Pacifier

🌼Camille🥀

"Once," i held my little finger up to him in the doorway.

The study was dark and blue moonlight left a watery sheen across Vans pale skin. He looked petrified, in the moment it was easy to believe that perhaps he was begging me to stay. Begging me not to leave him alone with her.

But I'd done all I was willing to do to help him.

I'd stitched the poor doll back up, I'd been gentle when he was incapable and now I knew he needed leaving. They needed leaving alone together.

If he wanted her, and I knew that he did, he needed to learn to be affraid of losing someone, he needed to learn to be gentle when that fear turned to fury turned to violence under threat.

I couldn't teach him those things and I couldn't do them for him, and once was all I was willing to lie for him.

Just this once.

I closed the door to the study and I took a second to exhale. Took a second to steady myself.

The sight of her had been heartbreaking but we moved in a world of broken hearts and bad dreams.

We lived and breathed them.

So I could breath this heartbreak out, as simple as lighting a cigarette, as simple as taking a drag and blowing smoke out of Johnnys bedroom window.

For a moment I thought that he'd drifted off in the half hour I'd been gone, having been torn from the depths of his slumber earlier that night by Vans frantic shaking me, who had been sleeping beside him.

John had woken up when hed felt me being tugged gently from his arms, he'd mumbled and fought to keep me there but when I'd pried his fingers from my waist he'd pushed himself up away from the pillow and come out with some half hearted line about how Van was trying to smuggle his missus away in the middle of the night.

He'd yawned and the corners of his mouth had formed a lazy smile, and he'd remained sitting, watching me pull his t-shirt on to leave.

But when I'd returned he'd been returned to the sheets, eyes closed, chest rising and falling slowly with every lethargic exhale.

So I'd thought he was sleeping. For a second.

"He asked me to lie to you..." I said, testing the waters, watching the street outside through the half drawn curtains. They rippled in the breeze like my hair.

I could sense him listening, I could tell he was watching me through the dark.

My voice had drifted calm like the still night sky outside but inside I was twisting, not guilty but bitter. Bitter because I'd been reminded of the power Van had over me.

We didn't usually opperate with a hierarchy between us but tonight he'd exercised the controls of his birth rights and i despised him for it.

Expecting me to lie to the only man I could be honest with.
Expecting me to leave Johnny in the middle of the night to tend to him because he was too erratic, too chaotic for his own good.

Because he couldn't control himself to the same degree he liked to control everyone else.

When Johnny said nothing I turned to him, dared a glance, just a glance, to make out his calm tidal expression, his eyes watching mine. He had already resigned himself to a dishonest evening. The look in his eyes told me he already knew anyway, told me he'd been expecting this. Told me he didn't mind.

"Did you tell him you would?" he asked tapping the ash of his cigarette waiting for my answer, a nod, just a nod, before he stubbed it out, grinding it down in the little dish beside the lamp before he leant back, hands behind his head, resting against the headboard with half an amused smirk on his lips. "Cmon then doll," he said, his voice low and honeyed, "lie to me..."