Miles to Go before I Sleep -- by Anne Shier

(This story was inspired by Celine Dion’s song of the same name.)

In my darkest dreams, I can still envision the day my life changed forever. No matter what happened from this day forth, I would never be the same. I would never look at another man the same way. I would never trust another man like I used to and would definitely never go to sleep again without dreaming of that horrible night. I keep asking myself, What happened to make me into this hermit of a young woman?—someone who had just wanted to go out and have some fun, dance a lot, drink a little and maybe meet someone with whom I’d want to spend some quality time. That fun-loving young woman is now gone for good. How did this ever happen to me

        It all began when my best friend, Melissa, had called me the previous Tuesday evening. She said, “What’s happenin’, girlfriend? Are you available this Saturday night? I want to party, as you well know, and I need to know if you want to join me. You might have to drive me to the bar though—I hope you don’t mind.”

 “You should know better than to ask me if I want to party! Of course I do! I don’t think about anything else all week at work except what we’re doing on the weekend! It might take me all of the following week to recover, but I am going out, don’t mistake me.”

 “Great, Gwen. Well, call me Friday night and we’ll talk about our evening out and you can tell me what dishy dress you’re planning to wear on Saturday night, okay?”

 “Okay. You pick out an equally dishy dress and we’ll pretend we’re competing against each other for the best-looking man in the place! Deal?”

 “Deal!” she replied to my teasing. “Seriously, though, what are you going to do if you do meet someone really terrific? Go home with him to his place or take him back to your place, as usual?”

 “If I knew the answer to that, I wouldn’t have to keep asking you for advice about men and how to act around them, would I? I figure that if I meet Mr. Right, I’ll just know it in my heart. That’s it—I’ll follow my heart—end of story.”

 Little did I know that “following my heart”—which to me meant using my intuition about men—is not always foolproof, even though I thought it was. My mother had always warned me about talking to strangers, but I never thought she meant I should never talk to a young man my own age who just wanted to meet someone like me, to talk to and get to know better.

  On Friday night Melissa called me to ask what dress I was going to wear on Saturday night, and I told her my favourite—a royal blue, satin, below-the-knee-length dress that had a slit up the side to my mid-thigh and a V-neck with a delicious dip in the middle and short sleeves. I thought it looked sexy on me; I felt very sexy when I wore it. No eligible man was going to be able to resist me if I willed him to come over and talk to me. Let’s face it—I liked having the attention of the male species. And so did Melissa, only she was more blatantly assertive about it. It didn’t bother her in the least to walk up to a man she thought was attractive and flirt outrageously with him. He would get the message soon enough that she wanted him in her bed that night. I, on the other hand, was content to sit back and play the waiting game and have the object of my desires come over to me. It made me feel feminine and invincible to know I had that kind of power over an attractive man.

  On Saturday night, I left my place all dolled up with my makeup tastefully applied, some jewellery accents, my sexy blue dress and black, three-inch heels on my feet. My dress was more than enough to make me look good. I felt great, ready to party with Melissa and whomever I might meet that evening. Nothing was going to make me change my mind about the evening’s outcome. It would be a terrific evening because I looked and felt terrific. I was going to meet Mr. Right tonight, even if he turned out to be “Mr. Right Now.” I could always pretend he was Mr. Right, and he would never know what I was thinking and that was fine with me.

   Our favourite hangout, the Soho Bar & Grill, was one of the best bars I’d ever been to downtown. I had somehow always managed to meet my fair share of men there, younger or older, good-looking or just above average. They had all treated me with respect and I had trusted them—you know, as far as one can trust someone you have just met.

  My instincts were usually fine-tuned for those predatory types who come on like gangbusters and expect that you’ll just fall at their feet begging for love or something. If a man did that around me, I just ignored him and went on my merry way. I wasn’t desperate for a man’s attention and affection; I just really liked it when a man I was attracted to seemed to reciprocate. He had to play it cool around me and not act like I owed him anything sexual. In my view, sex is something a couple should mutually agree on. There should be no obligation of any kind to do anything one doesn’t want to do with another person. I wanted it that way and it was the only way I could handle it. Anyway, everything had gone so far, so good—until the Saturday night I met Ryan.

  Ryan was tall at six feet three inches, of Caucasian descent with jet-black wavy hair and a neatly trimmed jet-black moustache. He had clean, average features and dark-brown eyes; he looked like one of those sexy guys on TV and the movies who doesn’t shave for a week—with a shadow of black hair just showing on the lower part of his face. There was no denying that I was attracted to him on sight. If there were such a thing as love at first sight, it hit me when I met Ryan. He seemed to reciprocate my instant attraction, and we sat together pretty much all evening, talking and gazing into each other’s eyes. We couldn’t get enough of each other that evening.

