Page 46 of Rune’s Solace
“He didn’t even have enough respect for me to say it to my face. That’s the part I can’t get past. If he didn’t want me, fine. Whatever. People don’t want people back all the time. I would’ve lived.” My throat tightened and I hated it, hated that after all these months he could still do this to my voice without even being in the room. “But he didn’t tell me. He put his arm around another woman and walked her down that hall with everybody watching. With me watching. He made sure I understood without him having to say one damn word.”
“Amy—”
“Do you have any idea how stupid I felt?”
That one came out small.
I stared down at my bare feet. “Everybody knew I followed him around. Everybody knew how I felt about him. God, I wasn’t exactly subtle.” I laughed once, but there wasn’t anything funny in it. “Then he just picked somebody else right in front of me like he was making sure there couldn’t possibly be any confusion.”
“I’m not—”
“So no. I’m not walking down there at two in the morning because I had a nightmare and asking him to make it better. I won’t do that to myself. I won’t stand on his porch and hand him one more chance to show me how little I meant to him.” My eyes burned and I scrubbed at them, mad now because crying was apparently the only hobby I had left. “I’d rather never sleep again.”
And Sable made a sound.
Small. That same little catch I’d heard on her back steps months ago, that half-breath, the front edge of a word that wouldn’t come out. But this time it didn’t stop. This time something behind it gave way.
“Oh God,” she said.
“What.”
“Oh, God, Amy.” And her voice had gone strange, thin and horrified, and I sat up straight in the dark. “Amy. Listen to me. He didn’t sleep with her.”
The room went very still.
“What?”
“He didn’t—” I heard her take a breath, then another, too fast. “That night. I saw him, Amy. After I left you out front, after we talked, I went around back to get some air before Thunder came looking for me, and Rune was out there. Alone. It couldn’t have been ten minutes after he walked down that hall with her. He was walking toward his cabin with a lost look on his face, and there was nobody with him. No club woman. Nobody.”
I couldn’t get any air.
“He left her,” Sable said. “Wherever he took her, he left her, and he went back home. That’s what I saw. That is exactly what I saw and I have never in my life been so sure of anything.”
“Why — ” My voice came out of somebody else. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I forgot.” The words broke coming out, and I could hear her crying now. “Oh, Amy, I know how awful that sounds, but think about where my head was then. I was waiting every second for Gabriel to make a move. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t think, half the time I didn’t know what day it was. I saw Rune standing out there looking gutted and somehow I just...lost it in everything else.”
“Sable—”
“It’s been nagging at me for weeks, and for some reason tonight it hit me. How could I have forgotten something so important to you?”
“Sable. Stop.” My hands were shaking. Not from the not-sleeping. “Stop. It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay, you’ve been carrying this for months — ”
“You were running for your life.” And I meant it, all the way down, because I have been the thing running and I know what it does to a mind, I know exactly how much of the world just falls out of your head when you are busy staying alive. There was nothing to forgive. There was nothing even close to it.
I got up off the bed.
I stood in the middle of my room with the phone against my ear, my heart going like a hammer, and I felt something happen in me that I didn’t have a name for, a sort of cold glaring terrible clarity.
He didn’t sleep with her.
He walked her down that hall, in front of everybody, in front of me, then he left her.
Which meant it wasn’t real. Not one second of it. It was theater. It was a performance, put on for an audience of one, and I was the one, and he had stood there and looked me in the eye and made me watch —
“Amy?” Sable’s voice, far away. “Amy, say something.”
