by Tess Harper
“You are not a one night stand, Emily. You’re the girl I want to spend—”
“Look,” I interrupted, getting annoyed. “I know that you’re trying to be romantic and sweet, but listen to what you’re saying! Why do we have to get married? Seriously, why? If we like each other, then it will happen naturally. If things don’t work out, then we’ll be able to avoid major heartache and all sorts of other unseen complications.”
“Why wait if you know? A marriage is a partnership. I want to be your partner.”
“How can you want to be my partner if you don’t even know me? It takes time to establish that kind of relationship. We have—had—a great beginning, but there’s a lot more to a relationship than fun times and great sex.”
Jack looked like I slapped him. “You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t understand that marriage takes work? That people who once loved each other might end up despising the other’s existence if they don’t communicate? That they can become strangers? I’m doing this because I know these things.
“If we don’t make this commitment, what would happen next? I’ll leave town soon and you’ll let me because you won’t want to hold me down. We’ll keep a polite distance from one another because that’s what’s expected and neither of us wants to be a burden to the other. But then what? We visit each other on weekends, or when we have time. One of us will get busy or both of us will and suddenly seeing each other is stressful. Maybe that stress will break us apart, or maybe we’ll swiftly try to move in together to force things to change for the better. But both of us will still have our own separate lives, and that quick attempt to patch things over will just show us the cracks in the walls more clearly.
“When I make this commitment, I’m telling you that you come first. That what we have is more important than anything else. That supporting you will never be an inconvenience for me, because more than anything, that’s what I want to give you. There will never be any insecurity in your mind about where my heart lies, because it’s always yours.”
A part of what he said made sense. When I started teaching in the fall, would I make time for a boyfriend in another state who I’d just met? I’d try, but I wouldn’t make it a priority. My future would come first.
And marriage wouldn’t change that.
“Jack,” I whispered, taking his hand and placing it on my thigh. I rubbed it gently. His fingers were so strong—so young. “Even when things seem perfect at first, they can break apart. People change.”
“I love you,” he repeated. “It happened before I was even conscious of it.”
“And you can fall out of love just as quickly.”
“No,” he vowed. “I’m not like that.”
I sighed. “Jack, even you just said you’d never been in love like this before.”
“That just makes this even more precious.”
“Jack.” I kept saying his name because I didn’t know what to say or what to do. This was all so surreal I wasn’t even sure if it was real. No, that wasn’t true. There was something so real right now that it cut through everything else—Jack’s sincerity.
I remembered what it felt like to be in love like this—to be so willing to throw everything else away.
I was still living with the pain of that impulse.
“I’m starting a job this fall that’s very important to me. It’s something I’ve dreamed of doing ever since my High School took a field trip to the MET—”
“So you live in New York? That’s great.”
Actually, I didn’t live in NYC and had no plans to move there. “Jack, you’re not listening.”
“I can easily move to New York.”
My heart stopped. “What?”
Jack’s grin was so wide I felt like I’d be swallowed whole. “I love that city.”
My heart started up again, beating so fast the room began to spin. “But what do you mean you’ll move there?”
“I can leave in a few days. Just tell me the street corner, and I’ll be waiting for you with a bouquet of roses.”
A few days? Just tell him the street corner? I struggled to keep my hands from shaking. “I want you to answer this next question honestly: Did you have any intention of moving to New York before this conversation?”
“No.” He was still grinning. Why was he still grinning? Did he really think it was a good thing to just move to a new city on a whim when you’re starting your life?
“You’d move to a new city just to be with me?”
His expression softened. “Of course.”
Of course? “Do you really think that’s a good idea? What if it doesn’t work out?”
He glanced away. “Then I’ll know it wasn’t meant to be, and didn’t fail just because I didn’t try.”
It’s worse when you know something failed because of you. When you can’t blame it on anything or anyone else. When you put all of yourself into something and it still doesn’t work out.
His hand beneath my suddenly felt hot. Mine were cold. Clammy. Was that panic making my heart beat so fast? I didn’t expect his words to touch me this deeply. To make me so afraid.
Jack reached for the plastic bubble that had housed my ring and stuffed it in his pocket. “Sorry,” he said as he stood. “I…I pushed this really fast, didn’t I?”
Yeah. I sat in silence. What could I say? I balled the hand with the ring on it into a fist. The purple flower kept smiling, taunting me.
