Chapter 20 Totality #2
As my legs kick below the surface, my free arm slices through the choppy water with determined, rhythmic strokes. Ignoring the burn in my muscles, my existence narrows to this one impossible act.
Waves thrash and crash around us, the ruthless currents striving to tear her body away from mine.
Breath scraping my lungs, I grip her tighter, bones aflame from the effort.
But I propel us forward, each stroke driven by utter defiance.
As a breaker barrels over us, I’m thrust beneath the surface, the dark covering my vision, assaulted by what lurks in my own violent waters.
Jaw clenched, I fight the intrusive images back into the abyss, tightening my hold on Collins. The weight of her against my chest sends fresh adrenaline surging. With a furious roar, I claw my way back to the surface of my shore.
I hold on to her, refusing to lose her to the dark waters.
An eternity passes before my boots scrape the sand. I stagger ashore, legs buckling beneath the weight of my exhaustion and her limp body. I collapse to my knees, laying Collins along the hard sand.
Lungs searing, vision blurred, I press my fingertips alongside her neck, waiting to count her beats, her blinks, her breaths. Waiting to hear her soft notes.
My throat constricts. Hand unsteady, I clear the sand from her pale blue lips, her skin like ice beneath my bare touch.
Her blouse has come undone at the top, and I settle my palm at the hollow beneath her collarbone, between the swell of her breasts.
Breath caged, I lean in, waiting to feel the faintest brush of her breath. My chest goes as still as hers—
She gasps in air, and with my own shuddering breath, I turn her face.
A cough rattles her chest as seawater spills from her lips.
With my other hand, I grasp the nape of her neck, bracing her while she clears the water from her lungs.
Her eyelashes flutter, eyes blinking open to reveal a slate sky, gold waking in the depths like early stars.
I swallow hard, my throat aflame with salt, as her gaze slowly focuses on me. A shiver clings to her body, lips trembling, before a slow smile graces her mouth.
“You’re touching me,” she whispers.
A rush of air escapes my raw lungs. My hand moves lower, fingers reverently covering the scar that splits the valley of her chest. “You’re letting me touch you.”
Emotion wells behind her eyes. She reaches up, fingertips gentle against my cheek, her touch an electric, humming current. She wanders lower, exploring my jaw, my neck. Descending even lower as she tenderly trails her fingers over the planes of my chest, tracing the designs inked into my skin.
And I’m just as reverent, mapping the last of the light along her cheekbone with my thumb, memorizing the soft feel of her skin. But the moment is broken too soon, the awe in her gaze stolen by a flicker of panic as memory begins to flood back—everything that happened before.
The dark lanes in her eyes deepen, dimming the gold. And yet, as I fall deeper into those shadowed corridors, a subtle brilliance emerges. Once your eyes adapt to the darkness, you find the hidden light there, like uncovering a distant cluster of stars within the void.
Her fingers curl urgently into my damp shirt. Her throat pulses with a hard swallow. “Orion—”
“I’m going to kiss you, Collins,” I say, my voice scraping the air between us. I hold her gaze, letting the fiery ache consume. I graze my beaten knuckles over her bruised cheek, still so shaken at the soft feel of her.
Above us, the sky darkens, the eclipse nearing totality. Shadows stretch across rocks, color bleeding away and plunging the shore into a surreal, silver dusk.
Everything stills. The ocean falls to a hush, as if holding its breath in anticipation for second contact. An unnatural silence envelops the shore, the universe pausing for this one moment.
And within this breathless dark, she’s so fucking beautiful. A frozen star bathed in twilight, ruinous and devastating.
I brush my thumb across her lips, aching to taste them. Her fingers curl over mine, lacing our hands together in response, and my entire body ignites. I surrender to the hunger burning through my veins, desperate to give her these fleeting seconds.
Billions of light-years away, two black holes merged in a violent collision, their gravitational waves sent rippling through the fabric of space and time to eventually reach us here, now—resonating in the space between our pounding hearts as I slant my mouth over hers.
The impact is cataclysmic.
The instant her lips part against mine, I’m pulled into her. I tunnel my fingers into her wet hair, cradling the back of her head against the sand as I crush my mouth harder to hers, deepening the kiss.
A groan is torn from my throat as my tongue sweeps hers, tentative for a moment before she moans, then I’m a rising tide of molten need.
She inhales deeply, stealing my breath to reclaim her own, and I hungrily, greedily steal it right back.
