You Say It First

by Katie Cotugno

  Meg thought about that for a moment. “I’m going to work a few more hours at WeCount,” she said. “Spend time with my mom, I guess. And also, you know . . .” She glanced at Emily, who was standing across the patio talking animatedly to Adrienne about the bedding she wanted to get for her dorm room. “Get ready for Cornell.”

  Colby followed her gaze, his eyes widening. “You still haven’t told her?” he asked quietly. “I thought you said the interview with the Annie Hernandez people went well.”

  “Shh,” Meg hissed. Then, barely above a whisper: “It did. Really well, actually. But that doesn’t mean I’m a hundred percent going to get it. And even if I do . . .” She trailed off. “I don’t know. What about you, huh? What are you up to this summer?”

  Colby made a noncommittal sound, fussing with the napkin around the base of his cone instead of looking directly at her. “I think I’m going to take that job after all,” he said finally. “With Doug.”

  “Seriously?” Meg grinned, hopping down off the railing and flinging her arms around his neck. “Colby! That’s such good news!”

  He shrugged, all broad, embarrassed shoulders. “I mean, we’ll see. Don’t get too excited yet. It might be a disaster.”

  “Oh, whatever, of course I’m excited. I’m proud of you, you know that?” Now it was her turn to be embarrassed, a little; still, it wasn’t like it wasn’t true. “Is that weird to say?”

  Colby rolled his eyes, but he was smiling. “As long as you don’t, like, ruffle my hair.”

  “I’m not going to ruffle your hair, asshole.” Meg punched him lightly in the side. She could tell he was proud of himself, too, the way he ducked his head and jammed his free hand into a pocket of his khakis; more than that, though, she could tell he was proud to be telling her. As soon as Meg had the thought, she was hit with wave of fondness so fierce she almost couldn’t breathe for a second. It felt like when they’d gone to the beach in New Jersey when she was a kid, like getting caught in a riptide.

  Just like that, she was done with her ice cream, tossing her cup into the trash and wiping her hands on her dress. “Um,” she said, clearing her throat a little, “do you want to get out of here?”

  Colby looked at her over his cone, surprised. “Now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where do you want to go?” he asked, and Meg shrugged, lifting her chin to look him in the eye.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Anywhere.”

  All at once, he seemed to take her meaning. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple moving inside his throat. “Um, sure,” he said, finishing his ice cream in two giant bites and sliding his rough hand into hers. “Let’s go.”

  They said good night to Emily and Mason and Javi and Adrienne, then took her car and drove around for a while. She showed him the WeCount office and her favorite bookstore and the park where she’d broken her wrist when she was little, hanging by her knees off the monkey bars. “It took my parents a full day to take me to the doctor,” she confessed, remembering. “I was trying to be brave and act like everything was fine.”

  Colby smirked in the green glow of the dashboard. “That . . . is extremely on brand for you.”

  “Shut up.” Meg reached over to nudge him in the shoulder; he caught her hand and kept it, linking it with his in his lap as she drove past the food co-op and the hipster salad place. “I’m sorry,” she said finally; she was aware of trying to gather her courage, of anticipation hanging in the car between them like a physical thing. “Is this boring? This, like, extended Life and Times of Meg Warren tour I’m taking you on right now?”

  Colby shrugged, leaning back in the passenger seat. “Why would it be boring?” he asked. “I want to know everything about you.”

  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.”

  Don’t call me buddy, Colby barely managed to keep himself from saying. “Yeah, uh. Well. Thanks anyway.”

  “Colby—”

  “Okay. Uh. Bye.” Colby punched the screen to end the call.

  For a moment, he just stood there, staring blindly out into the traffic. So that was the end of that, he guessed. This was why it was stupid to get your hopes up about stuff in the first place: because people were generally full of shit, and they inevitably let you down, and then—

  He glanced down at the phone in his hand, his brain shorting out for a white-hot second as he caught sight of the date on his calendar app:

  May twenty-fifth.

  Holy shit, today was—

  And he hadn’t even—

  And he wasn’t—

  “Hey,” Meg said cheerfully, coming out of the salon behind him with her hair in a fancy updo, tucking her wallet back into her purse. “You ready?” Then her eyes narrowed for a moment. “Everything okay?” she asked. “Who was on the phone?”

  Colby hesitated for a moment. There was no fucking way he could tell her—about Doug or his dad or the anniversary, any of it. He could not believe he had to go to her rich father’s wedding right now. “Sure,” he said finally, jamming his phone into his jeans pocket. “Let’s go.”

  Thirty

  Meg

  “Are you sure everything is okay?” Meg asked for what felt like the twentieth time since this morning, sitting rather miserably at a big, round table in a fancy seafood restaurant while her dad and Lisa swayed to a song by the Cure.

