Page 30 of Rune’s Solace

That’s all I meant to take. Then my thumb moved across her knuckles. Stupid. Selfish. I did it anyway, and she could’ve pulled her hands out from under mine, but she didn’t.

Rode the next five miles wanting another stop sign like a goddamn teenager.

By the time we hit the compound she was all the way against me, forehead back on my shoulder, arms easy around my waist, and I didn’t want to see that gate. First time in my life I’d wanted a road to grow another hundred miles while I was riding it. Could’ve kept going till the tank ran dry with her wrapped around me like that.

Then I stopped the bike, and she didn’t let go.

One second.

Maybe two.

Didn’t know for sure, but I didn’t breathe through either. I could still feel that part hours later, sitting outside my cabin like an idiot with melted ice in my whiskey.

Wasn’t the wanting that kept me awake. I’d wanted Amy so long I’d gotten used to carrying it. Knew how to live around that particular ache.

It was the trust.

She’d put her body against mine and gone silent.

I’d spent months telling myself I’d done the right thing by her, then months learning what bullshit that was, and now she’d handed me the one thing I had no right asking her for. Didn’t matter that it only lasted twenty minutes. Didn’t matter that come morning she’d probably be back to looking at me like she’d rather cross the street than stand beside me.

I had it tonight.

So I sat there and let myself keep it.

Around one I finally went inside and lay down, stared at the ceiling, and told myself what I always told myself, this was the right kind of hurt. The kind a man earns when he’s the one who did the damage.

Half believed it.

Same as always.

Then the sun came up and I went to see about her car, and the night stopped mattering.

* * *

Gearhead had it up on the lift by the time I got to the shop, hood open, the guts of it spread out on a rolling cart, that little Honda looking sad and violated the way a car does when it’s been opened up. He had a rag in his hands and grease to the elbows and a look on his face I didn’t like, the look of a man turning something over that won’t sit right for him.

“Radiator,” he said, before I asked. “Like you figured. She’s been runnin’ it hot a while, that part tracks, but the hot’s not what killed it.” He set the rag down. “Come look at this and tell me I’m seein’ things. ’Cause I might be.”

I came and looked.

He had the radiator off, sitting on the bench, and he put a finger near a spot low on the core, not touching it, the way you point at something you’re not sure of. There was a hole in it. Small. Low and to the side, down where you wouldn’t see it without pulling the thing.

“Now that,” Gearhead said slow, “could be nothin’. I want to say that first. Could be she picked up a rock off the interstate, road junk, some piece of metal kicked up under there at speed, punched it and dropped back off, happens, I’ve seen it. Radiator sits right up front, it eats whatever the road throws.” He scratched his jaw with the back of his wrist. “That’s the reasonable answer and I’d put money on the reasonable answer nine times in ten.”

“But.”

“But.” He blew out a breath. “The shape of it’s a little too… I don’t know. Road debris tears. Punches ugly, leaves a burr, tweaks the fins around it. This is cleaner than I’d want it to be. Almost like something narrow went in on purpose, once, and came back out.” He shook his head. “And there’s no strike anywhere else on the front end. Nothing on the condenser, nothing on the skid, no paint off the bumper. Whatever got the radiator didn’t touch one other thing on its way in, which is a neat trick for a rock doing seventy.” He picked the rag back up, wiped his hands like he wanted the feel of it off him. “I ain’t sayin’ it’s anything, Rune. I want to be real clear. I’ve been wrong about weirder. I’m sayin’ it’s the kind of thing where if you asked me to swear to it either way, I couldn’t. That’s all. It just sat funny with me and I figured you’d want to know, since you’re the one out there with her.”

I looked at that little clean hole in the metal, and everything the night had left soft in me went cold and dropped away.

Because here’s the thing I did in my head, standing there, the timeline I couldn’t not lay out. That car ran fine that morning. I know it did, I watched her drive it out the gate at seven-oh-two, smooth, no trouble. It ran fine all the way to the city. And it died a mile past the bridge coming home. A slow leak out a hole like that, you’d drive on it for hours before it starved, cooked and quit. Which means whatever happened to it happened somewhere in the middle. Happened while it sat still.

Happened while it sat all day in a campus lot, in the city, where I was.

While I was sitting forty feet away watching Sawyer put his goddamn hands on her.

Fuck.