“So you’re all alone out there?” Allan asked her.
“Yes, I’m alone,” Ruth answered. She tried to lie on her side with her legs tight together, but Scott Saunders was strong; he was able to pull her up on her knees. He’d put enough lubricating jelly on the condom so that he slippe
d inside her with surprising ease; it momentarily took her breath away.
“What?” Allan said.
“I feel terrible,” Ruth told him. “Let me call you in the morning.”
“I could come out there,” Allan said.
“No!” Ruth said—to Allan and to Scott.
She rested her weight on her elbows and her forehead; she kept trying to lie flat on her stomach, but Scott pulled her hips into him so forcefully that it was more comfortable for her to stay on her knees. The top of her head kept bumping the headboard of the bed. She wanted to say good night to Allan but her breathing was jerky. Besides, Scott had jammed her so far forward that she couldn’t reach the night table to return the telephone to its cradle.
“I love you,” Allan told her. “I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry,” Ruth managed to say, before Scott Saunders took the phone from her and hung it up. Then he cupped both her breasts in his hands, squeezing them until they ached, and he humped her from behind, like a dog—the way Eddie O’Hare had humped her mother.
Fortunately Ruth did not remember the episode of the inadequate lamp shade in great detail, but her memory was sufficient for her to never want to be in the same position herself. Now she was in it. She had to push back against Scott with all her strength or her head would have kept bumping against the headboard.
She’d been sleeping on her right shoulder, which was sore from all the squash, but her right shoulder didn’t hurt her as much as Scott Saunders hurt her. There was something about the position itself that hurt her—it wasn’t only a matter of her memory of it. And Scott’s grip on her breasts was much rougher than she liked.
“Please stop,” she asked him, but he could feel her pushing her hips back against him and he humped her all the harder.
When he was finished with her, Ruth lay on her left side, facing the empty bed; she listened to Scott flushing away another condom. At first she felt she was bleeding, but it was only an excess of the lubricating jelly. When Scott came back to bed, he tried to touch her breasts again. Ruth pushed his hand away.
“I told you I didn’t like it that way,” she said to him.
“I got the right hole, didn’t I?” he asked her.
“I told you I didn’t like it from behind—period,” she said.
“Come on, your hips were moving. You liked it,” Scott told her.
She knew that she’d had to move her hips against him so that she wouldn’t keep bumping her head on the headboard. Maybe he knew it, too. But all Ruth said was: “You hurt me.”
“Come on,” Scott said. He reached for her breasts again, but she pushed his hand away.
“When a woman says ‘No’—when she says ‘Please stop’—well . . . what’s it mean when a man won’t stop?” Ruth asked. “Isn’t that a little like rape?”
He rolled over on the bed, turning his back to her. “Come on. You’re talking to a lawyer,” he told her.
“No, I’m talking to an asshole,” she said.
“So . . . who was the phone call?” Scott asked. “Someone important?”
“More important than you are,” Ruth told him.
“Given the circumstances,” the lawyer said, “I presume he isn’t that important.”
“Please get out of here,” Ruth said. “Please just go.”
“Okay, okay,” he told her. But when she returned from the bathroom, he’d fallen back to sleep. He was lying on his side, his arms reaching out to what had been her side of the bed; he was taking up the whole bed.
“Get up! Get out of here!” she shouted, but either he was sound asleep again or he was pretending to be.
In retrospect, Ruth might have deliberated a little longer on her next decision. She opened the condom drawer and took out the tube of lubricating jelly, which she squirted into Scott’s exposed left ear. The stuff came out of the tube a lot faster than she expected; it had a more liquid consistency than normal jelly, and it woke up Scott Saunders in a hurry.