Raspberry #3
“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.”
“I still do,” I told him. “It’s just…” I sighed, trying to bite a lie off my lips. “I’m just tired, my brain’s tired. And… do you ever feel like you just want to be over… it?”
“Over it?” Zane asked me, “you mean over what Jax did to you?”
I nodded, pressing my lips together as if I wanted to seal the feeling inside me. “Sometimes I wish we could just… move on.”
Zane did not answer right away. He did not flinch, and he did not offer a quick, empty sentence about how time heals all wounds. He just watched me, his eyes absorbing the weight of what I had just admitted. He set his sandwich down again, completely abandoned now.
“I know,” he said softly. “I know you do, Seren.” The way he said my name landed in my stomach, that golden peace he floods me with became a bath of warm water on my chilled skin.
“But you can’t rush it,” he continued, leaning his forehead forward just enough that if I tilted my head, our temples would touch.
“What happened… it wasn’t a car accident or a broken bone.
It was a winter that almost froze us both out.
You don’t just wake up one Tuesday and decide the snow is gone.
We just have to wait until it melts. And it has melted. Some of it has melted.”
“I know,” I whispered, looking down at our hands.
“But I’m just so sick of it. I’m sick of carrying it into the grocery store, and into lectures, and into conversations with some harmless guy who just wanted to buy me a coffee.
I want to be a normal girl who eats a tuna sandwich on a Tuesday afternoon without analyzing whether the universe is trying to flip upside down and take everything away. ”
“You are eating a tuna sandwich on a Tuesday afternoon,” Zane reminded me. “And you’re doing it with me.” He reached up, his fingers gently catching my chin, moving my face until I had no choice but to look at him. His eyes were wide, clear, and certain.
“Lucy isn’t there to make you walk through the storm every week,” he said, his thumb brushing the corner of my lower lip where I’d been biting it. “She’s there to help you figure out what happens when the snow melts.”
“I know, you’re right,” I muttered, tracing the skin on the back of his other hand. “You are always right. You always know what to do.”
“I’m not,” Zane said, a low, rough sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. I looked up, surprised by the sudden shift in his voice. He was looking at our hands now. For a second, the infallible, unbreakable wall that was Zane felt incredibly normal.
“I don’t always know what to do,” he said, his eyes lifting to meet mine.
There was no judgment in them, just raw honesty.
“I don’t always know what to do. Half the time, I’m just guessing.
I’m just looking at you and trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing so I can stand in front of it. ”
He reached over with his other hand, taking my face between his palms. His skin was warm, his grip firm but incredibly gentle.
“When you say I’m always right, it sounds like I have a map,” he said. “I don’t have a map. I just have you. If I look like I know where I’m going, it’s only because I’m following your lead. When you break, I just try to be the ground you land on.”
Hearing him admit that did not make me feel less safe; I knew he was right. He wasn’t a machine built to protect me. He was a boy who loved me enough to let my storms batter him, too.
“You are wrong about one thing though,” I told him, watching him react to my words. He looked both cautious and curious.
“What am I wrong about?” he asked me.
“You might not always know what to do, but you always know what to do for me. You always know how to help me, you always know how to make me smile, and how to make me feel less alone. You always know what to do with me.”
Zane blinked slowly, running his eyes across my face as he seemed to turn what I said around in his mind. “Okay, baby.”
He let his hands slide down to my shoulders, giving them a brief, reassuring squeeze before finally letting go and leaning back in his chair. The intense, heavy atmosphere broke, letting the ordinary campus sounds rush back into the space between us.
“So,” he said, picking up his forgotten sandwich and giving me a look that was pure, classic Zane, dry, demanding, and utterly devoted. “You’re going to call Lucy. And right now, you’re going to eat that tuna before I start questioning my own sanity for letting it sit in the sun this long.”
He picked up his sandwich, but he took my hand again, forcing himself to unwrap it one-handed with a casual sort of clumsiness that made a tiny laugh escape my throat.
“You’re ridiculous,” I whispered.
“I’m efficient,” he corrected, a genuine smirk finally breaking across his face. “Eat your tuna, Seren. We have twenty minutes before I have to go watch people stare at their watches in row four.”