Chapter 35
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
TYLER
“Fuck,” I mutter as the muscles in my right arm lock up and I lose my grip on the dumbbell I’ve been using in my very halfhearted attempt at bicep curls. It goes clattering to the padded floor, just narrowly missing my foot.
The sweat currently dripping into my eyes is baffling, considering the fact that even though I’ve been in the gym in my parents’ basement for at least an hour trying to exercise away how much I miss Sophie, all I’ve managed to do is a run on the treadmill that I had to stop after five minutes because my chest was so tight it felt like I couldn’t get a full breath of air, and two sets of bicep curls that felt like I was dragging the dumbbell through mud even though I was only lifting half the weight I normally do.
Bending down, I try to pick up the dumbbell from the floor, but my hand is shaking and so slick with sweat I can’t get a good grip, so it goes crashing right back to the floor.
Everything is fine.
I repeat the words over and over in my head like a prayer, as if I’m asking for it to be true, even knowing it’s the biggest lie I’ve ever told, and I’ve never been much of a liar.
My hands keep shaking, and the raw edge of panic that cuts me off at the knees is somehow both inevitable and surprising.
Fuck. Not now. Not here.
Opening and closing my hands and shifting my weight from one foot from the other, I try to calm down so I can go home and fall apart in the privacy of my house.
But the hitch in my breath when I try to take in air, the way static buzzes in my ears and makes it hard to hear anything except my own panting, and the unrelenting gallop of my heart all tell me I’m not going anywhere and everything is absolutely not fine.
I am not fine.
Bending at the waist with my hands planted on my thighs, I try to force myself to breathe, but with every shuddering inhale, the band around my chest tightens. My vision darkens at the edges, and I slam a hand down on the weight bench in front of me when my legs start to give out.
Kneeling on the padded floor, I bend over until my forehead is on the bench, trying, unsuccessfully, to force air into my lungs.
I rip my hat off my head and toss it to the ground as if that might help me feel less like I’m inhaling through shards of glass, and I wonder dimly if this is how I go.
Having a fucking panic attack in my parents’ gym, covered in sweat from a workout I didn’t even actually do, the woman I love more than two thousand miles away on her birthday and the day before mine.
The birthdays we always spend together.
It’s the thought of the birthday night we’re missing that shoves me off the edge I’ve been riding straight into full-blown panic attack territory.
An oily curl of nausea snakes into my gut, and I grit my teeth against it as I collapse backwards, laying flat on my back, my hands flying up to grip my suddenly pounding head, as if holding on will keep me from exploding apart.
“Tyler.”
My dad’s voice filters into the edges of my consciousness, somehow piercing my spiraling thoughts, but as I fight through my lungs’ partial shutdown, all I can do is lay there, my chest heaving as it searches for air.
“Ty, I need you to listen to my voice right now.” My dad speaks firmly, somehow pulling me up into a sitting position, slotting in behind me and wrapping his arms around my chest. “Breathe with me, okay? Just feel me breathe and do what I do.”
“Can’t,” I manage, my head dropping forward as my dad’s arms tighten across my shuddering chest.
“You can,” he orders, stretching his legs along the outsides of mine. “You’re Tyler Hansley. You can do fucking anything, and right now I need you to breathe. One at a time. Just take it slow.”
With my dad’s chest rising and falling against my back, I feel my heart rate start to slow, the band around my chest easing just enough for me to take one single breath. And then another.
“Good,” my dad says, flattening his palm on my chest. “Do it again.”
We sit like that, my dad behind me with his arms around my body as my heartrate comes all the way down, my breathing returning to something resembling normal.
Sweat slicks my back, and my head pounds with the aftereffects of my panic attack, exhaustion dropping over me like a weighted blanket.
I feel like I could sleep for a year, except I know I can’t because the Sophie-shaped empty space in my bed keeps me from even being able to close my eyes.
The thought of that empty space becoming permanent, of her moving to California and leaving me here, has my breath hitching all over again, my heart slamming against my ribs.
“Nope,” my dad says, swinging around to crouch in front of me, his hands gripping my shoulders. “You stay right here with me. Breathe, Tyler,” he orders. “Just keep breathing.”
