1993
Pauline was no regular teenager. While her friends were dreaming about what they wanted to be when they grew up, whom they would marry, Pauline’s dreams were much more personal.
Pauline only dreamed about being seen. Standing in a room or on a stage and being looked at. Stretching her arms out toward the spotlight with hundreds of pairs of eyes following them. Not being ignored, not being looked down on, not feeling isolated. This dream made her hands sweaty and her skin flush.
And then one warm summer, when Pauline was sixteen, her small family was invited to a holiday home with a couple of her dad’s brothers and their respective families.
Almost a week of boredom had passed when a young man with a cheeky expression suddenly arrived to join them. From the moment he first looked at her, his eyes made her skin tingle.
Palle Rasmussen was not one of the brothers the others spoke well of. They thought he was too much, too uncompromising when he raised his voice and started arguing, causing cozy afternoons to suddenly feel uncomfortable.
Pauline knew from her dad that Palle was embarking on a career in politics, and that was far more interesting than being a shopkeeper, accountant, or anything else that the Rasmussen family had produced.
The first time Pauline was alone with this uncle, he put a ping-pong paddle in her hand and told her to slap him across the face with it.
She hesitated, but when he grabbed her crotch and said that if she didn’t oblige right away he would punch her in the stomach, she swung the paddle at his face so hard that it broke.
He stumbled backward and looked at her with surprise. She was also shocked that she had actually done it, but then he grabbed another paddle and asked her to do it again.
Another member of the family might have noticed his red cheeks when they sat down at the dinner table, but Palle was unfazed. And by then, Pauline had already fallen in love with him.
It was not long before Pauline had a key to Palle’s apartment, and the things they did to each other could never be done better by anyone else. For the first time, she felt the power of her sexuality and desire, and she realized that this was the way to get what she wanted in life.
Palle praised her and listened to her in a way no one else did, which turned her on almost as much as turning him on did. Everything about those two when they were together was uniquely intimate and exhilarating in a way she could never have imagined, and the feeling gave her a high. A high from knowing that she had power over someone else’s body. From hearing and feeling the pleasure of another person’s moans of pain, from seeing that pain materialize in red marks and sores.