Chapter 13: Troubling Choices

Neither of them had seen me yet, and so I dropped down the last few feet to the ground right behind him— he was still somewhat on his feet— and I grabbed him by his shoulder, digging my fingers in pretty hard, as I lifted him fully onto his feet.

“What the fu—? Oowww!!” That last was said as he tried to turn around, and I tightened my grip, holding him in place for the moment. It helped that his pants were undone, and both they and his underwear had drifted to right about where his knees were; if I’d let him go, he would have stumbled, or even fallen, and likely landed on the parts of him that were now exposed to the air.

“This doesn’t look ... consensual,” I offered, the two voice-altering devices built into the helmet giving me a flat, almost androgynous, not quite robotic, tone to my words; the pause was both deliberate and sarcastic. “Miss?” I turned slightly towards the woman who was laying upon the ground, looking up at both him and me; I’m not sure who she thought was more menacing right in that moment. “Is this an assault? Or just enthusiasm for being outdoors?”

The man didn’t even have the time to draw breath to respond, before the woman shouted her own answer. “Assault!” She called out, then, louder, “Rape! He was raping me!”

She certainly looked the part; she had been shoved into the ground, underneath the man, laid on her belly with her ... skirt? It was torn, tattered, and bunched up close to around her waist, while her panties were shredded, and parts of her usually kept covered— or so I would have imagined that they were usually kept covered— were more exposed to the night, and my accidental view, than they would have otherwise been. She was struggling to get her knees up under her, to force herself back up to her feet.

“I ain’t rapin’ nobody!” The man finally got his voice working, “Bitch was teasing me all night, tellin’ me she wanted it rough—”

“I did not!” She shouted in disagreement.

“—she liked it outside,” the guy kept going—

“You fuckin’ liar!”

“—and she said she had a rape fantasy!”

“You’re a fuckin liar!”

“One of you is lying,” I interrupted them, “So...” I paused again, and pretended to press a few ‘buttons’ on the wrist of my outfit, the wrist still gripping the man at the shoulder, then: “ ... let’s start with you, miss; tell me your side of things.”

The man started to speak, to try and interrupt the woman trying to speak her story, but a couple of ... gentle squeezes to his shoulder got him the message to shut the fuck up.

I added, though, “You each get to tell a story; either of you gets out of line— interrupts too much, yells, tries to hurt the other ... I will hurt you.” I looked at the man, and then at the woman. “That goes for both of you, miss. So, first, your turn.”

Her story was that she’d agreed to go out on a date with him— she liked him, he had gotten the balls to ask her out— and they’d gone someplace nice, Outback Steakhouse, she said. Personally, I wouldn’t called Outback ‘someplace nice’— it wouldn’t even be in my top ten. But, I suppose for a college-age woman, on a date with a college-age man with a college-age budget, it could maybe be considered ‘someplace nice’. In any event, after their date, they did some kissing and making out, during which the young man slowly got increasingly more insistent about wanting more than just kisses. But it wasn’t until they had gotten back on campus that she said that he began telling her that she ‘owed’ him, for the money he’d spent on their date, and the gas he’d burned through, taking her down to Montgomery and back. She’d told him ‘no’, and things had pretty quickly escalated until he’d chased her down and threatened her with a knife. He’d shredded her clothes and gotten a few strokes in, before I’d shown up and put a halt to things.

The man tried a couple of times to interrupt, but again, a ‘gentle’ squeeze at his shoulder stopped him, and let her finish her story. Then it was his turn.

Fundamentally, he told the same story, with the differences that she had teased him and taunted him, telling him that she wanted him to ‘chase’ her, and ‘take’ her. When I asked him if at any point she’d said ‘no’, he agreed that she had, but then remarked that she’d told him that ‘no’ was just a part of the situation.

“I was a virgin, Lamar!!” She screamed at him, her words almost tailgating the finish of his own story. And then she burst into tears.

I gave a hard look at ‘Lamar’— even though he couldn’t see my face through the helmet— who looked at the woman with surprise and something that I thought of as ‘horror’ in his eyes, before his gaze shifted to me, and his gaze hardened a bit. And then he tried to lash out at me.

I didn’t feel a thing, not really, but it was more in his actions, as he swung his free arm up and around his own body and into mine. The look on his face was one of a bit of vicious anger, which melted away into confused surprise as he looked down— and I did, too— and noticed that he’d tried to stab me with the knife that he’d still been holding in his hand, and found the blade snapped off.

“You done fucked up, Lamar,” I growled at him, and with a shift of a foot and the help of gravity, I pretty much body slammed him into the ground, not hard enough to kill him, but definitely hard enough to knock the wind out of him; I knelt over him, one knee down, an arm pressing him into ground. I let him gasp for a few moments, before I spoke.

“So you get to choose, Lamar,” I continued, my tone almost conversational but for the emphasis on his name. “Your nuts, or your dick; which one do you want to keep?”

“Wh-what?” He coughed, and weakly tried to struggle, to get some kind of leverage from his supine position on the ground.

“Your nuts, or your dick,” I repeated, “which one do you want to keep? Cuz I’m going to take one of them from you.”

“You can’t do that!!” He shrieked in a harsh not-quite-whisper, as he was still trying to catch his breath, and speak, at the same time.

“I repeat: I’m going to,” I said to him. “That’s what I’ve decided is going to happen to rapists when I catch ‘em. Not only that, but you tried to stab me; be lucky that I don’t snap your fucking neck.”

“I can’t let you do that,” a new voice intruded.