Page 13 of Friends to Lovers

chapter nine

“So,” I say, falling onto my bed as I hold up a card. The first rush of April sun streams in through my lone window and catches on the gold leafing around the border. “I have a Save the Date.”

“Lydia and Isaac?” Ren asks on his end of the line. “I got that today too. Crazy that our college roommates ended up marrying each other.”

It’s Sunday afternoon, and Ren and I are on one of our daily phone calls.

It’s become a habit, working each other in around our otherwise busy schedules.

Ren calls me when he’s on his way home from the gym most weeknights.

I’ll call him as soon as he’s up on weekends, knowing he usually sleeps later after his bartending shifts on Fridays and Saturdays.

Sometimes we talk for hours, through errands and cleaning our apartments, all the way until I’m headed out the door with Stevie or he’s off to grab a beer with his old soccer friends.

“Are you free the weekend of July fourteenth?” I ask him.

“I don’t know,” Ren says, voice going distant, the sounds of a car passing, people strolling by, in the background. “Might have something else going on.”

“Okay,” I say, trying hard not to reveal my disappointment that our tradition didn’t even make it through one year of living apart. “Maybe there will be another wedding. We could—”

Ren’s soft laugh cuts me off. “I’m kidding.”

“Oh my god,” I say, but I’m laughing as my disappointment morphs into relief.

I settle back against my pillows. We hadn’t planned on not seeing each other for ten months, had cited my birthday in late October, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, as rewards for our time apart while we were sprawled on the beach at the vacation house last summer.

But plane fare is expensive, and time off work is hard to come by, especially when we’re each trying to prove our places at our respective companies, and it’s turned out that days slip by more easily than either of us anticipated.

We’d floated the idea of Ren coming out to New York for my birthday, but in the end, the timing didn’t work out.

Stevie and I went to Sasha’s in Boston for Thanksgiving, where we met her new boyfriend, Alex, and Ren’s family went to Los Angeles to spend Christmas with Thad and Gemi.

“Can you FaceTime for a minute?” Ren asks.

“Sure,” I say, sitting up on my bed and running a quick hand through my hair.

His video request comes in a second later and I let out a confused laugh when it isn’t his face but the view from Overlook Park, a spot where you can see a perfect shot of the river and the city skyline behind it, that fills up my screen.

“Just showing off?” I ask as Ren turns the camera back to himself. He’s in a denim jacket over a black hoodie, earbuds in, cheeks vaguely rosy from what I know is still crisp morning air. The spring version of himself.

“That’s your favorite view in the city,” he says. “Thought you could use it right now.”

I’d told him that my New York therapist suggested finding small pieces of home to hang on to, to ease the transition of moving, and while I’ve been settled in here for several months now, I still find reminders of Portland comforting.

It’s like Ren has some uncanny ability to sniff out when I might be feeling homesick, photos from Sublimity or postcards with the Burnside Bridge coming when I need them most. The fact that we haven’t seen each other in so long makes me more homesick than anything.

I sink into my pillows again as we talk through the rest of his walk. Hearing his voice always puts me at ease, but there’s something different about seeing him, like the familiar angles of his face, each shift of his expression brings him that tiniest bit closer to me.

“Hey,” he says when he’s back to his place. “I’ll find a hotel for Chicago and book it tonight, okay?”

“I don’t know,” I say, echoing his comment from earlier. “Might have a work thing that weekend.”

He smirks at me before we hang up.

* * *

By the time Lydia and Isaac’s wedding weekend rolls around, I am deeply immersed in Novo’s latest project.

A short that features a girl named Antonia and her porcupine sidekick, Paul, who wears a red backpack made from the fabric of one of my own vintage jackets.

I have built Paul from the ground up, spending hours twining together each of his individually crafted quills (of which there are three thousand nine hundred and sixty-two per puppet; so far there are nine Pauls), and hand-painting each of his tiny, replaceable faces.

The Friday morning I’m supposed to catch my flight, I glance up at the clock above my desk just in time to see that I’m running late.

I took the whole day off, but at 6:00 a.m. I remembered I’d left half of one of Paul’s faces out to dry at the office and needed to complete his touch-ups.

I’d let myself into Novo with my suitcase in tow, sure I’d only need twenty minutes to finish up.

I make it to my gate with minutes to spare.

Once I’ve shoved my bag under the seat in front of me, I put in my headphones and cue up the playlist Ren sent for the trip.

Lorde’s “Supercut” plays me through takeoff, kicking off the weekend as if I’m in a movie montage of two long-lost friends returning to each other, which is what I’d told Ren I’d wanted when I texted him to ask if a playlist was forthcoming.

I finally take a breath and let myself turn off the work part of my brain.

There’s a list in my phone of all the activities I’ve scheduled for us before the wedding tomorrow, pulled from the recommendations Lydia and Isaac shared to their wedding site.

