Fable of Happiness (Fable #2) by Pepper Winters

Panic coated my palms with sweat as I rifled through my thoughts.

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.

But why?

Was I 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 something nice for 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, then I’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...

I might as well drown myself in the river.

I might as well end this goddamn struggle because what sort of cruel, sadistic joke was life playing on me when I finally had someone to call my own and I couldn’t fucking remember her!

You can’t afford to call her your own, remember?

Oh, God.

I didn’t know who I was anymore.

I had no strength or desire to love.

Yet I wanted to love more than anything.

My hands reached for the medical texts, my fingers running down spines, my eyes squinting past haze, struggling to read. My broken arm throbbed from whatever I’d done to it last night. The fresh cuts on my knuckles oozed, and the scent of papaya kept teasing my memories.

The smell hissed as if it was stark evidence, collaborating Gemma’s claim that we’d lain beneath the stars together.

I froze, doing my best to imagine it. Two of us in the bath. My hands on her body. My cock pulsing inside her.

I hardened.

I choked.

Come on.

There had to be something in this godforsaken place that could help me.

Ripping out a medical journal, I carried the heavy book back to the chair and collapsed.

Sinking into the leather, I skimmed the contents until I stopped on concussion.

Holding my breath, I flipped to the right chapter and shook my head, trying to be free of the rocks and fog that’d never left me alone since falling off that awful cliff.

Given the absence of a diagnostic test or biomarker for concussion, the current concussion diagnosis is confirming the presence of symptoms after an individual has experienced a hit to the head or body.

I skimmed the jargon, racing to find what I needed.

Basic concussion:

Can cause irritability, tiredness, forgetfulness. The individual might suffer from—

I skipped to the next part.

I wouldn’t lie to myself and think I had a mild concussion. I wasn’t an idiot. Mild didn’t equal being so fucking tired I could barely stay awake for a few hours at a time. Mild didn’t explain while Gemma said I woke up as different versions of myself—

Wait, you remember that.

You remember...

I groaned, forcing my messed-up brain to dig deep, to shovel hard, to uncover things I didn’t want it to erase.

A rabbit!

I choked as images of sunshine and a juicy rabbit flashed through my head.

Cooked meat.

The scent of skin charring and the stomach-churning fragrance of my own flesh being burned by Lev—

Nope.

The shutters came down. The memory flickered out.

And I was left panting, holding the book as my gaze fell on something that explained my current circumstances and left me doomed all over again.

Severe concussion:

Can last for days, weeks or even longer. Common symptoms after a concussive traumatic brain injury are headache, blurred vision, dizziness, nausea, and loss of memory (amnesia). The amnesia usually involves forgetting the event that caused the concussion, sequences following after it, and sporadic deletion of day to day life.

I stopped breathing, snapping the page over, searching for a cure or at the very least a time frame on how long I’d have to deal with this shit.

But nothing.

Just a stupid footnote that the patient should see a qualified practitioner and be prepared for up to a few years of rehab.