Page 16 of Keep Me

Austin grumbled something low and unintelligible under his breath, his forehead dropping against the crown of Blair’s blonde head for a split second. He straightened up, his eyes moving across the small space to lock onto me. He reached out, his hand landed on the back of my neck, and he pulled me forward just enough to press a rough, affectionate kiss to the top of my head.

“Call me on Monday, Seren,” he said softly, his fingers giving my hair one last, protective tug. “And don’t let Briggs skip out on checking that alternator. I don’t want you stranded on the shoulder.”

“You realize I drive a Mercedes, right? Why are you acting like I make her ride in a Civic older than me?” Zane seemed perplexed.

“I won’t,” I murmured anyway, my heart swelling with that warmth that only Austin could bring into a room. “Safe flight, Austin.”

He nodded once, a sharp, decisive movement, before his eyes shifted to Zane. The two of them didn’t say anything. They just traded a short, heavy look that carried the weight of unsaid promises. I’ve got her. I know.

“Night, guys,” Blair said, giving us a small wave as Austin finally let her pull him out into the hallway.

The elevator doors slid shut with a low, hydraulic sigh, leaving just me and Zane in the small, mirrored square. The silence that followed was not stale; it felt like the air clearing after a thunderstorm. When we reached our floor, Zane unlocked the door, his frame shielding me from the drafty hallway until we were safely inside. The apartment was cool, the quiet kitchen smelling faintly of the vanilla candle I had burned that morning.

I didn’t bother turning on the overhead lights. I just kicked off my shoes by the door, my bare feet sinking into the soft texture of the living room rug. I felt small in the dark, but it was the kind of small that felt protected, not exposed. Zane walked up behind me, his feet making no sound on the carpet. His large hands came down to rest flat on my shoulders, his thumbs tracing slow, heavy circles against my collarbones.

“You’ll never understand how much I love you,” he murmured, his chest pressed flush against my back, his breath warm against the nape of my neck. “You did good tonight.”

“I missed them,” I admitted, leaning my head back against his shoulder, looking out the window at the city lights below. They looked like fallen stars scattered across the dark grid of the streets. “It felt… normal.”

“It is normal,” Zane said, his grip tightening just enough to secure me to the floor, to the room, to him. “This is the part where we just live, Seren.”

I closed my eyes, letting the rhythmic thud of his heart beneath my cheek become the only sound in the world. Here in North Haven, the city was vast and indifferent. Back in West Bridge, the ghosts were still throwing things around in the dark. My dad was sitting on his porch, watching a feeder in the quiet hours of the night, and Austin was packing a bag for a state I had never seen.

But here, inside our blue apartment, the air was warm and everything was okay.

Staircase

People talk about the dead in a different voice.

I’ve noticed that. Even the brave ones. Even the people who could narrate a car crash without blinking. When a dead name leaves their mouth, they drop somewhere lower, somewhere slower, like the volume of the living does not fit it anymore. Like the name is something they are carrying down a staircase in the dark, and they are terrified of dropping it.

I know my own ghosts by name. My mom, who lives in the silence of my dad’s house, in boxes and unsaid sentences. Jax, who I refuse to let live anywhere, and who lives everywhere anyway. They are my ghosts. I know their weight. I know their schedules. I know which doors they like to slam at three in the morning.

But there’s another kind of ghost. The borrowed kind. The ones that come attached to the people you love. The dead you never met but live with anyway. You learn them slowly, in pieces. A name inside a story. A pause shaped like a person. You can’t grieve them. You are not invited to that. All you can do is watch someone you love to carry something you can’t carry for them and pretend you don’t see the weight.

Zane has one of those. It has been a part of our story for years, but in the form of chapters I could not go back and read, the way you know there’s a room in a house you’ve never been let into. He kept the door closed, and I never knocked. I thought that was kindness. His ghosts. His staircase. His dark. His things being thrown around at three in the morning. His, not mine.

It was Thursday, eight days before Zane’s first final, and the apartment smelled like Cassidy’s pad thai and highlighter fumes. The radiator was doing its train impression. Nobody was studying.

“Two weeks,” Cassidy said from the floor. She was cross-legged on our rug, her textbook open to the same page it had been open to for forty minutes. “Two weeks and O is done, and then he’s mine for the entire summer. I might cry.”

“You’re already crying,” Zane said from the table, without looking up from his notes.

“This is allergies,” Cassidy quickly rebuffed him, though we all knew she was lying.

“It’s May.”

“Allergies don’t have a season, Zane, that’s a myth invented by people who have their boyfriend in the same city.”

I laughed, and Cassidy threw a piece of crumbled paper at me for it, and missed, and made me pick it up anyway. For a while it was just that. The three of us, the radiator that we couldn’t turn off, and the warm easy nothing of a Thursday night. The kind of evening I used to think other people were lying about.

Then Cassidy hugged her textbook to her chest and got that look she gets when her heart climbs up into her face. “Do you ever think about how insane we are?” she asked. “Me and O. We were fourteen. Who finds it at fourteen? Nobody finds it at fourteen.”

“You did,” I said.

“We did,” she agreed, smug for a second. Then softer, almost to herself, “we got lucky. We got so lucky.”

“You did,” I repeated my words. “You are lucky. And O is even luckier.”