You Say It First - Katie Cotugno Page 0,48

asked, pulling her feet up onto the bumper. “If you could build anything?”

“I dunno,” Colby said, but she could tell he was lying. “I’ve never thought about it, really.”

Meg rolled her eyes. “Tell me,” she said, nudging him with her ankle. “What, do you think I’m going to make fun of you? I don’t know how to build anything.”

Colby shrugged. “Just a regular house. I don’t know.”

“You don’t have to be embarrassed,” she pressed—it felt important, all of a sudden, to get him to tell her. “It’s just me, remember?”

“Oh, right, it’s just you, like you’re—” Colby broke off, made a face. “Fine,” he said, taking a sip of his giant soda. “Something with a big porch, I guess. And a bunch of fireplaces.” He thought. “And a game room.”

“See?” Meg said, her skin warming slightly. “There you go. You do have an imagination.”

Colby snorted. “Oh, I’ve got an imagination,” he said, almost under his breath. This time when she kicked him he grabbed her ankle and held it, his fingers curling around the jut of bone in a way that set off a string of tiny explosions she felt all over her body. Meg didn’t breathe until he finally let it go.

He gazed at her for another long moment, an inscrutable expression in his hazel-brown eyes. “What?” she finally asked.

Colby shrugged, finishing the last of his sandwich in one giant bite. “You look different than I thought you’d look” was all he said.

Meg laughed. “You seriously never Googled me?”

“No,” he said once he’d swallowed.

“Really?”

“Why?” He raised his eyebrows. “Did you Google me?”

“Of course I did,” Meg admitted immediately, unembarrassed. “Like, the very first night we talked, even. But you’re basically impossible to find.”

Colby smirked. “That’s the idea.”

“Well,” Meg said, tugging a bit of cucumber out of her sandwich with her thumb and forefinger, “I’m infinitely searchable.”

“That is . . . not surprising to me.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Meg smiled. “Good different or bad different?”

“What?”

“Do I look good different or bad different?”

Colby’s mouth twitched then, infinitesimal. “That seems like a trick question,” he said.

“How is it a trick question?”

“Meg.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “You’re pretty, if that’s what you’re asking. You’re, like . . . really, really pretty.”

“Oh.” Meg felt her whole body prickle—and now she was embarrassed, a little, to be caught fishing for a compliment so blatantly. But there was another part of her—the part of her that had asked to come visit to begin with, maybe—that wasn’t embarrassed at all. “Yeah,” she said, bending down and rubbing her nose against her denim-covered knee, looking at him out of the corner of her eye. “I guess that was kind of what I was asking.”

“Uh-huh.” Colby gazed back at her for a moment, inscrutable. Then he grinned. “Come on,” he said, crumpling up his sandwich wrapper and pushing himself up off the bumper. “Let’s get going.”

Seventeen

Colby

They were just getting back to the house when Colby’s phone dinged with a text from Micah. “Who’s that?” Meg asked, reaching down to scratch the dog under her chin.

He watched her for a moment, intrigued; he’d automatically assumed she was one of those people who was going to be weird and stupid about pit bulls, and he was surprised and pleased to find that he’d been wrong. “Just a buddy of mine,” he said, tucking the phone back into his hoodie pocket. “They wanted to know what I was doing—well, what we were doing, I guess.” That wasn’t true, technically, since he hadn’t told anyone Meg was coming in the first place. Honestly, he hadn’t really thought she was going to show up. Now he kind of wished he had. “They’re hanging out.”

Meg raised her eyebrows. “You want to go meet them?”

Colby shook his head like a reflex. “That’s okay,” he said. “We don’t have to.”

“Why not?” she asked—straightening up again, lifting her chin like a challenge. “You embarrassed of them, or are you embarrassed of me?”

The answer to that question was emphatically both, but there was no way to explain that to her. Instead, Colby just shrugged. “Neither,” he said, hoping his voice didn’t betray him. “We can go if you want. But I’m warning you, they’re literally hanging around in front of an abandoned office building. It’s not exactly a fun night of culture in the big city.”

“I love abandoned office buildings,” Meg deadpanned. Colby snorted, fully thinking she was joking, but she shook her head. “No, I seriously do!” she protested. “I love all abandoned places. Have you ever