Chapter Twenty-One
I WOKE UP on a man’s floor at ten in the morning having slept nine hours straight, and for about five seconds it was the best I have ever felt in my life.
The first second, my body straight-up lied to me.
Before the memory comes back, there’s this little window where you’re just a body that finally got what it needed.
Warm, heavy, loose, still mostly under. My head didn’t hurt.
The buzzing behind my eyes was gone. I could feel my own hands again.
Nine hours. I hadn’t strung nine hours together in weeks, and my body was drunk on it, stupid with relief.
Then I opened my eyes and saw the ceiling of Rune’s cabin.
I came up off that floor like it was on fire.
There was a blanket on me that hadn’t been there when I went down.
There was a pillow under my head, a real one, off his bed, I could tell because it smelled like him and it made me want to put my face in it, which made me want to throw it across the room.
My boots were off. Rune had unlaced my boots and set them by the door, side by side, neat as anything, and something about that, the care of it, the small stupid domestic care of it, hit me harder than any of the rest.
And he wasn’t there.
That was the first thing I understood, standing barefoot in the middle of his front room with my heart going, he’d gotten up and gone out and left me alone in his house.
No hovering. No sitting there watching me sleep waiting for me to wake up so we could Have A Conversation.
He’d just — gone, left the door unlocked, and left me a way out that didn’t cost me anything.
I hated how well he knew me.
* * *
I found him in the garden because that’s where he always is at this hour.
I stood in the doorway in my sock feet and watched him for a minute before he knew I was there, which is a thing almost nobody gets to do to Rune.
He was down the far end of a row with his back to me, working, hands in it, sleeves shoved up, the sun already hard on him.
Not looking at the cabin. Not waiting on me. Just doing the thing he does.
Just Rune, doing the thing Rune does.
And I felt it. Standing in that doorway with my hair a disaster, last night’s clothes on and nine hours of sleep in my body for the first time in a week, I felt my chest do something complicated and warm and I hated it, I hated it so much, and there was not one thing I could do about it.
He straightened up and turned around like he’d known I was there.
“There’s coffee,” he said. “On the stove. It’s been sitting, so it’s bad, but it’s hot.”
That’s it. That’s all. No how’d you sleep. No we should talk. No look on his face that asked me for anything at all.
“Rune.”
“Yeah.”
I stood there and I couldn’t get a single one of the nine hundred things in my chest up my throat, and finally what came out was: “You took my boots off.”
Something moved across his face and got shut down.
“You were asleep in them,” he said. “They were laced too tight. Your feet had swelled.” He looked back down at the row. “It’s not a thing, Amy.”
But it was. That’s the trouble. It was a thing, it was such an enormous thing that I had to turn around, go back inside and stand in his kitchen with both hands flat on the counter until I could breathe right.
* * *
I took a drink of coffee and immediately regretted it.
He loved me.
I was still angry enough that I could feel it if I went looking, but it wasn’t clean anymore.
Last night anger had been easy because I hadn’t had room for anything else.
This morning, after nine hours of sleep and the truth sitting where the lie used to be, everything else had started getting back in.
And everything else was a problem.
Because I remembered kissing him.
I remembered exactly what his mouth felt like, which seemed deeply unfair after months of working very hard not to.
I remembered the ride home with my arms around his waist and the hard heat of him against me.
I remembered his chest under my palm in that parking garage, rising slow beneath my hand while he breathed me back into my own body, and I remembered waking up this morning with my face in his pillow and wanting, for one humiliating second, to stay there.
Worst of all, I could look out that window now and know it hadn’t only been me.
Every look I’d caught and talked myself out of. Every time he’d gone too still when Sawyer touched me. Every second in the garden when the air between us had felt like something I wasn’t supposed to name.
He’d felt it too.
The bastard.
I wanted to stay mad at him. I was mad at him. He had earned every inch of that anger and knowing he’d loved me while he broke my heart didn’t excuse what he’d done.
It just made it a hell of a lot harder to look at his forearms without thinking about what he’d said last night.
I wanted you.
