Gabe nods, tilting his head back and looking at the ceiling. “That part wasn’t right, either,” he tells me. “She was great, but it wasn’t—I mean, I didn’t—” He stops, looks back at me. “I kept looking at the dumb picture I took of us,” he says quietly, seemingly out of nowhere. “The one from Paris.”
I wrinkle my nose at him, teasing even as my pulse races. “The one where I’m making the world’s dumbest face?”
“It is a pretty ridiculous face,” Gabe admits, grinning a little. “But we also just look really . . . happy in it? I felt happy that day, for the first time in a really long time. I felt like myself. And it wasn’t ’cause things were fixed, necessarily, or because I had solved all my problems. The more I looked at the picture the more I realized that it was ’cause of you.” He takes a deep breath and then he says it. “I love you.”
I shake my head. My first reaction is bald denial, that no you don’t ready on the tip of my tongue. I don’t deserve it, I want to tell him. Instead I take a pause and remind myself that I do.
“I kind of don’t think I ever stopped,” Gabe continues, shrugging helplessly. “I thought if maybe I could cut off the oxygen to that part of myself it would be fine, you know? Like if I acted a certain way for long enough, then eventually it wouldn’t be acting anymore.”
That makes me smile. “I am sorry to inform you, turns out it doesn’t work that way. At least, it didn’t when I tried it.” I sit down across the table, the side of my foot brushing his for the briefest of seconds. “Speaking of breakups,” I begin.
Gabe raises his eyebrows. “You and Ian . . . ?” he asks.
“There is no more me and Ian,” I admit.
That surprises him; I can see the relief—and the hope—on his face in the second before he schools his expression. “I’m sorry,” he says quietly.
“I’m not,” I counter. “Or, like, I am, but not because it wasn’t the right decision. The truth is we probably shouldn’t have been together from the beginning. Not when—” I gaze across the table for a moment. “You were right,” I tell him, instead of continuing. “I was trying to be some perfect, brand-new version of myself who always had a plan and never screwed up or made a scene or embarrassed herself or offended anybody. But as much as I hate to admit it—and I really, really hate to admit it—it never felt totally normal. And being on that trip made me realize I just couldn’t do it anymore.”
“I don’t need you to be perfect,” Gabe promises. “I just want you to be you.”
“But how do we know we won’t just make a mess of things all over again?” I ask him. “How would it even work?” Ellie looks up at the sound of my voice, trotting over to sniff my ankles curiously. I bend down to stroke her soft, silky head. “Your whole family hates me,” I remind him, grimacing at the thought as I straighten up again. “A hundred times more than they did at the beginning of last summer, probably. If we were just going to spend the rest of our lives ambling around Europe far away from everyone here, maybe, but—” I hold my hands up, baffled. “We just have so much baggage, Gabe.”
“No shit,” he agrees easily, and I like the fact that he doesn’t try to argue. “That’s kind of the whole point. Like . . . it turns out the only person I want to carry bags with is you.”
That makes me laugh, a quiet exhale. “Because I’m such a train wreck?” I ask.
Gabe shakes his head. “Because you’re yourself.”
“A train wreck,” I clarify.
“Stop saying that,” he tells me. “Like, are you messy? Is our whole relationship so fucking messy? Yes, clearly. But so what? It’s kind of liberating, isn’t it?”
I think of jumping out of airplanes and splashing around in fountains and crying on top of the Eiffel Tower; I laugh again then, for real this time, resting my chin in my hands. “The idea that we’re so messed up together that messed-up stuff happening is just par for the course?”
“That we can get through messed-up stuff,” Gabe counters. “That at this point there’s nothing we could tell each other that would automatically be a deal breaker.” He shrugs. “I can be myself with you, even when I’m being a whiny, entitled asshole. And I think—I think—you can be yourself with me.” He looks at me urgently. “Can’t you?”
I think of spending eight months sure that if Ian knew the truth about me he’d run screaming for the Berkshires. I think of spending a whole year wanting to disappear. I open my mouth to tell Gabe that he’s right, that we understand each other: “What if you came to Boston?” is what comes out.
Gabe’s eyes widen. “Really?”
“Um. Yeah.” I blurted it before I could even have the thought all the way, instinct and impulse, but as soon as it’s out of my mouth I realize I want it desperately: I want to bring him to the place where I live now, to go to movies at the dilapidated old indie theater in Somerville and walk him by the tiny half doors in the brownstones on Beacon Hill and point to the place where the stolen paintings used to hang at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. To make him a part of my life. “You could figure stuff out from there.”
