I could’ve told him I knew he’d invited the three of us to stay the weekend because he wanted me so badly he was willing to break the rules, engineer the whole scenario. That I suspected thoughts of me had plagued him, kept him awake at night, until he couldn’t take it anymore. I’d had little tastes of power with men before, but my power over him was intoxicating, and what I wanted more than anything was more of it, proof that I was right.
Of course, I didn’t have those words back then—only in hindsight. So instead I said, “You tell me what I want.”
I think that’s what he’d been waiting for. He used one hand to hold me against the bed and the other to tug down my panties. I could feel him hard and warm against my back. He said, “You want to obey. No questions.”
I’d only started to nod when he grabbed my hips, and I drew a sharp breath. He clapped a hand over my mouth and said, “Only when I tell you.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d had sex, but it might as well have been. First over the bed, then up against the wall. When I tried to twist to breathe, he tightened his hand over my mouth. My world narrowed: There was nothing except the sensation of his body surrounding me, the rub of the plaster against my cheek, the desperate tightening in my chest.
Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, I thought: What would my mother say?
It was like a switch flipped, and I felt indescribably wrong. My eyes grew hot; then there were tears on my cheeks. I thought, Look at me. How will I ever show my face outside these walls?
Don pushed me to my knees, hard enough that I cried out, because my knees were still raw from cleaning. He grabbed me by the hair, thrust my face to his boot, and said, “Remember, I know your secret. Show me you’re my girl, Shay. Lick it.”
I ran my tongue over his boot. He bent and started touching me. I licked harder, longer strokes, tasting the bitterness of the leather, feeling the grit.
He said, “You’re pathetic, aren’t you?”
I could feel the truth of it in the way my body responded. I’ve never felt more electric than when I was down on the floor, licking his shoes. I’m sorry, Jamie. It’s just I want you to know the truth.
JAMIE: Don’t apologize. Keep going.
SHAY: I clutched that night with Don to my chest the entire next day. While we cooked and read, and he lectured, I thought: No one else knows, but secretly, I’m his and he’s mine.
He had a lot to teach us. In the beginning, I was skeptical, but there was something so provocative about what he said that it was hard not to consider it. Then slowly, day after day, it began to feel like truth. He said feminists were some of the worst agents of misinformation. The whole movement had started with good intentions but got twisted, and now everyone insisted on denying the differences between men and women. If you dared question the ideology or point out nuance, you were ruined. And the end result was that girls like us had a yoke around our neck, put there by other women who claimed to know what was best for us.
He said it was important that people were honest about who they were and what they wanted, even if it wasn’t convenient or didn’t fit a political fantasy. He pointed at Laurel and said, “Is she as tall or as strong as I am?” He pointed at me and said, “Am I as curved as Shay? Of course not. There’s truth in our DNA. But everyone likes to pretend there’s no such thing as truth these days. They like to act like everything’s constructed, it’s all relative, as if there’s not a raw, real, natural world. It’s willful ignorance at best—at worst, dangerous denial.” He told us denial was why the world had gone off course, why people slumped through their lives feeling empty and alienated.
He looked at us and said, “You’ve felt lost, haven’t you? Like you have no clue who you are and what you should be doing.”
We all nodded—
JAMIE: You were college students. Of course you felt that way.