It was an addiction, really. It had been slowly spiraling out of her control, not that she cared to control it. The random men, the pain, the way they used her, hurt her, choked her. It left her tingling in ways that no other moment of her life did. She didn’t want a nice guy. Indeed, those men scared her. She couldn’t understand what they wanted or what their motives were. Clearly, they were up to something, but what that was, was hidden.

The men at the bars, in the chat rooms, the ones that leered at her, she knew what they wanted. There was a strange safety in that, even if they didn’t care if she wanted it as well. And that was fine with her. People pretended otherwise, but experience had taught her that was how things worked. It was that way in high school, in college, everywhere. And you either fought or accepted it. You might even begin to seek it out.

After a drunken night, alone and depressed, she had met some guys hanging out at a bar. Did some coke with them, partied, made out, and danced, and afterward she didn’t remember much. Until the morning at least.

Then, she woke to a man grunting and thrusting into her, finishing and dumping a load into her. He got up and left, which was when she realized she wasn’t even in a room, but in the dirty stairwell of some run-down apartment complex. Her body was covered in bruises, and she reeked of cum and piss. She had been used and just dumped. She slowly walked home, barefoot, her purse stolen. When she got home, she vomited in the toilet, sick. She passed out again, exhausted, dirty against the clean toilet.

She had to take the morning after pill after that. A course of antibiotics to treat the STI she had gotten. She just cried and masturbated at the thought of what they had done to her. She told men online about it, and they made her hurt herself to the things they would have done instead. Threats of making her disappear into their basements, dumped in the trash, gang raped, and whored out.

She came to all those thoughts.

So she started doing it more. Not always drunk, but dressed to tease, and that she did. She would toy with them, taunt them, and insult the men. Anything to push them across that line that they generally wouldn’t cross. All to get them to hurt her. She tried repeating it with some of them, but they would start to be nice to her or ask about safewords. They tried to put in safety nets. She wanted none. She needed to feel alive, no matter the cost or the risk.

She got robbed several times and even raped once in her apartment by someone who knew where she lived. She didn’t care anymore. She struggled to sleep. Every sound sent her heart racing in the hope of being used again.

She put her info on rape sites all over the internet, in chat rooms, desperate. An addict needing her fix. More random visits, more drops in the quiet in between. It felt like she was slowly going crazy, a roller-coaster of highs and lows. Alive and dead inside. Empty and quiet or bruised and used. Lost and found. The greatest spiral of her life.

She didn’t hear when the last one come in. She never kept her doors locked anymore, nor her windows. Her apartment was as easy to access as she was. She slept in her thin halter top, with no air conditioning on in the heat of the summer. She didn’t budge as he rifled through her belongings, stealing what little money she had. She only woke when he pounced on her, covering her mouth. She tried to scream, of course. Not too hard, not too loud, but she had to struggle. They wanted to rape her and compliance was not rape. Her feeble attempt got her slapped, followed by a hard punch to the gut. Then the blankets were torn away, her legs spread.

He mocked her for being soaked, just another broken whore. That only made her wetter. Then he slammed into her, pumping her cunt, backhanding her, and pinching her nipples. She came almost instantly. That brief high kicking in. Alive. When his hand gripped her throat, she thought nothing of it. She’d been choked out before. But something in his eyes warned her before his hand went from squeezing to crushing. He fucked her harder, his eyes watching hers as her face turned red. She gasped, panting, her hands clawing at the bed, tighter and tighter. She came again.

The black began to creep in when the air and blood didn’t. The pain became overwhelming but he wouldn’t stop squeezing or fucking. She smiled up at him, because she didn’t care. At least until the black enveloped her a final time, she truly felt alive.