Secrets and lies

Henry sits at the foot end of the bed, watching me from the corner of his eye while absently playing with a vintage gold cigarette lighter. His personality dissolves when I write about him, here he seems unreal and without form. Maybe it's because I know so little about him, as little as he knows about me. We only talk about trivialities and other people, never about ourselves or each other.

His mother died in a car accident when he was fifteen, he's only mentioned his father once and he seems to regret that he did. I told him about mine because he wanted to know, it's one of the few things he's ever asked me.

He doesn't know about this blog, if he did he would kill me. As would my mother. I don't use their real names of course, everything is encoded to protect them and myself. I sometimes think about what he would do to me if he found out. It's almost like a drug, the excitement: to leave him with my laptop open, to come back and to find him reading what I've written about him and the second that he looks up and sees me standing by the door, helpless.