slut for the smut

A Court of Thorns and Roses

Azriel X Female!Reader

Is It Really for the Best - The mating bond between the reader and Azriel clicks into place, but with the potential war with Hybern on the rise, the risk of having that bond fall into the enemy’s hands has the reader and Azriel questioning their partnership.

The Summer I Turned Pretty

Conrad Fisher x Female!Reader

Storm Warning - After Susannah’s dedication, tensions boil over when Belly announces her engagement to Jeremiah. Feeling overwhelmed by everything unraveling around you, you drive, not knowing what the storm that lay ahead has in store.

Do You Miss Me? - Months after Susannah’s funeral, life has dulled to routine and avoidance. But one night, a call from Conrad changes everything.

Careful Hands - Tension in the kitchen boils over into an emotional confrontation with Conrad. A slip of the knife turns vulnerability into closeness, and long-held feelings finally break the surface.

Heated Rivalry

Ilya Rozanov x GN!Reader

Silent Ice - You’ve always known Ilya’s body better than anyone, but lately, you can’t read his heart. After weeks of distance and coldness, you watch Ilya play recklessly, ignoring pain and caution. When you confront him, his words push you to the edge of heartbreak.

What Happened, Happened - When Ilya Rozanov goes down on the ice, you forget every rule you’ve ever followed - no cameras, no media, just the two of you. In the aftermath, you’re left navigating injuries, press releases, and a relationship that suddenly has nowhere left to hide.

Ilya Rozanov x Female!Reader

Collision Course - You come to Boston chasing the Olympics, not distractions, but stolen glances with Ilya Rozanov make late nights at the rink feel anything but empty. One drink after a game blurs the line between focus and feeling, leaving you wondering how something so unexpected managed to matter at all.

Off Campus

Garrett Graham x Female!Reader

Learned Response - Garrett Graham notices everything about you - including the things you never meant for him to see. When the pressure of the semester finally breaks him open, one moment is enough to change everything, and neither of you knows how to come back from it.

High Maintenance - You've been falling apart quietly for three weeks and you're very good at making sure nobody notices, especially your boyfriend Garrett. You're less good at it after four drinks and one overheard conversation you were never supposed to hear.

John Logan x Female!Reader

Drive Safe - When you borrow Logan's truck for a late-night rehearsal, a drunk driver changes everything - and Logan spends the worst hours of his life learning exactly how it feels to almost lose someone he loves.

Hannah texts you on a Tuesday.

hey, just wanted to check in. garrett told me what happened at the house. are you doing okay?

You stare at it for a long time before you respond.

I'm okay, you type back. how's the house?

The three dots appear and disappear twice before her response comes through.

honestly? tense. like really tense. garrett says it feels like everyone's just waiting for someone to explode. dean and logan aren't talking at all. practice has been rough.

You set your phone face down on your desk and stare at the ceiling.

The guilt settles heavily on your chest.

The hockey house is fractured and everyone in it is walking on eggshells and the reason, the central unmovable reason sitting at the middle of all of it, is you.

Not entirely. You know that, logically. Dean made his own choices. Logan made his. But logic has never been particularly good at talking down guilt.

You pick your phone back up.

I'm sorry, you type. I hate that it's like that because of me.

Hannah's response is immediate. it's not because of you. it's because dean is an idiot.

You smile despite yourself. Then you put your phone away and open your laptop, because the alternative is sitting here feeling terrible about something you cannot fix, and you have a final project due in eleven days that is not going to write itself.

Distraction. You are getting very good at distraction.

---

The project is for your literature seminar, a twenty-page critical analysis that counts for forty percent of your grade and requires sources, plural, the kind that live in physical books in the basement level of the library where the fluorescent lights flicker slightly and there is never anyone else there after ten PM.

Which is exactly why you go after ten PM.

It's quiet in the library, broken only by the occasional hum of the heating system and the sound of your own pen moving across paper. You spread your books out across the table and you work, actually work, with a focused tunnel-vision.

It's almost peaceful. It's the closest thing to peaceful you've had in weeks.

You don't notice him for almost an hour.

A shape in your peripheral vision, someone at a table on the far side of the room, far enough away that you register the presence without registering the person. You go back to your notes. Five minutes later you look up for a different reason, reaching for a different book, and your eyes cross the room and land on him and stay there for a second too long before you can stop them.

Logan.

He's got his head down over something, a textbook open in front of him, pen moving in the margin. His jacket is draped over the back of his chair. He looks tired, shoulders slumped just slightly.

You look away. You go back to your notes.

You are very focused on your notes.

You look up again four minutes later. He's not looking at you.

You look up again eight minutes after that and he is, just briefly, and you both look away at the same time, and the silence of the library takes on a different quality entirely, charged in a way that has nothing to do with anything being said.

This goes on for forty-five minutes.

You are on your third page of notes and you have retained approximately none of it, and you are seriously considering packing up and going home except that it's eleven PM and cold and you need these sources, when you hear the chair legs on the other side of the room scrape against the floor.

Footsteps.

You keep your eyes on your notes with the concentrated effort of someone defusing a bomb.

Logan stops at the edge of your table.

You look up.

He looks the same as he has every time you've seen him for three months, which is to say he looks like himself, which has always been the problem. The bruise along his jaw has faded to a yellowish shadow. He's got a pen tucked behind his ear. He looks at you with that expression you have never been able to fully classify and he says, "I can't keep doing this."

You set your pen down.

"The avoiding thing," he says. "I can't keep sitting twenty feet away from you pretending I don't see you. It's-" He stops. Exhales. "I can't do it."

"Logan-"

"I'm not trying to start anything," he says. "I just couldn't sit over there anymore."

The library hums around you. Fluorescent lights flicker.

"Okay," you say.

He pulls out the chair across from you and sits down, and the ghost of every other time he's done exactly that moves through the room. Logan sits down across from you like it's the most natural thing in the world, like it has always been this easy, like none of the last three months happened.

"How's your project?" he asks.

"Terrible," you say honestly. "Yours?"

"Econ final." He glances back at his abandoned table. "Also terrible."

"Great," you say. "We're both terrible."

Something almost like a smile crosses his face.

You go back to your notes. He goes back to his table, collects his things, and comes back to yours without asking, spreading out across the other half of the table, and you work in silence for another hour and a half that feels nothing like the silence you had before he sat down.

At twelve-thirty you close your last book and rub your eyes and say, "I have to go home."

"Yeah." Logan is already capping his pen. "I'll drive you."

You look at him.

"It's late," he says simply. "And cold."

You should say no. You know you should say no, you know what the inside of his truck feels like and what it does to your ability to maintain any kind of reasonable emotional distance, and you should absolutely say no.

"Okay," you say.

---

The drive starts the same way the last one did.

Silence. The heat coming on. The radio low. Hastings moving past the windows in the dark.

Only this time nobody has just caught their boyfriend cheating. This time there is no crisis to manage, no immediate wound to navigate around.

This time it's just you and Logan in the dark of his truck and the specific charged quality of all the things neither of you has said sitting in the space between you, and it is somehow so much worse.

Logan pulls onto your street. The familiar buildings, the familiar parking spots, the familiar route you've walked a hundred times. He slows down. He doesn't stop.

He drives past your building.

You look at him.

"Sorry," he says, and turns around at the next block. "Sorry, I just-" He stops. His jaw is tight. He pulls back onto your street and this time he pulls to the curb in front of your building and puts it in park and the engine idles and neither of you moves.

The clock on his dash reads 12:47.

"Y/n." His voice has changed. Something in it that was under the surface the whole drive has come up to the top, and when you look at him his hands are gripping the steering wheel and he's staring straight ahead and he looks like someone standing at the edge of something very high. "I need to say something."

"Logan..."

"I've been holding this in for months." He says it to the windshield. "I held it in when you started dating Dean because he's my best friend and that's what you do. I held it in at the Sig Tau party and in the kitchen that night and every single time I sat next to you and it was - easy, in a way that things aren't supposed to be that easy, and I told myself it didn't mean anything." He exhales, sharp. "I held it in in this truck a few weeks ago when you told me we couldn't be friends anymore and I drove you home anyway because I didn't know what else to do."

You are very still.

"And I have been so careful," he says, and there is something raw in his voice now, something that doesn't belong to the Logan who is always composed. "I have been so unbelievably careful for so long, and I took a punch to the face last week and I sat in that library tonight for an hour pretending I didn't see you, and I just-" He finally turns to look at you and the expression on his face knocks the breath out of you completely, because it's the unguarded version, the one he keeps under all the steadiness. "I can't keep being careful. I don't have anything left to be careful about."

"Logan...." you say, and your voice comes out very small.

"I know the timing is a disaster," he says. "I know Dean is- I know what this looks like. I know you just got out of something and I know I'm the last person you should be sitting in a truck with at one in the morning, and I'm not asking you for anything, I just-" He stops. "I needed you to know. That it's not nothing. For me, it has never been nothing."

The heater runs. The clock ticks over to 12:48.

You think about three weeks ago in this exact truck on a different street, telling him it was his fault, telling him you couldn't be his friend, and the way he said okay and drove you home anyway.

"I don't know what it is," you say. Your voice is barely above a whisper. "I told you that in the truck that night. I don't know what to call it or where it came from and I-" You stop. Breathe. "But I think- I think maybe there's something there. I think maybe there has been for a while and I didn't let myself-" The words stick in your throat. "I didn't let myself look at it."

Logan is watching you.

"I don't know what that means," you say. "I don't know what to do with it."

"I'm not asking you to do anything with it," he says quietly. "I just needed to say it out loud."

You look at him. He looks at you. The truck is very small and very warm and outside the winter night is very dark and very cold and there is something happening in the space between you that has been building for awhile.

And you are so tired of pretending it isn't there.

You don't decide to close the distance. You're not sure either of you decides anything. It just happens the way things happen when the pressure gets too high and the walls come down -slowly, and then all at once, his hand coming up to your jaw so carefully it makes your chest ache, and then his mouth on yours.

It's not what you expected.

You don't know exactly what you expected. Maybe something charged, something desperate, something that matches the weeks of tension and unspoken things.

But it's not like that. It's soft. Tentative. Like a question being asked very carefully, like he's giving you every possible opportunity to answer differently.

And it gives you butterflies.

Stupid, simple, devastating butterflies, the kind you haven't felt since the very beginning of something, the kind that live in the chest and make you feel seventeen and irrational and completely undone, and you understand in this moment with sudden and terrible clarity why the last three months have been so impossible.

Then the logic comes back.

It always does. Annoyingly, it always does.

Dean's best friend. The hockey house already in pieces. Weeks since the party. The team walking on eggshells. Garrett's face in that room when he pulled Dean back. You at the center of all of it, you always at the center of all of it, and here you are in a truck at one in the morning making it worse, making it so much worse-

You pull back.

Not far. There's not much room to pull back.

"We can't," you say.

Your voice comes out breathless, which is embarrassing, and Logan's eyes are open and very dark and very close and the expression in them is the most honest thing you have ever seen on his face.

"Logan." His name in your mouth like a full sentence. "We can't. You know we can't."

He doesn't say anything for a moment. His hand is still at your jaw, very lightly, and he looks at you with that wanting expression that you feel in the center of your chest where the butterflies are still stupidly, pointlessly going, and you watch him work through something behind his eyes.

Then he nods.

He drops his hand. He sits back. He looks at the steering wheel.

"Okay," he says.

Okay. The same word he said a few weeks ago on a different quiet street when you told him you couldn't be his friend anymore.

You hate it.

"I'm sorry," you say.

"Don't be." His voice is rough at the edges but even. "Go inside, Y/n."

You reach for the door handle. Your hand is not entirely steady.

"Logan."

He looks at you.

You want to say something that covers all of it, the months, the kitchen table, the slow song, the truck, the punch he took without throwing one back, the way he just said okay like it didn't cost him anything when you can see on his face that it cost him everything.

You want to say something that does justice to the size of all of it.

You don't have the words. You're not sure the words exist.

"Thank you," you say instead. "For tonight. For... all of it."

He nods once. Doesn't look away.

You get out of the truck.

The cold hits you immediately, sharp and clarifying, and you walk to your building door and let yourself in and you don't look back.

You make it up the stairs and into your room and your roommate is asleep and the room is dark and you sit on the edge of your bed and press your fingers to your mouth and you sit there for a long time.

You kissed John Logan.

John Logan told you it has never been nothing, and you told him maybe there was something there, and then you kissed him in his truck at one in the morning and then you told him you couldn't and he said okay and let you go.

Because that is who he is. That is exactly and completely who he is, and you are sitting on the edge of your bed at one in the morning with butterflies that won't quit and guilt that won't quit and the memory of his hand against your jaw so careful it made your chest ache, and you do not know what you're supposed to do next.

You lie back on your bed and stare at the ceiling.

Down the street, in a truck that is probably still idling at your curb, John Logan is sitting with his hands on the wheel and everything you just said and didn't say, and you have no idea what his face looks like right now, and that, somehow, is the thing that finally makes your eyes sting.

The thing about heartbreak is that it doesn't actually stop your life from moving forward whether you want it to or not.

You still have an eight AM on Monday. You still have a group project due Thursday that two of your three group members are completely useless about. You still have laundry that needs doing and a dining hall that closes at nine and a roommate who takes forty-five minute showers and a life that does not pause, not even slightly, because Dean Di Laurentis decided to blow it up at a party on a Friday night.

So you do what you know how to do. You throw yourself at school with the kind of focus you haven't had since freshman year, because if you stop moving for too long the ache in your chest catches up to you and you cannot afford that right now.

Dean texts you every day. Sometimes twice.

I know you don't want to hear from me. I just need you to know I'm sorry.

Can we please talk. Please Y/n.

I don't know what I was thinking. I wasn't thinking. That's not an excuse I just-

You read them all. You don't respond to any of them.

Logan doesn't text you at all.

You tell yourself that's what you wanted. You told him you couldn't be his friend anymore, you told him clearly, and he is respecting that. This is what respecting it looks like. Radio silence.

---

Garrett shows up on a Wednesday, eight days after the party, at seven in the evening, with two hot chocolates and the kind of expression that means he's been thinking about doing this for a while and finally just decided to do it.

You open your door and stare at him.

"Hey," Garrett says.

"Hey," you say.

He holds out one of the hot chocolates. "Can I come in?"

Your roommate is at her boyfriend's place for the night, so you step back and let him in, and he sits on your desk chair with his drink and his big, steady presence and looks around your room for a second like he's taking inventory.

"You look tired," he says.

"Thank you, Garrett."

"I didn't say you looked bad. Just tired."

You sit on your bed cross-legged and wrap both hands around your cup and look at him. Garrett has always existed in your life as a kind of reliable background constant - steady, even-keeled, the person in every room who is somehow always holding it together.

"You don't have to do this," you say. "I know this is weird. You're his best friend."

"Yeah," Garrett says. "I am." He says it simply, without apology. "I'm also someone who knows that what he did was a complete and total jackass move, and that being his best friend doesn't mean pretending otherwise."

You look down at your hot chocolate.

"I'm not here to make you forgive him," Garrett says. "That's between you and him and frankly it's none of my business. I'm just here because -" He pauses, turning his cup in his hands. "I kept thinking about you going home that night and nobody checking on you, and it bothered me."

You nod. The room is quiet for a second.

"Can I say something?" Garrett asks.

"You're going to regardless."

The corner of his mouth pulls up slightly. "Yes, Dean is one of my best friends. I have watched him do some genuinely stupid things over the years and I have had his back through most of them because that's what you do." He looks at you steadily. "But there's a difference between having someone's back and pretending they're not capable of being wrong. And he was wrong, Y/n. He didn't just mess up a little. He fucked up, and he fucked up in a big way."

Your throat tightens.

"Garrett-"

"You're allowed to be angry," he says. "You're allowed to be sad. You're allowed to not be okay for a while. You don't have to figure it all out right now. That's what I came to say." He pauses. "Also the hot chocolate is because the dining hall closes in twenty minutes and I didn't know if you'd eaten."

You look up at him.

"I hadn't," you admit.

"Yeah." He pulls something out of his jacket pocket - a granola bar, slightly bent, the kind from the vending machine by the rink. He sets it on your desk. "Eat something."

You laugh before you can stop it. It comes out a little wet around the edges, which is embarrassing, but Garrett doesn't make it weird.

"Thank you," you say, when you've collected yourself. "For coming."

"Yeah," he says simply, and strides out the door.

You eat the granola bar. You go to sleep before midnight for the first time all week.

---

The problem with throwing yourself into school is that eventually school lets up, and then you're left with all the hours you've been filling and nowhere to put them.

It's a Saturday when you finally admit to yourself that you need to go get your stuff.

It's not much, just a hoodie, a phone charger, a book you actually need for class, a pair of earrings you left on his dresser weeks ago.

You text Dean first, because you're not cruel and you're not interested in drama. You say: I need to come get some stuff from your room. Can you let me know when is a good time?

He responds in four minutes: I'm not home right now, Tucker is. You can go whenever.

Which is not ideal, but it's fine. Quick in and out. Ten minutes and then you won't have to go back.

Tucker lets you in with the easy, slightly uncomfortable friendliness of someone who doesn't know what to say and is compensating with helpfulness.

The hallway upstairs is quiet.

You let yourself into Dean's room and get to work, moving efficiently because you don't want to be here any longer than you have to. The hoodie is balled up on the floor of his closet. The charger is exactly where you left it behind his desk, your earrings still on his dresser.

You're reaching for the book on his shelf when you hear the door handle.

You turn around.

Dean comes through the door laughing at something, half turned back toward the hallway, and behind him, hand tucked into the crook of his elbow, is Allie Hayes.

The same Allie Hayes.

The three of you form a frozen tableau for approximately three seconds.

Dean's face goes through approximately six expressions in rapid succession: shock, guilt, something that might be shame, and then, underneath all of it, a defensive hardening that you recognize because you have seen it before, that particular Di Laurentis reflex of going on the offense when cornered.

Allie has the decency to look like she wants to disappear through the floor.

You look at Dean, then at Allie, then back at Dean, and you feel something move through you that is not quite the same as what you felt two weeks ago. Two weeks ago it was shock and heartbreak and the specific devastation of something breaking open.

This is something else. This is the quieter, colder variety, the kind that comes after you've already done your crying.

"Seriously?!" you say. Your voice comes out sharp.

"Y/n-"

"I texted you," you say. "I told you I was coming."

"I didn't think you'd be here yet-"

"It doesn't matter when I'm here, Dean." You turn back to the shelf and pull out your book, because you came here for your stuff and you're getting your stuff and then you're leaving and that's the only thing that matters right now. "I'm not doing this. I came for my things."

"Can we just-"

"No." You tuck the book under your arm and pick up your earrings and your charger, and you look at him one more time. "I think you should know," you say, "that I really did love you. I want you to actually understand that, because I need someone to understand it, and it might as well be you. I loved you, and I chose you, and I kept choosing you, and this-" You gesture at Allie, at the room, at all of it. "This is what you did with that."

Dean opens his mouth.

"Don't," you say. "Please. Just don't."

You move toward the door. He steps slightly into your path, not blocking you, not quite, but enough.

"So that's it," he says. "You're just-"

"I'm leaving, Dean."

"Right." Something hardens in his voice. "You're leaving. And I'm sure Logan will be very-"

"Oh my god" You half whine, the words comes out sharper than you meant it to. "Just shut up already."

"Why?" His voice is rising now, and Allie has gone very still in the corner of the room, and you are so tired, you are so profoundly tired of this. "Why is that off limits? I've been losing my mind for two weeks trying to figure out what I did wrong-"

"You cheated on me," you say flatly. "That's what you did wrong."

"And you spent three months-"

"Nothing happened!" You say, a bit louder than intended. Your voice cracks on the last word and you hate it. "Nothing ever happened, I have told you that over and over -"

"He drove you home!" Dean's jaw is tight. "After everything, after that night, you went straight to-"

"I didn't go to him!" Your voice continues to rise despite yourself. "He followed me out. I told him to go back inside, I didn't ask him to come after me, it wasn't some- You press your fingers to your forehead. "It doesn't matter. None of this matters. I'm leaving."

"Y/n-"

"Hey."

The voice comes from the doorway.

Logan is standing in the hall, jacket half on, keys in hand, like he just came upstairs and walked into this. He takes in the room in one quick sweep - you with your arms full, Dean with his jaw tight, Allie pressed against the far wall - and his expression settles into something very still.

"Don't," Dean says immediately, pointing at him. "Stay out of it."

"I heard yelling," Logan says. Simple.

"It's fine," you say, because it needs to be fine. "We're almost done."

"We're most certainly not done," Dean says, and his attention has shifted now, that restless volatile energy redirecting itself the way it does, and you watch it happen with something cold settling in your stomach. "You drove her home."

Logan doesn't say anything.

"That night," Dean says. "You followed her out of that party and you drove her home and you didn't say a word to me about it."

"Dean-" you start.

"No." He steps toward Logan and Logan doesn't step back, just stands there in the doorway with that infuriating steadiness. "I want to hear it from him. I want him to stand there and tell me it didn't mean anything, that he was just being a good friend, because I have been sitting with this for two weeks and I want to hear him say it to my face."

"She was walking home alone," Logan says. "It was fifteen degrees. That's it."

"That's it," Dean repeats, scoffing. "Right. Because you're always just being a good friend. Always just happening to be there. Always just-"

"Dean." Logan's voice doesn't change. "She came to get her stuff. Let her leave."

"Don't tell me what to do in my own room-"

"I'm not telling you what to do. I'm asking you to let her walk out of here without making it into something else." Logan looks at you. "Do you have everything?"

And that's what does it.

All it takes is Logan looking past Dean, looking at you, and asking if you have what you came for, and Dean sees it, sees the way Logan looks at you and the way you look back, and two weeks of grief and guilt and wounded pride come apart at the seams all at once.

Dean's fist connects with Logan's jaw before you even register that he's moved.

The sound is horrible.

"Dean!" Your voice comes out as something between a shout and a gasp.

Logan hits the doorframe on the way back. He catches himself, one hand going to his jaw, and for one terrible suspended second the room is completely silent.

Then Dean goes for him again.

"Hey! Hey!" Tucker appears from nowhere, physically inserting himself between them, hands up. Behind him Garrett comes through the door and gets his arms around Dean from behind, hauling him back. It takes visible effort, Dean fighting against the grip with all that wound-up miserable energy, and Tucker stays planted between them with his hands out.

"Enough." Garrett's voice, low and sharp and absolutely final. "Dean. Enough."

Dean stops fighting. He goes still in Garrett's grip, chest heaving, and he looks - wrecked. He looks like someone who has broken something they can't put back together and is only now understanding what they've done.

The room is very quiet.

You look at Logan.

He has straightened up from the doorframe. His hand is at his jaw, checking it, and there is already a bruise forming along the bone. He is looking at you.

Not at Dean. Not at Tucker. At you.

"Are you okay?" he asks.

Two weeks ago, on a quiet side street with the engine idling, you told him you couldn't be his friend anymore. You told him whatever this was, it was the reason everything fell apart. You closed a door and you meant it and you have spent fourteen days respecting that decision.

And he is standing here with a bruise on his jaw that he got defending you in a fight he didn't start, and he is asking if you are okay.

"Logan..." Your voice comes out barely above a whisper.

"I'm fine," he says, before you can ask. "You should go."

"Yeah." Garrett, still holding Dean, looking at you over his shoulder with that steady captain's expression. "Y/n. Go ahead."

You look at Dean one last time. He's staring at the floor. He looks very young and very tired and like someone who has run completely out of road, and you feel something that is not quite pity and not quite grief but somewhere in between, because you did love him, you loved him genuinely, and this is what's left of it.

You go.

Down the stairs, through the living room, past faces you don't register. Out the front door and into the cold and you walk half a block before your legs decide they need a moment and you stop on the pavement and just stand there.

