Page 3 of Friends to Lovers

chapter three

There was a time I would have been thrilled if Ren and I had a whole day here to ourselves, but the idea of being alone with him now has me hurrying away as fast as I can.

I speed-walk back down the hall, fly up the stairs two at a time, close my door quietly behind me before leaning against it and letting out the breath I’ve been holding.

It takes me a minute to clear my head, to sort through the conversation I half blacked out downstairs, catalog each item so I can proceed accordingly.

Ren. Ren is here . Not just here, but off doing something, existing like I’ve been doing a mediocre job pretending he doesn’t these past years.

And after tonight, we’ll be sharing a room for the rest of the week.

The thought makes me claustrophobic, like this house isn’t big enough for us and all of our history.

I need to get out of here.

I stuff a tote bag with enough supplies to last me months and lug a camp chair down to the beach.

It’s one of the rare days when the temperature will climb into the eighties, the sun al ready beating down intensely, the sand scorching my feet.

I slather my shoulders in sunscreen and settle in with a book, ready to escape into the tale of a woman who falls in love with a guy five hundred years her senior, but it’s okay because he’s magic and heir to some throne.

But after a while, I realize I’ve read the same paragraph four times. The words are blurring in front of me, and the corners of the book keep digging into my legs.

I toss the book aside and trade it for my phone.

“Leo wants to play capture the flag,” Stevie says by way of an answer.

“He— Now?” I drag my sunglasses back down my face now that I’ve abandoned the romantasy.

“No, on Wednesday.” She’s rummaging around on the other end of the line, a series of clinks and thumps.

“Stevie, you’re going to have to provide a little more clarity than that,” I say, pressing my toes into the sand.

She sighs. The rummaging stops. “It’s some big tradition,” she says. “He and his brother organized a whole crosstown event when they were kids. It’s his singular request.”

“Fair enough.” I pull my phone away from my ear when there’s a sound like an entire shelf of books has caved in. “What are you doing?”

“I’m in our office.” Stevie huffs. “It was someone’s bright idea to store all the band’s extra shit in our suitcases to save space, but now I actually need to use them.”

“Ah,” I say. “The tour.” Immediately following their honeymoon, Stevie will be joining Leo on his band’s North American tour for the first three months of their marriage.

“Hey,” Stevie says. “Where are you?”

“Just at home.” The lie comes surprisingly quickly.

I’d decided to wait to tell anyone about being fired until after Stevie’s wedding.

Coming here early to regroup had seemed like the perfect way to prepare myself for a week of lying to my family.

That is, until the person I most dreaded seeing showed up early too.

“Last I checked, you couldn’t hear the ocean in your apartment.”

I grip the arms of the chair, curl my toes in the sand. Down the beach, a family is rapidly approaching, sand pails in the hands of a pair of shrieking kids, the father’s booming voice telling them to slow down.

“Oh, it’s a playlist,” I say.

“What?”

“I listen to it when I’m trying to sleep. You know, rain sounds, ocean sounds.”

“Huh,” Stevie mutters. “Were you trying to sleep?”

“No. Just…” I scramble, trying to lie better. “Couldn’t wait a second longer to hear those seagulls!” It comes out like a carnival worker trying to sell a wailing kid on a ride.

“What’s going on?” she asks.

I squeeze my eyes shut, readying myself for this week to implode before it’s even started.

“Is it because of Ren?” she asks. “Seeing him tomorrow.”

Stevie is the only person in my family who knows Ren and I haven’t spoken in the last two and a half years.

She’s confirmed no one else is the wiser on the Webster side of things either, so at the very least, Ren and I implicitly agree that our families should be spared our drama.

But Stevie doesn’t know what happened between us, the line we crossed.

Something else Ren and I implicitly agree on, I guess.

“I’m a little stressed,” I admit. A breeze moves through the beach grass behind me, teasing my neck. “But we’ll be fine, Stevie. We’re two people who used to be friends, and now we’re not, and that’s it.”

Stevie snorts. “Yeah. That’s it .”

“Let’s talk about the schedule for the week,” I say, the sun catching my eye as it bounces off a dory fishing boat bobbing by. I squint out at it, then at where the waves come to tiny points of light. “You don’t need to worry about Ren and me.”

