Fable
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Four days later, the whole town smells like woodsmoke and fried sugar, because Hartsgrove does autumn the way Orion does grocery shopping: aggressively, thoroughly, and with a commitment level that borders on unhinged.
Main Street has been closed to traffic and colonized by an army of striped tents.
There are hay bales on every corner. There are pumpkins on the hay bales.
There are tiny pumpkins on the regular pumpkins, which feels excessive, and somewhere a bluegrass band is playing with the enthusiasm of people who have been waiting all year for this exact Saturday.
The air smells of woodsmoke and fried dough and cider, and strings of lights zigzag overhead between the lampposts, waiting for dusk.
I closed the store at four.
On a Saturday.
I want that on the record, because Fable Larkin does not close early.
Fable Larkin has a laminated schedule. But a three-hundred-year-old lycan king showed up at my register at three forty-five, held me in that steady gray gaze, and said, “There’s a festival.
You have a coat. I’ve already flipped your sign,” and apparently that’s all it takes to dismantle six years of routine.
I’m choosing not to examine what that says about me.
“You’re scandalized,” he observes as we walk. “I can tell. You keep looking back at the store.”
“I closed early. People will talk.”
“People are currently watching a man in a corn costume lose a footrace to a nine-year-old. Your register is safe from public scrutiny.”
“Mrs. Patterson will notice. Mrs. Patterson notices everything.”
“Mrs. Patterson,” he says calmly, “is by the cider stand, and she’s been photographing us for the last two minutes.”
I follow his glance. Mrs. Patterson lowers her phone with the speed and subtlety of a startled cartoon. Then, accepting she’s been caught, she simply waves, beams, and mouths something to the woman next to her that is definitely, one hundred percent, the word finally.
“Great,” I mutter. “By Monday we’ll be engaged. By Wednesday I’ll be pregnant with triplets.”
“The Hartsgrove information network is remarkably efficient.”
“It’s terrifying is what it is. It’s surveillance with casseroles.”
The first food stop is nonnegotiable, because I can smell the cider donuts from half a block away and my body is already walking there without consulting me.
Orion buys a dozen. When I raise my eyebrows at the box, he says, “Data suggests you’ll want more than two, and I refuse to stand in that line twice,” which is either romance or logistics, and with him there’s genuinely no difference.
The donuts are so good I make a sound that startles a passing dog.
“Good?” he asks.
“I want to be buried in these. That’s my updated will. Cider donut mausoleum.”
“Noted. I’ll have the paperwork drawn up.”
We work our way down the street, and it turns into a gauntlet in the best way.
Kettle corn. Caramel apples, he watches me try to bite one with the fascination of a nature documentarian.
Cheese curds of questionable provenance that squeak against my teeth while he explains, unprompted, the microbiology that causes the squeaking, and I eat four more just to make him keep talking, because there is something deeply unfair about how attractive competence is.
A man should not be able to say casein matrix and set off a slow, warm pull behind my ribs. And yet.
You have a problem, my brain observes.
I’m aware, I tell it, and hand him the rest of my caramel apple so I can watch his jaw work.
Halfway down the block, his phone buzzes.
He glances at the screen, and for one second, half a second, a change crosses his face. A shutter. The line of his shoulders acquires a new weight, the kind I’ve learned to notice, and then it’s gone, smoothed over, and the phone disappears into his pocket unanswered.
“Everything okay?”
“Nothing that can’t wait.” He looks at me, and whatever was on that screen loses. It visibly loses. “Today is spoken for.”
File it, my brain says, and I do, in the folder that’s getting fuller by the day, the one labeled things he isn’t telling me. But his hand finds the small of my back, warm even through my coat, and the folder can wait too.
The games section is where things get out of hand.
It starts at the ring toss, which every human alive knows is rigged. The rings are barely wider than the bottles. The bottles are angled. Nobody wins the ring toss; that’s the ring toss’s whole personality.
Orion studies the booth for eleven seconds, a general before a chessboard.
“The rings are undersized,” he says.
“Yes. It’s a scam. It’s traditional. You pay three dollars to be humbled.”
“The bounce is the problem. If the ring arrives with no rotational energy and lands dead…” He pays his three dollars, weighs a ring in his hand, and tosses it with a flat, unhurried flick.
It drops over the bottle neck and stops. No bounce. No drama. It simply obeys.
The carnival worker stares at it.
Orion tosses the second ring. Same flick. Same result.
