She stared at the ceiling as the weight on her body moved in rhythm with a pattern that no longer surprised her. It wasn’t violent. It wasn’t passionate. It was mechanical. Perfunctory. Like being used.
The curtains were always drawn at night. But that didn’t stop the shadows from crawling along the walls.
The nurses’ station smelled of alcohol swabs and overworked bodies. Elena Cross scrubbed her hands at the sink until her skin reddened beneath the pressure. A code blue had just been cleared. Her shift was ending.
The clock blinked 12:04 AM.
Outside, the streets of the city whispered under dim lights. Elena zipped her jacket up and walked out, exhausted. Her footsteps echoed in the empty parking lot as she made her way to her battered sedan. The city was cold tonight. Sharp.
Home was fifteen minutes away. But every red light brought her dread closer. She wasn’t afraid of Mark—not in the way most people understood fear—but she was terrified of the emptiness that filled the air between them.
Mark Cross drove trucks for a living—overnight logistics. He claimed to love the road, the silence, the absence of walls. But in truth, it was the escape that seduced him.
He was never fully present. Not at work. Not at home. Not even during sex.
He had a growing appetite for exposure. For risk. He talked about it like it was some natural quirk, something Elena should find thrilling.
"You ever think about being watched?" he asked her once, unzipping his fly while parked on the highway shoulder.
She said nothing. Just turned her head to the window and watched the distant lights of traffic.
Mark began treating Elena like something between a wife and a prop. She was there when he wanted her—never kissed on the lips, never spoken to softly. She was bent, taken, discarded. Like a habit he didn’t acknowledge.
He didn’t hit her. That was the part that confused her.
Was it abuse if he never yelled? If he always smiled afterward?
She tried to rationalize it. Nurses do that. They diagnose. But no matter how she examined it, the conclusion was the same:
She wasn’t being loved.
She was being used.
It was in the break room of St. Claire’s General Hospital where Janet Morgan found Elena crying.
She placed a hand on her shoulder. “Trouble at home?”
Elena wanted to lie. But her throat ached. Her voice came out cracked.
“I feel like an object,” she whispered.
Janet sat beside her. “That’s not what love is.”
Janet urged her to see someone. A counselor. At first, Elena resisted. But one rainy Thursday, she stepped into a quiet office three blocks from the hospital and found a woman named Maya Chen who simply said:
“Start wherever you want.”
So she did. Not all at once. But slowly. Carefully. Every week.
And what emerged wasn’t just the truth about Mark.
It was the truth about herself.
The first time Elena said "no" to Mark, he blinked like she had spoken a foreign language. He laughed. Tried again.
But she stepped back.
“I’m not yours to use anymore,” she said.
Something in him twisted—disbelief turning to irritation. But she didn’t move.
She didn’t break.
That night, she slept in the car.
The next day, she packed a bag.
In a new apartment near the hospital, Elena lived alone for the first time since college. The silence was different now—empty, yes—but free. She painted the walls a soft blue. Bought herself a proper bed.
She began journaling. Volunteering. She took long baths and longer walks. She read books about healing. She touched herself without shame.
Maya called it reclamation.
Elena called it becoming. Becoming a woman, not a doll. A voice, not an echo.
Epilogue
Years later, Elena sat with another nurse crying in a break room.
She didn’t ask, “What happened?”
She simply said, “You’re not alone. And you’re not what he says you are.”
She had once believed that love meant surrender. But now, she knew:
Love begins when you remember you are human.
 |
 |
