After the third miscarriage, Alex was done trying.

She was done hoping.

As it's so often wont to do, the hopelessness slowly gave way to indifference, to complete and utter apathy. It took Alex's infectious laugh, her joyous spirit. It took the way she sang along to the radio in the car, the way she danced around the kitchen as she cooked, the way she lit up every room she walked into.

It happened gradually and Emily could only watch as her wife spiralled into a deep depression. Alex didn't even seem to notice it was happening – though, to be fair, Emily had a feeling she could've been hit by a truck and she wouldn't have felt it because she was so numb to the world.

Alex took a sabbatical from her teaching position. She stopped seeing her friends or contacting her family. She was no longer interested in anything at all and spent most of her time lying in bed and staring blankly at the wall.

As hard as it had been watching Alex get her hopes up, only to have them dashed, this was even harder... It was like watching her wife slowly wither and die like a neglected plant and there was nothing she could do to stop it or bring her back to life.

Finally, when she could no longer stand idly by and hope something would change on its own, Emily settled on the edge of the bed and gingerly rested a hand on Alex's shoulder. "Ally, I think it's time we go to the doctor and see about getting you on some antidepressants," she murmured.

Alex brushed her uncombed hair away from her face as she looked up at Emily with tear-filled eyes. "I'm sorry," was all she managed to choke out.

"For what?" Emily asked, stroking her cheek tenderly.

Her tongue flicked out over her lip as she seemed to struggle to phrase her apology. Ultimately, all she was able to articulate was, "For everything..."

The antidepressants gave Alex her life back. At least, to a certain degree.

Things were still hard sometimes, but at least she was able to function again. She was able to go back to work, to reconnect with her family, to have a social life again. Little by little, Emily saw the light come back to her eyes, the life come back to her body. She saw the woman she loved come back to her.

It was as close to a miracle as Emily believed was possible to experience.

Of course, there were strings attached as well...

The first antidepressant she tried gave her an arrhythmia so bad she quite literally thought she was dying. The second made her vomit every time she tried to eat solid food. The third one caused occasional insomnia, but she could live with that.

It took some time before the other side effects became apparent.

As Alex had gotten depressed, her sex drive had more or less vanished altogether. And Emily could hardly blame her for that. In the early days of their relationship, Alex's sex drive could almost have matched Emily's, but while Emily's never seemed to wane, Alex's had slowed with time until the antidepressants took away all that remained.

Emily knew Alex felt a great deal of guilt over not being quite as eager for sex as she was, fearing Emily might think she wasn't attracted to her or something equally unlikely. Emily had never for one second doubted that Alex loved her and wanted her...it was just the depression talking.

The other, more insidious, side effect was that the medication made it almost impossible for Alex to climax. Where Emily used to be able to make her cum with barely any effort at all, it was now an arduous and time-consuming task that more often than not ended with Alex in frustrated tears and nowhere near her peak.

And no matter how many times Emily assured her that it truly didn't matter whether she came or not because that wasn't the point of sex – at least, not the only point – Alex never seemed to believe her.

"Maybe you should talk to your doctor about it," Emily suggested at one point. "If it bothers you, it's worth seeing if there's something that can be done about it."

Alex had simply glared at her. "I'm not discussing the finer points of our sex life with my doctor," she said flatly.

Emily had wisely dropped it. She'd long since learned that if there was one quality in which Alex equalled or outrivalled her, it was stubbornness.

The problem wasn't even that she couldn't climax. Not really. It was the inevitable frustration Alex felt as she tried her hardest to turn herself over to the pleasure of the moment and shut off her brain and never ever having it be enough... The frustration only made things worse. And what inevitably followed was blaming herself and endless apologies.

One day, Alex came home in a righteous fury. Absolutely fuming. When Emily had dared to ask her what was wrong, she'd growled, "I cannot believe I just have to live like this and the fucking radio is playing ads for premature ejaculation treatments!"

Emily blinked a few times, stunned. "What?"

Rather than directly answer that, she said, "Did you know that there is five times more research into erectile dysfunction than PMS, even though ninety percent of women suffer from it, compared to nineteen percent of men who experience the former?"

"No..." she said slowly, unsure where this was going.

Alex just shook her head angrily. A moment passed and all the anger seemed to bleed out of her. "I just want to be able to enjoy sex with my wife without being made to feel like I'm broken..."

"Oh, Ally, you're so far from broken," Emily assured her. "You're whole and complete and perfect. Just the way you are."

"No," she said, shaking her head. "I'm not. I used to be. I used to be a lot of things..."