NOAH
To my father,
The biological fact of my existence was just a technicality, an unfortunate footnote in his biography.
The walls of that office started to close in.
The air felt thin, like I was trying to breathe through a wet cloth. All those eyes. All that judgnt. And my father’s voice, cool and detached, reciting a list of my failures as if he were reading a grocery list.
Every comparison ever made, every ti I wasn’t enough, every ti Nick was more, it all ca rushing into that small, cramped room at once.
I rembered my heart starting to race, a frantic drumming against my ribs. I hadn’t known what a panic attack was then.
I just knew that my body had decided the world was ending, and it was announcing it loudly in a room where I couldn’t afford to be anything other than silent.
The flashback didn’t stop. It started to bleed into the present.
The sounds of the carnival, the laughter, the chanical whir of the rides, began to blur into a distorted hum. The edges of the food stall went soft and grey.
The heat hit first. It wasn’t the warmth of the evening; it was a sick, internal fever. My skin suddenly felt too tight, every nerve ending firing at once. Then ca the compression. It felt like an invisible weight had been placed on my sternum, a heavy, cold slab that made it impossible to expand my lungs.
I noticed my breathing change. I tried to slow it down, but the more I thought about it, the harder it beca. I was overthinking the most basic function of life, and my body was failing the test.
I pressed my hands flat against my thighs, trying to hide the tremor that was starting in my fingers. They were damp with a cold, sickly sweat. I could feel it at the back of my neck, too, my collar suddenly felt like a noose. I was too hot and too cold all at once, a shivering, sweating ss in the middle of a Friday night.
The table felt unsteady. Or maybe it was . The ground seed to tilt, the park going distant as if I were looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope. I couldn’t finish a thought. Every sentence in my head dissolved into white noise before it could reach a conclusion.
Oh... it’s happening again... I’m spiraling, I realized with a jolt of terror.
I knew it was happening, but knowing didn’t stop it. It never had. There was a vast, yawning gap between understanding the chanics of a panic attack and being able to do a single thing to halt the descent. I was in that gap now, falling through the dark, and there was nothing to catch .
I didn’t know when he moved.
One mont, I was drowning in the air of a principal’s office from years ago, and the next, the world snapped back into focus. Cassian was right there.
He wasn’t sitting across from anymore. He was squatting down in front of , his knees on the pavent, bringing himself down to my level. His hands were on my face, not heavy, but firm. His fingers gave my cheeks a few light, grounding taps.
"Noah."
His voice cut through the noise in my head like a blade. It was the only thing that sounded real.
"Noah, look at ."
I blinked, and the park returned in pieces. The neon lights, the sll of grease, the sound of a distant bell. And Cassian’s face. It was so close I could see the slight tension in his jaw. And then I saw the expression on it, sothing I had never seen before.
It was fear.
It was small, controlled, and tucked behind a layer of iron discipline, but it was there. He was afraid for .
"Breathe," he commanded. It wasn’t a suggestion; it was an instruction from a man who expected to be obeyed. "With . In."
He waited, his eyes locked onto mine, his thumbs tracing the line of my jaw.
"Out."
He did it again. And again. He didn’t look away, and he didn’t let go. He was the only solid thing in a universe that had gone liquid.
"Again," he whispered.
My eyes were wet. I realized it the mont Cassian’s thumb moved, brushing a stray tear from my cheek. I hadn’t even known I was crying. I didn’t rember starting.
Before my brain could catch up, before the sha could tell to pull away, my body moved on its own. I leaned forward, collapsing into him. My arms went around his neck, my fingers digging into the expensive fabric of his suit. I buried my face in the side of his neck, breathing in the scent of him, sothing expensive and sharp and safe.
The sob broke out of then. It wasn’t a choice; it was a dam bursting.
Everything I had been holding since I saw the tropolitan Club on the invitation. Everything I’d held since the lobby, since Nick’s cold voice, since my father’s silent dismissal. Every ounce of the "restraint" Nick had seen practicing all night, it all ca out.
I cried into the collar of his dinner shirt, my shoulders shaking with the force of it. I was in the middle of a public park, surrounded by strangers and bright lights, and for the first ti in my life, I didn’t care who was watching.
Because Cassian was holding . He didn’t pull back. He didn’t tell to be quiet. He just wrapped his arms around and held like I was sothing worth keeping. He held while I broke apart, and for that mont, the math didn’t matter. The comparisons didn’t matter.
There was just the sound of his breathing, the warmth of his coat, and the quiet realization that I wasn’t in that office anymore.
I was here. And for so reason I couldn’t yet understand, I wasn’t alone.
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