Free With My Body by Nikki Gemmell

your legs, and squeezes your chin firm, twisting your skin, pushing in the intrusion of his tongue and sweeping your mouth like a mine sweeper, kissing you hard as if his lips are wooden. You don’t like it anymore, it hurts. He jiggles your breasts, scrunches them up. Flips you over, smartly, like a piece of meat; you’re now kneeling with your belly over the couch and you cry out in shock, it’s too rough, changed, insistent.
    ‘Wait,’ you gasp but he’s not listening anymore, now something is between your legs nudging, pushing, bullying; it’s too fast, there’s no tenderness.
    You pull away before it’s too late.
    ‘ Stop! ’

Lesson 42
Her poor little bones were crunched between his dazzling jaws
    Stumbling, reeling from his warehouse saturated in its golden light with your legs slightly apart and the ache, in all of you—at your tender parts so sullied, violated. But that is nothing compared to the enormous, flinched hurt of your heart. Where was the mystery, the grace, the empowerment?
    There was no you.
    In any of it.
    From that moment he kissed.
    It was wrong, just that.
    And you knew in that instant something you will now know for the rest of your life, at the first touch of a man’s lips: if it is wrong at that moment then what hope has the relationship got, can it ever endure?
    It’s all in the kiss.
    You recall the lack of tenderness most of all. The violence of that. And the way he spat, sharp, on his fingertips—the cheapness of that gesture. And the sound. Like a fork in fettucini as he worked his way in. Hooked you, hard. In ownership. He had no right.
    My good, obedient, little schoolgirl.
    The chuff in his new voice. The ugliness. Taken over bysomeone else, a man you didn’t recognise anymore. With … what was it, distance? Yes that, in his tone; you could have been anyone. In an instant he was changed—stripped—his true self and you didn’t like it one bit.
    Only one thing is certain now: they will never know how much you are watching them.
    The way he clumsily jiggled your breasts as if he’d read how to do it in a manual, that this is what turning on a girl was all about. Not feeling it. And you, staring at him in shock, at everything he was suddenly doing. Not participating. You have no idea if this is what is meant to happen but it just felt wrong, mechanical, bleak; it was not the sex of your imagination, your mind defrauded you. Or he did.
    He didn’t like women, that was the most shocking lesson from it.
    The affronted, luminous pain of the experience is like a bell of sadness inside you, pushing against your skin, as you stumble, dazed, into the late afternoon.
    No idea where to go from it.
     
    Lune will know none of it. You shut down, shamed, will never talk of it.
    And the knowing, now, one other thing: you are too clever to love anything like that.
    Furiously you wipe away the tears, lift your face high to a ravishing sunset. You’ve got a train to catch.

Lesson 43
The free, happy ignorance of maidenhood is gone forever
    In your diary, late that raw, ranging night, you come across a scrap of something from Gabriel Garcia Marquez describing the loss of his virginity as a teenager—how it triggered a vital force within him.
    The sense of celebration, the boldness, intrigues and angers you. You wonder if this feeling of empowerment is a particularly male phenomenon. What vital force? You’ve been shocked into silence; in the addled aftermath of this episode you’re experiencing a catastrophic loss of spark, of certainty. You can barely record the episode in your diary—the sheer, puny grubbiness of it. Once you felt so cheeky and curious, bold and sure; now, suddenly, you’re faltering. What happened back there? As soon as a man put his arm around you something was rubbed out; some inner certainty. Why the leakage of confidence, the capitulation, as you entered the realm of the sexual? Why did you nod and gush so pathetically, saying ‘yes please, a studio, wow,’