You are still holding your book. Your charger. Your earrings.

You got what you came for.

The December air is sharp and the street is quiet and somewhere upstairs in that room is the wreckage of something that used to be a friendship, a relationship, four months of your life, and the person who took a punch to the jaw on your behalf asked you if you were okay before he touched his own face.

You press your free hand flat against your sternum and breathe.

You don't know what you're supposed to do with any of this. You don't know how to stop being the reason two of the closest friends on that team are falling apart. You don't know how to carry the particular weight of watching someone absorb something they didn't deserve because of you, for you, and not fight back.

The first time it happens, you don't even realize it's happening.

It's a Thursday night, which means you have a paper due at midnight and your laptop is open on the kitchen table of the hockey house and you have written approximately two hundred words in the last hour and a half. Dean is supposed to be here. He said he'd be back from the rink by eight, and it's now nine-fifteen, and you've texted him twice.

The third text you send says hey, where are you? and you stare at it after you hit send and feel something small and tired settle in your chest.

You're not mad. You're not even close to mad. You just have a paper due at midnight and you're sitting alone in a kitchen that isn't yours and you don't know where he is.

"Hey."

You look up. Logan is standing in the doorway in a t-shirt and sweatpants, clearly just out of the shower, hair still damp. He looks at your laptop, then at your face, then at the laptop again.

"You okay?"

"Fine," you say. "Paper."

He pulls out the chair across from you and sits down without being invited, which is such a Logan thing to do that you don't even register it as strange.

"What class?"

"Poli Sci. Constitutional law." You drag a hand through your hair. "I know what I want to say, I just can't get it onto the page. It keeps coming out wrong."

Logan is quiet for a second, "What's the argument?"

You look at him. "You want to hear my constitutional law argument."

"I want to hear why you're staring at a blank document at nine PM looking like you're about to give up."

You're not about to give up. You are almost about to give up. You look back at your screen and say, "It's about judicial overreach." You pause. "It's a ten page paper and I have four hours."

Logan pulls your laptop toward him. Just like that, just like you've been studying together for years. He reads what you have. You watch him read it, which feels strange and also, for reasons you can't immediately identify, settles the anxious thing in your chest by about thirty percent.

"Your intro is the problem," he says. "You're burying the argument. Lead with the claim, not the history."

"I always lead with context."

"Yeah, and it's killing your momentum before you even start." He pushes the laptop back. "Try writing the conclusion first. Figure out where you're going and then work backward."

You stare at him. "That's not how I write."

"How's your current method working out?"

You look at your two hundred words. You look at him. He raises his eyebrows, not unkindly.

You pull the laptop back and start typing the conclusion.

Something loosens after about four minutes, and the words start coming the way they're supposed to. Logan stays at the table, scrolling through his phone, not talking, and you write six pages in the next two hours and the whole time there is something in the back of your head that you don't look at directly, something about the fact that this is not how tonight was supposed to go but you're not entirely sure it went wrong.

Dean gets home at eleven-fifteen. He's loud in the doorway, laughing at something Tucker said, and when he comes into the kitchen and sees you his face does something quick and unreadable.

"Oh, hey," he says. "You're still here."

Like he'd almost forgotten.

"Paper was due at midnight," you say, and close your laptop.

"Did you get it done?" He's already opening the fridge.

"Yeah," you say. "I got it done."

You don't look at Logan when you say it. You don't need to.

---

The second time, it's worse.

There's a party at Sig Tau that you don't particularly want to be at. Dean wanted to go, so you went, and now Dean is three drinks deep doing shots with Tucker and you're standing near the back wall with a drink you don't really want, wearing a dress that's about fifteen inches too short for winter in Hastings.

You should find someone you know. You should do something other than stare at the side door and calculate how long you need to stay before it's acceptable to leave.

"You look like you're planning an exit strategy."

Logan appears beside you from nowhere, red cup in hand, with that expression he always has when he's drinking - slightly amused.

"I'm fine," you say.

"You've been staring at that door for like six minutes."

"I wasn't-" You pause. You were. "I just don't love parties like this."

"Then why'd you come?"

"Because Dean wanted to."

Logan nods once, like that's all the answer he needed, and doesn't push it. You always appreciate the way he doesn't push.

"Dance with me," he says.

You look at him. "What?"

"Not-" He makes a face, like the implication is annoying. "You look like you're being held hostage. Just dance. It'll kill some time."

It's so plain and reasonable that you say yes without thinking about it, because it is nothing. It's just Logan being Logan, it's just friendly, it's just dancing.

And it is. For the first song it's completely, perfectly fine. Logan is a better dancer than he has any right to be and he clearly knows it, and it's funny, and you laugh, and for a few minutes you forget that you're cold and restless and quietly waiting for the night to be over.

Then the song changes. Something slower.

Logan doesn't step back. You don't either.

His hands stay where they're supposed to. It's not inappropriate, but you're close, and the music is loud, and he says something near your ear, and his voice is low and warm and you feel it settle somewhere in the center of your chest in a way that confuses you so completely that you go still for half a second.

"There you are."

Dean's voice is light. His eyes are not.

He's looking at you first, then at Logan, and his face is doing something careful and controlled that makes your stomach drop.

"Having fun?" he asks, and the question is aimed at you but his gaze has moved to Logan.

"Logan was just keeping me company while you were-"

"She's all yours, man," Logan says, easy, and steps back, and lifts his cup in a loose salute, and disappears into the crowd like it was nothing.

To him, it probably was.

Dean takes your hand and his grip is tight and the rest of the night has a tension threaded through it that you spend the whole drive home trying to rationalize away.

---

The third time is the smallest thing. Somehow it's the worst.

You're at the hockey house again, you're always at the hockey house, this has simply become a feature of your life. It's one of those rare quiet evenings with you and Dean and Logan and Garrett watching film from last week's game.

Dean falls asleep twenty minutes in. This is not unusual. You look at him for a moment with something soft and helpless in your chest.

You love him. You need to keep remembering that.

You get up to get water from the kitchen. Logan follows, not in any loaded way, he's been sitting too long, he needs to move. You've noticed he does that.

You fill your glass at the tap. Logan leans against the counter. There's an easy silence between you, the kind you've never had to manufacture, and you're not thinking about anything in particular, you're just standing in a kitchen getting a glass of water.

"He's been stressed," Logan says.

You look over. "Dean?"

"Yeah." He turns his cup in his hands. "About the season. His dad's coming to the game next weekend and he's not great at talking about it."

"I know," you say, a little quietly.

"He loves you," Logan says, completely even. "Genuinely. He talks about you when you're not around and it's kind of obnoxious, honestly."

You laugh and look up. Logan is watching you with an expression you can't quite read and the laugh fades and the kitchen is quiet and you feel, for just a moment, like the air in the room has changed slightly.

Then it's gone. You don't even know if it was real.

"Logan-" you start, though you have no idea what you were going to say.

"Get some sleep tonight," he says, already pushing off the counter. "He needs you tomorrow."

And he walks back into the living room.

You stand there holding your glass of water, and you feel something that you don't examine, something you close a door on quickly and firmly.

---

The fight happens on a Wednesday.

It starts small, they always do, with Dean saying something offhand about the Sig Tau party. About how you and Logan looked comfortable. You say it was just dancing. He says he knows that. And then somehow twenty minutes later you're both standing in his room saying things that are too loud and too honest.

"It's just the way you two are," Dean says. "There's this whole-I don't even know how to explain it, Y/n. I just see something."

"There is nothing to see." You mean it. Completely. "Dean, I love you. I am with you. Logan is your best friend and I have never-"

"I know you haven't." He drags a hand through his hair. "I don't think you've done anything. I just think-" He stops. "Never mind."

"Say it."

"I don't want to say it."

"Dean."

He looks at you for a long moment. "I think whatever it is, it means something to you."

The room goes very quiet.

"I love you," you say, and your voice cracks slightly. "I am standing right here and I love you and I need you to believe that."

And Dean crosses the room and holds you, and you press your face into his shoulder and you think about how real this is, how much you want it to be the only thing you feel.

"I believe you," he says against your hair.

But you stay up half the night with his arm around you and your eyes open, and you feel like something is fraying somewhere you can't reach, and you don't know how to stop it.

---

The game against Eastwood is supposed to be a statement game.

You watch from the stands with your scarf pulled up to your chin, and you can see it from the first period - something is wrong.

Dean and Logan, who have always had an almost irritating natural chemistry on the ice, are completely off. Missing passes by inches. Getting in each other's way. Playing like two people who have never met.

By the second period the crowd has gone restless, and you can see Coach Jensen on the bench looking like he's considering early retirement.

It's Garrett who holds it together, redistributing plays on the fly and dragging the team forward almost through sheer force of will. When the final buzzer goes, the win feels more like a rescue operation than a victory.

You find Dean after in the concourse and he hugs you and he smells like ice and sweat and he seems lighter, like the win burned something off. You hug him back hard.

"Party at the house tonight," he says. "You're coming, right?"

"Obviously," you say.

---

You arrive at the hockey house at ten, a little later than you meant to, and it's already loud in the way that only a hockey house after a win can be. Every light is on, music too high, someone in the backyard doing something inadvisable.

You move through the crowd looking for Dean. He texted you twenty minutes ago but hasn't responded since, which is normal for a party.

Not in the kitchen. Not on the back porch. You check the living room twice.

Garrett finds you near the bottom of the stairs looking uncertain, and something moves across his face.

"Have you seen Dean?" you ask.

A beat too long before he answers. "I think he went upstairs."

You head up.

The hallway is quieter, just the muffled bass from below. You knock on Dean's door out of habit. It swings open, unlatched, and you stop-

Dean.

And Allie.

Dean and Allie, eyes now wide as they realize who is at the door.

They break apart.

Everything in your body goes cold and then immediately, searingly hot.

"Y/n-" Dean is on his feet. He looks horrified, which is somehow worse than anything else, because at least if he looked defiant you'd know what to do.

"What is this," you say. Your voice comes out completely flat.

"It was nothing, it was just-" Allie is talking but there is a ringing in your ears that swallows her words whole.

"Don't," you say to Dean. Just that. Don't.

He takes a step toward you and something inside your chest tears and it moves through your whole body, and you hear yourself say, in a voice you barely recognize: "How could you do this."

"Y/n, please, I didn't-"

"I stood in front of you," you say, and your voice is rising now, all that cold shock burning off into something rawer. "I told you I loved you. I told you nothing was happening. I chose you, Dean, I kept choosing you-"

You can't finish. There are people in the hallway now, you can feel them, and you cannot be in this room, you cannot look at his face for one more second.

You walk back out the door. Down the hall. Down the stairs. Through the crowd without seeing any of it. Out the front door.

You don't look back.

---

December in Hastings is brutal, and you didn't bring a heavy enough coat because you were supposed to be inside, because you were supposed to be at a party where your boyfriend was happy to see you.

You walk. You don't know where you're going, just away. Away from the house and the music and the look on Dean's face. The tears dry almost instantly in the cold.

You are three blocks away when you hear boots on the pavement behind you.

"Y/n."

Logan.

"Go back inside," you say without stopping.

"It's fifteen degrees."

"I know what temperature it is."

"Y/n." He falls into step beside you, not touching you, just there. "I saw you leave."

"Then you know I don't want to talk."

"I'm not trying to make you talk."

You stop walking.

Logan stops beside you. He's in his team hoodie, which is not nearly warm enough either, keys in one hand,.

"What did he do," he says. Not quite a question.

"Don't ask me that right now."

He nods. Doesn't ask.

"I have my truck," he says. "Let me drive you home."

"You don't have to-"

"You're not walking home alone at fifteen degrees." His voice is quiet but there's something firm underneath it. "Come with me."

You look at him for a moment in the dark, "Okay."

You ride in silence for a few minutes. The heat comes on. The radio is low. Hastings moves past the windows.

"He cheated on me," you say eventually. Flat. Strange sounding.

Logan's hands tighten slightly on the wheel. He doesn't say anything.

"Allie Hayes." You don't know why you say her name. Like the detail matters. "I went up to find him and he was with Allie Hayes."

"Y/n-"

"I don't want you to say you're sorry." Your voice comes out sharper than you mean it to. "I don't want- just don't do the thing where you're nice about it."

He goes quiet. Keeps driving.

And that's somehow what breaks it open. It's the silence, the patience of it, the fact that he just absorbs it without pushing back.

Something rises in your chest that has nothing to do with Dean, and everything to do with the person sitting twelve inches away from you, and you hate it, you hate yourself for it, you hate that even right now, even in the middle of this, you are aware of him in a way you can't turn off.

"Pull over," you say.

"What?"

"Logan, pull over."

He does. A quiet side street. Engine idling.

You stare at the dashboard for a moment and try to find the right words and can't find them and say the wrong ones instead: "This is your fault."

The air in the truck changes.

"Okay," he says. Careful.

"I mean it." You turn to look at him and you don't care what your face looks like right now. "I told Dean nothing was happening. Over and over and over, I told him. And I meant it - I wasn't going to do anything, I would never have-" Your throat tightens. "But I wasn't being honest. Not completely. Because something was happening, even if it was only in my own head, even if I never-" You stop. Press the heels of your hands to your eyes. "I don't even know what it is. That's the thing. I don't know what to call it or where it came from-" You make a helpless sound. "I thought I'd be fine, I'd be with Dean and I'd be fine, and then you'd be there, and it would be this- I don't know. I don't know what it was."

Logan is very still.

"And he knew," you say. "He saw it before I even- he kept telling me and I kept telling him he was wrong." Your voice breaks. "I believed I was telling him the truth."

"Y/n-"

"I can't be around you anymore."

Logan doesn't move.

"I can't keep doing this thing where we're just- fine, where everything is easy, and I sit next to you and nothing happens and I go home and I feel like I've done something wrong even though I haven't." You're crying now, properly, and you hate it.

"Whatever this is, it's the reason everything just fell apart. Maybe not the only reason. Maybe Dean would've-" You exhale sharply. "But I spent three months feeling guilty about something I couldn't even explain and lying to myself about why and I can't-" Your voice gives out.

You press your fingers over your mouth and breathe.

"I can't be around you," you say quietly. "I need you to understand that. It's not- I'm not blaming you for what he did. I know that's not fair. But I can't keep being near you and pretending I understand why it feels the way it does, because I don't. I don't understand it and I can't afford to figure it out right now."

The silence that follows is the worst one you've ever sat in.

Logan's hands are on the wheel. He's staring straight ahead. You watch something work in his jaw, once, and then go still.

"You don't have to decide anything tonight," he says, very quietly.

"I think I already have."

"Y/n." Your name in his mouth, rough at the edges in a way you've never heard from him. He still doesn't look at you. "You walked out of a party where your boyfriend just-" He stops. Jaw tight. Starts again. "You don't have to make permanent decisions right now."

You look at his profile in the dark , the set of his jaw, the way he's holding himself very still, and you feel the whole weight of everything you've never said pressing behind your sternum and you think about how stupid this is, how none of it ever needed to be this complicated, and you look away.

"Take me home," you say.

He does.

He pulls up in front of your building and puts it in park and neither of you moves for a second. Then you reach for the door.

"Y/n."

You pause. Half-in, half-out.

Logan is looking at the steering wheel. His voice, when it comes, is low and careful. "For what it's worth-" He stops. Shakes his head once, like he's thought better of whatever he was going to say. "Go inside. It's cold."

You get out of the truck.

And you don't look back.

You make it through the front door and down the hall and into your dorm and you sink down onto the floor with your back against the door and you cry.

You cry for Dean, who you loved and who broke your heart.

You cry for yourself, for three months of feeling guilty over something you never even let yourself look at.

And somewhere underneath all of it, quiet and shapeless and without a name, you cry for something else entirely.

"Are you sureeee it's okay if I borrow your car?" You drew the word out, hovering by the door with your bag slung over one shoulder and Logan's keys dangling from two fingers like you were holding a live wire instead of a key ring. "I know it's like your baby."

Logan didn't even look up from where he was crouched in front of the TV, untangling a controller cord that didn't need untangling. "Take the truck, Y/N."

"I'm serious. If I so much as scratch it, I feel like you'd actually leave me."

That got him to look up. He grinned at you, that lazy, lopsided grin that still did something stupid to your stomach even after you'd seen it approximately four thousand times. "Babe. I built that engine with my own two hands. I've replaced the transmission. I know that truck better than I know most people." He stood, crossed the room, and looped his arms around your waist. "And I'd still rather you have it than take the bus in this weather."

"The bus isn't that bad."

"The bus is practically a crime and you know it."

You laughed, leaning into him. "Okay, fine, the bus is pretty nasty. But you love that truck more than you love Garrett."

"Hard to say," Garrett called from the couch, not looking away from the screen where he was loading up whatever game they'd decided was going to eat their Thursday night. "I'd say it's close."

"It's not close," Logan said. "But Y/N's not taking the bus to rehearsal in the snow, so." He shrugged like it settled the matter, because to him, it did. He pressed a kiss to your temple. "Me and Garrett are staying in tonight anyway. Full video game lineup. Garrett bought snacks that are concerning in quality."

"They're concerning in quantity," Garrett corrected. "I only bought the good kind."

You rolled your eyes, smiling softly. The kind of smile that came easy around him these days, easier than it used to come around anyone. Six months in and John Logan still looked at you like you'd personally hung the moon, like letting you borrow the one material possession he actually cared about was the simplest decision in the world.

"You're a sap," you told him, grabbing your bag again.

"I'm aware."

You kissed him on your way to the door. Quick, easy, the kind of kiss you don't think twice about because you assume there will be a thousand more just like it. He caught your wrist before you could pull all the way back.

"Drive safe," he said.

"Yes, dad," you said, smirking, and ducked out before he could swat at you.

He laughed, shaking his head as the door shut behind you, and turned back to Garrett and the controllers and the concerning amount of snacks, already thinking about absolutely nothing important at all.

---

It was snowing harder than the forecast had promised, the kind of fat, fast snow that turned headlights into smears and made every taillight ahead look like it was floating. You drove careful. Drove the way you always drove when it wasn't your car. Slow on the turns, hands at ten and two, radio low enough that you could hear road noise change under the tires.

You did everything right.

You just couldn't control the truck that came through the intersection against the light, going twice the speed the weather allowed, driven by someone who'd had more to drink than they should have before they got behind the wheel.

It happened too fast to be anything but a blur. A blur of headlights where there shouldn't have been headlights. A blur of sound, metal folding, glass giving way all at once.

Then there was nothing.

---

Back at the house, the TV glowed blue against the dark living room, gunfire and explosions filling the silence between Logan and Garrett's trash talk. It was a good night. An easy night. The kind of night where nothing was supposed to happen.

Logan's phone had been buzzing on the couch cushion for almost a full minute before he even registered it.

"You gonna get that?" Garrett asked, eyes still on the screen.

"It's not important." Logan glanced at it without picking it up. Couldn't be Y/N. You'd be deep in rehearsal by now, phone shoved in your bag.

But the phone didn't stop. It rang out, went silent for three seconds, and started right back up again.

"Dude," Garrett said, finally looking over. "That's like the third time."

Logan sighed, paused the game, and grabbed the phone off the cushion, already annoyed at whoever was about to ruin the one quiet night he'd had in weeks.

DEAN.

Logan answered. "Dude, what-"

The sound that came through the line wasn't words at first. It was breath. A long, shaking exhale, the kind you make when something terrible almost happened and didn't, the relief so big it comes out sounding like it hurts.

"Logan. Oh my god. Logan, you're okay. You're actually-" Dean's voice cracked, words tripping over each other. "Tucker and I were driving back from the rink, man, and there was this accident, this horrible accident, the one car was wrapped around the pole, it was - I swear to god it looked exactly like your truck. I thought - I genuinely thought it was you, I've been calling for like five minutes straight, I thought-"

The words were coming too fast, tumbling over one another, but Logan's brain had already snagged on one phrase and gone perfectly, horribly still.

Your truck.

"What," Logan said. His voice didn't sound like his own voice. "What car. What - Dean, where."

Something in his tone must have shifted, because Dean's rambling cut off mid-sentence. "Logan?"

He couldn't answer. His chest had gone tight in a way that didn't make sense, in a way his body understood a full beat before his brain caught up, because Y/N had the truck. Y/N had taken his truck to rehearsal tonight. Y/N was somewhere out on those roads, in the snow, in his car, and Dean was talking about an accident, an accident that looked exactly like-

"Logan?" Garrett's voice this time, closer. He'd set down his own controller, was watching Logan's face do something he'd clearly never seen it do before. "Logan, what's wrong?"

Logan couldn't speak. The phone was still pressed to his ear, Dean saying his name over and over on the other end, and Logan's vision had gone strange and tunneled, like the room had tilted three degrees to the left.

Garrett pulled the phone gently out of his hand. "Dean, it's Garrett. What's going on."

Logan watched his best friend's face change as Dean explained. Watched it go from confused to alarmed to something carefully, deliberately calm, the kind of calm Garrett only put on when something was actually, seriously wrong.

"Where," Garrett said. A pause. "Okay. Okay, listen to me. Y/N had the truck tonight. She took it to rehearsal." Another pause. Logan watched Garrett's jaw tighten, watched him glance over with an expression he was clearly trying to keep from cracking. "Yeah. Yeah, man, I know. We're coming, we're coming right now."

He hung up. Looked at Logan, who hadn't moved from the couch, who was staring at nothing with his hands shaking in his lap.

"Logan. Hey. We have to go right now."

Logan didn't remember standing up. Didn't remember his shoes, or the door, or Garrett's hand wrapped around his arm steering him toward the car because Logan's legs weren't entirely cooperating, weren't entirely sure how walking worked anymore. There was a roaring in his ears that wouldn't quit, a single thought looping over and over with nowhere to go and no way to make it stop:

You could be gone. You could already be gone and he let you take the truck and he told you to drive safe like that would be enough, like saying it would actually protect you.

He didn't know what to do with that thought. He'd never had to know what to do with a thought like that before.

The drive to the accident site took eleven minutes. It felt like eleven years.

When they pulled up, the scene was lit up in flashing red and blue, snow falling sideways through the lights, and Logan's whole body went cold the second he saw it.

The truck, his truck, crumpled in on the driver's side like a soda can, the front end accordioned around a light pole, glass scattered across the asphalt in a wide glittering fan. The driver's door was completely caved. The roof had buckled on one side.

He was out of the car before Garrett had even put it in park.

"Logan-!"

He didn't hear him. He was walking toward it, faster, then running, some animal part of his brain refusing to accept what his eyes were telling him until he was close enough to see every detail. The caved door. The spiderwebbed windshield. The dark stain on the snow beneath the wreckage that he refused to let himself look at directly.

His knees gave out.

He didn't decide to fall. The ground just came up to meet him, and then he was on his knees in the snow and the cold and the wreckage of the only thing in his life he'd ever built with his own hands, and the sound that came out of him didn't feel like it belonged to him at all. Something raw and wrecked, a sob ripped loose from somewhere underneath every other feeling he'd ever had.

"Logan." Garrett was there, hands under his arms, hauling him half-upright even as Logan's whole body shook. "Logan, hey. Look at me. You gotta breathe, man."

"That's my car," Logan said, and it didn't come out as words so much as a gasp, splintered and wet. "That's - Garrett, that's my car, she was in my car, Y/N was-"

"I know. I know." Garrett's voice cracked too now, holding him up even as his own eyes went glassy. "We don't know anything yet. You gotta breathe."

Headlights swung in behind them. Dean and Tucker, out of the car before it had fully stopped, and then there were four of them in the snow, the boys flanking Garrett, all three of them holding Logan up like he might shatter if they let go, because he might.

He genuinely might.

Tucker peeled off toward one of the officers standing near the wreckage. Logan watched him through a blur of tears and snowfall, watched him talking, gesturing, watched the officer's expression shift when he glanced over at Logan.

Tucker came back. His face was pale and carefully empty.

