my face up to his for a kiss. He was clumsy about it.
After a minute he said, “Your time of the month?”
I thought briefly about nodding, but it wouldn’t do me any good. “No.”
“Why you being so unfriendly, then?”
“I’m not being unfriendly,” I said, trying to keep my voice bright. “Just tired, that’s all.” To prove my point, I hid a delicate yawn behind my hand.
“You’re always fucking tired.”
I was at that crossroads again, the one where I could either be brave and let him have what he wanted, or try to fight it and risk getting another serious beating. When he was drunk like this, he wasn’t going to let me get away with saying no, and I didn’t want to risk starting my new job in New York with yellowing bruises on my face.
“I’m not too tired, though,” I said, with a smile. My hand in the crotch of his jeans, giving him a rub. Undoing his belt.
In the end, he beat me anyway. He fucked me and I tried hard to make sure it didn’t hurt too much, trying to make it last as though I was enjoying it. I knew the way it was going when he started slapping my backside while he was fucking me, just a slap at first, but carrying on getting harder and harder until I had to cry out. That was what seemed to turn him on these days. He could fuck for hours, especially if he’d had a drink, his erection coming and going, until he found some way of hurting me—biting me, or pulling my hair until I cried out, and as soon as he heard that genuine note of pain in my voice, he’d go at it harder until he’d hurt me enough to tip him over the edge and he’d orgasm.
He pulled out of me abruptly and turned me over onto my back, his breath coming in ragged gasps, his eyes glinting with pleasure. The skin on my behind stung as it came into contact with the carpet underneath.
I wondered what he was going to do. I thought by now it wasn’t possible to still be afraid of him. He’d hurt me so many times that this was now almost a regular event. He was getting ever more inventive, finding new ways to humiliate me.
“Don’t hit my face,” I said quietly.
“What?”
“Anything—just not my face. They ask too many questions at work.”
He grinned, an ugly leer, and for a moment I thought he was going to do just that, hit me again and again across the face until my skin split. I felt tears start, although I hated letting him see me cry.
“That so?”
I nodded, not able to look at him anymore. Then he deliberately put one hand under my chin, choosing his place, thumb on one side, fingers the other.
“No,” I said, “please, Lee . . .”
“Fucking shut up,” he said, “it’s good like this, you’re going to love it.”
While he fucked me, he took away the air from my lungs, my fingers at my throat, trying to relieve the pressure, the air burning my lungs, the roaring in my ears signaling that I was going to lose consciousness in just a matter of moments.
Then, still fucking me hard, he’d ease the pressure and I’d cough and gasp, dragging air into my lungs. The only way to stop him was to give in. I screamed, as loud and as hard as I could, tears racing down my cheeks. I’d almost seen death. I was utterly terrified and screaming was almost involuntary—so I screamed.
He didn’t try to stop me, didn’t put his hand over my mouth again, and just let me scream. It did the trick. A few seconds later he pulled out of me and jerked off over my face.
On the train now, the Midlands rushing by in a blur of green and sunshine, I closed my eyes against the nausea.
Afterward, he’d picked himself up off the carpet, staggered to the downstairs bathroom to wash in the sink, and then he’d gone upstairs and fallen into bed. I’d waited until I could hear him snoring, then I got to my hands and knees, still crying, and went to have a shower. At least the only bruises I had that time were around my throat. I wore a neck scarf to work every day this week. They all thought I’d gone and gotten myself a hickey, at the grand old age of twenty-four.
At nine o’clock, the train pulled