“Sir,” the worker says weakly.
Third ring. Third bottle.
“SIR.”
By the time we leave the booth, a small crowd has gathered, the worker looks like he’s witnessed a crime he can’t report, and I’m carrying a stuffed wolf the size of a golden retriever. It’s gray. It has ridiculous golden button eyes and an expression of permanent mild concern.
“He looks like you,” I say.
“He doesn’t look like me.”
“He absolutely does. Look at his little worried face. This is you when I put a mug down without a coaster.”
“I don’t have a worried face.”
“You have seventeen worried faces. I have a catalog.” I hold the wolf up next to his head, comparing. Several bystanders laugh. Orion endures this with the long-suffering dignity of a king being publicly compared to a plush toy, which only proves my point. “I’m naming him Mr. Darcy.”
He stops walking. “You’re naming the wolf after a fictional romantic hero.”
“I’m naming the wolf after the blueprint, Orion. Proud, rich, emotionally constipated, secretly devoted. If the fur fits.”
“I’m not emotionally constipated.”
“You alphabetized my chaos shelf instead of asking me to dinner for two weeks.”
A beat. “The shelf needed alphabetizing.”
“Mr. Darcy,” I tell the wolf, “you understand me.”
The strength hammer is where he nearly breaks the town.
I only want to watch the parade of festival-going men crack their spines trying to ring the bell, because that’s quality entertainment and I refuse to apologize for it.
But the guy running it, all handlebar mustache and showmanship, sizes Orion up, then slides his gaze to me and lets it linger a beat too long.
“Come on, big fella,” he says, still looking at me, “win something pretty for the lady.”
Orion goes very still.
It’s fast, half a second, but I’m close enough to catch it: the flicker of gold flooding his eyes, there and gone, and a sound low in his chest that isn’t quite human, that I feel more than hear, a warning with three centuries of teeth behind it.
The mustache man doesn’t consciously register it.
But his showman’s grin falters, and he takes an involuntary half-step back from a display he’s stood behind all day, suddenly and inexplicably certain he’d rather be somewhere else.
Orion blinks the gold away. Rolls his shoulders like he’s putting something back in a box.
“Sorry,” he murmurs, just for me, a little rattled at himself. “He looked at you.”
“I noticed.” My heart is doing something absurd. Note to self: the unflappable king has a leash, and it is shorter than advertised. I file that away for later, in a folder I’m not going to examine in public. “Win me the sheep, caveman.”
And I watch, with genuine fascination, as three hundred years of restraint does math in real time.
Orion picks up the mallet. Considers it. Considers the machine. And then he taps it, taps it, the way you’d knock politely on a door, and the puck sails up and rings the bell, one clean, final note, a decision being made.
The mustache man’s whole face recalibrates.
“Again,” someone in the crowd says.
He does it again. One-handed. While looking at me.
“That’s the most obnoxious thing I’ve ever seen,” I tell him, taking possession of a second prize, a small plush sheep this time, which I hand to Mr. Darcy for emotional support. “Do it again.”
He does it again.
By dusk I’m carrying a wolf, a sheep, a goldfish in a bag that I have already sworn to keep alive out of pure spite, and a paper cone of kettle corn, and my face hurts.
That’s the part that catches me off guard, somewhere between the pie contest and the bluegrass band.
My face hurts from laughing. I keep trying to remember the last time that happened, my cheeks aching, my guard just, gone, misplaced somewhere between the donuts and the ring toss, and I can’t. I can’t remember the last time.
The string lights come on overhead all at once, the whole street igniting soft and gold, and everyone cheers, and Orion looks up at them and then down at me, and the lights are doing something to his face that should be illegal in several states.
“What?” he asks.
“Nothing. You’re just.” I gesture at all of him with the kettle corn. “Ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous.”
“Objectively. You won a goldfish with physics. Your jaw is doing the thing. The lights like you. It’s a lot.”
“My jaw is doing what thing?”
“It knows what it’s doing,” I say darkly, and he laughs, that real laugh, the low rare one that I’ve started collecting the way I collect first editions, and the warmth behind my ribs pulls tighter, lower, more insistent, and I have to look at the goldfish for a second and remember how breathing is organized.
That’s when I spot the photo booth.
It’s ancient. It’s magnificent. It’s one of those genuine relic booths with a sagging velvet curtain and a hand-painted sign promising FOUR POSES, ONE DOLLAR, MEMORIES FOREVER, and I’m dragging him toward it before my brain finishes the thought.
