Derek shook his head. “No. Fuck, I’m sorry, I’m super not okay. I can’t…we’re stuck, and I feel like I’m about to lose my goddamn mind and I don’t…”
The stranger interrupted him with an impatient noise, pulled the phone away for a second, and he could hear the faint sound of the default iPhone keyboard clicking as the guy typed. After what felt like a short forever, the phone returned.
Sorry, can’t understand. Deaf. I’m Basil. Please type. Help you, OK?
Derek stared at the words, trying to make them make sense in his scrambled-eggs processing, but he couldn’t seem to figure out what to do next. His hands stayed pressed against the window, and his breathing got tighter. Squeezing his eyes shut, he felt an all-too familiar wave of dizziness and the room felt tilted.
Then, just when he thought he would lose all sense of reason, a hand pressed itself to his sternum. He was gently turned from the window, and the man—Basil—took his right hand and laid it on his sternum. Derek couldn’t begin to understand, but after a beat, he felt the guy’s chest rising and falling with a slow, steady breath. Basil was counting off a rhythm with a tap on his forearm.
One. Two. Three.
One. Two. Three.
Derek let himself release the air in his lungs, drew in another when Basil’s chest expanded, then held it for one, two, three. He released it the same time as the stranger in front of him—the man he’d never met before, but who was somehow keeping him from falling apart.
One. Two. Three.
His head began to clear, bit by bit, and the room began to still. He was hit by a sudden wave of humiliation at the way he’d just fallen apart. He was still trapped, the electricity was still out, and the storm was still raging, but he was calming down and reality began to set in.
“Shit,” he said aloud, “I’m so sorry.” Then he stopped, remembering what the guy had typed on his phone. In the very faint glow of the phone, he could make out the guy’s frown of confusion.
There was another moment he could see Basil typing, then he handed the phone back to Derek and took a step back.
Panic attack? I have before. Your name what?
Derek frowned at the wording and deeply wished he had bothered to learn more sign. He knew a handful of words, all of them baby related since Antonio and Katherine had been taking beginner’s classes once their daughter had been diagnosed with hearing loss. The entire crew knew enough to make Jasmine laugh and understand when she wanted her bottle or her parents, or a cookie. But that was about it. Tony and Kat had been on them about starting up in the beginner’s ASL, but all of them had been dragging ass, which was now coming back to bite him.
At a loss for any other way to respond, he tapped the return button a few times, then typed his response.
My name’s Derek. I’m claustrophobic and being in a closed space unexpected gives me panic attacks. I’m really sorry if I freaked you out.
He handed the phone back, watching Basil’s expression soften a little as he read the message. When he looked up, he waved off Derek’s apology, then pointed to the ground near the door and made a sign Derek did recognize. ‘Sit.’ When Derek nodded and moved to sit, Basil looked surprised. In the light of the phone, he saw Basil make a series of signs, but only recognized two. ‘Sign, you?’
Derek made grabby hands for the phone. My boss’ baby girl has hearing loss and I know a few words, but not a lot. When he handed the phone back for Basil to read, he demonstrated. ‘Milk, cookie, mom, dad, sit, no.’
At the last one, Basil laughed, a low sound, coming straight from his chest which Derek found fitting for some reason. He grinned back, hating that he couldn’t see the guy properly, but it was still comforting to have him close by. The fact that he was trapped in a closed space was awful, but not being alone was helping. The storm was still raging outside, with no signs of slowing, but they couldn’t be trapped forever.
At some point, tomorrow morning, the bank would open. Orsecurity would come by and see them. Something. Hell, he could use Basil’s phone to call the cops if it got dire. For now, he was safe. He was drying, and the air was still warm, and nothing in there could kill him.
Derek’s thoughts were interrupted when Basil made an inquiring noise, then touched his arm, then handed the phone over.
Tattoo? What meaning?
Derek glanced down at his left arm, curled over both crooked knees, which he’d drawn to his chest as a way of comforting himself. He was asked that question a lot, and the funny thing was, there wasn’t some deep meaning behind most of his ink. They were a flood of images he just liked, things he saw and wanted on his body in a permanent way. Some of them were cover-ups from younger days of bad line work and piss-poor shading and a few stick-and-pokes. Some of them were new and still bright, and some had faded into something soft and quiet.
Their real meaning was rebellion. Was taking charge of his own body after having spent years and years taking abuse from the people who were supposed to love him. And his twin brother, Sage, had grown up the sons of a military-rigid politician whose idea of spare the rod meant literally taking a rod to them any time they stepped out of line. He didn’t like closed spaces because he’d spent the majority of his formative years being locked in a tiny shed for hours upon hours until his father felt he had ‘learned his lesson’.
He and his brother dressed in collared shirts and pressed slacks and never had a hair out of place. For all appearances, he’d been a well-dressed, strait-laced boy with high aspirations of a lucrative career, end up as Dr. Osbourne in some field or another. His obedience and clothes hid all manner of his father’s sins, and he didn’t dare step out of line.
Except when he had. Except when he was fifteen and exhausted and ready to break. So, he’d stolen his father’s car and ended uppulled over and detained by the local sheriff who laughed it off as, ‘boys will be boys.’ The sheriff didn’t miss the terrified look on Derek’s face when his father laughed too, with a cruel sort of mirth. It wasn’t until he’d spent thirty-six hours in the shed, no water, no food, that a panicked Sage had disobeyed the rules and broken him out.
The two of them ran that night. They took Sage’s cash savings and they ran, and they didn’t look back. Derek knew his father had called the police, begging to have his boys brought home, but Derek was sure that police chief hadn’t looked for them very hard.
They landed in Oklahoma City and worked as day-laborers to get by. They squatted with a group of run-aways in a surprisingly nice warehouse, and Derek got his first stick-and-poke next to an old camping stove where a boy named Pepper had sanitized his needle over the open flame. It was the only tattoo Derek would never cover up. It was a shitty, off-center hand holding up a middle finger on his right hand’s middle knuckle.
Every bit of ink after that had been a fuck-you to his dad. The day he got the call that his dad was in the hospital—liver failure putting an expiration date on his life and in need of care—he’d gone to visit him in the hospital, then returned to the shop and lay on Antonio’s table and begged him to just make it hurt. He had a crow on the inside of his elbow, filled completely with black, only an eye shaded red staring out with its stark splash of color.
His tattoos were proof he had survived it and moved on. That he’d gone from an abused kid to a tattoo artist and full-time student determined to get his work into galleries and studios and into the hands of people who really and truly understood him.
