Page 5 of Friends to Lovers

chapter five

When my mom informed me I would be the one to represent the family tonight while she and my dad are out of town and my sister is at orientation, I almost said no.

Historically, I have not been the biggest fan of my cousin Claudia.

But her wedding might have me forgiving some of her past transgressions.

“The vibes ,” I say to Ren as we enter the romantically lit room, its long walls broken up by high, arched windows and doors that lead out to a greenery-lined rooftop. Everything inside is done up in golds and deep greens, tiny touches of blush in the centerpieces.

We head straight to the bar. The venue is above a cidery in downtown Portland, and we clink tiny glasses of what a sign says is Whiskey Pear, pale and sparkling and aged in bourbon barrels.

“You can count the number of hangovers in the works in this room,” Ren says, wincing as he sets his glass back on the bar.

We order something lighter and meander out to the terrace. It’s the kind of late-summer evening that makes everything feel happily slow. Sleeves are pushed above elbows, heads tilted toward the waning sun.

We stop at the balcony railing, Ren twisting to lean his back against it, his arm stretching along it.

Ren is one of those people who seems like he might have been made for formal wear: tall, long, lean lines, and an ability to coolly adjust a cuff, a collar.

He’s a different version of my best friend when he puts on a tie.

Ren’s always been handsome, in a way that began to attract attention sometime around tenth grade and followed us all the way to college in Portland, where the usual cast of girls obsessed with him got even bigger.

It’s not that I don’t get it. I too tend to notice good arms and hair that looks like a tortured hand has just been run through it, teeth that should be in a Colgate ad.

But there’s also a picture of Ren wearing my Minnie Mouse swimsuit at my fifth birthday party sitting on the mantel at my parents’ house, so at a certain point, his vague Peter Parker charm lost some of its impact.

The crowd shifts around us as the cocktail hour winds down and people begin to find their seats. Ren grabs my hand and guides us to a row near the back, where we can carry on our own quiet commentary without being too noticeable.

The music starts up, a string arrangement of a song that sounds familiar but I can’t totally place.

Claudia floats down the aisle in a dress with a train so long the photographer nearly trips trying to tiptoe around it.

Once she reaches Clark, their Australian shepherd escapes with the rings attached to his collar tags.

Ren presses a finger to my lips, trying to shush my laughter, but his shoulders shake too as Clark’s best man lurches after the dog, sprawling across the front row as he tries and fails to catch him before Claudia’s train slows him down long enough for one of her bridesmaids to nab him.

After dinner (wood-fired pizza bar: good, the receiving line: disorganized and short-lived, the DJ: late), we make our way to the dessert bar and wander back to our table with cake and coupes.

My uncle gives a speech that raises the question of whether he even likes Clark, and Claudia’s maid of honor hic cups her way through a toast about friendship, and then the DJ has arrived, and people are dancing, and the room is loud, and the bourbon-barrel cider this place is advertising as “shots” is flowing freely.

Ren spins me to “Dancing in the Moonlight” before I loop my arms around his neck for Ray LaMontagne’s “Hold You in My Arms.” Claudia and Clark sway gently nearby, guests milling around between the bar and the dance floor.

“Add this song to my wedding playlist,” I say to Ren, who nods as if that playlist actually exists. It’s one of the songs that would play through Ren’s laptop speakers while we studied in his dorm room in college, soothing and slow no matter the context.

He turns me, palm sliding across my back. “I’m happy we’ll have the weddings,” he says, voice low. “I’m really going to miss you.”

“I’m really going to miss you too,” I tell him, swallowing against a sudden ache in my throat.

I’ve never had to say goodbye to Ren before.

He, our friendship, is my anchor, has held me for as long as I can remember, and I’ve spent most of my life with the certainty that on any given day, if I want to see him, I can.

Sure, there was the month he spent in Indonesia when his family went to meet his brother’s husband’s family, the semester I spent in Edinburgh.

But I was always coming back to him, or him to me, and it strikes me now that while I’ve said goodbye to plenty of other people—friends, coworkers who opted to accept severance packages instead of relocating—actually saying goodbye to Ren hasn’t ever felt real.

