In through the nose. Four counts. Hold. Seven counts. Out through the mouth. Eight counts. The 4-7-8 pattern that my body recognized at the cellular level because the rhythm had been imprinted during childhood by a woman whose hands had been warmer than these and whose voice had been softer, but whose intention was identical:stay here. Match me. You’re safe. I’m not going anywhere.
I matched him.
Not immediately. The first three cycles were ragged—my lungs fighting the imposed rhythm, the panic’s momentum resisting the deceleration the way a body in motion resisted a change in direction. But by the fourth cycle, the overridewas taking hold. The chest expanding further. The diaphragm engaging. The oxygen reaching the lower lobes where the real work happened, and the carbon dioxide—the accumulated, anxiety-produced excess that had been fueling the spiral—finally finding its exit route through the controlled, metered exhales that Luka’s pattern was dictating.
By the seventh cycle, the world stopped tilting.
By the tenth, my vision cleared.
By the twelfth, the bands around my chest loosened enough that I could feel my heartbeat decelerating from the redline it had been sustaining and settling toward a rate that, while still elevated, was compatible with consciousness and cognitive function and the basic human capacity for embarrassment, which arrived approximately three seconds after the panic receded and hit me with the force of a slap shot to the pride.
I cursed.
“So fucking embarrassing.” The words were ground between my teeth like gravel. My forehead was still pressed against Luka’s—the contact point warm, slicked with the sweat that the panic had produced, carrying both our scents at a concentration that was intimate beyond what either of us would have voluntarily created in a locker room during halftime of a qualifying match. I attempted to rise.
He held me in place.
Not forcefully. With the specific, immovable,you-are-not-done-recovering-and-I-am-the-one-making-that-determinationresistance of a man who understood that the urge to stand was pride, not wellness, and who was not going to permit pride to compromise the recovery he’d just facilitated.
“Just sit for a damn moment.”
I huffed. The sound carrying the specific, cornered,I-hate-that-you’re-rightfrequency that Luka’s directives consistently produced in my respiratory system. “So you can mock me? Fuck that.”
“When have I ever mocked you?”
The question was quiet. Direct. Carrying the weight of years of shared history and a track record that I couldn’t dispute without lying. The answer was: never. Not once. Not during the episodes. Not afterward. Not in the vulnerable, post-crisis, shame-saturated windows where I was at my lowest and most exposed and where a different kind of man would have stored the vulnerability as ammunition for future use. Luka had never deployed it. Never referenced it. Had simply absorbed the knowledge of my weakness and filed it in the same secure, access-restricted archive where he kept Stockholm and the forehead-breathing technique and every other piece of classified information I’d inadvertently granted him.
“Never,” I admitted. The word grudging. Honest. “But that might change today.”
The sentence opened the door that the panic had been guarding.
“Parts of my team clearly hate me.” The words were flat. Exhausted. The post-crisis monotone of a man whose emotional reserves had been spent on the ice and whose verbal output was now operating on fumes. “Five of them just declared it publicly by walking to the other side of a line drawn by a man whose contribution to this roster was throwing games and shopping for Canadian recruitment.”
I stared at the locker room floor. The gray concrete. The scuff marks. The institutional geometry of a surface that held no answers and offered no comfort.
“Everything had to be shit today. We’re losing a qualifying match by three goals and we have one remaining period to prove we can override the deficit against a team that’s been scoring at will because our goaltender wasletting them.” I swallowed. “And weaning off these blockers is driving me fucking mad.”
The last sentence left my mouth before the filter could catch it.
Luka pulled back.
The forehead contact breaking. The separation creating six inches of space between our faces that the steam of our combined breathing occupied like a visible membrane. His green eyes found mine with the sharp, alert,what-did-you-just-sayfocus of a man whose analytical mind had just received an input that required immediate processing.
“You’re weaning off?”
His voice was barely above a whisper. Carrying the genuine, unperformed surprise of a man who had not expected this particular development and whose recalibration of the situation’s parameters was happening in real time behind his green eyes.
I stared back at him. My color was returning—I could feel it, the blood redistributing from the crisis-constricted vessels back toward the surface, the pallor receding as the cardiovascular system resumed normal service after the panic’s interruption. My cheeks warmed. My ears heated. The frosted-pine scent settling from its agitated, blade-sharp peak back toward its resting composition.
I huffed.
“Olive wants me off.”
The nickname landed in the locker room’s fluorescent air with a weight that exceeded its two syllables.Olive. Thename I’d invented to irritate a figure skater who’d irritated me first, the provocation that had calcified into an intimacy, the word I hadn’t spoken to anyone except the woman it belonged to in the years since she’d left my house with her skates on the third shelf and a silence between us that a man named Garrison had engineered with the precision of a demolition expert.
Luka blinked.
Three times. Rapid. The processing blinks of a man whose auditory system had just received a word it hadn’t heard in years and whose brain was verifying that the reception was accurate before assigning the emotional weight the word demanded.
