“Who else are you going on dates with?”
“Tomorrow I see a journalist. He’s twenty-six. Then a twenty-four-year-old DJ, then a twenty-eight-year-old screenwriter, but he says he doesn’t want to have sex with me.”
“That’s a load of shit. I think the DJ will be the best at sex.”
I told him I was interested in politics, and he asked me why, and I didn’t know how to answer.
“Because it affects a lot of people maybe.”
“I work for a company that makes cancer drugs, and that affects a lot of people.”
“I really want to have sex with you, but I think it’s going to be really bloody, and I don’t care, but it’s going to be really gross for you. I think if I take a shower first it’ll be okay.”
“I think we should have sex, and then we should take a shower, and then we should have more sex.”
I stared at him.
“I used to work in a lab.”
I took another drink. It was my third beer and I guess I was tipsy.
“Okay! We’re going to take pictures, but first we’re going to take these things off.”
He came toward me with a grin on his face.
I said, “I can do it.”
“I’ll do it.”
Petsheep lifted my camisole over my head and unhooked my bra. I held my breasts in my hands. He went to his bed. I was standing there unbuttoning my skirt. Then I had to pull down my leggings and underwear, and I knew he could see my pad. I said, “Ewww.” I’m not so self-hating enough that I think my own menstrual blood is that gross, it’s just embarrassing to show it to somebody. You have to act like it’s gross as a kind of apology.
“Give me a blowjob.”
I got on the bed and ran my hand up and down his cock. I pushed my hair behind my ears and put it in my mouth. Right away he took a picture. I thought he would have waited until he was in deeper, but I guess it made more sense this way. I ended up on top of him.
“You should really use something.” I didn’t like having to say it, but it seemed like he had sex with a million people. He ignored me. “I’m not good at being on top.” At that time it hurt a lot whenever I was on top. But maybe it was unfair of me to tell someone to be dominant who obviously didn’t really enjoy it. I insisted he used a condom again. He got up, and I watched him put the condom on and also lube. He really didn’t need the lube with all the blood. He got on top of me. I felt bad just lying there and moaning, but I didn’t know how to react, he was doing it so hard. He was kissing my face and neck. He licked my ear up and down. I really liked that, so I moaned louder. He looked down between our legs and said, “Cute little pussy.” His cock went soft for a moment and I thought it was my fault. I couldn’t really feel anything, I think because of the blood. I lifted my legs up. He asked, “How does it feel to have sex with thirty-year-olds?” I opened my eyes and tilted my head to look into his eyes. He looked angry. I must look very ugly right now. I closed my eyes again. I don’t like intense emotions. He lifted my legs up much higher. I was in pain. “Is that okay, or too rough?” “Too rough.” He let go of my legs. I felt good again, so I moaned.
We looked in each others eyes. He asked, “Do you love me?” “Yeah.” I moaned. What else was I supposed to do? “Put your arms around me, tell me that you love me.” He sounded frantic. I did what he said, and then I said, “I want you to fuck me without a condom,” and moaned. “Why do you want that?” The truth was, I was in pain because I have a latex allergy. I said, “I think it would feel good.” “How’s about you let me fuck your ass? Wouldn’t that feel nice?” “No, I don’t want to.” He fucked me in silence for a while, and then asked, “Were you lying earlier, when you said you loved me?” I didn’t say anything. “Were you?” I just kept moaning. It seemed like he was giving up, or at least he was moving his body slower. “Do you like it rough? Is that how all the boys fuck you?” “Yeah.” “Well, you’ll have to go to them then, because I like to do it slow.” He turned me over and fucked me slowly. We didn’t talk much after that. Once he said, “Great tits.” When he got off me, I saw he was masturbating. I told him to come on my face, and he came in my mouth. I swallowed it, but I don’t think he noticed. He handed me a cigarette.
He asked, “What do your parents do?”
I said, “They’re like managers in casinos.”
“I don’t get smoking after sex. I think it’s just like smoking at any other time.”
I realized that this was the first time I had had sex since I was raped nine months earlier.
“Are you going to stop being so shy around me, now that I’ve had my cock in you?”
“No, that’s not how it works. If you like me, you have to like shyness,” I said.
After the cigarette, I went to take a shower.
He said, “The green toothbrush is mine.”
The tub was really high up and there was nowhere to hold on while getting out, so I almost slipped on the wet floor.
I said, “This seems like a great fucking way to die.”
After I got out, he went to take a shower, and I was glad to be left alone. I went on his computer and looked at all of the messages he had sent on the dating site where we met. He said he had been asking everyone if he could take their photograph, but like I suspected all of his messages were to young girls. Out of the shower he was dressed in t-shirt and jeans. His skin was all red and his hair looked darker, no longer blond, since it was wet. Somehow he seemed much older, and looked less attractive.
“Do you ever worry about like the emotional consequences of having sex with someone?” I asked. “Like lots of older guys won’t have sex with young girls because they’re afraid they’ll get all attached.”
“Do you ever worry about the emotional consequences of not having sex with someone? Like if you hadn’t done it with me I’d have been heartbroken.”
