Page 23 of Severed Heart

“Again.”

We repeat the count as I ease back into a sense of familiarity from the space I’m in—some foreign, endless abyss. A darkness I drift further and further away from toward the voice summoning me back:“... your breaths and body are all that matters. This you control. One. Two.”

Breathing on count, I fixate on the solid, dark twin pinpricks behind my lids, ignoring all muted light surrounding it—no outside images or noise, only my body and each breath. Counting again and again as I slowly come to.

“... again. One. Two. Three.”

“One,” inhale, exhale. “Two,” inhale, exhale. “Three,” inhale, exhale. Within the next breath, I exist only inside the black and remain there until the next command is spoken.

“Open your eyes, Tyler.”

When I do, all surrounding light temporarily blinds me, and I look down to see Delphine standing directly in front of me, staring up at me keenly from where I hover above her short stature. For the first few seconds, we simply stare at one another, me speechless, shaken, and feeling transported. Especially since I have no fucking idea how I came to stand in the middle of Dom’s living room. Utterly stupefied, as I come further into myself, I note my state—heart rate steady, breaths even, the sweat on my neck and back has long since dried.

“How did I get here?” I ask Delphine, who stares back at me attentively. “I found you here,” she replies in a tone a little above a whisper.

“How long were we doing that?”

“Not sure, ten minutes, maybe longer,” she says in the same sleepy tone she used throughout the exercise, though her return stare remains intent.

“How did you know how to do that?” I ask, not exactly sure whatthatis.

“It is common for some and can be mastered with many, many hours of practice,” she relays calmly while seeming to search me for any sign of the opposite. Of any of the remaining rage I know that brought me here.

It’s then I realize how numb I am to what set me off other than what I’m currently experiencing—fear and ... shock. Whatever the hell she just led me through worked miracles. The anger is still there ... but distant—as if it’s in a faraway place that I can reach if I need it. It dawns on me then whatitmight be. “You mean suppressing emotion?”

She shakes her head. “Non, not exactly.”

I’ve read up about this. While something similar is a part of military training, it’s been a hard concept for me to grasp. From the minute the door closes between recruits and the outside world, they teach them to ignore their own free will, opinions, and comfort. They eventually put them and keep them in the mindset of survival mode, only thinking of the mission—the mission being the most important. So, while their tactic is not to suppress emotions because they don’t want a heartless military, the goal is to get them to compartmentalize the emotions for a later time for the sake of completing the mission.

I’m still a few years away from that training, but I can’t understand how this tiny woman in front of me is so familiar with it, to the point that she seems to have mastered it and guided me through it so flawlessly.

“The fuck?” I say aloud, still shaken. To my surprise, Delphine laughs. Memory kicks in of what waits at home for me, and my residual anger suppresses any return smile I could possibly give her.

“Is this how you escape?” I ask, knowing such a personal question to her will probably go unanswered, but she surprises me again with a reply.

“There is no escape. Your problem is still there, is it not?”

I nod.

“But maybe who you’re mad at has more of a chance to get away, at least temporarily.”

I don’t bother to defend that this wasn’t some teen angst drama I brought to her doorstep and that my home-life just imploded—though her joke indicates that’s her belief. Right now, I don’t have the energy to correct her. “That was some Jedi mind trick,” I tell her.

“Ah”—her eyes light—“you speak of Star Wars. IloveStar Wars.”

This time, I can’t help but grin. “Do you?”

“Yes, I watch every time there is a marathon.”

Tilting my head, I take note of the playfulness in her eyes. One I’ve never seen before, though I’ve never been this close to Delphine. Not in all my years of knowing her.

Of course, I’ve noticed her beauty once or twice. It’s fucking impossible not to, but her behavior, along with her aggressive, cruel posturing over the years, has made it easy to ignore. As I stare down at her now, the adult lens associated with her presence in my life starts to dissipate as she comes into clear view, far more dimensional.

“Dom is at Sean’s ... if you want to see him.”

“Thank you,” I say on autopilot as I drink in more of her details. Silver-gray eyes peer back at me, slight confusion marring her expression as I consider her for the first time, and not as a background presence or authoritative prop. Or the woman I habitually help Dom gather from whatever foundation we find her passed out on—last time, it was the backyard, and she was barely conscious.

Within seconds of my first real look at her, I take another greedy pass while a dozen questions start to accumulate, my curiosity running rampant. It’s when I’m tempted to sweep her again that I know I need to see myself out. And so I do, but not without pausing at the storm door and looking back as she walks into her kitchen. It’s only when her head starts to turn in my direction that I rip my eyes away and slip out of her front door.