You just sit back and smile because it’s all you know to do. Well, at least, it’s the one thing you know how to do really, really well. The one thing that you can always count on to always work no matter what the situation. And it will work this time just like it has the last 6,876 times.
Your smile manipulates him, makes him bend until he almost breaks. It gets him to do things he never thought he’d do. Things that he still swears to the world that he absolutely, positively does not do. Things that he whispers about in the dead of night. Things that are followed by ‘and I swear if you ever tell a soul’…
That smile made you his two-night stand, four-night stand, three-year stand. That smile made you his sometimes-more-often-than-not live-in lover. It made him tell you things he never began to imagine would pass his poison-laced lips. Promises and sentiments filled with words like ‘more’ and ‘stay’ and ‘need’.
That same smile put a hairline crack in his heart when it went away. It started hiding for days and then weeks and finally one day it was gone all together. It faded out of his life when he wasn’t looking.
And he pretended that a smile of that magnitude was not hard to come by. That it was something found on every street corner, like a two-bit violinist playing for pennies. That it most definitely was not something to be cherished and revered and held sacred. Above all, it was not the sort of thing you missed. And yet, he craved it in a way that made him hate happiness.
And while he did in fact miss it when it was gone, though would never admit it, he didn’t realize how much until it came back to him. Until the moment it walked into the room and sat down in front of him and demanded to be let back in to his life. Only then did he realize what missing really was.
And so you’re back and your damn smile too. Flashing your pearly whites and curving up the corners of your perfect, thick, cherry-red lips whenever you need or want anything. And you get exactly what you need and want from him every hour of every day. And you’ve come to discover that all that is in fact is his smile. Open and warm and so painfully real you know it rivals your own.
And best of all it shows you pieces of him that no one else sees. So now you’re even. You and your smiles drowning one another in impossible addiction. And you’ll take it, because there’s nothing else on earth you’d rather be dependant on.
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