Page 6 of Rune’s Solace

“So tell her. It’s a good color.” He tilted his head at me, studying it the way people did, like the answer might be written in there somewhere. “How’d you land on it, anyway? You never said.”

“Just liked it, is all.” I gave him the same thing I gave everybody, a quick little shrug that made it seem like there wasn't anything more to tell. “Wanted something that was mine.”

That part was even true. It just wasn’t everything, and this particular thing wasn’t for a lecture hall on a college campus, wasn’t for anybody, really. I’d chosen the color a long time ago, for a reason I kept folded up small and carried where nobody could get at it. People saw it every day, the world got to look right at it, and not one of them knew the first thing about what they were looking at. I liked it that way. Everybody saw it. They saw it every single day and probably thought I just really liked purple. Nobody knew why it mattered to me.

I liked that.

***

After classes we went to the coffee place a couple blocks off campus, the one we’d started going to sometime last fall and then kept going to until apparently that was how a place became yours.

Sawyer spent five solid minutes doing an impression of our chemistry professor that sounded nothing like him and somehow captured him perfectly, and I laughed loud enough that a woman at the next table looked over. That only encouraged Sawyer, obviously.

A guy at the counter clocked Sawyer for a second too long, and I watched my friend go careful and bright the way he did, the shutters coming down behind the smile, and I bumped his knee with mine under the table. Just so he’d know I saw. Just so he’d know he wasn’t doing it alone.

“You’re a good fake girlfriend,” he said.

“Best you’ll ever have.”

“Low bar. You’re the only one I’ve had.” He stole my coffee, drank from it, made a face, gave it back. “Can you hang out tonight? Or are you going back to the — ” he did the little wave he did instead of saying compound, because he’d been out there exactly once, just long enough to drop me at the gate and get a good hard look from everybody with a patch, and he wouldn’t go back if he had any say, and he didn’t. “Fort Murderbike.”

“It’s not — ” I started, and didn’t finish, because it kind of was, from the outside, and he wasn’t wrong to worry, and I loved him for worrying even though he had it upside down. He thought the danger was the place. He didn’t know the place was the safest I’d ever been. He didn’t know why I needed it to be.

I rolled my eyes, but he wasn’t completely wrong about how the place looked from outside. Razor wire, bikes, armed men, locked gate. Sawyer saw danger.

I saw Brenda yelling at Josie because he didn’t put enough salt in something.

Different perspective.

“I’m going back,” I said. “Brenda needs my help tonight. She talked Josie into a lowcountry boil.”

“Brenda.” He said her name like she was already one of his favorite people. He’d only met her once, when the three of us went to dinner a couple weeks ago. Brenda had taken one look at him and decided he needed feeding. She spent the whole meal pushing the bread basket at him, ordering things she thought he’d like, and asking him about a hundred questions.

Sawyer loved her by dessert.

Most people did.

“Tell her I said hey. And tell her the boil sounds disgusting, but I support it.” He pointed the last bite of muffin at me. “And text me when you’re across the bridge so I know Murderbike didn’t get you!”

“You know that’s not what it’s called.”

“You still haven’t told me what it is called.”

“Yes, I have.”

“A clubhouse is not a name, Amy. It’s a description.”

“I always text you.”

“You do.” He looked at me a second, and the goofy went out of it, and it was just the two of us and the truth for a beat, the way it got sometimes. “You seem good lately, Ames. Like, actually. You seem like you.”

I didn’t know what to do with that.

Compliments were easy when they were about a test score or my hair. Things like you seem like you got inside somewhere and stayed.

So I did what I always did.

Put it away to think about later.