Stay If You Can

Chapter Six

Jenna had replayed exactly four seconds of her life approximately four hundred times since Friday, and she was getting real tired of herself.

Not the kiss part. The kiss part she could have watched on loop forever, honestly, which was itself a problem. It was the four seconds after his face doing that catastrophic collapse, the door clicking shut, the silence he'd left behind like a hole in the shape of a person that she couldn't stop picking at, the way you can't stop pressing on a bruise just to confirm it still hurts.

She'd texted him Saturday. Something light, deliberately casual *you owe me a real opinion on that movie, you didn't watch a single minute of it* and gotten back a thumbs-up emoji forty minutes later. A thumbs-up. From a boy who, two nights earlier, had kissed her like his whole life depended on it and then bolted like the building was on fire.

By Sunday she'd worked her way through irritation, humiliation, and a genuinely unhinged hour of convincing herself she'd imagined the entire thing, before landing somewhere calmer and considerably more useful: information.

Because Jenna read people. That was her whole thing. And what she'd read, underneath the panic, underneath the *I can't do this* was not a boy who didn't want her.

It was a boy who wanted her so much it had scared him into a full sprint.

That distinction mattered. It changed the math completely. If he didn't want her, fine, that stung, but it was simple you moved on, you found someone who did. But this wasn't that. This was a boy who'd spent his whole life learning that wanting things got them taken away from you, and Jenna had front-row seats, now, to exactly how deep that lesson went.

Which put her in an impossible position, because everything in her the loud, reckless, *live-loud-Jen-Jen* part of her that had gotten her through eight years old and every year since wanted to march up to him and say *I'm not leaving, why can't you just believe me.*

But she'd also learned something else, watching her mother grieve for two years after Dani: you cannot argue someone out of a fear that's been proven true before. Telling Eli *I'll stay* wasn't going to undo eighteen years of people telling him the same thing and then not.

So Monday, when she saw him at his locker, jaw tight, visibly bracing for whatever version of this conversation he'd spent the whole weekend rehearsing Jenna did the hardest thing she'd done in years.

She smiled like nothing happened.

"Hey," she said, breezy, easy, like Friday night was a movie they'd both actually watched and mutually forgotten. "You look like you slept even worse than me."

Eli blinked, visibly thrown. He'd clearly prepped for tears, or anger, or a Conversation with a capital C not for her to just breeze past it like it was nothing.

"Jenna, about Friday"

"We don't have to talk about Friday." She kept her voice light, even though every word cost her something. "Seriously. It's fine."

"It's not fine, I just left, I......"

"Eli." She looked at him then, really looked, let just enough truth leak into her voice to make sure he heard it under the casual. "I'm not going to make you talk about something you're not ready to talk about. That's not me giving up. That's me not being one more person who pushes you into a corner."

Something in his face cracked slightly relief, maybe, or the specific ache of being understood by someone he was actively trying to push away.

"I don't deserve that," he said quietly.

"Probably not," she said, and let herself grin, just a little, just enough to lighten it. "Doing it anyway."

They fell into step toward first period, and it was almost normal almost the version of them from before Friday, easy in the old way, if you didn't count the careful foot of space Eli kept between their shoulders the entire walk, like proximity itself was a risk he wasn't willing to take again yet.

Jenna noticed. Of course she noticed. She noticed everything.

She just didn't say anything, because she'd made a decision somewhere around three a.m. Sunday night, staring at her ceiling, replaying his face in that doorway.

She wasn't going to chase him. Chasing would only prove his theory right that wanting her was a countdown timer, that closeness came with a bill. Instead she was going to do the only thing she actually had control over.

She was going to stay exactly where she was. Steady. Unmoved. Un-leaving.

And let him figure out, on his own timeline, that some people didn't need to be chased because they'd already decided not to run.

It was a good plan. A patient plan. The kind of plan that required exactly the discipline Jenna wasn't sure she actually had, especially not with him three feet away, jaw still tight, clearly replaying the same four seconds she was.

She lasted eleven days.