Page 25 of Keep Me

I grabbed my keys and went down to the park three blocks over.

By two o’clock, the light had turned hot and bright, filtering through the massive oaks creating small pauses of shadow. It was almost the hour where those same shadows began to grow teeth. I walked the gravel perimeter, my hand slipping into my pocket to check my phone. No texts. I dialed Zane, but it went straight to voicemail, his phone was likely dead or buried at the bottom of his gym bag after his post-final run.

A cold, familiar prickle started at the base of my neck. The park was too quiet. The trees were too still. Ahead, where the path bent around a dense thicket of old bushes, a lone figure appeared. He was walking slow, his head down, his posture obscured by the deep, violet shadows of the trees. My chest did that sudden, high stress tighten. The thriller instinct, the one West Bridge had spent years cultivating in the marrow of my bones, told me the perimeter was compromised. I tracked the distance between us, my fingers locking around my keys in my pocket. The figure stepped out of the shadow and into a bar of light. It was Finn.

He was wearing his same faded red hoodie, but instead of a biology textbook, he was being dragged forward by a ridiculously small, extraordinarily fluffy white dog with a pink rhinestone collar.

“Seren?” Finn stopped on the gravel, blinking at me. “Hey.”

The dread vanished so fast it left a hollow, ridiculous echo in my ribs. I let go of my keys. “Hey. Finn.”

“I didn’t think anyone else used this park,” he said, his voice entirely sincere as he looked down at the tiny creature currently vibrating against his sneaker.

“I do sometimes,” I said, looking at the fluff ball. “Is that… your dog?”

“My sister’s,” he explained, a faint, slightly embarrassed color hitting his cheeks. “She’s working a double shift at the clinic. His name is Sir Reginald. He looks like a loofah, but if I don’t walk him every thirty minutes, he chews the baseboards.”

An involuntary laugh broke out of me. For the next ten minutes, we walked the loop together. We didn’t talk about communications theory, or warehouse shifts, or the people who had died before there was an us. Finn talked about the schedule of feeding the eight-pound dog, and how Sir Reginald was terrified of plastic bags, and how the four-fifteen bus had been four minutes late today. It was weightless. It was ten minutes of unengineered normalcy, a casual conversation with someone who did not need me to explain the shape of my ghosts.

When he turned off toward the street, Sir Reginald trotting beside him, my chest was completely clear. I sat down on a green bench near the exit and pulled out my phone again. The promise from last week was sitting in my head like a small task on a checklist.

He picked up on the third ring. The background noise on his end was a chaotic, industrial symphony, the high-pitched whine of a pneumatic impact wrench, the heavy clank of iron, and someone shouting about a nail gun in the background.

“Seren?” his voice came through the speaker, a low rasp that sounded like he had been shouting over someone. Or maybe at someone. “Hey. Everything okay? You’re not in a ditch, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, a smile hitting my face as my fingers touched the smooth green painted wood of the park bench. “I mean. No, I’m not in a ditch. Everything is great. I just… you told me to call you. To check in.”

“Took you long enough,” Austin said. The background noise suddenly dropped in volume, a heavy metal door slamming shut as he stepped out of the construction and into the back office. His tone instantly shifted into that protective warmth that belonged entirely to him. “I’m glad you called, love. Your old man called me this morning, too. Around eight. Sounded completely different. Slower. He told me he was officially signing over the titles and stepping away from the heavy lifting.”

“He told me too,” I said, a small, sweet knot of pride tightening in my throat. “He’s staying home.”

“Good for him,” Austin murmured, and even through the speaker of my phone, I could hear the relief in his chest. “Lord knows he’s earned the break. He has spent too many years running himself into a wall.” He paused, and I could hear the familiar, sharp click of his lighter, followed by a long, slow exhale of smoke. “Listen, I’m heading back next week. Things are going good here, I should get to stay for a while.”

“Promise? You always say that and then go back to Florida, always something else that needs your attention now,” I told him. Halfway joking.

“You know I wish I could take you with me, Seren,” he said. “Zane wouldn’t like that very much, would he?”

“No,” I laughed. “He probably wouldn’t.”

“I’ll try my best. I need a break, and I miss you too,” he told me. “Life is great and all, but sometimes I miss having a fucking night to myself. Even if that night means you torturing me with episodes of medical drama.”

“Yeah,” I agreed with him, remembering the nights where neither of us had anything to do except exist in the silence beside each other. “Maybe one day, things will slow down again.”

“Doubt it,” Austin chuckled. “Alright, love. I have to go. I’ll see you soon. Tell Briggs to keep his side of the perimeter locked down.” The line went dead with a blunt click. A perfect confirmation of the peace I had seen in West Bridge. I took a second of silence to myself before standing up to walk back to the blue apartment.

Zane was already there when I let myself in. The kitchen smelled like garlic and olive oil, and he had a wrench sitting on the counter next to a completely silent radiator. He had changed into a clean black t-shirt; his hair still damp from the shower.

“Where’d you go?” he asked, turning from the stove to look at me. “Sorry I took so long, the market didn’t have the ice cream you like, so I had to go all the way over to Bay Street. And would you believe this… they didn’t have it either.”

“Don’t tell me you went all the way to Fisher for my ice cream, Zane,” I said with a happy sigh.

“Of course I did,” Zane looked at me like I offended him. “You’re not dating a loser, Seren, come on.”

The look on his face made me laugh. He was right, though. I sure as hell wasn’t. “And all of this while your phone was dead, huh?”

“I’m taking that to mean you tried to call me,” Zane frowned. “I’m sorry, baby. You didn’t answer my question, where did you go?”

“Just the park,” I said, dropping my keys on the counter. I walked over to him, leaning my back against the refrigerator. “I ran into Finn. The guy from bio-stats.”