“I’ve only slept with five people my whole life.”
He glanced at her while she put up her fingers to count. “My high school boyfriend, then Ivan, Liam, Matthew, and Danny.”
“Which one was Matthew?”
“When you moved to Las Vegas. I saw him for a couple of years. You and I were still texting, but we didn’t talk about personal stuff.”
“No, we didn’t.” He was silent for a moment as they drove down the road. “So what was the high school boyfriend like?”
“You’ll love this. He was our school’s only goth.”
Ren laughed. “Black hair, black clothes?”
“Black eyeliner. Black combat boots. He wrote anti-capitalist song lyrics and planned to change his first name to Crow when he started college. I don’t think he went through with it.”
“But his actual first name was…”
“Philip. I broke his heart when I broke things off before going to McGill and he wrote angry songs about it. What was your first girlfriend like?” She thought about how strange it was that they’d never talked about this stuff. At university, they’d talked about music and books, but never about their lives.
“First girlfriend or first person I slept with?”
“Either.” The answer itself was interesting, Sarah thought.
“I had an in-retrospect deeply problematic relationship with a twenty-one year old when I was sixteen.”
Sarah was appalled. “Ren.”
“I guess she qualifies as a girlfriend. In retrospect, it wasn’t a good idea. I was acting out a lot around then.”
“Was that after you saw your mother’s article where she regretted having kids?”
Ren shot her a surprised look, as if he hadn’t expected her to remember that. “Yeah, partly. And our household was very tense in the years leading up to their split, which I guess I blamed on myself.”
“So what happened with the twenty-one year old?”
Ren shifted his eyes away. “So I have a question about Ivan, while we’re on this topic.”
Sarah nodded, noticing Ren’s deflection. “What about him?”
“Why that guy? I hated him so much. He was so into talking about his feelings and his taste in movies was boring David Fincher shit. And then you got right back together with him after you finally broke up. Like two days later.”
“Well, first of all, he was the only person who asked me out at McGill.”
“There’s no way that’s true.”
“It’s true,” Sarah said. “I wasn’t somebody people were into. You must remember this. I wasn’t sexy and elegant like Kristie or a blond fairy princess like Anya.”
“You know what’s funny,” Ren said. “You talk about yourself like you’re not attractive, but in the twenty years I’ve known you, you’ve almost never been single. I’ve been single for probably ten of those years, and you’ve been single for maybe three. And when you were single, you turned it into an amazing photo series. So I don’t get this theory you have that you aren’t attractive.”
“Oh come on. Compared to you, my love life has been staggeringly boring. You were hooking up with two or three women a month.”
“One a month, maybe,” he replied. “And I should get a little credit for the ones I turned down.”
She laughed. “Rene Durand, hereby awarded sainthood for the million women in Montreal he managed not to sleep with.”
They drove past another small town made up of little more than a gas station and a fish and bait shop.
“I think you’re just better at falling in love than I am,” he said after a moment. “It always seemed like you could fall in love withanyone. And it took me forever to evenlikemost people.”
