“I know, I just…and I didn’t want to hear that you were dating another one of your jerks.”
“I’m not dating one of my jerks,” she said. “I’m not dating anybody.”
His eyes were warm as he looked at her, and she felt a wave of nerves. It hit her then that they were both single. He was looking at her like he wanted to kiss her, and for once, she felt sure that he did. Her insecurity had blinded her to the possibility he might like her back in undergrad, but now she thought she could understand him better. He glanced at her hair, her tight wrap dress.
“Me neither,” he said. They stared at each other.
“Hey you two!” Trish called. “We’re telling everyone to eat.”
“Come on,” Sarah said gently, nudging his arm. “Let’s check out this Vegas buffet. Although I guess you get those all the time.”
“My Vegas buffets usually involve Jandro’s leftover bags of Cheerios in my car.”
“Thai food!” Trish said to everyone, waving at the trays. “It’s amazing. Trust me.”
Trish seemed unexpectedly calm for someone who had seemed poised to be a full Bridezilla in her mid-twenties. That was a healthy sign, Sarah thought. She glanced at Trish’s parents standing nearby in fancy clothes, chatting with Ian, who was serving as best man. It was good, also, that Paul had told his parents not to come. The official reason was that he and Trish were returning to Newfoundland to celebrate with Paul’s parents, but Sarah suspected that he also didn’t want his mother to create any drama.
It was going to be a good night, Sarah decided. In all sorts of unexpected ways. She and Ren sat next to each other at the table and slowly filled in the details of the last few years. Ren had never gotten a solid journalism job in the States, but instead had been going out to shoot photos in the desert and had a couple of his photos in galleries. She told him that herExistential Innocenceseries was still going strong and showed him some of her favorite commissions.
As the meal wrapped up, she covered a yawn, tired from her long travel day.
“You’re tired,” he said gently.
“I should probably turn in before I nod off into my Tom Kha Gai.”
“I wish I could head to bed myself, but I need to go see what errands Paul wants me to run in the morning.” It was like Ren to be kind and helpful. She always forgot that about him.
“Are you staying at the hotel? I guess not.”
He shook his head. “No, but Jandro is at Paola’s for the whole weekend.”
“Sure,” she said. “Hey, I have tickets tomorrow to that James Turrell art installation called Akhob. Want to come? I reserved them weeks ago on Kristie’s recommendation. She was on a film shoot here and told me it was the thing to do. I got two tickets in case I could drag Paul, but it sounds like he’ll be busy, so you could come instead. If you haven’t been.”
“That sounds amazing,” Ren said. “I’ve heard about it and wanted to see it.”
“Then it’s a plan. We’ll go be art snobs together.”
“I thought I was the art snob and you were the voice of pop culture.”
“Either or. I could switch roles for a day.”
He gave her a warm look. “Text me the details.”
As Sarah took a taxi back to the hotel, she wondered whether Ren was going to call the redhead from that morning and meet up again. But she wouldn’t let it worry her.
Sarah and Ren were having a moment, weren’t they? Just maybe not the kind that sent you to bed with someone.
The art installationby the renowned visual artist James Turrell required ticket reservations weeks in advance, and was improbably hidden within a Louis Vuitton store in the mall. Ren was waiting for her outside at the pre-arranged time, looking much more put-together than the previous morning in jeans and a black button-down shirt. He gave her a hug when he saw her, and she let herself smell him: the same nice smell of spice and coffee, with a lot less weed.
They were part of a group of only four people allowed to visit the space for the next half hour. They got a brief introduction to the installation, put on cloth booties over their shoes to keep from tracking in dirt, and then entered the installation via a row of black stairs, stepping inside a round portal. The space itself was a large hollow room shaped like a giant white egg, perhaps twenty-five feet across, with a distant wall lit up by hidden light sources. Once they were inside, the whole space began to slowly shift color, the walls slowly gliding into radiant shades of scarlet, then lavender, then blue.
They stood there in silence, watching as everything around them glowed more brightly by the second. Sarah thought of making a joking remark, but it was too beautiful for her to want to spoil it: the silence, the color, the slow shift of the light. It began to feel like they were floating in space, with no clear demarcation between the smooth floor and the curved walls. After a while, Sarah lost track of time entirely. The other two people were silent as well, staring around them in awe.
She glanced at Ren and saw that he was looking at her intensely. She smiled and he stepped closer, so that he was just beyond her reach, gazing right into her eyes. For a moment, they were the only people in the universe.
She was now even more tempted to make a joke to escape the intimacy of that look, but she stopped herself. The wall behind him slowly shifted to a cooler blue, endless as the heavens. The light felt as pure and simple as a prayer. When it grew to be too much to keep gazing at him, she shifted her eyes back to the walls, and so did he. Everything was a radiant purple, now.
“Thank you for inviting me,” Ren whispered.
