Paige’s body registered Ren’s presence well before her brain did. Sitting at a wooden booth at Sam’s, she was in the middle of a sentence when Ren walked through the bar’s rustic double doors. Only, she didn’t know it was Ren—not yet. It was just a body—one that her mind had once spent so much time tracing and retracing that she went frozen with recognition.
Paige’s gaze followed her as she headed straight to the bar, her hand clasped around another woman’s.
And then she heard it. Her laugh. Loud and rich, tossed back like a pinch of salt behind her shoulder.
Ren. Here. At Sam’s. In Sungold. Paige’s mind could not make sense of the scene. Her mouth, she realized, still hung open, the trace of a story lost on her tongue.
“Paige?” Frankie said from across the booth, waving an open palm in front of Paige’s face. “Hellooo?”
Paige snapped back to attention, the noise of the bar resuming like she’d come up from underwater.
“Sorry,” Paige said with a soft laugh, shaking her head. “Sorry. I totally spaced out. What was I saying?”
A look of playful curiosity bloomed on Frankie’s face. “Well, you were telling me about Bobby’s new teacher, but now I want to hear about why you just malfunctioned when that couple walked in.”
Paige’s cheeks heated. “Sorry, yeah,” she said. “Okay, don’t look, but I think I know—knew—the one in the black trenchcoat. I think that’s… Ren.” At her name, Paige’s voice lowered, her eyes wide. “And I did not malfunction!”
Frankie smiled and threw their hands up. “Okay, okay, you didn’t malfunction. But, uh…” she dipped her head towards Paige and lowered her voice to match. “Who’s Ren?”
“Ren!” Paige repeated in an urgent whisper. “I’ve told you about her! Friend-from-college Ren? Studied-abroad-together Ren?” Frankie continued to shake her head. “Heart-wrenching-gay-awakening Ren?”
“Ohhhhh,” Frankie said, her hand on her chest as she laughed. “That Ren!”
“Shhh! What if she comes over here! We haven’t spoken in—stop laughing! Why are you laughing?”
“I’m laughing at how worked up you are! It’s cute! I never get to see you so…”
Paige raised her eyebrows, daring Frankie to finish that sentence. “So what?”
“So…nervous,” Frankie said finally, a sweet smile on her face. “I haven’t seen you like this since we first started dating.”
Paige resisted the urge to cover her face with her hands.
In the years after college, she imagined this moment constantly—how and where she might accidentally run into Ren. She’d fantasize about it. What would they say to each other? Would Ren be happy to see her? Even in the early days with Jared, she fantasized. It wasn’t until she was pregnant with Bobby that she stopped thinking about every detail of those three months.
Actually, the last time Paige thought about Ren had been during her early months in Sungold, almost four years ago now. When Paige met Frankie, she had—almost instantly—reawakened in Paige what only Ren had ever really begun to rouse within her (save for a few drunken almost-hookups her senior year of college). That all-consuming, white-hot yearning to be received and sated by someone who saw you completely. A softer, yet sharper, sort of desire. Tender electricity.
At the bar, Frankie reached over the booth and held Paige’s hand in her own, which was hard and rough from her work on the farm. Her thumb brushed Paige’s engagement ring, and Paige smiled softly.
“I’m not nervous,” she protested, “I’m just caught off guard. I haven’t thought about her in years. Haven’t seen her since I was—god—twenty-one?” Paige shook her head, trying to wrap her mind around the fact that time had bested her so thoroughly. How had it been twenty-five years?
“I wish I knew you at twenty-one,” Frankie replied.
“No, you don’t. Trust me.”
At the sincerity in Paige’s voice, Frankie’s smile faltered. “Tell me about her. Ren, I mean. Tell me what happened.”
“I already did!”
“That was four years ago, love. I didn’t even remember her name.”
Paige rolled her eyes. “You really want to do this now? What if she overhears?”
Frankie, who had the view of the bar from her side of the booth, shrugged. “She’s sitting all the way at the other end of the bar,” Frankie said. “C’mon, please? Tell me all about closeted, twenty-one year old baby gay Paige. Spare no detail.”
Paige leveled a look at Frankie: her broad-shouldered, straight-backed, fiancé staring eagerly at her from across the booth. The look on her face reminded her of Bobby’s when Paige would read him stories at bedtime.
“Fine,” she relented, the corner of her lips tugging into a smile. “But you can’t get jealous.”
