Page 29 of Friends to Lovers

The memories of those first few weeks after press in on me.

I flew back to New York with a throat raw from the perpetual lump in it, like I’d inhaled too much smoke.

It was easy enough to throw myself back into my routine at Novo, but every now and again I’d have this shaky feeling run down my arms, the familiar beginnings of a panic attack, the ones I knew I should go see a therapist about but was actively ignoring, making it so I had to put down whatever delicate puppet I was working on until it dissipated.

For a while, it was just a matter of feeling the minutes tick by until my heart rate returned to a normal speed, reminding myself that I could go home and crawl into bed and cry or sleep at the end of the day.

But work, art, eventually felt good, safe again, even if the rest of the world didn’t.

I saw him everywhere else, in everyone I passed on the street: dark hair and flannel shirts, brown eyes and strong shoulders.

I couldn’t listen to music without thinking about him, and so my world became quieter for a while.

I wondered about him in every moment I couldn’t distract myself, if he hated me, if every time I almost called him he was doing the same, if he’d answer.

If he wouldn’t. I wondered if he was fine without me, which hurt most of all, even if it was what I’d wanted.

It hurt all the time, a physical pain stopping me short, and so I started to diligently shut him out of my brain.

Now Ren and I have been talking to each other again for all of two days, and despite all that, despite how painful I know it is to lose him, here I am, fantasizing about his goddamn hands.

I drag in a shaky breath and shove my thoughts as far down as they’ll go, smiling over at Stevie. “We’re friends for at least this week,” I say. “I’m not thinking about what happens after that.”

“Why not?” Stevie pushes her paddle off a rock jutting up in the middle of the river, glides around it before she’s next to me again.

I know she means Ren, but her question has me seizing up, worrying she knows. About my job, the fact that I don’t technically live anywhere anymore, that I have six months of savings, but that six months goes quickly if I don’t have an actual plan.

“It’s just—” I say, swallow over the achy feeling in my chest. “We don’t really know what things look like after this week.”

“You could, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” she says, working her paddles in a way that does exactly nothing to propel her forward. “You and Ren have a lot of history. I don’t know if your entire relationship is worth throwing away over something that happened over two years ago.”

I nod, mostly because I don’t want to keep having this conversation. Only danger lies on the other side of it.

“I’ll think about it,” I tell her.

We catch up with Sasha at the next bend and paddle the end of the river together, until we come around the final curve and the ocean spreads out across a sandbar in front of us, sparkling blue, boats bobbing out of the harbor in town a few miles down, the salty air brushing against my neck now that we’re out from under the tree cover.

“Want to go farther out?” Sasha asks, nodding toward the far end of the sandbar.

It’s calm here, no rocks or crashing waves to contend with, but it’s still the ocean. Hemsworth told us we could paddle a ways out into it if we were brave, which I am certainly not when it comes to aquatic sports beyond, well, the two-inch drop we went over at the onset of this whole adventure.

Luckily, Stevie’s outdoorsiness ends here too. “No way,” she says. “But I will so happily watch you be adventurous.”

“I’ll just go for a minute,” Sasha says before she heads off.

I turn my kayak to face Stevie and set my paddle across my lap, dip my fingers into the water.

“Hey, remember the bulletin board in the mailroom in our building?” Stevie asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “Why?” It was meant to be a spot for tenants to post things like flyers for gigs, sticky notes about a free cof fee table, but it more often turned into the apartment message board.

If 4C can please start keeping it down between the hours of ten and six, 4B would be very appreciative.

Blondie with a heart tattoo on your shoulder—u live here?

Please stop leaving your dog’s shit on the sidewalk, Marcus . So on and so forth.

“I was just thinking that the kayak rental guy would totally vibe with whoever kept trying to start his pot business on that board,” Stevie says, eyes fixed on some far point on the horizon before she swivels them to me, mouth spreading into a wide grin.

I throw my head back, laughter hooting out of me. “Wasn’t that Derek?” I ask.

Stevie swats her paddle at the water, hitting me with a splash this time. “You knew who the pot guy was all along?”

“So did you!” I say, gasping with laughter. “He was the one who kept trying to ask you out, but you didn’t notice.”

“Okay, telling someone you’re ‘thinking about checking out the new Thai place’ does not constitute an ask-out. You’ve got to put some intention behind it.”

I frown in solidarity with Derek. “He was nervous.”

“He was a drug dealer!”

“He was an aspiring drug dealer.” This prompts a full-body laugh out of Stevie. She leans back in her kayak, eyes closed as giggles bubble out of her.

“Oh, man,” she says when she looks at me again. “Thank god we don’t live there anymore.”

