Page 312 of Once Upon a Fable

The valley.

The seasons changing.

The river glowing blue.

I could remember all of that with perfect clarity.

Gemma nursing me.

Gemma cursing me.

Gemma promising to teach me the pain of heartbreak.

I dug deeper.

I kept digging.

Nothing.

I can’t remember what happened next.

There were...pieces.

Flickers of arguments. Feelings of desire, frustration, and fear. All interspersed with missing blankness. My mind had become a book with torn out pages, erased paragraphs, scribbled sentences. Vital information hadn’t just been stolen; it’d been deleted as if it never existed.

Wh-what’s happening to me?

I bent over and rocked, groaning with nausea, with pain, with rapidly building fear that I was getting worse.

Schizophrenic!

The word blasted through my skull with familiarity, just like her shrug.

Butwhy?

WasI schizophrenic?

Was having Swiss cheese for a brain a symptom of such a thing?

Wrenching my head up, I glared at the bookcases and the many tomes, novels, and texts I’d devoured over the years.

See...I remembered that.

I remembered my solitude and loneliness. I remembered my Fable family. I remembered dark and disgusting things. And I also remembered those memories were locked up tight for a reason. So why couldn’t I remember somethingnicefor once?

“Goddammit!” Swooping upright, I stumbled to the side with vertigo and tripped to the bookcases.

I had to know.

I couldn’t live like this.

I couldn’t take her looking at me as if we’d shared so much, only for her to tell me things that couldn’t possibly be true.

If we actually slept together last night?

If something impossible because possible, thenI’m more fucked than I thought.

I was lost because if I could forget something like that. If I could sleep with the girl I wanted more than anything and not have a shred of remembrance of how she felt, how she moved, how she tasted then...