Page 53 of Rune’s Solace

“Amy.” He said it gentle. “I know exactly where I stand with you and I’m not confused about it.”

I nodded at his collarbone.

“You need to sleep,” he said. “That’s all this is. That’s the only thing on the table, and it stays that way as long as you want it to.”

“And what do you get out of it?”

It came out before I could stop it, and I regretted it instantly. It was the kind of question that sounds like an accusation and I didn’t mean it as one, I honestly didn’t, I just wanted to understand. But he took it seriously. He always takes me seriously. That’s the thing that undoes me about him, over and over.

“I get to watch you sleep,” he said. “That’s plenty for me.”

And then he started walking again, like he hadn’t just cracked my chest wide open in the middle of a pine path at eleven in the morning.

“I still hate you,” I called.

He didn’t turn around. “Yeah, darlin’. I know.”

Oh.

Oh, that was dirty.

I followed him up the path, furious all over again for an entirely different reason.

* * *

I made it to my room. I showered. I put on clean clothes and looked in the mirror and the girl in it had color again, actual color, in her face, for the first time in a week, I stood there, looked at her and I didn’t know who she was or what she was going to do.

Brenda caught me in the hall.

She looked at me. She looked at my face, at my color, at whatever else a woman like that can read on a face, and something went across her that I couldn’t name and didn’t want to. She didn’t ask where I’d been. She knew. Of course she knew, this is a compound, and Brenda has never in her life not known.

“You slept,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Good.” Her jaw worked. “That’s good, baby. You needed it.”

And that was all. She went on down the hall. And I stood there and watched her go and understood that Brenda, who had begged me not one inch, who had gone to war with Devil to keep that man away from me, was going to let it happen and hate every second of it, because she’d rather I sleep in Rune’s cabin than come apart in mine.

That woman only asked one thing of me. And now she was giving up the one thing she actually asked for.

I went into my room and shut the door and sat down and put my head in my hands.

Because I already knew.

The sun was up, my head was clear, there was color in my face and I was rested for the first time in weeks, and I already knew exactly what I was going to do when it got dark.

I’m going to go back down there tonight.

I’m not going to be able to help it. I’m going to lie in this bed, watch the window go dark, feel the thing start to come up in me, the hallway, the weight on the board, the feel of him at the end of it, I’m going to get up, put my boots on like a girl walking out of her own good sense, I’m going to go down that path in the dark to a man who hurt me, lie on his floor, listen to him breathe, and sleep like a child.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

SHE CAME BACK the next night, and the night after that, and by the fourth one I quit pretending to myself that I was surprised.

I’d leave the door unlocked around ten. Not sitting there waiting on her. I wouldn’t do that to her, she’d have felt it the second she walked in, and the thing only worked because it cost her nothing to come. So I’d go about my business. Clean the kit. Sort the drying racks. Work the mortar until my hands hurt. And around eleven, sometimes midnight, there’d be boots on my gravel. Every damn time, my heart would kick hard once before I could stop it, and every damn time I’d keep my back to the door, give her a minute to come in on her own, and say something ordinary about the kettle.

That was the deal we never made out loud. She got to come, and I got to not make it a thing.