“Absolutely,” I say. “Yes. This is happening.”
“I haven’t been in one of these since 1987.”
“You’ve been in a photo booth?”
“It was Theo’s idea. There was a bet involved. The photos are sealed by treaty.”
“I will find those photos if it takes me the rest of my life.”
The booth was engineered for two average humans, and Orion is neither average nor, technically, entirely human, so getting us both inside is a negotiation involving his knees, my elbows, Mr. Darcy, the sheep, and the goldfish, who gets the place of honor on the tiny shelf.
By the time we’re settled I’m basically in his lap, my legs over his thigh, his arm the only thing keeping me from sliding off the bench, and the curtain drops and closes us into a small dim world that smells of dust and him, pine and woodsmoke and a warmer note beneath, and suddenly the booth feels a lot smaller than it did four seconds ago.
“Pose ideas,” I say, slightly breathless, feeding the dollar in. “Go.”
“I don’t pose.”
“Everyone poses. Smile like you’ve seen the sun before. It’s four flashes, Orion, survive it.”
The first flash catches him solemn and me mid-laugh, pointing at his solemnity.
The second catches whatever face he makes when I whisper, “Mrs. Patterson has a betting pool about us, and I know for a fact she has money on ‘kissing by the gazebo,’” which turns out to be genuine, startled laughter, head back, unguarded, and I feel it in my chest, a small win I immediately want to repeat.
For the third, I kiss his cheek. That’s the plan, anyway. Cheek. Wholesome. Suitable for the betting pool.
But he turns his head.
His mouth catches mine, and the third flash goes off at the exact moment the kiss stops being wholesome, and then nobody is counting flashes anymore.
His hand slides into my hair, tilting me, and I make a sound against his mouth that the booth absorbs discreetly, professional about it, clearly not its first rodeo.
The kiss goes deep and unhurried, cider-sweet, his other hand splaying warm across my hip and pulling me more thoroughly into his lap, and I go, I go so willingly it’s embarrassing, my fingers curling into his sweater, the low pull behind my ribs dropping straight through my belly and catching fire on the way down.
He kisses me until my toes curl inside my boots.
He kisses me until I forget there is a festival, a town, a goldfish bearing witness from the shelf.
The fourth flash fires somewhere in the middle of it, unnoticed, unmourned.
“Fable.” My name, rough, against the corner of my mouth. His restraint is audibly fraying, and knowing I did that, me, a disaster in a coat covered in kettle corn dust, sends a hot, giddy spike of power straight through me.
“Mm.”
“We’re in a public booth.”
“It has a curtain. That’s basically zoning.”
“It has a line,” he says, and I go still, and through the velvet comes the unmistakable sound of two preteens debating loudly whether the booth is broken because it’s been, quote, like ten minutes.
We look at each other, my lips kiss-stung, his eyes gone molten at the edges, both of us breathing wrong, and I start to laugh, silent and helpless, my forehead dropping to his shoulder while he exhales the long, controlled breath of a man reassembling himself brick by brick.
“Later,” he says quietly, and it isn’t a question, and the word lands low in my belly with a weight I feel all the way home.
“Later,” I agree.
We spill out of the booth, flushed, with all the dignity of teenagers caught behind the bleachers, and the preteens file in with judgmental looks. The machine whirs and drops our strip into the slot.
Four frames. Him solemn, me laughing. Him laughing, me delighted. The kiss, caught right as it turned.
And the fourth: blurred, close, indecent-adjacent, my hand fisted in his sweater, his hand lost in my hair.
Orion looks at the strip for a long moment. Then he tears it, carefully, precisely, along the line between the third frame and the fourth, hands me the top three, and slides the last frame into the inside pocket of his coat, directly over his heart.
“That one’s mine,” he says.
I do not survive this. Somewhere on Main Street, under the string lights, holding a stuffed wolf named Mr. Darcy and a traumatized goldfish, Fable Larkin quietly perishes, and the woman who walks home hand in hand with a lycan king, laughing at something he says about the structural integrity of funnel cake, is somebody new.
The goldfish, we decide on the walk, is named Ishmael, because I own a bookstore and some jokes are simply required of me. He will live above the register at Fable Tales, on the high shelf Mario has never conquered, where he can supervise transactions and be kept alive out of pure spite.
“Call me Ishmael,” Orion says, deadpan, testing it.
“See? It works on every level.”