Top Ten by Katie Cotugno
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.”
NUMBER 2
FINALLY
MORNING AFTER GRADUATION
GABBY
Three and a half years after the first night she met him—eighteen hours after graduation, thirty seconds after she decided hooking up with him had been a giant mistake—Gabby bailed out of Ryan’s house as quickly and quietly as she could. She got as far as the driveway before she heard the front door squeak open behind her. “Gabs,” he called out across the yard. When Gabby turned to look, he was standing on the tiny front stoop, barefoot and sleepy-faced and scruffily handsome. Gabby sort of hated his guts.
“Stop,” he pleaded. “Don’t go like that.”
Gabby stood next to her car, arms crossed, not moving. She made him come all the way down the steps to her. “I’m sorry about what I said in there,” he told her, close enough that she could smell the sleep on him. “I was being a huge asshole.”
“Is that what you think of me, actually?” she asked, trying not to let her voice waver. “That I’m scared of everything?”
“No,” Ryan said, no hesitation. “Of course not. I’m sorry. I was being a dick; I wanted to hurt your feelings.”
“Yeah, well.” Gabby shrugged. “Guess what? You did.”
“I know,” he said, making a move like he was going to touch her and then thinking better of it, sticking his hands in the pockets of his ridiculous fratty mesh shorts instead. “I’m sorry.”
Gabby looked at him for a moment, considering. In the early-morning sunlight his face was clear and lovely and sharp. “How long?” she asked.
Ryan shook his head. “How long what?” he asked.
“You said you’ve wanted to try it, try dating, for a long time. And I’m asking you how long.”
Ryan made a face like she was trying to embarrass him on purpose. Good, she thought meanly. He could stand to feel a little embarrassed every once in a while. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “Since sophomore year, on and off? But it wasn’t, like—” He shook his head again, as if he wasn’t exactly sure how to say this. “I don’t want you to think I was, like, creepily pining, or—”
“No, I get it.” She did, too. She thought of that very first night in her bedroom when they were freshmen. She hadn’t been creepily pining, either. “I understand.”
“You do?” Ryan asked, looking suddenly interested. “You mean, like, you—?”
Gabby scoffed. “Don’t fish.”
“I’m not,” he said, and his voice cracked the tiniest bit, like he was still in middle school. “Gabby. I’m not.”
Gabby gazed at him in the purple morning. His hair was sticking up dopily. He was her most important person, the one she told things to so that they would be real. So that she would be. His friendship was the best thing in her life. And she’d have been lying if she said she’d never thought about this exact possibility, especially back when they’d first met.
Gabby bit her lip. Shay had broken up with her three months before, in the parking lot of a Carvel on the very last night of her spring break. There was no way she’d thought she’d date somebody else before she left for the city at the end of August—let alone that it would be Ryan. There were so many things that could happen. There were so many ways it might go wrong.
“Let’s try it,” she heard herself say.
Ryan rolled his eyes at her, shifting his weight on the blacktop. “I don’t want you to sympathy date me, Gabby, thanks.”
“No no no,” Gabby said, reaching out, plucking at the sleeve of his Colson Cavs T-shirt. “It’s not sympathy dating, it’s not. I got scared, I got freaked out. I was worried it would screw with our friendship, you know? But I want to.” She ran her fingertips down his arm and took his hand then, and it felt like the bravest thing she’d ever done in her life. “Do you want to?”
Ryan let a breath out, a half laugh, a sigh. “Of course I want to, idiot. You know—of course I do.”
“Okay,” Gabby said, and his grin looked like a sunrise. “Let’s.”
RYAN
Sophie’s parents’ beach house was a cheerful, cotton candy–colored cottage, full of waterlogged paperbacks and couches that smelled vaguely like mildew, board game boxes with the corners blown out. They stopped at a general store for chips and Hostess cupcakes and hot dogs, plus a trunk full of beers thanks to Ryan’s fake ID; Anil blared old-school hip-hop from his speakers as they unloaded the car. “Last one down the beach buys dinner,” Sophie crowed, whipping off a tank top to reveal a black one-piece bathing suit printed with tropical flowers, the kind of thing Ryan had seen pictures of his mom wearing in 1995.
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
“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?”
Ryan’s heart sank. “No no no, hold up,” he said, rushing to 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. “To what, 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 on the 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 Phil the 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?”
Ryan didn’t ask if that made him part of the old junk category or not.
“She has a point,” Gabby said when he complained about it. They were sorting through a bunch of old toys that still lived in Rubbermaid bins at the back of his closet, Pokémon cards and Transformers he obviously didn’t need anymore but felt suddenly salty about giving away. “It’s not like you’re going to have to see the guy every day. You’ll be halfway across the country. It’ll be nice for your mom to have the company.”
“Uh-huh,” Ryan agreed, tossing a plastic Wolverine into the garbage bag and not quite looking at her. They hadn’t talked at all about what would happen between them at the end of the summer: after all, Minnesota was also halfway across the country from New York City, where she was going to study photography at Pratt. He wanted to ask her about it, but the more time went by the more dangerous it felt, like a sinkhole they
Well, that wasn’t true. More like: the only conversations he’d ever been afraid to have with Gabby were the ones about their actual relationship.
Still, Ryan liked dating her—loved dating her, even. He loved her skin and smile and the smell of her shampoo on his pillows. He loved the way she bit his bottom lip when they were kissing. And if sometimes things between them felt a little awkward, like a new pair of hockey skates that didn’t quite fit right—well. It took time to break things in, he guessed.
“Are you okay?” Gabby asked now, looking at him and frowning, a Nerf gun clutched in one hand. “You’ve been rubbing your head all afternoon.”
“No, I haven’t,” Ryan said automatically, jamming both hands into the Rubbermaid bin to illustrate. His headaches had never been this bad in the off-season before. His vision had also started doing a weird thing where it blurred and then focused again for no reason, but that did not feel like the kind of thing he should mention at this particular moment.
“Ryan—” Gabby said, but Ryan shook his head to stop her, taking the gun from her hand and shooting her in the bicep with a little foam dart.
“Come on,” he said, “I’m bored of this. Let’s go get some ice cream.”
GABBY
They went to a place in Colson Village with weird flavors like lavender and Earl Grey tea and a long line that snaked around the block on Friday nights during the summer. Gabby had never minded waiting back when she used to come here with Shay—it was good people-watching—but with Ryan it always kind of felt like running a gauntlet: a million different people to say hi to, a million different chances to embarrass herself. On top of which it felt like every time they were out in town they bumped into some different ex-girlfriend of Ryan’s, all of whom seemed less than impressed with his current romantic situation: namely, Gabby herself.