Calamity

thoughts. That’s a ticket on the Too Fucking Bad Train. Don’t worry.”

“Okay.”

“Besides, you wore a rubber, right?”

I’m really fucked.

Tyler had lied about the condom and Paul had reassured him that there was nothing to worry about. After the conversation, Tyler laid in bed and ran through the whole event again and again. He found himself getting hard seeing Sasha’s breasts flop out of her bra and feeling her wetness, but he scolded himself, and flushed those thoughts away with images of burly men gang-raping him in a prison shower.

He managed only two hours of sleep and awoke Saturday morning with burning eyes and a pounding headache. It was a hangover of the worst kind: the guilty conscience kind. And only when he started pacing his room did the full weight of the situation crash on him. Not only had he raped her, he had ejaculated inside her. Not only could she have him arrested for rape, she might be pregnant with his baby.

Yet somehow that wasn’t even the most disturbing part of all this. That part was something he hadn’t even told Paul. He could accept that he had been overcome with lust, with a passion so strong it blotted out his rational mind, he could accept that he had fucked up and might have to pay some serious consequences, but those were all solid things, concrete facts, or at least things accepted as somewhere in the range of normal or Happens From Time to Time. This other thing, though, was something beyond the logical, concrete world, and it scared the shit out of him.

For what seemed like a long time, he had sat in the car, pants around his ankles, while Sasha cried in a fetal position on the passenger seat, and stared at the lights of all the houses on the hill across the lake. His limp dick started to make him nauseated and he yanked his pants up. It could have been ten minutes or even closer to a half hour before Sasha pulled her clothes back on.

“I told you to stop,” she whispered.

Tyler stole several glances at her thighs and butt as she pulled on her jeans. Was she still wet? He started to get hard again. That arousal collapsed quickly, however, when she repeated how she had asked him to stop and then begged, her eyes swollen red with tears, why, for the love of God didn’t he stop when she was screaming for him to?

He started to respond and couldn’t. He didn’t know the answer. Was he a bad person? He didn’t believe so, but he had done a bad thing. What did that mean? Yet, hadn’t she wanted him? That’s how it seemed. Why couldn’t she appreciate this from his standpoint? They had shared a fucking awesome moment and now she wanted to ruin it all because she had been scared or something.

“You heard me and didn’t care,” she said in that same small voice. It was the voice of a beaten child. “You just wanted to blow your load and … and …” Sobs choked out her words. Through her tears, he caught the most frightening possibility of all: “What if I’m, you know, pregnant?” She said the word pregnant like it was some incurable disease, like it was cancer.

“You’re not.” It was the first thing he had been able to say.

She shook her head. “I can’t believe you did this to me.”

Part of him knew he should keep quiet and not say anything but another part of him, the part that stole those glances at her bare thighs perhaps, ushered out the words. “You can’t just blame me. You didn’t complain when I took off your pants or when I …”

“What? Jammed your fingers inside me?”

He flexed his hands and clenched the steering wheel.

“That doesn’t mean I wanted you to … fuck me.”

She made the whole thing sound so dirty and wrong. Tyler needed to shower.

After a minute or so of silence, she told him to drive her back home unless, that was, he wanted her to walk home or maybe wanted to rape her again. He could have punched her.

“I didn’t rape you.”

“Then who did? Not you? Fine. Your fucking dick? You want to blame it all on your manhood? Is that how much of a pussy faggot you are?”

Tyler blinked. He needed to say something to appease her and fast. “I’m sorry?” He said it like a question.

She laughed sarcastically. “Just take me home before I run to somebody’s house and tell them Tyler Williams just raped me.”

He didn’t say anything else. Trying to calm her wouldn’t work. She had already decided what happened, already judged him, found him guilty, and was now determining sentence. If he pushed her, she really would run to somebody’s house (trashy trailer) and start squawking about date rape. Or even assault rape.

He drove back up the twisty roads, maneuvering between more parked cars than earlier and noticed how many of the mobile homes were set askew from each other like teeth in a malformed mouth. Several people were outside smoking cigarettes and each person watched him drive past as if he were a possible threat to their smoking break. Driving up the hill that corkscrewed was like trying to leave Hell; every time he thought he had reached the summit, the road curved again and continued upward. He grew dizzy.

He stopped outside her house, put the car in park, turned to her. “Sasha …”

She took a deep breath.

“Sasha, I—”

She spun toward him, hair wiping around her face. “You raped me. You. Raped. Me. You don’t get to say anything. Not one fucking thing. If you mention anything to anyone, I will tell the whole world. But don’t think I won’t tell everyone anyway. You know why? Because you raped me. I decide what happens now. If I go inside and decide to call the police, too bad. If I tell everyone I know and your reputation is ruined, too bad. You got that? You can’t say shit. Okay?” Spittle had gathered at the corners of her mouth and now a long strip of phlegm hung from her lower lip like drool from the mouth of a pit bull.

He didn’t say anything. What could he say?

She swung open her door and jumped out. But as she did, and just before she slammed the door hard enough to rock the car, she said something that Tyler barely caught. It sounded like, Mother is not going to be pleased. Then she was running across her front lawn and sprinting up the stone steps like something was chasing her. A moment later, a light came on in an upstairs room.

Mother is not going to be pleased. Who called their mom “mother” anyway? And what did that mean, not going to be pleased? It was her phrasing that gnawed at his brain. He wouldn’t have thought anything of it if she muttered that her mom was going to totally flip her shit or be totally fucking pissed, but saying she was not going to be pleased seemed more menacing somehow. It reminded Tyler of cold-blooded psychopaths who calmly told their kidnapped victims that they had brought all this on themselves before slicing their throats. Rational people got pissed. Psychos calmly placed blame and started killing.

Tyler started to drive away and stopped. Someone was staring out from the bottom window near the porch. A red light flickered behind the figure, casting the person’s face in complete shadow. It had to be Sasha’s mother. The longer he stared, Tyler was better able to make out long hair that sat in a clump on top of her head and fell unevenly to border her face. As he strained to see, Tyler convinced himself that the woman was staring straight at him with large eyes, which glowed red each time the light flickered in the room. Could she see him sitting in his car? Did she know what had happened, or at least suspected what had happened? Was her mouth open? Was it opening and closing as if she were saying something? But what and to whom? Maybe he was imagining all of this.

Mother is not going to be pleased.

Tyler drove away from that house and out of Hidden Hills Trailer Trash Town as quickly as he could without inviting cops or a car accident.

The silhouetted image of a woman—definitely her mother—kept him awake most of the night. Every time sleep took him away, the woman’s large, red eyes pulsing in the dark ushered him back to consciousness. Also in those dreams (more like quick, horrific flashes) the woman’s mouth was moving in silent prayer. But not prayer, no. She was mouthing the words to a curse.

* * *

With a horrendous headache and burning eyes, Tyler shuffled into the bathroom, washed his face, and joined