Jourdan Mathews has a secret, and she knows she needs to take this one to the grave.
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Her life was never complicated: a college student with a close family, good friends, and a plan for her future as a doctor. Had that night had never happened...
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The rest of the weekend leading up to heading back to Denver on Monday for the holidays felt like a fever dream. When I'd come back to the apartment after walking Ryder out, Andee had been standing hesitantly in the hallway, almost as though she knew what had just happened.
She didn't ask any questions, she didn't say anything at all, she just held me when I broke down, collapsing in her arms as I began to cry. She told me it would be okay, she told me not to worry, that Ryder and I could talk tomorrow and maybe things would be different after a night apart.
But he didn't call or text and neither did I.
I don't think either of us wanted that to happen. He's afraid of the future, and I guess . . . well, I guess I never thought too far into the future about it. Never considered that this relationship was one that might take us into life together. That I'd be in Denver, like Bex said, studying to get a degree is psychiatry or business while Ryder traveled and played. That our relationship would evolve to essentially revolving around our cell phones.
So, I spent Sunday in a perpetual gloom, not eating or sleeping that night, and when I finally got home Monday evening, my mother was there with open arms to comfort me too. I'd called her after it happened and Andee had calmed me down a bit, finally confessing everything to my mom that I'd been feeling for so long on a nearly two-hour long phone call. And she'd sat with me through it all.
Now, at home, I spent all of Tuesday and Wednesday locked up in my room, shifting between watching TV numbly and crying on the bed until my throat felt hoarse. My parents mostly left me alone, knowing I needed time to come out of this trance. My mother occasionally checked up on me, bringing me something to eat or drink, but I never had much of it. I had no appetite.
It was strange.
When Miles died, I don't think I cried until nearly a month after the funeral, both Susan and I breaking down together one afternoon after we visited his grave. The pain then was numbing, heavy, like a weight that might pin me down for the rest of my life.
But now, this breakup, this idea that I'd never be close with Ryder again, that he'd never hold me like he used to, that we wouldn't spend our nights together in the comfort we'd found before . . . it hit me so deeply I couldn't stop crying.
The irony was through all these months, Ryder had become my best friend.
It occurred to me that if the roles were reversed, if perhaps I'd dated Emerson and we'd broken up, and it'd left me crying on my comforter, curled into a ball for a whole day, then Ryder would be the first person I would've called.
He would've told me that I was worth more than Emerson ever could be. That I needed to pull myself together and get on living my life my way because no loser like that should ever keep me down.
