Pacifier

✨Isabelle🌹

Time moved slowly, it passed but it didn't really feel like it was passing at all.

We must have been there for weeks before she told me, and I must have been high on weed and painkillers for most of those long dreary days at the cottage because sometimes when I look back now I'm not really sure she was there at all.

Della I mean.

Even her arrival had been dream like, the way she'd walked in so subtle and soft, feet on the floorboards like she was an intruder. Perhaps she felt like she was or would be once she told me.

My memory of those days is strange and cloudy, pieced together with the dribs and drabs from the cutting room floor. Someone else must have taken all the good bits because all I remember is the hours we spent just me and her, sitting on the lawn.

There are some memories I know I couldn't walk yet, we had to call out for Van to come and carry me back out of the cold or the rain. And their are memories where I could, not particularly well, always with a grimace and a pained step, but I could stand alone and that was all that I cared about really.

I remember that when she told me I could just about walk by myself. We were sitting on the lawn where we always sat, tucked behind the hedge at the bottom of the garden where we could see the lane but the lane couldn't see us. We were sitting at the edge of the shade, me with my back against the tree, Della with her head resting on my good leg. Her hair tickling my thigh.

"When your brother comes..." started Della with a strange certainty, I distance in her voice. Neither of us really certain she meant it because it was the certainty of a narrator, not a girl.

"And Camille," I said, almost superstitious in my urgency to say her name too, to make sure they both came back. As if if we were to slip up for even a second we would jinx the whole thing. Though neither of us really believed in those superstitions anymore. And yet we clung to them more close than we ever had before.

"When they come back," she said correcting herself, "whats gonna happen then... Does he actually know what happens next?" she asked me, glancing over at the cottage, where Sam and Van would be watching us from the window no doubt.

I smirked, she never really called him by his name and I wondered why. Found it funny to remember that she was so much more distanced from him. That she'd never had the chance to know him as anyone other than that intimidating paternal figure at the head of our fucked up family unit.

Not like me.

"I don't remember much," I said, "I haven't asked him about it really," I said, because it was true. I hadn't.

I hadn't asked because in some strange way it felt like we would never leave that cottage. That this little shelter we had was forever now. Like it was this weird bubble we were in, seperate from the rest of the world, when we were here, tucked away in the middle of nowhere, we were safe and cut off and lingering in this perpetual something else.
Detached from the rest of the world.

How could we possibly leave?
How could there ever be an after?

"Oh," said Della chewing her lip, her long skinny arm reached out then, flopping down on the grass away from us, her elbow jutting as her slender fingers reached for the packet of cigarettes we were sharing.

I held the lighter for her when she placed her cigarette between her lips.

She was much thinner now than she had been in school. Not so much in an unhealthy way but in a mature way. She wasn't skinny like a child anymore. She was skinny like a woman. The grey around her eyes was feminine, her thick black lashes those of a woman's when her black eyes blinked up at me.