Page 91 of Rune’s Solace

There it was again. I studied his face for a second, this impossible man who had gotten so much wrong with me and somehow understood this one thing better than I had.

Then another thought came.

“Do you want me to tell you?”

Rune’s thumb stopped against my cheek. “Only if you want to.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

He went quiet.

“Do you want to hear it from me?”

His eyes changed. “Yeah,” he said finally. “I do.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s you.”

“Wasn’t about easier.” He almost smiled, and it broke my heart. “Not one thing about loving you has been about easier. That’s how I know it’s the real thing. Everything else in my life I did because it was easier.”

* * *

So I gave it to him.

It wasn’t that I decided to, exactly. It just started coming, there in the silence, in the last part of the day, not because he didn’t know, but because I needed to be the one to say it out loud, finally, to a person, with my own mouth, in my own words. Take the thing that had only ever been done to me and, for once, do something with it myself. Hand it over on purpose, to the one person who’d earned it, as a gift and not a wound.

I’ll keep most of what I told him to myself. It’s mine, and I finally, finally know that it’s mine, and I don’t have to give it to anybody I don’t choose. But I told him. The house. The hallway. The door that didn’t lock and the man who taught me to go small and away. I told him how it all was, all of it, the long dark of it, and my voice shook and sometimes stopped and he never once rushed me, never filled a silence, never flinched, just sat there and received it like a man being handed something holy, and let it cost him what it cost him.

And when I got to the worst of it, the part where a small girl figures out how to survive a thing a small girl should never have to survive, I stopped. Because this was the part he didn’t know. This was the part Brenda couldn’t have told him, because I never told Brenda, I never told anyone, it was the one thing in the world that had only ever been mine.

“There’s a thing I never told you,” I said. “I never told anybody. Not Brenda. Not Sawyer. Not one living soul in nineteen years.” My hand went up to my own hair without me deciding it, to the lavender ends of it. “You asked me once, way back. In the garden. You asked why lilac.”

He went very still.

“When it was happening,” I said, “when I was little, and it was bad, and there was nothing I could do and nowhere I could go. I learned how to leave. Not my body. I couldn’t take my body anywhere. But I’d close my eyes and I’d go somewhere in my head, every time, the same place, and it got so I could get there fast, get there before the worst of it, and stay there till it was over.” My eyes were streaming now and my voice was even, which is a strange thing, the two at once. “It was a field of lilacs. I don’t know where I got it — we never had any, lilacs don’t even grow where I’m from, it’s too hot, they need the cold, they need a real winter — but somewhere I must have seen a picture, and my head grabbed it and made it mine, and that’s where I went. A field of them, purple as far as I could see, and the smell of them, and the wind in them, and it was mine, it was the one place in the world he couldn’t follow me to, couldn’t touch, couldn’t take. He had everything else. He never once got the lilacs.”

Rune had a hand pressed over his mouth. His eyes were wet. He didn’t say anything. He knew not to.

“So when I got away,” I said, “when I ran, and I was building somebody new, somebody he’d never find and never recognize, the first thing I did, the very first thing, before the new name, before any of it, I found a drugstore and I dyed my hair the color of the only place that ever kept me safe. I put the field on the outside. Where everybody could see it and nobody knew what it was.” I was almost laughing through the tears now. “Everyone thinks it’s a fun color. A girl thing. A phase. And it’s the bravest thing I ever did. I wore the thing that saved my life on top of my head every single day, right out in the open, and he never knew, nobody ever knew, it was my secret the entire time, it was mine — ”

And I couldn’t finish, because Rune had made a sound I’d never heard him make, and pulled me into him so careful of the bruises, and pressed his face into my lilac hair and held me while I cried out the last of a thing I’d been holding for nineteen years, and I felt him shaking, this enormous man, felt him come apart around the story of a little girl in a field that wasn’t real that saved her life.

“Thank you,” he said into my hair, so low it was barely a voice at all. “Thank you for giving me that. I know what it — I know what it cost. Thank you.”

“Nobody else has it,” I said. “Just you. Only ever you.”

“I’ll keep it my life.”

We sat there a long time in the dark that had come down while I talked. And then he said something into my hair, so quiet I almost missed it, in a voice full of a thing that sounded like a door opening in a man who’d kept it shut a long time.

“You know that garden of mine. How I never grew one thing in it just to be looked at.”

“I know.”

“Not one. Never planted a single thing in that plot that was just for looking at. Everything out there’s got a job. I told myself that was because everything ought to earn its place.” His arms tightened around me. “That’s not why. You knew it wasn’t why the second you saw it. I’ve been growing penance in that dirt for six years and calling it medicine.”

“Rune — ”