Free 99 Days by Katie Cotugno Page A

you noticed I have no friends?”
    “You have Gabe,” Tess points out. Then, like she realizes that’s possibly not the best example to be using: “And you’re Penn’s favorite, clearly. I just, I don’t know, you’ve known those guys forever, you’ve known Imogen forever—”
    “It’s not like that.” I shake my head. “Whatever it used to be—it’s definitely not like that anymore.”
    “Well, whatever.” Tess smiles, then takes the last bite of her peach and tosses the pit into a nearby trash can. “So we’re okay? I just didn’t want to spend the whole freaking summer doing that
Mean Girls
stuff, that’s not really how I roll. We’re okay?”
    “We’re
fine
,” I tell her, and my smile then is genuine. Even if Patrick’s going to hate me forever, it occurs to me to be glad he’s got someone like Tess. “Yeah, we’re good.”

Day 19
    They’re doing a Summer of Spielberg thing at the hundred-year-old theater over in Silverton, and Gabe’s grin is bright and crooked in the light from the vintage marquee. “Oh, hey, I brought you something,” he says as we’re crossing the parking lot, digging into the cargo pocket of his shorts and coming up with one of those plastic glasses sets with the nose attached, complete with a fuzzy synthetic mustache. “To avoid detection.”
    I laugh out loud as we head into the lobby, grabbing them out of his hands. The very tips of his fingers brush mine. “Oh, you’re funny,” I tell him. “Nobody will notice me now.”
    “Nope.” Gabe smirks, reaching for his wallet as we step up to the ticket counter. “I got it,” he says easily, waving me off when I try to pay.
    “You sure?” I ask, tucking my disguise into the collar of my shirt. Until now we’ve always split dead even when we did anything together, lunch at Bunchie’s or the first night we went to Frank’s for hot dogs. I’m not totally sure what it means that he’s changing the rules.
It’s not a date
, I told myself as I got ready tonight, even as I wiped vanilla behind my ears and flicked on mascara.
    In any case, Gabe lets me pay for the popcorn, and we settle into the tattered red seats, bits of crimson thread dangling from the edges. The chilly air is heavy with the smell of old butter and salt. The theater’s old, and the rows are crammed close together: Gabe’s knees bump the back of the seat in front of him hard enough that the girl sitting there whips around and shoots him a dirty look in the half second before she realizes how cute he is, and smiles instead.
    Gabe shakes his head sheepishly. “Look at me, I’m like Andre the fucking Giant,” he murmurs to me, snorting a little. “Do you know I actually got asked to go stand in the back of a bar in Indiana last winter? It was a
Game of Thrones
watching party; I was blocking everybody’s view of the dragons.”
    That makes me laugh. “Life’s hard,” I tell him, and he mock-scowls and makes a big show of not knowing what to do with his elbows. It’s surprisingly goofy, not a side I’ve ever really seen out of him before—growing up, I always thought of him as Joe Cool, not somebody who ever felt self-conscious or unsure about anything.
    “Is this a date?” I blurt as the lights dim, squinting a little to track his curious, open expression in the fading light. He looks surprised. “I mean, like, right now? You and me?”
    Gabe looks surprised. “I don’t know, Molly Barlow,” he says, shaking his head like he’s setting me up for a riddle. “Do you want it to be?”
    Do I want it to be?
    “I . . .”
don’t know, either
, I almost tell him, but just then the lights darken completely, the familiar old score starting up. Gabe reaches for my hand in the dark. Instead of holding it like I’m expecting, he turns it over, though, rubbing the tip of his index finger in patterns over the inside of my wrist, stroking over my pulse point until it feels like every nerve ending in my body is concentrated in that one