Two.
Three.
Four.
By five, I can breathe a small breath.
By six, I take a large one.
By seven, I’m able to move my head, to look and see who is with me.
Dare stands in front of me, concern swimming in his dark eyes, his lithe form hovering by my car. It’s like he’s afraid to approach me, afraid that I’m a wild animal poised to attack.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him, my lungs still feeling fluttery. “I don’t know what happened.”
He takes a step, his eyes wary and concerned. “Are you okay?”
Am I?
I look around, at my car, at my open car door, at the way I just melted down in the street. But I nod, because I can’t do anything else.
“Yeah. I just… there was something in the road. I almost hit it. I think it might’ve been a kitten. I might’ve even hit it. It happened so fast, I don’t know.”
I bend over again, and Dare pulls me up.
“Stand up,” he reminds me. “It opens your diaphragm up.”
Right. Because I’m melting down and can’t breathe. For a minute, I decide this must be how Finn feels all the time. So crazy, so helpless.
“I’m sorry,” I mumble, my hand reaching back for my car fender to lean on. Dare cocks his head, so calm in the face of my panic.
“For what?”
“For falling apart,” I whisper. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
He’s unfazed. “Tell me what happened,” he suggests softly, and his hand is on my back now, rubbing lightly between my shoulder blades, reminding me to breathe.
“I told you... I was driving down the mountain and swerved because of a cat. I… don’t know why I panicked.”
“Maybe because your mom just died in a car crash?” Dare prompts gently, more gently than I would’ve ever guessed he could. “Maybe it scared you?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “I just kept hearing her scream. She… I was on the phone with her when she died.”
I whisper that like a confession, because I know I’m the reason she’s dead. Dare doesn’t lower his gaze and once again, he doesn’t judge.
“That’s terrible.”
I nod. “Yeah.”
I realize suddenly that the roar I’d heard a minute ago wasn’t my car door, of course. It was Dare’s motorcycle. “Were you going to town?” I ask him half politely, half truly curious, but mostly just to change the subject.
He shakes his head. “No. I was coming back. I returned a library book.”
I’m not sure what I’m more focused on, the fact that he reads, or the fact that he was coming up the hill and I was going down, just like the night mom died.
She was coming up, someone else was going down.
“We could’ve hit,” I realize, a chill running down my spine.