Page 23 of Friends to Lovers

chapter fifteen

“Have you seen my black heels?” I call from my bedroom floor. It’s midnight, my window unit working double time in the thick July heat, I have an alarm set for four in the morning, and so far, all I’ve packed is the dress I’ll be wearing to my aunt Charlene’s wedding this weekend.

“These?” Stevie asks as she wanders in, the heels dangling by the straps from her fingers.

“Thief,” I say.

She deposits them into my hands before collapsing onto her stomach on my bed. “Is Collin taking you to the airport?”

“No. He has to work early.” Collin, my boyfriend of roughly five months, manages the brunch place where we met.

At first, when he’d scrawled his number on my to-go cup, I’d assumed it was his move, what he did to every girl he noticed who came in.

But Stevie had stopped me from tossing it, even crafted my first message to him.

It’s probably time you try actually dating someone , she’d said as she tapped out the text for my approval.

You haven’t had a boyfriend in years. She was right.

I had been telling myself that when I liked someone enough, I’d make room for them, but there was always something just off enough that I found a reason not to get too close.

Collin was something of an experiment, and so far, to my pleasant surprise, nothing terrible has happened.

“Well,” she says. “Enjoy the disgustingly hot subway platform.”

I ignore her comment and flash her a puppy-eyed look. “Are you sure you don’t want to drop everything and come to the wedding?” I ask her. “We could even split a cab to the airport.”

“I’m sure I’d like to time travel back to March and convince myself not to take summer classes,” Stevie says around a yawn. “I’d so much rather drink with you and Mom on a goat farm instead of studying for finals. Besides,” she says. “If I go, what will Ren do?”

“We’ll miss you,” I say.

“Yeah, yeah,” she says. “Tell Ren I’ll take his thanks for allowing him to replace me as your plus-one in the form of student loans payments.”

“Totally even trade,” I say, tucking the heels into my bag.

Stevie watches as I sort through the pile of folded laundry next to me. “So how do you think Amanda feels about this whole weekend?” she asks me.

I pause, a shirt half-folded over my arm.

I’ve only met Ren’s girlfriend once, and briefly, during the holidays, when she and Ren walked into my parents’ Christmas Eve party with the Websters looking fresh out of some ad that involved a lot of cross-country skiing and mulled wine by an enormous fire.

Stevie and I were stamping out cookies on the kitchen counter and while I’d been excited to meet Amanda, I suddenly felt a little like I’d been banished to the kids’ table.

Here was Ren, the best friend who I’d once won a flip cup tournament with in college, walking into my childhood home with the air of someone with a mortgage and more than a surface-level understanding of Roth IRAs, a beautiful, tall redhead at his side.

The conversation I had with Amanda—short, polite, nothing profound—was enough to tell me Ren’s significant other wouldn’t suddenly become my other best friend, like I’d envisioned growing up.

Some joint wedding situation, houses next door to each other, things that seem weird to me now but made perfect sense in the mind of a teenager.

“Feels about what?” I fit the shirt and a pair of shorts into a corner of my suitcase.

Stevie scoffs. “About her boyfriend being your plus-one to Aunt Charlene’s wedding.”

“Stevie, Ren would tell me if it was a problem.”

“If you say so.”

She doesn’t bring it up again, instead passing out across the foot of my bed, which is where she stays the rest of the night. Eventually, I curl up next to her to try to catch a couple hours of sleep, kiss her head goodbye as the sky turns gray out my window.

When the plane touches down in San Francisco, my brain is foggy but wired in an all-nighter kind of way, but I’m sort of used to it now.

Because of Novo’s production deadlines, I’ve been staying at work later and later.

The schedule is so hectic that I have to miss the week at the beach this year, so this weekend is especially important.

Not only for seeing my parents, our promised twice weekly phone calls getting shorter and shorter over the past months, but also for making sure Ren and I take full advantage of our time together, and not in the way we did in Chicago. No lists, just us.

It’s three hours until Ren lands, so I pick up our rental car and point it toward the closest coffee shop, where I order a heavily sweetened and extra-large cold brew and slump into a window seat.

My phone dings with a notification from Collin.

Safely there , he sends, no punctuation.

Here! I reply. Grabbing a coffee before I pick up Ren.

