“theres never been someone so perfect for me”

He also kept a heavy hand on the small of your back any moment his hand was free. You put on a good act, pretending it didn’t get to you every time his fingers drew small shapes over your top, or whenever his digits slipped beneath the fabric when the boys were too busy laughing, leaving you with a hitched breath and a warm feeling between your legs.

When the other half to your dynamic duo, Kendall, stepped between the two of you and grabbed your hand, spluttering something about dancing to her favorite song, Logan’s grip tightened on you for a moment before he loosened up and plastered a pursed smile on his face.

“As long as you bring her back to me,” he said. Kendall laughed at his joke as she dragged you away. But one look between you and Logan and you knew he wasn’t trying to be funny.

“He’s so down bad for you, it’s hilarious,” Kendall giggled to you with a roll of her eyes. “He needs to lighten up.”

The pair of you danced to an ABBA song, laughing and belting out the lyrics. You closed your eyes and let loose, submitting to the tingle of whatever alcohol remained in your system.

John watched like a hawk. The irony wasn’t lost on him considering his bird costume. You looked so good. He wanted to hold you from behind and make you feel how heavy his—

“Any more staring and she’ll burst into flames.”

Logan snapped out of it and turned to Garrett, who wore a knowing smirk and offered him another can of Sprite.

“Thanks, man,” Logan said gratefully, taking the refill.

Garrett looked at your dancing figure. “Freshmen on the team were asking about her.”

“Yeah? What’d they say?” Logan replied almost absentmindedly, sipping his drink and staring at you.

Garrett sighed. “Rather not say. I’m supposed to be Hannah’s ‘boyfriend’ and all.”

Logan peered at him from the corner of his eyes, feeling his protective instincts start to wake. Garrett noticed and gently bumped their shoulders together.

“Not like that. Wasn’t bad. Just…” Garrett hummed into his red solo cup. “Horny.” He settled on that word.

That was enough.

Logan chugged down whatever was left in the can of soda before making his way over to you. He crossed the room in quick strides, ignoring Kendall’s amused voice when she cooed, “Uh oh, return to sender already?”

Logan took your hand and pulled you away; away from the dance floor, away from the party, and most importantly—away from the lingering gazes so many guys sent your way.

“Logan?” You queried as he brought you up the stairs.

He didn’t respond, just kept tugging you along.

“Logan.”

Nothing.

“Baby—”

He finally stopped and turned to look at you. His stature towered over you and you suddenly felt small with the way he was staring down at your face.

He exhaled a heavy breath. “Fuck, baby, I’m trying really hard to be respectful.”

You cupped his cheek. His skin was hot to the touch. He subconsciously burrowed closer into the palm of your hand.

“You don’t have to be,” you murmured.

He closed his eyes for a moment. “How many drinks have you had?”

“A can and a half of beer,” you answered.

He opened his eyes to make sure you were being honest. You stood unwavering.

“You’re sober?” He asked.

“Mhm.”

“You’re sure?”

“100%. Are you?”

He sighed, turning away. “Yeah. Yeah, I made sure not to…” his words trailed off.

You smiled. “You made sure not to drink too much so we could fuck?”

He looked at you again. “Don’t say it like that.”

You giggled, pushing away a strand of fallen hair from his forehead. “I’m saying it as it is.”

“I made sure not to drink too much to be responsible,” he corrected.

You nodded along, “Oh, yeah. Responsible. My responsible and respectful boyfriend.” You teased. He did not appreciate that.

“Okay,” he let out an amused sound as if he were faced with a challenge. He leaned in and whispered, “Let’s see who’s laughing when I stop respecting you and start doing all the things I plan to do to you.”

You gulped.

+

He led you to the nearest vacant bedroom in the Maxwell family home before pushing you inside and locking the door behind him. You thought he’d pin you against the door and makeout with you.

Instead, he said, “Sit on the bed,” in that husky voice you rarely hear so you knew you had to listen.

You sat down. The covers were soft and cool. You watched and waited for his next words, but Logan was too busy pacing in front of the door and running his hands through his hair. He looked so yummy.

“Take your clothes off. Let me see you.”

You blinked. You weren’t used to Logan being like this. He usually did all the work. But this new side of him was hot, so very hot.

You slowly unzipped your boots and kicked them off along with your socks. Next, your headpiece with the sprinkles. Then, your tube top, revealing your bare breasts, and lastly, your skirt, leaving you in nothing but underwear.

You felt exposed, just sitting there on the bed as Logan stared at you without a word. His eyes were nearly black from how blown out his pupils were, his bottom lip chewed and slightly pink from how much he dragged it beneath his teeth.

“Pretty,” he finally commented. “That’s new.”

You glanced down to where he gestured, looking at the lace thong you wore. He was right; it was new. You and Kendall bought matching ones for the costumes, but you didn’t need to tell him that bit right now.

“Yeah,” you confirmed.

“Was it expensive?” He asked.

“Not…really…”

“Good,” he nodded to himself. He pushed off the wings he wore for his costume and pulled his shirt over his head, tossing it aside.

He knelt down in front of you and spread your legs apart. “So I can ruin it, right?”

That shot up your spine. Your thighs wanted to rub against one another at his remark, but he held your knees firmly. “Answer.”

You nodded without thinking. “Yes.”

He smiled at your obedience and nodded. “Yeah, we’ll get to that. But for now…” his words died down as his lips attached to yours.

It was all tongue and messy. Logan pinned your wrists to the mattress as he kissed you. He grunted against your lips every time you bit his lip teasingly. Eventually, his kisses trailed downwards. To your neck, your shoulder, your collarbone. He made sure to give all your sensitive spots an abundance of attention.

Then? His favorite bit. Your tits. John Logan was a tits guy, through and through. Doesn’t matter what size or shape, he was enamored with them.

“Missed my girls,” he murmured before he took one of your breasts into his mouth, swirling his tongue over your pebbled nipple and sucking softly, then switching to the other boob and giving it the same treatment.

Your head tilted back and let out soft sighs. The comfort of him mouthing at your breasts left you aching and squirming on the bed. “Oh, baby…”

He pulled away at your voice and left a sloppy kiss between your tits. He peppered a few more kisses on your abdomen—nipping an especially ticklish spot below your rib—before diving in and licking you over the fabric of your lace thong. You gasped, your hand flying to his hair like second instinct.

He groaned against you, the sound muffled but the vibrations sending sparks to your core. “Already so wet for me. I hardly did anything.”

“Logan, please…”

He kept licking up your slit through your panties. He could feel your juices seep through the delicate material. The friction was doing wonders for your pleasure, but you grew impatient. “Logan…”

He finally pulled your thong to the side and resumed his ministrations with extra fervor. The direct contact had you jumping in your seat, but Logan’s strong arms held your hips down.

He groaned again, pulling away just to mutter, “Fuck, gorgeous, maybe he was right to call you cupcake. You taste so fucking sweet.”

Your eyebrows furrowed in confusion before his words fully registered in your head. “James?” You asked, breathlessly.

He pulled away and looked at you with a deadpan expression. He crawled up your body until he was face-to-face with you and said, “Please don’t ever say another man’s name when my tongue is inside you.”

That had your hole clenching around nothing.

“Got that?” He asked.

You nodded right away, “Mhm.”

“Words,” he demanded.

“Yes. Got it.” You responded quietly.

“Good,” he murmured before smoothing your hair down and admiring you for a moment. Then, his head was back between your thighs.

“Ah, Logan!” You breathed out, digging your nails into his scalp.

He raised up two fingers to your lips without stopping. You blinked back bleary eyed at that. “Open,” he said.

Immediately, you parted your lips. He shoved his ring and middle fingers inside your mouth and you sucked on them diligently, running your tongue over his calluses earned from hockey and various handyman jobs. Once they were appropriately wet, he pulled his fingers out and into your pussy.

You keeled over with a loud cry, “John!”

He raised his head up, letting his fingers do all the work now. “You like that? Yeah?”

You bobbed your head up and down, unable to find any words left in you from how nicely Logan scissored his fingers inside you, all whilst keeping his thumb on your clit in steady motions.

“Look at you. So pretty and whiny for me,” he murmured, voice smooth as honey. “Letting me wreck you like this and I haven’t even used my cock yet.”

You whimpered, hand gripping onto his bicep. You were sure you’d see nail marks on his skin even tomorrow morning.

“Oh, you like that?” He asked, tilting his head. “You want me to fuck you stupid with my cock?” The pace of his fingers increased.

Your eyes screwed shut. “Yes! Please, I want that.” You tugged him closer so you could bury your face in his neck, feeling so overwhelmed by pleasure.

He let out an airy chuckle. “Such a good girl. Just for that? I’ll reward you.”

He made you cum on his fingers. The heel of his hand applied pressure on your sensitive bundle of nerves until you seized and melted against him with a moan.

“Shhh, that’s it. Come down from it, you’re okay,” he kissed the top of your head.

You mumbled incoherent sentences into his neck and he merely smiled and rubbed your back.

After a minute of breathing, he pulled back slightly to look at your face. “You okay?” He asked, pushing a lock of hair away from your face.

You nodded, still buzzing from what had happened. “Yeah,” you exhaled.

He nodded, watching you carefully in the vulnerable afterglow. Your hands trailed down to his jeans, tugging at his belt, silently asking for it to come off.

Logan chuckled softly before helping you remove his belt and jeans. He reached into the pocket then chucked them on the floor and you instantly started palming his eager boner through his boxers.

He hissed, tossing his head back. “Fuck, baby.”

“Please tell me you have a condom,” you said.

He held the small foil up in his fingers.

At that, you rid him of his boxers and watched in tense awe as he teared the packet open with his teeth and rolled the condom on. You settled back against the bed pillows as you waited in hot anticipation.

“Uh uh,” he wagged his finger before curling it in a come hither gesture.

You sat up, letting out a surprised squeal when he lifted you by your thighs and settled on the bed before placing you above him. Your hands scrambled until they settled on his abs.

He looked up at you with hooded eyes, “Look good for me, gorgeous. I want a show.”

You leaned down and peppered kisses over his face. He let out a relaxed sigh and rubbed up and down your sides lazily. You nibbled on a spot right below his ear, earning you a delicious whimper from him.

“Tease,” he muttered and you grinned.

“Thought you wanted a show,” you remarked.

He hummed, “Mm, yeah. But just for me. No one else.”

You looked down at him, realizing he’s still a bit hung up from the incident earlier that night. Your finger slid sensually from his adam’s apple to his naval. “No one else. Only you.”

“Yeah?” His voice got deeper. “Show me.”

Sir, yes, sir. You held his dick from the base and slowly sank down on him. Logan groaned, his grip on your hips tightening. The stretch of him filling you up was deliriously good. You bit your lip as you took him in, inch by inch.

Finally, you both let out a sigh in unison. You planted your palms flat on his abdomen and started rocking back and forth.

The room succumbed to the sounds of soft moans and the subtle creak from the bed. The party downstairs was long forgotten. Here, it was just you and Logan.

“Just like that, baby, hah,” he breathed out, moving you back and forth. Even if he put you on top, Logan would always end up doing the work for you. You were his pampered princess.

You threw your head back, feeling the pleasure build up in your tummy once again. You took one of Logan’s hands and guided him through rubbing circles on your clit.

“Do you like that, sweetheart?” He asked.

You nodded fervently. “Yes. Fuck, yes, Logan. Keep doing that, baby, I’m so close.”

He held you firmly and started bucking up into you. You cried out, slumping against his chest as he thrusted in and out of you, reaching so deep inside, hitting that spongy part that left you seeing stars.

“Cum for me, baby. I know you can do it,” he said.

The coil snapped and you released, letting out a long moan. Your body shook, the pleasure and adrenaline rushing through you like a live wire meeting water. You collapsed against him, your bones feeling like putty.

He took your chin in his hand and tilted your head up to meet his face. He was still rocking into you. “Need to see you, baby. Need to see your pretty face when I cum.”

You were so out of it, barely processing his words. You simply nodded and chewed on your bottom lip. He looked so hot all sweaty and breathing heavily.

His eyes squeezed shut when he came, letting out a guttural groan. You felt his hips falter as he bucked up into you, rhythm sloppy and erratic. He let out a shuddering breath and dropped his head back onto the pillow.

The room was quiet now. The hum of electrical circuits and the distant noise of the party below filling up the space. You traced shapes onto his ribs, your touch barely skimming his skin. His hands caressed your back slowly, giving a small squeeze every now and then.

“Not jealous anymore?” You murmured, looking at him with an amused smirk.

He scoffed. “I wasn’t jealous.”

You hummed, “Ohhh, okay. Not jealous. Just possessive.”

He rolled his eyes fondly, a smile threatening to tear his lips wide. “Just…want you to be mine. All the time.”

You smiled, “I am.”

“I know you are.”

His hair was still damp at the edges from his post-game shower, curling slightly where he’d shoved his hand through it too many times, and the dark blue Briar letterman jacket had stayed on for maybe twelve minutes before the house got too hot and he dumped it over the back of a chair.

He was, by every reasonable standard, doing great. His girlfriend was not. His girlfriend had arrived at the party with Allie and a plan that had included one drink, maybe two, and absolutely no consideration for the fact that girls pouring vodka cranberries in hockey houses tended to treat measurements as a loose concept. 

Garrett had been across the living room when she’d taken the first one. He’d been in the kitchen with Tucker when she’d finished the second. By the time he saw her again, she was standing near the bottom of the stairs with one hand wrapped around a red cup, smiling at something Allie said with the bright, floaty concentration of a girl whose whole body had started operating on a two-second delay.

He could notice a winger drifting out of formation from half a rink away with two guys trying to take his head off. He could absolutely notice his girlfriend blinking too slowly under the hallway light, her cheeks warm from alcohol and the heat of too many bodies packed into the house, her mouth glossy and parted slightly like she kept forgetting whether she was meant to be talking or laughing. 

She looked happy, which helped. Loose and giggly and pleased. But she also kept shifting her weight like the floor had become more wobbly than usual, and Garrett had not fought for his life against Harvard’s second line that afternoon just to let his girlfriend get taken out by hardwood.

So he left Logan mid-sentence. Logan didn’t even pretend to be offended. He just followed Garrett’s line of sight, saw her trying to drink from the cup and missing her mouth by half an inch, and winced. “Oh, buddy.”

Garrett pointed at him without looking back. “Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were about to.”

“I was gonna say she looks graceful.”

“Die.”

Garrett crossed the room with the easy confidence of someone everyone automatically moved for, red cup of water in hand because Tucker, thank God, had seen the situation unfolding and passed it over like a medic on a battlefield. 

She didn’t see Garrett coming. She was too busy nodding very seriously at Allie, who was holding both her hands and saying something that involved the words no, babe, I’m so serious and eyebrow blindness.

Garrett stepped into her space, close enough that his knee brushed hers. “Hey, baby.”

She turned toward him. For one beautiful second, her face went blank. Then her entire expression rearranged itself into scandalised horror.

“Excuse you,” she said, pulling herself up to her full height, which was less effective than usual because she swayed slightly at the top and had to catch Allie’s wrist. “I have a boyfriend.”

Garrett blinked.

Allie made a noise like she’d swallowed a firework. Garrett looked at his girlfriend. His girlfriend looked back at him with genuine, drunken offence, like he’d approached her in a bar wearing a leather bracelet and too much confidence.

“Uh huh,” he said slowly, because there were moments in life that required leadership and moments that required not laughing directly in the face of the girl you loved while she was doing her best. “That’s great.”

“It is great,” she said, lifting her chin. “He’s very tall.”

Garrett’s mouth twitched. “Good for him.”

“And he plays hockey.”

“No shit?”

“And he’s, like, really good at it.”

Allie had turned away now, one hand clamped over her mouth, shoulders shaking. Garrett refused to look at her because if he did, he was going to lose it, and that felt like the sort of thing his girlfriend would interpret as disrespect from a strange man at a party, which apparently he was now.

He held out the cup. “Can you drink some water for me?”

Her eyes narrowed. Suspicious. Wobbly. Deeply loyal to the absent boyfriend currently standing less than a foot in front of her. “Why?”

“Because you’re drunk.”

“I’m not drunk.”

“Baby.”

Her mouth dropped open. “Don’t call me baby.”

“Right. Sorry.” He pressed his tongue to the inside of his cheek, nodding with a level of solemnity he absolutely did not feel. “My bad.”

“My boyfriend calls me baby.”

“Does he?”

“Yes.”

“Sounds annoying.”

“He’s not annoying.” She frowned at him with such force that it seemed to briefly take all her balance with it. Garrett’s free hand shot out to her waist before she could tip sideways into Allie. She looked down at it, then back up at him, appalled. “Don’t touch my waist.”

Garrett removed his hand at once, palms lifting. “Alright.”

Allie, still dying, leaned in and said, “Babe, maybe just drink the water.”

She looked betrayed. “You’re taking his side?”

“I’m taking hydration’s side.”

Garrett offered the cup again. “Just a couple sips.”

She stared at him for another second, clearly weighing the moral implications of accepting water from a man who looked suspiciously like her boyfriend but who she had, for reasons unclear to everyone except the vodka, decided was not. 

Finally, she took the cup with great caution, like he might use the transfer to propose something criminal, and drank.

Garrett watched her swallow three obedient little sips, then nodded. “Good girl.”

The look she gave him could have killed a weaker man. “Nope.”

“Right. Yep. Forgot.”

“My boyfriend says that.”

“Bet he does,” Garrett muttered.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

She handed the cup back, pleased with herself and still indignant, and then immediately turned toward Allie like the conversation had been handled.

Garrett stood there for half a second, holding the water, staring at the side of her face.

Dean appeared beside him like he had been summoned by humiliation itself. “Hey, man.”

Garrett didn’t look over. “Do not.”

Dean’s grin was audible. “She knows you’re her boyfriend, right?”

“She’s drunk.”

“She just told you she has a boyfriend.”

“Yeah, Dean, I was here.”

Dean leaned around him to look at her, delighted. “This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Garrett finally turned his head and gave him a flat look. “That’s sad.”

“No, what’s sad is getting rejected by your own girlfriend.” Dean clapped him once on the shoulder and immediately stepped out of reach. “Tough shift, captain.”

Garrett pointed at him. “I will put you through a wall.”

“Wow.” Dean called over his shoulder, already retreating. “Her boyfriend would never.”

Garrett took a slow breath through his nose and looked back at her. She was laughing at something Allie said now, one hand pressed to her own chest, head tipping forward so her hair fell around her face. 

She looked ridiculous. Beautiful and unsteady and way too warm in the cheeks, standing under the hallway light like the world had gone pleasantly fuzzy and she trusted it not to hurt her because she hadn’t yet noticed Garrett had been replaced by some guy bothering her with cups.

His annoyance softened before it could become anything real. Fine. He could work with this.

For the next twenty minutes, Garrett kept orbiting. That was the only word for it. He didn’t hover, because hovering would get him accused of being controlling by Dean, and probably by her if she remembered how to form an argument. 

He orbited. Close enough to keep an eye on her, far enough that she didn’t look up and accuse him of trying to steal girlfriend privileges from Garrett Graham, who was both beloved and missing.

She danced with Allie in the living room, mostly from the waist up because her coordination had started giving its two weeks’ notice. 

She complimented Tucker’s shirt with extreme sincerity even though Tucker was wearing the same plain black t-shirt he wore to every party. 

She told Logan he looked so tall tonight, which made Logan look down at himself like height might have happened recently and without his permission.

Garrett found her again near the back door, rubbing both hands over her bare arms.

The house was hot, but the door kept swinging open whenever someone stepped out to smoke or yell into the yard, letting in cold spring air that slipped over her skin and made her shoulders inch up toward her ears. 

Garrett saw the little shiver move through her before she did. He grabbed his letterman jacket off the chair and came up behind her, careful this time, no hands first. Just the jacket, warm from the room and heavy with him, settled over her shoulders.

“There,” he said, low near her ear. “You’re cold.”

She froze.

Garrett closed his eyes for one second. “Please don’t.”

She shrugged the jacket off so fast it nearly hit the floor. Garrett caught it by the collar.

“Nope,” she said.

“Baby.”

Her head snapped around. “I said no.”

Garrett looked at the ceiling. The ceiling offered no help. “You’re shivering.”

“I only wear my boyfriend’s jacket.”

“This is your boyfriend’s jacket.”

“No, it’s not.”

“It literally has my name on it.”

She squinted at the embroidered Graham on the chest like letters were a personal challenge. “Lots of people are named Graham.”

“Not on this team.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do, actually. I’m the captain.”

Her face twisted with immediate doubt, like that was exactly the sort of lie a jacket predator would tell at a party. “You’re the captain?”

Garrett stared at her. “Oh my God.”

From the couch, Logan made a strangled sound into his beer.

She pointed at Garrett’s chest, very serious now. “My boyfriend is the captain.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard great things.”

“He’s very hot.”

“Is he?”

“So hot,” she said, and then sighed, soft and dramatic and so genuinely fond that Garrett’s irritation had nowhere to land. “Like, stupid hot. It’s actually kind of annoying.”

Garrett’s face moved before he could stop it, warmth pulling at his mouth. “Yeah?”

She nodded. “And he has really nice hands.”

Logan choked.

Garrett didn’t look away from her. “Good hands are important.”

“They are,” she agreed solemnly. “And he’s not some random guy trying to give girls jackets.”

“Right.” He held up the jacket between them, helpless now. “Can I just–”

“No thank you.”

“You’re gonna freeze.”

“I’ll wait for Garrett.”

“You do that,” he said, because love was standing in a hockey house holding your own jacket while your drunk girlfriend faithfully rejected you on your own behalf. “Sounds like a plan.”

She smiled at him then, bright and polite. “Thank you for understanding.”

Garrett looked at her for a long moment, then at the jacket, then back at her. “Anytime.”

He walked away to the sound of Logan losing the fight against laughter so badly he had to bend over his own knees.

“You’re not helping,” Garrett said.

Logan wiped under one eye. “I’m sorry, man, but she’s loyal as hell.”

“She thinks I’m a stranger.”

“She thinks you’re a stranger with bad intentions. There’s a difference.”

“Great. That makes it better.”

Tucker came up beside them, looking far too amused for somebody usually committed to being the reasonable one. “You know, technically, this is a very good sign for your relationship.”

Garrett gave him a look. “Don’t start.”

“She’s hammered and still refusing men for you.”

“She refused me.”

“Exactly. Nobody is safe.”

Dean reappeared then, because joy, unfortunately, had a way of finding him. “I just heard she wouldn’t wear your jacket.”

Garrett’s jaw tightened. “You heard wrong.”

Dean grinned. “Did I?”

“I’m gonna kill you before playoffs.”

“No, you’re not. You’re too busy getting friend-zoned by your girlfriend.”

Garrett shoved him in the chest. Dean laughed all the way into the kitchen.

By the time Garrett found her again, she had somehow migrated to the old armchair near the stairs, sitting sideways with her knees tucked up and Dean perched on the arm like some kind of terrible emotional support animal. 

Her bare arms were folded tight over her chest now, because she was still cold and still deeply committed to jacket monogamy. Her face had changed too. Gone softer around the edges, bottom lip pushed out, all the earlier moral outrage curdled into something wounded and grumpy.

Garrett stopped a few feet away. Dean saw him first and his grin turned wicked. “Oh, thank God.”

She frowned up at Dean. “What?”

“Nothing.” Dean patted the top of the chair. “Your night’s about to improve.”

She slumped deeper into the cushion, still looking at Dean. “I haven’t seen Garrett all night.”

Garrett blinked.

Dean pressed his lips together so hard his whole face went strange.

She kept going, mournful now, eyes glossy from alcohol and the kind of drama that only really existed after midnight in a crowded house. “He’s, like, disappeared.”

Garrett slowly looked at Dean.

“He had a game,” she said, to no one in particular, or maybe to Dean’s knee. “And I wanted to tell him he played really good.”

“He knows,” Dean said, voice suspiciously tight.

“No, but I wanted to tell him.” She rubbed at one eye with the heel of her hand, then stopped halfway as if remembering makeup existed. “And there’s this guy who keeps talking to me.”

Garrett’s eyebrows went up.

Dean made direct eye contact with him and looked like he might actually pass away.

“He keeps calling me baby,” she muttered. “And trying to make me drink water.”

Garrett bit the inside of his cheek.

“Sounds awful,” Dean managed.

“So annoying,” she said. “Like, okay, hydration police. I have a boyfriend.”

Garrett stepped closer then, because there were only so many times a man could be called the hydration police by the love of his life before he had to intervene. “Hey, baby.”

Her head lifted. The transformation was immediate and almost violent. Her whole face opened, bright and relieved and suddenly so happy to see him that it genuinely knocked the joke sideways in his chest. “Garrett!”

He froze. “Hi?”

“Baby!” She reached both arms out toward him from the chair, nearly tipping herself forward in the process. Garrett crossed the last step fast and caught her by the hands before she could slide off the cushion. “Hi.”

“Hi,” he said again, slower this time, looking down at her. “You recognise me now?”

She frowned like he’d said something deeply strange. “What are you talking about?”

Dean made a sound that might have been a cough if he had not immediately turned away with his shoulders shaking.

Garrett stared at her. “Nothing.”

She squeezed his face, delighted and fully unaware of the damage she’d caused him tonight. “I missed you.”

His mouth softened despite himself. “Yeah?”

“Yes.” She tugged at him, needy and uncoordinated, until he stepped properly between her legs where she’d moved to sit properly in the chair. Her knees bracketed his thighs, her fingers curling in the front of his shirt like now that she had found him, she intended to physically prevent further abandonment. “You were gone for so long.”

Garrett looked at her for one second, then over her head at Dean, who was wiping tears out of the corner of his eye. “I was around.”

She shook her head, very firm. “No.”

“No?”

“No. There was just this guy.”

Garrett nodded, face serious. “Right. The water guy.”

She gasped softly, looking up at him with genuine alarm. “You saw him?”

Dean slid off the arm of the chair. “I need to go tell Logan something immediately.”

Garrett didn’t even try to stop him. His hands had settled at her waist now, thumbs pressing lightly over the fabric of her top because she was still swaying in tiny increments even while sitting down. “Yeah, baby, I saw him.”

“You should talk to him.”

“Oh, I should?”

“Yes.” Her voice dropped into a whisper that wasn’t remotely quiet. “He was flirting with me.”

Garrett’s eyes flicked over her face. “Was he?”

“He kept calling me baby.”

“That’s crazy.”

“And he tried to give me his jacket.”

“What a dick.”

She nodded, relieved that he understood the severity. “I know.”

