Page 8 of Keep Me

“Tuna? Yuck, thank God you didn’t.” Cassidy wore a look of disgust on her face as she glanced down at the sandwich on the table. Then her eyes darted between our faces slowly, like she was trying to solve a riddle. “What is so funny? Why are you staring at each other like that?”

“Nothing,” I said, letting my eyes leave Zane’s face. “I… just used to hate tuna fish.” I felt slightly bad for not letting her inside of our joke, but I didn’t think it would be as funny to her. “Now I don’t.”

“You used to hate everything,” Cassidy replied, her eyebrows raising, mirroring Zane’s reaction from the car. “Except…”

“Except vodka, cigarettes and me,” Zane finished her sentence.

“Well, exactly,” Cassidy nodded. “Though, she kind of hated you too, at first, let’s not forget.”

“Hey!” I swatted her arm, checking Zane’s face out of habit but he was still smiling. “That is not true… I didn’t hate him. It was just…” I stilled, awkwardly trying to find the right words. “You know…”

“General indifference.” Zane found the ones I was looking for. We all knew that this was not something that was a surprise. Out of everyone, Zane was the most aware of the evolution of my feelings for him. But whatever it was I felt for Zane before I fell I in love with him was certainly not hate. I couldn’t quite name it, but I knew it was not that.

“General indifference?” Cassidy snorted, dusting powdered sugar off her fingers. “Please. We thought you were his imaginary friend that he invented to get through being forced into private school. But hey, tuna sandwiches and handholding. Look at you two now. No more general indifference.”

“Don’t ruin the moment, Cass,” Zane said softly. He didn’t let go of my hand, his thumb tracing over my knuckles. “I worked hard for this.”

“Yeah, yeah. Just don’t start sharing the tuna,” she said, though her eyes were soft as she looked at us. She grabbed her now empty bag of donuts and pushed her chair back, the harsh metal scrape sounding a lot friendlier this time. “I’m going to leave you two to your romantic seafood lunch before the smell makes me lose my appetite. See you in bio, Zane. Seren, don’t let him eat your sandwich.”

With a dramatic roll of her eyes and a quick wave, she melted into the lunch-time crowd, leaving a pocket of quiet behind at our table. The campus hummed around us, the chatter of students, the rustle of leaves, the heavy thud of backpacks, but inside our little perimeter, the air felt perfectly still. I looked down at our joined hands, then up at Zane. He was already looking at me, his expression relaxed, the defensive wall he had a habit of wearing when anyone else was around us was completely gone. He did not look away from me. Gray skies felt a little more like a sunrise these days.

“You don’t hate everything anymore,” he murmured, his voice was low, but I caught the subtle appreciation in it.

“No,” I admitted, a smile forming on my lips as I reached for the sandwich with my free hand. “Not everything.”

“Is it easier?” he asked me, looking into my eyes the way he usually did when my answer meant something to him. As if he could see the truth inside my mind.

I looked down at the wrapped sandwich in my hand, tracing the neat edge of the plastic wrap, before looking back up into the intensity of his eyes. Zane did not ask questions just to fill the silence. When he asked if something was easier, he was asking if the world had stopped feeling like a battlefield I was fighting in alone, if only for an hour.

“Some parts,” I said, but recalibrated more honestly. “Most parts. And most parts being easier is a massive upgrade from everything sucks.”

I wished I could tell him that everything was easy now, but I didn’t want to lie to him. It was not entirely easier. The campus was still too loud, the people were still unpredictable variables, and I still spent too much time looking for the hidden thorns in every pleasant interaction. But I looked at his hand, still resting near mine on the table, and then up at the steady curve of his jaw.

“Being here with you is easier,” I added, my voice dropping lower so it wouldn’t carry over the campus noise. “Sometimes things are just… it’s just loud. But when you’re sitting here, it feels like someone turned the volume down.”

Zane’s expression softened, the guarded look he wore for the rest of the world completely vanishing. “That’s all I need. Just focus on the volume here. Let me handle the rest of the noise.”

“Is it easier for you? Now that I don’t hate everything?” And when I asked the words, I looked into his eyes in the same way I did when I really wanted to know his answer. It mattered to me.

I have never wanted things to be difficult for Zane, and that has been one of my hardest things to learn about both being in love with him and being loved by him. Sometimes, I made things hard. I knew that and there was no benefit to pretending it wasn’t true. Sometimes, I thought his life might be easier without me. Loving me was his choice, though. It was not my decision to make. It was not something I could control. And if he wanted to be beside me, whether it was hard for him or not, I sure as hell wasn’t going to say no.

Zane’s movements stopped. He didn’t drop his sandwich, but he set it down on the plastic wrapper, his entire focus shifted back to me. The easy smirk he’d been wearing faded, replaced by something much deeper.

“Seren,” he said my name. He leaned in closer, bringing his face toward me, until the rest of the quad was just a blur of color behind him. “Loving you has never been hard. You’re the easiest part of my day.”

I realized he didn’t really answer the question, instead, he had answered the thing he knew I was really asking.

“When you hated everything, I just had to be the one thing you didn’t,” he continued. “Now that you don’t… now that you’re actually letting yourself breathe a little? Yeah. It’s easier. Because I get to see you laugh at stupid jokes about tuna fish.”

He reached up with his free hand, his warm knuckles gently brushing against my cheekbone, a gesture so steady and certain it made the volume turn down to zero.

“Don’t do that,” he muttered. “Don’t decide my life would be simpler without you. I told you once, nothing worth seeing is easy to get to. I meant that.”

I swallowed any arguments I had in my throat. He meant it. Every single syllable. I knew he did. Of course, I knew that. Sometimes my brain still tried to trick me, though.

“Okay,” I agreed, the word small but solid.

“You know who would be a good person to bounce those feelings off of…” Zane’s tone took a turn from his adoration filled one. “Lucy. Your therapist. In therapy. Why don’t you want to go? You used to love therapy.”