Stay If You Can

Chapter Three

They ended up back at that same bleacher four more times that week, and Eli couldn't have told you how it happened.

He hadn't planned it. Planning implied he'd made a decision, and he was fairly sure he hadn't his feet had just started taking the long way home again, the way that went past the courts instead of past the mess waiting for him at the house. And every time, somehow, Jenna Ellis was already there, sinking threes in that same gold light like she owned the hour.

"You're stalking me," she said on day three, not even looking over, ball rotating in her hands.

"You're the one who's always here."

"I'm always here on purpose. You're always here by accident. Different energy."

He didn't have a comeback for that, mostly because it was true, and he'd never met anyone who called things true right to his face like it cost her nothing.

That was the part that unsettled him. Not Jenna herself though she unsettled him plenty, in ways he didn't have a name for yet and wasn't in a hurry to find one but how *easy* it was. Talking to her didn't feel like the careful, load-bearing conversations he had with everyone else in his life, the ones where he was constantly calculating what to hold back, what version of *fine* would keep the peace. With Jenna he just talked. Said things. Half of them true, all of them unguarded, in a way that scared him more than it should have.

Eli had learned a long time ago that ease was a warning sign, not a comfort. Things that felt effortless were things you hadn't yet paid for. His mother's promises were effortless. His brother's *I'll always come back* had been effortless too, right up until it wasn't. Comfort, in his experience, was just grief that hadn't introduced itself yet.

So on day four, when Jenna flopped down next to him mid-sentence about some teacher she couldn't stand, close enough that her shoulder pressed warm against his, and he felt something in his chest unclench that he hadn't even known was clenched he almost got up and left.

He didn't. That was new too.

"You do this thing," she said, apropos of nothing, studying him with that unreadable-reading look of hers, "where you catch yourself liking something. Like it's against the rules."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"You just did it. Right now. I said something, you almost smiled, and then you yanked it back like smiling was going to cost you money."

Eli looked at the ball resting between her feet instead of at her. "Maybe I don't smile much."

"Everybody smiles for free, Eli. You act like yours are rationed."

He didn't answer that, because the honest answer was too big to hand over on a Thursday afternoon to a girl he'd known for four days, and the dishonest answer felt, for once, like it would actually be a lie *to* her, not just a management strategy for everyone else.

Jenna let the silence sit for a second she was good at that too, he was learning, letting quiet do work instead of rushing to fill it and then she bumped her shoulder into his, light, easy, like it meant nothing.

"I'm not going anywhere, if that's what the face is about," she said.

His whole body went still.

"I didn't say anything."

"You didn't have to. You've got a whole vocabulary that isn't words." She shrugged, like she hadn't just reached directly into the one place in him nobody got to touch. "I just figured I'd save us both some time."

Eli's pulse was doing something complicated. Nobody talked to him like this like his silences were legible, like his weather was worth tracking. It should have felt like exposure. Instead it felt like relief, which was almost worse, because relief meant he wanted more of it, and wanting more of something was exactly how you ended up gutted when it left.

"You don't know that," he said, quieter than he meant to. "That you're not going anywhere. Nobody knows that about themselves."

Something shifted in her face not hurt, not quite, but a flicker of recognition, like he'd stepped on a nerve she usually kept well hidden.

"No," she agreed. "I don't know it. I'm choosing it. There's a difference."

"That's not how it works."

"Says who?"

*Says everyone who's ever loved me and left anyway,* he thought, and didn't say, because some sentences you didn't hand a near-stranger no matter how unnervingly safe she made you feel.

Jenna watched him not-say it. He could see her clocking the shape of the silence, filing it away like she filed everything.

"Okay," she said finally, standing, brushing off her shorts, tossing the ball up and catching it one-handed. "You don't have to believe me yet. I'll just keep showing up till you do."

She was already walking backward toward the court, grinning that certain grin, when his phone buzzed in his pocket his sister's name lighting up the screen, three texts in a row, which was never good.

He read the first line and felt the easy afternoon evaporate.

"I have to go," he said, standing fast.

Jenna's grin faltered, just slightly, reading something in his face before he'd said a word about it.

"Eli. Hey. What's wrong?"

He was already walking, phone pressed to his ear, dialing his sister back with hands that weren't quite steady.

"Nothing," he said over his shoulder, the old lie sliding on like a jacket he knew too well. "I'll see you tomorrow."

He didn't see the way Jenna stood there a second longer than she needed to, watching him disappear toward whatever he wasn't telling her already deciding, quietly, that *tomorrow* wasn't going to be good enough anymore.