Page 50 of Rune’s Solace

“Loved.”

“Love.” It came out of me broken. “Love, Amy. Present tense. Every day. Every single day since before I had any right to, every day after I threw it away, every day I’ve sat forty feet behind your car pretending it was a job.” I put my hands up and dropped them, useless. “There. That’s the rest of it. That’s everything I’ve got. I love you, and I’m too old for you, and I’ve got blood under my nails, and I hurt you worse than any man ever should have, and if you walk out that door right now, I will still be sitting out there behind you tomorrow morning at seven, because there is not one thing on this earth that could make me stop.”

The cabin was so quiet I could hear the moths at the window.

She stood there in the middle of my floor with tears running down a face, six days without sleep, holding onto the back of a chair like it was the only thing keeping her upright.

And she said: “I hate you.”

“I know.”

“I hate you.” She was shaking. “You broke something in me that nobody else had gotten to yet. I let you in. You were the only one. You were the only man I ever — ” She stopped and put a hand over her mouth. “And you knew that. You knew it and you used it. You knew exactly where to hit me.”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t just agree with me!”

“What do you want me to do?” I took a step toward her and stopped myself before it was a step too far. “You’re right. Every damn word. I’m not going to stand here and defend it just because hearing it hurts.”

She stared at me.

“You can hate me as long as you need to,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

And that broke her.

I watched it happen. The fury went out of her all at once, like a rope cut, and everything holding her up went with it. Her knees gave. She went down and I got to her before the floor did, on my knees with her in my arms, and she was crying, crying so hard it didn’t make any sound at first, this awful silent heaving, months of it, months of it coming up out of her all at once, and she was hitting me. Open hand, no strength left in it, hitting my chest and my shoulder while she cried. And I let her. I held on and I let her hit me and I didn’t say one word.

Then the hitting turned into holding.

I felt it turn. Felt her hands stop striking and start gripping, felt her fist a handful of my shirt, haul herself in against me instead of away, and she pressed her face into my chest, hung on like I was the only thing between her and a long way down, I put my arms around her all the way, shut my eyes and knew I was going to hell for how good it felt.

“I can’t sleep,” she said, into my shirt, with almost nothing left to say it with. “Rune, I can’t sleep, I haven’t slept, I close my eyes and he’s there, and I can’t — I can’t do it anymore, I can’t do another night, I can’t — ”

“I know.”

“I didn’t want to come here.” She was still crying. “I didn’t want it to be you.”

“I know that too.”

“I still hate you.”

“That’s alright.” I got a hand up and put it on the back of her head, careful, the way you’d handle something that had already been broken once. “You can hate me and sleep at the same time. People do it all the time.”

And she made a sound that was almost a laugh, it about killed me, her fingers tightened in my shirt, and she didn’t let go.

I sat down on the floor of my own front room with my back against the couch, this girl in my lap, I left the lamp on, and I did the only thing I have ever been any good at where she’s concerned.

I breathed slow, and I let her follow it.

She was out within minutes.

* * *

I didn’t move for a long time.

She slept hard, heavy and boneless, all the way under, her hand still knotted in my shirt like she’d drop if she let go. Her breathing went deep. The shaking stopped. Somewhere in the first hour her face came unclenched and she looked, for the first time since I’d known her, like a girl of nineteen.

I sat on that floor and held her and did not sleep, because there was a man out there with a tattoo scratched into his throat, and because Devil had told me not two days ago that a wall doesn’t get to have hands, because he was right, because I was going to fail at that, and I knew it already, sitting there in the dark with her heart going slow and even against my ribs.