Telling Tales Read Online Free Page A

feel every tale I ever told right on the tip of my tongue, and when Wade congratulates me on staying true to my dreams I can’t stop myself. I have to start us down this path—the one none of us have actually taken.
    “It’s not real writing, what I do. I just…” I start, but Wade cuts in. Of course he does. I can see he’s been raring to go ever since that stubble crack in the entranceway. He looks so bristling and spark-eyed, with all his hair slicked back and his new, gorgeous man’s face.
    “So it’s fake, then. You write on air with a magical unicorn hoof.”
    “I don’t—”
    “They print your articles in Non-Existent Monthly .”
    Gah, him and his stupid fake magazines. I make them up myself, but it’s only because of him.
    “No, it’s not fake. It’s just…not what I always wanted to write.”
    He raises his glass to me.
    “Hey, it’s still more than any of us managed, kid.”
    I kind of hate him, for saying that. But then Kitty stretches out on the couch beside me, and curls an arm around my scrunched-up legs, and puts her head in my lap. She’s already half-cut, I know she is, but I also know why she then says: “We could all still manage, if we wanted to. People don’t ever run out of stories.”
    I expect Wade to interject then—with something about rejection, probably, or losing the will to or any of the things I’ve felt myself a thousand times—but it’s Cameron who gets there first. I’d almost forgotten he was there even though he’s just to my right, in Professor Warren’s old wingback. Sitting at the head of the room like a tombstone, still and quiet and far more comfortable than he’d looked two hours ago.
    I guess maybe he’s a little cut too.
    “Apart from me. I think I ran out before I ever even began.”
    And then everyone laughs, of course they do. Funny, that I don’t really feel like it.
    “I always loved your spaceship story,” I tell him, because that’s the truth. I did. It’s not a pity party I’m throwing here.
    But he looks at me as though maybe I am.
    “Ohhhh no you didn’t. I stopped writing years ago anyway,” he says, and then he runs on before I can push at him again. “But I did always want to hear the end of “Hamin-Ra.” Did you ever finish that one, Allie?”
    I think I go a little cold then. Not because I couldn’t remember ever reading it out to them—after a moment, I vaguely recall reading the tame, vanilla beginnings of it—but because it’s so fresh in my mind. I think about the answering machine and the lurid list of bizarre scenarios, prancing through my head. I think about the window in the boat room, just waiting to open and let me through to another world of joy and pleasure and beauty.
    Not like this world of leather and drinking and designer stubble.
    “Yeah,” Kitty mumbles from my lap. “I want to know if the Queen ever found her heart.”
    And now I feel slightly less disconcerted. It’s better when it’s not just Cameron remembering this one weird story I wrote, as though it had some special meaning or even worse…as though he somehow heard me through a fucking answering machine.
    But it’s still odd. I can’t even recall writing that part of it, about the heart or whatever it is Kitty’s blathering over. The whole and original thing is in one of my bags, but I’d stuffed it in there without looking, while the majority of me pretended I wasn’t doing it at all. After all, it isn’t as though this month is really going to be about ancient writing we did three hundred years ago. We aren’t really going to share stories just like before, and God knows I’m not going to share “Hamin-Ra” even if we decide to do just that.
    I only brought it because…I brought it because I brought other stories too. I brought it because I grabbed a bunch and shoved it all in, and there’s nothing more to it, really. Just as there was nothing more to Cameron shoving rolls of stories into the back of his pants as though