The Fable of Us (10 page)

“I’m just gonna take a quick shower, then we’ll go watch for arsenic poisoning, k?”

I rose up in bed and twisted in his direction. “Not enough time . . .”

Boone was heading into the bathroom, his back to me and still clutching the sheet around his waist. However, it wasn’t covering anything around his backside.

“Jesus Christ, Boone. What happened to your boxers?” I should have clamped my eyes closed again, but Boone’s backside . . . yeah, it would have been a crime against humanity to divert my eyes when his ass was in view.

“I took them off. Too restrictive.”

“Well, would you mind putting them back on? Preferably before I wake up and you start traipsing around my room naked?”

“I’ve got a sheet on.” He paused outside the bathroom door and turned around.

My eyes shot up from where they’d just been focused. I didn’t want him to know I’d been checking out his ass. From the flash in his eyes, he already knew.

“A sheet only works if a person cinches it around their front
and
back.” I lifted an eyebrow at him.

“Oh, well, in that case . . .” Lifting his arms in a
what the hell
kind of gesture, he let the sheet float to the floor. And now he was standing in front of me, facing me, fully naked.

I tried not to look.

I wasn’t up to the task apparently.

“You’ve proven your point, Boone. You have nothing to hide. Would you mind covering up now?” My chest was on fire, spreading to the further reaches of my body. How I managed to sound so unaffected, I didn’t know.

“Nothing you haven’t seen before. Nothing you haven’t done a lot worse with either.” Giving another shrug, Boone disappeared into the bathroom, only closing the door halfway.

While he took his shower, I threw on a light cotton shift dress and a pair of sandals, and ran a brush through my hair a few times before I tied a scarf around it. I wanted to brush my teeth, but that would have required stepping into the bathroom, and after everything that had already happened between Boone and me this morning, I didn’t need to add seeing him step out of the shower, wet and naked, to that list.

There was only so much a woman could take before she broke. I was fast approaching mine.

So the tooth brushing was delayed, temporarily filled in by a couple pieces of mint gum I’d unearthed from one of my suitcases. I’d just finished popping in my second piece when I heard the shower turn off.

I sat on the edge of my bed, having already made it, and waited for Boone to get dressed. When he emerged from the bathroom a minute later, in the same clothes he’d been wearing last night—since the whole packing a suitcase for my plus one hadn’t crossed my mind—he broke to a stop when he saw me.

“You waited for me,” he said, more like a question than a mere observation.

“You seem surprised.”

He rolled the cuffs of his sleeves up past his elbows, giving his wet hair a shake. Droplets of water rained around my room, catching the sunlight breaking through the windows and forming hundreds of tiny prisms.

“I just assumed you would have headed down when you were ready, you know, so you wouldn’t keep your family waiting.” He bent over to tug on his boots, seeming grateful for the distraction.

“Yeah, well, I didn’t want to throw you to the sharks all alone. This might be a business deal, but that doesn’t mean I can’t treat you humanely in the process.”

Boone stopped in the middle of tugging on his second boot, the skin between his eyes creasing. He was going to say something—I could feel it—then the moment passed before it had a chance to take root.

Standing, he cleared his throat and headed to the door. “Rip the bandage off?” He opened the door and waited.

“Rip that sucker off.”

I lifted off the bed and crossed the room toward him. When I passed by, I felt like I was passing through an energy field. Like the electricity in the air was especially concentrated around him. That wasn’t something new when it came to Boone, but it was something I’d hoped would have been decommissioned after all of this time. After all of the baggage that came with the story of us.

When I stepped into the hall, I almost felt my walls lifting back into place. My body armor fit snugly around me, secured so there were no weak spots a sharp thing could penetrate. It came naturally. I’d learned long ago that the only way to survive in this family was to protect myself, invisible walls and armor included.

“Let me do the talking when it comes to us,” I whispered to Boone, who’d shouldered up beside me and wasn’t scanning the area like he was just waiting for some family member to pop out of one of those dozen doors and fire off one belittling comment after another.

