* * *
By the time Lydia and Isaac’s wedding weekend rolls around, I am deeply immersed in Novo’s latest project. A short that features a girl named Antonia and her porcupine sidekick, Paul, who wears a red backpack made from the fabric of one of my own vintage jackets. I have built Paul from the ground up, spending hours twining together each of his individually crafted quills (of which there are three thousand nine hundred and sixty-two per puppet; so far there are nine Pauls), and hand-painting each of his tiny, replaceable faces.
The Friday morning I’m supposed to catch my flight, I glance up at the clock above my desk just in time to see that I’m running late. I took the whole day off, but at 6:00 a.m. I remembered I’d left half of one of Paul’s faces out to dry at the office and needed to complete his touch-ups. I’d let myself into Novo with my suitcase in tow,sure I’d only need twenty minutes to finish up.
I make it to my gate with minutes to spare.
Once I’ve shoved my bag under the seat in front of me, I put in my headphones and cue up the playlist Ren sent for the trip. Lorde’s “Supercut” plays me through takeoff, kicking off the weekend as if I’m in a movie montage of two long-lost friends returning to each other, which is what I’d told Ren I’d wanted when I texted him to ask if a playlist was forthcoming.
I finally take a breath and let myself turn off the work part of my brain. There’s a list in my phone of all the activities I’ve scheduled for us before the wedding tomorrow, pulled from the recommendations Lydia and Isaac shared to their wedding site. We have so much lost time to make up for, so many moments over the course of the last year when I wished Ren had been there, like when one of his favorite bands was in town, or when no one seemed to make a gin and tonic as much as I liked the one he made me, or when Stevie and I found a vinyl store that had the best collection of rare pressings I’d ever seen and where I’d bought his birthday present this year.
I spend the better part of the flight with my head twisted toward the window, staring at the patchwork world below me like I can watch the miles between Ren and me shrinking. At one point, my seat partner, a middle-aged woman with bottle-orange hair and a heavy dose of something artificially vanilla scented wafting off her, asks if I have a million dollars waiting for me on the other end of this flight.
“Better,” I tell her, grinning like a hyena. “My friend.”
“Your friend?” she asks.
“Mybestfriend,” I say.
She frowns. “That’s…sweet.” She returns to perusing her back-issuedPeoplemagazines.
I’m run-walking as soon as I’m off the plane, hustling past parents dragging their kids on suitcases and slowing down around groups on the moving walkway.
I’m by baggage claim,Ren’s text read as soon as I could check my messages again after landing. We’d coordinated our arrival times as best we could, but he still touched down an hour before me.
Baggage claim seems miles away, but I finally emerge from the swampy halls of the main terminal, bursting through the automatic doors like a plane-sweaty orc free from their primordial ooze. I scan the long line of carousels, searching.
When I spot him waiting by a pillar, sunlight playing in his hair, I break into a full-on run. The sound of my sandals slapping against the tile at full speed gives me away, and the smile that spreads across his face is so much better in person than it is over FaceTime.
He only has to take two long strides before I’m launching myself at him. He catches me and lifts me off the ground, spinning me once around before he sets me down.
“Wow,”I breathe as I pull away from him, letting my eyes wander over him. “Look at you. You’re perfect.”
Ren’s cheeks flush, and I decide to lean into it. “A dream,” I say. “A sight for the sorest eyes. A work of art.”
“Stop,” he says, hooking an arm around my neck and tugging me into him.
I burrow deeper into his side, arms around his waist, feeling like I might absorb some of him and subsist on it until the next time I see him. I hadn’t realized how much of that I’d already been doing, that it was his voice in my head giving me a pep talk on my first day of work, his T-shirt I put on when I was missing home one night when Stevie was out with her school friends.
“Tell me life is miserable without me,” I say when we break away from each other. I loop an arm through his and we walk toward the doors, carry-ons in tow.
“Life is miserable without you,” Ren says.
“Tell me how much Portland misses me.”
Ren guides us through the doors, a rush of hot air hitting our faces. “Obviously Portland misses you,” he says as we hit the pavement and join the queue for cabs.
It’s been the kind of summer that makes everywhere uncomfortable, the only place to find any relief a walk-in freezer or a very expensive bar. Even there, the heat seeps in, closing hellish fingers around your neck before you even notice.
I slip my arm out of Ren’s and twist my hair up on top of my head. He bends at the same time, so his lips are level with my ear.
“I miss youmore,” he whispers, breath somehow cool against my skin. He’s smiling at me like he just told me a secret.
We don’t talk much on the ride over to the hotel, on account of the fact that as soon as we climb into the cab we have to stick our heads out our respective windows because the driver isnota fan of AC. At one point, I look over at Ren, a bead of sweat rolling between my already sticky boobs, and he shoots me such a miserable glance that the hoot of laughter I let out almost sends the driver careening into the other lane.
“I missed you too!” I shout over at him.
“What?” he shouts back, his head angled toward the inside of the car.
