Page 33 of Beyond the Blue Horizon
Used and pleased.
Consumed and sated.
Heat licked across the surface of my skin, and I tossed the covers off like I’d been burned.
Breaths heaving, I stared up at the vaulted, wood-beam ceiling, trying to blink away the fantasy.
But each time my lids closed, I was hit by a black and white projector flash of what he might look like standing under the shower.
That lean, fierce body covered in all that ink.
My throat grew thick, and my heart beat at a rapid pace.
One-Star. One-Star. One-Star.
I silently chanted it like it might hold the chance of knocking some sense into me.
But was it wrong?
Aching for it?
Human connection?
I hadn’t been touched in so long, and that vacancy was beginning to feel like a canyon carved out in the middle of me.
As if I’d been fragmented.
Cut from the life that I’d dreamed of and hollowed out by the one that I’d been given.
The stirring on the far side of the room caught my attention.
The only light dissecting the lapping darkness of the room was the bare bit of moon that peeked out from the clouds that had begun to abate and streamed through the window.
Just enough to illuminate the shape of the portable crib that had been set up against the wall. One that had also come when the baby gate had been delivered.
Another thing that had been so thoughtful.
I didn’t know if Theo Mallin was a windstorm or a buoy.
But he couldn’t be anything.
My thoughts spun and spun.
The car.
Our situation.
In an instant, panic surged.
Depriving me of oxygen.
I sat up on the side of the bed, gasping for that breath and trying to see through the disorder.
A gust of wind clattered at the window, and the branches of a tree scraped against the pane, sending shadows crawling over the walls of the small room.
And the fear consumed. Winding and winding around me like a rope.
Compressing until I felt as if my ribs would crack.
