Page 47 of Friends to Lovers

chapter twenty-nine

I fell asleep without closing the curtains last night, so I wake up earlier than usual, jerking upright in the direction of Ren’s bed.

But his blankets are undisturbed.

As I change into a pair of jean shorts and a crewneck sweatshirt, shove my feet into my Birkenstocks, I try to comfort myself with the fact that at least life was beautiful again for one brief, shining moment.

The house is still quiet as I cut through the kitchen and out the back door, walk the short path down to the beach.

The tide is out, seagulls circling in the gray morning.

I gaze down the long stretch of coast that comes to a point far in the distance, then back toward the lighthouse, my heart stuttering when I see him, walking toward me from where the sand runs into the rocks, still in his clothes from last night.

His hands are in the pockets of his dark gray chinos, a hunter green fleece that I think belongs to Thad—one he wouldn’t have had to grab from the porch, at least—pulled over his white button-down.

“Hi,” he says when he gets to me. He’s barefoot, the hems of his pants just rolled to avoid the wet sand. There’s stubble on his chin, faint lines under his eyes. I’m sure I don’t look much better. “Did you sleep?” he asks me, his toes kicking the sand.

“Not really.” I ask it plainly, no pretenses left between us. “Where were you?”

Ren squints up at the house. “I just needed a little time to think,” he says.

I look away too, but in the other direction, toward the water, trying to match my breathing to the steady in and out of the waves. Though I know where things are heading, it doesn’t make it hurt any less.

“I understand,” I tell him.

“Joni.” He reaches for me, slips his fingers into my hair. I shiver at the contact, and how much I don’t want it to end. “Will you walk with me?”

I nod. Kick off my sandals and set them near his shoes, the ones I missed, at the base of the path. We start walking down the beach that seems like it stretches on forever.

“So,” he says, sooner than I expected. Diving right in. Ren usually takes his time with his words. “You got fired.”

“I got fired,” I say through a shaky breath.

I can feel him looking at me, and I glance up at him. His mouth is turned down. On anyone else, I might call it pity, but I know Ren better than that. He’s pensive, ready to help if I need it. “What happened?”

“Um,” I say, not quite sure how to sum everything up now that I’m finally saying it out loud.

“The studio didn’t want the movie. We screened it for them and they said it wouldn’t read well with audiences, and—and it cost a lot of money, so Ramona had to fire someone.

The team I worked with to pitch it—a bunch of us were fired. ”

Ren is quiet, his lips pursed. “There wasn’t any point during production that someone could have told you it wasn’t working?”

“No, I know,” I say, before we can go too far down that road.

It’s crossed my mind too, that Ramona, at any point in the last three years, could have told me it wasn’t shaping up how it should be.

That some studio head who wandered through to “see how things were coming along” could have thought to themselves that the movie wasn’t going to read well with young audiences.

I should have trusted the few times I felt things weren’t working, like when the lead character didn’t read right on camera, or our shooting schedule was always behind because sets and puppets were getting too complicated.

I was so desperate to use work as the thing to keep me afloat, that I ignored how my desperation was hurting the work itself.

“But they took a risk on us. I wanted to prove we could pull it off.”

Ren’s head tilts, a ghost of a disbelieving smile playing at one side of his mouth. “You’re always defending Novo,” he says.

“What?”

He shakes his head. “Just—no part of you is a little mad? All the time you put into that company, and this one mistake—”

“A million-dollar mistake,” I cut in.

“Okay,” Ren says. “Fine, a million-dollar mistake. But there were a lot of people who approved your idea, who worked on it too. Ramona just let you pour all of yourself into it and then take the fall?”

“It makes sense that they fired me.”

“Maybe,” Ren says. The sand scratches against my ankles as we walk. “But Novo isn’t perfect. I know you’ve put everything into that company. Your whole life. But this situation isn’t all your fault.”

His words hit me square in the chest. Your whole life.

I had been ignoring the signs, was so determined to prove myself there, to prove to everyone by doing well there that my anxiety didn’t rule me anymore, that I didn’t see what this singlemindedness was doing to me, not until Ren helped me see it, brought me back to myself.

But then when I lost him, it only got worse again, like now I also had to prove it to myself .

