Page 36 of Rune’s Solace

That’s the first reason, and it’s a good one.

Reason number two was worse.

I wanted to go.

Bad.

I’d wanted to go before I even admitted to myself that the cabin was what I was thinking about, and once I did admit it, every part of me seemed to know exactly how far it was from my bed to his door. Down the hall. Out the back. Across the yard. Through the pines.

I could’ve been there in five minutes, and that was the problem. Because maybe the nightmare wasn’t the reason at all. Maybe it was just the world’s shittiest permission slip. Maybe some stupid part of me had spent months waiting for one good enough excuse to go back to Rune, and tonight my own screwed-up head had finally handed me one. I couldn’t do that, because if I went, I’d never know which Amy had gotten me out of that bed, the one who was scared and needed him, or the one who still wanted him after everything he’d done.

And God, I still wanted him.

There. Fine. I said it. To myself, in a bedroom, with nobody around to hear it, which barely counted, but still.

I wanted Rune.

I wanted the cabin, the garden and his stupid tea. I wanted that soothing voice telling me to breathe. I wanted to put my hand back on his chest, feel it move under my palm, and that thought got shut down so fast I nearly gave myself whiplash.

None of it mattered.

He chose somebody else.

That happened. That is still true tonight, it’ll be true in the morning, it’ll be true next week, and there is no amount of a man kneeling on a garage floor being the only thing on earth that can reach me that changes one single fact of it.

So I sat up with the lamp on until I saw dawn outside my window. Then I got up, showered, put on the good jacket, drew the line on my eyes sure as a surgeon, and I went out, got into a car Gearhead had fixed, and I drove to school with a man on a motorcycle behind me all the way.

I didn’t turn my head. Not one time.

And I didn’t go to him.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE KID CAME to me on a Thursday, alone, and that was the first thing that told me something was wrong.

I’d been on the bike across from the lot behind her building for about an hour, waiting on her three o’clock to let out, when I saw him come through the doors alone. That was wrong right off. Him and Amy were damn near always together; I’d watched enough of them these past few weeks to know that, and hated most every minute of what I’d seen. But here he came without her, moving fast and headed straight for me, shoulders tight and hands jammed in his pockets, none of that easy grin or smart mouth he usually had going.

He stopped about six feet off, farther than he usually stood, and didn’t say one goddamn thing about a muffin.

“Hey.” He pulled one hand out of his pocket and put it right back in. “Can I—okay, this is weird. Can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Where is she?”

“Library. She’s fine. She’s completely fine, that’s not—” He stopped, dragged a hand through his hair, and I caught the shake in his fingers.

I got off the bike.

He saw me do it and swallowed. “Okay. That’s somehow worse. But okay. I’ve been standing in a stairwell for twenty minutes trying to figure out how to say this without sounding insane, and I’ve officially run out of better versions.”

“Say it.”

“There’s a man watching Amy.”

Everything in me went still.

“Yesterday,” he said, talking faster now that it was out, “she came out of her two o’clock and I was waiting for her by the columns, and there was a guy standing across the quad. Just… standing. Not walking anywhere, not on his phone, not doing anything, and he was looking right at her. So I thought, okay, creepy campus guy, congratulations, we’ve invented another one, and I kept an eye on him. Then we walked to the coffee place, I looked back and he was behind us. Half a block, maybe. We sat down, he ended up across the street. We got up, he got up.”

I didn’t say anything.