Garrett’s grin finally broke free, slow and helpless. He stepped closer until her forehead could tip against his stomach, and when it did, she sighed like the entire night had been restored to its proper axis by the smell of his shirt. 

He looked down at the crown of her head, at the way her hands had found the hem of his t-shirt and held on loosely, and brushed his fingers once over the back of her hair.

She had rejected him all night. She had accused him of being a stranger, declined his water on principle, refused his jacket with the ferocity of a woman defending a sacred oath, and still somehow the inside of him went soft at the way she leaned into him now, trusting and warm and gone enough to be ridiculous but not gone enough to forget where she wanted to end up.

“Baby,” he murmured.

“Mhm?”

“You wanna get outta here?”

Her head lifted at once. “Yes, please.”

“Yeah?” He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, watching the way her eyes followed his face now with no suspicion at all. “You done?”

“So done.” She nodded, then winced faintly at the motion like her brain had moved one direction and her skull another. “Can we go home?”

“Yeah, we can go home.”

“And maybe get McDonald’s?”

Garrett laughed under his breath, and the sound made her smile like she’d won something. “Sure, baby.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. But you gotta stand up first.”

She looked down at her own legs with sudden doubt. “Okay.”

“Confident.”

“I can do it.”

“I know you can.” He took both her hands and backed up half a step, giving her room. “Come on. Up we go.”

She stood with the intense focus of someone attempting a field sobriety test on a ship. Garrett’s hands went to her waist at once, steadying her as her knees straightened and her body tipped forward into his. 

He didn’t make a show of it. Didn’t laugh when she grabbed his forearms and blinked hard at the room. He only held her until she found the floor again, fingers spread warm and firm at her sides.

“There we go,” he said softly. “You good?”

She nodded, then thought about it. “Mostly.”

“Mostly works.” He leaned around her just enough to grab his letterman jacket from the back of the chair “Can I put this on you now, or are we still being loyal to your boyfriend?”

She looked at the jacket. Then up at him. Then back at the jacket.

“That’s yours,” she said, like he was the one struggling to keep up.

Garrett pressed his lips together. “Yeah.”

She smiled, sweet and pleased. “Okay.”

He slid it over her shoulders. This time she pushed her arms into the sleeves with immediate enthusiasm, even though they swallowed her hands completely. 

Garrett zipped it halfway because she was too busy smelling the collar with a happy little hum that did absolutely nothing for his ability to remain normal.

“You smell good,” she told him.

“Thanks.”

“Like Garrett.”

“Crazy coincidence.”

She nodded, accepting that, and slipped her hand into his when he offered it. Her fingers were warm and clumsy between his, squeezing twice like she was checking he was real. He squeezed back once and started guiding her through the house.

The party kept moving around them. Someone called his name from the kitchen and Garrett lifted his free hand without stopping. Logan appeared near the doorway, took one look at them, and grinned.

“She found you,” he said.

Garrett pointed at him. “Not a word.”

She turned toward Logan, solemn and slightly off-balance. “There was a guy bothering me all night.”

Logan’s mouth opened. Closed. He looked at Garrett, then back at her. “No way.”

She nodded. “Way.”

Garrett kept walking. “Let’s go.”

Behind them, Logan said, “Hope your boyfriend handles that.”

She turned around while still moving, which forced Garrett to catch her by the waist and redirect her like a shopping cart with a bad wheel. “He will!”

“I’m sure he will,” Logan called, voice cracking around laughter.

Outside, the cold hit her properly. She shrank into the jacket at once, shoulders rising, Garrett’s hand still wrapped around hers while they moved down the front steps and along the path toward his car. 

The night was damp and dark around the edges, grass glittering faintly under the porch light, the music dulling behind the shut door until it became a pulse more than a song. She walked close to him, not quite straight, occasionally bumping into his side and then apologising to his arm.

“Baby,” she said halfway down the walk.

“Yeah?”

“That guy was so annoying.”

Garrett glanced down at her. “Still thinkin’ about him?”

“He was talking to me all night.”

“Sounds like a loser.”

“He was kind of hot, though.”

Garrett stopped walking.

She stopped too, delayed, then looked back at him with wide innocent eyes. “What?”

He stared at her. “Hot?”

She nodded, very serious. “But not as hot as you.”

“Uh huh.”

“And he had your jacket.”

“My jacket?”

“Yeah.” Her brows pulled together. “Actually, that was weird.”

Garrett looked up at the sky for patience. “So weird.”

“You should talk to him, baby. I’m serious.”

“Oh, I will.”

“Good.” She nodded once, satisfied, and started walking again. “Don’t fight him though. You had a game.”

His mouth twitched. “Right. Wouldn’t wanna overdo it.”

“And you already won.”

“I did.”

“You were really good,” she said, and the words came out softer now, slipping under the joke with no warning at all. Her fingers tightened around his. “I forgot to tell you.”

Garrett’s steps slowed by a fraction. He looked down at her, at her messy hair and flushed cheeks and his too-big jacket hanging off her shoulders, at the careful way she was watching the pavement. “Yeah?”

“Mhm. You did that thing.” She lifted their joined hands vaguely, as if the thing might be available in the air somewhere. “Where you went really fast and then the other guy was stupid.”

Garrett laughed, warm and surprised. “That was my favourite play.”

“It was good. I’m real proud of you.”

“Thanks, baby.”

She leaned into his arm, pleased. “You’re welcome.”

At the car, he opened the passenger door and turned her gently by the hips before she could attempt entry at a dangerous angle. “Alright. Watch your head.”

“I always watch my head.”

“You don’t.”

“I have one.”

“Having one and watching it are different.”

She ducked into the car with exaggerated care, one hand on the roof, one hand still gripping his. Garrett waited until she was seated, then crouched slightly and drew the seatbelt across her. 

She looked down at him while he clicked it into place, her expression suddenly soft and sleepy. “Baby.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m so glad I found you.”

His hand paused on the belt for half a second.

She sighed, sinking back into the seat, eyes half-lidded now that the car’s quiet had started wrapping around her. “I missed you tonight.”

Garrett looked at her in the blue dashboard glow, and something in his chest pulled tight and fond and a little ridiculous. “Missed you too.”

“There was this guy–”

“I heard.”

“–and he kept trying to give me water.”

“So rude.”

“Exactly.” Her head tipped against the seat, eyes closing for one beat before opening again. “Can you get me nuggets?”

Garrett smiled and brushed his thumb over her knee before standing. “Yeah, babe. I’ll get you nuggets.”

“And fries.”

“Obviously.”

“And a Sprite.”

“You need water.”

She made a face. “The guy said that too.”

Garrett leaned one arm on the open door and looked down at her, trying very hard not to smile too much because she would see it and accuse him of something. “The guy sounds smart.”

She frowned. “Don’t compliment him.”

“My bad.”

“You’re my boyfriend.”

“I am.”

“And I love you.”

The words came out simple and softened by vodka and sleepiness and the warm cocoon of his jacket around her, but real enough that Garrett felt them land under his ribs.

He bent and kissed her forehead. “I love you too.”

She smiled, eyes closed now. “Good.”

“Good,” he murmured, brushing her hair back from her face before shutting the door. 

He walked around the front of the car with a grin he couldn’t quite get rid of, hearing the muffled thump of the party behind him and the faint sound of her shifting around in the passenger seat like she was trying to get comfortable in sleeves three sizes too big. 

When he got in, she was already curled toward his side, cheek against the seat, looking at him with heavy eyes and total, trusting recognition.

Garrett started the car. She reached blindly for his hand. He gave it to her.

For a minute they sat there in the dim quiet before he pulled away from the curb, her fingers woven through his, his thumb moving once over her knuckles. Then she inhaled like she had remembered something important.

“Babe?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re gonna talk to that guy, right?”

Garrett smiled at the road, the house falling behind them, McDonald’s glowing somewhere ahead like a drunken little lighthouse.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll give him a stern talking-to.”

“Good,” she mumbled, already drifting. “Tell him I have a boyfriend.”

His grin widened.

“Trust me, baby,” Garrett said, squeezing her hand once as he turned out onto the street. “He knows.”

❄︎ ❄︎ ❄︎

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Not nicely, always. Figure skating had never been gentle, no matter what people thought from the stands when the dresses were pretty and the music swelled and everybody politely forgot that most of the sport was just girls repeatedly hurling themselves at the ice until one day the hurling started looking graceful. 

Her body had always hurt somewhere. Ankles, arches, hip flexors, the backs of her knees, the little bruises on her thighs from falls she’d stopped counting years ago. 

Pain had been background noise. A language, almost. Something she could interpret and bargain with and, on good days, ignore.

This is different. This is her body becoming a locked door.

“Again,” Cam says.

She looks at him through the mirror. He has the clipboard tucked against his chest and the calm, mildly sympathetic face of a man who has chosen professionally to ruin people’s afternoons through controlled movement. “Cam.”

“One more set.”

“You said that last set.”

“I lied.”

She lets out a breath that’s too close to a laugh to count as actual protest and steps back onto the little foam pad. It dips under her weight. Her ankle wobbles. Her knee, traitor, considers doing something stupid. She fixes it fast, jaw tightening before her face can give too much away.

Cam notices anyway, because Cam is awful.

“Good,” he says. “That’s better.”

“It feels bad.”

“It’s supposed to feel hard.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“I know.”

She hates that tone. Cam is one of those deeply inconvenient medical professionals who knows exactly when not to give you the easy reassurance, which means she can’t even be properly irritated with him without feeling immature about it. 

He doesn’t say you’ll be back before you know it. He doesn’t say you’re young, you’ll heal fast, as if youth is a warranty and not just another thing that can get snapped in half during a bad landing. 

He just says again, and better, and not yet, and lets the rest of the room sit there around it.

She finishes the set with her hands hovering slightly away from her sides like she might be able to balance through prayer, then steps off the pad and pretends the relief doesn’t go all the way through her.

Cam scribbles something down. “That’s enough for today.”

Her breath leaves her in one piece. “Thank God.”

“Don’t sound so grateful.”

“I’m trying to make you feel valued.”

“That was your version?”

“It was implied.”

He smiles faintly and reaches for the roll of athletic tape on the table. “Ice tonight if it gets cranky. Don’t push the stairs. And don’t go on the ice.”

She looks down at her bag too quickly. Cam pauses. The silence is horrible.

She lifts her eyes back to him with as much blank innocence as she can assemble while sweaty and standing in one shoe. “What?”

He gives her a look.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Good.”

“I know I’m not cleared.”

“Great.”

“I’m not an idiot.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“You were thinking it in your Cam voice.”

“My Cam voice?”

“The one where you sound nice while accusing me of crimes.”

That gets a small laugh out of him, which she counts as a win even though he immediately ruins it by pointing at her with his pen. “No ice.”

The words land flatter than the joke leaves room for. She nods, because nodding is easier than speaking when the answer has gone somewhere tight under her ribs. 

No ice. Two tiny words. Perfectly reasonable. Clinically correct. Devastating in the way small, practical sentences often are when they’re the ones standing between you and the only place your body has ever made proper sense.

She sits on the bench to change back into her other sneaker, unwrapping the brace strap with careful fingers. There’s a damp patch at the collar of her shirt and another under the elastic of the brace, and she can feel the dull, complaining warmth in her knee beginning to spread now that the session is over and adrenaline has stopped being useful.

The door opens while she’s shoving her water bottle into the side pocket of her bag, and Garrett Graham steps in.

He comes in the same way he always seems to come into rooms, even injured. He just has that stupidly natural presence that takes up space before he’s done anything to earn it, all broad shoulders and damp dark curls and Briar Hockey hoodie with one sleeve pushed higher than the other. 

His gym bag is slung over one shoulder, his phone in his hand, and there’s a strip of white tape disappearing under the edge of his shorts near his thigh, which she tries very hard not to look at for too long.

She knows him, technically, Briar ice athletes overlap. They know the same rink schedule, the same sharp smell of resurfaced ice, the same ugly fluorescent tunnel between the locker rooms. 

She knows Garrett Graham because everyone knows Garrett Graham, but she also knows him in the more specific way of someone who has seen him skate when he thinks only hockey matters. Fast, controlled, mean in the cleanest possible way. Good hands. Good edges, for a hockey player, which she had once made the mistake of saying near one of the other figure skaters and had been accused of sounding weirdly horny about crossovers.

She wasn’t. Mostly.

He knows of her too. She knows this because he’d said her name once in the rink hallway last semester when she’d nearly collided with him coming around the corner with her skate bag, and because he’d watched the last ten minutes of one of her practices from the boards with Logan and Tucker a few months ago, both of them still in half their gear, while she ran the footwork section of her short program three times in a row until her lungs burned and her coach finally stopped looking like she might start throwing things. 

Garrett had leaned his forearms on the boards and said something she couldn’t hear. Logan had laughed. Tucker had looked politely impressed in the way nice men look when women do difficult things they understand enough not to interrupt.

So, first-name basis. Vague orbit. Mutual ice awareness.

Not whatever this is, which is Garrett walking in right as she’s sweaty and sore and trying to get her sneaker on without making the tiny injured-person grunt she has grown to hate in herself.

Cam looks over his shoulder. “One second, Garrett. I won’t be long, man.”

Garrett nods, easy. “All good.”

His eyes move from Cam to her, and she braces, because she’s been doing a lot of that lately, bracing. For pity. For questions. For the little sympathetic wince people do when they’ve heard about the injury but don’t know what to say after sorry, that sucks, so they fill the air with optimism until she wants to bite through her own tongue.

Garrett doesn’t wince. He gives her one of those small, quick smiles instead. 

“Hey,” he says.

“Hi.”

He shifts his bag higher on his shoulder, glancing once at the brace and then back at her face so quickly she almost appreciates the politeness of it. “I heard you got hurt. That’s… yeah. Fucking sucks.”

It shouldn’t help, except it does. The bluntness. The lack of inspirational packaging. The fact that he says it like someone who knows exactly how unhelpful it is when people try to make being benched sound like a spiritual growth opportunity.

She nods and looks down for half a second at the zipper on her bag, pulling it closed even though it’s already closed. “Yeah. It’s pretty shit.”

His mouth moves, not quite a smile. “Yeah.”

“I heard about yours too,” she adds, because it’s only fair and also because looking at him directly for too long feels slightly like standing too close to a heater. “I’m sorry.”

He makes a small shrugging motion. It’s casual, but not quite enough to hide the little tightness that passes across his face when the movement pulls at something. “Could be worse.”

She looks at him. Garrett looks back.

Then he huffs a quiet laugh. “Sorry. That’s such an asshole thing to say to someone injured.”

Her mouth lifts before she can stop it. “It’s okay. Everyone says it.”

“I know. I keep wanting to fight them.”

“Have you?”

“Not yet. Cam said it would slow my recovery.”

“He’s very anti-violence for someone who hurts people for a living.”

Cam, from the cabinet, says, “I can hear both of you.”

Garrett’s grin appears then, quicker, brighter, and for one strange second it makes the rehab room feel less ugly. 

Cam comes over with his clipboard tucked under one arm and gives Garrett the tired look of a man who has known hockey players long enough to consider them a hazard. “Ready?”

Garrett nods, but his eyes flick back to her. “See you.”

It’s a small, stupid, future-tense thing. See you. Like it’s already assumed there will be another time. Like she’s not just passing through the doorway of his appointment with her bag on her shoulder and her knee taped into submission, but someone who exists in the shape of his week now.

She nods. “Yeah. Bye.”

Then she leaves before her face can do anything unhelpful.

After that, they keep seeing each other. That’s the whole problem with schedules. They make coincidences stop being coincidences and start becoming routines before anyone has to be brave enough to choose them. 

Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Her appointment first. Garrett after. The first few times, it’s only hey and how’s it going and Cam making deeply unimpressed noises when Garrett leans in the doorway instead of waiting properly outside like a normal person.

By the following Wednesday, Garrett’s sitting on the bench in the hallway when she comes out, elbows on his knees, hoodie sleeves shoved up, one hand wrapped around an iced coffee that looks mostly melted. 

He glances up as the door opens, like he’s been reading something on his phone and not listening for it, which is a performance she respects enough not to challenge.

“You survive?” he asks.

She shifts her bag higher on her shoulder. “Barely.”

“Bad?”

“Cam made me do step-downs.”

Garrett’s face changes with immediate, serious recognition. “Oh, Jesus.”

“Right?”

“No, those are evil.”

“They look so stupid. That’s what makes it worse. Like, I’m standing there trying not to die on a four-inch box.”

“Yeah, and Cam’s like, great, now control the descent.”

She laughs, and then looks down because the laugh comes out too easy. Too relieved. “He says it like that too.”

“Of course he does. He has a script.”

From inside the rehab room, Cam calls, “I still hear you.”

Garrett raises his coffee vaguely toward the door. “We’re bonding through shared suffering. It’s part of the process.”

“It’s not billable,” Cam says.

Garrett looks back at her, and there’s that little curl at the corner of his mouth again, but softer than she expects. “You got class after this?”

She blinks. “Yeah.”

“Where?”

“Psych. Levin.”

He pauses. “Wait, the eleven-thirty?”

“You’re in that class?”

His expression shifts into something almost sheepish, which is such a strange look on him that she forgets for a second to be awkward about her own surprise. 

“I sit in the back,” he says. “Very engaged. Quietly academic.”

“I have literally never seen you.”

“That feels like a you problem.”

“It feels like an attendance problem.”

Garrett presses a hand to his chest like this has wounded him. “I’m injured and you’re attacking me.”

She laughs. “You started it.”

“I asked about class.”

“Menace behaviour.”

He laughs at that, quick and low, head ducking for half a second. Then he stands because Cam calls him in, and he’s suddenly very close in the narrow hallway, close enough that she has to tilt her face a little to keep looking at him. 

His smile stays, but the volume of it drops. “See you in Levin, then?”

She should say maybe. Or sure. Or something easy and noncommittal that keeps the moment from feeling too visible.

Instead she says, “If you show up.”

His eyebrows lift. “That a challenge?”

“No.”

“Sounded like one.”

She doesn’t know what to do with that, so she adjusts her bag again, which has become a humiliating little habit around him. 

Her hands always need a task before her face gives her away. “Go do your step-downs, Graham.”

He smiles properly then, pleased. “Yes, ma’am.”

She walks away before Cam can witness the way her mouth betrays her.

Garrett does show up to class that day. He comes in two minutes late, because punctuality would have damaged the brand, and slides into the seat beside her with his laptop under one arm and a coffee in his hand. 

There’s a row of empty seats behind them. Several, actually. He ignores all of them.

She looks over as he sits. “Subtle.”

“What?”

“You could have sat literally anywhere.”

He opens his laptop. “This seat has a good view.”

“Of the lecture?”

He glances at the front of the room, where Dr. Levin is fighting with the projector and slowly losing. “Sure.”

She looks down at her notebook because smiling at her paper is less incriminating than smiling at him. 

Garrett doesn’t push it. That surprises her a little, though by then maybe it shouldn’t. He jokes, yes. He has the kind of natural charm that makes silence around him feel almost rude. 

But he’s not constantly filling space just to hear himself in it. He seems to know when to let a moment breathe, which is worse, somehow. Much worse. Because it means the attention is not accidental.

He takes notes badly. Not because he’s stupid, she learns that very quickly. Garrett isn’t stupid in the way some people like to assume athletes are stupid when they would rather not admit physical talent can exist alongside a working brain. 

He just takes notes like a man who believes future him will remember the context through sheer confidence. Half sentences. Arrows to nowhere. One bullet point that just says dopamine??? and then, underneath it, ask her.

She catches it while he’s typing and looks at him.

He doesn’t look back, but his mouth moves. “Don’t judge my system.”

“That’s a system?”

“It works.”

“It says ask her.”

“Yeah.” Now he glances over, and his eyes are warm enough that her stomach does something small and deeply unhelpful. “See? Efficient.”

She lets out a breath through her nose and turns back to her own notes. “You’re ridiculous.”

After that, the talking becomes easier because it has somewhere to go. Rehab into class. Class into walking halfway across campus. Walking into texts, eventually, though the number exchange happens in the most Garrett way possible, which is to say he makes it sound practical even while looking far too pleased with himself.

They’re leaving psych one afternoon, the sky low and grey over campus, both of them moving slower than the stream of students around them because neither of them can walk at full speed without paying for it later. 

Garrett has his hood up against the cold and his bag slung over one shoulder. She has one hand wrapped around the strap of her own, the other holding her phone, thumb hovering over a message from her coach she hasn’t opened because she can see the first line in the preview and already knows it will make her feel like peeling her skin off.

Garrett notices. 

“Coach?” he asks.

She looks over. “What?”

He nods toward the phone. “I know the face.”

She looks down at the screen again. The preview says, no pressure, just wanted to check in about competition timeline, which is exactly the kind of text people send when there is pressure and everyone knows it but nobody wants to be rude enough to name the animal in the room. Her thumb locks the phone before she can read the rest.

Garrett doesn’t say anything for a few steps. He doesn’t immediately try to fix it. Doesn’t ask if she’s okay in a tone that makes okay feel like a performance. 

He just walks beside her, slower than campus wants him to, shoulder occasionally close enough to brush hers when the path narrows.

Finally, he says, “I hate those texts.”

She glances at him.

“The check-in ones,” he says. “Like they’re being nice, and they are, but it’s also like… hey, just wondering if your body has stopped ruining the plan yet.”

Her throat tightens so quickly she has to look away.

Garrett’s voice stays even, low enough that the people passing them don’t get any of it. “The hockey staff keep doing it too. Not in a shitty way. They’re trying to be normal. But every time someone asks how recovery’s going, I’m like, I don’t know, man. I miss my life and my hip feels fucked up. You want the official answer or the weird one?”

She laughs, but it comes out thin. Still, it comes. “My knee feels fucked up.”

They walk a little farther. The cold air catches under the hem of her sweatshirt and sneaks up her back. Somewhere across the quad, a group of boys are laughing too loudly near the library steps. A bike bell rings. The world continues in its very rude way, all motion and noise and healthy knees.

Garrett clears his throat. “You can send me those, if you want.”

She looks up at him.

“The annoying texts,” he says, and now he does seem a little more careful, eyes flicking to hers and away again. “Or just, like… complain. If you don’t want to answer normal people nicely.”

Something in her chest shifts. “Normal people?”

“You know.” His mouth tips. “Healthy civilians.”

“That’s dark.”

“It’s accurate.”

She looks at her phone. Then at him. “Are you giving me your number so I can forward you texts from my coach?”

He shrugs, but his ears go just slightly pink from the cold or the question. “I mean, when you put it like that, it sounds weird.”

“It is weird.”

“You want it or not?”

She does. Immediately. Stupidly. Enough that she has to make herself take a second before answering. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah.” She opens a new contact and hands him the phone before she can overthink the fact that her fingers feel too warm. “For fucked up knee purposes.”

Garrett takes it, smiling down at the screen while he types. “Obviously.”

He saves himself as Garrett, then, after one tiny pause she absolutely notices, adds a hockey stick emoji. When he hands it back, she looks at it and raises her brows.

“Subtle.”

Her first text to him, sent that night after staring at her coach’s full message for eleven minutes and then lying face-down on her bed in a silence so complete her roommate had paused in the doorway and then wisely kept walking, is just a screenshot.

Garrett replies three minutes later.

Garrett: jesus. “no pressure” should be illegal.

She types, right????

Garrett: they put it at the front like a tiny little lawyer.

She laughs into her pillow hard enough that the pressure behind her eyes changes shape.

After that, it’s embarrassingly easy.

She’s slower to warm, more cautious, more likely to tuck herself back inside her own head the second a feeling starts getting too large to hold naturally. 

Garrett seems to understand that without making her explain it. He doesn’t crowd. He doesn’t demand a constant version of her that knows how to be charming back on command. 

He sends her a picture of Logan asleep sitting up on the couch with an ice pack balanced on his shoulder. 

Garrett: warrior down. 

She sends back, is he alive? 

Garrett: unclear. tucker says we should wait and see.

Sometimes they talk a lot. Sometimes it’s only a stupid photo, a class complaint, a how’s the knee? sent at nine p.m. that makes her chest go warm because he remembers which days hurt more. 

Sometimes she doesn’t answer for hours because the whole day has been too much and she’s gone quiet in that way that makes even typing feel strangely exposed. 

Garrett never punishes the delay by getting weird about it. He just picks the conversation back up wherever she left it, like the space is allowed.

He’s not always gentle. She wouldn’t like him as much if he were. Garrett’s gentleness works because it’s threaded through the rest of him, through the easy confidence and the dry little comments and the occasional captain voice that slips out when Cam tells him to stop overdoing it and he says, “I’m not,” with the exact expression of someone absolutely overdoing it. 

He still chirps Logan across the room. Still gives Dean shit when Dean swings by the rehab hall one afternoon and announces, loudly, “Damn, this is where they keep all the broken hot people,” before Tucker drags him back by the hood and says, “Don’t flirt with the injured. It’s unethical.”

Garrett, sitting beside her on the hallway bench with an ice pack on his thigh, doesn’t even look embarrassed. He only rubs a hand over his mouth and mutters, “I’m so sorry.”

She presses her lips together to keep from laughing. “Are they always like that?”

“No,” Garrett says. Then, after half a second, “Yes.”

Dean, from down the hall, calls, “She seems nice, G!”

Garrett closes his eyes briefly.

Tucker says, “Keep walking.”

Logan’s voice drifts back too, amused and bright. “Garrett made a friend!”

Garrett opens his eyes and looks at her with an expression so tired and resigned that she actually does laugh then, full and surprised and too loud for the hallway. His face changes when she does. Only for a second. It softens, almost helplessly, before he covers it by looking down at his ice pack.

“Yeah,” he says. “They’re always like that.”

By the second month, Cam starts pairing them for parts of rehab because, as he puts it, “You both complain less when you’re trying to look normal in front of each other.”

Garrett looks offended. “I always look normal.”

Cam doesn’t even glance up from the clipboard. “You asked me yesterday if your hip mobility was ‘giving washed-up uncle.’”

She bites down on a smile.

Garrett points at her. “Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were going to.”

“I was not.”

“You were thinking it.”

She looks down at the resistance band looped around her ankle, cheeks warm. “I mean. A little.”

Garrett’s mouth twitches. “Unbelievable.”

Rehabbing together is both better and worse. Better because Garrett makes the room less lonely without trying to fill it too brightly. Worse because now she has to be perceived while doing the ugliest exercises known to sports medicine. 

There’s nothing romantic about hip bridges. There’s nothing elegant about controlled lunges when your knee is shaking like it’s received bad news by telegram. 

There’s  no world in which she wants Garrett Graham to watch her do glute activation with a yellow band around her thighs while Cam says, “Good, hold that,” in the background like a man actively trying to end her life.