“What do you mean?” I ask. I dip one end of my paddle into the water to straighten myself out. Our apartment wasn’t what either of us dreamed—smaller than we anticipated, a notoriously unreliable landlord—but it was ours, creaky floors, stuck windows, and all. “I loved that apartment.”

Stevie’s nose wrinkles. Between her hat and her braids, she looks so much like she did as a kid. “Did you?”

“Of course I did,” I say. “Did it not seem like I loved it?”

“I don’t know,” she says. She rolls her paddle across her lap, back and forth. “Sometimes you just didn’t seem all that happy in New York.”

“I mean—” I say, answers jostling for position in my brain. I go with, “I was a little stressed sometimes, for sure, but…” I shrug.

Stevie keeps an eye on me. “Are you happy now?” she asks.

The words escape me again, so many possible things to tell her right now but none of them seeming exactly true.

I am happy there would be a lie, especially in the last few years.

I’m lonely would get me closer to the truth, but it would mean having to dig into all the specifics of that, tell her about the hole I’m worried I’ve dug myself into.

When I look at my sister, the ready expression on her face, like she knows she’s providing an opening for this enormous piece of news, I almost tell her.

That Ramona fired me. That I have no clue what I’m doing next.

That I’ve been realizing, lately, that I’ve been lost for a lot longer than I care to admit.

She’s not wrong—I haven’t always been happy in New York.

Stevie seemed to enjoy her time there, but she’d always known it would just be for grad school, hadn’t planned on staying beyond that, and she’d stuck to her word.

The loneliness didn’t really settle in on me until she left.

But even after trying harder, after making an effort to go out with people after work, exploring on my own and creating a haven for myself in my apartment, New York never felt quite like mine in the way Portland did.

I’d watch other people falling in love with the city while I continued to feel some pull to the West Coast that I couldn’t sever.

I told myself it wasn’t real: that it was just nostalgia.

But then I was back, for one brief moment two and a half years ago, and I felt it.

Some weight lifted off me, like I was back where I belonged.

As I cycle through the past five years, searching for an answer for Stevie, I realize that there were times I wasn’t so focused on work, when I let it slip away and my mind cleared again for a minute, and there was almost room to think about a different kind of life, if I’d let myself.

The weddings with Ren.

I twist myself straighter in my seat, the confession dying on my lips.

But I still feel guilty when I shake my head and tell her that yes, of course I’m happy.

“Okay,” she says. It’s obvious she doesn’t totally believe me, and I almost open my mouth to offer up something—what, I don’t know, maybe an anecdote about the woman in my building who I am convinced is a lost Olsen triplet—but a cold wash of water goes sailing over my head at that moment, soaking down my back.

I dig my paddle into the water and flip around to see Sasha, eyes wide as she tries to suppress a laugh. “Shit,” she says. “I didn’t mean—”

The splash from my paddle drenches her hair before she can finish her sentence.

“Oh my god,” she says, spluttering. “That’s war.”

“Stop!” Stevie shouts as Sasha’s next splash hits her. “I’m not prepared for this! My hat!”

“Outdoorswoman,” I say, swiveling to face Stevie, bangs dripping water down my face. “You’ve—”

I truly should have known better, but Stevie’s look of delight as she gets me square in the chest is the image that will always define this morning for me.

* * *

We paddle back to the lake—Hemsworth looking very relieved that we didn’t clumsily abscond with his kayaks—and drive back to the house. It’s nearing two, and Stevie is singing along to the radio tunelessly in the backseat, hands behind her head as the wind whips strands of her braids loose.

“Okay,” Sasha says as we turn off the highway. “Showers, then meet up in Stevie’s room to get ready?”

“Do we have stuff for spritzes?” Stevie says, poking her head through the seats.

“Obviously,” I say. “It’s your wedding.”

We arrive at the house, and Sasha stops her car in front of the garage. “Stevie, I didn’t know Leo was so competitive,” she says as we hop out.

I follow her gaze to the beach, where the bachelor party is playing touch football, not a shirt among them. Leo is weaving an impressive line through what I assume is the opposite team, the drummer reaching out and tagging his side.

“Yeah, he fits right in with you Websters,” Stevie says, leaning against the hood of the car, shading a hand over her eyes.

“Well, I’m going to shower.” Sasha moves toward the house. “I’ll meet you upstairs!”

I wave a hand at her before leaning next to Stevie and turning my attention back to the beach. Ren catches the football that Thad hikes to him, runs backward until he brings his arm up, throws it to Leo, cheering when Leo twists and leaps into the air to catch it.

Are you happy now? Stevie had asked me. The broad answer is no.

In life, I’m not happy, and it’s been that way for a long time, even before the worst happened at my job.

But if I were to answer her about right now, I might tell her that yes, everything else aside, here at the house, I’m as close to happy as I’ve been in a long time.