Page 20 of Friends to Lovers

chapter thirteen

“Sasha says that if we get the tables out today, we won’t have to worry about it the rest of the week,” Stevie says as she, Ren, and I stand in front of the cobwebbed storage area at the back of the lighthouse keeper’s cottage.

On Saturday, Stevie and Leo will get married on the lawn that stretches out from the lighthouse and overlooks the ocean, but the reception will be inside and it’s up to the wedding party to set it up.

After a spider-ridden, cramped hour—the storage area is little more than a damp closet—Ren and I manage to roll out all the tables into the main room, Stevie providing vague guidance along the way.

“So good to see you two together again,” she says as we lean the last of the tables against the far wall, both of us sweating.

“Stevie,” I sigh, pushing my bangs off my forehead. While I appreciate her rescuing us from the moms, she has to know that, no matter how badly she wants us to be friends again, it’s not so simple for me and Ren.

A few months into the silence, when she casually admitted that she’d asked Ren what happened, it felt like the floor had dropped out from beneath me at the prospect that they might have discussed it.

This was a private matter, between me and Ren, and the idea that he might have disclosed it made me question if I ever knew him at all.

But Stevie said he’d only told her to ask me, and simply nodded when she asked him if we still weren’t talking, and I was relieved that Ren had still been kind enough to keep our secret.

“What? It’s been a while,” she says now.

“Yes, we know .”

“What else do we need to get out of storage?” Ren asks, ignoring the conversation.

Stevie shrugs. “The chairs won’t be here until Saturday morning, and we’ll get the bar and outside ready on Friday, but we should definitely get the tables up now. See how the room looks before we bring anything else in.”

Ren starts toward a table, but I narrow my eyes at my sister, suspicious. “Do we really need to set this up before Friday?”

“Always good to get a task checked off the list, Joni,” she says, like she’s echoing something Sasha told her. She tucks her phone, which she used to illuminate our path through the storage space while we hauled out the tables, into the pocket of her shorts.

Ren and I unfold the legs on the only rectangular table and carry it to the head of the room before going back for the circular ones where guests not in the wedding party will sit.

He nods at me as he tilts the first one, letting me know when to turn my side, and takes the more difficult, backward path toward where we set up the other table.

Stevie blows out an exaggerated breath, shaking her head. “You know what? I’m the bride. I’ll let you wrap up here.”

“Don’t you want to tell us where they all should go?” I ask after her as she walks to the door, lifting her long, brown hair off her neck like she’s the one who’s been doing manual labor.

“I trust you!” she calls before she disappears.

“Classic Stevie,” I say, turning to the next table and releasing the legs on my side, as Ren does the same opposite me.

“Did you think we’d ever be setting up for her wedding?” Ren asks as we each take a side and flip the table upright.

“I definitely never thought we’d be setting up a wedding like this for her.” We shuffle the table over next to the other one, arrange it until there’s adequate space between them. “I kind of always assumed that if Stevie ever did get married, it would be at, like, a haunted house.”

“At the center of a corn maze,” Ren says as we walk back across the room.

“If you can find them, you can come to the wedding,” I say.

Ren half laughs. “Saturday will be good,” he says. “Even if we didn’t picture this elegant seaside affair for her.”

I watch his face as we tilt another table to its side, his mom’s words from the kitchen echoing in my head. “How does this week make you feel about all of it?” I ask.

“Hmm?” Ren mumbles. He’s crouched down, focused on where one of the legs is stuck.

I stare at the top of his head. “Marriage, settling down, all of it.” He bumps the heel of his palm against the hinge. “You weren’t lying about your mom being bummed about Amanda.”

The hinge gives. Ren pulls the leg open and locks it into place before he straightens and meets my eyes. “You know. It’s nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Isn’t it?” I ask. I know Hannah, like my own mother, can ask a lot of questions, but I don’t remember her fussing over Ren’s romantic life this much.

“She’s just not dealing all that well with the breakup,” Ren says, rubbing a hand at the back of his neck.

“Your mom isn’t dealing well with your breakup?” I ask.

“I think she’s worried I won’t ever get married,” he says, then hastens to add, like he’s revealed too much, “or, she’s just worried about me settling down.

Thad and Sasha are so happy and I’m—” He breaks off, studies the table between us.

