Page 119 of Rune
“Wait, so they’re just… on the run now?” Sofia asked after what felt like a whole minute of being frozen in place, mouth agape, eyes wide.
“We have no idea where they are,” I confirmed. It wasn’t a lie. The club had handled the bodies. We were in the dark about where, geographically, their cousins were.
“But you guys are, you know, safe?”
“Yeah. We’re good. And you’re safe too,” I assured her.
Sofia exhaled hard and nodded. “Okay then. Well, thanks for stopping lying to me. I know you guys could have just kept it going. I appreciate you not doing that.”
“I’m sorry I kept it from you for so long,” Carmen said.
Sofia reached out to grab her sister’s hand. “I know you are always trying to protect me from everything. But I’m grown now. You don’t need to do that anymore. I’d really like it if you could see me more as a peer than a little sister.”
Carmen winced. “I have been doing that, haven’t I?”
“You have. But it was from a place of love, so I didn’t mind. But now that we’re so far away, I want radical honesty from you. And you,” she said, looking at me.
“You got it,” I agreed. “Now, give me my present.”
Carmen - 6 months
I had buttery yellow paint soaked into my jeans, my shoes, my shirt, and splattered down my arms and in the tips of my hair.
How did I manage to drop an entire gallon of paint in the parking lot of the home improvement store, you might be wondering? Yeah, well, so was I. One moment, it was there in my hand. The next it was at my feet, all over me, all over my car, and covering the cement.
Thankfully, the employees jumped into action, showing up with these magic paint wipes that got everything off my car before I had to live with a permanently stained vehicle. I also managed to get some of it off my clothes and body, but it was all too much for a puny bag of wipes to handle. So I had garbage bags covering my seat as I drove home.
Home home.
Not the clubhouse.
Rune had bought a sweet little two-story house just on the outskirts of Navesink Bank a few weeks ago. We didn’t have much to move in with, so we’d slept those first few nights on an air mattress on the primary bedroom floor while we waitedfor furniture to be delivered. In our free time, we worked on the house. Which was where Rune was—putting down new tile in the primary bathroom with his father as Cain sanded and refinished the floors in the living room.
Rune got the place for a song exactly because it needed a lot of sprucing up. But Cain and our inspector assured us that the bones were good; it was just the aesthetics that needed some work. Which we were intrigued by anyway. As a neat freak and a professional cleaner, we had very strong ideas on what types of materials should—and shouldn’t—be used in builds or renovations. So we were fixing those types of things as we went. As well as painting and decorating.
Except, now, I was the one painted.
I was halfway up the driveway when Cain and Rune came walking out of the open door.
Cain spotted me first, shooting me a sympathetic smile. “Well, at least it’s a nice color.”
Rune glanced over, paused, then threw his head back laughing. A small one escaped me as well as he came over toward me, reaching for my hips. “No, it’s still all wet.”
“Luckily, I’m filthy too,” he said, pulling me flush against him and pressing his lips to mine.
“Alright. I’m heading out.”
“We’re in the middle of a project,” Rune objected.
“I have a feeling this little interaction is going to end up with you insisting you help Carmen clean all the paint off. And I don’t need to be here for that. It really is a nice color,” he said to me before making his way to his bike.
“You know, it would be hard for you to see all the spots…”
“The bathroom is under construction.”
“The guest one, in all its pink tile, isn’t.”
I slipped my hand into his, and we walked into our new home together. Where we got cleaned up together. Then we spent the night eating Chinese and painting our kitchen.
