You're both practiced in the art of self-deception. It crept up on him through the pouring of himself into countless characters until the lines between who he is and who he's created became grey. You mastered it over years of creating facades and pushing away emotion in a desperate attempt to defeat the burden that is your empathy.
You both are involved with another. He has his blonde arm candy, and you have your dark play thing. They mean something, but they mean nothing. They're the warmth beside you in your bed and the distraction that helps with your deception. Only sometimes, the distraction isn't enough. Isn't enough in any sense of the word.
The first time you find yourself dialing his number at two am, while your companion sleeps soundly and the space between your legs is throbbing, you aren't sure why, and you sure as hell aren't planning what happens next. But somehow he ends up whispering dirty nothings in your ear while you bite down on your lip to stop your lover waking to the sound of your pleasure and get yourself off with your fingers and the sound of his voice. The first time is not the last.
Sometime over the next few days, when the tension between you is weighing down the air until it threatens to choke you, you'll pull him into the bathroom on the third floor that no one frequents and drop to your knees and return the favour. You'll take pleasure in the fact that he fists his knuckle against his mouth to stop his appreciation being vocalised. It's something of an unspoken pact between the two of you – you stay silent. You don't talk about it. What isn't said out loud can be ignored. An unscripted event can be denied, can be in keeping with the walls you've both built when it comes to each other and the truth. The game of deception can carry on.
You settle into a holding pattern of helping each other to find your breaking point. It's quick and dirty and you know that it's wrong, but it's the most delicious kind.
Your moments together are dreamlike. They feel like snippets of stolen fantasies, something too good to be real, and you suppose that it helps you both quieten your consciences.
So when he's suddenly single and telling you he loves you while you lie on wet grass with a bullet in your heart, the dreamlike quality threatens to break and you can feel your emotions pushing against the floodgates, waiting to come bursting out and drown you. You cling to deception and denial like a lifeline and tell both yourself and him that it never happened. But you must not be as good at it as you once were, because something makes you cut ties with your official boyfriend, who, for the record, didn't seem to mind very much.
The evening when you break down and confess your loneliness, detail how everyone is gone, he presses you to the wall and thrusts inside you in a frenzy and murmers I'm here, I'm here and you both come within minutes. When you wake in the morning, you're alone again, left with a blurred memory of him stumbling out your door by the light of the moon and you aren't certain, but you'd swear the echoes of the words 'just a dream' are still playing on your lips.
You don't get involved together again, not while reality is still a foe that's creeping closer by the day. Not until reality crashes down in the form of anger and death and violence and the realisation that life is too damn short. Not until reality offers itself as a solution rather than a problem. When it does, you go to him. In the pouring rain and bitter wind, you go to him. You greet him with your lips, and that's how he knows. Because, despite your intimate knowledge of each other, you have never kissed. It would have been too close, too soft, and too real. It's how you let him know that this is it. This is real.
In the morning, when you give him his coffee and he says so it wasn't a dream, you smile. You take great pleasure in saying, no. He definitely wasn't dreaming.
Not this time.