I swallow. “Back to Stevie’s,” I say.
“Joni,” Ren says, and it’s in that moment that I drop a veil between what I’m feeling and how I have to act. I can’t let Ren know how much this is killing me, leaving him. Leavingthis. Us. I channel every time I’ve ever seenhimdo exactly this, shut down any flicker of emotion on his face.
“Will you talk to me?” he asks, stepping in closer, his hand lifting toward my arm.
I retreat, twist slightly out of his reach.
I look up at him, heart thudding painfully in my chest as his lips part, body goes remarkably still.
“Ren,” I say. “This won’t—” The words catch. I try again, my voice small. “This was a mistake.”
He doesn’t move. “What was a mistake?”
“All of it.”
He stares at me quietly for a minute, eyes locked on to mine. His mouth tightens like he’s trying to work something out. I stare back, work as hard as I can not to betray anything.
“You don’t mean that,” he says finally. He’s looking at me like he doesn’t believe it, like what I just said doesn’t add up, short breaths lightly fogging the air in front of him.
This will be my memory of tonight, I realize. Ren in his suit and tie on a freezing city street.
I lower my gaze to the sidewalk between us. “I do,” I say. “August shouldn’t have happened. We—we rushed into things.”
“What about the past few days?” Ren asks, voice just breaking on the last word.
It makes me look up at him, which is a mistake. I’ve never imagined what hurting Ren would look like, would feel like, but it’s a stab at my side, a knife hollowing me out.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I should have said something sooner. But we can’t do this, Ren, it’s too—it’s too much.”
“Okay.” Ren nods, rubbing at one temple. “Then we pretend it didn’t happen,” he says, a desperation in his voice.
I want to take the last four months back, but it’s out there now, the truth of how I feel about him, and I know our friendship won’t be able to recover, not fully. If I tell him I can pretend, I know I’ll stumble sooner rather than later, and I’ll let him move for me, let him give up his dream job, the whole life he’s built here, just because I want him. Maybe a year from now I won’t feel this way. Maybe I’ll wake up in a month and decide I was too rash. But right now I’m having trouble thinking beyond my next breath, and I have to get out of here, and explaining any of that to Ren will just land us back in this same impossible place.
“I don’t know if I can,” I say.
Ren takes a step toward me and says, hoarse, “You’re my best friend. What—what am I supposed to do without you?”
I can hear the same fear that I feel in his voice: I can’t picture a world without him in it either. It seems impossible.
“We messed it up, Ren,” I say, and swipe an angry hand at my cheeks when I realize they’re wet. “We crossed a line we said we wouldn’t and now we can’t go back to how things were before.”
“When did we say we wouldn’t cross that line?” Ren asks.
My gaze floats back up to his. “What?”
“When did we ever say we wouldn’t cross that line?” His voice is firm, like he’s found some point to keep me here.
“We didn’t,” I admit. “But—”
“Then what’s the problem?” Ren presses. “So we crossed it, so you don’t want this anymore. I—”
“Best friends don’tdothat, Ren.”
“Well, we did,” he says. He takes another step toward me. “We wanted it.”
I shut my eyes, squeeze them closed like it might make all of this easier. But nothing will make this easier. The only thing that will make him accept this is if I lie, if I say something I don’t believe but that cuts to some vital part of him.
“I don’t think you know what you want,” I say, and Ren falls back a step.
