He often mocks me like this, pretending ignorance of the hurt he's caused, treating me as if I'm stupid and peculiar for reacting. It upsets and arouses me in equal measures.

We drink our tea and converse normally before I get up to close the curtains, and he follows me, catches me on my way back to the sofa and wrestles me to the ground. Pulls my top up to expose my breasts, spits in my face and then drags me by my ankles to the bedroom, my bare back burning on the carpet all the way.

He’s holding me in front of the mirror and he’s hurting me. The mirror is too short, so he forces me on my knees, keeping a firm grip on my hair, then pulls me up a little so I’m in an uncomfortable position halfway between a kneel and a squat. It’s a strain on my muscles, although that’s not my main concern right now.
“Look at yourself,” he is sneering, and other jibes. “Open your eyes.”
And I am, and I do. And as I watch my face contort with pain, which is something I have never done, I am surprised by thinking I look pretty like this and it feels like a ray of light in the dark.

The endless brutal fucking. He slows and stops every now and again, stops himself from coming so he can continue to hurt me. He makes me beg for it to end and then tells me I am not convincing enough, so it continues. On and on. I am so close to crying and my eyes are hot with tears that I’m refusing to shed. Eventually I run out of energy to writhe and gasp and moan and plead and my body goes limp, checked out, burrowed deep somewhere in my own head. It does end, eventually. I remain unmoving.
“Are you still in there?” he asks, his tone casual, after lying down next to me. I respond – I think I respond.
It’s probably only about five minutes, but it feels like forever before I can reach out for his hand, curl my fingers into his. I come back.

It’s the second time he’s asked if I want him to piss on me. Everything felt fun and light a few seconds ago, but I can feel my face twist and my eyes narrow as I struggle to articulate the way him asking that makes me feel. He is surprisingly patient as I organise my mouth to try and form words, stammering slightly. I tell him I am finding it difficult to say yes.
“Okay,” says he, and as a solution to the problem drags me by my hair to the bathroom.

I asked for rope and he held me down and pulled the rope over the hinge joints of my arm until my skin ripped and burst from friction. Later on when I’m cooking him dinner, I’m sitting on the kitchen counter and we are chatting, his arms around me. I can sense his attention flickering and before I know it he’s running his fingers over my wounds, the burns that are angrily red and raw. He pulls at the frayed edges of skin as I whimper and try to get away, mashes his thumb into them over and over again.
“What’s the matter? Is something wrong? Why does it hurt? Did something happen? Why are you making that noise?”
He often mocks me like this, pretending ignorance of the hurt he’s caused, treating me as if I’m stupid and peculiar for reacting. It upsets and arouses me in equal measures.

Later on still, before sleep. He asks where I keep my plasters and sterile wipes, and makes me lie back on the bed. After a night of countless brutalities, it is the tenderness of him gently cleaning my wounds that makes me cry. I manage to do so completely silently, hoping he doesn’t notice, although he’s sitting on top of me and my stomach is convulsing violently from all the swallowed sobs. I watch through tear-misted eyes as he ever-so-carefully lines up the plaster to the lacerations in my armpit and elbow, and I want to wail. It’s too much. I feel incapable of understanding, wretched and undeserving. It hurts more than everything else combined. And the fact that this hurts – that care and compassion hurts in the deepest place inside me – that is the thing that hurts most of all.