  He told me he liked the look of my dark-blonde hair and blue-green eyes, more green than blue on any given day. He liked me in the sexy dress I had so carefully selected to wear that evening, and he complimented me on it. From then on, I knew it would be impossible for me to walk out that evening and leave him there, and it would be equally impossible for me to allow him to leave without me.

  What happened next is sort of a mystery. I don’t remember a whole lot about it. All I know was that I wanted Ryan more than any other man I could think of. We sat there drinking, mostly Coke and ginger ale, because I knew I had to drive home sober and so did he; I wouldn’t drive home drunk and presumed he wouldn’t either. He told me he was a police officer and I believed him. Police officers have to be very responsible. I told him I had three police officers in my own family tree, all cousins. They were all very upstanding and respectable people.

 Ryan was kind enough to offer to drive me home. I asked him what I should do with my car, and he said he would pick me up tomorrow from my place and bring me back here to get it. It sounded like an awfully nice gesture to make toward someone he’d just met that evening, but I said it sounded like a very good idea, and off we went together.

 However, instead of taking me to my place, Ryan took me to his place, somewhere out in the country, I think—at this point, I wasn’t sure of the way there. I assumed we were just going to get something he’d forgotten before he took me home.

 We had a drink together at his place after we arrived, but I’m not sure how potent that drink really was. I must have passed out afterward though, and when I momentarily woke up, I discovered he had undressed me and put me in his bed. I was so groggy that I didn’t really know where I was, but I trusted him not to hurt me. I passed out again, I believe, but this time when I woke up, he was on top of me, about to rape me! I was so shocked that he would do this that I screamed. He then changed his mind and forced me to “go down” on him. I thought that doing this would appease him, though I vehemently objected to being used like this. Not only did this act repel me, he repeatedly forced oral sex on me until the wee hours (four or five a.m.?), at which time he finally fell asleep. I knew sleep was out of the question for me. If I had known where I was, I would have gotten up while he was asleep and gone home, walking or hitchhiking if necessary. I felt dirty, used, abused and raped, not to mention horrified.

 I thought about laying charges against him, but he was a police officer. How would I ever get anyone on the police force or in the courts to believe that I had been raped, as I believed I had? He could so easily get his buddies on the force to testify in court that I was nothing but a cheap whore who gave out sexual favours on demand. What was I to do?

 When I finally got home after Ryan had driven me back to where my car was parked, I got into a very hot bath and scrubbed myself from head to toe and, afterward, rinsed out my mouth continually in the sink. But nothing would take away that sense of having been violated and invaded against my will; suddenly, I was very scared. Should I report the rape and go to the hospital? If I did that, they would do a “rape kit” on me to get the necessary physical evidence of sexual assault. Unfortunately, now that I’d had a hot bath and had cleaned out my mouth, there was probably no physical evidence left in or on my body anywhere. Thus, no charges could be laid against him and no trial could happen to convict him. Not only that, I felt that I might now be vulnerable to harassment by police at their whim from now on even though one of their own had not actually been charged and convicted as a result of my report. He was going to get away with it, and there was absolutely nothing I could do. I had never felt so powerless in my life.

 In some ways, it was still a mystery to me as to how he’d managed to get me into his house, undress me, put into his bed and then assault me so relentlessly. I had discovered something very important from this horrible experience, and that was to not trust strangers so blindly ever again. I knew it would be a very long time before I trusted any male again, if ever.

Of course it was never going to be that simple. I still can’t sleep at night without experiencing nightmares and flashbacks of what he did to me. I have to watch TV or movies till the wee hours before I’m finally exhausted enough to drop off to sleep. I suppose I’d just been fortunate enough until then not to have met a predatory type who was on the lookout for a vulnerable female to damage and destroy. I never in a million years would have thought that person could be a police officer. I have never gone out with another police officer on a date and have no intention of ever doing so.

But it was more than that. I had to learn how to protect myself, my emotions, my body, everything from now on. I have to ensure that I’ve locked myself in securely every night in order to feel safe.
Although I have three cousins who are also police officers, only one of them works on the same force as Ryan, and I never really knew him since he is just a distant cousin-in-law. Somehow I know that my police officer cousins are all very good people, but I can’t seem to shake the notion that someone who is in a position of social authority, like a police officer, is still someone I cannot readily trust.

copyright - Anne Shier, 2013, all rights reserved, published by Authorhouse, Bloomington, Indiana, USA