I fully expect him to say no. It’s a random, ridiculous proposition: it doesn’t solve the problem of what’s going to happen to the pizza place, it doesn’t solve the problem of what on earth he’s going to do next. It doesn’t solve anything but the problem of us not being together, and I’m opening my mouth to let him off the hook when he smiles. “I could do that,” he says.
My mouth drops open. “Really?”
Gabe shrugs. “Why not?” he asks. “That’s where you’ll be, right?”
“I—yeah,” I say slowly, letting myself imagine it—hockey games at the arena on Friday nights and coffee in the North End on Saturday mornings, fall settling down over the city like a blanket. “That’s where I’ll be.”
Gabe gets up and comes over to my side of the table then, the smell of grass and detergent and the lake at the very end of summer. Both of us have spent the last year trying to prove we were worthy of someone loving us—reinventing and remaking ourselves, tearing out the stitches and starting all over again to try and fit the patterns we thought other people wanted to see. But maybe that isn’t what we need to do at all.
“Can I kiss you now?” he asks me, hands finding mine down at my sides and squeezing, a feeling like holding on for dear life. “Is that finally okay?”
“Yes,” I tell him, standing up, the anticipation inflating like a hot air balloon inside my chest, like something big enough to cover long distances. “It’s definitely, finally okay.”
“Okay,” he says.
“Okay!” I say, and then both of us are laughing, how it feels awkward but it also just feels right. He wraps one hand around the back of my neck and tilts my chin up, ducks his head. “I love you too,” I tell him, or start to, but the words get cut off because he’s already kissing me, his mouth warm and soft and familiar. I wrap my arms around his neck and we stand there for a moment, together in this place where we started.
I can’t wait to see where we go next.
Acknowledgments
This one was tricky but so worth the fight. A hundred humble thank-yous to my sharp-eyed, bighearted editor, Alessandra Balzer, and all the clear heads and generous souls at Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins—especially Kelsey Murphy, Bethany Reis, Jen Strada, Megan Gendell, Michelle Cunningham, Alison Donalty, Kristen Eckhardt, Vanessa Nuttry, Stephanie Boyar, Nellie Kurtzman, Bess Braswell, Ebony LaDelle, Sabrina Abballe, Andrea Pappenheimer, Kathy Faber, Kerry Moynagh, Jessica Malone, Jessie Elliot, Heather Doss, Jennifer Sheridan, Fran Olson, Deb Murphy, Susan Yeager, Jess Abel, and Caitlin Garing.
All my love and gratitude to Josh Bank, Joelle Hobeika, and Sara Shandler, who believe in me and make me laugh and listen with open hearts and minds to my half-finished sentences and middle-of-the-night worries and weird, complicated ideas. Les Morgenstein and everybody at Alloy, especially Stephanie Abrams, Laura Barbiea, Matt Bloomgarten, and Romy Golan, thank you for being so good at your job
s.
Lisa Burton, Jennie Palluzzi, Sierra Rooney, and Marissa Velie, forever friends and fiercest role models; Rachel Hutchinson, for always sticking; the Colleran and Cotugno families, especially my sister, for too many things to say. Tom Colleran, for being my buddy. I love you all the days that end in Y.
About the Author
Photo credit JENNIE PALLUZZI
KATIE COTUGNO is the New York Times bestselling author of 99 Days, Top Ten, Fireworks, and How to Love. Katie is a Pushcart Prize nominee whose work has appeared in Mississippi Review, Apalachee Review, Iowa Review, and Argestes, among others. She lives in Boston with her husband, Tom. You can visit her online at www.katiecotugno.com.
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Books by Katie Cotugno
How to Love
Fireworks
Top Ten
99 Days
9 Days and 9 Nights
Copyright
Balzer + Bray is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
9 DAYS AND 9 NIGHTS. Copyright © 2018 by Alloy Entertainment and Katie Cotugno. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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COVER PHOTOGRAPHS BY MEREDITH JENKS
COVER DESIGN BY MALLORY GRIGG
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017954055
Digital Edition MAY 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-267411-1
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-267409-8 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-06-284243-5 (international edition)
Endpaper photography used under license from iStock, Brzozowska (Paris croissants), Arthur Zogheib Pinatto (Temple Bar—Dublin), Nikada (stairway—Paris), Andreka (corner cafe), Missing35mm (medieval Irish bridge), littleny (London phone booth), Nikada (Westminster Bridge), Engamon (Irish sheep), andhal (bike), lechatnoir (colorful French pastry), Rixipix (Citroën H type), IakovKalinin (Eiffel Tower).
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FIRST EDITION
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