garrett graham ❄︎ slow laps.
pairing – garrett graham x figure skater!reader summary – rehab is ugly, slow, and humiliating. garrett graham, annoyingly, makes it feel a little less lonely. warnings – sports injury, rehab/physio, knee injury, recovery anxiety, fear of reinjury, crying, emotional vulnerability, strong language notes from me – thank u for the request, anon!! such a cute idea 🥹 tried to write this !reader as a lil more anxious & shy than my others, it was fun!! <3 word count – 5.5k
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By the second week of physiotherapy, she’s started recognising the rehab room by smell before she even gets through the door.
It’s always the same: rubber mats, disinfectant, stale coffee from the travel mug Cam leaves on the little desk by the wall, the faint clean plastic smell of resistance bands and ice packs and the weird foam balance pads that look harmless until you’re standing on one leg on top of them, sweating through a university-issued t-shirt, trying not to make eye contact with your own reflection in the mirror.
The room isn’t big enough for how humiliating it is. That’s what she decides somewhere around the seventh time Cam tells her to keep her knee tracking over her toes and not let her hip drop, as if any part of her body has retained a functional management structure since the injury.
It’s not big enough for the amount of trying happening in it. Not big enough for lacrosse girls doing hamstring bridges, a baseball player walking around with one of those compression sleeves on his elbow, a freshman swimmer crying silently through shoulder mobility in the corner while pretending she is absolutely not crying.
It’s not big enough for all the little griefs athletes drag in with their water bottles and their taped joints and their faces set carefully into the shape of being fine.
She used to think of her body as something she could ask things of.
Not nicely, always. Figure skating had never been gentle, no matter what people thought from the stands when the dresses were pretty and the music swelled and everybody politely forgot that most of the sport was just girls repeatedly hurling themselves at the ice until one day the hurling started looking graceful.
Her body had always hurt somewhere. Ankles, arches, hip flexors, the backs of her knees, the little bruises on her thighs from falls she’d stopped counting years ago.
Pain had been background noise. A language, almost. Something she could interpret and bargain with and, on good days, ignore.
This is different. This is her body becoming a locked door.
“Again,” Cam says.
She looks at him through the mirror. He has the clipboard tucked against his chest and the calm, mildly sympathetic face of a man who has chosen professionally to ruin people’s afternoons through controlled movement. “Cam.”
“One more set.”
“You said that last set.”
“I lied.”
She lets out a breath that’s too close to a laugh to count as actual protest and steps back onto the little foam pad. It dips under her weight. Her ankle wobbles. Her knee, traitor, considers doing something stupid. She fixes it fast, jaw tightening before her face can give too much away.
Cam notices anyway, because Cam is awful.
“Good,” he says. “That’s better.”
“It feels bad.”
“It’s supposed to feel hard.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“I know.”
She hates that tone. Cam is one of those deeply inconvenient medical professionals who knows exactly when not to give you the easy reassurance, which means she can’t even be properly irritated with him without feeling immature about it.
He doesn’t say you’ll be back before you know it. He doesn’t say you’re young, you’ll heal fast, as if youth is a warranty and not just another thing that can get snapped in half during a bad landing.
He just says again, and better, and not yet, and lets the rest of the room sit there around it.
She finishes the set with her hands hovering slightly away from her sides like she might be able to balance through prayer, then steps off the pad and pretends the relief doesn’t go all the way through her.
Cam scribbles something down. “That’s enough for today.”
Her breath leaves her in one piece. “Thank God.”
“Don’t sound so grateful.”
“I’m trying to make you feel valued.”
“That was your version?”
“It was implied.”
He smiles faintly and reaches for the roll of athletic tape on the table. “Ice tonight if it gets cranky. Don’t push the stairs. And don’t go on the ice.”
She looks down at her bag too quickly. Cam pauses. The silence is horrible.
She lifts her eyes back to him with as much blank innocence as she can assemble while sweaty and standing in one shoe. “What?”
He gives her a look.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Good.”
“I know I’m not cleared.”
“Great.”
“I’m not an idiot.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“You were thinking it in your Cam voice.”
“My Cam voice?”
“The one where you sound nice while accusing me of crimes.”
That gets a small laugh out of him, which she counts as a win even though he immediately ruins it by pointing at her with his pen. “No ice.”
The words land flatter than the joke leaves room for. She nods, because nodding is easier than speaking when the answer has gone somewhere tight under her ribs.
No ice. Two tiny words. Perfectly reasonable. Clinically correct. Devastating in the way small, practical sentences often are when they’re the ones standing between you and the only place your body has ever made proper sense.
She sits on the bench to change back into her other sneaker, unwrapping the brace strap with careful fingers. There’s a damp patch at the collar of her shirt and another under the elastic of the brace, and she can feel the dull, complaining warmth in her knee beginning to spread now that the session is over and adrenaline has stopped being useful.
The door opens while she’s shoving her water bottle into the side pocket of her bag, and Garrett Graham steps in.
He comes in the same way he always seems to come into rooms, even injured. He just has that stupidly natural presence that takes up space before he’s done anything to earn it, all broad shoulders and damp dark curls and Briar Hockey hoodie with one sleeve pushed higher than the other.
