Page 22 of Rune
“I don’t ask you about your sex life, perv,” I said, tossing a cherry tomato at her.
“Fine. Leave me in the dark. I mean, a man with that much charm has to be great in bed. So congratulations on the awesome sex you refuse to tell me about.” She turned to toss the pasta in the pot, then rummaged around for a carving fork she always used to mix the spaghetti so it didn’t stick together. “He’s insanely beautiful.”
Hemight balk at being called ‘beautiful,’ but I couldn’t disagree with her on that.
“And he’s protective, which is hot.”
“What do you mean he’s protective?”
“I was telling him about the bullies at school and he said he would have beaten up anyone who did that to his little sister.”
“How long was he here before I got home?”
“I don’t know. Fifteen or twenty minutes, maybe.”
“And you managed to talk about your childhood trauma in that time?”
“Well, it started with a girlie mug and then ended up at siblings and bullies.”
Ah, yes, Sofia and her famous winding conversations.
“He has a brother too,” she added. “In case you guys didn’t discuss that yet. And they used to get roped into tea parties with their little sister into their teens.”
Okay.
That was kind of sweet.
But that didn’t mean he didn’t grow up to be a monster who did horrible things. Plenty of serial killers did community outreach. It was always the guy “nobody suspected” who liked to blindfold and cuff people and hunt them like wild animals.
Just because Rune was nice to his siblings and had the face of a god didn’t mean he also hadn’t done what I knew he did.
“I’m not sure if I’m going to be seeing him,” I told her.
“Carmie. Come on. You’ve gotta give a guy a chance,” she said as she mixed the pasta. “I say this next part with love, so youcan’t get mad at me,” she told me as she turned. “You are not the easiest person to get to know. And you tend to kind of push people away.”
I knew she didn’t mean it the way I took it, but the words landed like a metal bat to the stomach, knocking out my wind, filling me with pain.
“Oh. No. No, that’s not what I meant!” Sofia was immediately contrite, her eyes going glassy as she understood what I was inferring from her words.
I tossed the last cucumber on top of the salad. “I’m going to take a shower before dinner,” I said, turning and walking away before I cried in front of her.
“No, Carmie. Wait. I’m so sorry!” Sofia called after me.
“It’s fine,” I called down the stairs even as I reached up to swat a tear from my cheek.
I knew my sister wanted to follow. But when we’d decided to move together, we’d made an agreement that if someone was storming off, we would give them their privacy, that the only way cohabitation would work would be if we gave each other space when needed.
Sofia was not someone who needed it. She was comfortable with her feelings, and when she was in them, she wanted to be with someone, not alone.
But as the older sister, I felt the need to protect my sister from my moods, like I’d been doing our whole lives.
Healthy? Probably not. Especially since I didn’t have anyone else to talk to. But we all did the best we could. For me, that meant closing and locking my door, sinking onto the floor beside my bed, pressing my face into a pillow, and purging more of the pain. I thought the crying was done many months before, replaced with the anger that had kept me going since.
That was the funny thing about grief. The pain wasn’t linear. You could be doing well—great, even—for weeks or months or ayear. Then some random Thursday afternoon, it cuts you off at the knees.
I knew better than to try to stop it. That only led to it creeping up on you at inopportune times. Like while you were talking to a client. Or in line at the grocery store.
There was a soft knock at the door as I was blowing my nose for the fifth time, once I felt wrung dry of tears.
