He uncrosses his arms, absentmindedly rubs the hem of my T-shirt between his fingers. Our gazes both drop to the spot, but when I look back up at his face, it hits me. His suggestion that we make our plus-one arrangement a tradition, his expression when I all but dismissed it… Ren is worried,reallyworried, about what this move will mean for our friendship. And all these weeks I’ve been throwing it in his face, showing him pictures of the apartment I’ll be sharing with my sister, who will be attending graduate school at NYU, asking him to help me with packing.
“Hey,” I say, leaning over him, propping my arm next to his shoulder to hold myself up. Ren is good at hiding his emotions, and all these weeks I should have remembered that, and stopped for one second, among all the chaos, to tell him how much I’m going to miss him, to reassure him that I couldneverforget him. “We’ll do it,” I tell him, my hip pressed against his. “We’re each other’s plus-ones.”
“Joni, it’s stupid,” he says, head starting to roll to the side, but I grab his chin.
“It’s not stupid,” I say. “It’s a good idea.” He’s right. A plan wouldn’t hurt. We’ll make it work.
He doesn’t respond, and suddenly I feel nervous he’ll say no. That my initial reaction made him change his mind. That there’s nothing I can say to reassure him. I bring my face over his, like the proximity might prove I’m serious. “Iwantto.”
We stay like that for a while before he slowly smiles, an exhale of a laugh coming out of him. He pulls me into his chest, my head just under his chin. “Okay,” he murmurs against my hair.
I close my eyes, let the familiar scent of him envelop me, until I’m reminded of the time, and I spring up from my bed, grab my dress from where it’s hanging over my closet door. “Close your eyes,” I say, and he does, pressing a hand over them for good measure. I tug my shirt over my head and toss it on the bed next to him before slipping on my dress.
“Done,” I tell him. I lift my hair off my neck. “Zip?”
Ren pushes himself up and walks over to where I’m standing in front of my mirror. I watch as he zips my dress—green, wrestled off a rack in a vintage shop down the street. His eyes meet mine in the reflection. “You clean up nice, Miller,” he says, fingers going still.
I straighten a strap of my dress. “You don’t look so bad yourself, Webster.”
Ren nods toward the door. “Should we get going?”
“Two minutes,” I say.
In the bathroom, I put on a pair of tiny gold hoops and spritz perfume onto my wrists. As I’m inspecting myself one last time, my eyes find Ren waiting for me in the living room, a skyscraper in the middle of the low-lying buildings that are my packed-up belongings.
“Joni?” he calls.
“Coming!” I say, then, cringing, “Wait, I need ChapStick, just—thirty more seconds.” I rush back to my bedroom and root around one of the boxes there until I find a tube of Burt’s Bees.
When I turn to go, a flash of white catches my eye. The Sublimity T-shirt, carefully folded on my pillow.
chapter five
When my mom informed me I would be the one to represent the family tonight while she and my dad are out of town and my sister is at orientation, I almost said no. Historically, I have not been the biggest fan of my cousin Claudia. But her wedding might have me forgiving some of her past transgressions.
“Thevibes,” I say to Ren as we enter the romantically lit room, its long walls broken up by high, arched windows and doors that lead out to a greenery-lined rooftop. Everything inside is done up in golds and deep greens, tiny touches of blush in the centerpieces.
We head straight to the bar. The venue is above a cidery in downtown Portland, and we clink tiny glasses of what a sign says is Whiskey Pear, pale and sparkling and aged in bourbon barrels.
“You can count the number of hangovers in the works in this room,” Ren says, wincing as he sets his glass back on the bar.
We order something lighter and meander out to the terrace. It’s the kind of late-summer evening that makes everything feel happily slow. Sleeves are pushed above elbows, heads tilted toward the waning sun.
We stop at the balcony railing, Ren twisting to lean his back against it, his arm stretching along it.
Ren is one of those people who seems like he might have been made for formal wear: tall, long, lean lines, and an ability to coolly adjust a cuff, a collar. He’s a different version of my best friend when he puts on a tie. Ren’s always been handsome, in a way that began to attract attention sometime around tenth grade and followed us all the way to college in Portland, where the usual cast of girls obsessed with him got even bigger. It’s not that I don’t get it. I too tend to notice good arms and hair that looks like a tortured hand has just been run through it, teeth that should be in a Colgate ad. But there’s also a picture of Ren wearing my Minnie Mouse swimsuit at my fifth birthday party sitting on the mantel at my parents’ house, so at a certain point, his vague Peter Parker charm lost some of its impact.
The crowd shifts around us as the cocktail hour winds down and people begin to find their seats. Ren grabs my hand and guides us to a row near the back, where we can carry on our own quiet commentary without being too noticeable.
The music starts up, a string arrangement of a song that sounds familiar but I can’t totally place. Claudia floats down the aisle in a dress with a train so long the photographer nearly trips trying to tiptoe around it. Once she reaches Clark, their Australian shepherd escapes with the rings attached to his collar tags. Ren presses a finger to my lips, trying to shush my laughter, but his shoulders shake too as Clark’s best man lurches after the dog, sprawling across the front row as he tries and fails to catch him before Claudia’s train slows him down long enough for one of her bridesmaids to nab him.
After dinner (wood-fired pizza bar: good, the receiving line: disorganized and short-lived, the DJ: late), we make our way to the dessert bar and wander back to our table with cake and coupes. My uncle gives a speech that raises the question of whether he even likes Clark, and Claudia’s maid of honor hiccups her way through a toast about friendship, and then the DJ has arrived, and people are dancing, and the room is loud, and the bourbon-barrel cider this place is advertising as “shots” is flowing freely.
Ren spins me to “Dancing in the Moonlight” before I loop my arms around his neck for Ray LaMontagne’s “Hold You in My Arms.” Claudia and Clark sway gently nearby, guests milling around between the bar and the dance floor.
“Add this song to my wedding playlist,” I say to Ren, who nods as if that playlist actually exists. It’s one of the songs that would play through Ren’s laptop speakers while we studied in his dorm room in college, soothing and slow no matter the context.
He turns me, palm sliding across my back. “I’m happy we’ll have the weddings,” he says, voice low. “I’m really going to miss you.”
