Author's Note: This was inspired by the Caroline Kepnes novel You, which is a terrific read. It contains scenes of graphic nonconsensual sex. It is perhaps the darkest thing I've ever written. Feel free to comment about how sick and twisted I am, but in my defense, I wanted to imitate a different style. Call it my own method of masturbation. As always, I am healing from surgery slowly but surely, and I do appreciate any help from volunteer editors.
*****
It's always about you. What you're doing. Not that I'm ever invited. Just told, sitting there unnoticed behind you, always unsure about how to speak and enter your world.
I only overhear things.
Not that I would be able to make any of the parties you've mentioned.
Unlike the rest of my peers, college is not a community to me. I work. I spend Monday, Wednesday, Friday and weekends manning the register at a seedy adult bookstore, sweeping up condoms and cum. The money I do make, goes into keeping the lot fees paid and making sure there's enough McCormicks for mom in the freezer.
That way she'll keep co-signing my loans.
I don't belong at a school like Texas A&M. Another white-trash boy with an absentee father doesn't make the school more diverse. You wouldn't have come all the way to College Station if the recruitment flier let kids like me in the photo. And while I work away the weekends under the table, I have to hear you complain royally about the city I never see.
Party here, club there. Vapid, oblivious, nonsense...
I know I'm jealous.
I'm not part of your world. I'm fixated on wars: The High Kings of Ireland, the Flight of the Earls, and the end of it all. I'm fixated on Oliver Cromwell...
And what you're wearing. Not that I can help noticing. Jesus Christ do I notice. Every inch of your body. I notice. Especially now, when we're in class, and I can't focus on Cromwell or the goddamn Irish. All I can think about, every day, every fucking second...
You.
I know you made friends with me strategically. I get that. Pretty girls with expertly styled dirty blonde hair and Daddy's credit card don't bother taking notes in class. I take notes in class, but not because I need them. I'm not one of the mindless drones coping down the lecture slides. Or at least I wasn't. Not until you asked me to because I just seem like I'm so smart and so good at school. And god are you just so new and everything seems so big!
You're from a small town in Texas. Clearly for the first time you are not the prettiest girl within driving distance. You're insecure about that. It's transparent. It secretes from your perfect pores. It's why you don't ever show up to class wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt. You make yourself up all nice and pretty for me.
You make sure to show off every inch of your beautiful breasts. Low cut dresses, spaghetti tops, blouses that bow down underneath your enormous bust; you show all you can without getting kicked out of class.
Oh and the professors know it.
Only they don't give a fuck about you. You haven't got that yet. They don't give a fuck about your body (and it is quite a body). Most importantly they don't give a fuck about your education. They're all here like me, trying to write a book, and need to be left alone to do it.
I haven't written anything real in days.
That's why I'm in the Irish history class. I'm digging through primary sources of the sack of Wexford during Cromwell's campaign in Ireland. I'm working with Dr. Riley after class and accessing primary sources at the Cushing Library. I actually give a shit about my degree.
You took this class because you thought the professor would be hot and have a cool Irish accent.
Not that you aren't smart. You graduated valedictorian in a small Podunk public school with a graduating class less than 100 students strong. And you make sure to tell everyone, but in a casual way, so that you don't sound like you're bragging.
But you are.
And you have quite the crowd, quite the following. I live in this town, at home with my family. This is my safety school. I can't actually afford any of the more expensive, more prestigious private and state schools despite the few scholarships I received.
You talk to one of the other girls. I don't like her. I don't like any of the other classmates. I'm jealous of them. You're putting on a performance, prancing and posing so that everyone can see you. So that the whole classroom glows in the light of that special bubbly energy you bring to everything with your forced and fake nativity, with your subliminal sexuality. You're sucking out the entire room's attention with your big breasts, with that tight ass, and with that perfectly trimmed pussy.
Of course I don't know you trim your pussy, but I think about it.
I think about how often you play with it.
I think about your bronzed skin, artificially colored over and over again as a meticulous ritual and risk to melanoma.
I think about you all spread out over my bed, your long legs stretched out as I reach up them. My fingers feeling every inch of you. Your pussy feeling every inch of me.
Then I try to think about class. I keep coming back to Wexford. I can see you, imagine you through the sounds, empty noise except for what was in my head. The silent sounds of battle clang over the lecture, over the sounds of keys clacking out notes about the lecture, or more likely about Facebook and Instagram and all that other bullshit.
While everyone else focuses on something else, we are there.
Mostly screams, only they can stand out over the cannon shot. Here and there, the quick succession of a volley catches my attention. But in this fantasy, I'm still focused is always on you. Here wearing one of those peasant skirts, I know stereotypical, it's a green plaid, over a white blouse. It's ripping off of you like some sort of French resistance fighter.
