Page 22 of Rune’s Solace

I already knew. I think I knew before she said the next part. My body knew, the way it always knows the thing before the words come.

“And they’re all spoken for,” I said.

“All but one.” She looked at me then, and there was so much sorry in it. “Baby, I fought it. I want you to know I fought it hard as I could without — without sayin’ things I’ve got no business sayin’ in front of Devil. But everybody’s spoken for. Everybody’s got a post. There’s exactly one man with the hours free, his own way to get around and nothin’ tyin’ him to the walls.”

“Say it,” I said. My voice already betraying me. “Say his name, Brenda.”

“Rune.”

There it was.

I don’t know what hit first, except I was mad. Really mad. The absolute nerve of it. I’d spent months figuring out how not to be wherever Rune was, and now Devil had decided Rune was going to follow me around every day and called it protection, which apparently meant I didn’t even get a vote. Worse, he was putting him right in the middle of the one part of my day that was mine, that forty-minute drive across the bridge when nobody needed anything from me and I could turn the radio up or leave it off and watch the river go pink-gold for those ten minutes before the sun got too high. I got to just be Amy out there, and now Rune was going to be there too. Every morning. God, this was going to suck.

“No,” I said.

“Amy — ”

“No. I’ll take the bus. I’ll — there’s a park-and-ride, I’ll leave the car, I’ll — ”

“They thought of that. He follows the bus too. He follows whatever you do.” Brenda reached across and put her hand over mine and I let her, barely. “Honey, listen to me. This is not a thing you can win. I already lost it for the both of us. The only choice you got left is whether you make it hard on yourself on top of everything, or whether you get in the car and let the man do his job and don’t give him one inch of yourself past that.” Her fingers tightened. “You hear me? Not one inch. He drives behind you, that’s all he gets. That’s all any of them ever get, if you’re smart, and you’re the smartest girl I know.”

She meant it to keep me from getting hurt. She’d already paid for that lesson herself and was trying to give it to me for free.

“Fine,” I said. “Not one inch.”

And I meant it, walking out to my car. I meant it all the way down to my shoes.

* * *

He was already there.

Out past the gate, off to the side of the road, straddling that bike of his with the engine off and one boot planted on the ground. He wasn’t looking at me. He was watching the road, the trees, everything around us, because apparently Rune took follow Amy to school as seriously as he took everything else. He had his cut on, dark glasses hiding his eyes, sleeves pushed up enough to show his forearms, and the whole big-biker-on-a-Harley thing should not have worked on me nearly as well as it did.

Great. Apparently being furious with Rune did not make him less hot.

That was the problem with him. I could be mad at him all I wanted. My body apparently hadn’t been invited to that decision.

I got in my car, not looking back at him as I pulled out onto the road, in my mirror the bike came to life and swung out behind me, and that was it, that was us, that was the new routine of every morning until further notice. A girl in a Honda and the man who broke her, forty minutes to the city, him hanging back exactly far enough that it never once felt like company and never once let me forget he was there.

Here’s the thing I wouldn’t admit to myself, the thing that made me grip the wheel till my knuckles went white halfway across the bridge.

I wasn’t scared.

I should have been. Not of him. Of the feeling of it, a man behind me, following, matching my turns, his eyes on my back all the way. That’s the exact thing my body is built to come apart over. I have panicked in a grocery store because a man I didn’t know took the same three aisles I did. I have gotten off buses a stop early, walked the long way and doubled back, heart going like a bird, because somebody stood too close too long. Being followed is the oldest and worst of all my alarms, the one that never quits, the one that’s kept me alive.

And he fell in behind me and it didn’t go off.

It just...didn’t. That was the weird part. I’d been mad since Brenda told me, mad when I got in the car, mad when I saw Rune sitting out by the gate waiting for me. But somewhere between there and the bridge, my hands loosened on the wheel. My shoulders came down. I stopped checking every car that got too close because there was a motorcycle in my mirror and I knew exactly who was on it.

I hated that.

My body had always been better at knowing when something was wrong than the rest of me. I’d learned to trust that feeling because it had kept me out of my father’s way more times than I could count. It had gone off with the man across the street in Charleston before I’d even figured out why I was scared.

But it had never gone off around Rune.

Not once.

Not in his cabin. Not alone with him in the woods. Not when he kissed me. Not in the garden three nights ago when he got close enough that I could smell dirt on his skin and all I could think about was his mouth. Not now, with him following me across a river. That should’ve made me feel better. Somehow it made me want to scream. So I did the mature thing and refused to look at him.