Page 5 of Where the Snakes Sleep

Sometimes he’d smile at me across the living room, and for a split second I’d swear nothing had changed.

Whatever happened to us didn’t happen all at once. It happened so slowly that half the time I want to blame myself for not noticing. It’s like watching paint fade in the sun. You don’t see it day-to-day. The walls just exist. Until one afternoon you look up and realize the color you remember is gone, and you can’t remember when, why, or who started letting it fade.

I wonder often how much of this is my fault. If I’d only tried harder to be the person Paul needed—wanted? expected?—maybe the two of us would still be able to hold a conversation that wasn’t an endless negotiation of terms. Maybe I wouldn’t have learned to anticipate a fight every time he opened his mouth. Maybe sex wouldn’t feel like a test of how much I can give up without unmaking myself. It was easier, in some ways, to just go along with whatever Paul wanted, because saying “no” didn’t mean the conversation stopped. It just meant the conversation got more complicated, and the ground under me got less steady.

Sometimes I think about leaving. I even tried once, packing a duffel bag with enough clothes and a couple of ratty paperbacks, walking down the block to the convenience store, and then sitting on the curb with nowhere to go and no concrete plan. I lasted forty-three minutes before Paul’s car pulled up, flashing headlights at me in the near-empty lot. I got in without a word, and Paul didn’t ask why, where, or even if. We drove around for an hour, ended up at a Taco Bell at two in the morning, and ate three chalupas each in silence. The next morning I unpacked the bag and put the books back on the shelf, but left the duffel hidden beneath my underwear and socks in the dresser drawer, just in case.

I’m not ready to leave yet. Not when Paul still feels like the sweet, caring guy I love sometimes.

* * *

The bedroom is dark when I wake.

Not the gentle dark of a room I’ve known for years; I can tell something is wrong before my eyes are even open. My body knows before my mind catches up, the way it always does when danger crawls beneath the surface of sleep.

There’s a weight on top of me.

Too hot, heavy, and moving.

My pajama bottoms are gone. I don’t remember taking them off. I don’t remember a lot of things because I was asleep, and now I’m not, and Paul is—

He’s inside me.

The realization hits like ice water thrown across my face. I gasp, and the sound is small and pathetic in the dark.

“Shh.” His breath is hot against my ear. One of his hands is pressed flat against my sternum, holding me down. The other is gripping my hip painfully hard. “It’s okay. Go back to sleep.”

“Get off me!” The words come out strangled. My hands fly to his shoulders, pushing, but he doesn’t budge. He’s twice my size, and he’s using all of it. “Paul—stop—”

“Just let it happen, Ry.” His voice is so calm it makes my stomach turn. He rocks into me slowly like he has all the time in the world. Like this is something we agreed to. “You need this. You’ve been so tense.”

I can’t breathe. Every nerve in my body is screaming, but I’m trapped beneath him, and I know—I know—that fighting is only going to make it worse. I’ve read enough—heard enough from therapists, from survivors—to know that sometimes the safest thing to do is endure.

Just get through it.

Let it be over.

So I go still.

My body goes limp beneath him, and I feel the exact moment he registers it. His rhythm changes. He makes a soft, satisfied sound against my neck, like a man settling into a warm bath.

Just get through it, I tell myself. Just let him finish, and then you can leave. You can figure out leaving. You just have to survive this first.

I close my eyes and try to disappear. I’ve gotten good at that over the years—the art of being somewhere else while my body stays here. It’s a skill I learned long before Paul, in a different house with a different man’s voice.

But then I feel it.

The absence of something I should feel.

There’s no latex. No thin barrier between his skin and mine. Just heat and wetness and the terrible intimacy of skin against skin.

My eyes fly open in the dark, the dissociation shattering like glass. “Are you—” My voice breaks. I try again. “Are you wearing anything?”

Paul doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to. The absence of anything between us is its own answer, and it sends a bolt of pure, animal terror through me that overrides every instinct toward compliance I’ve ever built.

“No—no, no, no—” I’m thrashing now, my hands scrabbling at his shoulders, his arms, his face. My knee connects with something—his thigh, his stomach, I don’t know—and he grunts but doesn’t stop. “Get out of me—Paul, you’re not wearing anything, get out—”

“Stop fighting.” His voice hasn’t changed. It’s still calm, still reasonable, like I’m the one being irrational. His hand on my sternum presses down harder, pinning me flat and restricting my breathing. “It’s okay, Ry. It’s okay.”