AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I thought Canaan broke me,” I whisper. “It’s probably why I was so…determined toliveand experience everything the second I thought I had a chance with you. I don’t even think I realized back then how scared I was that I’d never have this. Because of what they did. Not that I believed in what they were saying, necessarily, but I worried…I worried it still had some impact on me, you know? Like I…like I wouldn’t be able to feel attraction again or let myself be with a man, or be able to even stomach a man touching me without fearing for my soul or feeling sick to my stomach.”
His jaw tenses, but he doesn’t interrupt.
“But then I saw you. That day on the beach.” I give my head a little shake. “And it was like you reached into that cold, dark place—the eye of all my storms combined—and grabbed me. Pulled me out. Suddenly, I was alive again. Suddenly, I could see and feel again, and for once in my life itfelt good.It hurt, but it hurt so good.”
A tear squeezes out from between his lashes.
“And I was…addicted, I think. It’s why I kept staring at you,” I say, a rusty laugh escaping me. “It felt like…like maybe you were the key all along. The key to everything, and I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t stay away. I just…Iwanted.And I never stopped.”
He makes a small, choked sound in the back of his throat, his strong, calloused hands coming up to clutch my cheeks.
“I don’t know how I got so lucky finding someone like you,” I tell him in a broken hush, my gaze sweeping over every inch of his perfect face. “Sometimes, I worry that maybe it’s not real—that I’m still in that pitch-black basement, and this is like some fantasy world I created to escape what was happening.”
Nolan sucks in a shaky breath, and rocks his head side to side. “It’s real, it’s real.”
Peering up through my lashes, I gaze at the star-speckled sky, and for a moment I let myself remember it all, like a movie playing out in my head, scenes from the past woven into scenes of the present.
That day—the day we met—seeing his tattoo for the first time, and feeling my heart skip a beat.
The night sky.
“It’s finally finished,”he’d told me last week, when he pulled off his shirt to show me the newly added lightning bolts spiderwebbing across his chest, woven in with the clouds and stars.
And his daughter’s birthday, cradled by the cracks of light, like it’s all somehow connected. The universe that his life revolves around, mapped out on his skin, as apart of him as the bonds that ground him to this earth.
“For you,”he said, as he dragged my finger down the path of one of the bolts, right to where his heart thumped heavily from behind his ribcage.
“For me?”
He nodded.“You’re what I’ve been waiting for all along. The missing piece. The lightning that lit up my world.”
And then it’s another stormy day flashing through my brain, but this time I’m alone, fighting a losing battle with a current determined to keep me under.
I’m drowning, lost, and devastated it ended before it could even begin, not even knowing then what I know now. And in my fading thoughts, I remember thinking of that very same tattoo, and praying I could find my Heaven there.
Millions of moments, all blurring together…
Limbs tangled.
Lips brushing.
Groans and gasps into the air.
“I love you,”he tells me under the glow of Christmas lights, and I nod, because I know. I feel it in the thunder that pumps my blood. The buzzing that bites at my fingertips.
His love for me…
His undeniable, unfaltering devotion to me.
He owns me… storms and all.
I gasp, and come back to earth “Nolan, open your eyes,” I tell him strongly.
Green, glimmering eyes fly open, colliding with mine, and I’m flying—soaring. Definitely way too close to the sun, but it’s okay.
It’s okay.
We can burn together.
