Page 42 of Friends to Lovers

I return his smile, but it’s a little hard to keep on my face. I want Ren, but I need him, the best friend who so much of me is built around, the most important person in my life even when we weren’t speaking, more.

And then, Stevie steps forward.

“Joni and Ren are sleeping together!” she shouts at the top of her impressive lungs.

This time, it’s not a slow fade as much as a bomb dropped, the sound of the impact ringing in everyone’s ears.

“Stevie,” I hiss. She throws a hand over her mouth, eyes going dinner-plate round. “What the fuck?”

“I’m so sorry,” she says. “I think I might be drunk.”

Everyone’s attention is ping-ponging between me and Ren, waiting for one of us to say something.

“We’re not—” Ren stares straight at me, brow knitting. “We’re not sleeping together…”

“Anymore,” I finish for him, without thinking. Then, as if it matters, as if anyone out here needs to be privy to the twisted timeline of our relationship, “Yet?”

Next to Ren, I see Sasha muttering something before Thad hands her a folded bill. When her eyes snag on mine, she shrugs. “Sorry,” she says, looking between me and Ren. “It’s just…it’s not surprising , is it?”

And that’s when the anger hits me, drowning out everything else. “Are you—” I say, heat flaring in my chest. “Are you taking bets on us?”

“Joni,” Ren says, voice rough. He stands up, strides around the table toward me and sets his hands on my shoulders, probably trying to put an end to this pathetic scene.

“No,” I say, leaning around him to peer at the others.

Hannah looks stunned, Greg’s mouth is turned down in a way that suggests he’s not that surprised either.

My dad, beyond him, is intently studying his water glass.

“Is it all just some joke? Ren and Joni will eventually get together?” Ren kneads at one of my shoulders, trying to calm me, but I can’t keep it in now, not when I’ve withheld it from them all these years for their sakes, neglecting how that would impact me.

“Well, who had three years ago?” I say, voice high.

I swear I see Leo’s hand twitch upward, and I want to throw my glass of wine in his direction.

“Because I hate to break it to all of you, but that’s when it actually happened. This week was just a victory lap!”

“Three years ago?” my mom says next to us. Apparently she, at least, wasn’t in on this betting pool.

“Is that why you haven’t been here the last two summers?” Sasha asks.

“No,” my mom says, shaking her head. “Of course not. Joni’s been working.” She seems to reconsider this, adds, “At the job she’s been fired from, I suppose.”

“No, let’s get it all out in the open,” I say to her. Ren has dropped his hands and stepped to the side of me, opening the scene up to the deck again, my protective layer gone. “Isn’t that what you wanted? Yes, Sasha, great guess. Did you have any money on that one?”

“Hey, I’m the one who defended you not being here,” she says, holding up her palms. “And it was because of Ren ?” She gestures toward where he’s standing next to me, his eyes stuck on some spot on the ground.

“It wasn’t his fault,” I say.

“So you two just slept together and then you happened to stay on the East Coast for two and a half years.”

I scramble, my anger suddenly muddled, like I can’t find my footing.

“Yes. But not like that.” I look up at Ren, but his posture is rigid, drawn in.

I’ve gone too far, and I can see the slight wince sweeping off his face, there and gone and replaced with a forced, small smile before he thinks I can notice his hurt at every stupid, desperate thing I just said to try to explain this away. “I’m not saying what I mean.”

My mom’s voice, softer than before, startles me. “What do you mean, then?” she asks.

“I mean…” I trail off again, cupping my elbows. Everything is spilling out, and I can’t contain it.

“Joni?” my mom says. She’s eyeing me like she used to when I had a panic attack in high school, questions brimming behind her teeth.

“I didn’t come back because I knew that if we saw each other again, we’d ruin each other’s lives,” I blurt. It’s why I left, after all, what I told myself every time I almost called him, almost flew home, almost took back everything I’d done. That this was how it had to be.

The confession lands on the deck with the rest of me, for everyone to see. Everything goes silent.

