Page 49 of Friends to Lovers

chapter thirty

Sasha’s efforts have, once again, paid off.

When we get back to the house, everything is running smoothly, if quickly.

Thad and Alex are down at the lighthouse, setting up the last of what was delivered yesterday.

Hannah and Greg are in town picking up the flowers.

My parents are tidying up the house, readying it for relatives planning to stop by before the wedding.

As we enter the kitchen, Sasha gives Ren his car keys and me a steaming mug of coffee.

“Kegs are under your name at Clyde’s,” she says to him as she ushers me out of the room.

“Photographer will be here in an hour to take pictures of us getting ready, so you better depuff those eyes,” she says to me. “Did you sleep at all last night?”

Ren smiles a little wistfully at me before Sasha turns me away.

She herds me upstairs to my parents’ room, the one with the best light streaming in through the picture window.

As soon as I walk through the door, arms are coming around me with so much force they knock me off-balance.

Some of the coffee sloshes out of my mug, and Sasha takes it from me and sets it aside.

“I’m so sorry,” Stevie says when she releases me. Her face is all screwed up, nose red. “I didn’t mean to tell everyone, it just came out.”

Sometimes, Stevie will surprise me with something that fits the classic younger sister stereotype.

For the most part, she’s just my friend, our age gap small enough that it doesn’t make that much of a difference.

She’s never needed all that much taking care of, for instance.

In fact, oftentimes, she’s the one who’s had to take care of me.

But there are moments, like last night, when our birth order comes starkly into view.

Case in point: her declaring for the whole world that I’m sleeping with Ren, and her explanation that she didn’t mean to .

“You could have talked to me about it first,” I say as the door closes quietly behind us—Sasha leaving.

Stevie sighs, flops onto the edge of our parents’ bed.

“Stevie, you know Ren and I being together is a big deal. Exactly the kind of thing Mom would freak out about. I’m not sure it was the best moment to bring it up.”

“Yes, because she cares so much about you,” she says, twirling her engagement ring around on her finger. “Our whole lives, it’s always been you Mom worries about.”

“Stevie. You don’t want Mom to want to be your therapist.”

“Maybe sometimes I do,” she says, mouth twisting. “Maybe sometimes I do want her to worry about me, just a bit.”

I don’t answer right away. The picture she’s painting is completely at odds with what I’ve spent so much of my life believing: I needed to escape our mom’s worry so I could just live , prove to her I was steady enough for her not to read into every detail of my life like I was one of her patients.

But Stevie never had this impulse because our mom doesn’t ask after her in the same way.

If Stevie has a problem, is stressed out, overwhelmed, Stevie just goes to her.

I always assumed the difference was because she trusted Stevie to handle things on her own, to speak up if she needed help.

But maybe it would begin to feel like my mom cared a little less if she didn’t ask me so many questions.

“Mom worries about you too,” I say. When Stevie protests, I cut in with, “She does. You two have a special bond, so maybe it doesn’t always come off that way. But she trusts you in a way she doesn’t trust me.”

“Well, I am sorry I gave her so much to worry about,” Stevie says.

“I get what you mean, though,” I tell her, even if I’m still wrapping my head around it. “At least you have the perfect supporter in Leo. I see how well he looks after you.”

“Yes, like last night when he asked why I thought our rehearsal dinner was the time to share your secret with everyone. In a very gentle way, of course.”

I roll my eyes good-naturedly. “It’s okay,” I say. “It’s not like you made something up.”

“Wait, so you and Ren are sleeping together?” she asks sarcastically.

“Stevie,” I say. “You obviously figured it out.”

“Maybe, but you didn’t actually tell me any details.”

“It’s messy,” I sigh.

“I have time,” Stevie says.

“You literally don’t.”

“So I look a little tired in my wedding pictures. So what?”

I laugh, pull my legs up onto the bed.

Her face softens. “Are you in love with him?” she asks.

I force a smile, my eyes starting to burn.

As soon as I saw him in the kitchen that first morning, lit golden, I knew.

I tried to convince myself it was just some trick of nostalgia.

But the feelings hadn’t gone away. As soon as I knew I loved him, they were never going to.

