17. Fable
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Fable
Two days after the barbecue, the bookstore feels wrong without him.
I didn’t expect that. I expected relief, or at least the blessed numbness that comes with distance.
I expected the space I asked for to manifest as peace, quiet rooms, clear thoughts, the gradual return of the person I was before a supernatural creature started showing up with color-coded groceries and opinions about my organizational systems.
Instead, every corner of Fable Tales echoes with his absence.
The chaos shelf is still alphabetized, and I can’t bring myself to mess it up because he touched every one of those spines.
The laminated checklist hangs by the register, and I trace the edges with my fingertips approximately seven thousand times a day.
The back door still has the better lock he installed after the break-in, and sometimes I stand there and stare at it like it might have answers.
Mario has taken up a permanent position in the front window, perched on a display of new releases he’s slowly crushing with his considerable orange mass, and he stares at the woods, a Victorian widow waiting for a ship that sailed away and might never return.
“He’s not coming,” I tell him, for approximately the fifteenth time today. “I told him not to.”
Mario ignores me. Mario has been ignoring me since I drove home from the barbecue and he realized that his favorite furry mode of transportation wasn’t lurking in the shadows behind the building anymore.
He’s respecting your boundaries, I remind myself, reorganizing the same shelf for the third time because my hands need something to do. That’s what you asked for. That’s what you wanted.
Except it turns out that getting exactly what you asked for can feel worse than not getting it at all.
Because if he was showing up, doing his creepy guard-dog routine, leaving wildflowers on my doorstep, being his usual obsessively protective self, I could be angry about that.
I could have something to push against. I could feel like I was in control of this situation.
Instead, there’s just silence.
And my own thoughts, which are terrible company.
The bell over the door chimes, and I look up with my customer service smile firmly in place, the one that says I’m fine, everything’s fine, please buy something and don’t ask about my personal life…
“I leave for THREE WEEKS,” Millie Vance announces, dropping her bags in the middle of the store with the finality of a planted victory flag, “and you get a SECRET BOYFRIEND?!”
I burst into tears.
“Okay, okay, okay.” Millie installs herself on my couch, a general establishing a command center, wine in one hand and her phone in the other, and levels me with the look that’s gotten confessions out of me since we were nineteen.
“Start talking. And don’t you dare summarize.
I’ve been on a boat with marine biologists and no internet for three weeks, sustained entirely by your unhinged cryptic texts, and I require everything. ”
So I tell her the shape of it. The crash.
The wrong phone number scrawled while concussed.
The unfairly hot stranger who showed up at the hospital anyway, drove me home, and then simply…
kept showing up, alphabetizing my chaos shelf and laminating my anxiety checklist like that’s a normal thing a person does.
“That last part is actually kind of sweet,” she admits.
“I know.” My voice goes small. “I know it is.”
She studies my face, and whatever she finds there makes her set the wine down. “Fable. That’s not the something. You’ve got a whole other thing behind your teeth, I can see it. Spit it out.”
I’ve been dreading and craving this for three weeks. My best friend, in my apartment, close enough to tell.
“The something was sex,” I say. “That’s part of it.”
“I KNEW it…”
“But that’s not the thing.”
“Yes.”
“On a couch?”
“The first time.”
“THE FIRST TIME? There were multiple times?!”
“There was also a bed. During a rainstorm. It was…” I struggle for words. “Intense.”
Millie stops pacing. Stares at me. “Define intense.”
“I don’t think I should.”
“Define intense immediately or I’m calling him right now and asking personally.”
“You don’t have his number.”
“I will find his number. I’m very resourceful. Define intense.”
“He… grounds my panic attacks. He memorized my breathing exercises from one conversation. He makes me feel safe in a way I haven’t felt since…” I stop. Swallow. “Since before the accident.”
The playfulness drains from Millie’s expression. She sets down her wine and comes to sit beside me, close enough that our shoulders touch.
“Fable,” she says quietly. “What happened at that barbecue?”
So I tell her.
Except there’s a piece I have to hand over first, the piece everything else is built on, and I’ve been rehearsing versions of this sentence for an hour and they’re all terrible, so I just say it.
“Millie. Orion is a lycan.”
She blinks. “A what?”
“A werewolf. Technically a lycan. He’s very specific about the distinction.”
Millie, who has just picked her wine back up, sets it down again with the extreme care of a person handling live explosives. “Fable.”
