“Holding space?”
“Give me a few minutes. I’ll show you.” Chris pushes some papers around on his cluttered desk until he finds a set of earphones to put on. He stays fixed on the screen as he starts scrolling through options, only occasionally pausing to look out the small basement-level window behind me.
I lean back on my hands and wait. Save for the hint of sound that comes from the earphones that Chris has in, it is quiet. He swivels lazily back and forth in the chair, and I like that he is so engaged in whatever music he is listening to because it allows me to look at him closely. To take him in. I try not to squirm. He hasn’t shaved in a few days, and it’s a good look for him. Forme. Since he keeps brushing hair from his face, he could probably stand to get a haircut, but I like his gently scruffy look. And the way his hair falls against the back of his neck… God, I find the tanned skin between his shirt and his hair almost intoxicating. What would it be like to have that skin under my lips, to slowly inch my mouth across his shoulders, to touch him lightly with my tongue…
I’ve gone insane. At least I am not drooling, though. Or moaning.
“The music has to be the background, the mood. Once you’re in that safe place, that holding place, then you run, push your body. You need songs with meaning, and mood, and heart. Not this pop crap.”
He has brought me back to the real world, and I shake my head. “I don’t know. I don’t like meaning. Or mood or heart.”
Chris kneels in front of me as he takes one earbud out and moves his hand to my ear. I place my hand under his to adjust the fit in my ear, and he pushes back my hair for me. His hand stays on the side of my head as he tilts my face so that I am looking into his eyes. “You need songs that make you feel. Some make you strong, some make you weak. Some build determination, some tear you apart. But you need all of those.” Music begins to play. Slow music. Soft and rhythmic, layered. “Run through the pain.”
I shake my head again and look past him. “No.” I want to concentrate on the tan on the back of his neck instead.
He nods. “Yes. Run through it, feel it, let it happen.”
“No,” I say more adamantly. “I do that too much already.”
“I don’t think you do. I think that you dwell on parts of things and then brush them away. Stop fighting it.”
“How do you know that?” Damn it. I can feel that familiar sting in my eyes again. It’s so easy for my emotions to be played with, flipping erratically from one extreme to the next. Lust, then anger, then pain… It is never ending.
And Chris seems to make the extremes much worse. So why did I come to his room?
“You scream it in everything you do. You’re holding on to what happened because you think that’s all you have.”
“It is all I have.”
“Find more.”
I shake my head. I don’t know how to do this.
“Blythe.” Chris looks around the room as if trying to find a way to convince me. He thinks for a minute. “Your parents died. Your world fell apart.”
I nod.
He puts his hand on my cheek. “You were left drowning.”
I nod again.
“And you’re struggling to breathe.”
I am. It’s a constant struggle to stay near the surface. I have just enough air to stop me from totally going under, but not enough to thrive.
“So do it. Breathe. Just breathe.” He turns up the volume and strokes my hair.
I want to tell him that the pain of the last four years has taken a toll, and that I’m not sure I can breathe on my own.
“You have the here and now,” Chris says. “You have a future. Deal with the past so you can stop looking back. It’s just pain.”
I sigh heavily and look at him again. “It’s just pain,” I repeat.
“Yes.” He tucks my hair back again, and I catch my breath as heat sears through my body. His touch is incomparable to anything that I have felt before, and this mix of my personal anguish with the intensity of his touch is messing with my head. “Yes, Blythe.”
“Just breathe?” I manage with a laugh.
“Pretty much.”
