A Penitent Season: Day 10

Note: This is a series of 14-days of erotic penance written in real-time available exclusively to my patrons. It's our observation of a real fucked up version of Lent. You can access the entire series at this tag.

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Day 10

I woke up this morning because someone was testing the speakers for their Holi party. Punjabi music was blaring out of speakers that could stand to be repaired or thrown away altogether. The song was so familiar, the kind of cultural institution that is indisputable and unbearable; it was the kind of song that no one ever plays for themselves, but everyone knows all the words to, and everyone will beg for it to be played at parties. Dance is so important to social rituals in our country. Sometimes I wonder what the Indian identity means to me, and while I keep coming up with the constitution as the only acceptable answer for myself, I think I discount certain cultural aspects of identity. Like spices and dancing. What is India really? The individual spice palettes of every state seem to form the conglomerate that constitutes its fingerprint. The myriad excuses to dance in different ways, for different reasons, at different times of day; there is a melody to the way we exist, there is rhythm, and every political distortion of divide is an arrhythmia, but that break in the pattern isn't what sullies Indian identity, it's part of it. We're a vibrant, lovely tapestry with heart disease. The horrible is much who we are as the wonderful.

As I resolved and failed repeatedly to go back to sleep, he stirred beside me. He turned around and put his arm around me. I tried to adjust my arm but he grabbed my wrist and held it to the bed. I could feel his erection against my thigh. In a few moments he went back to gently snoring, but my wrist remained fastened by his grip, like I was chained in wait, of the inevitable impalement. The song changed to another one of those Punjabi songs. It reminded me of a bar I used to frequent fourteen years ago. It was halfway between school and my home, but that's not why I went there. I wasn't even that much of a drinker, but there was something forbidden about working-class watering holes. Forbidden to women, that is, and I didn't quite know how to articulate this then, but I was seeking to impose my right to loitering space. When you're a young woman growing up in a conservative culture, no matter how progressive your household may be, you have to contend with the mores of society and so much of them were to do with what girls could and could not do.

We couldn't wear this or that. We had to be home at a certain hour. We had to be polite to men because you couldn't hurt a male ego. We had to dumb ourselves down because we would scare the men otherwise. We couldn't just express sexual interest in people lest we have our reputations ruined, it was mandatory to perform the dance of reluctance and emotion for every dick we wanted in us. We couldn't go to bars like that one. Those bars were for the men and to go alone, all bars were for men. I wanted that space. I knew that the only long-term plan to emancipated myself was to wait till I was a legal adult, a high-school graduate and able to make all decisions for myself, but in the meanwhile, for the few intervening years, I needed to be able to make a play for some kind of free.

That bar was freedom to me.

I used to go there so often, they let me do whatever I wanted and I know a certain sensibility is bound to wonder why they weren't perturbed by the underage girl in the bar and it is simple. First of all that rule was barely enforced back then and second the pornographic view society is allowed to have of young women in general made them want me their. I was an aberration. A spectacle. A wayward girl. They wanted to watch me like a dirty train wreck.

I was dirty.

I am a confident person but in that phase in my life I possessed a kind of toxic sexual confidence that was unshakeable. Look, I am not proud of it, but the awareness that no matter what happened the fact that I would always be the underage one in that equation, emboldened me to fearlessness. The fact that I had already, in my life, let a man get away with raping me and convincing me that I had somehow been wrong to allow it, had me on a vengeful rampage. I would find men at the bar and take them to the mostly abandoned back stairway. I barely said a few words to them before I asked them if they wanted to fuck, I enjoyed how startled men are by that. They think you are crazy, but it scares them too. If they said yes, I would lead them to the staircase and push them against the wall. They'd try to kiss me but I would drop to my knees and unzip their pants. I'd hold their wrists against the wall while I sucked their cocks. I'd ask them to pull my hair, choke me, push me against the wall and also me. All of it, at my instruction. All of my pleasure, delivered to the letter, as I wrote it.

And then later when I saw them again at the bar, I would mix them up. Forgetting which cock was inside me on which day of which week, I had no qualms about showing my confusion. Some of them told stories about me, turning my presence in that bar into a show they would summon other men to witness, but it wasn't the blatant sexuality I carried that scares them, I know, it was the fact that I wasn't scared of them. The fact that I came into that bar and acted like I had the right to belong. That I didn't need them for anything except my pleasure. I was at my most fearless when I grabbed men by the wrist and pushed them into the wall.

I am at my most fearful when he grabs my wrist.

There are messaging systems in place between us, ones that evolved slowly over years of flirtatious exchanges and heart-wrenching exposure, I know what he means when he touches me a certain way. When he strokes my chin with his thumb, he is about to slap me. When he takes his watch off hours before bed, he is about to beat me. When he strokes the lower part of my back he wants me to bend over. When he grabs my wrist, he is going to fuck me. I knew it was coming. In time he began to grab my wrist harder and pulled himself over me. As he pushed both my wrists into the bed and opened his eyes to my terror, I couldn't help but think back to all the years of demanding a fucking from the men before me. Of screaming in throes of need that they weren't hurting me nearly at all. *Fuck me harder, fuck me harder.*

And now.

