Getting away

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“Mom, are you all right?”

Chrissy awoke to find Danica leaning over her. Chrissy’s first response was to start and then pull the sheets over her body in fear that Dani would notice the bruises from the attack the night before.

“I’m OK, honey,” Chrissy answered, feeling startled.

“The school called. It’s almost 8 a.m., you know. I told them you were ill and wouldn’t be coming to school today,” said Danica as she turned on her heel and strode away. “I am going to be late myself if I don’t get moving.”

“Oh no! I’ll be in today! I’m just feeling …”

Chrissy heard the front door slam and knew her audience was gone. Immediately she fell to checking herself out. Her vagina was puffy and bruised, like her rectum, and her breasts were finger-marked heavily. Her thick lush lips felt bruised but when she looked at the hand mirror she kept on the table alongside her bed she noticed only a slight swelling that nobody else would probably be able to detect.

Her stomach whirled as if with nausea as Chrissy relived in her mind a few horrible moments from the attack. She vaguely remembered snickering as she recalled the pounding of thighs against her buttocks and her pussy spasmed briefly and got wet.

Tears started to come to her eyes. It never goes away, she thought. It’s like programming. I will never change. Instantly she wondered who else knew what had happened to her. Did Dani suspect? Her heart fluttered anxiously at the thought. Chrissy had worked hard to keep her professional life as a sex worker and prostitute in the past with her daughter or secret whenever glimmers of it resurfaced.

Occasionally Chrissy bumped into old clients in LA when her daughter was a toddler or young girl and it had always been embarrassing.

It was, she suspected, a kind of craving, like for ice cream. The desire to be wanton, slutty, to shove her tits and cunt at the world and get fucked hard for it was like a drug. To walk down the street and draw men’s attention, to see other women react with subtle jealousies or contempt, was a thrill, a power that brought with it danger, high risk, reward and always, she realized, guilt and punishment. It was a stress-reliever and an escape, like all sex. For years after she left the business she loved to occasionally go to the beach in a bikini and see people stare. She loved to watch young men get flustered and erect. It could be activated by the simplest things: Spraying perfume on her neck. Catching her own reflection in a window. It happened pretty much every time she put lipstick on her lips, especially a hot pink or slutty blood red color. It was a feeling that always passed quickly. She found ways to exorcise the demon: One-night stands. Quick porn engagements. She had an agent she could call who could get her in a movie inside 12 hours for an orgy scene; longer if the sex was specialized. Sometimes random encounters worked.

Once, during a particularly stressful time, she had seen a mailman walking his route and invited him into her car to escape a thunderstorm. She had been slightly drenched herself and wasn’t wearing a bra. When his stares at her breasts became too much, she found herself pulling them out of her shirt and jerking him off through his pants with one hand as she diddled herself with the other. She wryly promised him a repeat performance the next time there was a thunderstorm in L.A.

Now Chrissy had a whole bunch of new problems to contend with. Who had attacked her? Why? Was this the end? What was next for her? How could she stop them and protect herself? And what did the symbol mean?

Chrissy found herself rushing to the bathroom and vomiting into the toilet for several minutes, her oversized implanted breasts bouncing as she ran and then slapping against the hard and cold porcelain rim as she bent over. She heaved for several minutes, then sat down hard on the floor panting.

Showering and dressing were automatic. Her clothes for school she had laid out the before she went to feed the dogs the night before. Soon she found herself on auto pilot walking the campus to her building and classroom.

Days passed and the terror of the attack seemed to recede. People noticed her own reticence but didn’t question it. Oddly, she felt not more stares and attention sent her way but less, as if after the attack people were less interested in her. It wasn’t as if anyone knew, precisely; it was more that her increasingly dulled, numbed sense of herself thanks to the attack translated into a lack of tension around her. Sometimes as she graded papers or sat quietly at her desk she found herself recalling specific moments from the attack: her nipple being bitten or the plunge of a cock against her clit or the grip of the handcuffs on her wrists. She remembered lifting her thighs and opening herself to her attackers, a rote response, as were some of the things she said and the sighs and groans she made as they fucked her hard.

Her first post-attack insight into Fieldings came during a classroom lesson. A 19-year-old post-grad student sitting in the center of the back row of three desks jammed closely together had asked her a question and as she bent over his desk next to him to answer it she saw the symbol again, that strange bullseye with the marked right quadrant. She froze immediately. It was on a small paper near his book, written in handwriting she didn’t recognize as his. She stared at him shocked but he continued impassively, pointing to a passage in the textbook and asking her a question. His eyes were friendly and warm, his voice betraying nothing unusual.

She began to answer a question when she felt it: A hand slipping quickly between her thighs and under her short skirt. She could tell immediately that it wasn’t his; his hands were right in front of her on the book, as he continued to huddle close to her and listen. The hand slipped down her thigh and was gone. She looked around furtively and saw no one paying attention to her. The grope felt almost like someone had brushed past her casually. She walked quickly to her desk and sat down as the students continued their bookwork, looking up suddenly to see if any were paying her any special mind. None were.

Chrissy walked to the back row again and looked to see the paper with the symbol written on it. It was gone!

“What happened to the paper that was here?” she asked the student, Billy Richards.

“You mean that?” he said, pointing to a scrap of paper on the floor.

Chrissy bent over straight and quick to grab the paper, inadvertently flashing the boys a quick glimpse of her panties.

“Is this yours?” she said, almost angrily.

“No, ma’am,” he said. “That was on my desk when I got here.”

His eyes were blank and she could see immediately that the red handwriting under the symbol was not Richards’ and that he was writing with a black pen. She stared at him until his eyes shifted back down to his book.

She folded the paper and carried it back to her desk. When the students left, she looked at it again and saw a notation:

6:30 p.m. Theater.