"They took her to Hastings General," he said quietly. "That's all they'd tell me."

"We have to go," Logan said, except his voice barely worked. "We have to go, we have to-"

"We're going," Garrett said. "Right now. Come on."

Logan didn't remember the drive to the hospital. Not really. He remembered being in the back seat, wedged between Garrett and Dean like they thought he might try to climb out at a red light, like he was something fragile that needed containing. He remembered staring at his own hands and not recognizing them. He remembered Tucker driving too fast and nobody telling him to slow down.

He felt like a shell. Like someone had scooped everything out of him and left the outline standing.

The waiting room was too bright. Fluorescent and humming and smelling like antiseptic, every chair the same shade of blue. Logan sat in one of them with his hands clasped so tight between his knees his knuckles had gone white, staring at a spot on the floor like it might tell him something.

Allie and Hannah arrived not long after. Garrett had texted them from the car, hands shaking too badly to call. Hannah went straight to Garrett, and Allie crouched in front of Logan's chair and took both of his hands in hers without saying anything at all, because there wasn't anything to say yet.

Your family was three states away, too far to do anything but wait by a phone for updates Allie had promised to send the second there was something to send. Which meant in that waiting room, in that moment, Allie's hands wrapped around Logan's were the closest thing to family in the building.

Nobody spoke much after that. There wasn't anything to fill the silence with that didn't sound stupid. So they just sat.

Hours passed in the kind of slow, syrupy way that only happens in hospital waiting rooms. Someone got coffee at some point. Nobody drank it. Garrett had his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. Dean kept checking his phone and then putting it face-down. Tucker stared at the wall across from him like it was the most captivating thing in the world.

Logan didn't cry again during any of it. He didn't have anything left. He just sat there, hollowed out, running the same loop: drive safe, drive safe, I told her drive safe, like the words had failed some sacred duty he hadn't known he'd given them.

It was well past midnight, everyone's eyes red-rimmed and swollen, when a doctor finally pushed through the double doors and scanned the room.

"Family of Y/N L/N?"

Every single one of them stood up at once.

The doctor's eyes found Allie. "You're listed as her emergency contact?"

Allie nodded, voice already cracking. "Yes. That's me."

"Can I speak with you for a moment?"

Logan watched them step aside. Watched the doctor talk low and measured. Watched Allie's hand fly up to cover her mouth. Every second felt like a year. He didn't breathe the entire time.

When Allie came back, her face was wet and streaked with mascara.

"She's-" Allie's voice broke immediately. She tried again. "She's in pretty bad shape. Broken wrist, broken leg, some internal bruising, a lot of cuts from the glass. She's still not conscious. But-" she pressed a hand flat to her own chest like she needed to hold something in, "-the doctor said given how bad it looked, she's going to be okay. She's going to be okay."

Logan's knees buckled for the second time that night. Garrett and Dean both caught him, lowering him back into the chair, and his whole body shook with something that wasn't quite crying and wasn't quite laughing and was somehow both at once.

The relief was so enormous it felt indistinguishable from grief.

"They said we can go back, a couple at a time," Allie said, wiping her face. She looked at Garrett, then at Logan. "Take him first."

The hallway felt impossibly long. Logan's legs barely worked, Garrett's hand steady against his back the entire way. When they reached the door and the nurse pointed them inside, Logan stopped in the doorway.

You looked so small in the bed.

Smaller than he'd ever seen you look. Swallowed by white sheets and the soft mechanical beeping of monitors, a cast running up your left leg, another cast cradling your left wrist. Cuts crossed your face and neck in thin red lines, some of them stitched, all of them stark against skin gone pale from blood loss and shock. There was a bruise blooming dark along your jaw.

The sob came up out of him before he could stop it.

"Hey." Garrett's hand tightened on his shoulder. "She's okay. She's right here."

Logan crossed the room and sank into the chair beside the bed. He took your right hand, the unbroken one, as carefully as if it might shatter too, and held it. He ran his thumb slowly over your knuckles, over and over.

Some old animal instinct: if he just kept touching you, kept feeling the warmth of your skin and the faint pulse under his fingers, his body might finally believe that you were still here. Still real.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly, even though you couldn't hear him. Even though there was nothing for him to apologize for and he still needed to say it. "I should've driven you. I should've never let you take it in the snow."

His breathing started to even out eventually. Slow and ragged, then steadier. Grounded in the feel of your hand in his. Garrett stood quiet in the corner and didn't say anything because there wasn't anything that needed saying.

It was almost an hour later when your fingers twitched.

Logan's head snapped up. "Y/N?"

Your eyes moved first, slow and heavy, fighting against whatever they'd given you for the pain. When they finally found him, hazy at first and then sharpening, something in Logan's chest cracked open all over again.

"Logan?" Your voice came out wrecked, barely there. Confusion clouded your face as you took in the room, the machines, the cast on your arm. "What - where am I, what happened-"

"You were in an accident." He barely got the words out. His free hand came up to brush hair gently back from one of the cuts on your forehead. "Someone ran the light. You're at the hospital. You're okay."

Your eyes filled. Tears slipped down over the cuts on your cheeks, and your grip on his hand tightened as much as it could.

"Your car," you whispered. The horror dawned across your face almost immediately, cutting right through the fog of painkillers and shock. "Logan, your car. I wrecked your car. I'm so sorry. You built that whole engine, I-"

And Logan, despite everything, despite every awful hour of that night, laughed. An actual laugh, involuntary, and completely disbelieving. Because of course. Of course that was the first thing out of your mouth. Half-conscious, covered in stitches, and already worried about the truck.

"Are you serious right now," he said.

"It was your baby," you mumbled, fresh tears slipping free, which only made it worse somehow.

"Yeah." He exhaled, shook his head. Looked at you. At the cuts and the bruises and the cast, and at the fact that you were awake and looking back at him, which was the only thing that actually mattered. "It's also just a truck, Y/N."

"That you built."

"That I can rebuild." He said it flatly, like it was obvious, because to him it was. "I know how to fix the truck. I had no idea what I was gonna do about the other thing."

You stared at him for a second. "The other thing."

"You. The other thing is you."

You let out a short, wet laugh and immediately winced. "That's the most you've ever said about your feelings in six months."

"Don't push it. You're on drugs."

"I'm retaining every word of this."

"You're really not," he said. "Go back to sleep."

"I just woke up."

"Go back to sleep anyway."

You laughed again, quieter this time.

Outside the door, Garrett slipped out into the hallway to tell the others. Down toward the waiting room, the group of exhausted friends with red-rimmed eyes would fall apart all over again, this time in relief. But Logan didn't think about any of that. He just sat there holding your hand, listening to the monitors beep their steady, boring rhythm.

"Drive safe," Logan murmured, "really does mean something, you know."

"I'll remember that," you whispered back, "next time I steal your truck."

"There's not gonna be a next time."

"There's absolutely gonna be a next time."

Four days and one brutal hangover later, you were fine.

You were completely, totally, absolutely fine.

You were fine in the way that meant you'd gotten very good at performing fine, which was a skill you'd apparently had your whole life and had only recently begun to notice the cost of.

You were fine when Garrett texted you good morning with a photo of the dining hall's sad Tuesday breakfast spread. You were fine when Hannah checked in and you told her you were doing better. You were fine sitting in your 8 AM lecture not eating anything because you'd woken up twenty minutes late and told yourself you'd grab something after, and then after came and went, and now it was 11 and you were on your third coffee and the granola bar at the bottom of your bag had been there since Thursday.

The grade calculator was still open in a tab you kept minimizing and reopening. You knew the numbers by heart at this point, which maybe meant you should stop running them, but you kept running them anyway.

The bad exams - the ones you'd told yourself were just a rough patch, just a bad week, just temporary - hadn't been temporary. They'd compounded. Missed readings had turned into missed concepts had turned into two midterms where you'd sat in the exam room and felt the material slide sideways out of your grasp. The grades had come back and they were bad, and then the next ones had come back and they were worse.

You weren't on academic probation. Not yet. If your GPA slipped any lower - if you didn't ace everything left - then you would be.

You didn't let yourself think about it in full. You just ran the numbers. Over and over. You minimized the tab and reopened it and ran the numbers again.

You were, currently, on your third coffee and had eaten half a granola bar since yesterday afternoon.

Fine, you thought, clicking to a new tab. Absolutely fine.

---

You'd been in the library for four hours when Garrett found you.

You hadn't told him you were here. You'd silenced your phone at noon and tucked it face-down under your notebook, which you told yourself was for focus. The other part was that every time he texted you something sweet and normal, some small affectionate thing that cost him nothing, you felt the guilt accumulate in your chest.

He was being so careful. You could feel him being careful, the slightly-more-frequent check-ins, the way he phrased things as just wanted to say hi instead of how are you, giving you room without making it a production.

It was making you want to disappear.

So you were in the library, third floor, the section nobody used because it was all periodicals from 2003. Your notes were spread across most of the table. The grade calculator was open again. You'd been staring at it for twenty minutes without actually doing anything.

You didn't hear him until he was right there.

He didn't say anything. He just slid a paper bag onto the corner of the table - Malone's, your usual order - and sat down in the chair beside you like he'd been planning to be there all along.

You stared at the bag. Then at him.

He was already looking at his phone, one leg stretched out, the other pressed against yours under the table.

"How did you know I was here?"

"You have a library card tap on your student account." He didn't look up. "Hannah mentioned you'd gone out this morning."

"You're not supposed to be able to see that."

"I'm not." A pause. "Eat your wrap."

You looked at the bag. Your stomach did something complicated — hunger, shame, guilt — and you pulled it toward you without saying anything else.

The wrap was warm. You ate half of it before you remembered you'd been starving, and then ate the rest faster, and when you looked up Garrett still hadn't looked away from his phone.

He had, you noticed, the smallest smile.

You looked back at your notes. Minimized the grade calculator. Reopened it. Closed it for real this time.

For a while there was nothing but the quiet of the third floor and the scratch of your pen and the occasional scroll-sound from his phone, his leg steady and warm against yours.

It was the nicest thing anyone had done for you in weeks and it was also, quietly, eating you up inside.

You pulled your notes closer and tried to focus.

At some point - twenty minutes later, maybe thirty - you felt him shift, and then his chin was briefly at your shoulder as he looked at the page.

"Is that even English?"

You laughed.

It came out before you could stop it, and you put your hand over your mouth like you could take it back, and when you looked at him he was already looking back at his phone. The small smile still there.

"It's organic chemistry," you said.

"That's not what I asked."

"Garrett."

"I'm just saying. That looks like a cry for help written in highlighter."

"There's a color system."

He looked at the page again, at the four different colors of highlighting, at the margin notes that had started running up the sides because you'd run out of room. "Babe." He said it gently. "There are six colors."

"The orange is a subsystem."

He looked at you.

You looked at him.

"Okay," he said, in the voice of someone who had decided to love you exactly as you were, chaos color-coding and all, and went back to his phone.

He stayed for two hours. He didn't ask you what was wrong. He didn't ask why your phone was face-down or why you'd been in the library since noon or what the numbers on the top of the page meant - the ones you'd circled in red, the grades, the running average that kept coming out the same no matter how many times you recalculated it. He just stayed, leg resting against yours.

You thought about the grade calculator. About four weeks and what it would mean if you couldn't fix it all.

You pressed your knee harder against his, and he pressed back without looking up, and you didn't say any of it. You just worked. And he stayed.

When you finally packed up your notes - eyes burning from the hours of reading - he walked you back to your dorm with his hand warm around yours, and at your door he kissed you once, soft and unhurried, like he had all the time in the world.

"Get some sleep," he said, against your hair.

"I'm fine," you said, automatically.

He pulled back just enough to look at you. The look that said I know and I'm not going to push.

"Sleep," he said again, soft. And let you go.

You leaned against your closed door for a long time after.

---

Three days later, on a Thursday, you went to the hockey house to pick up Garrett and ended up waiting in the living room because he'd texted five more minutes roughly twenty minutes ago.

You sat on the couch with your laptop and your notes and your color-coded highlighters and tried to get something done.

"You're in my spot."

You didn't look up. "Your name isn't on it."

"My name is absolutely on it." Dean dropped onto the opposite end of the couch, feet swinging up onto the coffee table, with the energy of someone who had never once felt like an inconvenience in his life. You envied him sometimes. "Move over."

"There are three other cushions."

"I have a system."

You looked up. He pointed at the far left cushion with great seriousness. You sighed and shifted six inches. He immediately sprawled into the space like he'd claimed a country.

"Thank you," he said. "This is much better."

"You're a menace."

"I prefer force of nature." He looked at your screen. Made a face. "Is that the organic chemistry thing?"

"How do you know about my organic chemistry thing?"

"Garrett mentioned you've been doing something he described as 'color-coded suffering.'" He tilted his head at the screen. "He's not wrong."

You closed the laptop slightly. "He talked to you about my studying."

"He talks to me about everything. It's one of the great burdens of being his best friend. I know more about your coffee order than I know about my own family members." He said this completely without self-pity, in the flat tone of someone reciting facts. "You get oat milk even though you claim not to care about dairy. He thinks it's because you actually care about dairy but don't want to seem high maintenance at coffee shops."

You stared at him.

"He's not wrong, is he," Dean said.

"That's-" You stopped. "That's extremely specific."

"He pays attention to everything. It's genuinely concerning." Dean picked up the TV remote, looked at it, set it back down. "He skated into the boards yesterday, by the way. At practice."

"What? Is he okay?"

"Completely fine, thanks for asking, it was hilarious." Dean's expression was deeply satisfied. "You'd texted him. I watched it happen in real time. One second he's running a drill, next second he's checking his phone like a golden retriever who heard a treat bag, then-" He made a sound effect. "Boards. Full speed." A pause. "Coach made him skate laps."

"Oh my god."

"I have zero sympathy. For either of you." He pointed at you. "You made my best friend skate into a wall."

"I texted him about my chemistry notes-"

"And he skated into a wall. That's on you." He seemed genuinely pleased about this. Then, in a tone that was casual enough to be deliberate: "You eaten today?"

The shift was fast enough that you almost missed it. Almost.

"Yeah," you said. A beat too late.

Dean looked at you. Not for long. Just a second, just long enough for you to see it - and then he looked back at the TV like he'd never asked.

"Cool," he said.

"Dean-"

"There's leftover pasta in the fridge. Tucker made too much, as he always does, because he cooks like he's feeding a village." He picked up the remote again. "Just saying."

You looked at him. He was scrolling through channels with complete disinterest.

"You're not going to make it weird?" you said.

"I said there's pasta. I'm not giving you a TED talk." He landed on some sports recap show. "I do that once per crisis and I used mine at the party." He glanced at you sideways. "You're welcome, by the way."

"I thanked you."

"Not enough." But there was no real edge to it. Just Dean, comfortable in his own skin, watching sports highlights. "Garrett's probably another fifteen minutes."

You opened your laptop again.

You went and got the pasta five minutes later. You didn't say anything about it. Neither did he.

When you came back and sat down, he moved over exactly six inches without being asked, making just enough room. You ate. He watched his show.

It was the second nicest thing anyone had done for you all week.

---

The invitation came at 7 PM the next day, after a four-hour study session that had started to feel less like studying and more like sitting in front of words until they stopped meaning anything.

Garrett's name on your screen.

You picked up on the second ring.

"Malone's," he said, by way of greeting. "Everyone's going. Come."

You looked at your notes. At the grade calculator still open in a tab, the numbers you'd been rearranging all afternoon. If you aced the next two exams and the final paper came back strong, the math was possible. Barely.

"I don't know," you started.

"Y/N." His voice was warm and easy, no pressure in it. "You've been studying since noon. Come out for a couple hours. We don't have to stay late."

You thought about the grade calculator. About the math that only worked if everything went right.

You thought about how much you wanted, desperately, to just be normal for one night.

"Okay," you said.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Give me twenty minutes."

He made a sound that was embarrassingly close to delighted, and you smiled into the phone before you could stop yourself. "See you soon," he said, like that was the best thing he'd heard all day.

You meant to eat something before you left.

You forgot.

---

Malone's was exactly the kind of loud that used to feel like relief.

The team was already at two pushed-together tables in the back, the particular chaos of hockey players who'd had a decent practice and were feeling it. Garrett found you at the door before you'd even gotten your coat off, hand finding the small of your back, pressing a kiss to your temple.

"Hey," he said, into your hair.

"Hey," you said back.

He kept his arm around you as you made your way to the tables, and for a little while it worked - the normalcy you'd been chasing. Someone made a joke. You laughed at it. Hannah and Allie were there. Hannah caught your eye across the table and smiled and you smiled back, real, actual.

Garrett was pulled into a conversation about the upcoming game on your left, animated and certain the way he was when he talked about hockey, and you felt yourself lean into his shoulder a little even as he gestured.

You were going to order something to eat.

There was a menu in your hands and everything on it looked fine and you just needed a minute to look at it properly because the words were doing something slightly blurry and you'd been staring at text for six hours and it would all be clearer in a minute.

Someone asked you something across the table. You answered. You laughed when the response was funny. You were very good at this, the performing fine.

Tucker said something about the power play. Garrett leaned forward, and you set the menu down meaning to pick it up again in a second, and then the second passed and someone else said something and then Garrett's hand found your knee under the table, warm and absentminded, just there, and you thought -

After this drink, I'll order something.

After this.

An hour passed. Then close to two.

The accidently not-eating had stopped feeling like hunger around the ninety-minute mark and started feeling like something else. The edges of things felt slightly further away than they should have been, sounds arriving a half-second late, the overhead lights doing something they hadn't been doing when you'd walked in.

You told yourself it was the noise. You told yourself you just needed air.

You were fine.

In a minute, you thought. I'll get some air and then I'll be fine.

You touched Garrett's arm. "Bathroom," you said when he looked at you. "I'll be right back."

He nodded. His eyes moved over your face for a second and you did your best to keep your expression neutral, and he let you go.

You made it past the bar. Past the first set of tables.

The floor felt strange. The kind of strange that meant it was still there but you weren't entirely certain of it, your body suddenly very loud about several things it had been trying to say for a while. Your vision went static at the edges.

Oh, you thought, with a kind of exhausted clarity. Oh, that's not good.

You reached for the wall.

You didn't find it.

Dean caught you.

He'd been at the bar getting a refill. His hands caught your arms before you hit the ground and the next thing you were aware of was the floor, but not hitting it - sitting against it, the wall at your back, Dean crouched in front of you with an expression you'd never seen on him before.

"Hey." His voice was even. "I've got you. Look at me."

You looked at him. The static was still at the edges. "I'm-"

"Don't say fine." He had one hand at your shoulder, steady. His eyes were moving over you, assessing. "Someone get Garrett," he said, without raising his voice, to whoever was behind him. "Now, please."

Please. You'd never heard Dean say please like that.

"I just need a second," you tried.

"You just went down." His hand moved to your wrist, two fingers, checking your pulse like he'd done it before. "When did you last eat?"

The honest answer was the pasta Dean had made you eat at the hockey house, which had been lunch, which had been -

Yesterday.

His expression didn't change but his jaw did. "Okay," he said, and turned his head. "Tucker. Water. Bar, go."

Then there were footsteps, fast and heavy, and Garrett was there.

You watched it happen on his face. Couldn't look away from it even though you wanted to. The second he saw you on the floor, the split second before he got himself under control - something moved through him. The specific fear of someone who'd been halfway worried for weeks and had just found out he was right to be.

He crossed the distance in three steps and dropped to the floor beside you.

"Hey." His hands found your face. "Hey, look at me. Y/N."

"I'm okay," you said. Your voice came out unsteady.

"I know." He said it like it didn't matter whether it was true. His thumbs moved over your cheekbones. "I've got you."

Dean pressed a water bottle into Garrett's hand without being asked. The two of them moved around each other with an ease that meant they'd been friends a long time, no words needed. Garrett opened the bottle for you. You drank.

"She hasn't eaten since yesterday," Dean said, behind Garrett, in a tone that was quiet and not accusatory and somehow that made it worse.

You felt Garrett go very still.

"I meant to," you said, to neither of them.

"I know," Garrett said again. Still not angry. "Can you stand if I help you?"

You nodded.

He got you up like you weighed nothing, arm solid around your waist, and he didn't let go after you were standing. He just recalibrated, hand flat at the small of your back, body angled toward you.

"We're going to sit somewhere quiet," he said. "Okay?"

You nodded.

He looked back at Dean over his shoulder. Something passed between them - a look, brief and complete.

Dean nodded. "I'll handle it," he said, already turning back to the tables, already sliding back into the noise like he'd never left it. Covering. That easily.

Garrett found a booth in the back, half-hidden, away from the noise. He sat you down and then went and got food - actual food, something from the bar menu, not glamorous - and he put it in front of you without ceremony and sat across from you and waited.

"Eat first," he said. "Then we talk."

You looked at the plate. Your throat was tight.

"Garrett..."

"Please." It came out rough at the edges. "Just eat something. Please."

You ate.

He watched you the way he'd been watching you for weeks, that careful attention he thought he was hiding. He wasn't hiding it.

When the plate was half-empty and the static had fully cleared from your vision and you felt more like yourself than you had in hours, you looked up and found him looking back.

"I'm okay," you said.

"I know." He exhaled. "I need you to tell me what's going on."

Your hands were in your lap. You looked at them.

"Y/N."

"My GPA," you said, to your hands. "It's been... those exams at the start of the semester, the ones I told you were just rough patches? They weren't just rough patches. And then I was sick, and the readings kept piling up, and I thought I could catch up but I just kept falling further behind..." Your voice did something you hadn't authorized. You pressed your lips together.

Silence.

"How much do you need on your remaining work?" Garrett said carefully.

"Everything has to go right." You laughed, and it came out broken. "It's not impossible. Technically. If I ace everything left. But I'm so far behind, and every time I think I'm catching up there's something else, and I just-" The words came faster. "I didn't tell you because you have scouts and finals and I-"

You stopped. Started again. "I didn't want to be one more thing you had to manage..."

Garrett went very still.

"That's what she said," you said, before he could. "At the party. Kendall."

He closed his eyes for exactly one second.

"Of course it was." He said it quietly, not quite to you. Then he looked at you, and his expression had shifted into something more deliberate. "She said that to you."

"I wasn't supposed to hear it."

"That doesn't-" He stopped. Exhaled through his nose. "She wanted something she didn't get. With me, before you. And I handled that badly, and apparently she's still-" His jaw tightened. "That's not about you. That was never about you. That was about me, and she aimed it at you."

"Garrett-"

"I'm not done being annoyed about that." He said it flatly. "I'll be done in a second."

A beat. He looked at the table. Came back.

"Okay." He reached across and took both your hands. "I'm done. Keep going."

"...that's it? That's your processing time?"

"I'm a fast processor." His eyes were still a little flat. "Keep going."

"I just-" You exhaled. "I've been so behind, and every time you showed up I felt worse about it. Like you were going out of your way for someone who couldn't even keep it together enough to-" You stopped. Tried again. "You just showed up with food I didn't ask for and sat down like it was nothing. Like it cost you nothing. And I kept thinking, he's going to get tired of this. Of me being like this. And then you just kept showing up anyway."

"I've been showing up at the library," he said, "texting you constantly, bringing you food you didn't ask for - and you thought that was me managing you?"

"Yes," you said, quietly.

"I've been showing up at the library," he said, "texting you constantly, bringing you food you didn't ask for — and you thought that was me managing you."

It wasn't a question. His voice was even.

"Yes," you said, quietly.

"It wasn't." Simple. Flat. Like he was correcting a fact. "I was doing it because I like you." He said it like it was the most straightforward thing in the world. "I really, genuinely, a completely ridiculous amount - like you. Have you not noticed that? I've been making it extremely obvious."

"Garrett..."

