Page 14 of Friends to Lovers

chapter ten

It turns out my list may have been a little overambitious.

We hurry through the top hits of the Art Institute, ending at the America Windows , then hustle through Millenium Park, stop at The Bean and take an obligatory picture in its mirrored surface.

I doggedly try to keep us on schedule, checking the time every twenty minutes, while Ren gamely pilots us toward each stop like a dad on vacation, following the blue dot that represents us on his phone screen and turning me toward our next destination when I get so focused on moving quickly that I nearly miss it.

By late afternoon, the next three stops on the list are all bars. “The tiki bar is this way,” Ren says once we reach the river.

At the bar, we sit under a speaker that plays a cover of “Kokomo” on repeat that I enjoyed the first three times and is now the auditory equivalent of Baker-Miller Pink, and order Isaac’s favorite drink on the menu.

They arrive in coconut-shaped cups after fifteen minutes of the thirty I allotted for this place.

I gulp half of mine down before my brain freezes from the icy, pina colada–adjacent mix while Ren sips his more carefully.

Some of the energy seems to have seeped out of him, and I can’t totally blame him.

Everything feels sticky here, and we’re crammed at a tiny table in between two loud, sweaty groups.

“Let’s go,” I say, glancing at the time on my phone.

Happy hour ends in twenty minutes at the wine bar Lydia suggested, and I can only hope things might be better there.

I nod at the unfinished drinks between us, tap mine against his.

“Bottom’s up.” Ren takes one more drink of his, but leaves it mostly unfinished.

He’s not one for overly sweet things, anyway.

On the walk there, I keep my eyes forward as we pass a beer garden with picnic tables under umbrellas, misters set up around the perimeter. The blazing sun makes every step feel like ten, and my head is starting to spin from all the ground we’ve covered, but there isn’t time for it.

“Let’s stop here,” Ren says, and I realize he’s no longer next to me.

I turn around, observe the border of flower beds surrounding the tables before ambling back over to him. “It’s not on the list.”

Ren squints toward the tables, the dogs sprawled under them, the people looking a lot happier than we are in direct line of the sun.

His eyes stay narrowed as he sucks at one cheek.

“Seems like it should be,” he says. “Have we considered the possibility that Lydia and Isaac compiled their suggestions in much cooler weather?”

“The entrance isn’t even on this side.”

He nods at the flower beds, barely knee high. “I think we can manage.”

“We can’t just climb—” The words aren’t even out of my mouth before Ren is wrapping an arm around my waist, pulling me into him as he picks me up easily and steps over the flower bed.

On the other side, he sets me down, my hands finding his shoulders to steady my feet.

“See?” he says, grinning down at me. “Easy.”

With the cool water misting down on my bare shoulders and Ren’s arm still around my waist, there is no list, only the yeasty smell of beer wafting out of the building, the soft fabric of Ren’s T-shirt against my skin, and the whole evening stretching ahead of us.

But only one evening, I remember. I step back, hands dropping to my sides. “This isn’t on the list,” I remind him again. Tonight is our one night because tomorrow we’ll be at the wedding, and on Sunday we’ll say goodbye again.

I attempt to leap back over the offending flower beds, but Ren’s fingers catch my wrist and tug me back toward him.

“We don’t have time for this,” I say.

“We do,” Ren says. “If we want to have time for this.”

“Well, I don’t,” I say, gesturing toward the picnic tables. “What if this place is terrible?”

Ren smirks. “Yes, because the tiki bar was really a top ten experience.”

“It was on the list!”

“Fuck the list,” Ren says. I open my mouth to protest, but he continues.

“I’m serious.” He jerks a thumb over his shoulder.

“There are at least twenty dogs here just waiting to be rated.” It’s another one of our dumb games, picking which dogs are the best on various scales.

They’re all winners in the end. But it’s not what we need to be doing right now.

“The wine bar is, like, fifty feet away.” I throw an arm in its direction.

Ren looks down at me with those soft brown eyes. “Joni,” he says.

“Ren.” I swallow.

He steps up to me so he can take my face in his hands. They’re warm on my cheeks, and for the first time since we left the hotel, I feel my thoughts slow down. I lean my face into one of his palms, close my eyes. When I open them, his gaze has gone darker.

“Joni—” he says, a slight edge to his voice. He’s going to offer up another argument for why we should stop, but I’m already convinced.