We have so much lost time to make up for, so many moments over the course of the last year when I wished Ren had been there, like when one of his favorite bands was in town, or when no one seemed to make a gin and tonic as much as I liked the one he made me, or when Stevie and I found a vinyl store that had the best collection of rare pressings I’d ever seen and where I’d bought his birthday present this year.

I spend the better part of the flight with my head twisted toward the window, staring at the patchwork world below me like I can watch the miles between Ren and me shrinking.

At one point, my seat partner, a middle-aged woman with bottle-orange hair and a heavy dose of something artificially vanilla scented wafting off her, asks if I have a million dollars waiting for me on the other end of this flight.

“Better,” I tell her, grinning like a hyena. “My friend.”

“Your friend?” she asks.

“My best friend,” I say.

She frowns. “That’s…sweet.” She returns to perusing her back-issued People magazines.

I’m run-walking as soon as I’m off the plane, hustling past parents dragging their kids on suitcases and slowing down around groups on the moving walkway.

I’m by baggage claim , Ren’s text read as soon as I could check my messages again after landing. We’d coordinated our arrival times as best we could, but he still touched down an hour before me.

Baggage claim seems miles away, but I finally emerge from the swampy halls of the main terminal, bursting through the automatic doors like a plane-sweaty orc free from their primordial ooze. I scan the long line of carousels, searching.

When I spot him waiting by a pillar, sunlight playing in his hair, I break into a full-on run. The sound of my sandals slapping against the tile at full speed gives me away, and the smile that spreads across his face is so much better in person than it is over FaceTime.

He only has to take two long strides before I’m launching myself at him. He catches me and lifts me off the ground, spinning me once around before he sets me down.

“Wow,” I breathe as I pull away from him, letting my eyes wander over him. “Look at you. You’re perfect.”

Ren’s cheeks flush, and I decide to lean into it. “A dream,” I say. “A sight for the sorest eyes. A work of art.”

“Stop,” he says, hooking an arm around my neck and tugging me into him.

I burrow deeper into his side, arms around his waist, feeling like I might absorb some of him and subsist on it until the next time I see him.

I hadn’t realized how much of that I’d already been doing, that it was his voice in my head giving me a pep talk on my first day of work, his T-shirt I put on when I was missing home one night when Stevie was out with her school friends.

“Tell me life is miserable without me,” I say when we break away from each other. I loop an arm through his and we walk toward the doors, carry-ons in tow.

“Life is miserable without you,” Ren says.

“Tell me how much Portland misses me.”

Ren guides us through the doors, a rush of hot air hitting our faces. “Obviously Portland misses you,” he says as we hit the pavement and join the queue for cabs.

It’s been the kind of summer that makes everywhere uncomfortable, the only place to find any relief a walk-in freezer or a very expensive bar. Even there, the heat seeps in, closing hellish fingers around your neck before you even notice.

I slip my arm out of Ren’s and twist my hair up on top of my head. He bends at the same time, so his lips are level with my ear.

“I miss you more ,” he whispers, breath somehow cool against my skin. He’s smiling at me like he just told me a secret.

We don’t talk much on the ride over to the hotel, on account of the fact that as soon as we climb into the cab we have to stick our heads out our respective windows because the driver is not a fan of AC.

At one point, I look over at Ren, a bead of sweat rolling between my already sticky boobs, and he shoots me such a miserable glance that the hoot of laughter I let out almost sends the driver careening into the other lane.

“I missed you too!” I shout over at him.

“What?” he shouts back, his head angled toward the inside of the car.

I catch the driver checking on us in his rearview, the wind whipping into his own window sending his hair dancing across his forehead.

“I said I missed you!”

“Oh,” Ren calls back. “Sure!”

I laugh and give up for now.

We gasp our way into our hotel and collapse flat onto our beds. Ren rolls his head to the side toward me, and it’s just the two of us staring at each other, breathing in the same air again, existing in the same space.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi,” Ren says back.

My bangs are stuck to my forehead, and Ren’s hair curls at the nape of his neck in the way it does only when he’s returning from a run, fresh out of the ocean, when it’s July and everywhere is an oven.

It always makes him look a little boyish, drawing me back to the adolescent version of him I used to sleep with on the trampoline in his parents’ backyard, or teenage Ren, lounging on a chair next to me at the public pool in summer, when it seemed like that part of our lives would never end. All we had was time.

It makes my arms itch in an anxious way, this reminder that this weekend is the exact opposite of days like that. Now, we only have thirty-six hours to fit in all the time we’ve missed together over the last year.

I push myself up to standing before I can get too comfortable, and extend a hand toward Ren. “Come on.”

“Where are we going?” he asks, observing my waggling fingers but not moving an inch.

“Come with me and you’ll find out.”

For a minute, I worry he won’t. That the idea of going back out into the heat is too unbearable, and the list and this weekend will be for naught. That I won’t be able to make it all up to him, how inconvenient my move has made a relationship that was once as easy as breathing.

But just as I’m about to try to urge him up again, Ren smiles and grabs my hand.