Chapter 36 – Aurora #2
“Match me,” he says. “In.” He breathes deep through his nose, belly first. He waits, eyes steady on mine. “Out.” He doesn’t blink. “Again.”
My lungs hitch and refuse dignity. Panic rides you like a thief; it believes it owns your breath. I follow his anyway, clumsy, a quarter beat behind. My fingers twitch against him because I’m counting, and counting gives me something to do that isn’t reliving.
“In.” His hand on mine warms with his breath. “Out.”
The tunnel at the edges of my vision pulls back a fraction. It’s not gone; it’s just letting the windows exist again. My throat stops strangling me. I realize I’ve made a small sound that probably wasn’t words and he acts like he didn’t hear it.
“You’re not there,” he says, his voice steadying. “You’re here. North studio. Tall windows. Wet garden. Paint on your hands. My shirt.” His mouth flickers, not quite a smile. “You look better in it than I do.”
It’s designed to slide a sliver of relief under the door. I take it in spite of myself. The room shifts one more degree toward current time.
My chest finally obeys the basic instruction to fill and empty without catching fire.
Tears still go without permission. I hate them for a second and then manage not to.
The shame layer starts to lift when he refuses to name it.
I stare at his throat because it makes the counting easier; his pulse doesn’t race to match mine.
Steady. His steadiness makes me angry and then that anger helps, too.
“I hate this,” I say. It comes out raw and small. I sound like the girl who used to throw up in school bathrooms and lie about food poisoning because admitting to panic gets you labeled, and labels get you moved, and moved kids lose what little they have.
“I know,” he answers. He squeezes my hands once, a brief press like shorthand for with you. “It’s a bad trick your body learned to survive. We’ll teach it better ones.”
He says we like he’s not trying to own the problem, like he plans to stand to the side of it with me and kill it without making a circle that only fits one. The part of me that wants to do everything alone hisses; the part of me that wants to stop drowning coughs and drags itself to the surface.
The worst of it passes like storms do: still present in the sky but no longer overhead. I pull back enough to sit on my heels. He follows to keep our eyeline level. There’s paint on his knee; he didn’t notice when he knelt in it. Something about that tugs at me hard.
“I was twelve,” I say, and my voice behaves, if you don’t mind the rasp.
I push my sleeves higher because they keep falling and the motion lets me look at the canvas while I yank the words up.
“They moved me again. They moved all of us like pieces on a board, except sometimes the board was on fire and sometimes the board decided to hide under a bed. That house had a stairwell. Two landings. Window painted shut. I used to sit there because no one looked up if you didn’t make noise. ”
He waits. No interruption, no urging and no mm-hm that people throw in as if your memory is a ride they can push along by jostling it.
“I started drawing on the wall because breathing wasn’t working and pictures sometimes made a room bigger.
I found a roller in the basement. I found paint.
I stole it because the woman who smiled at me in the kitchen that morning wasn’t looking and because I needed a door somewhere in the house and the real ones didn’t open for me. ”
My throat closes for a second at the memory of the first swipe of cream over the grime. I swallow it down.
“I painted. I made a sky so I could stand under something that wasn’t a ceiling. I made a door to a place that wouldn’t hurt. I put a girl in the corner because if I kept her small enough, maybe the men walking through the house would miss her.”
My eyes find the girl on the canvas now without my permission. I still haven’t given her a face.
“And then he came home early,” I say, simple, because the details don’t need to be named for him to know the shape.
“He didn’t like that I touched the wall.
He didn’t like that I had something he hadn’t given me.
He took the roller out of my hands, and he painted over the sky while I watched.
He said—” I stop because suddenly I can hear the exact cadence and I’m not giving the dead version of him space in this room. “It doesn’t matter. It’s gone.”
It isn’t, because my hand just did it again on a morning when my body thought it needed stairs to survive. But it’s gone, because there’s a place in me that locked twelve in a box and put a heavy thing on top.
“I never painted it again.” I wipe at my face with the back of my wrist and smear a grey streak along my cheek that probably looks like I’m trying to war-paint myself and failing. “Until now.”
The room waits. He lets it. When he speaks, his voice has lost some edges I didn’t know were still there.
“Then you paint it here,” he says. “No one will cover it.”
The first emotion to flip in my chest at that sentence is a strange grief. The second is something almost like relief, then anger at relief because I don’t want to need his permission or his protection to paint what is mine. The third is the one that scares me: trust.
He shifts to sit with his back against the wall, like he plans to stay long enough for the floor to mark him.
His knee bumps mine. I lean sideways until my shoulder finds him.
It’s not a calculated movement. It happens because my body decided we’re done arguing with comfort for the next sixty seconds.
He doesn’t make a sound to claim the moment.
His hand rests on the floor near mine, not touching. He is warm.
There is a smear of my paint on his palm.
I look at it until the shaking in me finishes its last small loop and leaves.
It’s my color on his skin. I inhale and don’t see that stairwell for the first time since I walked in here.
North light through big windows. Wet garden outside, leaves shining like they’re brand new.
Oil and solvent and salt on the air. Present.
“You keep saving me,” I say, and as soon as I do, the bell rings in my head—too much, too fast, the kind of sentence that sounds like a leash.
I close my mouth on the apology I was going to offer the room to take it back, because apologizing for needing help is a habit I refuse to feed in front of him.
“Maybe you’re saving me.” He says it as if the words surprise him and he’s decided not to correct them.
It lands in me like heat finding cold. I turn my head to look at him.
He’s staring at the painting, not at me, jaw tight like remembering still costs him interest he can’t refuse to pay.
The pieces of him click in my hands and make a shape I want to keep.
For the first time since I crossed the gate, I realize I’m not just inside Cassian’s world. He is inside mine. The canvas says so. The floor says so. The quiet in my chest says so.
I don’t know what that will cost yet. I just know I’ll pay it on my terms.