“ One beer,” I say. Ren’s mouth snaps closed, and for a second I see it there: something more he was about to add, something he’s not telling me.

“Were you going to say something?” I ask.

Things often need to be drawn out of Ren, the result of being the youngest of three, with two deeply extroverted siblings, and never wanting to fight for attention.

But Ren just releases my face, a smile spreading as he loops an arm around my shoulders and turns me in the direction of the bar.

“You won’t regret it, Miller,” he says, pushing me forward.

He scrubs a hand over the top of my head, and I pretend to shove him away. “Yeah, yeah, Webster.”

* * *

An hour in, Ren is right: I don’t regret it.

“I can’t believe your dad agreed to go skydiving,” he says, grabbing another fry from the basket between us.

We’re at a table next to a group with three friendly golden retrievers.

One named Hopper keeps coming over and resting its chin on Ren’s leg, looking up at him with doleful eyes while he scratches behind its ears.

“Believe me, neither could I until I saw the pictures.” I dunk a fry into the lake of ketchup I upended into the basket.

“I don’t think he’d ever do it again. But my mom has made it their personal goal as a couple to face a fear once a month this year.

Got the idea at some therapist conference she went to.

At least she has a hobby and isn’t nagging me as much.

” My phone buzzes against the table then.

I pick it up, glance at the screen. “Speak of the devil,” I say.

“Do you need to take it?” Ren asks.

I set my phone down again, shake my head.

“I’ll call her back. Probably just another one of her interrogations.

” Ren knows them well from college—my mom calling me every other day to ask how I am, if I went to therapy, if work is overwhelming, so on and so forth.

It’s always the same questions, and they’re never productive.

“Okay, what fear are you facing this month?” Ren asks me, trying to divert attention away from our third guest, I know.

“Answering one of my mom’s calls and telling her I’m not sticking to her facing-my-fears plan,” I say.

Ren laughs, Hopper raising his head at the sound.

“To facing our fears,” Ren says. He lifts his half-empty glass. We cheers.

Now that we’ve actually been able to sit down, take a breath, we’ve been working our way through everything there is to catch up on.

We might talk every day, but somehow, our phone calls always seem to devolve into arbitrary things like what’s your take on reincarnation or how long can we still say we’re postgrad or let’s really dig into that whole glitter conspiracy. “How’s the team?” I ask.

Ren started coaching a youth soccer team in college, something he’d done at summer camps when we were in high school.

“They’re good,” he says. “We might actually win a game this year. Oh—remember Cameron Velasquez?”

“Star midfielder?”

“And now full-blown teenager,” Ren says. “He’s my neighbor.”

“No way.” I swipe another fry into the ketchup. Ren watches the movement before his eyes find mine again as I chew. “Was he already living in the building?”

It feels strange that I haven’t seen the apartment Ren moved into a few months after I left for New York.

We’d made so many memories in his old place.

Evenings out on the balcony, movie marathons on his couch, Wednesday night dinners.

But when his roommate, a friend from college, relocated to Washington, Ren decided it was time to find a one-bedroom.

I’ve only seen snippets of it in pictures, or when we FaceTime.

It makes me feel one step further removed from his life.

“Moved in a month after me,” he says. “He’s applying for soccer scholarships.”

“That’s amazing,” I say. “I bet he loves having you as his neighbor.”

“He’d love you more. He’s super into film stuff. Always wants to talk about Hitchcock.”

I pause with another ketchup-laden fry halfway to my mouth. “Ren. You know about Hitchcock.”

“I know what you’ve told me about Hitchcock,” he says. He leans toward me, hands folded on the table between us. “I hate to break it to you, but I don’t really seek out slasher films. Not big on watching people get ripped in half or dipped in wax.”

“Hitchcock horror is different than modern-day horror,” I say. “I don’t want to watch, like, The Strangers . That’s all Stevie.”

“Face your fears, Joni,” Ren says.

I smile, let him win this round. “So,” I ask. “How are we feeling about the list?”

Ren looks a little wary as he sits back, fingers playing at the sides of his glass. “Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

“I say we scrap the list. If we see something we want to do, we can, but I think this last hour has been better than rushing around trying to fit everything in.” He flinches as he says it.

“Hey,” I say, an uneasy feeling coming over me. “Why are you looking at me like you’re scared?”

“Because I don’t want to disappoint you,” he says, tipping his glass up toward his mouth but not taking a drink. “I get it.”