Page 11 of Keep Me

The silence stretched over the video call, heavy and thick, filling the corners of my bedroom until the hum of my laptop fan felt deafening. I kept my eyes closed, letting the dark behind my eyelids shield me from the green light of the webcam. I did not want to look at Lucy, and I definitely didn’t want to look at the small square showing my own face.

“When you say it’s all you know now, Seren,” Lucy’s voice came through the speakers, “it sounds like you’ve let that night become the foundation for everything else you build.”

“It is the foundation,” I said, opening my eyes to stare at a loose thread on my quilt. “How could it not be? Every choice I make now, every time I look at a sidewalk, or a guy in the quad, or even the way I let Zane touch me, it all passes through that filter first. It is the starting line for the rest of my life. I can’t just pretend the track starts somewhere else.”

Lucy didn’t argue. She did not offer a gentle metaphor to soften the edge of what I had just admitted. “But you aren’t standing at that starting line anymore. You have made it the last three years. You are in college. You’re sitting in your room with a man down the hall who loves you. The rape happened, yes. But it is not the only thing that has happened since.”

“It feels like the only one that’s permanent,” I mumbled, my thumb catching on the rough edge of the duvet seam. “The other stuff… the good stuff… it feels fragile. Like it’s just a layer of paint over something rotten. One bad day and the paint chips right off.”

“Is that how it feels with Tom, too?” Lucy asked, shifting the mirror just a fraction, bringing my dad into the frame before I could brace for it. “Like it’s temporary?”

I swallowed, the sudden pivot making my chest feel tight. “No. It’s different with him. It’s not paint. It’s more like… I’m just waiting for one of us to slip and ruin the whole thing.”

“Because you’re still waiting for him to walk away,” Lucy stated.

“Yes,” I said, glad to be back on territory I could at least name. “We had our monthly dinner last week. It was fine. Better than fine. He hugged me before I left. And the entire drive home, all I could think was okay, that was the peak. It’s only downhill from here. I am keeping him at arm’s reach because if I start counting on him to be my dad, I’m giving him the power to break me all over again.”

Lucy bobbed her head slowly, her reading glasses sliding a fraction of an inch down her nose. “You’re trying to protect yourself from a future loss by denying yourself the connection right now. That is a very lonely way to stay safe, Seren. He is trying to reach you. What happens if you just let him?”

Before the words could fully settle into the space between us, a sharp, sudden buzz cut through the quiet of my bedroom. My phone, lying flat on the mattress right beside my thigh, lit up. Instinctively, my eyes darted down to the screen. It was a text from my dad. There were no words. No Thought of you. No How is school? It was just an image, slightly grainy and overly bright with afternoon sunlight. A single hummingbird, its wings a blurred halo of green and silver, suspended mid-air right at the edge of the feeder on his back porch.

I stared at the glowing rectangle. It was so entirely out of character for him, a man who usually communicated in brief, functional logistics about oil changes or grocery lists, that it sat completely wrong in my chest. Coming right on the heels of what I had just confessed about the permanency of things, the silent image felt like a strange, clumsy echo. Like a hand reaching out in the dark, poking me.

“Seren?” Lucy’s voice pulled me back to the monitor. “What is it?”

Slowly, I picked up the phone, turning the screen toward the laptop camera so she could see the glowing rectangle. “My dad just sent me this,” I said, my voice sounding smaller than it had a minute ago. “Just the picture. No caption. Just… a hummingbird.”

Lucy peered through her glasses at the screen, her expression turning thoughtful as she took in the image. “A hummingbird,” she repeated.

“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean,” I finally said, my eyes dropping back to the tiny, blurred bird on my screen. I didn’t have the context.

“Maybe it doesn’t have to mean anything right now,” Lucy told me. “Sometimes things are just what they present as, and there doesn’t have to be something behind it.”

I nodded, and silence filled my room again as Lucy wrote in her notebook. She took longer than she usually did, this time, so my mind had time to spot a small hole in the blanket in front of me. I picked at it, each time my finger moved, the hole became a little bigger.

“Seren,” Lucy said, and my head snapped back up to the laptop. My finger kept moving, though, kept making the hole grow. “I have a question for you.”

“Sure,” I said, though it sounded more hesitant than sure. Lucy did not usually soften her blows.

“Do you have anyone in your life that is not connected to the rape? Any interpersonal relationships that formed outside of what Jax did to you?” she asked, her head was turned down, and she was peering at me.

“Um…” I barely had to think. I knew the answer. “No.” Zane, Austin, Cassidy, Gavin, O… Hell, even my friendship with Blair was formed as a result.

“No,” Lucy repeated, writing something down again. Then she looked back up, and this time, she looked hesitant. “Have you ever? Had any kind of relationship that did not connect to the rape?”

I blinked. I heard the question, but I was reluctant to grant it access to my brain. I did, after a few more blinks. Olivia, Trinity… all the people who I thought were my friends, even the boys I used to kiss when I was drunk. They all co-existed with Jax.

“My mom,” I said dryly, after the look into my memory was bleak. “If she counts.”

Lucy didn’t say no, but her head shook back and forth slightly. “No one else?”

“Nope,” I said louder than before. But then—well, maybe. “Wait,” I said, stopping my own finality. “Alex.”

Lucy’s pen paused. “Alex?” she repeated, her voice neutral, careful not to scare the name back into whatever corner of my brain it had been hiding in. Like I said, Lucy knew me. She knew the people in my life, past and present. She knew I had never mentioned this name. “Who is Alex?”

“Just a boy,” I said, already regretting the way my mouth had run ahead of my filter. I shifted my weight, trying to find a comfortable position on the mattress that didn’t feel so exposed. “It wasn’t a relationship. We weren’t even friends. Not really. I haven’t thought about him in years.”

“That’s okay,” Lucy said. “Tell me anyway.”