Fucking Witch

What we were, probably more than anything, was in complete lust with one another. I had, even at the age I was when I first got to know you, had crushes before, but those crushes were usually school girl: mooning over pretty boys with highlights and girlish jaws. This was different: I wanted you, and even when I was thirteen, I knew you wanted me to. It is hard to explain what it was exactly. You weren’t an old man, you were 26 or 27 when I first began to experience these bizarre sensations of lust, but you stood like a man and your eyes were old and your voice was deep and your skin was prickled with dark hairs. That doesn’t do justice to what it was, it was all of these things but it was more too, it was the dent of your glasses on the bridge of your nose and the sides of your head next to your ears; it was the nails on your fingers, bitten down over so many years that the skin had grown over the tops of them; it was the hint of chest hair at your throat; it was the stubble rash on your neck that burnt into your pale skin; it was the curl and lay of your off-blonde hair, which you did nothing with except get cut every so often; it was the East Midlands accent with a hint of here, which you laughed in and said my name with and told me I was funny with; it was the way you stood and it was the way you looked at me and it was the way you seemed to know me without ever knowing me. Sometimes it was the faint smell of soap and aftershave when you walked past me in the corridor, sometimes it was the way you carried your rucksack over one shoulder and gave yourself bad posture. Once it was the evidence that the sixth form girls giggled when you spoke too, another time it was when you called me “sweetheart" and I died and went to heaven on the spot, like some girl in a teenage romance novel. 

I remember once, idly chatting with you in your classroom, the autumn that I was fourteen. I perched on the edge of the desk and my school skirt had ridden up, revealing opaque-nylon covered thighs. You looked and looked away and I knew then and there that I had a power that I hadn’t quite realised before. As the time went by there were other signs that you wanted me: lingering looks, uncomfortable glances, nervous gesture when we were too close. Huddled close to the back of the school stage, waiting to go on for a school assembly one morning not long after, all that could be heard was the sound of your laboured breathing and my heart beat out of my chest with nervousness and desire.

A couple of years later, when I had passed the age of consent and was having sex with a boy the same age as me, you cornered me at an evening function in the hall. We were standing and chatting and you complimented me on my top, a billowing gold and maroon thing that I probably thought looked good in light of the fashions of that summer. The swell of my breasts was visible and my long legs were unencumbered in the short skirt I was wearing. You couldn’t take your eyes off of me. After maybe fifteen minutes your wife came over, her face like thunder, and ushered you away, but your eyes were never far from me for the rest of the evening. Months later I found out that she had rowed with you that evening, told you to keep away from me, that I was jail bait and that I had trouble written all the way through me like a stick of rock. But the damage was done. You were under my spell now, just as I had so long been under yours. You said later that you thought you had become a bit obsessed by me, and that was clear. I don’t know what did it, not the skirts or the breasts, they were just window dressing. It was certainly nothing that I did on purpose, although you told me about you obsession in an accusatory tone, although I had put you under my spell deliberately… Made you want me by some use of a love potion or a wand. I was only behaving as I had always behaved, if I were bewitching then that was because I was a fucking witch.

When we eventually made it to bed, it was like when a storm breaks. You feel it brewing for what seems like hours: the dark clouds, the eerie silence of the birds going away, the feeling that the air is somehow thicker, darker. And then the rain comes and the world breathes out.

You pinned me to the bed, kissing me with an honesty, an earnestness that was absent from every other encounter we ever shared. I finally felt that skin, touched that hair, knew you. Our words were sighs, little os which evaporated into the air as soon as we had said them. You told me that you loved me a thousand times, and you never did that again, as though sex was somehow detached from love in any way. I was never a prude, never stopped you from doing what you wanted, and I wanted whatever you wanted, but I never did understand that. I wanted you to know how much I loved you when our clothes were off, I didn’t want to pretend it was recreational. It didn’t feel recreational, it felt serious and hard and as the inevitable drew closer I wanted to cry more than I wanted to moan. It was as though this act, which would be so cheapened as time went on and the years went on with nothing else from you, had become a legally binding contract, it felt solemn. And in a way, it was. This was statutory rape. If I let you do this, I was saying that I would never tell. That I would never blame you for this. When you put yourself into me, it was suddenly over. The whole thing. It would go on for years, but it was over now.