Pacifier

🌹Della🥀

I spent one ordinary day with Sam. The morning after the night before, when Sam killed the stranger who had wanted to kill me.

That morning was ordinary.

Ordinary if not for the fact that I woke up with Sam's arm draped lazily over my waist, his nose nuzzled into the back of my neck. His body relaxed against mine in a way I was certain it wouldn't have been had he been awake, concious of his movements. Concious of just who it was he'd snuggled up to in tbe night.

Still, in the sleepy morning light of what would be an unreasonably ordinary day, I quite liked the warmth of his body pressed against mine, i liked the weight of his arm on my waist and, I didn't want things to change. Not straight away at least.

In this moment he was a comfort, protective and wrapped around me, something I hadn't been sure he could be until now.

For a minute it was easy to pretend that this was normal, that he was just a boy and I was just a girl. That he hadn't kidnapped me, hadn't forced me into his car and into his house.

That he wasn't keeping me apart from my brother, that he didn't need a reason to have me in his home. That this was mine too.

I knew it wasn't. That it never could be and i could never let my guard down, but the memory of the night before, as it came slowly creeping back to me, favoured Sam and nobody else.

He'd moved so quickly without a second thought to protect me.. No other motivation as far as I could see, only to keep me safe from a man who had clearly wished to harm me.

A man who hadn't even checked i was who he thought I was before he'd tried to kill me. And Sam, seeing what he saw, a man with a knife to my throat, hadn't even checked whether the intruder was friend or foe, an ally or an enemy before he'd shot. He'd just known. Double crossers couldn't afford those kind of thoughtless instinctive reactions. They needed a moment to process, they needed a minute or two to negotiate.

But last night, with me, with Sam, with the stranger and the knife to my throat, Sam hadn't the need for negotiating. There was no negation when it came to me.

Even at home, with the bottlemen, I'd not known that kind of loyalty. I'd been the pivotal object in negotiating the split between my family and my family the bottlemen. I was the trade off nana ru needed not to get child services involved. She'd claimed to care so much about the children and then only taken one of us. But the bottlemen who claimed to call us family, they too had settled for only one of us. Called it a compromise, where everyone was happy but me.

Sam hadn't needed a single second to decide his loyalty, so perhaps it really lay where he said. Perhaps it lay with my brother, with me.

I chewed my cheek, beginning to grow concious of how still I had been trying to lie since I'd woken up, beginning to grow concious of the fact I was affraid to move. Not because I didn't want him to wake up, but because I didn't want him to wake up and leave me.

He was warm, it was cosy, lying with him, under the duvet and i didnt really want to move. It shouldn't have felt safe because I'd seen what he'd done last night and I'd seen all the evidence I needed to know that shooting people dead without a second thought was perfectly ordinary and mundane for the man who lay beside me. But still, I did.

And besides, my own brother could do the same. Everyone I'd ever trusted could do the same.

I wasn't exactly used to it but it was something I found easy to accept.

So when he pushed himself up and yawned and stretched, all lethargy and sleepy eyes, when he asked me how I'd slept, instead of answering him, telling him it was the best night's sleep I'd had since he'd taken me, i pushed myself up too. Sat crossed legs wrapped up in his covers, hands in my lap and looked up at him. Plain, simple.