“Nah,” Ryan said, and grinned. “I’m really popular.”
Gabby rolled her eyes at him, but she was laughing in spite of herself. “Yeah, I bet you are.” She liked him, she realized. She tried to remember the last time she’d warmed so quickly to another person, and couldn’t. It was kind of embarrassing.
Ryan nodded at her book splayed open on the bed, the Tudor thing. “Are you reading that?” he asked.
Of course she was reading it; what did he think it was doing there? Still: “It’s for school,” she lied, as if doing homework on a Saturday night while a party raged one floor below her was somehow less dorky than reading because she wanted to. She blew out a breath, then, annoyed at herself, amended: “It’s not, actually.”
Ryan shrugged. “Whichever.” He reached over and picked it up, scanning the back for a moment before looking up at her seriously. “I’m sure this will come as a shock to you, Gabby, but I am not a huge pleasure reader.”
Gabby hid a smile. “You’re not, huh?”
“I mean, some things,” he said. “I know how to read. There are some sports books I like. Magazines, sometimes. And, you know, the backs of cereal boxes in the mornings.”
“BuzzFeed lists,” Gabby put in.
“Hey, I love BuzzFeed lists!” Ryan protested, bouncing off the edge of the desk and plopping himself into the seat of the chair she was roosting on; Gabby moved her feet to give him room. “Twenty Times Kim Kardashian Showed Her Butt Crack Getting out of a Limousine. Or like, Seventy-One Things That Will Only Have Great Meaning to You If You Were Born in March of 1996.”
Gabby looked at him with great skepticism. He was sitting close enough that she could smell him; she braced herself for pukey unpleasantness but instead he just smelled kind of warm. “Are you being extra dopey right now so that I’ll forget you barfed in my bathroom?” she asked.
Ryan shook his head. “I think I’m this dopey all the time,” he said, leaning back against the chair cushion. His solid-looking shoulder brushed her knee. “I’m not kidding though; I do really like those lists. I make them in my head sometimes, if I’m bored or whatever.”
“You do, huh? Like what?”
“Top ten things about this party,” he said immediately. “You’d be on that one.”
Gabby threw her head back and laughed, except then she slammed her skull on the wall behind her, and she would have actually died of embarrassment only Ryan was laughing, too.
“Shit,” he said, reaching up with his nontaped hand and rubbing the back of her head, gentle circles. “You’re gonna have a bump.”
“Probably,” Gabby agreed, though she found she didn’t actually care about that, not really. Was this flirting? she wondered. It must be, right? This must be what normal people did when they weren’t hiding in their bedrooms like hobbits. “I’ll live.”
“I hope so.” Ryan grinned.
He was a hockey player, Gabby reminded herself. He probably acted exactly this way with every single girl he encountered; he’d probably acted exactly this way with some other girl tonight. But she couldn’t make herself care about that, either. For the first time in possibly her entire life she wasn’t worried about saying something stupid, about being hopelessly inept and embarrassing. For the first time she wasn’t worried that everything about her was wrong.
“Are those broken?” Gabby asked him, motioning to his taped-up fingers. His hands seemed disproportionately bigger than the rest of him, like a puppy that hadn’t grown into his paws.
“Nah,” Ryan said. “Just jammed.”
“They hurt?”
“Not as much as your head, probably,” he said. Then he smiled. “Anyway, I’m really tough.”
“Oh, right.” Gabby snorted. “Clearly.”
“Clearly,” Ryan echoed. They were quiet for a minute. Gabby could hear the noise of the party from downstairs. She kept expecting him to get up and go back down there, but when she glanced over he was just sitting back in the chair and gazing at her, patient and easy.
“I want to kiss you,” he announced.
“What?” Gabby felt like a trap door had opened up underneath her; her first, gut reaction was to frown. “Why?”
That made him laugh. “Why?” he repeated. “’Cause you’re pretty, and I like you. And I like how your mouth looks.”
I like how your mouth looks. That made Gabby’s heart and stomach and all her organs do a pleasant/painful thing inside her. She’d never been kissed before in her life. She peered back at him for a moment, heart pounding in a way that for once had nothing to do with anxiety. She liked how his mouth looked too.
Still: logistics. “You literally just barfed,” she pointed out, wrinkling her nose at the thought of it. “I’m not going to—”
“I didn’t barf because I’m sick!” Ryan protested, looking wounded. “I barfed because I was drunk.”
“You’re still drunk,” Gabby said.
“Not that drunk,” Ryan argued. “Plus I had gum and water.”
“Oh, well. In that case.” She looked at him for another moment. The truth was, she liked his whole stupid face. She thought of Celia, earlier: Don’t you ever want to have fun?
“Okay,” she finally said.
“Really?” Ryan looked like he thought he was getting away with something. “I can?”
“I said yes!” Gabby was laughing, she couldn’t help it. “Hurry up before I change my mind.”
“Well, then.” Ryan tilted his head at her. “Come here.”
“You come here,” she said, rolling her eyes at him, but by then he was already doing it, warm and friendly and familiar. Like they weren’t even strangers at all.
GABBY
Gabby woke up the next morning with a start and a headache, even though she hadn’t been drinking. She rolled over under the covers, then gasped again: Ryan McCullough was still sprawled sleeping on her floor, under the triangle quilt she’d thrown over him when he’d announced himself too tired to get up and go anywhere, including his own house, then promptly passed out on her shag rug. Gabby still couldn’t believe she’d let him stay.
She peered over the edge of the mattress again, curious. He looked sort of nice when he was sleeping: younger somehow, his face softened. Like maybe that was the real him, when he was asleep.
All right, Gabby scolded herself. Enough. This was a completely random hockey player she was ogling, a virtual stranger. He had explicitly announced that he didn’t even read. He wasn’t the kind of person she could ever see herself with, not really.
Not that she was stupid enough to think that kiss had actually meant something. She definitely wasn’t.
But what if it had?
Gabby slipped out of bed and into the bathroom, brushed her teeth and hair. When she got back to her bedroom Ryan was sitting up, looking sleepy and alarmed. “Um,” she said, feeling herself blush. “Hi.”
Ryan blinked at her. “I slept here?”
“You kind of passed out,” Gabby told him. “I tried to wake you up, but you weren’t really . . .” She trailed off.