Page 74 of Rune’s Solace

“I’m not being held here.”

“Blink twice anyway, for fun.”

“Sawyer.”

“I brought your Faulkner and the study guide and also these — ” he pulled a crushed bag of the specific gas station cinnamon things I like out of his back pocket, warm from being sat on — “because I refuse to let your GPA die just because your life became a country song. Who do I talk to about getting your assignments? Is there a — is there like a front desk? A biker concierge?”

And I was so busy laughing, so busy being happy, that I didn’t clock the yard going quiet until it already had.

* * *

Rune had come out onto the porch.

I don’t know how long he’d been there, but I turned with Sawyer’s hands still on my shoulders and found him standing at the top of the clubhouse steps with a stillness coming off him that I felt before I understood.

I know that stillness now. I’ve learned it. It’s the one that means the low flame just went out and something colder lit under it.

He was looking at Sawyer’s hands on me.

And it hit me all at once, the thing I’d never once stopped to think about in all these weeks, because who thinks about it, Rune knew exactly who Sawyer was. Of course he did. He’d known for as long as I’d been on this compound. The boyfriend. The boy from the coffee shop he’d sat across the street and watched, the one he told me himself he’d learned “a new way to hate.” Rune wasn’t confused about a single thing standing in that yard. He knew precisely who had his hands on my face.

That was the problem.

Because neither of them had the piece I had. Rune didn’t know the boyfriend was a lie Sawyer and I had built together, that Sawyer had never once wanted me and never would, that the world’s idea of the two of us was a decoy and always had been.

Rune had spent all this time aching over that boyfriend from a distance. And now the boyfriend was standing in his yard with his hands on me. I watched all of that go through him at once behind those green eyes and turn to something cold and awful.

“Sawyer,” I said carefully. “I need you to take a step back from me. Not because I want you to. Just — do it. Trust me.”

Sawyer, God love him, didn’t do it. Sawyer turned to see what I was looking at, kept one arm slung around my shoulders, spotted Rune, and smiled.

“Oh — hey! It’s you!” He actually waved. At Rune. “The biker, from the parking lot, Amy, it’s your murder monk!” He beamed up the steps at a man I have personally watched make grown bikers find somewhere else to be. “I never got to thank you properly for the whole… you know, the looking-out-for-her thing. Seriously. It means the world. Being her boyfriend isn’t always easy— ”

“The boyfriend,” Rune repeated, interrupting him.

He said it very softly. That’s the thing about Rune, the softer he goes, the worse it is, he had gone about as soft as I’ve ever heard him, and I watched Sawyer, who cannot read a room to save his life, keep smiling, every other man in that yard go very still and very interested, and I understood I had about ten seconds to keep the sweetest person I know from a misunderstanding that had been sitting loaded all this time and had just found a match.

“He’s not,” I said, loud, fast, stepping out from under Sawyer’s arm and putting myself between them, one hand up toward Rune. “He’s not my boyfriend, Rune. He never was. Look at me. It’s not real. It was never real.”

Rune’s eyes came off Sawyer and onto me. Still cold. Still working it out.

“He just said — ”

“I know what he said.” I could feel my face burning, feel the yard watching, feel Sawyer behind me going “wait, what’s happening” in a small confused voice. “It’s a cover. It’s been a cover since we met. It was never real, not for one single day, there has never been anything between me and Sawyer romantically. Not ever. Not once. He is my best friend and he is not — ” my voice cracked, stupidly — “he was never competition. There was never anybody for you to lose me to. There was never anybody at all.”

And I watched it land on Rune.

Not the way I expected. Not relief, not first. Something else went across his face first, something that looked almost like grief, and it took me a second to understand it, and when I did it about broke my heart right there.

Because he’d believed it. That was the part that knocked the wind out of me. This entire time he’d thought I had somebody. A boy my own age, clean and normal, the kind a girl like me was supposed to want. And I could see now that he’d used it. Every time he made himself let go of me, that boy was the reason he gave himself for it. And there’d never been a boy at all. He’d given me up, over and over, for somebody who never existed.

After a minute he seemed to let it go and looked at Sawyer. “I guess you can live,” Rune joked.

“Oh, thank God,” Sawyer said behind me. “I was worried this was going to get weird.”

Rune stared at him.

And from somewhere near the garage, somebody laughed.