The Yearning

By Tammy

Category: Tess pov

Summary: Inspired by another one of my father's poems-The Yearning, which is posted below. I got to thinking about Tess and the dreams, and what if she really didn't want them. *Warning* deals with rape.

* * *
The yearnings of your hot imagination
trapped between two sheets
and alive in those impassioned screams
heard often late at night

do not come to the young lean poet
who left you
for another
softer in his arms.

When they answer your pleas for help
and you tell them of the young lean poet
who raped you in your sleep,

they’ll smile and shake their heads
and leave you weeping
with your pillow
soft against your cheek.

~*~

They all thought she wanted it. Thought she desired it...lusted over it...was obsessed with it. And she never told them contrary, because the one time she tried...

Dreams. Figments of your imagination, they told her. Don’t get worked up over it. Just go to bed. And every time she did, she screamed.

Nightmares. No big deal, they said. You’ve been stressed lately. Everybody gets them. Just go to bed.

So she did. And she’d scream and toss and twist between her two sheets. They’d wrap tighter and tighter around her body, like a snake cutting off her air supply.

She told her guardian about the dreams. His eyes lit up--in confusion? In fear? she wondered. But then it passed and he told her to go to bed.

But did they mean something? she asked.

Of course, they mean something, he replied. But you aren’t old enough to concern with those matters yet.

Like everything else he told her, she filed it in her head for later--for when she was old enough to be concerned. She went to bed that night, hoping they wouldn’t come. She was going to another school the next day and erratic nerves and bags under her eyes wouldn’t make a very good impression.

They came anyway.

He leaned in close; she could feel his hot breath on her neck. He whispered things like destiny and love in her ear. He was her king and she his queen. Sometimes they were in the desert, sometimes the school, or even a castle in the clouds.

But the dreams all ended the same. He’d place a small kiss on her lips. So soft, she wasn’t even sure he kissed her. Kisses with boys at school were sloppy and rushed. But his...no one would ever guess that a person with such soft kisses would--

This time they were in the desert. He had her trapped between his body and a large rock. She took a step back from the kiss; the rock’s sharp edge stabbed her, causing her to gasp lightly in pain. Her first mistake. So easily misconstrued to be a sound of pleasure. But it was, wasn’t it? she’d ask herself later. At least at first. Didn’t that make it her fault?

She could feel the heat emanating off of his body as he stepped closer. Soon she was pressed up against the rock--it’s jutting edge forgotten as she stared into his eyes. He leaned down again, kissing her more forcefully and pulling her into his embrace. When she resisted, he let out a low growl from underneath his breath. Pulling her close to him again, he pushed her up against the rock, grasping her camisole top.

His kisses turned sloppy and hurried--hungry for more. She felt her top twist between his hands; the seams screaming to be released until finally they gave way. He muffled her screams with more kisses. Kisses she didn’t want anymore.

She woke up the next morning with her pillows strewn across the floor. Aside from the sheet twisted around her body, everything else from her bed was on the ground. She let out a cry of anguish when she checked between her legs, finding red and purple marks. Nightmares weren’t real, were they?

She took a shower, hoping it would wash away the feeling he had left her with. After she had dressed, she was confronted by her guardian. He shoved a picture in her face. Make friends with them, he ordered. They’re like you.

She screamed when she recognized his face from her dreams. Her guardian slapped her. What’s wrong with you? he asked.

It’s the boy from my dreams.

So?

He hurts me.

The dreams are telling you of how things are supposed to be.

I don’t want to--

Too bad, he interrupted. You belong to him. He may do--

I belong to no one, she replied defiantly.

You do now, he started before changing his mind. Fine, he continued. Then you’ll always be alone.

She grabbed her backpack and ran down the stairs to her car. She drove slowly and still arrived early. A boy saw her and made small talk. She flirted back, like she had hundreds of times before. She wished she belonged to him. She had a feeling his kisses would be sloppy and hurried, but that’s all they would be. Just kisses.

The boy from her dreams was in her biology class. She shuddered when the teacher made them partners. He smiled, not recognizing her. But how could he not? Or was she just a vessel without a face? She sent him a dream, so he’d know it was her. And he caught on fire.

Her car broke down one night. It was raining and her guardian wasn’t answering the phone. Suddenly he appeared.

