Donatello stood there in the center of his room staring at me for what seemed like an eternity. It felt as if we were mirror images of the night before. I had stared at him as he slept & he had caught me, not knowing where to be in this little room that should be a place of happiness. It seemed like months had passed since. He wanted to sit with me. He wanted to talk, to comfort me, to be comforted. He looked kind of rediculous; his bloodied lip so red it was like he had lip gloss smeared around him mouth. His eye was now dark bruised & almost swollen shut, & the cut on his cheek looked like a bee sting.
I watched him solemnly as he stepped across the cobble stones & sat quietly on the bed. We were almost shoulder to shoulder, staring down at the little wooden crate on the floor.
"Are you alright?" He reached his hand to smooth the hair down my back, but he pulled his hand away like he remembered he wasn't supposed to do something like that. "Why didn't you wake me?"
"I'll be fine."
"What are you doing?"
"I'm packing. If you want this stuff, just tell me."
"No...no it's your's. I kept it for you. For when you came back." His voice was hoarse & he sounded so empty. "Are you coming back?"
"I don't think I should."
"Where are you going?"
"I'll stay in New York. I have. I have some things I have to take care of."
"You don't..."
He stopped & caught his breath shakily. He laid down across the bed behind me. I wanted to just lay back against him & cry. I heard him rustling things around as he'd realized he'd laid on the pictures. He sat up & leaned close to me.
"This was the best day."
He was holding a picture of "Berni" & me; the day we went to Coney Island. He reached over & grabbed the stuffed hippo plush & squeezed it against himself.
"Where would we be if I was that guy?"
I didn't need to see the picture to imagine the beautiful guy in the photo booth, next to me. His wide deep, dark eyes. The strong crescent shape of his jaw. The long, low nose that started just above his full lips & ran all the way up to his high, rounded brows. I knew that face by memory. I had seen it through so many lives & always found him more lovely than the time before. I didn't answer him.
"I remember this! God I was so happy to see you!" Donnie thrust the picture of us on the couch in front of me so I could see. I wish he hadn't. "You weren't happy at all, were you?"
I couldn't hold back any more. I tried to hide the tears rolling down my face in silence. I breathed slowly to try to control it, but the damn tears kept coming. He placed his hand on my back, but great fully he couldn't see me. My face was hot & could feel the the cold tingling rising on the back of my neck.
"Were you ever in love with me."
"I loved you enough not to hurt you."
It wasn't a lie to sate him. It mattered that he was a mutant. Practically the first thing he had said to me when I first came back, was that we didn't work because I was human he wasn't. I had known he was being spiteful; he meant I looked human & could move freely though the world. It had destroyed all I had built up in my mind that I would come back & he would rush to embrace me; disrupting even the cushions on the couch. I sorrowfully laughed to myself. Instead he'd said we weren't meant to be & that we had been reckless even being together at all. He didn't know how those words had brought us to now.
"Why are you crying then, April?"
He leaned against my back & pulled me against him so he could see my face. He ran his hand over my cheeks to wipe the tears. He was the most beautiful person I had ever known, it didn't matter what he looked like to everyone else. I had to laugh at his absolute inability to read emotional cues. It was all together genuine as it was poignant & disheartening.
"I really meant it when I said I'm happy for you & you're girlfriend."
"She's not my girlfriend."
The genuine sincerity in my heart was almost instantly overcome by anger with him for her; I'm pretty sure she thought she was. "How can you say that?"
"How can you say that to me?"
"The guy I used to know wouldn't be so careless & brash."
"Stay out of my head, April. Whatever you think you know, you don't know her."
He suddenly covered his mouth as droplets of blood dripped from it & he quickly got off the bed & ran into his bathroom. I stood in the doorway by the bookshelf & watched him as he doctored his wounded face in the mirror. He held a wad of toilet paper to his mouth & it began to seep red with more blood.
"April, I'm trying to talk to you. My mouth is bleeding again, this isn't going to close."
The bathroom opened up into his work shop; the reason he'd always kept this room. He walked through the second door & out into the workshop; into his lab. He quickly came back, holding one hand over his mouth & a "stitch box" in the other.
"Can you still suture?" He asked as he handed me the little red metal lunch box.
There were several of these, lovingly referred to "stitch boxes" through out the house. They had everything needed for quick stitches. How normal, insane things seemed here.
He sat on the toilet & held his face up for me to see his busted top "lip" had reopened while the bottom was already starting to heal. It would have been difficult for him to see to fix on his own, the way his mouth was shaped. I leaned his head back a little to make sure there was good light; he was so tall I really didn't have to bend down.
"So Noni isn't your girlfriend?" I asked him as I sterilized a needle.
"No, April. I guess I know what you're referring to."
I sprayed his mouth with a little bottle of saline solution. Maybe slightly aggressively to shut him up.
"Honestly, April; how can that matter to you?"
I wiped his face with clean gauze & watched to see if his lip began to bleed again. "I'm glad it's you & not Raphael; he would make sure my face looked crooked forever."
"Do you want to be with her?"
"Yes."
He looked at me & I stopped short of pressing the needle into his skin. He was absolutely honest, he wanted me to see that, but he looked at me with almost as much sadness. He put his hand around my wrist, knowing he wouldn't be able to speak once I began.
"That's not what I wanted, April. Noni is an afterthought."
"Don't demean your feelings for her."
"April. I don't have anything to hide from you. And she knows about you. About everything & last night. I wanted to be with you for the rest of my life. You left me, remember?"
I could suddenly hear her voice in my head. I could see him leaving before the sun was up & sitting with her under the pane glass window. She had kissed him & he had embraced her with a sense of longing, sadness, & regret. "I want you to be certain. If it's not right in the end, promise me you'll think of me." She had given him the choice with an open heart & a doubtless mind.
The earnest, soulful face he was giving me, laid it all out. It was my choice. I pierced his soft skin with the sharp needle & it cleared from one opening of the cut, into the other.
"That's why you were gone this morning."
He wanted to put his hands around me, but he was so incredibly frustrated. He knew if I left, he would go back to her & that would be the end of us. She was incredibly graceful for someone so young. She knew better than me, that he had to be certain of his choices, & he needed others to be certain as well. It wasn't like he hadn't asked that of me literally a dozen times. I never had been, but now I was certain I was leaving to free him of me.
I held his face in my hands & thought about "Berni's" charming smile. The gap in his front teeth, his soft lips. I thought, as I was sewing Donnie back together, how he did look like him. A mutated version of him. He still looked the same; in the eyes & the shape of his face, his smile. He no longer had a "nose", but a long, low hump that started at his scalloped mouth & went up to his large eyes. The same freckles were purple instead of brown. The thick dark hair was gone but his high cheek bones were there & the shape of his broad angular shoulders & long elegant neck were exposed, as Donnie held his face up to me.
All these years the question had played out in my mind. Was I only ever really in love with Donnie's human form? Because of something so shallow? Looking into that face as he held as still & without protest, as I ran the needle painfully back & forth; I was free to look at him as closely as I wanted. Tears from the sting were beading on his tiny fawn eyelashes. His eyes shifted from carmel to coffee to burgundy & back again with the sharp pinches I was inflicting, as gently as I could. He was beyond beautiful inside out. He was everything I had ever wanted; I just wanted to be with him.