It was my birthday, ten in the morning, when I got to her flat; she answered the door dripping wet, wrapped in a towel. She told me she'd only be a minute. She told me to go into the living room. So I went into...
He must have been waiting behind the door. The first I knew he was there was his hand over my mouth, pulling me hard - not violently, but forcefully - back against his chest.
His other hand was underneath my jaw, with something cold and pointed.
"The knife is sharp, wee lass," he said. "No noise. Kneel down, nice and slowly."
---
He? Who was he? I'd better start again. The truth is I never actually knew who he was. I never saw him. I know he was tall, strong, lean. He had a nice voice, calm, confident. He was calm and confident.
About a month afterwards she took me to a gig - a little local band in a room over a pub, there can't have been two hundred people. She teased me he was there. I spent most of the evening looking at men. There were about twenty who were tall enough, lean enough, strong enough... But... I mean, you can't just go up to someone and ask. I can't!
This isn't very good, is it? I'll try again. I'll tell you who she is.
Well, actually, I won't tell you who she is, because if this sort of story got out she'd lose her job, and I'd hate that. But I will tell you about how I met her. I went to a poetry workshop, in my second year of university. I went without any of the people I knew, which - well, it's brave for me. I saw her at once, smart, elegant composed. People read out their poetry. I read out a poem of mine, not very good. She praised it, looking at me in the eyes. Then, later, she read out a poem of hers, and something moved wet and warm in me. A darkly erotic poem. A tangential poem, which on the surface... But what mattered wasn't on the surface. Under the surface, it seemed to me, it was dark and powerful, consuming.
I thought it was wonderful. I told her so. I gushed.
A few days later I was in a coffee shop, an open notebook in front of me, staring at nothing. She sat down opposite me and smiled.
"Hello," she said. "You're the girl who came over my poem."
"I didn't!", I said, feeling blood rush to my face, hearing my voice go squeaky. I dropped it, carefully. "I didn't... orgasm."
She grinned. "Certain?" she asked, head on one side.
I swallowed, blinked. I shook my head, and, catching myself doing it, nodded emphatically. "I didn't!" I said. "But... I really liked it."
She took a sip of her latte, a moustache of milk-froth forming on her upper lip. She kept her eyes on mine. I tried to meet her gaze.
"Is it about..." I said, "were you... were you raped?"
That first time, she smiled a dark secret smile, shook her head, and changed the subject. But two weeks later I asked her again. We'd met three times in the cafe by then. I would go there, hoping she'd be there, and sometimes she would just appear. She looked so glamourous and confident and worldly. So sexual. We talked about poetry, about me - we seemed to talk a great deal about me, far less about her - about beauty, about the complexity of life. But that was the first time we'd arranged to meet. We met in the art gallery, there was an exhibition she wanted me to see. The exhibition was bodies entwined, the forceful and the surrendered. It left me turbulent.
---
Afterwards we strolled lazily in the park. I envied her freedom, her short dress and long legs bare to the sun, the golden down on her long freckled arms. There was a bench in the shade of a weeping willow, overlooking a pond. We sat.
I asked, again, about her poem. Had she been raped?
She looked at me hard, almost frowning.
"What is rape?" she asked.
"Being taken. By force. Without consent. Perhaps by someone you don't know?"
"Yes," she said, coolly, more coolly that I was used to her talking to me. "But which bit of it is rape?"
"I don't know," I said. "All of it."
"You haven't actually had sex, have you?"
We'd skated round this obliquely, several times before. Shamefaced, I shook my head.
"Consent isn't simple," she said. "People pretend it is, but it isn't. You could sit down in front of a judge and two witnesses, and sign in triplicate that you consent to be fucked by your lover; and go straight from there into your bedroom and discover that you don't. You can open your legs wide to welcome someone's cock into your cunt" - she knew I had difficulty with those words, she enjoyed my difficulty - "and find, when it's pounding mindlessly within you, that it's the wrong one, attached to the wrong person, doing the wrong things in the wrong way. Consent isn't all or nothing. It's fleeting, contingent, mutable - at once immanent and intangible. It ebbs and flows through the course of the act. I don't believe there's anyone, in any relationship lasting more than three hours, who hasn't, at some point in sex, wished it wasn't happening."
She put her finger under my chin and lifted my head up, until I looked back at her, meeting her eyes.
"But nevertheless," she said, "rape is about consent. It's about desire and consent. If you desire it, and welcome it, and enjoy it, then you are not raped."
I licked my lips, feeling the pressure of her finger below my jaw. "And did you?" I asked.
"Did I what?" she said. Her voice was still cool, but her eyes were warm.
"Desire it," I whispered. "Welcome it. Enjoy it."
She grinned. "Oh yes," she said. "Oh, yes."
I closed my eyes, not able to meet her glow. "Was he," I whispered, "was he a stranger? Did he force you?"
"You make it sound as if it's only happened once," she said, a thread of teasing laughter under her voice.
"It hasn't?" My eyes were opened wide, staring at her in shocked admiration. "But... but... that poem is about one memory, one specific incident."
At last her eyes dropped. She grinned, a feral, inward grin. "That's perceptive of you."
She looked up at me again. "Yes," she said. "He was. And he did." She smiled. "It's too hot out here," she said. "Come on, lets go back to my flat."
Her flat was modern, white, sparse, high in a new block looking out toward the sea. There was a patio door out onto a balcony that she'd flung wide, letting in a cooling breeze. She'd gone through to the kitchen, and came back with two long glasses of ice and limejuice. She was naked.
I looked away, carefully... and then back. And catching her knowing smile, away again. She put a glass on the bookshelf under my gaze, her body close and warm behind me. I stared at the leather binding of an aged book of John Donne's love-poems. "Are you a good girl?" I asked her.
"Am I what?" she asked. Warm surprise in her voice.
I broke away, and went quickly out onto the balcony, looking back at her pale in the shadow of the room. "They say," I said, "that good girls dream of rape because that way they can have sex - rough, hard, fierce sex - without having to be responsible for it."
"They do," she agreed. She came out onto the balcony, too, confidently naked, but - courteously, I think - leant on the rail at the opposite end from me. "Do you dream about rape?"
I looked out to sea. It would be poetic to describe something I saw, in detail; but the truth was I didn't because my eyes were blurring with tears. "And have you seen him again? Since?"
"You must be very warm in all those clothes," she said.
I swallowed. "Have you seen him again since?" I heard a pitch of desperation in my voice.
I heard the smile in hers. "I have," she said. "He comes occasionally, without warning. He takes me by stealth and by surprise, and leaves me sore and satiated. I never know when he'll come again. The ice in your glass will be melting."
"Yes," I said. I turned to look at her. A curling arabesque of tattoo swirled out of her shaven mons, and curled away over her right hip. I gulped and looked up. She had breasts. "You're trying to seduce me, aren't you?"
She smiled. It was a beautiful smile, warm and sensuous. "I am," she said. "But I'm in no hurry."
I gulped, awkward. "Look," I said, "I'm a virgin, but I don't think I'm a lesbian. And I -" tears were flowing now, I scrubbed them angrily away. "I'm a good girl. I don't know whether I can be seduced. I don't think so. I think I'd better go now."
---
It was three weeks before I saw her again. I was in the cafe, trying to compose a difficult letter to my parents. She eased herself into the chair opposite, settling gently with fluid winces.
"I'm glad you're here," she said. "I need to say sorry."
