CHAPTER THREE
“This is so fucking weird,” Holly whispered.
“Yeah,” Gabe muttered.
They had parked on the side of the road.
The ‘road’ being dirt that abruptly turned into blacktop.
It was old, though. Very old. It was cracked in many places, and dead plants now resided in most of those cracks.
The road ran on for about the length of a football field and then abruptly ran out.
Along the opposite side of that road were three buildings.
They were all rotted and ruined. Broken windows.
Weathered exteriors. Graffiti on the walls, overlapping.
They’d held up pretty well, probably because they were all made of brick.
One of them was clearly going to be a gas station, judging from the single pump in the front. The other two could’ve been anything.
“It’s like…” Holly looked all around them, doing a slow spin. “It’s like someone chopped out a section of a town and dropped it in here.”
“Yeah, or like the rest of the town failed to generate.”
“So what is it? I mean, why is it here?”
“I thought you didn’t want to know.”
“Well...now I do wanna know. So tell me.”
He chuckled. “Well, it’s hard to say. I did the research that I could, and there’s little in the way of hard facts.
The general consensus seems to be that some local rich guy wanted to build his own little tourist trap town here.
He was working with the city, put a lot of his own money into it, and they got some months into construction and then he disappeared. With all his money.”
“Any ideas why?”
“Something illegal. He was caught up in some kind of embezzling or extortion scandal, or something, and he managed to get wind of it ahead of time and apparently fled the country. So construction stopped. And they didn’t know what to do with it, so they just sorta left it.
I think technically the city owns it, but… ” He shrugged.
“It’s amazing,” she whispered, awed.
He chuckled. “I was hoping you’d think that. Come on, let’s go poke around.”
“All right.”
Gabe was feeling pretty good about this. It was off to a good start.
They walked across the cracked blacktop of the road and then across the cracked pavement of the parking lot. As they approached the first building, one of the anonymous ones, Gabe tried to get a measure of Holly.
Of them all, Holly seemed to be the...simplest wasn’t the right word. Easiest, he supposed, although that clearly had bad connotations as well. She was the one who seemed easiest to please, and she seemed to ask for the least.
Which was beginning to worry him.
She’d been withdrawing a little lately. It was in little ways, but he had seen it.
She was spending more time alone, she was smiling less, she wasn’t as interested in going out.
It was subtle, but it was there. As he continued to live this seemingly impossible new life that had fallen into his lap, Gabe was finally beginning to realize the enormity of his responsibility.
In some ways, they were all responsible for each other, and that truth was the only thing that allowed him to actually do this.
But in other ways, it was becoming clear to him by now that he was at the center of this web.
He was the load-bearing cornerstone, the central support pillar.
He didn’t necessarily assume that it would all fall to pieces if he had an off day, but, he was learning, even in the fairest of social settings, there had to be a leader.
That it was him was a fact he was still adjusting to.
And he did wonder if he ever truly would.
Gabe thought that he had come a long way in a short amount of time.
He already felt extremely different from how he had before Ellen had walked back into his life, mostly in good ways.
He handled things a lot better, just across the board.
He was less stressed...or just better at processing it.
He had to admit, having five girlfriends (and healthy relationships with all of them) was doing wonders for just about every aspect of his life.
Which was good, because he not only had more responsibility in his life than ever before, but he was finally doing something that he cared about.
That had been his biggest issue: he just didn’t give a shit about too much of his life.
Too much of school and way too much of work was just...
doing shit he didn’t really care about. It was obvious to him that some people, perhaps even most people, tolerated that a lot better than he did. But for him, it was like torture.
But now he finally had something to dedicate his life to, something he cared about on a deeply emotional level.
And one of the things he’d realized as he’d pondered this development was that he tended to go with the flow a little too much. Or, rather, he got too wrapped up in his own life. He realized he had fallen into the trap that a lot of guys seemed to fall into.
If she needs something, or is upset about something, she’ll tell me.
But there were too many reasons why that might not be true.
And he was really seeing that now with Holly.
Because not everyone worked like that. Hell, most people didn’t.
His own discovery of emotional intelligence had revealed to him just how few people seemed to have it.
At first, he’d reasoned that more people than ever seemed to at least be on the path to it, but then reluctantly admitted that what most people were saying was less genuine emotional intelligence, and more just pop psychology phrases they’d heard and were parroting without truly grasping what it actually meant.
Or, worse, just using emotional intelligence as a tool to manipulate others.
Holly, he was realizing, was one of those people who just wouldn’t speak up for themselves. Maybe not never, but it had to get kind of bad before Holly said something. And he was worried her own inner life was worse than any of them really realized.
He’d made a decision on it, but right now he was kind of torn.
