The "Not" Rape

D and I had a couple of consensual, mediocre sexual encounters that fall.

I went into them thinking he liked me as more than just a fling. I was wrong. It was a rather typical boy-uses-girl, girl-gets-hurt situation. I’d never been used like that. I also think I had put too much emotion into it, as I was still broken-hearted from my ex and thought I wasn’t. It’s very confusing to know when you’re ready to move on, and I hadn’t, but I tried because I wanted to feel something for someone.I definitely “caught feelings” from those sexual encounters. He did not. He knew I had though, and he made it clear he didn’t care.I cut him out of my life eventually. I ignored his drunk texts. I realized over several months that there was something very wrong with him – how manipulative he was, how deceitful he was, how he didn’t really have much of a personality (never talked much except basic “bro” comments), how he could lie so well, how he got drunk and then always could be counted to try to “get” with someone. He was so different than the year before, look-wise, and I think it’s because he truthfully has no personality but is a reflection of his friend group; in this case, frat “bros.”

As time went on, more specifically after the rape, I realized that he matched the definition of a true narcissistic sociopath. During our brief Facebook friendship that fall, he even posted an article defending narcissism.

Ignoring him actually ended up working too well, because when April hit, I thought I could be alone with him again. I was partially right: I didn’t want to do anything with him. What I didn’t count on was his not caring that I didn’t want to do anything. Who wants to believe that someone who had touched them before would betray that trust in the worst way?I was celebrating my birthday on April 1, 2015. I felt like everything was falling into place. I also felt, “Wait…something is going to happen now to screw it up.” It was the Wednesday before Easter break. One bar had a special on Wednesdays that was too good to turn down. The night became blurrier and blurrier, of dancing, of drinking, of laughing, of people toasting me and buying me drinks. It was a nice last college birthday – the last day where I could get a hangover and the biggest thing I would miss is a class or two, not a full day of work. That’s how I approached it.D was at the bar. A drunk me can get along with anyone, like many other happy-go-lucky drunks, and I remember saying something to him for the first time in months – a lighthearted ribbing of some kind. I didn’t think much of it. He saw an opening.

I don’t remember how I got to my apartment that night after the bars closed at midnight. I blacked out.

I remember my phone going off while I dressed for bed. It was my best friend, checking to make sure I made it home. I remember being in bed when I checked my phone one more time and saw two texts: one from D, one from a guy I’d had a brief fling with a few weeks before.Drunk me didn’t think much of the weirdness of D texting me. He sent me several texts, asking how I was and then if I wanted to eat pizza. I said no. He kept trying. At one point I sent a text telling him that I still kind of had feelings for him and needed to stay away. His response was “come over and we’ll talk about it.”I took the bait. I couldn’t help it; even in my drunken state, my heart lifted. I wanted things to be okay between us, a good way to end my senior year on a positive note, and he finally seemed interested in patching things up too. All of the nasty things he’d done had faded over time, and I was so hopeful, so giddy, that things would be resolved. I think a large part of that was alcohol but I think even a sober me would be excited - if you took away sober me’s caution. Then again, if I was sober, things would have happened very differently, I think. Predators don’t act when their prey is alert.I also arranged to meet up with the fling guy; subconsciously, I think I knew better than to trust D into not manipulating me and was trying to make sure I had a reason to leave.The problem was that when I was almost to D’s doorstep, the fling guy cancelled. Drunk me was like “oh no. Let’s go home.” But another part was “we’re almost there…just go talk.”The first thing out of D’s mouth was that he didn’t order pizza. I didn’t know how to react. I didn’t know how to bring up what had happened in the past. I was so drunk I fell down at least once when we were in his room. I said I was drunk from celebrating my birthday; he said he knew. He asked if I wanted to watch Netflix; I said yes. A few minutes in, he shut the laptop off. He kept trying to pull down my pants and kiss me. I consented to oral sex to avoid anything more. It turned rough. I would pull his hands away from my pants and he would stop for a second, but it’s not as if he actually intended to stop; I remember being confused because he seemed to just be stopping as if taking a moment to himself. A small part of me at the time sent up a red flag, sensing, as if observing all of the happenings from afar, what he was doing: re-strategize. Kiss her again, talk to her, try again.

Eventually I was naked. He made me be on top. I remember several times where I pulled myself away, even physically removing him from my body and saying “I can’t do this with you. I just can’t.”

