My new short story

Give and Take

I walk immersed in the sunset, thinking she sounded a bit down, thinking I should get her out of the house and bathe with her in these fiery colours. 

She opens the door. She has been crying. 

"What is wrong with me?" is the first thing she says to me.

"There is nothing wrong with you" is the first thing I say to her. "What did he do?"

We do not go out to bathe in the sunset. Instead, I let some of it into her bedroom, where she has led me. We sit, half lie down on the bed, propped up on the cushions and pillows in front of the wardrobe mirror, and she tells me that he has raped her… “He said he wouldn't have had to do it, if I were what a girlfriend was supposed to be; you know, always available."

I am so angry, I can hardly speak, but I make myself relax for her sake. I look into her eyes in the reflection in the mirror, and say warmly: “Look at you. Look at yourself carefully. This is you. This is your body. Not his! Yours. You decide everything about it. Whether you want it in any proximity to someone else or not, whether you want it touched or not, whether you want to have it pleasured or not, and you decide in what way and when and with whom. All of this has got nothing, nothing to do with him.”

She looks at herself, at her reflection, her eyes filling with tears. Then she looks directly at me and smiles a little. She puts her head on my shoulder and I kiss her forehead. I put my arm around her and we sit like this for a while, what is left of the sunset gradually leaving us in darkness. We relax into it, and sit there for long enough to fall asleep a little. Through the dark, I hear her whisper.

“When I asked him to get off me, he said that sex was a give and take, and I was not giving him enough, so he was going to take it.”

I wonder whether to talk about men’s sense of entitlement and their violence, but decide to say something else altogether. “And what is it exactly that he is giving you?” I ask. I know he is not a friend to her, not a support in any way. He has nothing on offer intellectually, emotionally or physically. I know she has not had an orgasm with him yet. He ignores her clitoris, as if it’s nonexistent. I can’t think of anything she is getting out of the relationship.

“Nothing,” she whispers. “I don’t even know why I am with him.”

I want to say: “Because you have been brought up in a patriarchal society on the patriarchal fairytales, on the patriarchal conception of romance, of family,” but I stay quiet. I feel that she wants to say something else. I let the silence be there.

She moves herself closer to me. My arm is sore. I remove it from around her. We lie facing each other. She says: “I took a shower afterwards. A long shower. I wanted to wash him off me, from me, from inside and outside of me.” I move her fringe from her eyes.

“I don’t know what to do now. Is he even still my boyfriend? Has he ever really been one?”

I let her stay with these questions, ponder them.

It feels as though we drift off to sleep again.

***

When we wake up, it is morning.

“I think I am going to report him,” she says with conviction, but then as if losing confidence, she adds: “Would you?”

“I think I would,” I say.

“I thought you were going to say it depends.”

I smile. I often say it depends. It has become a joke between us. “I could say that.”

“Then what would that depend on?”

“Whether I felt up to it. Whether I felt like making a stand by reporting. Whether I believed he would be punished and I would be able to handle being re-traumatised."

She nods, then hugs me. I know what she is saying. We are going to do it.

© Agnieszka Niemira 2013