Alicia liked to think she knew her girlfriends pretty well, but somehow, one of them seemed to always take her by surprise. Whether it was Tatum’s extreme emotional maturity or Leighton’s genius, Alicia never really knew what to expect from their dinnertime conversations, but even then, nothing seemed to come completely out of left field. Which is probably why she’s frozen to the spot in their kitchen watching Tatum crumble in on herself.
The normally stoic and confident woman, the woman who rules the tennis courts and the classroom, the woman who seemed to be able to make anybody blush, but especially Alicia and Leighton. They had been making dinner, Tatum and Alicia, while catching each other up on their days while they waited for Leighton to finish with one of her seminars. She had been in the middle of a sentence about an upcoming fitness thing the tennis coach expected from the team while chopping up the bacon to go in their soup when she very carefully set the knife down and instead turned her white-knuckle grip onto the edges of the counter.
Mental health had been a recent conversation between the three of them, the result of a few too many comments Leighton had made about her eating habits that Alicia and Tatum could no longer brush aside. So Alicia knew Tatum suffered from an anxiety disorder, she had proudly put the prescription of anti-anxiety meds next to her own anti-depressants in their medicine cabinet when she convinced Tatum it wasn’t something to be ashamed of. But it was one thing to talk about the more acute symptoms and another to see them play out in their kitchen in the middle of a benign conversation.
Something in Alicia activated as she watched Tatum move to lean back against the counter at her back. She registered the fact that Tatum had been handling the chef’s knife, and something about that kicked her ass into gear as she moved towards her girlfriend to see if she was hurt. The cutting board didn’t show any signs of blood, but that didn’t mean Tatum couldn’t have still cut herself.
Carefully, Alicia moved the knife to the sink, for her own peace of mind, before turning to give Tatum a once over. She didn’t appear to be physically hurt, but Alicia could see the rapid rise and fall of her chest. Tatum, who plays tennis for over twenty hours a week, who runs four days a week to keep in shape, has a ridiculously low resting heart rate and an alarmingly fast recovery period. These two facts Alicia had learned very early on, when she had ended up with her head on Tatum’s chest after a mind blowing orgasm and got to watch as Leighton worked her magic on the taller blonde.
(It had been extremely sexy to get to listen to Tatum’s heartbeat as Leighton worked her up and over her climax, but Alicia had practically jumped out of her bed at how quickly Tatum’s heart stopped pounding. It just wasn’t fair to the rest of them!)
So she knows, immediately, that for Tatum’s body to be giving such obvious signs of distress something was really wrong. The problem is, Alicia can’t pinpoint what could have been said or what might have been heard in Tatum’s head to trigger a panic attack. It wasn’t usually this bad, often Tatum needing five minutes to herself to remember how to breathe properly before picking up where she left off. The last time Alicia had seen her girlfriend unable to stand had been months ago before they had even talked about what was going on between the three of them.
She isn’t sure what to do in this scenario, only knowing the bare minimum from a conversation of abstracts. She knows Tatum prefers space, but not too much space otherwise it makes it even more difficult for the grounding techniques to work. She knows that touch is too much for Tatum, she knows how easily Tatum can tip from panic into overstimulation and Alicia doesn’t want to make this situation more difficult than it already is. If touch is too much, would Alicia’s voice serve to the same detriment? Should she call out to Tatum? Ask what is needed of her? Or should she sit idly by, next to her girlfriend as Tatum fights an invisible battle against her own body?
Alicia’s mind moves quickly through her own anxieties, and she decides for herself to stay near Tatum; her own heart cannot handle the idea of leaving her girlfriend to suffer alone. So she sits with her back against the counter Tatum had been standing at just a few moments ago, her legs crossed under her and close enough that if Tatum needed, she could reach out and grasp onto Alicia. She watches with careful eyes, paying attention to how Tatum presses her hands into the ground next to her, how she fights so desperately to breathe evenly, how she fails time and again with a stuttering gasp.
They don’t have a plan for anything like this, not like they have when Leighton can’t walk straight because her head hurts so bad or when Alicia feels so numb getting out of bed is hard. Contingencies exist in their household, but they had clearly missed an important member of this relationship and Alicia can’t stop the tears from welling up in her eyes at the thought.
With shaking hands, Alicia unearths her phone from the pocket of her sweatshirt; a herculean effort given the way her hands are shaking. She swipes to her messages, shoots off a text to Leighton asking her to hurry home before she opens up the internet and attempts to find any grounding techniques that she might be able to walk Tatum through. Each idea seems entirely useless, and if Alicia herself wasn’t so close to panic, she would probably see the merit in each one, but how could she ask Tatum to find five things in their apartment when Tatum hasn’t even opened her eyes in the last five minutes?
Oh God it’s been five minutes, is she at risk of passing out? How long can a person hyperventilate for before they no longer get oxygen to the brain?
“Tatum?” She asks in a shaky voice, cutting into the panicked silence of the kitchen. “Can you hear me?”
