Page 32 of Friends to Lovers

chapter nineteen

Being here again feels out of time, like I’m a slightly different version of myself that I seemed to have lost and am now finding my way back to.

From a stage set up at one end of the yard, a twentysomething guy in striped overalls is crooning out covers on his acoustic guitar, a drum track behind him, everything from Tom Petty to Taylor Swift.

“Shots!” Stevie shouts to the rest of the red team, who will be footing the bill tonight, her fist in the air.

As the lead guitarist and Oliver pop up at the other end of the table and head to the bar to order, she leans toward me.

“Is Clyde going to cebelrate—celerate—” She screws up her face, thinking hard.

“Celebrate?” I offer.

She snaps her fingers and points at me. Turns out she was the main participant of her drinking game.

“Is Clyde going to celebrate with us?” She pronounces the word with enormous concentration.

“If we can track him down,” I say, glancing over my shoulder as if to search for the eponymous—and likely deceased—original owner of the place. We’ve never met Clyde, but he’s something of a legend in town.

Stevie crashes into me, squishing her cheek against my shoulder. “I love you,” she coos. Stevie is an affectionate drunk, and this place seems to amplify it in her, the way it makes all of us feel more carefree. “You’re my favorite sister.”

“You’re mine .” I tuck a lock of brown hair behind her ear as she smiles up at me, this beautiful bride-to-be.

She and Leo are perfect for each other, but it hits me now how much I’ve missed being able to walk into her room and curl up in her bed, or decorating for holidays together, that we may be doing even less of that in the future, and I haven’t treated these last vestiges of our childhood with the sacredness they deserve.

While Stevie told me she understood when I couldn’t make her engagement party, or Leo’s shows, I should have tried harder to be there during these important moments in her life.

Oliver returns with a tray of shots the color of Pepto-Bismol.

I’ve been taking it easy tonight, nursing a margarita all through dinner while I emceed the game, so the shot doesn’t go down quite as easily as it seems to for everyone else.

Except Ren, apparently. At the other end of the table, he grimaces.

“Dance!” Stevie says after she tosses back a second shot, having resorted to communicating in single, easily pronounceable words for the rest of the night. A chorus of cheers goes up around the table.

The line at the outdoor bar is long, so as our table heads toward the dance floor, I weave my way inside to order a beer, desperate to wash away the sickly taste of the shot still on my tongue.

On my way back out, the ancient jukebox in the corner catches my eye and I wander over, idly flipping through the records.

“Diet Bob Dylan not doing it for you?”

Ren’s presence is so familiar I’m surprised I didn’t notice him approach.

I glance up at him, his hair mussed from him dragging a hand through it. He leans an arm on the jukebox as I keep flipping. “Not a G&T girl anymore?”

“No, I am,” I say quickly. I squeeze the cool beer bottle tighter, reach out to tap a toe against his. “I’ve just been waiting for when you can make me one again.” In all honesty, it’s still my usual order, but Ren will forever make my favorite version.

“Or it’s probably not best to mix margaritas and gin with whatever’s in those pink shots.” His knuckles tap against the top of the jukebox.

“No.” I shake my head. “Just left my best bartender back in Portland and a gin and tonic has never been the same.”

“If you say so,” Ren says as I raise the beer to my mouth. He keeps an eye on the bottle, like one Modelo is so damning.

“I haven’t changed that much in two years,” I say.

“Two and a half,” Ren says.

My hand stills as I’m raising the bottle to my lips again. I’d said it casually, tossed out in the name of seeming like the six extra months aren’t that important, when really, they’re scratched on the inside of my brain like tally marks. “What?”

“Two and a half years,” Ren says, eyes suddenly, deeply focused on me. “Or, if you want to be really specific, thirty-one months, one week, five days, and roughly—what, twenty-one hours?”

For a second, I feel a little off-balance, like I’m back in the kayak.

“I’ve missed you, Joni,” he says quietly.

On the list of things I’ve wanted to hear from Ren, this is near the top.

Some acknowledgment that the time we spent without each other was worse than however complicated it would have been to remain in each other’s lives.

His admission buoys and scares me in equal measure, the implications too much to think through in this setting, and with his body so close to mine.

I’ve missed you too , I want to say. My brain is repeating it, but the words don’t come out.

Say it, say it, say it , I think, but I’m stuck on the way Ren’s mouth moved around the words.

