Page 61 of You Say It First

Meg’s whole body got very warm all of a sudden. “Okay,” she said, nodding. “One more place, then.”

In the end she brought him to the senior parking lot behind Overbrook Day, turning the car off at the far end of the lot underneath the low branches of some evergreen trees. The lot was empty and quiet, just the orange glow of the safety lamps attached to the buildings and an owl hooting somewhere farther off. It gave Meg the same feeling as she’d had in the hotel room that night in Ohio, like if she didn’t know better she’d think they were the only two people on Earth. She didn’t know what it meant that it felt like she and Colby made the most sense in places like this: just the two of them separate from the rest of their lives and everyone else who knew them, an invisible signal carrying a pair of voices through the air.

Colby leaned across the gearshift and put a hand on the back of her head, his mouth warm and a little bit cautious. Meg tucked her fingers into the collar of his shirt. She didn’t think she’d ever been as aware of her body as she was when Colby was kissing her—the obvious parts, sure, but also her hips and the backs of her knees and her eyelashes, all her systems humming some inaudible sound. Colby challenged her. He infuriated her. He made her feel like she could reach out and grab the world in both hands.

“Wait,” she muttered finally, opening her eyes to look at him in the darkness. Her whole face felt swollen and smudged. She’d unbuttoned his shirt to the waist, rucked up his undershirt so she could feel the muscles jumping in his stomach. His skin was impossibly warm. “I just—let’s go home, okay?”

Colby backed off right away, wiping his palms on his thighs and clearing his throat a little, wincing as he thunked the back of his head on the passenger-side window. “Sure,” he said, nodding about a thousand times.

“No, I just, like—” Meg broke off, shook her head. Then she laughed. “Home, where my bedroom is.”

“Oh.” Colby nodded once more—his whole body relaxing, then tensing again. “Oh.” He laughed, too, the sound of it echoing all down her backbone. “Okay.”

Meg grinned and put the car into drive.

Twenty-Nine

Colby

Meg had to get her hair done for the wedding the following morning.

“You want to come with me?” she asked, knocking on the door of the guest room and handing Colby an iced coffee. He’d wanted to spend the night in her bed, and from the way her mom’s door was shut tight, he thought they probably could have gotten away with it, but in the end she’d walked him back to the guest room, kissing him for a long time in the darkness before scampering down the hallway alone. “I mean, I can’t imagine what would be more fun for you than sitting in a hair salon reading Cosmo for an hour.”

“I like Glamour better, actually,” Colby said, trying and mostly failing to keep the dumb smile off his face. It was weird, he thought, gazing across the room at her and feeling himself blush a little as he thought of the quiet, secret sounds she’d made last night: it wasn’t that he felt any different now, exactly. He’d always thought that when this finally happened—if it ever finally happened; sometimes it had felt like there was a not-insignificant chance he’d be a virgin until he died—the first thing he’d want to do was brag about it to Jordan and Micah and anyone else who would listen. Now that it actually had, though, he didn’t want that at all. He wanted to protect her or something. He wanted to protect whatever this was.

Now he took a sip of the iced coffee, which was extremely bitter and expensive-tasting. “I can tag along,” he said. After all, it wasn’t like he had anything to do around here without her. He certainly didn’t want to spend the morning with her mom, who kept eyeing him as if possibly he was going to make off with her jewelry. What he really wanted to do was find someplace he and Meg could be alone again, where he could lay her out on her back and stare at her for the foreseeable future.

Well. Not just stare.

As if she could read his thoughts, Meg closed the door to the guest room behind her and climbed into the bed beside him, setting her own coffee cup on the nightstand. “Hi,” she said, pulling the quilt up over them both. Her bare feet brushed his, smooth and cold.

Colby gulped, every single nerve ending in his body open and alert all of a sudden. “Hi yourself,” he managed to say. Then, as she slid one hand up under his T-shirt: “Is this okay? I mean, is your mom...?”

“She’s at the store,” Meg promised, rubbing her sharp nose along his collarbone. “We have, like, twenty more minutes at least.”

Colby grinned.

At the salon, he sat on a pink suede chair and flipped through a couple of wrinkly Us Weeklys while she went and got her hair done. He scrolled idly through apartment listings on his phone. The place on Cypress was still available, and he was imagining making Meg breakfast in the tiny galley kitchen when all at once it rang in his hand—Doug, said the caller ID, and Colby swallowed.

“I’ve gotta take this,” he called to Meg, though he didn’t think she could hear him over the sound of the hair dryers. He stepped outside into the busy weekend morning, early-summer sunlight prickling on his arms and legs.

“Colby,” Doug said when he answered. “I got your message.”

“Hey,” Colby said. The salon was in the middle of a little shopping district, people pushing strollers and walking their chocolate labs and drinking lattes. He could see a farmer’s market set up by the commuter rail station at the end of the block. “Yeah, I was just calling to see when you wanted me to start.”

“Colby, I actually offered the job to someone else.”

Colby blinked. “You did?”

“Yeah,” Doug said. “When I didn’t hear from you, I figured you weren’t serious, and construction is supposed to start in a couple of weeks, so...”

“Oh,” Colby said. Oh, fuck, he felt stupid. He could feel it growing inside him, expanding like an overfull water balloon, like his whole body was made of cheap plastic and couldn’t accommodate the stretch. “Okay.”

“Hey, I’m really sorry, Colby. But I called you twice—did you not get my messages?”

“Uh,” he said, his whole body prickling with embarrassment. He thought of all the times Meg had asked him if he’d followed up yet. He thought of all the times he’d blown her off. The rush of regret was hot and shameful in the moment before it turned to anger: He’d been worried about the rug getting pulled out from under him, hadn’t he? And sure the fuck enough, he’d been right. The guy hadn’t said anything about a time limit, or about having somebody else lined up if Colby didn’t move fast enough. Where the hell did he get off? “No, I got ’em.”

“I wish you’d called me back, buddy.”

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