Pacifier

🍎Camille🥀

The wake was strange. Strange because although most around us were celebrating, trying as best they could to be hopeful and happy, to remember Jake well, not everybody was.

Larry and Van had been at eachothers throats all evening, subtle as they tried to be and though they went unnoticed by most, it was impossible for their glowering eyes, their shadowy discussions to go missed by me.

I could feel the static between them, the quiet hostility, it flickered between them, occasionally it singed the edge of a word and the other looked wounded, but wounded with frustration and scorn not hurt. Not loss. Not the things they should have been wounded with today.

"Kita and Blakes," i nodded across the room, my voice quiet and low, only smirking slightly as i leant back against Johnny, my head resting against his chest as he leant back against the wall, one arm across my collar bones, hand curved round my shoulder, the other holding a glass of whiskey to his lips.

"Fuckin hell.." he mumbled into his glass, "remember when that was the drama of the day..."

"I know" I smirked, watching the two across the room. The unlikely couple. The whore and the royalty. It was a secret actually, nobody knew. At least that was what they thought and maybe for the most part it was true.

"Course you knew doll," he chuckled his voice sweet and low and tickling my ear as he bowed his head to talk only to me, "you're the eyes an ears of this place, sometimes think there's nothin you don't see" his lips by my ear brushed over my skin but his words felt leading. Like they were leading to something. A question perhaps, an expectation. Suspicion. More than anything they felt suspicious, suspicious of me.

"Oh aye," i mocked his voice, the thicker accent he spoke in.

"I wasn't being sarcastic milly," he smirked, his voice lower again, the slight threat sending a shiver through me which was hard to conceal him with my body pressed so closely to his. "forgive me for suggesting such a treasonous notion, but some might say you hold even more power than Van Mccann with all them secrets locked up inside your pretty little head," he was smirking still, light dancing in his eyes when i turned to check, he was only teasing, his eyes not on me but on the secretive couple the other side of the room. They were talking by the door, thinking that they were going unnoticed but they weren't.

And Johnny wasn't really teasing.

"If you've got something you'd like to ask me doll..." I smirked, dragging the word out to mock him as I twisted my neck to look up at him with a teasing kind of light dancing in my own eyes.

"Van calls more meetings with you than he does me an Blakes these days.." he carried on and though I knew exactly where this was going i was loathe to let it go there.

"That's because he already knows the advice you'd give him," i said picking my words carefully, knowing I was walking a very fine line between betraying Van and betraying my John, "and he's not ready to hear it."

"He doesn't tell us anything anymore Milly but you.."

"Don't go mistaking talking for telling John," i said leaning my head back into the crook of his next, the feeling of his thumb brushing over my bare shoulder a comfort though I knew it was supposed to be a temptation. Tell him everything and I'd get my reward.

But I had nothing to tell him.

"Van doesn't talk to me about the Reids," i said taking his hand in mine and holding his palm to my mouth to place a kiss, a promise to tell him the truth.

"I know that love im not daft," he smirked, "he talks to you about Isabelle," he said, catching me out so that my heart stopped for a moment and my lips froze against his skin.
"He's not the only one keeping secrets from me now is he Milly," he said, his voice too honest, almost wounded for me to bare it but i knew that I must.