“Of course I am,” I admit, nervous to be sharing this with Stevie.

It makes the fact of me having wasted so much time, of us still not actually being together too real.

When Stevie came home after Sasha’s wedding, crawled into bed next to me and hugged me silently while I cried, or when she called me every day for months after I flew back to New York, always asking if I was okay and not pushing in her usual fashion, I felt like I was letting her down by not being able to share any of what happened with her.

More than that, I was ashamed of what I’d done, how I’d handled things with Ren and everyone.

And telling her this now makes it something to discuss, dissect, brings to light all the ways I could have been better.

It means my conversation on the beach with Ren is confirmed, final.

“Took you a while,” she says. She leans back, mouth twisting to one side as she thinks. “I guess I just thought that when you and Ren finally got together, it would be forever.”

“Yeah,” I say softly. “Turns out it’s all a little more complicated than that.”

“Why?”

I shrug a shoulder, looking at my sister.

For all of her idiosyncrasies, she always knows what she wants.

To go to school in New York. To move back to Oregon.

To marry Leo. “I don’t know what my life looks like anymore,” I say, though I’m not totally sure how true that is now.

There’s something murky beginning to take shape in my mind. I just can’t distinguish its parts yet.

“Are you okay?” she asks. “Novo was everything to you.”

“Not everything,” I point out, because it’s true, even if it seemed like it.

Even if I let it be, there were still so many other things that mattered.

I just shut them out to make room for the thing that I felt like I had the most control over.

“I’ll be okay. I just don’t think I can jump into something with the way my life is going right now.

And I might have caused too much damage when I left last time.

I don’t think he trusts me in the same way.

” I glance down at my hands, back up at Stevie.

“Maybe friends is all we’re supposed to be. ”

Stevie rolls her eyes, not like she’s exasperated, but like she’s rolling them at what she’s about to reveal.

She steels her shoulders, takes my hand in hers.

“Listen,” she says. “I’m only going to say this once because I feel like I’ve doled out more affection than my weekly quota allows—you have something that’s kind of a miracle.

” Her eyes are going watery now, and I need her to stop.

If Stevie cries, I’ll cry, and then we’ll really be on Sasha’s shit list. “I’ve grown up watching you and Ren be this example of the kind of love I always wanted.

You two are each other’s center in this way that doesn’t just happen.

And look, I know someone might say it makes sense, you grew up together, but I don’t know if it’s just that.

A lot of people spend their lives together without ever really knowing each other or ever really loving each other, but you two are this thing entirely your own.

“Neither of you have been yourselves since Sasha’s wedding.

And I’ve felt like I needed to be neutral—not tell you when he moved in with Amanda, not tell him when you tried dating again—but you’re just half of yourselves without each other.

You can still be happy like that, I know, but after seeing you two together, it’s like you just shut down when things fell apart.

And I know I don’t know exactly what happened, why it fell apart.

But I love you both so much, and all I’ve wanted for so much of my life is for you two to be together.

” She sniffles, almost laughs. “I think that might be why I did what I did last night. I thought that maybe, deep down, I was helping.”

“I mean,” I say. I’m going to be a puddle soon, no longer a body, just raw emotion. Stevie’s announcement was abrupt, but it might have been the thing Ren and I needed to get everything out in the open instead of ignoring it until it blew up in our faces. “It did force us to talk.”

“I know that I’m getting married today, so I’m really into this love stuff, but I just think you should try, if you can. People spend their whole lives looking for something that comes close to it.”

I’m searching for a response to this when a light knock on the door saves me. It swings partially open, our mom poking her head in. “Can I join you?” she asks, and Stevie waves her over to the bed.

“Are you talking about—” she asks, and at Stevie’s nod, she quiets, reaching out to cup a hand under my chin.

I shrug her off, suddenly tense now that she’s here. “It’s Stevie’s wedding day. We don’t need to talk about me anymore.”

“Sweetie,” my mom says. “Why don’t you want to talk to me?”

There’s a reason I haven’t tried to have a conversation about our relationship with her. How do you tell someone their well-meaning worry is stifling you, pushing you farther away? If I didn’t give her anything to analyze, there was a chance she could just be my mom.