You Know You Want This

by Kristen Roupenian

  What would you do in that situation? Seriously, I’m asking you. Because what I do is: I laugh at her. I laugh right in her face. Not because it’s funny, but just because—I don’t even know why. I laugh and laugh, and when she doesn’t laugh, too, I just blink at her, until at last she says, slowly, “That’s what I want. Punch me, and kick me, and then, once you do, we can have sex.”

  In my head, I’m like, okay, this is a crazy person.

  Or she is messing with me.

  Or it’s like a test, and we’re on reality television or something.

  But I’m trying to be polite, so all I say is, “I’m sorry, I respect your desires and everything, but I’m not really into that.”

  And she says, “It doesn’t matter if you’re into it. I’m into it. And that’s what I need to happen if we’re gonna fuck.”

  It was the most uncomfortable goddamned thing. She’s just staring at me, waiting, expecting me to agree to do this thing that obviously I’m not going to do, and I don’t know what to say, but she’s not giving me any hints, and it seems insane to just be like, well I guess that’s it, check ya later, sister. So finally, I say, “Do you mind if we keep making out for a while, and I can think about it?”

  She says yes, so that’s what we do. The whole time, my brain is just fucking racing. I’m thinking, no, absolutely not, I’m not here to punch some random girl, uh-uh no way. The truth is, she didn’t even know what she was asking. She couldn’t have. She was a small girl, maybe a hundred pounds if I had to guess, and I’m stronger than I look. If I punched her as hard as I could, there was a legitimate chance she would actually fucking die. Even if it was some kind of setup, like the plan was that afterward she’d threaten to turn me in to the police and blackmail me, or her boyfriend would come in and rescue her and beat me up because that’s what he gets off on, she still didn’t know what she was doing, asking me to punch her that hard.

  But of course, because she’s cute and we’re still making out and I’m into it, eventually my brain starts trying to figure out a way of thinking about it that will make this absurd request seem not quite so completely insane. Maybe she’s mistaken about the amount of force she’s telling me to use, but other than that, she knows what she wants. Like, there are degrees of punching, and what she wants is to be punched in a way that doesn’t actually put her life at risk. Maybe getting caught on the phrase as hard as you can is just getting tripped up by semantics. The girl wants me to punch her, because that’s what gets her going, and if you think about it, it’s not that much different than a girl wanting to be slapped or spanked or choked, all of which I’ve done before, with various degrees of enthusiasm and success.

  Okay, I’m telling myself, the girl has a kink, and it’s a scary one. Who knows where she got it—I mean, I can imagine, and there are a lot of dark possibilities, I don’t want to go too far down that path. But for whatever reason, she’s got it now, and she can’t help it, necessarily—it’s like a foot fetishist or even a pedophile—we don’t have control over what we want; all we can control is how we act on it. This girl acted on her desires in a perfectly mature and responsible way; she told you about it, right up front, she didn’t wait until you’d gone on three dates and were like head over heels for each other; she was straightforward and she gave you a choice. In a way, she’s making herself vulnerable to you, asking you to do this thing that a lot of people would judge her for. Yes, she came off as kind of bossy and rigid about it, but the truth is she was honest and open and direct, and in a way, you’ve got to admire that.

  So then I’m at the point where I’m asking myself: Can I punch her? Not as hard as I can, but just kind of . . . symbolically? Assuming that afterward she’d be wildly turned on and we’d have amazing sex. Why not, right? But still I’m like—who does this? What kind of a person goes to meet a guy she doesn’t know and asks him to punch her as hard as he can? Someone with a death wish, that’s who. And even setting aside my own natural aversion to introducing punching into a sexual situation, what am I doing, fucking a girl with a death wish? What does that make me?

