Page 3 of Keep Me

“He’s good,” I told my dad, pushing a piece of potato around my plate. “I think he’s in Florida right now.”

“Oh? Is he still with that girl?” he asked me, genuinely curious and not just making conversation. “That one that he spent all those years talking about?”

“Blair,” I reminded him. “Yeah, they are still together. I can’t see him ever letting her go, honestly. She makes him light instead of mean and grumpy like he usually is.”

I thought about the change in Austin when he first met Blair, just after we had graduated high school, not long after the bad things had finally begun to settle down into the past instead of the present. The way that it felt like a light had suddenly turned on in his world that previously was only dark and gray. I was proud of him for the work he did after meeting her. Proud of him in the way he was probably proud of me.

One night, the two of us had stayed up until the early morning hours watching Grey’s Anatomy at his house. He had been in a horrible mood, barely talking, the scowl on his face was different from the grin he usually wore around me. I had given up trying to speak any kind of hope into him, and we had been sitting side by side in silence for hours.

Then, Austin paused the show, he looked at me, and said did you ever think we would be here? Us? In therapy every week? Getting better? Wanting to get better? Trying?

And for a moment, he stunned me. He was right. When I was a teenager, when I was going through the storms and the hard nights and the grief and all of the bad things, sitting beside Austin Portwood in silence, sober, fresh from therapy… was a future I never saw coming.

Dad nodded slowly, a small, thoughtful smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Good for him. He deserves that. It is a rare thing, finding someone who can make you feel like that. Once in a lifetime, I would say. Hold it when you get it.”

I looked down at my plate, the steam from the potatoes curling into the air. My mind drifted back to that night with Austin; the flickering blue light of the TV, the heavy silence, and that sudden question: Did you ever think we would be here?

“He’s coming back this week,” I added, pulling myself back to the present. “He wants to take us all out to that pier place. The one with the overpriced oysters.”

Zane chuckled, the sound low and warm. “Austin and his oysters. I’m surprised he hasn’t opened his own raw bar by now.”

“He probably would if Blair let him,” I joked, the tension at the table lifted. It felt normal. It felt easy.

My dad laughed, a real sound that made him look younger, less like the man in the wool suit and more like the father I was still getting to know. “Well, tell him he is welcome here anytime. He doesn’t need to wait for a weekend.”

I watched him take a bite of his steak; his movements relaxed for the first time all evening. He was happy. He was content in this small moment.

“How’s school?” he asked us, looking between me and Zane.

“Finals are coming,” Zane answered for us. “But I think we’re both ready for it. Seren’s been hitting the library harder than I have lately. We are almost at the finish line for the semester.”

I nodded, though my thoughts drifted, again. To my dad, school was a metric of success, a series of grades and credits. But to me, it was just proof that I was trying. Every lecture I attended, and every paper I submitted felt like a stone laid in the foundation of a life I actually wanted to live. It wasn’t about the degree; it was the proof that I was no longer a trap made specifically to catch myself in.

“Proud of you guys,” my dad nodded as he said the words, looking at Zane first but then zoning back into me. “You’re really making it. Soon enough you’ll be graduating. One more year. I can’t wait to see you on that stage, Seren. It will be the proudest day of my life.”

I offered him a small smile, the kind that was meant to be enough. He thought the stage was the destination, the final, public proof that the storm had passed and his daughter had survived it. School has been hard, and it is an accomplishment, but my real hard work happened in the quiet hours of Tuesday afternoons in therapy, in the choice to keep breathing when the air felt like lead, and in the slow process of becoming someone I didn’t have to hide from.

The clinking of silverware against ceramic filled the brief silence until Zane reached across the table, his hand momentarily covering mine. He knew what I was thinking, where my mind had gone. And the way my body reacted to his touch was the same as it always is. Like my cells stopped buzzing. Like my lungs grew.

“Speaking of next year,” Zane said, his voice bringing the conversation back to reality. “Have you thought about the lease on the apartment? The management office sent over the renewal papers this morning.”

“Of course we’re keeping the apartment,” I said quickly, looking at him like he had suggested giving away something made of gold. “We love it there.”

“You love it there,” he shook his head, but with a smile and a small laugh. “It’s… got some issues that I could live without.”

“Like what?” I asked him, though I already knew what he was about to list off.

“The radiator that sounds like a train at three in the morning,” Zane started, ticking it off on one finger with a grin. “The one that doesn’t seem to have an off switch, even in the middle of the summer.”

“It’s like white noise,” I countered, though even I knew that was a stretch. “Helps me sleep.”

“And the window in the kitchen that only stays open if you prop it up with a specific textbook,” he added, looking at my dad with a look that asked for some help. “Sink doesn’t drain, the bathroom light flickers no matter how many new lightbulbs I put in. Not to mention the neighbor’s cat that seems convinced our welcome mat is its personal scratching post.”

Dad laughed, warmly, which surprised me. He looked at Zane, and for a second, they were just two men commiserating over the stubbornness of the woman they both loved.

“I remember the first apartment your mother and I had,” dad said, leaning back in his chair, and I went still because he never talked about my mom. “The sink leaked so loudly I had to sleep with earplugs, but she wouldn’t let me call the super. She said the leak had a soothing rhythm.”

My mother was the constant silence that lived between my dad and I, a silence I had learned to leave alone years ago. To hear my dad speak her title was like hearing thunder boom on a clear night. I thought about the leaky sink and her soothing rhythm, and I wondered then if my stubborn love for the radiator’s clatter and the propped-up window was not just a preference. Perhaps it was an inherited, cellular desire to find comfort in imperfect things and to make a home out of things that were trying to fall apart.