"I skated into the boards at practice because you texted me about chemistry notes." He held up a hand. "I got laps for that. Actual laps. And I would do it again." He looked at you, completely serious. "That's where we are. That's how much I like you. I'm not showing up at the library because I feel obligated, I'm showing up at the library because you're there and I'd rather be wherever you are, even if wherever you are is a depressing corner full of fifteen-year-old magazines." His thumb moved over your knuckles. "I don't show up for things I don't want to show up for. You know that about me."

Your eyes were burning again.

"You got laps," you said, because it was the only thing you could manage.

"I got laps," he confirmed. "Completely worth it."

You looked at him for a second, this person who tracked your library card and brought you food and skated into walls over chemistry notes, and something in your chest did something complicated and enormous that you didn't have a word for yet.

"I don't know what to do with you," you said, very quietly.

"You don't have to do anything with me." He said it simply. "That's kind of the point."

You looked down at your hands in his.

"You scared me tonight," he said after a moment. "That's going to take me a minute to get over."

"I know. I'm sorry - I didn't mean to, I just got so caught up in everything. The studying, trying to catch up, and I just..." You shook your head. "I forgot."

He looked at you for a long second.

"Lucky for you that's not really a problem," he said.

"Garrett-"

"I like taking care of you." Simple. Like it was obvious. "So just let me. Okay?"

You looked at him. Thought about arguing. Decided you were too tired.

"Okay," you said quietly.

"Good." He tilted his head slightly. "Also, for the record - you are supposed to be the brains of this operation. It would be genuinely embarrassing for both of us if you ended up with a worse GPA than a hockey player."

You stared at him. "Are you serious right now."

"I'm just saying. I have a 3.1. The bar is right there."

"You have a 3.1?"

"Don't sound so surprised, that's rude."

"I'm not - I'm just-" You pressed your lips together. "You're unbelievable."

"And yet." He was watching you with that look, the one he thought he was hiding. He wasn't hiding it. "There it is."

"There what is."

"That." He nodded at your face. "You almost smiled."

"I did not."

"You did a little."

"Garrett."

"I'll take it." He squeezed your hands once. "You want to do something useful, talk to your advisor Monday. Figure out what your options are."

"I will."

"Good." A beat. "You're not high maintenance. You're just bad at asking for help. Those aren't the same thing." He squeezed your hands once.

Your eyes burned.

"I've got you," he said. Matter-of-fact.

You stayed like that for a while. The noise of Malone's carried on around you, oblivious. In your corner booth it was just this. Your hands finally, finally still.

Dean appeared at the edge of the booth twenty minutes later, hands in his pockets, expression carefully calibrated to neutral.

He looked at you and did a quick inventory the way he always did, fast and thorough.

"You look terrible," he announced.

"Thank you, Dean."

"Much better than twenty minutes ago, though." He leaned against the side of the booth. Looked at Garrett. Something passed between them. "Tucker's telling the thing about the chirp from the Eastwood game. Everyone's distracted. Nobody made it weird."

"Thank you," Garrett said.

Dean waved this off like it was nothing. Because for Dean, it was. He'd covered, he'd handled it.

He looked at you for a second. Then, with the gravity of someone making a formal announcement:

"For the record, I did not catch you because I like you."

You blinked. "...okay."

"It was reflex. Athletic instinct. I would have done it for anyone." He held up a finger. "The point is it wasn't personal."

"Noted."

"Also-" He pointed at the empty plate. "Eat like that every day or I'm going to have to start caring about you, and I have a very full schedule." He pushed off the booth, already turning. "I'm at capacity. Emotionally. No room."

"Dean-"

"Goodnight, Y/N." He walked away with a sly smile and a wink.

Your throat went tight again.

"He loves you," Garrett said. "He just can't say it like a normal person."

"Neither can you, half the time."

He made an offended sound. "I said it literally last week."

"You said, and I quote, 'you're very tolerable for someone who doesn't understand or appreciate the music of Warrant.'"

"That's a compliment."

"That is not a compliment, Garrett."

He laughed and squeezed your hands again.

"I love you," he said. "Like, a completely embarrassing amount. Dean can confirm, he thinks it's a problem."

Your eyes burned again. Different reason.

"I love you too," you said, quiet.

"I know." He held you tighter. "Now let me take you home."

He stayed.

He helped you change into something comfortable and found your water bottle and filled it and put it on your nightstand, and when you got into bed he sat on top of the covers beside you with his back against the headboard, his hand in your hair.

"I'm going to email my advisor tomorrow," you said, to the ceiling.

"Good."

"I don't know what she's going to say."

"That's what tomorrow's for."

"I'm nervous."

"Yeah." His hand stilled briefly, then kept moving. "I know. That's allowed."

You looked up at him.

"You're going to stop disappearing on me," he said. It wasn't a question.

"I'm going to try."

"Close enough." He brushed the hair from your face. "Sleep."

"Bossy."

"Always." He looked at you, soft. "I'm not going anywhere. You know that, right?"

You looked back at him.

"I know," you said.

Eight months in and you still hadn't figured out what to do with being someone's favorite thing.

Garrett wasn't subtle about it. That was the thing, he had absolutely no interest in being subtle about it. He'd find you across a dining hall full of people and his whole face would do something embarrassing. He'd mention you to his teammates with the casual frequency of someone who didn't realize he was doing it, which, according to Dean, he wasn't. He'd show up at your dorm with soup when you were sick, uninvited, unashamed, completely certain he was welcome. He was always welcome. That was the other thing.

Eight months. Long enough that his hoodie had more or less permanently become part of your wardrobe. Long enough that you knew exactly which toothpaste brand he preferred, and that he took his coffee wrong, and that he looked up at the stands exactly once per game - same moment every time, right after warm-ups - just to find you.

You were, by every reasonable metric, fine. Good, even. Happy.

You were also, quietly and without telling anyone, coming apart at the seams.

It hadn't started with anything dramatic. That was the part that made it hard to explain. There was no single thing to point to, no moment where it all went wrong. Just a bad exam grade, then another. Readings piling up in two classes, then three. A cold that moved into your chest three weeks ago and apparently liked it there, the kind of tired that sleep didn't touch.

You'd cancelled plans with Garrett twice. Both times he'd said it's okay, babe, seriously, without missing a beat, and both times something in you had gone slightly sideways, because of course he had. Of course he was fine about it. He was always fine about it, which somehow made it worse, because it meant he was noticing, and adjusting around you, and that meant you were someone who needed adjusting around.

He'd started checking in more. Texts a little more often. Soup you hadn't asked for, dropped off with a knock and a smile like it was nothing.

It was nothing. That was the problem. To him it was nothing, and to you it was accumulating into something you didn't have a word for yet.

Too much, something in the back of your head had started saying. Quietly at first. Then less quietly. You're too much right now.

You were good at ignoring things. You'd been ignoring this for three weeks. You were, it turned out, not as good at it as you'd thought.

The party was Garrett's idea. Well, it was everyone's idea. Briar had won the game 4-1, and the hockey house was the kind of loud that rattled inside your skull pleasantly, all bass and laughter and the clatter of the boys being celebratory and stupid. The living room smelled like beer and Axe and the particular chaos of hockey players who were very pleased with themselves.

You'd smiled through most of it. You were good at that, too.

Garrett had kept you close the whole first hour, arm slung around your shoulders, pressing a kiss to your temple every time someone stopped to talk to him, like punctuation. Hannah had found you at some point and the two of you had ended up in the kitchen with drinks you weren't really finishing, talking about nothing, which was nice.

But Garrett had gotten pulled away - something about Dean needing him, something about the highlight reel someone had pulled up on the TV - and you'd drifted. Which was fine. You were fine.

You'd ended up on the back porch without fully meaning to.

The night air was cold as you leaned against the railing, tipped your head back, and breathed.

You're okay. You're fine. You're at a party celebrating your boyfriend's win and everything is fine.

You heard them before you saw them. Two girls tucked into the corner of the porch, half-hidden by the shadows. You hadn't noticed them when you came out.

You recognized one of them.

Kendall. You'd heard the name in the careful, neutral way girls mentioned names when they meant something. She and Garrett had hooked up before. Before you. It wasn't a big deal. You knew it wasn't a big deal.

You turned slightly away, meaning to go back inside, meaning to just not be here for whatever this was.

But her voice carried.

"-no, I just mean, look at her. She's been off all night."

A murmur from the other girl. You went very still.

"I'm not being mean, I'm just - Garrett has a lot going on. He's got scouts looking at him, he's got finals coming up, and now he's got-" a pause, something that wasn't quite a laugh, "-one more thing to manage."

One more thing to manage.

The words landed somewhere below your sternum and just sat there.

"She seems kind of high maintenance," Kendall continued, quieter now. "I heard she's been sick, like, for weeks, and he's been running over there constantly. He doesn't have time for that. He doesn't have time for someone like- I mean, it's Garrett Graham. He could have-"

You stopped hearing the rest.

Not because they stopped talking, you just stopped being able to take anything in. The world narrowed down to the railing under your hands and the cold air in your lungs and the feeling of something fracturing very quietly behind your eyes.

One more thing to manage.

High maintenance.

He doesn't have time for someone like-

You turned around and went inside.

You went for the kitchen.

There was a handle of something on the counter - vodka, cheap, the kind that came in a plastic bottle - and you poured it into whatever cup was closest without really looking at what was already in it. You drank it faster than you should have. Poured another.

This was not something you did. You were not, by nature, a drink-until-it-goes-away person. You'd watched enough people use that particular coping mechanism to know better. You knew better.

You poured a third.

The thing was, and you understood this even as you were doing it, which somehow made it worse, that the words were just sitting there. One more thing to manage. Right in the center of your chest, perfectly placed, like Kendall had known exactly where to aim. And you needed them to move. You needed them to blur, or soften, or stop feeling so much like the thing you'd already been thinking at three in the morning for the past three weeks.

So you drank.

Hannah found you twenty minutes later, laughing too loudly at something a guy from the lacrosse team had said. She gave you a look, the kind that meant how many is that, and you smiled wide enough that she let it go. Or seemed to. You slipped away before she could ask a follow-up question.

The party had taken on that particular underwater quality that meant the alcohol was working. The edges of everything softened. The bass felt further away. You moved through the living room with the careful precision of someone who knew they were drunk and was trying very hard not to show it, which probably meant you were showing it completely.

Garrett was somewhere in this room. You could feel it the way you always could, that low awareness, like a compass needle swinging north. Normally you'd find him without thinking.

Tonight you turned the other direction.

You grabbed someone's abandoned drink off the end table. You didn't know whose, you didn't care, which was so unlike you that some distant sober part of your brain flinched, and made your way to the other side of the room. Someone pulled you into a conversation about something. You nodded. You laughed when they laughed. You were very good at performing fine, even now, even like this.

But Garrett kept appearing at the edges of things. You'd see his shoulder, the back of his head, catch a flash of his smile across the room, and something in your chest would do that terrible thing it always did.

So you kept moving.

You ended up in the hallway. Then near the stairs. Then, without fully deciding to, on the stairs themselves, sitting halfway up with your cup.

You sat for a while.

The alcohol had moved past the useful stage and into something messier, the kind of drunk where everything felt slightly too large and slightly too true at the same time. Your eyes were doing something embarrassing. You pressed the back of your wrist to them, hard.

You're fine. You're not going to do this here.

You stood up. Gripped the railing. Made it to the top of the stairs on the second try.

The upstairs hallway was dark enough that it felt like breathing room. You leaned against the wall and closed your eyes for a second, just long enough to get your legs back under you. Your dorm key was in your jacket pocket. Your jacket was downstairs. You needed to find it and leave before Garrett realized you'd been avoiding him for an hour, because if he looked at you right now with that face - the one he made when he was worried - you were going to fall apart in the middle of his own party, and you would not do that to him, you refused to do that to him tonight...

You pushed off the wall.

Misjudged the distance to the opposite side of the hallway by about four inches.

The door swung open before you could knock properly, or maybe you knocked wrong, and suddenly there was light and Dean Di Laurentis was right there, some girl half visible behind him, and all three of you stared at each other.

"Bathroom," you said, except it came out slightly sideways.

Dean blinked. Looked at you. Looked at the cup in your hand, mostly empty. Looked back at your face.

Something shifted in his expression, fast and uncharacteristically serious.

"Babe." Not to you. He was already half-turning to the girl, his voice dropped low. "I need a minute."

"You're kidding-"

"I'm really not." A beat. Something in his tone that left no room for argument. "Please."

The girl left in the precise way people left when they were furious and had decided to be graceful about it anyway. You watched her go down the hallway and felt vaguely guilty about it.

Dean stepped back from the doorway. "Get in here."

"I don't need-"

"You just walked into my door."

"I knocked."

"With your face, a little bit." He looked at you levelly. "Get in here."

You got in there.

He closed the door. The noise from downstairs dropped to a murmur.

"How much have you had to drink?"

"That's a weird opener."

"It's a normal question for someone who just almost fell through my door." He crossed his arms, leaning against the wall, "How much."

You thought about lying. Decided it wasn't worth the effort. "Enough."

"Enough," he repeated, in the tone of someone doing math. His eyes moved over you, assessing. Quick and thorough the way athletes were sometimes, used to reading situations fast. "You don't drink like this."

"People drink at parties."

"Not you. Not like-" he gestured vaguely at the cup still in your hand, "-whatever this is." A pause. "What happened?"

"Nothing happened. I'm fine."

"Okay."

You stared at him. He stared back. He did not appear to be in any rush whatsoever.

You hated that. You hated the waiting.

"I overheard something," you said, and the words came out a little slurred at the edges. "On the porch. Kendall - you know who that is?"

Something crossed his face. "Yeah. I know who that is."

"She was talking about me." The cup in your hand felt very heavy suddenly. You set it down on the nearest surface. "She said I was one more thing Garrett had to manage." The words tasted exactly as bad coming out as they had going in. Worse, maybe, because you were saying them out loud now, making them real. "That I was high maintenance. That he didn't have time for someone like me."

Dean was quiet for exactly two seconds.

"She said that."

"She's not wrong, that's the thing." You laughed, and it came out wrong, too bright and too brittle. "I've been sick for like three weeks, and stressed, and he keeps showing up for it, and I keep letting him, and he has scouts and he has finals and I just-" You stopped. The room was doing something slightly unsteady. You pressed your fingertips to the dresser behind you. "I just didn't want to feel it. I didn't want to stand there in the middle of his party and feel like that, so I-" You gestured at nothing. At the cup. At yourself.

"So you drank a stranger's leftovers."

"I don't know whose cup it was."

"Yeah, that's the part I'm stuck on." Dean pushed off the wall and grabbed the desk chair, set it down in front of you, and sat in it backwards, arms folded over the top, looking up at you with an expression that was not quite his usual one. "Sit down before you fall down."

"I'm not going to fall-"

"You're leaning."

You looked down. You were, in fact, leaning slightly. You sat on the edge of his bed.

Dean watched you with the particular patience of someone who had decided they weren't going anywhere.

"She's not-" You exhaled, stared at your hands. "She's not some villain. She just said the thing I've already been thinking. And I couldn't-" Your throat tightened. "I couldn't stand there and keep smiling, so I thought if I just-"

"Drank enough that it blurred out?"

"I wasn't going to phrase it like that."

"But yeah?"

A beat.

"Yeah," you said, very quietly.

Dean rubbed the back of his neck. Looked at the ceiling. Then back at you, and something in his face shifted into something more serious, more deliberate, the version of him he mostly kept underneath all the noise he usually made.

"Can I tell you something without you getting weird about it?"

You made a helpless gesture.

"Garrett talked about you at practice last week," he said. "Full cringe, by the way, I'm doing you a public service by telling you this. Tucker asked how you were doing - just like, making conversation - and Garrett stopped mid-drill to answer. Like, stopped skating. Coach blew the whistle. Garrett didn't even flinch, just full-on answeredTucker like they were at brunch." He paused. "It was genuinely awful. The guys made fun of him for four days."

You stared at him.

"He said - and I am going to say this exactly once and then never again - that being with you was the first time in his life that coming home from a game felt better than the game itself." Dean's expression was the one people made when they'd eaten something sour. "Verbatim. He said that. To the whole team. In the locker room. While wearing his pads."

Your eyes were burning again, for a completely different reason.

"He talks about you like-" Dean exhaled through his nose. "Look, I've lived with that guy for three years. I have never, not once, seen him like this. And I mean the whole team. We all, okay, this is going to sound really weird-"

"Just say it."

"We all kind of think of you as ours too. Like, you're around all the time, and you're funny, and you ate nachos with us during the game and didn't complain about the TV volume once-" A pause. "That matters more than you think."

A noise came out of you that was almost a laugh. Wasn't quite.

"Kendall doesn't know what she's talking about," Dean said, and his voice had gone flat again. "She's not a bad person, she's just... she wanted something she didn't get, and that makes people say stupid things. It doesn't make the stupid things true."

Your eyes burned. You pressed the heel of your hand against one of them, hard, like you could physically hold it back, and for a second you almost managed it. Then your breath hitched and you didn't.

You hated it. You hated this, you hated that you were sitting in Dean Di Laurentis' room at your boyfriend's party with someone else's alcohol in your bloodstream, falling apart. This was not you. This was so profoundly, embarrassingly not you - and yet here you were, doing it anyway.

"I hate this," you said, rough.

"The crying or the drinking?"

"Both." You dragged your wrist across your face. "I don't do this. Either of this. I keep it together, and I've been keeping it together for weeks, and then one person says one thing and I'm-" You gestured at yourself. At the whole situation. The cup on his dresser. Your face. "This."

"You can't hold it together forever and then wonder why it comes out somewhere inconvenient." Dean's voice was even. "That's not strength. That's just pressure building."

You looked at him.

"Real talk," he said. "You've been running on empty, you've been pretending you're fine, and tonight cracked it open. And instead of letting yourself feel it, you drank half a mystery cup and were about to walk home alone in the cold." He raised an eyebrow. "Which we are going to circle back to."

"I wasn't going to walk home."

"You were absolutely going to walk home."

You didn't answer.

"Also," he said, and the sarcasm slid back in like he genuinely couldn't help it, "if you tell anyone I said any of this, I will deny it completely. I have a reputation and I'd like to keep it."

A sound came out of you that was almost a laugh. Wasn't quite. But almost.

"Drink some water," he said, standing, already moving to the mini fridge in the corner. He tossed you a bottle without looking. "And hey-"

You looked up.

"He's been looking for you for twenty minutes. Downstairs, increasingly frantic. You should talk to him."

You found Garrett's room because it was the only one with the light on.

The door was cracked. You pushed it open and stood in the doorway for a second, holding onto the frame slightly. The water Dean had given you was helping. A little. The edges of things were still slightly wrong.

You made it to the bed. Sat down. Put your face in your hands.

You heard him on the stairs before the door opened - that particular weight and rhythm, two at a time the way he always took them. And then Garrett was there, filling the doorway, and he stopped.

Just for a second.

Long enough for you to see it, the relief flooding in so fast it almost looked like something else. And underneath it, the residue of the twenty minutes before. He'd been worried. Not panicked, not Garrett, but worried. You could see it in the set of his jaw, the way he exhaled.

Then his eyes moved over you and his expression shifted into something different.

"Hey," he said carefully. "How much did you drink?"

You laughed, and it came out wrong. "Dean already asked me that."

"Dean texted me that you'd had a lot and that you were upset and to be..." he paused, "gentle. His word."

"Dean used the word gentle?"

"I was also surprised." He crossed the room and dropped to his knees in front of you, and it was such a Garrett thing to do - not sitting beside you, not keeping distance, just immediately down to your level, hands finding yours - that your throat tightened all over again. "Look at me."

You did.

He looked back, and he didn't rush it. Just looked at you the way he sometimes did when he thought you weren't paying attention. His thumb rubbed circles on your knuckles.

"I'm okay," you said. Force of habit.

"I know you're not." Not a judgment, just a fact. "Talk to me."

Your jaw worked. "I don't want to..." The words snagged. "I don't want to be something you have to manage, Garrett."

He went very still.

"I heard something tonight." Your voice came out thinner than you wanted, and you couldn't tell anymore how much of it was the alcohol and how much was just you: exhausted, hollowed out, finally out of room to hold it. "Someone saying I was... that I'm a lot right now. That you're running yourself into the ground for me, and you don't have time for someone like..." You stopped. "I've been thinking it for weeks. She just said it out loud."

"Who."

"It doesn't matter."

"It matters to me."

"Garrett." You shook your head, and the room moved slightly with it. "That's not the point. The point is that I believed it. That I heard it and something in me just - yes, obviously, correct. And I hated that. So instead of finding you and telling you I was upset like a normal person, I-" You gestured vaguely at yourself. At the state of you. "This."

He looked at you for a long moment.

"You've been carrying this for weeks," he said. Not a question.

"I didn't want to make it your problem."

Something crossed his face. "You are not a problem."

"You have scouts. You have finals. You've been coming to my dorm every other day with food I didn't ask for-"

"Because I wanted to."

"-and I keep letting you, and I feel like I'm taking something, like I'm-"

"Stop." His hands tightened around yours. "Listen to me. I come over because I want to be there. I text you because I want to know how you are. That's not- it's not labor, it's not obligation, it's not me managing anything. It's me." He exhaled slowly. "You're it for me. You know that."

"You can't just say that."

"I say it constantly. The guys are sick of hearing it."

"Dean told me about the locker room thing."

"Of course he did." No heat in it. Just resignation, and something softer underneath. "It was embarrassing. I meant every word."

You looked at him, and your eyes were burning again, and this time you let them. You were too tired and too drunk and too emptied out to hold that back too.

Garrett rose off his knees and sat beside you on the bed and pulled you into him without any hesitation.

You leaned.

That was the hardest part, always. The leaning. Letting someone else take some of the weight.

You were so tired of holding yourself upright.

"You're not too much," he said, into your hair. "You have never been too much."

You didn't answer.

"I mean it."

"I know you do," you said, very quietly.

He held you tighter. The party carried on below, muffled and oblivious, bass thumping through the floor, and up here it was just this. His arms. The familiar smell of him. The particular exhaustion of something finally, finally spilling over after being held too long.

You didn't feel better.

Not exactly. Not the way you'd maybe hoped. The shame of the drinking wasn't gone - that would probably be worse in the morning, honestly.

But Garrett didn't let go.

He kept one hand moving, slow and steady, through your hair, the way he did when you were half-asleep and he thought you weren't noticing. Like this was something he wanted to do. Like you were something worth being careful with.

You didn't know how to explain what that did to you.

You weren't sure you had to. At least not tonight. Not to Garrett.

Tonight, you closed your eyes and let him hold you, and tried to remember how to just be here. Without managing, without performing.

The thing about Garrett Graham is that he pays attention.

People assume he doesn't, assume that the cocky grin and the easy confidence mean there's nothing running underneath, that he moves through rooms the way he moves through a crowd: loud, certain, taking up space. His teammates assume it. His professors definitely assume it. Even Hannah assumed it, once, before she knew him better.

But you figure it out early.

You figure it out the first time he shows up at your apartment door in October with coffee. Yours, specifically, the order you'd said out loud exactly once during a group hangout where there were six other people talking over you, and just sets it on the counter while he unpacks his calc notes like it's nothing.

"How did you even—"

"You said it last week," he says, not looking up. "At the Sig house thing."

Hannah is watching from the kitchen doorway with an expression you can only describe as I told you so, and you think: okay. Okay. So that's how it is.

It's how it is.

You've been dating since early September. Three weeks after Hannah dragged you to her tutoring session because her car was in the shop and she didn't want to go alone, and Garrett showed up ten minutes late with his hair still damp from practice and made fun of her notes and somehow that turned into all three of you getting food after, and then somehow that turned into him texting you at midnight about a meme he saw that reminded him of something you said, and then somehow that turned into this.

Two months in. Still new enough that sometimes you catch him looking at you like he's surprised you're real. New enough that you still get a little breathless when he reaches for your hand in public, casual, like it's nothing, like you haven't spent most of your life around people who treat softness like a liability.

