Page 56 of Rune’s Solace

I can’t tell Amy I know.

That’s the thing that sits on my chest at three in the morning while she’s finally sleeping. Because one day she’s going to look at me and understand that Brenda told me everything. That the worst thing that ever happened to her got told without her knowing, by the one person she made promise never to tell anybody. And when she finds out I knew and let her believe I didn’t, I don’t know if she’ll ever trust me the same way again.

But I still hold it. Every night while she lies there talking to me in the dark.

I told her three weeks ago in this room that I would never run another play on her as long as I lived, I meant it with everything in me, and I’m lying to her every single night, and I’d do it again tomorrow, because the alternative is taking from her the last thing on this earth that’s still hers to give.

That’s the damn trap. There’s no clean way out. I’ve turned it over a hundred nights and there isn’t one.

She has to tell me herself.

She has to hand it to me, in her own words, in her own time, and I have to sit there and take it like it’s the first time I’m hearing any of it, and God knows what that’ll cost me, and I don’t care, I’ll pay it. It’s hers, and I’d cut my own tongue out before I’d take it.

* * *

Last night she came down at eleven with her hair wet from the shower and her eyes already half-gone, and she didn’t say much of anything at all. Drank the tea I put in front of her. Made some small joke about her chemistry professor that neither of us laughed at. Then she went and lay down on my bed with her back to the room, the way she always did, and I put the light out and got down on the floor against the frame, the way I always did.

And that should have been that.

She got comfortable above me. I heard her breathing start to stretch out, and I lay there listening to the moths tapping at the screen while I did what I’d gotten real good at doing, kept my hands to myself and thought about everything except the woman in my bed.

Then the bed moved.

Not much. Just the shift of her sitting up, careful about it. I heard her come up on one elbow, heard her go still, listening, and I understood exactly what she was doing.

She was checking if I was asleep.

I didn’t move a muscle. Kept my breathing slow, deep and even, the same rhythm I’d been giving her for weeks, I did it on purpose, and I knew what I was doing when I did it.

The covers pulled back. The mattress creaked. And then there were two bare feet coming down beside my shoulder, and a small weight lowering itself onto the floor, and Amy lay down on that hard floor behind me in the dark, in my shirt, and fit herself along my back like she was hiding from something.

Fucking hell.

Her forehead nestled between my shoulder blades.

I forgot how to breathe.

Then her hand came around me. Slow. Slow enough that I felt every inch of the decision before her palm finally stopped over the middle of my chest. Right over my heart.

Every muscle in my body locked.

She went still behind me too, and I understood what she was doing. Waiting to see if she’d woken me. Giving herself one last chance to get up, climb back into that bed and pretend none of this had happened.

I kept my eyes shut and made my chest rise under her hand.

After a minute, when she believed it, something in her loosened against me, and that’s when I understood. She hadn’t come down because of a nightmare. There hadn’t been a sound out of her, no bad breathing, no jerk awake, none of the things I’d learned to hear before she did. She’d been lying awake in my bed. Then she’d climbed down onto a hard floor because she wanted to be close to me.

Wanted.

Christ Almighty.

Her nose brushed once against the back of my neck as she settled in, probably an accident, probably nothing, and every part of me that was a man came awake so hard and fast I had to clench my jaw against it.

I could feel the warmth of her from shoulders to knees. Feel her breath through my shirt. Feel each one of her fingers where they rested over my heart, and there wasn’t one damn part of me that didn’t know exactly how easy it would be to turn over.

If I did, she’d have died of it. She’d have been up and out that door and back in her own bed with her jaw set and she would never, ever have come down that path again.

So I didn’t move.