To Bleed a Crystal Bloom (Crystal Bloom, #1)

by Sarah A. Parker

I hang my head and pretend the stars aren’t staring holes through my back. But they are. They always are. And they always fucking will.

I’ve just learned to cram my body full of things that sedate me enough to mask the pain;

Why all the men in my life seem so caught up on my lacerated skin, I’ll never know.

How can he say that when my breasts are practically jumping out of this torture suit? I miss my chest wrap.

girl same

“I hate you,” I manage to whisper, watching him stalk toward the wide-open doors. He grinds to a halt the moment the words slip off my tongue. A small, humorless smile curls his lips into something almost painful to witness—a wicked sharpness that reminds me I don’t know this male despite all the years we’ve lived under the same roof. All the droplets of myself I’ve shared with him. “Oh, precious,” he says, surveying down, then back up the lines of my body still pinned to the wall by his phantom touch. “You don’t even know the meaning of the word.” And then he’s gone.

I need my feet dug into fleshy soil; need to pull some peace from the earth and pretend I’m not fraying at the seams. I just need.

Because I deserve gentle. I deserve gentle when this man is so boldly destroying me.

Perhaps I’m cursed to be surrounded by intense men who make very little sense.

Let the anger win, Orlaith. Let the anger win. “Fuck. You.”

the monster you know is safer than the monster you don’t.