“I’ll be back soon,” I promise. I just gotta get somewhere safe. Everything is falling and I have to get safe. Everyone knows you gotta get safe when there are earthquakes. Everyone knows.
“Okay,” he says reluctantly.
I can feel his eyes on my back as I round the side of the house.
BY THE time I hit the front door, I can’t breathe.
It’s odd, this reaction. From a distance, like I’m floating above myself held only by a string, I can see it empirically. Here lies my intelligence. Here, I can scoff at myself for the child I really am inside. So things aren’t going the way I wanted them to. So things aren’t going the way I planned. Do they ever, really? Does anything ever really work out? And this of all things? I magically and without warning decide I’m in love with a man six years my senior when I’m fifteen years old? So what if I’ve thought there was always something there. So what if I just couldn’t give it a name. Bear gave me a way out from my own cowardice, and I ran with it like I was nothing but a child, a kid, incapable of making decisions, incapable of deciding my future for myself. And this is pain? I think this is pain? I survived my mother leaving me when I was five. I survived the death of the woman who filled her place when I was nine. After all of that, after everything I’ve been through, this is what brings me down? This is what knocks me to my knees? I deserve it, then. I deserve every part of it because if I can’t survive this, then I can’t survive anything.
Empirical. Cold. Real. That’s all my mind is. Through the haze and panic, my thoughts are hard. I’m pragmatic. I am logical and I am reasonable. This is nothing. I don’t need this. I don’t want this.
Except I do, my heart whispers. Except I do.
I may be floating and my mind may be running, but it’s my body that can’t breathe. My heart is the tether holding me to myself, and it ignores all reason. It ignores rational thought. It ignores everything but the hurt and the want and the need, because that’s all it knows. Now that I’ve allowed the walls to crumble, allowed myself to feel something, it won’t go back. It won’t fade. It just wants to burn.
It feels like everything is shaking when I hit the stairs, tripping on the first one and then the second. I grab the banister and I think wildly about the first time I saw Dom, standing across the street from me, watching me, his shoelace untied and trailing after him as he followed me down the road as I followed the ants. It was inevitable then, and it’s inevitable now.
The door to the bathroom stands open, and I slide on the tile floor, almost falling. I grip the edges of the bathtub and kick the door shut behind me. Even as it feels like the room starts to collapse, and I close my eyes against the vertigo, all I can see is his smile against her lips, the way his hand went to her hair. All I can see is their mouths together as she sighed. He’s mine! I want to scream greedily. Unfairly. He’s mine and you can’t have him! Because, I know, I understand, that’s how I’ve always thought of him. That’s how I thought he’d always be. Yes, there’s me and Bear. Yeah, there’s me and Otter. But they belong to others. They belong to each other. But him? He belongs to me, and that’s the way I want it. I found him. I brought him home. I kept him. He’s mine. He belongs to no one other than me.
“Ah,” I moan. “In. Just hold it in.”
But I can’t. I can’t catch my breath. With all the strength I have left, I lift myself up and over the bathtub rim and slide down into it, crashing onto the bottom, my shoulder twisting and my head rapping against the hard surface. Cold stars flash across my vision for a brilliant moment, but then they’re gone and all that’s left is my constricted chest in this shaking house.
I curl up my knees to my chest, wrap my arms around my legs, and wait for it to stop.
I DON’T know how long I’ve been in here, but it can’t be more than minutes. My shoulder still smarts and my chest is still tight and I still can’t think clearly. I still can’t think rationally. I can’t stop shaking because I’m cold. My skin feels like ice. My teeth won’t stop chattering.
There’s a knock at the door.
Go away. Go away.
“Tyson? You in there?”
Bear.
I open my mouth to tell him I’m fine, that I’ll be out shortly, but all that comes out is a weird croak. Get it together. Now. This is not you. You are better than this.
I clear my throat. I wrap my arms tighter around me. “Yeah, I’m in here,” I say, my voice high. I cough. “I’ll b-be out in a b-bit.”
Silence.
Then: “What are you doing?”
“I’m in the b-b-bathroom.”
“You sound funny.”
“Thanks. Can you l-leave me alone?” My voice comes out like I’m begging, and I can’t stop it.
“Your voice,” he says.
I wait.
“It’s echoing.”
I say nothing.
“Ty?” He sounds pained. “Are you in the bathtub?”