Page 6 of Friends to Lovers

His cheeks are warm under my palms, and I’m suddenly mesmerized by the shape of his jaw, my finger grazing along it.

I’m so used to looking up at Ren that this perspective feels strange, like I can study him from a different angle.

I feel his hand flex against my waist as his eyes move to my lips, slowly work their way back up my face.

When his gaze locks onto mine again, the molecules in the air between us seem to go still, time halting, our breaths hitching.

There are vague beeps in the background, the countdown about to end, but they don’t fully register.

I tilt closer, his hand tightening on my thigh as my eyes start to close—

The flash goes off.

We spring apart, Ren’s elbow whacking against the wall behind him as my head bounces against the opposite one.

“What do we do for the last picture?” I say, pulse hammering in my ears. Ren’s hands are still on me, and I am still on his lap, and his face isn’t that much farther from mine than it was three seconds ago because this photo booth is simply not that big .

“Just—look happy,” Ren says again, his voice rough.

The camera clicks for a final time, and I yank the curtain open and all but fall out, gasping like I’m breaching the surface of a lake. Ren stumbles out behind me.

“I think I need some air. Want to get us drinks?” I force out as he grabs the strip of photos from the slot at the bottom of the machine.

Ren barely has time to reply before I’m winding through the crowd, shoving through a door on the far wall and bursting out into the cool night air.

I amble over to the terrace railing. Something is itching at the corners of my brain, energy racing up and down my arms. I fold them in front of me, press my fingers into the creases of my elbows, count my breaths, try to will away the images of what almost just happened.

If I’d leaned a little closer, let my lips brush against his, if his hand had climbed into my hair—

When Ren joins me again, I accept the glass he hands me and take a long drink.

“Here,” he says as he digs into his pocket and produces the strip of photos. “You keep these.”

“Thanks.” I jam them into my purse without looking.

Ren leans his arms on the railing next to me and we stare out at the lights of Portland.

He sips his drink, casually checks the time on his phone.

“Predictions?” he suddenly asks, sliding his elbow over to lightly tap against mine.

It’s a game we play where we guess at what will happen during our vacation with our families, like the one that begins tomorrow, both a tradition and this year a marker of my last week in Oregon.

Six days at the house we’ve been going to since we were kids, the one our parents bought together in a fit of youthful hope: visions of us growing up there, vacations on the coast, a second home.

I finally look at him. Ren’s acting so unaffected, his shoul ders relaxed, breathing even.

I can’t decide if he’s doing this to be nice, if he noticed the way my hands shook slightly when I took the drink, or if I imagined that moment in the photo booth altogether, that my emotions are just on high alert because I’m leaving, because I’m going to miss him.

“Stevie and Sasha get wine drunk the first night,” I predict about our sisters, playing along.

“Our moms scold them,” Ren says, his lips tugging upward. “But they’ve had more wine than them by the end of the night.”

The images of life at the house start to slow my breathing as we settle into a familiar routine.

“Thad and Sasha get into it about her shower schedule,” I say.

Ren’s siblings are always fighting over the shower, so his sister has constructed a detailed plan for all of us to avoid any major blowups.

“Thad and Gemi slow dance around the living room by…night two?”

“You move back onto the screen porch because Stevie won’t stop snoring,” Ren says.

“Only to discover you’ve already moved back out there too.”

“So my sleep talking keeps you up anyway.”

“I’m already up,” I say. “And I so prefer your sleep talking to Stevie’s snoring.”

Ren laughs. We go on and on, trading predictions until they become utterly ridiculous. By the time we’ve finished our drinks, the photo booth seems like a distant memory for Ren, and so it becomes one for me too.

On Monday, we drive to the coast, the playlist Ren made for the car ride on.

He drums out the rhythms against the steering wheel.

The house has always been a special place, where the outside world—and all its worries—seem to fall away.

