When she opened her eyes she noticed that the sheets were on the floor. Funny that she hadn't noticed it before. She knew she had to be cold, but she didn't feel cold. She didn't feel anything. She had no idea how much time had passed or how and when she must have discarded them.
It did not help to open her eyes again. Open or closed, she would see the same images, over and over again. Slow motion, zoomed in, closed-up, pinned-up pictures. Over and over again. Like a cheap trash movie haunting her from out of time.
Nothing had helped so far, and she had the disquieting feeling that there was nothing that would. The doors of her quarters were now decorated with rivulets of cold coffee, slowly trailing into the carpet. Glass was shattered on the floor, sparkling with reflections of passing stars. A pile of unread reports had found its way crashing into the wall separating their quarters, and she knew that some of them would be useless now. Additional work for those crewmembers who'd have to write them again.
She knew she would care tomorrow when she'd stopped seeing the images. She knew she would be angry that he could do this to her in the end. After seven years of trying to deny this, it had finally slapped her in the face. Twice. And she didn't know which stroke hurt the most or angered her more than the other.
It should have been the right choice. In all those seven years no crewmember ever had to redo his work because she had been distracted by him. Distracted by his love and his lust. Her love and her lust. Distracted because she kept seeing images of him in slow motion. And seven years of pretending should have made it the right choice, real, immutable and irrevocable.
That's why she had set the parameters on narrow margins. Margins that would not allow the existence of anything that could cause images to form in her head. And she had expected him to follow the rules as they had moved along their path. And if he didn't, she would always have the liberty to feel angry about it. Enough anger to keep the images at bay.
If she had been able to feel anything, she would feel cheated now. He had obeyed all the rules, never once overstepped the boundaries. But then without any warning he had left the path. He had simply chosen another one. Out of her reach and her parameters. Unfortunately not out of sight.
And the view could not have been better. Front row seats with magnifying 3-D glasses, free entry guaranteed. And she had been gloriously unprepared for the assault. Unprepared for the flood of images invading her mind, fueling long suppressed imagination and sending it to overload. All she could see was creamy white skin writhing under tanned fingers, blond hair spilling over black. All she could hear was his name coming out of her beautiful mouth. Like it would have come out of hers.
Closing her eyes again to stop the tears that came with the images, she felt that life had betrayed her. Failing to tell her that in the end denial was as powerful as acknowledgment would have been. Leading to the same results.
Maybe she would cry herself to sleep after all. But she would leave the sheets on the floor.