But new enough that there are still questions neither of you has asked yet.

The first time he notices, really notices, is at a home game in mid-October.

You're in the student section with Hannah and Allie, squeezed in close because the rink is packed and everyone is loud and happy and drunk on the particular electricity of a team. You've got Garrett's number on your back - a fact that made him smile so wide it looked like it hurt when he saw you in the tunnel before warm-ups - and you're holding your plastic cup of terrible beer and watching the ice.

Logan scores in the second period and the section erupts.

You flinch.

It's barely anything. It's the kind of flinch most people wouldn't even register. A quick tightening of the shoulders, a slight lean away from the noise.

Garrett is on the bench when it happens, but he looks up into the crowd the way he always does, scanning for you without meaning to, and he sees it. He sees the way your body moves before you catch yourself.

He doesn't say anything.

He files it away.

It happens again at the post-game party.

Dean cranks the music up without warning and someone behind you lets out a whoop right next to your ear and your whole body jerks. Just for a second, just a small intake of breath and a slight step sideways, away from the sound. You recover instantly. You smile at whatever Hannah is saying and nobody else even blinks.

But Garrett is watching you from across the room with a red cup halfway to his mouth and something tight forming behind his eyes.

He doesn't bring it up.

He thinks about it all night.

He thinks about it lying next to you afterward when the party has thinned out and you've ended up back at his place, half-asleep in his bed, your breathing slow and even against his shoulder.

He decides not to push. He decides to wait until you're ready.

He also decides that from now on, he's going to notice. Really notice. Keep cataloguing the small things the way he catalogues play patterns on the ice: quietly, carefully, building a picture.

The way you scrunch your nose after a shot.

The way you twist a strand of hair around your finger when you're anxious.

The way you go a little still when someone raises their voice, even in laughter.

He notices everything. He keeps all of it.

---

It's a Wednesday night in late October when you finally say it.

You're both in his bed, the lamp on the nightstand casting everything amber. You're on your stomach, his shirt barely covering you, scrolling through your phone with the kind of boneless satisfaction that follows a very good hour. Garrett is on his back, one arm behind his head, the other resting warm across the small of your back.

"Okay but Dean," you say, without looking up.

Garrett laughs - the real one, low and easy. "I know."

"He threw the cup."

"He didn't throw it, it slipped—"

"He launched it, Garrett. There was arc. There was follow-through."

"He was drunk and it was plastic and it went like four feet—"

"The point is the energy," you say. "The point is that he was losing at a drinking game and decided the appropriate response was to throw something."

Garrett is still laughing. "He was fine. He wasn't even actually mad."

"He was a little mad."

"He was a little drunk."

"Both," you say. "Both can be true."

He concedes that with a hum. His thumb moves, absently, back and forth across the small of your back.

You look at your phone. Scroll without reading anything.

"My dad used to throw shit when he got mad," you say.

You say it casually. The way you might say I had a weird dream or I think we're out of coffee. Like it's a small fact, a footnote, something that doesn't require a particular response.

Garrett goes very still.

"Throw shit," he says, slowly.

"Like. Plates sometimes. His keys. Whatever was near him." You don't look up from your phone. Your voice is even. "He had this temper. Not - it wasn't like he was scary all the time. Just when he got really wound up."

Silence.

"At you?" Garrett asks.

There is a pause.

It lasts about three seconds longer than it should.

You don't answer.

Garrett feels something cold settle in his chest. He looks at the side of your face - the way you're looking at your phone but not really looking at it, the slight tension in your jaw, the careful way you're holding yourself.

"Y/N."

"I'm fine," you say. "It was a long time ago."

He doesn't push. He is very, very good at knowing when not to push.

But he moves his hand on your back. Slowly, deliberately, just pressing warm and steady there, and you exhale.

"I know," he says quietly.

He doesn't say: that's fucked up. He doesn't say: I'm sorry. He doesn't perform anything. He just keeps his hand on your back and stays.

Later, after you've fallen asleep, he lies awake for a long time.

He thinks about the flinching.

He thinks about the way your body knows things before your brain admits them.

He thinks about you, small and too young, in a room with someone who threw things.

He doesn't sleep well.

---

November comes in cold and relentless.

The thing about the back half of the semester is that it doesn't ask nicely, it just arrives. The midterms and the papers and the looming weight of finals building on the horizon, plus practice ramping up because playoffs aren't that far off and Coach is running them into the ground trying to get the power play where it needs to be. Plus Garrett's dad has been calling more, which always means something, and that something is never good.

Garrett doesn't talk about his dad. Not really. Not to most people.

He talks to John Logan sometimes. Late nights, half a beer in, when the walls come down a little. But to you, he hasn't gone there yet. There's a part of him that doesn't want to. That wants to be the version of himself he is with you: the guy who brings you coffee because he remembered your order, the guy who makes you laugh, the guy who holds you steady.

He's not sure he can be that and also this. This thing that gets wound tight and snaps at Logan and stares at his phone for ten minutes after his dad's number lights up without answering.

He compartmentalizes. He's always been good at it.

But you notice.

You've been noticing for three weeks.

The way he's quieter after practice. The way the easy grin doesn't come as fast. The way he laughed at your joke last Tuesday but the laugh didn't reach his eyes.

You don't say anything at first. You give him room. You show up and make yourself comfortable in his space the way you always do, and you don't ask, because you know what it feels like to not want to be asked.

But it gets worse.

By the second week of November, it's bad enough that Logan is making faces at you behind Garrett's back, the universal sign for I don't know what's going on either but something is.

And then there's the Thursday night.

You're at the hockey house when he comes back from practice. You've been there for an hour doing readings at his kitchen table and patiently waiting for him to come home.

He comes in at nine-thirty, and you know from the sound of the door that it's bad.

"Hey," you say, not looking up immediately. Testing the temperature.

"Hey." Flat.

You look up then. He's dropping his bag, his jaw set, not looking at you. There's a bruise forming along his cheekbone from whatever happened on the ice. He moves to the fridge, grabs a water, drinks half of it standing over the sink.

"Rough practice?"

"I'm fine."

You go back to your reading.

Thirty seconds pass.

"You don't have to stay," he says. Still not looking at you.

You put your pen down.

"I know I don't have to."

"I just- I'm not good company right now."

"That's okay. I'm not here for company. I'm here because I want to be here."

He doesn't respond to that. He refills his water and moves to the couch and picks up his phone, and you can see from across the room that he's not actually looking at anything on it. He's just holding it. Staring at the screen.

You give it ten minutes. You try to read. You get through one paragraph three times without absorbing any of it.

"Garrett."

"I'm fine."

"You keep saying that."

"Because I am."

"You're not. You've been somewhere else for three weeks and I've been trying to give you space but-"

"Y/N." His voice has an edge to it. "I said I'm fine."

Something sharpens in you. Not anger, exactly, more like a refusal. A refusal to be managed.

"You're shutting me out," you say, and your voice comes out steadier than you feel. "I'm your girlfriend. I'm sitting right here. You can talk to me."

"There's nothing to talk about."

"That's not-" You close your textbook. "That's not true and we both know it. Your dad's been calling. Playoffs are coming. You're running on no sleep and you're carrying all of it alone and I'm right here and you just keep-"

"I don't need you to fix it."

"I'm not trying to fix it! I'm trying to be here-"

"You being here doesn't actually help." He says it fast, like he didn't mean to say it, but it's out now.

The room goes quiet.

You stare at him.

He's sitting on the couch with his phone in his hand and his jaw tight and there's something in his expression that's half anger and half guilt, and for a moment neither of you moves.

"Okay," you say, quietly. "That was a shitty thing to say."

"Y/N-"

"No, I know you didn't mean it like that, but it came out like that and it landed like that and I'm telling you, that was-"

"I know." His voice is rough. "I know. I'm sorry."

"I don't want an apology, I want you to talk to me-"

"I can't." It comes out frustrated, strangled. "I can't right now, I don't - I can't do the whole talking thing right now, I just need-"

"What? What do you need? Because I keep trying to figure that out and you won't let me close enough to-"

"I need you to stop pushing!" His voice rises sharply. "Jesus Christ, Y/N, I said I'm fine, I said I need a minute, why can't you just-"

"Because you're not fine and someone has to say it—"

"WOULD YOU JUST-"

The sound is very loud in the small room.

There is the crack of something hard against something hard, his phone, face-down onto the coffee table. Not thrown, just slammed. One sharp motion.

The room goes silent so fast it feels like a held breath.

Garrett breathes.

The room breathes.

He turns back to you.

And sees it.

The flinch.

Not dramatic. Not a cowering, not a cry. Just your body doing what your body learned to do, sometime between the first time a door slammed and the first time something broke near your feet on a kitchen floor. Your shoulders up. Your chin down. Your weight shifted back, one small step, heel finding the floor behind you.

Your face.

He will never, for the rest of his life, forget your face in that moment.

It is not scared of him, exactly. It is something worse. It is a face that has already run the calculation. Already moved through the sequence. Already folded itself into something smaller, something unthreatening, something that does not make the moment worse.

It is the face of someone who has done this before.

It is automatic. It is not about him. And somehow that makes it worse.

Because it doesn't matter that it's not about him. It doesn't matter that you already know, intellectually, in the three seconds it takes you to recover, already straightening, already blinking, already pulling yourself back up to full height, that he is not your father. That he is not that.

It doesn't matter.

Because he still did it.

And your body still knew what to do.

The silence that follows is the loudest thing Garrett has ever heard.

He doesn't move.

He is standing with his hands at his sides now, not touching anything, not doing anything, and he is staring at you with an expression that is very pale and very still and completely hollow.

You are looking back at him. You have straightened. Your arms are at your sides. You are breathing.

Neither of you speaks.

Garrett's eyes drop to the phone on the table. Then back to you.

"I—" he starts.

His voice breaks.

He steps back. Away from you, putting space between you and him like that's the thing that matters right now.

His throat moves.

"I'm sorry," he says. It is very quiet.

You open your mouth.

"Y/N, I am so-" He stops. Swallows. "I am so sorry. I shouldn't have - I didn't - I'm not going to-" He runs a hand over his face, pressing hard. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

"Garrett-"

"You should go." He says it without looking at you. "Please."

"I don't think that-"

"Please." His voice cracks on the word. "Please."

You look at him for a long moment.

He is looking at the floor. His hands are at his sides. He looks like something is eating him from the inside, quietly, with his permission.

You pick up your bag, your jacket, and let yourself out.

The door closes behind you.

The house is very still.

Garrett stands in the middle of it for a long time.

---

Logan finds him at eleven-thirty.

He comes back from a late night repair job to the house being dark except for the kitchen light, and Garrett is sitting on the couch with an open beer bottle, not drinking, just holding it. Staring at the middle distance.

He stops in the doorway.

"Hey," he says carefully.

Garrett doesn't respond.

Logan takes off his jacket. Gets a glass of water. Sits on the other end of the couch, leaving space.

Five minutes pass.

"She looked scared of me," Garrett says.

His voice is flat. Empty. Like he's reported something from very far away.

Logan is quiet for a second. "What happened?"

"I lost it." Garrett sets the bottle down on the coffee table, right next to the phone he'd slammed there earlier. "I was frustrated and she kept pushing and I just- I slammed my phone down. And I yelled. And she-" He breathes. "She flinched."

Logan says nothing.

"You yelled," he says, after a moment. "You were pissed. You slammed something down. That's - look, that's not great, but it's not-"

"That's not the fucking point." Garrett's jaw tightens. "That's not - Logan, her dad-" He stops himself. That's not his to say. He shakes his head. "She has a thing. About loud-"

"You didn't know you were going to do it."

"That doesn't matter."

"Garrett-"

"It doesn't matter." He finally looks at his friend, and his eyes are red-rimmed. "I don't get to say I didn't mean to and have that fix it. I did it. It happened. She was standing in my house and she flinched because of me and there's no-" He exhales roughly. "There's no walking that back."

Logan sits with that.

"You're not him," he says, eventually.

Garrett looks away.

"I did the same thing."

"You didn't hurt her."

"I scared her." He says it quietly. "That's enough..."

He was so tired. Tired of himself right now.

"I love her," Garrett says.

"I know," Logan says.

"I don't know what to do with that right now."

Logan doesn't answer, because sometimes there isn't an answer, and Logan is smart enough to know which moments those are.

---

You, meanwhile, are not wallowing.

You are sitting on the edge of Hannah's bed at midnight, and you are furious.

Not at Garrett. Or, not only at Garrett.

That's the complicated part. That's the part that would take a therapist and probably a lot of time to fully untangle, and right now you don't have either, so instead you have your knees pulled up to your chest and Hannah sitting across from you cross-legged and patient besides Allie, because they both know you well enough to wait.

"He scared me," you say.

"I know."

"For like two seconds. I knew it wasn't - I knew it was different, I knew he wasn't going to-" You make a frustrated gesture. "But my body didn't get the memo. And then I looked at his face and I felt guilty-"

"You don't get to feel guilty for-"

"I know that, Allie, I know that, I'm not saying it's rational." You press your fingers against your eyes. "I'm saying that's what happened. I looked at his face and he already looked gutted and I thought oh god, now I've done that to him and that is so fucked up."

"It's not fucked up."

"It is a little bit."

"It's complicated."

You all sit with that for a moment.

"He's going to spiral," you say.

"You don't know that."

"Hannah. You know him. He's going to spiral."

She doesn't argue.

"And then what?" you continue. "He gets to have the breakdown and I get to feel like the reason for it and none of this is-" You stop. Breathe. "I wasn't made of glass before tonight. I'm not made of glass now. I hate the idea that this is the thing that defines the whole-"

You stop again.

You think about the coffee order. The way he remembered.

You think about the nights he made you feel like the most noticed person in the world.

You think about the flinch, and the look on his face afterward.

You're angry. You're scared. You're exhausted. You're grieving something that isn't quite gone yet but that you can feel shifting.

You don't know.

And not knowing is the part that is actually, genuinely unbearable.

---

Two days pass.

They are the worst kind of days. You go to class. You do your readings. You text Hannah and Allie too much and your phone is quiet otherwise and you don't let yourself check it more than twice an hour, which still feels like too much.

Garrett texts once, on day two.

I'm sorry. I know that doesn't fix it. I'm sorry.

You read it six times and don't respond, not because you don't want to, but because you don't know what to say.

On day three, Allie appears in your doorway and says, "We're going to Malone's," with a tone that doesn't accept alternatives.

You go because the walls of your room have started to feel like they're listening.

Malone's on a Friday is comfortable and loud in the way of a place that has hosted a thousand Friday nights, worn into its own shape by it. You slide into a corner booth with Hannah and Allie and order a beer you're not sure you want and try to be present, which mostly works. Hannah doesn't mention Garrett. Allie mentions him once and gets a look from Hannah and drops it. You talk about Allie's audition nightmare and Hannah's research paper and the fact that the dining hall has been inexplicably serving breakfast food at dinner three times this week, and it's almost normal.

Almost.

You see him when he comes in.

Garrett, with Dean and Tucker, half-past nine. He doesn't see you immediately. He's saying something to Dean, nodding toward the bar, and you have about six seconds to decide what to do with your face.

You decide: nothing. Neutral. You're not going to perform anything.

Hannah has seen him too. Her hand finds your knee under the table. Brief. You okay?

You nod.

He spots you on the way to the bar.

The moment is small and enormous. He goes still for just a second, a slight check-step, and then he keeps moving, but his eyes stay on you for a beat longer than is casual. You hold his gaze. You don't look away.

He looks like he hasn't slept.

He looks like he's been carrying something very heavy for three days, which tracks, because you know him well enough now to know that he carries things heavily.

Dean notices the exchange. He steers Garrett toward the bar and away from your line of sight.

You turn back to Allie's story.

An hour passes.

It's Garrett who ends up outside first. You see him slip toward the door, shoulders tight, probably needing air or a moment or both. You give it three minutes and then you look at Hannah.

"I'm going to go talk to him."

Hannah holds your eyes. "You don't have to."

"I know."

"You're allowed to be angry."

"I know that too."

You slide out of the booth.

He's standing at the side of the building, away from the small cluster of smokers near the door. His hands are in his jacket pockets and he's looking at the street, and you watch him for a second before he hears your footsteps and turns.

His face does the thing - the opening, the complicated hope - and then goes careful. Reining something in.

"Hey," he says.

"Hey."

You stop a few feet away. Not the distance of strangers, not the distance of people who have slept tangled together for two months. Somewhere in the middle.

"How are you?" he asks.

"I've been better." You look at him. "You?"

He lets out a breath that might, in another version of this conversation, have been a laugh. "Yeah."

Silence. The street hums. Someone comes out of Malone's and moves past you and the door swings shut again.

"I'm angry," you say, because you decided on the way out here that you weren't going to start anywhere else.

"Okay." He says it carefully.

"Not- it's not a simple anger. It's not just at you." You watch his face. "I'm angry because you scared me. I'm angry because my body did that stupid thing and I hate it. I'm angry because-" You stop. Breathe. "Because you get to spiral about this and I'm the one managing my trauma response and worrying about you at the same time and that's a lot to be in charge of."

His jaw moves. "I know. You shouldn't have to-"

"I know I shouldn't. I'm telling you how it felt, not asking you to fix it."

He nods. He's looking at you very carefully, like he's translating, making sure he hears the right thing.

"I've been thinking," he says, after a moment.

"Tell me."

He looks away. Down the street, at nothing. His jaw works.

"I've been thinking that - I saw your face." His voice is rough. "That night. After I... You stepped back and I saw your face and I can't-" He stops. Swallows. "I know why. I know what that look means and what you learned to do with that look and the fact that I made you do it, that I was the reason-"

"Garrett-"

"Let me say it." He looks at you. "Please."

You go quiet.

"If I can do it once," he says, "I can do it again."

The words land like stones in water.

You watch him.

"That's not-" you start.

"It is." His voice is very flat. Not performative. Just... certain. Like he's made up his mind about something and he's telling you the result. "That's just- that's what it means, Y/N. I have his temper. I've always known I have his temper. I thought I had it controlled but I didn't, and if I couldn't keep it then, when things got bad-" He breathes. "What happens when things get worse? What happens in two years, five years, when there are more things to be bad? What happens the first time something really falls apart and you're standing in front of me and I-"

"Stop."

"-I can't make that promise. I can't look you in the eye and say that won't happen again-"

"Stop." Your voice is harder now. "Stop narrating my future for me."

He goes quiet.

"I'm not a child," you say. "I get to decide what I can and can't handle."

"That's not-"

"You doing this, deciding for me what's too much, deciding I'm too breakable, deciding that you get to make the call about what I walk away from, that's not protection. That's just a different way of taking away my choice."

He looks stricken.

"I know what my dad was," you say, very quietly. "I know what it looks like when it's bad. I've been in a room where bad was the whole atmosphere. That's not-" You gesture, frustrated. "What happened was not that."

"It could be-"

"Stop." You step closer, close enough that you can see the exhaustion in his face, the way he's held himself apart for three days and it's cost him. "You scared me for two seconds. I've been scared before. I survived." You hold his gaze. "And then I looked at your face and saw what it did to you and that was..." Your voice wavers slightly, just once. "That was different than what I grew up with. You understand? That look on your face was different."

Garrett's eyes are wet.

"That's not enough," he says.

"That's not your call."

"Y/N..."

"It's not." You are shaking slightly, not from cold. "You don't get to love me and then decide you're protecting me by leaving. That's not-" You laugh, short and humorless. "That's not how any of this works."

He is quiet for a long time.

The street keeps going. Car lights sweep past the mouth of the alley. Music from inside Malone's bumps through the wall, muffled and warm.

"So what now?" you ask.

Garrett doesn't answer.

He opens his mouth. Closes it. He looks at you with the kind of look that holds an entire argument inside it, every angle, every possibility, all the ways this could go. He looks at you like you're everything and like you're the most dangerous thing in the room.

If he forgives himself, there's a part of him that believes he's telling himself it's okay. That it's acceptable, that the first time is a free pass, that he can do it again with a story ready.

If he doesn't, if he holds this and holds himself responsible and carries it permanently...

He loses you.

He already knows he loses you.

And standing here, in the cold, looking at you in the light spilling out from Malone's, with your arms crossed and your eyes tired and something in your face that is sad and angry and still so impossibly here - he thinks he might deserve to lose you.

He thinks: I am my father's son.

And that thought is so old and so ugly that it's almost a relief to finally be looking at it directly.

"I don't know," he says.

His voice is barely above a whisper.

"You don't know," you repeat.

"I don't know," he says again. "I don't know if I can..." He stops. "I don't know how to do this right. I don't know if there is a right."

You look at him for a long time.

Then you say: "You're not your father."

"You don't know that," he says.

"I know you remember my coffee order," you say. "I know you moved slow every time you saw me flinch at loud sounds. I know you've had three days to be angry at me for pushing you and instead you've been punishing yourself." You hold his gaze. "Your father didn't do any of those things."

Garrett closes his eyes.

"That's not..."

"It's not nothing," you say. "I'm not saying it fixes anything. I'm not saying you're perfect. I'm saying those are two different things and you're flattening them into one because it's easier to decide you're a monster than to actually do the work."

He opens his eyes.

He looks wrecked. Genuinely, quietly, terribly wrecked.

"I scared you," he says.

"Yes." You don't flinch from it. "You did."

"I'm sorry."

"I know you are."

"I can't promise..."

"Then promise something smaller," you say. "Promise therapy. Promise that when you're wound that tight you tell me instead of letting me walk into the middle of it. Promise that you stop making decisions about my life without consulting me." Your voice is very steady, and you are very tired, and you are also, despite all of it, still here. Still standing in front of him. "Promise the next thing. Not the whole future. Just the next thing."

He is looking at you like you've said something in a language he's still learning.

"Why?" he asks.

"Because you remembered my coffee order," you say quietly. "Because you went slow. Because the second it happened you looked sick with yourself before I even had time to react." You swallow. "Because I'm angry and I don't want to leave."

The street is quiet.

Garrett breathes.

He reaches out, very slowly, and the question is obvious - is this okay? - and you step forward instead of back.

He pulls you in.

He holds on like you might disappear if he isn't careful, like you're the most breakable thing in the world and also the most solid, and he presses his mouth against the top of your head and says your name.

Not I love you. Not I'm sorry again. Just your name.

Y/N.

Like it means you are real.

You are here.

I will try to deserve it.

You stand there until the cold gets to be too much.

Until Hannah appears in the doorway looking for you and takes in the scene and disappears back inside without a word.

Until Garrett's breathing evens out against your hair and you feel the tension start to leave his shoulders, slowly, by degrees.

The work isn't done. You both know that. But his arms are around you and you haven't pulled away, and for tonight, that's the only answer either of you has.

You learn quickly that Boston doesn’t sleep.

The city hums at night, streetlights bleeding into wet pavement, late trains rattling underground, the distant roar of traffic that never quite fades. It’s nothing like home.

But here, in this city, you’ve found something close to peace.

The rink.

You’re a year younger than most of the elite skaters you admire, but young doesn’t mean unready. You didn’t uproot your entire life for nothing. You moved to Boston with one purpose: to skate. To train under a renowned coach whose name alone could open Olympic doors.

Your apartment is small. Too quiet. You don’t have friends yet, not really. Most nights, you eat alone, stretch alone, fall asleep with sore muscles and the weight of expectation pressing into your chest.

So you stay late.

The rink becomes your refuge. A place without decisions. A place where the world narrows to edges and timing and breath.

The Boston Raiders practice earlier in the evenings, their presence loud even before they take the ice. Laughter echoing, blades clacking, voices bouncing off the rafters. You wait patiently, lacing your skates on the bench, stretching, zoning in.

And every night, like clockwork, there’s him.

Ilya Rozanov.