I tuck my face against his chest, hang on to him a little tighter.

Ren has a habit of holding steady when he suspects I’m struggling, and the truth is I still haven’t been able to shake the look in his eyes from earlier, the one I can tell he’s been fighting to keep in all night.

Maybe he was right to be nervous. Maybe I’ve worked too hard to convince myself that I don’t need to be.

Will we still be us if we’re not in the same city?

If I have a bad day here, I can go over to Ren’s place.

If I need to talk to him, I can stop in at Sublimity.

There’s never more than half an hour between us.

Once I move, though, going over will become a phone call, one he might miss.

We’ll have the weddings, but we won’t have Wednesday night dinners.

Sometimes Ren knows how I’m feeling before I do.

After a few more songs, Ren pulls us over to the line for the photo booth.

I try to push aside the thought of leaving him, pay attention to the time we do have left instead.

We rifle through the table of props, feather boas and oversize sunglasses, tiaras, and cutouts glued to the end of flimsy dowels, things like Congrats, Clark and Claudia! and I do!

“Here,” I say, stretching up to plonk a captain’s hat on his head. I adjust it so it sits at an angle, framing him with my fingers. “You’re missing something.”

“A boat?” he asks as I comb through a box of scarves until I find a striped blue one, tiny lobsters dancing along the edge. “The ability to sail?”

“You could sail if you wanted to,” I say, tucking the silky fabric under his collar, knotting it above his tie. “You certainly look like you could sail.”

“Do you want me to learn how to sail, Joni?” Ren asks, head dipped toward me.

I link my elbow in his, lean my cheek against his arm. “I’ll be your first mate.”

“What, are we attempting to complete the first circumnavigation of the globe?”

“Boats still have crews,” I point out. “First mate is still a station on a ship.”

“Who knew you were so up on your nautical trivia,” Ren says as laughter bursts from the photo booth and it expels no fewer than seven people, like a clown car unloading.

It’s a tight fit inside, which makes the fact of the party before us even more impressive. After a minute of trying to arrange ourselves, Ren tugs me onto his lap, his arm wrapping around my waist to keep me from slipping off. He draws the curtain closed, the lights around the camera pinging on.

“Okay, what’s our plan?” I ask, shifting so I can sling my arm around his shoulders.

“We have to have a plan?”

I make a face at him. If this strip of photos is going to serve as a reminder of our last hurrah in Portland together, it needs to fully encompass our friendship.

“We’ve been in photo booths before. We didn’t have a plan then.”

“One. One photo booth,” I say. “And we were drunk, so it doesn’t count. I look like a mole rat in those pictures.”

“Two,” Ren says while I fix my hair in the warped mirror affixed to the wall.

“What?”

“Two photo booths,” he says. “The one you’re talking about, at that bar in college, and the one at the fair when we were sixteen.”

I look down at him. “The phantom photo booth.” We’d stumbled upon it, cotton candy in hand, just sitting in between the livestock pavilions like it was off-limits.

We’d ducked inside, taken one strip of photos before it stopped accepting our money.

When we’d tried to find it again later, to see if we could get any more pictures out of it, it was gone.

Someone bangs on the side of the present photo booth. “Are you done?” a voice slurs.

Ren leans forward and presses the button to trigger the countdown. “Just—look happy,” he says. He grins at the camera.

I reach up to remove an errant feather from my mouth as a series of beeps lets us know the first picture is impending.

“I am happy,” I say. “But this has to be perf—” The flash goes off, and I scramble to rearrange myself, sitting up straighter. Ren shifts underneath me, resting his other hand on my thigh to steady me, something unfamiliar vibrating through me at the contact.

“Just make a funny face,” he says.

“What funny face?”

“I don’t know. The funny face you make when you have two seconds until the flash goes off,” he says as fast as he can, so the words all blur together. I go with the most obvious option: holding up two fingers behind Ren’s head while he crosses his eyes at the camera.

“Okay, now look at me like you love me,” I say as the countdown begins again. I set a hand on either side of Ren’s face, shake my hair back from my shoulders. When I look down at him, he’s staring up at me, brown eyes gone as soft as I’ve ever seen them.

“I do love you,” he says.