Top Ten(6)

“I—” Gabby paused, thought about it for a moment. Sighed theatrically. “No.”

“Okay,” Ryan said, making a big goofy show of looking her up and down. “Good.”

“Good,” Gabby echoed. She wrapped her arms around his neck, trying to relax into the warm, solid broadness of him. She wanted to do this—God, she thought as he worked the button on her jeans, she definitely wanted to do this—but try as she might she couldn’t ignore the persistent lick of anxiety at the base of her spine. After all, this was Ryan: her best friend, her Most Important Person. Even if this was a one-time thing—and that’s what it was, Gabby was pretty sure, some kind of aberrant graduation-induced insanity—the stakes felt ridiculously, absurdly high.

And then there were the practical concerns: mainly, that she knew for a fact he’d already had sex with a million other people. Whereas Gabby herself—well.

“Okay, here’s the thing, here’s the thing, though,” she finally said, peeling his hands off her body and lacing his fingers through hers, squeezing. “You realize I’ve never done this with a boy before.”

“Oh,” Ryan said, and Gabby watched understanding dawn on his face. “I—right. I guess I knew that.” He paused for a second. “Right.”

“Well, don’t think about it,” Gabby said, feeling strangely invaded. Some things were private, even from him. Especially from him. “Don’t be a perv.”

“I’m not!” Ryan defended himself, then, with a crooked smile: “Well, okay, now I am.”

Gabby frowned. “I’m serious,” she said. It had been real, what she and Shay had done together. She didn’t want him to think it was some kind of performance for his benefit. “I didn’t say that to like, turn you on or something gross like that, that’s a whole other—”

“No no no, definitely, of course, I know.” Ryan’s eyes went wide. “I didn’t mean it that way at all, I just—”

“Uh-huh.” She didn’t want to talk about this anymore, so instead she pushed him down onto the bed. His sheets were worn and pilled from years of washing and probably a couple of days past clean. Gabby barely noticed, though, because here was Ryan tugging her underwear down her legs in the darkness, here were his hands and his hipbones and his good, familiar face.

“I’m not going to lie to you,” he muttered into her neck, his mouth warm and friendly against her collarbone, “this definitely makes the Top Ten list.”

Gabby shivered as he worked one hand down between them, her bare feet sliding against the hair on his legs. “Oh yeah?” she asked, struggling to keep her voice even. “And what Top Ten list is that, exactly?”

“I don’t know,” Ryan admitted, voice muffled. “I have no idea. Every Top Ten list, maybe.”

Gabby laughed. “Shut up,” she said, and yanked his head up to kiss him, and they didn’t talk any more after that.





RYAN


Ryan didn’t mean to fall asleep, but he must have, because when he woke up the sky was just starting to get light outside the window, and Gabby was pulling on her jeans across the room.

“You’re leaving?” he asked, rolling over in his bed and looking at her. He’d never noticed the line of her neck before, the way her shoulder blades looked like bird wings moving under the pale skin of her upper back. He kind of just wanted to stare at her for the foreseeable future. He would have felt embarrassed, if he hadn’t felt so glad.

Gabby nodded. “I have to get home,” she explained, pulling last night’s tank top over her head.

“Why?” Ryan asked sleepily. “Stay. We’ll go to the diner and get eggs.”

“I can’t,” Gabby said, and Ryan wasn’t sure if he was imagining a slight edge in her voice. “I need to be there before my dad wakes up, or he’s going to freak out and think I got murdered. Not to mention the fact that I don’t want your mom to catch me walk-of-shaming it out of your house.”

Ryan frowned, sitting up on the mattress and scrubbing a hand through his hair. “I don’t know if I’d call it walk-of-shaming it, exactly.”

“Oh no?” Gabby dug one flip-flop out from underneath his bed. “What would you call it?”

“Well.” Ryan took a deep breath. Before last night he’d completely given up on the idea that any of this was still a possibility; now he felt like the universe had dropped one last chance in his lap. He’d have to be an idiot not to take it. “I mean, we could call it, like. The beginning of something. If you wanted.”