Consent_A #MeToo Romance

by Jason Letts

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  From the Author

  Copyright Page

  CONSENT

  a #MeToo Romance

  Jason Letts

  CHAPTER 1

  I was at a coffee shop with my old college friend Jenny early one morning having one of those conversations that begs the simple question, Do any decent men exist out there?

  Jenny, a normally perky blonde wearing a dark purple cardigan marked with little flecks of paint, had bags under her eyes and a sullen expression, suggesting she’d been up too late or been crying, or both. But she forced a bewildered smile and leaned over her macchiato, tapping a card against the table.

  “But I’ll tell you, you were smart not to stick around for grad school, Sarah. Even in Fine Arts it’s getting old. I go out to clubs now on weekends not because I get any enjoyment out of it but because I want to try to remember what it feels like to be a human being. Most of the time all I come home with is a mild sense of self-loathing. Those are on the good nights.”

  I could see the look in her eyes asking me to let her go on about the bad nights and at the same time hoping I wouldn’t. I’d only seen Jenny once since graduation despite talking often on Facebook about getting together. Then all of a sudden she was adamant about meeting me immediately but wouldn’t say why. I had a feeling I was about to find out.

  “What happened this time?” I asked, obliging her as a group of guys sat down at a nearby table. Jenny didn’t seem to notice them, instead wrinkling her brow and gesturing to her face.

  “Oh, you can tell? I was hoping it wasn’t that obvious,” she said while I pursed my lips and girded myself for the worst. “It was just last Friday when I was over at Midnight with my art friend and I let myself get carried away thinking I’d actually found someone. He had a face to die for with stubbly cheeks and thick eyebrows. You know I just love that. The way he danced was too good to be true. I kept working nearer to him, hoping he’d find me, and then we were dancing together in the kind of sexy way you dream about when you’re sixteen. I kept finding ways to run my fingertips over his chest and stomach. It felt like I was touching fire. I don’t even know when my friend left.”

  I nodded, waiting for the other shoe to drop, as it always does.

  “We moved on to the second stage of the club triathlon, boozing. I was already wondering how far this would go and had that bloom of anticipation that this guy could actually be someone for me. I mean, he was there and I was there and we were having fun, and he really wasn’t paying any attention to any of the other girls around. We’d exchanged a few words and had a drink. I was starting to feel really good about it. Maybe it was the tingly feeling inside, but he seemed funny and warm.

  “But then my phone buzzed and I got this nightmare text you wouldn’t believe. A water main in my building burst. I live in the basement and I immediately got this image in my head of my apartment turning into an aquarium. I said I was really sorry but had to leave right then. He gave me this hard look, and when he started following me out I figured he couldn’t hear me because of the noise. We made it to a quieter hallway and I started to tell him again what happened, but he just shook his head and said we should get an Uber.

  “I knew he didn’t mean the car would take me home. He was talking about me going back with him. So I’d been working on some of the paintings in my living room for months; I’d flunk out of my degree without them. I didn’t get why I couldn’t just give him my number and we could pick up where we left off another night once my life wasn’t ruined, but he got this nasty grin on his face and said that he’d been very patient and wasn’t going to get dropped at the end of the night without something to show for it.

  “It was dark in the hallway. He grabbed my wrist and began pulling me along. I struggled but it seemed like we were heading outside, which would’ve been OK, until he pushed me into the men’s room. He was bigger than me and a lot stronger, and I couldn’t believe something like this was happening. The worst part of it was that there were a couple other guys exiting the men’s room who saw him forcing me. They just laughed and made a joke about him having a live one.

  “When we were alone in there I said to the guy, like, “Is this what you really want?” He said something about how I really wanted it and would feel better about it once we got started. The look in his eyes was crazy. His arms were locking me in and I was completely stuck until this second where he started undoing his belt. He glanced down and I pushed off hard from the wall. I guess it caught him off-guard or something because he stumbled back and I managed to get past him, fling open the door, and run for the exit. I was looking over my shoulder expecting him to try to catch up to me for two blocks before I managed to get myself together enough to hail a cab and get home. My stuff was fine.”

  I was grimacing through her entire story. In some ways it was the same as a hundred other stories I’d heard, even if the details were completely different. That feeling of powerlessness, a normal situation turning traumatic, it never failed to make the world I lived in feel like an alien place, or remind me of the painful memory I could never outrun.

  “I’m so sorry that happened to you,” I said, my heart going out to her. They say about thirty-three percent of women become victims of sexual assault, but from my own anecdotal experience that number was more like ninety-nine percent. I glanced at the clock, wondering how much time for sympathy I had before I needed to get where I was going. I felt the pressure and the willingness to be there for Jenny, but she couldn’t have picked a worse time to spring her request for friend therapy. Of course, it wasn’t like she got to pick when she was assaulted either.

  “It just hurts, you know,” she said, her eyes narrowing. “Not just the physical pain of being touched in a way you don’t want to be. It’s someone you thought you had even a vague understanding of turning out to be completely different. It’s feeling like I must’ve done something wrong.”

