Page 8 of Friends to Lovers

It catches me off guard, this open acknowledgment of the state of things between us.

I look at him in what I hope is a what the hell, man way and he returns it with an exasperated no taking it back now expression.

But, I remind myself, it’s been a long time since Ren and I communicated silently like this, so I could just be misreading him.

“Of course she is,” my mom says, the entire upper half of her body hidden inside the fridge as she organizes its contents.

Sasha pats the chair next to her, angling her head at Ren. “Stop moving for a minute,” she says. “I haven’t seen you in months.”

Ren hesitates. He’s been carrying everything inside from the cars, pausing to help when my mom noticed one of the blinds on the kitchen windows was loose, crouching down to examine the stairs when his dad stopped him on the front porch within minutes of his arrival and said we should repaint soon.

Sasha and Thad are together all the time in LA, but naturally they must not see Ren as often.

He sets the box on the table, slides the backpacks off his shoulders, and sits down next to Sasha. She squeezes his arm, looks up at where I’m standing across from them. Ren follows suit, face inscrutable.

“It’s like old times with you two camping out on the screen porch again,” Sasha says. Apparently I was the only one not clued in to the sleeping arrangements ahead of time. She picks up her phone, squints at it. “Great opportunity for the two of you to catch up.”

I can’t help it: I look at Ren again. He and I are united in our deception, after all, and something in this sentiment has me worrying Sasha suspects us, like he’s told her. But he just shakes his head imperceptibly.

“Catch up,” he says to his sister as I look away and bite down, hard, on a grape. “Of course.”

I stare into the bag as I pick through it, tell myself not to read so much into every tiny thing. If I do, we won’t last the day.

“Wait, but you two just saw each other this spring.” Sasha is still scrolling on her phone, half in this room and half in her well-organized head. “That week Ren was in New York.”

My throat tightens. Ren was in New York?

Ren was in New York for a whole week and I didn’t know?

Was it that time in April when I woke up in the middle of the night convinced I wasn’t totally alone in my apartment, or the few days in March I kept glancing over my shoulder, some strange feeling skittering down my spine?

No, Joni , I tell myself. Don’t attribute cosmic significance to this just to make yourself feel better .

“Actually,” Ren says, looking directly at me. “Joni ended up being on a work trip that week, right?”

It surprises me that I can’t respond faster, that making up a lie about being away because of work suddenly seems so much bigger than lying about the fact that I don’t actually have work anymore.

“Right,” I manage as my mom finally extracts herself from the fridge, huffing as she pushes her hair back from her forehead. Because I don’t have anything to add to his lie, I just say, “Last-minute thing.”

“That’s too bad,” Sasha says to her phone screen. “When is the last time you saw each other, then?”

“Um,” I say, eyes latching on to Ren’s again.

“Shit!” Sasha exclaims, slamming her phone onto the table. “I just got an email that the winery is closing tomorrow for the rest of the week for emergency repairs. Something about water damage.”

“When are we supposed to pick up the wine?” my mom asks. She’s halfway between the cooler and the fridge, a bottle of orange juice in each hand, face stricken.

“Saturday morning. I was going to have you two stop there after you got the kegs.” Sasha pushes a hand into her hair, tugs her laptop closer.

“Why don’t I just go pick it up now?” Ren says. “My afternoon is free.”

Sasha turns to him like he’s just defused a bomb.

To be fair, to her and my mother, anything that gets in the way of a schedule might very well be on par with an actual bomb.

For a moment I feel like my own life’s chaos might not actually be that bad.

I might not be able to keep my job, but I do think I could manage a minor crisis like a winery being closed.

“That would be so great,” Sasha says. Ren starts to get up, and I have to hand it to him.

This is the perfect solution. Less time in the house together.

Fewer opportunities for us to mess this up.

Then she adds: “Joni can go with you. You two can grab a glass of wine while you’re there. You’re welcome .”

Ren seems to power down, stuck in a position between standing and sitting.

His eyes are on the table, and I think he must feel how I did when I couldn’t come up with a good work trip story: brain somehow working both double time and not at all.

But then Sasha looks at him and he straightens quickly, lips pressing into a weak smile before he walks over to the front door and grabs his keys from the small pegboard hanging next to it.

“I can stay,” I say to Sasha, gesturing at her laptop. “Help with whatever you originally had on the schedule for Ren.”

“The next two hours are for organized fun,” she says without an ounce of sarcasm in her voice. It’s always been like this: Sasha carefully scheduling things to ensure we maximize our time together.

“Don’t I need to be here for that?” I ask her.

My mom shuts the door to the fridge and turns to me with a slight frown. I swear, my voice is the dog whistle to her highly attuned ears. “Honey,” she says in the same tone she uses when she’s trying to weasel something out of her patients. “Is something wrong?”

I’ve tried too hard to get out of going, I realize.

Before, I would have already been halfway to Ren’s car, keys in hand.

If I protest more, someone will suspect something is up.

I smile at her, casually pop another grape into my mouth, prepare myself mentally for an afternoon with my former best friend, who’s currently spinning said keys around one finger before he catches them in his fist. But the grape launches straight to the back of my throat, and my mom has to slap my back three times as I cough and spit the whole unchewed thing into my palm.

When I can finally look up again, eyes teary, Ren is watching me from near the front door. “Careful there,” he says, trying to suppress a smile. “Wouldn’t want to miss the winery.”