Lessons in grey shadows.., p.1
Lessons In Grey: Shadows of Sin, page 1
Lessons in Grey
Shadows of Sin
H.G. JOHNSTON
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are fictitious products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or establishments is solely coincidental.
Copyright © 2024 by H.G. Johnston
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any form without permission from the author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. Please do not take part in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.
Cover design by H.G. Johnston
Manufactured in the United States of America
To those of you with fractured souls and cracking hearts.
Your darkest days are terrifying, but don’t count out the seconds of light within the shadows.
Don’t inhale just yet, not until I get to know you a little better before you leave this tired little world.
I will never know you enough.
Lessons in Grey
TRIGGER WARNING
This book is not for those who are triggered easily over topics of depression, self-harm, or suicide. This book is a dark romance, so please consider the warnings carefully before moving forward.
If you are sensitive to any of the following, please do not continue reading.
Self-harm/thoughts of self-harm, suicide, drunk driving incidents, the loss of family, the abuse of stepsiblings, emotional abuse, teacher kink, biting kink, pain kink, unsolicited therapy, alcoholism, explicit sexual scenes.
This book takes a deep dive into the mind of a woman who experiences severe depression, so please tread carefully.
I love you, and you do matter.
Your mental health matters.
Playlist
1. Dark Thoughts – The Funeral Portrait
2. Do it for Me – Rosenfeld
3. Twin Flame – Machine Gun Kelly
4. The Greatest Show – Hugh Jackman and friends
5. Two – Sleeping At Last
6. Born To Love You – LANCO
The Family
We call ourselves The Family.
We each have a part to play but we also do our own thing.
Jack, the Hunter.
Everett, the Heir.
Azrael, the Ghost.
Greyson, the Teacher.
Beckett, the Uncle.
Malachi, our Father.
We have sisters who keep us in line, but their jobs prove to be difficult from time to time as we tend to become…unhinged.
Malachi tries to keep track of us. He gives us jobs to keep us busy, but sometimes a few of us like to go out on our own.
This is my story.
Good evening, I’m Greyson, but she calls me Grey. I want you to lay back like the good little student you are so I can walk you through exactly what I want from you.
That’s my girl.
1
Rags
July 7th, 2021
I took a long drag from my cigarette, leaning back against the damp brick wall of some old gas station in the middle of a city I had been living in for the last three years.
Malachi liked that I had picked a city to settle down in. He didn’t need me traveling like the others to complete his work, there was plenty to be done here.
I had just finished a job, actually. Some gun runner who got too big for his britches and needed to be put down.
I watched as everyone who stopped in for gas took their time walking from the pumps to the front doors, gawking at my car. Had I been some 22-year-old boy with light in his life, I might have gone over there and talked to them.
As it was, I didn’t truly care. A car was a car. Wheels and an engine strapped on by metal to a frame that was meant to draw attention. If only they knew I had won that car off the black market from some gambler in way over his head. He tried to kill me to get it back, so I put a bullet in his head. Some people just couldn’t accept the loss.
I flicked my cigarette to the ground only to light another. We all had our vices.
“Those things could kill you.”
I rolled my eyes as I inhaled the flame, the end coming to life, glowing brighter than the soul residing in my chest. “You’re one of those then,” I said on the exhale.
“How else do you start a conversation with a stranger besides insulting their vice?”
I slid the lighter away and spared the girl a glance as I took another drag.
She was standing feet away, leaning back against the same brick wall that I was against. Fuck, she was a beauty. Inky black hair, falling in thick waves to her waist, wearing a pair of torn-up cut-off dark denim shorts, lace stockings that hugged her thick thighs, an oversized black hoodie with frayed sleeves, the hood hanging onto her head for dear life, strange neon designs covering it, and a pair of dark blue high-top converse. Her skin was the color of porcelain, and as her eyes flicked to mine, I realized that I never truly knew the color green until now.
Big green eyes, impossibly big, surrounded by long dark lashes, her lips painted with a light pink gloss, a bruise on her jaw.
I studied that bruise as I leaned my head back against the wall, pushing back my hair. “Does that mean you don’t believe it’ll kill me?”
She looked unimpressed as she pulled out a sour gummy worm from seemingly nowhere only to slide it over her tongue.
I tracked that movement, my pussy-hungry cock already twitching as she chewed it slowly.
“Some author wrote some character that said something about a metaphor,” she finally said and turned back towards the parking lot.
I couldn’t help but stare at her, absorbing her words as if they were the answer to some cosmic question. “Gummy worms could kill you too,” I finally said, dragging on my cigarette again.
“They wouldn’t dare,” she said on a breath.
She was so sure of it. As if death had no right to control her.
I wondered what she looked like under that oversized hoodie that, had it not been shoved up by the wall, would have covered her shorts completely. “Do I get a name?”
