Page 16 of Friends to Lovers

chapter eleven

“There she goes,” I say the next afternoon as we float away from the shoreline, the blast of the boat’s horn notifying everyone on the banks of Lake Michigan that we are On Our Way.

“Who’s she ?” Ren asks, amusement etched on his face as he leans against the railing next to me, looking out at the still blue water, the Chicago skyline beyond it.

I glance over at him, the cool breeze ruffling his hair. It’s bearable out here, not socked in by asphalt and concrete.

“Escape,” I say dramatically.

Lydia and Isaac decided to get married on a yacht that won’t dock again until nine. It is now three o’ clock. Maybe for them six hours on a boat with your friends and entire extended family is considered a recipe for success.

We wind our way to the observation deck with everyone else, pausing to accept flutes of sparkling rosé and say hello to a few familiar faces.

“Priya and Jamie are here together,” I say, voice urgent as I grab Ren’s wrist. “Six o’clock.

” He follows my coordinates. “Priya and Jamie from our writing seminar freshman year are here. Together. Priya told me she’d never date Jamie,” I mut ter as Ren steers us toward a table across from where they’re standing, his hand on my back.

“Evidently, she changed her mind,” Ren says. He nods toward the far side of the deck, at a particularly raucous group shouting over each other in jovial tones. “Remember the parties that house used to throw?”

“Oh, Ren. How could I forget the party there where you declared ‘Mr. Brightside’ your song ?”

We were juniors, and one of Ren’s friends—a percussion major who always seemed to know about every single party happening—had invited us to the once-impressive Victorian mansion two blocks from campus that housed forty different college students at any given time, with more always spilling out onto the rickety front porch and the unkempt lawn.

It was also the night Ren swore off tequila “for the rest of time, and after that too,” a promise that didn’t hold up all that long.

After too many shots, we were on one side of a beer pong table, feeling overconfident about our skills.

In the middle of the game, just as Ren threw, he turned to me, the ball sailing off somewhere into the ether of the crowded basement.

“Joni,” he said, gripping above my elbow while I tracked the path of the ball for one drunken second before turning back to him.

“What?” I asked, tipping his direction.

“This is our song.” He looked at me like he’d just made a brilliant discovery.

“What are you talking about? This isn’t my song,” I said, the shitty fluorescent lights reflecting off the red Solo cup in my hand.

“Fine,” he said, feigning disappointment. “Then it’s my song.” He slipped his hand into mine and sang the first lines of the chorus, holding his other hand out to me like a microphone.

I snorted, unable to stop myself from grabbing onto his biceps and singing the chorus along with him.

His energy was contagious, and soon enough I was bouncing on my feet, and a small crowd had formed, everyone singing along and dancing.

After that, anytime “Mr. Brightside” came on, we’d pause whatever we were doing, turn it up and belt the lyrics as loudly as we could, windows down in the car or dancing around the kitchen or at the bar.

I loved when Ren got like that: some of his shell cracking.

I’d seen more of that side of him when we were kids, but sometime in high school, this thin layer between the best friend of my childhood and the best friend I know today had taken shape.

It didn’t make me feel any less close to him, but it did mark some shift between us I didn’t feel totally clued into, like Ren had suddenly just grown up faster than me.

But it meant that when those parts of him did come out again, I was all the more grateful for them.

“It’s not my song,” sober Ren says now, taking a serious drink of his wine. “It’s America’s song.”

I shake my head. “Not according to twenty-one-year-old you. As far as he’s concerned, that is Ren’s song .”

Ren grimaces. “Sometimes I really hate our collective memories.”

“No, you don’t,” I say.

His eyes sparkle as he smiles down at me. “No,” he says. “I don’t.”

I lean my elbows on the table. “Is it weird that Lydia and Isaac are getting married?” I say, dropping my volume. “I mean, I still feel like a baby.”

“Yeah, me too,” Ren says. “But Isaac was a total goner the second you showed up to our room with Lydia move-in weekend. Why wait if you know?”

“Hmm,” I mumble against the rim of my glass, eyes skimming the crowd. “What must that be like?”

