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This post may be too much information for some. If you don’t wanna know, maybe skip this one?

[Read part 1, part 2 & part 3 first]

I didn’t like to think about it, not even in my most private moments. Except that I did. Couldn’t help it really.

Such a fuzzy combination of nothingness blended with images, loud thoughts and soft, a strange procession of ideas and most pressingly, regret. It didn’t come straight away but with more time to reflect it was glaringly obvious that I’d made a foolish, foolish mistake.

I can tell you what I think, what I remember, what I suspect, but I can’t tell you what really happened. I’ll never understand everything, clouded as it was in alcohol and crowded out by my ridiculous adversity to taking care of myself.

Belief was my downfall. Always a belief in the best of people until proven otherwise.

But people not doing their best is not always evil, is it? It’s not always bad or wrong. Or maybe that just depends entirely on your point of view. In any case, I can’t tell you what happened, if I had sex with anyone that night and if I did, how many.

I suspect I did though. Like, really suspect. I’m almost sure that I did but there’s no way for me to prove it. Not then, and certainly not in retrospect.

And there’s no doubt that I was entirely at fault for being there in the first place.

It was a Night of Monumental Bad Choices. Not my last or first. But certainly a rather memorable one.

I got the call. Others had already turned the job down because of the distance. But the money was tempting, even though I didn’t have a car and it was a really, really long way to go. A bunch of guys for a bachelor party wanting a semi-naked lingerie-clad female to entertain them for the night.

M wasn’t sure about the gig and wanted me to use her driver – have him come and pick me up late in the evening.

We organised to meet at the Portsea Pub because the beach house they were staying at wasn’t easy to get to. They’d drive me there and M’s driver would pick me up later. That’d been the plan anyway.

They were a nice looking bunch of guys – preppy-ish but down to earth and clearly money wasn’t an issue. Conveniently since we were at a pub, they asked what I’d be drinking that night. It was beer for them and Baileys for me.

Off the beaten track and surrounded by trees. It was a pretty weatherboard split level house. Already there were many cars in the drive. I was shown into a room to change and came out in French knickers, suspenders and heels.

The boys decided we’d play drinking games and here’s where I forgot (rather crucially) that I wasn’t among friends, but employers of my flesh. I drank with bravado and really didn’t think it through. Sure I can keep up with the boys no problems! [Are you shaking your head yet?] By the time M’s driver called I was pleasantly wasted and easily persuaded to stay the night, with the offer of a lift home the next day.

What did we do in those hours? I can’t say. There were flirtations and craziness. Games, silliness. The groom fell drunkenly on a glass table, swiftly dispatched to hospital for stitching. Then he was back and still partying of course. It was his party, after all! I ended up in the back of a station wagon with one I thought was cute… but I think it didn’t go anywhere in the end. I think…

There’s hours I don’t recall. Then, the unpleasantly creepy surprise of waking up in the groom’s bedroom with him standing over me, somewhere deep into the middle of the night. He must’ve carried me there and I wondered how he’d done it given the stitches he’d just earned. And I remember leaving the room and finding a bunk to pass out in.

It all seemed harmless enough until I ended up pregnant and unsure of the father. Because I could no longer avoid those burning but muted and pressing questions.

That I didn’t know caused me shame. Embarrassment. Sadness. Fear.

What happened that night? How many? How often? Sure they were nice guys (sorta) but did they intend to get me drunk? (I suspect now that was definitely the case).

They drove me home the next day as promised. It was almost as if the lingerie-clad me and the fully clothed me were separate people – one was a service provided by the other. I even gave them my phone number when asked.

Because I occupied a hollow little world of denial. A vacuum where self-esteem had no foothold, and even knowing that I’d probably done things I wish I hadn’t… I still didn’t tell them “no thanks”.

But somewhere in there, what I did remember was roasting on a slow burn. Eventually, combined with the abortion, that night must’ve formed part of the foreboding sense of doom I felt. The one that caused me to retire from the world of cash for flesh. It seemed that out of nowhere, I felt panicked by the idea of doing any more gigs and I quit.

Later, I was living back at my parents’ place. I’d moved on from stripping to working as an actor in children’s theatre. Highly ironic, I know. The phone rang one day and it was one of them, the bachelor party boys. M must’ve given them my new number. No, I’m sorry. I’m not in that line of work any more… Another cringe of fear, because now I WAS feeling defiled. Just what did they think my services entailed exactly??!

Ah… so interesting how the subconscious harbours those things the conscious mind wishes to ignore. That’s why denial never really works and why we can terrorise ourselves and become our own worst enemy: in the end we can’t escape our own truths, no matter what.

And so it was that the writing of this series helped me to see. Oh! FUCK! Those terrorising dreams where I thought I’d been molested? Well yeah, maybe that did happen but in a different setting… [heart thudding].

Once thunk, that thought rang long and loud in the hall of truth and I have to admit that’s quite possibly how things played out.

There were at least four of them… and I swear that’s all I really know.

[Epilogue]

~Svasti