She cheered up a little bit once they parked the car in what Ryan hoped was a no-tow zone; he bought her a giant bag of sour-cream-and-onion chips and a Gatorade at a bodega, brought her upstairs to the room. “This is a nice hotel,” Gabby said, sitting on the bed and crunching thoughtfully. “Sorry you’re not going to get to use it for its intended purpose.”
“I’ll live,” Ryan said, sitting down heavily on the duvet beside her. “Did we seriously both get dumped tonight?”
“You got dumped?” Gabby asked him. Then, before Ryan could answer, “Did I get dumped?” And just like that, she started to cry.
Ryan froze. He’d seen Gabby cry exactly once before in their entire relationship, at the end of that Pixar movie about girl emotions, after which she insisted loudly and vehemently that she’d gotten pretzel salt in her eye. Seeing it now broke both his head and his heart.
“All right, sad sack,” he said, taking the bag of chips out of her hand and setting it down on the bedside table, wrapping his arms around her. She smelled like beer and like cold and like Gabby, peppermint soap and organic lotion. “You’re okay.”
“I’m too boring for her,” she said into his shirt collar. “She’s got this whole other life and all these new friends and she wants to go out and do stuff, and I can’t even be mad at her for it! It’s normal! She’s in college! I’m the one who isn’t normal.”
“You’re normal,” Ryan promised, smoothing her damp hair back. “There’s nothing boring about you. You’re the least boring person I know, honestly.”
“That’s a lie,” Gabby said. “Celia is right. I never leave the house. I’m terrible at social situations. I had a panicker as soon as I got out of your car.”
“Okay,” Ryan said. “Easy.” He rubbed her back for a minute, slow circles, the way his mom soothed the nervous dogs she worked with. Gabby was so much narrower than Chelsea, all sharp shoulder blades and bumpy spine, like she might blow away if he wasn’t careful. Like she was someone he wanted to protect. “You’re perfect, okay?”
Gabby sniffled into the crook of his shoulder. “You have to say that,” she said in a wet, muffled voice.
“I really don’t,” Ryan promised. But he let himself hold her a little tighter anyway, the two of them sitting like that for a long, quiet minute. He liked how warm she was through her T-shirt. He liked how she seemed to actually need him right now, the way she hardly ever seemed to.
He liked—oh Jesus Christ—the feeling of her warm mouth brushing against his neck.
Ryan felt himself pop an immediate boner, every nerve ending in his body screaming to urgent, hysterical life in the moment before he eased himself back away from her. “Gabby,” he said quietly, “are you drunk?”
Gabby shrugged in a way that was somehow combative, burrowing back in closer instead of looking him in his face. She kissed his neck again, more purposefully this time. “A little,” she admitted, and he winced.
Fuck, he wanted to. He wanted to so bad. It was like all the time he’d spent over the last two years convincing himself this wasn’t what he wanted had suddenly evaporated and here it was again, sharp and immediate and his for the taking. But he liked to think he wasn’t fundamentally a fucking piece of shit, so he gently untangled her arms from around his neck. “Hey,” he said into her temple, tasting sweat and shampoo. “Come on. Not like this.”
“Sorry,” she mumbled, shoving him away, not quite gently.
“Gabby,” he said.
“No, you don’t want me, either,” she snapped. “I get it.”
“Hey,” he said. “Cut it out.”
Gabby heaved out a noisy breath. “Sorry,” she muttered again, flopping backward onto the mattress, squeezing her eyes shut and digging the heels of her hands into the sockets. “I’m being an asshole.”
“Kind of,” Ryan agreed. He was irritated suddenly: the knowledge that she was blatantly using him to get back at Shay for something; the idea that he’d do because she was hurt and lonely and here. He was tired; he’d spent three hundred bucks he didn’t really have on this hotel room. Chelsea had dumped him. He wanted to go home.
He looked at Gabby for a moment, still lying on the bed with her eyes covered like a little kid playing hide-and-seek. He could lay it all out there for her, he thought crankily. Blow her fucking mind. You really wanna know why Chelsea dumped me, princess? Listen to this. But it was Gabby, and he loved her, and she looked so fucking sad. He didn’t want to blow her mind. He wanted to make her feel better. And if something was going to happen between them—and Ryan felt pretty sure now that it was—he wanted it to be—well. Kind of . . . perfect.
“Come on,” he said finally, toeing his boots off and standing up, nudging her with his knee to get her attention while keeping the rest of his body a safe distance away. It was insane to him suddenly, how fast this whole night had changed directions. How fast his entire heart had. If he thought about it for more than a second, he had to admit that it wasn’t actually much of a change at all: his feelings for Gabby had always been there just underneath the surface, constant as breathing and just as reflexive. He didn’t usually stop to consider them. They just sort of were.
She still wasn’t looking at him; Ryan jiggled the mattress a little bit. “You said you wanted to sleep, yeah?” he asked. “Let’s go to sleep. We’ll get out of here early tomorrow; we’ll get eggs.”
Gabby huffed another sigh, then lowered her hands and looked at him pitifully. “Don’t hate me,” she said.
Ryan rolled his eyes, reaching for the remote and flicking through the channels until he found a Friends rerun, bright and familiar. “I don’t hate you, dumbass.”
“Okay,” Gabby said, not sounding entirely convinced. She kicked her shoes off and crawled under the blankets, like a bear preparing to hibernate for winter. After a moment the top of her head poked back up. “I don’t hate you either, for the record,” she told him, voice muffled by the blankets. She reached her hand out and waggled it at him pathetically. “Just in case that was a thing you also had crippling social anxiety about.”
Ryan grinned at her, he couldn’t help it, a feeling like hearing the first three chords of his favorite song on the radio. A feeling like the start of something good. “It wasn’t, actually,” he said, reaching for her cold hand and squeezing. “But it’s nice to be reassured.”
GABBY
“More coffee?” asked the waitress as she dropped off their check the following morning. They were back up in Colson at the diner, sitting across from each other at the same ripped booth where they’d gotten egg sandwiches and late-night pancakes a million times before. This wasn’t so bad, Gabby thought. She’d just spend the rest of senior year eating eggs in diners with Ryan. Maybe they could do a hash brown tour of the Hudson Valley or something. Top ten spots to eat ham-and-cheese omelets.