You

[Claire]

I enjoyed it. Usually stranger danger assaults aren't my thing but the little pragmatic details (like not being able to tell the color of her bra) made it feel real.

A few typos (I think) :
Your salivating ==> You're salivating
to far ==> too far

Ugh, I'm such an idiot. I don't know how many of those typos I've corrected on this story up to this point and I still keep finding more. Thanks for pointing these out to me! I will fix them immediately.

Also, glad to hear you liked the story! Normally, this is also not my favorite scenario. I chose it because I wanted rapist and victim to be strangers and the assault to be not planned. But yeah, man assaults woman in a park, that's very cliché and uncreative.

[Nickamano]

Great writing. Very clear and concise. I really liked the male POV.

It put a number of thoughts into my head. Like he could have started to try and make deals with her to buy an easier time of it. Like "if you stop struggling I'll use a condom" - which then put into mind an alternate scenario of (perhaps the same man) walking through the park and spies a couple having sex against a tree, or on a park bench. They seem to be having a good time. He watches for a split second, smirks and then moves on. Then the perspective shifts to the couple and its revealed that the woman is being raped, only she had decided to cooperate in order to get an easier (safer?) time out of the experience. The observer could easily have gone over and helped the woman but he misread the situation and walked on. Just something interesting that came to me.

The only bit of criticism I could suggest is that there's no transition from the man's intention to protect the woman from a hypothetic rapist to taking on that role himself. I probably would have had a paragraph when he is looking at her body through her clothes and is getting increasingly turned on by her and like a switch flipping the lust overtakes the morality.
I don't know how an actual rapist's mind works, there's the back and forth that it isn't about sex but about power, which I only half agree with but I feel like there must have been some trigger for your character that turned him from a concerned observer to full on stranger danger... Or maybe it is there all along and I just missed it?

Overall a really well imagined and well written story.
To answer the question I personally wasn't thinking of anyone specific - and in fact I missed not having more description of the woman. Of course, if you had described her then you wouldn't have left room for reader projection, so believe I understand the choice.

[Claire]

Great writing. Very clear and concise. I really liked the male POV.

Thanks, I appreciate the compliment. It has been a while since I wrote this but I also think it holds up nicely.

It put a number of thoughts into my head. Like he could have started to try and make deals with her to buy an easier time of it. Like "if you stop struggling I'll use a condom" - which then put into mind an alternate scenario of (perhaps the same man) walking through the park and spies a couple having sex against a tree, or on a park bench. They seem to be having a good time. He watches for a split second, smirks and then moves on. Then the perspective shifts to the couple and its revealed that the woman is being raped, only she had decided to cooperate in order to get an easier (safer?) time out of the experience. The observer could easily have gone over and helped the woman but he misread the situation and walked on. Just something interesting that came to me.

Go for it! I'm curious to see what a short story from you would look like.

The only bit of criticism I could suggest is that there's no transition from the man's intention to protect the woman from a hypothetic rapist to taking on that role himself. I probably would have had a paragraph when he is looking at her body through her clothes and is getting increasingly turned on by her and like a switch flipping the lust overtakes the morality.
I don't know how an actual rapist's mind works, there's the back and forth that it isn't about sex but about power, which I only half agree with but I feel like there must have been some trigger for your character that turned him from a concerned observer to full on stranger danger... Or maybe it is there all along and I just missed it?

Overall a really well imagined and well written story.
To answer the question I personally wasn't thinking of anyone specific - and in fact I missed not having more description of the woman. Of course, if you had described her then you wouldn't have left room for reader projection, so believe I understand the choice.

My intention when I wrote this was that this whole "I'm just looking out for her..." thought pattern was a justification for himself. His heart starts racing as he gets closer, he realizes immediately that he has been hard for a bit now as he grabs her etc. He just tried to maintain that self-image of being a good guy until he ran out of even the last bit of plausible deniability. But I agree with you. If that doesn't click with the reader immediately, that he's lying to himself as he approaches her, then the transition is jarring. Now I am curious whether others thought, too, that his concern in the beginning was genuine.