Chapter 11 Frozen Stars
Frozen Stars
Music can give you a different way of seeing the universe. It’s like finding a pathway into the brain. The notes are made of the stuff of the universe.
— brIAN MAY, QUEEN GUITARIST & ASTROPHYSICIST
ORION
When our reality is challenged, it creates a deep, unsettling feeling.
On a fundamental level, we understand that touch is merely the perception of vibration. That at the quantum scale, we never actually touch an object—only interact with the electromagnetic fields at its surface.
And yet, because the sensation feels so intensely real, we can never truly grasp that it’s an illusion. It’s too disturbing, too unsettling, to challenge our concept of reality. So our mind retreats to what feels safe.
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 to stop thinking 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 sound waves 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.
They devour everything around them.
While the term black hole might be more accurate, it doesn’t evoke the same cosmic beauty as a star frozen in the depths of space, suspended, eternally waiting.
Torrid heat licks through me as my middle finger wanders over the teeth of the piano, my gaze absently trailing the inked designs across the back of my hand.
The compulsive need to press the same note with my right hand pulses against my skull.
That agonizing desire for symmetry is a demon at war with my will.
Just one of the reasons I haven’t attempted to play in all these years. You can’t perform a musical piece when you’re fixated on pressing keys to feel a rightness versus creating music. It destroys the ability to compose.
Before the wreck, music was a passion.
After, the desire to even touch a piano withered into decay.
When passion is lost, the very spark of our soul that animates us becomes a destructive force. We become these frozen stars, suspended, waiting—fearing the pain from any change.
While this piano is merely a decorative addition for the university, for me, it’s an infuriating reminder of that loss every time I walk past the atrium, speared through with a searing rod of resentment.
But tonight, in an effort to expel her torturous melody from my head, I forced my fingers to the keys. I invited the pain. Like a darkening celestial body, she’s a star on the brink of collapse. Vibrating at her own frequency, resonating a tune that demands to be captured, composed.
If I could just purge the melancholic notes I hear every time I look into her beautiful, arresting eyes, then maybe her song won’t haunt me once she’s gone.
When observing an event, the observer cannot interfere. In our universe, it’s an unbreakable rule.
Nothing I do will alter the outcome.
Instead, as the warm piano note fades, I flip my wrist over and check my astronomical watch, gauging the alignment markers. The sun and moon dials inch closer—a countdown to the solar eclipse.
Once the sun goes dark, so will I.
I glance at my reflection mirrored in the dark pane of glass, my twin staring back. It’s a distorted, disturbing symmetry—the core paradox of my research.
Light and dark. Matter and antimatter. Life and its opposite, coupled in cosmic duality.
At the shadowed boundary of every black hole lies a place where past is preserved, memories trapped beyond the horizon of loss. Echoes detectable at the brink of annihilation, in the final pulse of a fading heartbeat.
My fingers splay wide across the keys, and I hammer down a D minor chord. The dark notes crash through the room with jarring intensity, my resistance splintering against sweet smiles and sultry looks.
Shaken, I pull my hand away and rub the dust between the pads of my fingers, feeling the particles tangle with mine. My vessels constrict, pulse spiking in alarm. The compulsive urge to wash the grime away is surpassed only by the prickling sensation at the back of my neck.
I sense the change in the air, feel the abrasive rustle of fibers against my skin as cold sweat stings my scalp. That’s why, even before I hear a sound echo from the observatory, I know someone has invaded my space.
My finger gently depresses the piano key. A stark note rings out, reverberating against the glass, before a sharp clink follows in response.
Pushing to my feet, I send the bench scraping across the sandstone in warning. As I slip on my gloves, I stride from the atrium, my steps deliberate.
The corridor grows darker the farther I head toward the observatory, and I catch the familiar scent of vanilla in the air. I breathe in deeply, a smile twisting my mouth as hunger burns low in my stomach.
Like a hunter trailing its prey, I follow, my senses sharpening as I pick up on the clack of heels, the movement whispering through the shadows.
It’s been one hundred and fifty-six hours since I last laid eyes on her. One hundred and fifty-six hours of torturous restraint, denying myself even the smallest taste. No lingering gazes on courtyard benches. No heated exchanges in darkened hallways. No stolen glances across lecture halls.
The sight of her now crashes into me with the devastating force of a high-speed particle collision. The impact almost hurts, this energy that can’t be contained, its only course is to crack my rib cage.
Restraint shattered, I have her backed against the stone wall, my gloved hand covering her mouth to stifle a scream.
Her startled cry is hot against my palm, the enticing, throaty sound of it traveling right to my groin. Unable to deny myself the sinful feel of her curves, I press my thighs flush with hers to trap her in place, and my cock defiantly twitches.
Her wide eyes stare up at me, and before she can push against my chest, I have her wrist captured and pinned to the wall above her head. She curls her other hand beside her thigh, somehow having the capacity to keep from touching me.
I don’t have the same capacity when it comes to her. The fact that I’m stripped of control around her drives a pulse of fury through my veins.