Page 10 of Keep Me

“Yeah,” I said. “Obviously.”

“Where did this thought come from?” Lucy asked me, her voice not shifting from its calm cadence.

“I don’t know,” I said. Lucy looked at me. She knew I was lying. I sighed. “Just something I mentioned to Zane today.”

“Okay,” Lucy replied. She was always playing poker with me. “Do you think you are close to being over it, as you put it? Or is that just something you are considering?”

I nodded, my teeth finding the dry skin of my lower lip, biting down hard enough to hurt. “Sometimes I wish we could just… move on. I look at people on campus, and they’re just walking. They’re going to class, they’re complaining about the cafeteria food, they’re existing in the present tense. I’m always checking the weather. I’m always looking at the sky, waiting for the first drop of rain, wondering if the person standing next to me has a knife behind their back. I’m tired of it.”

“You’re tired of hypervigilance,” Lucy clarified gently.

“I don’t know,” I muttered. “I guess so. I just… it’s in the past. I want to leave it there.”

“The past doesn’t work like that,” Lucy said, her pen bouncing between her fingers, hovering just over the pad in her lap. “You can’t just leave it there. Not when it still affects the way your brain behaves, your daily decisions and the way you react.”

I leaned my chin on my knees, watching her through the screen. She was wearing a deep teal poncho today, her gray hair pulled back, completely unfazed by my frustration. “I don’t want to be the girl with a tragic story forever. It’s exhausting to still be talking about the wreckage when everyone else is just living their lives.”

“Who is everyone else?” Lucy asked, her tone soft and steady.

“Austin. Cassidy. My dad,” I said, letting out a deep breath. “Zane. Mostly Zane.”

“Is Zane telling you that you need to move on?”

“No,” I admitted, looking down at the quilt. “He told me today that I’m the easiest part of his day. He said loving me has never been hard.”

Lucy jotted something down on her pad, then looked back up at me over the edges of her reading glasses. “And how did that make you feel, Seren?”

“Like he’s wrong,” I said. I pulled my legs tighter against my chest, my fingers drumming against my shins. “Because if he thinks I’m easy now, what happens when I’m not easy, again? What happens on the days when the anxiety comes back, and I can’t even sit at a campus table without looking for an exit? He is default-set to protect me, but everyone has a limit. Eventually, people get tired.”

“We have talked about this, Seren. You need to stop forecasting people’s actions from the fear-based part of you. It is not fair to you, and it is not fair to Zane,” Lucy said, her voice dropping into that familiar, patient tone. “But when you ask if we’re going to run out of things to talk about once you are over it, it sounds to me like you are questioning your own worth. Do you think that the only reason people stay close to you is to help you manage your pain?”

I did not answer her. I just stared back at the screen, my bottom lip pushing out slightly as her words settled into me. She was doing it again. She was pulling the truth out of my chaos before I even fully understood what I was feeling.

“No, that doesn’t even make sense,” I said, trying to hide the way she hit my exposed nerve. “I want to be done with my pain so Zane can finally stop taking care of me. And we can move on.”

But even as I said the words, I kept flinching back to her question. I couldn’t argue the fact that my pain is the reason people stay. Zane, Cassidy, Austin, even my dad. Without the pain, would they have still seen me? Or would I have been something easier to look away from?

I let out a slow breath, leaning my forehead against my knees. I hated when she was right, mostly because it meant I couldn’t use my anxiety as an excuse to pull away from the people who were actually trying to hold onto me.

Lucy watched me, her pen hovering back over her paper. “But you are still trying to control how everyone feels about you, so you don’t get hurt. You can’t do that, Seren. You must let them be here in the way that they choose to be. In the way that it is.”

“I don’t like the way that it is,” I told her. “I mean,” I shook my head. “I like the way things are right now. I just wish… I wish things could be like this, but what happened… didn’t need to happen to end up here.”

“By what happened, you mean Jax and the rape,” Lucy told me, and the way she let the words land felt like the way my dad spoke about my mom. Unexpected thunder when you are looking at the sun.

Lucy must have watched the way my face changed. “You’ve gone back to that place,” she said. “Where you don’t want to name what happened. You were out of it, now you’re back.”

“Because Jax is dead and he should stay dead.”

What is it with all the dead people in my life? They keep coming back to throw my stuff around while I am trying to sleep. Lucy didn’t answer immediately. She shifted between writing things down in her notebook and looking at me.

“Have you ever noticed,” I started speaking without my own permission, the thoughts becoming words that took a path without my filter. “That once you’re raped… you can never be un-raped?”

I resented that. It had crossed my mind too many times to count. It was not like cancer. You get diagnosed, you do the chemotherapy, you go into remission, and you don’t have cancer anymore. It did not work like that when you get raped. It is permanent. A change of state. A change of being completely. You can’t go back. Can’t get clean.

“I think it’s more important to talk about how you’ve been thinking about that.” Lucy held the mirror directly to my eyes. “What would un-raped look like to you?”

I closed them instead of looking. “I don’t know. That’s all I know now. Even when it doesn’t hurt so much, even when I almost forget.”