You don’t mean to notice him. Not at first. But it’s hard not to. He skates like he owns the ice - powerful, sharp, effortless. There’s something restless about him, like he’s always holding back, even when he’s moving faster than everyone else.

You see him most clearly at the transition moment.

The Raiders file off the ice, sweat-soaked and buzzing from drills, and you step forward, heart already syncing to the rhythm of your routine.

That’s when it happens.

Your eyes meet.

It’s never intentional. Never prolonged. Just a beat too long to be accidental. His blue gaze catches yours, curious, unreadable, and something sharp curls low in your stomach.

You tell yourself it’s the cold.

But the shiver that runs down your spine feels nothing like it.

A month passes like this.

Then one night, everything shifts.

You’re exhausted, but you push through one last run-through of your routine. The music echoes through the empty arena, haunting and full, your blades carving clean lines into the ice. You lose yourself in it, in the spin, the jump, the landing that finally feels right.

When you step off the ice, breathless and flushed, the silence hits you.

You’re not alone.

Ilya is sitting on the bench near your bag, long legs stretched out, elbows resting casually on his knees. He looks unfairly good like this - hair still damp, practice jersey clinging to his frame.

“You skate late,” he says, voice low, accented, amused.

You blink. “Funny. I was about to say the same.”

A corner of his mouth lifts. “I was impressed. That routine, very clean.”

You scoff lightly, grabbing your towel. “Didn’t know hockey players doubled as critics.”

“Only when something is worth watching,” he replies smoothly.

There it is.

You arch a brow. “So tell me, do you always hang around rinks at night to watch girls you think are cute?”

He laughs quietly, shaking his head. “No. Usually I ask them out for a drink first. But you…” His eyes flick over you, unapologetic. “You never gave me chance.”

Your heart stutters.

“Maybe I just don’t trust men who lurk in empty arenas,” you shoot back.

“Fair,” he says. Then, softer, “But I am not so bad, yeah?”

You hesitate only a second. “Fine. One drink.”

The grin he gives you is slow, victorious. “Tomorrow. After game.”

You don’t realize how excited you are until the next evening sneaks up on you.

You pretend you’re calm as you get ready, phone propped on the counter, the game versus Montreal playing quietly. You half-listen, catching commentary about a fight - Rozanov involved, of course -something about a guy named Hollander.

You roll your eyes. “Short fuse,” you mutter.

Boston wins.

You text him: On my way.

He likes the message.

Your Uber drops you behind the club, bass thudding through the brick walls. The bouncer checks the list, nods when he sees your name, and waves you inside.

The club is dark and alive, lights pulsing, bodies moving as one. The music slides under your skin, pulling you in.

You’re debating calling Ilya when a hand glides along your lower back.

You jump, spinning around.

“There you are,” Ilya says, amused. “Very easy to scare.”

Your breath catches.

His hair is still damp, skin warm, cologne intoxicating. His eyes are impossibly blue, focused entirely on you.

“You look…” He pauses, then smirks. “Different from rink.”

“Is that a compliment?”

“I am used to seeing you in very little clothing,” he says casually. “But this-” His gaze flickers. “This is dangerous.”

You blush despite yourself.

He leads you to the dance floor, hands light but confident on your hips. You move together easily, bodies syncing, the music dissolving the walls you didn’t realize you’d built.

He buys you drinks. One becomes two.

You feel free, lighter than you’ve felt in weeks.

Almost like flying.

His forehead dips closer, breath warm against your cheek. Vodka and something undeniably him. Your lips hover inches apart-

Then a hand grabs his shoulder.

“Now I understand why you don’t answer my texts!”

A man - dark-haired, broad, angry - glares at Ilya.

“Shane,” Ilya snaps, stepping in front of you. “Leave it. You are drunk.”

“Oh, like you care,” Shane scoffs, drawing eyes.

Your stomach drops.

“I’ll go,” you say quickly, tugging Ilya’s hand.

He shakes his head. “It is fine. I handle this.”

Shane swings.

Everything explodes. Voices, movement, bodies colliding. Bouncers rush in. Raiders. Montreal players.

You step back, heart pounding.

And then you’re gone, your better judgment finally cutting through the haze. You remind yourself that this is a strange city, that you barely know these people, that whatever just ignited on that dance floor is not worth getting caught in the fallout of someone else’s temper.

Before you can second-guess yourself, the Uber door shuts with a heavy thud.

The city streaks past the window in fractured neon and headlights, your reflection staring back at you, still buzzing with adrenaline. Your heart won’t slow down. Your body keeps replaying the moment his breath hovered near your mouth, the way it felt like something was almost about to happen after weeks of stolen glances....

Almosts hurt more than nos.

Your phone buzzes in your lap.

A message from Ilya.

I am sorry. I hope you got home safe.

It’s simple, and somehow that makes your chest ache worse. You read it again, wondering what he’s not saying.

You type. Delete. Type again. Delete.

Outside, Boston keeps moving, indifferent and loud, while inside you feel suspended, caught between caution and curiosity.

You lock your phone and lean your head against the glass, exhaling slowly.

This wasn’t supposed to matter. He wasn’t supposed to matter.

And yet, deep down, you know this isn’t finished.

You’re not supposed to be this close to the glass.

You know that. You’ve known it all season. Press access ends two rows back, where the suits sit and the cameras don’t catch reactions that matter. But tonight the arena is too loud, and you drift forward without thinking. Until you’re right there, fingers curling into the edge of the boards like they could anchor you to something solid.

Ilya is on the ice.

He’s always on the ice, untouchable in that way that made you fall for him quietly, stupidly, months ago.

Until he isn’t.

It happens so fast it barely registers as a moment. A collision at center ice. A sickening crack of shoulder into head. His skates tangle, fail him, and suddenly he’s not upright anymore, he’s falling. Wrong. Limp before he hits the ice.

The sound he makes doesn’t carry. The crowd roars anyway.

You stand before you realize you’re moving.

“Ilya.”

Your voice cuts through the noise, sharp and unguarded. You hear it echo off the glass. You feel heads turn in your direction. Someone grabs your arm, security maybe, but you shake them off because none of that matters when Ilya isn’t getting up.

He’s on his side. Then his stomach. Then still.

The trainers are too slow. The refs are arguing. Seconds stretch and snap.

You press your palm flat against the glass, breath stuttering. “Get up,” you whisper, “Please.”

When the medics finally reach him, you’re already crying.

You don’t remember deciding to leave your seat. You don’t remember pushing past the usher, the credentials flashing uselessly at your chest. You only remember the tunnel swallowing you whole and the ice-level cold hitting your lungs.

They’re lifting his helmet when you reach him in the medical room.

Blood streaks his hairline, dark against pale skin. His eyes are half-open, unfocused, blinking too slow. Someone is asking him questions - his name, the date, the score - but his mouth doesn’t move.

“Ilya,” you say again, closer now.

His gaze shifts.

It lands on you and stops.

His brow furrows, confusion giving way to something softer, frighteningly familiar. His fingers twitch against the ice. “You,” he murmurs, voice hoarse. “Why are you-”

The medic glances back at you, sharp and assessing. “You know them?”

Ilya doesn’t answer. He’s still looking at you like you’re the only solid thing in the room.

“I’m here,” you say, because you don’t know how to do anything else. “I’m right here.”

His hand finds yours.

It’s weak, clumsy, but it’s enough. He squeezes once, grounding himself like he always does with you when the world spins too fast. His eyes flutter. “Don’t go,” he says, barely audible. “Please.”

Every rational thought you’ve ever had evaporates. You nod, tears blurring everything. “I won’t.”

The door opens before you can say anything else.

“Okay,” a voice says gently but firmly, a hand already at your elbow. “We need some space.”

“I’m not in the way,” you insist, panic sharpening your words. “I can stand back, I-”

“I know,” the doctor says, not unkindly. “But we need the room.”

You look at Ilya once more.

His eyes find yours immediately. There’s a flicker of protest there, but he’s already fading again.

“I’ll be right outside,” you promise, voice breaking.

The door shuts behind you with a soft, final click, and the quiet that follows is worse than the noise ever was.

You barely make it three steps down the hallway before it hits you.

Cameras. Lights. Voices overlapping, too loud, too close.

“Hey- excuse me!”

“Can we get a comment?”

“Are you and Rozanov-”

The first flash goes off and your heart lurches violently. You turn, instinctively shielding your face, but it’s useless. They’ve already seen you.

You don’t answer. You don’t stop. You push through the crowd with your head down, pulse roaring in your ears.

Ilya didn’t want this.

You know that. You’ve always known that. The careful way he kept you out of public sight, the quiet entrances and exits, the shared looks instead of shared statements. This was never supposed to be how it came out.

By the time you reach the parking garage, your phone is vibrating nonstop.

Missed calls. Texts. Notifications lighting up your screen like a warning flare.

ROZANOV’S SECRET PARTNER?

WHO WAS WITH ILYA AFTER THE INJURY?

INTIMATE MOMENT CAUGHT ON CAMERA-

You unlock your car with shaking hands and pull out before you can read any more. The drive back to the apartment is a blur of red lights and spiraling thoughts.

You should be with him.

That’s the only thought that matters. That and the hollow ache of knowing you can’t be.

Your phone rings again. This time you answer without looking.

“Shane,” you say, already tired.

“Oh my god,” he says, words tumbling over each other. “You and Ilya? This whole time? How did I not know? Is he okay? Are you okay? I saw the photos and-”

“I’m fine,” you cut in, sharper than you mean to. “I don’t- I just need to know if he’s okay.”

There’s a pause on the other end. Then Shane exhales, grounding himself. “Okay. Okay. I get it.”

He softens. “Let me make some calls, Y/N. I’m pretty close with the trainers at that arena. I’ll see if they can give me any updates.”

Relief hits you so hard it nearly knocks the air out of your lungs. “Thank you,” you whisper. “Really. Thank you.”

You hang up and sit there for a moment before going inside, forehead pressed to the steering wheel, breathing through the anxiety clawing at your ribs.

The apartment feels too big without him.

You pace the kitchen, hands twisting together, checking your phone every thirty seconds. Minutes stretch into something unbearable.

Then it rings.

Not Shane.

Ilya.

You answer instantly. “Ilya.”

“Hi, baby,” he says, voice rough with exhaustion, his accent thicker than usual. Just hearing him makes your knees weak.

“Oh my god,” you breathe. “I didn’t want to leave- I swear, they pushed me out and then the press saw me and I tried to get away and-”

“I am okay,” he interrupts gently. “Maybe bit of headache. But okay.”

You sag against the counter, tears finally spilling over. He explains: Hollander calling the medic, pulling strings, convincing them to let Ilya make one call. To you.

“Ilya,” you whisper, voice shaking. “There are photos... The press is going crazy. I’m so sorry...”

“Do not apologize,” he says immediately, firmer now. “What happened, happened.”

You nod even though he can’t see it, fingers tightening around your phone.

After a moment, you ask the question you’ve been avoiding. “What do we do now?”

There’s a pause on the line.

“I should have been more careful.”

You tense. “Ilya-”

“I will handle the press,” he continues. “You don’t need to be involved.”

The words land heavier than you expect.

There’s another pause before you ask, quieter this time, “And us?”

Silence stretches.

You’ve learned how to read Ilya’s body the way some people read sheet music.

The hitch in his stride when his ribs are taped too tight. The way his shoulders lock when he’s bracing for impact instead of dodging it. The reckless angle of his hits when he’s no longer protecting himself, just throwing everything he has into the boards and whoever’s unlucky enough to be there.

From the stands, it’s agony.

You sit with your hands laced together so tightly your fingers ache, eyes never leaving the ice. He’s been like this all game. Charging too hard, staying out too long, taking hits that make your stomach flip. You know he’s already hurt. Bruised ribs don’t heal because you want them to. They heal because you rest.

He isn’t resting.

Every time he crashes into the boards, you feel it in your chest like a phantom pain. This isn’t hunger. This isn’t playoff fire. This is something uglier. Desperate.

You’ve felt it for weeks now. The distance. The clipped answers. The way he kisses you like it’s a habit instead of a want. You told yourself it was the playoffs. Pressure. Stress.

Now, watching him practically invite injury, you know better.

The buzzer sounds. Final score flashes overhead.

3–1. Loss.

The Boston Raiders skate off, shoulders slumped. You’re already moving, threading through the corridors toward the locker room exit. One by one, his teammates file out, quiet and exhausted.

Ilya doesn’t come.

Minutes pass.

When he finally emerges, showered and dressed, hair still damp at the nape of his neck, he looks devastating in the way he always does. Broad shoulders. Sharp jaw. Eyes dark with something closed off and unreachable.

He doesn’t smile when he sees you.

The walk to the car is silent. You take the keys without asking. He doesn’t argue. Streetlights blur past as you drive, knuckles white on the steering wheel. He stares out the window like he’s somewhere else entirely.

Inside his apartment, the door clicks shut behind you.

You exhale like you’ve been holding your breath all night.

“What the hell is going on with you?”

He blinks, slow and blank, like he doesn’t understand the language you’re speaking.

“What?”

“You’ve been dismissive for weeks,” you say, voice tight. “Cold. Distant. I thought it was the playoffs, I really did, but tonight? Ilya, you were begging to get hurt out there.”

He turns away, heading for the kitchen.

“You know what could’ve happened,” you follow, words spilling faster now. “You’re playing with compromised ribs, your core stability is off, one bad hit and you’re looking at torn intercostals, an ACL if your mechanics are off-”

“Enough,” he mutters, grabbing a glass and pouring himself a drink.

“Don’t,” you say, frustration burning behind your eyes. “I can see what you’re doing to your body and-”

“I said enough.”

He’s so cold it feels unreal. Like someone flipped a switch.

You swallow. “This isn’t you.”

That’s when he finally looks at you.

Something sharp flashes across his face. Then he snaps.

“I cannot do this anymore,” he says, voice rising, accent thickening as his control slips. “All of it. Hockey. Pressure. Everyone wants something from me.” He drags a hand through his hair.

Your heart twists. “Ilya-”

“And then you,” he cuts in sharply. “Always watching me. Telling me what is wrong. What I do to my body.” His voice breaks, then turns cold. “I am tired of being managed.”

“I’m not managing you,” you whisper. “I’m caring about you.”

“I don’t want care,” he snaps. “Not like this.”

He steps closer, anger burning in his eyes. “I just want nothing. To not think. To not feel like I am failing at everything.”

He glares at you, eyes wet but sharp, voice dropping to a final, cold edge.

“Go. I need air… I need silence… I need you out of my head.”

Your vision blurs. You nod once, because if you speak, you’ll shatter. You grab your jacket, hands shaking so badly it takes two tries.

“I’m sorry,” you whisper, though you don’t know why.

He doesn’t stop you.

The hallway feels endless. The night air burns your lungs.

Your hands fumble for your phone. You don’t think. You just tap the first name that feels safe.

Shane.

When he answers, sleepy and confused, your voice comes out broken.

The last thing you expected to see today was him.

Conrad Fisher.

In Paris.

The city was loud and golden, morning light slipping between stone buildings as you clutched the back of Benito’s scooter. Your laughter still hung in the air from the reckless way he swerved around a corner, the wind tugging at your hair. By the time he pulled up in front of your building, your heart was still racing - half from adrenaline, half from the way Paris always felt like it was moving faster than you could keep up.

“Always dramatic, always late,” Benito teased, pulling off his helmet. His smile was easy, warm, familiar in a way Paris had made you crave. He hopped down first, steadying the scooter as you slid off, your legs shaky from the ride.

“You drive like you’re trying to kill me,” you shot back, laughing.

“That’s the Parisian way,” he grinned, leaning down to kiss your cheek. It was quick, European, effortless. Still, you felt the brush of his lips linger longer than necessary.

“À ce soir,” he said, tugging his helmet back on before kicking the scooter to life. The hum of the engine faded as he pulled away, leaving you with the smell of exhaust.

And then you froze.

Because standing on the sidewalk, not ten feet away, was Conrad.

Hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his khakis, hair a little too long, eyes fixed right on you like he wasn’t sure if he was awake or dreaming. Your chest stuttered with disbelief, the world shrinking down to the span of cobblestones between you.

“Conrad?” you breathed. His name felt foreign in your mouth, sharp and tender all at once.

“Y/N,” His voice was quiet, careful. He shifted his weight, almost wincing. “I- sorry. I didn’t mean to just… show up like this.”

Your heartbeat was thunder. “What are you doing here?”

He exhaled like he’d been holding the breath for weeks. “There’s a conference in Brussels. With Dr. Namazy. It was a last-minute thing.” His eyes flicked toward your building, then back to you, full of nerves you hadn’t seen since you were kids. “And I thought… since it’s Belly’s birthday…” He trailed off, the words collapsing under the weight of his own doubt. “I can leave, though. If you’re busy.”

The old Conrad - the one who always pulled away before you could reach for him - was right there in front of you, already retreating.

You opened your mouth, then closed it again, heart stuttering with too many things at once. The right thing would be to let him go, let him disappear back into the Paris crowd like a ghost you’d only imagined. But he was here, real, standing in front of you with that lost look in his eyes. And you couldn’t quite bring yourself to send him away.

“We… we have plans at eight. Belly and I,” you said finally, your voice softer than you meant it to be. “But until then…” You hesitated, fumbling for something that wouldn’t sound like an invitation but also wouldn’t be a rejection. “Let me drop your bag upstairs, at least. Before we go out. Play tourist for a little while.”

The words felt like a compromise, though you weren’t sure who you were trying to protect - him, or yourself.

Relief touched his face, small and fleeting, but enough. He shifted the strap of the bag on his shoulder, nodding. “Yeah. Okay.”

Inside your apartment, you left his bag neatly by the wall, needing a second to process the impossible reality that Conrad Fisher had just materialized on your street.

You splashed cool water over your wrists, staring at your reflection. Your head was swimming - shock, confusion, something else you refused to name. This didn’t have to be anything. Just a few hours of playing tour guide before sending him on his way. That was all.

When you came back, he was taking in the view of your street, staring down at the road where Benito’s scooter had disappeared.

“Ready?” you asked, slinging your purse over your shoulder before he could ask questions you weren’t ready to answer.

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“Conrad?” Belly's voice had you both turning to face her. Her eyes darted from you to Conrad and back again, disbelief flashing sharp and clear. "What are you doing here?" Her tone was fiery, unkind.

“Hey, Belly.” He straightened, shifting under her gaze. “I, uh- I had a conference in Brussels. Thought I’d stop in.” The words were identical to what he told you, but even shakier now.

Belly’s brows lifted, skeptical, though she didn’t press. Instead, she turned her gaze to you, a silent question in her eyes. You felt it like a current between you- big sister, little sister telepathy. Is this okay? Are you okay?

You forced a smile, heart hammering. “I’m taking him out to see Paris before dinner. Do you want to come?”

For a beat, she just studied you, like she could see straight through the calm mask you’d thrown on. Then Belly shook her head, offering a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “I think I’ll rest. Big night tonight. Don’t forget we have plans at eight.”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” you promised.

And then you had no choice but to step into the streets of Paris together.

---

Paris opened itself to you like it always did, cobblestone streets unfolding into wide boulevards, cafés spilling laughter and cigarette smoke onto the sidewalks. You walked a step ahead of Conrad, pointing out the things you loved.

He listened, mostly quiet, his gaze more on you than the city. You could feel it, the way his eyes traced the slope of your shoulder when you turned, the curve of your mouth when you spoke. It rattled you, made you hyperaware of every gesture, every step.

At Versailles, you slowed, brushing past him as you pointed toward a fountain. His hand grazed yours, barely, but the spark of it rippled through you both. Neither of you pulled away.

Conrad’s voice was low when he finally spoke. “I’ve imagined this,” he said. You glanced up at him, startled. His eyes were on the skyline, but his words were for you. “What your life would look like here," He breathed out a shaky laugh. “I wish I could see Paris the way you do.”

Something in your chest tightened. Without thinking, you said, “I know where to take you.”

The rooftop was one of your secrets. The city glowed in the distance, and below, the streets buzzed with life.

Conrad’s breath caught audibly. “God.” His voice broke into a whisper. “You seem… very comfortable here. In Paris.”

You leaned against the low wall, staring out at the city that had taken everything from you and, slowly, given it back. “It took me a year to feel that way,” you admitted. The truth lodged like glass in your throat. “But I got here.”

Conrad turned, his face lit by the shimmer of the lights, and you couldn’t tell if it was the night or his expression that made your stomach lurch. “I always knew you could.”

The air between you thickened, charged - like the rooftop was its own small universe where anything could happen. His fingers brushed yours again, deliberate this time, lingering just long enough to make your heart stutter.

You cleared your throat, forcing yourself back into motion before you drowned in it. “Listen… there’s a pre-birthday dinner tonight. For Belly. My friends are throwing it.” You risked a glance at him. “You could come. Catch a later train to Brussels.”

His mouth curved, soft and unsure. “You want me there?”

You hated how much you did. “It’s for Belly,” you said, and your voice was almost steady.

But when he nodded, eyes holding yours too long, you knew he saw straight through you.

---

Back in your apartment, you tried to keep your hands from shaking as you put on your finishing touches. The black dress felt like armor, the red lipstick a shield, but when you glanced at your reflection, your heart still stumbled. Because no matter how much you told yourself this night was for Belly, you knew Conrad would be watching.

You left him with her in the bedroom, bracing yourself for tension -sharp words, cold silence, maybe worse. But when you emerged, smoothing down your dress, you froze in the doorway. Belly was laughing, her face soft in a way you hadn’t seen in months. Conrad was grinning faintly, like he’d been waiting years just to hear that sound again.

For the first time, relief eased something tight in your chest. Maybe they could still find their way back to each other, in their own way.

Conrad’s gaze flicked up then, landing on you. His expression stilled, and you felt the heat rise before he even opened his mouth.

“You look…” His voice caught, then steadied. “Beautiful.”

You looked away, cheeks burning. “We should go,” you murmured.

Hugs were exchanged as soon as you and Belly walked through the door. The room was crowded with your friends, wine glasses clinking, laughter spilling into the night air. Belly glowed under the attention.

Introductions circled, your friends offering curious and impressed eyebrows when they saw your arm candy. You were thankful Conrad didn't know a lick of French.

Benito was the last to say hello, giving you a kiss on the cheek that lingered just a bit too long. Grinning at Conrad with sharp curiosity, they exchanged introductions. “We’ve heard everything about you,” he said. “You’re like a legend in Paris.”

Conrad’s brow arched, amused but wary. Before he could answer, Benito tugged Belly aside, insisting on giving her her gift.

Before long, the group found themselves sitting around the table, wine glasses filled for the second and even third round.

“So tell us,” Benito said, tilting his glass. “Why are you really here?” His question to Conrad laced with condescension.

Belly jumped in quickly. “He’s here for work. A conference in Brussels.”

Benito didn’t buy it. His smile was tight. “Funny. Brussels is far from here, surely there would've been an option for a direct flight, no?”

The air shifted, every pair of eyes on Conrad. He hesitated - just long enough for your pulse to quicken - then spoke quietly, his gaze flicking to yours.

“I changed my flight,” he admitted. “Because I wanted to see Y/N.”

A hush lingered, broken only by the clink of someone’s fork against a plate. Then one of the girls laughed, waving a hand. “Ignore Benito. He’s still bitter Y/N shot him down. And Belly didn’t exactly want to get her sister's sloppy seconds.”

The irony bit deep, but you only smiled faintly, turning to Benito. “Don't worry, you’ll always be the boy who taught me how to ride a scooter.”

Conrad’s voice cut in, “And I’ll always be the one who taught her how to ride a bike.”

The table erupted into teasing oohs and laughter, but you caught the flicker in his eyes.

Later, as Belly opened gifts, Conrad leaned closer, his shoulder brushing yours. His voice dropped to a murmur only you could hear.

“So, Benito. Not your boyfriend?”

You kept your gaze on Belly, lips curling into a small, steady smile. “I never said he was.”

