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At first, Phil thought he’d be ace at this. An escape room is filled with the type of puzzles that his nonlinear brain was made for. He’s pretty sure that’s why he was invited on this double date after all; there’d be no other reason to be stuck as the fifth wheel.
It’s not like Phil isn’t used to it. Board Game nights or movie nights with PJ and Sophie curled into each other on one sofa, Bryony and Kayla curled up on the other, and Phil with his legs flung over one side of the armchair. Even visiting his brother and Cornelia is a similar set up. Although tonight is an oddity in that they’re out of the house for once, he’s still the odd man out.
The escape room’s theme is really cool— a kind of steampunk abandoned tunnels concept which Phil has mostly forgotten. The short video beforehand reminded him of being in Disney World and the way they tried to make the wait for the ride more interesting than a simple line. So unfortunately when Bryony is fiddling with the fake gears and asking about the mad scientist’s birthday, he can’t remember anything about a mad scientist, let alone any birthday outside of his own.
“It was something something 1884,” PJ says, his eyebrow quirked sharply, almost as though if he can only get the angle of his brow sharp enough, the something somethings will come back to him.
They’re too slow, though. A buzzer goes off and it sounds like the old air sirens Phil has heard in war movies. The gap in the wall where Bryony was meant to put the gears has slammed shut with a copper gate and that form of escape is lost. They basically have to start from scratch with ten of their precious minutes already gone.
Sophie starts reading the small note she found on the back of a picture frame. Phil isn’t listening anymore. He’s looking at the walls and letting his mind spin.
They’re getting closer, aren’t they? The walls…
He’s sure that’s part of the puzzle, right? They aren’t actually getting closer but some optical illusion is making it feel like they are. None of this is real. It’s all meant to be fun.
Only, it isn’t fun anymore.
Because Phil’s heartbeat has actually tripled in pace and he can’t hear anything except the rush of his blood. He can’t swallow and can barely breathe. And he hasn’t felt like this in years but even so he still knows a panic attack when he has one.
“I need to get out,” he says to the camera in the corner— the same camera the instructor had pointed to when they first walked in.
The response is immediate, a voice through the loud speaker asking, “Just you, or the whole group?”
“Just me,” Phil says before anyone else can answer. He doesn’t want to spoil their fun. He doesn’t want to be the reason the whole night comes crashing to a halt.
“You okay, Philly?” he hears PJ ask, but Phil waves him away and tells them to keep puzzle solving without him.
He’s not really sure how he gets out of the room because his vision is so tunneled and only focused on his own shaking hands, but soon he feels that he’s sitting in a folding chair.
“Here,” the same voice from the intercom says, though this time the voice is so close that Phil jumps.
“Sorry,” he mumbles and looks to see the guy next to him is holding out a water bottle.
“Don’t be sorry,” the guy smiles. Phil can’t take in his whole face yet, just focuses on the dimples next to his smile and the curl of brown hair by his ear. “Wish I had something other than single-use plastic to give you, but I can’t get my manager to give a shit.”
Phil looks at the water bottle in his hand, the thin plastic crinkling a little as he closes his hand around it. He opens it and takes a drink and feels the cool water traveling down into his stomach. Every step feels intentional. He has to focus what he can of his brain to complete each segmented task. He still can’t breathe very well, but he’s thankful he could swallow the gulp. It feels so good, he drinks another.
After Phil takes a third drink, the escape room employee asks, “Feeling better?”
“Yeah,” Phil says, though his hands are still shaking. “Fucking embarassing,” he says in a half-sigh. His vision has widened enough to take in that the nametag on his grey shirt says Dan.
“Oh you’re hardly the first,” Dan smiles a non-mockish smile. “Our brains are hardwired for shit like that. Leftover survivalist stuff from when we were cavemen who could only fight, flee, or freeze.”
Phil nods. He kinda feels like he did all three, and also nothing.
“At least you didn’t shit,” Dan offers.
Unfortunately, Phil was halfway through another gulp when he said it. He has the good luck to choke and laugh into the garbage rather than onto the screens where Dan is still monitoring what’s left of the group. “Has someone really?”
Dan shrugs his shoulders. “I don’t think I’m legally allowed to tell you,” he laughs.
“Why do we put ourselves through this and call it fun?” Phil leans his head back against the wall.
“Same reason we drink too much peach schnapps or ride vertical roller coasters.” Dan turns his swivel chair away from the monitors and focuses solely on Phil. It’s a little too much, Phil thinks, considering he’s still acutely aware of every muscle twitch himself.
Dan looks like he’s going to say something else, but then he gets distracted by a little chime on his keyboard. “Your friends just got to the fourth level,” he says. “You can rejoin them whenever you like.”
Phil considers it. Then Dan smiles another dimpled smile and Phil stops considering it.
“I think I’ve had enough excitement tonight,” he laughs.
“Shame,” Dan says, and Phil thinks it’s almost flirtatious.
Phil takes another long drink of water to avoid having to come up with an answer to that. Dan doesn’t seem to mind though; he keeps alternating looks between the monitor and turning back to Phil. Not in a frantic way, and not in an exact pattern Phil thinks, though he doesn’t bother timing it.
