Thirteen Letters I Never Wrote: Dear M, You Cannot Play With My Monster.

Dear M,

He was a pimp, and I was his whore, but you didn't know that did you? I bet you didn't expect to fuck a whore, while the man who owns the property watches.

You thought I was bringing you a cuckolded man, and I never led you to believe that, in fact, I told you it was the opposite. You didn't believe me. You saw me with my loud, decisive voice, and my brisk, confident walk, and you assumed, a fatal assumption, that I was a woman who enjoyed being in control. A dominant woman, you called me. You wouldn't be the first person to make that mistake about me. I suppose I can even see why. I'm what they call an extrovert, and I talk to people with ease. I would never call myself accomplished inside my own head, but I can demonstrate it to other people. I can't help but take charge of situations, and conversations, and you thought based on that character I play, that I call the shots in my relationship. You were so comfortable with that that you touched me underneath my own dining table without feeling like you needed my permission, that may have been a mistake. You touched me without his permission, that was definitely a mistake.

I asked you about it. I asked you to take a walk with me, in plain view of all your peers and colleagues, so we could talk about what you really wanted from me. You suggested we go on a long drive instead, and you thought I turned you down because I didn't feel safe with you. That's hardly surprising, given that fifteen-years ago a man by your name destroyed my life for a bit, but it wasn't that. The only reason I feared for my safety was because I don't trust the driving of people I don't know well enough, I didn't think your feeble masculinity could actually attack me or take me from me something I may not have been willing to give. Your monster is pedestrian, and incapable of playing with mine. Your monster is in grade-school and mine is halfway through its second Doctorate. Your monster is childish, it gets its kicks by cheating and touching women underneath tables in the hope they will cheat on their partners too. There was never anything you thought you could give me, that I actually wanted.

You have to understand, often my games require a pawn, and I have all this morality stored inside me in a folder I can't help but reference, and so I have to choose my pawns carefully. You were perfect, because you are scum. You thought you could act with impunity, that touching me or any woman (and I know you touched many others because you had a process, a seemingly innocuous, tentative process, that I recognise from every man like you who came before you), is consequence-free. You were too pleased with yourself, perhaps because the vestiges of a handsome youth still showed in your face or maybe it was because the athleticism of the same youth ensured you were still limber, but you didn't bat an eye when I told you your daughter was my age, and your wife as old as my mother, and your marriage older than even hers. I thought about your wife for longer than you did. You said you wouldn't consider it cheating if you fucked me, because you had an understanding with her, but when I asked if I would get the same answer if I spoke to her, you said I couldn't speak to her at all without inviting scandal for myself and catastrophe for you. That seemed like cheating to me. Even a practice of "don't ask don't tell" is only acceptable when all parties agree, what you do is nothing but lies and betrayal. It's not impressive or unique that you have convinced yourself that it is anything other than that. But, it also doesn't matter to me.

Not everyone agrees but I firmly believe that it is my duty to be honest in my marriage, not in someone else's. Maybe within a certain set of ethics, I shouldn't fuck married men, but their marriages are not my responsibility. I resent the idea that the other women are responsible for the end of marriages, we're not, you are. Whatever is happening in your marriage and lives that leads you or your partner to stray, that's on you as a couple, and as individuals. I don't like lies and cheating, so I don't do it. That's what I told you on our walk. I told you that if you wanted to fuck me, you would have to see me out in the open, and shake hands with my husband. I told you that whatever it was that you thought you could offer me, not even a hundred-times that was worth jeopardizing my relationship with my partner. I do fuck without him, I do, but not you. I was never going to fuck you without him present, and it's not because I was afraid you would hurt me, no, I was afraid you weren't capable of hurting me at all.

A man by your name once hurt me very much. I was a child, and he came into my bedroom, and took power away from me. He made me realise I was vulnerable to men in a way I hadn't noticed. Yet the pleasure I experienced while he raped me for months on end made me complicit, I shouldn't have done that. I couldn't help it and many people since have told me it wasn't my fault, but I know things I can never tell them, and while I wouldn't say it was my fault, I cannot forget those orgasms I had on his cock. Just once I wanted to fuck a man by your name and hate it. Lord knows I was never able to experience sex again the way I did with him, it went from pleasure to a lifetime of atonement so quickly, and maybe a jaded part of my heart thought that if I could have you, and hate it, I would finally be forgiven. I am not sure who is forgiving me, and the suggestion that comes up most often is that it's me, but it's not a part of me that I control. It's not a part of me that I can assess or predict, I don't even know where that part of me lives, but I know that part of me does not forgive.

That's why I seek forgiveness from men like my husband, and that's why I needed him there. You never had it in you to forgive me, all of this is and was always, beyond your comprehension. All you wanted was to put your dick inside a cunt, and touch a breast, and maybe see a woman naked in your bed, and I was hoping that would be all you were capable of, because I was sure to hate all of that. Please, please, understand, I needed to hate being fucked by a man with your name, and I just knew you would fuck me exactly as he did. Gentle and enthusiastic, without any skill whatsoever. I needed to know I wasn't that girl anymore, the one who had little orgasms when being fucked by a man who even in rape, doesn't know what he is doing. That's all I wanted from you.

But you had to prove something to my husband.

That was your doing. Maybe you wanted to show him what a big man you are, and how much better you can please his wife. You should have listened when I told you I wasn't in this for the pleasure. It could have been nice and simple, but you rubbed him the wrong way, and I have to say the loop of terror on your face as he started to beat me right in front of you was worth it. You're a proxy, I know, but I still got to show a man with your name that your little acts of weak-minded transgression don't scare me anymore. You're no longer the monsters in my life. I eat will like yours for a light breakfast, and forget about it completely by lunch. I just wish I could ask you how it felt to be handed a condom by a man who scared you too, and he should, he's quiet but he's terrifying, isn't he? I wish I could ask you how it felt to fuck me while I was draped over his lap clearly enjoying the warmth of his lap more than whatever you were doing inside me. I wish I could ask you if it was humiliating knowing you were making no impact, and I had to be pushed into your cock by another man just to get through it.

I wish I could ask you many things, but you wouldn't be able to answer, because you never learnt honesty in your life. That makes me feel sorry for you, and to think just seventeen years ago, a man by your name, felt sorry for me.

Regards,
Ancilla.