Exiled: A Black Diamond Novel

At this point, I don’t even know anymore if I’m just in love with a memory…
Or the boy who would probably just be a stranger to me now. The boy who is now a man and might see me as the villain in their story.
So I think I’m going to stop writing you. At least, I’m going to try. It doesn’t feel like I’m writing to you so much anymore, as I am a ghost, and that doesn’t sit well with me.
God, I hope you’re not a ghost.
If you are, feel free to haunt me.
Then again, you already are…
Storms and all, always,
Nolan

Well, it’s not in the stars you’ll find us.
Not Nolan and me.
Our story lives on in the lightning, forever painting the night sky violet.

Wrong or right—messy that it is—I know as well as she does that we wouldn’t trade a single, goddamn second of what led us here.
Because we’re here.
All of us.
Happy and whole.
No longer exiled…
But loved.

“Mountains and all,” I vow softly against his mouth.
Growling, he nips my lip, vowing right back, “Storms and all.”

“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.”

“I love you, Nolan,” he says quietly, with all the graveness in the world, like it’s something terminal.
And it is, isn’t it?
A love like ours.
It’s the kind you die for. The kind you die with. The kind that…Well, hell, makes me believe there’s a place for us in the afterlife, a place where we can still be together, for all of eternity.
Whether it’s in the heavens, or the night sky, or deep, deep in the ocean where no one’s ever been…
It doesn’t matter where, so long as he never leaves my side.

And now that the words are out there—these feelings I’ve kept trapped in my heart, my bones, my skin…for years…
I realize there was never any choice.
I’m keeping this boy. This man. My hurricane.
For as long as he’ll have me, I’ll keep him.
I just need to figure out a way to keep them both.

He doesn’t smell like the ocean anymore.
But he still smells like mine.

“I didn’t know what it was. But you…you captivated me, Sky. It’s like my world stopped when you turned around, and looked at me for the first time. It stopped, and then it started again, and life just never looked or felt the same since.”

I was taught craving another man was a sin, but I see now how wrong they were. It’s not the fact it’s a man I desire so desperately, it’s the intensity with which I claw and grab and reach for him that has them clutching their bibles.
I’d kick down the door to Hell itself to be with this man…
And that terrifies them.
It terrifies them that love could be so raw, so primal, so powerful—stronger than any prayer.