Page 63 of Rune’s Solace

He was gone before I finished making it.

Off me and up and back in the space of a breath, sitting back on his heels giving me air, his hands up off me and open where I could see them. “You’re alright.” Low and even, the voice he uses on spooked things, the voice that has been reaching me since the first month I got here. “You’re alright. You’re in my cabin and the lamp’s on and it’s just me. Nobody’s here but me. Take your time.”

I lay there with my heart slamming and waited for the shame to come, the way it always comes, the of course you ruined it, of course you’re broken, of course you couldn’t even have this —

And it didn’t come.

Because he wasn’t looking at me like I’d ruined anything. He wasn’t angry, wasn’t impatient, wasn’t doing the thing men do where they’re kind about it but you can feel them waiting for you to get over it. He’d just — stopped. Completely. The second I needed him to, no questions, no cost, like stopping was the easiest thing in the world and he’d do it a thousand times and never once make me pay for it.

He’d wait all night. I could see it on him. He’d wait all night and never touch me again and never hold one bit of it against me.

And that — that — was the thing that finally took the last of the fear out of me. Not being wanted. I’d been wanted before, by him, in the dark. It was being wanted by a man who would let go of all of it in an instant the moment I flinched. A man whose wanting had a brake on it, and I held the brake, me, and I always would.

I reached up and took his hand off his knee, then put it back against my bare side myself, making sure he understood that I was the one putting it there. I looked him dead in the eyes. “It’s you. I know it’s you. Come back.”

And he came back.

Slow. So slow. And this time when the trauma came digging at the corners I just held onto him and said his name, and it went, because he was louder than it now, his slow, sure heart and his careful hands and his mouth at my throat saying something I couldn’t hear, and for the first time in my life my body and I agreed completely on where I was and who I was with and that I was safe.

I’ll leave the rest of it where it belongs, which is between the two of us and nobody else, in a cabin with the lamp on, in the middle of the night, at the far edge of a compound full of guns.

I’ll only say this. It was slow, and it was mine, and I cried when it was over. He didn’t ask why because he already knew, and afterward I fell asleep wrapped all the way up in him with the lamp still on. Neither of us bothered to turn it off.

We were done hiding in the dark.

* * *

I woke once near dawn with Rune’s arm heavy around my middle and his chest warm against my back, and for a minute I lay there trying to figure out what was different.

Then I heard him breathe.

He was asleep.

Actually asleep.

Rune, who could lie beside me for six hour, rather than let himself drift off, was dead asleep with his face half buried in my hair and one big hand loose against my stomach, and something about it made my chest ache so badly I had to close my eyes.

He trusted this too.

I lay there inside the circle of him and, for once, didn’t take the feeling apart to see if I was allowed to have it. No talking myself out of a single thing.

I just had it.

Then I remembered Sawyer.

My phone was on the nightstand. I stretched carefully until I could reach it without waking Rune, opened our messages, and stared at the screen for about three seconds before sending exactly what he’d demanded.

A thumbs up.

I barely had the phone back on the nightstand before it buzzed.

I grabbed it before it could wake Rune.

OH THANK GOD.

I clapped a hand over my mouth, but the laugh got into my chest anyway, shaking me just enough that Rune made a low, sleepy sound behind me and tightened his arm around my waist without waking, hauling me backward until I was tucked against him again.

That shut me up.