We spend the week wading as far into the frigid, crashing Pacific as our bravery will let us, sprawling on the beach and shaking sand out from the pages of our vacation books.

We drink chilled reds from the natural winery a few miles down the road and coordinate meals.

We walk on the beach, nap in the after noons, laugh our way through old movies, sit up late huddled in a blanket on the sand with Thad, Sasha, and Stevie, the soft din of our parents’ voices floating down from the back patio, start and end every day together.

It’s the perfect send-off, which is what I say when we’re all hugging each other outside the house on our last day, what I remind Ren of when he picks me up to drive me to the airport the next morning.

But on the ride there a knot begins to form in my chest, my anxiety about leaving growing as the minutes until departure tick down.

When it’s time to say goodbye at the security line, I’m having trouble breathing around it.

“Can you imagine a better way to say goodbye to Oregon than a week at the house?” I choke out because I have to say something.

I’d planned to worry my way through security alone, but Ren is Ren and insisted on paying for parking, walking me in, carrying my bags.

He shakes his head wordlessly and hugs me tight against him. I lock my hands together behind his back like I might never let go, wrap myself around this person so fundamental to me.

“New York’s lucky to have you,” he says into my hair.

I lean my head back to look up at him, chin against his chest. His arms are slightly freckled from all the time we spent in the sun this week, the back of his neck tan from his morning runs.

“I’ll call you every day,” I say.

He chuckles. “You’ll be too busy to call me every day.”

He starts to pull away and I tighten my grip because I don’t want that Ren right now, the one who tries to hide behind levity, who never asks for anything. “We’ll talk every day. Promise?”

He brushes a thumb under my right eye where a tear has escaped, lets it linger as he scans my face. “I promise,” he finally says. He loosens an arm to reach into his pocket and withdraw his phone, taps on the screen before he pockets it again. “I made you a playlist.”

I reach for my own phone, but Ren stops me.

“Look at it once you’re through security.” His fingers slip through mine and he squeezes, once, before he lets go. “Let me know when you land, okay?”

It feels unceremonious, like I should say something profound, but all I can manage is a nod.

When I’m next in the security line, I turn back, hopeful he might still be there, that he might give me one last boost of confidence.

He’s standing right where I left him, watching me.

He smiles reassuringly, lifts a hand, and I wave back, big and exaggerated, because our last moment can’t be a sad one.

Ren and I will be fine, but I still hate the burn at the back of my nose, the way my stomach sinks.

I keep waving until he laughs, mirrors me.

On the plane, I add the playlist to my library. It’s long, as Ren’s playlists tend to be. I take off to Death Cab for Cutie’s “Marching Bands of Manhattan,” observing Portland and all the greenery surrounding it shrink below me.

I smile to myself when “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” comes on next, the image of Ren in his suit in my bathroom doorway flashing across my mind. He was right: the song feels more appropriate now.

The mood picks up from there, numbers that we loved in college, in high school, ones we’ve listened to in his car with the windows down and bands we’ve seen live together.

Then halfway through the flight, it changes again. “Where’d All the Time Go?”, Langhorne Slim’s “Changes,” and “The Only Living Boy in New York”—Ren seems to have intuited the melancholy I would feel spreading down to my toes as the distance between my old life and my new one began to grow.

I sift through all the ways things are about to change.

Learning a new city, new job, my whole routine shifting, of course, but also things like a new neighborhood coffee shop, time zones, not knowing that Sublimity is where I’ll be going on a Friday night.

That there’s a boy waiting for me there behind the bar.

By the time we’re an hour out, the songs are upbeat again, and I spend the rest of the flight vibrating in my seat, reading through the emails my boss has sent about our first month in the new space once, then again, then scroll through the pictures Stevie sent me of our new place.

We land, and I rush out of the airport with my two giant suitcases and an unfounded air of someone who’s actually been to New York before. I get in the back of a car and watch through the window as my new city flies by.

I call Ren and tell him all about it.