Stay If You Can

Chapter Five

It happened on a Friday, which felt unfair. Fridays were supposed to be easy.

Jenna's parents were out of town for the weekend, and she'd texted him around seven *movie night, my house, bring bad opinions about action films* like it was nothing, like it was the hundredth time instead of the first time he'd ever been inside her house at all.

It should have felt like a big deal. Somehow it didn't, and that was its own kind of dangerous. Nothing with Jenna ever felt like a big deal until it was already too late to brace for it.

Her house was warm in a way his wasn't not temperature, something else, something in the framed photos crowding the hallway and the smell of something her mom had baked before leaving. Eli noticed it the way he noticed everything that reminded him of what he didn't have, filed it away, kept his face neutral.

They ended up on the couch with a movie neither of them was really watching, a bowl of popcorn between them that had migrated, over the course of an hour, from the middle cushion to entirely her lap, then entirely his, then somewhere neither of them was tracking anymore because they'd stopped pretending the movie mattered around minute forty.

"You're doing the thing," Jenna said, not looking away from the screen, though he could tell by the set of her mouth she wasn't watching it either.

"What thing."

"The thing where you go quiet and I can feel you thinking really loud."

Eli huffed something close to a laugh. "That's not a thing."

"It's extremely a thing." She finally turned her head, chin propped on her fist, studying him in the blue flicker of the TV light. "What's the loud thought."

He should have deflected. He had four years of practice deflecting, a whole toolkit of *I'm fine*s and *just tired*s built for exactly this moment. But something about her face right then open, unguarded, close enough that he could count the freckles across her nose if he let himself made the toolkit feel useless.

"I was thinking," he said slowly, "that I don't know what to do with how easy this is."

Jenna went very still. "Easy bad or easy good?"

"I don't know yet. That's the problem." His voice had dropped lower than he meant it to. "Everything easy in my life has had a bill come due eventually."

"Maybe this is the exception."

"You keep saying that like it's a fact instead of a hope."

"Maybe I just believe things harder than you do."

They were close now closer than the couch cushion between them should have allowed, close enough that he could feel the warmth coming off her skin, and neither of them had moved to fix it, which was its own kind of confession.

"Jenna"

"Don't," she said quietly, not unkind, almost pleading. "Don't do the thing where you talk yourself out of it before it happens."

"I'm trying to protect"

"I don't want protecting. I want you to stop flinching every time something good is standing right in front of you."

His pulse was a live wire under his skin. Every rule he'd built for himself don't want things you can't keep, don't hand people the ability to gut you, don't mistake ease for safety was screaming at him to stand up, make an excuse, put six feet of air back between them before this became something he couldn't take back.

He didn't move.

Neither did she.

The space between them collapsed slow, deliberate, both of them watching it happen like they were narrating it to themselves in real time *this is a bad idea, this is a bad idea, this is*

And then it wasn't a thought anymore. It was just her hand curling into his shirt, his forehead dropping to rest against hers first, both of them breathing like they'd been running, the whole world narrowing down to the six inches of space that used to separate two people who'd sworn, silently, separately, that they weren't going to do this.

What happened next happened slow and then not slow at all soft at first, careful, like they were both testing whether the ground beneath them would hold, and then not careful anymore, something two months of pretending had been building toward finally given permission to exist. It didn't feel like the first time so much as the seventeenth like some part of both of them had already been doing this in every conversation, every shoulder brush on that bleacher, every silence Jenna had known better than to fill.

For one uninterrupted stretch of time, Eli didn't think about his mother's car door or his brother's silence or the bill that was always, eventually, coming due. He just existed, fully, in the fact of her and it terrified him more than anything ever had, precisely because it felt so much like relief.

It was Jenna who pulled back first, breathless, forehead still against his, eyes searching his face for something he wasn't sure he was ready to give her yet.

"Eli," she whispered.

And that was the exact moment his brain caught up with his body the exact moment every warning system he'd spent eighteen years building came roaring back online, screaming that this was the beginning of the part where it all got taken away.

He pulled back like he'd been burned.

"I can't," he said, already standing, already putting distance between them, his voice cracking in a way he hated. "I'm sorry. I can't do this."

Jenna sat frozen on the couch, lips still parted, face doing something complicated between hurt and confusion and the particular stillness of someone trying very hard not to let either show.

"Eli, wait"

"I have to go."

"You always have to go," she said, quiet, and it landed harder than shouting would have. "Every single time something real happens, you find a reason to leave the room."

He stopped at the door, hand on the frame, not turning around, because if he turned around and saw her face he wasn't sure he'd be able to walk out at all.

"I know," he said, so quiet she almost didn't catch it. "That's exactly why I have to."

The door clicked shut behind him before she could answer, and Jenna sat alone in the blue flicker of a movie neither of them had watched, one hand pressed to her own mouth, replaying the whole thing on a loop she already knew she wasn't going to be able to stop.

Neither of them said a word about it on Monday.