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Contents ( 42)
  1. The Art of Breathing
  2. Part One: How We Became Who We Are
  3. Prologue: Or, Where the Kid Hears the Word of the Day
  4. 1. Where Tyson Learns to Breathe
  5. 2. Where Tyson Makes a Phone Call
  6. 3. Where Tyson Graduates and Bear Freaks Out
  7. 4. Where Tyson Says Good-Bye
  8. 5. Where Tyson Gets the Mail
  9. Part Two: Coming Home
  10. 6. Where Tyson Comes Home
  11. 7. Where Tyson Gives a History Lesson
  12. 8. Where Tyson Attends the Most Awkward Party Ever
  13. 9. Where Tyson Plans Attends a Protest
  14. 10. Where Tyson Gets Arrested
  15. 11. Where Tyson Gets His Ass Handed to Him
  16. 12. Where Tyson Writes Bad Poetry and Gawks at Frat Boys
  17. 13. Where Tyson Decides to Man the Fuck Up
  18. 14. Where Tyson Asks Some Questions
  19. 15. Where Tyson Remembers Theresa Jean Paquinn
  20. 16. Where Tyson Learns the Benefit of Therapy
  21. 17. Where Tyson Meets the Man Who Becomes Helena Handbasket
  22. 18. Where Tyson Gets Screwed at His Own Birthday Party (And Not in a Good Way)
  23. Part Three: Just Breathe
  24. 19. Where Tyson Goes to Helena Handbasket’s Sex Dungeon
  25. 20. Where Tyson Beholds the Awesome Wonder That Is Paul Auster
  26. 21. Where Tyson Receives Advice from the Six Sages
  27. 22. Where Tyson Makes a Phone Call
  28. 23. Where Tyson Hears the Inevitable
  29. 24. Where Tyson Meets His Match
  30. 25. Where Tyson Says Hello, Where Tyson Says Good-bye
  31. 26. Where Tyson Touches upon the Inevitable
  32. 27. Where Tyson Faces the Music
  33. 28. Where Tyson Breathes
  34. 29. Tyson And Dominic
  35. 30. The Art Of Breathing
  36. Epilogue: Or, Bear’s Perspective, As It Were (Yeah, He’s Gonna Freak)
  37. Author’s Note
  38. Excerpt
  39. Prologue: Or, Where Bear Answers the Door
  40. More from TJ Klune
  41. Readers love the Bear, Otter, and the Kid Chronicles by TJ Klune
  42. By TJ Klune

It’s odd, this reaction. From a distance, like I’m floating above myself held only by a string, I can see it empirically. Here lies my intelligence. Here, I can scoff at myself for the child I really am inside. So things aren’t going the way I wanted them to. So things aren’t going the way I planned. Do they ever, really? Does anything ever really work out? And this of all things? I magically and without warning decide I’m in love with a man six years my senior when I’m fifteen years old? So what if I’ve thought there was always something there. So what if I just couldn’t give it a name. Bear gave me a way out from my own cowardice, and I ran with it like I was nothing but a child, a kid, incapable of making decisions, incapable of deciding my future for myself. And this is pain? I think this is pain? I survived my mother leaving me when I was five. I survived the death of the woman who filled her place when I was nine. After all of that, after everything I’ve been through, this is what brings me down? This is what knocks me to my knees? I deserve it, then. I deserve every part of it because if I can’t survive this, then I can’t survive anything.

Empirical. Cold. Real. That’s all my mind is. Through the haze and panic, my thoughts are hard. I’m pragmatic. I am logical and I am reasonable. This is nothing. I don’t need this. I don’t want this.

Except I do, my heart whispers. Except I do.

I may be floating and my mind may be running, but it’s my body that can’t breathe. My heart is the tether holding me to myself, and it ignores all reason. It ignores rational thought. It ignores everything but the hurt and the want and the need, because that’s all it knows. Now that I’ve allowed the walls to crumble, allowed myself to feel something, it won’t go back. It won’t fade. It just wants to burn.

It feels like everything is shaking when I hit the stairs, tripping on the first one and then the second. I grab the banister and I think wildly about the first time I saw Dom, standing across the street from me, watching me, his shoelace untied and trailing after him as he followed me down the road as I followed the ants. It was inevitable then, and it’s inevitable now.

The door to the bathroom stands open, and I slide on the tile floor, almost falling. I grip the edges of the bathtub and kick the door shut behind me. Even as it feels like the room starts to collapse, and I close my eyes against the vertigo, all I can see is his smile against her lips, the way his hand went to her hair. All I can see is their mouths together as she sighed. He’s mine! I want to scream greedily. Unfairly. He’s mine and you can’t have him! Because, I know, I understand, that’s how I’ve always thought of him. That’s how I thought he’d always be. Yes, there’s me and Bear. Yeah, there’s me and Otter. But they belong to others. They belong to each other. But him? He belongs to me, and that’s the way I want it. I found him. I brought him home. I kept him. He’s mine. He belongs to no one other than me.