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I rest my head on his arm, and he settles down next to me, setting his free hand on my hip. He rucks my shirt up and traces lines over my ribs. “I’m sorry you had to see that today.”

I frown. “See what?”

“At the apartment?” Rune squeezes his eyes shut. “I don’t…I don’t like anyone seeing that. It’s humiliating.”

“Oh, sweetheart…”

Rune bites his lip. “I don’t know why I let him get to me the way he does. I—god, I don’t know how he crawled under my skin and stayed there. He was never kind, and it makes me realize how desperate I was back then.”

“Hey, don’t be so hard on yourself.”

He shakes his head. “I was desperate though. I was scared, single, lonely. After we met, he would make comments about how most men wouldn’t want to date a single dad, let alone a dad with a disabled child. I thought he was right. Those were all the things I thought about when I made the decision to solo parent Elio.”

“Neal’s a fucking jackass,” I spit. “He only said that shit because he knew if you were left to figure out the truth on your own, you’d see what a lie that was.”

“It’s not always a lie. Trust me,” he murmurs.

I let out a small sigh and nestle against him. “Okay, I get that. People suck a lot. But not everyone does.”

He wraps a hand around the back of my neck in a gentle squeeze. I can’t help but wonder if he’s thinking about the way Neal was holding him like that. But I don’t ask.

“No,” he eventually murmurs. “Not everyone does.”

ELEVEN

RUNE

We spend a gorgeous couple of hours in Leo’s gazebo before it’s time for me to pick up Elio. I drop Easton off at the station, and thankfully, no one’s there to see me. I’m fairly sure he won’t sell me out to any of them. Not until I give him the go-ahead. But he does linger and look back, and his eyes are soft, and fuck, it’s so hard not to jump out of the car and kiss the shit out of him.

I don’t have time, of course. I’m barely going to make it to the pickup line, and while I’m usually way ahead of the crowd, today, I’ll be in the back.

It was worth it though. After we lay on the swing and made out like teenagers, Easton took me out to see the bees, where he then shoved me against a tree and gave me a mean, messy, desperate bite on my collarbone over the spot where he bit me in the bunk. It left a mark, and I can’t seem to stop touching it, remembering how it felt to have his teeth in my skin.

There’s so fucking much I want to do with him. So much I want to do to him. I want to show him just how goddamn good it can be with me—and everything he’d been missing out on while pretending his desire to climb into Idris Elba’s pants was just a normal straight guy thing to do.

The thought makes me smile. I was never really like that. I knew pretty early on what I liked. Who I liked. But I did deny myself for a very long time. I was afraid for other people to have hard evidence. I was afraid of what my life would become if I accepted that about myself.

I’m not much different now. I’m out, but sometimes I jump at my own shadow, and I don’t want to be like that. I have no reason to be. I have solid friends, a good family, and once I get Neal out of my life, that’ll be it.

I’ll have room for something else.

For someone else.

By the time I’m pulling up to the curb where Elio is waiting, I’ve managed to put all thoughts of Easton in a little box for the evening. I hit the button to deploy the ramp, and then I lean over the seat as he makes his way in and take his backpack from his para.

“There was an incident today. The report is in his folder,” she says.

I lift my brows at Elio, who’s looking anywhere but at me. “Is that so?”

“It wasn’t my fault. Mr. Post was being a fucking asshole⁠—”

“Elio!”

He looks unrepentant. “I’m not sorry. He is. He said that disabled people on disability shouldn’t have the right to make more money because it gives them an unfair advantage, and that’s one aspect of our country turning to socialism.”

My face gets hot. “Right.”

Nancy isn’t looking at me at all.