Page 240 of Breathe Like Hell

Not this body.

Not myself.

“I’m leaving,” I said. Dakota started crying harder again, even though she’d known this was coming. We didn’t spend much time together now. Not meaningful time, anyway.

All I did was leave.

All she did was stay, waiting for me to come back.

I knew it hurt her.

But I needed a way out.

I left without another word, numb to everything except the void in my chest where Micah should’ve been.

I got in my car, shifting into gear and pulling out onto the road too fast. My brain didn’t need to send conscious signals to my body telling me where to go. There was only one place that’d ever called me.

Wheels crunched over gravel when I arrived, the endless ocean in front of me, the horizon a blur between sea and sky.

It looked exactly the same as it had the day I first opened my eyes on Earth.

I was the only thing that had changed.

When I’d seen Micah for the first time in two decades, he’d told me I hadn’t changed. I’d believed him then. It’d been true then. But now, I was nothing more than a shell concealing a storm stronger than I even wanted to attempt navigating anymore, a void of grief and suffering. I’d thought Micah leaving me was the greatest pain I would ever feel.

It wasn’t.

The pain of his death was unfathomable in a way I hadn’t been prepared for.

I got out of the car.

The wind carried the sharp scent of salt and wet stone, filling my lungs with its familiarity. It was unmoved by the grief I’d brought here. The water reflected almost no light beneath the overcast sky. Every shade between black and silver painted the waves, all of it tinted with blue. Gunmetal. Steel. The shade of Micah’s irises.

Everything existed in the rolling waves, the crashing foam on the beach, the endless pull of the tide.

I left my shoes and shirt in the car, then allowed my wings to carry me above the tumultuous surface. No one was watching. No one was here to witness my agony.

Once, I’d struck the ocean hard enough to split it around me. Plummeting out of a storming sky, my hand slick with rain, his hand slipping away from mine, wind tearing us apart, dropping me into the waves and him into the trees.

This time, I slipped beneath the surface without so much as a ripple.

I’d carried this ocean inside of me for decades, and I would return to it now.

Just for a little while.

Just until I can feel something other than hurt.

Micah needed blades, needed pain, but I needed this.

I dove down beneath the waves into the frigid water, pulling with my arms and kicking with my feet, going down. Deeper and deeper. Disappearing into the depths, leaving the broken surface behind.

Invisible currents surrounded me, wrapping my body with pressure, threading through my feathers, pressing in against my skull and my lungs, but I ignored them. I just crawled deeper.

The farther I sank, the quieter everything became. The crash and roar of the waves dissolved into a heavy stillness that settled over me like a weighted blanket, a sea-soaked weight clinging to my soul.

I let myself drift the last several feet.

My feet found the seafloor with a muted thud, stirring clouds of sand that curled lazily around my ankles before disappearing into the dark.