I thought that if I worked harder, happiness would magically be there waiting on the other side.

But it wasn’t. Because happiness was never going to come from tying my self-worth to my job.

It couldn’t come from any one thing. I had to build it, and I hadn’t. Life continued on without me.

There have been glimmers this week, small glimpses of some version of me that exists outside of Novo.

I thought the week would be one painful lie, but it hasn’t been.

In a lot of ways, it feels like I’m looking up at my life for the first time in years, that maybe, some cosmic force intervened once it realized I might never do that unless I was forced to.

That it happened now, because this place—the house, the beach, the people, Ren—was always going to be what would bring me back to the parts of myself that had gone missing.

It hurts, though. Giving Novo up. Letting it go.

I look over at Ren. His eyes are focused on the sand in front of us. “I just— I had it, you know? This job that I worked so hard for. That I loved, even if it exhausted me. And now I’m almost thirty and what do I have to show for it? This isn’t where I’m supposed to be right now.”

“You’ll have it again. Besides, I think supposed to be is highly subjective,” Ren says with a knowing smile.

When his career path wasn’t the same as his siblings’, his parents worried, and then when he did find professional success, his mom shifted her sights to marriage.

Always the next thing. Always concern that came from a loving place, but piled up to feel like disappointment.

But it’s always easier to apply that kind of thinking to someone else’s life than your own.

“I don’t mean to discount how hard it is, though,” Ren says, nudging my shoulder.

“I wish I could have been there for you.” We walk in silence for a minute, our only other company the breeze and soft hush of the waves rolling in.

I can feel him glance over at me before he asks it. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

I suck in a breath, let it out. “I just got you back,” I say, some thing about last night cracking the remainder of any delicate shell around us. “It felt fragile. And selfishly, I wanted to be happy for a minute.”

“I understand,” Ren says, jaw working as he nods, his eyes on the ground again. “But I don’t think we’re all that fragile. Two and a half years didn’t do us in.”

“Can we sit?” I ask, suddenly exhausted. From waiting so long to have this conversation, from missing him, from trying so hard to figure out how to say what I mean.

Ren follows me toward drier sand, dropping down next to me, his forearms resting on his bent knees, hands dangling between them. I want, more than anything, to lean into him, let his arm come around me, but I know it can’t be that simple.

“I’m sorry,” I say, tone half-joking. Ren looks quizzically over at me. “I just couldn’t not kiss you.”

He chuckles, gazes out at the gray ocean. “Joni,” he says softly. “I think I’m always going to be waiting for just five minutes of you loving me like I love you.”

I turn my head toward him. We’ve never said things like “I love you” beyond friendship.

Ren’s mouth tilts down. “I’ve never…liked talking to you about other women, relationships, whatever it is.

And look, for a while it was just because I thought I liked you in a way that would eventually go away.

” He lifts a hand, rakes it through his hair once.

“But I realized it’s because I was comparing all of them to you.

Trying to find someone who made me feel like you do. But no one is you.”

Hannah’s words from Sasha’s wedding night echo through me. Such a good fit for you. “What about Amanda?” I ask.

Ren nods, looks down at the sand between his legs. “After what happened between us, I thought maybe it could be her. I hoped it could be, because if it couldn’t, then I had to be pathetic, right? I’m just someone who’s been in love with my best friend since forever and can’t get over it.”

The revelation races over my skin before settling somewhere deep in me. “Since forever?” I ask.

He looks up at me. “I started to feel it sometime in high school.”

I remember how overwhelming it was when my feelings dawned on me at Willow and Martin’s wedding. The thought that Ren had been carrying that alone for so much of our lives makes my chest hurt.

“But, Joni,” he says, “I knew you didn’t feel the same way, and yes, I’m still in love with you, I have been for so long, and I thought about telling you more than once.

Before you moved to New York, in Chicago before Lydia and Isaac’s wedding.

I should have told you in Boston. But I also love you.

Care about you more than anyone else. And I don’t want you to think our friendship was just some act. ”

I love him too, still, I know. I never stopped. I don’t think any amount of space or time could stop me from loving him. “I don’t think that,” I say emphatically. “I don’t think our friendship ever could be an act.”