A smile tugged at my lips. I’d worked a lot in high school, sure, maintained top grades, but back then… “More like the do-anything-for-a-laugh type.”
He gasped. “Really? Tell me more.”
Regaling Ren was easy. He was a great listener and would pipe in with his own stories. My favorite was how he’d organized the senior prank at his high school—setting off confetti and glitter bombs in the teacher’s lounge and cafeteria. “Teachers still talk about it to this day.”
“They do not.”
“Well, my brother’s a teacher there, and he still does. Blames me for the glitter he gets on his shoes.”
“That’s the brother that windsurfs?”
“Yeah. He’s the cool one. Even lets me call him by his nickname, Pooh Bear, like my mom calls him. That’s why he’s my favorite.” He looked me dead in the eyes.
“You manipulative bastard.” I knew exactly what he was on about.
“Are you telling me that sexy lumberjack is the only one who gets to call you Jamie?”
Oh my god, he did not call Autumn “sexy lumberjack.”
“Sexy lumberjack has a name and doesn’t pester me about whether I do briefs while in my briefs when I go home.”
Ren’s entire body shook with laughter over our inside joke, referencing a past client who had hit on me every chance she got.
“Well, Jamie sounds like a person who would do briefs in their briefs, and I want to be friends with him… James, however…”
“Fine. Call me Jamie,” I conceded.
His head dipped nervously. “I know we’re joking about it, but you have experience now. Do you think you can be friends with an ex? Grant has had me thinking, and I realized I kind of wish things weren’t completely over with Zachary. We used to be best friends.”
“I don’t know if you would call what I’m going through ‘experience,’ but yeah, I think it can work. I hope it can work.” I shrugged. Ren stared at me as if he could see right through me,and it made me want to sink back inside my shell, but I fought it anyway. “Autumn and I were close back then, and seeing her now… It’s just a lot. But I realized today that I’ll take whatever I can get.”
“You sound like you loved her,” Ren noted, in a moment of seriousness I wasn’t used to from him.
The wordlovesounded so wrong in the past tense, but it was the truth, so I nodded.
