Page 11 of Friends to Lovers

chapter eight

We each wheel a dolly stacked with cases of wine to Ren’s car, where he puts the seats down and loads them into the trunk. We’re quiet again on the drive back to the house, but the air feels warmer between us.

After hauling the wine onto the far end of the screen porch (because it’s not only our sleeping quarters, but the place to store every spare thing that has ever come through the door of this house, including a lot of the boxes from the back of Stevie and Leo’s car), we join the others down at the beach.

We kick our shoes off at the bottom of the path to the sand, and Ren shrugs on the black hoodie he grabbed from the hook. It’s cooler here.

A ways down the beach, Thad is helping their dad, Greg, as tall as the rest of the Websters, set up a badminton net. “You and me against Sash and Dad?” he shouts to Ren.

“I’m in!” Ren can never pass up competition, a holdover from his days of playing soccer and running track.

He heads off in that direction, his feet leaving imprints in the sand, and I try hard to shake off the feeling that he wants to get away from me, that I misread our conversation at the winery and it was just for the sake of keeping up appearances.

But halfway to the net, he turns around, walking backward, his eyes catching mine: something inviting and familiar there.

He smiles at me, until Thad tells him to hurry up and he jogs the rest of the way forward.

To one side of the net, my mom and Ren’s mom, Hannah, are sitting in beach chairs, laughing with Stevie and Leo, who are on a blanket next to them. But I’m not ready to drive myself into another pothole-riddled discussion, so I join my dad at the water’s edge, where he wanders, pant legs rolled up.

“Hey, kiddo,” he says, slinging an arm around my shoulders. “Wine crisis averted?”

“Just barely,” I joke. “Almost had to reroute to Costco.”

My dad, who hates a bulk store, shudders. He toes at something in the sand before bending down to retrieve it. “Look at that. Full sand dollar. Don’t see many intact like that.”

Sasha lets out a furious cry at losing a point as he hands it to me, and I’m tugged farther into this place.

My dad is collecting shells; Hannah and my mom fuss over everyone; we’re all on the beach to mark our first afternoon together.

This is still the same place it was. Houses like this hold steady, waiting to catch you when you need them most.

It’s why I didn’t want anyone to know about Ren and me: this house, our families, are a well-balanced ecosystem that thrives on so much of the same. Coming back to the same house, at the same time, doing the same things every year. Any hint of a rift could easily disrupt the balance.

“Your mom’s looking forward to catching up with you this week,” my dad says, sending a familiar twinge through me.

It’s an old routine. In high school, my mother would poke her head into my room every thirty minutes, always just to “check in,” and when I didn’t give a proper response, she would tell my father that she was worried about me, and he would gently nudge me her way.

Then in college, the same thing would play out over the phone.

“Yeah,” I say now. “We’ll talk.” My usual response.

My dad glances over at me, the final step in all this forthcoming. “I know it’s a lot for you, her worry,” he says. “But it’s just because—”

“She loves us all so much,” I finish. And yet, it makes me feel like I can’t breathe sometimes.

“Richard!” my mom shouts then, waving us over, her other hand clutching her straw sun hat. “Bring Joni back over here!”

My dad raises his eyebrows at me. “We’re being summoned.

” We trudge up the beach. My mom directs me into the spot next to Stevie and thrusts a coconut seltzer my way.

“Put on your sunscreen,” she says, passing me a tube as she rummages in her truly bottomless bag.

“I have another hat in here—do you want a hat?”

“I’m good, Mom,” I say as I slather my legs in lotion.

“Sweetie,” Hannah says, leaning around my mom from her other side. “Are you and Ren really okay sleeping on the porch?”

“They’re fine,” my mom says. “They ended up camping out there even after we moved them both inside.”

“I know, but they were still kids then.”

“They were twenty-three,” Stevie says from next to me.

She has a pair of round sunglasses on, a finger holding her page in the magazine she’s reading.

I didn’t think she was listening. “What?” she says at the look I throw her, worried she might inadvertently give us away.

“You were well into adulthood the last time you slept out there together. That’s all I’m saying. ”

I fiddle with the tab on the seltzer my mom gave me. That was the summer I moved to New York. After that trip, I’d stayed inside with Stevie. Thinking back now, I’m not sure why, what changed, if it was one of many hints of shifting feelings that I’d missed or some harbinger of what was to come.

