Page 24 of Keep Me

He kissed me then, deeply, thoroughly, with all the sweet, lingering ease of a Friday night where we didn’t have anything to study for. His hands moved down to the small of my back, lifting me slightly until my toes were barely touching the floor, holding me entirely against him. It was that specific way he held me when the rest of the world finally stopped loud talking, like he was subtly reminding the air between us that we didn’t require any extra space. I let my head drop back against his forearm, my hands curling into the collar of his shirt. His lips moved from my mouth to the sensitive skin right below my ear, his breath warm and perfect.

“You smell like library coffee,” he murmured.

“And you smell like a guy who just sat in a crowded room for three hours,” I whispered, laughing a little as his hair brushed my cheek.

“Well, that’s what I did.” He pulled back just enough to look down at me, his thumbs tracing the line of my hipbones beneath my sweater. The golden hour light hit the side of his face, turning the dark of his eyes into something warmer, almost amber. He looked at me the way he always looked at me when he was finally done holding his breath, like I was the only thing in the room that had a fixed position. “I missed you today.”

“Zane, we saw each other at breakfast. I put three granola bars in your bag.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said softly, his expression settling into something more intense. “You were two hours away last Friday and then you were on the third floor of the library all afternoon. That’s two Fridays in a row.”

“I’m right here,” I said, reaching up to run my fingers through the messy hair at the back of his neck again, pulling him down toward me again. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Good,” he whispered against my lips. “Please don’t.”

He kissed me again, but the frantic energy of his exam ending had fully dissolved now. He moved his hands beneath the hem of my sweater, his palms slightly rough against my bare skin, tracing the curve of my waist with a slow familiarity that felt like a quiet conversation we had been having for years.

He guided me back a step, then another, until the back of my hips hit the edge of the kitchen counter. He didn’t break the kiss. He just stepped into me, his thighs framing mine, his weight leaning into me just enough to remind me how small my body was against his. The counter was cold through my shirt. He wasn’t. Heat came off him like he had been standing in the sun, and I wanted to press into it until I could not tell whose it was.

His hand slid up the back of my neck, into my hair, and closed around it. Not pulling. Holding. My whole body understood the difference before I did. The kiss got deeper and slower at the same time, which should not be possible, which was the whole problem with him. He kissed me like we had years. Like the wanting was the point and the having could wait. I made a sound I would deny later.

He smiled against my mouth when I did. I felt it. I bit his lower lip for it, and the smile died and something else took its place, something with more gravity, and his hips pressed me into the counter hard enough that the edge would leave a line I’d find in the mirror tomorrow and stand there touching.

His mouth left mine and traveled. Jaw. The place below my ear. My throat, where my pulse was giving me away in Morse code, and he stayed there, reading it. His hands found my waist and gripped, and I felt what it was costing him. The stillness. He was holding himself back the way you hold a door against weather, and knowing that was hotter than anything he could have done with his hands.

For a long time, it was just the two of us in the quiet of the blue apartment, breathing each other in, while the sun slowly melted into the floorboards.

The next morning, the small square of Lucy’s face on my laptop screen pixelated for a second, the Wi-Fi lagging before snapping back into focus. Usually, I had therapy every Tuesday, like clockwork. But sometimes, Lucy liked to schedule what she called a check in. Basically, it was extra time around the pressure points, like finals week, to make sure I hadn’t tied a knot in all the progress we have made together.

Zane had gone to the grocery store to buy things for a dinner we didn’t have to rush through. I sat cross-legged on the couch, the laptop balanced on my knees, my fingers lightly tracing the edge of a blue mug.

“You’re breathing differently today,” Lucy noted through the speakers. She didn’t have her legal pad out yet; she was just sitting back in her office chair on the screen, her glasses pushed up into her silvering hair, looking at me with that clinical curiosity that usually made me want to close the tab.

“I went back to West Bridge,” I said, and the name of the town didn’t even cause a hitch in my pulse. “To my dad’s house.”

On the screen, Lucy paused, her eyes widening just a fraction before settling back into their professional stillness. “And how did that feel?”

“It was fine,” I said, a small smile touching my face. “We opened some boxes. We sorted through my mom’s things together, her old recipes, her scarves. No one slammed any doors. No one shut down. We just… handled it.”

“And Tom?” she asked softly, her voice clear through my headphones. “How was he with the inventory?”

“He seemed okay,” I said, the relief still tasting sweet in my mouth. “He’s stepping back from the company; he gave me a photograph of my mother on the porch. One I had never seen before. He seemed lighter, Lucy. Happy, almost.”

Lucy looked at me through the camera for a long beat, her gaze scanning my face through the digital feed, checking the micro-expressions, doing the silent mental math she always did when I reported an interaction from West Bridge. But there I had no tells today. No flat left eyebrow, no defensive posture. I was presenting her with a clean bill of health, a domestic victory years in the making.

“It sounds like he’s finally allowing himself to inhabit the present,” Lucy said, her voice dropping into that validating register. She leaned forward, resting her chin on her hand, looking out from the little video box on my screen. “You have spent a long time anticipating a storm every time you crossed that county line, Seren. But sometimes, people change when we aren’t looking. Sometimes things are just what they present as.”

The sentence settled into the quiet room like a truth.

“Yeah,” I murmured, leaning back into the couch cushions, looking out at the bright May beyond our window. “I think that’s true.”

“And how are you doing, outside of the West Bridge dynamic?” Lucy asked, her pen finally appearing in the frame as she hovered over her pad.

I looked down at my hands, then back up at the camera, my shoulders dropped, my chest open and clear. “I’m doing well,” I said.

The words felt solid. They felt earned. I was doing well. I had a blue apartment, a boy who held me until the dark staircase disappeared, and a father who was finally learning how to look at the afternoon sun.

I closed the laptop twenty minutes later, letting the plastic lid click shut. The apartment was still empty when I finished, the quiet of the rooms holding the lingering warmth of the noon sun. I needed to move. I needed to let my feet touch the pavement while my mind was still light before the gravity of doing well had a chance to pull me back down.