The Woman Who Pretended to Love Men

by Anna Ferrara

  It felt heavenly; more so when I opened my eyes and saw Milla, with her magnificent blue eyes now open, beaming at me.

  “Morning,” she said.

  “Morning.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  I felt a grin come upon my face, as if pushed up by springs. “Pretty good. You?”

  “Pretty great.” She grinned too and her eyes twinkled again, like how they had been doing before I first turned her away. “This feels... right.”

  Are you sure? Was it right with that other woman, whoever she was, too? How about with that manly woman? My grin fell. “Am I your first woman?”

  “No. There were four other women—”

  Four?! Not just two? I felt myself pulling away from her.

  “—but they were all just... one night stands.” Her grin grew wider as she took in the look on my face. “Are you jealous? Already?”

  I inhaled sharply. “No.”

  A twinkle appeared in Milla’s eyes and she beamed yet again. She scooted close to my face and whispered, “I think you are.”

  “I’m not.” I tried to back away further but found I was already at the edge of the bed with nowhere to go.

  Milla laughed, grabbed me by the buttocks and dragged me into the centre of the bed where I wouldn’t be falling. “You broke my heart, Sandra. I had to do everything I could to forget you. I was determined to put you behind me and ignore you forever.” She smiled at me and—

  —left me feeling ripples of electrical energy underneath my skin again. I looked away and sighed. “So why aren’t you?”

  “Aren’t I what?”

  “Ignoring me. Forever.”

  I glanced up at her and saw her smile again the moment our eyes met.

  “Because you love me. As much as I love you.”

  I think I gasped. I found myself staring into the depths of Milla’s eyes, unable to look anywhere else. Being able to do so surprised me; with Jackson, or anyone else for that matter, eye contact of ten seconds was max. With Milla though, it felt as if I could look at her forever without feeling out of sorts. “Why? Do you love me?” I asked.

  She shrugged and smiled more. “Because you can pick locks? And you’re smart, interesting, fun and really nice to look at, and touch, and hold?”

  I found myself grinning again. “Really? A woman picks a lock and makes you realise you’re really... into women?”

  She giggled. “Of course not. I’ve always been into women. I only ever notice women. I mean I try and pretend like I notice men too but truth is, I don’t. Don’t ask me why. It’s just the way I was made, I guess? I don’t know.” She sighed. “I tried really hard with men, I swear, but love just never happened. So I gave up. All that talk about how the world might end because of the Y2K makes you really think about how you truly want to live before you die, you know? I decided to start afresh, get a woman I could love, and as if right on cue, I met you. You’re the first woman I ever kissed, Sandra, so, I need to know. How many women have you slept with?”

  “Me? Just one. You.”

  “Really? You’re not lying to me again?”

  My heart jumped and my cheeks got all toasty. Not about that, I’m not. “I swear. I’m not like you, Milla. All I wanted before the new millennium was ‘get a promotion’, you know? Dating a woman, sleeping with a woman, kissing a woman never once crossed my mind. I always thought it was going to be a man and children for me. That’s just the way life works around here, what everybody else does.”

  Milla stared hard into my eyes, then, to my horror, shook her head. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “I’ve seen the way you don’t look at men. How you looked at me when we first met. People don’t become gay overnight. You must have fancied some other woman before.”

  How the hell does she know these things? I felt my cheeks go hotter and found myself biting down hard on my lower lip. “Well,” I said, then stopped because I found it too hard to say the words out loud. Truth was, Milla was right. Just one day before, while trying to figure out how I had ended up crushing on Milla so badly, I thought of another woman I had fancied in the same way, many, many, many moons before. The thought horrified me so much, I willed myself never to think of it ever again yet somehow, I don’t know how, Milla managed to see it there, as if she could read my soul.

  “It’s okay,” she said, as if she could sense how uncomfortable I was getting too. She stuffed her hand into mine and squeezed hard. “I’m just like you, Sandra. I won’t be in any position to judge.”

