Law School, post Story of O

In my senior year of college (Spring 1998), in New Haven, Connecticut, on the recommendation of a grad student in comparative literature who I suspect had a crush on me, I found Story of O on the shelves of a bookstore, and my life changed.

Fantasy-Emily would put it like this:

About a month before I married Charles Smith, I noticed that Amazon.com had recommended a book I'd never heard of, with a strange, bare cover, called Story of O. I ordered it, with a click, and my life changed.

I never slept with the comp lit grad student, but I did, probably as a way of trying to deny my longing for Roissy, lose my virginity to a forgettable law student, in the most vanilla way possible, and then proceed to "date" (really, just sleep with) four more guys (grad students, all of them, in one field or another--English, English, Philosophy, French, I think), all of them nice guys and I think objectively worth sleeping with if you were 21-25 and interested in sleeping with people. 

To none of them did I communicate the vivid fantasy I couldn't escape: that they were turning me over and deflowering my ass. Instead, I went about the business of learning how cocks worked, and how my own body worked in relation to them. I did it in what I hoped came across to the guys as an unbusinesslike way, but which felt to me, frankly, pretty businesslike, at least by the French grad student, who was probably the closest of all of them to being a top. 

(If any of them had in fact tried to turn me over and deflower my ass, I almost certainly would have screamed bloody murder and then, if they had managed to go through with it, have them hauled up on charges of sexual assault. When Charles finally did do it, that memorable night in March 2001, the reason it felt like, I don't know, the anal ravishment I was asking for, was of course not that I was fantasizing about having my ass ravished, but that I desperately wanted to give my ass to him.)

I suppose I was hoping, just under the surface of my awareness, that one of them would do something that reminded me of Story of O--tell me to take off my panties, or suggest, in a slightly degrading manner, that I should suck his cock--, but the problem was that if any of them had, it would have been a turn off, if not grounds for a lawsuit, because I didn't actually know them. It's fine to fantasize about a stranger ravishing your ass; reality can't work that way, for me at least, if only because I don't know where a stranger's cock has been.

In the Fall of 2000, though, Charles, a grad student I did actually know, started his own graduate work in New Haven.