Conrad didn’t reply, but when you dared to glance at him, the look in his eyes made it impossible to breathe.

Conrad cleared his throat. “I, uh- actually got you something.”

Belly blinked, surprised. “For me?”

He nodded, reaching into his bag. What he set on the table wasn’t wrapped, but somehow that made it more intimate: a small glass vial, filled with pale sand.

“This is from a Fourth of July,” Conrad explained softly. “A few summers ago. I started keeping it with me whenever I felt homesick. Having a little piece of Cousins… it makes me feel connected to everyone. I thought maybe, if you missed home too - you’d want to have it.”

Belly’s eyes shimmered in the candlelight. She leaned forward and pressed a quick, tender kiss to his cheek. “Thank you, Conrad.”

Something in your chest swelled so painfully you almost had to look away. No matter what, he was always looking out for her - for her heart. That part of him never changed.

Later, after dinner, Belly insisted on staying out with her friends to ring in her twenty-second year. She called it the perfect birthday. Which left you and Conrad walking alone beneath the amber glow of Paris streetlamps, the city’s hum softened by the lateness of the hour.

“I’ll be honest,” Conrad said, hands tucked in his pockets. “Before I came here, I thought… maybe you were hiding out. Punishing yourself for everything that happened.” He glanced at you, expression gentle. “But now? I see you’ve made this incredible life for yourself. And I’m glad I got to see it.”

You gave a small laugh, shaking your head. “You’re not wrong. At first, I was hiding out. I felt lonely. I put everything into making sure Belly was okay and forgot about myself.” A pause. The words scraped their way out. “And… I know I was the villain in all of it. I reacted irrationally-”

“Don’t,” Conrad cut in quickly, firm. “Don’t think of yourself like that.”

Silence stretched between you, heavy with the weight of things unsaid. Then Conrad exhaled. “Jere knows I’m here. He told me… ‘good luck.’”

That tugged a startled laugh out of you, your chest warm and aching all at once.

Conrad tipped his head back, staring at the Paris sky. “I like being under the same moon as you again.”

Something trembled in the air, like he was about to add more, but you stopped him. “Come on. There’s one more place I want to show you.”

The Seine glittered under the lamps, the city’s reflection rippling across dark water. A sweet melody played softly from a radio nearby. Conrad slowed, then turned to face you fully. “Dance with me.”

You let out a shaky laugh. “Here? Now?”

“Why not?” His hand reached for yours.

You took it. His palm was warm, grounding, even as your heart knocked against your ribs.

“Do you remember the last time we danced?” you asked quietly.

He thought for a moment. “Summer house. We were kids. Must’ve been.”

“That feels like a million years ago.” You swallowed hard. “For a while… your letters kept me going. When I was lonely, when I missed home... I’d read them. Over and over.”

His eyes darkened, searching yours. “Then why did it take you so long to write me back?”

The ache of that question lingered. “Because I had to move on. And I couldn’t do that if I was still holding on to you.”

The night seemed to still around you, waiting. Conrad’s voice broke the quiet. “Have you?” His gaze held yours, unflinching. “Moved on?”

You didn’t answer. Instead, you surged forward, rising onto your toes and kissing him like you’d been waiting your whole life for this.

It wasn’t soft or tentative. It was every swallowed word, every letter left unanswered, every summer night you’d lain awake thinking of him. His mouth crashed against yours with the same ferocity, like he’d been starving and only now allowed to taste.

The world fell away. Paris, the Seine, the years between you - all of it blurred, inconsequential compared to the electric pull of his lips on yours. His hands framed your face, trembling as though he couldn’t believe you were real, and you fisted his shirt like if you let go, he might disappear.

“Come home with me,” you breathed, your lips brushing his, desperate, pleading.

Conrad didn’t hesitate. The kiss deepened, urgent, greedy, as though you were trying to memorize each other in one night. You barely registered the taxi ride, too caught in the press of his forehead to yours, the quiet hitch in his breath every time your mouths met again.

By the time you stumbled through your front door, you were still kissing, still pulling at each other like gravity itself demanded it. The door clicked shut behind you, sealing the two of you inside, and suddenly it didn’t matter how much time had passed. His shirt fell forgotten on the floor, your hands sliding into his hair, tugging him closer.

The years apart, the misunderstandings, the silence - they all funneled into this one moment, this frantic need to make up for everything you had lost. The city outside went on without you, but in here, it was only him.

And when your lips finally slowed, when the frantic urgency gave way to something softer, steadier, you realized with bone-deep certainty: this was the kiss you’d been waiting for all along.

His forehead rested against yours, his breath unsteady, his hands still trembling where they held you. In the quiet between heartbeats, he whispered, raw and unguarded,

“I’ve been dreaming of this. You.”

---

The room was dark except for the faint glow of the city bleeding in through the curtains. His chest rose and fell beneath your cheek, his arm draped heavy and warm across your back. For a fleeting moment, it felt like you could stay there forever.

Then your gaze caught the red digits on the clock. 4:02 a.m.

“You missed your train,” you murmured.

Conrad shifted slightly, eyes half-lidded, a sleepy smile tugging at his mouth. “I’ve been thinking about skipping the first day of the conference. Leaving tomorrow night instead.”

Your stomach tightened. “You shouldn’t change your plans for me.”

He lifted his head, brows knitting. “Why not?”

“Because I wouldn’t change mine for you,” you said quietly. “I have a life here.”

The weight of the night pressed down then - the heat of skin on skin, the kiss that had cracked you open, the way his love always felt too big, too dangerous. It reminded you of that morning when Belly told you she was engaged, and suddenly the air felt too thin, the room too small.

“The next train’s at five,” you whispered, pulling back from him. “You should go.”

Conrad sat up, watching you closely. “Or… we could get breakfast. Just us.”

You shook your head, voice sharp with panic. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

His expression flickered, wounded. “Is everything okay? Did I do something?”

Your throat burned. “Conrad… what do you think is happening here? You show up at my door, unannounced. What even was your plan?”

“I didn’t have one,” he admitted, raw and unflinching. “I just knew I wanted to see you. To tell you that I love you. To ask if any part of you still loves me.”

The silence after that was unbearable.

“You don’t love me anymore?” he asked, his voice breaking on the word anymore.

Your chest cracked. “Of course I do. I always have. That’s the problem.”

He blinked at you, confused.

“Maybe the only reason we were ever together was because of Susannah,” you confessed. “Maybe there’s a reason life kept pulling us apart. A reason you kept leaving. If your mom had never gotten sick, would I have been there to hold you up? Would you have even looked at me that way? Or was it always about Belly - that she didn’t want you, so you came to me instead?”

“That is not why I love you.” His voice was low, fierce. He leaned forward, eyes burning into yours. “I have tried everything not to love you - for Jere’s sake, for your sister’s, for mine. I didn’t want to drag you down into my grief. But I couldn’t stop. I felt it way before that summer, before my mom got sick, before all the mistakes with Belly. You’ve always been a precious person to me. At some point, I started to see you differently, and it terrified me. Because I didn’t want things between us to change.”

Your breath shuddered out, but he wasn’t done.

“If I met you for the first time tonight,” Conrad said, voice trembling, “I would still love you.”

You shook your head, tears pricking your eyes. “How do you know that?”

“Because I’ve changed everything about myself,” he said. “And the only thing I haven’t been able to change is how I love you.” He was crying now, tears reflecting gently in the glow from the light outside.

Your heart split clean down the middle. “Conrad, I wish I could be as sure as you. But I can’t. I’m sorry.”

He held your gaze for a long, unbearable moment. Then he nodded, just once, and reached for his bag.

“I’m not sorry,” he said softly. And then, quieter still: “I’m going to try to catch the 5 a.m. train.”

And just like that day at the dedication, the world became suffocatingly small.

---

You watch him go before you really understand you’re watching him go.

The apartment hums with the residue of skin and breath and the quiet aftermath of everything you let happen. You tell yourself you’re practical; of course he has to catch the train. It’s 5 a.m. and the world is doing the tidy thing it always does: moving on.

But the thing about feeling like you’ve been stitched together only moments before is that the thread can catch and pull again.

You stand on the balcony, bare feet on cold concrete, and you think of the way he held you like he was making up for years. You think of the way his voice trembled when he said he’d tried not to love you. You think of how light the city seemed when he kissed you, like someone had opened a window and let the sun in.

You want to believe you’re different now. You want to be the grown version of yourself who can hold a life in Paris without ghosts wrecking the corners.

But the truth is steadier and harder:

you are still her -the girl who loved too loudly and followed her heart until it bled.

Was that girl so bad? She made mistakes, yes. She hurt people. She also kept going. She kept loving. You inch your hand to your mouth and the thought surfaces like a breath you can’t hold down.

I still love her, you tell yourself - meaning the version of you that kept trying, that still deserved a chance.

And then: I still love him. I will always love Conrad Fisher.

The realization is both a surrender and a lit fuse.

He’s not there. The silence pushes back like a tide.

You don’t think. You move.

You throw on jeans, a sweater, anything. Your fingers are clumsy with urgency; you fumble for your phone, for your keys. The taxi ride is a blur of brake lights and breath that fogs the window.

The train station is bright with a million signs. You run because there is no other movement that matches the speed of what your chest has become. People surge past you, sleep-slick and indifferent. A woman with a stroller throws you a look. A man in a suit curses when you clip his heel. Everything minor in the world sharpens into something urgent and incandescent: him.

You step into the carriage of the 5 a.m. headed to Brussels, and everything hushes. The scrape of fabric, the puff of your own breath loud in your ears as you frantically search through the rows.

The wave of relief you feel when you spot him is indescribable.

“Is this seat taken?” you ask, and your voice sounds like it belongs to someone who has been underwater.

He looks up slowly. Surprise softens into something stunned and then, impossibly, an incandescent smile that makes the world tilt right.

“Conrad,” you say, and it is the most ordinary thing you could possibly say to him, but it carries everything. “I choose you - of my own free will. If there are infinite worlds, every version of me chooses you in every one of them.”

Silence drops like a curtain. For an absurd, suspended second you wonder if the motion of the train has stopped the rest of time from breathing.

He stands then, like something answered that had been waiting long enough to be prayer. His palms are warm as he takes your face gently, two hands cupping both sides as if he needed to check that you were actually there.

“I love you, Y/N,” he says - the words tumbling out with the weight of everything that came before them. It’s not reckless. It’s not careless. It’s a confession matured in the kind of earnestness you’ve watched hide behind his usual reserve.

The words land in the hollow of your ribs and set you on fire.

You answer before you can measure the consequences because measuring felt cowardly and because you want this truth to be solid and ongoing, not some promise stolen in the dark.

“I love you too,” you whisper, and the sound of it is both surrender and triumphant claiming.

He leans in and kisses you like the world is ending and beginning at the same time.

His mouth is warm and steady, the press of his forehead against yours a punctuation that feels like home.

Around you, the carriage rocks and people sleep and announcements scrape over the loudspeaker like far-off rain. But inside your chest, it’s a storm breaking open - thunder rolling through your veins, lightning sparking where his hands hold you steady.

You let out a laugh that is half sob, joy strangled with years of waiting. He smiles into the curve of your face, and it feels like standing in the eye of something once dangerous, now finally calm.

When he pulls back, his voice is raw and certain:

Reader's POV

Following Belly’s AirTag led you to more than just her stolen backpack.

The next few months blurred like spilled paint. You and Belly found a dingy flat with too many roommates and paper-thin walls. Rent was cheap, the bathroom sink never stopped dripping, and the kitchen smelled faintly of garlic no matter what anyone cooked. But it was yours.

You both found work. You bartended in a smoky bar where the floors stuck to your shoes. Belly handed out tickets and swept aisles at a neighborhood theater. Neither job was glamorous, but they paid enough.

Belly started taking online classes, chipping away at her degree. Watching her inspired you. So between shifts that stretched until dawn, you re-enrolled too. Your laptop perched on the rickety kitchen table, essays lit by the glow of a bare bulb.

Little by little, it started to feel like life was stitching itself back together. The chaos had rhythm. The city became yours.

But as November bled into December, homesickness crept in like frost. You missed the hum of the Cousins house, your mom’s dry humor, Steven’s easy warmth. Worst of all, you missed him. Conrad.

You hated admitting it, but it was true. No matter how far you ran, no matter how many crowded metros you pushed through or pastries you devoured on cobblestone corners, he lingered. His absence had a shape, sharp and unbearable.

And then, as if he’d read your mind, his letter arrived.

He imagined what your days must look like here: you with a bitter coffee in one hand, a flaky croissant in the other. He guessed at which bars you might haunt, which streets you might get lost in. He wrote about Paris like he’d walked it beside you, like he knew. And at the end, he wished you a Merry Christmas. Said he hoped Paris was everything you dreamed it would be.

You read it three times. Then you folded it away.

Belly was glowing, though. She’d met a boy, Benito. He had dimples that made her blush and the kind of easy charm that pulled her into laughter. For the first time in months, her eyes lit up again. You were grateful for that.

Christmas Eve came and went. Belly was swept away by Benito, and you spent it alone. The streets outside glittered with lights, voices spilling from bars and cafés. But inside your apartment, you sat curled by the frosted window, aching for home, aching for everything you’d left behind.

New Year’s brought Taylor. She breezed into Paris with her big laugh and bigger opinions, and suddenly your cramped apartment transformed into a party. Music thumped, your new friends crowded the space, bottles passed hand to hand. For one night, the heaviness lifted.

Benito arrived late, knocking at the door with a crooked grin and a package in his arms. “This was downstairs for you,” he said, pressing it into your hands.

Your chest tightened when you saw the handwriting. Conrad’s.

Inside was another letter. And a stuffed animal. The one he’d won for you on the boardwalk years ago.

Belly’s eyes softened. Taylor’s narrowed knowingly.

“Is this why?” Taylor asked. “Why you won’t let yourself try with anyone here?”

You shook your head quickly. “That's not it. It’s me. I don’t want to hurt anyone else...”

Taylor arched a brow. “Newsflash, Y/N - hurting people is inevitable. You can’t live your whole life avoiding it.”

Her words clung like smoke.

When midnight struck, you forced yourself to be brave - or maybe reckless. A stranger with kind eyes stood nearby, and you leaned in, kissed him as fireworks thundered outside. His lips were warm, steady.

But the moment it ended, a hollow ache spread in your chest. It felt wrong. Off.

Because no matter how many strangers you kissed, you knew the truth: you would never be able to get Conrad out of your system.

---

Conrad's Pov

The months since you’d left blurred into a kind of gray. On the surface, I functioned. Classes, work, study. I smiled when people expected it, nodded when they spoke.

But underneath, everything hurt.

I was happy for you. At least, that’s what I told myself when Taylor mentioned Paris, when she dropped hints that you were settling in, that you and Belly were okay. I wanted to be glad. And some part of me was. But the other part - the louder, uglier part - ached with the knowledge that I’d almost had you back that summer. And then I lost you all over again.

And Jeremiah.

The guilt of both cut sharper than anything else.

I called Laurel a few days before Christmas. “Would it be okay if I came? Even with Jere there?” My voice caught. “And… would it be okay with Y/N?”

Silence, then: “They’re not coming home this year. Belly and Y/N are staying in Paris.”

The relief and ache tangled until I couldn’t tell them apart.

“I was thinking of reaching out,” I admitted quietly.

“Take the risk,” Laurel said gently. “If you’re thinking about her, let her know.”

So I wrote.

When Christmas came, I found myself in Cousins anyway, at your family’s house. The rooms felt hollow, like they were waiting for you. Even the air seemed different, missing something essential.

Steven sat on the couch, a controller in his hands. The sounds of his video game filled the silence, but neither of us really cared about the game.

I sat on the edge of the armchair, leaning forward, elbows on my knees. The words came before I could stop them.

“Does everyone still hate me?”

Steven’s hands stilled on the controller. He didn’t look at me right away, just let out a long sigh. “No,” he said finally, voice quiet but firm. “They don’t. I just… I wanted to protect my sisters. You don’t always make it easy.”

His words hit something deep. My throat tightened, but I forced myself to speak. “I know. And I’m sorry. For everything. For Belly. For Y/N. For… all of it. I never meant to make it harder on anyone, I just…” My voice cracked, and I had to swallow hard before continuing. “I thought I was protecting them too. And maybe I was wrong. No- I was wrong.”

Steven set the controller down, finally turning to look at me. His gaze was softer than I expected.

“I know you’re sorry,” he said after a beat. “That’s the thing. You carry it around like a backpack full of bricks. But Conrad…” He shook his head. “Sometimes saying sorry isn’t the point. Sometimes it’s about being the guy they can actually count on, not the guy who decides for them.”

The words landed heavy, but not cruel. Honest. Exactly like Steven always was.

“I want to be that guy,” I said, my voice low, almost a whisper. “For them. For her. I just don’t know if I can ever make it right.”

Steven leaned back against the couch cushions, blowing out a breath. “Look, you’ve put them through a lot. You’ve put yourself through a lot. But you’re here, right? That counts for something. Belly knows you care. Y/N knows it too, even if she won’t admit it right now. Time has a way of softening things.”

I blinked hard, relief stinging the back of my eyes.

And then Steven smirked, picking the controller back up. “Besides, if I can forgive you, anyone can. I mean, you did used to steal all the marshmallows out of the Lucky Charms and blame it on me.”

A laugh broke out of me before I could stop it, sharp and almost painful with how much it loosened in my chest. “They were Y/N's favorite part," the memory brought a small smile across my lips, "You still holding onto that?”

“Damn right I am,” Steven said, eyes back on the screen, but the corner of his mouth twitching upward. “But I guess I’ll let it slide. This time.”

Later, wandering upstairs, I found myself in your room. Empty bed. Books stacked on the desk. And there, shoved up in the corner of your closet, the stuffed animal I’d won for you years ago.

I picked it up, thumb tracing its worn fur. And I knew what I had to do. I boxed it carefully, wrote another letter, and sent it across the ocean.

---

It was April now, and the cemetery smelled like wet earth and lilies. Five years since Mom. I carried flowers to her grave, but stopped short when I saw Jeremiah already there, hands shoved in his pockets, head bowed.

For a while, neither of us spoke. Just the wind and the faint rustle of leaves.

Finally, I forced the words out, almost a whisper. “I’m sorry. For everything.”

His shoulders stiffened, but he didn’t look at me. “You pretended to help with the wedding while you were trying to ruin it. And you did.”

The accusation landed like a blow. I lowered my eyes, “I know.”

He turned then, finally, and his face was hard- like every ounce of pain had crystallized into anger. “Do you get it, Con? You destroyed the one thing I thought I could hold on to. You made me believe you were on my side, and then you ripped the floor out from under me.” His voice cracked, sharp and ragged. “You think I don’t already hate myself for Cabo? For what happened with Y/N?”

My chest caved at her name.

Jeremiah shook his head, eyes glassy. “I only did that because I felt like everything was crumbling. Like I had to beat you at something, even if it made no sense. Even if it meant…” He trailed off, jaw tight, and I knew what he wasn’t saying.

“I tried to stop loving her,” I whispered, my throat raw. “I tried to keep my promise to Mom - to put you first, always. But I couldn’t. I failed you, Jere. I failed her. And I failed Mom too.”

The silence that followed was unbearable. Until finally, he looked at me, really looked at me, for the first time in months. His eyes weren’t just angry. They were hollowed out with grief.

“I promised her too,” he said hoarsely. “That I wouldn’t let anything come between us as brothers. And I broke it.”

We stood there, two broken halves of the same family, the weight of Mom between us. The weight of her absence.

Then, almost without thinking, we stepped forward and embraced. It was rough, like we were clinging to something that might slip away again. Not forgiveness. Not yet. But something.

When we pulled apart, Jeremiah’s voice was softer. “I don’t think Belly and I will ever work, don't think she'll ever forgive me. And…” His mouth trembled before he steadied it. “and if Y/N ever forgives me, she deserves to be with someone who really loves her. Not someone who just needed to win.”

The words gutted me. Not a blessing. Not entirely. But the closest thing to one I’d ever get.

And for the first time in months, I let myself breathe.

---

Later, I wrote you again. Told you Jere and I had made up, or at least started to. And then: “In case I haven’t made it clear, I think about you a lot. You’re pretty much all I think about.”

Weeks passed. And then it came.

A postcard. From Paris.

Your handwriting.

You thanked me for the stuffed animal, for the letters. Said you and Belly had found a permanent place. Ended with: “I hope you’re well.”

The words were brief. But to me, they were everything. Proof you hadn’t erased me, hadn't shut me out forever. Proof I still mattered, even in some small way.

I read it until the ink blurred, until the edges wore soft beneath my hands. I folded it up into my wallet to keep it close.

It was the postcard, and also a bit of encouragement from Agnes, that convinced me to go. I was already scheduled to be in Brussels for a conference with Dr. Namazy.

So I changed my flight.

Not Brussels.

Paris.

Reader's POV

You almost let your legs do it. Almost let yourself run straight to him the second you saw him sitting there in that awful chair at the airport gate. His hair fell into his eyes, his duffel slouched at his feet like he’d been waiting for hours.

It took every ounce of restraint you had not to cross that polished floor, not to say his name. You could already imagine how it would go - his head snapping up, that startled, wrecked look he always wore when he was trying too hard not to fall apart in front of you. Maybe he’d stand. Maybe you’d let yourself fall into his arms.

But before you could even lean forward, before your lungs could draw in the breath to call out, Belly’s hand was around your wrist, tugging.

“Come on,” she whispered.

And then you were moving, her pulling you down the jetway, boarding the plane, away from him.

You told yourself not to look back. That was the rule. Don’t look back.

But the heat in your chest felt unbearable, like you’d swallowed fire, and when the plane lifted off the ground you almost believed you’d left your heart behind at the gate.

You pressed your forehead to the cool oval of the window and told yourself this was what you wanted - space, distance, silence. But your mind wouldn’t stop circling back to the words he’d left you with.

“I’m sorry for screwing everything up." His voice had cracked.

You’d called him a runner before. Told him he always found a way out when things got too close. But now here you were, running too. Thousands of miles away from Cousins, from him, from all of it. Hypocrite, you thought bitterly, digging your nails into the armrest.

The plane was loud but also suffocatingly quiet. Belly beside you tried to distract herself with a magazine, flipping pages without reading them, biting the inside of her cheek. Eventually she nudged your arm.

“You okay?” she asked softly.

"I should be the one asking you that question," you gave her the most sympathetic smile you could muster, "I saw him at the gate...”

Her shoulders sagged. “I know. I did too. That’s why I pulled you.”

A humorless laugh slipped out. “Thanks for saving me, I guess.”

Her hand stilled on the crumpled magazine. “No. Thanks for saving me.”

You turned toward her, surprised by the rawness in her voice. For a moment she looked so small, like the little sister who used to trail behind you with scraped knees and sticky hands, begging you to wait up. You leaned your head against hers, and she let out the breath she’d been holding.

The city greeted you with gray skies and the smell of roasted chestnuts drifting from a vendor cart. It was overwhelming - foreign signs, different rhythm, the kind of beauty that only reminded you how far you were from home.

By the time you and Belly found a small café, your bodies felt heavy with exhaustion. You slid into a table by the entryway.

For a while, neither of you spoke. Belly mindlessly stirred the drink she bought. Finally, she whispered, “You’ve always been here. For me. Even when I didn’t deserve it. Especially then.”

You blinked at her, throat tight.

“I’m sorry,” she added. Her voice trembled. “For what I said at the wedding. For all of it. You were right.”

The air between you shifted. You reached across the table, squeezing her hand. “You’re my sister,” you said. “That’s never going to change.”

Her shoulders sagged with relief, a small smile pulling at her lips. For the first time since you’d boarded the plane, you felt something other than regret.

But then reality hit. “We should call Mom,” Belly said softly. “She’s probably worried sick.”