“Look, we’ll hold off on marriage. Forget I said anything about marriage. Let’s just move in together and see how it goes.”
I stared at him. Did he just say he wanted to move in together and see where it goes? He still wanted to move in with me? He didn’t think that was a little fast? “I can’t do this.”
“What do you mean?”
“Jack, look. I really, really like you. But this just isn’t how successful relationships work.”
“And you have a lot of experience with successful relationships?”
I drew back as if he’d slapped me.
“Sorry. I should never have said something like that to you. I just got—”
“It’s alright,” I interrupted. “I don’t have a lot of experience with successful relationships. I mean, I was with someone for four years, but looking back I think it was just because of inertia. It was easy to be together, so we were. When I tried to push things to a deeper level, it fell apart.”
Jack knelt next to me and rubbed the small of my back. “I’m sorry, Emily. I’m not like that. I would never push you away.”
I looked away from his blue, pleading eyes. I saw too much of myself and my own failures in them. “I know you’re not, and that’s precisely why I can’t do this. I saw how much damage I could do to a relationship. I don’t want to know how much damage two people with the same mentality could do.”
“They’d support each other and make sure the other one never felt alone.”
Maybe. And they’d both sacrifice everything until there was nothing left but that other person, and one day they would wake up and wonder what happened to all their dreams.
“Sometimes being alone is a good thing, Jack. Sometimes, you need to be alone to find yourself.”
Jack’s face crumbled. “Don’t do this, Emily. Don’t throw this away just because you’re scared.”
I tilted my head back, my eyes following the path the cracks and peeling paint made in the ceiling. “I need space. I need time to think. When I’m with you, I have a tendency to forget the things I’ve sacrificed so much to achieve. That’s not good.”
“I don’t want you to have to sacrifice your dreams. I want to be by your side when you make them come true.”
I shut my eyes. His words touched some deep part of me, making me tremble. I wanted to reach out to him. To accept his words as truth.
This was worse than I thought—he was so much more dangerous than I’d originally thought—because he believed every single thing he said. He didn’t know how passion could fade,
how dreams could be buried, and how, because of those two things, you could slowly come to despise the one you loved more than anything else.
“Time.” My voice was a hoarse whisper. “I need time…to think.”
“What do you mean?”
I straightened my back. The hand that had previously been rubbing me so tenderly fell to the back of the seat. “I mean, I need time to think all this stuff over between you and me.”
“Why don’t you talk to me about it?”
No! I can’t think when you’re around, can’t you tell? I don’t feel like myself when I’m with you. I feel like this other, more desperate and emotional thing. The thing I used to be. The thing that was willing to give too much of herself away and ended up getting hurt.
“I need time, Jack. If you’re not willing to give me even a few hours to myself, then this isn’t going to work.”
He stood and ran his hands through his hair. “Sorry. I’m just worried.”
“About what?”
He glanced out at the branches waving in the morning breeze outside the kitchen window. “That you’ll run away again.”
“What do you mean ‘again’?”
“Like you did at the pool—”
“You mean when you found me while I was naked and proceeded to take off your clothes? Yeah, wonder why I did that.”
He shook his head, a half-smile on his lips. “And then on the beach.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “We were playing tag.”
“I was trying to ask you out. You only agreed to play tag because you knew that you were faster than me.”
He had a point.
He looked at me, his expression full of longing. “You are faster than me, Emily. I’m afraid that if you run again, I’ll never be able to find you.”
Nervous energy coursed through my body, making me shake. “Four hours,” I whispered. “Just give me four hours.”
“And you won’t run?”
I balled my hands into fists. “I won’t.”
“Promise?”
“Jack—”
“Even if you want to run, even if you are going to run, just tell me.”
I wet my lips. “So you can try to talk me out of it if I decide to leave?”
“Yeah,” he admitted, then slowly shut his eyes. “But also because, if you do decide to leave, I want to say goodbye.”
***
Sophie flopped into the driver’s seat and slammed the door behind her. Then, she turned and looked at me. “You sure about this?”
“I’m sure.”
She sighed and put the car into reverse. “Alright. If you’re sure, then I’m sure.”
The car pulled back. I shut my eyes and tried not to remember the letter I’d written with trembling hands on the kitchen counter with a stupid ballpoint pen that kept running out of ink.
