A scrapbook of my obsessions

I have built a house where I wait for your return

The dress had been hanging on the back of the bedroom door for almost two weeks before Jack finally noticed it.

You had left it there on purpose, though you told yourself you hadn’t. You told yourself it was there because the closet was too full, because the garment bag was too long, because the silk would crease if you shoved it between winter coats and blazers. You told yourself a lot of things because admitting the truth felt too humiliating, and the truth was that part of you wanted him to see it. You wanted him to remember without being reminded. You wanted him to walk past it after a long shift, pause with his hand still on the doorknob, and say, “That’s for the gala, right?” like the date lived somewhere in his head that wasn’t overcrowded by trauma charts, shift changes, hospital pages, and everyone else’s emergencies.

It was a black silk gown, simple in the way expensive things were simple. Off the shoulder, fitted through the waist, smooth over the hips, with a slit that opened only when you walked. It wasn’t flashy. It didn’t need to be. The fabric caught the bedroom light softly, almost like water, and every time you passed it, you imagined wearing it beside him.

That was the part that embarrassed you now. You had imagined it.

Jack in a dark suit. You in the black dress. His hand at the small of your back while people congratulated you. Maybe he would be tired, because he was always tired, but he would be there. You pictured him standing slightly behind you when people asked questions about the hospital contracts, his expression quiet but proud, his thumb brushing your hip like he needed to remind himself you were real. You pictured him leaning down and saying something low near your ear, something dry and teasing, something only meant for you. You pictured walking into a room and not feeling like you had to be impressive alone.

Three weeks earlier, he had stood in the kitchen with the invitation in his hand, wearing sweatpants and an old Pitt hoodie, his hair still damp from the shower. His eyes had looked bruised underneath from exhaustion, but when he read your name embossed in gold, he smiled.

“Dr. Y/N Abbot,” he said, running his thumb over the raised lettering. “Founder and Chief Systems Architect. This is fancy.”

You had been sitting at the island with your laptop open, pretending not to watch him too closely. There was a half-empty mug of tea beside your hand that had gone cold while you answered emails, and Jack had been barefoot on the kitchen tile, still carrying the warmth of the shower and the fatigue of the hospital with him.

“It’s a major industry gala, Jack. It’s supposed to be fancy.”

He looked up, amused. “I know. I’m just saying. This is real fancy.”

“You’re acting like I invited you to prom.”

“Kind of feels like it,” he said, setting the invitation down. “Except I don’t think anyone at my prom was casually entering billion-dollar valuation territory.”

You laughed despite yourself, and he came around the island, slipping his arms around your waist from behind. For a moment, you let yourself lean back into him. He smelled like soap, coffee, and hospital laundry detergent, that clean, sterile scent that had somehow become part of your marriage. His mouth brushed the side of your neck, and for a second, the kitchen felt like a place where both of your lives still fit.

“Don’t say it like that,” you murmured.

“Like what?”

“Like it’s ridiculous.”

“It is ridiculous,” Jack said, his voice low against your skin. “In a good way. My wife builds technology hospitals are fighting to buy, and I’m over here trying to remember where I left my badge.”

You turned in his arms and looked up at him. His hands stayed at your waist, warm and familiar. You could feel the small tremor of exhaustion in him, the way he was never fully still after a hard shift, like some part of his body was always bracing for the next alarm.

“So you’re coming?”

His smile softened. “Of course I’m coming.”

“You asked Harper to switch?”

“Already done.”

“You’re not on call?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

Jack’s expression changed then, the teasing fading into something more careful. He touched your cheek with his thumb, and you hated how quickly your heart wanted to believe him. It was always like that with Jack. One gentle touch, one serious look, one promise said in that tired, sincere voice, and all the loneliness you had been trying to gather into evidence loosened in your hands.

“Hey,” he said. “I’m coming.”

You searched his face. “This one matters to me.”

“I know.”

“It’s not just dinner. We’re announcing the hospital network implementation contracts. The rollout plan. Market entry. The valuation estimate. This is the kind of night people remember.”

Jack nodded and kissed your forehead. “I’ll be there. I promise.”

That was the version of him you kept loving. The version that meant it. The problem was, Jack almost always meant it. If he had been careless, maybe you could have hated him properly. If he had forgotten because you did not matter, maybe the grief would have sharpened into something cleaner, something you could hold without blaming yourself. But Jack remembered in fragments. He loved in fragments. He showed up in small, exhausted pieces and looked at you like he wanted to give you everything, right before the world asked him for more than he had left.