He wanted to talk with her plainly about the situation, but he also knew it would probably be a miserable discussion. And this was their Valentine’s Day. And he didn’t want to ruin that. So he was shutting up about it for now.
Because right now she seemed authentically happy.
She was clearly captivated by the ruined building. The door was simple and wooden, obviously meant to be a placeholder. It was ajar. Holly paused as they came up to the door, then snapped a photo.
“Wait here,” Gabe murmured when she’d finished.
She nodded and watched as he moved forward.
By now, they had agreed on a system, a set of rules to help these little excursions go that much more smoothly.
One of the bigger rules was that he had to clear a place before she went inside.
It was pretty unlikely that there was anyone or anything seriously dangerous inside.
But not impossible.
Gabe approached and peered in through the crack between the door and the heavy metal frame.
He saw gray shafts of sunlight slanting in through the broken windows, and a few down from the roof.
He didn’t hear anything, didn’t see anything obvious.
After a moment, he pulled open the door. It gave with a horrific squeak.
Well, if they’d managed to hide their presence so far, it was no longer hidden.
Nothing happened, though, as he finished opening the door. Looking around, he found a rock about half the size of his head and used it as a doorstop.
Gabe walked into the building and checked around. It wasn’t very big, just one larger room with a pair of doors at the back, a big counter, and some shelving units scattered around in a random mishmash.
“Looks clear,” he said, walking inside.
Holly followed him in silently, staying near the open door.
He took a look around, going to the back to investigate the doors.
Only one was closed, and not all the way.
Poking his head into the open door revealed a bathroom that smelled pretty bad.
The second door let into a room empty of everything but trash, the remains of a fire in what appeared to be a metal desk drawer, and more graffiti.
People had definitely camped here.
But it looked safe.
“We’re clear.” With that out of the way, he returned to the main room, and looked at Holly. She was clearly enraptured, a faint, disbelieving smile on her pretty, pretty face.
Goddamn was Holly hot.
They all were, but each in different ways.
Holly had the appearance of a small town girl who was a straight ten, but didn’t really know it.
Now she knew it, at least, and it was interesting seeing her try to be seductive.
Mostly she just used it on him, but sometimes she did on Ellen, and he totally got that.
He was going through something similar himself.
While even now, five wives deep, he knew that he wasn’t a straight ten, because it was different when you were a guy, given that most women got hit on regardless and most men didn’t, it was clear to him that he had sorely miscalculated his own attractiveness.
He still thought he was kind of weird-looking, but maybe that was a good thing.
There were some actors out there who were pretty weird-looking but had literally millions of women ready to drop panties for them.
He was beginning to suspect that confidence actually was (or, at the very least, could be) manifested through practice. Confidence was magic, a physical impossibility: something from nothing. Because he’d sure as hell never had any before, but now?
Now he was a lot more confident. The fact that he’d gone after Chloe and it had worked struck him as insane. He’d been attracted to the women he’d dated in the past, but Chloe was hot on a whole other level. They all were.
Gabe realized his mind was wandering a little too much and walked back to the door, leaning out and listening for cars, looking for people. He needed to be more present, especially in situations like these.
He looked back at Holly. She was framing up a shot of the counter and the doors behind it.
“Hey, Holly...I know I’ve asked this before, but I’m still curious. Why do you like this stuff so much?”
She snapped the photo and lowered the camera, then turned to look at him.
“I’ve been thinking about that a lot. I still don’t have a great answer.
But I’ve been wondering about it in more, I guess, realistic terms?
I think humans are programmed to find mysteries compelling, because if you came across a mystery in the stone age, there was a ninety percent chance it was caused by something that could kill you. ”
“That makes sense.”
“Right. So I think this is just sort of my brain accidentally hacking that instinct? But beyond that, I really don’t know.
It’s not like I spent a ton of time in places like this when I was growing up, or was even around them all that much.
Maybe I saw an abandoned house once when I was really young and it just stuck?
That happens sometimes. But...I don’t know.
It’s just so...cool. It’s mysterious. Now that I’m getting more into games, I’m finding that I care about exploration of everything else. It’s just so fun.”
She paused for a long moment, pursing her lips, apparently really thinking about it.
“It’s satisfying,” she said finally. “Satisfying in a way nothing else is.” She paused, then smiled a dirty little smile. “Well, almost nothing.”
He chuckled. “I can understand that. Writing is kind of the same way.”
“Here, lemme poke through the back rooms for a minute.”
“Poke away,” he replied. She snorted. “What?”
“That’s what I tell you pretty often...with different words.”
He laughed. “Go on.”
She smiled, walked up to him, gave him a firm, long kiss on the mouth, then walked towards the back of the store, camera in hand, humming happily to herself.