You Say It First - Katie Cotugno Page 0,56

how Colby was going to react to that—not, she reminded herself, that it was any of his business to react to either way—but in the end he just nodded back like he’d figured as much. “Makes sense,” he said. “That’s what people do, right?”

“Some people,” Meg said. It had been fine with Mason; they’d waited until they’d been dating for six months and he’d been extremely respectful, but it hadn’t rocked her world or anything. It hadn’t, she thought suddenly, felt anything like this. “Not everybody.” She looked at him another moment. “Girlfriends?”

“Some, kind of.” Then he shook his head again, glancing up at the ceiling. “Not really. I’m stupid with girls. I don’t know.”

“Not that stupid,” Meg teased, slipping a finger into his belt loop and yanking once.

“Pretty stupid.” Colby sat back against the headboard, crossing his ankles. Both of them were still wearing their shoes. “I came close a couple times, I guess. This girl Brooklyn I knew in high school, and this other girl who worked the registers at the store for a while.”

“Joanna,” Meg reminded him pointedly.

“Joanna, maybe. I don’t know.” Colby shrugged into the pillows. “It’s like that whole cost-benefit-analysis thing again, I guess. It just never felt like it was worth it to potentially, like, humiliate myself to try and get over the—the—”

“Hump?” Meg supplied, and Colby laughed.

“Yeah.”

She was quiet for a moment, tucking her legs up underneath her. “It feels worth it with me, though, right?” she couldn’t help but ask.

Colby smiled crookedly. “I mean, I’m not planning to humiliate myself any more than I already have, if I can help it.”

“Well, sure.” Meg didn’t smile back. “But still.”

Colby took a breath. “Yeah,” he said, looking at her across the mattress. “It feels worth it with you.”

Meg didn’t know if she believed him, not entirely; still, she nodded in reply. “Good,” she said, stretching out beside him and resting her cheek against his shoulder. “It feels worth it to me, too.”

Colby reached over and turned off the lamp on the nightstand, leaving the others blazing. The sound of his heartbeat was the last thing she heard before she fell asleep.

Nineteen

Colby

Colby woke up with a gasp from a nightmare—fisting his hands in the sheets for a moment, not entirely sure where he was. Then he blinked and looked around the hotel room—the lights still on, the dawn dripping up outside the open window, the girl sacked out beside him with her T-shirt rucked up just enough to expose the dimples on either side of her backbone—and remembered.

Meg was sleeping so deeply it felt like a shame to wake her up, but he didn’t want her to think he’d bailed without saying goodbye. “Hey,” he said, laying a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I gotta go let the dog out before work.”

Meg blinked awake, her eyes huge and dark and deep as caverns. “Oh,” she said, a moment of her own confusion before she blinked again, sitting up. “Okay.” He could see that she was wanting to ask if she was going to see him again. He wanted to ask it, too, and didn’t.

Instead, he took a deep breath, reaching out and tucking her hair behind her ear. “Can I kiss you goodbye?” he asked.

“Colby . . .” Meg wrinkled her nose. “I’ve got morning breath.”

Colby smiled; he couldn’t help it. “I don’t care about your morning breath.”

“Well, I do.” Meg gamboled upright and darted into the bathroom, returning a minute later smelling like Colgate Total and face wash. He could see where she’d tried to rub the smudges of mascara from under her eyes. She wasn’t the prettiest girl he’d ever met—he thought Jo was probably prettier, if you put them side by side—but there was something about Meg that made him feel like his heart was on fire when he looked at her. There was something about her that made him feel like he could build a staircase to the sky.

She scooped his hoodie off the floor and held it out in his direction, but Colby shook his head. “Keep it,” he said, aware that he wanted her to have something of his and embarrassed about it in equal amounts.

Meg smiled. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, I don’t know. Come here.”

Colby put both hands on her face and kissed her, tasting toothpaste and something like hope. She fisted her hands in his T-shirt, her short nails zipping against the cotton. “Bye,” she muttered into his mouth.

“Bye.”

He kissed her one more time before he went, the lock clicking