Emerson
For at least ten minutes, we say nothing to each other. We just walk in silence through the forest. I guess you could call it a companionable silence.
“I miss this,” Jake finally says, throwing his arms wide and tipping his head back to the sky.
I smile, but a little tightly. You can only miss something if you have the opportunity to leave it in the first place.
“What do you miss most?” I ask as we keep walking through the woods. There’s a sense of warmth flooding through me at the familiarity of being with him, of walking beside him through woods.
He glances in my direction briefly, then looks away fast. “The sky. And the trees. And the water.” He pauses again. “Do you remember that time we planned to run away together and camp out here?”
“Oh my God.” I laugh as the memory comes back to me. “I’d forgotten about that. How old were we?”
He shrugs. “Eight? You got into trouble at school—”
“And I was too scared to tell my mom and dad!”
“So you made a plan to steal a kayak and run away—”
“And you agreed to come with me.”
“I was worried you wouldn’t make it in the wilds on your own.”
I turn to him, surprised. “Really?”
He shrugs. “Yeah. Plus, you had a big bag of marshmallows. I’d follow you to the ends of the earth for a bag of marshmallows.”
I fall silent. Jake does too. We keep walking.
This could be the moment. I remember what my mom said about talking about what happened, but as soon as I contemplate it, my throat squeezes shut as if someone is strangling me. I know what I want to say to him. I want to ask him whether he thinks I’m a liar. I want to know why he left and never got in touch. I want him to know how much it hurt me. But there’s no way I can put any of that into actual words.
“It would have been cool,” Jake muses. “Setting up home here. Living on berries and marshmallows.”
I smirk. “We would have lasted a night before you got hungry and made us go home.”
“I would not.”
For a moment I can almost hear the eight-year-old versions of us arguing, their voices echoing through the woods.
Without realizing, I have slowed down so he can catch up with me. We walk alongside each other again, arms almost brushing. “Why didn’t we run away in the end?” I ask Jake.
“Your dad busted us trying to sneak a tent and a bag of marshmallows into a kayak.”
“Oh yeah.” I laugh as the memory comes back to me. “You tried telling him we were just acting out a scene from Huckleberry Finn, but you’re such a bad actor he didn’t believe you.”
Jake laughs. I almost do too.
“What did I even do? Why was I in trouble? I don’t remember.”
“That particular time?” Jake answers, raising his eyebrows at me in amusement. “Who knows? Was that the time you glued Tanya Hollingsworth’s hair to the back of her seat?”
A smile bursts across my face. I’d forgotten that, too. “The temptation of a hot glue gun. I put some on Reid’s hockey stick too. Do you remember? His hand got stuck to it.”
Jake glances sideways at me. “Remind me never to get on your wrong side.”
Another awkward silence descends. His smile fades. Mine too. I think about turning around and making an excuse about needing to get back, but I find my feet are following him. Push, pull. Push, pull. I’m a magnet that can’t work out its charge.
“Why did you choose Boston?” I ask him when we’re almost a mile down the trail.
Jake gives me a one-shouldered shrug and a half smile. “Full scholarship. Great hockey program. Interesting choice of major.”
Makes sense, I suppose. “Do you think you’ll stay in the game?”
He draws in a deep breath, then lets it out. “For the moment. It’s tough sometimes,” he explains, “trying to balance the academic side with the athletic side. They don’t cut us much slack.”
“But is it what you want to do? After college, I mean?”
“I’ve got a contract already to play. So yeah, I think so.”
“You think so?” I ask, surprised.
“I love the game. It’s what I want to do. For now. But, you know, I’m not going to be able to play forever.”
“What will you do after? Any ideas?”
“I don’t know. I’m thinking about something like architecture, like Toby, but with a focus on sustainable design.”
I nod.
“Maybe it’s thanks to having grown up here,” he says, gesturing at the woods around us, “among so much nature. I want to get back to it. Hockey’s all about the buzz. Everything’s about the kill. About winning. Out here it’s just about the quiet. Winning doesn’t matter so much. I like that.”