  I shook my head and opened my mouth, ready to tell her all about how it wasn’t her fault at all, but a voice from the next table cut me off.

  “Maybe you should’ve just let him have it,” one of the guys said to Jenny, setting off a round of snickering.

  “Are you kidding me?” I blurted out, on my feet before I even knew what I was doing. My cheeks were hot and I felt like I’d been pushed over the edge in a snap. “That kind of comment is not OK. How would you like it if people made nasty comments to you, second-guessed your decisions, and preyed on your insecurities every day? You’ve got a small dick. Your hair is thinning. Do you even know what the inside of a gym looks like?”

  I took a step toward the guys, laying into them even more. People around were looking and it was making these boys uncomfortable. Their mouths were shut but I could see from the looks in their eyes all of the vile things they were thinking about me. I’d heard it all before and I didn’t care. This kind of carefree sexism always seemed so insidious to me. I wasn’t particularly big, but I was intimidating enough to convince them to pick up their drinks and leave the cafe.

  “Sleazeballs,” Jenny said, biting her lip and staring blankly at the table. She clutched the card in her hand.

  “You can’t let them beat you down,” I said. My flash of anger had been replaced by a knot in my stomach over how she’d just received a splash of salt in her wound.

  “I know,” she said, and I was relieved to see her ta
ke a deep breath and muster a little confidence. “It’d be really great to get back at him for what he did, make him pay for it.”

  “Yeah, it would,” I said, immediately scanning my mind for the best route for her to take with law enforcement and legal help. There surely wasn’t any security footage in the club bathroom, but perhaps the hall or dance floor had surveillance. Maybe he was a regular and a bartender knew him.

  “So are you going to write about it?”

  I paused, thrown off by the hopeful look dawning on her face.

  “Write about it?”

  “I’ve seen your blog where you dress men down for inappropriately dressing down. It’s good. Some of your posts have gotten a lot of shares. Don’t you think that this could be the story that really helps you go viral?”

  A sense of unease settled in my throat. I didn’t even know that she knew about my blog, which I never shared on Facebook.

  “Look, that was just something I did to try to escape the boredom of writing manuals for electronic equipment. And it wasn’t investigative journalism. It was just commentary on the latest eruption of sexism or scandal in the public eye.”

  “But it could be big,” Jenny went on. “All you need is a big break, something to fall in your lap. This could get into the newspapers, then you get on talk shows, book deals. The guy gets exposed, I get justice, and you hit the big time.”

  I didn’t want to disappoint her, but it was never going to be as easy as she made it out to be. I wasn’t even sure if hitting the big time was what I wanted, and public shaming had its place and uses but wasn’t an equal alternative to legal recourse for sexual assault. I went for the biggest gap I could see in her story, hoping she’d see the flaw and accept that this wasn’t going to be the bombshell she thought it would be.

  “We don’t even know the guy’s name,” I said.

  A sly smirk spread across Jenny’s normally innocent face as she shrugged her shoulders and flipped the card she was holding.

  “Actually, we do. He dropped this and I happened to pick it up.”

  My jaw dropped a little when I realized that she’d been holding a credit card the entire time. The man’s name, evidently, was Jacob Marcusian. I was so taken aback that I again got to my feet. I had no idea where in her story this man had happened to drop his credit card for her to retrieve, or if that even happened, but alarm bells were going off in my head so loud it was surprising the entire cafe didn’t think there was a fire in the back.

  “I thought you were holding your student ID or something,” I stammered, glancing around mystified and happening to spot a clock.

  “It’s OK, Sarah. I just brought it so I could prove to you who it was and that we were there together. I’m not going to do anything with it.”

  I was already backing away toward the door.

  “I want to help you but I just can’t be involved in this. Look, I’ve got to run or I’m going to be late for my interview. Yeah, we didn’t even get to that. I have an interview,” I said.

  Jenny looked at me expectantly, and I could tell as I was leaving that her hopes were being dashed. I’d let her down, even if she should’ve known she was crossing a line. What was worse, as I stepped out into the cold and trudged down the crowded street, was that in the bottom of my heart I couldn’t blame her. When seemingly every guy on the planet was this bad, and justice was nothing more than a fairytale, why did I have to be the one to tell her that she still had to play by the rules?

  “Martin will see you now,” said a boy in his late teens who was sitting at a workstation that seemingly doubled as reception. He pointed vaguely over his shoulder in the direction of a glass room halfway across the floor of this retrofitted downtown office building with white-washed walls and cracked cement flooring.

  I followed the boy’s direction, trying not to let my nerves affect the way I walked. The sign of the company, Mouse Roar Inc., hung on the wall to my left. It was the fifth interview I’d been to that week after voluntarily but involuntarily leaving my previous position at the electronics maker because of, ahem, personnel conflict. If I didn’t find something soon, I was either going to have to beg my mom for money and endure her guilting disappointment or relocate onto the street.

