Yes, I conclude. I do. I dream about sex sometimes, and I wake up with my vagina contracting hard in orgasm. I dream about the rape, but in my dream, there is no pain. Just the feeling of being roughly penetrated, of my breasts being handled, of a hard, male pelvis pushing and pushing against my clitoris until I come. Sometimes one of the other men nudges his cock into my mouth while I’m being fucked, and I suck on it. Sometimes I’m not asleep and dreaming, but awake and fantasising. I masturbate to my own rape.

I haven’t told anyone about this, not even L. Bascombe, my therapist. Not even when the urge to mess with her head is at its strongest.

I take another sip of whisky. Okay, a gulp. It no longer burns going down. My throat is numb, but my head is buzzing with the sound of angry insects.

“Lucy?”

“Sorry. I answered you in my mind, but not with my mouth.”

“Well, could you repeat it with your mouth, please? I didn’t quite get it the first time.”

“Yes, I get horny. I think about sex all the time. I miss it.” I think about being raped and I masturbate until I come.

“You what?”

The sharpness in her tone makes me look up. I realise I have said those words out loud.

“Dude, are you serious?”

“I’m a corrupt person. I’m evil. I deserved what happened to me.”

“Wait.” She fumbles with her phone. “I’m asking Google about this.”

There’s a solemn silence while she punches questions into Google, and I drink my whisky. The insects in my head are getting louder, and my eyelids feel heavy. I rest the back of my head against the armchair and slide into an uneasy doze. I jerk awake when the tumbler bumps against my leg.

Moira is still frowning at her phone.

“There’s nothing there, is there?” I say. “I’m a freak. I knew it.”

“You’re not a freak. And there is some stuff here. Admittedly, a lot of it is porn. Turns out that when you type, ‘I fantasise about my own rape’ into Google you mostly get porn.”

“Oh, joy.”

“But wait. There’s also a blog by a woman who was raped who says she used to fantasise about it for a couple of years afterwards. And there’s an abstract in Psychology Today about a case study of a woman who eroticised her own rape in imaginative fantasy. It’s behind a paywall. And there are quite a few articles about women who have reported experiencing orgasm during rape.”

I seize at this straw. “That’s worse, isn’t it? At least I didn’t actually come while I was being raped. I just fantasise about it after the fact.”