“I didn’t mean it like that,” I say. “Just—”
“We’re not friends anymore. I get it.”
He turns away and lies back down. I stare at the top of his head, trying to will the words out of me. Suddenly, this tenuous civility between us feels like the most important thing in the world, something I need to be gentler with. Ren was always better at that than I was, though, treating things with the reverence they deserved. Slowing down, paying attention.
I lie back myself, quiet until it occurs to me how I might make this better. “Ren?” I say. This time, I don’t wait for him to answer. “I would have been happy to see you. When you were in New York.”
He’s silent for so long I wonder if he’s fallen asleep. I try not to take it personally, try not to let it mean anything.One day doesn’t mean you’re friends again, I remind myself.There might be too much lost time between you for that to even be possible.
But it felt possible today, laughing at the winery and Ren having my back on the beach. Like some part of me had been unearthed, brushed off.
I’m adjusting my pillow, my cheek finding the cool side, resigning myself to the fact that he’s not going to respond when his voice comes out of the dark.
“I would have been happy to see you too.”
five years ago
Lydia and Isaac
Chicago, Illinois
chapter nine
“So,” I say, falling onto my bed as I hold up a card. The first rush of April sun streams in through my lone window and catches on the gold leafing around the border. “I have a Save the Date.”
“Lydia and Isaac?” Ren asks on his end of the line. “I got that today too. Crazy that our college roommates ended up marrying each other.”
It’s Sunday afternoon, and Ren and I are on one of our daily phone calls. It’s become a habit, working each other in around our otherwise busy schedules. Ren calls me when he’s on his way home from the gym most weeknights. I’ll call him as soon as he’s up on weekends, knowing he usually sleeps later after his bartending shifts on Fridays and Saturdays. Sometimes we talk for hours, through errands and cleaning our apartments, all the way until I’m headed out the door with Stevie or he’s off to grab a beer with his old soccer friends.
“Are you free the weekend of July fourteenth?” I ask him.
“I don’t know,” Ren says, voice going distant, the sounds of a car passing, people strolling by, in the background. “Might have something else going on.”
“Okay,” I say, trying hard not to reveal my disappointment that our tradition didn’t even make it through one year of living apart. “Maybe there will be another wedding. We could—”
Ren’s soft laugh cuts me off. “I’m kidding.”
“Oh my god,” I say, but I’m laughing as my disappointment morphs into relief.
I settle back against my pillows. We hadn’t planned on not seeing each other for ten months, had cited my birthday in late October, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, as rewards for our time apart while we were sprawled on the beach at the vacation house last summer. But plane fare is expensive, and time off work is hard to come by, especially when we’re each trying to prove our places at our respective companies, and it’s turned out that days slip by more easily than either of us anticipated. We’d floated the idea of Ren coming out to New York for my birthday, but in the end, the timing didn’t work out. Stevie and I went to Sasha’s in Boston for Thanksgiving, where we met her new boyfriend, Alex, and Ren’s family went to Los Angeles to spend Christmas with Thad and Gemi.
“Can you FaceTime for a minute?” Ren asks.
“Sure,” I say, sitting up on my bed and running a quick hand through my hair. His video request comes in a second later and I let out a confused laugh when it isn’t his face but the view from Overlook Park, a spot where you can see a perfect shot of the river and the city skyline behind it, that fills up my screen.
“Just showing off?” I ask as Ren turns the camera back to himself. He’s in a denim jacket over a black hoodie, earbuds in, cheeks vaguely rosy from what I know is still crisp morning air. The spring version of himself.
“That’s your favorite view in the city,” he says. “Thought you could use it right now.”
I’d told him that my New York therapist suggested finding small pieces of home to hang on to, to ease the transition of moving, and while I’ve been settled in here for several months now,I still find reminders of Portland comforting. It’s like Ren has some uncanny ability to sniff out when I might be feeling homesick, photos from Sublimity or postcards with the Burnside Bridge coming when I need them most. The fact that we haven’t seen each other in so long makes me more homesick than anything.
I sink into my pillows again as we talk through the rest of his walk. Hearing his voice always puts me at ease, but there’s something different about seeing him, like the familiar angles of his face, each shift of his expression brings him that tiniest bit closer to me.
“Hey,” he says when he’s back to his place. “I’ll find a hotel for Chicago and book it tonight, okay?”
“I don’t know,” I say, echoing his comment from earlier. “Might have a work thing that weekend.”
He smirks at me before we hang up.
