Reveal

So I can now tell you about what this post was in reaction to.

I was at home in res, marking tests between glimpses at Survivor, when my German girl asked if I would drive her to a block of flats where her friend lives. I was at first a bit put out - I had just sat down, and it's Survivor - but she leaned down and whispered in my ear, and convinced me.

"P's neighbour wrote her a letter, it said he wants to ..."

At P's flat, or rather, her neighbour Charmaine's flat, we found her, looking shell-shocked.
I sat as the evening's events and the contents of the letter flooded out of her in German, nodding at what I thought were the appropriate places, joint-hugging her when she cried, trying not to look too shocked when her recitation of the letter was peppered with the English words he'd used, and when she used her hands to show what he'd meant.

It had all started innocently enough - he lived next door, and she saw him when she returned from gym one day. Before then, their only contact had consisted of short, clipped greetings in the passage. This day, he told her that he liked the way she brushed the sweat off her face with her hand. She thought it strange, but left it. A week later, he knocked on her door, she invited him in for coffee. They sat on her bed (she has no other furniture). She made tea. He gave her two pages of a letter.

It was sweet, she remembers. Saying that he liked her and would like to get to know her more. The second page ended abruptly and he told her that if she wanted the other pages, she'd have to ask him. She asked him for them, and he gave her another 3 pages.

By the end of the fourth page, she felt trapped. His words had gone from sweet to pornographic; this man, who was sitting on her bed, had written about the things they would do, in great detail, how long it would go on for, what she would say to him, how he wanted her to be; he wrote that he had been listening and so knew when she was showering, when she was sleeping. He thought of her while masturbating. She asked him to leave. He grabbed the letter away from her; she regrets not grabbing it back.

But, I told her...

a day ago, you would never had said this man could harrass and scare you like this. Today, you would never say he would have hurt you had you grabbed the letter back.

He didn't hurt her. We took her away, and there is a sexual harrassment case pending. She's leaving for home (Germany) in a week. She moved out that night - as we took her to my car, he peered through the window.

He is a lecturer. In my department. And something in his mind told him it would be okay to do this.