“Yeah.” Ryan nodded. “Um,” he said, scrambling to his feet and grabbing for his giant teenage-boy sneakers, which he’d kicked off beside her desk. “Tell me your name again?”
Gabby felt something thud deep inside her then, like a satellite falling quietly and unceremoniously to Earth. “Gabby,” she told him. “My name is Gabby.”
“Gabby,” he repeated. “Right.” He looked at her awkwardly. “We didn’t—” He gestured between them. “Or anything, did we?”
Gabby could not believe this was happening, except for the part where she definitely could: Of course it was happening. She was exactly the kind of person this would happen to. “No,” she said after a moment, peering coldly back at him. “Not at all.”
Ryan had the grace not to be too openly relieved. “Okay,” he said. “Good.” He got up then, trying ineffectually to fold the quilt but mostly just wadding it up into a brightly colored mass.
“Give me that,” Gabby snapped finally, taking it from his arms and dumping it on her bed. She was going to have to throw it in the washing machine anyway. She wanted to scrub this whole dumb encounter out of her brain. “Let’s go.”
Ryan blinked at her again, slightly bewildered. “Okay,” he said. “Um. Thanks for letting me stay.”
“Uh-huh. Sure.” Gabby all but shoved him out of her room and downstairs into the hallway, would have kicked him down the front steps if she thought she could get away with it. When she turned around Celia was standing in the kitchen door in her pajamas, a roll of paper towels in one hand and an utterly shocked expression on her face.
“Who the hell was that?” she asked.
Gabby shook her head. “Some idiot hockey player I’m never going to talk to again.” She turned to her sister, pushed her hair behind her ears. “Let’s clean up.”
NUMBER 2
FINALLY
MORNING AFTER GRADUATION
GABBY
Three and a half years after the first night she met him—eighteen hours after graduation, thirty seconds after she decided hooking up with him had been a giant mistake—Gabby bailed out of Ryan’s house as quickly and quietly as she could. She got as far as the driveway before she heard the front door squeak open behind her. “Gabs,” he called out across the yard. When Gabby turned to look, he was standing on the tiny front stoop, barefoot and sleepy-faced and scruffily handsome. Gabby sort of hated his guts.
“Stop,” he pleaded. “Don’t go like that.”
Gabby stood next to her car, arms crossed, not moving. She made him come all the way down the steps to her. “I’m sorry about what I said in there,” he told her, close enough that she could smell the sleep on him. “I was being a huge asshole.”
“Is that what you think of me, actually?” she asked, trying not to let her voice waver. “That I’m scared of everything?”
“No,” Ryan said, no hesitation. “Of course not. I’m sorry. I was being a dick; I wanted to hurt your feelings.”
“Yeah, well.” Gabby shrugged. “Guess what? You did.”
“I know,” he said, making a move like he was going to touch her and then thinking better of it, sticking his hands in the pockets of his ridiculous fratty mesh shorts instead. “I’m sorry.”
Gabby looked at him for a moment, considering. In the early-morning sunlight his face was clear and lovely and sharp. “How long?” she asked.
Ryan shook his head. “How long what?” he asked.
“You said you’ve wanted to try it, try dating, for a long time. And I’m asking you how long.”
Ryan made a face like she was trying to embarrass him on purpose. Good, she thought meanly. He could stand to feel a little embarrassed every once in a while. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “Since sophomore year, on and off? But it wasn’t, like—” He shook his head again, as if he wasn’t exactly sure how to say this. “I don’t want you to think I was, like, creepily pining, or—”
“No, I get it.” She did, too. She thought of that very first night in her bedroom when they were freshmen. She hadn’t been creepily pining, either. “I understand.”
“You do?” Ryan asked, looking suddenly interested. “You mean, like, you—?”
Gabby scoffed. “Don’t fish.”
“I’m not,” he said, and his voice cracked the tiniest bit, like he was still in middle school. “Gabby. I’m not.”
Gabby gazed at him in the purple morning. His hair was sticking up dopily. He was her most important person, the one she told things to so that they would be real. So that she would be. His friendship was the best thing in her life. And she’d have been lying if she said she’d never thought about this exact possibility, especially back when they’d first met.
Gabby bit her lip. Shay had broken up with her three months before, in the parking lot of a Carvel on the very last night of her spring break. There was no way she’d thought she’d date somebody else before she left for the city at the end of August—let alone that it would be Ryan. There were so many things that could happen. There were so many ways it might go wrong.
“Let’s try it,” she heard herself say.
Ryan rolled his eyes at her, shifting his weight on the blacktop. “I don’t want you to sympathy date me, Gabby, thanks.”
“No no no,” Gabby said, reaching out, plucking at the sleeve of his Colson Cavs T-shirt. “It’s not sympathy dating, it’s not. I got scared, I got freaked out. I was worried it would screw with our friendship, you know? But I want to.” She ran her fingertips down his arm and took his hand then, and it felt like the bravest thing she’d ever done in her life. “Do you want to?”
Ryan let a breath out, a half laugh, a sigh. “Of course I want to, idiot. You know—of course I do.”
“Okay,” Gabby said, and his grin looked like a sunrise. “Let’s.”
RYAN
Sophie’s parents’ beach house was a cheerful, cotton candy–colored cottage, full of waterlogged paperbacks and couches that smelled vaguely like mildew, board game boxes with the corners blown out. They stopped at a general store for chips and Hostess cupcakes and hot dogs, plus a trunk full of beers thanks to Ryan’s fake ID; Anil blared old-school hip-hop from his speakers as they unloaded the car. “Last one down the beach buys dinner,” Sophie crowed, whipping off a tank top to reveal a black one-piece bathing suit printed with tropical flowers, the kind of thing Ryan had seen pictures of his mom wearing in 1995.
Sophie and Anil were taking the master bedroom, obviously; Ryan was supposed to be sharing a bunk bed with Nate, but instead he followed Gabby up the stairs to the tiny back bedroom, with its sharply sloped ceiling and pale blue bedspread edged with a fake-satin border. “Hi,” he said, hovering in the doorway. The whole ride down here she’d acted like nothing was different between them, looking out the window in her sunglasses and joking around with Nate and reading her Tudors book; Ryan wasn’t sure if she didn’t want their friends to know or if she was having second thoughts or none of the above. Suddenly he wasn’t sure what to do with his hands.