Chapter Seven
I MADE IT a few months without setting foot near Rune’s cabin, and Brenda’s back ended the streak in a few sentences.
Not that she asked me to go. She’d never have asked me to go.
Brenda would sooner crawl out there on her hands and knees than send me back to that man’s door, and we both knew why, even if we’d never once said it out loud.
That was the big problem with the tin being empty.
It sat there on her nightstand, no sound when I shook it, and Brenda lay there curled up around the bad place in her spine trying to pretend the heating pad was doing something it wasn’t, and she didn’t ask me for a thing.
Which is exactly how I ended up walking out the back of the clubhouse at dusk with the empty tin in my jacket pocket, telling nobody where I was going, because if I told somebody they’d have talked me out of it or worse, offered to come, and I didn’t want a witness for this.
I just wanted to get the tea and get back, have Brenda sleep through the night, and if the price of that was walking back into the one place I’d worked hardest to stay out of, then fine.
It was just a garden. It was just tea. I said that to myself about four times on the way out and didn’t believe it any of the four.
Here was the part nobody else knew. It wasn’t just Rune’s cabin I was avoiding.
For most of the year I’d been here, before everything got messed up, that garden had been mine too.
I’d spent entire mornings out there on my knees in the dirt beside him, learning which leaves did what, why you cut some things at dawn but waited until dark for others.
I’d followed him into the woods with a basket more times than I could count, learning where to find the things he couldn’t grow, ginseng under the hardwoods, the good mushrooms, which bark he wanted, which trees you left alone.
He taught me all of it, never got annoyed when I forgot something or asked the same question twice, never treated me like some kid he had to keep entertained.
Out there, with dirt under my nails, my basket getting heavier, Rune talking to me in that soothing voice of his, I got to be somebody he wanted around.
That was when I started falling in love with Rune.
And safe. I’d felt safe. First place in my life I ever did.
The path out to his place ran along the back fence and then broke off through a little stand of pines, and I knew every root and dip in it in the dark, because I’d walked it in every season there was.
My feet remembered the entire way even after I’d spent months trying to make my head forget it.
And then the trees opened up and there it was, and I had to stop for a second, because the missing it came up on me all at once, worse than I’d prepared for.
I hadn’t let myself come back here since the night it all went wrong. Not once. And standing at the edge of the pines looking at it, I understood exactly how much that had cost me, and how good I’d gotten at pretending it hadn’t.
The garden.
It ran along the south side of his cabin and out past it, bigger than I remembered, the rows going soft at the end of the day.
The smell hit me before I reached it, mint and rosemary, warm dirt and crushed leaves, all of it so familiar my chest tightened.
Bees still worked the flowers, moving through orange calendula, white chamomile, purple echinacea.
I knew every bit of this garden. I’d planted some of it, cut some of it, dried and steeped things beside Rune more times than I could count.
I’d missed it.
That hurt almost as much as missing him.
“Brenda’s back.”
I hadn’t heard him. That was Rune. A man that big had no business being that quiet, but somehow he always was.
I turned and there he stood maybe ten feet away at the end of a row, little shovel in one hand, dirt all the way up his wrist, staring at me with those green eyes I could never figure out.
He’d gone completely still when he saw me.
Even from where I stood, I could tell he was being careful, like one wrong move and I might take off.
He wasn’t wrong.
“It’s out,” I said, and pulled the tin from my pocket and held it up like evidence. “The tea. She won’t ask you for more. So.”
“So you came.” Something moved through his voice and got shut down before it finished. He set the shovel down on the edge of a bed, careful, everything careful. “Yeah. Course. Give me — ” He looked at his hands, the dirt on them. “Give me a minute to wash up. I’ll make it fresh, it’s better fresh.”
“I don’t need to watch you make it. Just — if you’ve got some already done.”
“I don’t keep it made. It doesn’t keep.” He said it plain, not a dig, just true, and started toward the rain barrel at the corner of the cabin to rinse his hands, then stopped, and half-turned back like he wasn’t sure what to do with me. “You can wait out here. If you’d rather. Than come in.”
Than come in. Because we both knew what was in there.
I’d been inside that cabin plenty, back before, sat at that little table by the window grinding things down with his mortar, waited out summer rain with a cup of something warm he’d pressed into my hands.
But it was also the room where he’d kissed me the one time, the thing that ended all of it, and he knew I couldn’t walk back in there like it was nothing.
He was handing me the out before I had to ask for it, and I wanted it so bad it made me mad, and it made me madder that he’d known I’d want it.
“Out here’s fine,” I said.
He nodded and went inside, and I stood there a second with no idea what to do with my own hands, which had never once happened to me out here in a year of mornings out here.
I should have just stood there and looked at the fence.
Instead I wandered into the garden while he was gone, my hand finding the lemon balm before I even thought about it.
I brushed my fingers over the soft leaves and breathed in that familiar lemony smell.
My hands remembered this place. Rune had taught me every row, morning after morning, back when I got to follow him out here and he wanted me here.
The thought hit before I could stop it.
He’d let me into this part of his life. Made me feel like some of it was mine too. Then one night he decided he didn’t want me in it anymore.
Whatever. I pulled my hand back like the leaves had gone hot.
“You still go straight for the lemon balm.” He came back wiping his hands on a rag and stopped a few feet away, giving me room. “First thing, every time,” he said. His voice was calm, but his grip on the rag wasn't. “You always did.”
“Muscle memory.” It came out harder than the moment called for.
“Doesn’t mean anything.” He took it without a flinch, the way he’d taken the one in Brenda’s room, the way I was starting to understand he’d take anything I threw, and that was its own kind of maddening.
