Another door movement that is quicker without hesitation, with a stride that carries weight and decision. Before he speaks, I know who it is because the air notices him the way I do: more oxygen, less noise.
“Aurora.” Cassian’s voice is low and even, a steady line drawn under the chaos. “I’m here.”
I can’t look up yet. If I look up I might break the wrong way. My hands are still at my temples, paint tacky against skin. The floor blurs and swims. He kneels; I feel the shift in the air, the heat of him lowering into my line, the particular cedar on his skin that my stupid brain has already filed underhomeand I refuse to analyze.
“Leave us,” he says, quietly enough that Navarro takes the instruction as a kindness, not a command. The door clicks once more and then the room gives us only the hum of the building and the sound of my own wreckage.
He doesn’t touch me first. He waits for the refusal in me to snap and spend itself on nothing. I learned a thousand versions of unwanted hands. Recognition is the difference in me now. I can feel the gap between whoever I was then and the man who is kneeling on my floor now, but panic is greedy, and it wants to eat every distinction.
“Aurora.” His voice is closer now. “Look at me.”
I shake my head. His tone shifts just enough to cut through the cotton in my ears.
“Rory.” He almost never calls me that. It goes through me like a door opening.
I lift my head because he asked for me and I hate that he knows how to call me back and I am grateful he knows how to call me back and I can hold both. My eyes find his without having to search. He’s close enough that I can count the darker ring of color around his irises. His hands are braced on his thighs, not on me.
“Good,” he says. He takes my paint-streaked hands gently and pulls them off my face. He doesn’t flinch at the mess. He sets both palms flat against his chest under his own hand, presses methere like he’s teaching me a new instrument. His heart is solid and slow. “Feel this.”
I nod, a jerk that feels like a yes drawn with the wrong pen.
“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 youlabeled, 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 forwith you. “It’s a bad trick your body learned to survive. We’ll teach it better ones.”
He sayswelike 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 nomm-hmthat 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.