And you kept living on those pieces.

A hand on your waist in the kitchen. His mouth against your temple before a shift. The rare mornings where he woke before his alarm and pulled you back against him like sleep had made him honest. The way he still looked at your face sometimes, quietly, almost helplessly, like he was surprised life had ever given him something soft. You had survived on that for longer than you wanted to admit, and that was the humiliating part. Not that he hurt you. Not even that he missed things. It was that one good look from him could still make you forgive a loneliness he had not yet apologized for.

On the night of the gala, he called you at 5:18 p.m.

You were standing in the bathroom in a silk robe while your makeup artist packed up her kit. Your hair was pinned into a low twist at the back of your neck, with a few pieces left soft around your face. Your earrings were already on, small diamond drops that caught the light whenever you moved. Your face looked finished in the mirror — warm skin, dark lashes, softly lined lips — polished enough that no one would know how nervous you were.

The bathroom smelled like hairspray, powder, perfume, and the faint steam from the shower you had taken an hour earlier. On the counter, your lipstick lay uncapped beside a little dish holding your wedding rings, which you had cleaned that afternoon because you thought there would be photographs of the two of you. The whole apartment felt too quiet, too prepared, like a stage waiting for someone who had not arrived yet.

Your phone lit up on the counter.

Jack.

Your stomach dropped before you even answered.

“Please don’t,” you said immediately.

There was a pause on the other end. Then Jack sighed, and the sound told you everything before he did.

“Y/N.”

You closed your eyes. “You said you weren’t on call.”

“I wasn’t.”

“You said you switched.”

“I did.”

“Then why are you calling me like this?”

He sounded tired already. Not physically tired exactly, but braced, like he knew he was about to hurt you and hated that knowing. “Harper’s kid got sick, and they’re short. It’s bad. I wouldn’t go in if they had coverage.”

You stared at yourself in the mirror. Your eyeliner was perfect. Your lips were perfect. Your whole face looked calm in a way that made you feel almost detached from it.

“Did they ask you, or did you offer?”

Jack didn’t answer quickly enough.

You let out a small, humourless laugh. “Oh.”

“They were drowning,” he said.

“So you offered.”

“I said I could come in for a few hours. I’m going to try to get out as soon as I can.”

You pressed your fingertips into the cool marble counter. The makeup artist moved quietly in your peripheral vision, pretending very hard not to listen.

“Jack, the reception starts at seven. Dinner is at eight. Speeches are at nine-thirty.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“That’s not fair.”

You looked down at your wedding band in the dish. The diamond caught the bathroom light, clean and bright and cruel.

“I can’t do this right now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know you are.”

The silence stretched. You could hear hospital noise in the background already: a distant page, someone calling for transport, the low hum of a place that never cared what anyone had planned.

“I’ll make it,” Jack said, but his voice had changed.

You heard the lie before it fully left his mouth.

“Don’t,” you said softly.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t give me a second promise to cover the first one.”

He exhaled. “Y/N.”

“I have to finish getting dressed.”

“I love you.”

Your throat tightened. “I know.”

He waited, but you did not say it back. After a few seconds, he said he would text you when he knew more, and you ended the call before he could apologize again.

The makeup artist stood very still, her brush bag in one hand, pretending she had not heard enough to understand. You looked at her through the mirror and smiled with the exact expression you used in investor meetings.

“Sorry about that.”

Her face softened. “No, don’t apologize.”

You picked up your lipstick and opened it even though your lips were already done. “I’m fine.”

She did not believe you, which was kind of her. At least she did you the courtesy of not saying so.

You waited until she left before you put your rings back on. For a moment, you stood in the quiet bathroom and looked at yourself in the mirror. The woman looking back at you was composed, elegant, expensive. She looked like someone who knew exactly where she was going. She did not look like someone trying to decide whether it was more pathetic to cry before the biggest night of her career or to still hope her husband might walk through the door in time.

You got dressed carefully. You stepped into the gown and pulled it up over your body, smoothing the silk over your hips with both hands. The dress fit perfectly. That almost made you cry. You had wanted Jack to see it. You had wanted the private little intake of breath he sometimes gave when he forgot to pretend he wasn’t stunned by you. You had wanted him to look at you like he remembered you were not just the person waiting at home with leftovers and patience.