Frankie raised her eyebrows at Paige and sipped the foam that topped her beer. “You know I’m not the jealous type. Now let’s hear it.”
In Dublin, when Paige first saw Ren, something within her shifted. It would take months for her to realize what, but in that moment—mingling at their study abroad program’s orientation—all she knew was that she wanted to continue being in a room with her. Any room. She wanted to walk up to her and hear her name in her mouth.
Paige hung at her new roommate Holly’s side, repeating her rehearsed answers when asked. It’s Paige, yes, nice to meet you! I’m from Idaho. English major with a minor in Marketing. All the while, she snuck glances at Ren. She had dark hair, sheared choppily short. Warm, tawny skin. And her lips—full and pink, spread wide across her face as she laughed. Paige was, for reasons she did not understand, aware of Ren’s body in the room. In the corner, by the snack table, behind her to her left. And then, fifteen minutes before orientation was set to end: out the door, gone.
The program was big—over a hundred and fifty students from various universities across the globe, all housed in concrete dorm buildings across campus. And so Paige didn’t see Ren again until a month later, when she agreed to meet a guy from her photography class at the pub near campus. It was only after downing her second Guinness that it occurred to Paige the guy from class was not coming, and it was after the third that the girl from orientation hopped onto the stool next to hers and ordered a lager.
Paige’s body tensed at the proximity. In her periphery, she watched her pull a sketchbook and oil pastels out of her bag. Watched as she opened to a blank page and began to sketch, the lines creamy and thick. Paige’s gaze roved from her paint-smeared fingers to the ripple of bones on the back of her hand as she worked.
“So beautiful,” Paige breathed. She hadn’t meant to—it was the Guinness, loosening her tongue.
Ren’s head snapped up, her eyes roaming over Paige’s face for a moment before the corner of her lips rose into a smirk. “Yeah?” She glanced briefly down at her work, then fixed her gaze on Paige. “I think so, too.”
This was how it started. Ren introduced herself. Said she’d seen Paige around. Paige said the same. At orientation, she clarified. I saw you.
They sat at the bar another two hours, the conversation and beer flowing so smoothly Paige had to contain her shock. Ren asked if she wanted to walk back to campus together, and Paige smiled. Of course she did. As they stood, her body was flush with Ren’s for a brief second before she turned to grab her bag. A second that, later, stretched into hours in Paige’s mind.
On the walk, Paige tripped on the cobbled path, tipsy and unwilling to tear her gaze away from Ren’s moving mouth to watch where she was going. Ren was an art history major, she learned. A year older than Paige, she was set to graduate from Smith College that spring. She had no plans beyond graduation. Her laugh was loud and unhurried.
Paige found herself telling things to Ren she would not normally disclose to a stranger. Like how she broke up with her boyfriend this past summer, and harbored guilt for not feeling sad about it. Or how much trouble she’d had making friends in their program.
“I’m just not used to it,” Paige said. “Spending so much time by myself.”
“But do you like it?” Ren asked.
“Like what?”
“Your own company.”
Paige paused. She’d never thought about it before. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “What do you think of it so far? My company?”
At this, Ren smiled, her brown eyes flashing with something Paige could not decipher. Curiosity? Intrigue? Paige would become addicted to it—this look.
“Well, I would say it’s pretty good…” Ren said finally, “but it’s way too soon to tell. I haven’t spent nearly enough time with you yet.”
Yet. That night, laying atop her covers as her roommate snored in the bunk beneath her, Paige repeated this over again in her head. She had never in her life been more excited at the prospect of knowing a person. Had never had a friendship appear so viscerally out of thin air. It occurred to her only after meeting Ren that Paige had, since she arrived, been achingly lonely. When they’d parted ways that night, it seemed, at least to Paige, with a shared understanding: she would not be lonely anymore.
And she wasn’t. For the next two months or so, the two hung out nearly every day. Before classes, after classes. On the weekends. Sometimes just the two of them, other times with Holly or Ren’s friends. In the evenings, they’d take the bus to nearby towns, popping into the quiet, dimly lit pubs on street corners. Ren had a way of talking to people that made them uncoil. Paige loved to watch it—the way she took a grumpy, tightly wound stranger and smoothed their edges with her words.
One night, when they got back to campus late, Paige commented on how much further of a walk her room was from the bus station. How Ren was probably asleep by the time Paige turned the key in her lock. It was just a joke, really. But then Ren said, “Just crash with me.”
She had a single room—a haven to Paige’s cramped double. Ren said she’d take the floor—she didn’t mind. But did they want to watch a movie first?