His gym bag is slung over one shoulder, his phone in his hand, and there’s a strip of white tape disappearing under the edge of his shorts near his thigh, which she tries very hard not to look at for too long.
She knows him, technically, Briar ice athletes overlap. They know the same rink schedule, the same sharp smell of resurfaced ice, the same ugly fluorescent tunnel between the locker rooms.
She knows Garrett Graham because everyone knows Garrett Graham, but she also knows him in the more specific way of someone who has seen him skate when he thinks only hockey matters. Fast, controlled, mean in the cleanest possible way. Good hands. Good edges, for a hockey player, which she had once made the mistake of saying near one of the other figure skaters and had been accused of sounding weirdly horny about crossovers.
She wasn’t. Mostly.
He knows of her too. She knows this because he’d said her name once in the rink hallway last semester when she’d nearly collided with him coming around the corner with her skate bag, and because he’d watched the last ten minutes of one of her practices from the boards with Logan and Tucker a few months ago, both of them still in half their gear, while she ran the footwork section of her short program three times in a row until her lungs burned and her coach finally stopped looking like she might start throwing things.
Garrett had leaned his forearms on the boards and said something she couldn’t hear. Logan had laughed. Tucker had looked politely impressed in the way nice men look when women do difficult things they understand enough not to interrupt.
So, first-name basis. Vague orbit. Mutual ice awareness.
Not whatever this is, which is Garrett walking in right as she’s sweaty and sore and trying to get her sneaker on without making the tiny injured-person grunt she has grown to hate in herself.
Cam looks over his shoulder. “One second, Garrett. I won’t be long, man.”
Garrett nods, easy. “All good.”
His eyes move from Cam to her, and she braces, because she’s been doing a lot of that lately, bracing. For pity. For questions. For the little sympathetic wince people do when they’ve heard about the injury but don’t know what to say after sorry, that sucks, so they fill the air with optimism until she wants to bite through her own tongue.
Garrett doesn’t wince. He gives her one of those small, quick smiles instead.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hi.”
He shifts his bag higher on his shoulder, glancing once at the brace and then back at her face so quickly she almost appreciates the politeness of it. “I heard you got hurt. That’s… yeah. Fucking sucks.”
It shouldn’t help, except it does. The bluntness. The lack of inspirational packaging. The fact that he says it like someone who knows exactly how unhelpful it is when people try to make being benched sound like a spiritual growth opportunity.
She nods and looks down for half a second at the zipper on her bag, pulling it closed even though it’s already closed. “Yeah. It’s pretty shit.”
His mouth moves, not quite a smile. “Yeah.”
“I heard about yours too,” she adds, because it’s only fair and also because looking at him directly for too long feels slightly like standing too close to a heater. “I’m sorry.”
He makes a small shrugging motion. It’s casual, but not quite enough to hide the little tightness that passes across his face when the movement pulls at something. “Could be worse.”
She looks at him. Garrett looks back.
Then he huffs a quiet laugh. “Sorry. That’s such an asshole thing to say to someone injured.”
Her mouth lifts before she can stop it. “It’s okay. Everyone says it.”
“I know. I keep wanting to fight them.”
“Have you?”
“Not yet. Cam said it would slow my recovery.”
“He’s very anti-violence for someone who hurts people for a living.”
Cam, from the cabinet, says, “I can hear both of you.”
Garrett’s grin appears then, quicker, brighter, and for one strange second it makes the rehab room feel less ugly.
Cam comes over with his clipboard tucked under one arm and gives Garrett the tired look of a man who has known hockey players long enough to consider them a hazard. “Ready?”
Garrett nods, but his eyes flick back to her. “See you.”
It’s a small, stupid, future-tense thing. See you. Like it’s already assumed there will be another time. Like she’s not just passing through the doorway of his appointment with her bag on her shoulder and her knee taped into submission, but someone who exists in the shape of his week now.
She nods. “Yeah. Bye.”
Then she leaves before her face can do anything unhelpful.
After that, they keep seeing each other. That’s the whole problem with schedules. They make coincidences stop being coincidences and start becoming routines before anyone has to be brave enough to choose them.
Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Her appointment first. Garrett after. The first few times, it’s only hey and how’s it going and Cam making deeply unimpressed noises when Garrett leans in the doorway instead of waiting properly outside like a normal person.
By the following Wednesday, Garrett’s sitting on the bench in the hallway when she comes out, elbows on his knees, hoodie sleeves shoved up, one hand wrapped around an iced coffee that looks mostly melted.
He glances up as the door opens, like he’s been reading something on his phone and not listening for it, which is a performance she respects enough not to challenge.
“You survive?” he asks.
She shifts her bag higher on her shoulder. “Barely.”
“Bad?”
“Cam made me do step-downs.”
Garrett’s face changes with immediate, serious recognition. “Oh, Jesus.”
“Right?”
“No, those are evil.”
“They look so stupid. That’s what makes it worse. Like, I’m standing there trying not to die on a four-inch box.”
“Yeah, and Cam’s like, great, now control the descent.”
She laughs, and then looks down because the laugh comes out too easy. Too relieved. “He says it like that too.”
“Of course he does. He has a script.”
From inside the rehab room, Cam calls, “I still hear you.”
