Page 1 of It Couldn't Be You
Prologue
Iknew my boyfriend didn’t want me to go to this party, but here I was at the Hernandezes’ anyway.
Pulling up to the house and seeing Gabriel’s—who was definitely not my boyfriend—janky old truck parked out front, felt like I had stepped into some kind of cruel time machine.
As I parked my car, I was suddenly sixteen again, my heart beating faster just at the knowledge of Gabriel’s presence. My body felt electric, like someone had connected wires that had been left disconnected for too long.
No, I reminded myself as I unbuckled. I was a twenty-four-year-old woman. I was a college graduate with a career in a serious relationship (and not with the owner of the aforementioned janky trunk). I wasn’t going to be affected again by this man.
But, as I went to open the car door, my mind raced with questions. Was he hoping to see me? Was he single? How long was he staying?Was he even there?
It’d been so long since I last saw him. The sight of that truck in the driveway still sent my pulse humming.
You will not be affected by this man,Emma, I repeated to myself.
What was it about Gabriel?
Well, okay, it was that I could always feel him. I remembered being sixteen and feeling my hair stand on end just knowing he was upstairs working on homework while I was downstairs talking in the kitchen with Gabriel’s younger sister and my best friend, Katie. Existing in the same space as Gabriel made the air around me drum the chorus of a pop punk early 2000s love song. I was completely thrilled to know he was breathing and moving and living a flight of stairs above me. That maybe I’d get the chance to hear his thoughts, to hear his voice—to brush up against him.
Gabriel was thrilling, but I obviously didn’t like him. He was off-limits with the whole brother to my best friend thing and kind of conceited. Plus, he always said whatever he thought without any kind of filter, which could sometimes piss me off.
He was just Gabriel. And no matter the jolt of electricity that went down my spine whenever he sat beside me—we couldn’t be together.
Gabriel made me roll my eyes, but he also made breathing embarrassingly complicated when he let his eyes linger on me. Plus, there was his curly brown hair. He had this one curl that always fell across his forehead, and sometimes, like on my twenty-first birthday, I would wrap it around my finger—and he let me.
But that was the thing about Gabriel. Ever since I was, like, twelve years old, he made it hard for me to concentrate on anyone but him.
We would be at a Christmas party at his house or an English Club meeting at school, and I would have to literally make myself listen to whoever was talking to me and not tune in to whatever Gabriel was saying across the room to someone else. As if I cared what he had to say about the gas mileage on his truck or his chemistry exam grade.
And don’t get me started on whenever he was flirting with some other girl. Okay, there was some part of me that felt some way about Gabriel. But it was the curly hair. And the sideways grin. I preferred that grin to be about me, and I felt lucky when it was. I would get nervous about losing his approval, his adoration—like when someone falls asleep on your shoulder, and you stay as still as you can so you don’t wake them.
That was the thing about Gabe, I thought. There was some kind of heat between us. When we were in the same vicinity, you could follow the trail of sparks from me to him. Maybe it even stretched farther than being in the same vicinity. Maybe it ran from Texas to California, and we were just really good at ignoring it.
God,I thought to myself.I’d hope all these years had blown every little spark out.
The last time I remembered us really talking, just the two of us, face to face, was the night of my twenty-first birthday. I could still hear what Gabriel said that night. I felt my cheeks go hot as I remembered.
How could Gabriel’s hand tugging on my elbow do more to me than my own boyfriend’s lips on mine? How could Gabriel whispering my name in my ear with some dumb joke make me melt easier than a man I’ve been dating getting down on one knee?
I shook my head.That wasn’t true.
I didn’t want that to be true. Maybe it was true for teenage me, but it just couldn’t be true anymore, not for twenty-four-year-old me. I needed a key to lock up these stupid thoughts.
I needed to get my mind in order. No one made me feel like my boyfriend, I almost said aloud. Except, how my boyfriend made me feel was a complicated issue lately. Like a song fading, and you didn’t even realize you’d missed the last few lines.
But here I was outside Gabriel’s house. I took a deep breath. He was just stupid, annoying, get-my-heart-beating Gabriel. It was just the way he was. It was about him, not me. Maybe he wasn’t even here. I hoped he wasn’t. I fidgeted with my keys.
I felt a thrill go through me at the idea he was standing in his kitchen all barefoot and grinning. One of his plain white tees on with a V-neck, the kind he usually wore under his other clothes. The kind that smelled like him when he got close. His dark curls and amber eyes. He’d grin at me when I walked in. He’d greet me in the way he always did.
“Emma,” he always said. Not “hi” or “hello,” always my name first. Like when I was sixteen. The day after my birthday.
My mom dropped me off in front of their house like she always did. The anticipation fluttered in my chest when I spotted his truck that afternoon. That janky old truck. I bypassed the front door and headed around the house through the side yard toward the back porch, which ran along the pool. I was all timidity and reckless excitement for him to see me in my new yellow halter bikini—to get his eyes on me.
“Emma,” he said, almost teasingly, when he saw me turn the corner toward the pool. The summer sun beat down on us, and I tossed a smile his way.
“Em,” Katie, my best friend since kindergarten, called out. She was lying on her stomach, working on her tan. “You made it!”
“I did,” I said. I was about to say something about being tired from my party last night, but then Katie’s mom, watering their plants in the backyard, called out, “Did you drive yourself here?”