In the twin bed, they laid on their stomachs side by side with their heads propped in their hands, the light of the laptop flashing white on their faces. They watched something stupid—one of the three DVDs Ren had. Paige, however, did not watch at all. Her eyes were fixed on the screen, yet every ounce of her attention was trained on all the places their bodies touched. The sides of their arms. Their hips. Paige was adorned in the Looney Tunes t-shirt and basketball shorts Ren had tossed her. Occasionally their feet touched, Ren’s wool sock brushing against Paige’s heel, down her bare calf, and up again.
Somehow, at some point, the movie ended. Neither Paige or Ren moved to the floor, instead turning to face each other in the dark. Paige felt the space in between them like an energy field, vibrating.
The silence screamed to be filled. Paige opened her mouth to speak, and when she did, it was not a voice she recognized. “I’m really glad I met you,” she whispered. It had been a little over two weeks since that day at the pub, and not a day had gone by that Paige didn’t think this.
Ren was quiet for a moment, and then said, “I think I have my answer.”
“To what?”
“To the question you asked the day we met. I think your company is some of the best I’ve ever kept.”
A smile spread across Paige’s face. “Some of the best?” she teased, and Ren laughed.
“So greedy,” Ren said. “Fine. The best.” In the dark, she brought her hand to Paige’s face and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
Paige was no longer laughing. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak. After a few seconds, Ren whispered goodnight.
It became a habit—these sleepovers. Late nights out, excuses made, t-shirts borrowed. It went from once a week to three or four. That first night was the first and last time Ren claimed any intention of sleeping on the floor. Some nights, they slept back and back. Contained. Others, Ren pulled Paige to her in the hours after they’d gone to bed, her heat seeping into Paige’s skin.
Nothing ever more than this—just holding and being held, despite the warmth between them feeling, on some nights, scalding. Despite the anticipation Paige now felt each night to be inevitably touched, and the tidal wave flip of her stomach the moment Ren laid a hand on her. The undeniable ache that pulsed within her once her hips settled into place, Ren’s body curling around her.
It confused Paige. All of it. How intensely her body reacted. How normal Ren pretended things were. How natural. Only once did she dare herself to voice her perplexion. “Ren?” she said, her head resting on Ren’s chest, her arm draped over Ren’s stomach.
“Yeah?” Ren’s voice was thick with sleep.
“Do you…do you cuddle with all your friends like this?”
Ren paused. For a moment, Paige feared she fell back asleep. Then she felt Ren’s hold around her tighten.
“Only my favorites,” she said finally, her breath warm on the top of Paige’s head.
Paige deflated, taking careful breaths not to betray her hurt. This was nothing special. She was nothing special.
As time passed, Paige knew things could not go on like this. Her confusion had given way to a growing shame that sat heavy within her, rotting by the day. Ren was all she could think about it. She had spent the entirety of last summer dreaming about this semester abroad, the adventures she’d take, and now? Now she struggled to muster excitement about doing anything, going anywhere, in her short time left in Dublin if Ren were not there.
What was wrong with her? Was she…? Was Ren? If…if Ren felt what Paige felt, she would have done something about it by now. It was her initiating all of it, after all. The touch. The long, endless bouts of eye contact. This was what Paige told herself.
She thought about calling her older sister, Eve, like she’d done so many times before when she felt out of control. Despite being only a few years older, Eve was annoyingly wise. But what would Paige tell her? That she made a really close friend who loved physical touch? That she was maybe, what—a lesbian? What about her ex-boyfriends? Could all of this be in her head?
She felt slightly nauseated. Maybe, Paige decided, some distance from Ren was what was needed.
In the years to follow, it would occur to Paige that trying to have an open, honest conversation with Ren about their relationship had not even crossed her mind. It had not even been a blip. She had always identified as a tried and true problem-solver, and yet, her grand solution: avoiding the problem like the plague.
For a couple of days, it worked. She declined Ren’s invitations, ate her meals with Holly, gave her number to a man who asked for it. The days, it turned out, were an easy feat compared to the nights when, lying alone in her bed, she could not stop her thoughts from wandering. She would squeeze her eyes shut, willing herself to think of anything, anyone else. And yet, without fail, as she drifted into the early haze of sleep, she found herself in a place she’d imagined countless times: underneath Ren, looking into her eyes, a moan caught in her open throat as Ren’s fingers moved inside her.
