He was young. I could tell immediately it was his first time. He wasn’t good at it. Not good at all.
It happened on campus, in his dorm. The way he did it—botched. Blood everywhere. My DNA on him, his on me. Prints, too.
He didn’t know me. But I had noticed him in the weeks before. If you hung around the university long enough, especially on Saturday nights, you could be sure a shy undergrad would eventually walk up to you. Unsure how to ask, when to pay.
Most of them snapped out of it after they handed me the money. Then they carried themselves with the arrogance the world had taught them. They were respectable young men, and I was the woman charging fifteen dollars for a blow job.
I did not expect it from him. He was too young, too frail. He had no idea what he was doing.
He was surprised, I think, that I liked to read. The guys never thought of me as someone who might have liked to read. But I did. I wrote notes next to the passages that made me think, dog-eared the pages that made me feel. That night, I had two paperbacks on the dashboard of my truck: It and a thriller called Loves Music, Loves to Dance. I remember them both because I never got to find out how they ended.
He waited until I went to put my top back on. His hand shot out to my neck. Like a dare with himself. Like he knew that if he didn’t do it then, he might chicken out forever.
His eyes widened as mine shut. The air of amazement on his face: Shock that he was actually doing this, and that my body responded in the correct manner. Shock that it was a real thing—that if you squeezed someone’s throat hard enough, they would in fact stop moving.
I remember realizing, while he killed me: if he gets away with this, he’ll think he can get away with anything.