  I gazed up into her wide eyes and into those oversized pupils and felt nothing but love and excitement swimming around my heart. Could I really say it? I wondered. To another person? Out loud?

  Milla nodded, as if she knew exactly what was going through my mind.

  I took a deep breath. “Well, when…” I gulped and chewed on my upper lip this time. “When I was a teenager, I had this... family friend. We had dinners together with our parents every now and then and we went to school together... too. The first time I saw her, I think... I mean I didn’t realise what it was back then but I think I kind of... developed some sort of... crush on her. She was just so pretty and... cute and she had those pixie-like features and I just... I couldn’t stop staring at her or thinking about her. For a whole year, all I wanted was to see more of her and hang out with her but, unfortunately, that was just about the last thing she wanted. What she really wanted was her father’s attention, yet, during those dinners, he was always giving it to me or my... my father. As a result, she... hated us. Me, especially. She thought I was competing with her for her father’s affections and made it clear, mostly through ignoring me, that she wasn’t going to tolerate it. Eventually, it got really awkward between us so I forced myself to keep my distance at school or... otherwise. I never thought of liking another girl or woman that way again.” I shrugged. That was the truth.

  “I see,” Milla said. “What was her name?”

  I took another deep breath, swallowed the lump that appeared in my throat and I looked away, down at my fingernails. “Carla,” I said.

  Milla pulled my chin up and forced me to look into her eyes. “I hope you never see her ever again.”

  She looked so stern when she said so, so much like one of those discipline mistresses everyone feared, I couldn’t help but laugh. “Frankly, I hope I never see her again myself. You have no idea how many family dinners I’ve missed because of her.”

  “I’m serious,” Milla added. “I don’t want you thinking about her ever again either. I don’t want to have to share you with anybody.”

  Oh? I narrowed my eyes. “Well, I don’t want to have to share you with anybody either so... can you please just tell me how Danny Diaz fits in all of this? If you’re not into boys then why do you go about telling people he’s your boyfriend?”

  This time, Milla was the one pulling away. She went to the other side of the bed and threw herself back into her own pillow. “This topic is such a romance killer, Sandra,” she said to the ceiling.

  “I know, I know and I’m sorry but please... it’s driving me crazy. I won’t write about you if you don’t want me to, I swear. I just want to know because... I want to know everything about you. I mean, look at us? This means we’re sort of dating, right?”

  Milla’s eyes darted back towards me and suddenly looked all shiny. “Well, I don’t know. Just a week ago you told me you weren’t a lesbian. You’re ‘just a regular woman who wants to get married and have children’, you said. Although after what I saw, heard and felt last night, I find that really hard to believe.”

  I laughed and rolled over to her side of the bed until our bodies touched again. “Fine. I’ll admit it. I want to be your girlfriend, Milla. Forever. Will you be mine?”

  I meant it and I could see Milla could tell. What I didn’t expect was for her to look a little hesitant, as if she suddenly wasn’t entirely sure if she wanted to go along with it all.

  I too
k one look at her face and suddenly no longer felt as comforted by her scent as I had been before. “What?” I said.

  She gulped. “There’s something I need you to know about me before you decide if being with me, forever, is what you really want.”

  “Oh… kay….” An uneasy buzzing sensation crept underneath my skin as my mind ran through the possibilities. Was she going to tell me she was the daughter of one of the most notorious mob bosses in the United States? I could handle that. What if she told me she kidnapped C39? Not ideal but not that bad either. What if she told me she murdered him? That, I might not be able to handle so well. That might change everything, in fact. “Tell me.”

  She took a really long time to get the words out of her mouth. In the meantime, I began feeling all panicked again; even though I wasn’t wearing any clothes, I began to sweat. And maybe she was sweating too because the part of my chest where my flesh touched her arm began to feel a little wet.

  “How do you feel about raising a child with me?” she said eventually. “Us doing it together?”

  A child? The mysterious child I couldn’t find any information about? “How would we have a child together, though?” I asked; carefully, slowly and calmly.

