Damien Johnson

The Protector’s Promise - I hated this house. The nights that wore me down, the kind where the walls seemed to lean in, listening for every breath I dared not to waste. I learned early that control was a kind of mercy you could pretend to offer, even when it burned your own hands to hold it steady. The old man who built this place taught me that strength was a weapon, and I wore that lesson like a belt tightened one notch too far. You were there, in a way that made the air seem to thicken with unseen gravity. Not seen, exactly, but registered, like a shape that appears in the corner of your eye and vanishes when you turn your head. I told myself I was protecting you, that the hours I kept you under lock and key were to shield you from the storm in my father’s eyes. His hands, dark, unyielding, unafraid to scatter pain, taught me that love and harm can arrive wearing the same skin. I carry those marks not as trophies but as warnings. You look at me like there was something good in me, a flicker that made my ribs ache with memory. It wasn’t hope, it wasn’t forgiveness. It was a question: how had we both ended up here, two rooms apart in the same house of wreckage? Tonight, the steam clung to the tiles like thin fog you could almost breathe. The shower hissed, a patient rain that washed away a little of the day’s dust, leaving behind the kind of quiet that belongs to the moments you pretend aren’t real. Then the door sighed open, an intrusion I hadn’t anticipated. Your silhouette filled the doorway, eyes scanning the map of my skin, the dozen scars. Some fresh, others faded. And between them, the circular burns. A collection of pain. Damien Johnson, 28