Chapter 58 Melissa
Melissa
Melissa checks the equipment in the back of the ambulance ahead of the day’s shift.
She is tired and tetchy and lets out a yawn so wide, her jaw clicks.
It’s the result of another fitful sleep in which she dreamed about Adrienne drowning a newborn baby in the sea while Damon stood watching from the beach.
Each time she ran towards Adrienne, her feet sank deep into the pebbles.
It isn’t the first time the dream has haunted her.
And every night she has it, she awakens to find herself sitting upright, face and chest drenched in sweat, and Adrienne rubbing her back, assuring her it’s not real and that she’s safe.
Her girlfriend is understandably concerned where this is coming from.
Melissa has tried to reassure her that all is well.
When she left Damon, she vowed that in her next relationship, she would be honest about everything right from the start.
Only, deceit has crept in again. Because she isn’t excited by this baby.
Not anymore. Damon’s demands have put paid to that.
The joy she felt in the beginning of their journey has been replaced by guilt over what she’s allowed Damon to persuade her to do.
She knows the longer they continue, the more they are living on borrowed time.
And the less chance there is of them completing their IVF journey.
As Melissa wipes clean the green plastic stretcher cushions, she wonders how life might’ve been had she stayed in her lane.
Had she and Damon begun the family he’d longed for.
She thinks back to a year before she and Damon married, when she admitted she had grown tired of her job as an assistant manager at a hotel on the outskirts of town.
‘It doesn’t fulfil me,’ she told Damon. She knows now she could also have been referring to their relationship. ‘I want more out of life.’
‘Such as?’ he asked.
‘I’ve talked about being a paramedic for as long as we’ve known each other. Perhaps now’s the time to start looking into it properly?’
‘But we get married this time next year and then we agreed to start trying for a family,’ Damon argued. ‘So where will training to be a paramedic fit in? You’ll only have to give it up when you get pregnant.’
In those three short sentences, there was so much she wanted to take him to task over. But she held back. ‘Well let’s delay our family plans,’ she said instead.
‘How long for?’
‘Only until I’m qualified, and then we can reassess.’
Damon didn’t try to disguise his disappointment, and he barely spoke to her for the best part of a week. She understood why. She was removing from the table something hugely important to him.
Now, when she reflects on her marriage, she realises this moment was where its decline began in earnest, and her awakening commenced.
Later, and shortly after she’d made their separation permanent, she spotted an attractive young nurse filling in forms in A&E.
They chatted for a while, and it was Adrienne who asked Melissa if she had time for a coffee.
The spark between them was instant. Afterwards, Melissa couldn’t stop thinking about her.
And, despite long shifts and unsociable hours, not a day passed when they weren’t with one another.
A year later, when Adrienne asked her what she thought about the two of them starting a family, Melissa didn’t shrink into herself like she had with Damon. Because it felt right. This is how love is supposed to feel, she told herself.
A noise approaching her from behind returns her to the present. The familiar shuffle of his feet gives him away.