Page 315 of Breathe Like Hell

Long enough to feel my own grief and persistent sadness and hopeful love for this creature that didn’t know me, but not long enough to suffocate in all of it.

And when she finally found her way back into the forest, she wasn’t running this time. Wasn’t darting away from danger, sprinting with her fear, anxiety firing in her brain.

She was simply returning to her home. The shadows between the trees.

The safety of darkness.

Once she was gone, I turned, too. A soft shiver moved up my spine like careful fingertips, a breath of winter air spilling from my neon-sustained lungs. My fingers grasped the doorknob and twisted it slowly, until the latch slid free. Both Micah and Mason would be waiting for me when I went inside, my vast forest and my endless ocean, shadowed in their own ways, pulling me to themselves like infinite magnets.

One more inhale.

One more exhale.

Then I pushed the door open.

And I returned to my own safety, my own darkness.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT

MICAH

I got my lab back without much trouble. My office and my class, too. I’d be teaching again starting spring semester. It seemed like they’d temporarily given both Unit Ops sections to the other person who taught it, but with me back, the sections could be split again. I was grateful they hadn’t finalized anything with hiring a new professor.

I used to think I wouldn’t need this job once I had other things in my life. Chemical engineering had been nothing but a distraction from the pain of losing Mason, and eventually a vessel through which I was lucky enough to meet Dakota. It was supposed to be an objective I could have to fill my endless amount of time.

But now, even with Dakota and Mason back in my life, I still wanted to be here at Blackpine. Teaching. Researching. Being caught up in all of it.

The mathematics had become so much more beautiful and the science so much more profound now that it’d brought me to Dakota—now that I could witness all of it through her eyes. Her blue pen strokes, her soft voice, her beautiful brain. I loved teaching her more than I ever enjoyed learning it myself. It actually felt meaningful this way.

For years, engineering had worked fine as a distraction, as a shallow purpose for my life, but it became something else once I met her. At first, it was a way I could categorically improve her life, by giving her more lab experience for her resume, and by helping increase her confidence in herself. But then it became more. A passion I had because I lived through her.

She’d encouraged me to continue the research I’d been doing all the way back when I got my doctorate, the process I’d written about for my dissertation. Kinetics and Mechanisms of Neon Isotope Separation in Low-Temperature Catalytic Systems. My main focus had to remain on sustainability—that’s what my funding was actually for—but I spent my spare time working on my personal research.

With very little effort, I’d been able to convince the university to give Dakota a permanent role with me in the lab. A role which did pay quite a bit more than minimum wage. My grad student, Nick, had graduated at the same time Dakota did, and he wasn’t at Blackpine at all anymore. I wished I’d been able to see his graduation, too.

Dakota and I been working our way through any other research we could find on similar neon separation processes—not much—going back through my own research, and of course fucking around with equipment in the lab.

Against the far wall, to the side of the stainless-steel distillation column I’d spent years refining as part of my main research, another network of polished tubing wound between insulated vessels. The vessels were now coated with a thin layer of frost. Weeks of redesigning my dissertation work had ended in something far less elegant than I’d imagined in graduate school—a compact enrichment system meant for no one but us. It separated, concentrated, and stored trace atmospheric neon in its reservoir, which was no bigger than a scuba tank.

The reservoir was most of the way full now, but it’d taken several weeks to get there.

It was absurdly inefficient. Entirely impractical. Perfect.

A passion project.

Because I had passions now, apparently.

I was also irrevocably in love with two people.

None of us were entirely healed, but we had time for all that. There was too much pain in our past to erase it so simply. I knew the hard times would be back, knew we’d be tested, knew things might even fall apart again. But the difference this time was that we’d never let them stay that way.

That was because of Dakota.

I took no credit for this, and neither did Mason.

She was the sole reason we’d been reunited, and the sole reason we were able to love again now. This brave, broken girl, showing both of us how to breathe again, despite her own pain. She was a miracle.

I often found her sleeping in my office, waiting for me to finish lecture. Seeing her like that still took my breath away. Like I’d somehow gotten lucky enough to be entrusted with protecting the most precious thing in the universe, and she wanted me to. She trusted me. She loved me. She felt cared for and safe enough to seek me out for comfort. I couldn’t even really describe the way that made me feel.