Page 49 of Guy's Girl
Because Ginny is at that house, drinking with the rest of them, waiting for him to arrive.
After the night they slept together and Adrian told her he wasn’t looking for a serious relationship, Ginny never texted him again. Though he should have felt like he dodged a bullet—clearly, she wasn’t on the same page—after he stopped hearing from her, he felt oddly like he lost something he didn’t even know he had.
Now they’re going to spend a week together, and he has no idea how she’ll act toward him. Will she be friendly? Cold? Will he feel that same strange comfort from before, the warm blanket that wrapped him whenever she was around, or will things be horribly awkward? A few weeks back, he heard that Finch and Ginny were together, but then separately he heard that Finch was still with his high school girlfriend. He doesn’t know which story is true.
He has a feeling he’s about to find out.
Ginny is addicted to Finch. As she pours two glasses of wine at the outdoor bar, she can’t stop glancing over to where he sits on one of the lounge chairs by the pool. Every time she does, he’s looking back at her.
Ginny looks away before Clay and Tristan notice. Not that it would surprise them. Everyone knows what’s happening between Ginny and Finch, even if no one will admit it.
Behind one of Hegyvidék’s many hilltops, the sun is starting to set, casting Budapest in a burnt orange glow. Tristan’s house nestles high into the ridge of a mountain. From the pool deck, they have an immaculate view of the valley below. It ebbs and undulates, peppered with pine trees and multicolored rooftops.
Down the stone steps from the outdoor bar is the pool, connected to a three-tiered waterfall with a hot tub at the very top. Across from the pool is the garden, which is shaded by apple and cherry trees. It is, by far, the nicest property on which Ginny has ever stayed.
The Murphy family mostly vacationed in their motor home, a tricked-out 1995 fifth wheel with three sets of bunk beds, into which they packed all five children, plus a dog, and saw every corner of the United States. If they stayed in a hotel or bed and breakfast, it was the three-star kind, where dinner was the Applebee’s down the street and midnight snacks came out of a vending machine.
This house—this entirelifeGinny now leads—was an unforeseen side effect of getting into Harvard. Ginny had been so focused on doingexactlythe right thing—followingexactlythe right path, gettingexactlythe right grades, doingexactlythe rightafter-school sports, all to guarantee her spot atexactlythe right school—that she never considered how drastically her life would change based solely on the people she met.
She pulls out her phone to type a quick message to her mother, letting her know that they made it safely to the house and that she’s still planning to fly back to New York the following Saturday. If Ginny is surprised by the route her life has taken, her mother is nothing but overjoyed; her daughter gets to explore the world in a way she never could.
Tucking her phone into her pocket and pinching the wineglasses by their stems, Ginny bumps the outdoor fridge shut with her hip and heads from the bar—a granite island flanked by a grill and wood-burning pizza oven—over to the boys. She settles onto the end of Finch’s chair, folding her legs beneath her, and passes him the second glass. He winks.
This vacation came at exactly the right moment. After a year of Ginny working her ass off to impress Kam, her boss finally sat her down fortheconversation. The one she’d been waiting for—promotion.A jump from manager to senior manager. Everything is going exactly according to plan.
Except when it isn’t.
Ginny knows it’s wrong, how close she and Finch have become. Not because men and women cannot be friends; she herself has proven that myth wrong time and time again. No—it’s wrong because he and Hannah are still together. And although she and Finch are friends in name, in truth, they are far more.
There’s something seductive about their friendship. Maybe it’s the way they look at each other—always for a beat too long, always with something lingering just behind the eyes. Or maybe it’s the push and pull, the way Ginny will decide one day that this thing between them needs to end, but by the next, be sitting on the end of his bed, laughing harder than she has all week.
Finch is the first person she calls when something goes wrong, the first person she texts when something goes right. That role used to belong to Clay and Tristan, but she’s drifted further and further from her two closest friends. It’s sad, but that’s what happens, right? That’s adulthood. Friendships shift. Draw closer or slowly unravel. She and Finch—they have something special.
In the apartment, she always sits next to him on the couch. He learned how to play her favorite country songs on the guitar, and they sing them together, her voice practically gravel next to his. They spend so much time together that they might as well be in a relationship. They are, emotionally speaking.
At night, when she touches herself, she pictures Finch, lying awake just ten feet away. She pictures getting out of bed in nothing but her bra and crossing those ten feet. Crawling into bed with him. Pulling off his boxers. Sliding him into her. She cannot picture anyone else. She does not want anyone else. She knows he pictures her, too.
“Ginny,” Clay said one night as they waited for shots at Dream Baby. Ginny had spent the last half hour letting Finch swing her in circles around their table. “He has a girlfriend.”
“I know that.” She accepted two lime wedges from the bartender. “We’re just friends.”
“Are you, though?”
“Of course. Have you seen us kiss?”
“No.” Clay hunched over the bill from the bartender and added a tip. “But I just—I worry about you, you know?”
“Come on. This is Finch we’re talking about. He’s one of your best friends.”
“He is. But so are you. And the way Finch is with girls—”
Ginny held out Clay’s tequila. “You worry too much.”
He doesn’t, of course. He’s spot-on. But she knew that if she tried to explain the energy, the connection that tied her and Finchtogether, he wouldn’t understand.Shebarely understood it herself. All she knew was that when she was around Finch, time didn’t exist. Hours could be minutes.
There were hard moments, too. Finch is moody. As quickly as he can smile, laugh, tell stories at a pace nearly too fast to follow, so, too, can he become sarcastic, jaded. Almost cruel. Ginny hated when that side of Finch came out. She missed her best friend.
“Adrian is almost here,” says Clay, setting his phone back on the stone table beside his lounge chair.
