Page 27 of Rune’s Solace

The bike had pulled onto the shoulder behind me before I even got my door open. He’d been forty feet back all day, same as every day, and now he was off it and walking up the shoulder toward me with that unhurried way he had, big and easy, reading the situation before he got to it the way he read everything. I got out and put the hood up mostly so I’d have something to do with my hands and something to hide my face behind, and I stared into the guts of my dead car like I had the first idea what I was looking at.

“Radiator,” he said, from a respectful distance. Not close. He never got close. “Or the head gasket, if you’ve been running it hot. You have?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” I didn’t turn around. “Can you fix it?”

“Not here. Not tonight.” A pause. “It needs a shop.”

“Okay.” I straightened up and made my voice businesslike, the voice I use when I’m about to lose control of a situation and I’m trying to grab it back. “Then I’ll call a tow. You can go on. I’ll wait.”

“You’re not waiting out here.”

“I’ve waited plenty of places, I’m fine — ”

“Amy.”

He said my name and it stopped me, because he almost never said it, he’d spent months finding ways not to say it, and hearing it in his mouth after all that time did something low and stupid in my stomach that I absolutely did not have time for.

“It’s not about fine. You know it’s not. Nobody under this lockdown waits alone on a dark road right now. Not you, not anybody. That’s the reason I’m out here.”

And there it was. The lockdown. The thing I couldn’t argue with because it was true and because arguing with it meant admitting I knew why it was true, and I didn’t have the details but I had enough, I always had enough.

“Then I’ll call somebody to come get me.” I already had my phone out. “Brenda, or — ”

“Brenda’s not cleared to leave the compound alone and there’s nobody free to bring her. Everybody’s on the wall.” He said, no satisfaction in it, just the facts closing around me one by one like a hand. “There’s no car coming, Amy. Not tonight. Devil’s got every wheel on the property spoken for.”

I stood there on the shoulder with my dead car and my useless phone and the sun going down, and I felt the last door swing shut, and I knew, and he knew I knew, and to his credit he didn’t say it. He just waited. He let me get there myself, which was somehow worse than if he’d said it, because it meant I had to be the one to turn around and look at the motorcycle.

“No,” I said.

“It’s twenty minutes to the gate.”

“I said no.”

“I know.” He didn’t move. Didn’t push. Just stood there being immovable in that quiet way, a man who’d clearly decided the outcome and was willing to wait as long as it took me to catch up to it. “You don’t have to like it. You’ve got to do it anyway. I’m not leaving you on this road and there’s one way off it.”

I’d been trapped before. I knew what having my choices taken away was supposed to feel like, knew the cold that came with it and the awful feeling of everything closing in, and I waited for it standing there with Rune between me and the only way home.

It didn’t come.

That was almost worse.

I was furious and cornered and wanted to kick my own tire just to have something to kick, but underneath all of it I was still okay. My body wasn’t screaming. Nothing in me was telling me to get away from him. Apparently every alarm I owned had looked at the giant outlaw biker telling me I had no choice but to climb on the back of his motorcycle and decided this was fine.

Traitors. All of them.

“Fine,” I said, and it came out mean. “Fine.”

He went back to the bike and I followed, arms crossed so tight I could feel my own pulse, and he swung a leg over and got it upright off the kickstand, and then he did the thing that undid me before we’d even moved.

He took off his helmet and held it out to me.

“I don’t — ” I started.

“Put it on.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll be alright.” Like it was nothing. Like a man handing a girl the only helmet and planning to ride bare-headed himself twenty minutes up a county road. He didn’t make a moment of it. That was the worst part, he didn’t make it mean anything, he just held it out because I was the one who needed it more and that was the end of the discussion in his head. And I took it, my hands shook a little buckling it, it smelled like him, woodsmoke, green things, something warm underneath that I remembered from being way too close to him in his cabin, and apparently smells could remember things your brain had spent months trying very hard to forget, because suddenly I remembered his mouth too. His hand in my hair. The feel of his face against mine, the way that one kiss had started careful and stopped being careful at all.