This tiny town

It was an accident that I saw him again. He was one of my earliest clients when I was with the agency and he had terrified me. He’d pinned me to a wall, moved in weird, abrupt ways, made ugly sounds. I told my booker I didn’t ever want to see him again but she pushed it; she set us up once again, claiming it was a mistake, and afterwards settled for telling me he was asking about me, for months. And I know he did because he mentioned me to the other girls, talked about me on message boards. Not malicious but plaintive: why won’t she see me, what did I do wrong, give her this message, do you have her email address? 

If he recognized me, he didn’t let on. I knew his face was familiar when I opened the door and there was an instant when I thought it could even be—but I pushed it away. I told myself so many of these men look the same, I wasn’t sure I’d ever even met him before. But it was him and I had, almost four years ago. 

It’s easy now to ask why I didn’t just end it as soon as I knew for sure. Why didn’t I leave? I’m not sure if the truth is that I didn’t trust myself to remember right, or if I wanted to see if he was different now or if I were different now. But all of that was wrong. 

I prayed for an orgasm, just one moment of escape, no matter how much I hated him or how vile I would feel, but it didn’t come. I whimpered at one point and he said, “that’s right, cry a little.”

I went to dinner that night and sat across from my date, looking normal and feeling strange. He talked about Kabul, then about a court tennis pro, and as he spoke a dense spine of pain shot up through the center of my chest like a lightening bolt. It faded, then flared back again. I felt the focus go out of my eyes. 

I put my palm on my bare collarbone and held it there flat like I was bracing my whole body. He asked if I was okay. I blinked tears back. I said yes.