Garrett raises his coffee vaguely toward the door. “We’re bonding through shared suffering. It’s part of the process.”
“It’s not billable,” Cam says.
Garrett looks back at her, and there’s that little curl at the corner of his mouth again, but softer than she expects. “You got class after this?”
She blinks. “Yeah.”
“Where?”
“Psych. Levin.”
He pauses. “Wait, the eleven-thirty?”
“You’re in that class?”
His expression shifts into something almost sheepish, which is such a strange look on him that she forgets for a second to be awkward about her own surprise.
“I sit in the back,” he says. “Very engaged. Quietly academic.”
“I have literally never seen you.”
“That feels like a you problem.”
“It feels like an attendance problem.”
Garrett presses a hand to his chest like this has wounded him. “I’m injured and you’re attacking me.”
She laughs. “You started it.”
“I asked about class.”
“Menace behaviour.”
He laughs at that, quick and low, head ducking for half a second. Then he stands because Cam calls him in, and he’s suddenly very close in the narrow hallway, close enough that she has to tilt her face a little to keep looking at him.
His smile stays, but the volume of it drops. “See you in Levin, then?”
She should say maybe. Or sure. Or something easy and noncommittal that keeps the moment from feeling too visible.
Instead she says, “If you show up.”
His eyebrows lift. “That a challenge?”
“No.”
“Sounded like one.”
She doesn’t know what to do with that, so she adjusts her bag again, which has become a humiliating little habit around him.
Her hands always need a task before her face gives her away. “Go do your step-downs, Graham.”
He smiles properly then, pleased. “Yes, ma’am.”
She walks away before Cam can witness the way her mouth betrays her.
Garrett does show up to class that day. He comes in two minutes late, because punctuality would have damaged the brand, and slides into the seat beside her with his laptop under one arm and a coffee in his hand.
There’s a row of empty seats behind them. Several, actually. He ignores all of them.
She looks over as he sits. “Subtle.”
“What?”
“You could have sat literally anywhere.”
He opens his laptop. “This seat has a good view.”
“Of the lecture?”
He glances at the front of the room, where Dr. Levin is fighting with the projector and slowly losing. “Sure.”
She looks down at her notebook because smiling at her paper is less incriminating than smiling at him.
Garrett doesn’t push it. That surprises her a little, though by then maybe it shouldn’t. He jokes, yes. He has the kind of natural charm that makes silence around him feel almost rude.
But he’s not constantly filling space just to hear himself in it. He seems to know when to let a moment breathe, which is worse, somehow. Much worse. Because it means the attention is not accidental.
He takes notes badly. Not because he’s stupid, she learns that very quickly. Garrett isn’t stupid in the way some people like to assume athletes are stupid when they would rather not admit physical talent can exist alongside a working brain.
He just takes notes like a man who believes future him will remember the context through sheer confidence. Half sentences. Arrows to nowhere. One bullet point that just says dopamine??? and then, underneath it, ask her.
She catches it while he’s typing and looks at him.
He doesn’t look back, but his mouth moves. “Don’t judge my system.”
“That’s a system?”
“It works.”
“It says ask her.”
“Yeah.” Now he glances over, and his eyes are warm enough that her stomach does something small and deeply unhelpful. “See? Efficient.”
She lets out a breath through her nose and turns back to her own notes. “You’re ridiculous.”
After that, the talking becomes easier because it has somewhere to go. Rehab into class. Class into walking halfway across campus. Walking into texts, eventually, though the number exchange happens in the most Garrett way possible, which is to say he makes it sound practical even while looking far too pleased with himself.
They’re leaving psych one afternoon, the sky low and grey over campus, both of them moving slower than the stream of students around them because neither of them can walk at full speed without paying for it later.
Garrett has his hood up against the cold and his bag slung over one shoulder. She has one hand wrapped around the strap of her own, the other holding her phone, thumb hovering over a message from her coach she hasn’t opened because she can see the first line in the preview and already knows it will make her feel like peeling her skin off.
Garrett notices.
“Coach?” he asks.
She looks over. “What?”
He nods toward the phone. “I know the face.”
She looks down at the screen again. The preview says, no pressure, just wanted to check in about competition timeline, which is exactly the kind of text people send when there is pressure and everyone knows it but nobody wants to be rude enough to name the animal in the room. Her thumb locks the phone before she can read the rest.
Garrett doesn’t say anything for a few steps. He doesn’t immediately try to fix it. Doesn’t ask if she’s okay in a tone that makes okay feel like a performance.
He just walks beside her, slower than campus wants him to, shoulder occasionally close enough to brush hers when the path narrows.
Finally, he says, “I hate those texts.”
She glances at him.
“The check-in ones,” he says. “Like they’re being nice, and they are, but it’s also like… hey, just wondering if your body has stopped ruining the plan yet.”
Her throat tightens so quickly she has to look away.
Garrett’s voice stays even, low enough that the people passing them don’t get any of it. “The hockey staff keep doing it too. Not in a shitty way. They’re trying to be normal. But every time someone asks how recovery’s going, I’m like, I don’t know, man. I miss my life and my hip feels fucked up. You want the official answer or the weird one?”
She laughs, but it comes out thin. Still, it comes. “My knee feels fucked up.”
