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Rose was a drug. That’s all there was to it.
Luisa felt Rose in her blood, in her bones; when she wasn’t allowed to feel that soft, pale freckled skin under hands they shook. Her heart pounded, her stomach turned – she was intimately acquainted with withdrawal, and this was it.
But there was no solution. There were a million things to go to rehab for, from alcohol to sex and back again, but what do you do when the drug is a person and sex is only part of the reason why?
She’d tried going cold turkey; it ended with Rose pressed against the wall, quivering under the onslaught of her fingers.
She’d tried her version of the patch – redheads in bars, which of course didn’t smell right, sound right, feel right – and found herself chasing quick trysts with Rose. Little hits, little bumps, just to get her through the day, a kiss in an elevator, a grope in a bathroom.
But, inevitably, it wasn’t enough, and before she knew it she was making Rose come in the bed she shared with her father.
Because Luisa, well, she was an addict. What before had been a cycle of drinking and rehab had been replaced with a cycle of drinking and Rose. If she wasn’t drinking, she was with Rose; if she wasn’t with Rose, she was drinking. She felt like she was in a constant state of relapse, if it wasn’t one it was the other and all she could do was fall again and again.
It might have looked to an outsider like a battle between two frustratingly painful cravings, but Luisa knew that the feel of Rose against her was higher than any high that liquor could provide, but then, of course, that meant that the lows were also lower. Which inescapably sent her spiraling into a bottle of vodka, the only reprieve from which came in the form of Rose gently wiping sweat from her forehead and holding her until she stopped shaking.
There was no way out. When Allison came along (again) she used her as a substitute, somehow the methadone to Rose’s heroin. It wasn’t the real thing, just the next best. She threw herself into that relationship with everything she had, willing it to work, willing it to save her.
And for a while it did.
She was happy – or she thought she was, which really is the same thing. They laughed, and they talked, and they fucked, and they built something almost like a life. Allison proposed, and she said yes, and she tried not to notice the way a pair of blue eyes were locked onto the diamond ring on her finger.
The wedding night approached, and Luisa found herself pacing the halls of the Marbella late into the evening, hunting for Rose, insisting to herself that it was just the one more, the last taste before she gave it up for good. Hours later when she left Rose exhausted and weak (and broken, though she didn’t yet know that), she forced herself to believe that it really was the last time. That now, she was clean. She was free.
And, again, for a while, she was.
Allison bought throw pillows, and Luisa threw her white coat back on and helped people, and they were okay. She didn’t touch a drop of alcohol, and she didn’t pull Rose’s head back sharply to leave a purpled and possessive mark on her neck, and felt victorious, like she’d truly broken the cycle, found a way out.
She felt strong.
She ignored the way her heart pounded when she smelled the liquor in other people’s drinks and the way her mouth went dry at the bare skin of Rose’s legs as she lay beside the pool. Those feelings were remnants of the past, not signs of an imminent future.
Until it turned out that they were more than signs, they were warnings. Allison fucked her assistant and Jane Villanueva fell asleep in an exam room and then everything burned down. So Luisa found herself staring at a bottle of vodka, daring it to find its way into her system, but it was all for nothing when her worst addiction walked through the door in that skirt with those lips and those eyes that for the first time in a long time were unguarded, exposing the want and desperation that lay beneath them.
And so, she relapsed.
And she never stopped.
Rose had her committed, Luisa took her furiously in the bed in the hospital, pretending it was a way to get herself out.
Rose killed her father, Luisa let herself sink into the warmth of Rose’s words and voice, the shivers of need sustaining her, just barely, until they didn’t anymore.
Then Rose was dead, and she didn't have her brother or her father or her wife, and all she could see on the horizon was alcohol and desperation.
Except, there was Susanna. Susanna took the dark and scorching hole that Rose had left in her and filled it with something that felt like honey dripping and lazy weekend mornings.
But, then, Rose was Susanna, and Luisa took her hand and followed her into the dark. She had Rose full time, whenever she wanted, however she wanted, and it kept her just on the edge of overdose, the edge of just too much, and somehow that place was good. Their lives involved prosthetic masks and fake names and honest to god henchmen, but she was happy, honestly and truly happy. For the first time. And all it took was a never-ending supply of her drug of choice.
Except, suddenly, that supply dried up. Rose trusted her, Rafael betrayed her, and she found herself thrust into the worst withdrawal of her life. And she lost her mind.
There was nothing to do but give away the last bit of independence she had left. She couldn’t be trusted with it. So, she signed away her freedom.
A whirlwind of lies and manipulation and jailhouse escapes spun around her as she tried to rebuild her mind from the bottom up, but when Rose’s hand reached through the door to her sanctuary, she took it. Of course she took it.
No matter what, in the end, Rose was a drug, Luisa was an addict, and that was all there was to it.