Instead, you zipped yourself up alone.

The first news segment aired from the lobby of The Pitt just after 7:00 p.m.

It wasn’t unusual for the televisions in the emergency department to run local news with the volume low. Most of the time, no one paid attention unless there was a weather alert, a mass casualty incident, or something affecting hospital funding. It was background noise beneath sharper sounds: monitors beeping, wheels rattling, phones ringing, curtain rings scraping open and shut.

Jack was at the desk reviewing imaging when one of the nurses looked up at the television.

“Wait,” she said. “Is that your wife?”

Jack’s head lifted.

The screen showed the front of the Meridian Grand, a luxury hotel downtown with a glass canopy and warm lights spilling onto the rain-dark sidewalk. A reporter stood outside in a wool coat, holding a microphone while guests moved behind her in formalwear.

The lower-third banner read:

L/N POWER SYSTEMS CELEBRATES MAJOR HOSPITAL GRID CONTRACTS Company valuation expected to climb as implementation phase begins

Jack’s hand tightened around the tablet.

The reporter smiled into the camera. “Tonight, L/N Power Systems is hosting a private gala following a major round of hospital infrastructure contracts that could place the company among the most valuable emerging players in emergency energy systems. Founded by electrical engineer Dr. Y/N Abbot, L/N Power Systems has developed adaptive microgrid technology designed to keep critical hospital units powered during grid failures, natural disasters, and rolling outages.”

A resident standing nearby glanced between the television and Jack. “Dr. Abbot, that’s your wife, right?”

Jack nodded once. “Yeah.”

“Damn,” the resident said, clearly trying to sound impressed rather than awkward. “That’s huge.”

Jack did not respond. The broadcast cut to a graphic showing projected contract values, implementation timelines, and valuation estimates. The numbers were careful, couched in analyst language, but the implication was obvious. If your company hit its implementation targets and the contracts expanded the way people expected, you were on track to enter billion-dollar territory.

A nurse whistled quietly. “Billion with a B?”

Another nurse said, “And she designed the actual system?”

Jack looked at the screen. “Yeah.”

The nurse shook her head. “That’s wild.”

The camera returned to the hotel entrance just as your car pulled up. Jack knew it was you before the door opened. He recognized the way Mara, your assistant, stepped out first and turned back toward the car, one hand hovering near the open door.

Then you appeared.

For a second, the desk around him faded out. The dress looked different on you than it had on the hanger. It followed your body with quiet confidence, the black silk catching silver from the camera flashes and gold from the hotel lights. Your shoulders were bare. Your hair was pinned low, elegant but not severe, and the diamonds at your ears glittered whenever you turned your head. You stepped under the canopy and smiled for the cameras.

It was a beautiful smile. It was also the smile you wore when you were trying not to feel something.

The reporter turned as photographers called your name. “And there she is now, Dr. Y/N Abbot, founder and chief systems architect of L/N Power Systems. Dr. Abbot has been described by analysts as one of the most closely watched engineers in the hospital infrastructure space, especially now that her company’s adaptive grid platform is moving from pilot installations into large-scale implementation.”

Someone at the desk said, “Jack, aren’t you supposed to be there?”

Nobody meant it cruelly. That almost made it worse.

Jack swallowed, still watching as you paused beside the step-and-repeat, your clutch held neatly in both hands.

“I was.”

The answer made the area around him go quiet.

On-screen, a reporter asked you, “Dr. Abbot, tonight is being described as a turning point for your company. What does it mean to have hospital systems moving forward with implementation?”

You smiled, and Jack noticed your fingers tighten slightly around your clutch.

“It means the work is becoming real,” you said. “Designing the system was one part of it. Proving it under stress testing was another. Implementation is where it starts to matter for patients, doctors, nurses, and everyone relying on those seconds when the grid becomes unstable.”

The reporter asked, “There’s already discussion of a possible billion-dollar valuation. Are you thinking about that tonight?”

You gave a small laugh, polite and controlled. “I think my CFO is probably thinking about it more than I am. The valuation matters because it affects growth and deployment, but for me, the focus is still the technology. If a trauma bay stays powered during an outage because of something my team built, that means more to me than a headline.”

The reporter thanked you. You nodded, smiled again, and moved inside.

