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My ear rings with a high-pitched whine drowning out the rain, and the taste of blood floods my mouth instantly. My cheekbone feels like it’s been turned to dust, throbbing with a heat that sears all the way down to my neck.

For a second, the world is just grey static and pain.

“Don't,” he says calmly. “Don't you ever shout at me.”

The burning tears begin to cascade, tracking through the makeup on my cheeks, dripping off my chin to leave dark, salty starbursts on the front of my coat. I hate them. I hate that I’m crying. It feels like just another thing I’m doing wrong.

I lift my foot off the accelerator, reaching for the indicator.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“I can’t,” I gasp, my breath hitching in a wet, ugly sob. “I can’t drive like this, Matthew. I’m pulling over.”

He lunges across the center console, his hand slamming over mine on the wheel. He yanks it hard to the right, forcing the nose of the car back toward the center line.

Panic flares, wild and hot in my chest, my fingers going numb with fear.

“Let go!” I scream, yanking the wheel back, trying to wrestle control from him.

The tires scream.

The back end kicks out.

The world outside the window tilts on its axis, the headlights sweeping wildly across the wet trees.

There’s a flash of silver guardrail, and then a sound that eats the world—metal screeching on metal, the sickening crunch of a soda can being crushed by a giant’s fist, the explosion of safety glass turning into a storm of diamonds.

The ceiling becomes the floor as I’m tossed like a ragdoll in a dryer, over and over, until everything goes black.

******

I don’t know how much time has passed. Seconds? Hours? Time feels irrelevant right now.

The screaming of the tires and the shouting is gone—replaced by the ticking of a cooling engine, and the relentless, indifferent drumming of the rain against the exposed metal belly of the chassis.

There’s an overwhelming weight slicing diagonally across my chest, digging in until it meets bone. I try to move, but I’m paralyzed by the geometry of the crash. Gravity has turned traitor. I’m suspended by a nylon noose, dangling like meat in a butcher’s window.

Blood’s pooling in my skull, a heavy, hydraulic pressure that feels like it’s trying to push my eyes out of their sockets. Something warm and viscous is leaking into my hairline, tracking a slow, wet path from chin to nose to forehead.

Breathe. Just breathe.

But the second I try, a line of white-hot fire wakes up across my stomach, and a gargled cry wretches out of me.

I look down—or up, through the twisted ruin of the cabin—and the nausea hits me so hard, the already-dark world greys out at the edges.

The dashboard has buckled. A piece of jagged, serrated plastic has shorn through the dark like a shark’s tooth, tearing through my coat, through my shirt, and into me. I’ve been unzipped. The pain is absolute, a screaming, blinding thing that makes my vision flicker like a dying lightbulb.

I try to look closer, and a scream dies in my throat, choked off by pure horror.

Through the raw, ragged lips of the wound around the plastic, there’s a pulse of, glistening pink.

Oh God. Oh God.

I’m not just hurt; I’ve been unzipped.

As my hands fly to my stomach, fingers slipping on the hot, bloodied flesh in a desperate attempt to hold my own organs inside myself, my gaze catches on the passenger seat.

Matthew’s dangling too, his expensive sweater dark with liquid that definitely isn’t rain. His eyes are wide, white-rimmed marbles in the gloom, darting frantically around the wreckage before locking onto me.