Chapter 14: The Terms

I woke to the smell of him.

That was the first thing — before the light, before the hurt. His smell, all over me and all through the bed, the thick sour reek I’d fallen asleep soaked in. The sweat and the low ripe basement smell of him, and under it, sharp, the cum. It was dried on my thighs and worked down into my own skin and matted in my hair where I’d lain all night in the wet of it in the sheet, and I’d breathed it all night, and for one whole second, surfacing, I didn’t know where I was or why the entire world smelled like my father.

Then I moved, and it all came back through my body before it reached my head — the deep bruised ache low in my belly, the raw open burn between my legs, my thighs stuck together where the blood and the cum had dried. I was naked on top of the covers where I’d dropped. Under me the sheet had gone stiff and dark where I’d bled and leaked into it all night — a dried stain crusted brown at the edges, spread out under me where my hips had lain.

I got up and locked the bathroom door and made myself look, all the way, in the hard flat morning light, because I am my father’s daughter and I had to know exactly what he’d made of me. The wall mirror first, standing — my own face, my own body, all of it I could take in from up there. Then what I’d really come in to see: I dug the hand mirror out of the drawer, set one foot up on the edge of the tub, and held it down between my legs and looked at that too.

It wasn’t mine anymore.

Where I’d been a girl yesterday — sparse and shut and new — it was swollen now, and open, and wrong. The lips of it were puffy and dragged out and gone a dark bruised red, one worse than the other. The inner ones worst of all — the little soft folds that had always sat tucked up small and hidden inside the outer lips. The girth of him had caught them on every stroke and dragged them out and shoved them back in, over and over, until they were pulled loose and hung down swollen and dark below the outer lips, out in the open where they’d never once been, and they didn’t go back. And the whole of it wouldn’t close. It hung open. Actually open — a slack parted gap where there had never been a gap, too stretched and too swollen to shut the way it was supposed to, and if I looked I could see up into myself, pink going to raw red, tissue that was never meant to be on the outside sitting out there in the light.

His hairs were in it. Coarse and dark and curled, a dozen of them, stuck to the swollen lips and caught up in my own sparse hair, glued there by his dried cum where he’d ground himself into me. I picked one off and it pulled at the skin, and I stopped.

A ring of dried cum crusted the opening, pale and flaking. And worked down into the creases where the swollen lips met my body, and smeared in a film up inside the open rim of me, was the other thing. His. The waxy white stuff — the same stuff I’d smelled off the used sleeve on the basement floor, off the ruined middle of the doll, off the front of his sweatpants all summer, and here it was now, worn off himself and packed up into me. Off that unwashed hooded head of him, ground into me over and over, until his filth was sitting inside my own body in a place I couldn’t reach to get it out.

And it hadn’t all dried. When I shifted my weight to see, something deep in me let go and slid, and a slow thick rope of it came down out of the open hole — his cum gone a day old, yellow-white and stringy, and a fleck of the waxy stuff riding out in the middle of it, sliding to the rim and dropping to the tile between my feet. More welled up slow behind it, the way it had leaked into the sheet all night — and more of it was deeper still, up past where I could reach, packed into me where he’d left it.

Down the insides of both thighs, his dried streaks, brown-red and pale together, flaking when I moved. I put a finger to the swollen open rim of myself, barely, and the soreness went so deep and so sick that I took my hand away, set the mirror down, put my foot back on the floor, and stood there with both hands on the edge of the sink and breathed.

And standing there looking at it, the plain crude size of what he’d done landed on me. Not felt up in the dark by a relative. Not even just raped. Fucked — the full grown thing of it, split open and worn out and pumped full of his cum and left to leak, used the way a man uses a woman, the way he used the machine down there every night. Yesterday I could walk into any room I chose and run it. This morning my father’s cum was drying up inside me and leaking down my own legs, my body wouldn’t shut, and there was one word for what he’d done to me that I’d never once thought to use about myself. He’d conquered me.