Jack stood very still until the charge nurse beside him looked over. “You okay?”

He dragged his eyes from the screen. “Yeah.”

She held his gaze long enough to make it clear she did not believe him. Then a trauma page came through, and the whole department lurched back into motion. Jack handed off the tablet, shoved his phone into his pocket, and went where he was needed.

Again.

At the gala, people kept asking where your husband was.

You answered the first few times with patience. “He got called into the hospital.”

Most people responded kindly. Some even looked impressed, as if Jack’s absence made the two of you nobler somehow.

“Oh, of course. Emergency medicine.”

“That must be so difficult.”

“You both do such meaningful work.”

“Power couple, even when you’re in different places.”

You smiled through all of it. “Yes. He’s very dedicated.”

The ballroom was beautiful, but after a while its beauty started to feel almost cruel. The ceiling was high and painted cream and gold, with chandeliers throwing soft light over round tables covered in white linen. Each place setting had a black menu card with gold foil, a small arrangement of white orchids, and a tiny glass votive candle. Along one wall, a projection displayed animated renderings of your adaptive grid system: hospital wings lighting in sequence, power rerouting through alternate pathways, emergency loads stabilizing under simulated failures.

Your company’s leadership team sat near the stage. Your engineers were at the tables closest to you, dressed in suits and gowns that looked slightly unfamiliar on them. You loved seeing the people who had built the system with you getting treated like they belonged in rooms where money moved. Some of them kept taking discreet pictures of the menus and the floral arrangements. One of your junior engineers had shown up in a suit that still had a faint fold line in the sleeve from being fresh out of the garment bag. Another kept touching the stem of his wineglass like he was afraid of breaking it.

You should have been happy. Part of you was happy. That was what made the grief feel so unfair. The night was not ruined. The contracts were real. The applause was real. Your team’s pride was real. Your name on that screen was real. All of it was real.

So was the empty chair beside you.

By the tenth time someone asked where your husband was, you stopped hearing the question as a question. It became part of the room.

Where is he?

In the clink of champagne glasses.

Where is he?

In the scrape of chairs being pulled out for other wives, other husbands, other people with someone’s hand resting warmly against the backs of their seats.

Where is he?

In the empty space beside your plate, where his name sat in elegant black ink on heavy cream cardstock.

Dr. Jack Abbot

You stared at it for too long once, long enough that Mara touched your elbow beneath the table.

“You okay?”

You smiled before you answered, because that had become its own kind of muscle memory. “Yes.”

But your chest ached with something so childish and raw that it embarrassed you. You wanted him to think of you. Not the company. Not the press segment. Not the award. You. The woman in the dress he had promised to stand beside. The woman who had cleaned her wedding rings because she thought there would be photographs. The woman who kept glancing at the doors like wanting him hard enough might make him appear.

You hated yourself a little for that.

You hated that even surrounded by applause, even with your name glowing behind you, some stupid, tender part of you was still waiting to be someone’s favorite thing in the room.

Mara stayed close, fielding conversations when she sensed you needed a breath. She wore a deep green dress and carried a tablet even though you had told her not to work tonight.

“You’re doing great,” she murmured when a hospital executive walked away after asking too many questions about rollout costs.

You looked at the champagne flute in your hand. You had not taken a single sip.

“I’m doing rich-woman cosplay.”

“You are a rich woman.”

“Not emotionally.”

Mara almost laughed, then looked at your face and didn’t.

Your hand went to your clutch, where the white envelope from the doctor’s office was tucked beneath your phone. You had not told anyone. Not Mara. Not your mother. Not Jack.

Especially not Jack.

The result had come through that morning after bloodwork confirmed what the home tests had already said. Five weeks. Early enough that it still felt secret and unreal, but real enough that the nurse had told you to start prenatal vitamins and book a follow-up appointment. You had sat in your car outside the clinic with both hands on the steering wheel, staring at the printed result until the words stopped looking like English.

Pregnant.

At first, you cried because you were happy. Then you cried because you were scared. Then, worst of all, you cried because the first person you wanted was Jack, and you had already known there was a chance he would not be there when you told him.

During dinner, your phone buzzed once. You checked it under the table.

Jack: I’m still here. I’m so sorry. I watched your interview. You looked beautiful. I’m proud of you.

You stared at it for a long moment. For a second, you felt nothing. Then the hurt arrived slowly, settling into the parts of you that had already made room for it.