Our bodies move on instinct, bridging a divide we’ve held in place far too long.
Her leg slips through the slit in her skirt to curl around my hip, boot heel digging into my thigh, pulling me closer as another surge of icy tide washes over our calves.
I drag her body half beneath mine, falling heavy over her with the surrender to gravity.
And we align—heart to heart, pulse to pulse—two tidally locked stars, flaring in a single beat.
Sensation and need build to a crescendo. A symphony rising higher, louder.
Something primal breaks loose at the gentle vibration in her throat, and I angle my head, bracing my palm along her jawline, my thumb sweeping her skin as I savor her, fierce and ravenous, tasting salt and life and sweet, intoxicating want.
“God—fuck,” I groan over her mouth, my restraint stretched unbearably thin as the soft contour of her body meets with mine, perfect in our symmetry.
“You came back for me,” she whispers against my mouth. Her hand in my hair tugs, urging me even closer. It takes every shred of my control to resist, to bury the darker desires clawing at my skull.
“I will, always.”
The moment the eclipse reaches totality, I feel it down in my marrow, fine-tuned. This obsessive fear of losing control, of losing her, tightens my grip.
A dull throb pounds at my temples, and I push back against the pain being this close to her brings. I’d cross an entire goddamn ocean for her. Fight the destructive waters of my mind. Fuck, to keep her just like this, I’d let the pain burn me alive.
As the moon covers the sun, devouring the last traces of light, the shadow claws forward, urging my hand higher, to seal tighter. Black filaments invade, compelling me toward this monstrous act—to claim her final moments beneath the rising constellation of stars.
My fingers tremble at her throat, balanced precariously between tenderness and threat. Collins gasps against my mouth, her breath shallow and quick. Fire lashes against my bones as the dark tide surges, the violent impulse to take her last breath.
As my hand collars her throat, I kiss her harder.
As my body strains against the painful urge, I clutch her tighter.
As the insidious force all but strangles me, I breathe her in deeper.
And as a crown of fire ignites the dark sun, casting a blazing halo around shadow, my muscles coil brutally tight, bones locked in a vise as I desperately deny the ritual. Fighting the compulsion to capture her echoes at the brink of annihilation, in the final pulse of her fading heartbeat.
When the system detects an anomaly, it calls for a complete shutdown.
This crucial moment of retrieval, to recover that lost unit of time, slips away like the last grains of sand from my grasp.
Gone.
And still, I hold on tight—so tight she winces, and a breath shudders out of me as I force myself to loosen my grip.
Darkness pours across the shore, draping us in the umbral shadow of totality. I capture her mouth in another fervent kiss. My tongue skims her lower lip, tender, tasting—
Her breath catches sharp, her body clenching in pain. “Orion,” she whispers over my lips, her voice going breathy. “Something’s wrong.” She flinches. “My heart—”
Dread is a monster ripping open my chest. “I’m right here,” I say, hand pressed fiercely to her chest. “I’m not letting go.”
Above, the sky darkens in mirror of the void thrashing within me. Desperate, I press my forehead to hers, eyes fastened shut against the suffocating agony. Fingers dug into the hard sand, I clutch the dip of her lower back, arching her body into me.
“Don’t worry,” I tell her, jaw tense. “I’ll come for you. I won’t lose you to the dark waters.” I pull back and kiss her forehead, her cheek. “Not ever, Collins. I will never let go.”
My left hand remains centered in the delicate slope of her chest, feeling each jagged inhale and exhale, counting every precious, irregular beat of her heart before her rhythm slips…
…falling silent beneath my palm.
And her heart stops.
I fall back on my heels, my face turning skyward. Chest heaving, I drive a hand through my hair, caught between the breathtaking solar eclipse and the violent reckoning tearing through me.
In the eerie stillness of totality, details are luridly vivid. Collins, lying unnaturally still, her skin pale and ethereal beneath the uncanny glow. Colors drained away, shadows clawing across her motionless body on the gray sand.
Every cell of my being revolts, terror tightening like a mass beneath my ribs as I haul her body against mine. I clutch her to my chest, thumb brushing the stars along her wrist, the absence of her pulse tearing a broken sound from my throat.
The loss of her is annihilating.
This moment suspends, a moment that feels infinite, stretched like the endless fury of the ocean as it tears through me.
A storm in time.
Collapsing into a single, unbearable point—a singularity where everything stands still, as frozen as her heart.