Things That Happened to my friend no. 1

A greyish-black flashed between her eyes, like an old-timey picture slideshow tried to advance to the next frame inside her head.

Her mouth turned into a face splitting grin.

“No.” she said in a demanding tone I'd never heard before, and started grinding faster.

I leaned up on my elbows, confusion on my face.

“I’m about to cum. You need to get off of me.” I said firmly, unable to comprehend her response.

“No!” she said again, her hips moving back and forth even faster, her thighs desperately clasping onto my torso.

“LeeAra, you need to get off of me!” 

“NO!”

Her face was as close as another person’s face could get, and less than a second later, she pushed my shoulders back, pinning me down even more flagrantly. I was shocked. I did not recognize this person. Immediately I doubted that she was using birth control, as she had said. I could not get out from between her thighs. I felt lost, helpless. Underneath a stranger, a demon, something entirely foreign to me.

I came.

She giggled, and wrapped her arms around me.

“Oh Noah!” she said, her meager breasts in my face.

It did not help that this was my name. Over the years, I have mistakenly answered numerous times to people merely saying the word “No”, often just overhearing someone’s answer to another person’s question. For the first decade of my life, among other monikers, I was called “No One” more than my own birth name.

My mother always said, “When you’re called, you’re supposed to come”. I was taught never, ever, ever hit a woman. I was scarcely allowed to move a muscle without my very Swedish mother’s permission during my childhood.

My foster parent’s would attest that my “default” response under stress, between, fight, flight, or freeze, was demonstrably the latter. I had already had a few panic attacks, and have fainted at least once.

LeeAra as she was called, fancied herself a hippy, a “witchy pagan”, an advocate for sustainability who had it all figured out after just one semester at an institution that billed itself as an “environmental liberal arts college”. Throughout her pre-adult life, she had been a “horse girl”, her parents having bought a few horses, and enrolled her in lessons and competitions etc. Her thighs were stronger than I had given her credit for.

She had started withholding sex from me weeks before this incident, as I refused to forego a condom.

She complained that condoms had too many chemicals, that intercourse felt better without them, that she felt like we weren’t actually even having sex if there was a barrier, that they were unnatural, that the spermicide would mess with her hormones and her ability to have children.

After a few days, she promised she would use her own birth control. I told her I would pull out every single time so I could still observe my own form of birth control.

She and I started engaging in intercourse again, and I would pull out every time, no matter what position. If she was in a position of greater control (which she seemingly preferred), I would tell her when I was about to cum and she would cooperate, enabling me to finish outside of her.

This instance was different. And completely out of character for her from what I had come to know.

I had no reason to believe she would coerce and rape me, in an effort to conceive a child.

She and I were each in our second year of college, we were decidedly a couple at the time, and had already talked about having children. We had agreed to wait until after we had graduated from college at the earliest. We were hardly ever outside of each other’s company. Later I would find out she unfriended some of my childhood female friends from my facebook account, in some cases blocked some of them. I didn’t notice because I wasn’t in regular communication with any of them.

I do not know why she suddenly felt the need to be pregnant at that time.

But her plan was successful. A few weeks later, she missed her period, and pissed on some plastic. Sure enough, she was pregnant. The last time I remember fainting is when she told me. My mind immediately went back to this incident, when she sexually assaulted me after coercing me into limiting my observation of birth control to what comes down to trust. Which she broke.

She was over the moon. Calling her mom, calling her sister, calling my sister, making facebook posts.

I decided I would wait it out, hoping she miscarried in the meantime. In any case, I would be butchered socially for leaving her at this point, and my social circle was highly limited, having already been threatened with being “disowned” by my foster parents, who had legally adopted me without me even knowing, who had never allowed me to use a vehicle independently, and who had chosen to homeschool me. I had few to zero friends, certainly no one I could speak honestly and openly to.

Either she would miscarry, or I would have to wait until a few months after the baby was delivered, before I could hope to leave. Was there any way she could possibly make this right? I couldn’t think of a way. It would turn out, no, definitely not. The next nine months were spent with her twisting the knife. She wanted to drop out of school (she already knew everything she needed to), I wanted to finish the semester at least. I could no longer engage in sex with her, so I began masturbating to experience release. She wanted to move closer to her parents, that seemed wise since I did not plan on being in the picture.

I shut down, emotionally, just went on autopilot. She told my parents I was a porn addict, further severing my relationship with the only “lifeline” I knew of. She decided she wanted an open relationship, and then harassed me and tried to publicly humiliate me for getting a Tinder account, going so far as to physically beat me with a high heeled shoe the moment I walked in the door after I got home from work, since I had a new female facebook friend, an attractive woman I’d met at a local music show.

When it finally came down to separating, she stated all she wanted was for me to pay off her student loans, totaling about $12,000 at the time. I thought that was a ridiculous request to put in writing. And I had no idea how she lived with herself. I thought if I merely started at the very least, paying the legal minimum for child support, she would soon take some responsibility and move on from me completely, even out of preservation for her precious narrative. Instead, I’ve now paid well more than that over the last eight years. And someone who is raped to produce a child shouldn’t have to pay a cent for that offspring anyway.

Published 7/2/23