  “If one of us got pregnant, maybe? Say… by accident? Maybe... me, for example.” She grinned at me but I could see, from the way her cheeks quivered, that she was freaking out inside, way more than I was. She swallowed hard and seemed to go pale.

  I didn’t get it at first, and then, all of a sudden, I did. My eyes fell on the part of the quilt that was over her torso on instinct and my mind made the connection. I recalled the tiny mound of fat under her otherwise well-toned abdominal muscles and I gasped again, even though I would have preferred not to have done so. “You’re pregnant? Right now?”

  She swallowed hard and looked me in the eye, clearly petrified. “Yes. Will that be a problem?”

  “Who’s the father?”

  “Who do you think?”

  I inhaled sharply. “He raped you?”

  To my surprise, she shook her head. “I told you, I really tried with men. Before I gave up, I told myself to give it one last go. I went to a Club, alone, looked for the best-looking guy I could find and told myself to try really hard to love him. The guy I found was Danny D. He was hot, physically perfect and yet by the next morning, I knew I never wanted to see him or any other man again. I never expected to get pregnant but what do you know, I got lucky. Now I can have a baby without having to sleep with another man just for one.”

  That was a little too much information for me to take; besides, my chest was getting too sweaty and hot for comfort. I pulled away from her, went back to my side of the bed and sat up. The quilt that had been over my chest fell away and left my breasts exposed but I didn’t even care, not even when Milla dropped her eyes down at them. “Wait, let me get this straight. You planned a hit on Danny Diaz because you slept with him and never wanted to see him again?”

  Milla sat up and exposed her breasts too. “The hit wasn’t my idea. It was my brother’s. Danny knew who I was when he slept with me so he made a tape. Threatened to make it public if I didn’t give him money so I did, but he soon wanted more. When he found out I was pregnant, likely with his kid, he thought he would be set for life. He wanted me to marry him. Threatened to make the tape public if I didn’t. I thought leaving New York would solve the problem, but, as you can see, it didn’t. I had to tell my family about him and they decided my brother Angelo, the guy you saw the other day, would come settle it. He needed to make his bones anyway. Had Danny actually died, Angelo would have been made the moment he got back to New York. But now, he’s stuck till he finds Danny or someone else to hit.”

  I frowned. “Is there anyone you know of who might have helped Danny? Some other gang or... organisation maybe?”

  “Unlikely. I had men tailing him for weeks. He’s just a jobless, couch-surfing crack addict. A customer, unfortunately. He thought he was too handsome for menial jobs so he spent his days hanging out in clubs trying to get spotted by a talent scout or sugar mummy or whoever might get him more crack. That was all he was. Nobody who’s anybody knows who he is or cares if he lives or dies. Not here, not in New York.”

  My heart skipped a beat because... although she didn’t know anyone who knew him… I did. I knew of a couple of people who knew about him, in fact. A couple of people who also cared about his whereabouts. And they cared very much, enough to devote a ton of resources to making sure he was... found. I pushed away the quilt and jumped onto my knees.

  “That tape the 81M men saw? The tape with Carmen in it? There was a man blocking me from the camera the whole time?”

  “Yes. With a newspaper. The whole time, until you left. They could barely even see your feet.”

  But nobody gets that lucky. ‘Lucky people make their own luck, don’t they?’

  Suddenly, it all became clear to me; sharp as a well-focused photograph. I had an idea; I knew who might have had a reason, and the ability to, take C39 out of his ward without anyone noticing. It was an idea I never would have thought of before but then, it was an assignment that would ‘require a lot more of (my) wits and skills than (my) previous assignment ever did’, wasn’t it?

  I jumped out of the bed and went in search of my clothes. I found them on the floor near the door, next to Milla’s clothes, and scrambled to get them on.

  “You’re leaving?” Milla said. She sounded worried.

  “Yes, but not because I’m unhappy with you or... your baby.” I popped back onto the bed once my t-shirt and jeans were on and planted a firm kiss on her lips. “You’re right. I love you and I would love to bring up your child with you.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, but right now, I need to go to work. I think I know who took Danny.”