They walk a little farther. The cold air catches under the hem of her sweatshirt and sneaks up her back. Somewhere across the quad, a group of boys are laughing too loudly near the library steps. A bike bell rings. The world continues in its very rude way, all motion and noise and healthy knees.
Garrett clears his throat. “You can send me those, if you want.”
She looks up at him.
“The annoying texts,” he says, and now he does seem a little more careful, eyes flicking to hers and away again. “Or just, like… complain. If you don’t want to answer normal people nicely.”
Something in her chest shifts. “Normal people?”
“You know.” His mouth tips. “Healthy civilians.”
“That’s dark.”
“It’s accurate.”
She looks at her phone. Then at him. “Are you giving me your number so I can forward you texts from my coach?”
He shrugs, but his ears go just slightly pink from the cold or the question. “I mean, when you put it like that, it sounds weird.”
“It is weird.”
“You want it or not?”
She does. Immediately. Stupidly. Enough that she has to make herself take a second before answering. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yeah.” She opens a new contact and hands him the phone before she can overthink the fact that her fingers feel too warm. “For fucked up knee purposes.”
Garrett takes it, smiling down at the screen while he types. “Obviously.”
He saves himself as Garrett, then, after one tiny pause she absolutely notices, adds a hockey stick emoji. When he hands it back, she looks at it and raises her brows.
“Subtle.”
Her first text to him, sent that night after staring at her coach’s full message for eleven minutes and then lying face-down on her bed in a silence so complete her roommate had paused in the doorway and then wisely kept walking, is just a screenshot.
Garrett replies three minutes later.
Garrett: jesus. “no pressure” should be illegal.
She types, right????
Garrett: they put it at the front like a tiny little lawyer.
She laughs into her pillow hard enough that the pressure behind her eyes changes shape.
After that, it’s embarrassingly easy.
She’s slower to warm, more cautious, more likely to tuck herself back inside her own head the second a feeling starts getting too large to hold naturally.
Garrett seems to understand that without making her explain it. He doesn’t crowd. He doesn’t demand a constant version of her that knows how to be charming back on command.
He sends her a picture of Logan asleep sitting up on the couch with an ice pack balanced on his shoulder.
Garrett: warrior down.
She sends back, is he alive?
Garrett: unclear. tucker says we should wait and see.
Sometimes they talk a lot. Sometimes it’s only a stupid photo, a class complaint, a how’s the knee? sent at nine p.m. that makes her chest go warm because he remembers which days hurt more.
Sometimes she doesn’t answer for hours because the whole day has been too much and she’s gone quiet in that way that makes even typing feel strangely exposed.
Garrett never punishes the delay by getting weird about it. He just picks the conversation back up wherever she left it, like the space is allowed.
He’s not always gentle. She wouldn’t like him as much if he were. Garrett’s gentleness works because it’s threaded through the rest of him, through the easy confidence and the dry little comments and the occasional captain voice that slips out when Cam tells him to stop overdoing it and he says, “I’m not,” with the exact expression of someone absolutely overdoing it.
He still chirps Logan across the room. Still gives Dean shit when Dean swings by the rehab hall one afternoon and announces, loudly, “Damn, this is where they keep all the broken hot people,” before Tucker drags him back by the hood and says, “Don’t flirt with the injured. It’s unethical.”
Garrett, sitting beside her on the hallway bench with an ice pack on his thigh, doesn’t even look embarrassed. He only rubs a hand over his mouth and mutters, “I’m so sorry.”
She presses her lips together to keep from laughing. “Are they always like that?”
“No,” Garrett says. Then, after half a second, “Yes.”
Dean, from down the hall, calls, “She seems nice, G!”
Garrett closes his eyes briefly.
Tucker says, “Keep walking.”
Logan’s voice drifts back too, amused and bright. “Garrett made a friend!”
Garrett opens his eyes and looks at her with an expression so tired and resigned that she actually does laugh then, full and surprised and too loud for the hallway. His face changes when she does. Only for a second. It softens, almost helplessly, before he covers it by looking down at his ice pack.
“Yeah,” he says. “They’re always like that.”
By the second month, Cam starts pairing them for parts of rehab because, as he puts it, “You both complain less when you’re trying to look normal in front of each other.”
Garrett looks offended. “I always look normal.”
Cam doesn’t even glance up from the clipboard. “You asked me yesterday if your hip mobility was ‘giving washed-up uncle.’”
She bites down on a smile.
Garrett points at her. “Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were going to.”
“I was not.”
“You were thinking it.”
She looks down at the resistance band looped around her ankle, cheeks warm. “I mean. A little.”
Garrett’s mouth twitches. “Unbelievable.”
Rehabbing together is both better and worse. Better because Garrett makes the room less lonely without trying to fill it too brightly. Worse because now she has to be perceived while doing the ugliest exercises known to sports medicine.
There’s nothing romantic about hip bridges. There’s nothing elegant about controlled lunges when your knee is shaking like it’s received bad news by telegram.
There’s no world in which she wants Garrett Graham to watch her do glute activation with a yellow band around her thighs while Cam says, “Good, hold that,” in the background like a man actively trying to end her life.
