My Sleeping Body Is Not An Invitation
TRIGGER WARNING - This piece contains details about sexual assault.
It’s you, and then the wall. Then beyond you, people. Then beyond people, the door. The radiator is cold against my leg, the wall unyielding. Your sweet, sickly breath shrouds me in an alcoholic haze. It’s heavy, quick, and desperate. Short, sharp breaths that permeate my eardrums and invade my space until it’s all I can hear. Your body is hot with nerves, rippling with tension, quivering at our closeness.
I lie as still as possible, hoping you’ll forget I’m there, hoping I’ll forget you’re there. Eyes closed, breathing in and out, in and out, in and . . . and you’re touching me. A gentle caress of the hand. Innocent? Accidental? Error of judgement? Panic mounts against a wall of mistaken faith in your better judgement, spilling over into paralysing doubt and blame. I want to be free of you, to cut you off like a loose thread. Your hand is moving up across my arm, drawing out my goosebumps, brushing the hairs standing on end. Your hand is in my hair, deep in thick curls and pulling on knots.
I sigh out, simulating sleep. Hoping that you’ll stop because that would be the right thing to do. But you don’t, do you? You leave my hair and you meet my arm and you slide your hand across to my breast and you hold. I’m still breathing deeply, to fool you, to fool myself that I’m asleep. I’m somewhere else, I’m not in this room and I’m not lying next to you. But you’re brazen, bold, boisterous. My breasts weren’t enough for you and you just keep going. I don’t remember what you did next.
We’d spent the day on the trampoline, playing childhood games fuelled with cheap cider. A weekend reunion punctuating the long summer after first year exams, discovering each other’s home towns and home friends. A long night of singing to Imagine Dragons and Indie music from our teens.
It ended in piling into a childhood bedroom, laughing at football posters, pulling on pjs, exhausted and drunk. There were six of us. Six sweaty people piled in together with the sticky air reeking of stale alcohol. A row of air mattresses and a bed with no space in between. A barricade of sleepy, drunken bodies. Bodies of barely my friends, your best friends. Friends with whom I’d joked you were crushing on me. In the morning, you left to buy breakfast butties and they joked how you’d rushed to sleep next to me. I told them all what happened, then you came back and nobody said anything.
Months later, back at university, I walk into a party. You’re there unexpectedly. In all those months, I’d barely thought of you, then in the moment I felt an overwhelming desire to cry. So I left, and I cried.
Two years later, I ignore you at a party and you message me something you probably thought was an apology. Empty, lengthy words, void of meaning, full of privilege. You don’t even know what you did was wrong. Another few months, another party, I ignore you for the whole night and you find me as I’m leaving and hug me and tell me you hope I’m okay. As if you’d been playing on my mind this whole time. As if you deserved that.
You’re one of 3 men who’ve taken my sleeping body as an invitation.
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This piece has been kept anonymous to protect the author.