Page 51 of Rune’s Solace

She’d come to me. After everything. She’d walked down a dark path in the middle of the night, stood in my house and told me she hated me, and then she’d fallen asleep on my chest.

I’d take it. God forgive me, I’d take whatever she gave me, for as long as she’d give it.

And in the morning I was going to have to look her in the eye and keep the other thing from her, the thing Brenda told me in that kitchen, the thing I hadn’t slept a full night since hearing, the thing that made me want to put a man in the ground and sleep fine after.

I held her, and I watched the window, and I waited for the sun.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I WOKE UP on a man’s floor at ten in the morning having slept nine hours straight, and for about five seconds it was the best I have ever felt in my life.

The first second, my body straight-up lied to me. Before the memory comes back, there’s this little window where you’re just a body that finally got what it needed. Warm, heavy, loose, still mostly under. My head didn’t hurt. The buzzing behind my eyes was gone. I could feel my own hands again. Nine hours. I hadn’t strung nine hours together in weeks, and my body was drunk on it, stupid with relief.

Then I opened my eyes and saw the ceiling of Rune’s cabin.

I came up off that floor like it was on fire.

There was a blanket on me that hadn’t been there when I went down. There was a pillow under my head, a real one, off his bed, I could tell because it smelled like him and it made me want to put my face in it, which made me want to throw it across the room. My boots were off. Rune had unlaced my boots and set them by the door, side by side, neat as anything, and something about that, the care of it, the small stupid domestic care of it, hit me harder than any of the rest.

And he wasn’t there.

That was the first thing I understood, standing barefoot in the middle of his front room with my heart going, he’d gotten up and gone out and left me alone in his house. No hovering. No sitting there watching me sleep waiting for me to wake up so we could Have A Conversation. He’d just — gone, left the door unlocked, and left me a way out that didn’t cost me anything.

I hated how well he knew me.

* * *

I found him in the garden because that’s where he always is at this hour.

I stood in the doorway in my sock feet and watched him for a minute before he knew I was there, which is a thing almost nobody gets to do to Rune. He was down the far end of a row with his back to me, working, hands in it, sleeves shoved up, the sun already hard on him. Not looking at the cabin. Not waiting on me. Just doing the thing he does.

Just Rune, doing the thing Rune does.

And I felt it. Standing in that doorway with my hair a disaster, last night’s clothes on and nine hours of sleep in my body for the first time in a week, I felt my chest do something complicated and warm and I hated it, I hated it so much, and there was not one thing I could do about it.

He straightened up and turned around like he’d known I was there.

“There’s coffee,” he said. “On the stove. It’s been sitting, so it’s bad, but it’s hot.”

That’s it. That’s all. No how’d you sleep. No we should talk. No look on his face that asked me for anything at all.

“Rune.”

“Yeah.”

I stood there and I couldn’t get a single one of the nine hundred things in my chest up my throat, and finally what came out was: “You took my boots off.”

Something moved across his face and got shut down.

“You were asleep in them,” he said. “They were laced too tight. Your feet had swelled.” He looked back down at the row. “It’s not a thing, Amy.”

But it was. That’s the trouble. It was a thing, it was such an enormous thing that I had to turn around, go back inside and stand in his kitchen with both hands flat on the counter until I could breathe right.

* * *

I took a drink of coffee and immediately regretted it.

He loved me.