I’ve existed in this realm of unsettling truths so long that I thought nothing could rattle me anymore. I’ve learned to accept my irrational fears, because the constant strain of challenging them is fucking exhausting.
And once I did, the desire for touch became an afterthought, lost beneath the ruthless demand of my research. Over time, I forgot what it felt like—the heat, the pressure, the tantalizing friction of skin against skin.
I severed that part of my humanity, discarded like a failed experiment. Obsolete. Irrelevant.
Only now, sitting here on this bench, hand hovering over the ivory keys, locked in this position until my fingers start to cramp and a slow burn builds in my forearm, I’m rattled to my goddamn core.
Since I forced myself out of her office, I haven’t been able tostopthinking about it. Touching her. Her touch. Our bodies touching. Collins splayed on top of the desk like an offering. Her legs parted for me in invitation, her back arched, blouse torn open as I claw my way through her.
“Fucking Christ,” I mutter through gritted teeth.
Letting my demons out to play felt good. Too fucking good. Reining them back in was damn near impossible.
I told her to leave.
Desperation can push us to take extreme risks.
In mine, I raced my Triumph down winding coastal roads, climbing to dangerous speeds as I chased a rush of adrenaline to burn her from my system.
It’s not enough.
The dark tide within me is rising—a stirring I feel before every celestial event.
The tide will keep rising before it recedes.
Even after I barricaded myself inside my observatory behind locked doors and shuttered windows, I could still sense her. Like soundwaves drawn past the horizon, I’m losing the fight to resist her pull.
I told her to leave?—
But there’s nowhere she can run to escape me.
I will hunt her.
I will find her.
And when I finally get my hands on her, I will relish in breaking her.
My fingers tremble, hovering just above the keys. Pain sears my muscles, old breaks rebelling as my wrist throbs, but I suffer the burn. If Collins’s approach was to push me over the edge, my little archer hit her mark—pushing me right over the threshold of the one place I never enter.
A humorless chuckle escapes, bouncing around the darkened atrium. The bones of the room amplify the aching notes inside my head. Black grilles slice through the glass walls like the ribs of the organ contained within. The glass ceiling above grants a view of the starry night sky. A slash of moonlight spills through an arched pane. Vines crawl along the walls as silver light bleeds across the sandstone, washing the room in a shadowy pale gray.
The doors leading to the observatory are cracked open, allowing a cool ocean breeze to travel through the hollow corridor, but I still can’t breathe.
Her scarf drapes the carved music rack of the vintage Blüthner. Scents of amber and vanilla and the sweetest floral note tortuously cling to the fibers, infusing my lungs with white-hot embers. Little pops of satisfying pain to curb the cravings.
With a defeated groan, I finally relent, letting my finger fall to a key.
An A above middle C shatters the silence, resonating at 440 hertz—both foreign and haunting—as the sound echoes off stone and glass.
Overcome, I release an unsteady breath. The note reverberates through my skull, tuning my chaotic thoughts the same way an orchestra tunes its instruments.
My hand spasms from inactivity, and I flex my fingers to restore feeling, pinpricks attacking my nerves. It’s a deceptive belief to think we’re safe when motionless, unable to cause any ripples.
Remaining frozen inflicts far more pain.
Before Einstein proved his theory of relativity, physicists referred to hypothetical collapsed stars as frozen stars. To the observer, the surface at the moment of collapse appeared frozen in time.
It wasn’t until Wheeler defined these cosmic voids as black holes that light was shed on their consuming nature.
