Page 35 of Rune’s Solace

I came up out of it like a drowning.

That’s the only word for it. Not woke. Drowning people don’t wake, they break surface, they come up clawing.

I woke up sitting straight up in bed.

For a second I didn’t know where I was. My hands were out in front of me like I was trying to keep somebody away, my heart was beating so hard it hurt, and I couldn’t get enough air no matter how fast I tried. My shirt stuck to my back. The sheets were wet. There was some awful sound coming out of me, and I slapped both hands over my mouth before anybody could hear it.

The walls in this place are thin. Brenda is three doors away and I couldn’t have her running in here. She loved me. That was the problem. She’d come. She’d sit on the end of the bed and hold me, tell me I was safe, and I would feel nine years old all over again.

So I didn’t make a sound.

I sat there in the dark until the shaking got smaller and my breathing stopped sounding like I’d run somewhere. Nobody knocked. No doors opened down the hall.

I’d gotten away with it.

Then I turned on the lamp, because I was nineteen years old and apparently still needed one on after a nightmare, I sat with my back against the headboard with my knees pulled up until the room started looking like my room again.

I knew I wasn’t going back to sleep. I’d done this before. Wait for the sun. Get dressed. Pretend it didn’t happen.

Except this time, sitting there with the lamp on and my heart finally slowing down, I thought about the cabin.

* * *

Here’s what I know. Here’s the thing I’ve been working all day not to know.

There is exactly one thing on this earth that has ever gotten me through a stretch like this. Not a pill. I’ve tried the pills, they put you under and lock the door behind you and you dream anyway, only now you can’t get out. Not Brenda, because Brenda loves me too much and that’s its own problem; she worries and hovers and gets that look on her face like she’d fight my childhood with her bare hands if somebody would just point her at it, and then I end up worrying about her worrying about me. Not Sawyer, who’s across a river and can’t ever know, because there’s a version of me that he has never met and I would like to keep it that way.

It’s him.

It’s been him since my first month here, when I was so far gone I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep and flinched off every man who came within ten feet of me, except, for reasons I have never once been able to explain to myself, the biker with the dirt under his nails.

He never made me talk about it. He never asked me what I dreamed or who did what or how bad it got. He just turned up with something warm, and then he’d sit down outside my door with his back against the wall, close enough that I could hear him breathing through the wood, far enough that I never once felt cornered, and he’d stay. Sometimes an hour. Sometimes all night. And I’d lie there on the other side of that door, put my breathing on top of a sound I could barely hear, and I would go to sleep. Actually sleep. Because some old, wordless thing in me had decided that as long as that particular man was sitting between me and the hallway, the hallway couldn’t get in.

That’s all he ever did. Sat on a floor and breathed.

It worked every single time.

And this afternoon, on the concrete, scared and shaking with people standing around us, he put my hand flat on his chest and did the same thing he’s always done, and it worked. Right there in front of everybody, my body begged for him so fast I was ashamed of how badly I’d needed it.

So now I’m sitting up in a soaked bed at two in the morning with my heart still going, and I know, the way you know your own name, that if I got up and went out the back, down the path through the pines and knocked on that cabin door, he’d open it. He wouldn’t ask me one question. He’d put the kettle on and he’d sit down on the floor.

And I would sleep.

God. I want to sleep.

* * *

I didn’t go.

It wasn’t pride. Or it wasn’t just pride. I had the rest of the night to sit there and come up with reasons, and some of them were even good ones.

If I went out there, I was that girl again. The one Brenda found on the street. The one who couldn’t sleep and barely ate and made everybody lower their voices when they talked to her like one wrong word might send her running. I’d worked really hard not to be that girl anymore. I crossed the river by myself every morning. I went to college. I knew answers in rooms full of three hundred people. Yesterday I’d put myself between Brenda and a federal agent before I even thought about being scared.

I liked that Amy.

I wanted to keep her.

And that Amy did not sneak through the woods at two in the morning to knock on the door of a man who’d put another woman on his arm and made damn sure she saw it, just so she could ask him to sit outside a door and help her sleep.