One True Loves(16)

Jesse smiled. “You know, you’re nothing like I imagined you’d be.”

“What do you mean?” I asked him. It was hard for me to believe that Jesse had thought about me before, that he even knew I existed before tonight.

“I don’t know; you’re just . . . different.”

“In a good way or a bad way?”

“Oh, definitely a good way,” he said, nodding. “For sure.”

“What did you think I was like before?” I asked, now desperate to know. How did I seem before that was bad? I needed to make sure I didn’t seem like it again.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“C’mon,” I said. “Just say whatever it is.”

“I don’t want to, like, embarrass you or something,” Jesse said.

“What? What are you talking about?”

Jesse looked at me. And then decided to just say it. “I don’t know. I got the impression that maybe you might have had a crush on me.”

I could feel myself move away from him. “What? No, I didn’t.”

He shrugged as if this was no skin off his back. “Okay, see? I was wrong.”

“What made you think that?”

“Carolyn, my ex-girlfriend . . .” he said, starting to explain.

“I know who Carolyn is,” I said.

“Well, she thought that you might.”

“Why would she think that?”

“I don’t know. Because she was always jealous when girls looked at me. And you must have looked at me once. And it made her think that.”

“But, I mean, you believed her.”

“Well, I mean, I hoped she was right.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, ‘why’?”

“Why did you hope that she was right? Did you want me to have a crush on you?”

“Of course I did. Doesn’t everyone want people to have crushes on them?”

“Did you want me in particular to have a crush on you?”

“Sure,” Jesse said as if it were obvious.

“But why?”

“Well, it doesn’t matter why, does it? Because you didn’t. So it’s irrelevant.”

A conversational roadblock.

It was one I could only get past if I admitted the truth. I weighed the pros and cons, trying to decide if it was worth it.

“Fine—I had a crush on you once. Freshman year.”

Jesse turned and smiled at me. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, but it’s over.”

“Why is it over?”

“I don’t know; you were with Carolyn. I barely knew you.”

“But I’m not with Carolyn and you know me now.”

“What are you saying?”

“Why don’t you have a thing for me now?”

“Why don’t you have a thing for me now?” I asked.

And that’s when Jesse said the thing that set my entire adult love life in motion. “I think I actually do have a thing for you. As of about an hour and a half ago.”

I looked at him, stunned. Trying to find the words.

“Well, then I do, too,” I finally said.

“See?” he said, smiling. “I thought so.”

And then he leaned over when no one was looking and he kissed me.

That summer, I had to work triple the normal amount of shifts at the store as penance for my underage drinking. I had to listen to four separate lectures from my parents about how I had disappointed them, how they never thought I’d be the kind of daughter who got detained.

Marie took the assistant manager job, making her my boss for a third of the hours I was awake. I learned that the only thing I disliked more than hanging out with her was taking orders from her.

Olive spent the summer on the Cape with her older brother, waiting tables and sunbathing.

Sam moved to Boston two weeks ahead of schedule and never said good-bye.

But I didn’t mind any of that. Because that was the summer Jesse and I fell in love.





Emma, would you just turn around?”

“What?” I said.

“Just turn around, for crying out loud!”

And so I did, to find Jesse standing behind me on a sandy beach in Malibu, California. He was holding a small ruby ring. It was nine years after he kissed me that first time in the Acton Police Station.

“Jesse . . .” I said.

“Will you marry me?”

I was speechless. But not because he was asking me to marry him. We were twenty-five. We’d been together our entire adult lives. We had both moved across the country in order to attend the University of Los Angeles. We’d spent our junior year abroad in Sydney, Australia, and backpacked across Europe for five months after we graduated.

And we had built a life for ourselves in LA, far away from Blair Books and five hundred–meter freestyles. Jesse had become a production assistant on nature documentaries, his jobs taking him as far as Africa and as close to home as the Mojave Desert.

I, in a turn of events that seemed to infuriate Marie, had become a travel writer. My sophomore year of school, I found out about a class called travel literature offered by the School of Journalism. I’d heard that it wasn’t an easy class to get into. In fact, the professor only took nine students per year. But if you got in, the class subsidized a trip to a different place every year. That year was Alaska.