“ThankChrist.” Ryan was on her in a second, the coconut tang of sunscreen and the sticky catch of her lip gloss, the ancient bedsprings shrieking as they landed on the thin, lumpy mattress. Gabby’s sunglasses fell right off her head.
“Don’t crush them,” Gabby mumbled, giggling—andgiggling, Jesus, Ryan didn’t think he’d ever heard her make that particular sound before. It was kind of the best thing in his life. He reached for the tie on the back of her bathing suit, fingers fumbling with the knot. “I love you,” he told her, the words coming out before he knew he was going to say them. Still, it wasn’t like they weren’t true. “I just—you know that, right? That I love you?”
Gabby wrinkled her nose at him, skeptical. “I kind ofthink it doesn’t count if you’re looking at my boobs while you say it,” she pointed out.
Ryan closed his eyes. “I love you,” he said one more time. “Hey. Gabby Hart. I love you so much.”
When he opened them again Gabby’s face was close to his, noses touching. There was a little bit of hazel in her eyes. “I love you too,” she said, and she sounded so serious. His heart felt like it was oozing lava inside his chest.
“Gabby and me are dating now,” he announced when they finally made it down to the beach a while later. They were last, which left them on the hook for dinner; Ryan emphatically could not bring himself to give a crap. “So any of you who were planning to try and kiss me on this vacation, you’re shit out of luck.”
“Oh my god,” Gabby said, hiding her face as she plopped down onto her towel beside Sophie, but she was smiling.
Actually, she was smiling alot.
They hung out on the beach for the rest of the afternoon, Gabby reading her Tudors book under a listing umbrella while Ryan played Frisbee and swam with the others, coming out of the ocean periodically to shake himself off beside her like a dog. They brought pizzas back to the house for dinner, played a battered game of Taboo they found on the bookshelf until eventually Nate decided Ryan and Gabby couldn’t be on the same team anymore.
“It’s an unfair advantage,” he complained, handing out another round of beer cans over the back of the saggingbeach house sofa. “One of you says ‘Tom Cruise’ and the other one of you says ‘Mount Rushmore’ because of some weird inside joke from three years ago, and none of the rest of us stand a chance.”
“Sounds like somebody’s being a whiny little bitch to me,” Ryan said, grinning, but the truth was he felt kind of smug about it. Actually, he felt like the smartest person in the world. Ofcoursehe and Gabby had an unfair advantage. It was him and Gabby. And now they were a couple.
The two of them went out on a grocery run the following morning, Gabby heading across the street for iced coffees while Ryan picked up eggs and bacon at the general store on the corner. The cashier was a pretty girl about his age, long blond hair and a slouchy tank top. “Making breakfast?” she asked as she rang him up.
“Sure am,” Ryan said, leaning over the counter a little bit. “I don’t really like to brag about this, but I once won a statewide scrambled egg contest.”
The girl nodded, smirking a little. “That so?”
Ryan grinned. “Nope.”
The girl giggled.
“Hey,” Gabby’s voice called; when Ryan turned around she was standing in the door of the grocery store, a cardboard tray of iced coffees in her hands and an unreadable expression on her face. “I’ll meet you back at the house, yeah?”
Ryan’s heart sank. “No no no, hold up,” he said, rushingto dig some money out of his pocket. “I’ll be right there.”
When he got outside Gabby was sitting on a bench with the iced coffees beside her, scrolling through Instagram on her phone. “So, that wasn’t what it looked like,” he said, knowing even as the words came out of his mouth that they were ridiculous. It was exactly what it looked like. He’d been flirting with the checkout girl. He always flirted with the checkout girl. He flirted with the checkout girl and the barista and the drive-through attendant at Wendy’s. He didn’t mean anything by it.
Gabby shrugged. “Okay,” she said, standing up and sticking her phone in her back pocket. “Let’s just go, yeah?”
“Gabby—” Ryan stopped, put the groceries down on the bench, and reached for her hands; Gabby rolled her eyes at him, but when he laced his fingers through hers, she didn’t protest. “There’s probably gonna be an adjustment period, right?” he asked. “While we figure out how to go from being friends to like... ?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Gabby said, smirking at him as he trailed off. “Towhat, exactly?”
“Jerk,” Ryan said, and kissed her. His whole body relaxed when he felt her kiss him back.
They spent the weekend eating popcorn shrimp out of flimsy paper boats at picnic tables overlooking the ocean; they went bowling at an old-fashioned alley in a neighboring town, Gabby lining everybody up against a mural onthe exterior wall and taking a million goofy pictures. They swam out past the breakers and floated until their toes were pruny, Gabby’s legs wrapped tight around his waist.
“Does this make the list?” she asked him, grinning. Ryan dunked her head under the waves.
RYAN
The summer seeped by. They walked into Colson Village for everything bagels slathered with cream cheese; they swung on the swings at Ridgeview Park and went out for pizza with Gabby’s friend Michelle and her pretentious, smelly boyfriend. They went down to Rye and rode the old wooden roller coaster that looked like a dragon, Gabby throwing her smooth, tan arms up into the air. Ryan loved her like that, the odd times when she was suddenly so fearless. The random moments when she seemed so free.
At the beginning of July, his mom started clearing the house out, dragging massive garbage bags full of ancient kitchen appliances and candleholders and old clothes into the garage to get ready for a yard sale at the end of the summer. “I think it’ll be nice, don’t you?” she asked Ryan, arms full of wilted winter coats she’d dug out of the hall closet. “To have all this old junk out of here before Phil moves in?”
Ryan frowned. His mom had gotten engaged to Philthe Dachshund Guy earlier that spring, had been walking around with a goofy smile and a fat diamond ring on the fourth finger of her left hand, a stack of wedding magazines on top of the toilet tank when he went to brush his teeth in the morning. “So he’s just going to come live here?” Ryan had asked when she told him. “With all three of the dogs?”
“You won’t even be here,” she’d pointed out, handing him a dusty box full of what looked like orphaned power cords to take out to the garage. “You’ll be in Minnesota. What do you care?”
