Page 102 of Breathe Like Hell

After a few minutes, I realized she’d fallen asleep.

━━━━━

The morning was cold, rain already pelting the windows when I cracked my eyes open. Dakota was still sleeping next to me, which was good. She usually didn’t get enough sleep.

My mind had been running half the night, thoughts branching off each other into intricate webs while I watched Dakota dreaming. Deer and forests.

Listening to Dakota talk about her own death last night was surreal for many reasons, one of those being the simple truth of it. She was a human and she was going to die; that was something she’d always known in the back of her head. An inevitability. There would be an end to her life eventually.

I thought of her words, You don’t get it because you’re not going to die.

But she didn’t know how sometimes I wished for that, too. Wished for the ability to die.

There was no easy way out for me. There was no number of pills I could swallow to make everything stop. I couldn’t put a barrel in my mouth and pull the trigger without a chance to take it back once my finger curled. I couldn’t jump off a building and be crushed into the pavement, my life stolen in that instant. I would live through all of that, only in excruciating pain for the amount of time it took my body to heal the wounds.

The only way for me to die was by asphyxiation.

And that would take at least twenty one minutes and fifty nine seconds.

It was the longest I’d ever held my breath underwater, back when I still lived in Heaven.

I didn’t like thinking about the memory now, because it represented the start of the very thing that broke me in the end. It represented the start of two souls binding together. Mine and Mason’s.

The first moment where I could see we would become one single thing. No longer two souls, but one. One knotted rope.

And I couldn’t even describe how excruciating it was to eventually rip that rope apart, how it felt like I’d lost every important part of myself when I left him, how I’d truly believed I’d never be whole again. I still believed that, and he didn’t have a clue.

When things first started with Mason, all we were doing was hooking up. It was supposed to be meaningless. I knew I was giving him a different experience since he’d never been with a man prior, and I’d been accepting of the fact that this was all I’d ever be. A new experience.

But he was Thrausian. I knew that from the start.

It was part of the reason I was drawn to him, among many others.

It intrigued me. I wanted to…help him.

Help wasn’t really the right word, though.

I wanted to show him that his aspect wouldn’t be a hindrance with me. I wanted to show him there were angels who’d rather appreciate everything about who he was rather than hate him for it. I wanted to support him without changing him.

Unfortunately, not all my initial desires translated correctly into my actions.

I’d seen him hold his breath underwater a few times, but I knew he couldn’t feel his limit. He wouldn’t know how long he could stay submerged without dying, so I’d done it myself. I submerged myself in a pool of black water and counted the numbers until I felt like my lungs were about to explode, then I wrote it on a scrap of paper and gave it to him.

21:59

That was when things changed.

It was the perhaps the single most important moment of my life, even if I hadn’t known it at the time.

Dakota stirred, drawing my attention back to the present.

I was grateful for it.

She rolled over and peered up at me, looking like herself again in the soft morning light. There was no longer vacancy in her stare or transparency in her irises. The amount of heartbreak in her brain was manageable for now. I wanted to ask what Mason had done to her last night, but I didn’t.

“I’m hungry,” she said.

I laughed. “Okay. We can get breakfast.”