Pacifier

🥀Sam🍎

Tonight was the last night we'd stay here.

Thats what i was telling myself as I lay beside her on my bed, her cheek so close to my hand but not quite touching. My fingers lax and lazy but not quite brushing her skin the way I felt myself needing to. To touch her.

She was half asleep, her eyes shut, chest rising and falling slowly with her breathing. She could have been sleeping and maybe a couple weeks before I'd have thought she was. But not now. Not when i knew her so well.

Perhaps she didn't tell me things, perhaps she didn't trust to share her deepest fears and thoughts, her history and the things she had felt and was feeling now, but she didn't have to tell me for me to know her that way now.

She wasn't sleeping and I knew because she was sad. The curve of her lips resting simmered with her sorrow. When she slept she was not. Her lips did not. She was peaceful and soft and body melted into the sheets as she melted into sleep.

That night she was stark and solid against the bed linen and i could tell she was in pain.

Perhaps it was that which drew my fingers closer once again to her cheek. To brush along her skin which caught the fading evening light so pristine.

Her eyes fluttered open and met mine, held mine. They were deep and cool and she was trying even harder than she had been before, not to show me how she felt but I could see the pain and the guilt which welled up and flowed through her like water in the spring.

"You don't have to treat me like a kid you know," she said, her voice just as matter of fact, slightly cutting, as ever, "I'm not a baby, you don't have to keep sleeping with me you know... I can sleep by myself I'm not..."

When she said it I felt myself twist with a discomfort, this strange loss of purpose. Her telling me she didn't need me like that when that was the way things had been and the way I had grown accustomed to them being. Id been good at being soft with her, at being gentle. I liked it even, sometimes. And now she was looking me in the eyes and demanding that i stopped.

It was a relief but at the same time it was not.

To see her spark returning, to see the stubborn streak which had gone from her, all the spirit choked out slowly seeping back into her being.

But i didnt like the cold in her irises and i didnt want to see the frost which was sparkling there now.
"This your way of tellin me a snore lass?" I smirked, the smile I cracked not quite awkward though I felt it.

The way I felt the pull between us, something in her aura that dragged me ever closer, lurred me in against my better judgement.

She had been sent to taunt me, now as she turned me away again I was sure of that.

"You fidget too," she said, a small smirk tugging at the corners of her lips.

"So you're not scared of intruders anymore?" i smirked too, rolling over to face her properly. Our eyes locking, parallel to eachother now. Our shoulders aligned.

"They killed Nana Ru," she said, i wasnt prepared for the what she said next, i wasnt prepared for the way her eyes flickered momentarily doubting, away and then back up to mine. "She did so many protection charms and they still killed her didnt they..."

I wanted to tease her, it was my first instinct, to crack a smile, to try to be warm and light-hearted, to take the weight off. Not to let her wrap me round her the way that she was. But I couldn't.

I couldn't laugh when I was certain the pain in her expression was real and true and too deep for her alone to handle.

"Maybe," i said quietly, teeth skimming over my bottom lip as I wondered again whether this was really a good time to be gentle, to be honest. My fingers still resting millimeters from her cheek were bristling with the friction, the need to feel her beneath them. They pulled me in again. "Maybe she wasn't casting them for her... Maybe they were for you..."