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“She’s here. I cut my hand, and then she was on the floor. I don’t know what’s wrong with her. I don’t think she can breathe.” Casey returns, her voice laced with worry.
“I’ll deal with her,” Gianni barks. “Go help Faith.”
Gianni’s hand slides under my arms. He hooks one arm under my legs and scoops me up. He carries me into the office, closes the door behind us with his foot, and plants me carefully on a swivel step stool by the door.
“Chloe, listen to me.” He’s in front of me, his knees bent to meet my eye level. I try to focus on him, but everything is hazy. “I need you to listen to me.” I want to listen to him, but I can’t breathe. I pull at his shirt, my nails clawing at the material, my chest heaving under the large lungfuls of air I keep trying to gulp down, but they do nothing. I feel like a beached whale, gawping at the air, wondering why I’ve been hauled from my comfortable surroundings.
Gianni pulls my hands from him and holds them still in my lap.
“Chloe, you’re having a panic attack,” he tells me. “It will be okay. We just need to wait for it to pass. I can help you, but I need you to listen to me.” It’s as if he’s talking to me underwater, but I nod.
“Good, now listen,” he instructs me. “It’ll pass, I promise, but it will take a moment. In that time, I need you to focus. I’m here, and I will help you, but you need to do exactly what I say.” I’m floating in a dream, but I hear him. “I need you to look around the room and find me something that’s red.”
His request seems odd, but I’m convinced none of this is real, so I might as well do as he says. My eyes scroll across the room. Something red. There’s his briefcase, the chair, and the table, but none of these things are red. This is impossible. I can’t breathe, and he wants me to search for colors? I turn to him, about to tell him how stupid this is while gasping for air when I spot a cashbox sitting on top of the lockers.
“The box.” I breathe.
“Good, now I want you to find me something blue.” I search again around the office. My hands are clammy, and I want to scratch my skin, but Gianni will not let go of them. I scan the desk, but there’s nothing other than office supplies. There’s a green pot plant on the small window ledge, a yellow Post-it note on the wall, but next to that sits a tissue dispenser with a blue roll hanging in it.
“The blue tissue…” I stammer, “… on the wall.”
“Good.” Gianni releases my hands and strokes the side of my face. His hand instantly brings calm. The smoothness of his skin and the familiarity of his touch are all I need. I’m being pulled back into the room. I’m aware of the things around me and not what’s going on inside my body.
“Now that I have your attention, I want you to focus on my breathing.” He turns me around on the stool so he’s kneeling behind me. He wraps his arms around me, encasing my arms and chest. I rest the back of my head against his shoulder, his warmth already flooding down my neck.
“I want you to look at the bulletin board,” he commands. His voice is dense and soothing. My eyes find the bulletin board as he tightens his grip on me. “I want you to look at the top left-hand corner and then move your eyes along the top edge until you reach the corner. As you do this, I want you to breathe in slowly through your nose. Can you do that?” I nod as I do what he says. “Good. Now continue to move your eyes down the side of the board as if you are drawing the shape, and as you do, I want you to breathe out slowly through your mouth.” I do as I’m told. I feel Gianni breathing behind me. The pressure of his chest against my back forces me to follow his lead. In, out, in, out, all the while my eyes are drawing the rectangular shape of the bulletin board. Slowly, air moves through my lungs. The tension releases, and the burning subsides.
“You’re doing really well, Chloe,” Gianni encourages. “I need you to keep breathing with me until it passes. It’s almost gone, but we need to make sure.” He squeezes me tighter as he speaks, his voice like a metronome, keeping me in time and pace with him. “This is good. Keep going.” I close my eyes. I don’t need the bulletin board anymore. I just need him.
I feel a calmness descend. I have no choice but to go along with what Gianni is saying. I’m captured by him as he orchestrates my breathing. I’m under his spell, completely at his mercy, and I don’t want to be anywhere else.
The tears come when I begin to return to reality. I grab Gianni’s arms. I don’t want to cry, but the surge of emotion is too much to hold in. The tears stream down my face as I take in where I am and the reality of what happened.
“Hey. Hey, I am here,” Gianni soothes as he turns me around. I fall into his arms, his chest taking my body weight as I nearly knock him over. He holds me tight.
“I’m sorry,” I sputter into the crook of his arm. He pulls me forward so he can see my face.
“I don’t want to hear you saying you’re sorry,” Gianni says. “You have nothing to be sorry about.”
“It’s busy. We don’t have time for this.” I cry.
“Do you think I care about the shop?” Gianni screws his face up. He cares about the shop, but I don’t want to argue with him. “You’re far more important than a few customers wanting their coffee. Besides, Faith and Casey can handle it.”
“You were right. I shouldn’t have come back. I should have stayed away.”
“No, you did the right thing. You need to be here. You were ready.”
“But just now, I don’t know what happened. I think it was the blood on the towel,” I try to explain, but I don’t want to see it again in my head.
“There was bound to be something that would trigger a memory. Like I said to you before, with me, it was the music on the radio. It can be the smallest thing that brings it all back.”
“And now I’m crying like some fucking silly cow.” I dab my eyes with the hem of my apron.
“This is good. It needs to come out. Otherwise…” He doesn’t finish, and I wonder if he means if it doesn’t come out, I’ll end up like him, angry and brooding.
We sit for several seconds, holding onto one another as if we’re joined in the middle.
“Oh God, what am I going to say when I go back out there?”
