The Fable of Us Read online

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  The Fable of Us

  Copyright © 2016 by Nicole Williams

  Cover Design by Paper and Sage Designs

  Editing by Cassie Cox

  Formatting by JT Formatting

  All rights reserved.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products, bands, and/or restaurants referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  License Notes

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  To Suzanne.

  You’re a bright light in what can, at times, be a writer’s dark world.

  Don’t ever let that light burn out.

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  About the Author

  I couldn’t breathe.

  That happened every time I passed by the Charleston city limits sign. I’d spent eighteen years in Charleston—born, raised, and hazed there—but had never really learned how to breathe there.

  Maybe it had more to do with the exhaling part of the breathing process. I’d spent my first eighteen years of life inhaling and holding my breath: waiting, enduring, biding . . .

  And then I’d gotten out.

  Santa Barbara might have been a part of the same country, but it might as well have been halfway across the world, complete with an entirely different culture and lifestyle. Moving there had been like finding my promised land without knowing there was one to find.

  I’d spent four years in college and the last few working. My family wanted to know when I would be coming “home,” a question they’d been pummeling me with since the day after my graduation. Three years later, and I still hadn’t worked up the nerve to tell them I was home.

  Down here, Southerners seemed incapable of comprehending home being anywhere else. Especially when a person came from the kind of family I did, with the kind of history and status mine did, in the suffocating heat that was only outdone by the humidity.

  Why my sister had decided to get married in the summer was beyond me, though I guessed it had something to do with making me as miserable as possible.

  Oh God. My sister. The wedding. Family. Old friends. My mother’s nitpicking and cloying perfume. My father’s elbow-rubbing and cigar smoke. That house I never seemed to belong in. That city that stifled the life right out of me. That entire part of the world that seemed to eject me from it as quickly as I ejected myself.

  Shit. I couldn’t do this. Not after everything.

  I knew the taxi driver had the air conditioning full bore. Not because I could feel its cool rush breaking across my skin, but because I’d asked him to crank it up before we’d pulled away from the airport loading zone. I’d thought it would help.

  I should have known better.

  Rolling down the window a couple of cranks didn’t help either. In fact, it only made my suffocation worse. The heavy air oozed into the backseat, reeking of the same familiar scents I’d tried to erase from my memory. The Charleston air encased me, seeming to cling to my skin and fall into my lungs like a couple of cinder blocks.

  I’d taken my first inhale in Charleston, and I’d be holding my breath until I passed that city limits sign in a week. I wouldn’t be able to breathe again until I’d escaped this place, and I’d spend the next three years, or preferably decades, dodging invites home for holidays or vacations.

  The blocks of concrete in my lungs weren’t sitting well. I’d gone years without feeling them, and my body was fighting instead of accepting them. That had happened the last time I’d flown back here too, when it had been two years since my last visit.

  When the taxi shot by another familiar sign, this one with its fresh yearly coat of paint outlining the words The Abbott Family Welcomes You to Charleston, Their home for ten generations and growing, I knew I needed to pull over and give myself a few more minutes to adjust before stumbling up the front steps of that house and succumbing to the whims and wills of my mom and sisters.

  I couldn’t pass through those double doors like this or else, like sharks sensing prey in distress, they’d see me as an easy target. Or an easier target.

  “Excuse me,” I said to the driver, my voice sounding strange to my ears. Probably because I’d been holding my breath for a few minutes now. “Would you mind pulling over? Sir.” I barely remembered my Southern manners and tacked on the address.

  Just because I knew this wasn’t where I belonged and avoided Charleston like my very existence depended on it didn’t mean I found it evil in all ways. From an objective point of view, Charleston, and the South as a whole, had plenty going for it . . . for people whose name wasn’t Clara Abbott.

  “We’re only a few miles from the address you gave me, ma’am.” The driver had a thicker accent than the locals, more New Orleans than Charleston.

  “Exactly. Please pull over.”

  If the driver didn’t detect the plea in my voice, he saw it on my face when he glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “No problem, ma’am. There’s a little place right up here I can pull into if you’d like to get out and catch your breath.”

  I nodded my thanks but not my agreement. There’d be no breath-catching for me for seven long, gruesome days.

  I knew the place just up the road he had in mind. Everyone who’d lived out here knew this place either by reputation or from personal experience. The Hide and Seek was an old hollowed-out train car that had been transformed into a bar of sorts. I didn’t know exactly how a bar was “of sorts,” but I thought it had something to do with the fact that while the place served shots like we were all waking up to the apocalypse, it didn’t follow with the bar trend of playing music or hanging neon lights in windows or offering a dance floor.

