One True Loves

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  Everyone was scrambling. What had previously been the controlled type of chaos that rages through a high school kegger became unruly disorder, teenagers running in every direction. It was the closest I’d come to seeing anarchy.

  When Jesse and I got to the bushes, he guided me into them first. They were dense and thorny. I could feel the skin on my bare arms and ankles chafing against the tiny sharp blades in every direction.

  But the bushes were big enough that Jesse could crawl in next to me and they were dark enough that I felt safe from the police officers. We were far enough away from everyone else that it started to feel quiet—if the background noise of a police siren and heavy running footsteps can ever really be described as quiet.

  I could sense Jesse’s body right next to me, could feel his arm as it grazed mine.

  “Ow!” he said in a stage whisper.

  “What?” I whispered back.

  “I think I cut my lip on a thorn.”

  A harsh stream of light cascaded over the bushes we were hiding in and I found myself frozen still.

  I could hear my own breath, feel my heart beating against the bone of my chest. I was terrified; there was no doubt about it. I was drunk by this point. Not plastered, by any means, but well past a buzz. There was real danger in getting caught: not only my parents’ disappointment, but also the actual threat of being arrested.

  That being said, it was impossible to deny the tingle of excitement running through me. It was a rush, to be stifling my own breath as I felt the shadow of a police officer grow closer and closer. It was thrilling to feel adrenaline run through me.

  After some time, the coast started to clear. There were no more heavy footsteps, no more flashlights. We heard cars driving away, chattering stop. My ankles had started to itch considerably and I knew I’d been bitten by something or somethings. It was, after all, May in Massachusetts—which meant that every bug in the air was out for blood.

  I wasn’t sure when to speak up, when to break the silence.

  On the one hand, it seemed like it was safe to come out of the bushes. On the other hand, you never want to be wrong about that.

  I heard Jesse whisper my name.

  “Emma?” he said softly. “Are you okay?”

  I didn’t even know that he knew my name and there he was, saying it as if it were his to say.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe a little scraped up but other than that, I’m good. You?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m good, too.”

  He was quiet for a moment longer and then he said, “I think it’s safe. Are you able to crawl out?”

  The way he said it made me think that maybe he’d crawled into the bushes before, that maybe this wasn’t the first time Jesse had been at a party he wasn’t supposed to be at, doing things he wasn’t supposed to be doing.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I got it.”

  A few awkward army-crawl-like steps forward and I was standing on the grass in front of Jesse Lerner.

  His lip was cut and there was a scrape on the top of his forehead. My arms had a few tiny scratches down them. My ankle still itched. I lifted my foot up and saw a few small welts where my pants met the top of my shoes.

  It was pitch-dark, the lights in the house all dimmed. Everything was deadly quiet. The only sound either of us could hear was the sound of our own breath and that of the crickets rubbing their wings together, chirping.

  I wasn’t sure what we were supposed to do now. How we were supposed to get home.

  “C’mon,” Jesse said, and then he took my hand again. Twice in one night, holding hands with Jesse Lerner. I had to remind myself not to take it too personally. “We will walk down the street until we find somebody else who escaped and bum a ride with them.”

  “Okay,” I said, willing to follow his lead because I had no better idea. I just wanted to get home quickly so I could call Olive and make sure she was okay and make sure she knew that I was.

  And then, there was Sam. He’d been there, in the pool. Where had he gone?

  Jesse and I set out down the dark suburban road, headed nowhere in particular, hoping it would lead us somewhere good.

  “How come you weren’t swimming?” I asked him once we were a few feet down the road.

  Jesse looked at me. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, aren’t you supposed to be the greatest swimmer of all time?”

  Jesse laughed. “I don’t know about that.”

  “You were written up in the Beacon.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not a fish. I do exist outside of the water,” he teased.

  I shrugged. “Question still stands, though,” I said. “It was a pool party.”

  He was quiet for a moment. I thought maybe the conversation was over, maybe we weren’t supposed to be talking, maybe he didn’t want to talk to me. But once he finally started talking again, I realized that he had been caught up in his own head for a moment, deciding how much to say.

  “Do you ever feel like everyone is always telling you who you are?” he asked me. “Like, people are acting as if they know better than you what you’re good at or who you are supposed to be?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think so.”

  “Can I let you in on a very poorly kept secret?” he asked me.

  “Yeah.”

  “My parents want me to train for the Olympic trials.”

  “Ah.” He was right. That was a very poorly kept secret.

  “Can I let you in on a better-kept secret?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “I hate swimming.”

  He was staring forward, putting one foot in front of the other along the road.

  “Do your parents know that?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “Nobody does,” he said. “Well, I guess, except for you now.”

  At the time, I could not, for the life of me, understand why he told me this, why he trusted me with the truth about his life more than anyone else. I thought it meant that I was special, that maybe he had always felt about me the way I felt about him.

  Now, looking back on it, I know it was just the opposite. I was a girl in the background of his life—that’s what made me safe.

  “I never really cared much for swimming anyway,” I told him reassuringly. I said it because it was the truth. But there was a large secondary benefit in what I’d said.

  Now I knew who he really was and I still liked him. And that made me different from anyone else.

  “My parents run the bookstore,” I said. “Blair Books.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know. I mean, I put that together.” He smiled at me and then looked away. We made our way around a corner and found ourselves on the main road.