“We’ll be fine, Hannah,” I say. Putting us on the porch makes sense, and my former self would have happily gone along with it.

“I just worry we should have added one more bedroom when we did the addition,” Hannah says. “Katie might not be the only grandchild. Eventually we’ll run out of space.”

Katie is Thad’s four-year-old daughter, still in Los Angeles with his husband, Gemi, until Saturday. Sasha’s husband will fly in in time for the rehearsal dinner on Friday night. Save for Leo, these few days are really the first time it’s been just us here in a decade.

I half listen as Hannah and my mom drone on.

Best friends since college, they get like this: discussing everything, including all of our lives, like no one else is around.

On the sandy badminton court before us, Sasha flings her arm back to serve the birdie.

Ren reaches up to hit it back over the net, the hem of his sweatshirt riding up to reveal an inch of muscular abdomen that has me thinking back to the movement of his body when he was mowing the lawn yesterday.

The two of them volley back and forth until Sasha misses, cursing to herself, and Thad and Ren bump fists in victory.

A few minutes later, they walk over, arguing.

“What’s the score?” my dad asks from a beach chair on Hannah’s other side.

“We absolutely beat you,” Ren says, pointing at Sasha with his racket.

“That last one you served was out of bounds,” she says.

“In what world?”

“This one!”

Ren turns to my dad, lifting a hand in the air in a who knows motion. “Sorry, Richard. We don’t know the score yet,” he says in a smug tone that indicates he absolutely knows who won.

Sasha scoffs.

“Time for everyone to take a break, I think,” Hannah says, motioning for them to sit down.

Ren drops onto the sand, leaning his forearms on his bent knees, racket still hanging from one hand.

“Thad, rematch!” Sasha calls, turning to head back toward the net. “If you beat me, I’ll buy your matchas at Alfred’s for a month!”

“I just don’t know how we’re going to accommodate everyone,” Hannah goes on.

“Speaking of beds,” Stevie says. “There are new sheets on ours.”

Ren and I pivot our heads toward her at the same time.

She’s the most observant person I know, which is why I’d had no choice but to tell her about me and Ren.

I can’t count the number of times growing up I would be talking to my mom in our kitchen at home, only to jump out of my skin when Stevie said something from right behind me, this invisible presence that had been lurking there all along.

“Are there?” our mom asks.

“Yes. I put the striped blue sheets on when we left last month. No one else has been up here since then, right?”

“Not that I know of,” my mom says. “Hannah?”

“Not us. Are you sure you put the blue sheets on there?” Hannah asks Stevie.

“I’m positive. I never forget a sheet.”

My mouth goes dry, knee starts to bounce. I choose this moment to open the can I’ve been absently toying with and take a long drink. Leave it to me to blow up this whole week by being polite enough to change the sheets.

“I’m sure it just slipped your mind,” my mom says.

“Or,” Stevie says, “Maybe someone broke into the house.”

“And changed your sheets?” Hannah asks. She smiles over at my mom, says in a low voice, “A thoughtful thief, at the very least.”

“I know I put the blue sheets on there.” Stevie flicks her eyes in my direction. Leo follows her gaze, but there’s only happy curiosity on his face, none of the appraising suspicion Stevie wears almost exclusively. I feel a slow burn creeping up my neck. “Joni, did—”

“I changed the sheets,” Ren cuts in.

We all turn to him. “You changed the sheets?” she asks. “Why?”

Ren shrugs, tapping the edge of his racket into the sand, the picture of casual. “I forgot to mention that I came up a day early. Sorry.”

“You never sleep in that room,” Hannah says.

“Why are we so worried about where everyone sleeps all of a sudden?” I ask through a nervous laugh.

“Why did you come up early?” Stevie asks Ren, ignoring my question.

I cast an apologetic look his way, but he’s focused on the groove he’s digging into the sand with his racket.

“I just wanted to get a few things done,” he says, dragging his eyes up to glance around at everyone before he looks at my sister. “Sorry, Stevie.”

“Hey, no need to apologize.” Leo, who’s watched us all volley back and forth with the smile of an audience member at a game show, tucks an arm around Stevie’s shoulders. “At least you figured out we don’t have a sheet-stealing burglar lurking in the woods, right, babe?”

“Right,” Stevie says, her eyes ping-ponging between me and Ren as idle conversation resumes around us.

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