Pacifier

❤️Camille🍀

I lay awake, eyes closed, shivering slightly, trying to stay still. Trying my best to block the dull ache of withdrawal, feeling bitter because the doctors had begun to ween my off my heavy painkillers. They thought I was doing well, they thought I was going to make a full recovery.

I trusted them, I knew they were right.
I was beginning to suspect that this dull ache which tortured my relentlessly might not be the work of any physical wound.

I opened my eyes when I heard a siren outside, we were so many floors up that the flash of blue from the siren didn't wash by our window.

I glanced at Johnny. Still sleeping. Still peaceful.

I'd watched a nurse bath the dry blood from his wrist earlier that day and hated her for holding his hand so delicately. For being the one who got to hold his hand, for being the one who got to bathe his wounds.

That had always been me. No matter how horrifying an injury he'd stumbled through the front door with I'd always been the one to bathe his wounds and stitch him back up. I'd always been the one to heal him.

But now they wouldn't let me.

I could stand and walk around for minutes at a time. I was about as recovered as I'd have allowed myself to become at home before I'd taken myself back out onto the streets working for Van, and yet here they were strict about making sure I got my rest.

I felt claustrophobic. I felt confined.

I didn't like the women who came and went from our room, who thought they were so good at their jobs, who thought they were on some kind of moral highground because they'd studied nursing in an institution.

I knew all the same things they did, had nimble tender fingers just like there's, the only difference between us was where and how I learnt my trade. And yet they tended to look at me with a level of pity and distrust I couldn't ignore.

It was 5am, just gone and the little clock on the wall kept ticking louder every couple of seconds, a rhythm which was beginning to get to me. Which was beginning to leave me restless so that I was two seconds away from pushing myself up and tearing the useless thing from the wall.

It was Johnny however, not me, who saved that ticking clock from such a fate.

It was Johnny who stopped me smashing it to pieces in a feminine madness, the kind they used to write about in dickensian novels.

He moved his head, only slightly to the left, slightly towards me. Enough to shift the fabric of his pillow and his blankets, enough to make just enough of a sound that my over sensitive ears which were listening to everything they could just then, heard him.

At first I thought perhaps I was deceiving myself. It wouldn't have been the first time I'd convinced myself I'd heard something, seen something, just a little movement in my peripheral vision. Just a soft little sigh which sounded like someone breathing in consciously for the first time in a while.

So I didn't look for a moment. I simply remained still, eyes fixed on the ceiling, watching the vague patterns of light from outside swell and decline over the white paint.

It was only when I heard the same sound again that I forced myself to turn my head.

Forced myself to look upon him and let myself down gently. That is to say I expected stillness. I expected to see him sleeping and peaceful and so far away from me.

But he wasn't.

His eyes caught the light and though it was dark I could make out his waking expression perfectly.