Sarah shrugged. “Not to dig up old issues, but it’s not like you asked me out. There was one night when you said we could have sex but you definitely didn’t want a relationship, but aside from that…”
The corner of his mouth quirked up. “I thought about asking you out after Kristie broke up with me, but I was sure you would laugh in my face.”
Sarah frowned in confusion. “Why would I have laughed at you?”
“Because you hated me back then. Or I thought you did.”
“We talked a lot.”
“Yeah, but mostly because you were mocking me,” he replied. “Your default attitude towards me was that I was an asshole.”
“But that didn’t mean I didn’t like you!”
He smiled. “Oh, okay. Wonder why I didn’t pick up on that.”
The past seemed very close for a moment. She thought back to all the times when they had been together as part of a larger group, all the times they had wound up next to each other, debating books and movies. “I liked you when you were being normal,” she said. “It was like you dropped the cool guy act sometimes and became a really nice person. But then you would start doing this brooding, mysterious, Kerouac quoting thing, and I didn’t know how to deal with you.”
His mouth twisted into a half-smile as he looked out the window. “I wish I’d…”
“Yeah,” Sarah agreed. “I wish we hadn’t been so young when we were young.”
“If we’d dated, I would have messed it up, though,” Ren said. “That’s the one thing I’m glad about. I would definitely have done something stupid if we went out, and you would have left. Never spoken to me again. There is no way we would be friends now if I had dated you back then.”
“Well, I messed up all my relationships, too. I was too insecure. That was the good thing with Ivan. I didn’t have to be insecure around him because he was so clingy. I had to worry about whether I was making him happy, but not about whether I was pretty enough for him.”
“You were always pretty enough,” he said quietly.
She kept her eyes out the window. None of this had to do with now. “It’s funny to talk about all this, all these years later.”
He nodded. “All I had to do was kidnap you and lock you in a car for seven hours.”
“And pay me ten thousand dollars,” she added. “That’s my price to talk about the past.”
“It’s worth it.”
Her heart warmed at the words. She didn’t want to kiss him anymore, but this felt like friendship, and friendship was good.
“So you started a photography business,”she said after a while, when they were heading down the highway. “And now you are some kind of international superstar.”
“If only.” Ren shook his head. “I don’t sell a lot of work. A few pieces a year. Most of my income is from teaching workshops.”
“Sure. But how did that all happen? It’s really impressive.”
He didn’t look at her as he began to speak. “Things weren’t good for me and Paola when I moved to Las Vegas. I don’t remember how much I told you back then, but things were bad pretty much right away. It was the combination of not being able to work much because of visa issues, staying home with Jandro, and living in the same house as Paola’s parents. She had a job working for her father, and he offered me a job too, taking photos of real estate, but I said no. I felt like that would make things worse, if Paola and I were working for her father and living with him. He would have had control over every aspect of our lives. But when I turned him down, he decided I was lazy.”
Some of this was what Sarah had feared would happen back in Toronto. “So did Paola end up getting her American law degree?”
“She took the bar exam, but she didn’t practice. Her father offered her a raise if she agreed to keep working exclusively for him.”
“That’s…”
“Controlling? Yeah. And meanwhile, I was home with Jandro all day and really isolated. I got a little depressed. Sometimes Paola would get home at night and I would just take off in my car and drive out into the desert an hour or two until everything was quiet. There were some of the most amazing stars I’d ever seen out there. So I started taking my camera. And it was like I got a piece of my soul back.” He shot her a look. “It was a learning curve, but I went on a lot of message boards about night photography and met other people who did it. And eventually I got a few of my shots into a gallery in Vegas.”
“And all was forgiven with your father-in-law and he started taking you seriously?” Sarah asked lightly.
Ren gave a weary smile. “It’s like you’ve heard this story. He did not take me seriously. And I wanted to move back to Canada, but I had done everything wrong in terms of being able to move away and share custody. We did eventually move out of her parents’ house, but her father gifted Paola the house we moved into, so he still had control over us that way.”
“Right.” She could see it all: the outlines of the whole divorce.
