Did Sarah ever wonder about Ren? There hadn’t been much else she had wondered about for a while. “Well, the fact that you hooked up with most of my friends means that I was pretty low on your priority list. So any wondering I may have done is in the past.”
“But you know why I went out with them and not you, right?”
Her heart froze in place. She did not know, and she didn’t know if she wanted to. “Why?”
He sighed, looking up at the plastic stars that were scattered on her ceiling, his elegant jawline lit blue from below. Her nightlight was a still frame fromHowl’s Moving Castlethat she’d found at a street fair after falling in love with the film the year before. At the time, she had profoundly related to the lonely heroine and her passion for a handsome, emotionally unavailable blond sorcerer. It had seemed to represent her relationship with Ivan perfectly, which in retrospect was definitely a warning sign. Now the soft light made Ren’s eyes look like they were filled with blue fire.
To her surprise, he shifted his entire body so that he was right next to her and then slid downwards, adjusting himself so that his head was near hers on the pillow. She was a little shocked but too bemused to be angry. She could always shove him onto the floor if he tried anything…which sounded fun, come to think of it.
When Ren spoke again, his eyes were on the ceiling. “I’m not good at relationships. And you’re a relationships person. But I wanted to ask if you wanted to sleep with me. You were looking really sad tonight and that’s one thing I’m good at. But we shouldn’t do it if it will mess up our friendship.”
Sarah could barely contain a burst of delirious laughter. “So you saw that I was sad and are nobly offering to cheer me up by giving me a good lay?”
He chuckled and leaned closer, his voice just audible above that stupid, sexy song that Kristie was playing. “Okay, first of all, there’s nothing wrong with sex. It can be healing, especially after a break-up. That’s one thing I know for sure.”
“Oh, I’m sure you do.”
He made a small sound, somewhere between amusement and frustration. Then she felt him shifting slightly lower on the bed, getting closer as he stretched beside her. She had always assumed that he got women into bed with a combination of witty flirtation and intense eye contact. Now she wondered if he did it by squirming into their blankets like a puppy.
Even more frustrating was that the tactic was working. Her heart was beating faster just being next to him; his body was warm through her thin sheets. She liked him, and she had always been attracted to him, and he wasright there. She could pull him close and kiss him all night. He had given her permission to do it, and he smelled nice. He always smelled nice, like cloves and coffee and vanilla soap (mixed, admittedly, with hints of cigarettes and weed). Her nerves were humming like a struck chord and her cheeks felt hot; her body had clearly made the decision of ‘all in favor’ when it came to Ren. Her body had probably made that decision the first time she saw him in class, trying to reassemble a pen he had taken apart and getting a furious grimace on his face when the pieces wouldn’t fit. She had been utterly lost for a while when it came to him.
“The thing is,” he added quietly, “I really like you. And I know you don’t want a relationship. But if we slept together, I mean as long as both people know it’s casual and are sober enough to consent…”
“I had two glasses of wine and you had at least three of Kristie’s martinis. Shouldn’t I be the one worried about your sobriety?”
He grinned as he shook his head. “That was liquid courage so I’d have the guts to do this. Doesn’t count.”
“But why? I mean, why do this?” His face was dangerously close, so she pushed a little farther up in her bed to put a safe distance between them.
“Because I’m attracted to you?” His pale eyes looked confused. “Because we get along? Even if you have total contempt for me?”
He was attracted to her? That was new. She stared at him in the half-light, her breathing shallow, then pushed up even further until she was fully sitting up.
“I mean, seriously, though, think about it, Ren,” she said. “You’ve slept with both my roommates and now me? Do you just need the trifecta?”
“Is that what you think of me?” He sounded a little wounded.
“That’s not what I think of you, Ren. It’s what you do! First Anya, then Kristie, Suki, Ellen, Yelena, Paulette?—”
“Yelena and I never hooked up. I took her home from the bar one time when she was too drunk to get home safely.”
That was kind of him, but Sarah didn’t let it stop her. “My point is,” she said primly, “that I think this is an unhealthy habit for you.”
She watched his mouth slowly crook in amusement. “You think what…I’m a sex addict?”
“No.” She stared at the ceiling and searched for words. “Okay, so you know how if you go to a party and you announce that you’re not drinking, most people will be cool with it, but there’s always that one person who keeps pushing you to drink, and insisting you have a drink? And that’s always the person who has the alcohol problem?”
His voice got quieter. “Yes?”
“Well, that’s you with women. You’re the person who can’t be friends with a woman without taking her to bed, because you’re the person with the intimacy problem.”
She could tell that her remark had landed from the long silence that followed. “Well, if I’m a sex addict, you’re a love addict.”
“Ha.”
“No, I’m serious. Look at you and Ivan.” He slid up fully to face her now. “He wasn’t nice to you. He didn’t even remember your birthday. He didn’t give you his coat that time it was snowing.”
She remembered the day Ren was referring to: a late October weekend when they had gone to the movies as a big group and Sarah had naively chosen to wear a t-shirt, expecting the weather to be the same after nightfall as it had been four hours earlier. When they left the theater, the wind was up and it had started flurrying. After half a block of walking, Ren stopped and peeled off his sweatshirt under a streetlight, handing it to her without a word; it smelled faintly of coffee and weed, and she washed it carefully before returning it to him the next day.