Alicia waits, as patient as she’s ever been, to see if Tatum will answer her. Tatum taps twice on the floor with her right hand and while Alicia may not know what that means, it seems to be the only way to communicate when Tatum is fighting for air.
“Okay that’s good, I need you to open your eyes for me, can you do that?”
At the next question, Tatum bonks her head back into the kitchen cabinet, letting out a little frustrated noise. Alicia takes that as a ‘no’ and tries to think of something else that might help. If Tatum can’t look at her – or anything really – it could be that the lights are too bright, or she’s focusing so hard on trying to breathe that she doesn’t have the energy to open her eyes.
Out of an abundance of caution, Alicia turns off the lights in the kitchen anyway. “Okay, that’s okay. You’re doing so good, Tate.” The praise isn’t something Alicia expected to dish out considering that Tatum usually rolls her eyes at anything of the sort. She’s too proud to accept being called ‘good’ for doing something, but in this case, it seems to bring the tension out of Tatum’s body just a little bit.
“Can I touch you?”
Another bonk of Tatum’s head against the cabinets, so Alicia remains in her spot across from her girlfriend. Vaguely, Alicia’s ears recognize the sound of the front door opening and closing, followed by the high-heeled steps of Leighton, and the sound seems to echo off the apartment walls as if their home was the grand canyon.
Tatum lets out a wince at the noise, and Alicia pops her head around the end of the counter, quietly trying to get Leighton’s attention. Her other girlfriend has her headphones on, face in her phone as she makes her way towards the bedroom, totally oblivious to the current situation. When she looks up, a smile graces Leighton’s cheeks before she seems to realize something is terriblywrong.
“Alicia, what’s going on?” Leighton asks as she sits herself next to Alicia on the floor, across from Tatum who hasn’t moved from her spot but is instead listing sideways like she can’t support herself.
“Panic attack while making dinner. I don’t know how to help. She doesn’t want to be touched and I don’t know how to help her,” Alicia whispers.
“Tatum,” Leighton starts. “Is it okay if I talk and you listen to my voice?”
And what the fuck? Why didn’t Alicia think of that? The other girl turns to look between Leighton and Tatum, breathing a sigh of relief when Tatum taps twice on the floor again. Leighton looks to Alicia in confusion at the signal, and Alicia can only tell Leighton, “I’m pretty sure that means yes.”
“Did you know that the Fibonacci sequence was actually identified in 200 BC in India as a way to enumerate patterns in Sanskrit poetry? It wasn’t until 1202 that the sequence of numbers was brought to Western Europe by Leonardo of Pisa, who would later be called Fibonacci. The sequence of numbers is created by adding the two previous numbers together. One plus two is three, two plus three is five, five plus three is eight, and so on. We learned about this closed-end function in my proofs class today, and there was a challenge to see who could name the most numbers sequentially. I won, of course.”
Alicia tears her eyes away from Tatum, who she’s been watching make her way to the floor with each passing sentence from Leighton, but it seems like she’s worn herself out more than has actually calmed. Alicia can see the sweat on her skin, can see how she still breathes heavily but at a somewhat subdued pace.
In the background, Alicia can hear Leighton begin to recite the sequence of numbers, each new number coming quickly after the next as she does her crazy math genius thing. Alicia makes her way over to Tatum, gently grasping one of her hands and bringing it to rest above Tatum’s head on the floor. It’s a move that Tatum has done to Alicia several times, usually after they do a session of hot yoga and Alicia can barely breathe from her workout. It helps to open the lungs, and Alicia figures it will help restore her girlfriend.
Tatum looks up at Alicia, eyes barely open and chest still rising and falling rapidly. It’s the first time in almost ten minutes that Alicia has seen Tatum look even a smidge coherent and she can’t help but let a smile overtake her face.
“Hey, stranger,” she whispers. Leighton’s got to some absurdly large number but she starts to make her way over to the pile of Tatum. Together, the two of them swipe away the sweat that’s caused flyaway’s to stick to Tatum’s face before sliding down to lay next to Tatum on the floor. Alicia places one hand over Tatum’s heart, resting lightly on her sternum to make sure the girl is actually starting to recover from her attack and isn’t just really good at faking being okay.
“You scared me,” she admits.
Tatum brings the hand at her side to sign out a quick “sorry” before dropping her hand to grab onto Alicia’s wrist.
“Nothing to be sorry for, love. We just worry.”
“Numbers?” Tatum manages a small glare at Leighton, who lets out a loud laugh.
“Mathematics has been proven to reach each side of the brain! By walking through calculations, I made your brain think, even if you didn’t know it, which, I’ve been told, can help with somebody who is in the middle of a panic attack. By getting your brain to focus on something new, you can override your nervous system.” Leighton is quick to defend herself.
“Uh huh, sure,” Alicia sounds skeptical, but at this moment, she can’t be too mad about Leighton’s ability to sneak math into everything if it means Tatum breathes a little deeper with each passing moment.
“We have to update our contingency lists,” she says. “And order dinner.”