This was just another problem. A challenge to be conquered.
I can do this.
“Tell me,” I said, calm and collected, standing as regally as I could muster. “Tell me what we need to do.”
We.
That one tiny word.
It hovered between us on a parachute, dancing on the fire between us.
He noticed.
He snatched it from the sky and hugged it close.
The faintest glow of relief filled his eyes as he nodded. The animosity between us was still there but muted beneath a common goal. “We work side by side to survive.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I WAS DEFINITELY SCHIZOPHRENIC.
How else could I describe the switches inside my head? The painful evolution of who I’d been for so long, followed by the agonizing regression back into the darkness I was born in.
For the past seven days, I’d become a stranger to myself.
I’d had far too much time to contemplate and analyze. I hadn’t turned to cleaning or reading even though my idle hands craved to be busy. Any and all activities hurt my head and sent my balance spinning. I also had no strength to garden or prepare, and I’d promised Gemma a week to acclimatize, so she was off-limits.
I could’ve gone to her, but it wasn’t just her who needed space.
I didn’t understand what was happening to me.
One morning, I was the man I’d always known. I was cold and dark and had a fortress of bricks blocking my mind from memories I had no desire to face. But by afternoon, I was someone else entirely. I was calm and light with a petrifying contentment just knowing I wasn’t alone. Knowing there was another soul in this place, breathing, eating, existing.
I’d think of her and the urge to do something nice would overwhelm me. I’d dream of her and the craving to have her bowing at my feet would make me hard.
Both sides of me wanted control over her. The only problem was one side wanted to force that control while the other understood if she gave it to me willingly it would taste so much sweeter than stealing it.
Those sorts of thoughts terrified me.
They kept me awake at night until my concussed brain flickered out, sending me unconscious wherever I happened to be sitting. For a week, I stewed in my thoughts, slowly becoming less and less familiar with who I was. Who I wanted to be.
I had no distractions to throw myself into. All my usual crutches, all the tricks I used to keep my mental walls in place were no longer an option, and the forced self-reflection led me to one horrifying conclusion.
I’m mentally damaged.
I was sure Gemma already knew this. If I was stupid enough to go to her and tell her my revelation, she’d laugh in my face and ask why it’d taken so long for me to see.
But maybe that was the point.
If you were mentally damaged, how could you know you were mentally damaged unless someone else brought it to your attention?
What sort of checklist did you have to complete to finally figure out what was wrong with you?
Because things are wrong with me. Too many things to count.
In the hours where my eyes weren’t too fuzzy and my head didn’t ache too much, I’d skim the medical books in the library. I’d search for an explanation why, ever since Gemma’s arrival, I’d been slowly losing grip on my reality.
One book said schizophrenia was an imbalance of brain chemistry that distorted real events, created fictitious happenings, and generally fucked up the person diagnosed. Without medical and long-term care, they were a danger and menace to society.
Could that be why I lived out here on my own? Perhaps Storymaker and the guests never actually existed? Could I have made all of that up?
Those questions scared me shitless because if that was true, it meant my Fable family wasn’t real. It erased the only happiness I’d ever gleaned thanks to short, stolen moments of togetherness. Nyx and Wes, Jareth and Elise were all just fragments of my fractured mind.
But then my gaze would land on my scars and trigger a flash of someone’s cock being thrust into me or some woman’s mouth trailing down my belly, and I’d stop breathing.
That sort of filth could only have come from experience.
My mind might be sick but not that sick.
I glanced at the woman walking by my side. Her feet encased in boots, her legs bare and flashing beneath her skirt, soaking up the heat from the bright sunshine. Her blond hair was threaded with precious golds and coppers, glinting as her head ducked, and her hazel eyes followed the hop of a lazy grasshopper.
The sensation of her every footstep resonated around my waist thanks to the shorter chain binding us. She walked beside me as if we were equals, yet the soft plink of metal was a constant reminder she wouldn’t willingly walk beside me if given a choice.