“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’llfreak 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’regoing 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 thissound, 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 washappening, 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. “Arewe?”
“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 hisI’m an open booktalk, 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.
Tonight, though, it was quiet.
“Come here,” Ryan murmured, pulling her through the door at the end of the hallway and shutting it safely behindthem. 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—?”
