I'd never really been attracted to anyone before. I was one of those late-blooming girls; I spent my adolescence in a bubble of confusion and awkwardness. I had never been concerned about my lack of sexual desire, until I understood what was different about me. Until I met her.
I remember that I was being treated for a wound--a gunshot had just missed me, and the bullet had grazed my leg. I was more in shock than anything else, and angry at myself for allowing it to happen. Lost in my own world, I let her bandage me with deft and gentle fingers.
"What's on your mind?" she asked me, her voice quiet and soft.
I was startled. "Nothing." I didn't want to let myself look at her. Every time I did, a weird flutter would start at my stomach and go coursing through my body. I didn't understand that this was what I'd been lacking my whole life.
"You don't need to worry," she said. "You'll learn. You won't let this happen again. You will succeed."
Her voice was soothing. I felt as though a warm light were coming over me, bathing me. I could feel myself relax.
All I could think about after that was her. She was constantly in the forefront of my mind. Everything I did, I did hoping that she might somehow see me. I didn't understand yet that this was love, or something like it. I never gave up hope that I might meet her again.
One day, I was asked to take a sample of a drug to the lab, where a doctor we had contracted was working on testing it. It was growing dark, and I remember how desperately I wanted to go home. In my tired, lethargic state, I went into the lab and was completely taken aback to see her there.
She remembered me. I stepped backwards at first, afraid, then went to her. "Your leg wound has healed," she said with satisfaction. "I'm glad." And she gave me a sweet smile, making my mind go blank.
The sample clattered when I set it down.
She watched me intently, almost with amusement, like a researcher watching monkeys play. I swallowed. I tried to think of what I wanted to say to her. What had I just given her? Why had I come here?
She took ten small steps closer to me. "You're a sweet girl," she said to me, and she put her hand on my face. "Stop dreaming. Wake up and go home."
I didn't want to go home, but I didn't want to tell her that.
She ran her hand over my face, down to take hold of my chin. She tilted my head upward and kissed me--gentle, practiced, experienced. I pressed back, much bolder than I intended, without any of the skill or technique that she had. It made her smile after we parted.
The first time we slept together was at my apartment. Afterward, she hugged her knees and stared into the darkness. Everything about her that was warm and beautiful had suddenly grown cold and lonely. I realized that even as our bodies slid against one another, I'd never really held her. Emotionally, I hadn't been able to get close to her.
She talked into the darkness. She told the night how her husband had died, and how alone she felt. She told the walls of my room how angry she was at being left alone in the world with her son, to raise him by herself, with help from no one. I thought she was talking to me, but when I tried to hold her, she pushed me away.
"You don't understand!" she screamed at me. "You could never understand!"
I didn't know whether to love her or be frightened by her.
When I saw her during the day, she deliberately avoided me. She would walk past me but refuse to look at me. I would stop, turn around, watch her walk away as if she hadn't seen me. She told me we had to keep our relationship a secret because I had been her patient once, and I believed that she really meant it. I wanted so much to believe that there was nothing illicit or shameful about our liasions. At night she would call me and coax me to come to her, or to let her come to me, and I would let her. I never understood why I let her. I should have known better than to stay with someone who hurt me like she did.
I could never tell if Sharon really loved me or not. She swore that she did. She would hold me close and tell me over and over how much she loved me, and then she would grow cold and turn away from me and hit me if I tried to touch her. I didn't know what to do for her, but I wanted to do everything for her.
Sometimes, on nights alone, I'd find her long blonde hairs between my sheets. I would hold them up to the light, like gold thread. I would run it over my tongue and between my teeth and eventually swallow it. I fell asleep with my stomach churning while I thought of her, imagining her hair inside me, being broken up into particles and absorbed into me. Becoming part of me. The closest I could get to her.
She drove me desperately, hopelessly insane.
When I found out she was getting married, I put on a smile at work and then went to her. For the first time, I screamed at her. I ripped her bed apart and threw her pillows at the walls again and again. "How can you do this?" I cried. "And of all people! I'll have to see the ring every day! You can't do this to me!" And through it all, she just sat in a chair and watched me; and when I finally stopped, she put her strong arms around my pale and shaking frame and said, "Melisse, Melisse...I love you." And somehow I forgave her, and kept on loving her.
I never stopped loving her.
A week before it happened I stopped answering her calls. I stopped looking at her at work. I listened to her voicemails: from "Melisse, baby, where are you? I'm waiting for you," to "I don't know why you have to act like this, Melisse. Don't be such a child."
But she was the child. She was the one who married my superior just to keep me in her power. She was the one who expressed all her pain, her loss, her sadness by hurting me and making me her defenseless slave. When I broke myself free of the chains Sharon Rosas had placed on me, I granted myself the freedom that I hadn't really realized I'd lost.
I never wished her dead, but when the world lost her, Sharon wasn't who I mourned.