I do, and when that second bout of panic passes, I drop my chin to my chest, blowing out a heavy breath. “Shit,” I mutter. “Hate when that happens.”
“How often does that happen?” my dad asks. And when I look up at him, there’s no judgment in his eyes. Only concern and the steady, rock-solid love I grew up with. The only kind I know.
I shrug, swiping a hand down my sweaty face.
“Enough,” I mumble. When my dad says nothing, just watches me with that even, non-judgmental expression of his, suddenly I’m sixteen years old again and confessing to drinking beer with Jack in the Sullivans’ backyard.
“Not all the time. A few times a year maybe. I handle it.”
Mostly.
My dad raises an eyebrow, tipping back to sit on the floor across from me. “Didn’t really seem to me like you had it handled just now. You want to talk about it?”
I didn’t have it handled because Sophie wasn’t here to help me handle it.
There was no hand on my back or finger linked with mine.
No steady brown eyes holding mine, reminding me I’m safe because she’s here.
No text message or familiar face in the stands or the knowledge that I can lean on her, because she’ll hold me up when I feel like I’m about to fall.
This is the moment I realize it’s possible I’ve neglected caring for my own mental health for so long because I’ve been relying on Sophie as a kind of crutch to do it for me and, well, that’s not awesome. I’m pretty sure it’s time I handled my shit. Far past time, probably.
“What’s going on down here?” I hear my mom jog down the basement stairs, and thirty seconds later she appears at the door to the gym, still dressed in her work clothes, bag of peppermint Hershey’s Kisses in one hand.
It may be almost four months post-Christmas, but my mom is weirdly obsessed with that particular seasonal candy, and my dad has some kind of mysterious hookup at Hershey to keep her stocked year-round even though they disappear from stores the second Christmas is over.
My dad grins, popping up from the floor and striding over to slip an arm around my mom’s waist, bending to kiss her.
And not just a little kiss. A full-blown, with tongue, filthy enough they should probably be alone in a dark room kind of kiss.
They’ve been kissing like that for my entire life, so I’m mostly used to it, except now that I know what it feels like to be as obsessed with someone as my dad has always been with my mom, it hits different.
Now, it makes my chest hurt. My arms practically ache to get around my girl.
“Juliette, you know how I get when I see you in your work clothes.”
She rolls her eyes, stroking his cheek with her thumb, a smile playing on her lips. “I know how you get when you see me breathe.” Linking her arm through my dad’s, she turns to me. “So, what are you guys up to down here?”
He guides her over to me, gently pushing her down to sit on a weight bench and then settling back on the floor next to me. “You’re just in time. Tyler was about to tell me why I found him lying on the floor in the middle of a full-blown panic attack.”
“What the fuck, Dad?” I mutter, my brain suddenly engaging, replaying the last fifteen minutes in my head. “And how did you know I was having a panic attack? And what to do to make it stop?”
“He knows because I get them,” my mom says, sliding off the bench and sitting right on the floor in her fancy suit.
“Or, at least, I used to. Not so much anymore.” My parents exchange a look full of meaning I can’t decipher and know isn’t meant for me.
Then she turns to me. “This wasn’t your first one. ”
It’s a statement, not a question, but I answer it anyway.
“It wasn’t.” And then, with the comfort of my parents sitting on either side of me and the gaping hole in my chest caused by Sophie currently being on the other side of the country, the words come pouring out.
“I kind of feel anxious sometimes. Not, like, all the time, but sometimes my brain won’t cooperate with me.
It happens when things don’t go as planned or when I hear a loud noise suddenly and other times too.
I can’t always pinpoint it. The hour or two before games isn’t my best time, and neither is anytime I’m on the field waiting around for a play to start.
When I’m moving, doing, not thinking, I’m fine.
But then when I stop…” I trail off, not knowing how to finish.
My mom squeezes my hand. “When you stop, you spiral.”
I sigh, rolling my head in a circle, trying to loosen my tight neck muscles. “Yeah. That.”
“How have you managed it until now?” she asks.