I was assaulted.
It started innocently enough. I made plans to hang out with someone I went to middle school with. I had also seen this person throughout high school, even though I went to public elementary and middle school and Catholic high school. My high school was all-girls, so naturally we needed to ship in boys to perform the male roles in plays, and this person was a drama person. We were also both hosts at the 99 (where I no longer worked when this happened). I’d been to his house for several parties, and had gone to see Les Miserables with him when it was in theaters.
Anyway. We made plans to hang out at his house, which, as I said, I’d done before. I got out of work at 5, and I was going to go right there and we’d order dinner.
I got there, in my sweater, leggings, and nearly knee-high boots. He let me pick what movie we watched. I picked Adventureland. We talked for a while, and I was getting hungry, but I didn’t want to be rude. We talked about a lot of things, among them my abusive ex-boyfriend. He asked why nothing had ever happened between he and I when we worked together, and I explained that I had a boyfriend, so the potential attractiveness of other people wasn’t even on my radar. Perhaps I should have left after that.
But I didn’t. We kept talking. I’m assuming it was harmless stuff, because I don’t remember it. But maybe I blocked it out.
Out of the blue, he tried to kiss me. I backed up, and suddenly he was on top of me. To paint a better picture, he is at least twice my weight. And I am now stuck underneath him. He keeps kissing me, and suddenly whispers in my ear, “The best thing about absolute power is giving other people the illusion that they have any power at all.” At this point, I’m crying, and can’t get any words out because I’m freaking out. He is, after all, twice my size. Which means he’s almost three times the size of my ex-boyfriend, the abusive one. I know what someone 1/3 his size is capable of, and I’m horrified by the potential he has to hurt me. Plus, no one else is home. No one can come help me anyway.
This part my brain definitely blocked out. He somehow got my pants and underwear off, and was going down on me. I’m still crying and freaking out, because I obviously know what he’s going to do next. He moves his head away from me and starts to unbutton his pants, and suddenly he’s apologizing because he can’t keep it up. He’s handing me my pants and underwear back. I throw them back on quicker than I’ve ever thrown them on before, and while I’m putting my boots on, he tells me that we should do it again sometime. All I can manage to do is shake my head, because no no no absolutely not. So he tells me I owed it to him, because he listened to me talk about my life. I didn’t even put my coat on, I just grabbed it and left.
He did bite me while he was going down on me, and I had a teeth-shaped bruise for almost a month. It hurt to drive and walk for a few days, because of how high up it was and the fact that I don’t have a thigh gap. The next day, as you may have guessed, was New Year’s Eve. My brother and I had already planned to watch the girls (A, A, and S, who I’ve mentioned in previous posts), so we did that, but I’ve never felt like doing anything less in my life. Shortly after that, the next residency of my graduate program started. I told my friends there what happened, and I presented it as funny, because I hadn’t truly processed it.
I didn’t let anyone touch me for a year and a half. I probably still haven’t processed it enough, because thinking about it is scary and painful. Sometimes I feel like a poser for being so affected by it, when other people’s assault stories are worse. But I’m trying to get better about knowing that other people’s bad experiences doesn’t mean mine wasn’t also bad.
I’ve been asked why I didn’t press charges, and it’s because I honestly just want it to go away. I don’t want to spend time and money to likely have nothing official come of it, and I don’t want things I did when I was younger used as proof that I somehow asked for this.
I did, about five or six months later, ask him to apologize. He read the Facebook message, but never responded to it. Now I have him blocked.
The reason that I’m posting this is so that other people this happened to might be less afraid to say something. We all deserve to be treated with respect. This is also why I don’t like New Year’s.
However, Happy New Year.