Garrett, to his credit, doesn’t make it weird. He makes other things weird, obviously. He’s still Garrett. When she wobbles on the balance pad, he says, “Very artistic,” and when she glares at him, he lifts both hands and says, “I’m appreciating the performance.” 

When Cam tells Garrett his form is getting sloppy, she murmurs, “Washed-up uncle,” under her breath and Garrett looks at her like he can’t decide whether to laugh or throw a towel at her. 

When she has a bad pain day and goes quiet halfway through, Garrett stops joking entirely and starts matching her pace so subtly she doesn’t realise until later. He finishes his reps slower. Takes longer between sets. Asks Cam a question he probably already knows the answer to, giving her thirty extra seconds to breathe without anyone looking directly at her.

That one stays with her for a while. It’s easier to let someone flirt with you than it is to let them notice you’re struggling and not make you feel small about it.

Garrett is cleared for the ice before she is. He tells her after a Friday session, standing outside the athletic building with his hands shoved into the pocket of his hoodie, campus cold moving around them in little grey gusts. 

He looks happy, but it’s careful happiness. Muted. Like he knows the news is good and still doesn’t want to set it down too loudly between them.

“Cam said I can start controlled skating next week,” he says.

Her heart does something complicated.

“Oh,” she says, and hates immediately that it comes out too small. So she fixes it fast, or tries to. “Garrett, that’s great.”

“Yeah.”

“No, really. That’s… that’s so good.”

His eyes stay on her face. “I know.”

“You don’t sound like you know.”

“I do.” He looks away for a second, toward the parking lot, where a bunch of hockey guys are piling into someone’s car and yelling about food. “It’s just weird.”

She nods before he has to explain. Being allowed back into the place you’ve been aching for isn’t cleanly joyful when someone else is still outside the door. Especially when that someone has been sitting beside you for weeks, teaching you through sheer proximity that your particular kind of misery is not as uniquely embarrassing as you thought.

“I’m glad,” she says.

Garrett looks back at her, and the softness in his face makes her wish she had phrased it better, or maybe worse. “You’ll get there.”

She nods. “Yeah.”

“I know you know that. Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay.”

“I just–” He stops, rubs one hand over the back of his neck, and for once the confidence seems to snag on something real before it can make the sentence smoother than it should be. “It sucks being the one still waiting. I know.”

Her throat tightens. She looks down at the crack in the pavement between them. “I hate that I’m jealous.”

Garrett’s quiet for half a second, in a surprised-by-her-honesty way. Then he says, “Yeah.”

She winces. “That was not my best quality.”

“It’s not a crime.”

“It feels ugly.”

“A lot of this feels fucking ugly.”

She looks up at him then, and his face is open in that simple, steady way of his that keeps undoing her. 

“Yeah,” she says. “It does.”

He nods once, like they’ve agreed on something important and awful. Then his mouth shifts, small and careful. “I’ll tell you if it sucks.”

She huffs a laugh. “Your first skate back?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s comforting.”

“I’m offering solidarity.”

It does suck, apparently. He texts her after the first session. 

Garrett: felt good for ten seconds then my body filed a formal complaint.

She stares at the message for a long time, then replies, rude of it.

Garrett: yeah. HR nightmare.

She sends, did it feel nice though?

The typing bubbles appear. Disappear. Reappear. The finally he replies.

Garrett: yeah. too nice. kind of wanted to stay out there forever and also throw up.

Her eyes sting so fast it embarrasses her, even alone in her room. She types, yeah. i get that.

Garrett: i know.

When her clearance comes, it’s a Saturday morning in the third month of rehab, and she almost doesn’t believe Cam when he says it.

Controlled ice work only. Edges. Slow laps. Nothing clever. Nothing she would describe later as just seeing how it felt, because that sentence has been the downfall of many athletes before her. She nods through all of it with her hands folded tightly in her lap.

Cam stops talking. Her eyes are fixed on the corner of his clipboard.

“You okay?” he asks.

She nods, once. Too fast.

He waits. A laugh comes out of her, tiny and breathless and nothing like humour. “Sorry. I just… yeah. I’m good.”

Cam’s face softens. “You’re ready for this part.”

She gets to the parking lot before she texts Garrett.

cleared for controlled ice work.

He calls her. 

She stares at the screen for one full ring, startled enough that she almost drops the phone, then answers with a voice that comes out much quieter than planned. “Hi.”

“Holy shit,” Garrett says, and the happiness in his voice is so immediate and unfiltered that she has to close her eyes for a second. “That’s huge.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s really fucking good.”

“I know.” She laughs softly, but it shakes. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

“Also valid.”

“Cam said I can go tomorrow morning. Just controlled stuff.”

“I’ll come.”

The answer is so quick she doesn’t know what to do with it. She sits in her parked car with the keys still in her hand and looks out through the windshield at the athletic building, the brick and glass blurred slightly by the cold. “You don’t have to.”

“I know.”

“You probably have… hockey things.”

“Can’t do hockey things yet.”

“Team things.”

“They’ll survive one morning without me standing there being inspirational in a hoodie.”

She smiles despite herself, and because he can’t see it, she lets it happen properly. “You’re very important.”

“Thank you.”

“I was joking.”

“I wasn’t.”

That gets a real laugh out of her, and Garrett is quiet for the smallest beat after it, like he’s letting himself hear it. 

Then his voice lowers a little. “Seriously. I’ll come. If you want.”

She swallows. The car is cold. Her knee aches faintly from the session. Her phone is warm against her ear.

“Yeah,” she says. “I want.”

The rink is almost empty the next morning. It’s early enough that the building still has that half-asleep feeling, the lobby lights too bright over the old carpet, the vending machines humming like they’ve been up all night thinking about their choices. 

Someone has left a stack of orange cones by the boards. The ice is clean from a fresh resurface, glossy and unmarked under the white lights, and the sight of it hits her so hard she stops walking halfway down the tunnel.

Garrett notices after two steps and turns back. He’s in a Briar hoodie and dark athletic pants, skates dangling from one hand, hair curling damply near his forehead because he’s showered before dawn like a lunatic. 

He looks less like campus Garrett here. Less like the guy everyone waves at in the dining hall, less like the captain with half the hockey program orbiting him. In the rink, he’s quieter. Familiar with the cold. Part of the architecture in the same way she is, or was, or is trying very hard to become again.

“You good?” he asks.

She looks past him at the ice. “Yeah.”

It’s very obviously not convincing.

Garrett doesn’t call her on it. He only nods and shifts his skates to his other hand. “We can sit for a minute.”

“I’m fine.”

“I didn’t say you weren’t.”

She looks at him then, and the gentleness of his face makes something in her twist. Garrett, thankfully, seems to understand that pity would make her walk directly into traffic. This is something else. Space, maybe. Offered without making her ask for it.

So they sit. Long enough for her to lace her skates with fingers that feel strangely clumsy. Long enough for Garrett to tie his own and then pretend very hard not to watch her checking the tension of hers twice, then three times, then pressing her thumb along the side of the boot like it might offer reassurance if handled correctly.

“Do you want me to say something helpful or shut up?” he asks eventually.

The question startles a laugh out of her. It comes out small, but real. “I don’t know.”

“Okay. I can do medium.”

“Medium?”

“Yeah. Light talking. No motivational speech. No silence so intense it feels like a funeral.”

She looks over at him. “You’ve thought about this.”

“I’m a thoughtful guy.”

“You’re something.”

His smile appears, quick and warm, but he doesn’t chase the joke. “I know it’s weird.”

Her hands go still on the laces.

“I mean, I don’t know exactly,” he says, looking out at the ice now instead of directly at her, which helps. “It’s different for you. But I know the part where you miss it so much that getting it back even a little feels…” He pauses, searching for the word and apparently deciding not to dress it up. “Fucked.”

“It feels like if I step wrong, everything starts over,” she says.

Garrett nods slowly. “Yeah.”

“And I know that’s not how it works. Like, technically. I know Cam wouldn’t have cleared me if he thought I’d immediately explode.”

“Probably not.”

“Probably.”

“I mean, I don’t want to overstate his kindness.”

She laughs again, and this one stays longer. Garrett’s mouth softens at the sound, but he looks down to adjust his skate before she can catch too much of it.

They step onto the ice together. At first, all she can feel is terror. The blade settles under her weight. The ice takes her. Her knee doesn’t collapse, doesn’t scream, doesn’t turn into the moment it all went wrong. It only exists. Present and warm and strange inside the brace, part of her and not part of her, a little guarded corner of the body she used to trust without needing to narrate the trust to herself.

Garrett steps on beside her and turns with the easy balance of someone who’s been on skates since before he had any say in the matter. He doesn’t reach for her immediately. His hands are there, ready but not assuming, and the restraint of it makes her want to cry more than if he had grabbed her.

She takes one small push. Then another. It’s awful. It’s fine. It’s the most familiar thing in the world and completely foreign.

Her breath catches, and Garrett moves in closer without crowding her. “There you go.”

“Don’t say it like I’m a toddler.”

“I was saying it like you’re someone doing something hard.”

She glances at him, caught by the simplicity of it.

He gives her a tiny smile. “But if it helps, I can say it like you’re a toddler.”

“Please don’t.”

“Cool. Good note.”

She looks back at the ice and manages another slow stride. Her shoulders are too high. She can feel that. Her arms don’t know where to go with none of the old choreography to place them, none of the speed, none of the music. 

She's spent years making skating look like instinct, and now every movement has to be discussed internally before it happens, which is both boring and humiliating and almost funny if she gets far enough away from wanting to scream.

Garrett skates beside her, slightly behind, matching the tiny pace without comment. A hockey player skating slowly is a strange thing. Like seeing a dog heel when you know it wants to run. 

Garrett is all contained energy, all strength kept deliberately soft at the edges. Every so often she catches him adjusting to her without making the adjustment visible enough to feel like management. He doesn’t hover, he just stays close enough that the air seems to know where he is.

After half a lap, he says, “For what it’s worth, you still look like you know what you’re doing.”

She lets out a shaky breath. “That’s because you’re used to hockey players.”

“Rude.”

“You guys do look like you’re being chased a lot of the time.”

“We are. By other hockey players.”

They make it once around the rink. Then again. The second lap isn’t easy, but it’s less impossible. Her breath begins to settle into the cold. The first hard spike of fear loosens by degrees and leaves something else behind, raw and bright and almost worse. 

The ice under her blades. The sound. That delicate scrape she used to know better than her own alarm clock. Her body, cautious but moving. Her knee, not perfect, not forgotten, but holding.

She doesn’t realise she’s started crying until the cold hits the wet under one eye. Garrett sees it, but he doesn’t stop abruptly or make a face or ask if she’s okay in that terrible alarmed voice people use when crying becomes an event.

He only slows with her and says, “We can take a second.”

She laughs once, embarrassed, wiping under her eye with the heel of her hand. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

“It’s stupid.”

“It’s really not.”

She looks at him, and the rink lights catch in his eyes. He’s close enough now that she can see the rough edge of stubble he probably missed shaving, the way his hair has started curling more as the cold gets to it. He looks like Garrett, but not the campus version. Just a boy on skates, injured and healing and kind enough not to make her crying about a slow lap into something she has to survive on top of everything else.

“I missed it,” she says, and it comes out barely above a whisper.

His face changes. “Yeah.”

“I know I’ve said that. But I don’t think I knew how much until right now.”

Garrett nods once, slow. “Yeah,” he says again, and there is so much understanding in it she has to look away.

They stand there near the boards for a while, the quiet rink around them, her hand resting lightly on the rail. Garrett doesn’t touch her. He just stays beside her while she gets herself back into her body.

Eventually, she breathes in and lets it out. “Okay,” she says.

“Okay?”

“Yeah.”

They start again. It goes better for maybe seven minutes. She’s still too careful, still too aware of every shift and edge and tiny correction. But there are moments now, little flashes where the fear drops half a step behind the movement and something older comes through. 

A turn of the ankle. A cleaner glide. Her body remembering a thing before her brain can interfere. Each one lands small and huge at the same time.

Garrett notices those too. He doesn’t cheer. Thank God, if he cheered, she might actually skate into the wall on purpose. 

He only smiles a little and says, “That one looked nice,” or “Yeah, that was better,” in the same low voice he uses when he’s telling her something true and not trying to make a moment out of it.

Maybe that’s why she gets stupid. A little more confident than she was three minutes earlier, enough that she lets herself push into a slightly longer glide coming out of the curve. Barely anything, nothing she would once have even counted as skating. Her blade catches anyway.

It’s tiny. The smallest wrongness. But her body doesn’t know the difference between small and catastrophic yet. Her stomach drops, knee locking in fear before pain can even arrive, and suddenly the whole rink tilts in one bright, awful flash.

Garrett catches her before she falls. One second he’s beside her, and the next his hands are on her waist, tugging her in with a controlled little scrape of blades that brings her straight against him.

Her hands land on his chest, fingers grabbing at the front of his hoodie. The impact is soft because he makes it soft, knees bending with hers, one arm braced properly around her back before she has even fully processed the fact that she’s upright.

“Hey,” he says, breath close. “I’ve got you.”

Her heart is punching so hard she can feel it in her palms where they’re pressed to him. “I’m okay,” she says automatically.

“I know.”

“I just slipped.”

“I know.”

“It was small.”

“I know.”

She lets out a breath that shakes on the way out and hates it, then hates that she hates it because Garrett is looking at her like the shaking is allowed, like none of this is embarrassing enough to require apology.

For the first few seconds, there’s only the aftershock. Ice, fear, the violent little replay of what if. Then the world begins to come back in pieces, and Garrett comes back with it. His chest under her hands. The warm line of his arm across her back. His face closer than it has ever been without the excuse of class or rehab or a crowded hallway. The smell of him, cold air and clean laundry and something faintly minty from gum.

His gaze drops to her mouth. It’s so quick she almost thinks she invented it. Then he looks back at her eyes, and the air between them changes so completely it feels like the rink’s gone quiet on purpose.

She should move. That would be the normal thing. Step back. Laugh it off. Say thanks. Return to the careful, slow lap. Keep everything in the safe category it’s technically belonged to for months, even as the edges have gotten less and less believable.

She doesn’t move. Garrett doesn’t either. His thumb shifts once at her waist. Small. Barely there. But she feels it through the layers anyway.

“You good?” he asks, and his voice is lower now.

She nods. His eyes move over her face with that same checking look, except now there’s something else threaded through it. Something less clinical. Less controlled. 

He’s still giving her an out. She can feel that. It’s in the stillness of him, the way his hand doesn’t pull her closer even though it could, the way his mouth is soft but not smiling, for once, like even Garrett knows this is not a moment to be smoothed over with charm.

She looks at his mouth. This time, neither of them can pretend he doesn’t notice.

His breath changes. Just slightly. “Careful,” he murmurs.

Her fingers tighten in his hoodie. “I’m not doing anything.”

Her face feels warm despite the rink. Everything does, actually. Her hands, her throat, the place under her ribs where fear had been sitting all morning and has now made room for something much more dangerous.

Garrett dips his head a fraction, then stops. The restraint of it is the thing that finally makes her brave. She lifts up on her toes, just barely, because they’re on skates, and kisses him.

He kisses her back, soft at first, because of the ice, because of her knee, because of the months of carefulness that have led them here. His mouth is warm in a way that feels almost shocking against the cold. 

She makes a small sound, and Garrett’s hand slides more securely around her back as the kiss deepens by degrees, still careful but less polite now. Like something in him has unclenched. Like every hallway conversation, every text, every slow walk to class, every time his hand almost touched and didn’t, has found the same narrow place to go.

Her arms go up around his shoulders before she thinks about it and he smiles against her mouth.

She feels it and pulls back an inch, breathless. “Are you smiling?”

Garrett’s eyes open, bright and warm and closer than seems legal. “No.”

“You are.”

“No, I’m being very serious.”

“You’re not.”

“I am.” His mouth brushes hers again, once, because he’s already become comfortable enough with this to be unbearable about it. “This is an important rehab milestone.”

She stares at him, and then she laughs, properly this time, startled and light and so relieved by the sheer stupid Garrettness of it that it breaks the last of the fear in her body loose. He laughs too, she feels it under her hands.

“You’re so annoying,” she says.

“I know.”

“I can’t believe you just said rehab milestone.”

“Was it too much?”

“It was awful.”

“Okay.” He nods like he’s accepting professional notes, but his hands are still at her waist and his face is still soft in a way that makes the joke land somewhere tender instead of sharp. “I’ll workshop it.”

“Please don’t.”

“Got it.”

They stand there smiling at each other like idiots, and she hates how much she likes it. Hates, a little, how easily the rink has shifted around them. The ice is still under her blades. Her knee still exists, still healing, still not ready for everything she wants. But Garrett’s hands are on her body and his mouth is kissed-soft and he’s looking at her like the morning has done something to him too.

Then he glances down at their skates, back up at her, and says, quieter, “You scared?”

She doesn’t know which thing he means. The ice. The kiss. The way those have somehow become tangled enough that the answer fits both.

She nods once.

Garrett’s face doesn’t fall. He only nods back, thumb moving once over her side. “Yeah. Me too, a little.”

That surprises her enough that she looks at him properly. 

He huffs a breath, almost a laugh, but not quite. “Don’t look so shocked.”

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

“I just…” She swallows, eyes flicking over his face. “You don’t seem scared of much.”

Garrett looks at her for one more second. Then he kisses her again. This one is easier. Warmer. Still careful, but with laughter caught at the edges now, his mouth curving every time she makes the smallest noise because clearly he’s going to be deeply smug about kissing her, which she should have anticipated. 

He keeps one arm around her waist and lets the other hand come up to her cheek, thumb brushing near her jaw, and her whole body goes strangely loose and awake at the same time.

When she presses closer, he makes a soft sound under his breath and shifts them without thinking, turning just enough that his body blocks hers more fully from the open rink, as if there is anyone there to see them besides the empty seats and the unbothered scoreboard.

She pulls back because she’s smiling too much to keep kissing properly.

Garrett looks very pleased with himself. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s a suspicious nothing.”

“You look smug.”

He shrugs. “I feel a little smug.”

“At least you’re honest.”

“You kissed me first.”

Her mouth falls open. “Barely.”

“Still counts.”

“I was emotionally vulnerable.”

“I know.” His smile softens before it can become too much of a tease.

She looks down, overwhelmed in a way that’s not bad but still requires a second. Garrett lets her have it. Then, because he’s Garrett and because tenderness with no escape hatch would probably kill them both, he says, “For the record, I had a very cool plan to do that eventually.”

She looks up again, grateful despite herself. “Did you?”

“Yeah.”

“What was the plan?”

His nose scrunches. “Still developing.”

“So... no plan.”

He tilts his head. “A flexible plan.”

“Right.”

“Probably would’ve walked you to class. Said something devastatingly charming. You would’ve swooned.”

“I don’t think I swoon.”

“You might have. We’ll never know.”

“You’re so full of shit.”

“There she is,” he says softly, and then seems to realise he’s said it in a way that gives too much away.

She glances toward the boards, then back at the stretch of ice ahead of them. The fear is still there, but quieter now. Less teeth. Her body feels wrung out and bright, like it’s survived two separate kinds of firsts before breakfast and does not know where to put the information yet.

Garrett follows her gaze. “You want to keep going?”

“Yeah,” she says. “But maybe…”

He’s already holding out both hands before she finishes. She looks at them, then at him.

He shrugs, casual and not casual at all. “Just for a bit.”

She puts her hands in his, and they start slow again. His fingers lace with hers this time. His hands are warm around her cold ones, and he skates backward at a careful pace, eyes mostly on her face, checking without hovering. The rink is still too bright. Her knee is still not perfect. Cam would probably have a clipboard-related opinion about the emotional developments currently occurring during controlled ice work.

But she’s upright. She’s moving.

Garrett’s thumbs brush once over her knuckles. “Good?” he asks.

She looks at him, at the ice, at the long clean stretch of it opening ahead. And for the first time in months, the answer does not feel like a lie.

“Yeah,” she says, a little breathless, a little shy around the smile she can’t fully stop. “Good.”

Garrett’s grin is small, real, and absolutely devastating. “Yeah?”

She nods.

His hands tighten lightly around hers, and he keeps moving backward, slow and steady, like he has nowhere else to be and no reason in the world to rush her. “Okay,” he says. “I’ve got you.”

❄︎ ❄︎ ❄︎

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X X X

You had been working at the Briar campus radio station for almost a year, which was long enough to know one thing for sure: you were damn good at your job. As a communication major, some tasks just came easy to you.

Art fair happening on campus? You’d head over, snap some photos, interview a few organizers and visitors, and publish it.

A play debuting in the arts department? You’d cover the premiere and talk to the actors.

The hockey team playing yet another supposedly important tournament? You’d go, do your coverage, and interview them about the results.

Except, no. Not this time.

You knew the team, it wasn't like the guys navigated campus subtly, after all. With their chaotic parties and loyal puck bunnies, they turned heads wherever they went. Partly because they were loud, but mostly because they were just... them. Big. Charming. Walking around like they owned the place.

Your paths had never crossed beyond one or two game coverages, or at parties thrown by Beau Maxwell, whom you’d known since high school. Because of that, heading to the game that night didn't feel like a big deal at all.

Briar completely crushed the opposing team, which left the players in a great mood and incredibly receptive to talking.

"That was a hell of a comeback, thanks to the defense! What do you think you did differently to turn such a tight game around?" you asked the blonde guy, who wore the grin of someone who was about to cause trouble.

"I gave it my best, gave it my all, and it paid off," Dean DiLaurentis answered, his gaze flicking between you and the microphone, looking like he wanted to say something else entirely.

"As the team captain, what was your advice in the locker room before the big turnaround? What did you say to them that changed the game like that?" you asked the one who honestly possessed the most composure there.

"I told them this is what we came for. This is what we trained for, and every victory this season led to today and not for nothing," Garrett Graham replied objectively, his arms crossed over his chest.

"Right at the beginning of the game, you were one of the players who kept the team steady before the comeback. Do you attribute the win to your initial effort and energy?" you asked, this time out of pure curiosity, completely straying from your script.

"I think my initial energy definitely helped hold the team together until we got on the same page," John Tucker answered, a bit uncertainly, his voice a little low.

"You were responsible for one of the biggest plays of tonight's game, with the shot that broke the tie. What was your strategy the moment you got the puck?" you asked, looking up from your notepad to analyze the brunette in front of you.

"And did you even notice the shot, or even how I made it?" The response came short and sharp, catching you completely off guard. John Logan wasn't even looking in your direction; he was lost in his own thoughts, looking desperate for the interview to just be over.

Things rarely went off script for you. People knew you were there working, checking off tasks. It was rare for a question to be poorly received, especially routine, standard questions like those.

You blinked once. Twice. Maybe you had misheard him.

"I was there. I watched the game," you decided to answer simply.

Logan looked at you this time. He nodded, giving a half-smile.

"Right," was all he said.

You stood there, frozen, staring at him in utter disbelief for a few seconds.

"Right. Thanks for your time," you said, but your tone was anything but grateful. You turned your back on him and walked down the hallway without formally wrapping up.

Completely unnecessary, you thought. How sexist of him to assume you weren't paying attention, would he have asked the same thing if it were a male colleague covering the event? Or worse, he completely discredited your work by assuming you’d just show up without even paying attention to the game before talking to the players.

Right then and there, you decided Logan was arrogant, and as a petty revenge, you were going to cut his part from the story, completely ignoring the fact that he had been crucial to the team's victory.

X X X

The thing about Beau was that he was persistent. He always operated under the assumption that you would do whatever he asked, mostly because you usually did.

You had come to Briar together, friends since high school, and stayed as close as your different interests allowed. You preferred a quiet life without any chaos; Beau climbed onto tables with drums to announce his parties. Of course, you still had fun, you were no saint. You hooked up here and there, drank heavily, and restarted your structured life on Monday as if nothing had happened.

So, when the phones of half the campus buzzed with an invitation to his annual party with Dean DiLaurentis, you didn't even bother officially RSVPing. You knew you were going anyway.

You also knew you didn't have time to plan a costume, and you lacked the patience to worry about it right now. Your choice was the exact same one from every Halloween back in high school: a long purple dress and a stuffed chameleon velcroed to your shoulder. You could always also carry a frying pan.

X X X

You couldn't help but notice everything; it was just in your nature. When you walked into the house, packed with costumed college kids, blasting music, and the smell of beer, you scanned every inch of the place. Even though your friends were talking and guiding you through the mass of people, you knew Beau and Dean were in the living room standing on top of a table; you knew Jules had her phone flash pointed at them, recording. You knew your friends from the radio station were all around the beer pong table.

What you also noticed right away was that the Johns of the hockey team were dressed as "the birds and the bees." You couldn't hold back a laugh as you processed their costumes.

Tucker seemed to be the one who came up with the idea, pointing at Logan whenever someone asked about their costume, which always earned them an "oooh!".

Logan, though... well, Logan looked like he hadn't even tried, even less than you had. But somehow, it worked. His toned arms were emphasized by a gray tank top, the only sign of a costume being a pair of wings. He was sipping beer from a red plastic cup, laughing at something Tucker said.

Accidentally, your eyes met. It took you a few seconds to realize he had caught you staring, and you quickly looked away.

"Are they serious that they didn't even bother?" you commented to your roommate, Daisy, who was dressed as Wednesday Addams.

"It's not like you did much either, right? Your dynamic duo is Pascal. And that dress got way too tight for you about three summers ago. Luckily, you look really hot," Daisy replied.

You looked down. She was right. The neckline squeezed your breasts, the waist was way too tight, and what had once been a long dress now barely hit your knees. You suddenly felt a bit too self-conscious and adjusted the straps on your shoulders.

"Don't judge Pascal, I couldn't leave him behind," you shot back, making a face at your friend.

"I can't believe you right now," Beau's voice boomed behind you.

You turned around with a smile, already knowing what was coming.

"I know."

"You've been wearing that costume for like five years. Pascal doesn't count as a dynamic duo," Beau replied with a disappointed pout.

Your jaw dropped, pretending to be offended. You covered the ears of the plush toy on your shoulder and said, "Don't speak like that in front of him!" which earned you a flick on the nose.

"Did you just flick my nose? How old are you, Maxwell?" you snapped while swatting his arm.

But you really couldn't stop paying attention to everything. It was just your nature. Your eyes searched for Logan out of pure curiosity, and he was no longer in the corner of the room where you had seen him. The problem was, you didn't manage to hide the fact that you were looking for him in time. Not in time to stop him from appearing right by your side.

"Now you're paying attention," he stated, completely without context.

"Excuse me?" you shot back immediately.

