Page 16 of Rune’s Solace

Which is exactly how I ended up walking out the back of the clubhouse at dusk with the empty tin in my jacket pocket, telling nobody where I was going, because if I told somebody they’d have talked me out of it or worse, offered to come, and I didn’t want a witness for this. I just wanted to get the tea and get back, have Brenda sleep through the night, and if the price of that was walking back into the one place I’d worked hardest to stay out of, then fine. It was just a garden. It was just tea. I said that to myself about four times on the way out and didn’t believe it any of the four.

Here was the part nobody else knew. It wasn’t just Rune’s cabin I was avoiding. For most of the year I’d been here, before everything got messed up, that garden had been mine too. I’d spent entire mornings out there on my knees in the dirt beside him, learning which leaves did what, why you cut some things at dawn but waited until dark for others. I’d followed him into the woods with a basket more times than I could count, learning where to find the things he couldn’t grow, ginseng under the hardwoods, the good mushrooms, which bark he wanted, which trees you left alone. He taught me all of it, never got annoyed when I forgot something or asked the same question twice, never treated me like some kid he had to keep entertained. Out there, with dirt under my nails, my basket getting heavier, Rune talking to me in that soothing voice of his, I got to be somebody he wanted around. That was when I started falling in love with Rune.

And safe. I’d felt safe. First place in my life I ever did.

The path out to his place ran along the back fence and then broke off through a little stand of pines, and I knew every root and dip in it in the dark, because I’d walked it in every season there was. My feet remembered the entire way even after I’d spent months trying to make my head forget it. And then the trees opened up and there it was, and I had to stop for a second, because the missing it came up on me all at once, worse than I’d prepared for.

I hadn’t let myself come back here since the night it all went wrong. Not once. And standing at the edge of the pines looking at it, I understood exactly how much that had cost me, and how good I’d gotten at pretending it hadn’t.

The garden.

It ran along the south side of his cabin and out past it, bigger than I remembered, the rows going soft at the end of the day. The smell hit me before I reached it, mint and rosemary, warm dirt and crushed leaves, all of it so familiar my chest tightened. Bees still worked the flowers, moving through orange calendula, white chamomile, purple echinacea. I knew every bit of this garden. I’d planted some of it, cut some of it, dried and steeped things beside Rune more times than I could count.

I’d missed it.

That hurt almost as much as missing him.

“Brenda’s back.”

I hadn’t heard him. That was Rune. A man that big had no business being that quiet, but somehow he always was. I turned and there he stood maybe ten feet away at the end of a row, little shovel in one hand, dirt all the way up his wrist, staring at me with those green eyes I could never figure out. He’d gone completely still when he saw me. Even from where I stood, I could tell he was being careful, like one wrong move and I might take off.

He wasn’t wrong.

“It’s out,” I said, and pulled the tin from my pocket and held it up like evidence. “The tea. She won’t ask you for more. So.”

“So you came.” Something moved through his voice and got shut down before it finished. He set the shovel down on the edge of a bed, careful, everything careful. “Yeah. Course. Give me — ” He looked at his hands, the dirt on them. “Give me a minute to wash up. I’ll make it fresh, it’s better fresh.”

“I don’t need to watch you make it. Just — if you’ve got some already done.”

“I don’t keep it made. It doesn’t keep.” He said it plain, not a dig, just true, and started toward the rain barrel at the corner of the cabin to rinse his hands, then stopped, and half-turned back like he wasn’t sure what to do with me. “You can wait out here. If you’d rather. Than come in.”

Than come in. Because we both knew what was in there. I’d been inside that cabin plenty, back before, sat at that little table by the window grinding things down with his mortar, waited out summer rain with a cup of something warm he’d pressed into my hands. But it was also the room where he’d kissed me the one time, the thing that ended all of it, and he knew I couldn’t walk back in there like it was nothing. He was handing me the out before I had to ask for it, and I wanted it so bad it made me mad, and it made me madder that he’d known I’d want it.

“Out here’s fine,” I said.

He nodded and went inside, and I stood there a second with no idea what to do with my own hands, which had never once happened to me out here in a year of mornings out here.

I should have just stood there and looked at the fence. Instead I wandered into the garden while he was gone, my hand finding the lemon balm before I even thought about it. I brushed my fingers over the soft leaves and breathed in that familiar lemony smell. My hands remembered this place. Rune had taught me every row, morning after morning, back when I got to follow him out here and he wanted me here.

The thought hit before I could stop it.

He’d let me into this part of his life. Made me feel like some of it was mine too. Then one night he decided he didn’t want me in it anymore.

Whatever. I pulled my hand back like the leaves had gone hot.

“You still go straight for the lemon balm.” He came back wiping his hands on a rag and stopped a few feet away, giving me room. “First thing, every time,” he said. His voice was calm, but his grip on the rag wasn't. “You always did.”

“Muscle memory.” It came out harder than the moment called for. “Doesn’t mean anything.” He took it without a flinch, the way he’d taken the one in Brenda’s room, the way I was starting to understand he’d take anything I threw, and that was its own kind of maddening. You can’t have a fight with a man who just stands there and lets you hit him.

He crouched beside one of the beds and started cutting what he needed, quick and sure, and I made the mistake of watching. His sleeves were pushed up, forearms tanned and rough, dirt streaked over one of them, those big hands moving carefully through the little leaves like they always did. I remembered those hands in my hair. Apparently my body remembered too, because something warm pulled low in my stomach before I could stop it.

Great.

I crossed my arms tighter and tried looking somewhere else.

It lasted maybe five seconds.

He was still Rune. Too big, too old for me, too dangerous, with hands that could coax something delicate out of the dirt or put a man on the ground. I knew both sides of him.