Page 350 of Coal Hearts

Placing his bare, dirty foot right between my breasts, he kicked me hard enough to scoot me off my knees and onto my back.

I landed with a wince and swallowed a scream as he grabbed my ankles and spread my legs.

I stared at the sky.

At the curtain of twinkling, twirling droplets falling straight from heaven.

Each one was a perfect universe.

Each one full of life to nurture the soil, the earth, the planet.

My heart hurled itself against my ribs as Daxton lowered himself onto me.

Don’t watch.

As my body was grabbed by bruising fingers and his weight crushed me into mud, the rain seemed to slow. Prismatic droplets hovered, shooting silver with lightning, then exploding into crystal snowflakes with thunder.

My eyes closed, eyelids pummelled by rain and anchored by lashes weighing as much as the world.

A sweeping, comforting undertow dragged me down and down and down.

I disconnected with my body.

I went empty.

I followed that grounding cord of light as it ushered me away to safety.

I let go.

I fell.

I didn’t watch...

Chapter Fourteen

...............................

Henri

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VISION WAS A FUNNY THING.

I’d once read—on a marathon binge about the make-up of the world and why we fucking existed—that the world was holographic. I read that within every raindrop, blooddrop, breath, and cell, we carried the entire code of the cosmos.

I hadn’t understood what the author had been jabbering on about. How the quantum realm was just energy waves until we actually looked and then it became whatever we decided it should be.

But...as I ran through rain and lightning, I began to understand.

The storm fragmented reality—twisting normal things and making them otherworldly.

The thunder rearranged the frequency of the very ground I ran over, making the earth fizzle and fry beneath my feet. The dense liquid in the air saturated my lungs with newness and power, making it hard to breathe.

All of that tried to distract me.

But something drove me.

A gnawing in my chest.