  “They want me to take over the store one day,” I told him. “They are always giving me these five hundred–page novels as presents and telling me that one day I’ll fall in love with reading just like they have and . . . I don’t know.”

  “What?” Jesse asked.

  “I hate reading books.”

  Jesse smiled, surprised and satisfied. He put his hand up, offering me a high five. He had confided in me because he thought I was a stranger, only to find that I was a comrade.

  I laughed and leaned over, raising my palm to his. We slapped and then Jesse held on for a moment.

  “Are you drunk?” he asked me.

  “A little,” I said. “Are you?”

  “A little,” he answered back.

  He didn’t let go of my hand and I thought maybe, just maybe, he was going to kiss me. And then I thought that was an insane thing to think. That would never happen.

  Later on, when Jesse and I would tell each other everything, I asked him what he was thinking back then. I’d say, “That moment when you held on to my hand, right before the cops found us, were you going to kiss me?” He’d say he didn’t know. He’d say that all he remembered was that he had just realized, for the first time, how pretty I was. “I just remember noticing the freckles under your eye. So, may
be. Maybe I was going to kiss you. I don’t know.”

  And we will never know.

  Because just as I built up enough confidence to look Jesse right in the eye in the wee hours of the morning, we were blinded by the stunning bright light of a police officer’s flashlight, aimed directly into our eyes. We were drunk on the sidewalk, caught red-handed.

  A litany of half-assed lies and two failed Breathalyzers later, Jesse and I sat handcuffed along the wall of the Acton Police Department waiting to be picked up.

  “My parents are going to kill me,” I said to him. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard my dad as pissed as he was on the phone.” In the bright light of the police station, the cut on Jesse’s lip looked burgundy, the bug bites on my ankles almost terra-cotta.

  I thought Jesse would react by telling me how much worse he had it, how much more unbearable his parents would undoubtedly be. But he didn’t. Instead he said, “I’m sorry.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. I never realized how often I used my hands to talk until they were constrained. “It’s not your fault.”

  Jesse shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “But I’m still sorry.”

  “Well, then, I’m sorry, too.”

  He smiled. “Apology accepted.”

  There was a list of recent detainments on the table just to our left. I kept sneaking peeks at it to see if anyone else had been caught. I saw a few names of seniors I recognized but no Olive, no Sam. I felt confident I’d been the only one of us picked off.

  “Are you worried about your parents?” I said.

  Jesse thought about it and then shook his head. “My parents have a very specific set of rules and as long as I don’t break any of those, I can pretty much do whatever I want.”

  “What are the rules?” I asked.

  “Break state records and don’t get anything below a B-minus.”

  “Seriously?” I said. “Those are the only rules you have to live by?”

  “Do you know how hard it is to break state records and get a B-minus in all of your classes?” Jesse wasn’t angry at me, but there was an edge to his voice.

  I nodded.

  “But the upside is they didn’t seem too angry on the phone when I called them from the police station at one a.m. So I have that.”

  I laughed and then fiddled with my arms in the cuffs, trying to keep them from rubbing against the bone of my wrists.

  “Why are they making us wear these?” I asked. “They didn’t even arrest us. What do they think we are going to do? Run away?”

  Jesse laughed. “Maybe. We could escape out of here. Go all Bonnie and Clyde.” I wondered if he knew Bonnie and Clyde were lovers. I thought about telling him.

  “So your parents aren’t going to take it as well, huh?” Jesse asked.

  I shook my head. “Oh, hell no. No, I’m going to be working shifts at the store from now until I’m ninety-two years old, basically.”

  “The bookstore?”

  “Yeah; that’s my parents’ favorite mode of punishment. Also, they are under the illusion that my sister and I are going to one day take over the store, so . . .”

  “Is that what you want to do?”

  “Run a bookstore? Are you kidding me? Absolutely not.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Get out of Acton,” I said. “That’s number one. I want to see the world. First stop, the Pacific Ocean, and then the sky’s the limit.”

  “Oh yeah?” he said. “I’ve been thinking about applying to a few schools in California. I figured if I’m three thousand miles away, my parents can’t force me to train doubles.”

  “I was thinking about doing that, too,” I said. “California, I mean. I don’t know if my parents will let me, but I want to go to the University of Los Angeles.”

  “To study what?”

  “No idea. I just know that I want to join, like, every abroad program they have. See the world.”

  “That sounds awesome,” Jesse said. “I want to do that. I want to see the world.”

  “I just don’t know if my parents will go for it,” I said.

  “If you want to do something, you have to do it.”

  “What? That doesn’t even make sense.”

  “Of course it does. If you want something as passionately as you clearly want this, that means you owe it to yourself to make it happen. That’s what I’m doing. I want out so I’m getting out. I’m going far, far away. You should, too,” he said.

  “I don’t think my parents would like that,” I said.

  “Your parents don’t have to be you. You have to be you. My philosophy is that, you know, you did it their way for a long time. Soon, it’s time for your way.”

  It was plain to see that Jesse wasn’t really talking about my parents and me. But everything that he said resonated. It reverberated in my mind, growing louder instead of softer.

  “I think you’re right,” I said.

  “I know I’m right,” he said, smiling.

  “No, really. I’m going to apply to the University of Los Angeles.”

  “Good for you,” he said.

  “And you should, too,” I told him. “Stop swimming if you hate it. Do something else. Something you love.”

  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.