Only you weren't fighting. You aren't even able to run. You're such a scared little thing.
I've written the erotic fiction. I describe the actions of the New Model Army as they storm over the walls. The English taking girl after girl, one after the other, then discarding them. It's not the focus, it's the layers, the context, the attention to detail. The reader wants to get a vivid picture of what life is like. Or what it's supposed to feel like.
I miss the mark for my audience. In my story, I take you. I grab you by the throat and shove you into the nearest hovel, not even really bothering with the chaos going on around me. I want to see your breasts first. I rip off the top of the dress. It's not sweet, it's not a moment of passion.
I'm seeing your nipples, large with the attention, exactly proportional to the size of your breast. They are described through the inexperienced, virginal details of my own imagination as I continue through with the vile act, hiking up your skirt, tearing it away as I ram myself into you, weeping and begging me to stop every second of the way.
Then I cum inside your perfect pussy, leaving you broken there, having to pick up the pieces in this ruined city.
The audience hated it. It sparked a major flame war, which I gleefully encouraged.
Trash, garbage, filth!
Take this sicko's work down!
Variations of everything that boiled down to what the fuck is wrong with you and how dare you write about things that actually happened?
They all want to pretend that our rape fantasies are really consent fantasies where the woman wanted it all along. As if that undoes all the terrible things that really turned us on about the fantasy in the first place. We're not clicking on rape fantasies, we are only into non-consent or reluctance play. Now we can stroke ourselves guilt free.
It's bullshit!
Some of us want to rape, some of us want to be raped. The irony is that once we find each other, is not actually rape. Semantically, it's an impossible fantasy. No actual rapist became one because he read a really dark story.
The audience knows this intellectually, they just need aftercare. They want the author to hold their hand, and say see! She really wanted it after all!
Isn't that worse?
Isn't "she really wanted it" the rationalizing mantra that enables every would be molester and monster?
Sometimes good porn hurts your feelings. Sometimes it makes you sick to your stomach that you found something so sinister arousing. It's entertainment. It's the erotic equivalent of enjoying a scientist sew three people together. Rather just accept that and write about it in the same way that one writes about anthropomorphized avatar aliens, the erotic community neuters an animalistic instinct inherent in us as a species.
Only I'm not even supposed to be writing porn. I have you in my head, a tick burrowed inside of my brain, driving himself deeper and deeper inside my erotic imagination. I can't focus. I find myself no longer taking notes, no longer listening to the professor, even as the exam approaches. I'm wrapped up in my fantasy. My idea of taking you. Of pulling back on your hair and watching her throat extend as I force myself inside of you.
You raise your hand.
And arch your body.
I can see the small of your back, almost to the part between the two cheeks as you stretch. You seem so small, but that's just compared to me.
I can see that you have a tastefully done thistle tattooed on your right cheek. I can just make out a couple of petals, and I'm impressed. It's not the average tramp stamp, and for the first time I'm focused on something other than your body.
"Is this going to be on the test?"
Dr. Riley furrows his brow, annoyed at being interrupted, and goes back to his lecture.
"There is an argument to be made that Cromwell's brutality ultimately save more lives as Ireland soon capitulated..."
But I'm not listening, I'm watching you. Watching your body contort as you stretch. You are clearly bored. Clearly looking for the easy way out of the exam. I'm not surprised when you're waiting for me after class.
"So... um... Red."
You start awkwardly searching for the word because you don't know my name. You only know that I have red hair because you're looking at it. That's okay, because I'm just a tool to you. I'm just a person with useful information in a class that's 60% lecture and 40% reading and you've probably done neither. You spent most of the semester on your phone, checking out the more attractive guys in class.
"How worried are you about the test?"
"Worried enough," I say casually. "This is my major, so I really get a high GPA for grad school."
"Oh really wow, I can't imagine. I'm just hoping to fake my way to C."
And that's what gets to me. History is why the world is the way it is, and you never notice anything unless it directly involves you. And I'm obsessed with you. I write about you. I think about you. I jack off about you, and I need to fuck you.
I hate myself.
And you aren't going to fuck me, not right now, not ever. There is no scene where I describe the English Civil War in enough detail that makes you want to fling off your clothes and roll around with me on a study table in the library. No, you are not coming back to my trailer to have sneaky sex in my twin bed, our bodies intertwining underneath the covers as we try not to wake my mother in the next room.
You're going to use me.
And I can hear the words tumbling out of my mouth without control, powerless as we agree on a time and place to meet. I'm like every other nerd in high school, thinking that you're jutting out your breasts to tease just me. Thinking they are something I might actually touch, something I might actually suck. My imagination, developed by years of being deprived, makes me like I'm almost there as you talk to me, peeling down your red bra.
Because I can actually see the strap.