  It was frequented by those who slithered in and out of society under the cover of night and those with more tar than blood pumping through their veins. You know, from their black hearts. At least that was the story I’d been told while growing up here.

  The Hide and Seek wasn’t for my family and its “kind;” it was a haunt for the “other kind.” No Abbott had stepped foot inside it. Until tonight.

  When the driver pulled into the rudimentary parking lot, equipped with enough potholes and mud bogs to keep out the expensive imports, I threw open the door before the taxi had come to a complete stop. I was out the door the moment the tires stopped moving.

  The driver threw his arm across the back of the passeng
er seat and twisted around to ask me, “Do you want me to wait or leave, ma’am?”

  “Wait please.” I was already moving toward the old train car, rusted out from age and humidity, tangled with vines and moss that had crept its way around it.

  “The meter won’t stop running.” He pointed at the meter that was already approaching the triple-digit mark.

  I nodded, continuing on my journey. “I know. I won’t be long. I just think I need a drink before I go any farther.”

  A silver, untamed brow lifted. “Ma’am, from the look of you, you’re in need of a whole fifth of drinks.” The driver waved, shooing me on my way. “I’ll be waiting. Take your time.”

  Firing off a wave at the driver as I powered toward the train car, I fought the urge to decipher “taking my time” as spending the next seven days here before staggering back to the cab and making the return trip to the airport.

  It was my younger sister’s wedding; I had to be there for her. The sentiment might not have been returned, and a fraction of my motivation for showing up might have been derived from the fear of our mother sending a lynch gang for me if I failed to appear, but I was going nonetheless. I just needed a shot or two of the kind of courage that came in liquid form. With my family, no one had the right to judge me for turning to a bottle to face them.

  After weaving through a brigade of beat-up trucks splattered in mud and hollowing out from rust, I made it to the train car. The entrance wasn’t visible from the parking lot, so it must have been hiding around the back. While most businesses would have placed a priority on putting the entrance in plain view of potential customers, The Hide and Seek seemed to want theirs to be difficult to find.

  I hadn’t stepped foot in the place yet, and I already knew I liked it. Nonconformist. Waving its middle finger at the world. This relic of a train car had ten times the courage I did within these city limits.

  When I stumbled around the back and almost crashed into a guy answering nature’s call up against the rusty metal wall, my impression fell a few notches. When it came to nonconformism, I drew a hard line at peeing in public, setting aside the fact that the entrance of The Hide and Seek wasn’t exactly the most public of places. Still . . . it was public enough to take your peeing elsewhere. Try behind that tree ten feet away elsewhere.

  After I dodged the guy relieving himself, he offered a grunt that could have been an apology just as easily as it could have been a greeting. Grunts, in this part of the world, were a multi-functional form of communication.

  Swinging open the screen door, I stepped inside The Hide and Seek, stitching on an expression that said I’d been here a hundred times and would come back another thousand. A quick look at the bar’s patrons glancing at me told me my ruse wasn’t working. With the way some of the guys were appraising me, the term fresh meat kept echoing in my head. Actually, when I took a second look around, it looked like I was the only woman in the place . . . or at least the only one a person didn’t need to play a guessing game to identify.

  Other than the door I’d just come through, there were no windows or doors cut out of the old train car that was just as rusted from the inside as it was from the outside. The lighting was somewhere on the scale between low to non-existent, and I swore I heard the whir of a generator in the background, possibly what was responsible for keeping the lights barely on and the beers, from the looks of the non-frosty glasses, a few degrees below room temperature.

  No air conditioning pumped through the space, not that I’d expected to feel any, and even though the sun had gone down an hour or two ago, the heat was still alive and well inside of this tin can. It was a good twenty degrees cooler outside . . . and I’d been about to swelter alive out there.

  Swallowing, I took a few more steps inside. The temperature crawled up a degree with every step I took, so instead of continuing toward the empty bar table at the back, I changed directions and snagged one of the empty stools lining the particle board bar, which seemed mostly held together by duct tape and rusty nails.

  I shuffled through my memory, trying to find the last time I’d had a tetanus shot. Only five or six years ago, maybe. I was good.

  Thankfully, the stools lining the counter were mostly empty, save for one guy at the opposite end who seemed as content to ignore me as I was to ignore him. The rest of the patrons behind me, staggered around the tables and chairs, were staring holes into my back. Fresh meat, fresh meat, fresh meat.

  If only my parents could see me now. They’d crap their colons.

  The bartender’s back was turned to me for a while as he poured a line of shots from a bottle that was almost the size of my hybrid back in California. If he’d noticed me come in, it didn’t show. As desperate as I might have been to grab a drink or two and get the heck out of there, I knew better than to clear my throat and throw around orders like I owned the place. The Abbott name ran deep in these waters, and just as many people would rather see us sink than swim. I’d changed a good deal from my former debutante days, but still . . . Abbott family photos had been plastered across enough billboards and newspaper articles in these parts to stick to the memories of even the most remote swamp dwellers.