You dialed, your heart pounding, and Laurel picked up on the first ring. The sound of her exhale was sharp, almost desperate.

“Tell me where you are,” she demanded. “I’ll come get you.”

You hesitated. “We’re… in Paris.”

Silence. Then: “Paris?”

Belly leaned close to the phone, speaking quickly. She explained how everything had been too much, how she just needed time and space, how you’d come to keep her safe.

After some convincing, Laurel’s voice softened. “Whatever you need to heal, Belly. I trust you.”

Her words landed heavy. She hadn’t asked about you. Not once.

When the call ended, you both stood to pay, Belly digging for her wallet, then freezing. “My bag,” she whispered. “Y/N, my backpack’s gone.”

Your eyes darted around the café. Empty chairs. A couple by the door. No backpack.

“Oh my god,” Belly’s voice pitched higher, panicked. “My passport-my- my ring-”

You rolled your eyes, already unlocking your own phone. “Relax. AirTag, remember?”

Her face lit with frantic hope as you opened the tracking app. A blinking dot appeared a few streets over.

“Come on!” you urged, grabbing her hand.

And then you were both running through the Paris streets, weaving between startled pedestrians, chasing the little dot that might lead you back to her bag.

---

Conrad's POV

The airport was too bright. Too loud. Announcements kept splitting the air, one after the other, voices echoing through speakers that crackled. I sat hunched in a chair, duffle bag slouched against my foot, staring at the scuffed tile floor. My flight wasn’t for another hour, but I couldn’t sit still. My leg bounced; my fingers curled and uncurled.

When my phone buzzed, I almost didn’t answer. But it was Dad.

“Hey, bud,” Adam said, his voice steady, almost casual. “Listen. I need you to check on Jere. He must feel horrible with the wedding getting called off.”

The words landed like a punch to the gut.

“The… what?” I kept my voice even, though my throat tightened.

“The wedding. It’s not happening. Look, I'm going to be stuck here for awhile cleaning up...” Dad kept talking, something about Jeremiah needing someone, but my brain wouldn’t focus. The wedding’s off.

“Yeah,” I said finally, my voice hoarse. “I’ll go.”

A laugh tried to claw its way out of my chest, ugly and wrong. Instead, I shut my eyes. The relief came fast, like a wave, but it made me sick. Because yes, I was glad it was over. I was glad Belly wasn’t going to marry Jeremiah, and that made me the worst brother alive.

But beneath all that, a flicker of something almost unbearable: hope. Hope that maybe, without that wedding between us, Y/N and I weren’t doomed after all.

Except I’d ruined it. I’d betrayed her. I’d told her sister what she had trusted me to keep. And now she was gone.

The bar glowed warm through the window when I pulled into the gravel lot. Denise, Redbird, a handful of others were inside. My eyes caught on Jeremiah immediately - slumped forward on a stool, his face dim under the hanging lights.

I froze. The last time I’d seen him, he’d made it clear he never wanted to see me again. My hand tightened around the steering wheel, even though the car was already in park.

Footsteps crunched on the gravel. Taylor, Steven just behind her. They intercepted me before I could make it to the door.

Taylor crossed her arms, her glare sharp enough to cut. “Congrats. You must be thrilled.”

I didn’t bother defending myself. “I messed up,” I said, the words flat. “Completely.”

“Half,” she snapped back. “The other half’s on them. Jere and Belly.”

The distinction didn’t lighten the weight in my chest.

I glanced toward the bar window again, at the blur of my brother hunched inside. “I just want to help him,” I murmured. “He’s my brother.”

Taylor studied me for a beat, then her expression softened just slightly. I hesitated, then asked, quieter than before, “Have you heard from Y/N?”

Taylor shook her head. “No. Not yet.”

I nodded once, but the answer landed hard. My stomach twisted. If Taylor didn’t know, it meant nobody knew. Which meant you could be anywhere. Alone. Upset.

“She probably just needs some space,” Taylor said. “If I hear from her or Belly, I’ll let you know. But right now? Jere doesn’t need you in there. Not like this.”

Her tone wasn’t cruel, but it left no room for argument.

I swallowed down the urge to press further, to ask if she was sure, if she’d keep her promise. My chest ached with the kind of worry I couldn’t say out loud - the kind that made me picture you in every worst-case scenario. But I kept my face even, the way I always did.

“Okay,” I said.

Turning back toward my car, I caught one last glimpse through the window: Jeremiah bent low, shoulders curved in on himself. Y/N somewhere I couldn’t reach. Both of you hurting, and me on the outside.

---

The Cousins house was too quiet when I got there. Too still. Every room felt swollen with memory, like the walls themselves remembered more than I could bear.

I couldn’t sit still. My body carried me in circles. From the living room to the kitchen, back again. My footsteps echoed against the floorboards Mom used to scold us for scratching up. She’d hated when we dragged furniture across them. Now every creak sounded like a reminder: she wasn’t here to scold, to laugh, to tell me I wasn’t as terrible as I felt.

I couldn’t get your face out of my head. The way your eyes had widened when I told you I loved you - like you didn’t quite believe it, but maybe you wanted to. The flicker of hope I saw there before I destroyed it. Before I proved that loving you didn’t mean I could protect you. That I could still be the one to hurt you worse than anyone.

And then there was Belly. My mouth opening, words spilling, every wrong choice burning itself into my chest. I wanted to fix everything, but all I’d managed to do was light another fire.

My chest felt hollow. If Mom were here, she’d know what to say. She’d know how to stop me from ruining everything. But the house was empty, and all I had was the sound of my shoes pacing grooves into the floor.

The next morning, I grabbed for a duffel bag in the hall closet, hands moving on autopilot. Jere’s clothes. Red Gatorade. I could at least bring him something clean, something normal, something to help with his no doubt ruthless hangover. It was the smallest gesture, but it was something.

The front door creaked. Steven stepped inside, his face tightening the moment he saw me.

“I’m grabbing stuff for Jere,” he said flatly. His eyes flicked to the duffel in my hand. “Don’t bother. I’ll take care of it.”

I froze, my hand still hooked on the strap. “I was just going to drop this off -”

“Stay out of it, Conrad.” His voice cut sharp through the quiet.

The words landed heavy, but he didn’t stop there. He stepped closer, his glare steady. “There’s no problem for you to fix. You are the problem.”

It hit harder than I expected. I opened my mouth, but nothing came.

Steven’s jaw clenched. “Do you get it? He doesn’t want to see you. You made your choice, and it blew up in everyone’s face. Don’t drag Jere through it again. And don’t drag my sisters through it either.”

My sisters. The words pierced deeper than any insult. Belly. Y/N. His tone was sharp, protective, and I hated how much it stung - because he was right to protect them. From me.

“I never meant to hurt her...” I said quietly, my throat tight. The words felt pathetic even as they left me.

Steven shook his head, disappointment written in every line of his face. “ Just- stay away. From Jere. From Belly. From Y/N."

His voice dropped at your name, like he knew it was the one that would land deepest. And it did.

I stood there in the half-light of the hallway long after he left, duffel bag still clutched in my hand, the weight of it pulling at my arm. My chest felt like the floor was falling away beneath me, like no matter how hard I tried, I would keep losing the people I loved most.

--

The house was dark when I came downstairs, except for the faint glow spilling out from the kitchen. I thought I’d be alone again, but then I saw him.

Jeremiah.

He was standing by the counter, hands planted firm against it, Mom’s painting laid out. I’d pulled it from the garage as a wedding gift, dusted it off. A piece of her, a reminder of what we’d almost had.

His eyes flicked to mine, cold and unyielding.

“Shit,” I started, my throat dry. “I-”

“Don’t.” His voice was sharp enough to cut. “You’ve done enough.”

I swallowed hard. “I just wanted to say-"

“Say what?” He spun on me, anger finally spilling over. “That you’re sorry? That it wasn’t what it looked like? That somehow, for once in your life, this isn’t your fault?”

The words landed like blows.

“I never wanted to hurt you,... I managed.

He laughed, bitter and humorless. “That’s the thing, Conrad. You don’t even have to try. You ruin things without even meaning to. You always have.”

My chest burned.

He stepped closer, eyes flashing. “She called me. Belly. She told me she and Y/N are in Paris.”

The ground tilted beneath me. My stomach dropped.

“She called me. Not you.” His voice shook, but it was steady enough to slice through me. “That has to mean something, right? That you weren’t the one she needed. They’re staying there. She’s not coming back.”

The words carved through me, but I kept my face still.

Jeremiah’s mouth twisted into something colder than I’d ever seen on him. “She didn’t choose me. But she sure as hell didn’t pick you either. And neither did Y/N.” His voice rose, sharp with finality. “So why don’t you get the fuck out, go back to California, and never come back?”

The kitchen went silent except for the blood pounding in my ears. I wanted to argue, to beg, to explain. But nothing came.

I just stood there, feeling the weight of his words sink like stones into my chest, knowing he meant every one.

---

Later, I sat across from Adam by the fire pit outside a bar, the flames throwing shadows across his face. The night smelled like smoke and salt, and the crackle of wood filled the silence between us. My whole body felt numb, but my chest burned like something had caved in.

“It wasn’t Jere who ruined anything,” I said finally, my voice low, raw. “It was me.”

Adam’s eyes flicked up from the flames, cautious.

“I told her I loved her. Y/N...” The name nearly broke me. “After I told Belly not to marry him. That he wasn’t good for her.”

Adam's face tightened. “Why would you do that?”

“Because it was the truth.” My breath shook. “But the way I said it, the way it all came out - I destroyed everything. I ruined the wedding. I ruined him. I broke her. And the worst part?” My voice cracked. “The worst part is I wanted to. Some part of me wanted it to all fall apart...”

The confession sat like acid in my chest. My hands trembled against my knees.

“I hate that he’s hurting,” I whispered. “But I can’t fix it. He’ll never forgive me. And maybe he shouldn’t...”

Adam was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, almost gently, “Give him space. That’s what I had to do with you, after your mom died. I trusted you’d lean on the people who loved you. And you did. He will too.”

I nodded, but the words barely reached me. The truth was unshakable, simple, brutal:

I’d only ever wanted you. Not Belly. Not anyone else. Just you.

I didn’t stop the wedding for me. I stopped it because Jeremiah wasn’t right for Belly. And because I knew you would never survive watching your little sister walk into a life that wasn’t hers. Not after everything you’d already carried.

So I burned it all down. For you. For your peace. For your future.

But as I sat there with Adam, the weight of it pressed so heavy I could barely breathe. Because maybe I’d saved your peace. Maybe. But I’d lost you in the process.

And I didn’t think I’d ever get you back.

We finally stood, said a quiet goodbye, and then I drifted toward the street. The night air was cool, heavy with ocean mist. My steps felt hollow against the pavement until my ride slowed to the curb, headlights sweeping over me.

I slid into the back seat, the leather sticking to my palms, duffle bag at my feet.

As the car pulled away, the firelight, the ocean, the whole of Cousins blurred in the rearview mirror. My chest ached with the cruelest truth of all-

I was always the one to run.

But this time, it wasn’t just running. This time, I was leaving everything behind.

The girl I loved, the brother I’d broken, the home that had swallowed me whole.

And I knew, with a kind of finality that hollowed me out from the inside, that once I left,

You barely slept.

When you finally pried yourself out of bed, it felt like you were dragging the weight of last night with you, every thought crashing like waves against your ribs. Conrad’s words - his confession, his betrayal - played over and over in your head until you could hardly separate them anymore.

He told Belly. He told her what Jeremiah had almost done to you. And he told you he loved you.

How dare he do both in the same night? How dare he rip your trust out from under you and then try to hand you his heart like it was some kind of consolation prize? You had never felt so split apart, so raw. And yet, a part of you, the smallest and cruelest part, couldn’t stop replaying it. His voice, breaking when he said he’d never stop loving you.

Maybe you did understand Jeremiah more than you ever wanted to admit.

Your feet dragged against the hardwood as you padded downstairs in search of coffee. The kitchen was quiet, sun pooling in through the windows, when you reached for a mug.

And then the sound of footsteps.

Conrad.

Your breath caught in your throat as he stepped into view. His eyes widened slightly at the sight of you, but he didn’t flinch, didn’t retreat.

“You’re supposed to be on the boat,” you said, voice stiff, trying to sound casual even as your chest caved in.

He shoved his hands into his pockets, leaning against the doorway like he hadn’t just detonated your world last night. “Something told me being stuck out on the ocean all day with my brother was a bad idea.”

You blinked, unsure if Jeremiah knew yet, if Belly had told him, praying for everyone’s sake that she hadn’t.

The silence stretched too long before he finally sighed, running a hand down his face. “About last night,” he said, voice low. “Forget it ever happened. I was drunk. Way out of line.”

Your jaw tightened, anger flooding your veins. “You weren’t drunk.”

His eyes flickered to you, a flash of something vulnerable before he straightened.

“You haven’t changed at all,” you said, shaking your head. “Dragging all of this up, the week of Belly’s wedding? You think you’re protecting her? You’re not. You’re ruining everything.”

Something snapped in him then. His voice rose, sharp enough to make you flinch.

“What do you want from me?” he yelled. “I laid myself fucking bare last night, I put it all out there, and you shut me down. Now here I am, trying to let you off the hook, trying to come out of this with a little piece of pride, and you won’t let me have that.”

The words cracked like a whip.

“You broke my heart last night, Y/N. Is that what you want to hear?”

You froze, throat burning. “You’re heartless.”

His chest rose and fell, eyes blazing. “No. You’re the one who’s heartless.”

The silence that followed was suffocating. You wanted to scream at him, to run from him, to collapse in his arms all at once. But before you could decide, he said it. The words you weren’t ready for.

“I love you. I will never not love you. I think you know that. I think you’ve known all along...”

Your breath hitched, but no words came.

“I’m not pretending for you anymore,” he said, and then he was gone. Just like that.

You stood there in the kitchen, coffee forgotten, the sound of his voice echoing in your ears until it almost didn’t feel real.

---

Upstairs, you found Belly perched on her bed, her face blotchy and pale, her eyes swollen from crying.

She didn’t look up when you stepped inside.

“Belly…” You hesitated before sitting down beside her, the mattress dipping under your weight. “I need to tell you something.”

Her silence was crushing, but you forced yourself to keep going, your voice rambling, uneven.

“I should have told you sooner, and I didn’t. That night… with Jeremiah. I wasn’t ready to talk about it. Not with you, not with anyone. I told myself it was to protect you, and maybe part of it was, but-” Your throat closed. “The truth is, I was embarrassed. Confused. I didn’t even know how to put it into words for myself.”

Her eyes flicked up to you, shimmering, and your stomach twisted.

“I’m sorry,” you whispered. “I never wanted to keep it from you. I just... I couldn’t face it.”

The silence stretched until her lip trembled. “He… he did something like that before. In Cabo.”

Your breath caught. “What?"

Her shoulders sagged. “I never told anyone. And I still-” She pressed her palms to her eyes, voice breaking. “I’m still marrying him.”

The shock lodged deep in your chest. “Belly...”

“I haven’t told him yet,” she said quickly, shaking her head. “But I will. I will.”

You wanted to scream, to shake her, to beg her not to do this, but the lie on her face told you everything. She was already in too deep. And so you just nodded, biting your tongue as she plastered on a smile and said she was fine.

By the time the rehearsal rolled around, you had painted yourself back together. Floor-length black dress, heels, light makeup. You told yourself that if you looked composed maybe you could trick yourself into feeling it too.

You had almost forgotten what the rehearsal entailed. Almost managed to block out the fact that you would be walking down that aisle, taking your place, pretending to be steady while your insides trembled. What you hadn’t managed to forget was Conrad. That he would be there. That you would have to see him again, up close, side by side.

When Paige’s instructions carried over the murmurs of conversation, you stiffened. The pairings. The walk. The aisle. And then suddenly he was there. At your side. Silent. Waiting.

For one terrible, suspended moment, you thought you might actually be sick. His presence was so close, so consuming, it made the room feel smaller, the air thinner. He didn’t say a word, and neither did you.

You looped your arm through his, trying to make it look effortless, like it was nothing more than following directions. But your skin brushed the fabric of his sleeve, and you swore you felt him tense. Swore you caught the smallest hitch in his breath.

The aisle stretched impossibly long. Every step echoed in your ears, heavy, deliberate. Beside you, Conrad’s warmth seared through the barrier of your dress and his suit jacket, like a low-burning fire pressed too close.

By the time you reached the altar, your lungs burned from holding your breath. You let go of him like your hand had been scorched, exhaling sharp, but the ache didn’t leave. If anything, it deepened.

Dinner afterward blurred into a haze of clinking glasses and forced laughter. Belly and Jeremiah raised toasts, their smiles bright, voices carrying high above the low hum of conversation.

Across the room, you caught his eyes. Just once. Just long enough to steal your air again. Then again. And again. Each glance, brief as it was, threaded like a needle into your chest, stitching you tighter, pulling you apart all at once. It wasn’t fair, how much it hurt to look at him, and how impossible it was to look away.

This weekend couldn't end soon enough.

---

Morning came too quickly. The wedding day.

You tugged your sage bridesmaid gown into place, makeup minimal, hair pinned. The chaos swirled around you - Anika brushing her teeth, Redbird searching for socks, Steven adjusting his suit. You made a snide comment about how decent he looked, but the words fell flat as soon as you opened Belly’s door.

Her face said it all.

“Jere’s missing,” she whispered, biting her nails. “No one’s seen him all morning.”

Steven tried to soothe her, but your blood ran cold when she admitted she’d confronted him last night.

It all clicked. Conrad.

You stormed to the sunroom and found him there, suit already on, devastating in navy. Your chest ached just looking at him.

“Jere’s gone,” you snapped. “Happy now?”

Confusion flickered across his face, but you didn’t let him speak.

“You couldn’t keep your mouth shut. You couldn’t let them be happy for five fucking seconds. This is on you. Fix what you broke. Find Jere.”

For once, he didn’t argue. He just left.

---

Later, in the bridal suite, the air felt suffocating, too much like a fairytale that was cracking at the edges. Belly paced in front of the mirror, twisting her engagement ring around and around like it might anchor her.

“He’ll come back,” she said suddenly, almost like she was talking to herself. Her voice trembled, brittle. “Jeremiah always comes back.”

You almost laughed. Instead, the words slipped out before you could stop them.

“It wouldn’t be the worst thing if he didn’t.”

Belly froze. Her reflection snapped to yours in the mirror, her eyes flashing. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

You swallowed hard, but you didn’t look away. “It means I don’t think you really want to marry him.”

“Yes, I do.” Her response was too quick, too sharp, like she’d rehearsed it a hundred times and still couldn’t make it sound true.

You shook your head, your chest aching. “No, you don’t.”

Her breath hitched. You could feel her unraveling, even as she tried to hold herself together. The sight of her - the little sister you’d spent a lifetime protecting - made your throat tighten, but you pressed on. “I’ve watched you choose him over Paris. Over Mom. Over me.” Your voice cracked, but you didn’t stop. “That’s not love, Belly. That’s losing yourself. That’s… that’s codependency. And it’s going to destroy you.”

Her face hardened, but you saw the tears pooling, ready to spill. She shook her head like a child refusing to hear, but her bottom lip betrayed her, trembling.

“If my maid of honor can’t support me,” she whispered, her voice breaking even as she tried to sound fierce, “then maybe you shouldn’t be here at all.”

The words sliced clean through you. For a moment, all you could hear was the thundering of your own pulse.

But you didn’t move. You stood your ground, even though your heart was breaking. You wanted to reach for her, to shake her, to pull her into your arms and remind her who she was before all of this. But she was already pushing you away, tears streaking down her face as she shoved you toward the door.

You stumbled back, the finality of it echoing in your chest.

When the door slammed, it wasn’t just wood and glass between you. It was everything you’d lost.

You stumbled into the hall, tears blurring your vision, chest caving in on itself. You barely registered the solid weight you collided with until strong hands steadied you.

Conrad.

He looked wrecked. His cheek was shadowed with a bruise, and yet it was his eyes that gutted you - dark, hollow, as if they’d been drained of everything except grief.

“I need to say something,” he rasped, voice shredded, like it hurt just to force the words out.

Your stomach dropped. Every nerve in your body screamed at you to run, to hide, because you knew what was coming.

“I’m sorry for screwing everything up.” His breath shook. “I hurt you, and for that, I am so-” his voice cracked, and he dragged a hand through his hair, like if he didn’t keep moving, he’d collapse right there in front of you. “I am so sorry. I don’t want to do that anymore. I can’t. So… I’m not gonna stay for the wedding.”

Your lips parted, a protest clawing up your throat, but he didn’t let you speak. His words poured faster now, as though if he stopped, he’d shatter.

“I’m just gonna take off now. I won’t see you for a long time, and that’s probably for the best.”

“No.” Your voice was hoarse, desperate, but he wouldn’t look at you. His gaze was fixed somewhere just past your shoulder, as though it hurt too much to hold your eyes.

“It hurts,” he said, finally meeting your gaze, and the rawness in his tone carved you open. “Being near you like this. And Belly... she’s the one who needs you right now. Not me. I’m just... a distraction. I need you to know that whatever happens-” his voice broke again, softer this time, “it was worth it to me.”

You could barely breathe. Every word sank like a stone in your chest, dragging you down, down, until your knees nearly buckled beneath you.

Then he leaned in, just enough for his lips to brush your forehead. Barely a touch, right above that now faded scar that seemed like it happened years ago, and yet it set your entire body alight.

You gasped, choking on the silence between you. The day Belly had announced her engagement surged back like a tidal wave - the same suffocating air, the same helpless shrinking. Except then, Conrad had been the one to anchor you, to save you from drowning.

“I feel alone.”

He swallowed.

“You’re not alone.”

You stared at him. “Then why do you keep leaving me?”

Now he was the one walking away. Again.

And all you could do was watch, rooted to the spot, as the boy you loved turned his back and left you in the dark.

You crumpled into the corner of the hall, sobs tearing through you until strong arms pulled you in. Steven.

He held you like an anchor, no questions asked, just quiet strength. “It’s okay,” he murmured. “Jere’s back. Him and Belly are talking now.”

You clung tighter, grateful for his steadiness.

Then Laurel appeared, frantic, searching for answers. Her eyes softened the moment she saw your face, but you shook your head.

“Right now, we just need to be here for Belly.”

Together, you entered Belly’s room. She turned at the sound of the door, tears streaming. Her lips trembled before she whispered, “lemon jelly belly.”

And then she broke. You and Laurel caught her at once, holding her through the sobs, through the heartbreak.

---

Hours later, your bags were packed, your whole life zipped into seams that felt too weak to hold it. The airport pulsed with motion - voices, wheels, overhead announcements- but it all blurred.

The only thing anchoring you was Belly’s hand in yours. Her grip was shaky, nervous, and you squeezed back, steady, promising without words that you’d follow wherever she led.

Paris. That was her escape plan. You didn’t care about Paris - the lights, the distance, the reinvention it promised. You just cared about her. If she needed to put an ocean between herself and the summer that had broken her, then you’d be there, no questions asked.

But beneath the resolve, dread coiled tight in your ribs. You knew running never truly worked, you’d tried before. The hurt always found its way across oceans, through time zones, into your chest.

You shifted your bag higher on your shoulder, eyes wandering over the rows of chairs, the blur of strangers...

And then your heart stopped.

Because there, not even ten feet away, sat Conrad.

The terminal tilted. Your stomach dropped, knees threatening to buckle. Air caught sharp in your lungs, like you’d forgotten how to breathe. The chatter, the rolling suitcases, even Belly’s fingers gripping yours - it all vanished, reduced to static.

It was just him. Conrad. Here.

Your pulse roared in your ears. Heat rushed to your eyes. Because it wasn’t Paris you were afraid of losing yourself in - it was him. Him, here, inescapable.

And suddenly, you weren’t sure if you were running toward Paris.