Page 4 of Friends to Lovers

chapter four

Ren knocks on my door at exactly the time he promised. I weave through the maze of boxes stacked in my living room and whip it open.

“Why are you always so punctual?” I ask, hurrying back to my bathroom and leaving the door for Ren to close. Tonight is my cousin’s wedding, and I’m still in a baggy T-shirt, my hair half-done.

“Why did you tell me you lost that shirt?” he calls after me. The shirt—one of my favorites, perfectly soft, hitting the exact right spot on my thighs—is technically his, the logo of the music venue/record label where he works emblazoned on the front.

“Because I plotted for months to make this shirt my own!” I pick up my curling iron from the counter, try one last time to get my bangs to sit right.

In the mirror, I catch Ren fiddling with my phone in the living room.

I know exactly what he, the music aficionado, is up to. “Don’t change this song!”

Ren sets my phone back on a box and holds up his hands. “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” plays on undisturbed.

“You like that song,” I say as he comes over and rests a shoulder against the bathroom door frame.

“As a person, of course I do.” He runs a hand through his hair. “But you still have a week left in Portland. Save something morbid like this for the plane.”

“Ren,” I say, patting his cheek. “I’ll never forget about you .”

He rolls his eyes and ducks his head away.

A month ago, when I’d announced I’d be moving across the country, Ren was, understandably, shocked.

I could still barely believe it myself. I’d been interning at Novo, a stop-motion studio, since graduation, hoping for something permanent to come along, but it never crossed any of our minds that my dream job would open up in the company’s new New York office.

Leaving Portland, the life I’d established here, wouldn’t be easy, but after a year of despairing as one by one my peers secured grown-up roles, as my mom warned me about “putting all my eggs in one basket,” a not-small part of me was so relieved that I pounced on the opportunity like a cat on a mouse.

When I told him the news, Ren had stared at me in silence for a good minute. But then his face broke into a huge smile, and he wrapped me up in a breath-stealing, congratulatory hug, and my own shock dissipated a little along with his.

“I’ll miss you too, Joni,” he says now, resettling against the door frame. “But at least we have the weddings, right?”

“Weddings?” I ask, meeting his eye in the mirror as I prop myself against the counter, mascara wand in hand.

“There’s always a wedding, Joni.”

“Ah, right.” I slam a fist to my forehead. “The plight of your twenties.”

“And we’ll always need plus-ones,” he says suggestively.

After my old summer camp friend’s wedding last summer, I went with Ren to his coworker’s in the spring.

We’d both decided that it was simpler just to take each other as dates rather than have a wedding be a first date with a stranger.

But as fun as it’s been, plus-oneing is easier when you live on the same coast.

“I don’t know,” I say, amused by Ren’s optimism, skeptical that this won’t end in disappointment.

It assumes schedules align, time off is approved, we’re invited to weddings.

It means promising to drop everything to be each other’s plus-ones from now until some unidentified end date.

And then there’s the obvious flaw. “We always get plus-ones? And we’re always single? ” I ask him.

Ren shrugs a shoulder in a who the hell cares motion. “It’s tradition now. We’re each other’s plus-ones.” He leans toward me, brown eyes never leaving mine. “It’s a way for us to make sure we still see each other sometimes.”

Sometimes. The word hits me square in the chest. “Ren, I’ll still come home for holidays,” I say.

“There’s still the beach house. We’ll be fine.

” This is what I’ve been telling myself over the last couple weeks, as the move has become more real, and it’s true.

We don’t need this tradition to ensure we’ll keep in touch.

Ren and I are fixed, a constant, best friends since age three, and no amount of distance will change that. We’ll still be us .

His eyes trace over my face, something falling in his gaze. A muscle moves in his jaw as he frowns, almost imperceptibly, then notices me watching him in the mirror. “Of course,” he says, with a small smile, nodding. He pushes off the door and walks down the hall.

I adjust a final piece of my hair, then head into my room to get dressed. Ren is lying on my bed, knees bent over the end and feet planted on the floor. His eyes are closed, arms crossed over his chest. He looks defeated.

“You all good down there?” I ask, sinking onto the bed next to him.

“Mmm,” Ren mumbles, the sound low and rough at the edges. I can feel it reverberate through me. “Just tired. Show ended late last night.”

“What’s going on with a new position?” Ren is ever politely trying to climb the ladder at Sublimity, where he’s been bartending for the last two years and is now their lead sound tech during the week. Music is what he loves, what he’s good at, and he works so hard. No one deserves it more.

“Nothing new,” he says. “It’s fine.”

He uncrosses his arms, absentmindedly rubs the hem of my T-shirt between his fingers.

Our gazes both drop to the spot, but when I look back up at his face, it hits me.

His suggestion that we make our plus-one arrangement a tradition, his expression when I all but dismissed it…

Ren is worried, really worried, about what this move will mean for our friendship.

And all these weeks I’ve been throwing it in his face, showing him pictures of the apartment I’ll be sharing with my sister, who will be attending graduate school at NYU, asking him to help me with packing.

“Hey,” I say, leaning over him, propping my arm next to his shoulder to hold myself up.

Ren is good at hiding his emotions, and all these weeks I should have remembered that, and stopped for one second, among all the chaos, to tell him how much I’m going to miss him, to reassure him that I could never forget him.

“We’ll do it,” I tell him, my hip pressed against his. “We’re each other’s plus-ones.”

“Joni, it’s stupid,” he says, head starting to roll to the side, but I grab his chin.

“It’s not stupid,” I say. “It’s a good idea.” He’s right. A plan wouldn’t hurt. We’ll make it work.

He doesn’t respond, and suddenly I feel nervous he’ll say no. That my initial reaction made him change his mind. That there’s nothing I can say to reassure him. I bring my face over his, like the proximity might prove I’m serious. “I want to.”

We stay like that for a while before he slowly smiles, an exhale of a laugh coming out of him. He pulls me into his chest, my head just under his chin. “Okay,” he murmurs against my hair.

I close my eyes, let the familiar scent of him envelop me, until I’m reminded of the time, and I spring up from my bed, grab my dress from where it’s hanging over my closet door.

“Close your eyes,” I say, and he does, pressing a hand over them for good measure.

I tug my shirt over my head and toss it on the bed next to him before slipping on my dress.

“Done,” I tell him. I lift my hair off my neck. “Zip?”

Ren pushes himself up and walks over to where I’m standing in front of my mirror. I watch as he zips my dress—green, wrestled off a rack in a vintage shop down the street. His eyes meet mine in the reflection. “You clean up nice, Miller,” he says, fingers going still.

I straighten a strap of my dress. “You don’t look so bad yourself, Webster.”

Ren nods toward the door. “Should we get going?”

“Two minutes,” I say.

In the bathroom, I put on a pair of tiny gold hoops and spritz perfume onto my wrists. As I’m inspecting myself one last time, my eyes find Ren waiting for me in the living room, a skyscraper in the middle of the low-lying buildings that are my packed-up belongings.

“Joni?” he calls.

“Coming!” I say, then, cringing, “Wait, I need ChapStick, just—thirty more seconds.” I rush back to my bedroom and root around one of the boxes there until I find a tube of Burt’s Bees.

When I turn to go, a flash of white catches my eye. The Sublimity T-shirt, carefully folded on my pillow.