Hummingbird #4
I nodded and let Zane gently guide me toward the front door.
Stepping back into the night air was like breaking the surface of a deep, warm pool.
The visit was a bridge we crossed every month, and every time, I felt both relieved, and hesitant to reach the other side.
The door clicked shut, sealing us inside the familiar dark of Zane’s car.
I sighed, leaning my head against the cool glass of the passenger window.
No matter how much therapy I did, my dad’s love, or sometimes-love, was always the hardest to figure out.
“You okay?” Zane’s voice was a low rumble as he started the engine.
“Yeah,” I murmured. “Just… tired.”
“He’s trying,” Zane reminded me, but he didn’t have to. I was constantly reminding myself. The slight vibration of the car helped calm my thoughts as he started to drive.
“I know,” I nodded. “We all are.”
“We all are,” he echoed, reaching over to take my hand between his. “Have you talked to Lucy at…”
I interrupted him. “Last week I had three tuna fish sandwiches for lunch.”
Zane blinked, once, twice. Third time. “What?”
“Last week I had three tuna fish sandwiches for lunch,” I repeated, my mouth in a straight line as if I was discussing a serious topic.
“Okay,” Zane nodded, looking sideways in my direction. “Like, all at once?”
“No,” I shook my head, rolling my eyes like he had said something absurd. “I had one on Tuesday, one on Thursday and one on Friday.”
“Hm,” he hummed in response. “The one on Thursday must have been convincing.”
I was about to open my mouth to let out another totally useless stream of information, but he spoke first. “You, on the other hand, are not convincing at all,” he told me, though a smile formed on his lips when he took a tiny break from the road and looked at me instead.
I frowned, though I wasn’t really surprised. “No?”
“Not at all,” Zane told me. “I figured you out when we were eighteen years old, I can figure you out much quicker at twenty-one.”
I let a laugh leave my lips. I might have overused that particular method of mine.
It started not long after Zane and I got together, after…
well, after. I guess the silent, moody Seren act became predictable for Zane.
Not in a bad way, but in the way he figured out exactly what I was thinking about and exactly what I was not saying.
Back then, Zane used to love when I spoke.
About anything. It did not matter what I was saying.
To him, every word that came freely from my mouth was something he was hypnotized by.
Whenever I didn’t want to talk about something, and he wouldn’t let it go, for my own good, of course, I would let whatever was floating through my brain release all at once.
Poor Zane didn’t know what the hell was happening the first few times.
He let me ramble on and on and on about a specific shade of purple I had a grudge against, or how the sound crows make freaks me out.
He was so bewildered that I was talking…
he just let me talk. And talk. And talk and talk, until he was cross-eyed, and he forgot what he was trying to pry out of me.
“But twenty-one-year-old me is so different from eighteen-year-old me, right?” I asked, partly joking but partly serious in my question.
After all, I am the sea. Always the same. Always different. I didn’t know the difference between what color I really was and what color I lied to myself about being.
“Yes,” Zane said the word so casually. “You are. You eat tuna fish now; you used to hate it.”
“Did I?” I asked him. I couldn’t remember.
Zane laughed. “Probably. You hated everything that wasn’t cigarettes and vodka.”
I laughed; the spot he was touching was not so tender anymore. “And you,” I reminded him.
“And me,” he agreed. “Somehow.”
The transition from the open road to the closed door of the apartment felt like a slow exhale. For two hours, the world was nothing but the hum of the highway and the intermittent glow of passing gas stations, a dark blur that existed only to carry us from who we were back there to who we are here.
By the time we reached the city limits, the doom of West Bridge had been replaced by late-night North Haven. Instead of driving past ghosts, it became the glow of streetlights, the distant hiss of tires on wet pavement, and the neon hum of a world that doesn’t close at eight o’clock.
“We’re back,” Zane murmured, “home sweet, annoying apartment.”
The blue apartment didn’t greet us with the sterile perfection of my dad’s house.
It greeted us with the smell of my jasmine tea and Zane’s cedarwood cologne, and the faint creak of old floorboards.
It was small, cramped, even, but every inch of it was a choice we had made.
The walls weren’t just painted blue; they were drowned in it.
Not dark blue. Not heavy. Pale blue.
Zane tossed the keys into the ceramic bowl by the door. I watched him move through the space, flipping on the small lamp by the sofa. He went straight to the kitchen window, checking the Psych 101 textbook that propped it open.
Getting ready for bed was a wordless choreography.
We brushed our teeth side-by-side in the tiny bathroom, our reflections overlapping in the mirror.
There was something special about the mundanity of it, the shared tube of toothpaste, the way Zane reached around me to grab a towel, the comfortable permanence of his presence in a space that belonged to us.
I pulled on one of his old t-shirts, the fabric soft and worn thin from a thousand washes.
When I climbed into bed, the sheets were cool, and the room felt still.
A moment later, Zane’s voice rang out. “Seren, I’m getting into the bed in five seconds.” He said the words without gravity, a routine he did every night. Only the second count changed. He said he would do this forever, so I never had to feel the way I did that night at the lake house.
1,2,3,4… the mattress sank beside me. Zane did not say anything else, he just pulled the duvet up and reached out, drawing me back against his chest. I tucked my head under his chin; my back pressed against the heat of him.
Outside, the city continued to move. Somewhere two hours away, a hummingbird feeder sat in the dark, and a man sat in a silent house.
But here, behind the blue walls, my eyes started to flutter closed. Sleep was easy, it usually was now. I was not scared of what was waiting to greet me in the morning, I knew nothing scary was there. Tomorrow wasn’t anything of importance. It was just tomorrow.