The game you play is pool.
You are a college freshman. You eat oily, orange macaroni and cheese in the cafeteria alone, because it's mid-September and you haven't made any friends yet. You hate sitting by yourself, but you hate finishing dinner even more, because then, lonely, you walk to your room to watch TV.
One evening, you go to the rec room to get a Diet Pepsi from the vending machine. As you wait your turn, arms folded across your chest, you see him watching you.
He is dark-haired and muscular, hanging out by the pool table. His lips curl, languid and practiced, into a half-smile while his Levis stretch tight against his thighs.
He saunters over and asks you to play. You say, I don't know how. I mean, I've only goofed off with guy-friends back home. Just for fun. We never even kept score.
You slide coins into the pop machine, hear the clattering of a can and stoop to grab it.
I'll show you, he says. He holds out his cue stick and when you don't take it, he tips it toward the table, as if directing you.
Come on, he says. For fun.
His arm, covered with fine, dark hairs, sweeps over the green-felt table and snags the balls, the striped and the solids and the number eight, the final ball you pocket to score your win, he says. He grasps it in a meaty hand and holds it like an omen: a small white circle nearly swallowed by inky darkness.
He shows you how to rack up the balls, corralling them in the plastic triangle. He tells you to make a tent with your thumb and index finger and perch the cue stick on top; then he stands behind you, his black Izod polo against your white T-shirt, and tells you to lean in, like this, to single out your target. He thrusts the cue stick back and forth, a rocking motion, before slamming the tip into a ball and sinking it.
He watches you practice, says he likes playing with you. What you like about him is that he likes you, so you meet every night.
A week later you walk to his room and make out a little, lying on his bed next to the wall tacked with pictures of his high school football team. You wish you could see Moonstruck at the Crest Theatre or eat at the new Chinese restaurant on Second Street, but you don't know that you just stepped into a cadence: playing pool, making out, playing pool, making out.
It's a Friday night when he pulverizes you, pocketing the final eight ball with ferocious surety. Afterwards, you walk to his room and he lies on the navy blue bedspread, pulling you to him, saying he beats you every time.
Hey, don't be so rough, you say, but then he grazes your forehead with his lips and you relax, sinking into the bed, while his tongue explores the nook behind your ear, the soft skin of your neck.
Later, you will blame yourself because you let his mouth wander to the edge of your breasts and begin to tug, willfully, at the buttons on your short-sleeve shirt. You will blame yourself because you let him slip it off your narrow shoulders, that and your bra, the ivory straps skimming your thin arms. And you will blame yourself because when he yanks at the zipper of your jeans you think, ridiculously, that you are still playing for fun.
But then he starts to paw at your breasts and belly, the nibbling little bites turn sharp and painful.
That hurts, you say, trying to shove him away as every muscle clenches tight, tries to protect.
Your skin is white on his dark sheets as his eyes turn to slits and his lips sneer. His cock begins to dart against your inner thigh with the incessant back-forth stabs of a cue stick warming up for a shot. You push your hands between his chest and yours, wedging him up a bit.
No. Your voice is raggedy.
But words are vapor against his frenzied desire to play this final game, the one he has been playing all along, even when he banked balls off the table's edge so they rolled free, even when he let you think you were winning. He jams into you again and again, seeking the soft, tender pocket of your body.
You are his eight ball, the ball never netted, the ball he must win.
Panic rises like bile in your gut and explodes through your arms and legs, searing you with tingly numbness, like when a limb falls asleep and it hurts but you can't move it, either.
Please.
A desperate sort of resignation seeps into your bones, a surrender, a feeling of stupidity and shame and horror that mutes your voice.
You do not know that when you write this story years later, you will long to infuse it with fiction — no, not fiction, but a twist in time — so that the kick-ass part of you who has grown up over the years, she whose skin is not so pale and whose muscles quiver fierce beneath the surface, will growl loud and menacing, GET THE FUCK OFF ME.
She will stand, pulling you with her, and gather your shirt from the floor, wrinkled now but not dirty, and button the fabric over your breasts. She will zip up your jeans and put her arm around you, pressing her cheek to yours for a moment, before you walk out the door, head held high and white cotton underwear not streaking with the thin, red blood you will find when you stumble to your dorm and lock the bathroom door, turning on the scalding-hot shower.
Lynn Baldwin-Rhoades spent the first twenty years of her writing life churning out ad copy for corporations. Now, she wrangles words for creative nonfiction essays from her home near Seattle, Washington.