It was after a week of this Paige readily accepted Holly’s invitation to go out dancing with her friends. It was meant to be a night of distraction, though it turned out anything but. The alcohol, the lights, the sweat, the emotion—all blurred together in a messy memory of color and heat, like one of Ren’s abstract oil paintings.
The club was packed by the time they made it through the line. Paige and Holly had tossed back two shots of vodka in their dorm room, and downed one more each at the bar with Holly’s friends.
Her body felt deliciously light as she moved. She had never been much of a dancer, but the alcohol loosened her limbs, her head swaying back and forth with the music. She spun, dancing with her back against Holly, laughing as she sunk low to the floor.
And then, as she rose, her mind struggled to make sense of what she saw in front of her. There were so many bodies, pressed and moving against each other in the flashing lights. Amongst them, she saw hands on hips, and she—she knew those hands. Had watched those hands dance across a sketchbook. Had imagined them all over her. In her.
Paige’s laugh died in her mouth as she stood fully, her eyes roving up the body those hands belonged to. Ren. Ren, pressed up against a girl Paige had never seen before. Ren, whispering something in the girl’s ear.
Ren, kissing a girl. Paige’s chest rose heavy with each breath she took. There was no air. She was only vaguely aware of Holly behind her, saying her name. Ren, kissing a girl. The sting of rejection that bloomed within Paige was so acute she felt sick. Too hot.
It was not a long kiss. And when Ren pulled away, her head turned in Paige’s direction, as though she’d felt the weight of her gaze. Her face went slack. “Paige—” she began to say, but Paige was already moving through the crowd, shoving and pushing toward the red light of the EXIT sign.
She burst through the door into the alley, the chill of air a shock to her drunken system. Breathe, she told herself. She leaned her back against the brick wall of the building, her hands rushing to wipe away the tears from the cheeks. So stupid.
And then Ren was there. Standing in front of Paige in a black t-shirt and jeans, eyes wide, breathing heavy. “Paige,” she said. “Fuck, are you okay?”
A half-laugh, half-sob escaped Paige’s lips at the question. She took a breath and looked in Ren’s eyes, bright with concern. “I’m sorry,” she said, sniffling. “This is so embarrassing. I—you have every right to kiss whoever you want.”
“Paige,” Ren said in a tone that made Paige shiver. “That’s not—”
“So it was just me, then?” Paige interrupted. “You just…didn’t want me?” She hated how pathetic she sounded.
Ren ran her fingers through her hair and took a deep breath. She took a step closer to Paige. Looked straight into her eyes. “Paige, of course I want you,” she said.
Paige swallowed. “As a friend, though.”
Ren huffed out a laugh. “Exactly what have I done to make you think that? Spending every second of my free time with you? Telling you how good you look all the time? Which—you do, tonight, by the way.” Ren took a step closer. “Or reaching for you in the middle of the night, because I can’t stand to not have my hands on you?”
Paige could no longer breathe. “But you—” she choked out. “You never told me. You never tried.”
“I didn’t know if you wanted me too. And the risk of losing you if you didn’t feel the same…” She took another step.
“But the girl,” Paige said, voice so soft it was nearly a whisper. “The girl in there. Why did you—”
“She’s no one. Nothing. I just met her tonight, I—You’d been avoiding me all week and I didn’t know why and I didn’t know you’d be here…” Ren shook her head. “I’m sorry.”
Paige nodded slowly, unable to form a coherent thought.
Ren took another step, their faces now inches apart. “You have to believe me when I say you are all I’ve thought since I’ve met you,” she whispered. “Every night you slept in my bed, I…it was everything I could do not to kiss you. I just…if you didn’t want me back…”
At this, Paige’s eyes lifted to meet Ren’s, now clouded with desire. “I did want you,” she breathed. “Of course I wanted you.”
Ren’s gaze moved to Paige’s mouth. “And what about now?” she whispered, her lips so close they brushed Paige’s cheek.
In response, Paige tilted her head up so her lips lightly grazed Ren’s, her eyes fluttering closed on their own accord. Ren placed her hand on the side of Paige’s face and stroked her thumb down her cheek, sliding it over her bottom lip. A soft whine escaped Paige’s throat. “Now I need you,” she said, but the words were swallowed by Ren, her mouth already on her.
