Page 15 of Friends to Lovers
“Get what?”
He gestures with his glass at the sidewalk, where people are still streaming by, at the river beyond. “The list. Trying to fit everything in. I don’t want to waste our time together either, but today…”
“Sort of felt like we were wasting it?” I ask.
Ren shrugs. “Yeah.”
“Well.” I grab a napkin, wipe away a drop of ketchup from my wrist. I wish I’d seen it earlier, wish we hadn’t wasted so much of our precious time together before coming to what seems like the now-obvious conclusion. And I don’t want to waste a minute more feeling that way. “I agree with you.”
“Forget the list?” Ren says, eyes hopeful.
“Forget the list,” I say, picking up my glass, extending it in his direction. “From here on out, we do what we want. The whole point is enjoying each other’s company.”
Ren presses the lip of his glass against mine, keeps it there. “Cheers to that.”
* * *
Once the sky turns pink, we head back to the hotel, drifting together and apart. The night is finally cooling down.
“Hey,” I ask as we wait at a crosswalk. “Did you ever ask your boss about an A&R position?” After enough to drink at the Tiki bar and beer garden, it just falls out of my mouth instead of the more tactful way I’d planned to raise the subject.
I haven’t brought it up since we talked about it last summer.
A&R isn’t the type of job Ren’s parents envisioned for him—a result of having two overachieving older siblings in more “traditional” fields—law and event planning—and even if he doesn’t verbalize it, I know that creates extra pressure for him.
But Ren deserves to talk about it with someone.
He deserves to have a cheerleader, to just be excited about what opportunity might be around the corner.
His eyes scan the street ahead for a minute before he looks down at the sidewalk, back up at me. “I did,” he says. “Just a couple weeks after you moved, actually.”
“And?” I ask, nudging him. “What’d he say?”
Ren blows out a breath, hands shoved in his pockets. “He said that it’s rare a position comes up unless someone retires. Or someone brings him something really great.”
“That’s good news,” I say as we cross the street. When he stays silent, I ask, “Isn’t it?”
He tilts his head toward one shoulder, mouth twisting a little to the side. “I don’t know. No one there is anywhere near retirement, and what am I going to bring him? I don’t even have time to go to shows anymore with my hours there.”
“Um, you bring him one of the amazing bands you’re always sending me that don’t have representation,” I say, stepping up onto the curb as we reach the opposite side of the street.
“You take a weekend off and go to some city where you can catch ten shows in two days, and you bring him the best of the best of the best and you show him how much you deserve a job not just as their sound tech, but working for the actual label.”
“I think you have a lot more faith in my taste in music than anyone else,” Ren says with a small laugh.
I stop him in the middle of the sidewalk, set a hand square on his chest so he’ll look at me. He does, throat bobbing as he pastes on a close-lipped smile. “No. I believe in you , my best friend, and how perfect you would be for a job in A&R.”
Ren is always the one who discovers bands before anyone else knows about them, who drags us to shows in basements or hole-in-the-wall dive bars in Portland and every city we ever visit, who still makes me playlists for every occasion.
There’s one called “For When Joni Doesn’t Want To Put Away Her Laundry But Already Has More Laundry To Do” that I’ve had on repeat for weeks now, and every single time it’s on in the office someone will inevitably stop in their tracks and ask me who’s singing, what the name of that song is, why haven’t they heard it yet.
Ren reaches up to squeeze my hand, lowers it back to my side, a slight smile on his face. “I know you do,” he says.
* * *
Back at the hotel, we take turns showering before flopping onto his bed and looking for something to watch. We make it halfway through Best in Show before we’re both dozing.
Ren is a weird sleeper. First of all, he’s out pretty much as soon as he lies down, which has always left me to haul the blankets out from under his dead-to-the-world body when we’d camp out on the trampoline in his backyard as kids.
Second, of course, is his sleep talking.
For the most part, it’s just soft murmurs, but there have been nights I’ve woken up to him sitting straight up in bed, having conversations with the wall.
I’d thought he was sleeping now, eyes closed and breathing steady next to me, but as I force myself up and into my own bed, I hear him shift, his voice coming out of the half dark.
“Maybe I’ll abandon Sublimity altogether,” he says. “Move to the East Coast with you.”
Something skips in my chest, and I hug my pillow.
I give myself half a minute to think about what that would look like.
Picking up coffee and going to museums together on the weekends, Ren taking us to shows any night of the week.
But the truth of it is, despite how much I want to see him all the time again, make a new home for ourselves, Novo has consumed more and more of my time recently, and images of reinstated Wednesday night dinners and exploring the city together are quickly replaced by my canceling because something came up at work, or not being able to meet him on a Saturday morning because I stayed at the studios too late the night before.
“I think you love Sublimity too much for that,” I say carefully.
Ren looks over at me through heavy lids, his cheek pressed to the pillow.
Our beds are close enough that I can make out the splash of freckles he gets on his nose in the summer.
“Like you love Novo, right?” he asks. The movie is still playing on the TV, Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara talking about their dog’s happier-to-know-ya kind of attitude.
“Right.” I love Novo in a bone-deep way.
I’ve learned so much more from colleagues than I could have imagined over the past year.
The work makes sense to me in a way other things often haven’t in my life: failed classes that seemed to come easily to others, an anxious brain that liked to work against me.
Art calms me, makes things go quiet. It’s why I wanted to create a career out of it in the first place.
As the moment stretches between us, his eyes flick between mine, like he’s mulling something over. Finally, he sits up, grabs the remote off the table between us.
“Done with this?” he asks, pointing it toward the television. I nod, and he turns the movie off.
As he heads into the bathroom to brush his teeth, my mind wanders back to what it would be like to have Ren in New York. To be together like this again all the time. But I tuck it away before I let that daydream settle in and become something real to hope for.