He Made Me His Nymphet
By Sage Lee
He liked to call me a nymphet. It was true, to some extent.
At 13 I felt like was 16, at 15 I became 18, and at 16 I celebrated my 21st birthday.
The first time he called me a nymphet I was 15 years old, and in my mind he was a beautiful boy who had rough hands and luminescent fingers. To my 15 year old mind he was who I wanted to be with, forever. I would be with him until I was old enough to buy my own cigarettes.
To my 15 year old self, he was worldly. He was otherworldly, he had his own car, he read me books, he had a voice like the dog-eared edges of an old book, warm, caressing — but the most important thing is — I thought he saw me, for me, the woman I was meant to eventually emerge as, not the young girl who had pimples on her face and had to go home before ten o’clock. He saw me outside of the dotted line.
I loved him for the fact that he had hands like Goliath, but I forgot that Goliath falters and is killed. Our bodies would never fit properly — his bones gnawed at my skin until I became too raw to touch. I hung from the tree, still untouched, forbidden, inviting — I never stopped him from putting me in his mouth, or even spitting me out afterward.
The first time he unzipped me I fell onto the floor in a pile of loose bones, broken skin, and insecurity. The youngest pile of bones his hands have ever caressed. The purest mound of flesh he has ever parted. The softer my skin was, the easier it was to stain me, and leave me. The last time he unzipped me I couldn’t see because he threw my glasses in the backseat and refused to give them back to me.
I never stopped thinking about him. I saw him again last month, after years of dreaming of our reunion. I couldn’t look him in the eye, because his fingers have lost their luminescence and turned into rotting twigs in my mind. Now, in my mind, he is still Goliath, the weak giant, and I have grown to be David.
This is the man who taught me how to play grown up games wearing a little girl’s skin, and took away my softness and pureness and youth, and now I am spitting him out.