I spend the rest of the evening catching up with various family members, always looking for Ren over my shoulder, but when I can find him, he’s either dutifully chatting with my parents and whoever they’re with, or standing off to the side, on his phone or just observing the room, lost in thought that I can’t chase after.
It’s cooled down significantly by the time the rehearsal dinner is over. After saying good-night to my parents at their yurt, we walk back up the path to ours in silence. Ren’s shoulders are relaxed, his stride slow, while I’m anxious, crossing and uncrossing my arms, rubbing at my elbows.
Unfortunately, we were so focused on getting to the rehearsal dinner earlier that it’s not until Ren is holding the door open for me that I pause to actually take in the room. We both seem to clock it at the same moment, glancing at each other and away quickly when we realize there is a singular bed. Ren’s hand in my hair earlier comes back to me, and I hurry into the bathroom, where I change into my pajamas, wash my face, brush my teeth.
When I come out, he’s setting up a makeshift bed on the floor with extra blankets and a pillow from the closet. “You take the bed,” he says. “I’ll sleep on the floor.”
“But you’ll be in so much pain tomorrow.” I grab my water bottle from my backpack and turn on the faucet in the kitchenette, stick my finger under it until it runs ice-cold. Ren doesn’t need to sleep on a concrete floor. We’re adult enough to share a bed for one night. I sit on the edge of the bed. “Come on. We’ve slept in the same bed before. It’s fine.”
Ren, who had been bending over the floor bed, straightens. He’s rolled his sleeves above his elbows and plants his hands on his hips as he surveys it. “I won’t be in pain,” he says, leaning down again and picking up one of the blankets, seemingly just to fold and unfold it again, the tendons in his forearms working.
“Ren—” I say.
“Aren’t we a little old for sleepovers?” he asks, the words snapping out of him. The water bottle I was lifting to my lips freezes in the air. He squeezes a hand to his temple. “I’m sorry,” he says. He flicks his eyes toward me. “I just— Can we do it this way?”
I screw the cap back onto my water bottle slowly, set it on the floor next to the bed. “Of course,” I tell him.
He watches me for a moment before grabbing his things and heading into the bathroom.
I climb under the blankets and stare at the pinprick stars that appear through the skylight above. This is new territory. I’ve felt it over the last year: the ground beneath me slightly rockier the shorter the texts between us got, but I told myself it was nothing, was consumed enough by work that I could ignore it. But in person this change between us feels different, more pronounced.
I scan through the skylight for the Summer Triangle, the trio of stars Ren first pointed out to me when we were fourteen,lying on our backs in the front yard of the beach house.
But I can’t find it.
Ren comes back into the room and rummages around in his backpack, pulls out a charger and plugs in his phone. He stands over it, tapping at something on the screen, then slides onto the floor bed, dropping out of my view.
I stare at the stars a moment longer before I’m leaning up on an elbow, looking down at him, something like determination firing in my chest. This can’t be how this weekend goes.
He has one hand tucked under his head, the other splayed across his chest.
“Is everything okay?” I ask.
“Of course it is,” he says, his voice flat. “Why?”
“Things have just seemed a little…off,” I say, nervous that if I say too much, he’ll pull even further into himself. “Between us. Tonight.”
At this, he turns his face up to fully look at me. “I’m sorry. Everything is really okay.”
I let my eyes drift over his features, searching for tension, forsomekind of hint, but they’re as unreadable as his voice.
I wait there, hanging over the bed. I want the Ren that predicted we’d have a great time this weekend.
But he doesn’t say anything more.
“Good night, then,” I say. I turn off the light and flop back against the pillows.
chapter sixteen
I wake up the next morning in the same position I fell asleep in, an indication that I actuallyslept. I stretch my arms above my head, then look down to find the floor bed empty.
I locate Ren on the front porch, sink down into one of the chairs next to him as he hands me a mug of coffee.
“I can’t get over how beautiful it is here,” I say, warming my palms against the ceramic. The sky stretches blue over the trees around us, everything hushed like the world has stopped spinning for a moment so we can take a beat to appreciate it.
But my mind is stuck on Ren, who smiles over at me but doesn’t say a word. I’d hoped this morning things might be normal between us again, and a pang flits through me at the thought that I don’t know how to fix it.
After a quiet half an hour sipping coffee out front, my parents swing by our yurt on the way to the goat farm, and Ren and I get ready quickly before heading there with them. We meet Donna, owner of the farm and our unofficial tour guide, in that she doesn’t actuallygivetours but is easily talked into it upon learning not a one of us knows a single thing about goats.
