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Weird.
He was acting weird.
And this was Cam we were talking about.
So if I thought he was acting odd, he was really being strange.
"For me?" I specified as I walked over.
Another tight nod.
"You already got me plenty," I told him, shaking my head, but reaching for the tucks at the sides under the tape, ripping the paper off.
To find a plain cardboard box with a lid beneath.
Feeling an odd wobbly sensation in my stomach, I pulled it off, finding a pile of red and green crinklies inside.
Cam was not - almost as a rule - someone who went overboard with the wrapping. For my birthday the year before, he had tossed my present in a birthday bag without any kind of tissue paper or anything.
Feeling oddly excited, I reached inside, feeling something cold, metal.
My hand closed around it, brows drawn together as I dragged it upward.
And there it was.
A Double Trigger.
The gun we needed.
The last one missing.
The one that had caused me to get my ass handed to me.
The one that had made almost a dozen men lose their lives.
The one that had brought Roderick and me together to begin with.
My brows drew together even as my head shot up, shaking my head, wanting, needing to know, but understanding that I might never know how he had pulled this off when Astrid hadn't been able to find even a hint of anyone talking about this one on legit or dark sites.
"Cam..." I said instead, shaking my head.
He gave me a look I couldn't decipher. And since I knew him as well as I did, since he communicated almost exclusively through his eyes, it bothered me that I didn't know this one.
It almost looked like something... fearful?
Yeah.
Fearful, worried, unsure.
Three looks you never usually found on Camden's face.
He swallowed hard.
And then I understood the look.
Because his mouth opened.
And words came out.
"G-g-g-g-go t-t-to h-him."
He stuttered.
He stuttered.
Jesus Christ.
All these years. Of silence. Of pleading for him to communicate with me. Of not understanding what could possibly keep him from even trying to.
And it was because he stuttered.
My free hand flew to my chest, pressing over a heart that swelled and ached at the same time.
Swelled because I could finally hear his voice, I finally understood his silence. But ached because he felt he couldn't share this with me before, that he had to hide something like that, something that never would have changed the way I viewed him.
Tears - something that had once been foreign to me, but were becoming more common for me - flooded my eyes as the gun fell from my hands and into the box.
I flew around the table, slamming into him bodily, my arms going around him so tightly it was probably cutting off all his air.
There was a pause before his arms lifted from his sides, folding around my back, squeezing me back hard.
"Thank you," I told him. "For the gun. But more for... for sharing this with me," I told him, not caring that I was getting his shirt wet with tears.
"T-t-t-time," he said, his air shuddering out of him on an exhale.
"Overdue," I agreed, giving him another tight squeeze. "We wouldn't have cared about a lisp," I added, wanting him to hear it. Because fear of our rejection was the only explanation for his.
"P-p-past s-s-s-shit," he said, shrugging it off when we both knew that if it was enough to make him mute for years, there was nothing about it to shrug over.
"I figured," I agreed, sniffling a bit, pulling away, wiping my cheeks with my sleeve. "What's your name?" I asked, the question that had been plaguing me since I met him.
"C-c-Camden."
"No.... really."
"O-only o-one t-t-t-that m-m-matters."
"Fair enough," I agreed. "All these years," I said after a second of silence. "I have thought of hundreds, thousands of things I wanted to ask you. And now I can't think of anything."
To that, his shoulder shrugged. And I realized that this wasn't some miracle, him speaking. It was a lifetime of training himself not to speak, to respond only with body language. We weren't going to go from complete silence to having long conversations in the matter of a few minutes.
And that was okay.
More than okay.
Wounds took longer to heal than get. If it took him another six years to be able to have a conversation with me, that was fine.
"I love you," I told him, voice thick with sincerity.
"L-l-love y-y-you t-too, L-Liv."
His voice was sounding scratchy, muscles atrophied from disuse.
"I won't tell Astrid," I promised. "That's for you. When you're ready."
"I thought it was part of my dreams," Astrid said, making us both jolt, not sure how we missed the scratch of her slippers on the floor.
"What?" I asked, looking over at a confused Cam.
"When I first came here," she specified. "When you guys first took me in. You remember the nightmares?"
