They were quiet for another moment. Ryan glanced over at her in the dark. He knew he ought to go inside, let her get home, but something stopped him: he felt irrationally nervous all of a sudden, like maybe he was never going to see her again.
“What?” Gabby was looking at him, suspicious. She’d changed her clothes for the party: a tank top with a low, swooping neckline, her hair scooped into a loose knot at the base of her skull. He knew she was pretty—of course he knew she was pretty—but he forgot about it sometimes, the way you get used to a smell. Noticing it now, or re-noticing, he suddenly felt very warm.
Ryan cleared his throat. They’d had enough near-misses over the last four years for him to know that kind of thinking wasn’t going to get him anywhere. He and Gabby were friends; they’d always been friends. And if he occasionally still thought about what it would be like to be more than that, well. That was his secret to keep. “No,” he said, “nothing.”
Gabby frowned. “Is your head bothering you?” she asked.
“You always think my head is bothering me,” Ryan said.
“Your head is always bothering you,” Gabby pointed out.
Ryan ignored that. First of all, it wasn’t true: a couple of hockey-related headaches were hardly a big deal, in the scheme of things. Second of all, even if it was true, it wasn’t worth dwelling on; after all, he was due at practice in Minneapolis in two months.
Two months.
The thought of it gave Ryan that same uneasy feeling from earlier, like everything was about to change whether he wanted it to or not and he couldn’t do one single thing to stop it. “Can I tell you something without you calling me a pussy?” he heard himself blurt.
Gabby made a face. “I would never use the word pussy, first of all.”
“Okay, sure, yes,” Ryan agreed, sitting back in the passenger seat. “Sorry. But without you calling me a wimp.”
“When have I ever called you a wimp?”
Ryan rolled his eyes. “Like a thousand times, actually, but—”
“Okay, okay,” Gabby conceded, “sorry, go. I promise I won’t denigrate your manhood.”
“That’s sweet of you, considering I’m trying to tell you a nice fucking thing here.” He blew a breath out, nervous all of a sudden. His friendship with Gabby was different from any other relationship in his life for a lot of reasons, but this was one of them: the careful reveal of information, the unspoken agreement they had about what they said to each other and what they didn’t. He wondered if even this was crossing the line. “It kind of scared the shit out of me, when your sister was talking about us being apart this afternoon.”
Promise or not, Ryan was expecting her to make fun of him a little, but Gabby just nodded. “Yeah,” she said quietly, glancing down and picking at her cuticles. “Me too.”
Ryan looked at her in surprise. Usually she met feelings talk of any kind with enthusiastic retching noises. “Really?”
“Of course I’m scared!” Gabby exclaimed. “Are you kidding me? I’m terrified. I have no idea what I’m going to do without you around every second. It’s entirely possible I’ll freak out and never leave my dorm and grow into my sheets like a science experiment.”
Ryan shook his head. “That won’t happen.”
“Oh no?” Gabby asked dubiously.
“Of course not,” he said, with more confidence than he actually felt about it. “You’re a graduate of the Ryan McCullough Party Project. We have a 100 percent success rate.”
Gabby huffed a laugh at that, banging her temple lightly against the headrest. “Is that so?”
“It is,” Ryan said. “And even if it wasn’t, I know you, and I know.”
“Yeah.” Gabby cleared her throat, looking down again; her wispy blond bangs fell into her eyes. “Well, you’re going to be the king of Minnesota,” she continued after a moment, more loudly. “They’ll probably name the student center after you your first year.”
“A bar, at least.”
“I’m serious,” Gabby said, reaching out to poke him in the shoulder. “I know you, too, you know.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said, grabbing her finger and holding it for a second. He wasn’t sure if he was imagining it, or if their faces were getting closer. His heart did a weird, trippy thing inside his chest. “I guess you do.”
They looked at each other for a moment. The air in the car seemed to change. He could smell her, her skin and the laundry detergent her mom used and the smell of her car, which was always a little like french fries when you first opened the door, but also like the Ocean Breeze air freshener hanging from the rearview. Ryan liked it. She smelled like home to him. She felt like home to him, too.
“Ryan,” Gabby said quietly. “What are you—?”
“Nothing,” Ryan said, and kissed her.
For one terrifying second Gabby didn’t do anything, her mouth still and slack against his, her body hunched like a question mark across the center console. Then she made this sound, like a gasp or a tiny whimper, and kissed him back. She was a good kisser, Ryan thought, surprised and then immediately feeling kind of like a dick about it. He just thought he’d probably kissed a lot more people than her. His hand was on her arm, then on her rib cage, then rucking the back of her shirt up to rub her warm, bumpy spine. Holy shit, this was actually happening. This was happening, after all this time.
“Okay,” she said finally, pulling away from him, tucking her hair behind her ears. She sounded breathless in a good way, which made him feel pleased with himself. “Are we, like.” She laughed a little bit. “Are we?”
“I don’t know,” Ryan said, hoping with every fiber of his being that the answer was yes. “Are we?”
“You tell me.”
Ryan gazed at her, her tank top and freckled shoulders and her red, smudgy mouth. Jesus Christ, he loved her so much. “Do you want to come in?” he asked, and it sounded a lot more like pleading than he necessarily meant for it to.
Gabby didn’t answer for a second, her blue eyes unreadable in the darkness. Ryan held his breath.
“Yeah,” she said, and it sounded like something beginning. “Yeah, I want to come in.”
GABBY
Gabby felt Ryan take her hand as they made their way down the short hallway that led to his bedroom, putting a finger to his lips so they wouldn’t wake up his mom. His place wasn’t entirely familiar to her: they’d never spent as much time at Ryan’s as they had at Gabby’s house. For all his I’m an open book talk, he could be cagey about it, which she thought probably had to do with how small it was in here: the low ceilings and narrow doorways, the kitchen and bathrooms that hadn’t been updated since way before they were born. To Gabby it had always felt cozy, the millions of photos on the walls in the living room and Ryan’s hockey trophies all clustered on the fireplace mantel, the wallpaper in the kitchen with its print of tiny herbs tied with bows. Ryan’s mom ran her dog grooming business out of the basement, barks and yelps perpetually echoing up the staircase, coupled with the Sleater-Kinney Luann liked to listen to while she worked.