Page 64 of Rune’s Solace

I looked down at the big hand spread loose over me, then back at Sawyer’s message, and something warm and ridiculous filled my chest.

I typed back with one thumb: Go to sleep.

Three dots appeared immediately. I put the phone facedown before he could answer. Whatever Sawyer had to say could wait. I turned in Rune’s arms instead, and even asleep he made room for me, his arm shifting around my back as I tucked my face against his chest. His heart was slow beneath my cheek, nothing like the fast beat I’d felt under my palm when I’d first reached for him with the lamp on.

I closed my eyes.

For once there was no hallway waiting behind them.

There was only this man, this room, morning coming through the window, and the strange new knowledge that I’d reached for something I wanted and the world hadn’t punished me for it.

So I let myself have that too.

I slept until the sun was all the way up.

I didn’t dream at all.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I SLEPT. THAT’S the thing I couldn’t get over when the sun finally dragged me up out of it. I’d slept all the way through, hard enough that for a few seconds I didn’t know what had woken me or why my body felt different, and then Amy shifted against me and the night came back at once.

I’m the one who stays awake. That’s the arrangement, been the arrangement for weeks: she sleeps and I keep watch, lie there in the dark being the thing between her and the hallway while I count ceiling boards and listen to every sound the compound makes. Only last night I went under with her wrapped all the way around me and the lamp still burning, and I didn’t surface once. Didn’t hear the compound. Didn’t check the window. Didn’t dream. Just slept, the hardest I’ve slept in longer than I could remember, and stayed down until the sun came through the window and found us tangled up exactly where we’d fallen.

That did something to me I wasn’t ready to look at too close.

She was still asleep, face slack against my chest, mouth a little open, one hand fisted loose in my shirt like even unconscious she wanted something solid under it. Her hair was everywhere, half across my arm and half across the pillow, and without all that watchfulness she carries around during the day she looked softer somehow, unguarded in a way Amy almost never lets herself be. There was no stubborn set to her mouth, no little line between her eyebrows from thinking too hard, no part of her ready for the hit that might come next.

Just Amy. In my bed. Wrapped around me. And there was a mark low on her throat where my mouth had been. I stared at that longer than a decent man probably would’ve.

Hell, maybe longer than an indecent one.

The memory of putting it there came back hot, along with enough of the rest of the night that I had to shut my eyes for a second and remind myself she was asleep, I was thirty-five years old, and there were limits to how much humiliation a grown man ought to suffer before breakfast.

Didn’t help much. When I looked again, the mark was still there.

Mine.

The word came up hard and primitive before I could do a damn thing about it, and for once I didn’t beat it back down or dress it up into something prettier. Mine. Not because she belonged to me. I’d learned that lesson about as painfully as a man could learn one, and I’d spend the rest of my life making sure I never forgot it.

But I belonged to her.

That was the piece I’d been too stupid to understand.

Mine to protect if she wanted protecting. Mine to hold when she reached. Mine to answer when she called, to sit outside a door if that was all she’d give me or wake up with her wrapped around me if she gave me this. Mine to spend whatever years I had left proving that when Amy Dawson put something fragile in my hands, I knew how to keep my fists open around it.

And hers.

That one hit harder.

I’d spent months telling myself all the reasons she couldn’t be mine and never once stopped to ask what it meant that I’d already become hers. The garden, the cabin, the bike, every hour sitting across from that campus, every night awake beside her, every goddamn thought I’d had for longer than I cared to count, they’d all bent toward this girl until there wasn’t much of me left that hadn’t.

I should’ve been scared by that. Instead I looked down at her sleeping against me and felt about as content as I’d ever felt in my life.

So I let myself have the morning.

Didn’t move. Didn’t start counting all the reasons this was complicated or all the ways I could still screw it up, didn’t reach for the age between us or the blood on my hands or any of the other weapons I’d spent months using against myself. I just lay there with one arm around her and felt her breathe, let the sun crawl farther across the bed, and when she shifted closer in her sleep and tucked her face into my chest like there wasn’t anywhere else she’d rather be, I put my mouth against the top of her head and closed my eyes.

Because I finally understood something, and it had taken me the long road of my own stupidity to get there.