I think it’s a situation many a girl has found herself in; you are not used to saying “no” in a sexual encounter, so you try to say no in a way that doesn’t hurt his feelings. I also was blackout drunk so, like many a person before me, I struggled until I found a string of words that more or less meant what I felt and kept repeating them over and over again. For me, “no” equated to “I can’t do this with you.” I said it wasn’t right, I was graduating soon, he hurt me before, “it could only be just sex.”He was okay with that, he said. Imagine that, right?I remember him touching me and I remember it hurting so badly. My whole body was against what was happening, even if my mouth had a hard time spitting it out. I got him to stop a few times and we would talk. Then he would start up again. At some point, he pinned me to his body. I couldn’t move. He did all the “work.”I gave up. I stopped fighting. I thought, “Just let him finish. Then he’ll stop.”At one point he said he was going to come inside me. I panicked and said, as clear as I could, “Please pull out.” He didn’t say anything and I didn’t know what he was going to do; a moment later, he did pull out. It was over. I was raw.He got a towel and it’s like something was switched off: gone were the coaxing words, the gentle tone of voice that he had adopted to distract me as he literally put himself back in. Now that the deed was done, there was total silence, and I sensed rather than saw his disgust, his utter detachment: he had gotten what he wanted. I stole a sweatshirt; a blurry memory of fluorescent lighting lets me know I was in the bathroom. Afterwards I came back; I felt so confused, so lost about what had just happened. I just wanted to sleep. I didn’t want to deal with it. I could tell even then he wanted me to just leave, but he let me stay. I’ve spent so many hours trying to imagine why he did each thing he did that night, and one is why he let me stay. Perhaps he was worried that if he kicked me out, I would go and tell someone that something had happened - that “loving and leaving” me would not work a third time around.I woke up early at 7:15. I woke him up and he seemed pleased I was leaving before anyone could see us. A knot in my stomach emerged. I even kissed his cheek. He didn’t react. The heavy pit of dread grew. I felt like I had been rejected, worse than he ever had before, and every part of me was filled with hurt and shame. I’ve never felt lower in my life. There was no validation, no comfort to be had, making all the effort - the staying the night, the kiss, the trying to cuddle - highlight how much he had broken me.I put on my underwear and sweatpants, kept his sweatshirt since I couldn’t find my shirt, and ran out his door and down a stairwell as I heard voices of other boys in the fraternity house. I circled around the lower level because a part of me said it would help to avoid being seen. I pulled the hoodie over my head to hide my face and to shield me from a light rain that was falling. I don’t remember feeling the cold. I don’t remember feeling anything but confusion.Several moments of that night haunted me for a long time. Some of them I didn’t recount here because it would mean looking at old journal entries too painful to review again. But three stick out: the moment I gave up, the moment he called me pretty while he was sexually assaulting me, and the morning after when I stumbled out into the rain. My favorite professor had sent an email to her students saying she would be in her office between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m.; I wanted to go to her office and talk. I knew I needed help; I was just scared of confronting what I went through because of what it would mean.I often wonder what would have happened if I had. Doubtless she would have helped me; I would have confronted what happened; I would have gotten a rape kit. I would have gone to the police. I shudder when I think about it. Would it be better than the hell I ended up going through?I ripped his hoodie off of me when I got home and stuffed it in the side of my bed. I didn’t want my roommate to see it. More importantly, I didn’t want to see it.I didn’t go to class. About an hour after I had walked home, I began puking. My head hurt. My vagina hurt. Everything was red. I don’t know if it was the vomit or the memories, but at some point I registered tears on my face.At one point, vomit became lodged in my throat and I couldn’t breathe. It woke me up more than anything, as I struggled to breath and the only relief was to puke it up.It’s a great metaphor for what I went through over the next several weeks: all the crap had to come out before I could breathe again.I finally wretched and collapsed on the floor, remembering the words “between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m.” I should go, I tell myself. It’s not 9 yet. I should get up and go. She will help me. I didn’t put words to what D did to me at that moment, but I knew my professor would help me.Even then, the small voice in my head was screaming at me that it was rape. I didn’t tell her to shut up. I ignored her completely; it was very effective.Instead, I told a friend at another school via text. That it hurt. That I fucked up. That my body wasn’t into it. I don’t fault her for what she said, which was “I’m not saying it wasn’t rape but that you might just have had bad sex”; we were both over our heads in confronting this. I learned later she had also been assaulted and I think she was still struggling with it at the time.Her words were enough to convince me that I shouldn’t tell anyone, that it was just “bad sex.”  “It wasn’t rape. It was bad sex, but it wasn’t rape.” That’s what I told myself – my words, not hers.For the next month, the “not rape” caused my entire life to fall apart.