Page 10 of Friends to Lovers

“So, what else do I need to know?” I ask. Ren’s right. We can’t risk slipping up again, not when everyone else thinks our friendship, and all the history that built it, is still very much intact. “How’s work for you?”

“Work’s good.”

I lean my elbows on the table. “Still bartending?”

“When I can.” He nods toward me. “Still in the same apartment?”

“Yep.” But not for much longer. Without a job, I won’t be able to continue to afford the tiny studio I found after Stevie relocated back to Portland, and I don’t relish the idea of staying in the neighborhood close enough to Novo that I would still run into coworkers at my favorite coffee shop.

I sip my wine, prepare myself to ask the obvious follow-up. If Stevie knows the details of Ren’s relationship with Amanda, his gorgeous, whip-smart girlfriend, she’s been kind enough not to share them with me. But I have to assume they might have moved in with each other. “You?”

Ren reaches up and rubs the back of his head. “I moved a couple months ago.” He doesn’t offer any more information than that, and instead glances toward the water.

I follow his gaze, take a healthy gulp of my wine. I’m so busy trying to appear unaffected that I don’t notice when he looks back at me.

“Who’s your plus-one to the wedding?”

I almost choke and spit out the wine. I know he’s asking because it’s the kind of thing he might need to know, but the question lands like my mom’s hand did on my back earlier, dislodging memories I can’t face right now.

There was a time Ren might have been my plus-one, but any trace of that is gone now.

“Grapes are really getting to you today, huh?” he asks.

I clear my throat. “What was the question?”

He takes his sunglasses off his head, fiddles with them as he repeats himself. “Who’s your plus-one this weekend?”

I had considered bringing someone, but I didn’t know who that someone would be.

I briefly dated a guy for a few months last year, but it didn’t go anywhere, and otherwise, my romantic life has been next to nonexistent.

No one has clicked, most dates the romantic equivalent of a Belvita.

Not that I’ve been all that interested in trying to make things work anyway.

“I’m not bringing anyone,” I say, squeezing the sides of my glass between my fingers. “What about you?”

Ren shakes his head, his eyes not leaving mine. “Not bringing anyone either.”

My grip tightens. Don’t ask, don’t ask, don’t ask. “What about Amanda?” It spills out of me.

A muscle tenses in Ren’s jaw, and the silence is enough. He’s about to tell me that he’s the next one to get married, that Amanda’s so busy planning their wedding that she can’t spare time to attend this one.

“We broke up.” He says it flatly, expression gone infuriatingly neutral.

“You— When?” Shame sparks in me that my first response is curiosity. I should be checking to make sure Ren is okay, not demanding details.

“Um. About four months ago.” He tugs a hand through his hair. “That’s why I came up early.”

I sit back. “Ah.” The pieces snap into place. Ren wasn’t here for purely altruistic reasons. “Not to mow the lawn?”

At this, his mouth ticks up. Not quite a smile, but not the indecipherable expression he was just wearing.

“Not to mow the lawn.” A couple wanders by, meandering in that slow, lazy way of people newly in love.

Ren’s eyes track them briefly before he looks back at me.

“This is the first big event since we broke up, and my mom isn’t happy about it.

She thinks I need to settle down. So I thought it might be good to have a day up here before the questions start. ”

A defensive instinct flickers in me. “Ren, you turned thirty in June. You’re not exactly a spinster. What’s the male version of a spinster?”

Ren finally cracks a smile, but at the same time, I feel the sting of it, that we haven’t been around for each other’s birthdays.

That there was the usual hoopla in the family group chat, as there is for everyone’s birthday, but rather than be an adult and send a perfunctory happy birthday message, like he has on my last three birthdays, I just liked the first celebratory text someone else sent.

It was a jerk move, I knew even then, but something about acknowledging the years passing between us in any real way hurt too much.

“A bachelor?” Ren says.

I lean my head back, an exasperated sound rattling out of me. “Why do men get something that they turn into a whole reality franchise, and we get Charlotte Lucas?”

“If I recall correctly, there is a bachelorette version of the franchise, and you once told me that you might be okay marrying someone like Mr. Collins if you never had to talk to him.”

“You remember that?”

“You made us watch Pride and Prejudice , like, a hundred times when you had mono.”

“Joni,” Ren had said after what I’m sure was our tenth viewing on his computer, angled from his dorm room desk so we could both see it.

It was all I really had the energy to do: consume comforting classics in between naps.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about the Elizabeth and Darcy of it all, but what if we watched something set in a time period where someone wouldn’t waste away from what’s currently ailing you? ”

“What’s currently ailing you,” I repeated. “Are you trying to sound like Darcy?”

On his bed, Ren pressed his hands to his face, groaning. “We’ve just watched it so many times. Keira Knightley was in my dream last night.”

“Okay, that’s not because of the movie.”

He threw a pillow across the room at me, and I pretended to flail, tossing a hand over my forehead and crying out that I was on my deathbed.

“That must have been the fever talking,” I say now, banishing the memory of the month I spent sleeping across the room from him, doing a fair amount of my own NyQuil-induced sleep talking and begrudgingly letting him bring me soup and tea.

His roommate was dating my roommate—the source of the mono—and had moved in to take care of her.

Because Ren and I weren’t the type of friends who made out on occasion, I’d lugged a suitcase over to his dorm and spent my recovery there.

“And Bachelorette is something entirely different than spinster. It brings to mind visions of feather boas, bride sashes, bedazzled penises.”

Ren laughs. I don’t fight the warmth that spreads through me.

“I am sorry,” I say. “About Amanda.”

He lifts a hand as if to brush this away, lets it drop back to the arm of his chair. “Don’t be. It was time for us to go our separate ways.”

I tilt my glass toward him. “Aren’t you well-adjusted.”

“To be fair, I did still come up here a day early to mentally prepare for a week with my deeply disappointed mother.” He pauses, considers me like he’s mulling something over. “Did you really come up early to help get things ready?”

I shake my head, shrug to stall. Lying to Ren has never been easy, but we’re not in a place where I can tell him the whole truth. I opt for the most basic answer. “No.”

Ren doesn’t press. I can feel the words there against the back of my teeth, aching to get out. It strikes me that if there’s one person I would want to talk to about this with, it would be Ren. Even after everything.

For a moment, I let myself study him as if the last two and a half years didn’t happen, imagine I was here to see the smiles that crinkled his eyes, led to the hint of crow’s-feet, to hear how he got that faint scar running up his left thumb that I know wasn’t there before.

When my eyes latch on to Ren’s, there’s something vaguely wistful in them, and I wonder if he’s observing the same changes in me.

“You must be the unhappy couple!” a voice says cheerfully.

We both lurch back and look up at the short, gray-haired man standing next to our table, his arms raised over his head like he’s cheering for us.

“Tony,” he says. “Let’s get you that wine.”