He responds with a thumbs-up.

As I sip my coffee, I scroll to the directions Charlene sent about how to get to the venue— Google Maps will lie to you about the turn!

—and let my mind wander to the weekend ahead.

Tonight is the rehearsal dinner, and my mom wants to go on a hike before the wedding tomorrow, so we can, as she puts it, “test out” the screws she had to have put in her ankle after she broke it mountain biking in the spring.

A continuation of the facing-your-fears trend, something she claimed has changed her life and has continued to try to get all of us to participate in, even following the accident.

Stevie and I had a shared minor meltdown when my dad sent a text that said only Mom, E.R.

, call please , in true parent fashion, but my mom has been intrepid about the whole thing.

Ren calls as I’m winding my way back to the airport.

“Shit,” I answer. Even without a list to contend with, I don’t want to miss a minute with him. “Are you here?”

“Flight landed a little early,” he says over the sounds of the terminal, a muffled announcement and conversations building and fading as he walks. “You’re stressed.”

“I’m late,” I say.

“For?”

“You.” I crane my neck to see around the line of cars waiting to exit toward the pickup area. “I should have just stayed at the airport.”

“Joni, it’s good,” Ren says. “I’m barely off the plane. I’ll hang out. Don’t worry.”

It’s been a long time since I’ve heard his voice.

Between our busy schedules, now we mostly just text, usually mundane things.

Grocery store officially has peaches. Faucet is dripping but only in the middle of the night?

Neighbor got a cat and it takes naps on the front porch now .

All these tiny details shared to prove we’re still intertwined.

And yet, I can’t deny that there are gaps between us that have grown over the past year.

There’s his relationship with Amanda. There are new friends I haven’t met.

For every just back from a run text I get, there is the run itself.

For every picture of a dog he sends, there’s pausing to talk with its owner, scratch the dog’s head.

Or maybe there’s a crosswalk because he’s headed somewhere or a table outside a coffee shop or an errand I know nothing about.

I feel it like a constant tap tap tap at my skull: here are the pieces you’re missing.

Here are the things you don’t know. I remind myself that even when I lived in Portland, there were moments like these I didn’t know about.

I can’t have all of him. But the physical distance makes it all seem much more important, and these mundane, insignificant details only have me craving more.

What else did you get at the grocery store?

What color is the cat? Where did you go on a run and what did you see, smell, hear, think about?

Let me crawl into your brain and make a home there.

That distance has me feeling even more anxious to get to him now.

By the time I make it to the pickup area, Ren is outside, frowning at his phone.

A lump forms in my throat at the sight of him.

He’s the same: faded blue jeans and a black crewneck, a white T-shirt just poking out underneath, sleeves pushed up his arms. But there’s something new about him too, and I can’t quite put my finger on it, and I hate that.

Hate that it might just be a result of the divide that’s formed between us, the one we’re not talking about.

“Webster!” I shout out the passenger window as I pull up to the curb, startling a tiny, elderly woman with a dog tucked under her arm.

Ren looks up, pockets his phone, and hurries to the car. He throws his stuff in the back seat before crossing to the driver’s side and opening my door.

“What are you doing?” I ask, looking up at him.

“Switching with you.”

“I’m a good driver, Ren.” I set my hands on ten and two to prove it.

“I know you are, Joni, but when have you ever wanted to drive on a road trip like this?”

I roll my eyes, but he’s right, and I get out of the driver’s seat. As I brush past him, he stops me with a hand on my elbow.

“Hey,” he says.

I squint against the sun streaming down behind him, the details of him fuzzy to me until Ren leans in a little closer and they come into focus, the almost teasing look in his eyes, the soft curve of his top lip as he smiles.

“Hey,” he says again.

His arms come around me, squeezing, and I feel like I’m home. “Missed you,” Ren says.

I fold my arms around his back. “Missed you more.”

He pulls away, nodding me toward the passenger seat. I comply, just in time to catch the eye of an older gentleman glaring at us from the front seat of his Toyota Corolla, blinker on, as he waits for our spot.

“So,” Ren says once we’ve gotten past the melee of airport traffic and are headed north. “Predictions for this weekend.”

I pout. “I’m so sad I don’t get to be at the house this year.”