Age of Consent by Marti Leimbach

Author:Marti Leimbach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-07-26T04:00:00+00:00

BECAUSE SHE WOULDN’T MARRY HIM

2008

Bobbie cannot eat the club sandwich she is given for lunch. She cannot drink the coffee. She can drink water; she can play with the wedge of lemon in the glass. She does not want to think or to talk to anyone.

She keeps watching for Dan. He is next in the line of witnesses for the prosecution. He is here in the building, somewhere. She isn’t sure whether she wants to see him or not. She is sure, however, that she doesn’t want to see anyone else.

When she gets back into the courtroom, she searches her bag for some lip gloss or ChapStick or anything that can soothe her dry lips. She feels inside the bag, but instead of finding the lip gloss, she feels a stiff piece of paper. She looks down and there, in her handbag, beside her makeup and notebook and keys and papers, she sees a page from a yellow legal pad folded into thirds, waiting for her. Her name, written in strange, blocky handwriting, blazes on the front of it. She knows at once that the letter is from Craig and that he has disguised his handwriting.

So nothing has changed for him. She feels a freezing in her chest, a sudden unsteadiness. Even now, he is able to do whatever he likes—in front of a judge and jury, in front of his own counsel. She believes the brazen manner with which he would write her a letter—at all, but especially here in court—is because he thinks he has done nothing wrong.

She recalls freshly how he would invent his own moral world, deciding in his mind the rightness or wrongness of an act. He had rules. He had notions of conduct. He would watch pornography before having sex with her, for instance, making a point that she should not see it. She was too young for that, he’d explained. She was not old enough yet to “handle porn.” Watching alone, then calling her into the bedroom with him, made it okay because he wasn’t letting her see what he called “the ugly side of sex.” He was shielding her from that which he found unsavory.

And so she would wait somewhere else. If his housemates were away she would stay in the kitchen while he watched a video, the curtains drawn, the only light coming from the TV screen. Sitting on a kitchen stool, waiting for him to call her, she might have been blowing bubbles in milk with a straw or dividing her M&M’s by color. Then she’d hear her name, put those things away, and walk like a zombie through the open door of the bedroom. Her eyes adjusted to the dim light and there it was: his arousal, abrupt and unconcealed. No matter how often she’d been exposed to him, naked and erect, the suddenness of seeing him on the bed, running his palm over his erection as though polishing a stone, the video still frozen on the screen, felt newly alarming.

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