Page 58 of Rune’s Solace

She left her hand there and closed her eyes, apparently satisfied, while my heart tried to beat its way straight through her palm. She had to feel it. There wasn’t any damn way she didn’t, but she never said a word, and after a while her breathing went deep and easy and I lay there looking at the ceiling with the strangest combination of misery and happiness I’d ever known.

Third night she took my hand.

One night she put her leg over mine, in her sleep, I lay awake until morning with her thigh across my hip and my hands fisted in the sheets on either side of me like a man holding onto a ledge.

Fifth night I got up at three, went and stood in the garden in my bare feet and put my head down and breathed like I’d run a mile.

* * *

So here’s the truth of my life.

I want her. I want her so bad I can’t see straight. I’m a grown man, I’ve had women and I have never in my life wanted anything the way I want Amy, and lying next to her every night is the closest thing to hell I’ve personally experienced, and I wouldn’t give it up for a place in Heaven.

And she’s testing it.

She doesn’t know she’s doing it, or she does and won’t say, and I couldn’t tell you which is worse.

Little things. She started wearing my shirts to bed, took one off the chair one night without asking, which about killed me, now it’s a thing, she’s a small girl in a big man’s shirt and I have to leave the room sometimes. She turns her face into my neck. She fell asleep the other night with her mouth against my throat, I lay there and prayed, actually prayed, for the first time since I was a boy.

And she’s started catching me looking.

That’s the newest thing. She’ll be talking and she’ll stop, and I’ll realize I’ve been staring at her mouth, she’ll go still and pink, neither of us will say anything, then she’ll look at my mouth, then the cabin will shrink, and one of us will find something to do with our hands.

Last night she came out of a bad one — thrashing, that awful strangled sound — and I got her back the way I always do, arms around her, breathing slow, saying her name. And when she came all the way up she didn’t pull away. She stayed right there with her hands on my chest, her face inches away, her breath going fast, and we looked at each other in the dark for what felt like a year.

And she said, “Rune.”

Just that.

I have never wanted to do anything as bad as I wanted to close that gap.

“Go back to sleep, Amy,” I said.

She looked at me a second longer. Something went across her face I couldn’t read and didn’t dare try. Then she rolled over with her back to me, and pulled my arm across her, and held onto it, and didn’t say another word.

I lay there against her back all night with my arm caught in both her hands, my heart pounding, my body demanding me to take what it needed, and I understood that I was standing on ground that was going to give.

Not tonight. Maybe not this week.

But it was going to give, and when it did, it had to be under her foot and not mine.

So I held still.

Fuck me, I held still.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

SAWYER LET ME get all the way through a large coffee and half a muffin before he set his cup down and said, “So. When were you planning to tell your fake boyfriend you’re in love with the murder monk? ”

I choked.

He handed me a napkin without any change in his expression, patient as a man who’s been waiting a long time to be right about something and is finally getting to be.

“I’m not — ” I got my airway back. “I’m not in love with anybody.”

“Okay.” He nodded. “Sure. Cool.” He took a sip of his coffee. “It’s just that you’ve had color in your face for a month, you stopped looking like a Victorian child with a wasting disease, the biker who used to sit across the street like some kind of tattooed watchtower, now looks at you when you’re not looking like somebody’s reading him his last rites.” He set the cup down. “But no. You’re right. Probably nothing.”

I stared at the table.