“Ah.” He studies the stage, nodding once. “HowamI.”
“So?” I ask, after he’s been silent for what must be a full minute.
He looks at me like he already answered the question and I just missed it. “I’m fine.”
“You’refine?”
“It was eight months ago,” he says, eyes fixed on the stage again. “I’ve moved on.”
“It’s okay if you haven’t,” I say. I know he might not tell me if he was still hurting, but I want to make sure he knows that hecan.
“You’ve moved on from Collin, right?”
“Yes,” I say, feeling a little guilty at how quickly I answer. I broke up with Collin not long after Charlene’s wedding, my conversation with Ren about his relationship with Amanda shamefully in my head the entire time. I didn’t care about Collin like I should.I try with Ren one last time. “What happened?” I ask him. “You still haven’t really told me.”
At this, the fingers Ren has been drumming against his cup still. He looks over at me, something unreadable on his face. “I just wasn’t the boyfriend she needed me to be.”
It’s an answer that doesn’t compute. I scoff, wave a hand in his direction.
“What?” he says.
I don’t know how to explain to him without sounding crazy that I don’t believe for a second there’s a single world in which he isn’t the best boyfriend, so I just say, “You have to be a great boyfriend. You’re perfect.”
One corner of Ren’s mouth twitches, tongue just slipping between his lips before he leans down to me, breath against my ear. “How do you know that, Joni? I’ve never beenyourboyfriend,” he says. He pulls away, but not very far, our faces inches apart. For a minute, I can’t hear the cheers around us. But I can see every shade of brown in Ren’s eyes: chocolate and almost black and hints of amber where the light hits them.
The slight smirk on his mouth as he straightens away from me has me shifting away too, bringing my cup to my lips. “Fair enough,” I say, before I take a long drink.
* * *
After an hour, Ren leads us in the direction of a gate. We weave our way through tour busses and vans, past a white catering tent where Ren grabs two water bottles and hands me one. Technically, he’s also here with Sublimity, who asked him to keep an eye out for new talent, and our VIP passes get us past security.
While Ren heads back to the artist hospitality area to meet with a couple acts, I make my way over to the main stage to catch a singer I used to listen to in college, all poppy beats and dreamy guitar. Stevie got a job writing for a culture publication in Portland as soon as she finished her degree last December, and I know she would kill to be here for this. I’ve missed her since she moved.
I’m near the outskirts of the crowd when he finds me again.
“How’d it go?” I shout over the music. “Did you close the deal?”
Ren chuckles. “No deal to be closed, yet. But there are a couple acts I think they’ll set up meetings with back in Portland.” He nods toward one side of the stage. “There’s one more band I need to check out.”
He takes my hand and snakes us through the crowds over to one of the side stages, glancing over his shoulder every now and then to make sure he still has me. Backstage, he navigates us around groups of people to a small space at one edge. He positions me in front of him, my shoulders warming where they meet his chest.
“She’s good,” I say, craning my neck back up at him when the singer is halfway into her next song. There’s something vaguely familiar about her feathery vocals, the indie-pop synth, and I wonder if Ren has included her music in one of the playlists he began sending me again the past few months. I’d missed them; another line of communication between us that had been cut.
As the crowd cheers at the end of a song, the sun dips toward the horizon, the world becoming golden. “There’s a friend of mine here tonight who’s a big part of the reason I get to play to a crowd like you,” the singer says into her mic. “He convinced some people he works with to give me another go, and I told him if he ever needed a favor to call me. If phoning it in for a Joni Mitchell cover is his big favor, then I think he got the short end of that stick. So I can sing it, but—” she unslings her guitar from around her neck “—I need someone else to play it for me.”
She casts around like someone might volunteer until her eyes land on us and her face lights up. I look up at Ren, confused.His lips are parted and he’s staring out at the stage, communicating something to the singer I can’t follow.
“I’ll be right back, okay?” he says, at last.
I nod, but I’m still lost as he steps around me and the singer extends her acoustic guitar toward him. He reaches the stage and loops the strap over his head, the crowd cheering as he adds a capo and tunes it. The singer is talking again, but I’m too mesmerized by the sight of Ren up on that stage to hear what she’s saying.
I’ve seen Ren play many times, but always in casual settings: when he first learned how to play when we were kids; when I would lie on the floor of his bedroom in high school and college and he’d mess around with some chords; when he helped with sound check at Sublimity.
This is something different. He plays the opening notes of “Cactus Tree,” my favorite Joni Mitchell song, and the pieces click into place. As the song continues to build, Ren smiles over at the singer, a layer of boyish joy underneath it.
I feel his quiet confidence square in the chest. My eyes get stuck on the way his fingers glide over the frets, how his body moves with the music. The way his shoulders shift under the arms of his T-shirt, how he watches the singer then looks back down at the guitar. Everything that isn’t him goes blurry, but he’s clearer to me than ever.
Having Ren more firmly in my life again these past months has slowed me down in a way I hadn’t realized I’d needed, made me appreciate each day. I leave work at a more reasonable hour, wake up excited to greet the day, and for him to wake up on the West Coast too so he can tell me how his night was. Our conversations have brought some part of me back to life, reminded me I’m a person outside of Novo. He inquires after my cranky neighbor, wants to know what books I’m reading, has more than once sent me locations for shows he thought I’d like. I’ve gone to a few, but it’s not the same without him next to me.