  The thing is, I have that thought now. I wish I could say I didn’t have it then: that I was too wrapped up in a depressive haze for it to occur to me. But it did occur to me. I thought about it but then I just . . . let it slide by. Like my conscience was a set of brakes that had worn thin. I didn’t want to punch this girl, but the situation had its own momentum, and yeah, she was fucked up, but the truth was, all these girls on Tinder who were meeting up with me and banging me in my motel room, they were all fucked up to some degree. Girls with any kind of functional self-preservational instincts—they could smell me coming from a mile away. I guess all girls could, in one way or another. Some of them were just drawn to the stink. Because let’s be honest, this girl wouldn’t have asked some fucking real-estate agent to punch her, or some college kid. She’d recognized me as someone who would give her what she wanted. I’d opened the door and she’d thought, yup, that looks like a guy who might enjoy punching me in the face. To be seen that way—it was unsettling. But what was even more unsettling was that for all I knew, she was right. Maybe that desire was in me, even though I couldn’t see it. And maybe by doing what she asked, I could either purge it, or prove it wasn’t there.

  So I ask her, one last time: “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  She says, “I’m sure.”

  I say, “You don’t want to just cuddle and watch a movie?”

  She giggles, and says, kind of teasing, “What, are you scared or something?”

  I’m about to deny it, but then I think, why not just tell the truth? So I say, “Yes, I am, actually.”

  She puts her hand over my hand, like she’s comforting me. “I know it’s strange,” she says. “I don’t mean to freak you out.”

  “I think I just need a little while to wrap my head around it,” I tell her. “I’ve never punched a girl in the face before.”

  In fact, I’ve never punched anyone in the face before, but I’m not saying that; I don’t want to sound like an amateur.

  She laughs. “No experience necessary!” she says. “I’d be honored to be your first.”

  Looking at her smiling at me like that, I have this impulse to ask her a million questions, like, how in God’s name did you end up like this, and where are you from, and do you have any brothers or sisters, and what do you do for work, and what’s the first thing you remember, and what’s your favorite color, and oh, by the way, what’s in that suitcase that you brought?

  But before I can say anything else, she squeezes my hand again. “You don’t have anything to worry about,” she says. “You’ll be great, I promise.”

  “I’m not really sure what that says about me.”

  “It means I trust you,” she says, and she kisses me on the cheek.

  I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s what I need to hear. I say, “Okay. If you’re sure it’s what you want, then I’ll do it.”

  Her face lights up like a fucking Christmas tree. She kisses me again and jumps off the bed and runs into the shower to check it out. Now, this probably doesn’t even bear explaining, but we are not talking about some romantic getaway bathroom with fancy soaps and a rain shower; it’s a cruddy little motel stall, with mildew in the tiles and stains on the walls of mysterious provenance. At least part of me was expecting her to see it and change her mind. But nope—she turns on the water and gets right in.

  She looks great naked, even in the fluorescent bathroom lights—she’s got that little spinner body type that I like a lot—but at the same time, I’m covertly scoping her for bruises, wondering if I’m like the third guy she’s asked to punch her this week. She doesn’t have any marks on her, though. No cuts or anything. She’s a perfectly normal-looking girl.

  I get in the shower with her, and we kiss, and she goes down on me a little, but I’m not exactly responding because of the pressure of what’s coming. Pretty soon it’s clear the blow job isn’t happening, so
I say, hey, let’s just make out, and we do, but after a few minutes she steps away and starts soaping herself, looking over my shoulder like there’s something super interesting up there. I figure this is her way of signaling that she’s not paying attention and now would be a good time for a punch.

  So I punch her. But not really. It’s just the lightest, most delicate tap. Like I’m going “boop” on her nose with my fist.

  Please let that be enough, I’m thinking.

  It’s not. For a second there’s this look on her face of total disdain. She says, “I need you to take this seriously, Ryan. That is not as hard as you can. Punch me for real. Okay?”

