#1248

I was 19 years old and in the military. I met a guy on Tinder and after a few days of talking he invited me over to his house one night, so I went. He led me upstairs and into his bedroom. He had LED strip lights close to his ceiling, so the whole room was illuminated red. Although I wondered if we might sleep together, I had not gone into the encounter expecting any particular thing to happen. We laid in his bed and watched T.V., I think Ozark or Yellowstone was playing. He started kissing me and stuck his hand up my shirt. I immediately felt uncomfortable, but I didn't say anything because I didn't want him to be upset at me or think I was a tease. After some time he slid his hand down my chest and stomach and into my pants. He started touching me between my legs, and I knew I didn't want to go farther with him so I pulled his hand out of my pants and let it rest on my stomach. Immediately he pushed his hand back into my pants and started touching me again. I froze, I was so scared, and I felt like I was watching everything happen outside of my body. I don't know how much time passed before I was able to move. When I could I jumped up, grabbed my purse and jacket off of a stand he had by his bedroom door and ran downstairs. I threw on my shoes and ran out to my car, locking the doors immediately. I spent the entire drive back to my dorm terrified that he was going to follow me home. That was the first time I was sexually assaulted. I didn't have any family who lived in the area, or close to it. I was knew to the base so I didn't really have any friends yet. I felt so extremely alone. I felt like I did not have anyone to tell or talk to about what happened. After the assault my life began to spiral out of control. I became hypersexual, putting myself in situations that could quickly become dangerous. I got drunk every single weekend, and sometimes drank on week nights. I did reckless things like driving 120mph down the highway at night. I contemplated killing myself, but I was too scared to do it, so I fixated on doing things that could result in an accident that could kill me. After a few months I began to get my act together again when I met a guy who worked in the same building as me. He had lots of friends, everyone at work loved him, he got countless awards and praise, he was into fitness, and seemed like the kind of person I needed in my life. I desperately wanted him to like me, and I could see a future where we were a great couple, going to the gym and hiking together, doing all the things "functional" couples do. One evening he was in my dorm room and we were laying in my bed talking. He asked me if I wanted to have sex with him, and I shyly told him no. He asked me again to have sex with him and I told him I didn't want to because I thought I had a yeast infection (a lie.) Ignoring my concern, he asked me a third time if I would have sex with him. I didn't know what else to do so I told him that we shouldn't have sex because I thought I had chlamydia (another lie.) He looked me in the eyes and told me "it's a risk I'm willing to take." I felt so weird about this, and I told him that we should because I would feel so bad if I gave him "chlamydia" to which he finally relented. He stayed late, so I let him spend the night in my dorm. For context, my dorm room was one of four that had one shared wall, so sometimes you could hear my quad-mate next to me playing videogames loudly. I was woken up in the middle of the night by the guy punching the wall and screaming "SHUT THE FUCK UP," at my quad-mate who was apparently playing videogames too loudly for him to sleep. He hit that wall so hard it shook a painting off my wall. This terrified me. I had been lying right next to him, and the fact that he could go from zero to screaming and hitting things over something so little was scary. After that things started to shift between us. He became increasingly more controlling, wanting me to spend the night at his dorm every night and driving me to work in the mornings. He had a pushiness about him, and even if I didn't do anything wrong conversations always came back around to how I was a bad person, how I was wrong, or something was my fault. He made me feel like the worst person ever. Like I was a negative, dark cloud over people's lives, and I was mean, and the choices I made were inherently wrong or bad. There was a general pressure for us to have sex that I tried to subdue by making out with him, or I even went as far to blow him to get him to stop pressuring me to have sex with him. The day I was raped, we were in his dorm, sitting on his mattress on the floor. He began kissing me, and I kissed him back. He took off my shirt and pants and started kissing my chest and touching it more sexually. The feeling of him kissing and sucking on my chest made me feel so physical, viscerally ill, I desperately wanted him to stop. I abruptly interrupted him, saying "stop, stop, I don't like that." He stopped, looked at me in such an unkind way, and asked me why. I said I didn't know why. He asked me again why I didn't like it. I said I don't know, I just didn't like it and it made me feel weird. He looked at me critically, he looked upset, before he moved quickly down to put his head between my legs. I didn't know what to do. I was scared that he would be upset at me and he would be mad at me and tell me more awful things about myself. I was also scared that he might get angry and physically hurt me. He was much stronger than me and had all his clothes on still, I only had underwear on. I didn't know what to do, I tried to ask him to stop and nothing happened, so I thought that I could minimize the damage if I just went along with what he was doing. If I just had sex with him he would stop pressuring me and bugging me about it. He would still like me if I had sex with him, and we could still have a relationship. So I just gave up, and gave in. I didn't resist or ask him to stop again. In my head I tried to think of anything that could take me away from what was happening. But I couldn't ignore the fact that it hurt when he pushed into me, or that he wasn't wearing a condom, or that he finished inside of me.