Garrett, to his credit, doesn’t make it weird. He makes other things weird, obviously. He’s still Garrett. When she wobbles on the balance pad, he says, “Very artistic,” and when she glares at him, he lifts both hands and says, “I’m appreciating the performance.”
When Cam tells Garrett his form is getting sloppy, she murmurs, “Washed-up uncle,” under her breath and Garrett looks at her like he can’t decide whether to laugh or throw a towel at her.
When she has a bad pain day and goes quiet halfway through, Garrett stops joking entirely and starts matching her pace so subtly she doesn’t realise until later. He finishes his reps slower. Takes longer between sets. Asks Cam a question he probably already knows the answer to, giving her thirty extra seconds to breathe without anyone looking directly at her.
That one stays with her for a while. It’s easier to let someone flirt with you than it is to let them notice you’re struggling and not make you feel small about it.
Garrett is cleared for the ice before she is. He tells her after a Friday session, standing outside the athletic building with his hands shoved into the pocket of his hoodie, campus cold moving around them in little grey gusts.
He looks happy, but it’s careful happiness. Muted. Like he knows the news is good and still doesn’t want to set it down too loudly between them.
“Cam said I can start controlled skating next week,” he says.
Her heart does something complicated.
“Oh,” she says, and hates immediately that it comes out too small. So she fixes it fast, or tries to. “Garrett, that’s great.”
“Yeah.”
“No, really. That’s… that’s so good.”
His eyes stay on her face. “I know.”
“You don’t sound like you know.”
“I do.” He looks away for a second, toward the parking lot, where a bunch of hockey guys are piling into someone’s car and yelling about food. “It’s just weird.”
She nods before he has to explain. Being allowed back into the place you’ve been aching for isn’t cleanly joyful when someone else is still outside the door. Especially when that someone has been sitting beside you for weeks, teaching you through sheer proximity that your particular kind of misery is not as uniquely embarrassing as you thought.
“I’m glad,” she says.
Garrett looks back at her, and the softness in his face makes her wish she had phrased it better, or maybe worse. “You’ll get there.”
She nods. “Yeah.”
“I know you know that. Sorry.”
“No, it’s okay.”
“I just–” He stops, rubs one hand over the back of his neck, and for once the confidence seems to snag on something real before it can make the sentence smoother than it should be. “It sucks being the one still waiting. I know.”
Her throat tightens. She looks down at the crack in the pavement between them. “I hate that I’m jealous.”
Garrett’s quiet for half a second, in a surprised-by-her-honesty way. Then he says, “Yeah.”
She winces. “That was not my best quality.”
“It’s not a crime.”
“It feels ugly.”
“A lot of this feels fucking ugly.”
She looks up at him then, and his face is open in that simple, steady way of his that keeps undoing her.
“Yeah,” she says. “It does.”
He nods once, like they’ve agreed on something important and awful. Then his mouth shifts, small and careful. “I’ll tell you if it sucks.”
She huffs a laugh. “Your first skate back?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s comforting.”
“I’m offering solidarity.”
It does suck, apparently. He texts her after the first session.
Garrett: felt good for ten seconds then my body filed a formal complaint.
She stares at the message for a long time, then replies, rude of it.
Garrett: yeah. HR nightmare.
She sends, did it feel nice though?
The typing bubbles appear. Disappear. Reappear. The finally he replies.
Garrett: yeah. too nice. kind of wanted to stay out there forever and also throw up.
Her eyes sting so fast it embarrasses her, even alone in her room. She types, yeah. i get that.
Garrett: i know.
When her clearance comes, it’s a Saturday morning in the third month of rehab, and she almost doesn’t believe Cam when he says it.
Controlled ice work only. Edges. Slow laps. Nothing clever. Nothing she would describe later as just seeing how it felt, because that sentence has been the downfall of many athletes before her. She nods through all of it with her hands folded tightly in her lap.
Cam stops talking. Her eyes are fixed on the corner of his clipboard.
“You okay?” he asks.
She nods, once. Too fast.
He waits. A laugh comes out of her, tiny and breathless and nothing like humour. “Sorry. I just… yeah. I’m good.”
Cam’s face softens. “You’re ready for this part.”
She gets to the parking lot before she texts Garrett.
cleared for controlled ice work.
He calls her.
She stares at the screen for one full ring, startled enough that she almost drops the phone, then answers with a voice that comes out much quieter than planned. “Hi.”
“Holy shit,” Garrett says, and the happiness in his voice is so immediate and unfiltered that she has to close her eyes for a second. “That’s huge.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s really fucking good.”
“I know.” She laughs softly, but it shakes. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
“Also valid.”
“Cam said I can go tomorrow morning. Just controlled stuff.”
“I’ll come.”
The answer is so quick she doesn’t know what to do with it. She sits in her parked car with the keys still in her hand and looks out through the windshield at the athletic building, the brick and glass blurred slightly by the cold. “You don’t have to.”
“I know.”
“You probably have… hockey things.”
“Can’t do hockey things yet.”
“Team things.”
“They’ll survive one morning without me standing there being inspirational in a hoodie.”
She smiles despite herself, and because he can’t see it, she lets it happen properly. “You’re very important.”
“Thank you.”
“I was joking.”
“I wasn’t.”