“It was the tree house,” I tell him.
“What was?”
“That was what inspired you to want to build stuff.”
He laughs. “Yeah, it probably was.”
“I guess we can share it,” I say, increasing my pace so I’m ahead of him once more. “You did build most of it, after all.”
He catches up to me and bumps my shoulder with his arm. “And there I was on the verge of calling in the lawyers.”
I smile despite myself.
“So, what about you, Em?”
He’s done it again. He keeps calling me Em. There’s a piercing joy to it. No one has called me that in such a long time. I didn’t want anyone to at first—insisted, in fact, that people call me Emerson—but hearing Jake call me Em, I feel a desperate sadness that I let Coach take my name as well as everything else. “What about me?” I ask quietly.
We’re strolling side by side again. Jake’s hands are swinging free by his sides, and I can’t stop focusing on them and on his forearms, no matter how hard I try not to. There’s just something about the strength in them that I’m drawn to. I can’t stop myself from imagining what it would be like to be held by him. How good it would feel.
There’s no more denying that I’m attracted to him. I can barely breathe whenever he’s nearby; every time we come into contact, lightning tears a path through me. I can feel my pulse beating in my belly, against my ribs, in my throat. Everywhere. I remember the way he was looking at me earlier in the store when I walked out in my bikini top. Am I reading into the way he keeps looking at me? Is it possible he likes me? The thought makes my heart race—though whether that’s panic or excitement, I can’t tell. Angrily, I remind myself that he can’t possibly feel that way about me.
“If you didn’t have to stay and help with the business and your dad, where would you go? What would you do?” he presses.
“What?”
“What would you do if you could do anything, go anywhere?”
I come to a halt, no longer focusing on his hands or his arms or on the possibility he might like me. Did he seriously just ask me that question? I shake my head and march on.
Jake chases after me. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
I stop and stare at him, frustration biting at me. “It’s just a stupid question, Jake. What’s the point of having dreams like that? Some of us don’t have the luxury of planning for the future.”
“It doesn’t have to be this way, Em,” he says softly, almost an entreaty.
“Oh, really? Do you see another option? Because I don’t.”
Jake chews his bottom lip and doesn’t say anything.
I exhale loudly and kick a pile of sticks lying on the ground. “I guess I’d study journalism and I’d go somewhere like Washington State,” I hear myself say after a few seconds. “Somewhere near home.”
“Is that because of Rob?” Jake asks. He throws it out there like a casual comment, but I sense that he’s holding his breath on the answer. The forest seems to fall silent waiting too.
I make a face at him, my heart starting to beat faster. “Rob? I couldn’t care less about Rob.”
“But—” Jake says.
“We’re not dating anymore,” I blurt.
Jake takes that in. He tries to suppress a smile, but he can’t, so instead he turns his head so I can’t see it. Will he ask when we broke up? Or why? “It’s over,” I say. “For good this time.” There, I’ve told him. “How about you?” I ask, then straightaway wince, wishing I could take the question back.
“How about me what?” Jake asks.
I shrug and look away, cringing.
“Am I dating anyone?” Jake asks.
My cheeks scald. Is he teasing me? I can’t bear the thought that he might think I care if he’s dating anyone.
“No,” he says quietly. “I’m not dating anyone.”
I shoot a quick glance in his direction, surprised at the news. He looks me in the eye. Is he a player? Is that why he doesn’t date? Because he has too many girls throwing themselves at him, so why bother limiting himself to just one?
I try to shake the idea off—Jake wouldn’t even play Spin the Bottle when we were kids; he’d get up and leave the room—but that was then, and this is now. I don’t know him anymore. I don’t know who he is. We’ve been apart for seven years. Look at how much I’ve changed in that time. Maybe he’s sleeping with a different girl every night.
He’s still watching me as though waiting for me to say something. He won’t look away. And I find that I can’t either.