Why are you doing this to me? he asked.

I don’t know what you’re talking about. My car broke down.

She wished he would go away. She’d rather walk home. Before she could move or speak, he covered her mouth with a kiss. Soft at first...then sloppy and rushed.

Why are you doing this to me? he had asked. Why are you doing this to me? she thought.

She wondered how long it would be before he grew tired of kisses.

Later, she began sending the others dreams in the hopes that one of them would know what she was feeling. Would hear her call for help from the dreams that raped her mind and left her with bruises in the morning.

They confronted her. They wanted to know why she was sending them the dreams. Don’t they know? she thought. She thought the dreams were so clear--her call for help so evident. But they had missed it, blindsided by their own repressed urges.

She began to regret ever showing them what was “supposed” to be, according to her guardian, at least. They craved more, yet pushed it all aside. She along with it. She belonged to no one, but, like her guardian had said, she was alone.

The dreams still came, though. And they all thought she wanted them. Thought she desired them, lusted over them, and was obsessed with them. She never dared tell them the contrary. Even if she had, who was to say they would even hear her?

As the weeks and then months went by, she found herself becoming more and more isolated. Alone with her dreams. She wanted, no, needed human contact. Something to push the dreams away.

So she told him that she belonged to him, and he to her. She wasn’t sure what her guardian would say to the last part, but she wasn’t quite ready to give up her freedom yet. Just enough to make the dreams stop.

He said no, though. They made their own destinies and what his mother said didn’t matter.

Summer passed and she was still alone, but the dreams began to fade. She felt empty inside; numb. She enjoyed it at first, relishing her sleep for the first time in years. Time passed and she felt herself pull away from the group-or the group away from her? Her feelings and emotions numb, she, too, began to crave. She wondered if the others felt the craving too, or were satiated with their significant others. She turned to the boy, the one she had met on her first day in Roswell, but found she still felt nothing. He couldn’t fill the void. He told her it was because they thought of one another as siblings. She nodded her head, agreeing, but not understanding.

She tried to amuse herself by playing mind games with one of the humans. She invited him over to the empty house she used to live in with her guardian. She made him believe she was one of his friends: small and brunette. He’d tell her stories about kids at school and she’d laugh and smile. But still, she felt the same. Their meetings became more urgent and his friends began to wonder where he spent all his time. He has other commitments, they said. He wouldn’t blow off practice. It also became harder for her to keep their meetings a secret. Now that his friends noticed his absence, she had to make him forget their conversations-mind warping him again.

She varied his illusions. Sometimes the blonde pixie, other times the voluptuous alien he lusted for. He’d whisper sweet nothings in her ears and place tentative kisses on her lips. But she didn’t feel the emotions she saw on t.v. Her heart didn’t flutter, her stomach wasn’t filled with butterflies, and her body didn’t warm at his touch.

Instead she felt nothing. Always the same. She grew frustrated, desperate to feel something, anything. She decided to have him decode the book for her. She hoped it would reveal to her how to feel again. She made a mistake though, mind warping him one too many times, and he died in a heap on the floor.

If she was caught, would she care? She wasn’t even sure if she could feel anything but the apathy that had come to consumer her life. But there was still the matter of the translation. The others didn’t need it, but she did. She wanted to feel something. So she turned to the one person who had made her feel for so much of her life.

She told him, again, in the observatory that she belonged to him. She hoped she would feel something. He leaned down and kissed her lightly on the lips. She hoped it would be different. That the dreams weren’t really true.

Hours later while he slept in post-coital bliss, she reached between her thighs to find the familiar bruises and cried. It was only then that she had realized her mistake.

Surrounded by the dreams all her life, and told by everyone she spoke of them to, had ingrained them as the norm in her head. She hadn’t realized that the feeling, or lack there of, that she had felt before the night in the observatory, wasn’t a void-wasn’t a numbness. But without the opposite to counterbalance the one, the yin and yang, per se, she hadn’t recognized what she had been feeling all that time when he had told her "no" way back when on the cliff.

Happiness.

Without evil, there can be no good or measure of it. All those years of hurt, and fear, and sadness...without anything to counterbalance them, she felt lost and empty without them-not recognizing her own happiness.

But it didn’t matter now. Because now she belonged to him. Her dreams had come true. Dreams she never wanted.

The End.