15. Duncan
Chapter Fifteen
Duncan
I was nowhere near as calm or confident as I hoped I seemed. My heart thrummed in my chest, pulse pounding loudly.
Rune's fingertips slid along the line of my jaw, came to rest on the pulse point at my throat. "Dunc, your heartbeat."
"You're not the only one who’s afraid," I said. "I want you to want me. I want to do this with you. I've been fucking miserable since you left."
Rune sighed. Brought her silken, warm cheek against mine, lips ghosting near the shell of my ear, her words barely a whisper. "Wanting you isn't the problem, Dunc."
"What is?"
"Everything else." She exhaled slowly, shakily. "C'mon, we need to talk somewhere more private." She pulled away, her sapphire eyes flicking up to mine. “ Talk , Duncan. Just talk."
"I'll try not to rip your clothes off," I deadpanned.
“You joke," Rune said, "But with us…"
I chuckled. “Yeah, you're not wrong. We don't have a great track record when it comes to restraint."
She took my hand and led me toward the sliding glass door, glancing back at her parents, who were sitting on their butts in the grass, watching us with open curiosity. "We're going up to my room to talk."
"Should we run an errand or something?" her dad asked, eyebrow arched.
Her mom whacked him on the arm with the back of her hand. "Tom! Inappropriate!"
He frowned at his wife. "Quit hitting me, woman. It's a perfectly appropriate question. She's a grown adult woman, not a fifteen-year-old girl."
Rune rolled her eyes, huffing. "No, Dad, you don't need to leave. We're talking—just talking. It's the not talking that got us into this in the first place."
Her mother bit her lip, stifling a laugh. "It’s always the not-talking that gets us into trouble, isn't it?"
Rune shook her head. "Like you would know. You and Dad were married when you had me."
Something made her stop, and we both glanced at her parents, who were trading glances.
"Wait," Rune said, turning to face them. "Weren't you?"
Thomas Rigby was smirking. "Not great at math, are you, Sweet-Pea?"
“What are you talking about?"
Her mother, Kelly, was grinning also. “You weren't exactly planned, Rune."
She pulled me back toward her parents. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"I was almost six months pregnant with you when we got married," Kelly said. "I had my dress custom-made to hide my bump."
Rune stared at them, one parent and then the other.
"Not even my parents knew," Kelly added.
Tom chuckled. "They were pretty confused when you gave birth three months after the wedding."
Kelly took to her feet—generously and helpfully assisted by her husband's hands on her butt. She batted at his hands with a comically cat-like hiss. "Hands to yourself, you dirty old man."
Tom just lounged back on one elbow, idly plucking at blades of grass. "Nope."
Kelly crossed to Rune, looking from her to me. "It's not something we felt was important, Rune. You may not have been planned, but you were welcomed with joy."
“I was scared shitless," Tom offered. "Definitely didn't feel ready to be a parent."
Kelly rolled her eyes. "You were barely taking care of yourself at that point, Tommy."
He nodded. "You ain't lyin', baby girl. I was a fucking disaster."
Rune shook her head. "I feel like you're shaking my worldview right now. What are you even talking about?"
Kelly took her daughter's hands. "I'm saying, this situation you're in is sort of like history repeating itself, honey.
Your father and I had only been together for six months when I came up pregnant.
Your father was living in a frat house with like ten other guys, and each of them was more of an animalistic, irresponsible man-child than the last, regardless of which order you put them in. "
Rune looked to her dad for confirmation, and he nodded. "Don't look at me—she ain’t wrong. I owned, like, three outfits, no underwear, worked part time, was failing all my classes, and spent pretty much every spare moment I had in the gym."
Rune frowned at her mother. "Then…what did you see in him?"
Kelly cackled at this. " Who he was, sweetheart, that's what.
I saw his kind heart. I saw how he treated the people in his life.
" She glanced at him over her shoulder, a tender smile on her lips.
"One of their roommates had Downs. His parents lived close and checked on him every day, but Tommy was his best friend.
He took such amazing care of him, Rune. It was so sweet to watch.
That, as much as anything, was what convinced me that there was a lot more to him than met the eye. "
"And you liked what met the eye, eyyy, baby?" Tom quipped.
She rolled her eyes again. "Yes, I did. But if I hadn't been willing to look past you dressing like a hobo, being broke, and prioritizing lifting over your education, it wouldn't have mattered."