“She was just really excited when Amanda and I got back together. I think she thought it was a pretty sure thing. And I hate being a disappointment.”

The words are hanging right there. You’re not a disappointment.

But before I can say them, he’s tipping the table up to standing and nodding at me to take the other side.

We may not have spoken in years, but I still know what Ren’s face looks like when he doesn’t want to talk about something. Flat, drawn-in, inaccessible.

Ren keeps his eyes on the table as we carry it over to the others. But when we set it down, he looks at me across it, considers his next words. “Amanda’s amazing.”

I nod, trying to keep my expression neutral.

He tilts his head, squinting.

“What?” I say. “Amanda’s amazing.”

“You never liked Amanda.”

“I didn’t really know Amanda,” I point out, which is mostly true.

I only met her once, when she and Ren first dated, and then, through vague family updates, witnessed the rekindling of their relationship.

It was six months after things between us blew up, and it felt like such an inevitability that I could only feel numb at the news.

What I did know about her was enough to tell me that she and I probably wouldn’t get along, because she was, in a lot of ways, the opposite of me.

Interested in different things, one of those people who might tell a deeply anxious person to just stop worrying about it!

In a well-meaning, if perhaps somewhat ill-informed way, of course.

Ren would never date an unkind person, and I understood what he saw in her.

She was self-assured, successful, put-together.

“But she made you happy, so I liked her. Fair enough?”

“Sure,” Ren says. He shakes his head, reaches under the table to check the legs a last time. “Anyway, she’s great. But I just… I couldn’t marry her.”

He makes his way back across the room, but halfway there, he turns back to me. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“We’re the only two unmarried kids left, Joni,” he says with mock seriousness before walking back for the next table. “What are we going to do about it?”

“Know anyone up for a marriage of convenience?” I ask, following him. “I bring a never-ending sense of doom and a total lack of direction to the table.”

It’s out before the words are even fully formed in my head. It was once safe to say anything to Ren, so much so that my thoughts mostly spilled out unedited. Now, talking to him this way feels precarious.

He pauses, his hand on the table, shoots me a curious look. “Something you want to share?”

“No,” I say, waving it off as blood rushes to my ears, and I focus on pulling the legs down. I can’t tell Ren what I really mean—that my life is currently the equivalent of a raft floating in the middle of the Pacific, no compass in sight.

Ren is still looking at me, a familiar expression on his face. “Joni,” he says. “If you want to talk about anything—”

“I know,” I cut in quickly. Then, softening my tone, “Thank you.” I’ve had enough almost talking about work today. I try to pivot. “Being back here with everybody has been pretty great.”

Ren smiles skeptically. “Even when our mothers won’t stop badgering us?”

“Okay, maybe not that part,” I admit. The interrogation Ren and I underwent in the kitchen is a great example of why neither of us has told our families, especially our moms, that we’re no longer friends.

If we told them, they’d force us to sit down in some kind of intervention that would have made it all worse.

“Well,” Ren says, picking at the edge of the table with a thumbnail. “That worry is always here for you.”

“Maybe,” I say. “Maybe I stayed away too long.” It’s a thought that’s plagued me over the years. Everyone was moving on with their lives, after all. There was only so long I could stay away before I would be left behind for good.

I reach down to turn the table over, but Ren stops me, steadying it with his hand so I have to look him in the eye.

“I hope you know you didn’t need to do that,” he says, a hint of worry lining his forehead. “I could have stayed away, if that would have meant you’d come. I didn’t think—”

“No,” I say. “It wasn’t you.”

“It was, though,” he says. “If we hadn’t—”

“I’m the one who left,” I say before we can dance too close to whatever dangerous memory he was about to bring up. Some part of me had just wanted to give him Oregon, keep a country between us so I couldn’t mess things up any more than I already had. “I just— I needed to be…”

“On the other side of the country?” Ren supplies.

I exhale a laugh through my nose. “Something like that.”

“I’m serious, Joni,” Ren goes on. “You’re one of us no matter what.

Everyone misses you, but no one faults you for not being here.

” He glances around the room like it represents the house, our families, and I see that mask falling, the best friend I used to know so well starting to show his face.

“It’s all here for you, whenever you want it. ”

As we lift another table, Ren’s words ringing in my head, I almost forget I have anything to worry about at all.