That gets a real laugh out of her, and Garrett is quiet for the smallest beat after it, like he’s letting himself hear it.
Then his voice lowers a little. “Seriously. I’ll come. If you want.”
She swallows. The car is cold. Her knee aches faintly from the session. Her phone is warm against her ear.
“Yeah,” she says. “I want.”
The rink is almost empty the next morning. It’s early enough that the building still has that half-asleep feeling, the lobby lights too bright over the old carpet, the vending machines humming like they’ve been up all night thinking about their choices.
Someone has left a stack of orange cones by the boards. The ice is clean from a fresh resurface, glossy and unmarked under the white lights, and the sight of it hits her so hard she stops walking halfway down the tunnel.
Garrett notices after two steps and turns back. He’s in a Briar hoodie and dark athletic pants, skates dangling from one hand, hair curling damply near his forehead because he’s showered before dawn like a lunatic.
He looks less like campus Garrett here. Less like the guy everyone waves at in the dining hall, less like the captain with half the hockey program orbiting him. In the rink, he’s quieter. Familiar with the cold. Part of the architecture in the same way she is, or was, or is trying very hard to become again.
“You good?” he asks.
She looks past him at the ice. “Yeah.”
It’s very obviously not convincing.
Garrett doesn’t call her on it. He only nods and shifts his skates to his other hand. “We can sit for a minute.”
“I’m fine.”
“I didn’t say you weren’t.”
She looks at him then, and the gentleness of his face makes something in her twist. Garrett, thankfully, seems to understand that pity would make her walk directly into traffic. This is something else. Space, maybe. Offered without making her ask for it.
So they sit. Long enough for her to lace her skates with fingers that feel strangely clumsy. Long enough for Garrett to tie his own and then pretend very hard not to watch her checking the tension of hers twice, then three times, then pressing her thumb along the side of the boot like it might offer reassurance if handled correctly.
“Do you want me to say something helpful or shut up?” he asks eventually.
The question startles a laugh out of her. It comes out small, but real. “I don’t know.”
“Okay. I can do medium.”
“Medium?”
“Yeah. Light talking. No motivational speech. No silence so intense it feels like a funeral.”
She looks over at him. “You’ve thought about this.”
“I’m a thoughtful guy.”
“You’re something.”
His smile appears, quick and warm, but he doesn’t chase the joke. “I know it’s weird.”
Her hands go still on the laces.
“I mean, I don’t know exactly,” he says, looking out at the ice now instead of directly at her, which helps. “It’s different for you. But I know the part where you miss it so much that getting it back even a little feels…” He pauses, searching for the word and apparently deciding not to dress it up. “Fucked.”
“It feels like if I step wrong, everything starts over,” she says.
Garrett nods slowly. “Yeah.”
“And I know that’s not how it works. Like, technically. I know Cam wouldn’t have cleared me if he thought I’d immediately explode.”
“Probably not.”
“Probably.”
“I mean, I don’t want to overstate his kindness.”
She laughs again, and this one stays longer. Garrett’s mouth softens at the sound, but he looks down to adjust his skate before she can catch too much of it.
They step onto the ice together. At first, all she can feel is terror. The blade settles under her weight. The ice takes her. Her knee doesn’t collapse, doesn’t scream, doesn’t turn into the moment it all went wrong. It only exists. Present and warm and strange inside the brace, part of her and not part of her, a little guarded corner of the body she used to trust without needing to narrate the trust to herself.
Garrett steps on beside her and turns with the easy balance of someone who’s been on skates since before he had any say in the matter. He doesn’t reach for her immediately. His hands are there, ready but not assuming, and the restraint of it makes her want to cry more than if he had grabbed her.
She takes one small push. Then another. It’s awful. It’s fine. It’s the most familiar thing in the world and completely foreign.
Her breath catches, and Garrett moves in closer without crowding her. “There you go.”
“Don’t say it like I’m a toddler.”
“I was saying it like you’re someone doing something hard.”
She glances at him, caught by the simplicity of it.
He gives her a tiny smile. “But if it helps, I can say it like you’re a toddler.”
“Please don’t.”
“Cool. Good note.”
She looks back at the ice and manages another slow stride. Her shoulders are too high. She can feel that. Her arms don’t know where to go with none of the old choreography to place them, none of the speed, none of the music.
She's spent years making skating look like instinct, and now every movement has to be discussed internally before it happens, which is both boring and humiliating and almost funny if she gets far enough away from wanting to scream.
Garrett skates beside her, slightly behind, matching the tiny pace without comment. A hockey player skating slowly is a strange thing. Like seeing a dog heel when you know it wants to run.
Garrett is all contained energy, all strength kept deliberately soft at the edges. Every so often she catches him adjusting to her without making the adjustment visible enough to feel like management. He doesn’t hover, he just stays close enough that the air seems to know where he is.
After half a lap, he says, “For what it’s worth, you still look like you know what you’re doing.”
She lets out a shaky breath. “That’s because you’re used to hockey players.”
“Rude.”
“You guys do look like you’re being chased a lot of the time.”
“We are. By other hockey players.”
They make it once around the rink. Then again. The second lap isn’t easy, but it’s less impossible. Her breath begins to settle into the cold. The first hard spike of fear loosens by degrees and leaves something else behind, raw and bright and almost worse.