He didn't answer, just took a sip of his beer. You stood there staring at him, just like you had at the game, completely incredulous that he was actually saying this.

"Don't you think you made it perfectly clear before that you think I'm completely oblivious and incompetent?" you said, exposing a little too much of how hurt you actually were from the day of the interview.

Logan raised his eyebrows. "Wow. I really got to you, didn't I?"

"No," was all you managed to choke out, embarrassed by the sudden display of weakness.

"You spent the biggest game of the season with your head buried in your notepad or looking at your phone, and then you came to ask me about a play I'm positive you didn't even see. Now you show up at my friends' party looking at everyone like you're judging them," it was Logan's turn to lay things bare.

You laughed. He couldn't be serious.

"First of all, Beau was my friend long before he knew any of you arrogant hockey players. Second of all, I don't know if you know how a radio show works, but I need to note down everything about the event, and I need to record everything on my phone. And I do my job incredibly well, for your information. No one has ever complained about a single detail slipping past me," you rambled on and on until you stopped almost abruptly.

You felt embarrassed for half a second, then turned and walked away, stomping your foot like a spoiled brat who didn't get her way. Logan brought out the worst side of your ego: he questioned your work, the literal only thing you were good at.

Fortunately, he didn't follow you.

Soon enough, you found Beau again in the kitchen.

"Geez, why the angry face?" he asked, handing you a shot.

"Your friend Logan is an arrogant jerk with zero manners," you practically spat the words out.

Beau furrowed his brow, his shot pausing halfway to his mouth.

"Logan? Are you sure you're not confusing him with Dean? Logan is the nice one of the group," Beau said.

"If he's the nice one of the group, I don't even want to imagine the rest," you muttered. You grabbed Beau's arm, linking yours with his, and downed the shot. He followed suit.

X X X

The problem with Beau and Dean's parties was that they threw them on Saturdays, and nobody had class on Sundays. Which meant it was 2:30 AM, you had already had way too much to drink, danced too much, and yet you still had all the energy in the world. The party was still going strong with no sign of stopping.

"I need to use the bathroom," you told Daisy as you already started heading up the stairs.

Everyone might have judged you for your costume, but right now you were grateful Rapunzel didn't wear heels. You had kicked your flats off a long time ago in the corner of some room, so you had to drag your bare feet down the second-floor hallway until you found the bathroom you knew was always empty.

But someone else had the exact same idea.

You bumped right into him, chest-to-chest, as John Logan stepped out of the bathroom. A few drinks ago, you might have kept your balance on your own. Now, Logan was the one who caught you. He grabbed your waist to keep you from stumbling backward, staring at you with wide eyes. You could even say he looked worried. Your hands flew to his chest, bracing yourself against him.

"Hey. You okay?" he asked, his voice low.

"Yes," you replied shortly.

The alcohol could have been blamed for your silence and lack of words, but you knew the real culprit was something, someone, else. Logan grew suspicious when you hurriedly pulled your hands off his chest, forcing yourself to step away from him. Even so, he didn't let go of your waist, studying your face.

Your gaze wouldn't settle on his face, his body, the wall, or the ceiling. He, on the other hand, stared intently at you, too close, for too long.

"I'm steady now," you said, once again far too short.

Logan seemed to get the hint. You only looked at him when he finally let go of your waist, taking a deep breath.

For no logical reason at all, you both just stood there, staring at each other for a few more seconds, expecting one of you to mention the conversation from earlier. You expected him to apologize, and he expected you to say something about it.

Neither of you said a word. You tried to brush past him to get into the bathroom, and at the exact same time, he tried to brush past you to leave. Too dizzy from the alcohol, you collided with Logan's chest yet again. This time, he grabbed your shoulders, with much more care than before.

"I think someone's had a few too many. Are you alone? Do you have anyone to take you back home?" His tone sounded almost like a surrender, as if he couldn't accept the fact that he was actually being attentive to you.

The cat got your tongue, you thought. There was no other explanation for how long it took you to answer him.

"I can take care of myself. I know how to pay attention to things," you intended to say it with venom, but it came out as a mere mumble.

Logan's hands on your shoulders softened, sliding down to your elbows. You were leaning against the door, still staring at him. He smiled, utterly perplexed.

"I'll go get Beau," he said, letting go of you and stepping back.

Your eyes widened, and you reacted entirely on instinct: you grabbed the collar of his tank top, yanking him back. Dammit, he was way too close now.

"Don't..." You swallowed, blinked, and looked away, suddenly realizing how dizzy you actually were. "Don't get Beau involved."

Logan raised his eyebrows, studying your face. Too close. Your hand stayed anchored to his shirt. Too close. He ran his tongue over his lips, his eyes locked onto yours.

"Okay," he whispered.

A shiver ran down the back of your neck. Instantly, you let go of him, throwing your hands up in the air as if surrendering. You grimaced, shook your head, and slipped away from him, finally stepping inside the bathroom. You turned around to slam the door in his face, but Logan was already leaning against the opposite hallway wall, arms crossed, never taking his eyes off you.

"What? Are you going to stand guard?" you teased. You couldn't help but let your eyes wander over how muscular his arms looked, specially by the way he was standing.

Logan didn't answer; he just smiled your way with the patience of a saint.

You closed the door, your back hitting the wood a second later.

He raised an amused brow, “Chocolate?”

You nodded, sipping your beer. “Chocolate.” You confirmed, then pointed across the room to where Kendall was busy making out with one of the hockey players. “She’s vanilla. We’re chocolate and vanilla swirl.”

The football player nodded in understanding. “Ah. I see,” he said before looking over at Kendall. “Though vanilla isn’t very vanilla.”

You laughed at his witty joke, both of you watching Kendall as she did a body shot off of the hockey player she was kissing two seconds ago. She was dressed in the same tube top and bubble skirt set you were wearing, complete with the knee-high boots and matching headpiece; hers a whipped white color, yours a cocoa brown.

From the other side of the room, Tucker and Logan were talking when the former spotted you chatting with the tall football player.

Tucker nudged Logan, “Yo, is that your girl?”

Logan followed his line of sight and it landed on you, leaning against the kitchen counter and speaking to the good-looking stranger with an easy smile on your lips.

Logan looked away and gulped down his beverage. “She’s a big girl.”

Logan wasn’t one of those insecure, pompous boyfriends. He didn’t do jealousy. He’s convinced jealousy was invented by a short dick man with an easily bruised ego. Logan was secure enough in his relationship with you to never have any reason to feel jealous.

You turned to the jock and gave his costume a once-over. Knitting your brows together, you racked your brain’s storage full of pop culture references and iconic fictional characters.

“Timothée Chalamet in Call Me by Your Name?” You tried.

He let out a huff of laughter, “Close. I’m Luca from the Disney-Pixar movie.”

“Ahh,” you nodded. “Practically the same.”

He flashed a charming smile, dragging a sip from his bottle. He extended his hand to you, “James.”

You shook his hand and told him your name.

“Pretty name,” he responded. “Though…” he leaned in closer, “…cupcake fits better, don’t you think?”

Ah. At that, you picked up that he was attempting to flirt with you. Forever loyal to your boyfriend, you opened your mouth to turn his advances down. But before you could, you felt an arm wrap around your waist from behind and find purchase on your hipbone. You knew who it was without even looking.

“Hey, got you a refill,” Logan said, taking the half empty can from your hands and replacing it with a new one.

“Thanks,” you said. As your hand moved to pop the can open, Logan’s deft fingers beat you to it and he cracked the tab for you.

The football player, James, eyed the two of you, biting his lip whilst reconfiguring his whole plan. “You’re both…?”

“Air signs,” Logan teasingly remarked with a straight face, casually drinking from his red solo cup. You elbowed him with a small smirk.

“No,” James shook his head. “I mean—”

“Together,” Logan told him, putting his now empty plastic cup down on the counter. His newly freed hand joined the other by holding onto your other hip and giving it a squeeze.

James nodded to himself. “Got it.” And away he went. Probably off to find his Alberto.

Logan’s eyes followed his retreating figure, not easing up until he was out of sight. Only then did he drop his hands off your body.

You turned around and looked up at your boyfriend with a wide smile. “What was that?”

“What was what?” He returned, pouring himself a new drink.

“That whole thing,” you responded.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” You repeated.

Logan shrugged. “A normal interaction, no?”

“He was flirting with me before that.”

“Oh so you’re aware.”

Your expression dropped. Oh, is that why—

“Logan.”

“Hm.”

“Logan.”

“Hm?”

You tilted his face down to look at him. “I wasn’t going to entertain it.”

“I know,” he replied.

“I was going to shut it down right before you showed up.”

“I know.”

“I want to make sure you know that.”

“And I know that.”

You squinted your eyes. This was suspiciously too easy. “Okay.”

“Okay.”

You stared at one another for a beat longer than necessary.

“You’re still upset,” you observed.

“I’m not upset,” he answered.

“So what are you feeling?” You asked.

“I don’t like how he called you cupcake,” Logan told you.

“Me neither. Not when I’m so clearly chocolate.”

“I’m being serious.”

“So am I.”

“Y/n.”

You sighed softly, “Okay, sorry. I thought humor would make it better.”

Your fingers curled into the hair at the nape of his neck, hoping to relieve some of his tension. It worked. A little.

“It was a shitty pickup line,” you said. “Wouldn’t work on me even if I was single.”

“I hope so.”

“Oh, please, Logan. Take me out the back and shoot me if you ever see me falling for that,” you commented. He let out a small laugh. That’s progress

His hands returned to your hips and he pulled you closer. Your arms instinctively wrapped around his neck. His large hands rested just above your ass.

“What if I called you that?” Logan said lowly.

“Wanna give it a try?” You offered.

He leaned in, his lips hovering right by your ear. You could feel his warm breath fanning over your sensitive flesh. “Would you be into that, cupcake?” He whispered, ending it with a gentle nibble on your earlobe.

You shivered, feeling goosebumps crawl over your skin. “Fuck, I guess you have to take me out back with a gun, Logan.”

He pulled back with a hearty chuckle. You gave a matching smile and he held your face, brushing his thumb across your cheekbone.

As he looked at you, his face turned thoughtful for a moment. You squeezed his hand reassuringly.

He leaned in again. “I didn’t like how he looked at you.”

“How’d he look at me?” You wondered.

“Like how I look at you.”

You stared up at him, biting your lip. “And how do you look at me?” You whispered.

He brought his forehead against yours, gazing deep into your eyes. “Like I want you.”

Oh screw your sexy boyfriend and his even sexier responses. And that’s exactly what you wanted to do now—if only you weren’t in the middle of Beau and Dean’s birthday bash.

You had enough of this game. You raised yourself up and pressed your lips to his. Logan was hungry; he seemed to devour your kiss, swallowing every soft sound you made. His hand strayed down to grip your ass, the other held your waist comfortably. His tongue was already begging to enter your mouth, and you obliged without hesitation.

When you pulled away several moments later, Logan chased your lips with eagerness, gently biting your bottom lip as you separated.

“Mine,” he breathed out under his breath.

You bared a dazed smile, “I only want you.” You mouthed silently.

Logan let out a soft sound of amusement, nodding more to himself than to you. Satisfied and high off your impromptu makeout session, he pressed one last kiss to your forehead before rejoining his friends, this time with a protective hand on the small of your back.

The bass at Malone’s was loud enough to vibrate through the floorboards. 

Every surface in the place felt sticky, humid from too many students packed together under flashing lights, and the air smelled like cheap beer, perfume, sweat, and something aggressively fried from the kitchen. Which normally would have been my cue to leave after thirty minutes. 

But Hannah and Allie had cornered me before I could escape. 

So now I’m trapped in the middle of the dance floor while Allie screamed the lyrics to a JLo directly into my ear. 

“If you elbow me one more time, I’m reporting you to the authorities,” I yelled over the music.

“You look too hot to complain!” she shouted back immediately.

“That’s because this dress is cutting off circulation to my legs!”

Hannah burst out laughing beside us, dark curls bouncing as she danced. “Worth it!”

Easy for her to say.

The black dress looked incredible in my bedroom mirror two hours ago. Sleek. Tiny. Dangerous in a fun way.

Now?

Now it had decided it couldn't stay down on my thighs and kept trying to ride up. Every thirty seconds I had to yank the hem back down while trying to preserve what little dignity I had left. 

“I swear to God,” I muttered, tugging at the fabric again, “this dress is one wrong move away from becoming a crop top.”

Allie nearly choked laughing.

“You’re so dramatic.”

“I’m fighting for my life.”

“You’re winning, though,” Hannah assured me. “Half the bar has been staring at you since we got here.”

“That’s not comforting.”

“It should be.”

Unfortunately, Hannah wasn’t wrong. I could feel eyes following us every time we moved through the crowd. And one pair in particular was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

Because leaning against the bar in a fitted grey Henley—with sleeves pushed up to his forearms like he personally wanted to ruin my mental stability—was John Logan.

He was currently talking to Garrett Graham. Laughing at something Dean said. Looking unfairly good doing literally nothing. I made the mistake of glancing over again. Big mistake. Huge.

Because Logan happened to look up at the exact same moment. Our eyes locked across the crowded bar. Then he smiled, not a polite smile, not a casual hey-I-know-you smile either. A slow, knowing smile like he’d caught me doing something I shouldn’t be. Heat immediately crawled up my neck.

“Oh my God,” Hannah said beside me. “You’re staring again.”

“I am not.”

“y/n,” Allie deadpanned, “you literally stopped dancing.”

I immediately started moving again out of pure embarrassment, nearly sloshing my drink onto the stranger beside me.

“I hate both of you.”

“You wanna know the worst part?” Hannah asked.

“No.”

“He keeps looking over here too.” 

I nearly choke on air. “Excuse me?”

But before Hannah could answer, the dress betrayed me again. Aggressively. I gasped, grabbing the hem before disaster struck. “That’s it. I’m taking this thing out back and setting it on fire.”

Allie doubled over laughing. “You brought extra clothes though, right?”

“Yes,” I said obviously. “Because unlike you two, I believe in preparation.”

Honestly, being roommates with Hannah and Allie meant always carrying backup options.

Backup makeup, shoes, advil, dignity. 

“My bag’s at the table,” I said, pointing toward the back booth where Tucker and Dean sat.

Hannah nodded sympathetically. “Go change before you accidentally traumatize the hockey team.”

“Excellent idea.”

I shoved my way through the crowd, muttering apologies. Heat clung to my skin from dancing, and by the time I reached the booth, I was already annoyed enough to change into sweatpants and never speak again. 

Tucker looked up first. “There she is,” he announced dramatically. “The only responsible person at this school.”

Dean snorted into his drink. “That’s a low bar.”

I laughed softly and bent down to grab my tote bag from beside the booth—Only for another hand to reach it first. Long fingers wrapped loosely around the strap. My stomach immediately did something humiliating. Slowly, I looked up.

Logan sat sprawled comfortably against the booth seat, one arm stretched along the back behind Dean. Up close he somehow looked even broader than he had across the room, shoulders straining the soft grey fabric of his Henley. His hair looked slightly damp at the ends and his eyes were absolutely full of amusement. 

“You leaving already?” he asked. His voice was rough from the noise in the bar, low enough that I felt my heart skip.

“No,” I replied. “My dress is trying to humiliate me.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “I noticed.”

My entire body heated instantly. “You noticed?”

Dean made a choking sound into his beer while Tucker physically covered his face.

Logan looked completely unashamed. “It’s hard not to,” he said. “You’ve been fighting with that thing since you got here.”

I pointed accusingly at him. “You are a terrible person.”

“Nah.” He stood up from the booth in one smooth movement. “Just observant.”

Standing this close to him felt unfair. He was tall enough that I had to tilt my head slightly to keep eye contact. Then Logan glanced down toward my legs again. A slow grin spread across his face. “You know,” he drawled, already shrugging off his hockey jacket, “there’s a pretty obvious solution here.”

Before I could answer, he held the jacket out toward me. Navy blue with ‘Briar Hockey’ stitched across the chest. It was still warm from his body.

“You’re offering me your jacket?”

Logan lifted one shoulder casually. “Seems safer for the general public.”

Tucker laughed so hard he almost dropped a fry.

I should’ve said something smooth. Something flirtier than standing there staring at him like an idiot. But of course my brain had become occupied by the sight of Logan holding the jacket. Dear God. “You okay there, y/n?” he asked, clearly entertained now.

“Yes,” I lied immediately. “I am perfectly fine.”

His grin widened. “That’s good news for me.”

I blinked. “Why?”

“Because I’ve been flirting with you for the last ten minutes.”

My heart nearly stopped.

Dean made a loud gagging noise. “Jesus Christ, Logan. Buy us dinner before you start confessing feelings.”

“Shut up,” Logan muttered automatically. But he never looked away from me once.

And suddenly the noise of Malone’s felt farther away somehow., like the entire bar had blurred around us. Then Logan stepped closer, close enough that my pulse jumped stupidly hard.

“C’mere,” he said softly.

My brain short-circuited again.

Before I could respond, he took the jacket gently from my hands and moved behind me.

Every nerve ending in my body immediately became aware of the fact that John Logan was standing directly behind me.

I could feel heat radiating off him.

Could smell his cologne more clearly now—clean and warm and dangerously comforting.

Then his fingers brushed lightly against my hips as he wrapped the sleeves around my waist.

Not lingering.

Barely there.

Still enough to make my stomach flip violently.

“You’re freezing,” he murmured near my ear.

I swallowed hard. “It’s winter.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Oh.

Oh, that was flirting flirting.

His knuckles skimmed my waist one last time as he tied the sleeves securely in front.

“There,” Logan said quietly behind me. “Problem solved.”

I turned around slowly.

Big mistake.

Because now he was even closer.

Close enough that I could see the tiny scar near his eyebrow.

Close enough that I noticed his eyes weren’t just brown—they had these stupid gold flecks in them under the bar lights.

Close enough that my brain started making deeply unhelpful observations about how nice his mouth looked.

“You’re very smug for someone lending me a jacket,” I managed.

“Can you blame me?” His gaze dragged slowly over me, entirely unapologetic. “You look really good in my clothes, y/n.”

That should not have affected me that much.

And yet.

I crossed my arms mostly to give myself something to do. “Do you flirt with every girl like this?”

“Nah.”

His eyes held mine steadily.

“Only the ones who stare at me from the dance floor like they wanna climb me.”

My jaw dropped open.

Dean lost it completely beside us.

“Oh my God,” I laughed, horrified. “You saw that?”

“Baby,” Logan said, grinning now, “everyone saw that.”

I groaned and covered my face instantly while Tucker cackled loud enough to attract attention from nearby tables.

“This is my villain origin story.”

Logan laughed too then.

Not the cocky teasing laugh from before.

A real one.

Warm and low and ridiculously attractive.

Then his hand closed gently around my wrist.

The touch surprised me enough that I looked up immediately.

“Don’t hide now,” he murmured, tugging my hand away from my face.

The teasing edge in his voice softened just slightly.

And somehow that felt even more dangerous.

“I kinda like when you look at me.”

My stomach flipped so hard it was honestly concerning.

For one suspended second neither of us moved.

The lights flashed blue and gold across his face. Music pounded through the floor beneath our feet. Around us, Dean was still laughing at something Tucker said, people shouted over drinks, glasses clinked behind the bar—

But Logan’s attention stayed completely, entirely on me.

Like I was the only interesting thing in the room.

Then his gaze flicked briefly to the jacket tied around my waist before returning to my face.

“Plus,” he added casually, “now everybody knows you’re wearing my jacket.”

I blinked. “And why exactly does that matter?”

His grin turned lazy again.

“No reason.”

Liar.

And judging by the look in his eyes—

he knew I knew it too.

By the time I realized John Logan was still holding my wrist, it was already becoming a problem.

Not a real problem.

A dangerous problem.

Because his hand was warm, his thumb rested lazily against the inside of my wrist, and the look in his eyes was doing deeply irresponsible things to my nervous system.

Around us, Malone’s was still loud and chaotic—music blasting, people yelling over each other, glasses clinking behind the bar—but somehow the space directly around us felt weirdly smaller.

Focused.

Like the rest of the room had blurred at the edges.

Logan tilted his head slightly, watching me with obvious amusement. “You always get this quiet when a guy flirts with you?”

I narrowed my eyes immediately. “I’m not quiet.”

“You were staring at me like you forgot your own name two seconds ago.”

“That’s a medical condition.”

Dean nearly fell out of the booth laughing.

Tucker pointed a fry at me. “Honestly, y/n? Respect.”

“Thank you,” I said with dignity. “At least someone here supports women.”

Logan’s mouth twitched.

Still holding my wrist.

Still entirely too close.

“You okay there, hockey boy?” I asked sweetly. “You seem attached.”

His gaze dropped briefly to where our hands were touching before lifting back to my face.

“Nah,” he said easily. “Just making sure you don’t run away.”

My stomach flipped.

Which was ridiculous.

Absolutely ridiculous.

Because John Logan flirted with everyone. That was practically part of his personality. He was charming and hot and knew exactly how to look at someone like they were the center of the universe for five minutes at a time.

I knew that.

Unfortunately, knowing it did absolutely nothing for me when he smiled like that.

“You think I’d run away?” I asked.

“I think,” Logan said slowly, “you’ve been pretending not to notice me staring at you all night.”

Heat crawled up my neck instantly.

“Oh my God,” I muttered.

“That’s not a denial.”

“Please stop being observant. It’s ruining my life.”

He laughed softly, finally letting go of my wrist.

I immediately missed the warmth.

Which felt pathetic.

Before I could spiral about that too much, Logan leaned one hip against the edge of the booth beside me.

“So what’s in the emergency backup bag?” he asked.

“Gym shorts. Oversized T-shirt. Snacks.”

His eyebrows lifted. “Snacks?”

“I’m a woman in STEM. Survival is important.”

Dean pointed at me dramatically. “See? This is why she’s my favorite.”

“You told Hannah last week I looked like I’d poison someone for fun.”

“You do.”

“That’s just the eyeliner.”

Logan laughed again, shaking his head.

God, he laughed a lot around me.

That felt… nice.

Dangerously nice.

“What kind of snacks?” he asked.

I stared at him. “Are you flirting with me or trying to rob me?”

“Can’t it be both?”

I snorted despite myself and finally crouched to dig through my tote bag. “Goldfish crackers. Granola bars. Sour candy.”

“y/n,” Tucker said solemnly, “marry me.”

“No.”

“That’s fair.”

I pulled out the folded pair of black athletic shorts I planned on changing into and tossed the bag onto the booth seat.

Logan looked personally offended.

“You’re replacing the dress?”

“The dress betrayed me.”

“But the dress is winning.”

“That sounds fake.”

“No seriously.” His eyes dragged over me again, slower this time. “It’s a really good dress.”

My brain fully malfunctioned for half a second.

The confidence in his voice was what got me.

Not teasing now.

Not joking.

Just honest.

And somehow that was worse.

“You are aggressively good at this,” I informed him.

“At flirting?”

“At making people forget basic motor functions.”

A grin spread slowly across his face. “Yeah?”

“Unfortunately.”

Dean groaned loudly. “I can literally feel the sexual tension from here.”

“Then leave,” Logan said without looking away from me.

Tucker clutched his chest dramatically. “He’s in deep already.”

“I’m not in deep,” Logan shot back automatically.

I raised an eyebrow. “Interesting choice of wording.”

He looked at me for a second.

Then smirked.

“You catch everything, huh?”

“Occupational hazard.”

“What occupation?”

“Judging people.”

“Damn,” he said. “And here I thought it was pharmacy.”

I laughed before I could stop myself.

And Logan’s expression shifted immediately when he heard it.

Softer somehow.

Like he liked making me laugh.

That realization hit me right in the chest.

“You know what’s weird?” he asked suddenly.

“What?”

“You’re way less scary than Hannah made you sound.”

I gasped dramatically. “Excuse me. I worked very hard on my terrifying reputation.”

“She told Garrett you once made Dean reconsider his entire personality.”

“I did.”

Dean pointed at me. “She looked me dead in the eyes and asked if I had hobbies besides being loud.”

Logan barked out a laugh.

“To be fair,” I said, “you didn’t have an answer.”

“That’s not the point.”

The music switched songs, bass vibrating through the floor harder now as more people crowded onto the dance floor.

Across the room, Hannah spotted me and wiggled her eyebrows obnoxiously.

I immediately flipped her off.

She looked delighted.

Logan followed my gaze toward the dance floor. “You gonna keep dancing?”

“Eventually.”

“You were having fun before your dress declared war.”

“I was having fun until somebody noticed.”

“y/n,” he said, looking genuinely amused, “you were staring at me like you were conducting scientific research.”

“In my defense, your arms are upsetting.”

There was a beat of silence.

Then Tucker made a strangled noise.

Dean physically bent over laughing.

And Logan—

Logan looked so pleased with himself it was unbearable.

“My arms?” he repeated carefully.

I immediately realized my mistake.

“Oh my God.”

“y/n likes my arms,” he announced to the table.

“I actually need everyone here to die.”

He laughed outright now, head tipping back slightly, and the sight hit me with embarrassing force.

Because Logan was pretty.

Like offensively pretty.

Especially when he laughed.

“You know,” he said casually, flexing one arm against the table edge just enough to be annoying, “most people compliment my face first.”

“You don’t need compliments about your face. You already know about your face.”

“That’s true.”

“Horrific answer.”

He grinned.

Then leaned closer suddenly, voice dropping lower.

“But for the record,” he murmured, “I noticed your legs first too.”

My entire train of thought derailed.

Completely.

Gone.

Dean slapped the table hard enough to rattle the drinks. “Jesus Christ, just kiss already.”

“Dean,” I said weakly, still staring at Logan, “I’m trying to have a nervous breakdown in peace.”

Logan’s eyes flicked down briefly to my mouth.

Just for a second.

Still enough to make my pulse jump.

Then he looked back up slowly.

“Would it help,” he asked softly, “if I told you I’ve been trying not to kiss you since you walked in?”

I forgot how breathing worked.

Actually forgot.

Logan noticed immediately too, because his grin turned lazy and unbearably smug.

“There she goes again,” he murmured.

“Shut up.”

“You get all wide-eyed every time I flirt with you.”

“Maybe because you flirt like you’re trying to cause structural damage.”

That earned me another low laugh.

And before I could recover from that either, Logan reached out and adjusted the collar of his hockey jacket where it sat tied around my waist.

His fingers brushed bare skin just above my thigh.

Tiny touch.

Barely there.

My stomach flipped violently anyway.

His eyes lifted back to mine.

“You keeping the jacket on?” he asked.

“Maybe.”

“Good.”

“Why?”

His gaze held mine for one long second.

