Chapter 9: HE WASN’T GOING ANYWHERE
Chapter 9
Ren
She disappeared down the hallway and I sat there on Neve’s sofa and stared at the empty doorway she had walked through and tried to figure out why I had just lied to her.
I wasn’t going to any restaurant.
I don’t eat after six. Haven’t in years, a habit that stuck somewhere along the way and calcified into routine.
My friends had given up trying to get me to change it, they just ordered without me now and I sat with them anyway because sometimes it was better than being alone in my own head.
Tonight I had been sitting with them at Jerry’s place. All four of us, low music and games on the screen.
It was the kind of gathering that usually settled something restless inside me. And it had worked, right up until it hadn’t.
I kept seeing her face.
The way something behind her eyes had cracked open, like I had said the exact thing someone else had already said to her today and she had been holding it carefully, trying not to let it break her but, I had knocked it out of her grip without even looking.
I knew the look, because I knew Lumi. I’ve studied her facial expression for years, back then when we were just, Lumi and Ren.
I had excused myself from Marco’s, gotten on my bike and ended up here without fully deciding to come.
And then I had stood at the door and said please, which I could not entirely account for.
And now I had told her I was on my way to dinner as if I ate dinner, as if that was a thing I did.
I pushed a hand over my jaw and exhaled slowly as the memory of the last few days kept playing in my head.
It felt like a long time ago now, even though it wasn’t. Neve had called me while I was finishing up a job, voice careful the way it gets when she’s asking me something she already knows I’m going to refuse.
She told me what had happened. Not everything, just enough. Lumi was back. She was staying at the house.
That she got important place to be and had to leave and she needed someone to check in.
I had said no immediately, flatly and without apology, because the last thing Lumi needed was me showing up at her door and the last thing I needed was to stand in front of her after seven years and try to act like that was a normal thing to do.
But part of me had already wanted to go. That was the part I hadn’t said out loud.
It had been seven years since I’d last seen her, I had been eighteen then, still in that uncomfortable space between being a pup and whatever I was supposed to become next.
I had stood back and watched her leave the country because there was nothing else I could do.
She had promised to return soon and take me along with her.
I had wanted to recognized her when she did. So during those years, I deliberately made sure I didn’t forget how she looked.
And it was really not hard. I remembered everything about her.
The way she used to move through those summers, the way she laughed, the way she dragged me and Neve through long evenings.
Her eyes. She had always had these eyes that caught light differently from other people, it was bright and beautiful.
Multiple boys had chased after her in high school. I remembered that too, watching from a distance with the particular irritation of someone who couldn’t name what he was irritated about.
She hadn’t paid any of them attention. She had just kept moving through life with those eyes, like she hadn’t noticed or hadn’t cared.
I told myself I hadn’t either.
When I finally decided to visit her after much plea from Neve, I told myself I was prepared. But as she opened the door and I saw her standing there, I realized I wasn’t prepared.
She was still pretty. Of course she was. She had always been, and time hadn’t changed that, if anything it had sharpened her, given her face a kind of definition it hadn’t had at twenty-two. But that wasn’t what stopped me.
It was her eyes.
Those eyes that used to gather light and throw it back at you had gone somewhere else.
They were still the same colour, the same shape, but whatever had lived behind them, that particular brightness, that easy, unselfconscious warmth, it was gone.
What was there instead was something carefully controlled and exhausted underneath the control, like someone who had been keeping a very large thing together for a very long time and wasn’t sure how much longer her arms could hold.
She recognized me, I saw it happen.
But then she looked at me like I was part of whatever had hurt her, like I was one more thing to manage and keep at arm’s length, when the truth was the opposite.
When the truth was that I had sat on my bike outside for three minutes before I could make myself come here, because I didn’t know how to face her after those years.
The anger that moved through me when she looked at me like that was immediate and irrational, because I understood why she was looking at the world that way right now and it had nothing to do with me.
But it still moved through me.
I left. And every single time, I told myself I wouldn’t come back, that she doesn’t need me anymore.
But then Neve would call and I would hear something in her voice and I would get back on my bike.
And now I was sitting on this sofa having received the first slap of my entire life from a woman who looked like she had shocked herself more than she had shocked me.
I had walked out not because I was angry, I wasn’t, not at her, but because I could see what was happening behind her eyes and I knew she needed me out of the room before it broke open completely.
I hadn’t gone far. I had sat on my bike at the end of the road for twenty minutes before I drove away.
And now I was here again, lying about going to dinner, and she had gone to get changed.
And I kind of used Neve as an excuse too, maybe not entirely a lie. Because I know my sis doesn’t play with her, and could drop everything just to be here.
The excuse worked, and I knew I already had something that’ll make her bend and that was Neve.
I was sitting on the same sofa looking at the doorway she had disappeared through, when I heard her footsteps.
I looked up.
She was wearing a floral dress, something simple, soft fabric falling loosely to her knees.
She had done something with her hair, not elaborate, just pulled it back from her face so you could see the line of her jaw and the set of her shoulders.
She was moving toward me with that look she had been wearing every time I saw her this week, careful and uncertain, like she wasn’t sure of the ground beneath her feet.
Something in my chest pulled tight.
She looked like herself, almost, just enough like the girl I remembered that it made the distance from that girl to this woman feel like something to grieve.
And underneath that was something else, something that had no business being there, a warmth at the base of my sternum.
I stood up.
*Seems like you forgot who she is.* Rolie’s voice arrived with the ease of someone who had been waiting for the right moment. *She’s Lumi. Your elder sister’s best friend.*
My wolf. My own wolf, fashioned specifically to make my life difficult, delivering the most inconvenient observations at the most inconvenient times with complete serenity, like he was doing me a favour.
*Thanks for the reminder,* I said back, flat and without gratitude.
Rolie said nothing further, which was worse because it meant he was satisfied, which meant he thought he had made his point.
I kept my face exactly as it was and walked toward the door ahead of her.
She was Neve’s best friend. She was going through something that had nothing to do with me.
She needed dinner and someone to take a photograph that would keep my sister from getting on a plane.
That was the beginning and the end of what this was.
I held the door open and waited.
She walked through it with that careful, uncertain step and I followed her out into the dark.
I told Rolie firmly and without room for argument to go back to wherever he went when I didn’t need him.
He didn’t answer.
Which meant he wasn’t going anywhere.