His head shook. “Yeah, when I followed that advice from you last time, your parents called the cops, thinking I was some half-naked miscreant in your bedroom, about to defile their daughter. Instead of believing the ‘alleged’ miscreant was dear daughter’s boyfriend who she’d just been defiling.” He gave me a nudge with his elbow, his grin as wicked as they came. “For the second time that morning.”

“You weren’t so eager to divulge what we’d been up to that morning either, so why don’t you turn that tsk-tsk tone on yourself for a change?” I scooted away from him, giving myself some space.

We were almost down the stairs and heading into the breakfast dining room—because the Abbott family had been eating their breakfasts in a separate room than their dinners for five generations—when Boone’s forehead creased. “It’s too quiet down here. Are you sure they weren’t going out to breakfast or something?”

Now that I was paying attention, I realized I didn’t hear anything either, which was unusual. Usually my dad’s booming Southern voice could be heard from a few rooms back, or my mom trying to get my dad’s attention by firing off question after question about whose dinner invite they should accept for the weekend, and Avalee and Charlotte could almost always be heard bickering about something. This morning though, when I knew at least a dozen extra bodies were living under this roof, I couldn’t make out the sound of a spoon scraping against a bowl.

“No, I’m not sure. Since Charlotte was the bearer of the breakfast news, this could be some kind of booby trap.” I craned my neck to look into the living room to see if anyone was in there. Like the rest of the house, it was empty.

“Or maybe Reverend Martin finally got it right and Armageddon arrived and took away all of the bad eggs,” Boone said, checking the kitchen to find it just as empty.

The thought made me laugh. “Free at last. Thank God Almighty, and Armageddon, I’m free at last.”

Boone and I were both still laughing as we rounded into the silent dining room. The breakfast dining room. Our laughs cut off mid-note.

“I don’t know about bad eggs, but if they’re not cold already from waiting on you two, they’re about to be.”

Boone cleared his throat while I slid a bit in his direction. There was a cold front directly ahead, whereas he’d always given off a warmth that bordered on sunshine.

The room had been silent before. It somehow became even more so.

At the head of the long table was my dad, untouched by age and unsoftened by experience, if his expression could be trusted. Where I was used to seeing three of the two dozen chairs staggered around the table filled, this morning, every one save for one was filled. Some faces I recognized; most I didn’t.

All clearly knew who I was though. Just as clearly as they knew who Boone was. No, that wasn’t the right way to put it . . . more likely, they knew
of
Boone.

Not the version I’d grown up knowing or even the one he truly was.

“Daddy,” I said at last, trying on a smile because the situation warranted it. Seeing one’s dad for the first time in over two years generally did . . . right? “I’m sorry I missed you last night. It’s good to see you again.”

“Yes, well, if someone would have arrived when we were expecting her, you wouldn’t need to make an apology in front of everyone at the breakfast table, would you?” My dad’s voice filled the room, bouncing off the walls and filling the empty spaces. He wasn’t what I would call a hard man, just an unbending one. He knew what he knew, and what he knew was the truth. No exceptions.

That left anyone looking to have a relationship with him the person who’d have to make so many justifications and conditions until they broke. The only way to love an unbending person was to break yourself.

It was what I’d done with my father.

It was what I was hell-bent not to do again.

“Your mother had the good grace to tell me who your date was for the wedding. The same good grace you might have exercised so we had a bit of a . . .” My dad’s eyes finally landed on Boone. If looks could commit murder, my dad had just earned himself a life sentence. “Warning as to what was coming.”

“Don’t you mean
who
was coming?” I said in a tone that got closer to snapping than saying.

My dad’s gaze cut back to me, his silver brow lifting in a way that suggested he’d made no error.

Boone moved a bit closer to me, holding his head so high it looked unnatural. “I bet you never thought you’d see my face around here again,” he said, managing to project in the same manner my dad had mastered.

Dad settled back into his chair, lifting the newspaper in front of his face. “More like
hoped
I never would,” he said, as though he were speaking to himself. “But like my daddy always used to say, hoping is worth its weight in shit.”

