Caroline’s eyes were growing more accustomed to the gloom.
The man was attempting to pull up his jeans while still supporting her.
She laughed what must have sounded like a hysterical giggle or cackle to the man.
No, this was definitely not the way she had thought things would work out. She had had something more sedate, a discrete seduction, soft lights, candles maybe, a spongy mattress, a sensuous disrobing, lingering, lazy mutual explorations and an unhurried, careful, greedy coupling. Standing in a puddle of her own urine while her assailant struggled out of his piss soaked pants feeling like she had just gone ten rounds with Sonny Liston really, really ought to have told her something about being careful what, in her old age, she wished for!
Caroline buried her face in his chest and shivered.
“What?” The man asked anxiously.
“Take those things off,” she suggested, trying not to laugh again, knowing that in her present confusion a giggle would emerge as a cackle. “Let go of me, I won’t run away.”
She did, however, put her hand to the wall to stop herself stumbling.
She looked at his half-flaccid nakedness.
Okay, that explains why it hurt so much at the beginning…
“I need to go to the bathroom,” she declared, attempting to stand up straight. This was more uncomfortable than she had anticipated. The man reached to her, she shook off his hand. “I need to go to the bathroom… ”
The man was crying.
She would have tried to hold him but he had just raped her.
“I need to clean up,” she muttered, pushing past him. It was only after she had stumbled into the whitewashed, antiseptic smelling bathroom at the back of the bungalow that Caroline Konstantis truly became aware again of her surroundings.
The whole building was spic and span, everything was in its place, scrubbed and ready for inspection. Correctly, she had predicted that Nathan would seek order, attempt to control his environment. He had spent over eight years in the military and been, by all accounts, an exceptional officer; meticulous in his attention to duty, a man who studied and trained with immense diligence, to whom ‘good enough’ was always ‘second best’. Shutting herself in the bathroom she sat a while on the toilet, wet, stinking, bedraggled and numb as slowly, her sensibilities returned, and she started to make a little sense of things.
Eventually, she peeled off her dress. Then she wriggled out of her girdle; she had felt ‘sexy’ in it with her womanhood open to the air beneath her dress. ‘Sexy’ now seemed ‘dirty’ and she did not know what she had been thinking when she bought the thing.
She filled the bath, a big white enamel monstrosity that occupied half the small room. The water was at first apologetically warm and then increasingly cold. The bath’s white enamel was chipped in half-a-dozen places. She unhooked her brassiere, hung it over the single towel rail, and began to soak the semen and the urine from the folds of her party frock. She was in no hurry. Later she sat in the bath until her lower limbs were chilled and she started to shiver.
The man knocked at the door a couple of times.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes!” That was a lie.
Eventually, she splashed water on her face, wrapped herself in a towel and emerged.
The man was on his knees, dressed only in his skivvies, in the hallway scrubbing the floor.
He looked up.
“I hung my things in the John to dry,” she explained distractedly, very tired and a little faint. “My bag is in the trunk of my car.”
Nathan stared at her, chewed his lip.
“I’ll bring it in.”
She nodded, stepped past him into the bedroom. This bungalow only had the one. There was a single double bed, made up with hospital-style precision. She guessed Nathan usually slept in the cot in the living room, preferring surroundings which more closely matched the generally Spartan conditions on Strategic Air Commands bases, many of which were located so far out in the boondocks that the nearest big town was twenty or thirty miles away.
Caroline sat on the bed.
Awakening much, much later she did not recollect burrowing beneath the sheets, or her head touching the pillow. She had fallen into the darkness as if plunging uncaringly over a precipice into some black abysmal depth. Her mind had embraced nothingness, and her body had surrendered to its exhaustion. She had seen it in so many others but never experienced it; that state when one’s mind and body shuts down, a self-defensive reflex, an autonomic questing for a safe place in which to hide.
The man was sitting in a chair watching her in the gloom when she awakened.
He had pulled on pants with razor sharp ironed creases, a fresh shirt. Having been dozing he blinked alert at Caroline’s groan of regained consciousness.
It was pain which had woken her.
Her bladder felt like it was fit to burst.
Wrapping a sheet around her shoulders she scurried to the bathroom, making it just in time. When she was finished everything hurt a little less. She checked herself, the bowl of the toilet.
No blood…
The John had a soft flush; Nathan must have done something about the building’s rusting pipe work…
The man was standing outside as she emerged.
Instantly, she held up a hand.
“No, no,” she murmured. “I need a little time… ”
She had a vile taste in her mouth, she was parched, and her voice was a hoarse whisper.
“No, I need a glass of water. And coffee; a little milky, not too strong.”
In the bedroom she edged back under the disturbed sheets and drew them up to her chin.
“There’s ice in the refrigerator if the water’s too warm,” Nathan muttered.
Caroline sat up, sipped, and then gulped water as if she had a desert thirst.
“More?” He asked.
“No. Coffee, I need coffee.” This said she collapsed onto the pillow and lay unmoving, utterly spent listening to the man in the adjacent kitchen. “What time is it?” She inquired when the man returned.
“Nearly seven,” he confessed.
Caroline realized she must have slept six or seven hours straight.
She grimaced as she tested the coffee; milky and sugary.
“Sugar’s good if you are in shock,” Nathan shrugged. “After what I did to you,” he shrugged again in an agony of self-loathing, “you must be pretty… ”
Caroline had sat up in the bed.
She took another mouthful of coffee. It tasted like the real stuff, ground beans although the milk and sugar spoiled it completely.
“I’m not in shock, Nathan,” she reassured, stifling a yawn. “And I’m not afraid of you,” she took a breath, “or anything. I’m just a little sore downstairs, okay.”
Sore as in sore the morning after she gave birth; one kid had been the deal with Harvey, her husband. He had wanted more but then he was not the one who had to pass their goddam heads thought his pelvic passage. No, now that she thought about it she was nowhere near that sore. She was older these days and she had not had sex with a youthful, energetic, well-endowed partner for over two decades.
“Oh, right,” the boy said, swallowing hard.
Caroline was finally starting to feel half-way normal. To her ‘normal’ was when she was in control and everybody in the room was listening to what she had to say and trying very hard to appear to be paying attention. ‘Shrinking violet’ had never been her style and although today had been a truly weird day, especially the being raped part of it, her equilibrium had returned and she realized that she was definitely the one calling the shots.
“Things,” she asserted sanguinely, “are screwed up, Nathan; out there in the World and in this bedroom. That’s just the way it is. The only thing that really surprises me is that we aren’t all complete basket cases. The whole fucking World got blown up less than two years ago, the country’s in a mess and most of the northern hemisphere is a goddammed rubble field!”