The relief that flooded Paige at the touch was so devastating—nothing could have prepared her for it. So many nights spent yearning for this, exactly this. The kiss moved from delicate and passionate to hungry and hurried. Ren placed a hand on the brick wall behind them, pressing her body into Paige’s. Every inch of her lit up with want for more. Paige slipped her hand into Ren’s t-shirt and roamed the muscles of her back, hard and warm beneath her palm, as her other hand found itself twisted in Ren’s hair.
“Paige,” Ren moaned, and deepened the kiss, her tongue in Paige’s mouth.
Paige melted at the sound of her name. She could feel how wet she was. How wet Ren would find her once her hand traveled up from where it gripped her leg. She didn’t care that they were in public—she didn’t care who saw. There was nothing she wanted more than Ren’s hand beneath her skirt. For Ren to feel how much she needed her. Ren’s mouth moved from Paige’s lips to her throat, sucking at the skin below her jaw. Paige heard herself groan and pushed her hips into Ren’s, her mouth back on hers, teeth skimming Ren’s lower lip.
It was Ren who pulled away, leaving Paige panting. Only then did she register the sound of Holly’s voice, and turned to find her standing by the bar door, open-mouthed. “Oh my god,” she said. “Um, so sorry—I came to check on—yeah, seems fine, so I’m gonna go!”
She was inside before Paige could process anything, let alone respond.
The world rushed back in an instant, like a trance had broken. There were people walking on the street at the end of the alley. Sounds of car horns and trash being thrown into garbage bins. The air was cold and damp from rain. When had it rained?
Paige looked at Ren, who looked so thoroughly disheveled Paige could not imagine how she looked. She looked at her lips, swollen and full—lips that had kissed two people that night.
Glancing down, Paige was horrified to find her skirt hiked up, a slip of her navy blue underwear visible. Her hands shook as she pulled it down.
“Paige—” Ren said.
“I have to go,” she said, the shame burgeoning within her so thick it brought a lump to her throat.
“What?” Ren’s eyes flickered with hurt. “No, Paige, wait a minute. Please, let’s—”
“I’m sorry, I can’t. I can’t do this right now. I’m—it’s too much.”
“Are you serious?” Ren said, her brow furrowed. “What just happened? Why are you—”
“I’m sorry,” Paige repeated, shaking her head as tears ran down her red, flustered cheeks.
Paige’s heels crunched on the gravel as she walked down the alley and onto the street, leaving both Ren and the person Ren turned her into, behind.
“And that’s the last time I saw her,” Paige said as she sat back against the booth. “Until now, I guess.”
Frankie sat across from her, mouth agape, her beer long since finished. “What? What do you mean that’s the last time? You just had the best kiss of your life! Well, before you met me, at least.”
Paige rolled her eyes at that, smiling and shrugging her shoulders slightly. “We only had two weeks left and I—I freaked out. I avoided her until classes were done and then went on a solo trip to Berlin.”
Frankie sat back in her seat and whistled. “Shit. Heart-wrenching gay awakening is right.”
Paige laughed. “The morning after we kissed…I just couldn’t handle how out of control she made me feel. How consumed I was by what I felt for her. I wanted her, yes, but I also wanted me back.” Paige shook her head, the feeling of it remembered in her body. “I had so much shit to figure out. So I swore to myself I’d never lose myself like that again.”
Frankie reached for Paige’s hand. “And did you? Ever lose yourself again?”
Paige considered this. “Yes,” she said after a while. “But not in the same way. When Bobby was little…motherhood consumed me. It took everything I had to offer.”
She voiced to Frankie what she hadn’t yet put words to. That all that love that poured from her to her son, all that pure-of-heart devotion, ate away at any part of her separate from mother and wife—including her sexuality. It feasted slowly, too—as though she wouldn’t notice. And she didn’t, she supposed. It wasn’t until Paige moved to Sungold and those parts of her began to reappear, like hazy memories, that it occurred to her they’d disappeared in the first place.
“I think…” Paige continued, “I think moving here and meeting you…it brought me back to the parts of myself I’d forgotten, yes, but it also bolstered and bettered those parts. It healed me in more ways than one.”
She was struck, then, by a wave of emotion, her chest welling with gratitude for her life here. For the calloused hand that held hers. And for perhaps the first time, she was proud of that younger version of herself, who did nothing but try her best to weave the messy, tangled threads of desire and identity and love into something that made sense. Something worth holding onto—which she did hold, now.
Paige was so lost in the warmth of these thoughts and the feeling of Frankie’s hand in hers that she didn’t even notice the sound of tentative footsteps approaching.
“Paige?” Ren said. “Is that you?”