I put the coffee down. Absolutely not. I had enough problems.
* * *
He walked me up the path.
I didn’t ask him to, and he didn’t ask if I wanted him to. He just fell in beside me when I came outside with my boots back on, close enough that I could feel him there and far enough that our arms never touched.
Which meant, naturally, I spent the first half of the walk thinking about our arms not touching.
Before last night I could pretend I didn’t know what we were.
I could call it awkward or angry or damaged and leave it there.
Now I knew there was a man walking twelve inches from me who had looked me in the face six hours ago and said he loved me, and apparently knowing that made me aware of every inch of him at once.
His boots on the dirt. His shoulder beside mine. The smell of soap, sun and whatever green thing he’d had his hands in before I came outside. Once the path narrowed and his hand came up behind my back without touching me, just there in case I slipped around a root, and my body noticed.
Traitor.
I crossed my arms tighter. He noticed that too. I knew he did. He didn’t say a word. Somehow that was worse. Near the top of the path, I stopped.
He stopped with me.
“I’m not—” My voice came out smaller than I wanted, so I started again. “Last night didn’t fix anything.”
“I know.”
“I’m still mad at you.”
“Know that too.”
I finally made myself look up at him, and that was a mistake.
He looked tired. More tired than I’d noticed last night, maybe because I’d been busy yelling at him, but there were lines around his eyes I didn’t remember being there before and dark stubble along his jaw, and I had the sudden, ridiculous urge to put my hand against it.
So naturally I got madder. “You don’t get to do that.”
His brow pulled in. “Do what?”
“Stand there being all calm while I’m trying to be furious with you.”
“Amy.” He said it gentle. “I know exactly where I stand with you and I’m not confused about it.”
I nodded at his collarbone.
“You need to sleep,” he said. “That’s all this is. That’s the only thing on the table, and it stays that way as long as you want it to.”
“And what do you get out of it?”
It came out before I could stop it, and I regretted it instantly.
It was the kind of question that sounds like an accusation and I didn’t mean it as one, I honestly didn’t, I just wanted to understand.
But he took it seriously. He always takes me seriously.
That’s the thing that undoes me about him, over and over.
“I get to watch you sleep,” he said. “That’s plenty for me.”
And then he started walking again, like he hadn’t just cracked my chest wide open in the middle of a pine path at eleven in the morning.
“I still hate you,” I called.
He didn’t turn around. “Yeah, darlin’. I know.”
Oh.
Oh, that was dirty.
I followed him up the path, furious all over again for an entirely different reason.
* * *
I made it to my room. I showered. I put on clean clothes and looked in the mirror and the girl in it had color again, actual color, in her face, for the first time in a week, I stood there, looked at her and I didn’t know who she was or what she was going to do.
Brenda caught me in the hall.
She looked at me. She looked at my face, at my color, at whatever else a woman like that can read on a face, and something went across her that I couldn’t name and didn’t want to.
She didn’t ask where I’d been. She knew.
Of course she knew, this is a compound, and Brenda has never in her life not known.
“You slept,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Good.” Her jaw worked. “That’s good, baby. You needed it.”
And that was all. She went on down the hall.
And I stood there and watched her go and understood that Brenda, who had begged me not one inch, who had gone to war with Devil to keep that man away from me, was going to let it happen and hate every second of it, because she’d rather I sleep in Rune’s cabin than come apart in mine.
That woman only asked one thing of me. And now she was giving up the one thing she actually asked for.
I went into my room and shut the door and sat down and put my head in my hands.
Because I already knew.
The sun was up, my head was clear, there was color in my face and I was rested for the first time in weeks, and I already knew exactly what I was going to do when it got dark.
I’m going to go back down there tonight.
I’m not going to be able to help it. I’m going to lie in this bed, watch the window go dark, feel the thing start to come up in me, the hallway, the weight on the board, the feel of him at the end of it, I’m going to get up, put my boots on like a girl walking out of her own good sense, I’m going to go down that path in the dark to a man who hurt me, lie on his floor, listen to him breathe, and sleep like a child.