My eyebrows drove into my forehead. My dad was of the South, for the South, and the essence of the South, which meant he followed a certain code of conduct that was exclusive to this part of the world. Part of that code included never cursing in front of the “gentler” gender and making up for those periods of abstinence by cursing it up with the rest of the Neanderthals who considered themselves the very pinnacle of human-dom. That he’d just dropped a shit bomb in front of a roomful of women meant my dad wasn’t feeling like himself. Either that, or he’d been possessed by a guy who’d spent a lifetime in a trailer park outside of Detroit.

“Why don’t you take a seat so we don’t starve our guests away?” Dad shook his paper open but couldn’t seem to distract himself from Boone and me hovering inside the room.

“There’s only one chair left.” I waved my finger between Boone and myself. “And there are two of us.”

Dad lifted his brow again, an expression of
So?
settling onto his face.

To my dad’s left, Ford covered his mouth as a laugh erupted from him. Everyone was still staring at us, and no one was taking the initiative to make the introductions, so I continued to stand there, accepting the gaping and snickers and invisible question marks hanging above everyone’s head. Waiting.

I’d spent half of my life waiting. Waiting for something that had never come to life. Waiting for something I couldn’t designate with a name even.

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Boone said, his voice drawing out the term of endearment longer than necessary. “You can sit on my lap. Wouldn’t be the first time we’ve eaten breakfast like that.”

When I looked at him smiling down at me like everything was coming up roses, I found my eyes starting to narrow. I caught myself before anyone else seemed to notice.

I was just about to plaster on a smile and say something along the lines of, “Not when there’s company around”
when my mom shot out of her seat.

“Now there’s absolutely no need for anyone to be left without a chair when we’ve got a whole storage room packed with them.” Mom lifted her eyebrows at one of the kitchen employees hovering in the corner of the room, then she plastered on a smile of her own. “I must have miscounted when I gave Frieda the number for breakfast.”

“You must have,” Boone replied, his smile more convincing than my mom’s, though I knew what he was saying between the lines.
You didn’t miscount anything, lady. You simply chose not to count me.

“How did everyone sleep?” Dad gave up on his paper and dropped it into a crumpled heap on the edge of the table. He couldn’t stop watching Boone and me.

A chorus of “good” and “well, thank you” swept around the table. The new chair was just being nestled in beside the other empty chair. Frieda rushed back into the kitchen to grab another place setting, and Boone took my hand and walked me over to our chairs. My dad’s eyes lowered to where Boone held my hand. If you could kill the same person twice, my dad had just earned himself another life sentence.

“I don’t know if you want to call it sleep, per se,” Boone said, firing off a wink around the table before continuing, “but I had one hell of a night if you know what I mean.”

My mouth wasn’t the only one that fell open. My mom’s, along with a few others, followed my lead, while Dad and Ford went with something more along the lines of curling their lips while reaching for their butter knifes. As Boone slid out my chair for me, I gave him a subtle nudge before sitting. One that suggested he shut the hell up unless he wanted me to stab him in the knee with my fork if he made any more comments of that nature.

Frieda raced back into the room and set up Boone’s place setting in less time than  it took me to unfold my napkin and smooth it into my lap.

Breakfast was a formal affair at Abbott Manor, as most everything was. We ate our eggs with cloth napkins, drank our coffee from porcelain cups painted with gold leaf, and sipped our pressed-fresh-every-morning orange juice from imported Italian crystal. While the breakfast centerpieces were typically extravagant, from the three floral pieces lining the center of the table, I guessed my parents had had every floral shop from Charleston to Raleigh on round-the-clock mode.

“Estelle tells me you’re unemployed, Boone.” Now that we were seated, my dad sawed into his ham steak, though I couldn’t help feeling like it was Boone’s neck he was envisioning. He cut into it a bit more eagerly than breakfast ham warranted.

Boone took a sip of his orange juice, ignoring the heads turned his way. “Estelle speaks the truth.”

“Is this something new?” Dad asked, before lifting a piece of ham to his mouth.