Page 49 of Rune’s Solace

So I told her.

No fixing it. No making it sound better than it was.

“Because I’m thirty-five and you were eighteen when you got here. Because I’ve put men in the ground, Amy. Because these hands you trusted to make tea and pull splinters and show you what grows where have done things I don’t ever want touching your life.” I looked down at them because I couldn’t look at her for that part. “You came to us broken and marked up, and the first man reaching for you after that should’ve been somebody better than me.”

“You don’t get to decide that.”

“I know.”

She went still.

“Know it now,” I said. “Didn’t then.”

I dragged a hand over my face. “I’d sat outside your door for months. Watched you jump every time some man got too close. Watched you learn how to breathe in this place one inch at a time. Then one night you looked at me and I wanted you.”

“You what?”

“Wanted you.” No sense softening it. “Bad. Worse than I had any business wanting anybody. Then I kissed you and every damn excuse I’d been holding onto disappeared.”

Her eyes didn’t leave mine.

“I thought if I kept going, I’d turn into one more man taking something from you because I wanted it.”

“You humiliated me.”

“Yeah.”

“You made me watch.”

“Yeah.” And I made myself say the ugly rest of it, because she’d walked down that path in the dark and she was owed every word. “Because a kind lie you’d have argued with. You’d have come back at me, and you’d have said the right things, you always say the right things, and I would have caved, Amy, I’d have caved inside of a week, because of how much I wanted you. So I didn’t give you anything to argue with. I gave you something you’d never forgive.” My throat closed up. “I needed you to hate me. It was the only thing strong enough to hold.”

She stared at me.

And then, almost a whisper, she said the thing that took the ground out from under me.

“You decided what I could survive.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You looked at me — ” and she was crying now, and furious about it, swiping at her face like the tears were something crawling on her — “you looked at me and you decided I couldn’t be told the truth. That I was too fragile for one hard sentence. So you managed me. You made a decision about my life without me in the room, because you figured you knew better than I did what I could carry.” She was shaking so hard she had to grab the back of a chair. “Do you know what this does to me?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

And that stopped her cold, because she hadn’t expected it.

“I’ve known it since the night in Brenda’s room,” I said. “I stood over that woman and I watched what fifteen years of a man deciding what’s best for her did to her, and I finally saw myself plain. I was doing the same thing to the girl I loved. And I haven’t slept worth a damn one night since.” I made myself hold her eyes. “My old man spent his life deciding what everybody else could take. Left my mother alone and called her tough enough to handle it. Walked away and told himself that made it alright.” I shook my head. “I built my life around not being him, but here we are.”

She was very still.

“Say it again,” she said.

“Say what?”

“The middle part.”

And I looked at her, at this girl, shaking, hollow-eyed, half-dead on her feet and still refusing to go down, and I understood exactly which part she meant and exactly what it was going to cost me to say it, and I said it anyway. I was done. There was nothing left in me to hold the line with.

“A girl I loved,” I said.