Mara leaned closer. “Is it him?”

You put the phone face down on the table. “Yeah.”

“Is he coming?”

You smoothed the edge of your napkin in your lap. “No.”

Mara went quiet. Across the room, your CFO was laughing with two investors. Someone from the hospital network raised a glass toward you, and you smiled back automatically.

“I don’t want to cry in this dress,” you said.

Mara’s voice softened. “Then don’t. Be mad instead.”

You looked at her, and something in your chest tightened. “I’m so tired of being mad.”

That was the truth you never said out loud. Anger took energy. Anger required the belief that something could still change if you made enough noise. You were so far past that now. You were tired in a way sleep could not fix, tired of dressing up disappointment until it looked like understanding, tired of giving Jack the best parts of your compassion while keeping none of it for yourself.

The first time the lights flickered at The Pitt that night, nobody really reacted.

Hospitals had a way of making disaster feel routine at first. A monitor blinked. A ceiling light hummed. Somewhere behind the desk, a printer stopped halfway through a page and then coughed itself back to life. The nurses looked up, annoyed but not afraid, because annoyance was easier to wear than fear.

Jack was in trauma two with both hands pressed around a patient’s bleeding thigh when the second flicker came.

This time, the room noticed.

“Power?” someone asked.

“Backup should catch,” a nurse said, but her voice had gone thin.

Then the overheads steadied. The monitors held. The ventilator kept its rhythm. The trauma bay stayed bright.

A few seconds later, someone from facilities came over the radio, breathless and stunned.

“Adaptive reroute engaged. Critical load stabilized. We’re holding.”

Jack froze.

Only for a second, but long enough for the words to land somewhere beneath his ribs.

Adaptive reroute.

Your system.

Your work.

Your sleepless nights, your marked-up schematics, your laptop glowing blue at two in the morning while he came home too tired to ask what you were building. Your hands, your mind, your stubbornness, your company, your impossible little gap between failure and recovery.

The trauma bay lights stayed on because of you.

And he was not beside you when the world clapped for it.

“Dr. Abbot?”

Jack blinked and looked down. His gloves were slick. The patient was still bleeding. The room still needed him.

“Clamp,” he said, voice rough. “Now.”

He kept working because that was what he did. He kept people alive. He kept rooms from falling apart. He kept going until the crisis passed and everyone around him could breathe again.

But after, when the patient was taken upstairs and Jack stepped into the hall, the television over the nurses’ station was still showing the gala.

Your gala.

The reporter’s voice filled the space between ringing phones and rolling carts.

“Moments ago, L/N Power Systems’ adaptive grid platform stabilized a critical load interruption at an emergency department participating in one of its pilot programs. Company officials have not yet confirmed which hospital experienced the event, but analysts are already calling tonight a live demonstration of the technology’s value.”

A resident looked from the screen to Jack.

No one had to say it.

Jack already knew.

The hospital had needed you tonight too. The difference was, the hospital had gotten you.

He had not shown up for you at all.

Jack saw your acceptance speech from the staff lounge.

He had missed the start because a patient had crashed, and by the time he made it to the lounge, his scrub top was damp at the collar and his hands still smelled faintly of antiseptic even after washing them twice. Someone had turned the television volume up because your gala was now the top local business story of the evening.

You were on stage behind a podium, your award resting beside the microphone. The lights made your skin glow and turned the black silk of your gown almost blue at the edges. Behind you, the screen showed a slow animation of your company’s system keeping a surgical wing powered during a simulated outage.

Jack stayed in the doorway.

On the screen, you took a breath and looked out at the room.

“When I started this company, a lot of people told me the idea was too difficult to scale,” you said. “Some were polite about it. Some were not. I was told hospitals already had backup systems, that emergency power was a solved problem, and that the failure gap we were focused on was too small to justify the investment.”

You smiled slightly, and the audience laughed when you added, “The thing about engineers is that if you tell us the gap is small, we tend to ask what happens inside it.”

Jack’s throat tightened. He had heard you practice versions of this speech in the shower, in the kitchen, in the car. He had teased you once for rewriting one paragraph eleven times. You had thrown a pillow at him and told him the paragraph was weak.

Now you were saying it without him in the room.

