You’d be amazed by the human memory’s ability to romanticise painful and traumatic experiences.
You’d thought it was over an hour ago, straddling my lap, when I gripped your hips and emptied myself inside you. You wanted it to be over; wanted to be pulled down and held in a comforting postcoital cuddle.
It’s what you’re used to, judging by the look of surprise-cum-sadness-cum-fear in your eyes when I instead pulled you up by your hair and tossed you onto the floor like a mewling rug. You were brave, though, I’ll give you that. You fought back your tears when I made you crawl naked to the bathroom, even when I put my foot up on your hip and kicked you over for the sheer amusement of watching you sprawl gracelessly.
It wasn’t until the first time the back of my hand connected with your cheekbone that the first tear came. And once the dams were broken, there was no holding it back. Great big heaving sobs, shaking your entire body while my hands coloured it in with bruises.
In your distress I don’t think you even heard me turn the tap on, and the weeping turned to screeching when I picked you up by the nape of your neck and bent you over the side of the tub. And now, your panic grows ever more frantic as you howl under the water, lungs filling perilously, and for the first time you have to feel someone force himself inside you when you genuinely don’t want it, fighting back with every bit of resolve you can muster. Until your strength slowly, inevitably, ebbs away, the screaming stops, and the water goes still once more.
It’ll be the most helpless and useless you will ever feel, if you’re lucky. For a while, you’ll try hard not to think about it at all. But you’d be amazed by the human memory’s ability to romanticise painful and traumatic experiences.
And you’ll be ashamed at how soon you’re lying naked in your bed at night, thinking back on it and rubbing yourself raw through your tears.