I look up at him, warmth thrumming between us as his expression shifts into something almost hopeful.

“I’ve missed you,” I tell him, even as I think that maybe I should lead us out of this territory into something less dangerous, where we aren’t making tipsy confessions, where the years lost between us aren’t laid bare.

“Hey!” We both turn at the voice shouting from the now-open back door. Sasha leans inside, glaring at us. “What the hell are you two doing in here? Get your asses onto the dance floor!”

Ren looks back at me once she’s disappeared. He holds out his hand. “Shall we?”

I wish I could say I weigh my options, but the pressure of his palm against mine again is too tempting. I lace my fingers through his, and he leads me outside to where the guy is now covering a blink-182 song but with a folksy, acoustic bent that doesn’t altogether work.

We wind our way onto the dance floor. I take a long drink of beer to steady myself and extend the bottle toward Ren.

He takes a sip and hands it back like it’s the most natural thing in the world, and I remind myself that some things can just be here and now, normal, not heavy with meaning.

Not everything has to be so wrapped up in history.

Bob Dylan Lite transitions into Big Star’s “Thirteen.” Everyone around us moves together, arms looping around necks and faces pressing against chests.

Ren is still holding my hand, and a small laugh spills out of me as he spins me, once, before pulling me into him, our bodies fitting together in one easy line.

I rest my wrist against his shoulder, bottle dangling behind him.

“I love this song.”

“I know you do,” Ren says.

I swallow, suddenly aware of all the places our bodies are touching. I bring the bottle back around and offer it to him, watch as he takes a drink, his eyes not leaving mine. I drain the rest, cast around for a place to set it. Ren lifts it from my hand and stretches over to a high top.

“Tell me about your new place,” I say because I have to say something. I’m afraid that if we don’t, I’ll inch even closer into him with no point of return.

Ren hesitates.

“What?” I say.

“It’s—” He breaks off. “It’s the house with the crescent moon window in the front door.”

I slow, still swaying, but now the world is swaying around me too.

Ren and I used to walk by that house all the time.

A bungalow off Mississippi—near Sublimity—that we both loved for its quirkiness.

There was a sunroom on one side where we would sometimes see a dog napping, a front porch that reminded us of the vacation house, the crescent-moon-shaped window in the front door.

When we were in our early twenties, it was one of our favorite games to pretend which houses we’d buy if we could afford them.

“Did you—” I say, the reality of the discrepancies between my life and Ren’s dawning on me. “Do you—”

“I bought it,” Ren says. “A couple months ago.”

“In this economy?” I murmur, like we’re talking about something secret, like someone might overhear us.

Ren laughs softly, the lines at the corners of his mouth showing up and making my heart swell. “There’s actually a lot of work that needs to be done. The outside is better than the inside.”

“But still,” I say, gazing over his shoulder as images of Ren doing things like sanding, standing over a table saw, ripping out floorboards, whatever it is you do when you renovate an old house, flood through me. “You’re a homeowner.”

“I guess so.”

“So grown-up,” I say.

Ren rolls his eyes. “Please.”

“Please what?” I say, drawing my head back. “You have your dream job, in your dream city, living in your dream—”

Ren’s grip on me tightens. “I don’t have everything,” he says, and something in the way he’s looking at me has my head going dizzy again.

There’s a squeal from the stage, and a familiar voice rings out.

“This next song,” Stevie says, not entirely upright, the microphone clutched in her hand.

“Is for—” She hiccups, loudly, the sound echoing into the microphone and around the yard.

Leo whoops. “Okay,” she says. “This next song is for my family, who’s here tonight.

” She waves a hand in the general vicinity of the dance floor, as if everyone at this bar is her family for the night, before turning back to Bob Dylan. “Take us away, Bernie!”

“Bernie,” Ren says, just as Thad appears over his shoulder. We step apart, and let him in between us.

“Name’s not Bernie,” Thad says, extending one of the pink shots toward each of us. “It’s Hank or Bob or something like that.”

“Please let it be Bob,” I say, eyes flashing to Ren’s.

He’s smiling, but it’s a little weak at the sight of the dreaded shot glasses suspended between us.

“I really hate these shots,” I say.

“To Stevie?” he asks.

I let out a small groan of protest, but tap mine against his anyway. “To Stevie.”