Me Too

“No.”

His lips don’t stop roving over my skin. Roughly, they travel from the curve of my jaw down to my collarbone, but I don’t really feel them—there’s a fuzzy buzzing in my head. For a brief second, I imagine cotton balls crackling with electricity squeezed between the space between my brain and my skull. I vaguely connect this with all the beers I had downed earlier.

“No.”

His hands start to descend lower in time with his mouth. Still pinning me to the wall of my pristine, white, and newly renovated basement suite home, he moves one hand from my waist to cup my rear and the other to hook my right leg around his waist. To this day, I still remember it was my right leg. I still remember his name, too, because he kept saying it over and over that night, as if he thought my drunk Asian ears were incapable of understanding English syllables.

“No,” I mumble, once he finally deigns to extract his tongue from my mouth. “I can’t.”

“’Course you can,” he laughs. His laugh skims the tiny space between our lips and our bodies, and the fluffy buzzing in my head intensifies. He smirks a little and kneads circles into my ass. I think this was meant to feel good, but my back is aching from being pressed into the wall. “Don’t be nervous. I’ve done this before.”

But I haven’t, retorts a voice inside me, but it sounds tinny and small. Afraid. It doesn’t make it past my lips. Instead, what did come out of my mouth was the same two-letter word I say over and over that night, but it sounds weak even to my cotton-filled ears. It’s as if part of its meaning got stuck in my throat each time I said it. “No,” I repeat.

He shoves me unceremoniously into my bedroom.

*

I wake feeling like someone had doused the cotton balls in my head with gasoline and set them on fire during the few hours I slept. The rest of my body hurts, too, and it is a peculiar and foreign pain. I hadn’t previously known that I could hurt in those places.

My eyes focus on the dark, stirring form in front of me and I notice he doesn’t look that much better than how I feel. The proud, feminine part of me registered a flicker of embarrassment: had I been unable to satisfy him? Would it have placed last night a tiny degree in the realm of okay if at least one of us had enjoyed ourselves?

Untangling his limbs from mine, he groggily sits up in my bed and starts to search for his boxers. I awkwardly drape a sheet over my breasts and try not to see his nakedness.

“God, I don’t know about you, but I feel like shit. Man, I really don’t feel good,” he gripes, rubbing his eyes. He shoots a tired glance at me and picks up his phone from my bedside table. A pause. “Think I can get your number?” He holds his phone, an old Blackberry, out to me.

“Um, I guess.” Blushing and without thinking, I take his proffered phone and punch my cell number into it. He leaves without lingering.

In hindsight, I never should have given him my number. I might as well have tattooed “pushover” or “easy” across my forehead. In all the versions in which I rewrite this memory, I don’t. Too bad rewriting memories doesn’t equate to rewriting history. God or the universe or whatever the hell is out there seems to be writing with a thick black Sharpie.

All we have left of our experiences are the words that are left behind. The details of that night—the colours, the music, the silence, the faces—became fuzzy as time passed, but on some days, I still find little pieces of the word “no” hidden in some dark crevice of my throat. Perhaps they’ve stayed lodged in there so that I never forget what they mean.