my voice, but I quickly realized that that wasn't it. It was that she

hadn't

recognized my voice. It wasn't exactly surprising; my breath smelled strongly of cigarettes, something that Hailey had never seen me smoke before, made rough by thirty minutes spent growling from the back of it as I set up, and kept to a lowered tenor. Very different than my normal, papery tone.

Don't do it

, the caring part of my brain urged her.

Make him work for it

;

him

, as if the him that I was urging her to fight back against wasn't me. And I suppose, in a way and at this time, it wasn't. As I tightened my fingers against either side of her neck, pressing down a bit harder with my arm, I both was and wasn't me. When I clenched my teeth, I felt the studs of my jawbone stand out in a way that I didn't usually. As my fingers dug into the skin of Hailey's neck, I felt their tense strength in a way I didn't usually. As I blinked, my eyes felt heavy in a way that they didn't usually.

Her hands went behind her back. The thin black rope from my back pocket went around them. I bind them in opposite directions, so that the tips of her fingers on either hand reach toward the elbow of the other. There's just enough natural slack in the rope for her to rotate them about two inches downward, but nothing more. My belt clinks as I drop my pants toward my knees. I hadn't worn underwear, and suddenly the air-conditioned air of the house is all around my bare skin. I've been hard since she stepped into the room--first, hard with restraint; after, hard with anticipation; now, hard with desire.