“Who knows.” Ren tips back the rest of his wine, clears his throat and nods toward where Isaac’s parents are talking to Lydia’s. “We might be at a totally different wedding if they’d taken their time. Lydia and Jamie.”

“It could have been Isaac and Priya,” I tack onto this alternate universe. “But I like how things turned out. It was pretty fun getting to play roommate with you half the time.”

“It was our duty to foster young love,” he says, looking down at me. I roll my eyes, but he cuts in. “I liked it too. Best roommate I’ve ever had.”

I smile, bump my upper arm against his and let it rest there for a minute.

Some of my favorite memories from freshman year of college are the ones we spent in his dorm room, talking late into the night like we would on the screen porch.

Sometimes I worried it was strange to like Ren as my roommate more than my actual roommate.

But when I thought about it, it made sense.

The transition to college was scary, and we were familiar, there to center each other if things got hard.

Ren is pulled into a conversation with some of the guys from his college intramural soccer team, and I make my way over to where two girls from my dorm lean against the railing, watching the crowd.

“Joni, hi,” one of them—Everly—says. Her white-blond hair is slicked back in a ponytail that tugs at her temples.

The other, Amina, who I also had a few classes with, hugs me hello. We catch up about generic things for a while, work and friends and living situations, before Amina is nodding across the deck.

“ That’s still happening, I see,” she says.

I follow her gaze to Ren, always standing a few inches taller than everyone around him.

“What’s happening?” I ask.

Amina and Everly exchange a look. “Come on,” she says.

“When that —” here she points with her eyes at Ren, like he is a particularly juicy cut of meat at a grocery store “—showed up to our dorm to walk with you to class like, every single day, we just kind of figured there was something going on between you.”

“You know there wasn’t,” I say, which is true, because they had asked, several times, and I had answered, always the same way.

We grew up together. We’re just friends.

It made me uncomfortable when they asked, like they were cheapening our friendship in some way, like we were fuck buddies instead of best friends who had seen each other through our entire lives to date.

Like there was no possible way we could love each other just for the sake of it.

“But you two have before, right?” Amina had asked me once, after a similar conversation.

“Have what ?” I’d asked.

“You know.”

I did know, but her question irked me. Yes, maybe sometimes I could come off territorial about Ren, but not in a way that made it hard for me to share him with the rest of the world.

Instead, in a way that made me almost angry at other people who didn’t love him like I did.

Look at this person! I would find myself thinking when he and his college girlfriend broke up.

You have the best person in the world in front of you, and you don’t even realize it!

No matter how badly I might screw up, I had done one undeniably good, smart thing in my life when I befriended Ren Webster at the ripe old age of three, and it bothered me that people sometimes thought they knew our friendship better than I did.

“Hmm,” Everly says now, swirling the wine in her glass. “If you two really aren’t dating, do you mind if I take a crack at him?”

“Everly!” Amina whacks her arm at the same time I say, “Take a crack at him?”

Everly shrugs a narrow shoulder. “I don’t know. It’s hard to meet people nowadays. Do you know if he’s seeing anybody?”

The question embarrasses me. Or, the fact that I can’t an swer with a hundred percent confidence does. Why, over the course of the past two days, not to mention the last ten months, have I not thought to ask Ren if he’s seeing anybody? Because he would have told me, surely.

But then again, maybe not. When I asked Ren if he’d ever slept with anybody our sophomore year of college, his face went so red that I knew the answer was unequivocally yes and that we also wouldn’t be discussing it.

He’s never been one to share details of his relationships with me, while I throw them around like I’m worried I won’t get a chance to voice them before things end, texting him play-by-plays of bad dates and asking for advice.

“You know,” I say to Everly now. “I honestly don’t know.”

“Hmm,” she says, the sound grating against me.

Once the boat has stopped, it’s time for the ceremony.

Ren finds me on the deck, and Everly follows us into a back row and sits on Ren’s other side.

Behind the happy couple, the water stretches out, sparkling, but all I can focus on is Everly’s pinky finger, seeming to strain toward Ren’s thigh as Lydia and Isaac recite their vows.

If Ren notices, he doesn’t give any indication.