She pulled out another gummy worm, holding it inches from her lips as she considered this seemingly life-altering question. “What is a name but a label given to us by parents who eventually just stop giving a shit?” she asked and slid the worm over her tongue, causing my own mouth to water.
Sour things. That’s why my mouth was watering. Not the fact that I had a sudden desire to replace that candy with my own tongue but because even thinking about sour things made my mouth pool with drool.
My gaze dried as I turned back to the parking lot, watching some guy in his late 50’s admire my black paintjob. “Daddy issues?” They all had daddy issues nowadays. Most women used it to get into lesser man’s pants. I, however, had learned over the years that ‘daddy issues’ didn’t mean what most of us thought we wanted it to mean. And even when it did, most men didn’t know how to deal with it properly. I wasn’t saying that I wasn’t most men, but then again, maybe that’s exactly what I was saying.
“God has fucked me over more times than I can count, but I wouldn’t say he’s the primary cause of my issues. What about you?” she asked, rolling her head against the bricks until her eyes found mine again. It was only for a second before those eyes dropped to my lips. “That car screams ‘mid-life crisis’.”
One corner of my lips flicked up. “I’m 31.”
She rose a brow. “I’ve been having a mid-life crisis since I was 7. Your age means nothing, but your trauma?” She turned back to the parking lot, studying something I couldn’t see.
Curiosity filled me. Curiosity for this creature that appeared out of nowhere saying such tragic things. I wanted to keep her talking, just in case she had any thought of leaving within the next few seconds.
But before I could get another word out, she said, “Tell me something brilliant.”
I closed my mouth, studying her before turning back to my cigarette, inspecting the little lines across the white paper. Something the companies did to prevent it from setting things on fire. It was meant to stop the flame if you stopped dragging. I never tested the theory.
“The universe is filled with echoes,” I finally began, turning back to her. “Echoes upon echoes. Echoes of stories once told, will be told, and some that will never be told. All around us are these echoes. Universes breathing and dying, stars exploding, everything we ever were or could ever be in the infinite forever and yet, here we stand. Two perfect strangers outside a gas station speaking of such insignificant things.”
She finally looked over, her eyes sparking in something that was there and gone before I could truly understand what it had been. “Nothing spoken is insignificant. Words tell a lot about a person. Which ones they choose to speak, how they say it. You spoke of stories; some are written in the space between the letters.”
I was enraptured by her. “What story do my words tell?”
She studied me, my lips, I suppose, my neck. “Do you ever wonder why people have such faith in certain things?” she asked instead. “For instance, one mistake in filling those gas pumps and they could blow up. Boom. The guys who made your car could have missed tightening a certain bolt. It could rattle free while you’re breaking every speed law there is to break, a tire falls off, you hit a berm. Boom.”
Boom.
The only thing I had faith in was my family. My brothers, I would die for them. They would die for me. Malachi, my father, he would burn down the world for us without hesitation, but having a belief like that was hard to find and even harder to hang onto. One word of broken trust and that faith would shatter faster than a glass doll. “Do you have faith in something?”
“Faith is a construct of a mind convinced that it needs people to survive,” she said evenly. “I have no such need.”
Fuck, she sounded just as broken as I felt. “Everyone needs people,” I said, shoving away from the wall, dragging on my cigarette. “Even the loneliest of us need socialization.” Something about her was electric. Sensual. Mysterious. A woman cloaked in darkness, talking to a stranger in the middle of the night, completely alone.
She didn’t care about herself in the slightest. Either that or she had horrifically high confidence in her ability to deflect bullets. This wasn’t a nice gas station. In fact, a lot of drug deals went on at this place in the back parking lot where there were no cameras.
Not to mention that I also had a gun, tucked away out of sight. Without my jacket, it was a little harder to get too, but Hell, I didn’t expect to need it here.
Her destructive mystery only drew me in, my curiosity growing.
She looked over as I stepped up to the curb, taking a few steps in her direction. “I never said we didn’t need socialization, I said I don’t need people. Keep up, Rags.”
My eyes furrowed as they fell down to my clothes. A suit, form-fitted, jacket in my car, tie tucked into the dark red vest. I looked up, ready to make my case only to find her smiling softly, her hopeless eyes taking me in as if I were some poem she wanted so desperately to never understand.
“It’s a metaphor,” she said, sliding another worm over her tongue.
“A metaphor for what?” I would give anything in the world to keep those eyes on me. Anything. I’d give up my gun, my job, the very breath in my lungs.
Fuck, I wanted her to be my new cigarette. I needed her to be my new cigarette.
She shrugged, something dangerous in her smile. “It just is.”
I had known danger my entire life. Even before Beckett had found me on the side of the road, half-dead, running from a place I would never speak of, I had been intimate with danger, but this…this creature of depth and solitude. She was something else. Her danger was venom, and fuck if I didn’t want to be injected with every ounce of it.
I took a long drag off my cigarette and exhaled into the night. “You speak like you’ve seen some things.”
