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Looking at him like that, so awkwardly bent, his belly thick and soft and covered with hair, Margot recoiled. But the thought of what it would take to stop what she had set in motion was overwhelming; it would require an amount of tact and gentleness that she felt was impossible to summon. It wasn’t that she was scared he would try to force her to do something against her will but that insisting that they stop now, after everything she’d done to push this forward, would make her seem spoiled or capricious, as if she’d ordered something at a restaurant and then, once the food arrived, had changed her mind and sent it back.
For Margot, questions of consent are fraught. As these lines show, she has internalized a belief that to go to a movie, have a drink, and then return to Robert’s house forms some sort of contract that she is now obliged to fulfill. Only a “spoiled,” childish woman would admit to having changed her mind when her date has already begun to undress. Part of her concern is for Robert, who might be hurt no matter how much “tact” Margot uses, but much of her concern is for her own self-image as a woman who is not a tease. Since Robert does pause to ask whether Margot is a virgin, it’s possible that, even had he felt rejected, he would have put his pants back on and taken Margot home. But cultural constraints compel her to go through with what she feels she has started.
When the next message from him did arrive, just after dinner, it was a harmless joke about Red Vines, but she deleted it immediately, overwhelmed with a skin-crawling loathing that felt vastly disproportionate to anything he had actually done. She told herself that she owed him at least some kind of breakup message, that to ghost on him would be inappropriate, childish, and cruel. And, if she did ghost, who knew how long it would take him to get the hint? Maybe the messages would keep coming and coming; maybe they would never end.
In her dorm after the terrible date, Margot fantasizes that Robert will just go away, but instead he picks up with the Red Vines texts that she once found clever and fun. She wants to break up, but as with her inability to change her mind and withdraw consent for sex, she can’t give herself permission to do so. What she wants most is to ghost Robert—to just be done with it all, right away. But she feels that she “owed” him a proper message despite her assessment of the joke as harmless and her guilty feeling that he hasn’t done anything to deserve “loathing.” The visceral, physical reactions Margot has, even to a text or thought about Robert, should be strong signals that the relationship is unhealthy for her, but she ignores her body and spends days dithering about how to end things, until Tamara grabs her phone and sends the blunt text. This action rescues Margot from her inability to exercise control of her body, her text messages, and her thoughts.