“Because I like seeing my stuff on you.”

Oh.

Oh, he was dangerous.

If only a few months ago, someone told you that you’d be sitting on the kitchen island of briar u’s infamous hockey house. You would’ve spat in their face and thrown out witch allegations. But, as it so happens, you were currently proving yourself wrong since you were in fact sat at said kitchen island, at 2 in the morning.

What was especially life altering was the fact that the hockey house at two in the morning felt fundamentally different from the version people saw during the day.

Quieter, obviously.

There was still the low hum of the refrigerator somewhere behind you, the occasional groan of pipes in the walls, distant traffic bleeding through the kitchen windows in soft waves. Someone upstairs snored loud enough that it periodically rattled the ceiling and every so often the house settled with little creaks that sounded almost human in the dark.

You had been staring at the same paragraph for twenty-three minutes, and you’re pretty sure the windows loading screen was implanted into your brain in that time.

From the outside, you still looked productive enough. Your notes were spread methodically across the kitchen island in organised little piles, colour coded tabs sticking from textbooks, highlighters lined neatly beside your laptop alongside enough empty coffee cups to medically concern most people. Your laptop screen glowed brightly against the otherwise dim kitchen, lecture slides open beside three different quizlets and a half-finished practice paper that had slowly become your mortal enemy sometime around midnight.

Your knee bounced aggressively beneath the stool.

One of your hoodie sleeves had been pulled over your hand completely, the cuff half-chewed from absentminded stress while your other hand tapped your pencil rhythmically against the counter.

Tap tap tap.

Pause.

Tap tap tap.

You reread the sentence again, hoping the information would magically inject itself into your brain. Still nothing.

Your eyes skimmed over the words, recognising them individually but refusing to process them collectively, which somehow felt even more insulting considering this was material you’d already revised twice.

You exhaled slowly through your nose, pressing your temples in an attempt to settle the dull ache behind your eyes.

Fine. Whatever. Maybe your brain just needed a second.

You sat up straighter on the stool and reached for your coffee, immediately grimacing when the cold bitter liquid hit your tongue. It truly was a miracle what a red bull and coffee could produce if brewed together. Thankfully, nobody would know of your creation since you cleaned up the evidence and were currently drinking through the undeniable urge to gag it all out.

Your planner sat open beside you, pages covered in your handwriting so intensely neat it bordered on threatening. Every hour of the week had been scheduled down to frightening precision - lectures, revision blocks, assignment deadlines, office hours, reading lists.

And still somehow, the tasks outweighed the hours- the day you made the schedule was the day you cursed those who didn’t warn you that at Briar, everyone here had already been the smartest person in the room somewhere else.

You had spent most of your life being good at things naturally enough that effort felt almost embarrassing to admit to. High school had been manageable. Predictable.

Briar was different, at Briar, everyone was either born with the syllabus out of the womb or could somehow use textbook pages to roll and smoke a joint- still managing to come out with a 4.0 GPA. Which just meant every mistake, no matter how tiny, felt absurdly catastrophic.

You clicked your pen repeatedly while rereading the practice question in front of you.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Your eye twitched.

“Okay,” you muttered quietly to yourself, dragging a hand down your face. “No, because actually what the fuck is oxidative phosphorylation.”

The kitchen answered you unhelpfully with silence, bar the occasional drip of the sink- which didn’t help since it added another item to you todo list, “tell Logan to fix the kitchen sink”. You prayed your brain would remember it for longer than 20 seconds, but given that it could barely splutter together the material you swore was genetically implanted into your DNA , you didn’t have much hope.

Alright, new strategy- you turned your focus to your laptop. You’d make this test your bitch, one way or another. 

The diagram on your laptop stared back at you smugly. 

Or not. You glared at the behemoth of a biological diagram, weird, blob-like shapes were sprayed across the screen with equally sharp, taunting labels and colours that honestly, should never be used in association with the human body.

Your phone buzzed from somewhere across the large island, most likely beneath a pile of flashcards- you barely broke eye contact with your goliath. It was probably Allie. Or Hannah. Or someone in your intro to human biology class freaking out about the test. 

The notification popped up in the corner of your screen, it was both of them. Teaming up to tell you to go to sleep before your body gave out and somebody had to physically remove you from campus again.

You swiped it away dismissively. Not happening.

You still had two chapters left to revise, one practice paper unfinished and exactly nine hours before the test. Which in theory, sounded manageable. In practice however, you would willingly let Dean teach you about anal sex and somehow understand it better than the words in front of you. Your brain was buffering dramatically against your task list. 

You rubbed hard at your eyes before leaning back over your notes again, trying desperately to force yourself into focus.

“Just lock the fuck in.” You whispered to yourself, frustrated with the way your shoulders slumped tiredly and legs began to numb from where they were awkwardly folded beneath you.

Just focus.

Your pencil tapped faster, eyes burning as you forced them to read the same line four more times.

Nothing.

An annoyed groan left your lips, because you could feel yourself slipping. 

Feel your concentration dissolving around the edges while your body keeps trying to push forward anyway. Your thoughts felt sluggish and overcrowded at the same time, every tiny unfinished task pressing against the inside of your skull until even breathing felt vaguely unproductive.

And still, you scolded your weary body and brain- convincing them to just keep going. One more hour. One more minute.

Because the alternative was stopping, and you wouldn’t dare consider it. Stopping meant acknowledging that maybe you physically couldn’t keep up with the pace you’d set for yourself- and the mere hypothetical made something uncomfortable curl in your chest.

You reached for another flashcard.

Read half of it and… forgot what it said immediately. 

A near hysterical laugh escaped you before you could stop it, fingers curling around the innocent card-stock. You wacked yourself with the flimsy thing before pausing with it pressed against your forehead, squeezing your eyes shut for a second longer than you deemed necessary.

You were fine, it's just a little stress. Everyone at Briar was stressed, and you refused to be the coward who was complaining about a little sleep deprivation and one difficult exam. 

Your eyes opened again and landed on the digital clock glowing faintly on the microwave, the numbers slightly blurry. 

2:07 AM.

You stared at it for a moment.

Then immediately looked back down at your notes like refusing to acknowledge the time would somehow stop it existing.

Tap tap ta-

The pencil snapped clean in half, one side stayed clasped in your hand whilst the other rolled uselessly away from you. At least something was escaping this revision nightmare. You froze, staring longingly at the traitorous piece of wood, scoffing in a kind of exhausted disbelief normally reserved for personal betrayals.

Then you laughed again, burying your face in your hands. 

Dangerously close to tears.

The kitchen light had been on long enough that Logan eventually noticed it in his sleep, not at first, just distantly, somewhere beneath the heavy haze of exhaustion and late-night dreams, his brain registered the thin strip of warm light cutting underneath his bedroom door which made him subconsciously shuffle around the bed, eyebrows furrowing when he sensed a change in the environment around him.

Because you were supposed to be upstairs.

More specifically, you were supposed to be asleep beside him.

Logan woke slowly, one arm stretching instinctively across the mattress before meeting cold sheets instead of your body. For a second he just blinked at the ceiling, disoriented in that miserable way people were at two in the morning, before finally pushing himself upright with a tired groan.

He sat up, swaying tiredly as his eyes adjusted to the rude awakening, his room was dark besides the faint orange glow of campus lights bleeding through the blinds and your side of the bed was empty.

Not recently empty either, the sheets had settled and emanated a chill that suggested you’d been gone for a few hours.

Logan scrubbed a hand down his face and began to search for something to cover up with. He already knew where you’d be.

The same place you always ended up when your brain refused to let you rest.

He shoved himself out of bed and reached blindly for the pair of grey sweatpants abandoned somewhere near the desk chair, dragging them on low over his hips before stumbling toward the door. His Briar hockey team hoodie hung half-off the back of the chair and he tugged it over his head without much thought, still too sleepy to care that it was inside out.

The stairs creaked under his weight, making him grimace and shift his feet experimentally- trying to make his way down quietly without disrupting the hushed atmosphere. The house was dead, Tucker wasn’t flopping around the couch yelling at a video game, Dean wasn’t raiding the protein powder cupboard, Garrett's old classic rock wasn’t blaring out of the speaker. It was just silent. 

Then you came into view, and it was like seeing a zombie in a graveyard. Logan stilled in his tracks.

It was exactly as he’d pictured you, hunched over the kitchen island, hair fluttering out the braid you’d messily done, probably when you first fled from the bedroom- your legs were pretzeled beneath you as you stared at your laptop, frozen in time with notes covering every inch of the island around you.

The stool you sat on vibrated from the force of your knee bouncing, even the empty coffee cups and highlighters jolted considerably; from what Logan could make out, almost seven different tabs were open across your screen, the garish light illuminated your face as you glanced up a few times, your hoodie sleeve covering half your hand while you aggressively annotated something in the margins of your textbook with enough force to threaten the integrity of the page itself.

He carefully treaded towards you, close enough to make out the look on your face. Sheer exhaustion plagued your features, not the normal version either, you didn’t have a lick of sleepiness on your face, it was probably wrung out from how wound tight you were. This kind of exhaustion settled beneath your skin and turned every small inconvenience into a potential psychological breakdown

Logan paused briefly for a second, just watching you. His chest tightened a little, because this had been your life for the past week. Barely eating unless necessary, sleep was just a polite grievance that you gave into once in a while when you weren’t studying into the night until your eyes were glassy. And somehow, you still thought people would believe you when you insisted that you were fine.

You muttered something under your breath at your laptop before aggressively clicking your pen- the sound was sharp enough to bring Logan back into the scene that laid out before him. 

Click.Click.Click.

“Baby?” He came up behind you, grabbing a bottle of water from the fridge and pressing his hand against your back. You startled so hard that the pen slipped from your fingers.

Logan immediately felt a little bad when you spun toward him with wide eyes, before you expression settled into something defensive. 

“I’m studying.”

Logan’s brows lifted as he unscrewed the bottle slowly,

“Yeah,” he said slowly, voice still rough with sleep, “I gathered that.”

You huffed quietly and looked back down at your notes, this close up, he could see how much worse you looked. There were faint shadows beneath your eyes, and you posture had curled inward, hostile in that specific way when you were overwhelmed but trying to hide it

“When did you come down here?”

“Like…” You squinted at the microwave clock, “Midnight?”

Logan blinked.

“Baby, it’s two in the morning.”

“I know what time it is.”

The sharpness in your voice surprised the both of you, mainly you, since you recoiled back and tightened your face apologetically. 

“I didn’t mean-”

“It’s okay.”

Logan cut you off gently before you could spiral into apologising. He shifted closer, resting one hand against the counter beside your thigh while looking over the mess of notes in front of you.

Biochemistry.

Jesus Christ.

“You should come to bed.”

“No.”

You didn’t even look up from the equations scribbled onto the paper in front of you, dismissing the idea entirely, like the suggestion itself stressed you out. 

You rubbed hard at your eyes before looking back down at your laptop screen.

“I still have so much left.”

Logan studied you quietly for a second. Normally, he would’ve pushed harder. Normally, he’d already be halfway through physically carrying you upstairs while you complained dramatically over his shoulder.

But this version of you would’ve gouged his eye out without thinking if he dared something like that. This version of you was overstimulated, overworked and balancing precariously on a thread built by your psyche. 

So instead, Logan just moved beside you, dragging a stool closer so he could slide in and rest a hand on your thigh absentmindedly, leaning lightly into your shoulder. 

You exhaled shakily through your nose, when he ghosted his nose against your cheek, nuzzled delicately.

“What are you working on?” he asked softly, tilting his head to squint his eyes at the paper that twitched under your fingers.

“Oxidative phosphorylation.”

Logan stared at you.

“Gesundheit.”

Despite yourself, your mouth twitched slightly.

“There are literally ATP synthase pathways in my nightmares now.”

“That sounds fake.”

“It’s not. I wish it was”

Logan hummed sympathetically like he understood literally any of what you were saying. He didn’t, but he knew enough to know that when your voice sounded too tight, the content was hammering around in your brain with the elegance of a troll. 

You clicked your pen again.

And again.

And again.

Logan’s gaze drifted slowly across the kitchen, the empty coffee cups he had noticed before now seemed to be stained an odd ochre colour, definitely not coffee but he wouldn’t question what concussion you had brewed to stay awake. He stopped himself from scolding you about the untouched granola bar beside your laptop and instead focussed on the way your notes depicted the journey of your mental state unravelling, starting out neat and ending up in frantic scribbles.

He squeezed your thigh once, “You eat anything?”

A pause.

Your pencil stopped moving and you bit your lip as you thought. Not a good sign.

“Yeah.”

Logan waited for you to elaborate. 

“…today?”

You glared at him weakly.

“That feels judgemental.”

“It’s meant to feel concerning.”

“I had coffee.” You looked over to the sea of cups beyond your materials, blinking at the odd colour their insides seemed to have picked up. That’s not a good sign for your stomach, a problem for future you entirely, “...which I brewed with redbull”

“Baby.”

“I know.”

The words came out as an exhausted sigh.

Logan’s thumb rubbed slowly against your thigh.

“You can’t study properly if you’re running entirely on some demon-drink and the hatred of your TA.”

You let out a short laugh at that, then immediately regretted it when your head throbbed. Logan’s frown deepened when you pressed your fingers against your temple. 

Your breathing had changed slightly, thinner, more aware of the toll this was taking on your body. Every inhale was getting caught halfway down and each exhale came out shaky. 

He watched you stare at the same page for several long seconds without turning it, watched your eyes scan the same line repeatedly, your fingers tightening in your hair where they were buried- cradling your head.

Your knee bounced harder against the stool.

“Hey.”

You didn’t answer immediately, instead your jaw tightened. 

“Baby.”

This time you looked at him, and Logan felt his chest tighten at the shiny film over your eyes. As if you were teetering on the edge of crying, and the only thing blocking the dam was your insistence to continue studying.

You looked away almost immediately, shoulders pulling tighter.

“I’m fine,” you muttered quietly.

Logan, had stopped pretending to believe that about ten minutes ago.

He stayed beside you, one hand still resting lightly on your thigh, thumb moving in slow, grounding circles like he was trying to keep you anchored in the room. He didn’t speak much anymore. Just watched. Quietly observant in that way of his that always felt slightly unfair, like he could read the parts of you that you hadn’t even admitted existed yet.

You didn’t realise you leaned into him but your head had come to rest on his shoulder as you continued to highlight pages. But when you hit a certain word with the electric blue ink, you paused, re-read it and frowned.

“Wait,” you muttered under your breath, you immediately sat up straight and flipped the page back, then forward again, then back. 

Logan didn’t say anything, but his thumb had frozen against your leg, his eyes darting worryingly between how fast your fingers were flicking the pages and your face, that was starting to crumple with realisation.

You scanned the entire paragraph again. Then the page. The words weren’t changing, but they might as well have been. They blurred together at the edges, refusing to hold shape properly no matter how many times you forced your eyes over them.

Your stomach tightened.

“No,” you whispered quietly, more to yourself than anything else, your fingers flying to check the lecture slides, then your revision guide. A slow, sinking realisation started to form in your chest.

“No, no, no,” you said again, this time sharper, somehow sitting up straighter as if posture alone could fix the situation.

Logan’s voice came gently from beside you, but you could barely hear it. A rush of panic roared in your ears and it felt as though you were drowning and he was standing above you- trying to communicate through litres of pitch black water.

“What’s wrong?”

You didn’t answer immediately.

Your eyes darted everywhere, from where you were flipping pages with increasing urgency, to scanning headings, rereading annotations you had definitely written yourself but suddenly didn’t recognise as useful.

This wasn’t the right topic.

You had spent hours on the wrong section.

Hours.

Your entire brain stalled for a second, like a car that had been slowly, painfully screeching up a hill- and at the last minute some unknown force engaged the hand brake and you were now rolling down at a speed you couldn’t stop even if you tried

Then, as if somehow slamming on the breaks would help, it tried to compensate by speeding up.

“That can’t be right,” you said quickly, breath thinning slightly. “I swear I already did this. I- I literally did this two days ago.”

Logan leaned forward slightly now, “Baby-”

“No, no, it’s fine,” you cut in immediately, too fast again, the rubber was burning as the wheels grinded against asphalt. “It’s fine, I can fix it. I just need to- I just need to switch it and then I can catch up, I still have time I just-”

Your laptop trackpad clicked aggressively as you opened another document.

Logan watched as your hands shook violently with each click, your breathing shallowed and shoulder tightened even more than before- your knee was bouncing so fast that it felt like your entire leg was vibrating against his hand. It was like you were slowly collapsing into yourself, and all he could do was watch with a concerned expression on his face.

“Hey,” he said again, softer this time. “Look at me.”

“I am looking at you,” you snapped automatically.

Your voice cracked at the end of your sentence and you froze- letting silence interrupt your world speeding to an untimely end. 

You swallowed, and then tried to laugh. Maybe if you could trick your body into thinking this was all just one big joke, it would stop trembling like you were in an active war zone. It didn’t come out right, more like a choked sob. 

“I’m just being stupid,” you muttered, turning back to the screen too quickly. “It’s fine. I can still revise it, I just lost time but I can make it up if I-”

Your eyes wouldn’t focus entirely, and when your cursor hovered in the wrong place guided by your fingers, that were quaking so uncontrollably, you ended up deleting the entire window. 

Your stomach dropped.

“Oh my god,” you whispered.

Then again, louder.

“Oh my god.”

Logan straightened slightly, his hand moving to hover over your forearm- but dropped it back to the familiar place on your leg, “Baby.”

“No, I’m fine,” you said immediately, too quickly again, voice shaking now whether you wanted it to or not. “I’m fine, I just messed up a bit, it’s not- it’s not a big deal I can fix it I just need to-”

You tried to re-open the tabs, but your laptop spluttered hopelessly, lagging out in front of you. Your breath caught when the entire screen went black and rebooted, the forced update screen blinked cruelly at you. And then you felt something in your chest whimper and crumple, like a house of cards met with the softest breeze. 

“No,” you said again, but this time it wasn’t frustration, it was fear that made your voice waver as your hands stilled over the keyboard

“I can’t- I can’t do this,” shaking your head you brought a hand over your mouth, almost disbelievingly, like you were hearing someone else say it.

Logan’s hand immediately left your thigh.

“Hey,” he said firmly now, moving closer. “Hey, look at me.”

You didn’t. Couldn’t. You were transfixed by the slow spinning pinwheel over and over and over- like it was hypnotizing you into staying upright in your seat. 

“I’m so behind,” you said quickly, words spilling out now that the dam had broken. “I’m actually so behind I don’t even understand how I’m supposed to catch up and I thought I was doing okay but I’m not and I just wasted so much time and I don’t- I don’t have time for this-”

Your voice broke properly at the end, and then the tears finally fell. You didn’t sob, just heaved heavy breaths that were interrupted by copious floods of salty liquid barrelling down your face. It wasn’t dramatic the way you fell apart, it was like throwing a pebble down a ravine, and waiting to hear the sharp sound of it dropping to the floor, you could only notice it if you listened very carefully.

You blinked hard immediately.

Once.

Twice.

Angrily.

As if that would fix it.

“No,” you said again, wiping at your face quickly with the back of your sleeve. “No, no, I’m fine, I’m literally fine I just- this is stupid I shouldn’t be crying I just need to fix it-”

You went to reach for your textbook and pen, you’d do it the old fashioned way then. 

Logan stopped you immediately, both hands wrapped around yours, gentle but firm. He pulled the pen and textbook out of your grip, dropping them somewhere on the table.

The thud echoed too loudly in the quiet kitchen.

You froze, staring at him like he had just pulled the plug of your life support. Your breathing became uneven now, chest tightening in a way that made speaking harder. 

“I need that,” you said, voice small but urgent. “Logan, I need that.”

“No,” he said softly.

You face crumpled in exhausted confusion, finally spilling over the edges of your carefully curated container of anger and frustration. 

“I don’t have time for this,” you whispered, voice breaking again. “I don’t have time to fall apart right now.”

Logan’s expression shifted, something within him went still as he rubbed your knuckles, 

“Baby,” he said quietly, and there was something different in his tone now. Less concern about the work. More about you. “You’re not falling apart.”

You let out a broken laugh and gestured to the minefield of study materials in front of you.

“Yeah,” you said shakily, wiping your face again. “Yeah, I am.”

Logan waited for you to continue, as if he didn’t see any evidence for your argument. The silence wrapped around you, compelling you to speak- your voice softer, smaller than before, 

“I can’t mess this up.”

Logan barely hesitated, he reached up and cupped your face gently, forcing your attention away from the table and onto him.

Your hands were still trembling slightly where they hovered near your lap. Logan’s palms were on your cheeks, steady and warm, keeping you anchored in place like he was afraid that if he let go you would dissolve back into the kitchen air.

And you just stared at him, not really able to focus on his eyes properly, like your brain hadn’t fully caught up to the fact that the panic had nowhere left to go.

Logan’s thumbs moved lightly under your eyes, brushing away the last of the tears before they could fully settle.

“Hey,” he said again, quieter now. “You’re okay.”

You nodded immediately, a sharp pang in your chest hit you like a ton of bricks, you felt guilty for taking up precious revision time- and for the fact that Logan had dragged himself out of bed because of you. 

“I’m fine,” you whispered, but it came out thinner than you meant it to. “I just- I just messed it up.”

Logan didn’t respond right away, just looked at you, how your eyes kept flicking from him to the notes and back to him. Like you were gauging how long you’d be away from them. He couldn’t wrap his head around how you could be sitting in front of him and still think this was about the notes on the table.

“I shouldn’t be doing this,” you said suddenly.

Your gaze stayed fixed on the kitchen island, as if the mess of colour-coded organisation and half-finished revision sheets could still be fixed if you just looked at them long enough.

“No,” you corrected quickly, shaking your head slightly. “No, I am doing this, I just- I just need to focus I just lost time and I can’t afford to lose time right now because if I lose time I fall behind and if I fall behind I-”

Your voice cracked halfway through, your eyes widened and you blinked hard, already angry at yourself.

Logan’s hand didn’t falter, instead they rubbed soothingly along your cheekbones,

“Baby,” he said gently.

But you weren’t listening anymore, the words spilling out now that your restraint had snapped, “I’m not supposed to be like this,” you said, voice breaking around the edges. “I’m not supposed to be the person who can’t handle it. I can handle it, I always handle it, I just need to fix it I just need to-”

Suddenly the tears were back, springing up to your lash line and bubbling down your face, you blinked immediately, wiping at your face like it was instinct rather than thought.

“No,” you whispered again, frustrated now. “No, stop, I can’t do this right now-”

Logan pulled you forward, a gentle tug on both your shoulders- you stumbled off the stool, kicking it back slightly until your forehead dropped against his chest, like your body finally gave up pretending it could hold itself upright alone.

Your hands curled into the fabric of his hoodie, tight at first, as though you were trying to hold yourself together through him- because you weren’t looking at the screen anymore, meaning there was nothing left to organise the chaos with.

“I’m sorry,” you said immediately, voice muffled against him. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m just being stupid I don’t know why I’m crying I just need to fix it I just-”

“Hey.”

Logan’s voice cut through gently but firmly.

“Hey. Stop.”

Your breath stuttered, and Logan thought that maybe he finally managed to get you to pause. You tried again anyway,

“I just messed up a whole section and I don’t have time and I thought I was doing okay but I’m not and I’m- I’m behind and I can’t be behind, I can’t-”

Your voice blubbered completely on the last word, you pressed your face harder into his chest like that would erase your stumble. Logan’s armed tightened around you, a slow exhale contracting his chest in relief, that he finally managed to create a boundary between you and everything else. 

You tucked your face into his neck and loosely wrapped your arms around him, you wished you could hold him just as tight- but your limbs were exhausted. “You’re not behind,” he murmured into your ear. You let out a shaky laugh that turned halfway into a sob, Logan somehow held you harder against him. 

“Yes I am.”

“No,” he repeated, firmer this time. “You’re overwhelmed.”

You stilled for half a second, torn by the accuracy of what he said- you couldn’t fully tell if a weight had been removed for your chest or if it had been pierced by his words. Either way, your breathing hitched again. 

“I can’t be overwhelmed,” you said quietly, like it was an unspoken rule you were breaking. “There’s too much to do.”

Logan lowered his head slightly, pressing a kiss against your forehead.

“You’re allowed to be overwhelmed,” he mumbled into your skin. 

You wished he hadn’t said that, because it had been the right thing. Or wrong thing. To make your shoulders shake once. And the minute the first racking sob emerged from your throat, you were crying properly the next. Deep, exhausted crying that you had clearly been holding back for far too long, you clutched his hoodie tighter, fingers curling like you were afraid of falling if you let go.

“I don’t know how to stop,” you whispered, voice breaking. “I don’t know how to stop doing this.”

Logan hummed, slowly dragging his hand up and down your back, rubbing soothing warmth through your clothes and against your spine.

“You don’t have to stop,” he said softly. “You just have to breathe for a second.”

You shook your head pitifully against him.

“I can’t waste time.”

That made him pause, then pull back, just enough so he could tilt your face up to meet his eyes. 

“Look at me,” he said gently.

You were stubborn to hold onto the one piece of dignity you had left, but the way the words were said so firmly in the space between you two, you couldn’t stop yourself from following his gentle command. 

Eyes still wet and red, your expression crumpled in a way that you would normally never let anyone see. Nevermind watch so up-close, letting them look at you the way he was, like you weren’t something to fix, or scold into productivity, just you. 

Like a prized possession that had started collecting dust on the same old shelf, and someone had picked you up and dusted you off- Logan studied you like it was the easiest thing in the world for him to love you.

“I do not care about your GPA right now,” he said quietly.

A laugh slipped out of you again, broken at the edges, “That’s easy for you to say.”

“No,” he said immediately. “It’s not.” His hands pressed into your face more firmly, as if he could permeate his intentions deeply into your pores. 

You blinked at him, owlish and tired- vision jumping with each uneven breath.

Logan wiped under your eye with his thumb again, slower this time, like he wasn’t in a rush to move past any of it, “You don’t have to earn being okay,” he said.

You leaned back into him without thinking, forehead pressing into his shoulder as your breathing slowly started to even out in small, uneven waves. He held you there, one hand stroking your hair, the other spread across your back- keeping you close so you could safely fall apart. 

You didn’t realise when the crying faded into soft hiccups and ebbed into soft breathes but the feeling didn’t resolve itself into manageable, malleable calm. Instead it changed shape, less sharp around the edges but stretched thin all over your body, planting its roots into your chest.

You had moved to the kitchen floor at some point, your head resting on Logan's shoulder as he stroked your hair. The kitchen was finally quiet, peacefully coexisting in the nightly hush with the rest of the house.