“I know how it sounds.”
“You had a car accident. A head injury. A CONFIRMED head injury…”
“The CT was clean, and also I’ve watched him turn into a lycan the size of a horse in my own shop, so.”
“Okay.” She presses her fingertips together in front of her mouth, her processing pose, the one she deploys on grant applications and bad dates.
“Okay. Walk me through the evidence. Because right now my two options are ‘werewolves are real’ and ‘my best friend needs a neurologist,’ and I know where my money is.”
I pull out my phone and open the photo Diana sent me from the barbecue: Mario, regal and unbothered, riding an enormous black lycan across a sunlit lawn while a crowd cheers.
Millie stares at it for a long time.
“That’s a big dog.”
“That’s Orion.”
“That is a BIG. DOG.”
“Millie. Look at the passenger. You know Mario. Mario once bit an actual therapy dog for the crime of optimism. Would Mario, our Mario, voluntarily sit on a dog?”
She looks. Her certainty wobbles. Mario’s expression in the photo is the expression of a creature exactly where he believes he belongs.
“Oh my god,” she says, very quietly. “You’re serious. You’re actually serious. Werewolves are real and you’re dating one.”
“Lycan.”
“I will call him whatever I want, I’m in crisis.” She reclaims her wine and drains half of it. “Wait. Am I allowed to know this? Is a wolf hitman going to show up and erase my brain? I’ve seen movies.”
“The king’s people are protected. Anyone I claim as mine counts.” I pause. “You count.”
“Did you just claim me?”
“Obviously.”
Her eyes go suspiciously shiny. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me while destroying my entire understanding of reality. Continue. Tell me everything.”
Then I tell her the rest. The pack, the tiny lycan children, the casseroles, the chaos.
I tell her about Mario riding Orion, tiny orange warlord that he is, while pack members took pictures with religious fervor.
I tell her about Mira and the tropes, about the “three hundred years of scowling” comment, about the way Orion watched me across the lawn like I was the only person there.
And then I tell her about the bomb.
Winnie and her punch-loosened tongue. The word mate landing in the middle of the party, an unpinned grenade. The way the yard went church-quiet while my brain did a slow-motion record scratch.
“She said he’d known since the crash,” I say, and my voice is steady but my hands aren’t. “That I was his fated mate. That it was destiny or whatever. And he never told me.”
“What did you do?”
“I confronted him. At the tree line.” I close my eyes, remembering. “I asked him why. He said humans can reject the bond… that he was afraid I’d feel trapped, that I’d stay out of obligation instead of want. He said he’d rather have me slow and human-paced than risk losing me.”
“And you said?”
“I said he lied to me. That he omitted and withheld and let me fall for him without knowing I was already his.” My voice cracks. “Then I asked for space and I drove home.”
Millie is quiet for a long moment.
“Okay,” she says finally. “I’m going to do two things now.
First, I’m going to torch him for the omission, because that was wrong.
You deserved to know what you were getting into from the beginning, and keeping that information from you, even with good intentions, was a violation of your ability to make informed choices about your own life. ”
“Thank you.”
“I’m not done.” She holds up a hand. “Second, I’m going to point out that a man who memorizes your panic-attack protocol from a single offhand mention is not a man running a con.
A man who breaks down a door to save you from a creep, who shows up every night to stand guard, who laminated your coping mechanisms because he noticed they were falling apart…
that’s not manipulation, babe. That’s obsession, sure.
But it’s the obsession of someone who actually gives a shit. ”
“He still lied.”
“He omitted. There’s a difference.”
“Is there?”
“Yes.” She turns to face me fully. “Lying is ‘I’m not a lycan.’ Omitting is ‘I’m not ready to tell you about the cosmic soulmate thing because I’m genuinely terrified you’ll run and I’ll spend the rest of my extremely long life mourning you.
’ One is deception. The other is fear.” She pauses.
“And honestly? If I found out the universe had assigned me a perfect match, and that person could reject me and leave me broken forever? I might wait to drop that bomb too.”
I open my mouth to argue. Close it.
“The thing is,” I say instead, and my voice comes out small, “I can’t tell if what I feel is real. He says the bond doesn’t create feelings… that it just recognizes compatibility. But how do I know? How do I know that I actually chose him, or if fate chose him for me and I just think I’m choosing?”
“Does it matter?”