Page 69 of Keep Me

“Do you ever wonder if I’m just the thing people reach for when they’re already falling,” I said. “Henry needed me because he was already gone. My dad needed me most in the last eight months he had left. You found me because you did not want me to end up like Henry. Austin held on because couldn’t see through the storms.” I heard my own voice go flat, the old register, the one that made the worst things sound like weather reports. “What if I’m not something anyone chooses? What if I’m only ever the thing people grab on their way down?”

Zane didn’t answer right away. That was the first thing he did right. He let the question sit in the air long enough to earn a genuine answer instead of a fast one.

“You want evidence,” he said finally, it was a question but we both already knew the answer. “Not comfort.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” He shifted, turning fully toward me, his knee brushing mine on the bench. “Here’s evidence. If I only loved you because Henry pointed at you, the math should’ve been simple. Assignment completed, assignment done. You pushed me out of this house days ago and told me to go stay at my parents’ and not come back until you called.” His jaw worked once. “An assignment doesn’t hurt like that. A job doesn’t sit in a spare bedroom at your mother’s house at three in the morning wondering if the person you are supposed to be protecting is safe enough to sleep. I was in pain. The whole time. Every single day you kept me at ten minutes away instead of in the room with you, it cost me something. And that’s not your fault. You didn’t cause the pain. That’s the price of love.”

I didn’t say anything. I was looking at the feeder again, at the syrup.

Zane’s hand came out of the dark and grabbed my wrist with a sudden tightness that made me blink. His thumb just pressed firmly into the bone, never too hard to hurt. Zane always touched me like I would break before I could forgive him. He pulled my hand down into the small gap between our thighs, trapping it there. It felt like he was keeping me from jumping.

“And here’s the other thing,” he said, quieter now. “If some part of this was fate. If Henry really put this whole thing into motion without knowing it. Fine. I’ll give you that much because Blair believes it and some days I do too.” He reached over, his hand finding mine, not gripping, just resting there. “I could have walked away and I never once did.”

“But would you have loved me if none of your bad things happened? If Henry lived… and you weren’t in pain.”

“If Henry didn’t die, we wouldn’t have met,” Zane reminded me. “I wouldn’t have come to West Bridge.”

“I know,” I sighed. “I know. But say we met anyway, would you have still seen me? Would you have looked twice?”

Zane went quiet again. He didn’t answer with words; instead, he slipped his arm around my waist and pulled me sideways into him, tucking me into his side. He rested his chin on the top of my head, his fingers tracking soft, idle circles over the fabric of my sweater at my ribs. It was an incredibly gentle, protective fold. It reminded me to breathe, and it reminded me that I belonged right here, regardless of how we had started.

“My dad filled that feeder every morning for twenty-one years,” I said slowly, the thought arriving as I spoke it, the way the truest ones always did. “He didn’t have to. Nobody was making him. My mom asked him once, on the day I was born, and after that it was just him, alone, choosing it again and again until the choosing turned into something else. Something that did not need the original reason anymore.” I looked at Zane.

He was already looking back, his head tilted slightly, his eyes tracing the lines of my face as if he were trying to read a map he knew by heart but still found beautiful. There was no sharpness in his stare, just a softness that seemed to accept every broken piece of me.

“You’re filling the feeder,” I said. “You’ve been filling it every morning without me noticing it was the same act.”

He did not say anything. His thumb moved once across my knuckles, slow, like he was trying to find my re-set button.

“Jax taught me love only shows up for the wreckage,” I said, and my voice didn’t shake on his name the way it used to, which was its own small mercy. “That you had to be broken enough to be worth someone’s attention. That the crisis was the toll you paid to be noticed at all.” I thought about hazelnuts and toasted coconut, a taste I’d forgotten and then remembered, a version of me who knew the difference before she was taught not to. “I think some part of me has believed that. That I only get chosen when I’m falling. Henry falling. My dad dying. You, pulled toward me by a ghost. I built a whole life out of the wreckage being the price of admission.”

“It’s not,” Zane said. “You are loved because of who you are. Not because of what has happened.”

I turned my hand over in his, palm to palm, and held on. I slid further into him until there was no space left, pressing my cheek against his collarbone and closing my eyes tight. It was the old, childish belief that if I couldn’t see the dark porch, or the empty yard, or the way the past dances in front of me, then they couldn’t see me either. Zane became my entire horizon. He shifted his weight, so he was leaning slightly over me, he was a shield that took the brunt of the cool night air, so I didn’t have to feel it.

“I keep thinking about the sea,” I said. “The sea. I am the sea, or the ocean. Always changing, always the same. Salt water that drowns anything that tries to live in it.” I looked at him. “Except for you. You don’t drown.”

“No,” Zane shook his head. “I don’t drown.”

I pursed my lips before asking the question that I didn’t want to ask. “Why not?”

“Maybe…” Zane took a second, organizing his thoughts. “Okay, maybe you’re the sea. But I’m not swimming inside you, Seren. I’m not struggling to survive inside you. I’m not treading waves.”

“You’re not?” I wanted him to confirm it.

“No, Seren, I’m not. I’m not water. I don’t know the tides. I don’t feel the moon pulling at me the way you do. I don’t understand the storms, not really, not from the inside.”

“I’m the cliff. I will stand there when you break against me, and I won’t erode. I’m always there. Even when there’s a hurricane and it’s wet and horrible. I can’t drown in you, Seren.”

“So, I don’t understand what it feels like to be the sea. I don’t need to understand you,” Zane said, “to refuse to leave.”

We sat there a moment, the feeder swaying very slightly on its hook. I let Zane’s words sink into my mind, trying to rest his reassurance against my worry. If I was the sea, he was the rock. He could not drown in me because he did not exist inside of me. I just moved around him.

“I used to think I’d never see snow,” I said, quiet now, the old line rising up out of somewhere I did not like the visit. “I thought that when I was seventeen, in my room, thinking it was the end of something. I told myself I guessed I never would.” I looked out at the dark yard. “I still haven’t. Isn’t that strange? Twenty-one years old and I’ve never once seen it fall.”

“You will,” Zane said. No performance in it.