“How about now?” Dan asks after a while of that. “Feeling better for real?”
It isn’t until he’s asked that Phil realizes his breathing is normal again, and his heart rate, and his vision. It’s only his hands which still shake, and that’s pretty standard for him.
“Yeah,” Phil nods, and he means it this time. “Thanks.”
“No worries,” Dan says. He turns completely away from the monitor again and folds his arms and leans back in his chair almost so far that Phil worries he’s going to fall. “I was on holiday with my family a few years back, over in France, and we went to the Font de Gaume cave to see the polychrome paintings, right?”
Phil doesn’t think he’s actually understood half the words Dan has said, but he nods anyway because he wants Dan to keep talking.
“I like, had a meltdown,” Dan shrugs. “I totally couldn’t handle it, just the bigness of the world and the smallness of us and the old old painting of rhinos and lions and no deer and perspectives and scenes of people that were here so long ago and which are still going to be here so long after me, it was like…” He runs a hand anxiously through his mop of curls and Phil has to stop himself from doing the same because they look so nice and soft. “It was crazy, and I just couldn’t handle it. I told my mum the breakfast wasn’t sitting with me, stepped outside and faked being sick and called a ridiculously expensive taxi to get me back to the hotel where I could sit alone and spiral the rest of the day.”
“Yeah,” Phil says. “I kind of felt the opposite of that in there.” He looks down to his shaking hands in his lap. Then he sees Dan move one of his own large hands to cover them. Dan’s hand is warmer than Phil’s. He likes that. And the shaking slows, but has a new reason now.
“We have some that are filled with fewer existential crises, I promise.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh yeah,” Dan says. He doesn’t move his hand. “How do you feel about the sea?”
“Hate it,” Phil answers.
“Noted,” Dan laughs. “I won’t suggest the submarine room then.”
“Definitely not!”
There’s the same sort of chime from the monitors which sounded earlier. Dan looks over, but still doesn’t move his hand. “They’re on the final level. Your friends are pretty sharp.”
“Well they clearly didn’t need me,” Phil says. “No point in dragging me along after all.”
“I’m glad they did,” Dan says. This time he moves his hand, giving Phils a little squeeze before he turns fully to face the screens again.
It only takes another few minutes for his friends to finish the last puzzle. He and Dan are quiet while they watch.
“So you can either look online to see if there’s another room you’d like to take a go at, or I can just give you a refund since you backed out before the twenty minute mark,” Dan says, leaning back in his chair again.
“How many times have you fallen out of that?” Phil asks, too distracted to answer Dan.
“I don’t think I’m legally allowed to tell you that either,” Dan smiles wide, but he does put all four legs of the chair back on the ground. His own two are still on top of the desk in front of him though.
“What if I guess?”
“I’ll give you three guesses.”
“Twenty,” Phil smiles.
“Less.”
“None?”
Dan laughs. “More.”
“Five?”
“Nope,” Dan shakes his head. “Seven.” He leans back like before.
“It’s about to be eight,” Phil teases, pantomiming a push.
“Oi oi oi,” Dan laughs, pretending to kick Phil back and almost losing his balance despite the point he was trying to make.
Phil nearly falls out of his own chair because in the doorway on the other side of the room he hears someone clearing their throat. It’s Bryony, the rest of the group behind her. Phil stands up straight like a child caught doing something he shouldn’t have been doing. “All set, guys?”
“Yeah, if you are,” she says.
Phil throws his empty water bottle in the bin he had spit in earlier and moves towards them. “Yeah,” he says, looking right at his feet and neither at Dan or the rest of his friends.
“Well, here,” Dan says before Phil gets too far away. Phil turns and sees him scribbling something on a post-it. “There’s my number, you can just tell me later if you want a different room or a refund or whatever.”
Phil takes the post-it. Dan’s written an XD under the phone number. It unlocks something nostalgic and achy inside of Phil.
“And er,” Dan shoves his hands in his pockets. “If you’d rather grab a drink or something sometime, I can give you a better idea of the room options than the website. My manager won’t let me make the place eco-friendly and he also won’t let me update the website which looks like it came right out of the naughties.”
“Yeah,” Phil says for what feels like the millionth time. “Yes, I’d like that.”
Dan lets out a laugh which Phil thinks sounds like he’d been holding it in. A relieved sort of laugh. Phil lets out on of his own, a matching pair hanging in the room.
Then Bryony clears her throat again. Phil turns to her and sees a teasing gleam in her eye that he knows he won’t be able to escape the whole way home.
He puts the post-it in his pocket. “I’ll text you.”
“You’d better,” Dan smiles.
“He will!” Kayla shouts from the hall.
Phil can feel all five sets of eyes on him as he leaves the room to join his friends. It’s not quite as terrifying as it usually is.
The London night air is cool when they step out of the building. Phil hears PJ tell him that the mad scientist’s birthday ended up being today’s date and the group wonders if that’s a coincidence or if it changes every day. They pass a pizzeria and the smell fills the air and the general murmur of the group is that they’re hungry enough to want to step in. But mostly Phil is focused on the post-it he feels in his pocket when he brings his no longer shaking hand there to double check.