Exiled (Unlucky 13, #11)

by Jessie Walker

It doesn’t escape me that it’s only because Nolan’s here that I feel confident I can go back out there and be a functioning adult. Just knowing he’ll be there to step in if I start to lose my shit… Well, it makes all the difference, and I hate that.

Humor. It’s how we all cope with the fucked up shit.

“I don’t know what your deal is, but I do know if you hurt a hair on that boy’s head, I will not hesitate to ensure you no longer have hands.” Leveling his gaze, I process his words. Finally, nodding, I reach out a hand. “I’d want nothing less.”

“He’s just…freer with you. I don’t know how to describe it.”

He came for me. He’s mad and he’s hurt, and rightfully so… And yet… He’s here. Still here, six months later, despite thinking I’d moved on. That has to mean something. I have to make it mean something.

“But outside of sex, you need to trust that I know what I want. I know what I can handle. I know who I am and…I know who I want to be with.”

Do you even know I’ve been looking for you? I miss you. Find me, sweetheart. Come to me. I beg you. You weren’t just a body for me to lose myself in those weeks we shared together. You changed me. Irrevocably…

“Yours, storms and all,”

Yours, still, storms and all. Storms and all, always. Yours always, storms and all.

“My hurricane,” he breathes. I shiver, kissing him softly. “I’ve missed you,” I whisper. He opens his mouth against mine, prying my lips apart. “No more of that,” he barely manages to growl, before sweeping his thick, hot tongue in my mouth.

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.

There’s no telling where he ends and I begin. We’re fused. In mind, body, and soul, and I’m gone. Lost. Shattering into a million pieces inside him.

Sometimes I just stim to stim. I don’t even realize I do it half the time. Dr. Maddock and Dr. Healey—the therapist I saw in Indiana—they said it’s how I self-soothe. Not just for comfort when I’m stressed, but also when I need to focus. Like my body knows that struggling to stay on task, or stay calm, is a trigger for me…and it compensates without my even knowing it’s happening to prevent a meltdown.”

“A lot of people assume being or going non-verbal means not talking at all. But it just means we lose the ability to put words to what we’re feeling and experiencing. It’s all there in our heads, but we can’t get it out, and it’s really distressing. We shut down. Well, I do. Or I flip out, if I’m dealing with the sensory issues on top of that. Again, it’s a huge spectrum. I can really only speak for myself.”

🥹😭

“A light-switch was flipped on. For the first time in my life, things made sense. I suddenly didn’t feel like I was drowning anymore.”

“You saw me and you listened and you just… You never looked away. Not now, not when you know everything that is…me. You still look at me like you always have. Talk to me like you always have. Though…” I narrow my eyes. “You are nicer now.” He barks out a laugh. Grinning, I say, “You’ve just always been you. No pretenses.”

“There’s just…so many rules. Peopling is hard. Not always, but sometimes.”

This. So much this. It’s exhausting.

“I’m tired, Sky.” “I know,” I whisper. “We deserve good things, right?” I nod. “We do.”

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.

And that lack of pressure to conform and impress is…nice. I’ve never felt so free to just…not care and be me before. I don’t have to be on.

Mask drop. 🖤👏🏼

Fuck, if it all doesn’t just make me want to pound on my chest, and throw him over my shoulder, and mess him up until my scent is as entwined in him as his own. He makes an animal of me, and he knows it.

“Your sexuality is not a threat to our child.”

“If I did have a problem with this, and I was the kind of awful person who’d make you choose—him or her—what would you do?” My eyes widen. Is she serious? “Mel…” “Humor me.” Clenching down on my molars, my eyes flaring at the thought, I say tightly, “I’d take you to court.” I pause meaningfully. “Not for sole custody. I’d never take her away from you, unless you gave me reason to. But I’d fight with everything I have to be able to stay in her life, and I’d never stop fighting. I’d give my land up, my business…” Tears shimmer in her eyes and she smiles. “But not him,” I choke out. “I choose them both.”

Well, too bad sweetheart. I choose both of you. And I’m never letting you out of my sight again.

“You’re not forcing me to move in with you just because I don’t have a real bed.” I cock my head. “No, I’m forcing you to move in with me because I love you.”

I don’t wanna miss a second of this moment, of what he looks like, gazing back at me in a way no one’s ever gazed back at me. Like he sees me—all of me—storms and all.

“Close your eyes. I’ll close mine too,” he whispers in a ragged hush.

“They say your life flashes before you when you die, but that day, it was the thought of losing you, that had all the what if’s and what could be’s flashing across my mind. I didn’t understand it then. I just knew I couldn’t lose you. It was imperative I didn’t lose you.”

“Out with it,” I whisper. He swallows—I feel it—and then I hear the words, somehow, before he even says them. “Marry me.”

“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 it felt good. It hurt, but it hurt so good.”

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.

“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.”

His love for me… His undeniable, unfaltering devotion to me. He owns me… storms and all.

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.

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

And Skyler is no less superhuman, just because he needs a little more support in place—people to help him when he needs to take a step back before he’s overwhelmed to the point that it’s a danger to him and others. He just needs to tap out sooner than most would, and that’s okay.

He was thrown into expert mode without warning or preparation, and it’s up to those of us who love him to help guide his way, and hold him when the earth shakes. To remind him he’s not alone in this, even if my challenges are different from his.

“Some daddies are called Dad, and some are called Sky,” is what she told me once. He and I had just gotten married, six months after we got engaged. Later, I’d asked Skyler if that bothered him, and he told me, “No. I’m still her dad. She said so.”

And if he happens to be autistic too, so what? It’s far from a death sentence.

👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

This, I think, remembering what I told Skyler on the dock so many years ago when I proposed. The future I saw that stormy day on the cliffs, watching the angry water devour it… This is what I saw.

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.

But because that’s what a real family is—it’s cooking out on the grill, and having water balloon fights in the yard, and feeling like you finally have a place to call home. A place that will unflinchingly catch you when you fall, and shelter you from any wreckage that may befall you when the world comes crashing down.

“As if I’d ever let you go,” he’d said. “I’ll be gray well before you, and I’ll still hobble my way to the ends of the earth for you.”

Nolan is and always will be my champion after all. The man who never fails to charge into the war raging on in my head, and sweep me off my feet. And I am the scholar, tasked with weaving our history, asking questions, and shedding light on things hidden and misunderstood.

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.

Find me, sweetheart. Come to me. I beg you. If you do, I’ll never let you go again. And if you don’t want me… Just show me some sign of life. Get a Facebook for fuck’s sake, I don’t know. I’m just… I’m lost here. Yours, still, storms and all, Nolan

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