The ice under her blades. The sound. That delicate scrape she used to know better than her own alarm clock. Her body, cautious but moving. Her knee, not perfect, not forgotten, but holding.
She doesn’t realise she’s started crying until the cold hits the wet under one eye. Garrett sees it, but he doesn’t stop abruptly or make a face or ask if she’s okay in that terrible alarmed voice people use when crying becomes an event.
He only slows with her and says, “We can take a second.”
She laughs once, embarrassed, wiping under her eye with the heel of her hand. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
“It’s stupid.”
“It’s really not.”
She looks at him, and the rink lights catch in his eyes. He’s close enough now that she can see the rough edge of stubble he probably missed shaving, the way his hair has started curling more as the cold gets to it. He looks like Garrett, but not the campus version. Just a boy on skates, injured and healing and kind enough not to make her crying about a slow lap into something she has to survive on top of everything else.
“I missed it,” she says, and it comes out barely above a whisper.
His face changes. “Yeah.”
“I know I’ve said that. But I don’t think I knew how much until right now.”
Garrett nods once, slow. “Yeah,” he says again, and there is so much understanding in it she has to look away.
They stand there near the boards for a while, the quiet rink around them, her hand resting lightly on the rail. Garrett doesn’t touch her. He just stays beside her while she gets herself back into her body.
Eventually, she breathes in and lets it out. “Okay,” she says.
“Okay?”
“Yeah.”
They start again. It goes better for maybe seven minutes. She’s still too careful, still too aware of every shift and edge and tiny correction. But there are moments now, little flashes where the fear drops half a step behind the movement and something older comes through.
A turn of the ankle. A cleaner glide. Her body remembering a thing before her brain can interfere. Each one lands small and huge at the same time.
Garrett notices those too. He doesn’t cheer. Thank God, if he cheered, she might actually skate into the wall on purpose.
He only smiles a little and says, “That one looked nice,” or “Yeah, that was better,” in the same low voice he uses when he’s telling her something true and not trying to make a moment out of it.
Maybe that’s why she gets stupid. A little more confident than she was three minutes earlier, enough that she lets herself push into a slightly longer glide coming out of the curve. Barely anything, nothing she would once have even counted as skating. Her blade catches anyway.
It’s tiny. The smallest wrongness. But her body doesn’t know the difference between small and catastrophic yet. Her stomach drops, knee locking in fear before pain can even arrive, and suddenly the whole rink tilts in one bright, awful flash.
Garrett catches her before she falls. One second he’s beside her, and the next his hands are on her waist, tugging her in with a controlled little scrape of blades that brings her straight against him.
Her hands land on his chest, fingers grabbing at the front of his hoodie. The impact is soft because he makes it soft, knees bending with hers, one arm braced properly around her back before she has even fully processed the fact that she’s upright.
“Hey,” he says, breath close. “I’ve got you.”
Her heart is punching so hard she can feel it in her palms where they’re pressed to him. “I’m okay,” she says automatically.
“I know.”
“I just slipped.”
“I know.”
“It was small.”
“I know.”
She lets out a breath that shakes on the way out and hates it, then hates that she hates it because Garrett is looking at her like the shaking is allowed, like none of this is embarrassing enough to require apology.
For the first few seconds, there’s only the aftershock. Ice, fear, the violent little replay of what if. Then the world begins to come back in pieces, and Garrett comes back with it. His chest under her hands. The warm line of his arm across her back. His face closer than it has ever been without the excuse of class or rehab or a crowded hallway. The smell of him, cold air and clean laundry and something faintly minty from gum.
His gaze drops to her mouth. It’s so quick she almost thinks she invented it. Then he looks back at her eyes, and the air between them changes so completely it feels like the rink’s gone quiet on purpose.
She should move. That would be the normal thing. Step back. Laugh it off. Say thanks. Return to the careful, slow lap. Keep everything in the safe category it’s technically belonged to for months, even as the edges have gotten less and less believable.
She doesn’t move. Garrett doesn’t either. His thumb shifts once at her waist. Small. Barely there. But she feels it through the layers anyway.
“You good?” he asks, and his voice is lower now.
She nods. His eyes move over her face with that same checking look, except now there’s something else threaded through it. Something less clinical. Less controlled.
He’s still giving her an out. She can feel that. It’s in the stillness of him, the way his hand doesn’t pull her closer even though it could, the way his mouth is soft but not smiling, for once, like even Garrett knows this is not a moment to be smoothed over with charm.
She looks at his mouth. This time, neither of them can pretend he doesn’t notice.
His breath changes. Just slightly. “Careful,” he murmurs.
Her fingers tighten in his hoodie. “I’m not doing anything.”
Her face feels warm despite the rink. Everything does, actually. Her hands, her throat, the place under her ribs where fear had been sitting all morning and has now made room for something much more dangerous.
Garrett dips his head a fraction, then stops. The restraint of it is the thing that finally makes her brave. She lifts up on her toes, just barely, because they’re on skates, and kisses him.
He kisses her back, soft at first, because of the ice, because of her knee, because of the months of carefulness that have led them here. His mouth is warm in a way that feels almost shocking against the cold.
