Page 18 of Rune’s Solace

CHAPTER EIGHT

SATURDAYS WERE MINE and Sawyer’s, and we had our fake-couple thing when anybody was looking, but mostly we just got to be ourselves.

We had a route. We’d done the same Saturday enough times that neither of us really had to decide anything anymore, coffee at the little place off King, then down King itself with no money to actually spend, just looking in windows while Sawyer narrated the displays in the voice of a bored European fashion editor until I couldn’t breathe. Then the used bookstore, where he disappeared into film criticism while I sat on the floor in the poetry section and read the thin ones cover to cover before putting them back. If the day was nice, we took the long way to the parking garage along the water, where the late sun hit the harbor and made Charleston look like the kind of place people probably saved up all year to visit.

It was the best day of my week. Every week.

I’d never told him that. I wasn’t sure why. Sawyer knew almost everything about me, but apparently telling him he made me happy was where I got weird.

“You’re doing it again,” he said.

“Doing what?”

“The thing where you’re here but you’re not.” He steered me around a family taking up most of the sidewalk with a stroller the size of a golf cart. “You’ve been half-gone all day. Since I picked you up. “The editor bit didn’t even get a smile out of you, and you love that one.” He cut me a look, still joking but not really anymore, the way he got when he wanted to ask me something without making it feel like he was asking. “Something happen out at Fort Murderbike?”

Something had happened at the garden three nights ago. Not really happened, which was the problem. Rune’s fingers had touched mine for maybe half a second, then he’d looked at my mouth, and somehow my brain had decided this was important enough to think about approximately six hundred times since.

I couldn’t tell Sawyer any of that because he didn’t know my thing with Rune. He knew there’d been something once, and I knew there were things about Sawyer he wasn’t ready to tell me either. We didn’t push each other. That was probably half the reason we worked.

“Brenda’s still rough,” I said, which was true, just not all of it. “It takes it out of you. Sitting with somebody who’s hurting.”

“Yeah.” He didn’t believe me completely, I could tell, but he let it go because that was Sawyer. “Well, you’re allowed to be off. Just tell me you’re off, in words, out loud. Don’t make me piece it together from clues like some sad detective in a coat, standing in the rain going, she seemed sad by the muffins. I can’t do the coat. Even if I have the build for the coat.”

“You would look terrible in the coat.”

“I would look incredible in the coat, that’s the tragedy, I just can’t do the walking-slowly-and-understanding-people part underneath it.” He knocked his shoulder into mine. “Bookstore. I have a theory about the entire back half of the film section that I’ve been building for a week and no one alive will let me deliver it. You’re legally my audience now. You signed the forms.”

So we did the bookstore, and he vanished into the film aisle while I sat on the floor in poetry and read one of those tiny books that somehow managed to say things I’d been trying not to think about all week.

It was on the way back that it happened.

We’d taken the long way, along the water like always, and the sun was doing its gold thing, and Sawyer had gone mute in the good way, the comfortable way, and I’d clocked, the way I clock everything, that he’d acted a little strange around a guy coming the other direction, tall, easy-looking, who held Sawyer’s eyes a beat past accident before they both looked away. I filed it. I didn’t say anything. There’s a language between me and Sawyer made of the things we notice and don’t name for each other, and giving him privacy about the guy on the sidewalk was just another dialect of it. I bumped his arm, once. I saw. You’re okay. He bumped back. I know.

And then I felt it.

I don’t know how to explain the feeling to somebody who’s never had it, and I’ve mostly stopped trying, because the people who’ve never had it always want to make it into something reasonable: a draft, a coincidence, your imagination, sweetheart. It isn’t reasonable. It lives lower than reasonable. It’s a thing your body learned in a house where the wrong footstep in the hall meant you needed to already be small by the time the door opened, and once your body learns it, it never unlearns it, it just goes quiet for a while and then one day stands straight up in you for no reason at all.

Somebody was looking at me.

Not glancing. Not the ordinary wash of strangers’ eyes you move through all day without registering. Looking. The specific heaviness of it, aimed, landing on the back of my neck and the side of my face like a hand that hadn’t touched me yet. My stomach dropped the old way. My feet planted before I told them to, weight even, ready, while my eyes started checking everything around us, the storefronts, the people, the places I could go if I needed to. Always the exits. I turned my head slowly, making it look like I was just another person checking out the view on a pretty Saturday evening.

Across the street, back in the narrow space between a closed gallery and a boarded-up ice cream window, there was a man. He stood far enough inside that the sunlight didn’t reach him, nothing clear but the outline of his shoulders and the pale blur of a face turned my way.

He wasn’t on his phone. Wasn’t smoking. Wasn’t looking through a window or waiting on somebody. I couldn’t see him well enough to know anything about him except that he was a man, he was standing very still, and he was looking at me.

Everything in me went cold.

Then a delivery truck came rattling down the street between us, big and slow enough to block him completely, and for two seconds, maybe three, all I could see was the white side of the truck.

When it passed, the shadow between the buildings was empty. Just brick, a dead neon sign and the dark not-yet-lit stretch of sidewalk. Nobody there. Nobody anywhere that fit, up or down the block, just the ordinary evening people, a couple with a dog, a woman with shopping bags, a kid on a skateboard.

“Ames?”

I hadn’t moved. That was how he knew. Sawyer had stopped a step ahead and turned back, and he was looking at my face, and whatever was on it had wiped the easy right off of his.

“What is it?” He followed my stare across the street, scanning, and I watched him find nothing, because there was nothing to find, because whatever had been there was gone, or had never been solid enough to be a thing at all. “What are you looking at?”

“Nothing.” My voice came out almost normal. Years of practice. “Thought I saw somebody I knew.”