He was smarter than me.
“Do you always have sex without a condom?”
“No, not always.”
“Aren’t you afraid of getting someone pregnant or STDs?”
“What did you say earlier? ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’”
“O.K.”
I yawned because I hadn’t slept on the plane. I could tell he thought I was bored, so I made myself yawn randomly at times to be mean. Then we went to walk to see the sea.
I asked, “Remember when we met?”
“You were hiding behind a coke machine.”
“What did you think when you saw me?”
“She doesn’t like what she sees, so she’s going to get on the next train and leave.”
“When I told my friends, well not my friends but like Internet people, that I was going to meet you, they were like, ‘Don’t meet him! He’s going to murder you!’”
“Not yet.”
At the sea we sat on the rocks. I said that growing up I always thought of the Atlantic Ocean as the lame ocean, all dirty, but now that I was here it was pretty cool, and he said something about BP. I snipped his arm with my fingers, like scissors. He was wearing a large metal-link watch like grown up men wear. I asked him who was stronger, and he said definitely you. I gripped his hand and pushed, and his arm fell without resistance. Three large boats were moving on the ocean.
He said, “There’s going to be a lot of ocean liner crashes today.”
“Big hips sink ships, loose lips eat chips!”
I used him as a shield from the wind to light a cigarette. He took my picture and said, “You are cool.”
Why would he think that? I’d been acting so uptight today. The whole time I was thinking, I don’t care about impressing this person.
He said sent me a message before he went to the station that said, I think I’m not cool enough for you.
“I’m too weird to be cool.”
“I’m incredibly lame.”
I could see what he meant. That’s why I wanted to meet him. All of the guys I had met who were at all interesting were also insecure and pr
etentious. He said he had a lot of cool friends, and one who had been in all sorts of magazines. When I dated cool older guys it was always a disaster meeting their friends, even though they were usually nice to me.
“You have nice legs.”
He grabbed my thigh.
“I do have nice legs.”
We looked at the sea in silence.
I asked, “Can I touch it?”
“Yes, I think you are able to touch it.”
We stood up and I clutched onto his wrist and elbow, one hand around each. The beach was all stone, and I was wearing pumps.
“My shoes are going to get all messed up. Oh, well, I don’t care.”
We ran up to the ocean, me clutching him tightly, and I leaned down and just barely put my hand in the water.
Then we walked to a convenience store. I saw a meat pie and said I wanted to try one. We don’t have them in America. He said it was going to be gross, but asked, “Should I pick one out for you?” He reached over me and grabbed one. “This is the traditional one I guess.” I like it when a guy makes decisions for you, buys things for you. “Do you want anything else?”
“Oh, I wanted to try biscuits.” I took a package of them.
“Do you want English beer?”
“Yeah.”
He paid for it. I stood near the entrance with my arms folded. On the walk back to his place, I pulled him up to a big glass window so we could see how we looked together. I stared and said, “No, we do not look cute together.”
Back in his room I sat on his bed, he showed me his teddy bear and asked me if I thought it was sweet how he had a teddy bear.
“No, I don’t think it’s cute.”
I lay down on the bed and he sat in the chair at his desk. I asked him what he was like as a kid.
“I was very quiet. I went to catholic school, but I never really grew up. I sleep with a teddy bear.”
Older men always say that they never grew up. In Portland they claim to be so young and in touch but they have no idea about anything current and listen to rock music from the 90s. Petsheep was kind of different but not entirely. He poured beer into a film canister and put it on the table near his bed. He asked if he should put the pie we bought the oven.
“Okay.”
He winked at me as he left the room.
I said, “That’s gross.”
When he came back he started to unbutton my skirt. I liked being undressed. I closed my eyes and lay down. Then I looked and saw him batting my right breast back and forth with his hands.
“What are you doing?”
“Playing with your tits.”
“O.K.”
“I hope you’re not expecting like profound answers from me.”
I was naked now, lying down. I ate a biscuit.
“Are you going to eat biscuits in bed?”
I laughed for a long time, but the biscuit was disappointing.
“These are just like cookies, but not as sweet!”
I lit a cigarette and flicked ash into the film canister.
He asked if he should get my pie out of the oven before it burnt. “It doesn’t matter. It’s going to taste the same.”
When the pie came out, I said, “Wow, this looks really gross.”
I ate just a part of the top of the crust.
“Give me a blowjob.” He was sitting in his chair.
I felt embarrassed having to kneel down in front of him, but once I started I enjoyed being on my knees. He would sometimes thrust upward so that his cock went deeper into my mouth. I liked that too. I heard a clicking sound and got scared. I looked up and saw he was lighting a cigarette. I wondered if I would ever have that kind of confidence and if he was enjoying degrading me. I felt extremely turned on and zoned out for a moment. He was making these high pitched moans. I never heard a guy make sounds like that. I was glad I could make someone make those sounds, but as soon as I became too conscious of what I was doing, he stopped. I blew him for a while longer then stopped and went and lay back on the bed.
He stood up and went to his computer and tweeted, “A very nice blowjob.”
I drank three beers and started yawning.
