Page 21 of It Couldn't Be You
It was reassuring, confirming even, but my anxious heart was still hammering away in my chest. As good as it was to talk to my parents, the person I needed to talk to was Jordan. But I really didn’t want to talk to him even if my heart wouldn’t rest until I did.
One of the big problems with making the rude, immature, and selfish decision was that it made it easier to continue making bad decisions. As if I had turned myself on the rude, immature and selfish setting, Jordan had tried to call me a few times, and I kept clicking “decline.”
Each time I pressed “decline,” I could see the hurt on his face when I walked away from him sitting on bended knee with a ring in his hand. I felt emotionally paralyzed. I couldn’t think up any words to say to the man hurting on the other line. I was barely even saying words to my parents. I was barely even thinking words to myself.
Jordan was one of the closest people in my life over the past couple of years. He felt like my hometown in human form. He had been my shoulder to lean on, my self-prescribed balm for the wounds of growing up. We had lived in this same town since we were babies. We were in the same nursery at church. Our moms were friendly in hallways and at football games. We went to the same summer camps, studied for the same tests, and bruised the same knees as we learned to ride our bikes.
This wasn’t a rarity with the people in my town, but it deepened our relationship like a gas on the pedal when we were first moving our relationship forward. Over the past two years, I had grown to know him even more. I knew his instincts, his reflexes, the black-and-white way in which he understood the world, how he thought literally and logically.
So, I knew his response would be, “Do you not love me anymore?” when I denied his proposal. But I did love him. Loving him felt like a natural reflex, like an “of course” to a silly question.
I had watched him from afar when I was a freshman in high school while he walked hand-in-hand with his high school sweetheart. All through high school, I had hoped, if he ever found himself looking for love again, he would ask me to the dance. I prayed he would see me in my new shirt and think I was beautiful. I wished for him to offer to drive me home. But he never did.
Not until we were in our twenties, at least. We found ourselves both recent college graduates moving back to our tiny Texas town, Sweet River. I remembered the day I saw him finally see me.
I was late to church on Sunday morning, rushing through the parking lot, and there he stood in the lobby as I rushed inside. Our eyes locked. I saw him notice me, like really notice me. I literally thought,finally. I forgot I was rushing as he walked over to me while I stood swaying in my royal blue wrap dress.
“Emma Brown, are you back home?” he asked me as if we’d been keeping track of each other’s whereabouts all this time aside from what we scrolled past on social media.
We both said that we couldn’t believe we had lost touch the past several years, both wrapped up in lives at different colleges—mine a school only a few hours away, Tarleton State University, in a similarly small town to this one, and his school was a big state school in San Antonio. He had moved home only a couple of years before me.
We decided right then that we needed to catch up like we were old friends. I don’t think we’d ever had a solo conversation in our whole lives. We made dinner plans. I found out over dinner at my longtime favorite Italian spot that he had come home to start his own construction company.
I told him how I had come home to take a job as a reporter at our local newspaper. I told him how the man who hired me had taught my high school journalism course. It all felt so nostalgic and welcoming after four years of growing pains.
As we walked back to his truck on that fall night, I just couldn’t believe my luck. He reached for my hand, and I remembered giggly conversations about what it would be like to hold Jordan’s hand at ninth-grade sleepovers.
I felt my life falling into place like dominoes. Jordan made coming home feel romantic and destined when mere weeks before, the idea of coming home felt like accepting a failing grade at adulthood.
Jordan and Emma. Didn’t it make sense? Wasn’t this the way the story was supposed to go? Didn’t this mean it was always supposed to be him? Could I make Jordan my dream come true?
But nostalgia and romance aside, while the story might make sense written in black and white—Jordan and Emma, the two individuals in living color, didn’t make much sense.
I guess I had started to realize slowly after I came down from the excitement of finally getting the school-age crush. It was hard to notice for a while because I never stopped liking him, not once throughout the whole two years.
There was a certain grief I felt when I lost the internship. I had applied for at my dream job in New York City, and then quickly afterward was rejected from another dream job I applied for in Los Angeles—at the same place that had hired Gabriel, actually.
I was grieving a certain belief I had in myself. A hope and dream I had to give up. A vision I had for my life that I lost by my own shortcomings.
Jordan was a salve, a comfort, and a distraction. I could lose myself in the butterflies, in at least one thing going right. There was this person who found me special and interesting when I felt like a giant disappointment. I let myself be distracted for two years, I guess. Distractions can last a while, especially when they kiss you good and tell you you’re beautiful.
It was easy to lose myself in the relationship, to ignore the future because Jordan and I feltgoodtogether. We just didn’t feelrightlike reaching for a strawberry but getting a bite of grape. It was good; it just wasn’t what you were looking for.
Jordan was always planning for his future in a way that made me anxious. He would talk about neighborhoods in town where he wanted to potentially buy a house, and I would nervously start tugging at my hair. He would wonder about the local schools his children would attend, and I would pick at my nails. He would buy season passes for the high school football team, and I would feel suffocated at the idea of knowing exactly where we would be for the foreseeable Friday nights.
He was building his own construction company here in town. None of this rootedness surprised me. It was my own reaction to all of it that was getting harder to quiet. I could only hit the mute button on my own feelings so often until the button broke.
It was just last week that I sat in the passenger side as he drove us to dinner when a thought I desperately wanted to mute snuck through.Jordan is barreling us toward a future that I hadn’t realized I buckled up for when I sat beside him.
It wasn’t necessarily because I didn’t want a future with him—though I suppose that was part of it—but it was how he mapped out his life in a way that made me realize that his map didn’t match mine much at all.
What did my map look like? I wasn’t sure. I just knew as I looked at his that it didn’t look likethat. But if Jordan was keeping me from what I wanted, I, too, was keeping him from moving forward with what he wanted. Being together wasn’t fair to either of us.
I could say I didn’t like breaking his heart, but really, I would be breaking him free to get what he wanted—because I wasn’t it.
As I thought this through, phone clenched in my hand, I thought of all I would be breaking free from, including the sweet, distracting things that had me riding alongside him for so long.
I could feel his lips on mine. His big hand on the small of my back. The way his cologne smelled like my own personal “feel better” elixir. The adorable way he would get caught up in a high school football game, his sisters and I giggling beside him in the stands, and his mom saying, “He should’ve been a coach!” His passion for tradition and grand gestures. A man a romance writer would create. A life with him would be sweet, satisfying, and fun. It was sweet and fun, I admitted to myself. And why it was hard to let go.