"Please don't fuck me," I begged him.

It's not just dreadful anymore, its elegiac, like every fucking is a swan song. He laughed at me and twisted my wrists, sitting down harder on my sore thighs and pressing into them hard enough for me to remember this game isn't over. God, it isn't over at all.

"Shut the fuck up, ungrateful ingrate," he said, gritting his teeth, "I was so nice to you all night."

That is a half-truth. At midnight, after he was done beating me, waterboarding me and torturing my cunt, I begged him to be nice to me for the rest of the night. I corrected and explained that he didn't even have to take care of me, I just wanted him to stop hurting me for a minute. He said he would stop, he said he would be nice, he kissed me for the first time this week, but two minutes later, he fell asleep. So, yes, he was nice to me, but what that really means is that he was asleep. Does that count? He says it counts and even asking that question means I do not appreciate the respite from all the things he could be doing to me while he is asleep.

"Now don't make me rape you first thing in the morning," he said, choking me, "Bend over and take your fucking."

I did.

I moved too slowly at first and he pulled me from my end of the bed to his. He got on his feet and I bent over in front of him. The cane was still lying on his side of the bed, he picked it up and rapped against the pillow closest to my face. I pulled it to myself and buried my face in it. I wonder if there are people in the world who don't get through sex with silent screams delivered into memory foam that will develop PTSD by the time I am done with it. I clutched my palms with my fingers. Digging my nails into the expanse. His cock rubbed against my hole.

"You're finally not wet, anymore," he said, I don't know if it was approval.

"The lube is.." I started to respond, perhaps leading up to an apology.

"There is no need for that," he said, pushing into me with a violent burst of discomfort, "I can hurt myself a little to hurt you a lot."

He did.

He hurt me a lot.

I don't know when the Punjabi music stopped playing in the background of my life, but wherever I am now, it is a triumph that girl from the bar would understand. I made space for myself in the world, and in that space, I will be haunted as I fucking please. Tell me to hide my madness now, the glint in my eye is still fearless.

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Tiny little droplets of blood splashed from my arms onto my face and shoulders. Every time he brought the cane down on my bleeding arms, more rivulets of scarlet decussated one another on my skin and poured onto the bed. I was chained in place, exactly where I go to bed each night, and I couldn't stop thinking about the very particular, eldritch romance of falling asleep on your own blood. Being lulled to slumber atop the plundered fields of your own massacre. I wondered if he was thinking about it too. He seemed so ensorcelled by the reactions of my skin, it felt like I had disappeared completely.

It's so strange, this condition where you are reduced to your flesh, not to be a sexual object, but one that bears endless pain. It's not even a reduction to the body, really, he reduces me to my suffering. I exist in all the ways in which I can hurt for him, do I even exist outside of my pain? Does he see anything else in me at all? Does he see that I am yearning for a moment of warmth? Could he tell, as he hit me, that I wished he could kiss my blood and then my mouth? Maybe he would have been able to tell if he wasn't so entrenched in the sanguineous seduction of my body.

He laughed, again and again, as he struck me and saw the blood pour out of me, he laughed. On any other day, in any other sequence of events, I could have really enjoyed this. I could have really enjoyed the handcuffs and chains around my wrists even though they were cutting into my skin. I could have enjoyed the cuts on my skin, burning from the exposure to the air. I could have enjoyed the impact of the cane on my arms as it came down, making my skin come alive with sensation. I could have enjoyed it. It seems like exactly the type of thing that would keep me warm on a lonely night, when memories and fantasy are all I have to wrap myself in. It seems like the sort of thing I would have tried to write into existence decades ago, when I was too afraid to believe in a fairy tale where *happily ever after* was forged in a dungeon.

But I suspect that something is broken.

This is the nature of unrelentingly persecution. It is not on the first day that you can take a person to the depths of their own horror, nor have them realise how pallid their resolve will become with prolonged exposure to despair, but on the tenth day, there is nowhere left to go. I'm at the bottom of the pit. Everywhere I reach, there is dirt and rubble. I avoid looking at it too closely because I worry that I will realise all of it broke off me.

I tried to turn my neck enough to look at the blood instead. I could see some of it, but not enough to placate the visual urge to see myself suffer. Then, almost out of nowhere, I started to beg him to stop. As far as I can remember it wasn't the pain, I wonder if I can really still even feel it. I felt a helplessness overcome me, a portentous helplessness, I needed him to show me he would care for me when I really needed it. I needed something, a single moment of compassion. I don't need him to bring me flowers, but if he could hold a dandelion out to me long enough for me to watch it fall to pieces, I will know that my powerlessness is not so abject I cannot escape. I will take a message sent to me in covert taraxacology, if he would just be willing to send me one. I begged and begged.

"You can beg all you fucking want, you cannot get me to stop," he said, swatting my wounds, "I don't know why you do this to yourself, why do you insist on holding on to hope?"

Why do I, though?

I suspect it is because it thrills me to see my naive, little dreams crushed by his iron-clad resolve to destroy me. I suspect I give myself dreams I don't even want, just so he can shatter them.

It's the least I can do.

It's my dandelion for him.

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