He said, “I don’t want you go to sleep now and then wake up at three in the morning and say, ‘Let’s drink!’ And then I go to work drunk.” He put something in my mouth, and I closed my throat.
“What is that?”
“Grape gummy.” He had a whole jar of them by the bed.
“I don’t like sweet food.”
We talked for a time and again he said, “Give me a blowjob. And then you can go to sleep.”
I got out of the bed and crawled over to him.
“Do you like giving blowjobs on your hands and knees?”
“Yeah.” I moaned. I was very turned on.
He laughed at me, and that was unfair. I had answered the question the only way I could. I started sucking his cock and again he lit a cigarette.
“Good girl.” It was like I was his dog. He was humiliating me but I felt safe and warm and completely turned on. Nothing could be more enjoyable than this. To be dominated and degraded was what I wanted. Sex is just a way to get those things. I felt valued, even though I actually wasn’t. It didn’t matter. Someone really wanted me and I didn’t have to worry about anything besides making him feel good through a blowjob or whatever it was he wanted. Then he pushed my head down. I started to have flashbacks of being raped, having my head forced down, gagging. I tried to resist but couldn’t. I gagged three times. He moaned the third time I gagged. He let go of my head. I looked up at him, shaking. He looked at me and gasped. He turned his head to look for his camera, but he didn’t grab it. I got up and lay down on the bed and turned towards the wall. We went to sleep.
We woke up three times that night. The first time he said, “You are so cute! What are you, if not cute?” The next time he said, “I like my fictitious American girlfriend.” The last time he said, “Try to go to sleep!” He snapped. I fell asleep feeling chastised.
I woke up at around 6:30. He was still sleeping, and I was bored, so I started to kiss and bite his neck.
“I can’t go to work with marks all over my neck.”
I had never had a job. I turned my head away and tried to go to sleep again.
“Suck it.” He pointed toward his erection. I slid down the bed and did as I was told. “Good girl.” I stopped when I got bored and lay back down next to him. He told me to blow him again. When I stopped again he hovered over me. “Down.” We had hard sex from behind. “Try to keep your voice down,” he told me. He never came. He threw the condom down next to the bloody one from the night before.
I got dressed.
“Hm, cute ass,” he said, and pinched it through my leggings. This offended me.
“Do you want coffee?”
“Yeah.”
We sat across from each other. I drank the coffee and smoked. He took a picture of me with a Polaroid camera. I asked him why he sometimes used his film camera and why sometimes he used a Polaroid.
“Why do you wear certain shoes some days and different shoes others?”
“Do my breasts look big while I’m wearing clothes?”
“Yep.” He showed me the developed Polaroid. I thought I looked very cool, with long dark hair and being so thin and holding a cigarette. We walked to the train station holding hands, mostly in silence. I never want to talk in the morning.
As we got near the station a crowd could see him in his suit and me looking like a schoolgirl.
At the gate to get on the train I stopped and looked in my purse for my ticket.
He asked, “What’s going on?”
“I was looking for my ticket.”
“You have it or you don’t have it?”
“I do have it.”
“Well, you have plenty of time. My train’s been canceled.”
I stared at him. He said before that we would ride the train together part of the way, to his stop.
I asked,
“Will we have to wait for a new one?”
“I have to take the bus.”
You are so dumb sometimes, Marie.
“Okay. Goodbye.”
We kissed.
On the train back to London I spaced out. In Waterloo station it occurred to me that I had spent the night with a man three years younger than my dad. At my hostel I changed my clothes and brushed my teeth and straightened my hair and got ready to have sex with Tom later that day.
cybersex
sex work experience three
I need money for BareMinerals foundation and MAC lipstick and soy lattes and pizza. If I earn money I will no longer be a financial burden on my parents; I will be productive and accomplish something. I will be a commodity, and I will be in demand and valuable. I am so beautiful and young that men will pay three hundred dollars to have sex with me; sex work will reify my youth and beauty. I have no friends and nothing to do except school and this will give me something to do and a way to study other people besides through the Internet. I’ll find out for myself what sex work means, and what kinds of men pay for sex and why they do it.
*
I stood out in front of my apartment, waiting.
I could tell it was him the minute I saw him get out of his black SUV.
He was very tall and bald; I guessed he was in his mid-30’s. He was wearing an orange hoodie and khakis.
“Are you Emily?”
“Yes.”
Most clients were nervous, but he didn’t hesitate before he walked ahead of me to my apartment door.
I followed him in. I shut and locked the door behind us.
We stood in the entry way.
“Do you want to get payment out of the way?” I had gotten in the habit of saying this firmly, robotically, but here my voice cracked because I was intimidated by his confidence. I was used to feeling like I had all of the power over the scared, pathetic johns, but with him I had the same feeling as when I was a little girl and my father called me into the living room for a lecture. There was that same guilty, anxious feeling.
“Here you go.”
He handed me the money. I counted it. Normally I went into the bathroom and hid the money, but now I felt too scared to do that. I just put the money on top of my dresser, which was in arm’s length of where we were standing near the front door.
what purpose did i serve in your life Page 4
