He nodded.
“Maybe not when you were married,” she added.
“If I’d known how to be with you, I wouldn’t have gotten married.”
His hands didn’t stop touching her until her breath was shallow and her fingers were clutching his shoulders. He watched as her breath grew faster, picking up on every sound she made, every movement. She came in a sudden, sharp crest that echoed out like waves on a pond.
When she came back to herself, he was smiling down at her. “You made a mistake back then too, you know,” he said. “You should have let me make love to you that night. You would never have gotten back together with Ivan if you had.”
“You’re very confident.”
“I’m very confident about belonging with you.”
When he was at last inside her, he pressed his face into her shoulder and kissed her there, looking close to tears. Beyond the physical sensations, her heart felt so ecstatic just to be with him, to know that they had time, that this wasn’t a one night stand, that this was a beginning rather than a goodbye. He kept murmuring romantic things into her ear that seemed so deliriously perfect that she struggled to believe he meant them. Ren was opening his heart at last, and she held his face in hers and kissed him again and again. She felt the moment that his control slipped, the moment he drove forward until his body shuddered and he collapsed against her.
“That,” she said into his ear, “was a very long time coming.”
He laughed silently.
Afterwards, they lay in each other’s arms and she felt pleased to see that he looked as dazzled as she felt, his eyes on the ceiling, one arm carefully tucked around her as if to make sure she couldn’t slip away. One of his hands grazed her breast like he was fascinated with it. She had never thought of him as being into women shaped like her; he had always seemed interested in the French gamine types, slender as reeds.
“You never dated anyone who looked like me,” she said after a moment.
“Why would I have wanted someone who looked like Sarah but wasn’t Sarah?”
“I thought you only liked me for my brains.”
He smiled. “If you’re worried that I wasn’t objectifying you, I used to have a whole list of things that I wanted to do to you if you ever broke up with Ivan. Even before I realized I had feelings for you.”
She rolled over to look at him. “When did you know you had feelings for me?”
“It took a few months. It was around the time Ivan forgot your birthday.”
“You gave me that homemade card.” Ren had made her a birthday card out of folded watercolor paper with a quote on the front that he had hand-written in ink-pen:Being afraid is the worst sin, which he admitted he had paraphrased from Godard’sBreathless. Inside he had written:Happy 20thto someone who deserves to never be afraid. Ren.She still had it somewhere, tucked in a box of precious things from her university years.
“I was so furious at him for forgetting your birthday and so furious at you for letting him get away with it. So I was complaining to Joel about it.” Joel had been Ren’s roommate at McGill; he was a friendly, easygoing athlete who always seemed like a mismatch for Ren’s intellectual snobbery but who had lived with him for their entire time at school.
“And after I’d been going on and on about it for a while, Joel said to me, ‘So you like this girl.’ And I said, ‘No, not at all. I’m just annoyed on her behalf.’ And he said, ‘You’ve been annoyed on her behalf for a week.’ And I thought,Oh, no.”
Sarah smiled. “I had no idea.”
“Half of me thought you did,” he said. “Kristie knew. I would have asked you out, but I was terrified you’d reject me, and I wasn’t sure I believed in dating in the first place. And I also had this fear that if you wanted to date me, it would only be because you thought I was a jerk and you were attracted to jerks.”
“I didn’t want to go out with jerks,” Sarah said. “It wasn’t like a philosophy or something. I was in love with Ivan before I figured out that he wasn’t very nice to me. But by then I felt like I had to stay because I could heal him if I loved him enough.”
“And then you picked Liam, who was so smug. We went out for drinks once and he didn’t ask anyone else a single question, just talked about himself in a monologue, like the rest of us had signed up for his podcast. I didn’t understand why you couldn’t see it. But now that I’ve met your mother, it makes more sense.”
She nodded against his shoulder. “She’s very self-doubting, and she transfers it onto me. I don’t blame her, though. We have similar personalities, but I fight it harder than she does. She lost her optimism when my father died. I don’t think she ever got it back.”
“She’s wrong, you know,” he said quietly. “I would marry you. I know it’s too early to bring it up, but I absolutely would.”
Sarah leaned into his arm and said nothing, too afraid of ruining the moment to speak.
“So what will you do when you get back to Toronto?” he asked. “Are you in trouble at your job?”
“I got fired.”
“What?” He sat up straighter.
