Yes, I Am

Chapter Thirty Five.

Two weeks later...

He makes me sit on a chair with my eyes closed, my foot tapping in anticipation for what seems like hours before he kisses the corner of my eye and allows me to regain my vision.

I shake the little box packed with the cute silver wrapping paper. There are specks of excitement and expectations scattered over the hazel of his wide eyes. "Just open it, Sherlock," he says, rolling his eyes at my elaborate guess work.

I chuckle and methodically unwrap it. This seems to annoy him as much as it annoys Austin. I don't know what it is about humans that makes them want to rip apart wrapping paper. For me, it is still paper and there is no way I can mutilate that and create a mess.

There is a black box inside with no logo on it that can give away what it is that he has got for me. When I unclasp it and flip it open, there is a bright red polished rock inside it placed on a velvety platform. It is shiny on the outer surface like it has been polished but I can see jagged edges inside it.

Caleb is propped up on the study table. He pulls my chair closer to him until I am sitting between his legs. "This is Cinnabar."

"An ore of mercury," I murmur, examining it with fascination as the light from my left reflects off of it. "It is available in California, Oregon and Nevada. How'd you get it?"

He smiles mysteriously. "In Taoist mythology, ingesting Cinnabar was said to make them immortal. I know you have a whole thing about not fading away so I took your fingerprint and had it printed on the inside of this stone with the help of a friend." He takes it in his hand and turns it around at a lower angle so I can peer inside it.

"That explains the whole discussion on impressions of thumbs for signatures," I say. He had made this whole deal about how illiterate people have to give their thumb impressions as signatures because they don't know how to write their name and how it was unfair because government is only supposed to keep the fingerprints of criminals in their databases. To illustrate his point, he'd made me dip my thumb in ink and put it on paper forcefully to show me how it would feel. We goofed around on that paper some more, making different shapes with our fingerprints like nursery kids. It mysteriously disappeared in the morning.

He blushes a little. "Yeah, well. This way you'll always exist long after you're gone. Some archaeologist a hundred years from now will discover it and analyze the fingerprint stored inside and he'll find out it belongs to the late famous editor of what's-its-name magazine, Matthew Westbrook."

I blinked rapidly to keep the overwhelming emotions at bay. I heard what he said but I also heard what he didn't say. I'll exist long after I'm gone and his memory will exist with me in the form of a rock long after he's gone. "That's the most thoughtful thing ever, Caleb. Thank you," I whispered.

He is positively shining, beaming at the fact that I like it. I don't know how much effort he had put in to get something like this but it had to be a hell lot. "You really like it?" he asks. It isn't really a question though. He knows I did. From the way I am torn up about whether to hug him or admire the stone more, it is obvious.

"I love it. I love you," I say throatily, swallowing my tears at the parting gift. "You're really going, huh?"

"Yeah." He says it so slowly that I wouldn't have heard it if I wasn't pressed against him. He wraps his functioning arm around me, pressing his lips to the crown of my head.

"I wish you didn't have to," I say as I breathe in the faint detergent scent of his T-shirt with his personal vintage one. After he was discharged from the hospital yesterday, I convinced Ed to let him stay with me till he regained enough strength to make the long flight to Australia. The shootings had hit the news really hard and the support had been overwhelming. The dean of his university had assured him that when he regains the use of his arm, he is welcome back to resume his course there. It will take about four to six months of rigorous physical therapy before he gets there though.

I trace my fingertip over the coarse material of his sling. "I'll come back," he says. It's the same line he's been saying since two weeks. He hates that I look at him like these are our last moments together. He firmly believes that he can press 'Pause' on his life in Orlando, rush to Australia and speed through his recovery, and come back here and press 'Resume'. It's not his fault; out of the two of us, he has always been the romantic. He sees the world painted in bright colors while I see the shades that never got through the prism. He wakes up sweating and screaming every night but I'm the one who stares at the nightmares fluttering behind his eyelids, holding his hand tightly until the gunshots die down.

His parents do not trust America anymore. I can't blame then. If someone hurt my son, I would want to burn the city to the ground for letting my sunshine be shadowed. I know that there's a real chance that they might not let him come back. Even though he denies it, I know that there's a real chance that he himself might not want to come back. I can't blame him either. I'm not reason enough to risk insanity. In the battle of love and fear, fear has the upper hand.

That's the sad thing, you know. They took out the bullet from his shoulder. They forgot to take it out from our minds. Being gay wasn't our fault. It was theirs.

"I know you will," I say to him. He smiles.