You can’t have a fight with a man who just stands there and lets you hit him.
He crouched beside one of the beds and started cutting what he needed, quick and sure, and I made the mistake of watching.
His sleeves were pushed up, forearms tanned and rough, dirt streaked over one of them, those big hands moving carefully through the little leaves like they always did.
I remembered those hands in my hair. Apparently my body remembered too, because something warm pulled low in my stomach before I could stop it.
Great.
I crossed my arms tighter and tried looking somewhere else.
It lasted maybe five seconds.
He was still Rune. Too big, too old for me, too dangerous, with hands that could coax something delicate out of the dirt or put a man on the ground. I knew both sides of him.
Stupidly, I wanted both.
“How is she,” he said, not looking up. “Brenda. Really.”
“Getting up. Eating.” I watched him. “You’d know that. You’re the one dosing her sleep.”
“Josie tells me she’s up. I like to hear it from somebody who sits with her.
” He clipped another sprig, laid it careful in the little pile on his knee.
“It’s a hard thing, what happened to her.
Loving somebody who turned out to be — ” He stopped.
His hands stopped. And I saw him hear it, hear where the sentence was walking, a half-second too late to turn it around.
“Turned out to be lying to her the whole time?” I finished it for him, and I don’t know where it came from, it just came, all of it, months of it, up and out before I decided to let it.
“Yeah. That is a hard thing. Loving somebody who looks you dead in the eye and makes you believe something that isn’t true, and then just…
walks off with somebody else to make good and sure it lands.
That’s a real hard thing, Rune. I’ll bet you can’t hardly imagine it. ”
The garden stopped making any sounds. Even the bees, it felt like.
He looked up at me from the low bed, and finally I got something from him.
I almost wished I hadn’t. Whatever he’d been keeping behind that blank face was right there now, hurt and angry and about ten other things I couldn’t sort out fast enough.
He opened his mouth like he was finally going to give me some of it.
Here it comes, I thought. Some version of sorry.
Some man’s half-apology, it wasn’t like that, or worse, you were too young, the thing everybody always circled, the thing I could feel him think every time he looked at me even now, the years between us sitting there like a fence I’d never be tall enough to see over.
And then I watched him swallow it. Whatever it was. I watched him take his speech, push it back down, close his mouth over it, and his eyes went flat and careful again, the shutters coming down, and he looked back at the leaves in his hand.
“No,” he said, low. “I don’t imagine I can.”
That was it. That was all he had. A man who could’ve said one true thing to me standing in his own garden with nobody around to hear it, and he picked the leaves instead.
I don’t know what I’d wanted. I’d have thrown whatever he said right back in his face, I’m sure of it, I had months of armor on and I wasn’t about to take it off for a man crouched in the dirt.
But he didn’t even try. And something about how easy he made it look, just letting me hurt, cracked something in my chest I’d have paid money to keep shut.
He stood up and came toward me slow, telegraphing every step like he was making sure I had plenty of time to move if I wanted to, and I hated how aware I was of him doing it, how much bigger he seemed the closer he got, until I could smell the dirt on him and that clean, woodsy something that was just Rune, familiar enough that my body remembered it before the rest of me could tell it not to.
He held out the little cloth pouch he’d tied off, and I reached for it, and his hand and my hand and the pouch all met in the space between us, and this time—I don’t know why, I’ve asked myself a hundred times—this time I wasn’t fast enough.
His fingers brushed the side of mine, warm and rough from the dirt, there and gone.
Neither of us moved.
It was half a second, probably less, but my body noticed.
Heat chased the touch up my arm and went somewhere much lower, and suddenly I was standing way too close to a man I’d spent months trying not to remember kissing me.
I remembered now. His hand in my hair, his mouth on mine, how easy it had been to lean into him like I’d been waiting forever to do exactly that, and apparently my body hadn’t forgotten any of it just because I’d told it we were done.
Rune was looking at me, but not the careful way he’d been looking at me since I walked into the garden, like I might bolt if he breathed wrong.
This was different. Something had slipped.
His eyes dropped to my mouth for one tiny second before coming back up, and the look in them made something inside me pull tight.
Oh.
Hungry was the word that came to mind, which made absolutely no sense.
Rune didn’t want me. He’d made that perfectly clear months ago, in front of a room full of people, and I’d spent enough nights reminding myself of it that I shouldn’t have been able to forget.
Except right then, standing close enough that I could still feel the heat coming off him, he looked like he did. Like maybe wanting me was the problem.
I should’ve stepped back.
I didn’t.
“Eight minutes,” he said, and his voice had gone rough enough that I noticed that too. “Steep it eight. Not less.”
“I know how.” I made myself look right at him. “You taught me.”
Something moved in his face, small but there, and I knew I’d gotten him with that one.
I hadn’t meant to. Or maybe some small, hurt part of me had, because he’d taught me all of this, given me mornings in this garden and baskets in the woods and a place beside him, then turned around and acted like none of it had meant what I’d thought it meant.
“Yeah,” he murmured. “I did.”
I turned and walked back toward the pines, and I didn’t run even though every confused part of me wanted to.
Behind me, the garden stayed green and full, Rune somewhere in the middle of it, while I carried Brenda’s tea back toward the clubhouse with my hand still tingling where he’d touched it and told myself all the way that nothing had happened.
Nothing had happened.
Rune had picked somebody else months ago. I’d watched him do it. I knew what that meant, knew it better than I wanted to, and one accidental touch in a garden didn’t change any of it.
So why had he looked at my mouth?
Why had he looked at me like that?
Like wanting me was the one thing he was trying hardest not to do.