The microwave blinked at you. “3:30 AM”

For some godforsaken reason, your body decided to remember everything you were holding back, bottling up, choosing to bring it back all at once. 

Your breath catches in your throat, high enough to make you stutter while your eyes begin to flutter with unshed tears. Logan froze with his hand buried in your hair, pulling away to analyse your face when he felt your fingers tighten in the fabric of his sweater. His hand shifts at your back, not rushing you, just adjusting like he’s already bracing for whatever direction this takes.

“Hey,” he calls softly.

You open your mouth, but it was as if you had inhaled a whole packet of tear stained tissues- your answer doesn’t come out cleanly, instead it's broken, cracked around the edges instead. 

“I thought I was done,” you whisper.

The tears come again, but differently this time. Less explosive. More like something that had been waiting politely in the background and finally got permission to exist again. You press your forehead back into him automatically, like your body already knows where to go when it stops trusting your head.

“I hate this,” you say, quieter now, words muffled against his chest. “I hate that I can’t just… be normal about it. I hate that I turn everything into this thing I can’t control.”

He doesn’t interrupt, instead he tightens his arms around you, tucking you further into the grooves of his body. You try to match the way his chest rises and falls, your breathing coming out shaky, broken.

“I was doing so well,” you add, like that matters, like it somehow redeems the fact that you aren’t now, “I don’t want to be like this,” you admit, the words spilling faster now that they’ve finally been let out. “I don’t want to be someone who breaks down over a test question or loses control over nothing and makes it everyone’s problem I just- I just want to be okay without it being this complicated thing I have to manage all the time.”

You press your lips together, a sinking feeling filling your stomach- you begin to pull away, accepting the fact that you shared too much, felt too much, hurt too much, for him to still willingly sit with you on the kitchen floor. 

But Logan doesn’t falter, his arm stopping you from going too far. He brings one hand up to the side of your face again, gently guiding you back to him before you can disappear into yourself.

“Don’t do that,” he says quietly.

Your eyes are wet again.

“I’m embarrassed,” you whisper.

“No,” his voice is hushed but the word shoots out harshly. Like he couldn’t believe that you were still worried about how strong you forced yourself to be. 

“Yes I am.”

“You’re overwhelmed,” he corrects again, softer this time, but firm in the way that he refuses to let you rewrite it into something cruel.

Your jaw tightens, because you know he's right and you can’t argue with it. If you couldn’t rebuild your shattered armour, you’d wipe it clean- and salvage what was left by wiping your tears away harshly with the back of your sweater.  Logan catches your wrist gently before you can.

“Hey,” he murmurs. “Stop trying to erase it.”

His eyes dart between yours, watching how you slumped in paralyzing relief. Relief that you didn’t need to think about the armour, that you didn’t need to present yourself as infallible.  

“I don’t know how to not be this,” you admit quietly.

Logan’s eyes steel protectively, “You don’t have to know that,” he says.

You shake your head slightly, still crying, still trying to steady yourself like it’s something you can logic your way out of, “I do,” you insist. “I do because I can’t keep- I can’t keep doing this where I fall apart and everyone has to-”

Your voice breaks again which prompts him to pull you in, firm arms bracketing around your body, a hand sliding into your hair with the other pressing steadily into your back, holding you in place while you shake.

He kisses your hair, “You’re not doing anything wrong,” 

“I don’t feel like I’m okay,” you whisper.

“That’s fine,” he replies immediately. “You don’t have to feel okay to be okay.”

You let out a small, broken sob against him like your system is finally losing the argument it’s been having with itself all night. Logan shifts slightly, guiding your head up to look at you properly, your face is flushed, messy, completely uncontrollable in a way that terrified you. His thumb comes up to brush away the fresh tears.

“I’ve got you,” he says quietly.

Your body eventually begins to loosen, your breath reaching a slower equilibrium- hiccuping in between but your shoulders begin to drop and your fingers let his sweater out of their death grip.

“I didn’t mean to ruin the night.”

Logan closes his eyes briefly like he’s trying not to react too strongly to that sentence, then he opens them again and shakes his head down at you, “You didn’t ruin anything,” he says.

You give him a look, a look that says, “Sure buddy, and those aren’t crater sized bags beneath your eyes”. Logan leans forward and presses his forehead gently to yours, “No more fixing yourself tonight,” he says quietly. “Okay?”

The air hangs heavy around you as you hesitate, pressing your lips together until you nod, slowly, hesitantly. And ever since this had started, your breathing finally didn’t feel like a chore to push out of your lungs, instead it flowed gently from your mouth in placid waves. 

Logan stays with you like that for a long time, intertwining your fingers together and cradling you against his chest, running his knuckles along your cheekbone until your eyes flutter shut. 

“For the same reason they’ve been givin’ me shit for the last month.”

“Which is?” You ask, squeezing his hand a little tighter.

“You.”

You smile so hard you have to look away. Garrett shakes his head at your reaction, trying to fight his own smile.

“Every time somethin’ happened tonight, I’d look for you.”

“Every time?” Your voice comes out soft and bashful with your eyes locked at the empty parking lot ahead.

“You acting surprised is the craziest part.”

“I am surprised.”

“No, you’re not,” he laughs, looking away for a second.

His arm slides around your waist as the two of you reach the Jeep. The parking lot light flickers overhead, and when he presses your back against the side of the cab, the space around you sinks into darkness.

His hand comes up, cradling the back of your neck as he kisses you, deep and familiar, like he’s been thinking about it since the second he saw you outside the locker room.

“I was gonna ask for that back,” he murmurs against your lips.

“Oh?” You whisper, your hands curling into the material of his sweatshirt.

“Not anymore.”

He kisses you again, catching your bottom lip between his teeth before letting it slip free.

A laugh escapes you, barely more than a breath, your cold hands sliding beneath his sweatshirt and making him shudder against your mouth.

“Walked into that arena lookin’ like you belonged to me.” The words come out rougher that time.

You smile into the kiss as he lifts you off your feet, pressing you lightly against the side of the cab, your arms sliding around his neck and your fingers threading through the curls peeking out beneath the back of his hat.

“Pretty sure I’d give you anything you asked for at this point.”

“Anything?” You whisper, playing with the dark curls at the nape of his neck.

“Mhmm.”

Your smile grows as you tilt your head just enough to meet his gaze.

The anticipation is written all over his face, impossible to miss. His hands are still on you, his eyes fixed on yours, and the sight of it makes another laugh bubble up from your chest. You let him wait a second longer anyway, enjoying it far more than you should before finally whispering—“Backseat?”

The Jeep unlocks with a sharp click, and you immediately start giggling against his mouth.

“God,” Garrett mutters, resting his forehead against yours for a second. “Baby, I was really hopin’ you were gonna say that.”

One hand stays anchored at your waist while the other reaches for the door handle. He pulls it open and steps aside, trying to look casual about it, but the grin spreading across his face ruins the effort completely.

You barely get the door open before he’s behind you, one hand settling at your hip as he helps you climb inside. Your knees hit the cushion, and the door rocks slightly beneath his weight when he follows after you.

Garrett is on you the second the door shuts, one hand braced beside your head as his mouth crashes back into yours.

The cramped space only seems to make him bolder. His hand slides from your waist to your thigh, squeezing hard enough to pull a breath from you, and the sound seems to go straight to his head.

He kisses you deeper, impatient now, like the few seconds it took to climb into the backseat were already too many.

His hand finds the back of your neck again, pulling you into another kiss before either of you can think better of it. The hat flicks off and his sweatshirt disappears somewhere into the dark, tossed aside without a second thought as his fingers slide into your hair.

A low groan rumbles from his throat when your hands find the waistband of his sweats.

“Can’t believe you’re lettin’ me do this,” he murmurs, shaking his head with a quiet laugh that sounds equal parts amused and disbelieving.

“Do what?”

“This.” His eyes flick over your face before a crooked smile pulls at his mouth, his voice falling lower. “In the parkin’ lot. Bet we could make it home if we wanted to.”

You immediately start nodding. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay—” You stop moving for half a second and Garrett lets out a laugh, the sound warm and low in the dark.

“Baby, c’mon.”

You grin. “What? I’m just givin’ you shit.”

“Yeah, well, people need to stop doin’ that tonight,” he mutters, shaking his head. “Been gettin’ roasted for like four straight hours.”

A laugh slips out of you. “Sorry.”

His eyes drop to your mouth. “Yeah?” The corner of his mouth tilts upward. “Then show me,” he mumbles, smiling into the next kiss as his hand drags between your thighs, rubbing your warmth through your clothes.

Your nails trail down his bare chest as you kiss along his neck, feeling the deep groan that rumbles through him.

“Let me see you,” he says.

Your heart stutters as he guides you into his lap. Garrett groans the second you settle over him, your clothed body pressing against him, separated by entirely too much for his liking.

He watches you with heavy eyes and parted lips, his hands already roaming beneath the jacket and jersey, sliding up your back before he undoes your bra in one quick snap.

“Fuck me,” he mutters, the words slipping out before he can stop them. His hands cup your breast as you straddle him and you gasp when his thumbs brush over you, your body arching instinctively into his touch.

“Don’t wanna take this off,” he mumbles, lips finding your neck again, kissing and lingering there as his hands refuse to stay still. “What do you—” His sentence dies halfway through when your hips grind against the thick print of him.

Garrett lets out a rough breath and squeezes his eyes shut for a second before looking back at you. “What do you wanna take off, baby? Anything? Nothin’?” The question comes out rushed, almost distracted. “Whatever you want.”

You shrug off the jacket and pull the jersey over your head, smiling when Garrett’s eyes immediately follow the movement. The bra he’d already unclipped slips easily from your shoulders and his expression goes completely blank for a second.

Then you reach down and pull the letterman jacket back on.

“Holy shit,” he murmurs, leaning back into the seat for a better look. “Yeah, see? That’s the problem right there.” His eyes drag over you again before finding your face. “Been drivin’ me fuckin’ crazy all night.”

Your soft lips lock down on his neck, feeling his pulse racing beneath your mouth before you kiss higher, lips dusting the shell of his ear as you breathe. Garrett lets out a rough groan when your hips roll against him just right, his eyes squeezing shut for a second as he fights for control.

“Oh my God, baby,” he mumbles, his gaze locked on yours before his mouth finds yours again, hot and greedy as you grind down against the outline of him through his briefs.

You keep him pressed right there beneath you, letting him feel every slow roll of your hips as you move against him.

“Baby…” He groans, his head tipping back for a second before his eyes drop again, eyeing the dark gray patch of fabric where the precum gathered.

“Mhmm,” you hum, dragging it out as your hips keep moving.

“Christ. Need to be inside you,” he huffs, the words tumbling out faster this time, his voice already rough. “You’re makin’ me lose my fuckin’ mind.”

His hands slide higher along your thighs before drifting back down again, fingers catching lightly at your leggings. And just like before, you’re already tugging them lower.

Garrett lets out a rough breath, the sound carrying more disbelief than confidence.

“Playin’ the best hockey of my life,” he murmurs, shaking his head like he still can’t quite believe how badly he’s got it. “Away game next weekend… what the hell am I supposed to do without you?”

You reach across the backseat and grab his phone, smiling to yourself.

“Your birthday,” he says immediately, answering before you can even ask for the password, already knowing where this is gonna go.

“Watch it next weekend. Call me after,” you say, leaning closer.

“How’d I get this lucky?” Garrett whispers as his lips dust over yours, lifting his hips just enough to tug his boxers down, his heavy cock hitting his skin.

“You gonna call me, Graham?”

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “But you already knew I was gonna do that.”

You giggle, shaking your head. “Yeah. I’m catching on.”

“Good,” he says.

Garrett’s mouth falls open when your hips start to move. Just the tip of him pressed right against your soaked entrance as you roll your hips with a practiced sway, dragging him through the slickness.

His head thuds back against the seat and a rough groan slips out of him. “Ugh, that’s it. That’s my fuckin’ girl,” he hums, watching you sink down on the first few inches before lifting off again just enough to leave him staring at the sheen of you on him.

“Feels so good,” you sigh, playing with the depth as you watch his composure start to crack. His hips lift off the seat automatically, chasing your warmth without a second thought.

He’s completely done with the teasing now. The easy confidence, the joking, all of it disappears. His biceps and forearms flex as his hands tighten on you, the look on his face giving him away long before his words ever could.

“Baby,” he breathes, voice rough around the edges, eyes fixed and heavy on you as your body moves in the dark. Every bounce of your chest, every flutter of your lashes, every shaky breath that leaves you when the angle hits just right.

He palms your ass, gripping your hips like he can’t decide where he wants to touch you most.

“Garrett,” you whisper, pressing your forehead against his, your breath unsteady. “Feels so—fuck, this feels so good. I’m close—”

“Yeah?” He breathes, the word barely making it out. One hand comes up to tangle in your hair while the other stays anchored at your hip, guiding you closer.

Your eyes pinch shut as he chases the feeling, and the reaction alone has him hanging by a thread.

“Garrett! Fu-uck—” Your voice breaks apart on his name, the sound punching straight through whatever self-control he has left.

His jaw clenches immediately. Not because he isn’t enjoying himself, because he is. Way too fucking much.

“Jesus Christ, baby,” he mutters, his forehead dropping briefly against yours as he fights to stay present, his hands tightening instinctively on your hips. The look on his face says exactly what Dean would’ve been making fun of all night.

“There she is,” he breathes, the words slipping out with a rough laugh. “That’s my girl.”

His hand slides up your back as he watches you come apart in his arms, eyes fixed on your face. A groan slips out of him at the sound of his name when it leaves your lips in a squeal.

“Yeah, baby? Shit.” His chain catches on the sweat slicked on his chest, his lips parted as his eyes start to glaze over with pleasure but he wants your focus. “Look at me.”

His strokes up slowly until he's pounding into you, the wet mess he made squelching through the Jeep as it sways, both of you sure you aren't going to last much longer like this.

"Feels so fucking good," he grits out.

You whimper that you're close, the words barely making it out of your mouth. "Fuck, I'm cumming," Garrett stammers, your pleasure enough for him to break, jaw tightening, brows furrowing, filling you up but refusing to stop until you cum again.

You follow close behind him, pussy fluttering around his cock as it throbs inside you, leaving him sucking in a breath.

You tuck yourself into his neck, both of you breathing hard, your body still trembling as his hands move slowly up and down your back. His lips press absentmindedly against your skin, soft now where they’d been desperate before.

“Damn…” He whispers, voice low and rough, smiling like an idiot as he stops the recording. “I don’t wanna leave.”

A laugh slips out of you, breathless and soft. “Don’t you have that boys’ night?”

Garrett immediately lifts his head, giving you the same look he gave Logan when he asked for a rain check.

“Baby.”

You laugh harder, his hand coming down to give you a play smack on the ass.

“No.”

“Garrett—”

“Hell no.” He’s already shaking his head. “You heard me the first time.”

His arms tighten around you as he settles back against the seat. You hide a smile against his shoulder as his hands drift underneath the jacket.

“I already told you I’m gone next weekend. So I’m spendin’ this weekend with you.” Garrett presses a kiss against your forehead before pulling back just enough to look at you. “Not even a discussion.”

“Sounds perfect,” you mumble, pressing a lazy kiss to his lip.

“My bed sounds too nice,” he chuckles softly. “Stay with me tonight.”

You smile and nod, reaching up to straighten the chain resting against his chest. Garrett catches your wrist before you can pull away, turning your hand just enough to press a kiss against the inside of it.

“Thank you,” he murmurs, his voice quieter than before.

Your brows pull together slightly, head tilting curiously. “For what?”

A crooked smile tugs at the corner of his mouth, looking back at you in his arms like this. “Tonight. Comin’ to the game. Wearin’ my stuff. Puttin’ up with my teammates. This… Especially this. Goddamn.” He shakes his head, laughing softly to himself. “All of it.”

Your hands cup his face, thumbs brushing over the stubble along his jaw while you take him in.

“Of course,” you whisper.

Eventually Garrett reaches for the pile of clothes beside you. He helps you get situated again, carefully gathering everything back together before draping the letterman’s jacket over your shoulders last.

“There,” he says, satisfied immediately.

“Happy?” You ask.

“Mhmm… Very.” His arm settles around your waist, pulling you closer against his side.

“I love you.”

Garrett’s smile softens instantly. “Love you too.” His forehead rests lightly against yours. “Love bein’ yours.”

dividers @uzmacchiato

His hockey sticks lined up exactly where he left them. His Jeep. His routines. His clothes. Especially his clothes.

He loved the way his jerseys seemed to fit you just right, skimming and teasing your curves when you tossed it on after sex, dressed in nothing more than his last name, a pair of panties.

And every time he turned around lately, something of his seemed to be in your hands. Garrett had a bad habit of handing you things and never asking for them back.

The letterman jacket was different. Maybe because it wasn't just another sweatshirt—maybe because he'd worn that thing for years.

Maybe because he'd left it at your apartment the night before after tossing it over a chair, fully intending to grab it on his way out the next morning. Instead, he'd stumbled out five minutes late for morning skate with his mind lost somewhere between the sheets and that goodbye kiss.

And when you showed up to puck-drop dripping in royal blue, he almost lost his edge completely.

His jersey. His letterman’s jacket. That dainty necklace he'd bought you for your birthday peeking through the space in between whenever you moved.

You looked like every hockey girlfriend fantasy he never admitted he'd been carrying around in the back of his mind. The kind of thing he'd spent years pretending he didn't want.

The kind of thing he'd caught the guys talking about on the bench between shifts; somebody waiting in the tunnel after the game, secretly texting from the gym when they’re supposed to be in a team workout, gifting jerseys, giving them a reason to look up into the crowd instead of the back of the net.

Now he couldn't shut up about you either.

You laugh at something the person next to you says before turning toward the ice, and even from halfway across the arena, Garrett catches the smile that spreads across your face the second you spot him.

Dean slashes him lightly as they skate out toward center ice, following Garrett's line of sight into the crowd. The second his eyes land on you, a grin breaks across his face.

"Holy shit,” Dean gasps dramatically.

Garrett immediately groans, throwing his head back, already knowing exactly where Dean’s gonna take this.

"You seein’ what I’m seein’, buddy?" He laughs, looking back toward the stands like he can't quite believe what he's seeing. "She looks good in your jacket—"

“Does she now?” Garrett asks with a challenging bite, latching onto the part where Dean said his girl looked good and ignoring the rest entirely.

Dean lets out another laugh, skating alongside him as they reset for the next shift. Garrett adjusts his grip on his stick, dropping his gaze to the tape wrapped around the blade. It lasts all of three seconds before he's looking back up into the stands again.

"Oh, you're in trouble,” Dean chuckles.

“Focus,” Garrett grunts, the attempt so half-assed it only makes Dean laugh harder.

"No, you focus."

Garrett shakes his head, trying and failing to hide the smile tugging at the corner of his mouth as the music blasts over the speakers.

Dean exhales sharply, blowing it out slowly like he’s genuinely concerned. "You're gone, bud.”

"Shut up."

“You are."

"I'm literally standing right here," Garrett laughs, finally looking over at him.

"Mentally?" Dean asks, smacking a gloved hand on top of Garrett's helmet. "Absolutely not."

Garrett opens his mouth, fully intending to argue but nothing comes out. Dean lifts an eyebrow, waiting for an answer.

"You got nothin'."

"Fuck off,” Garrett chuckles.

The puck drops and Garrett does his best to forget about the stands. And for a little while, hockey wins.

The game settles into that familiar rhythm; slamming into the boards, skate blades carving into the ice, eyes darting between bodies for an opening.

Dean feeds him a perfect pass through the slot and he takes it—bar down, the net ripples and the horn explodes ahead, the crowd erupts into cheers as the music plays.

Garrett’s fist pumps instinctively as adrenaline courses through him, teammates crashing into him from every direction before he can even slow down.

And like a complete idiot, the first place his eyes go isn’t the scoreboard.

Dean catches it immediately, grabbing him by the back of his jersey as they head back to the bench. “Did you do it for her? I just gotta know. How are we gonna play this?”

Garrett shoves him away, but Dean hangs on, refusing to let go.

“Boys,” Dean announces dramatically. “We lost him.”

“You’re such a dick.”

“Answer the question, Graham,” Dean demands as he steps off the ice.

“What question?” Garrett asks, brushing the ice off the blade of his stick.

“The goal.”

“The goal?”

“Yes, the goal,” Dean adds, with no plans of letting it go.

“I scored because you passed me the fuckin’ puck, buddy. That’s how hockey works—”

“See? That’s not a no.”

“Mhmm,” Garrett hums, gnawing at his mouthguard to hide his smile.

A few of his teammates stream past with the puck and distract Dean for a moment, Garrett’s eyes finding their way back to you. You’re looking down at your phone, smiling at the screen, and he can’t help but wonder if his phone is buzzing in his locker right now.

Fuck, he’s in trouble.

“Malone’s after this? A few beers with the boys, G. What do you say?” Logan’s voice calls from Dean’s right, catching him completely off guard. Because what do you mean, with just the boys on a Saturday night? A home game? With you in the crowd looking like that? Fuck off.

Garrett looks to his left and Dean and Logan are both staring at him now, matching grins stretched across their faces.

Garrett narrows his eyes immediately, the pieces clicking together all at once. Those motherfuckers.

It wasn’t an invitation. It was a test.

And judging by the way Dean doubles over before he can even answer, he’d failed it spectacularly.

“No way,” Dean howls. “No fuckin’ way.”

“You’re a dick,” Garrett laughs, flicking him off with a gloved hand.

“You’re the dick, G. Fucking rude, actually. You didn’t even think about it!” Logan adds.

“Not for a second,” Dean agrees, pointing at him like he’s presenting evidence in court.

“Shut up.”

“I’m serious,” Dean laughs. “That look on your face? Incredible.”

Garrett lifts his water bottle, taking a long drink while the two of them continue losing their minds. “Hang it up, Dean.”

“Not a chance… You know my favorite part is?” Dean asks as he leans forward, resting his elbows on his breezers.

“No… No I don’t,” Garrett answers simply.

“Three years. Three fuckin’ years of listenin’ to you tell everybody how there was no way you could do both. You spent all that time acting like getting attached was gonna ruin your game.”

“It would’ve,” Garrett deadpans.

“Really?” Dean asks. “Because you got a goal, two assists, and you’ve looked up into the stands approximately forty-seven times tonight—and it’s only the first.”

Logan nods, looking up at the scoreboard and back to Garrett. “Statistically speaking, she should probably come to every game.”

“—Yeah,” Dean agrees. “For the good of the program.”

Garrett scrubs a hand across his jaw, already losing the battle not to smile. “Both of you are idiots.”

“Maybe.” Dean shrugs. “But we’re right.”

Garrett rolls his eyes, hanging his head for a moment. Eventually the conversation drifts somewhere else, both of them getting distracted by whatever’s happening on the ice. Garrett immediately takes advantage of it, searching the crowd without even thinking about it.

Back to you.

Dean catches it almost instantly. “Fuckin’ love this for you, G.”

Garrett rolls his eyes toward the ice, but the smile gives him away. “Shut up.”

The second the locker room door swings open, Garrett spots you.

One second he’s laughing at something Dean says, smiling for one reason, and the next he’s smiling for another entirely. His hand drags across his mouth like he can somehow hide it, duffel bag looped over his broad shoulder, the other shoved into his pocket as he tries and fails to look casual.

You’re leaning against the brick wall, still drowning in that royal blue jacket of his.

Your eyes lift from your phone and the second you spot him, a smile spreads across your face, and Garrett feels his own answering before he can stop it. He doesn’t even realize he’s walking faster until Dean catches up beside him.

“Oh, wow,” Dean breathes dramatically.

“Go away, dude,” Garrett mutters under his breath with a laugh.

“No, seriously. Look at you… You are clippin’.”

Dean smacks him on the ass as he blows past, earning a startled laugh from you before he jogs ahead to catch the rest of the guys.

Garrett just shakes his head, already fighting a losing battle. His hand finds your waist, pulling you closer like he’s wanted to all night.

“Good game,” you smile.

“Yeah?” His grin softens immediately as he leans in closer. “You think so?”

“Rain check on that boys’ night?” Logan yells from halfway down the hallway, his voice echoing through the tunnel just as Garrett’s lips brush yours.

“Oh?” You ask sweetly as Garrett pulls back and shoots Logan a dirty look. “You have plans?”

“Hell no,” Garrett answers immediately, his hold on you tightening slightly as he turns you just enough to block out the idiots behind him.

“Goal was for you, by the way!” Dean shouts over their laughter, and Garrett’s entire face floods red.

“Don’t listen to them,” he mutters, pulling you into a tight hug.

“I mean, the first one definitely was,” Dean continues.

“Buddy, both of ’em were,” Tucker adds as the locker room door swings shut behind him, piling on while Garrett groans.

“Don’t you have shit to do?” Garrett asks.

“You better have him home by midnight, sweetheart,” Dean adds as he pushes through the side door, pointing at the two of you like an exhausted hockey parent.

Your back presses against the wall as Garrett keeps his eyes fixed on the exit, waiting for the last one of them to leave.

The second Dean disappears through the door, Garrett exhales, silence finally settling around you, just the two of you and an empty hallway, exactly like he’d been hoping for. He turns back to you, breath catching when he finds your eyes already on him.

And before you can speak he kisses you deep, his hand gripping into the back of the letterman’s jacket to bring you closer. His other hand lifts, cradling the back of your head, smiling against your lips as he draws back just enough to whisper.

“You ready to get out of here, baby?”

Bonus Drop: The Parking Lot ⋆✴︎˚｡⋆

dividers @uzmacchiato

Arriving, you spotted Hannah immediately, weaving between tables with three plates balanced on her arm. You passed her on your way to the staff locker room and gave her arm a quick squeeze. She grinned at you over her shoulder.

The lunch rush was the particular kind of brutal that didn't leave room for anything except moving, table to table, order to order, the focused blur of a busy service. By the time it slowed down your feet ached and your ponytail had developed a life of its own.

Hannah found you at the counter, mechanically polishing glasses.

"So busy we couldn't even talk today," she said, sliding in beside you and stealing a glass to polish.

"It was genuinely awful," you agreed. "My feet are going to file a formal complaint."

Hannah laughed. And then the door opened.

Logan, Garrett, Tucker, and Dean came in with the energy of people who had just finished practice and were extremely confident about their right to exist in any space they chose. Garrett made a beeline for Hannah with the focused intention of a man who had one priority. Behind him, Logan drifted toward the counter, casually, like he just happened to end up there, and leaned against it, watching you serve a customer with an expression that was doing nothing for your professional composure.

You almost dropped the bag the customer was reaching for.

