Read Online Your Voice in My Head by Emma Forrest - Free Book Online Page A

sex or if that meant it was anal sex.”
    Dr. R still isn’t writing.
    “It didn’t hurt much. I wasn’t there. He said he couldn’t help it. He said it was because of my body.”
    I look at my feet. I have on red sneakers I don’t ever remember buying.
    “If it didn’t hurt much and I wasn’t there, what was it? What am I upset about? Why did it leave me feeling marked?”
    He says nothing.
    “Afterwards, on the street, we ran into her bassist. She sensed something weird and asked if I wanted to go hang out at her place and he let me go off with her. So I went to her loft, with all these hippie musicians hanging out, and she laid me down on the sofa and I told her, I wasn’t crying or anything, I just said, really matter-of-factly, ‘I think I’ve just had sex.’
    “It wasn’t the thing of it that upset me so much as the name of it. I passed out cold on the sofa, and when I woke up, she said, ‘I called the …’ ”
    I don’t like this part. I really, really don’t like this part, for so many reasons. I start to cry.
    “She said, ‘I called the rape hotline.’
    “I didn’t ask her to do that.”
    Dr. R finally looks up. “You were unconscious, how could you?”
    I shrug.
    “When he pulled down your pants, you asked him to stop?”
    “Yes.”
    “Because?”
    “Because I didn’t want to have sex.”
    “He didn’t stop.”
    “No. I wanted him, I guess. But not like that. I’d nevereven made out with a boy. But mainly, I was devastated because I lost her, my platinum blonde. I wrote, like, these love letters and she never replied. What I heard through the bassist was, he had told his wife I hit on him and he made a mistake.”
    I remember, on the plane, I was too sore to sit down.
    I remember too, that before I lost consciousness on the bassist’s sofa, one of her roommates was playing Leonard Cohen, splicing together different lyrics of Cohen admiring the female nude. My dad and I had seen him play the year before at the Royal Albert Hall. And now Leonard Cohen was there in the aftermath I couldn’t tell my dad about. Links and ribbons, people knowing things without knowing. I’ll love Leonard for the rest of my life. My lids heavy from the Jägermeister, a searing discomfort in my vagina, the last voice you hear …
    “So, anyway,” I tell Dr. R, “I don’t like standing-up sex.”
    I’m ready to change the subject now.
    “It’s funny that you associate certain positions with certain lovers when you get old enough. There’s ‘the one who always wanted me to sit on his face.’ ‘The one who always wanted me on top, facing away so he could see my ass.’ Bianca says it’s called ‘Reverse Cowgirl.’ ”
    Dr. R blushes. I don’t like making him blush so I’m trying to joke it all away now, inventing sexual positions to make him laugh: “Extravagant Car Phone.”
    “Rheumatic Kitten.”
    He interrupts me. “It doesn’t matter what you call it, it was a transgression. If you’d been having sex for ten years, it would be rough sex. But it was the first.”
    “Yep.”
    The truth is: I lost my virginity. In an unpleasant manner. But I lost her too, and that felt worse. She had taken me to her favorite apothecary and I’d bought this moisturizer she used because it smelled of her. I took it home with me to London. I’d made myself a promise: I’ll use this every day, and when the bottle runs out, that’s the moment I’ll be over what happened in San Francisco. But I could never bring myself to use it. It’s still under the sink in my childhood bathroom at my parents’ house. I can’t imagine it smells any good; I’m too scared to open it. But, sometimes, when I go home, I look at it, and I can see that the moisturizer has separated from the oil. Something’s risen to the top.
    “You could take that as a happy allegory.”
    “No. Because I look at it and realize something in it is dead, that it must be made of whale fat.”
    “It’s from San Francisco. The