  She starts shampooing her hair, which buys me a little more time, but I can tell that, like, the clock is ticking, and now I have this fear in me, in my body, that I can feel as a weakness in my arms, a tightness in my chest. There’s a threshold in between where it’s fun, and where it’s real; I have to land in a space where it’s not enough to truly hurt her, but it is enough to satisfy her, and that’s a dangerously small band; the possibility of miscalculation is high. Of course, a small piece of my brain is telling me, dude, you don’t need to do this, you don’t need to go down this path. But there’s another part of me that’s thinking about how she apologized for freaking me out, and how I’d promised her that she wasn’t that weird for asking. I don’t want to take that back. I want to be able to give her what she asked me for, I do.

  So then we’re in this absurd situation, where she keeps glancing at me more and more sharply, like, come on, dude, just do it, just punch me in the face, and the water is getting cold and she starts to get truly annoyed, but since she has to pretend not to know it’s coming for it to work, she keeps endlessly shampooing her hair and sighing, and I’m clenching my fist and yelling at myself, do it, do it, do it—

  And I do. I haul back and punch her, for real.

  She collapses. As she’s falling, she lets out this long, melodramatic “ooooooof,” and when she hits the floor, there’s a little runnel of blood trickling from her nose down into the drain. Just a small one. But still.

  I go, “Shit! Are you okay?!”

  Immediately, I just feel sick. I’m thinking, oh my God, what if she’s dead? I’m imagining my arrest, my court date, my mom crying as I’m shuffled off to prison in chains. I’m thinking: I’m going to have to dispose of her body, because no one will ever believe me if I tell them the truth.

  I bend down to feel her pulse. She opens her eyes, and, like I’m her idiot partner in a high school play who’s forgotten his lines, she hisses, “I’m fine, but you’re supposed to kick me now.”

  She closes her eyes again, and let me tell you, in that moment, I hated that girl, and I’m pretty sure she hated me, too. I knew exactly what she was thinking: she’d been on the hunt for some badass dude who’d go down with her into whatever dark place she was trapped in, but instead she’d ended up with this lame-ass coward, a guy who’s too fucked up to tell her to get lost, but also too scared to do what he said he would do.

  I hadn’t even thought that much about the kicking before, because I’d been all hung up on the punch, but now it seems even worse, kicking her while she’s lying there with her eyes closed, defenseless, all curled up in the fetal position, as if she’s trying to protect herself from me. There’s a saying about that, even, about how wrong it is to kick someone who’s already down. I’m standing over her, in this icy mildewed motel shower, trying to move my leg, and I can’t, I can’t do it. But I know that until I do, it won’t end. Maybe in an alternative universe a version of me is picking her up and wrapping her in a towel and saying, “Honey, I respect you but you deserve better, we both deserve better,” or some nonsense like that. But if I lived in that universe she wouldn’t be here, I wouldn’t live in this motel; at the very least, that version of me would’ve dry-cleaned his fucking comforter, he would’ve told her to get her shoes off his bed. That would have been a world that made sense. But in this world, I’m looking down at this girl, and I’m thinking, wow, fuck you, lady, because I knew my life was shit . . . but I didn’t quite realize how shit until you came along.

  In recovery, they talk about what’s it like to hit rock bottom, and I want to say that was my bottom, standing over that naked girl and getting ready to kick her in the gut. That combination of responsibility and powerlessness—truly, standing over her, I saw with absolute clarity how I had no one else to blame, how I was the one who’d let my life spin completely out of control. Everything I’d ever done had brought me to that point; all my choices had led me right here, to this.

  But if that had been my rock bottom, I’d have changed, right? Seeing the light would’ve done something to me, helped me somehow. But it didn’t. It only made me feel worse.

  So, finally, I do it. I kick her in the stomach, just like she asked. And that’s when I realize why this whole thing had to happen in the shower, because she vomits. This beige oatmeal puke pours out of her mouth and mixes with the water and swirls around my ankles, and at that point my memory kind of fizzes out, like a broken television, but I can tell you it was so much worse than I thought it would be, it was so so so so bad.