  Milla’s mouth dropped open and her eyes widened. “Who?”

  My lips came apart then snapped back together the second I realised I hadn’t figured out what I was going to tell her. “I’ll tell you tonight,” I said instead. I jumped out of bed again and made my way towards the door. “Do you want to have dinner with me tonight? Here? I could grab takeout on the way back.”

  She gave me another one of those warm, dazzling smiles again. “I want to have dinner with you every night, Sandra. Just get your sexy ass back here as soon as you can. I’ll cook.”

  Her smile was too beautiful for me to resist. I found myself running back to the bed and kissing her with fervour for a good minute before I managed to get myself out of her bedroom.

  “I’ll see you tonight,” I said, right before I left her apartment.

  Last thing I saw was her nodding and throwing herself back down on the bed, still absolutely naked. With the grin she had on her face, you would think she just won the lottery.

  Chapter 20

  7 Jul 1999, Wednesday

  Less than five minutes later, I was back in my unfurnished apartment across the road, digging into my cardboard box of MultiMediaCards, praying I would find what I was looking for: the card from the camera I left under King George Hospital’s ninth floor chair on the first day of my assignment; the card I thought hadn’t caught anything of interest.

  If it were gone, if I had already recycled it and wiped its contents and stuffed it into one of those cameras in Milla’s apartment, I would have to go back to King George Hospital to look for the tape the 81M men saw, or locate it if it were gone. My palms and the back of my neck grew all sweaty just thinking about those tasks. Please, please, please just still be there.

  I got lucky for real this time. I found the card; it was right at the bottom of the box, forgotten and untouched. It worked fine when I plugged it into my floor-top computer too; its black and white video clip was still intact.

  I played the clip from the very beginning, in slow motion, and ran my eyes over every inch of the screen to take in each and every object my camera captured. Five doors, one vending machine that w
as out of order, three unknown medical machines with their electrical sockets curled around their bodies, just lying about waiting to be taken somewhere. Twenty-one people—standing around, seated on plastic chairs or just passing by. Man with newspaper? Man with newspaper... There! On the extreme right, between the chair I had been sitting on, where my camera was, and the hospital’s security camera on the ceiling.

  A fat man. Tall too. Local but a great deal larger than the average Hong Kong male. He held his newspaper wide open and up in the air as if he could only read it if he held it up that way. He stood facing the hospital’s security camera, with his back to my camera. Coincidence? Or intentional?

  Once I saw him, I couldn’t un-see him. He was huge like a gorilla and easy to spot. And yet I never noticed him before? Not when I was actually there on the ninth floor, not all those times I watched the clip trying to see if anyone was sneaking about the door of C39’s ward? Yes. My attention had been so fully consumed by C39’s door, I had missed the most suspicious-looking character of all. I mean, now that I thought about it, who the hell sticks his arms upwards for an hour just to read a newspaper? In the middle of a hospital corridor too.

  And there! There it was! Just seconds after I left the chair to go to lunch—I knew I left because I could see my thighs appear on camera for a second or two and see myself walking away on the left of the screen—the fat man put down his newspaper. He folded it, put it under his arm, turned and walked in the direction I had gone. He hadn’t looked at me once before that, but he did have—

  —black glasses on his face and... earphones in his ears! Black earphones, just like the ones that came out of Sandra Sum’s ready pack! He was dressed like a middle-aged hospital visitor and he moved about the corridor like he really was one too.

  I scrubbed to the end of the four-day clip, to the part where I would return to the chair to retrieve the camera. There! Exactly five minutes before I got back to the chair, that fat, bespectacled, earphone-wearing man reappeared on the ninth floor. He went back to the same position he had been standing at four days before and opened another newspaper, exactly three seconds before I saw myself walking back to the chair to collect and switch off my hidden camera. Once again, he didn’t even look my way. Nobody looked his way either, not even me. Despite his size, he blended with his surroundings like a chameleon might. He was just like any other middle-aged visitor; extremely inconspicuous, almost as inconspicuous as—