He’s disgusted at me. I know what he thinks, what anyone would think—that I’m an apologist, an enabler—but I’m defending myself just as much as I am Strane. Because even if I sometimes use the word abuse to describe certain things that were done to me, in someone else’s mouth the word turns ugly and absolute. It swallows up everything that happened. It swallows me and all the times I wanted it, begged for it. Like the laws that flatten all the sex I had with Strane before I turned eighteen into legal rape—are we supposed to believe that birthday is magic? It’s as arbitrary a marker as any.
...more
