Chapter 3
He jumps at the first telltale tingle on his skin, but learns not to expect much.
They'll meet eventually, he's sure; no one has any idea how to explain how the soulmate system works, but it's inexplicably powerful—it
has
to be, to bring so many people together in the way that it does—and he trusts that his time will come.
Besides, he can already deduce that they're Caldrian; he has it easier than the people whose soulmates live in different countries or continents entirely.
It isn't until a couple months after the forehead incident that Gael realizes he should probably do something to remind his soulmate that
yes, hello, I still exist
.
What happens is this: he wakes up Sunday morning, brushes his teeth, eats breakfast, gets dressed.
Right as he's pulling a shirt over his head, he happens to turn and catch a glimpse of himself in his dresser mirror.
His torso is littered in red-purple splotches.
On his chest, on his stomach, on the jut of his hipbone.
And Gael may have been naïve, but he sure as hell isn't stupid.
He knows these aren't the same bruises he used to get when he was a child.
His soulmate is discreet, he'll give them that.
The hickeys never travel above the neckline, an observation Gael makes with one part appreciation and three parts scorn, and they only show up on weekends, though it takes days longer for them to fade.
Gael may be bad at math, but he can put two and two together.
He thinks they might be in college.
Their notes have started mentioning lectures and professors ever since the school year began, and it would explain the hookups, too.
High school students don't have much time to do anything but study; certainly, it's taking everything in Gael to stay on top of his assignments while simultaneously preparing for the SAT, which lurks around the corner.
The first time the hickeys show up, he forces himself to dismiss them as a fluke.
A mistake, perhaps, a drunken one-time affair goaded on by the excitement of being in college.
But it happens a second time, and a third, and when Gael wakes up a fourth time to find marks he never wanted all over his body, he decides to take action, only to get stuck on precisely
how
to take action.
Can you maybe stop sleeping around
is a little too blunt.
Hi it's me I'm your soulmate
is just plain tactless.
In the end, he doesn't write anything at all.
But come Monday morning, during his first class of the day, he takes a ballpoint pen and—struck by a combination of boredom and inspiration—starts drawing.
Birds and flowers and leaves, anything that comes to mind, because he can't find the right words and Caldrian's always been his best subject anyway.
In the end, Gael doesn't write anything at all.
Instead, he draws an intricate web of life onto his left arm, a sprawling sleeve of tattoo-like designs, and when he caps his pen at the end of the period, he can't help but feel satisfied at his work.
More than words and numbers, art has been his preferred mode of expression for as long as he can remember—the visual, the physical, the tangible.
This time, he doesn't have to wait long.
Not more than five minutes pass before Gael feels the old tingle, on the back of his hand so as not to disturb the drawing, and when he checks, he doesn't have the faintest inkling of doubt that this message is for him.
Wow you're a really good artist!
!
"What are you smiling like that for?" Jonas asks, nudging Gael and leaning over before Gael can snatch his hand away.
"Finally work up the balls to talk to them, did you?"
Gael settles for pushing at Jonas's shoulder until he gets the hint and moves back.
"Mind your own damn business."
(Later, he racks his brain for something to say to his soulmate.
When he comes up blank, he decides to leave things as they are, figuring that it's best not to force it.
The hickeys stop happening after that regardless.)
Gael likes to think of what he and his soulmate have as a comfortable silence.
A quiet understanding, if you will, though he's aware that the only thing standing between them and real interaction is his own inhibition.
Gael's soulmate continues to write on their arms and Gael himself continues to remain content watching the words scrawl themselves across his skin.
They stay like that for a while—and Gael would be perfectly fine staying like that for a while longer because he can't be sure of where he stands with them, not after everything that's already happened, but his soulmate seems to have other ideas.
Draw me something?
The words appear on the back of his hand while he's working on his Dustrian homework.
Gael hesitates for only a few seconds before grabbing a pen and writing to his soulmate for the first time in his life.
What do you want me to draw?
The response comes almost immediately.
Anything you want.
It'll be amazing no matter what,
it reads, and Gael is suddenly glad that blushes aren't part of the mark-sharing deal because he's fairly certain he's turning red from head to toe.
That's how Sunday evening finds him pushing his shirt sleeve to his elbow and drawing a mandala-like pattern that wraps around the girth of his forearm.
He draws swirls and swoops and curlicues, shades it in dark enough to make it look like a tattoo; draws it from the inside out, starting from the center and making it grow along his arm, doesn't stop until his pen runs out of ink and he remembers that he has school tomorrow.
It takes the better part of an hour, but his soulmate's lavish praise—messy and barely legible, skittering across Gael's right arm in an slovenly line of characters—makes it completely worth the time.
The rest of high school passes in a caffeine-fueled haze of studying.
Draw for me?
becomes a thing between the two of them.
Sometimes the reason is
bad day, can you draw me something?
Other times it's
can you draw me a turtle I bet you'd make it look like a masterpiece
.
It's all the same to Gael because he
likes
doing this for his soulmate, likes getting the feeling that he's doing something for them, however small; likes getting the feeling that he might, just might, be making their day a fraction brighter in the only way he knows.
They don't talk much in the way of actual conversation, but a picture is worth a thousand words and Gael would draw a thousand pictures for his soulmate if they asked him to.
"Whipped,"
Jonas coughs none too quietly into his fist whenever he catches Gael doodling in class, which is—probably too often for Gael's own good, considering that grades are everything when it comes to the college application process.
But Gael has never pretended to be a better student than he is and it isn't like he ever wanted to go to any of the top universities, and besides.
He likes drawing, he likes art, and he likes his soulmate.
"Shut up," becomes the natural response to Jonas's teasing comments—okay, not that it wasn't already—and by the time Gael exits the hellhole that is high school and enters the entirely new hellhole that is university, he's inking his arms up on a weekly basis.