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Meg laughed again, a sound like a door slamming. “Because I’m spectacular, obviously.”

She was kidding, but Colby didn’t smile. “You kind of are,” he said.

Something about the way he was looking at her felt like trying to hold her hand against a hot stove. “Your friends didn’t think so,” she pointed out.

Colby blew a breath out, flopping back onto the mattress. “Yeah, well,” he said, “Micah is an idiot.”

“I know,” Meg said immediately. “Which is why it’s so fucked up that you wouldn’t just—”

Colby struggled upright. “I don’t want to have that argument with you again,” he said flatly. “Don’t you ever get tired of taking everything so personally?”

“Don’t you ever get tired of being too cool to care?”

“I’m not too cool for anything,” Colby countered, making a face like the word was somehow offensive.

“Too scared, then,” Meg said immediately. “They can’t pull the rug out from under you if you decide there’s no rug to begin with, right?”

Colby startled at that, eyes widening almost imperceptibly. Then he set his jaw. They were silent for a minute, just the hum of the AC underneath the window and somebody else’s TV down the hall.

“Can I ask you something?” Meg continued finally, perching on the greasy-looking desk and gazing at him across the hotel room. “If I hadn’t texted the day after you first called me, you would never have texted me, either, right?”

Colby didn’t have to think about it. “No,” he admitted. “Probably not.”

“Yeah.” Meg crossed her arms, feeling meanly satisfied. “That’s what I thought.”

“Well, congratulations,” he said, shrugging a little. “You were right about me, I guess.”

Meg looked at him for another long moment. “Do you think we’re too different?” she finally asked.

Colby raised his eyebrows, lifted his chin. “Too different for what?” he asked.

Meg shrugged. “Anything, I guess.”

“Too different for me to kiss you?”

It was so out of left field she didn’t know how to answer; she could tell he’d surprised himself, too, by the expression on his face. Still, he didn’t look away from her, his gaze like a weighted blanket. Right away, she wanted it like she’d never wanted anything in her entire life. She’d wanted it for a long time, if she was being honest with herself: since that very first night on the phone, maybe, the low, private sound of his laugh in her ear.

“Well,” she said, pushing off the desk and taking a step closer, wiping her suddenly sweaty hands on the seat of her jeans. “Only one way to find out, I guess.”

Colby smiled.

It was awkward at first: standing up, he was a lot taller than her, so the angle was funny, and then he came in kind of a lot with his tongue, but she put her hands on his shoulders and pushed him gently back to sitting, and after a moment it got better, their mouths getting used to each other and his palms warm and damp on her waist.

They kissed for a long time, Colby’s fingertips creeping up underneath her T-shirt. Meg crawled into his lap on the bed. “Is that okay?” he asked, and she unzipped his hoodie to answer, sliding her palms along his back and stomach and rib cage. The skin on his chest was very warm.

Eventually he nudged her onto her back on the mattress, the weight of his body half-suffocating and half-thrilling and his thigh warm and heavy between hers. Meg could feel her heart scrabbling around inside her chest. Being the kind of person who’d drive to Ohio without telling anyone was one thing, but being the kind of person who’d have sex in a hotel room with someone she’d technically just met felt like something else altogether. As Colby rubbed his thumb over the seam of her jeans, she wondered if it would actually be so bad to be that kind of person, but in the end she pushed him gently away.

“Okay,” she said, gasping a little. She wanted to so bad, was the truth. “We can’t—”

“No, I know,” he said, sitting up right away and shaking his head like he was trying to clear it, breathing through his nose like a bull. “I know, that’s—”

“Have you ever?” she asked, before she could lose her courage. It seemed weird that out of all the things they’d talked about, they’d never talked about this. “I mean...”

She watched him think about lying to her, but in the end he shook his head. “No, actually. Have you?”

Meg nodded. “With Mason.”

She wasn’t sure 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?”