"I prefer the term vagabond to hobo,” Tom muttered. "And the lifting ended up paying the bills, if you care to recall."
“ The point is ,” Kelly said, loudly, "I wasn't even sure I was in love with him when I found out I was pregnant with his child. And like you, honey, my first instinct was to run. You get that from me, I’m afraid."
"Had to chase her fine ass from California to Rhode Island," Tom added. "She didn't make it easy. Still doesn’t, come to think of it."
"Hush, you grumpy old bear." Kelly framed her daughter's face in her hands. "I wasn't ready. I was scared. I thought everything I'd worked for my entire life—getting my degree, my research, my career—was over. I didn't want to be a mother. Not yet, at least.”
"Sounds familiar," Rune muttered.
"Right? That's my point." Kelly smiled, kissing each of Rune's eyes tenderly.
"I'm not going to lie and say it was easy.
It wasn't. I told you already, your father and I almost didn't make it, those first few years.
Having a kid while being barely more than kids ourselves, your father trying to make a go of it on the strongman competition circuit while I studied?
It was really, really hard, and we wouldn't have made it without your father's parents taking care of you while I was in class.
" She paused, sighing. "But we did make it.
We committed to each other and to you. We worked at it. We forgave each other constantly."
" You forgave me constantly, you mean," Tom said. "Your mother was a saint, those early years. I never cheated, but anything else I could've done to lose her, I did."
Kelly smiled at him. "You were trying, honey.
And I saw it. You worked yourself to the bone taking care of us.
" She turned back to Rune. "We made it, baby.
And I've had a pretty decent career, I think.
I know you're facing a scary prospect. I get it—that's why I'm telling you this.
I know exactly how you're feeling. And what I’m telling you is that you can do this.
You just have to decide what you want and what's important to you. "
"Guess that's what I need to figure out," Rune said.
She patted Rune's cheek. "Go talk. But Rune?" She held her eyes. "You have to be honest with yourself, okay? You're a lot like me, and I have a tendency to twist myself in circles trying to avoid the truth when I don't want to admit it."
Rune sighed. "Yeah, I do that a lot.” She looked from one parent to the other. "Any other secrets I should know about?"
Tom shrugged. "Nothing comes to mind."
Kelly glanced at him, then at Rune, her face clouding. "I had a late-term miscarriage when you were two. The doctors told me it was too risky for me to get pregnant again, so I got my tubes tied and your father got a vasectomy. That's why we never had any more kids."
Tom's face shuttered. "That's not a secret, just hard to talk about. And you being conceived out of wedlock wasn’t a secret either, just not relevant until now."
"Wedlock, Thomas?" Kelly asked. "Really? It's not the Middle Ages."
Rune kissed her mom's cheek. "Thanks for sharing that with me, Mom. It…it does help to know. If you can do it, maybe I can, too."
"There's no doubt in my mind, honey," Kelly said.
Rune drew me away, then, inside and upstairs to her room, which was an eclectic reflection of the various periods and phases of her life—treasured stuffed animals from her girlhood decorated her bed, band and movie posters plastered the walls, bookshelves featured dogeared romance paperbacks, high school textbooks, dictionaries, a thesaurus, and nearly two dozen black and white comp notebooks.
A delicate, antique white desk under a window held a framed photograph of Rune with her parents at what I assumed was her first day of college, another of her as a preteen in front of the Grand Canyon in a Vanna White ta-da!
pose, and a third showed Rune and Lindsey in matching sorority T-shirts, faces painted in USC colors, grinning like fools in the SoCal sun.
Rune perched on the edge of her bed and slid back to put her back to the wall, grabbing a floppy-eared, well-loved stuffed rabbit. "I feel like I need to hold Babbitt for moral support," she said. "No jokes from the peanut gallery."
"Y'know," I said, lounging on the bed beside her, our feet hanging over the side, "I was talking to a customer a couple weeks ago about that phrase, and she told me it actually has racist connotations."
Rune looked at me in surprise. “Really? How? I thought it just meant unsolicited opinions or something like that.”
“That's what I thought too," I said, "but apparently the peanut gallery meant the cheapest seats, which were pretty much always reserved for Black people, back during segregation."
Rune blinked at this information. "Huh. Guess I won't be saying that anymore. I had no idea."
"Me either, until she told me." I took her hand. "So."
She slapped her other hand on top of mine. "So."
"You're pregnant."
She nodded. "Yup."
“You said you're planning on keeping the pregnancy?"