  She could tell it felt like the twentieth time to Colby, too. “Everything is fine,” he said, which was obviously a lie. He’d been in a terrible mood since he’d gone with her to get her hair done this morning, sullen and withdrawn and generally crabby. He’d sulked all the way through lunch at her favorite grilled cheese food truck in Montco, then taken forever to get changed back at her mom’s house. She’d knocked on the door to the guest room five minutes after they were supposed to leave for the ceremony and found him sitting half-dressed on the mattress staring sulkily at a pair of paisley socks. She’d hoped he’d cheer up when they got to the actual wedding, but if anything he’d just gotten grouchier: he hadn’t even danced when the DJ had played “Motown Philly,” even though last night he’d made this big show of telling her what a secretly stellar dancer he was. “Seriously.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure, Meg.” Colby reached across the table for his soda and didn’t quite look her in the eye. “Can you stop picking at me?”

  “I’m not picking at you,” she said, aware that it wasn’t entirely true. But it was like he’d gone somewhere she couldn’t get to him, and she didn’t know him well enough to know how to get him back. Sure, it had felt awkward between them in person before—they’d fought, even—but it had never felt like this. She had no idea what she’d done wrong. It occurred to her that her dad’s wedding was kind of a stupidly high-stakes event to have brought him to, and for the first time she wondered if maybe that hadn’t actually been the best idea.

  Meg frowned and glanced around the restaurant, all white tablecloths and gleaming wood, waiters in white jackets bustling around with crumb scrapers in hand and enormous live lobsters scuttling around in a tank near the maître d’ stand. They’d had the ceremony on the patio at sunset, Lisa’s daughter, Miley, reading a poem by e. e. cummings while a violinist Meg’s mother would have utterly hated played softly in the background. She’d reached out and laced her fingers with Colby’s, feeling wobbly and overwhelmed, but he’d pulled his hand away and scratched the back of his neck instead.

  “Okay,” she said finally, pushing her chair out and standing up. The DJ was playing a Jackson 5 song now, and her uncle Jim was waving her over from his post near the buffet. “Well, I’m going to go dance, then.”

  “Okay,” Colby said with no affect at all. “Go ahead.”

  Meg sat down again. “Can you stop?” she asked, faintly aware of how shrill she sounded. Emily and Mason sat across the wide circular table, just far enough away that they could pretend not to notice. She lowered her voice anyway. “Why are you talking to me like I’m other people? It’s just me.”

  Colby sighed, scrubbing a hand through his messy hair. “Look,” he said, “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be an asshole. I just don’t know why you need to talk everything to death, is all.”

  “Really?” Meg’s eyes widened. “I thought that was, like, kind of the entire point of our relationship, actually.”

  Colby frowned. “Yeah, I’m a dumping ground for your every thought and feeling, I know.”

  “I—wow.” Meg blinked back sudden tears. All at once, everything about him being here seemed insane. “You’re being kind of an embarrassing dick right now, do you know that?”

  That was the wrong thing to say; Colby seemed to fold in on himself, like a video of a collapsing star. “I’m embarrassing you, huh?” he said, and his voice was so quiet. “Well. That was only a matter of time, I guess.”

  Meg’s eyes narrowed. “What does that mean?”

  “You know what it means.”

  “I don’t, actually.”

  “It means I don’t know what you were trying to prove bringing me here, Meg. And obviously you don’t, either, so—”

  “I invited you here because I wanted to spend time with you,” Meg snapped, “although, honestly, right now I have no idea why.”

  “Yeah,” Colby said, his features twisting meanly. “I’d say that sounds about right.”

  “Look,” Me
g said, her voice low and urgent, shooting a glance at her friends across the table. Emily and Mason’s voices had risen slowly; she suspected they were purposely drowning her and Colby out. “Can we go and talk about this outside, please?”

  “Fine,” Colby said, shoving his chair back and stalking toward the exit.

  “We’ll be right back,” Meg announced to Emily and Mason, who’d finally abandoned all pretense of their own conversation and were openly gawking across the table. She bit back her grimace, forcing a cheery, reassuring grin. Holy crap, she could not believe she was plastering on a smile about Colby of all people, the one person in her whole life who never made her feel like she had to be fake.

  She followed him out into the parking lot, teetering a bit on her stupid heels. It was cooler than last night, the brackish breeze wafting in off the river. Her hair was coming loose from its bun. “I don’t know why you’re being like this,” she said.

  Colby leaned against the railing of a wheelchair ramp, like it was taking all his energy just to hold himself upright, and shook his head. “Forget it.”

  “No,” Meg insisted, “tell me. I thought everything was going great until this morning. Like, are you sorry we had—” She broke off. “I mean, is that what it is?”

  “No!” Just for a second, Colby looked horrified. “Jesus Christ, Meg, of course not.”

  “Then what?” she asked, relieved in spite of herself; still, it came out a lot more like begging than she meant for it to. “I don’t get it. We were supposed to have this totally fun weekend, my friends really liked you last night, you’ve got this great new job—”

  “I don’t, actually.”

  That stopped her. “What?” she asked, not understanding. “Why not?”

  Colby shook his head again, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Because I fucked it up, okay? Does it matter how?”