Flashfire

Ch14

Liam swung his legs, his left calf phasing through the knob of the cabinet door. "What are you going to do if he doesn't believe you?" He stared down at Caleb from his perched position on the kitchen counter.

Caleb looked up from his spot on the floor. "It's a risk worth taking." Caleb was not feigning his confidence, it was very real. He had gone back and forth in his head about it all night after he had gotten home and now, Caleb concluded that it was the only way to truly get their conundrum—and their solution to it, out in the open. He was definitely going to show Paul their secret now.

Was it a secret, really? It wasn't as though Caleb had made an effort to hide what he had done, it just wasn't something that came up naturally in a conversation, even with anyone around. No one interjected into a conversation with, "Hey, our team wouldn't have lost in the second half if we had our old quarterback, and also, I regularly summon the dead in the back kitchen of my bar."

Liam leaned over the countertop, his hands clutching the edge as Caleb reflexively gasped. "Why are you practicing for this, anyway? You already know what you're doing, right babe?" It was then that Caleb remembered Liam could not fall over, rather he would float up like a soap bubble from the sink. The light of the morning sun shone through him and made him glow as if he were a bubble, bright light outlining his edges.

He let out a laugh and it was so innocent, it made him shine even brighter.

Caleb looked back down at the book, mentally annotating the page that he had studied thoroughly already as though he were practicing for an exam. He was not sure why he was rehearsing the ritual.

"I'm just setting everything up, Liam."

"Really? You're nose deep in that book reading the same spell over and over. Is this how you practiced your marriage proposal?"

Caleb lifted his brows, still reading as a small smile played on his lips. "Actually, yes," he said.

If there was one thing about Caleb, he wanted everything to go right and he knew this only came with some level of rehearsal. Still, it was the most random of events that changed the course of his life. One day Liam was talking to him about his favorite obsession, birds. Caleb had never seen anyone so interested in one thing in all of his life, but the man had an unusual, encylopedic knowledge of them, even as a child apparently as he had told him as much.

It had been a reason that other children called him bird-brain, to which he would say, birds' brains are surprisingly efficient despite their size, and that actually, it was a compliment.

"...and it's so fascinating how much we are like them! Like, you know how we give each other shiny objects as a sign of affection? It's like, hey! I love you, take this pretty rock as a sign of my undying devotion." Liam grew more animated as he spoke.

He had made Caleb laugh so hard that tears streamed down his face, before it fell slowly. His eyes were locked on Liam for a long moment, similarly on the first night that he decided to enter into the bar, and a lightbulb went off in his head.

"What?" Liam said grinning.

It was then that he decided he wanted to marry Liam. Caleb had no money at the time, that much was the same, but he knew that Paul would lend him a suit and he could save enough money to buy two relatively inexpensive bands. The wait was agonizing. Every time he looked at Liam for a little bit too long he was afraid that he would figure out what he was planning to do, but Liam only smiled obliviously.

It was safe to say, he was completely surprised when the time for the proposal was just right. Caleb wanted to spend the rest of his life with Liam, a man who he never expected to meet, a person who was unlike any other that he had ever met, someone who had changed the course of his entire life. Plans always came out of random events. Caleb wondered if that was why, sooner or later, they fell apart.

"What are you going to do if he doesn't believe you?" Liam asked again.

Caleb bit his lip, reality crashing down on him as for the first time since he had been shaken up by that car, he had a rational thought enter his mind, and he realized that Liam had a point. There was a very good chance that Paul would think he had lost his mind if he showed up and found Caleb sitting outside of a circle of candles with a weird book in his hands, especially if he told him what he intended to do with it, what he had been doing with it.

He looked up slowly at Liam sitting on the counter, peering at his bright white edges as he came up with a new plan, possibly an awful idea but did he care about that anymore at this point? Caleb shrugged with that easy smile stuck on his face.

"Well, Liam. That's where you come in."