17. Fable #2
“Of course it matters. I need to know my feelings are mine.”
Millie takes my hands. Her eyes are fierce and gentle at the same time.
“Fable. Did fate make you argue with him about potato chips being vegetables?”
“That was…”
“Did the cosmic soulmate bond force you to write him a handwritten FAQ with eight questions and a drawing of a wolf?”
“I didn’t draw… he drew the wolf. In his answers.”
“Not the point. Did destiny require you to call him ‘very pretty for a hallucination’ while bleeding from a head wound?”
“I was concussed!”
“You were yourself. You’re always yourself.
” She squeezes my hands. “Babe, who cares who introduced you? The universe threw you together through a wrong phone number and a car crash, which is honestly the most chaotic meet-cute in the history of romance, and I say that as someone who’s read literally every book in your store.
But the universe didn’t make you fall for him.
You did that yourself. Every conversation.
Every stupid argument. Every time you let him in when you could have locked the door. ”
My eyes are stinging. I blink hard.
“What if I’m wrong?”
“Then you’re wrong. People are wrong about relationships all the time.
That’s not a fate thing; that’s a life thing.
” She pulls me into a hug. “But Fable… you drove home from that barbecue with steady hands. Six years of white-knuckling every drive, and you did that one calm. Something in you has changed. And I don’t think that’s fate. I think that’s love.”
The word sits between us.
I don’t argue.
I can’t.
It’s dark when I get in the car, and the first fat flakes are already drifting down under the streetlights, the kind that mean business. The forecast has been threatening a storm all day. If I’m going to do this, it has to be now, before the mountain roads close.
Mario is in his carrier on the passenger seat because I couldn’t leave him behind, he’s been mourning too hard, staring out windows, meowing at shadows. He deserves to see Orion again even if I don’t know what I’m going to say when I get there.
If I get there. I might die on this mountain road. I might chicken out and turn around. I might…
“Stop,” I tell myself out loud. “We’re doing this.”
The keys are cold in my hand. I slide them into the ignition and listen to the engine turn over, that familiar sound, the one that used to make my stomach clench with terror. Tonight it just sounds like a car.
Checklist.
But I don’t reach for the laminated card clipped to my visor. Instead, I just… breathe.
“Meds taken,” I say out loud, because the ritual still helps even if I’m not reading it. “This morning, with orange juice. Phone in the glovebox…” I reach over, tuck it away. “Mirrors adjusted.”
I adjust them. The rearview shows my own face: brown eyes too wide, hair escaping its clip, a smear of something on my cheek that might be tears or might be wine.
“You look like a disaster,” I inform my reflection.
My reflection does not argue.
“Seatbelt.”
Click.
“Music off. No distractions. You’re just driving. You’re a person who drives.”
My voice doesn’t crack this time.
I put the car in gear and pull out onto Main Street, and I point myself toward the mountain, and I go.
The road is dark, and the snow is coming harder now.
I forgot how dark it gets up here, no streetlights once you leave town, just the tunnel of my headlights carving through the black, the flakes rushing at the windshield in dizzying streaks.
The wind has picked up too, buffeting the car on the exposed curves, and the trees press close on either side, their branches already going white.
The curves come one after another, and I take them slowly, carefully, wipers working, hands steady on the wheel.
You’re doing this. You’re actually doing this.
“We’re fine,” I tell Mario, who is expressing his opinion of the drive through a series of increasingly dramatic meows. “We’re totally fine. This is fine. This is just driving. People do this constantly.”
Mario does not believe me. Mario thinks I’m taking him to his death.
“You’re going to see your favorite person,” I remind him. “The big furry one who you hate and also love. Remember him?”
A yowl that sounds like accusation.
“I know I’m not him. I’m sorry I’m not a giant supernatural creature with comfortable fur. I’m doing my best.”
The road winds higher, and the snow is starting to stick, a thin white skin forming over the asphalt ahead of me.
My headlights catch a deer at the edge of the trees, frozen, watching, and my heart stutters, but the deer bounds away and nothing happens.
No crash. No impact. Just the road climbing on into the storm, and me climbing with it, racing the weather to the top.
“I’m going to tell him,” I say to the darkness, to Mario, to myself. “I’m going to tell him about Mom and Dad. About where I was going that day. About why I couldn’t drive.”
Mario meows.
“I know. I know I’ve never told anyone. But he told me his secrets. He trusted me with the wolf thing and the mate thing and all of it. I have to trust him back.”
The trees thin. The road levels out. And there, through the swirling white, lights.
His house. Warm yellow glow spilling from the windows, smoke rising from the chimney to be torn apart by the wind. He’s home. I made it up ahead of the worst of it, though the snow is falling thick enough now that I can barely see the path.
Of course he’s home. Where else would he be?
I park. Turn off the engine. Sit in the silence for a long moment, breathing.
You drove here. You chose this. Now finish it.
I get out of the car. Grab Mario’s carrier. Walk up the path to his front door on legs that feel steadier than they have any right to feel.
I raise my hand to knock.
The door opens before my knuckles touch wood.
Orion stands in the doorway, wearing a sweater I recognize and an expression I don’t, something raw and wounded and desperately hopeful all at once. His eyes go from my face to the car in his driveway, to the keys still clutched in my hand.
“You drove,” he says, and his voice is wrecked. Broken. Like those two words contain everything he hasn’t let himself feel for the past two days.