Page 57 of Rune’s Solace

Hardest damn thing I’ve ever done.

I lay there on the floor aching, her hand over my heart and let her believe, all night long, that I was asleep and didn’t know.

She went out about twenty minutes later. Her fingers curled slowly into my shirt as she went under. I felt every one of them.

And God help me, I wanted to turn over.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

SHE DID IT again the next night, and the night after that, and neither of us ever said one word about it.

That was the arrangement, and it was the strangest damn arrangement I’ve ever been party to. She’d take the bed. I’d take the floor. We’d say goodnight like two reasonable people. And then somewhere in the small hours I’d hear the covers move, she’d come down, lie against my back on that hard floor with her hand over my heart, I’d hold still, breathe slow and let her go on believing I slept through it.

Every night. Like clockwork. And in the morning she’d be back up in that bed with the blanket pulled to her chin like she’d never left it. Then she’d come out of the bathroom with her hair up and ask if there was coffee, and I’d tell her where it was, and neither one of us would look too hard at the other.

I couldn’t have told you which one of us the lie was for.

It went on that way until she woke up one morning with a crick in her neck so bad she couldn’t turn her head and spent the next hour pretending otherwise. I watched her turn from the waist every time she reached for her coffee, watched her grit her teeth getting her boots on, and by the time I was in the garden that afternoon I’d had enough of both of us being stupid.

She was sleeping on a plank floor because she was too proud to ask for anything else, and I was letting her because I was too much of a coward to offer.

So that night I made the bed with two pillows, and I lay down on top of the covers on the far side of it with all my clothes on, and I didn’t say a word about why.

She came out of the bathroom and stopped dead.

I kept my eyes on the ceiling. Didn’t look at her. Didn’t explain. Just left the other half of that bed sitting there empty, and let her decide what to do with it.

It took her a long time.

Then the lamp went out, and the mattress dipped, and she lay down on her side of it, a good foot of air between us. I could hear her breathing in the dark, could feel the slight pull of the mattress under her weight, and my heart was beating hard enough I figured she could probably hear that too. But underneath all of it was something quieter, something that mattered more, I’d left the space open, and she’d chosen to fill it.

That’s how we did everything, that whole month. In the dark, sideways, and never out loud.

Ten minutes later, asleep, she rolled into me.

Her forehead found my shoulder and one hand curled into my shirt like it knew exactly where it was going, and every muscle in my body locked down at once. She was warm and loose against my side, breathing soft against my neck, while I stared at the ceiling and tried every useless trick I knew to keep my mind somewhere else. Plants from my mother’s notebooks. Parts on the bike. Long division, for Christ’s sake.

Nothing worked.

There was a woman I loved asleep against me, and if I turned my head inches my mouth would be in her hair.

I didn’t turn my head.

Near morning she made a little sound and tucked herself closer, and I shut my eyes.

I was in so much fucking trouble.

* * *

It got worse.

Second night she didn’t wait to fall asleep to come over. She lay down facing me with her eyes open, six inches away in the dark, looked at me for a long while, then reached out and put her hand flat on my chest without waiting on me to go to sleep.

“Is this alright?”

Was it alright.

“Yeah,” I said. My voice came out of a gravel pit. “It’s alright.”