Page 52 of Rune’s Solace

I was still angry enough that I could feel it if I went looking, but it wasn’t clean anymore. Last night anger had been easy because I hadn’t had room for anything else. This morning, after nine hours of sleep and the truth sitting where the lie used to be, everything else had started getting back in.

And everything else was a problem.

Because I remembered kissing him.

I remembered exactly what his mouth felt like, which seemed deeply unfair after months of working very hard not to. I remembered the ride home with my arms around his waist and the hard heat of him against me. I remembered his chest under my palm in that parking garage, rising slow beneath my hand while he breathed me back into my own body, and I remembered waking up this morning with my face in his pillow and wanting, for one humiliating second, to stay there.

Worst of all, I could look out that window now and know it hadn’t only been me.

Every look I’d caught and talked myself out of. Every time he’d gone too still when Sawyer touched me. Every second in the garden when the air between us had felt like something I wasn’t supposed to name.

He’d felt it too.

The bastard.

I wanted to stay mad at him. I was mad at him. He had earned every inch of that anger and knowing he’d loved me while he broke my heart didn’t excuse what he’d done.

It just made it a hell of a lot harder to look at his forearms without thinking about what he’d said last night.

I wanted you.

I put the coffee down. Absolutely not. I had enough problems.

* * *

He walked me up the path.

I didn’t ask him to, and he didn’t ask if I wanted him to. He just fell in beside me when I came outside with my boots back on, close enough that I could feel him there and far enough that our arms never touched.

Which meant, naturally, I spent the first half of the walk thinking about our arms not touching.

Before last night I could pretend I didn’t know what we were. I could call it awkward or angry or damaged and leave it there. Now I knew there was a man walking twelve inches from me who had looked me in the face six hours ago and said he loved me, and apparently knowing that made me aware of every inch of him at once.

His boots on the dirt. His shoulder beside mine. The smell of soap, sun and whatever green thing he’d had his hands in before I came outside. Once the path narrowed and his hand came up behind my back without touching me, just there in case I slipped around a root, and my body noticed.

Traitor.

I crossed my arms tighter. He noticed that too. I knew he did. He didn’t say a word. Somehow that was worse. Near the top of the path, I stopped.

He stopped with me.

“I’m not—” My voice came out smaller than I wanted, so I started again. “Last night didn’t fix anything.”

“I know.”

“I’m still mad at you.”

“Know that too.”

I finally made myself look up at him, and that was a mistake.

He looked tired. More tired than I’d noticed last night, maybe because I’d been busy yelling at him, but there were lines around his eyes I didn’t remember being there before and dark stubble along his jaw, and I had the sudden, ridiculous urge to put my hand against it.

So naturally I got madder. “You don’t get to do that.”

His brow pulled in. “Do what?”

“Stand there being all calm while I’m trying to be furious with you.”