I Said Yes to Make Sure He Used a Condom

since he’d already stuck his dick inside my vagina though I’d said no, no, my roommate being, at first, directly below us in our bunked dorm beds, but leaving when she heard the sound of kissing, already mad (which, fair).

I’d said no because of all the nuns at my middle school who I didn’t believe on the surface, but who I believed way down in some hidden part of me

about sin. And though I was not, at that time, a virgin, I was reticent about the sex part of sex because of reasons I didn’t know and still don’t know. I said yes also because of the nuns, because when he put his dick inside my vagina, just kind of let it lie in there, I thought of all the statistics they gave us about STDS, and this boy seemed particularly likely—

particularly— and also constitutionally unsuited to fatherhood, being, as we both were, like 20 or so. I said, fine, if you go get a condom, and I have to admit that I did find it funny/flattering seeing him run past my window half naked in the snow hunting up one of those bowls of condoms they put around college campuses in their ubiquitous gesture of, like, total boomer-era wokeness. And I realize that I could have hopped out of bed at this point and locked the dorm room door and that many of you will ask “why didn’t you hop out of bed and lock the door of your dorm room if you didn’t want to be raped?” (or— my anxiety compels me to amend this— pseudo-raped, as Leo and I joked that year— the “sliding scale of rape,” we said) but honestly,

in that moment, it didn’t seem that deep and I was drunk and sleepy and still not at all particularly interested in having sex, but definitely controlled by how angry I always expected people to be if I ever stood up for myself,

so he came back and climbed on top of me and, my vagina being the right shape and texture to have sex into, he had sex into it and it hurt, so I went off into the ceiling’s coarseness, just looking at it, thinking about it dryly, until it was over. And the next morning he asked me if I wanted to go to breakfast with him and I felt like I was in a dream either because I was still drunk or because

I had dissociated and we ate eggs in the dining hall and then I went back to my dorm room where he barged in and—i’m still not sure if this part even really happened, I was so detached by this time—told me

“I’m not really looking for a girlfriend” to which the only suitable answer would have been no fucking shit but instead I said

“I’m not really looking either,” or something like that, and though he kept trying to make the whole thing happen again, I never was drunk enough again, I guess, and instead some woman his act—it all starts with his act, which, in my experience, was a kind of performed attention to your body and personhood which gains him entry into the personal space of your bedroom—some woman his act worked on ended up pregnant the next year and they ended up getting married and having the baby and I thought, fuck, had I not— if I weren’t— but I did and I was, so I didn’t have a baby at 21, which I honestly don’t congratulate

myself on enough. And I ran across a video of him recently and saw he’s gotten a little fatter, like a dad, which he is, and I realized then that that’s the most

I’m going to get, revenge-wise, since there is not relief available for my particular—

my individual—

that precise type of—