Page 43 of Rune
It was getting late.
There was a good chance Rune would be asleep.
But I barely finished knocking when the door slid open.
And there he was.
In nothing but a pair of black basketball shorts.
Desire sliced through me, stealing my breath, making my belly twist as my gaze drifted across his wide chest, down the indents of his abdominal muscles, then traced the deep V that disappeared into the waistband of his pants.
“Carmen?”
I swallowed hard and pretended that there wasn’t an ache between my thighs. “Can we talk?”
Hopefully if he heard the breathlessness in my voice, he attributed it to wanting to be quiet so the other guests didn’t get annoyed.
“Yeah,” he said, pulling the door fully open, but barely moving out of the way. When I stepped through, my body brushed his. I swear each inch that touched warmed, sparked.
Rune’s room was smaller than ours, without a kitchenette, but dominated by a king-sized bed.
“You okay?” Rune asked, closing the door.
Aside from the throbbing need that was making it hard to think clearly? “Yeah.”
“Sof?”
I liked how he always thought to ask about her, to think about her.
“Sleeping. This was a lot. She hasn’t been plotting her own criminal lifestyle for the past year.”
“Yeah, about that,” Rune said, leaning against the wall, crossing his arms. “Why a year?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’ve been back in Jersey for longer than a year. And… and Victoria was—” he paused, softening his voice, “killed just before then.”
“I didn’t know at first,” I admitted. “We, uh, we were kind of… on the outs when she went to Puerto Rico for the summer.”
I wouldn’t claim it was the first time. Grief made me want to soften the sharp edges of our friendship. But the truth was that Vicky and I had a lot of ups and downs over the years.
We’d met in kindergarten when I’d been cleaning up the toy area, and she came through like a tornado, undoing everything I’d done.
We’d argued.
Yet somehow became immediate friends.
Fate was on our side through four out of the five years of elementary school, sticking us in the same classes until we were as close as sisters.
Middle school had deepened that bond from the superficiality of young friendships to the more emotional intensity of the tweens and young teens.
It was high school when our unshakable bond got, well, shakier. Part of it was because of boys and the way all young girls make the mistake of choosing them over their friends at times. Then there came the jealousy when, during one of our off periods when she was dating some college kid who didn’t want her hanging out with me, I started to get close to my little sister instead of her.
And so it went for the next several years. Periods where we were damn near inseparable followed by months where we barely spoke—mostly because Vicky started dating someone new, and that became her main focus.
There’d been a bad falling out when I’d chosen to move with my sister when she’d gotten into college in the city.
But we seemed to move like tides, retreating but always returning.
