“Good.”
There’s a moment of stillness, between breaths.
“The air conditioning.”
“Three.”
A faint hollow click from far away, the ghost of an echo.
“A door,” I say. “Shutting.”
“Four.”
I swallow hard, my mouth suddenly sticking to itself.
“You. Breathing.”
“Good,” he says, and his hands flex around mine, and—it’s not so bad.
“Four things you can feel,” he tells me.
I swallow again and try to breathe and shift gears, like I’m wrenching a massive wheel around to point in the right direction. I can practically hear the screech of metal on metal, gears grinding as the machinery lurches around. Around my chest, a few rubber bands pop off.
“My hand hurts,” I say.
“One.”
“My feet are sweaty.”
“Two.”
“Cold toilet seat.”
“Three.”
I pause. Breathe. That bubbling, graying feeling has receded, and I know what the fourth thing I can feel is but I don’t want to say it, somehow don’t want to acknowledge it for reasons I can’t enumerate so I resist. And resist.
Silas shifts on the floor in front of me, and I feel it in the slight shift in pressure of his thumbs on my skin. A sway. A pull.
“Your hands on mine,” I finally say, and as I do my eyes open and Silas is right there, a foot away and holding my gaze as he kneels on the bathroom floor. His eyes are the clear, deep blue of mountain lakes at sunrise. The churning blue of the sea after a storm.
He nods at me. Holds my gaze. Comforting and unnerving, all at once. I clear my throat, then swallow.
“White towel on the rack behind you,” I say, glancing up at it, moving on to three things I can see without needing to be told. I’ve done this exercise a hundred times, I know how it goes, and I glance around, breathe a little deeper. The cacophony of panic retreats further. “A white shower curtain.”
“Keep going.”
I look at him again, only to find it’s hard to look away.
“Your laugh lines. And freckles,” I finish.
“Now you’re imagining things,” he says, but the laugh lines deepen even as he says it.
“Have you looked in a mirror?”
“The freckles at least,” he admits, the lines still there, the smile still there. “My sister’s always after me about sun damage.”
“You do. Almost,” I say, and I can mostly breathe again and I’m mostly not shaking, but the panic attack loosened something in my brain, the same way it always does and I’m saying things I never would otherwise. Call it a temporary lack of oxygen. Call it the sickly euphoria of having made it through another one.