Page 52 of Friends to Lovers

chapter thirty-two

The next morning, back in New York, I trudge out for groceries to last me through a day of packing. Ren still hasn’t called or texted, but instead of obsessing, I’ve made a game plan. I’m moving back to Portland.

I could feel my body missing Oregon as soon as I got on the plane yesterday, like the West Coast was calling me back to it.

I’ll sublet for the rest of my apartment lease here and live in Stevie and Leo’s shoebox office until I get my feet under me.

I’m determined that will happen within three months, so I don’t bother them when they get back from Leo’s tour.

I’m going to find a job in the city that made me fall in love with stop-motion in the first place: where my commitment to Novo was formed and where I took the first steps to make art not just the thing that calms my mind, but my career.

If it means making coffee while I freelance, working the front desk of an art gallery, calling up some of the Novo people who stayed behind when the Portland office closed and seeing if they know of anyone’s friend of a friend of a friend who needs help with some unpaid project, I’ll do it. I’ll make it work.

But I’ll also look up. I’ll take advantage of living in a place that feels so much like mine. I’ll spend time with the people I love. I’ll carve out space in my brain that I don’t need to immediately fill, give myself time to discover new things to care about, to take up those empty spots.

I’ll find my way back to Ren, whatever that looks like.

Even if it means swallowing past the way his eyes make my heart work overtime, getting used to only having him in my dreams. It’s what he had to do for so long, after all.

Maybe friends is all we were ever really meant to be. Maybe timing really is such a bitch.

But the love that comes with our friendship won’t go away.

Ren was right: it survived two and a half hurt, shoved-down years, and a lifetime of twisting and bending and reshaping before that.

It’s spanned miles and other relationships and missed opportunities.

It was never going to be something I could control, but we can keep choosing it, promise each other that no matter what, we won’t turn our backs on it again.

It’s this, the knowledge that he’ll still be my friend, that I’m stuck on when I walk home, hit the first step to my apartment door, digging my keys out of my tote bag. I look up to avoid tripping, and my heart skips a beat as eyes—red-rimmed and exhausted—meet mine.

“What are you—” I say, breath catching in my throat at the sight of Ren sitting on my front stoop. Did he get my voicemail? I never thought about what I would actually say if he returned my call, just hoped that he would.

He stands, towering over me as he always has.

“I tried to catch you in Portland,” he says.

“I got in the car to go after you, but didn’t realize I hadn’t charged my phone last night, so I couldn’t call you, and you were already gone by the time I got to the airport, and I couldn’t get on a flight until the evening and it had this terrible overnight layover in Chicago and by then I realized I’d left my charger at the beach house and some lady with this truly heinous kid finally let me borrow hers for a minute so I got your voicemail but then the plane was taking off and it died again somewhere over Ohio, and—”

“Ren,” I say, something blooming in the center of my chest at how he’s rambling, so unlike him.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “The rehearsal dinner, Joni, just the way everything that happened between us was suddenly out in the open—it felt like that night at Sasha’s wedding all over again. We had this wonderful thing and then it was all falling apart.

“But watching you drive away yesterday also reminded me of that night. It felt like maybe you would just be gone again. Like I was saying goodbye to the most important thing in my life.”

His shoulders tense beneath his T-shirt, like he thinks there’s a chance I might deny it when he says, “You love me.”

“I do,” I say, the confession coming easily because it’s the truth.

“I love you so much, Ren. And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.

You said it’s like your heart exists outside of you, and I get that.

I understand how scary it is. But it’s you, Ren, of course it is, and I don’t need to get my life in order, I don’t need to wait until everything’s perfect.

I was just afraid, of what all this mess I’m still dealing with might do to us.

But—” I break off, worried I’ve said too much.

He’s still watching me, face betraying nothing, and maybe I got it wrong.

Maybe it doesn’t matter if I say it out loud.

There are still so many things that could go awry, after all.

All those years ago I still made a decision that hurt us, even if it was the best I could do at the time.

“But we can just be friends,” I say. “I just… I needed to tell you. I never told you.”

Ren takes a careful step toward me. He draws in a breath like he’s readying himself.

“I’ll be your friend, if that’s what you want.

If something’s changed since you left me that voicemail.

I’m not going anywhere,” he says, taking another step closer, sliding one cautious hand into mine.

“But if you meant what you said, if you want this, I’m here for all of the mess.

Whatever that looks like. I’ll fly here every weekend.

Or I’ll help you pack up your apartment and ship it across the country and hold your hand on the flight back.

Or pack it all into a U-Haul and take two weeks to drive it back to Oregon and stop wherever we want along the way.

Or, if you don’t know yet, if you want to move to Omaha or Idaho or Spain, then I’ll spend everything I have on plane tickets or invent teleportation, break the laws of physics just so I can fall asleep with you every night.

Whatever you want, Joni, because honestly, I’m just so fucking tired of not being with you. ”

It feels, at first, like something has burst inside me, the walls of some vital organ giving out, and I worry for a split second that there isn’t enough room not just in my body but in the whole world for loving Ren.

I thought that maybe I wasn’t supposed to love him, that by doing so I would be risking something fundamental to both of us.

But now, with Ren here, standing in my life, the one I know for certain doesn’t fit me anymore, I see our story for what it is: cool nights and warm hands and soft brown eyes and arcade games and laughter and memory, memory, memory with every rapidly increasing beat of my heart.

I don’t waste any more time now. I step forward, press the tips of my fingers to the tattoo we share, twin lines tying us together. “I love you,” I tell him again. “And I’m so fucking tired of not being with you too. So what do you say?”

Ren’s mouth twitches into that skeptical half grin of his, but there’s something more to it right now. Something soft and vulnerable and full of hope. “To what, Joni?”

I smile. “To us.”

His arms come around me, and I can feel the thrum of his pulse against my chest, can count every shade of brown in his eyes.

He dips his face close to mine, like he’s about to kiss me, but pauses. “I decided on us a long time ago, Miller,” he says.

He kisses me then, my heart lighting up as we take the first step into the next part of our story. Every memory that came before this one and all the ones yet to be made stretch out around us, but the most important moment is here. Now.