She wrapped both hands around my wrist and lifted my attention away from the tiny zipper on her equally tiny hotshorts. “Just so we’re clear, I don’t plan on having sex tonight.” Her words startled me. That sentence, so economical and precise, sounded like something from a pamphlet on sexual assault prevention. It sounded like a warning, an admonition, a heading off at the pass. In that moment I pictured her collecting brochures on sex and rape from the university clinic. “Sex happens on your terms,” one of her brochures probably exclaimed in bold capital letters. “Not on anyone else’s.”

Women my age treated sex like you treat a stray dog: if it hangs around long enough you’ll let it in and keep it with the others. To these women, sex wasn’t this event, this decision, this dance. It was more of an occurrence, a thing that happened. My immediate reaction to her bourgeoning feminist identity was a mixture of confusion and hostility: “Why the fuck not?” I wanted to ask in response to her declaration. I smiled instead and kissed her boringly on the mouth.

I knew very little about the pale twenty-one-year-old girl who, even as she so powerfully disavowed even the thought of sex, was busy slithering out of her tank top and wrinkling my Restoration Hardware duvet cover in the process. Until a week ago – when she emailed me to ask if I wanted “to get a drink sometime” – I considered her to be nothing more than another fidgety coed who took too many pictures of herself in the bathroom mirror. And now here she was, stripped down to nothing but her little white shorts and an expensive padded bra that simply accentuated the hollowness of her barely-legal chest. She came from a wealthy family and her bra – red and frilly and simply out of place on her as yet childish body – reflected a socioeconomic height I would never be able to reach. I recognized its signature fabric immediately: Agent Provacateur. I dated a rich British girl for a while who wore the same brand. We dated for about six months until she tried to kill me. We used to fight about her expensive lingerie: Wear something nice tonight, I would demand; What’s the point – you don’t keep my clothes on long enough to notice, she would counter.

The spry girl on my bed was not, I was confident, going to try to kill me. But I was slightly unnerved by her presence. She was a threat to my career, to what modicum of middle-class stability I had managed to scrape together since graduate school. She was a threat to my sense of self-worth. Is this what I had been reduced to? Really? Nevertheless, her vitality was invigorating, her innocence charming. I saw none of the anger, hurt, spite, and mistrust that mars the faces of women I meet in bars or on dating websites. She had no idea what was waiting for her. And I liked that. She was just beginning to understand the sexual power that women like her command and that they desire. I liked that too, even as I tried to ignore this growing sense of powerlessness within; thank God she’s leaving her shorts on I said to myself, while unhooking her expensive bra with a single gesture from a shamefully practiced hand.

Yet she, too, seemed practiced. With each item of clothing she tore from my body I felt increasingly exposed and vulnerable, like prey, like a chicken being trussed up in a butcher’s storeroom. She, the skilled predator, had exploited fears and insecurities in my masculine edifice. Otherwise I would have just turned down her invitation like any other adult would. Otherwise I would not have invited her over several days later, cooked for her, made a move on her that she had been patiently waiting for me to make.

            “This isn’t a date,” I said in a professorial manner the first time we went out, when I picked her up outside her dorm. She smelled way too good, her legs were way too shiny, and her skirt way too short. She nodded in understanding. “You get why, right?” I continued. She nodded again. “Nothing can happen. It just wouldn’t be right,” I said, attempting to convince myself of my words of prudence. Her ghostly white skin, held gently by my car’s red leather interior, was the carnal canvas of my dreams. Her aura, young and dangerous, coiled itself around my neck before diving down my throat and reaching into my lungs.

My anxiety that night was unwarranted, probably a figment of some twisted fantasy I harbored. Every heterosexual man hopes to be destroyed by a beautiful woman, of course, and surely my time would come. This girl just wasn’t the type to end lives, at least not yet. Of that I was sure. She tended to show up in class cloaked in oversized gray hoodies and swallowed up by baggy gray sweatpants, giving her the appearance of a retired cartoon mouse nobody liked anymore. And that was precisely how I saw her – as some creature that scurried in and out of my 1 pm class two days out of the week. I saw nearly all of my girl students in this light. When friends or even girlfriends would ask if I ever got hit on, I would always laugh: “Girls who study literature don’t have vaginas.” This explanation seemed to make a lot of sense to those who asked, and they never broached the subject again. This was pure hyperbole, naturally; literary girls have literary vaginas, and they typically use them to develop intellectual crushes on figures like Jack Kerouac, Sylvia Plath, or Salman Rushdie. I took her far from campus that first night, someplace beyond the mundane shadow of academic life, someplace I wouldn’t run into any of my colleagues or, worse, any of her 1 pm classmates.

