Page 224 of Once Upon a Fable

Not after this.

“I’ll look after you as long as you look after me,” he murmured. It could’ve been romantically sweet, yet it sounded like a death sentence.

We stood in that truce, knowing this was the moment everything changed. I didn’t know what that change would bring, but we were no longer separate. Our survival hinged on each other—the most intimate of all relationships.

Sniffing back my final sadness, I looked up and caught his stare.

I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t afraid. I was just me. A girl who’d achieved the impossible and become financially free thanks to scaling problems people deemed unachievable.

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

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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.