BreatheFight Me
Gisele
There are moments that split a story clean in two. Before you say it. After you say it. Before you touch. After you can’t stop. Around here, we pretend those moments sneak up on you. They don’t. You feel them coming from a mile away. And you step into them anyway.
Playlist: “Take Me to Church” by Hozier
The next day, I’m waiting for him when he comes out of the locker room.
Bennett pushes through the door and stops cold when he sees me. His hair is damp from a shower, his gear bag slung over one shoulder. He looks better than he did a few days ago—the haircut helps, obviously—but there’s an intensity in his eyes that tells me the improvement is surface-level.
Underneath, he’s still spinning. I know the signs now. The way his shoulders climb toward his ears. The hand twitching toward his hair. The carefully blank expression that means he’s screaming on the inside.
“Following me now?”
“Intercepting.” I fall into step beside him as he starts walking toward the parking lot. “There’s a difference.”
“Seems like the same thing from where I’m standing.”
“Then maybe you should work on your perspective.” I have to take two steps for every one of his, but I’ve been doing that since we were fifteen and I’m used to it. “Shep says practice went well. Once is luck. Twice is skill.”
“Shep needs to learn to mind his own business.”
“Shep will never learn to mind his own business. That’s kind of his whole brand.” I catch his arm, pull him to a stop in the corridor. “Hey. Look at me.”
He doesn’t want to. I can see the resistance in every line of his body—the tension in his shoulders, the way his jaw is set, the deliberate avoidance of eye contact. But eventually he turns, meets my gaze.
There it is. The spiral. The one that starts small—a thought, a worry—and feeds on itself until he’s drowning in his own head. I’ve watched it happen enough times to recognize the early stages. Not this time.
“Come with me,” I say.
“I have to—”
“Whatever you have to do can wait twenty minutes.” I don’t let go of his arm. “You’re about to retreat into control mode, and I’m not letting that happen. Not today.”
“You can’t just—”
“I can. I am. Let’s go.”
I lead him back into the rink, through a side door I shouldn’t have access to but do because I know which locks haven’t been changed in twenty years because I may or may not have made out with Tommy Richardson in here when I was sixteen.
The building is mostly empty now—practice ended half an hour ago, and the staff won’t start prepping for tomorrow’s game until evening.
The room I’m looking for is small, probably used for equipment storage at some point. Now it’s just empty space with padded mats on the floor and fluorescent lights that flicker when you first turn them on. Private. Quiet. No witnesses.
The thought should feel practical. It doesn’t.
“What is this?”
“This is where we’re going to work on your breathing.”
Bennett stares at me like I’ve suggested we rob a bank. “My breathing.”
“Your breathing.” I close the door behind us. “Sit.”
“Gisele—”
“Sit.”
He sits. On the mat, legs crossed, looking like a sullen teenager who’s been sent to the principal’s office.
I settle across from him, close enough that our knees almost touch.
The contact is barely there—denim against denim—but electricity crackles.
I’ve been touching him professionally for days now. This is different.
“Breathing exercises,” I say, “are one of the most effective ways to interrupt a stress response. When your body is flooding with cortisol and adrenaline, the fastest way to bring yourself back down is to consciously slow your breath.”
“I know what breathing exercises are.”
“Do you do them?”
Silence.
“That’s what I thought.” I adjust my position, settle my hands on my knees. “We’re going to start simple. Inhale for four counts. Hold for four counts. Exhale for four counts. Repeat.”
“This is ridiculous.”
“Most things worth doing feel ridiculous at first.” I meet his eyes. “You sat in the middle of a street because you couldn’t process your emotions. I’m teaching you a tool that might prevent that from happening again. Would you prefer I let you spiral in private?”
His jaw tightens. “Fine.”
“Good. Close your eyes.”
“Why?”
“Because looking at me is distracting you from focusing inward.” I raise an eyebrow. “Unless you’d prefer to stare at the wall?”
His eyes stay closed this time, though the tension in his face doesn’t ease.
We run through several cycles. Each repetition loosens something in him. His shoulders drop. His jaw softens.
“Good,” I say. “You’re doing good.”
“It doesn’t feel like anything’s happening.”
“It doesn’t have to feel dramatic to be working.” I lean closer, close enough that I can see the individual lashes resting against his cheeks. “Sometimes healing is boring. Sometimes it’s just sitting in a room breathing when you’d rather be doing literally anything else.”