What would they say, my colleges; her classmates? They would, in their little huddles behind closed doors or sprawled out catlike on dorm room furniture, gossip and speculate. What was he thinking? In the minds of naysayers, there would have been little question of my questionable character. Exactly what sort of questionability would have left everyone for a loss. Just who is he, they would wonder to themselves, to each other, deciding that they didn’t know me and that I obviously didn’t know myself.

Twice, since the early 1990s, two male professors had been busted and subsequently dismissed for sexual misconduct. But these were old scandals, the parties concerned long retired or simply uninteresting – fat, dumpy sorts who invited no gossipy fantasy whatsoever. My student and I were different. She, almost coquettish in her asexuality, and me, obviously able to get action whenever I wanted, were the types you wanted to slander. Every now and then a case turned up, almost always a fat male professor professing his affection for an uninterested female student. As student advocacy groups and HR departments were quick to point out, these cases were always lopsided and easily parsed into instances of harassment or manipulation. Extreme actions usually never needed to be taken. But university administrators were always eager to make an example of out of anyone who would dare violate what amounted to the first commandment of university professordom.

But those who might mock or criticize my intent did not understand. Surely they had never experienced the life-giving qualities of skin so refreshing and effervescent. Otherwise they would keep their mouths shut. It wasn’t necessarily that this girl was a virgin per se (maybe she was maybe she wasn’t), so much as that she represented something ever unattainable, something ever past tense. Her body had yet to traumatized by childbirth or years of endless drinking and empty conquests. She had yet to live dangerously and recklessly and regretfully. Pressed against me, her bony, protuberant body offered me reprieve from my own sense of decay and deceit. She didn’t know what to do with her mouth or her tongue or her hands – but it didn’t matter. Her body’s youth leveraged my decay against me, slathered me in sadness and missed opportunities.

I jammed my fingers in her mouth, then I yanked her hair. I took her by the throat. I stirred with a strange desire to mark her body, to deface this virginal tribute, to make up for something lost, something missing within me.

“Is this okay,” I offered, my fist full of her blonde hair.

She nodded only, before pulling hard on my arm and sending her chin into the air. She let out a small sound, adorable and cartoonish. “Do that again,” she whispered, eyes closed. The cartoon quality of her voice was gone now, replaced by that of an individual groping for a sense of the topography of some undiscovered country.

She wrapped her hand around my fist and squeezed tightly. “Harder,” she demanded. I did as she ordered and took a worrisome pleasure from the way she twisted her child-like face into a snarl of sexual perversity. She dug her shoulder blades into my duvet cover. “Harder,” she huffed.

The British girl was the first one who ever asked me to knock her around. Yet inexperienced, I cowered and dithered in response. “Why,” I asked, rather like an idiot. She shrugged. “I like it, I guess. I was with this guy who was rough and it just, I don’t know, did it for me.” I didn’t respond well to any of that, especially not her opaque yet blatant reference to someone else. What kind of guy just does something like that to a woman’s body, I wondered. At the same time, I admired this stranger, this conquistador. His bravado was still written on the body of the woman I was with; it was in her skin. He owned her, whoever he was, in a way I would never be able to replicate. I was angry at her words and my own cowardice. So I tore her lacy thong from her hips and stuffed it in her mouth. This was the wrong thing to do. “What the fuck, K?” she yelled, pushing me off of her and spitting her thong out on my bed like a cat expelling a hairball. “That was expensive. It’s Agent Provocateur.” It wasn’t long after that that she stopped wearing things like that.

After the British girl was the forensic psychiatrist who entertained fantasies of rape and domestic violence. By then I was better at donning the mask of the aggressor. I always felt a little strange afterward, guilty and misogynistic. But those feelings eventually passed.

Other women came and went, executives, yoga teachers, cashiers, each with their own indulgent narrative in which I was merely a supporting character. I always did as I was asked, figuring that the day would come when I wouldn’t be able to take the mask off so easily, when I would be the man who grabs a girl by her neck without asking, with the haughty presumption of consent. I would be the man to whom all other men would be compared and measured.

Was I supposed to do that now, to the girl presently stifling her screams? Was I supposed to rob her of the very thing that made her different from the Brit, the psychiatrist, and all the others? At first, it was frustratingly boring to me that she didn’t want to have sex. But it made sense now, at least from my perspective. I didn’t want to be responsible for who she would be tomorrow, for the ruination to come. I didn’t want to be responsible for who I would be tomorrow. I didn’t want to take that experiential process – so baffling and confusing and arousing – away from her. I was the wrong person to do this with her.

I let go of her throat. “What the fuck,” she snarled. “Grab my bra and wrap it around my neck.” The moment I would forever return to in my memory was the moment I did as she asked. I snatched her Agent Provocateur from the floor and strung it around her neck and pulled. Its fine fabric was smooth between my fingers. I pulled again and she cried out.

“Take my shorts off,” she moaned, as my heart sank in sorrow for the both of us.