Page 203 of Breathe Like Hell

My jaw clenched, my fingers curling against the marble, my stomach twisting. The ground seemed to shift beneath me, tipping me that much more off balance until it felt like I was barely clinging to the edge of the world.

Breathe. Fucking breathe.

It’s fine.

You’re fine.

Get it together.

But I couldn’t.

I slid down the cabinets until I was sitting on the floor, head in my hands, my throat closing. I’d tried so hard to tell myself not to want it, and stupidly thought I’d succeeded in crushing my own hopes before they could grow, but I was wrong. Even more wrong now.

But I didn’t have the right to feel upset about her decision because I hadn’t fucking been there.

I didn’t deserve a say. I didn’t deserve anything.

All I knew was that I had abandoned the woman I loved in one of the worst moments of her life, and in doing so, I’d robbed myself of the chance to mourn the child I’d been too frightened to stay for.

Tears stung my eyes and I couldn’t get a full breath in.

I heard footsteps, my head instantly whipping in the direction of the doorway. Mason appeared, then halted, probably shocked to see me sitting on the floor trying not to break down.

“Micah—”

“Stop.” I took his sight, his eyes blank before he got a chance to look at me very well. I didn’t want him to see me like this. His jaw flexed. “I don’t want to talk.”

“I know you⁠—”

“You don’t know shit, Mason,” I said as I walked past him toward the stairs.

“She’s asleep. Don’t go in there,” Mason said over his shoulder, anger clear in his tone, his hands clenched into fists.

“She’s not asleep.”

“She’s trying to be,” he snapped, still not facing me. It wouldn’t have made a difference, though. He wouldn’t have been able to see me if he was. Wouldn’t see the red around my eyes or the blood soaking my sleeves. “And she doesn’t need you right now. She needs to rest. You don’t get to come back whenever you feel like it and start making all the decisions again.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that, because he was right.

“If you want to be helpful, go to the fucking store and get stuff for her,” he added. “Don’t go up there.”

My feet carried me to the door without another word and, for the second time today, I fucking ran.

━━━━━

The week after Dakota’s miscarriage was miserable. It blurred into something I only experienced in sharp fragments, isolated moments lodging themselves into my veins until I bled. She’d eventually gone to Mason’s apartment on that night, and I hadn’t seen her since then.

Faculty meetings about changes for next semester came and went, emails accumulated in my inbox, and meetings over coffee about funding for my lab in the upcoming year somehow reached their conclusions without me remembering half of what I’d said. More than once, someone asked if I was feeling alright. Another colleague commented that I seemed distracted.

I answered each question the same way: with practiced composure and whatever excuse required the fewest words. Something vague and professional, something that didn’t invite further questions. They couldn’t have known I was stuck on a loop replaying that terrible day in my mind, or that no amount of work was enough to drown out the silence waiting for me every time I returned home.

I’d washed the sheets after Dakota left, and sometimes I wished I hadn’t.

But it almost didn’t matter, because no amount of scrubbing would erase the image from my mind. A miracle, reduced to nothing but bloodstains on cotton.

I was sitting on the cliff again now.

I’d come here every day since.