His eyes open faster than I expected, and the look he gives me is so raw it steals my own breath.
“I’d rather be here,” he says quietly. “With you. Even if it’s boring.”
I freeze. That was not in the script.
The impact of his gaze at this proximity is something I’m not prepared for. This close, I can see the flecks of gold in the brown, the exhaustion he’s been hiding, the way his pupils dilate as he registers how near I am.
I’ve been managing proximity for days—standing between his legs while cutting his hair, close enough to smell his shampoo, close enough to feel his breath. I thought I had it under control.
I was wrong.
“You’re very close,” he says.
“I’m demonstrating.” The lie is paper-thin. “Professional proximity. Matching breath is a technique for co-regulation. When one person is calm, the other person’s nervous system starts to mirror that calmness. It works better with proximity.”
“Is that why your breathing just got faster?”
Damn him. He noticed. Of course he noticed. The man who can’t name his own feelings apparently has no trouble reading mine.
“Close your eyes,” I say instead of answering. “Again.”
He doesn’t close them. He just keeps looking at me with that intensity that makes me want to crawl out of my skin and lean in at the same time.
“Bennett.”
“Your turn,” he says quietly.
“My turn for what?”
“To close your eyes.” There’s something different in his voice now. Lower. More measured. “Match breathing works both ways, right?”
I should say no. Should maintain the professional boundary I’ve been pretending exists, should redirect this back to the exercise and the purpose and the very reasonable therapeutic framework I’ve constructed to justify spending all this time in his space.
I close my eyes.
“Inhale,” he says.
His voice is right there, close enough that I can feel the warmth of his breath. I inhale, and my lungs fill with the scent of him—clean soap, woodsy notes, the slight chemical edge of the rink.
I want to memorize it. Want to bottle it and keep it and pull it out on days when he’s not close enough to breathe in.
The thought terrifies me.
“Hold.”
The world narrows to this moment. The darkness behind my eyelids. The sound of his breathing synchronized with mine. The electricity crackling in the inches between us.
“Exhale.”
I release the breath slowly, and something shifts. The air changes. The space between us gets smaller without either of us moving.
“Again,” he says.
I inhale. His hand touches my knee—just a brush, barely there—and my breath hitches.
“That’s not four counts.”
“I know.”
“You’re supposed to be demonstrating calm.”
“I know.”
His hand settles more firmly, thumb tracing a small circle against my jeans.
The touch is barely anything—a whisper of contact through denim—but it sends heat cascading through my entire body.
I’ve imagined him touching me. Late at night, when I couldn’t sleep, when waiting felt like forever—I let myself imagine.
The reality is so much better it hurts.
“Bennett.” My voice is a wreck. “What are you doing?”
“I don’t know.” He sounds effected, too. “I think I’m failing the breathing exercise.”
I open my eyes.
He’s right there. Close enough that I can see the way his pulse hammers at his throat. Close enough that I can watch his pupils blow wide as he looks at me.
“This is a bad idea,” I whisper.
“Probably.”
“It’s going to complicate everything.”
“Definitely.”
“I’m supposed to be helping you process emotions, not—”
His hand comes up to cup my jaw, and the words die in my throat.
“Gisele.” His thumb traces along my cheekbone. “Stop talking.”
“I can’t just—”
He kisses me. Like he’s been holding back for years. Like letting go might ruin him.
The first touch of his mouth is tentative—a question more than a statement. But when I don’t pull back, when my hand fists in the front of his shirt and pulls him closer, the tentativeness evaporates.
All of it combusts in the space between one breath and the next. And I let it burn.
He kisses the way he does everything else—focused, intense, completely committed. His hand slides into my hair, tilting my head for better access. His other arm wraps around my waist, pulling me closer until I’m practically in his lap.
I make a sound against his mouth—an embarrassingly needy one—and feel him smile. I should be mortified. Instead, I chase his mouth when he pulls back to grin, and that makes him laugh—low and rough and so unlike his usual controlled everything that I want to swallow the sound whole.
“That’s not in the breathing exercise,” he murmurs against my lips.
“Shut up.”
I kiss him harder, and he lets me, lets me take control for a moment before he reclaims it, shifting us so I’m pressed back against the mat with him bracing himself above me.
“We should stop,” he says, even as his mouth traces down my jaw to my neck.
“Probably.”
“This is going to make everything complicated.”
“Definitely.” I arch into him as he finds a particularly sensitive spot. “Do you actually want to stop?”