Page 54 of Rune’s Solace

The first few nights she slept on the floor. I’d get the blanket down and she’d curl up on it like a stray that wanted the fire but not the hand, and I’d sit against the couch a few feet off and breathe slow, and she’d match it without knowing she was doing it, and she’d be gone inside of ten minutes. Never longer than ten. Nine days without sleep does that to a body. It stops negotiating. It just falls.

That night I said, “Take the bed.”

“No.”

“Amy. Your back’s going to seize up on that floor.”

“I’m not taking your bed.”

“You are, or I’m going to spend the night listening to you not-sleep because your hip hurts, and then neither one of us gets anything.” I dropped the pillow on the mattress and went and sat on the floor with my back against the bedframe, in reach and out of reach, the same distance I’d sat outside her door for months a lifetime ago. “There. Same as always. You’re up there, I’m down here, and nothing on this earth is getting past me.”

She stood in the middle of the cabin working that over, and I could damn near see the argument happening behind her eyes, pride on one side and exhaustion on the other. Exhaustion won. She climbed onto the bed in her clothes, turned her back to me, and pulled the blanket up.

“This doesn’t mean anything.”

“Alright.”

“I mean it.”

“I heard you.”

“Rune.”

“Go to sleep, Amy.”

She was asleep in six minutes. I sat on the floor by that bed and listened to her breathe until the sun came up.

* * *

By the second week she’d stopped coming down dressed to sleep. She’d bring a T-shirt with her, disappear into the bathroom, and come back barefoot with her hair piled up and her face scrubbed clean, toothbrush in one hand like there was nothing strange about any of it.

That damn toothbrush nearly finished me.

It’s not the big things that get a man. You think it will be. You think it’ll be a woman asleep in your bed, or the first time she comes through your door after midnight, or knowing there’s a shirt of yours against skin you’ve spent months trying not to think about.

It’s not.

It’s her toothbrush beside yours in the morning.

It’s a hair tie she forgot by the sink and a cup she used still sitting beside the kettle. It’s opening your bathroom door and seeing little pieces of her lying around your house like they belong there, then realizing somewhere along the way you quit thinking of them as things you’re supposed to give back.

I liked having her there.

That was the truth of it, and there wasn’t much use lying to myself anymore. I liked hearing her feet on my floor. Liked knowing which tea she’d reach for without asking. Liked the way she’d steal the good pillow and deny she’d done it, liked finding one purple hair stuck to the towel and knowing exactly whose it was.

She started talking.

Never about the big thing. Never about where she’d come from or what she’d seen in that parking garage, and I didn’t ask. But the little things started coming when we lay in the dark, when she could talk without anybody looking at her face. She’d be lying in my bed, I’d be down on the floor and she’d tell me about a professor she couldn’t stand, or something stupid Sawyer had done, or a woman in one of her classes who ate tuna out of a bag and ought to be arrested for it. Sometimes she’d start telling me a memory, cut it off halfway through, and I’d let it die where she left it.

Entire conversations happened that way, scattered across a dark room with ten minutes of nothing between pieces.

I’d never talked to anybody like that in my life.

One night, somewhere past one, she said, “Tell me about your mother.”

I didn’t answer right away.

“You don’t have to,” she said.