"Hi, Logan." You kept your voice completely neutral. "Do you mind not staring at me? I'm working, you know."

He laughed, low and unhurried. "No, I don't think I can manage that."

"You could try."

"Not when you look this pretty."

"This pretty?" You gestured at yourself. "My hair is dirty and I didn't even have time to put on makeup."

"Still the prettiest," he said, and winked, and wandered back to the table where his friends had settled in like they owned the place.

You looked back at the counter. The glass you had been polishing was now somehow less clean than when you started.

Hannah had materialized at your elbow with the expression of someone watching something inevitable unfold.

"When," she said reverently, "are you two just going to date like normal people?" She sighed. "I hope it's soon. I kind of want to win that betting pool Tucker made."

You put the glass down. "What betting pool?"

Hannah's expression cycled through several things in rapid succession.

"No betting pool," she said. "I meant a real pool. Tucker said something about you guys and a real pool. Can't think of what it actually was. Because it was so long ago."

You looked at her.

"Hannah Marie Wells."

"That's not my middle name."

"Tell me the truth right now."

She looked left. She looked right. She found no exits. She exhaled.

"All right. Tucker organized a bet where everyone has to guess when you two will finally become a couple. I said three weeks from the day the bet was made, which is actually — tomorrow — so if you two could maybe just —"

"I cannot believe you guys would bet on something like that." You shook your head. "Actually, I can believe them. But you, Hannah. I expected better."

"Allie too," Hannah offered, as though this was helpful.

"What does the winner get?"

"Pride and glory. Also we each put in twenty dollars."

You set down the glass and made a direct line for the boys' table. Logan spotted you coming and started to smile, that smile, the one that was specifically for you.

"Logan," you said pleasantly, "can you help me with something? The door on one of the staff lockers is jammed. Do you mind taking a look? Your bill will be on the house if you fix it."

He raised an eyebrow. "Yeah, sure." He pushed back from the table, nodded to the others, and followed you toward the back.

Dean watched you go with an expression of mild suspicion. Tucker didn't look up from his menu.

The staff locker room smelled like industrial cleaner and someone's forgotten lunch, which was not exactly the atmosphere you would have chosen, but it would do.

"So where's the door?" Logan said, looking around.

"There's no door."

He turned. "What?"

"There's no door. I needed to get you alone." You crossed your arms. "Your friends are running a betting pool on us."

"What do you mean there's no door?" He looked genuinely betrayed by the architecture. Then: "And they're your friends too."

"Not when they're betting on us. There's no door, Logan, I made it up. Focus."

He laughed and crossed the small room toward you, his hands finding your waist and pulling you in with the unhurried ease of someone who had been doing it for a while, not long enough that it felt ordinary, long enough that it felt inevitable.

"It's not a big deal, you know," he said. "The bet. They're just nosy."

"I know." He was very close, which made it difficult to maintain the appropriate level of outrage. You found yourself pressing small kisses to his lips almost without deciding to, punctuating your words between them. "I just — don't want — to make it — a whole thing yet."

Logan pulled back far enough to look at you properly.

"Yeah?" he said. Not pushing. Just asking.

"It's ours," you said, which came out simpler and more honest than you had intended. "For a little while longer. I just want it to be ours."

Something in his expression settled, warm and unhurried, the specific look of someone who understood completely and wasn't going anywhere.

"Okay," he said.

"Okay?"

"Yeah." He tucked a piece of hair behind your ear. "Okay."

You pulled him in by the front of his shirt and kissed him properly this time, the locker room and the betting pool and Hannah's guilty face all receding into irrelevance.

Logan pulled back.

"Wait," he said. "So no bill on the house, then?"

one — tucker

The thing about Logan's shirts was that they were extremely comfortable.

This was not a controversial observation. They were soft and worn-in and smelled like him which was a feature rather than a bug on cold Sunday mornings when getting dressed felt like an unnecessary commitment.

You had not planned to be at the house on a Sunday morning. You had planned to be at your own place, in your own bed, wearing your own clothes, like a person who had their life together. What had actually happened was that Saturday night had turned into Sunday morning in the way that it sometimes did around Logan, and now it was nine-fifteen and you were in his kitchen in his grey shirt making coffee while he was still asleep upstairs.

Which was fine. Which was completely normal and fine.

The house was quiet. Tucker's door had been closed when you passed it. Dean and Garrett weren't home, Logan had said. You were alone with the coffee machine and a comfortable Sunday silence and absolutely no reason to think anyone was going to come downstairs for at least another hour.

You had just found the good mugs when you heard footsteps on the stairs.

Tucker appeared in the kitchen doorway in a hoodie and the expression of someone who had not yet fully committed to being awake. He was looking at his phone. He walked to the refrigerator. He opened it. He stared into it with the vacant focus of someone hoping food would appear through willpower alone.

Then he turned around and saw you.

The silence that followed had a very specific quality.

Tucker looked at you. He looked at the shirt. He looked at the coffee you were making, looked at the two mugs, and something moved across his face that went through approximately six stages before landing on stunned comprehension.

"Hey," you said, with the casual energy of someone who was not wearing their boyfriend's shirt in his kitchen on a Sunday morning. "Coffee?"

Tucker opened his mouth.

"I stayed over," you said pleasantly. "The couch is really comfortable actually."

Tucker looked at the shirt. He looked at the mugs. He looked at the shirt again.

"...Right," he said slowly.

"He let me borrow this because my top had a thing. A stain. From last night." You gestured vaguely. "Very embarrassing, actually. Pasta related."

Tucker was still looking at the mugs.

You picked up both mugs, tucked them against your chest in what you hoped was a casual gesture rather than an incriminating one, and smiled at him.

"I'm just going to bring this up," you said. "You should have some. There's plenty."

You walked past him and up the stairs before he could say anything else.

Logan was sitting up in bed when you came back, hair doing something architecturally ambitious, squinting at the light.

"Tucker's awake," you said, handing him his coffee and sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed.

Logan processed this. "And?"

"And I told him I slept on the couch because my shirt had a pasta stain."

Logan looked at you for a long moment.

"Did he believe you?"

"Absolutely not," you said cheerfully, and drank your coffee.

Downstairs, Tucker stood in the kitchen for another full minute. Then he took out his phone.

tucker: i just saw (Y/N) in the kitchen wearing logan's shirt

tucker: making TWO coffees

tucker: and she said she slept on the couch because of a pasta stain

dean: WHAT

garrett: what

tucker: I THINK I JUST WON THE BET

hannah: you didn't win the bet tucker. it was clearly just a pasta stain situation

tucker: HANNAH

allie: omg omg omg

tucker: do i win?? does the pasta stain story count as them getting together???

dean: i don't think pasta counts as confirmation tucker

tucker: I WILL NEVER FINANCIALLY RECOVER FROM THIS

two — hannah

The thing about Malone's on a Friday night was that it had exactly one staff bathroom and one customer bathroom, and the customer bathroom had been out of order since Wednesday, which meant that the staff bathroom had become public property by necessity, which meant the line for it snaked along the back wall and required a wait time that was genuinely unreasonable.

You had been waiting for four minutes when you remembered that you knew where the staff entrance was.

The staff hallway was quiet and dim, the sounds of the bar muffled behind the door. You had worked here long enough to know the code, and the bathroom was unlocked, and you were inside and washing your hands within ninety seconds, feeling extremely smug about the whole thing.

You were just reaching for a paper towel when the door opened.

Logan slipped inside, pulling the door shut behind him, and looked at you with the expression of someone who had just made the same efficient calculation.

"Oh," he said. "You had the same idea."

"Staff entrance," you confirmed.

"Smart."

"I know."

He crossed to the sink beside yours and turned on the tap, and for a moment you were just two people washing their hands in a small staff bathroom, which was either extremely romantic or extremely unromantic depending on how you looked at it. His shoulder was warm against yours in the small space. You handed him a paper towel.

"Tucker's texts have been unhinged this week," you said.

"The pasta shirt thing really broke him," Logan agreed, the corner of his mouth lifting.

"He texted me three times yesterday asking if I wanted to talk about my feelings."

Logan laughed. You loved the sound of it in small spaces, the way it filled them. You turned toward him and he turned toward you and you were very close, and he tucked a piece of hair behind your ear with the absent, habitual tenderness of someone who had been doing it long enough that he didn't think about it anymore, and you went up on your toes and kissed him quickly.

"Separate," you said against his mouth. "We should go back separately."

"Separate," he agreed, not moving.

You kissed him again, less quickly this time, his hands finding your waist, the paper towel entirely abandoned.

The door opened.

Hannah stood in the doorway.

The three of you looked at each other.

"The customer bathroom is out of order," Hannah said, very carefully, "so I used the staff code."

"Same," you said. You and Logan had separated with the practiced efficiency of people who had been interrupted before. "Just washing our hands."

"Both of you."

"It's a two sink bathroom," Logan said.

Hannah looked at the two of you. She looked at the very small bathroom. She looked at the single paper towel that was inexplicably on the floor.

"Right," she said. "Of course. I'll just —" she pointed at the toilet. "I'll just use this."

"We were just leaving," you said.

You and Logan filed past her. You did not look at each other in the hallway.

Behind you, you heard Hannah take out her phone.

hannah: ok so i just walked into the staff bathroom at malone's and (Y/N) and logan were BOTH in there

allie: WHAT

tucker: I TOLD YOU ABOUT THE PASTA SHIRT

hannah: they said they were just washing their hands

dean: both of them. in the staff bathroom. together.

hannah: there were two sinks

garrett: hannah

hannah: i mean it's a completely reasonable explanation!!

tucker: HANNAH YOU ARE LITERALLY DATING GARRETT YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS

hannah: i mean. yes. but also. two sinks.

allie: hannah i love you but two sinks is not an explanation

hannah: i just think we should give them the benefit of the doubt!!

tucker: hannah you literally have twenty dollars on this

hannah: ...i said three weeks

hannah: from a month ago

hannah: i may have already lost

three — allie

Allie considered herself an observant person.

This was not arrogance, it was simply a fact, documented over years of being the person in any given group who noticed things. Who left early. Who had argued with whom. Who liked whom. The small social architecture of any room was, to Allie, essentially readable at a glance.

Which was why she could not understand why no one else was seeing what she was seeing.

It was a random week night, the kind that had somehow evolved from a study session into a full group hangout without anyone formally announcing it, and now there were seven of them spread across the living room , Logan and Dean on the floor with Tucker's terrible taste in television providing background noise, Garrett and Hannah on the armchair that was technically too small for two people but they had been making work for months, and you and Allie on the big couch with your respective laptops.

Normal. Fine. A completely normal Tuesday.

Except.

Allie had been reaching for her water bottle when she saw it.

Logan had said something to Tucker, something quiet, barely audible over the television, and Tucker had responded, and then Logan had looked across the room at you. Just looked. For maybe two seconds.

And you had looked back.

It wasn't a loaded look, exactly. It wasn't the dramatic eye contact of a romantic comedy. It was quieter than that, it was the almost imperceptible look of two people who were sharing a private thought from across a room. Easy. Habitual. Like a conversation conducted entirely without words by people who had been having it for a long time.

Allie's water bottle missed the table entirely.

"You okay?" you asked, looking at her.

"Fine," Allie said. "Totally fine."

She looked at Logan. He had gone back to whatever Tucker was saying. Completely normal. Nothing to see.

Allie looked back at you. You were typing something on your laptop. Also completely normal.

I saw that, Allie thought. I absolutely saw that.

She leaned over to you. "Hey," she said, very casually. "What was that?"

You looked up from your laptop. "What was what?"

"That —" she gestured vaguely between you and Logan. "That look."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"You and Logan just —" she did the gesture again, which in retrospect was not a very descriptive gesture.

"Allie," you said pleasantly, "I genuinely don't know what you're referring to."

You went back to your laptop. Allie stared at the side of your head.

I saw it, she thought. I definitely saw it.

She turned to the room. She needed a witness.

"Dean," she said.

Dean looked up from the floor. "What."

"Did you just see —" she started. But Dean had already looked back at the television. Tucker was saying something about the episode. Logan was responding. You were typing. Nothing was happening. The moment was completely gone, absorbed back into the ordinary texture of a Tuesday night, leaving absolutely no evidence.

Allie sat back on the couch.

I know what I saw, she thought.

Twenty minutes passed.

And then Logan got up to refill his water bottle in the kitchen, and on his way back he passed the couch, and his hand dropped briefly to your shoulder, barely a touch, a graze really, the kind that lasted less than a second and you didn't even look up from your laptop, just tilted your head toward it slightly, like a plant toward light, like the most natural thing in the world.

Allie's laptop slid off her knees.

"I SAW THAT," she said.

Everyone looked at her.

"Saw what?" Tucker said.

"Logan's hand — and her shoulder — they just —" she pointed. Logan was back on the floor. You were looking at Allie with an expression of polite confusion. "He touched her shoulder and she —"

"Are you okay?" Dean said.

"I'm fine, I just —" Allie looked around the room. Six faces looked back at her with varying degrees of concern. "Did anyone else see that?"

"See what?" Logan said.

"You touched her shoulder," Allie said, pointing at him.

"I was just walking past," Logan said.

"She leaned into it!"

"I have a stiff neck," you said.

"YOU HAVE A STIFF —" Allie stopped. Took a breath. "I know what I saw," she said, with dignity.

"Allie," Dean said carefully. "Have you had enough water today?"

"I've had plenty of water, Dean, I'm not —"

"Sometimes dehydration causes —"

"I am not dehydrated!" Allie said. "I know what I saw and what I saw was —" she looked at you. You were looking back at her with an expression of patient concern. She looked at Logan. He was also looking at her with patient concern. Both of you at the same time, with the same expression. "— you know what, never mind," she said. "Never mind. I'm fine."

She picked up her laptop.

Across the room, completely undetected, Logan looked at you.

You looked back.

The corner of your mouth moved. His did too.

Allie, who had her eyes fixed resolutely on her screen, did not see this.

She was choosing not to look anymore. For her own mental health.

allie: OKAY SO

allie: I JUST SAW SOMETHING

tucker: WHAT

allie: logan touched (Y/N)'s shoulder while walking past and she LEANED INTO IT

allie: and before that there was A LOOK

dean: allie we were all in the same room

allie: YOU WEREN'T PAYING ATTENTION DEAN

hannah: what kind of look

allie: the kind that MEANS SOMETHING

garrett: i mean they're friends

allie: garrett

garrett: what

allie: i love you but you have the observational skills of a golden retriever

garrett: ...fair

tucker: ALLIE YOU MIGHT HAVE JUST WON THE BET

allie: i can't win on a shoulder touch and a look tucker i need more evidence

tucker: THE PASTA SHIRT WAS EVIDENCE

allie: the pasta shirt was circumstantial

dean: none of us are going to win this bet are we

three and a half — garrett

It was a Wednesday afternoon, the house quiet in the way it got between practice and evening, and you had let yourself in with the key Logan had given you two weeks ago, casually, like it was nothing, tucked it into your palm and gone back to whatever he had been saying, and you had put it on your keychain without making a thing of it either.

You were in the kitchen making tea when Garrett came downstairs.

He was in sweats, hair still damp from the shower, moving with the unhurried ease of someone with nowhere to be. He went to the refrigerator, opened it, considered it, closed it. Then he leaned against the counter across from you and looked at the mug situation with the mild, unreadable expression that was, you had come to understand, just his face.

"Logan's still at the rink," he said. "Film session ran over."

"I know," you said. "He texted."

Garrett nodded. He picked up an apple from the fruit bowl. He looked at it. He looked at you.

"You should tell him about the Boston thing," he said.

You looked up. "What?"

"The conference. The one your professor forwarded you." He bit into the apple with the casual certainty of someone stating something obvious. "You've been sitting on it for two weeks. You should just tell him."

You stared at him.

The Boston conference was something you had mentioned exactly once, in passing, weeks ago, in the middle of a conversation about something else entirely. You had said three sentences about it and then moved on. You had not mentioned it since. You had not mentioned it to Logan because you hadn't figured out how yet because Boston was four days in February and it was a good opportunity and you didn't know what it meant for the thing that was still, technically, just yours.

"How did you —" you started.

Garrett shrugged. "You got quiet when someone mentioned February plans at dinner last week." He took another bite of the apple. "Logan noticed too. He just didn't want to push."

The kitchen was very quiet.

"He'll be fine with it," Garrett said, simply, like that was the part you needed to hear. "He's not going anywhere." He pushed off the counter and headed toward the living room. "Tell him about Boston."

He disappeared around the corner.

You stood in the kitchen holding your mug, looking at the space he had just occupied.

You had not told anyone about Boston. You had not told Hannah, who told you everything. You had not told Allie, who noticed everything. You had mentioned it once, in passing, and Garrett who had the observational skills of a golden retriever, according to Allie, according to everyone had filed it away and waited until you were alone to say the thing you needed to hear.

You looked down at your mug.

Then you took out your phone and texted Logan.

can we talk tonight? nothing bad. just something i've been sitting on.

His response came back in under a minute.

yeah. i'll bring food. what do you want?

You smiled at your phone in the empty kitchen.

surprise me.

four — dean

You weren't really supposed to be there.

You had come over earlier in the afternoon with the genuine intention of spending a couple of hours with Logan and then going home like a responsible person. What had actually happened was that Logan had been very convincing about the staying part convincing in the specific way that involved kissing you before you could finish your sentence and pulling you back against the mattress until leaving felt like a genuinely unreasonable idea.

So now it was late, and you were sprawled across his bed while he kissed your neck, his hands finding the hem of your shirt and pulling it over your head.

"I missed them," he said, with complete sincerity, cupping your chest in both hands, unclasping your bra with an easiness that frankly made you jealous.

You giggled and pushed his shoulders. "You idiot."

He kissed you again slow and soft, his tongue lazy against yours, the unhurried quality of someone with absolutely nowhere to be. You were certainly not going home now. You reached up and pulled his shirt over his head, and your fingers found a purple mark spreading across his stomach.

"What's this?" you said, tracing it gently.

"Practice got tough."

"Oh, my poor baby." You shifted, pressing a line of soft kisses across his stomach. You felt him shiver underneath you. "My poor, poor baby —"

The knock on the door made you both freeze.

"Logan?" Dean's voice, from the other side. Another knock. The sound of the handle being tried. "You in there, man?"

You and Logan looked at each other with the wide-eyed, frantic energy of two people who had absolutely no good explanation for the current state of the room.

Logan started moving toward the door.

"No," you whisper-screamed.

"Hide," he said, at the same volume.

"Where?"

You looked around the room in rapid, increasingly desperate assessment. The bathroom — no, what if Dean needed it. The wardrobe what if Logan opened it. The only viable option was under the bed, the duvet long enough to reach the floor and conceal the gap completely.

You rolled off the mattress and slid underneath it in one graceless motion. You heard Logan muffle a laugh by converting it unconvincingly into a cough. In your frantic scramble you had grabbed your shirt, clutched against your chest, but your bra was somewhere out there discarded, incriminating, absolutely in the middle of the room.

Fuck, you thought.

Logan opened the door.

Dean walked in. There was a brief silence of the kind that meant someone had immediately spotted something they were not expecting to see. From your position on the floor you had a very clear view of Dean's socks stopping in the middle of the room.

Then not moving.

You watched Dean's socks stand very still for approximately eight seconds.

"I need to borrow your charger," Dean said.

His voice was extremely, carefully normal. The voice of a man making a decision in real time.

Logan turned and retrieved the charger from the bedside table. "Here."

A pause. Dean's socks did not move.

"Leave, Dean," Logan said.

Another pause.

Dean's socks backed slowly toward the door.

He stood in the hallway for a moment, you could hear him through the door, just standing there, processing, and then his footsteps retreated down the hall. You waited until you heard his door close before sliding out from under the bed, pulling your shirt back on and looking at Logan, who was leaning against the wall with his hand over his mouth doing an extremely poor job of not laughing.

"Your bra," he managed.

"I know."

"It was just — right there —"

"I know, Logan."

He was fully laughing now, silent and shaking, and you threw a pillow at him, which did nothing to help.

His phone buzzed on the nightstand.

dean: dude…

logan: say nothing

You watched him type it, one eyebrow raised. His phone buzzed back almost immediately.

dean: i have twenty dollars on the line

logan: dean

dean: i'm just saying

logan: goodnight dean

dean: does tucker know

logan: GOODNIGHT DEAN

Logan put his phone down. You looked at him. He looked at you.

"He's not going to say anything," Logan said, with the confidence of a man who was not entirely sure of this.

His phone buzzed again.

dean: for what it's worth i called it from the beginning

Logan turned his phone face down.

You looked at him for a moment longer.

Then you retrieved your bra from the corner of the room where it had been sitting like evidence at a crime scene, and you got back into bed, and Logan pulled you against him with the easy, unhurried certainty of someone who had won the argument about staying a long time ago.

Down the hall, Dean lay on his bed staring at the ceiling, charger plugged in, feeling extremely vindicated about everything.

He did not tell Tucker.

He did not tell Garrett.

He did not tell Allie, who sent him three texts the following morning about the shoulder touch that he left on read.

He did not tell Hannah, which was the hardest one, because Hannah asked him directly at breakfast if he had noticed anything and Dean had looked her in the eye and said no.

He was, he decided, a good friend.

He was also, he decided, definitely going to win that bet.

five — garrett

The hit happened in the second period.

It wasn't malicious, just the particular physics of two large bodies in a confined space moving fast, the kind of collision that happened in every game, that everyone who had ever watched hockey understood to be part of it. Logan went into the boards hard and stayed down for a moment longer than usual, and the arena went quiet in a collective way that meant everyone was holding the same breath.

You were on your feet before you had decided to stand up.

"He's fine," Allie said, grabbing your arm. "He's moving, look, he's moving."

He was moving. He was getting up, slowly, with assistance from a teammate, skating to the bench under his own power. The arena exhaled. You sat back down.

Your heart was doing something extremely inconvenient.

"You okay?" Hannah said, from your other side.

"Fine," you said. "Totally fine."

She looked at you for a moment. You looked at the ice.

Logan was on the bench. The trainer was with him. He was talking, responding, doing all the things that meant he was okay, and you sat in the stands and watched with the stillness of someone who was doing a very good impression of a person who was just watching a hockey game and not mentally composing hospital directions.

He came back in the third period.

You exhaled properly for the first time in forty minutes.

After the game the group filtered down to the corridor outside the locker room the way they always did. You went because you always went, because it was a group thing, because it meant nothing in particular.

The players came out in ones and twos. Garrett first, immediately absorbed by Hannah. Tucker departing with a couple of the other guys. Dean getting into a conversation with someone near the exit.

Logan came out last.

He had a bruise forming along his jaw and he was walking with the slightly careful gait of someone who had taken a hit, and when he saw you he smiled, that specific smile, the one that was yours, and something in your chest did the thing it always did, except louder tonight, turned up by forty minutes of sitting in the stands holding your breath.

You crossed the corridor and hugged him, which was normal, everyone hugged after games, that was a completely normal thing to do.

Except then you pulled back and looked at him, at the bruise, at the careful way he was holding himself, and you said his name, quietly, in the way that was only for him, and he looked back at you in the way that was only for you, and the thing you had been keeping quietly for months was right there at the surface, obvious and warm and entirely done being kept.

You kissed him.

Not a quick kiss. Not an ambiguous one. A real one, his hand coming up to your jaw, yours finding the front of his jacket, the kind that had three months of ordinary Tuesday nights and Sunday mornings and staff bathroom detours in it.

The corridor went quiet.

You pulled back.

The group was looking at you.

Tucker's mouth was open.

Garrett had an expression cycling through several things very quickly , and then it landed on something that looked, more than anything, like quiet relief. Like someone who had been waiting for a particular thing to resolve and was glad it finally had.

Hannah was smiling in the particular way of someone who had known something for a while and was very glad to finally be allowed to show it.

Dean looked, more than anything, deeply smug.

"Wait," Tucker said. "Are you two — have you been —"

"Three months," Logan said, still looking at you, the corner of his mouth doing the thing.

"THREE MONTHS?"

"We forgot to mention it," you said.

"YOU FORGOT TO —"

"Tucker," Logan said.

"I HAD TWENTY DOLLARS ON THIS." Tucker pointed at you both. "I HAD — the pasta shirt! I KNEW about the pasta shirt! Does the pasta shirt count? When was the pasta shirt? If the pasta shirt counts then I —"

"Who won?" Allie said. "Technically who —"

Everyone looked at each other. A rapid, chaotic calculation passed through the group.

"Garrett," Hannah said slowly. "Garrett said —"

"After a game," Garrett said, with the equanimity of someone who had never been particularly worried about it. "I said after a game."

"You said after a game," Dean confirmed.

Tucker made a sound that had no letters in it.

"So Garrett wins?" Allie said.

"Garrett wins," Hannah confirmed, and immediately turned to Garrett with an expression of pure delight. "You won, baby."

Garrett looked at Logan. Logan looked back at him.

"You've been together for three months," Garrett said.

"About that," Logan confirmed.

"And you didn't tell anyone."

"We wanted to keep it for a while," you said, which was the simplest and most accurate version of it. "It was ours. We just wanted it to be ours for a bit."

Garrett looked at you for a moment. Something in his expression was entirely unsurprised. He nodded once, like a thing confirmed, and then looked at Logan with the small, easy smile of someone who had never doubted the outcome.

"Okay," he said. "Good."

Tucker pointed at both of you. "I want my twenty dollars back."

"You didn't win," Dean said.

"I KNEW ABOUT THE PASTA SHIRT."

"Tucker —"

"THE PASTA SHIRT WAS EVIDENCE AND NO ONE LISTENED TO ME —"

Logan looked at you. You looked back at him.

"Worth it?" he said quietly.

You looked at Tucker, who was now gesturing with both hands. You looked at Allie, who was consoling him with the resigned energy of someone who had expected this outcome. You looked at Hannah, who was collecting twenty dollars from Dean with the serene satisfaction of a person who had always known. You looked at Garrett, who was watching all of it with the calm, unhurried expression of a man who had called it months ago in a quiet kitchen on a Wednesday afternoon and had simply waited.

"Completely worth it," you said.

Logan kissed your temple.

