Stay If You Can

Chapter Seven

Her name was Paige, and Eli picked her the way you pick a fire extinguisher not because you want it, but because you know exactly where the fire's going to be.

He wasn't proud of the logic, even as he was doing it. Paige was nice. Genuinely nice, easy to talk to, laughed at his jokes without reading three layers beneath them for what he actually meant. She'd been flirting with him since September in a low-key, unbothered way, the kind of interest that asked nothing of him and expected less.

That was the whole appeal, if he was being honest with himself, which he was trying very hard not to be.

With Paige there was no gold-light court, no bleacher, no version of himself that felt dangerously unguarded. With Paige he could hold a conversation the exact same way he held everything else in his life at arm's length, managed, safe. If Paige left one day, and people always eventually left, it would sting the way losing something ordinary stings. Not the way losing something necessary would.

He asked her to homecoming on a Tuesday, in the hallway, casual as anything. She said yes immediately, delighted, no idea she'd just been selected for the job of *not being Jenna.*

He told himself that wasn't cruel. He told himself a lot of things that week.

The problem was the eleven days since the couch hadn't actually done what he needed them to do. He'd expected the pull toward Jenna to fade with distance, the way everything faded if you starved it of oxygen long enough. Instead it had done the opposite every day he didn't let himself close that gap between them felt like holding his breath, and every accidental brush of her shoulder in the hallway landed like a small, precise injury.

Paige, mercifully, asked nothing of him that hurt. Paige didn't clock his silences. Paige didn't say things like *you catch yourself liking something like it's against the rules* in a tone that made him feel simultaneously seen and skinned alive.

It should have been a relief. For about four days, it almost was.

Then Jenna found out.

He didn't tell her he'd been actively avoiding any conversation that could lead there but Fairhaven was a small enough school that news like *Eli's taking Paige Doyle to homecoming* moved faster than he could manage it. He found out she knew because of the specific way she didn't react when she saw him at his locker that Thursday: too even, too pleasant, a smile calibrated exactly one degree too carefully to be real.

"Heard about homecoming," she said, breezy, not looking up from her bag. "Paige. That's nice."

"Jenna....."

"I said it's nice, Eli." Still breezy. Still smiling. Her eyes, when she finally looked up, absolutely were not smiling at all. "You don't have to explain your dating life to me. We're friends."

The word *friends* landed like a slap, precisely because she'd said it so gently, precisely because he knew the way you know your own hand that she was performing exactly the same steady, unbothered calm she'd promised herself she'd hold onto after the couch.

He should have let it go. Letting it go was the whole plan.

"It's not what you think," he heard himself say instead.

"I don't think anything." Her jaw was tight now, the smile fraying at the edges. "You made it extremely clear what you wanted. Or, well. What you didn't want." A beat. "This is just you being consistent."

"Jenna..."

"I have practice." She was already walking, already putting the hallway between them, and it was such a precise mirror of exactly what he'd done to her eleven days earlier that it landed like a punch he'd thrown at himself.

He stood there a long moment, locker still open, the taste of his own hypocrisy sitting bitter in his mouth.

The truth, the one he wasn't ready to say to anyone, least of all himself, was this: Paige was safe because losing her would cost him nothing. And the entire reason he needed something that would cost him nothing was that some part of him a part he was actively, desperately trying to smother had already understood that losing Jenna would cost him everything.

That wasn't distance. That was a confession dressed up as strategy, and some animal part of his brain had known it the whole time even while the rest of him insisted it was just being smart.

He went to homecoming with Paige three weeks later. She looked beautiful. She laughed at all his jokes. The music was fine, the night was fine, everything was exactly as manageable and unremarkable as he'd needed it to be.

Across the gym, half-lit under the same string lights, he watched Jenna dance with a group of friends, head thrown back laughing at something, looking every bit as free and unbothered as she wanted him to think she was.

She caught him looking once. Just once, just for a second, before she turned deliberately back to her friends and in that one second, Eli saw something flicker across her face that had nothing to do with unbothered.

It looked exactly like the thing he was working so hard to feel nothing at all.

He excused himself from Paige twelve minutes later, telling her he needed air, and stood alone outside the gym doors in the cold October night, breath fogging, chest aching in a way three weeks of careful distance was supposed to have fixed by now.

It hadn't fixed anything. He was starting to suspect nothing was going to.

His phone buzzed. A text, not from Jenna from his mother, four words that made his stomach drop straight through the floor of the whole manageable, unremarkable night he'd built for himself.

"Come home. Now. Please."