Ren shifts, suddenly another inch farther from me, and when I look up at him this time, he’s staring straight ahead, frowning. We haven’t had a conversation about what happened between us. There’s still so much for us to say.

“I’m still confused,” my mom says. “So you two haven’t seen each other.”

I hesitate, still watching Ren. I’ve shared enough, and it’s not just me at the center of this anymore. It’s both of us.

At my mom’s question, he seems to come to. He shakes his head. “Until this week, Joni and I hadn’t spoken since Sasha’s wedding.”

Someone blows out a sigh at the table.

“But you two talked about each other like you were,” my mom says. “Didn’t you?”

Whenever my mom asked how Ren was over the past couple of years, I’d lie.

Say he seemed good, but never elaborated beyond that.

It was part of why I’d pared back on my already slim communication with my mom, because I knew that if we talked too much, I might trip up, and she might drag the truth out of me, especially on one of my bad days, when I missed Ren so much I could feel it in my veins. Ren must have lied to Hannah too.

“I guess the two of you seemed so fixed that we all just assumed…” She looks over my head at Ren as if for confirmation, but he’s gone still.

“Are you two okay?” This comes from Stevie, who I’d almost forgotten was there.

There’s something like an apology in her eyes, her hands hovering like she might lunge over and hug me, and for some reason, it’s the thing that does me in.

I clench my jaw, try to think of ways to reabsorb tears as the selfish truth I’ve been burying shoots to the surface: I haven’t told Stevie what happened between me and Ren because I’m ashamed.

Of how I ran. Of how I couldn’t bring myself to fix it.

“I’m—” I feel it in my head, everything tilting around me like it has before, in a way that feels like the end of something.

“Honey,” my mom says, reaching toward my shoulder.

I slide her arm away. “I’m okay,” I say, my eyes on Ren.

All I want is to extract him, the pieces of him I got back this week, from this mess, and run off with them into the night.

But I can’t get him to look at me. “We’ll talk about it later,” I tell him.

We have to. He doesn’t even know all the details of why I left him the night of Sasha’s wedding.

But later, it turns out, doesn’t come. The whole ugly argument effectively ends the night, and we make our way back to the cars, all the seats in Ren’s already taken.

At the house, people go to their separate rooms or sit around the firepit, conversation gradually returning to the realm of celebration.

I go inside and check Thad’s room, thinking Ren might have gone to talk with his brother, but it’s empty. In the kitchen, Hannah is putting a kettle on the stove. As I round into the hallway I almost collide with Alex again. Everywhere, there’s someone else, but Ren isn’t among them.

When I check the living room one last time, my dad is sitting on the couch with his phone.

“Slow down a minute,” he says as I walk past him.

I pause, turn to him. “Have you seen Ren?”

He sits forward, sets his phone on the coffee table, pats the cushion next to him. I perch on the edge and he reaches over, stills my hands as I wring them in front of me. I glance down, the lump in my throat twisting ever tighter.

“You know who’s a great person to talk to about this kind of thing?” he asks. I shoot him a beleaguered look. I know what he’s going to say. “Your mom.”

“Mom doesn’t want to talk to me right now,” I say.

“She always wants to talk to you, sweetie.”

But there’s only one person I want to talk to right now, and the only way I know how to handle a crisis like this is one anxious step at a time. My mom is an issue for a later date. My dad seems to recognize this, hand sliding off mine.

“He’s somewhere,” he says. “Give him some time.”

But Ren and I don’t have time, we only have one day.

I keep searching, checking and rechecking every spot, always getting some approximation of the same reaction from everyone I run into: an expression somewhere between avoidance and pity.

No one knows what to say, and no matter what corner I turn, I still can’t find him.

Eventually, I go back to the screen porch to wait for him. I sit at the foot of my bed in my dress, teeth working at my lower lip until it hurts.

I wait until the house is silent, and the breeze coming in through the windows is cold. Until my mind goes from blank to frantic to blank again.

Ren doesn’t come back.