“You are a cool breeze on a calm sea.”  He wrote that on the last page of a paper I’d written for the class he taught.  There was an “A” in red ink, which pleased me not half as much as being compared to a summer’s day.  I was fifteen, just coming into focus.  I reminded him of himself, he said, and when he asked me to meet him at the football field on a Saturday afternoon I didn’t hesitate.  He drove me to his apartment, told me to take my clothes off in a way that made me uncomfortable.  But I liked having a secret.  

Later, much later, he told me he had a boyfriend, someone he loved.  He’d die if anything ever happened to him, if he were to find out what we did on Saturday afternoons.  So it stopped as abruptly as a needle being lifted from a record.  

What stuck with me wasn’t the rape, as my therapist insisted I call it, it was the power of words to seduce, to shatter.