Top Ten(71)

Gabby shrugged in a way that was somehow combative, burrowing back in closer instead of looking him in his face. She kissed his neck again, more purposefully this time. “A little,” she admitted, and he winced.

Fuck, he wanted to. He wanted to so bad. It was like all the time he’d spent over the last two years convincing himself this wasn’t what he wanted had suddenly evaporated and here it was again, sharp and immediate and his for the taking. But he liked to think he wasn’t fundamentally a fucking piece of shit, so he gently untangled her arms from around his neck. “Hey,” he said into her temple, tasting sweat and shampoo. “Come on. Not like this.”

“Sorry,” she mumbled, shoving him away, not quite gently.

“Gabby,” he said.

“No, you don’t want me, either,” she snapped. “I get it.”

“Hey,” he said. “Cut it out.”

Gabby heaved out a noisy breath. “Sorry,” she muttered again, flopping backward onto the mattress, squeezing her eyes shut and digging the heels of her hands into the sockets. “I’m being an asshole.”

“Kind of,” Ryan agreed. He was irritated suddenly: the knowledge that she was blatantly using him to get back at Shay for something; the idea that he’d do because she was hurt and lonely and here. He was tired; he’d spent three hundred bucks he didn’t really have on this hotel room. Chelsea had dumped him. He wanted to go home.

He looked at Gabby for a moment, still lying on the bed with her eyes covered like a little kid playing hide-and-seek. He could lay it all out there for her, he thought crankily. Blow her fucking mind. You really wanna know why Chelsea dumped me, princess? Listen to this. But it was Gabby, and he loved her, and she looked so fucking sad. He didn’t want to blow her mind. He wanted to make her feel better. And if something was going to happen between them—and Ryan felt pretty sure now that it was—he wanted it to be—well. Kind of . . . perfect.

“Come on,” he said finally, toeing his boots off and standing up, nudging her with his knee to get her attention while keeping the rest of his body a safe distance away. It was insane to him suddenly, how fast this whole night had changed directions. How fast his entire heart had. If he thought about it for more than a second, he had to admit that it wasn’t actually much of a change at all: his feelings for Gabby had always been there just underneath the surface, constant as breathing and just as reflexive. He didn’t usually stop to consider them. They just sort of were.

She still wasn’t looking at him; Ryan jiggled the mattress a little bit. “You said you wanted to sleep, yeah?” he asked. “Let’s go to sleep. We’ll get out of here early tomorrow; we’ll get eggs.”

Gabby huffed another sigh, then lowered her hands and looked at him pitifully. “Don’t hate me,” she said.

Ryan rolled his eyes, reaching for the remote and flicking through the channels until he found a Friends rerun, bright and familiar. “I don’t hate you, dumbass.”

“Okay,” Gabby said, not sounding entirely convinced. She kicked her shoes off and crawled under the blankets, like a bear preparing to hibernate for winter. After a moment the top of her head poked back up. “I don’t hate you either, for the record,” she told him, voice muffled by the blankets. She reached her hand out and waggled it at him pathetically. “Just in case that was a thing you also had crippling social anxiety about.”

Ryan grinned at her, he couldn’t help it, a feeling like hearing the first three chords of his favorite song on the radio. A feeling like the start of something good. “It wasn’t, actually,” he said, reaching for her cold hand and squeezing. “But it’s nice to be reassured.”





GABBY


“More coffee?” asked the waitress as she dropped off their check the following morning. They were back up in Colson at the diner, sitting across from each other at the same ripped booth where they’d gotten egg sandwiches and late-night pancakes a million times before. This wasn’t so bad, Gabby thought. She’d just spend the rest of senior year eating eggs in diners with Ryan. Maybe they could do a hash brown tour of the Hudson Valley or something. Top ten spots to eat ham-and-cheese omelets.

“I gotta pee,” Ryan said when the waitress was gone, digging some bills out of his back pocket. “Then we’ll get out of here?” He was weirdly chipper for somebody who’d been dumped twelve hours ago: by the time she’d woken up this morning he’d already been to Starbucks and back, was announcing plans for Ryan and Gabby’s Super-Sad Breakup Club. “Maybe today’s the day I teach you to ice skate.”