Top Ten(79)

I like how your mouth looks. That made Gabby’s heart and stomach and all her organs do a pleasant/painful thing inside her. She’d never been kissed before in her life. She peered back at him for a moment, heart pounding in a way that for once had nothing to do with anxiety. She liked how his mouth looked too.

Still: logistics. “You literally just barfed,” she pointed out, wrinkling her nose at the thought of it. “I’m not going to—”

“I didn’t barf because I’m sick!” Ryan protested, looking wounded. “I barfed because I was drunk.”

“You’re still drunk,” Gabby said.

“Not that drunk,” Ryan argued. “Plus I had gum and water.”

“Oh, well. In that case.” She looked at him for another moment. The truth was, she liked his whole stupid face. She thought of Celia, earlier: Don’t you ever want to have fun?

“Okay,” she finally said.

“Really?” Ryan looked like he thought he was getting away with something. “I can?”

“I said yes!” Gabby was laughing, she couldn’t help it. “Hurry up before I change my mind.”

“Well, then.” Ryan tilted his head at her. “Come here.”

“You come here,” she said, rolling her eyes at him, but by then he was already doing it, warm and friendly and familiar. Like they weren’t even strangers at all.





GABBY


Gabby woke up the next morning with a start and a headache, even though she hadn’t been drinking. She rolled over under the covers, then gasped again: Ryan McCullough was still sprawled sleeping on her floor, under the triangle quilt she’d thrown over him when he’d announced himself too tired to get up and go anywhere, including his own house, then promptly passed out on her shag rug. Gabby still couldn’t believe she’d let him stay.

She peered over the edge of the mattress again, curious. He looked sort of nice when he was sleeping: younger somehow, his face softened. Like maybe that was the real him, when he was asleep.

All right, Gabby scolded herself. Enough. This was a completely random hockey player she was ogling, a virtual stranger. He had explicitly announced that he didn’t even read. He wasn’t the kind of person she could ever see herself with, not really.

Not that she was stupid enough to think that kiss had actually meant something. She definitely wasn’t.

But what if it had?

Gabby slipped out of bed and into the bathroom, brushed her teeth and hair. When she got back to her bedroom Ryan was sitting up, looking sleepy and alarmed. “Um,” she said, feeling herself blush. “Hi.”

Ryan blinked at her. “I slept here?”

“You kind of passed out,” Gabby told him. “I tried to wake you up, but you weren’t really . . .” She trailed off.

“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.”