Sweat dotted her brow and the back of her neck where her hair hung in a limp curtain. Her breath was weak within the confines of her lungs. A warning that she needed to pause, to breathe.

The bristles inched closer to the surface. One sweep, and the white wouldn’t be perfect in its emptiness anymore. She’d learned the lesson early. Void wasn’t perfection. Putting her colorful, lawless mark on an otherwise blank canvas was what she did best. At least, it had been.

“This is stupid,” she hissed through her teeth as the song started over again for the ninth time. “Just put the damn brush on the damn canvas.”

It had been nearly two weeks since the last time her brush had swept through richly colored oils and created worlds where before there’d been nothing. It felt like a lifetime.

But the nothingness, the void, was safe. Pristine.

The tightness in her chest started to burn, and the brush rolled from her stiff fingers.

“For fuck’s sake,” she muttered, sucking in a breath.

She sank to the ancient, dusty drop cloth she’d reclaimed from her parents’ basement and used a corner of it to swipe the paint from her foot.

This whole “breakdown” thing was really starting to piss her off.

Her breath sounded thin and wispy.

“How are you going to live a full life if you can’t take a full breath?”

An old question posed by a new friend. And for once, Remi had paid attention.

“I’m not a yoga type person,” she’d insisted, eyeing the colorful parade of tights and tank tops and mats as students of all shapes, sizes, and colors marched into the studio. “I’m more of a ‘boot camp that makes you barf at the end’ person.”

“Mmm. And how is that working for you?” her friend had asked serenely.

“Fine, but next week you come to a boxing class if I hate this.”

She hadn’t hated it. She’d found something different, something special in the yoga classes that taught her to harness her energy and her breath. To move her body in ways that felt like honor rather than torture.

The breath was an anchor, and she’d clearly lost hers. Now she was adrift. And alone.

The song cut off, and her phone’s ringtone filled the living space. Pain in My Ass. Ugh. She hit ignore, sending the call to voicemail again.

On a wheezy groan, she switched playlists, cueing up some Lizzo girl power. Pinks and purples instantly billowed around her in pretty, vibrant clouds as she forced herself to sit and breathe in one of the swivel chairs in front of the window.

She glared out at nature’s perfection.

It had been premature and stupid to borrow studio space from Brick if she wasn’t even going to be able to use it. Thankfully she hadn’t tried this little failure of an experiment at his place. The idea that he could catch her in a moment so pathetically vulnerable made her want to barf like a finisher of a boot camp class.