Tucker made the sound with no letters in it again.

tucker: I WANT IT ON THE RECORD THAT I KNEW

tucker: THE PASTA SHIRT WAS REAL EVIDENCE

tucker: I CALLED IT FROM DAY ONE

dean: garrett won tucker

tucker: GARRETT WASNT EVEN PAYING ATTENTION

garrett: i was paying attention

tucker: YOU HAVE THE OBSERVATIONAL SKILLS OF A GOLDEN RETRIEVER

garrett: allie said that first

allie: it's true both times

allie: okay fine. garrett wins. i respect it.

tucker: I DO NOT RESPECT IT

tucker: TWENTY DOLLARS. GONE.

garrett: worth every penny honestly

allie: okay fine it was very cute

allie: i still saw the look though

allie: i want that acknowledged

dean: acknowledged allie

allie: thank you

Though to be fair, things with Logan are not bad. That's the thing people don't understand when they hear situationship from hell. On the contrary, things with Logan are very good. Too good. Too good to look at directly without feeling something inconvenient shift behind your ribs, which is precisely why it's bad. Because he had been so genuinely, almost aggressively nice about the whole thing. He had found you at the edge of that party and sat next to you and talked to you for hours like you were the most interesting thing in the room, and he had made a real effort not to look at your boobs while you were talking, which in that particular environment was either extremely respectful or a sign that he was raised correctly, and either way it had done something to you.

And then you had woken up on his chest the next morning. His warm skin and steady heartbeat, the sort of light that meant it was too early to be awake, and done the awkward post-hookup shuffle of words, and heard: I'm not really looking for anything serious.

A bucket of cold water dropped directly on your head would have been less effective. More merciful, probably.

What else could you have done except agree? For god's sake, he was sitting there in black boxers holding a cup of coffee, extending it toward you like a peace offering, brown eyes looking at you with an expression that was genuinely, unfairly soft for seven in the morning. You took the cup. He readjusted against the headboard and looked at you with those eyes and said, simply: "So?"

So. So what? What were you supposed to say?

"Sure," you heard yourself say. "I'm interested in that too."

Sure. I'm interested in that too. Your internal voice repeated it back to you with the tone of a younger sibling trying to get a rise out of you. That was, objectively, the least true thing you had ever said out loud. You had been raised on Bridget Jones and every famous rom-com ever committed to film. You believed in love, in its inconvenience and its necessity and its complete refusal to be reasoned with. Casual did not cut it for you. It never had.

But god. If Bridget could have seen John Logan in that particular light, with that particular bed head, she would have understood completely.

So you agreed. And after that came the encounters.

At first they were private, almost secretive, you telling your friends you were going for a run and then actually running, just in the wrong direction entirely. Logan telling his that he was going to study somewhere, which was technically true, depending on your definition of anatomy. It gave everything a specific kind of thrill, the pleasant urgency of something that existed slightly outside the normal rules, and for a while that was enough.

But time has a way of dissolving things like that. Gradually, without either of you deciding to, you stopped hiding. And that was when the real problem arrived.

You and Logan became friends.

Not the convenient, surface-level kind, the real kind, the kind that builds without you noticing until one day you look around and realize that this person has become load-bearing in your life. You were always at the house. You knew the full taxonomy of Dean's recent romantic encounters, the specificity of Garrett's current problems, the ongoing narrative of Tucker's various endeavors. You didn't just know about them, you helped. You were involved. You had opinions and history and context, and they knew it, and they came to you with things.

And it went the other way too. Logan had gotten so close to your friends that he would voluntarily drive Marissa to her therapy appointments in Boston without being asked, would send Benny reels about topics they'd talked about the week before, remembered details that even you sometimes forgot. He had threaded himself into the fabric of your life so completely and so quietly that you could no longer locate the seam.

And finally, finally, things had started to feel like they were moving in the right direction. The direction they probably should have been heading since the morning after Halloween. Maybe the casual arrangement had just been a detour — a scenic route to the same destination. All's well that ends well.

And then you and Logan would go to Malone's, and a waitress would glance between you with a smile and say what a nice couple you made, and Logan would laugh in that easy, noncommittal way of his and say: we're just friends.

And there it was. Bucket of cold water. Every time, without fail, like a reset button neither of you had agreed to keep pressing.

Every single time.

Which brings you to now.

You are sitting on Logan's couch, draped over him, legs intertwined, peppering kisses down his neck while he makes a valiant and increasingly unsuccessful effort to tell you about the new episode of some reality show he has gotten inexplicably invested in. Something about traitors in a castle. Who cares. Not you. Not when Logan smelled like that and the house was quiet and his hands were doing that thing where they moved without him seeming to notice.

You sank further into him. The kisses started to linger. His words got sparse.

"Are you even listening to me?" Logan murmured, his voice coming out considerably less steady than he had probably intended.

You hummed against his pulse point by way of answer.

The front door opened.

You both startled, pulling apart with the practiced efficiency of people who had been interrupted before, but the moment you registered it was Dean you settled back into exactly the position you'd been in. Dean didn't care about PDA. He actively encouraged it.

He dropped onto the opposite couch, looked at the ceiling briefly, then at you.

"Okay, I have a question," he said. "Logan, dude, this is for science, please don't be weird about it."

At this point you were sitting upright, Logan's arms still looped around you, his chin finding your shoulder, using you as a very comfortable shield against whatever Dean was about to say.

"Shoot," you said.

Dean took a breath with the energy of someone preparing to say something they had already decided to say regardless of the response. "Do you think I should buy a vibrator for a friend of mine?"

Logan laughed against your neck. You shivered slightly at the warmth of his breath.

"Are you the friend?" you asked. "Are you buying a vibrator for yourself?"

"What? No. I'm a man."

"That doesn't mean anything. Men are allowed to have vibrators."

"I know that. It's not for me."

"I really think you should get one though. For yourself. If you want to be the Samantha of the group you have to commit to the bit."

"I am the Samantha," Dean said, with genuine offense. "And it's not for me."

"Have you even watched Sex and the City?"

"Yes. I'm from New York, for god's sake and you're being such a Carrie right now."

You settled back against Logan's chest, his arms tightening around you automatically, like a reflex, like something he did without thinking about it anymore.

Yes, you thought. And my own Mr. Big is currently holding me on this couch.

Garrett and Hannah came down the stairs in what you assumed were their stay-at-home outfits: sweatpants, hockey jersey, the specific comfort of two people who had stopped performing around each other. The moment they came into view you felt Logan's hand still. Not move away just still. And then he shifted from behind you to sitting beside you, technically still touching but the warmth of it had changed completely. It was less person you are tangled up with and more person you happen to be sitting next to on public transport.

You knew that shift. You had felt it before.

The first time, you had told yourself you were imagining things.

It was a Tuesday, nothing special about it, the kind of evening that had become completely ordinary, you at the house, Logan beside you on the couch, his thumb making absent circles on your knee while Dean argued with Tucker about something that didn't matter. Hannah had stopped by to pick up something she'd left there the week before, and the moment the door opened Logan's hand had stilled. Not moved away. Just stilled. Like an animal that had heard something.

You hadn't said anything. You'd filed it away in the part of your brain reserved for things you weren't ready to look at yet.

The second time was at one of Garrett's games. You had been standing with Logan at the edge of the rink afterward, his jacket half around your shoulders the way it always ended up, and Hannah had appeared through the crowd. Logan had straightened. Subtly, almost imperceptibly, but you felt it the slight shift in his posture, the way his jacket had slipped back off your shoulders without him seeming to notice he'd let it go.

You'd picked it up off the floor and handed it back to him without a word.

The third time you stopped counting.

Malone's on a Friday night had a particular energy loud enough to feel festive, familiar enough to feel like home. Your usual table was in the corner, the big one that fit all of you without anyone having to pull up an extra chair, and the evening had been good. Genuinely good, the kind that reminded you why you had agreed to this arrangement in the first place, Logan's knee against yours under the table, his arm finding the back of your chair sometime around the second round of drinks, the easy warmth of being somewhere you belonged.

You were mid-story , a good one, the kind that had the whole table leaning in and you could feel it landing, the timing was right, and Garrett was already laughing before you got to the punchline and Dean had that look on his face that meant he was going to steal this story and tell it as his own later, and Tucker was—

You glanced at Logan.

He wasn't laughing.

He was looking across the table at Hannah with an expression you recognized because you had spent the better part of a year learning every single detail of his face, and what was on it right now was something soft and slightly helpless the expression of someone watching something they had decided they couldn't have.

The story finished without you. Somewhere far away, the table laughed.

You picked up your drink. Set it down. Picked it up again.

"I'm going to step outside," you said. "Just — smoke a bit."

"You don't even smoke, (Y/N)!" Tucker replied, laughing, and it killed you because all of Logan's friends had come to know you so well.

"You okay?" Garrett asked.

"Fine. Just air."

You were already standing. Already reaching for your jacket. Logan was on his feet before you made it two steps.

"I'll come with you," he said.

The parking lot outside Malone's was cold and poorly lit. You got about twenty feet from the door before you stopped walking. The noise from inside filtered out muffled and distant, everyone still laughing, completely unaware.

Logan stopped beside you. Waited. He had always been good at waiting, which was one of the things you had loved about him and one of the things that had slowly, quietly driven you insane.

"Don't," you said.

"Don't what?"

"Don't do the thing where you stand there and wait for me to calm down." You turned to face him. The cold air hit your face and you were glad for it. "I'm not going to calm down. So just talk to me. Tell me the truth. Please. Don't bullshit me right now, Logan, I am asking you to not bullshit me right now."

"Baby—"

"Don't baby me, Logan. Not right now"

He looked at you with that steady, unhurried patience of his, which tonight felt less like a quality and more like a weapon.

"What do you want me to say?" he asked.

"I want you to tell me if you have a crush on Hannah." The word crush felt absurdly small for the moment but you couldn't bear the weight of the more accurate alternatives.

Something shifted in his face. Not guilt exactly, something deeper than that. The specific expression of someone who had been quietly hoping a question wouldn't arrive and had known, somewhere underneath the hoping, that it always was going to.

"It's not—" he started.

"Logan."

He exhaled. Looked at the ground briefly. Looked back at you.

"It's not serious," he said. "It's nothing. She's with Garrett. It's not like I would ever—"

"Oh my god." The laugh that came out of you had nothing to do with anything being funny. "Oh my god, you actually do. You actually have a crush on her."

"It's not a big deal—"

"You have a crush on your best friend's girlfriend and it's not a big deal." You repeated it back to him slowly. "I have been right here, Logan. For almost a year I have been right here, and you have a crush on Hannah."

"It's just a feeling. It doesn't mean anything." His voice had an edge to it now, something defensive sharpening underneath the calm. "And you don't get to be mad at me for it."

"Excuse me?"

"You don't get to be mad at me for having feelings." The words were coming faster now, the composure cracking in a way you almost never saw from him. "We said casual. That was the agreement. I can't be accountable to you for things I feel when you are not my girlfriend."

The word landed like a slap.

Girlfriend.

"Right," you said. Your voice had gone very quiet. "I'm not your girlfriend."

"That's not what I—"

"No, you're right. I'm not." You looked at him. Really looked at him — this person whose coffee order you knew by heart, whose nightmares you had talked him through at two in the morning, whose hand had reached for yours in his sleep so many times you had stopped counting. "Can I ask you something? And I need you to actually answer me. Not just wait until I stop talking."

He said nothing, which you took as a yes.

"What did you think this was?" Your voice was still quiet. Controlled. "Not what we agreed on in the beginning. What did you think it was last week? Last month? What did you think it was tonight when you had your arm around me at that table? When you picked me up from my house and kissed me in your truck?" You took a breath. "Because I need to understand how you look at what we have been doing and see something casual. I genuinely need you to explain that to me."

"It's complicated—"

"It's not complicated. It's actually very simple. I just need you to say it out loud."

"You knew what this was when we started—"

"I know what it was when we started. I'm asking what it is now." You crossed your arms against the cold. "Because from where I'm standing it looks a lot like a relationship. It looks like you drive my friends places and remember things about them they never told you twice, and I know every single thing about your life, and we spend more nights together than apart, and you reach for me when you're asleep like I'm something you don't want to lose." Your voice cracked slightly and you pushed past it. "So you'll have to forgive me for being confused about the casual part."

"I can't—" He stopped. Started again. "It's not about not wanting to. It's about what I can actually give right now. Hockey takes everything. My family, my mother, I don't have money, I don't have stability, I don't have any of the things that—"

"I'm not asking you for stability. I'm not asking you for money." Something in your chest had cracked open and you were past the point of closing it. "I'm asking you to admit what this already is. That's all."

"I am being honest—"

"Then be more honest." Your voice broke on the last word and you kept going anyway. "Because I'm in love with you."

The parking lot went completely silent.

Logan stared at you. The words sat between you in the cold air like something that had changed the temperature.

"What?" His voice came out barely above a breath.

"I'm in love with you." Steadier the second time. "I have been for a long time. And I know that's not what we agreed on. But I can't stand here and pretend I don't while you tell me it's not a big deal that you have feelings for someone else." You looked at him. "We are already a couple, Logan. In every single way that actually matters, we already are. The only thing missing is you admitting it."

Something moved across his face — something large and unguarded and almost frightened.

"It's not that simple," he said, quieter now, the defensiveness gone out of it.

"I know it's not simple. I know about hockey. I know about your mom. I know all of it, Logan, because you told me, because that's what we do. But none of that changes what I just said." You took a breath. "So just tell me. Do you have feelings for me? Yes or no. That's all I'm asking."

Logan looked at you.

And said nothing.

The silence stretched between you, long and terrible. His jaw was tight. His eyes moved across your face like he was looking for something he either couldn't find or couldn't say, and the longer the silence went on the more clearly you understood that the silence was itself an answer.

"Wow," you said finally. Very quietly. "Okay."

You picked up your bag. Straightened your jacket. Looked at him one more time this person you had spent 338 days loving in whatever form he would accept.

"Don't follow me," you said.

He didn't.

You walked back toward the warm light spilling out of Malone's windows, past your friends still laughing, past the table that an hour ago had felt like home, and you kept walking. Past the door, past the window, down the street, into the cold.

Too angry to cry. Too tired to pretend. Too done to look back.

Behind you, in the parking lot, Logan stood very still and said nothing which was the thing he was best at, and the thing that had finally cost him everything.

It had been a hard couple of days. But the upside of a not-breakup in college was that you didn't get to wallow, no watching rom-coms until the wee hours, no doing the Bella, watching the months pass from your bedroom window. Life was as it had always been, minus the space Logan had occupied in your weekly schedule. Not a metaphysical space, a literal one. When you opened your Google Calendar you found his game days still blocked out in blue, his training days still marked, everything still there like a calendar that hadn't gotten the news yet.

Pathetic, you thought, and deleted them.

Your days now belonged entirely to yourself, which should have felt like freedom and mostly felt like a lot of unscheduled Tuesday afternoons. No more disappearing in the middle of the day, no more make-out sessions in the library during lunch break. Just you and your own company and the slow, unglamorous work of being fine.

You weren't fine. You were something adjacent to fine that required daily maintenance and the careful avoidance of certain songs.

Marissa had noticed, she called it being under the weather, which was such a specific and old-fashioned way of putting it that in the beginning you had found it strange and now found it completely endearing. Your own personal nanna, showing up with iced coffee and terrible ideas at exactly the right moments.

The terrible idea this time was an underground bar in Boston she had found, which was a surprise since Marissa was fundamentally a sports bar person. You had a strong suspicion the entire excursion was engineered entirely for your benefit and the benefit of your appetite for expensive, colorful drinks, and you loved her for it and didn't say so.

The drive took exactly long enough to hype yourself up.

I'm pretty. I'm smart. I'm a catch.

The bar was dimly lit in a way that felt intentional rather than neglected, all low ceilings and good music and the general atmosphere of a place that didn't need to try. You, Marissa and Benny settled into a corner booth and approximately ninety seconds later Benny's elbow was in your ribs.

"Cute guy. Nine o'clock," he said, in what he apparently believed was a whisper.

You glanced toward the bar. Tall, white jacket, the kind of easy posture that meant he wasn't thinking about his posture at all.

"I'm not really looking for anything," you said.

"You're single. He's cute. The bar has drinks. What exactly is the problem?" Benny tilted his head. "Go order our drinks and make some poor decisions. You've earned it."

"I didn't bring my ID."

Benny stared at you. "You came to a bar without your ID?"

"I forgot." You shrugged.

"(Y/N)." His voice had the specific tone of someone choosing their words carefully. "What is wrong with you. Go. Drinks. Now. The ID thing is a you problem, figure it out."

You slid out of the booth before he could say anything else.

The guy at the bar was, up close, even more irritatingly attractive than he had been from across the room. He glanced over when you appeared beside him, and then glanced again in a way that was not subtle and didn't try to be.

"You look like you're deciding something," he said.

"Whether to admit I forgot my ID at a bar."

He looked at you for a moment. Then he smiled easy and genuine. "Hunter," he said, and held out his hand.

"((Y/N))."

"I'll vouch for you," he said. "If you tell me what you're drinking."

You told him. He ordered both without being asked, which was either presumptuous or exactly right, and you decided it was exactly right.

By the time you made it back to the booth with four drinks and Hunter's number in your phone, Benny was looking at you with the expression of someone who had orchestrated something and was very pleased about it.

You didn't tell him he was right. But you didn't have to.

The thing about Hunter Davenport was that he was genuinely, irritatingly likeable.

You had not been thinking about Logan when you said yes to Hunter's suggestion of getting coffee. You had not been thinking about Logan when the coffee turned into a walk, and the walk turned into two hours of easy conversation that asked nothing from you and gave something back.

That was the point.

You had gotten very good at not thinking about Logan in the weeks since Malone's. It was a skill, like any other, it required practice and the occasional forcible redirection of your own brain, but you were nothing if not disciplined when the situation called for it. You had been showing up to things. Laughing at the right moments. Sleeping through the night, mostly.

You were fine. You were getting finer by the day, which was either progress or a very convincing impression of it, and right now you weren't examining the difference too closely.

Hunter was easy. That was the thing about him. He was warm and uncomplicated and he looked at you like you were worth looking at, which was something you had apparently needed more than you realized.

It was nothing serious. You had been very clear about that with yourself. You were not ready for serious. But his hand was warm when it found yours walking back from the coffee place, and you let it stay there.

You were almost believing it.

The team was at the rink for an open practice, one of the informal ones that sometimes drew a small crowd of friends and the generally affiliated. You had come with Marissa, which gave you plausible deniability about why you were there, and you had sat in the third row and watched without watching, which was a skill you had also been practicing.

Hunter had waved at you from the ice. You had waved back.

You had not looked at Logan. You had been extremely disciplined about not looking at Logan, which meant you were also extremely aware of exactly where he was at every moment without technically looking at him, which was its own kind of exhausting.

After practice, Hunter had come off the ice still in half his gear and found you immediately, easy and unhurried, and said something that made you laugh. Your hand had gone to his arm the way hands do when you're laughing at something someone said, and it had stayed there for approximately four seconds.

Four seconds.

You knew it was four seconds because you had counted them, which meant some part of you had been paying attention to something you were pretending not to pay attention to.

The locker room door swung shut behind Logan without him looking back.

You found a quiet corner of the rink lobby while Hunter went to get his bag. You were looking at your phone, not reading anything on it, when you heard footsteps and looked up.

Logan.

He had changed out of his gear. His jaw was doing the thing: the tight, controlled thing that meant something was happening underneath the composure that the composure was working very hard to contain. His eyes moved from your face to the door Hunter had gone through and back.

"Hey," you said carefully.

"You and Hunter," he said. Not a question.

"That's not really your business."

"You're spending a lot of time with him."

"Logan—"

"I'm just making an observation." His voice was very even. The voice he used when he was the least controlled.

"Make it somewhere else."

He laughed short and humorless. "Right. Okay." He looked at the floor. Looked back at you. "I just didn't think you were the type."

You went very still. "The type to?"

"To go after a guy because of who he plays for." Quiet. Measured. Like he had chosen this version of the sentence carefully. "I didn't think that was your thing."

The lobby was very quiet.

You looked at him for a long moment. Long enough to make sure you had heard what you thought you'd heard. Long enough to see something flicker in his expression, the immediate, unmistakable recognition that he had gone too far.

"Say that again," you said softly.

"I didn't mean—"

"No." Your voice was calm in a way that had nothing to do with being calm. "Say it again. I want to make sure I understood you. Are you calling me a puck bunny?"

Logan said nothing. The flicker had become something closer to horror.

"Because that's what you just said." You tilted your head slightly. "After everything. That's what you went with."

"I didn't — that's not what I meant—"

"Then what did you mean?" You took a step toward him. "Because I have been patient, Logan. I have been so patient with you. I said the most honest thing I have ever said to anyone in that parking lot and you said nothing back, which I am trying. I am actively trying to make my peace with. But you do not get to say that to me. You don't get to do that."

"I know." His voice had lost all its evenness. "I shouldn't have—"

"Why did you say it?"

He looked at you.

"Tell me why." Your voice cracked slightly and you kept going. "Because it wasn't an observation. So tell me why."

Something moved across his face the composure fracturing in a way you had only seen once or twice in all the time you had known him.

"Because I can't—" He stopped.

"Can't what?"

"Because I can't watch you with him and not—" He stopped again. Pressed his mouth shut. Looked at the ceiling briefly.

"Not what?" Your voice was barely above a whisper.

He looked at you. Right at you. And for one unguarded, terrible second you could see everything, all of it, the whole enormous weight of everything he hadn't said in the parking lot outside Malone's, sitting right there on his face with nowhere left to hide.

And then he looked away.

"I'm sorry," he said. "It was wrong."

You looked at him for a long moment.

"Yeah," you said. "It was."

You picked up your bag. Hunter had reappeared at the far end of the lobby, jacket on, easy smile, completely unaware of the wreckage he had wandered back into. You walked toward him and did not look back at Logan.

But you heard him the sharp exhale of someone who had just watched something leave that they weren't sure was coming back.

Good, you thought.

And hated that you thought it.

Here was the thing about being called a puck bunny: it wasn't the word itself that got to you.

Puck bunnies weren't the worst thing a person could be.

Men were allowed their types, allowed to prefer blondes or brunettes or redheads, to only date younger women, to have a thing for accents, to announce their type to anyone who will listen like it’s a personality trait, to want someone tall or short or with a specific laugh, or say things like "I have never been with a Brazilian before". They were allowed to say these things out loud, to Tinder-filter by height, and if it was possible they would do by weight too, to have opinions about bodies that they shared freely and without apology.

But god forbid a woman had a type. God forbid a woman found hockey players attractive or musicians, or academics, or anyone with a specific quality she was drawn to. Then she was something to be named and categorized and looked down upon. Then she was a bunny.

You were not offended by the word.

You were offended that Logan, who had been silent while you poured your heart out in a cold parking lot, who had said nothing when you asked him the most direct question you had ever asked another human being , had found his voice again specifically to say that. That of all the things he could have finally said to you, after all the silence, this was the one he chose.

That was what got to you.

Not the word. The timing. The source. The specific, devastating irony of a man who couldn't say I have feelings for you finding it very easy to say something that small.

You didn't tell anyone what he said.

That was the first decision you made, walking out of that rink lobby with Hunter's hand in yours and Logan's exhale still somewhere in your chest. You were not going to tell Dean, who would say something devastatingly accurate about it. You were not going to tell Marissa, who would want to talk about it for three hours. You were not going to tell anyone, because telling someone meant turning it over, examining it, and you were not ready to examine the specific shape of what Logan had said to you and what it meant that he had said it.

You knew what it meant. That was the problem.

You had known the moment you saw his face, that flicker of something before the composure reassembled itself, the way his eyes had moved to Hunter and back to you with an expression that had nothing casual about it. You had spent 338 days learning the map of Logan's face and you knew exactly what that look was. You had just also heard what came out of his mouth immediately afterward, which meant that what Logan felt and what Logan was willing to do about it were, as always, two completely different countries.

You were done trying to travel between them.

The week that followed was quiet and it felt different from the other times you had gone quiet. Before, the silence had always been temporary, a held breath. This felt more like an exhale. Like something had finally, after a very long time, finished.

You went to class. You had coffee with Hunter on Tuesday, which was easy and warm and asked nothing from you. You went to Marissa's on Thursday and watched something forgettable on her laptop and fell asleep on her couch, and she put a blanket over you without waking you up, which was the kindest thing anyone had done for you in recent memory.

You did not go to the house off campus. You did not text Logan. You did not check if he had texted you, which required leaving your phone face-down on your desk for approximately four days straight, which was its own kind of discipline.

You were fine. You were getting finer.

You were also absolutely not fine.

Dean found you on a Wednesday.

Not dramatically, he just appeared at the coffee shop near your building where you went on Wednesday mornings, which you had mentioned to him exactly once four months ago, which meant he had remembered it and filed it away and was now using it, which was such a Dean thing to do that you almost smiled.

He sat down across from you without asking if it was okay and stole a sip of your coffee before saying anything.

"He told me what he said," Dean said, without preamble.

You looked at your coffee. "Okay."

"He feels terrible."

"Good."

"I mean genuinely terrible. Like, I've known Logan for three years and I've never seen him—" Dean stopped. Seemed to decide something. "He's not sleeping. He's barely eating. He showed up to practice yesterday and coach pulled him aside after because his head wasn't in it, which has never happened, not once in three years."

"Dean." You looked up at him. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you deserve to know that it cost him something." His voice was straightforward, without manipulation. "I'm not asking you to forgive him. What he said was awful and he knows it. I'm just, you spent a long time showing up for him and I don't want you to think that none of it landed. It all landed. It's landing right now. It's just landing a little late."

You were quiet for a moment.

"A little late," you repeated.

"Okay, very late."

"Dean." You wrapped your hands around your cup. "He called me a puck bunny."

"I know." Dean had the grace to look genuinely pained. "He said it because he was jealous and scared and he handled it in the worst possible way and there is no defense for it. I'm not here to defend it."

"Then what are you here for?"

Dean looked at you across the table, this person who had been in your corner since before you had any idea how much you would need someone in your corner, and his expression was very honest.

"I'm here because he's my best friend and he's falling apart," he said. "And you're also my friend. And I hate watching both of you be miserable when I know exactly why you're miserable." He paused. "I'm not asking you to do anything. I just wanted you to know."

You looked out the window. The street outside was grey and unremarkable, the specific flatness of a Wednesday in November.

"How long has he known?" you asked quietly. "That he has feelings for me. How long has he actually known?"

Dean was quiet for a moment.

"A while," he said carefully.

"How long is a while, Dean."

Another pause. Longer this time.

"Since pretty much the beginning," he said.

You closed your eyes briefly. Opened them.

"Okay," you said.

"(Y/N)—"

"I'm not angry." And you weren't, which was almost surprising. You were something quieter and more tired than angry. "I just needed to know." You picked up your coffee. "Tell him I said he needs to sleep."

Dean looked at you. "That's it?"

"That's it." You met his eyes. "I'm not ready for anything else right now. But tell him to sleep."