Sophie and Anil were taking the master bedroom, obviously; Ryan was supposed to be sharing a bunk bed with Nate, but instead he followed Gabby up the stairs to the tiny back bedroom, with its sharply sloped ceiling and pale blue bedspread edged with a fake-satin border. “Hi,” he said, hovering in the doorway. The whole ride down here she’d acted like nothing was different between them, looking out the window in her sunglasses and joking around with Nate and reading her Tudors book; Ryan wasn’t sure if she didn’t want their friends to know or if she was having second thoughts or none of the above. Suddenly he wasn’t sure what to do with his hands.
Gabby looked at him, lips twisting like she couldn’t quite hide a smile. “Hi,” she said.
“Can I touch you?” he blurted, stepping into the room and shutting the door behind him, wiping his sweaty palms on his shorts. “Because I’ll be honest, Gabs, I want to touch you, like, all the fucking time.”
Gabby grinned for real at that, rolling her eyes a little. “Yeah, dork,” she told him, setting her overnight bag down next to the dresser and reaching her hand out for his. “You can touch me.”
“Thank Christ.” 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—and giggling, 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 of think 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 a lot.
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 sagging beach 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. Of course he 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?”