She inhaled deeply. “Don’t look too long there, Rags, you won’t like what you see.”
Was that why she wouldn’t meet my eyes longer than a few seconds. “How long?”
Her eyes flicked to mine before turning back to my car. “Three seconds,” she answered, despite my cryptic question. Could she read my mind? I knew it was impossible, but she seemed…impossible. If anyone in this world could read minds, I wouldn’t put it past this woman.
That was my new goal in life, to hold her eyes more than three seconds. “I’ve seen some shit too,” I told her.
One corner of her perfect lips flicked up in a dead smile. “It’s not a contest. Life is too filled with broken suffering, if we all started comparing our wounds, we might just start falling in love.”
“And what’s so bad about that?”
Her eyes flicked to mine once more. “I don’t do love.”
One.
Two.
Thr—
She turned away, lifting a hand in a half-assed wave. “Goodbye, Rags.”
“You leave me with nothing but a shared conversation, Snowflake?” The name just slid out, but it felt right. She was the rare snowflake you never got a picture of. Fractals of knives and nebulas. She was beautiful, dark, sharp, deadly, and if there was anything in this world that attracted me to it, it was the scent of death.
She chuckled but kept going.
My heart thudded. I wasn’t ready for her to disappear. I wanted to hear more of her strange words. Her broken poems and heartfelt nothings. I needed to hear more of it. I needed more time to figure her out, to get in her head.
I stepped after her. “In a world filled with raining stars, don’t be the ones they wish on.” I wanted to meet her in her broken poetry. I wanted to find her in the trembling notes of cracked organs. She has seared herself into my mind, onto my bones, and she would not get away.
She slowed and glanced back, her eyes finding my lips.
I ran my tongue over it, just to entice her, to tease her, to keep her attention.
She watched that motion until my tongue disappeared again. “I’m not a star, Rags, I’m the ghost of Christmas Death.” She turned back around and disappeared into the night, leaving behind the scent of sour gummy worms and a wicked taste of need in my mouth.
I took another drag on my cigarette and turned towards that brick wall. I wasn’t worried. I would find her, get her name. I needed to know more about her. I needed to know everything about her. I just found my new vice and I wasn’t going to let it go that easily.
I wasn’t like my brothers, I was less unhinged, but less didn’t mean not at all. We each had a bit of psychosis within us, it just took the right person to bring it out, and I think I found mine.
My eyes lifted to the roof of the gas station, and I frowned as I scanned it. God-fucking-dammit. There were no cameras here either!
Fuck!
2
Snowflake
September 1st, 2021
My therapist asked me once why I had such a problem talking to her, to anyone, about the things that are whispering through my head.
After some pushing, I finally sighed and gave her a little shrug. “I don’t know,” I said, “it just feels wrong burdening someone with my problems, my worries, the thoughts that scream, shredding my throat, forcing blood to my stomach just trying to escape. I can’t tell you,” I explained, “I can’t tell anyone. It’s not fair that both of us have to suffer for something I can’t even fully understand.”
She left me with this. “But is it worth it? To allow yourself to suffer in such silence that you force yourself to suffocate on those screams that will never be?”
I didn’t answer her then.
I simply drove home, undressed, and sat at the bottom of my shower, letting the cold water burn my skin.
“Yes,” I had told the void. “Because at least I know that nobody else can hurt because of me. The pain is confined to my skin and my skin alone.”
I can carry the emptiness. I can carry the abyss. I can carry the shattered fractals of a life unlived with me forever, I was strong enough for that, I knew that. What I couldn’t know for sure was that this other person, whoever they were, was strong enough too.
What if my pain and suffering caused them to end? I couldn’t handle that, it would be the straw that inevitably broke the camel’s back.
I strummed the strings of my mother’s old guitar, staring at the lyrics scribbled on the pages of a notebook my twin had made for us a decade ago. This whole singing, composing music bullshit was supposed to be for the both of us. A publisher and a fashion designer, corrupting the world with our thoughts through our very own music.
It didn’t pan out like that.
I was born this way. Broken. Mom once said that God gave me a twin knowing I’d be born missing something vital. Charlie had held those pieces within her. The Joy Gene, I called it. She got extra.
But then she died. And that piece of her, the Joy Gene, she had taken that with her, along with whatever thread we identical twins are born with that connected our souls. Except, when the thread snapped, it didn’t snap in the center like it was supposed to, it snapped out of my own chest.
She didn’t just take the Joy Gene, she took my soul too, leaving me with an empty chest and a fractured mind.
My parents really hit the lotto with that one.
Not only did that driver, that piece of shit drunk driver, not only did he take her away from me, but he had the audacity to take my mom too. Leaving me with the parent who, although he never spoke it, wished to holy Hell that I had been the one to die that day.
A knock sounded at my door, so I trapped the humming strings under a palm. “Come in.”
