"You Acted Like You Were Sober"

Jake offers me a beer before challenging, “Think you can keep up?” 

“I can drink you under the table,” I answer.

“Drink for drink then.”

We click our bottles and the game begins. I know I will lose. He’s six feet tall, lean and muscular, while I’m closer to five foot two. He easily weighs two hundred pounds which compliments his height and athletic build. My body is somewhere in the one hundred and ten mark. There is no way I’ll win. But that isn’t the point, is it?

After several drinks, my vision blurs but I refuse to lose. My steps falter. At one point, I'm sitting on a washer with his young niece’s head in my lap. I'm stroking her hair. Guilt washes over me. She's so young. I shouldn't be drinking in front of her. I ask, “Does it bother you that we're drinking?”

She looks at me, dark hair framing her small, pale face, blue eyes boring into mine. As she opens her mouth to answer, Jake says, “She's five. She doesn't know what it means.” She holds my gaze a second longer, and it's as though I'm looking at myself in a mirror while my parents drank. She knows what it means. I knew what it meant. She sighs and puts her head back in my lap. 

My vision fades to black.

***

I wake up on the couch beside him. His muscular arms wrap tightly around me, and it is so warm. In this moment, I am comfortable. I don't want to move and disturb whatever this moment is. As sleep slides away from me, I try to breathe, but it feels as though my entire body tumbled in a cement mixer all night. 

“Hey,” he says and stands. He kisses me quickly and continues into the kitchen, returning with a glass of water and Tylenol. 

I don't typically medicate a hangover, but this may be necessary. I swallow both.

“We've got to go,” he says.

“Now?” I ask, afraid to move. “Why?” 

He doesn’t answer. It feels like a cement mixer decided to park on top of me now. It's as though Hurricane Irene has taken residence in my brain. I don’t understand why we have to leave so quickly. But the urgency in his voice makes me try to move.

“In like five minutes.”

I sit upright too quickly and have to put my head in my hands. I make my way to the bathroom. When I pull down my pants, my underwear and menstrual pad are inside out. I shake my head. Was I so drunk I put it on wrong?No. They were on the right way when I’d gotten out of the shower.

There is only one way this could happen.

My underwear were off? Why were my underwear off? When were my underwear off? I take off my shorts and return my underpants to their correct placement. Near my ankle, there are blisters from what appear to be cigarette burns. 

A flash comes back:

Jake talks about how much he hates his father for staying with his mother. He's saying he hates his mother more than anyone in the world.

“If I were to have kids, they would hate me the same way you hate her,” I say, sobbing. I know this, because I’ve spent years hating my mother the same way and my sister constantly reminds me I’m just like her. I can never be a parent. I don’t want to be a parent. And no one will want me.

I take the cigarette and push the burning end into my skin, out of his sight, before bursting into tears again. He doesn't see me burning myself but tries to get me to stop crying.

I puke three times into the toilet. 

“We have to go,” Jake says from outside the bathroom.

“Leave me here to die,” I say, heaving again. I spit and rinse my mouth in the sink.

“Seriously. We have to go. Come on.”

I still don’t understand why we have to leave so abruptly but also know I have no choice in the matter. He gets my one-hundred-and-twenty-pound oaf of a dog, Baxter. I stumble into the Jeep, focusing on taking measured breaths to calm my stomach. We've gone a few miles when I ask, “What happened last night?”

He taps the brakes. “You don't remember?”

“I remember drinking.”

He looks at me, then at the road, then at me again. “You don't remember?”

“No, I don't. What happened last night?”

He swallows, as though he's debating what to tell me. “We had sex.”

The words are a sucker punch to my stomach. “What?”

“We were outside. You really don't remember?”

My stomach turns like it's a banana in the blades of a blender. We're moving too fast. We had sex. The sky swirls around me. I take shallow, rapid breaths. Bile builds in my throat. “Pull over! I need to puke.”

“Now?” he asks.

“Now! Now!”

He slams on the brakes. I fall out of the Jeep, run hunched over to the back, and puke a few more times. I stumble back and close my eyes while leaning my head against the back of the seat. I want to die.

“You really don't remember?”

My stomach swirls again, but I force myself to breathe through it. I shake my head. “I don't. I'm sorry.”

He shakes his head, clenches and un-clenches his jaw several times. “I'm sorry.”

I chuckle. “I'm not mad.” Am I? “I wish I had been present enough. I've been wanting to fuck you since January.”

He smiles, but it's forced. “Maybe we'll have to do it again.”

“Not today, I might puke on you.” My head continues to swirl like the start of a tornado. We had sex. I don't remember it. What does this mean?

We ride in silence a few more miles. “Are you okay?” I ask.

He doesn't look at me. Silence engulfs the Jeep.

“Jake?” I ask.

“I'm not a rapist.”

My jaw falls open. “I didn’t say you were.”  The word rape never crossed my mind. I don't know what to say. Was this rape? Was I raped? I flash back to the confusion of my inside out underwear this morning. My stomach lurches again in an attempt to answer the question, and I swallow.

“I thought...I mean, you.... you acted like you were sober,” he says.

-Lynne Schmidt

Lynne Schmidt is the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, and mental health professional with a focus in trauma and healing. She is the winner of the 2020 New Women's Voices Contest and author of the chapbooks, Dead Dog Poems (forthcoming from Finishing Line Press), Gravity (Nightingale and Sparrow Press) which was listed as one of the 17 Best Breakup Books to Read in 2020, and On Becoming a Role Model (Thirty West), which was featured on The Wardrobe's Best Dressed for PTSD Awareness Week. Her work has received the Maine Nonfiction Award, Editor's Choice Award, and was a 2018 and 2019 PNWA finalist for memoir and poetry respectively. Lynne was a five time 2019 and 2020 Best of the Net Nominee, and an honorable mention for the Charles Bukowski and Doug Draime Poetry Awards. In 2012 she started the project, AbortionChat, which aims to lessen the stigma around abortion. When given the choice, Lynne prefers the company of her three dogs and one cat to humans.