Jack,
I was going to give this to you in person, but I’m not strong enough. Goodbyes always seem cowardly to me. They mean you’ve failed, and even if it’s sometimes better to fail or to let go I just don’t think I can do it. I don’t want to be convinced to stay.
You’re very persuasive, but it’s a talent that can get you into trouble when you’re not careful. Marriage is something that you must be careful about. Love isn’t something you should give to others quickly. Lust can be misleading.
I don’t know what I feel for you. Lust, certainly. You’re beautiful, both inside and out. You’re passionate and young and intelligent. You have so much going for you. On paper, you’re the kind of guy every girl dreams of marrying. But you have one quality that is going to get you into trouble: an inability to be flexible and respect other people’s boundaries.
You said that we should put each other first. I did that, once. I put someone else first and I poured my entire existence into our happiness. I put my dreams second. And I ended up hating him. At first I hated how nothing I did was ever enough—how it never really made him happy. It wasn’t until later that I realized happiness for us would have been impossible. Even though I didn’t realize it at first, I was miserable, and that misery permeated into all aspects of my life until one day I realized that the person I hated wasn’t my boyfriend, but myself.
You might say that the reason why that relationship failed was because we weren’t partners. We weren’t equal. One of us was putting more of themselves in than the other. Maybe you’re right, but when someone puts their dreams second, they will always wonder what might have happened.
I don’t want you to follow me. I don’t want you to change your life for me. I want you to find yourself.
I don’t think that you can do that with me, and I’m fairly certain I won’t be able to with you. You say you want a partnership, but you didn’t listen to my concerns. Instead, you swept them under the rug or didn’t even hear them. That’s not a partnership. That’s one person telling the other person how it’s going to be, and that’s the kind of relationship I will never allow myself to be in, no matter how much I might care for that person.
I’m sorry I broke my promise to you, Jack. It probably doesn’t feel like it since I’m leaving things like this, but I am truly sorry. I wish you every happiness, and I know that you will find it without me.
Emily
I rubbed my hands over my arms, trying to stop myself from shivering. It wasn’t even cold. “Do you think I did the right thing, Soph?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sophie glance at me, then turn her attention back to the road. We passed two residential blocks before she said anything. “I don’t know. Maybe Jack won’t understand why you did what you did, but I do. It’s not your job or your responsibility to fix him, Em. What you did probably seems hurtful to him; but it was necessary to keep yourself from getting hurt.”
“Then why do I feel like such shit?”
“Because sometimes doing the right thing feels shitty.”
I groaned and rubbed my temples. “Ugh! Doing the right thing sucks.”
“Hey, I’m just trying to be honest. You can’t please everyone, Em. For what it’s worth, I’m really proud of you for putting yourself first.”
“Thanks Soph.”
“I told you this in 8th grade, and I’ll say it again now, no eye candy is ever gonna come between us.”
I sniffled and laughed.
“Was that a sniffle-laugh?”
I did it again. “Yeah, but thanks. I’m feeling a lot better.”
“Em, what he did to you wasn’t nice either. Other people probably wouldn’t see it that way, but I know your history and what you’ve been through. He said absolutely every wrong thing at the wrong time. If I were you, I probably would have done the same thing.”
“But that doesn’t make it right,” I whispered.
Sophie sighed. “You want to go back there to all that drama? Just say the word and I’ll turn around.”
My throat felt tight. Yes, a part of me screamed. You have to. You need him.
And it was precisely that desperate, needy part of me that gave me the strength to keep going forward. “No. I don’t want to go back.”
We stopped to let three kids holding their parents’ hands cross. Each one had a different colored sand bucket that gleamed under the sun—bumble-bee yellow, fire-engine red, and the deep, devastating, brilliant blue of Jack’s eyes.
Sophie must have seen something in my expression, because she continued, “It wouldn’t have lasted anyways, Em. He’ll move on and so will you.”
Would it really be that easy? And even if it was that easy for me, could I know for sure that it was that way for him too? I pressed my forehead to the window and watched bright blue, yellow and red scenes from Nantucket pass by. Soon summer would be over. Soon, everyone would go home. And the remnants of this beautiful, painful dream would fade into memory.
Chapter 8
I slapped my alarm clock, silencing it moments before it fell to the floor.
Well, this morning was off to a good start.