  Entering the office with a polite smile, I was greeted warmly by Martin, a tall and thin man sporting a bowl haircut, who was working behind a computer at a standing desk. He gestured for me to take a seat and began to lower the height of his desk via a hydraulic release. He glanced at my body no fewer than five times before the desk finished descending and he sat in his own chair.

  “Thank you for coming in, Miss Sarah Faverly,” he said in a British accent, pretending that he didn’t know my name already by simultaneously checking his screen with a bit of a squint.

  “Thank you for having me. What a fun atmosphere you’ve got here,” I said, glancing around outside of the glass walls at the various workstations positioned around the floor.

  “That’s very kind of you to say,” he said, staring at his computer screen. “We try to keep things casual and relaxed around here. What do you say we get right down to it? Oh, it looks like you went to NYU. So did I. We might’ve even overlapped by a year from the looks of it.”

  “That’s interesting. I can’t say I recall ever seeing you,” I said, sensing that he was eager to push the discussion further down this track.

  “Of course not. It’s a big school,” he said somewhat mutedly as he scanned my resume on his screen. “And then you spent a couple of years working at Visonic, finishing off just a few weeks ago. What brought about your transition away from there?”

  I smiled vapidly, unable to help myself from mentally running through the entire scenario with my ex-boyfriend, a salesman who never missed an opportunity to make a hard close. Things got uncomfortable around the office even though we worked on different floors, mostly because he’d managed to turn most of our other local coworkers against me. He’d gotten unreasonably controlling, trying to tell me what I could and couldn’t do even when he wasn’t around. I told him I was done with it and it ended up costing me my job. But Martin here didn’t need to know that.

  “It wasn’t a fast-paced work environment where I could take my own initiative to get things done and perform at a high level while collaborating with my colleagues.”

  He nodded slowly, suggesting his satisfaction with my nonsense answer. It gave me the impression I was doing well with the interview. That feeling quickly faded.

  “OK, what can you tell me about your skills?” His question made me sit up and lean in, brushing the hair over my shoulder with confidence.

  “After years of technical writing and extensive training with language in a variety of settings, it’s hard to imagine any kind of copy I couldn’t write, regardless of the style specifications. I know Chicago, MLA, Oxford…”

  “No, sorry,” he said, cutting me off. “I mean your skills. We can all speak English good. I’m talking about HTML, CSS, C#, Android, even just basic familiarity with Dreamweaver would be a minimum.”

  I swallowed. It was impossible to miss the sudden gap that opened up in front of me.

  “I’m familiar with Facebook and Blogger,” I said as Martin rolled his eyes. “I’m sorry, but I thought this position had the title Content Manager and was responsible for writing engaging copy that demands attention and spurs responses from customers. If I’m not mistaken that’s exactly what it said in the ad.”

  Martin nodded in a tired sort of way.

  “Yes, the writing is part of it, but without those other skills you’re never actually going to be able to communicate your text like we need you to. That’s what Mouse Roar is all about, using the internet to amplify our voices and cut through the noise in a way that gets our clients’ stories across. This kind of digital marketing strategy…”

  I began to tune out as Martin mansplained all about the ways advanced programming was a necessary component of writing sentences. Before long he’d convinced me that
it was hopeless being here, but the words kept coming out of his mouth. Every so often he’d purse his lips and glare at his screen while he spoke, or let his eyes wash over my chest just to make sure everything was still where he remembered it from last time.

  His distracted manner of speaking led me to reach for my bag, ready to cut in with an apology and gracefully accept defeat. But as I went for it I happened to look over and see a man standing beside one of the workstations, leaning over a colleague. I halted, caught by the way the subtly striped dress shirt stretched over his broad back. His black pants suggested tone and strength. Brown hair with a hint of curl flayed in bunches around his ears, forehead, and above the back of the neck.

  It wasn’t until he stood up that I got a better look at his face and needed to remind myself to breathe.

  The man had a chiseled jaw and high, sharp cheekbones. His brown eyes had the trance-inducing effect of looking out at the ocean from a lounge chair on a hot beach. Clean-shaven and with a glow to his cheeks, there was no way he was even thirty.

  “Miss Faverly? Sarah?”

  I cleared my throat and straightened up. Where was I? Oh right, an interview for a job I was never going to get.

  “I’m sorry about that. Look, I appreciate your time…”

  “If I could have your attention a little bit longer,” Martin said, sounding annoyed.

  It was one of those split-second decisions, but if he wanted me to waste more of my time in this office the least I could do was blurt out what was on my mind.

  “Excuse me, but who is that?” I asked, gesturing with a finger to the man standing by the workstation. As soon as I’d brought him up, he let go of the table and walked away behind me.

  “Oh, that’s the big cheese. Keenan Roche. I’m a little surprised you didn’t know that already. He’s been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Times, even a snippet in The Economist. It seems like one of those basic things you’d know before walking into an interview, whom you’d be working for,” he said, sighing.