Page 39 of Keep Me

It was time to ask him to stop. He found me on the floor, his hair still wet, a towel slung around his neck, and whatever he was about to say died somewhere behind his teeth when he saw the phone in my hands.

“Seren.”

“I need you to go to your parents’ for a while,” I said. My voice came out steady. I had practiced this, somewhere in the last week, without realizing I was practicing it.

He went very still. “What?”

“Not forever. Just for now.” I set the phone face-down on the floor beside me, gently, the way you set down something that might still be alive. “I can’t keep watching you watch me, Zane. I can’t keep being something you’re guarding. I need the house quiet. Actually quiet. Not the kind where you’re just being careful in it. I need to be alone.”

“Seren, I’m not going to leave you alone in this house.” The way Zane was looking at me reminded me of when we were in high school, of the time he brought soup to my house when I was pretending to be sick. I had secrets and he wanted to know them.

“I’m not asking. I’m telling you what I need.” I looked up at him, finally, and whatever was on my face must have been worse than anything he’d seen on it in days, because his jaw tightened the way it does right before he loses an argument he knows he’s already lost. “I’m going to tell Austin to stay at his own house. It’s only down the road. Cassidy’s a phone call away. I am not going to do anything to myself if that’s what you’re standing there trying to ask without asking.”

It was exactly what he was trying to ask without asking. I watched the question collapse in his throat, unspoken, because I’d already answered it before he could shape it into words.

“I just don’t think you should be by yourself right now,” he said, quieter now, the fight mostly gone out of it.

“I haven’t been by myself in days,” I said. “I don’t remember what that feels like anymore. I can feel you everywhere around me and it’s… smothering me. I can’t breathe. I need to remember. I need you to let me remember.”

“Why can’t you let me help you?” he asked me, his voice so soft it felt unfair. “I love you. Let me help you.”

“No,” I say, and the word did not come out sharp, it came out small, a desperate plea for air. “No. I don’t want you here right now, Zane. I can’t think.”

My hands went to my head, my thumbs digging into my temples, rubbing so hard the skin burns. I pressed until it hurt, like if I could create a localized pain right there, the throbbing sensation of being completely empty would reverse. “I need to think. I need to figure things out.”

Zane didn’t step back. He didn’t get angry. He just stood there in the dim light over the sink, his chest rising and falling. He looked at me the way I have been looking at the porch window all week.

“What’s there to figure out, Seren?” he asked.

He did not get it. He thought we were still playing by the old rules, where he can stay close and absorb the impact for both of us. He was watching me so intently, tracking every micro-movement of my jaw, every breath. It made me feel like the hummingbirds outside. Just a tiny, frantic heartbeat being watched through a pane of glass, trapped under a microscope while my wings were threatening to snap from the vibration. I loved him so much it felt like a physical weight on my ribs, but right now, being loved by him meant being seen. And being seen meant I must exist. And existing meant I must understand what existing means. If I understand my own existence, I must understand who does not exist with me.

“Everyone is dead!” The strange sob ripped out of my throat before I could stop it, too loud, shattering the quiet we had been cultivating for days. I did not mean to yell. I did not want to hurt him.

“And you can’t help me,” I choked out, my forehead dropping until it almost touched the marble floor beneath me. “You can’t help me, Zane. Every time I look at you, every time you look at me with that look in your eyes… it just reminds me of everything. It reminds me that he is gone, and you’re the only one left to watch me break. You cannot fix this.”

The silence that followed was unbearable, because I could feel the exact moment the words hit him. Not as an attack, but as a truth he already knew. His shoulders didn’t drop, but his face went perfectly still, his eyes darkened.

“We fell in love because you saw me,” I said, my hand reached out in the way it always reaches for Zane. As if his touch is oxygen and I have been underwater for too long.

He came closer, crouching in front of me. He grabbed my hand, but I was the one who guided it, until it landed on his face. And the way his touch brings me life, I knew mine brought him relief. His eyes watered as he looked back at me.

“I think you were the first person to ever see me, maybe the only one to ever really see me. I know that.” The edges of my mouth turned downwards, and I wanted to cry ugly tears, but it felt like they were stuck somewhere I could not access any longer.

“But I need you to look away, just for a second. Just for now. I don’t want you to look at me. I don’t want you to see me. I need… I need to exist without feeling eyes on me, without being watched. All the eyes make me feel like I’m trapped. Even yours. I need to exist without anyone seeing me, so that I can figure out how to make sense of life where my parents are in the ground without me. I can’t have you here while I try to understand why you are the only person who has ever really known me and still loved me.”

“You can’t save me from this, Zane,” I sighed, finally. Zane had been watching my face as the words tumbled out of my mouth, but as he did that, tears slipped down his face. “You can’t save me this time.”

“I know I can’t save you from this,” he said, his voice cracking just a fraction. “I know I can’t replace him, Seren. But I love you. I’m not watching you to judge you. I’m watching you so you don’t disappear.”

“But I want to disappear,” I whispered against the stone, inches from my father’s face-down phone. “Not the same way as last time. I’m going to come back up for air. I promise. Please, Zane. Just for a few days. Let me be a ghost instead of a hummingbird.”

I knew the words made no sense to him. But they made perfect sense to me. I did not want to be witnessed. I wanted to do the witnessing while being invisible.

He stayed there, crouched in front of me, for a long time, his weight shifted once. Then he sat down on the floor across from me, not touching me, just close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him in the cool kitchen.

“Ten minutes away,” he said. “That’s all. I love you. Ten minutes. You call, and I’m here in ten minutes.”

“I know.”