Me Too: an "almost" story

I can't see his face. I can't hear his voice. But I can still feel his full weight against me. I can feel the terror as I realized he had my shorts down to my knees.

If you asked me to pick him out of a lineup, I’d fail.

If you had me cross-examined by a room full of old white men who are predisposed to not believing women – to not caring about the damage a wayward sense of entitlement to someone else’s body can do- I wouldn’t be able to produce the details they deem most pertinent. However, I still remember what his living room looked like. His bedroom. How I told him that Sign o’ the Times is my favorite Prince album.

The lack of other details wouldn’t make it any less true that my freshman year in college a guy I was dating tried to rape me.

“You should have told me you were a virgin,” he castigated me when I somehow – miraculously – got his solid frame off of me.  He sat sheepishly on a stool in the corner while I hugged by legs to my chest on the bed. “I wouldn’t have tried if you had told me you were a virgin.”

As if only virgins are permitted to say no.

“I don’t plan on having sex so if that is a problem just let me know.” We’d literally had that conversation the day before, sitting in front of his couch listening to Prince. “No problem,” he’d responded, “I like you.”

Even so, that next day as I prepared to get in his car, something felt off. I had a surge of not exactly panic but noticeable unease that I chalked up to paranoia and silliness.

I thought about that feeling during the long minutes of him moving seamlessly from the two of us watching television to his weight pressing down on me, my arms pinned under the mass of his body, his hands sliding my shorts down.

We weren’t even making out.

That wouldn’t excuse anything but it added to my bewilderment. I had commented on something on the screen and then I was saying “no, No, NO!”

Miracles happen.

Somehow I got him off of my 125 pound body. If I hadn’t…well… I was at his house far from campus with no car of my own, years before cellphones littered everyone’s pockets and in a sleepy neighborhood that probably wouldn’t have heard my screams.

It is that thought that chills me.

Months later, walking on campus, I ran into my almost rapist. He attended a neighboring university so I was surprised to see him. He waved and smiled and walked directly towards me, as if excited to see me.

“You tried to rape me,” I said to him as casual as his hello.

His smile faltered and his hand fell and then he walked on.