Stevie sighs again, but relents. “You’ll probably get there before us tomorrow. Sorry we can’t pick you up at the airport.”

“It’s fine.” I don’t mention that it’s also the perfect cover for why I will have arrived before they do.

Stevie and Leo are stopping at our parents’ house on the way to the coast tomorrow morning so they can pack up all the wedding things they’ve been storing there: bins filled with favors, decorations, enough napkins for every wedding guest to douse theirs and their neighbors’ in gasoline and still have extra.

“I think Ren will be there early tomorrow too,” Stevie says.

“Will he,” I say.

“Will you be okay?”

“Stevie,” I warn.

“Fine, fine. Never mind.”

We go over the order of things: everyone’s arrival tomorrow, Leo’s capture-the-flag tradition on Wednesday, the combined bachelor and bachelorette Thursday night, wedding setup before the rehearsal dinner on Friday.

“Can’t believe I’m getting married,” Stevie says.

I pick at a piece of vinyl peeling off the arm of my chair. “Couldn’t be anyone but Leo,” I say.

“I know. I hate it so much.” The speed at which Stevie, former queen of no-commitment, fell for sunny, golden-retriever Leo surprised everyone. But she still has to be Stevie about it.

“Sure you do.” I bring my knees up to my chest and gaze back out at the white-capped, endless Pacific that’s been the backdrop to so much of our lives.

“Are you really going to be okay this week?” she asks.

I glance over my shoulder toward the house, where I can hear the sound of the mower running in the distance.

“This week isn’t about me, Stevie,” I say, determined not to give her anything to run with.

Ren is the A&R manager for Leo’s band, Bearcat, and Stevie and Leo spend a fair amount of time with him in Portland, a fact that caused a lot of sleepless nights when I first realized it.

Ren isn’t just some person I can write out.

His life will always be irrevocably intertwined with mine.

“It is if I want it to be. I’m the bride, and I don’t like that much attention.”

“Says the person who invited almost two hundred people to her wedding.”

“Only half of them are coming. And I didn’t invite them. My fiancé has never met a person he didn’t like.”

By the time we hang up, the sun is shifting toward afternoon in the sky, burning off the last of the mist hanging over the dense, coastal Oregon forest on either side of the house. The family from earlier is fading back the direction they came.

I stretch my arms over my head, twist back toward the house.

I can just glimpse Ren at the far side of the yard, pushing the ancient mower in clean lines back and forth, avoiding the rocky patch where it slopes at the bottom and making sharp, careful turns at each end.

He pauses, the sound of the mower dying as he peels his sweat-damp shirt over his head, his skin glistening in the August sun and—

I wrench my eyes away, but not before they’ve caught on him pulling the starter once, twice, the muscles in his back working.

I turn back around and wade into the freezing water.

* * *

That night, after trying and failing to distract myself, scrolling and not responding to a string of texts from my former coworkers “just checking in,” repacking my suitcase for when I move into what’s beginning to feel like the jail cell Ren and I will be sharing tomorrow, I turn off the lamp above my bed—Stevie and Leo’s bed, more accurately—and roll over to get some sleep for what will probably be the last time this week.

I close my eyes and count my breaths, do that thing where you clench every muscle in your body then relax five times in a row, tell myself a particularly boring story.

But after what feels like hours, I’m still awake.

I check the time on my phone—twenty-eight minutes have passed—and flop back onto my pillows.

My brilliant plan to come up here early has already failed, and tomorrow feels more daunting than ever.

It’s an unnerving combination, being in this place that’s supposed to bring me so much solace while feeling so on edge.

Ren and I managed to stay out of each other’s way today. When I walked into the kitchen to make myself dinner, I noticed his car was gone and wondered again, for a minute, if I made him up. If I’d been so worried about seeing him that I crafted some narrative that he showed up early.

But now I can feel him in the house, like I used to be able to feel him across town, across campus, across Portland, across the country, some point at the other end of a line that tethered us.

I kick the blankets off, stare at the ceiling. This nudge at my center that shifts with him, like every time he turns over in bed, he tugs a little—it used to be a comfort. Now it just feels like something else I can’t control.