Tonight, though, it was quiet.
“Come here,” Ryan murmured, pulling her through the door at the end of the hallway and shutting it safely behind them. His room was small and a little close smelling, worn blue carpeting and a standard boy-plaid comforter. A ragged poster of Brian Leetch from the New York Rangers was tacked on the wall above the desk. Ryan’s dad had bought it for him when he was still in diapers, Gabby knew. It had literally hung above his crib before he could walk.
Ryan clicked the desk light on now, bright enough that they could see each other’s faces, and Gabby looked at him for a moment: his scrum of messy hair and his friendly brown eyes, the tiny discoloration on the edge of his lower lip where he’d taken a hockey stick to the mouth sophomore year. God, he was so familiar in every way but this one. She couldn’t believe how this night had turned out. “Are we really doing this right now?” she asked.
“I mean, I think—” Ryan looked sheepish in the half dark, and suddenly very young. “If you—?”
Gabby nodded. It wasn’t like she’d never thought about it. Of course she’d thought about it, starting the very first night they’d met freshman year, but so many things—so many moments, so many people—had happened between then and now that Gabby had very nearly forgotten. It was like how she’d wanted a pet zebra when she was five: back then she’d imagined in great detail its personality and what she’d feed it, the adventures the two of them might have. But she never thought she’d actually get a pet zebra, not really, and now, at eighteen years old, she didn’t even want one anymore.
Except, apparently, she did.
Gabby kissed him again then, urgent. Ryan slid his hands down her back. She pulled his shirt up over his head, shocking herself with her own boldness; his chest was smooth and start-of-summer pale.
“Wait wait wait,” Ryan said suddenly. He was gasping, which surprised her. Gabby wasn’t used to him like this. He was such a lion of a person it was strange to feel like she could undo him, like she held that kind of power in her two shaking hands. “Are you too drunk to make good decisions?”
Gabby shook her head, laughing a little. “I’m not drunk at all, nerd,” she told him. “I drove, remember?”
“Oh yeah.” Ryan smiled. “Okay, good.”
“Are you drunk?”
“No,” Ryan said immediately. “Definitely not.”
Gabby raised her eyebrows. “What is that, then, the first time all week?”
“You’re a rude person,” Ryan said, and kissed her again. He walked her backward across the carpet, pulling her shirt up and tossing it onto the desk chair. For a moment, he only just looked. Gabby squirmed a bit, surprised and a little embarrassed by the expression on his face. He was gazing at her—there was no other word for this—adoringly. She hadn’t thought Ryan had it in him to look at anyone like that, really, but especially not her.
“Stop staring,” she ordered, nudging him roughly in the arm.
“I can’t,” Ryan said. Then: “Wait, really?”
“I—” Gabby paused, thought about it for a moment. Sighed theatrically. “No.”
“Okay,” Ryan said, making a big goofy show of looking her up and down. “Good.”
“Good,” Gabby echoed. She wrapped her arms around his neck, trying to relax into the warm, solid broadness of him. She wanted to do this—God, she thought as he worked the button on her jeans, she definitely wanted to do this—but try as she might she couldn’t ignore the persistent lick of anxiety at the base of her spine. After all, this was Ryan: her best friend, her Most Important Person. Even if this was a one-time thing—and that’s what it was, Gabby was pretty sure, some kind of aberrant graduation-induced insanity—the stakes felt ridiculously, absurdly high.
And then there were the practical concerns: mainly, that she knew for a fact he’d already had sex with a million other people. Whereas Gabby herself—well.
“Okay, here’s the thing, here’s the thing, though,” she finally said, peeling his hands off her body and lacing his fingers through hers, squeezing. “You realize I’ve never done this with a boy before.”
“Oh,” Ryan said, and Gabby watched understanding dawn on his face. “I—right. I guess I knew that.” He paused for a second. “Right.”
“Well, don’t think about it,” Gabby said, feeling strangely invaded. Some things were private, even from him. Especially from him. “Don’t be a perv.”
“I’m not!” Ryan defended himself, then, with a crooked smile: “Well, okay, now I am.”
Gabby frowned. “I’m serious,” she said. It had been real, what she and Shay had done together. She didn’t want him to think it was some kind of performance for his benefit. “I didn’t say that to like, turn you on or something gross like that, that’s a whole other—”
“No no no, definitely, of course, I know.” Ryan’s eyes went wide. “I didn’t mean it that way at all, I just—”
“Uh-huh.” She didn’t want to talk about this anymore, so instead she pushed him down onto the bed. His sheets were worn and pilled from years of washing and probably a couple of days past clean. Gabby barely noticed, though, because here was Ryan tugging her underwear down her legs in the darkness, here were his hands and his hipbones and his good, familiar face.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” he muttered into her neck, his mouth warm and friendly against her collarbone, “this definitely makes the Top Ten list.”
Gabby shivered as he worked one hand down between them, her bare feet sliding against the hair on his legs. “Oh yeah?” she asked, struggling to keep her voice even. “And what Top Ten list is that, exactly?”
“I don’t know,” Ryan admitted, voice muffled. “I have no idea. Every Top Ten list, maybe.”
Gabby laughed. “Shut up,” she said, and yanked his head up to kiss him, and they didn’t talk any more after that.
RYAN
Ryan didn’t mean to fall asleep, but he must have, because when he woke up the sky was just starting to get light outside the window, and Gabby was pulling on her jeans across the room.
“You’re leaving?” he asked, rolling over in his bed and looking at her. He’d never noticed the line of her neck before, the way her shoulder blades looked like bird wings moving under the pale skin of her upper back. He kind of just wanted to stare at her for the foreseeable future. He would have felt embarrassed, if he hadn’t felt so glad.
Gabby nodded. “I have to get home,” she explained, pulling last night’s tank top over her head.
“Why?” Ryan asked sleepily. “Stay. We’ll go to the diner and get eggs.”
“I can’t,” Gabby said, and Ryan wasn’t sure if he was imagining a slight edge in her voice. “I need to be there before my dad wakes up, or he’s going to freak out and think I got murdered. Not to mention the fact that I don’t want your mom to catch me walk-of-shaming it out of your house.”