She makes a small sound, and Garrett’s hand slides more securely around her back as the kiss deepens by degrees, still careful but less polite now. Like something in him has unclenched. Like every hallway conversation, every text, every slow walk to class, every time his hand almost touched and didn’t, has found the same narrow place to go.
Her arms go up around his shoulders before she thinks about it and he smiles against her mouth.
She feels it and pulls back an inch, breathless. “Are you smiling?”
Garrett’s eyes open, bright and warm and closer than seems legal. “No.”
“You are.”
“No, I’m being very serious.”
“You’re not.”
“I am.” His mouth brushes hers again, once, because he’s already become comfortable enough with this to be unbearable about it. “This is an important rehab milestone.”
She stares at him, and then she laughs, properly this time, startled and light and so relieved by the sheer stupid Garrettness of it that it breaks the last of the fear in her body loose. He laughs too, she feels it under her hands.
“You’re so annoying,” she says.
“I know.”
“I can’t believe you just said rehab milestone.”
“Was it too much?”
“It was awful.”
“Okay.” He nods like he’s accepting professional notes, but his hands are still at her waist and his face is still soft in a way that makes the joke land somewhere tender instead of sharp. “I’ll workshop it.”
“Please don’t.”
“Got it.”
They stand there smiling at each other like idiots, and she hates how much she likes it. Hates, a little, how easily the rink has shifted around them. The ice is still under her blades. Her knee still exists, still healing, still not ready for everything she wants. But Garrett’s hands are on her body and his mouth is kissed-soft and he’s looking at her like the morning has done something to him too.
Then he glances down at their skates, back up at her, and says, quieter, “You scared?”
She doesn’t know which thing he means. The ice. The kiss. The way those have somehow become tangled enough that the answer fits both.
She nods once.
Garrett’s face doesn’t fall. He only nods back, thumb moving once over her side. “Yeah. Me too, a little.”
That surprises her enough that she looks at him properly.
He huffs a breath, almost a laugh, but not quite. “Don’t look so shocked.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I just…” She swallows, eyes flicking over his face. “You don’t seem scared of much.”
Garrett looks at her for one more second. Then he kisses her again. This one is easier. Warmer. Still careful, but with laughter caught at the edges now, his mouth curving every time she makes the smallest noise because clearly he’s going to be deeply smug about kissing her, which she should have anticipated.
He keeps one arm around her waist and lets the other hand come up to her cheek, thumb brushing near her jaw, and her whole body goes strangely loose and awake at the same time.
When she presses closer, he makes a soft sound under his breath and shifts them without thinking, turning just enough that his body blocks hers more fully from the open rink, as if there is anyone there to see them besides the empty seats and the unbothered scoreboard.
She pulls back because she’s smiling too much to keep kissing properly.
Garrett looks very pleased with himself. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s a suspicious nothing.”
“You look smug.”
He shrugs. “I feel a little smug.”
“At least you’re honest.”
“You kissed me first.”
Her mouth falls open. “Barely.”
“Still counts.”
“I was emotionally vulnerable.”
“I know.” His smile softens before it can become too much of a tease.
She looks down, overwhelmed in a way that’s not bad but still requires a second. Garrett lets her have it. Then, because he’s Garrett and because tenderness with no escape hatch would probably kill them both, he says, “For the record, I had a very cool plan to do that eventually.”
She looks up again, grateful despite herself. “Did you?”
“Yeah.”
“What was the plan?”
His nose scrunches. “Still developing.”
“So... no plan.”
He tilts his head. “A flexible plan.”
“Right.”
“Probably would’ve walked you to class. Said something devastatingly charming. You would’ve swooned.”
“I don’t think I swoon.”
“You might have. We’ll never know.”
“You’re so full of shit.”
“There she is,” he says softly, and then seems to realise he’s said it in a way that gives too much away.
She glances toward the boards, then back at the stretch of ice ahead of them. The fear is still there, but quieter now. Less teeth. Her body feels wrung out and bright, like it’s survived two separate kinds of firsts before breakfast and does not know where to put the information yet.
Garrett follows her gaze. “You want to keep going?”
“Yeah,” she says. “But maybe…”
He’s already holding out both hands before she finishes. She looks at them, then at him.
He shrugs, casual and not casual at all. “Just for a bit.”
She puts her hands in his, and they start slow again. His fingers lace with hers this time. His hands are warm around her cold ones, and he skates backward at a careful pace, eyes mostly on her face, checking without hovering. The rink is still too bright. Her knee is still not perfect. Cam would probably have a clipboard-related opinion about the emotional developments currently occurring during controlled ice work.
But she’s upright. She’s moving.
Garrett’s thumbs brush once over her knuckles. “Good?” he asks.
She looks at him, at the ice, at the long clean stretch of it opening ahead. And for the first time in months, the answer does not feel like a lie.
“Yeah,” she says, a little breathless, a little shy around the smile she can’t fully stop. “Good.”
Garrett’s grin is small, real, and absolutely devastating. “Yeah?”
She nods.
His hands tighten lightly around hers, and he keeps moving backward, slow and steady, like he has nowhere else to be and no reason in the world to rush her. “Okay,” he says. “I’ve got you.”
❄︎ ❄︎ ❄︎
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