Page 17 of Rune’s Solace

Stupidly, I wanted both.

“How is she,” he said, not looking up. “Brenda. Really.”

“Getting up. Eating.” I watched him. “You’d know that. You’re the one dosing her sleep.”

“Josie tells me she’s up. I like to hear it from somebody who sits with her.” He clipped another sprig, laid it careful in the little pile on his knee. “It’s a hard thing, what happened to her. Loving somebody who turned out to be — ” He stopped. His hands stopped. And I saw him hear it, hear where the sentence was walking, a half-second too late to turn it around.

“Turned out to be lying to her the whole time?” I finished it for him, and I don’t know where it came from, it just came, all of it, months of it, up and out before I decided to let it. “Yeah. That is a hard thing. Loving somebody who looks you dead in the eye and makes you believe something that isn’t true, and then just… walks off with somebody else to make good and sure it lands. That’s a real hard thing, Rune. I’ll bet you can’t hardly imagine it.”

The garden stopped making any sounds. Even the bees, it felt like.

He looked up at me from the low bed, and finally I got something from him. I almost wished I hadn’t. Whatever he’d been keeping behind that blank face was right there now, hurt and angry and about ten other things I couldn’t sort out fast enough. He opened his mouth like he was finally going to give me some of it.

Here it comes, I thought. Some version of sorry. Some man’s half-apology, it wasn’t like that, or worse, you were too young, the thing everybody always circled, the thing I could feel him think every time he looked at me even now, the years between us sitting there like a fence I’d never be tall enough to see over.

And then I watched him swallow it. Whatever it was. I watched him take his speech, push it back down, close his mouth over it, and his eyes went flat and careful again, the shutters coming down, and he looked back at the leaves in his hand.

“No,” he said, low. “I don’t imagine I can.”

That was it. That was all he had. A man who could’ve said one true thing to me standing in his own garden with nobody around to hear it, and he picked the leaves instead.

I don’t know what I’d wanted. I’d have thrown whatever he said right back in his face, I’m sure of it, I had months of armor on and I wasn’t about to take it off for a man crouched in the dirt. But he didn’t even try. And something about how easy he made it look, just letting me hurt, cracked something in my chest I’d have paid money to keep shut.

He stood up and came toward me slow, telegraphing every step like he was making sure I had plenty of time to move if I wanted to, and I hated how aware I was of him doing it, how much bigger he seemed the closer he got, until I could smell the dirt on him and that clean, woodsy something that was just Rune, familiar enough that my body remembered it before the rest of me could tell it not to. He held out the little cloth pouch he’d tied off, and I reached for it, and his hand and my hand and the pouch all met in the space between us, and this time—I don’t know why, I’ve asked myself a hundred times—this time I wasn’t fast enough. His fingers brushed the side of mine, warm and rough from the dirt, there and gone.

Neither of us moved.

It was half a second, probably less, but my body noticed. Heat chased the touch up my arm and went somewhere much lower, and suddenly I was standing way too close to a man I’d spent months trying not to remember kissing me. I remembered now. His hand in my hair, his mouth on mine, how easy it had been to lean into him like I’d been waiting forever to do exactly that, and apparently my body hadn’t forgotten any of it just because I’d told it we were done.

Rune was looking at me, but not the careful way he’d been looking at me since I walked into the garden, like I might bolt if he breathed wrong. This was different. Something had slipped. His eyes dropped to my mouth for one tiny second before coming back up, and the look in them made something inside me pull tight.

Oh.

Hungry was the word that came to mind, which made absolutely no sense. Rune didn’t want me. He’d made that perfectly clear months ago, in front of a room full of people, and I’d spent enough nights reminding myself of it that I shouldn’t have been able to forget. Except right then, standing close enough that I could still feel the heat coming off him, he looked like he did. Like maybe wanting me was the problem.

I should’ve stepped back.

I didn’t.

“Eight minutes,” he said, and his voice had gone rough enough that I noticed that too. “Steep it eight. Not less.”

“I know how.” I made myself look right at him. “You taught me.”

Something moved in his face, small but there, and I knew I’d gotten him with that one. I hadn’t meant to. Or maybe some small, hurt part of me had, because he’d taught me all of this, given me mornings in this garden and baskets in the woods and a place beside him, then turned around and acted like none of it had meant what I’d thought it meant.

“Yeah,” he murmured. “I did.”

I turned and walked back toward the pines, and I didn’t run even though every confused part of me wanted to. Behind me, the garden stayed green and full, Rune somewhere in the middle of it, while I carried Brenda’s tea back toward the clubhouse with my hand still tingling where he’d touched it and told myself all the way that nothing had happened.

Nothing had happened.

Rune had picked somebody else months ago. I’d watched him do it. I knew what that meant, knew it better than I wanted to, and one accidental touch in a garden didn’t change any of it.

So why had he looked at my mouth?

Why had he looked at me like that?

Like wanting me was the one thing he was trying hardest not to do.