  I might have been of the family, but I wasn’t one of them. I had to remind myself of that again when the bartender continued to ignore me and my lack of breathing continued to strangle my waning courage. The bartender delivered the line of shots to a few of the tables, and when he returned, he continued being oblivious to the woman practically bouncing on her stool at the end of the counter.

  What was this? A boys-only club? A members-only maybe? Whatever it was, I wasn’t leaving until I’d had my drink, so help me God.

  “Hey, Tom, put her first drink on my tab,” the guy at the opposite end of the counter said, startling me. From how still he’d been, I’d been under the impression he’d passed out in his drink. “Any woman brave enough to step foot in this place deserves her first drink free.”

  The bartender gave one of those infamous grunts. “Considering the tab you’ve run up here, you’re lucky I poured you that drink you’ve been nursing the past two hours.”

  I was about to speak up—something to the gist of thanks, but no thanks—when the man at the end of the bar rose from his stool, took something from his back pocket, riffled through what I guessed was a wallet, and slammed a five dollar bill on the counter. “I said her first drink’s on me.”

  “Tom” glanced at the bill, ambled down to that end of the counter, then tugged the five from beneath the guy’s palm. “Still trying to play in a different league? I thought you would have learned your lesson with that Abbott girl, but hell, if you want to spend the last five in your wallet on a girl who wouldn’t let you mow her front lawn, who am I to turn my nose up at your money?” The bartender wadded up the bill and shoved it deep into his jeans, a rattle-like chuckle rising in his chest. “You’ve never been one for learning your lesson, Boone.”

  This time I had my mouth open and was in the middle of starting my “thanks, but no thanks” speech when the words froze in my throat. It couldn’t be. No how. No way. It couldn’t be . . . him. It had been years—seven to be exact—since I’d last seen him.

  His voice sounded different, yet similar in the way a person could never forget the color of the walls in their childhood bedroom. Boone. It wasn’t a common name, even buried this deep in the belly of the country.

  Still, I couldn’t help grasping that last strand of hope that it wasn’t the Boone as my head turned to take my first full look at the man sitting at the other end of the counter. I didn’t need more than a moment to confirm who it was.

  The Boone. Similar to his voice, he looked different, yet the same. The same dirty blond hair ever in need of a haircut, though now it was just long enough to be pulled back into the messiest ponytail I’d ever seen. The same wide shoulders and imposing frame that had made boys give him a wide berth. That had apparently transferred into manhood, as evidenced by the rest of the patrons staggered eve
rywhere in the bar save beside him. The same way he held himself, like he was always ready for a fight, fists semi-curled, shoulders partially tensed.

  The same way his Adam’s apple bobbed before he turned and looked at me . . .

  His eyes locked onto me, boring through me in a way that made me wish I’d worn body armor before stepping into this place. Unlike the rest of him, Boone’s eyes had changed. They were still the same chestnut shade, but the lights in them had burned out. That spark of trouble or excitement or whatever emotion he’d ever felt had gone out, leaving something dull and lifeless behind.

  “On second thought, I’ll take that five back, Tom.” Boone’s eyes stayed fixed on me as he held out his hand. “This woman’s taken enough from me for this lifetime and my next ten. I’m not giving her anything else, the last five in my wallet included.”

  Tom grunted at Boone, shoving the bill deeper into his pocket before grabbing a shot glass and pouring something into it.

  When I swallowed, my throat burned—parched from the memories I had of the man ten feet down from me, painful from the unpleasant memories that outweighed the pleasant ones. “That’s okay. I can go.”

  I stood from my stool as Tom slammed the shot in front of me. It smelled like the cleaner my mom used to insist the maids use to clean the showers with—the same stuff the FDA later banned after discovering it blinded people if even a splash of it wound up in their eyes.

  “No need to leave on my account, Miss Abbott. We all know you and your family come and go wherever they want, as they want, whenever they want.” Boone’s voice took on the sharp edge I used to hear him use with others but rarely with me. “Besides, you’re an expert at pretending I don’t exist. It’s been a while, but I’m sure it’s just like riding a bike. Carry on ignoring me. I’m confident I can return the favor.” He twisted around in his seat until he was hunched over in the same position I’d found him in.

  I’d known this trip would be a disaster of record-breaking proportions, but I hadn’t factored in running into Boone Cavanaugh at The Hide and Seek. I didn’t need another complication in this already-complicated trip home. I needed to get in, get out, and get moving on.