At the back of the staff room, the door to the facilities stands as warped as the rest of the wood in the bookshop and as shut as the entrance. The plastic sign on it tries to stay relevant with its two stick figures, and the small book shapes overlapping between them in permanent marker.
Maz pushes through and leaves the door hanging half open. The strip lights overhead buzz louder and glow brighter the moment she steps in.
She reaches the sink. The mirror above holds the room’s white tiles in doubled, contradicting angles. Maz’s reflection seems split into twins who don’t agree on which one is real. She presses her hands to the sink’s edge.
One, two, three. Breathe.
The breath she asks for fails to arrive.
Her pinky jitters against porcelain, keeping time with the sputtering lights. They cut out with the unintended tings of her nail and return on the flat tap of her finger as she counts to five.
Come on, breathe.
The fluorescent buzz above her swells.
She rinses her hands while feeling the cold of the water and hearing the brief rush of it before she turns the tap off.
Maybe now.
A seven count stays only as a count.
Her gaze finds the paper towel box hanging on the wall beside the mirror that holds both versions of her standing and unmoving. The water drips from her skin into the sink.
The lights give up for the next count of three and return with a periodic seizure.
She looks down at her dry hands holding her phone.
What? When did you…? You don’t remember taking the phone out. How did you…? The unlock, the scroll?
The screen, already glowing like a small cold sun in the flickering gloom, displays her own title ‘Bind.Breathe.Stay.’ and her own words underneath.
She stares at the phone while mouthing the title of the piece.
Fiction or confession. Either way, you do remember writing that, just not when.
Her thumb slides the view up and down as she hunts for a timestamp.
No publish date. Well, no ‘anything date’ at all. So even the app’s clueless on that bit.
She reads.
***
Author: Mazmire
Bind.Breathe.Stay.
—
When did the counting game start?
Well, his thoughts wouldn’t stop running around trying to find the perfect order of, in, around, about everything.
Seven heartbeats to interrupt the spin. Seven breaths to reset. You’d made it into a silly little thing you could share, a routine to pull him back when his mind circled the same worry until it wore grooves.
Tonight, the ribbon was for you.
Or what was left of it. You weren’t going to tell him that it was actually the red strap of your lanyard. People usually used silk ribbons in these types of situations, and this was close enough. Surely. He probably wouldn’t have guessed it since you’d taken the clip off, right? Well, the hope was for him to never ask about it. You didn’t have an answer that wasn’t embarrassing.
A frenzied sort of smoothness in your touch teased that strap into looping from finger to finger. It fell into an unending orbit that felt like the one distraction keeping your hands occupied.
The whispery friction rubbed against your fingertips, collapsing in the tension, starting again like you could spool up your own scattered nerves and smooth them flat if you just kept it moving.
He didn’t help as he spoke. Let alone just then, every time he said a word or two that were a little too honest while he kept his gaze on you, something, your knees, for starters, had to give.
You tossed your hair out of your eyes for the third time, not like he wasn’t already watching. He didn’t seem to mind, since the only thing he did was sit there on the bed and wait patiently. You hadn’t even started counting yet.
Performing the sole task you believed you could manage without crumbling, you worked your fingers to loop the strap faster, pulling more harshly, until it began to burn with a secret current.
His eyes followed the strap as if he’d already decided how this ended.
You stepped closer.
“You sure you’re still up for it?”
He presented his hands in a calm forward surrender that never became less disarming.
“Always.”
Didn’t he just say the right thing at the right moment? Completely unfair.
On the bright side, the old lanyard was a good accomplice. It was good at hiding the hesitation, finding its path and circling his wrists. As you leaned in and rested your brow against his, his breathing lost its symmetry. Yours matched it. Heartbeat for heartbeat.
He let the strap hang in its loose loop and walked his fingers up the veins on top of your hand, following a map that wasn’t perfectly arranged.
“Still ‘Truth’?”
For a second, you thought about coming up with a poetic line. Anything said after that was either going to sound childish or fall short of what he’d offered.
So you just allowed yourself to feel his pulse beneath your skin, counting three heartbeats for trust, five for certainty, seven for the promise you never needed to speak aloud. Each a beat you’d never want to lose.
A nod was the best thing you could come up with.
“You know you can use it.”
Your own breathing finally bothered to calm down as you smiled against his cheek.
As your knee found the bed to rest beside his thigh, your lips found the place below his ear where his pulse had a mind of its own. That reminded you to keep counting. He was acutely aware of every point of contact, the jumps between the beats of both hearts, and the skips, and the way your voice dipped lower with each count.
“You have to ask.” The way you pulled it off to sound bolder had nothing to do with how much your hands were trembling.
“Otherwise you’ll sit here all night and look at me with those eyes and…” You trailed off when you realised you didn’t actually mind if he did just that.
His grin suggested that he considered playing coy; your name left his mouth instead, stripped of anything clever.
It swept away any quip you had lined up as you smiled before you could even reach for a word.
“Count for me.”
So he did.
“Four. Five. Six.” His breaths were tiny rumbles against your skin. You stayed, letting him feel how close you were and how little the strap mattered.
“Seven.”
Whatever minuscule efforts of control you’d been maintaining eventually slipped.
He looked up and laughed. It was a quiet one, but was still ragged.
“You can’t ever keep a straight face.”
His wrists loosely tied in red were already lifting until his arms formed a shape above you. An impending trap?
“Looks like you’ve got a new name badge.” They descended over you to pull you in.
Yep, it definitely must have been a trap since it made you fall into his lap with your face buried in his neck. The laughter had spread throughout the room that time.
He pulled at your waist, demanding closer attention, if such a thing were even possible.
“Stay.”
“Make me.”
You thought your hands could find a surface to hold on to, but they found their way to him instead. Both of you did stop counting… and you can’t remember who started again first.
***
She stops reading.
The last line on the screen stares back at her, and the memory arrives in pieces, out of order. Breath first, warmth dragging behind.
Did that happen? Or did you just give a better version?
A brief flinch runs through her when the buzzing of the flat white lights scrapes into her ear.
The Maz in the mirror feels like the wrong reader for the words on her phone.
The woman in the piece knew where she was, as awkward as it may be. You, on the other hand, are gripping the sink, like it’s about to either shatter or run away.
“Stay.” Her whisper lands in the porcelain.
No strap in sight. No bed. No warmth. No heartbeat. Stop thinking. It wasn’t even a proper ribbon.
The soles of her boots suck in the cold from the tiles, as if her body wouldn’t have allowed any other temperature. She looks into the mirror and tries to smile.
Her twinned reflection returns the gesture, only half a second behind.
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