Page 15 of Rune’s Solace

I wanted. That was the trouble. I’d been holding it by myself so long, and this was the one person on earth I’d already handed it to once, and I was so tired.

“I’m not over him,” I said. To the pines. Out loud. First time in months, maybe ever, that clean. “That’s the thing I can’t tell Brenda and can’t tell Sawyer and can’t tell anybody, really. But you.”

“Sawyer.” She said it careful, testing. “That’s… your guy, right? The one everybody says you’re with.” She turned to look at me full on. “Amy, if your heart’s on one man and you’re out with another, that’s a knot, and I know from knots — ”

“Sawyer’s not real.” It came out before I could dress it up, and it felt good to say, one more true thing set down. “I mean he’s real, he’s my best friend, he’s… he’s the best person I know outside the club. But we’re not together. We just let everybody think it. It works for both of us.” I looked at her, and because it was Sable, because she’d told me the worst of hers on one of the worst nights of mine and never flinched at any of mine since, I gave her the rest of it. “He’s got his own reasons to want people thinking he’s spoken for. Reasons that are his to tell, not mine. And I’ve got mine. A girl with a fake boyfriend doesn’t get circled by the real ones. Nobody pushes. It’s the safest either of us has ever been. So no, there’s no knot. There’s just me, not over a man I haven’t spoken more than ten words to in months, playing house with a friend so the world leaves us both be.”

Sable was quiet a second, working through it, and then something in her face went soft and a little sad. “So your heart’s just… out there. Free.” She said it slow, like it mattered more than it should have. “Nobody’s got it.”

“Nobody’s got it,” I said. “That’s not the flex you’d think.”

“No.” She looked at me a beat too long. “No, I don’t imagine it is.”

Then she came back to the first thing. “So tell me what happened. With him. The real him, not the leaving part. You never did tell me all of it.”

I looked at my tea. And because I was tired, and because the porch light was burning in the daylight, and because if there was one safe place left in the world to set it down it was these back steps, I told her.

“And the stupid part, the part that makes me so mad I could spit, is he’s the one who ended it. He kissed me, in his cabin, and I thought… for about two days I thought the world had just turned over and gotten good. And then he made sure I watched him take one of those club women off to bed. In front of everybody. Didn’t even say anything, just… made me watch. Made sure I got the message.” My throat did something and I pushed through it. “So I don’t even get to be the one who’s sad about it, you know? He picked her. He looked right at me and picked somebody else, easy as that, and I’m the idiot still not-looking at a garden months later.”

And Sable made a sound.

It wasn’t much. A breath, in deep through the nose, the front end of a word that didn’t come. But I’d spent a lifetime learning to read the small sounds people make right before they say a thing that changes the mood, that skill you build young in a house where the small sounds are the only warning you get, and my head came up and I looked at her.

I stared at her.

“What?”

“You’re being weird.”

“I am not.”

“You are.”

“Amy.”

“Sable.”

She gave me a look.

I gave it right back.

“I’m fine,” she said finally. “I just hate that he hurt you like that. That’s all.”

I kept looking at her for another second, but she reached over and put her arm around me, pulling me against her side. “Come here. You’ve been sitting over there with this by yourself for way too long, and you’re not doing that anymore. You call me. I don’t care what time it is. I don’t care if all you do is cry or complain about his stupid garden for an hour. You call me.”

“Okay,” I said into her shoulder.

“I mean it, Amy.”

“I know you do.”

I drove home under the first stars feeling lighter than I had when I came. Not fixed. Not magically over Rune. Nothing that dramatic. I still loved him, which was annoying enough now that I’d finally admitted it out loud, and tomorrow I’d probably go right back to pretending his cabin didn’t exist.

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.