  Afterward, she barely rinses off. She doesn’t even touch the soap, she just gets to the bed and gestures to me, and that little voice in my head is practically screaming, it’s just like, Ryan, stop stop stop, please, but I don’t, I fuck her, right there on that motel comforter, and I’m holding my breath so I can’t smell the puke and there’s this layer of crusted blood inside her nostrils between her nose and upper lip that’s the worst goddamn thing I’ve ever seen.

  I don’t know.

  When I try to reconstruct the place that I was, at that point in my life, to figure out how I got there, to that punch, to that bed, to that girl—I can’t. I can see where some bad decisions led to some other bad decisions, but I can’t get all the way there; it’s like I imagine a curve, where I’m dropping lower and lower down, and then I’m off the radar screen, invisible, and then, after some time goes by, the line is rising, visible again, and I don’t know what happened in between. Because the worst thing wasn’t punching her, or fucking her afterward, or getting on my knees in the bathroom, heaving into the toilet, when it was done. It was how I felt after, when it was over, when she was gone, and I was alone.

  * * *

  I never found out what was in that suitcase. Maybe it was sex toys or lingerie. Maybe it was fetish gear. Maybe it was boxing gloves. Maybe it was a bomb: some sicko was like, go to this room and ask a dude to punch you, because if you don’t I’ll blow you both straight to kingdom come. Maybe it was empty. Maybe she was homeless, and it was everything she owned. She unmatched me on Tinder right after she left—seriously, it happened so quick I think she must’ve done it in the parking lot—so I’ll never know.

  She was a girl with a lot of problems, obviously. We both had issues, but I can honestly say she was the only person I’ve ever met who, without question, was as fucked up as me, so I guess we had that in common, at least?

  Not too long after all this went down, my brother showed up in Baltimore and ran an intervention on me; my divorce went through, and eventually I got a job and moved out of the city, started going to the occasional meeting, though I could never really commit to the steps. The line of my life didn’t begin ticking upward until I made sense to myself again; I could graph my decisions: even when I made bad choices, I could give you reasons for them; I could say, I did x because of y.

  It’s been years, but I still think about her. Jacquelyn, her name was. I wonder about her, about how she ended up like that, about the contents of her fucking suitcase, about what she’s doing now. In the end, I always come to the same conclusion, which is: She must be dead, right? The way she talked to me, how carefully she explained what she needed—I wasn’t the first person she’d asked to hit her like that. I know I wasn’t. And there’s a natural outcome to those kind of decisions. Insert x, get y. You can’t keep meeting guys in m
otel rooms and asking them to punch you without ending up dead sooner or later, can you?

  But who knows.

  Maybe you can.

  Biter

  Ellie was a biter. She bit other kids in preschool, bit her cousins, bit her mom. By the time she was four years old, she was going to a special doctor twice a week to “work on” biting. At the doctor’s, Ellie made two dolls bite each other, and then the dolls talked about how biting and being bitten made them feel. (“Ouch,” one said. “Sorry,” said the other. “I feel sad about that,” said the one. “I feel happy,” said the other. “But . . . sorry again.”) She brainstormed lists of things she could do instead of biting, like raise her hand and ask for help, or take a deep breath and count to ten. At the doctor’s suggestion, Ellie’s parents put a chart on Ellie’s bedroom door, and Ellie’s mom put a gold star on it for every day Ellie didn’t bite.

  But Ellie loved biting, even more than she loved gold stars, and she kept on biting, joyfully and fiercely, until one day, after preschool, pretty Katie Davis pointed at Ellie and whispered loudly to her dad: “That one’s Ellie. No one likes her. She bites people,” and Ellie felt so sick with shame she didn’t bite anyone again for more than twenty years.

  * * *

  As an adult, though her active biting days were behind her, Ellie still indulged in daydreams in which she stalked her coworkers around the office, biting them. For example, she imagined sneaking into the copy room where Thomas Widdicomb was collating reports, so engrossed in his task that he didn’t notice Ellie creeping up behind him on all fours. Ellie, what on Earth, Thomas Widdicomb would cry, in the final seconds before Ellie sunk her teeth into his plump and hairy calf.