“We built this system because seconds matter,” you continued. “A few seconds without stable power can change what happens in an operating room, in a trauma bay, in a NICU, in an elevator carrying a patient between floors. The goal was never to make hospitals perfect. The goal was to give them a better chance when everything else is failing.”

The staff lounge was quiet. Jack noticed one of the nurses standing near the coffee machine, arms folded, watching with damp eyes.

You glanced down briefly, then back up.

“I’m grateful for my team. I’m grateful to the hospital partners who believed in the technology early. I’m grateful to the people who asked hard questions, because they made the system better.”

You paused.

Jack knew that pause. He knew it because he had lived with you long enough to hear the breath you took before saying something that cost you.

“Tonight is a professional milestone, but I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t feel personal too. Building something this demanding changes your life. It changes your relationships. It tests who shows up, who wants to, and who actually does.”

Jack’s face went still.

On-screen, your expression remained calm, but your voice softened.

“I’ve learned that success does not make loneliness disappear. It can fill a ballroom. It can put your name on a screen. It can bring applause, contracts, and congratulations. But at the end of the night, you still know which chair beside you stayed empty.”

Nobody in the lounge moved.

Jack looked at the floor. He did not have to see the screen to know the camera would have found his empty chair. A place card with his name. A dinner plate cleared untouched. A visible absence.

But the camera did find it.

Not for long.

Just long enough.

There it was on the television: the chair beside you, empty beneath warm ballroom light. A white place card sat above the untouched dinner setting.

Dr. Jack Abbot

Someone in the lounge inhaled quietly.

Jack stared at his name on the screen.

It was different seeing it like that. Not as a missed text. Not as a fight waiting to happen. Not as something he could explain with patients and short staffing and impossible nights.

It was a space with his name on it.

A promise that had a shape.

An absence everyone could see.

You continued, steadier now. “I am proud of this company. I am proud of the team who built it. And tonight, I am proud of myself for believing that the things I needed were worth building, even when I had to build them alone.”

The applause started slowly, then grew.

Jack stood there, unable to move.

One of the residents near the table said quietly, “I’m sorry, man.”

Jack nodded, because there was nothing else to do. A minute later, his pager went off again.

You left the gala after midnight with your award in one hand and your clutch in the other.

People tried to stop you on the way out. A board member wanted to introduce you to someone from a national health system. Your CFO wanted five minutes about a follow-up call. A journalist asked for one more quote. You gave polite answers, promised emails, and let Mara run interference until you made it to the lobby.

Outside, the rain had slowed to a mist. The hotel’s front drive shone under the lights, slick and dark like spilled ink. Your heels clicked against the polished stone as you waited for the car. The night air was cold against your bare shoulders, and Mara draped your coat over you before you could pretend you were fine without it.

“You don’t have to go home,” she said.

You looked at the road. “I know.”

“I can book you a suite upstairs.”

“I already did.”

Mara turned to you.

You kept your eyes forward. “I booked it this afternoon. Just in case.”

Her expression changed, but she did not make it worse by reacting too much. “Okay.”

The car pulled up. The driver took your award and placed it carefully in the back seat. When you slid into the car, the dress gathered around your legs in a pool of black silk. Mara got in beside you.

For a while, neither of you spoke. The city moved past in blurred lights and wet windows. Billboards, traffic signals, restaurants closing for the night, people standing under awnings with cigarettes and phones. The world looked ordinary, which felt insulting. Something inside you had cracked open, and outside, people were still ordering late-night fries.

Mara broke the silence gently. “Do you want me to stay with you for a bit?”

You looked down at your clutch. “I’m pregnant.”

The words came out flat, almost too calm.

Mara’s head turned slowly. “Oh, sweetheart.”

Your eyes burned immediately. “I found out this morning.”

“Does Jack know?”

You shook your head. “I was going to tell him tonight.”

Mara covered her mouth for a second, then lowered her hand. “I’m so sorry.”

That was what undid you. Not the empty chair. Not the text. Not the speech. Just someone being sorry for you without making you explain why you had the right to be hurt.

You bent forward slightly, one hand pressed over your stomach, the other over your mouth, trying not to sob too loudly in the back of the car. Mara moved close and put an arm around your shoulders, careful of your hair, careful of the dress, careful of all the pieces of you that were barely holding.

“I wanted him there,” you said, voice muffled through your fingers. “I wanted one night where I didn’t have to understand.”

Mara rubbed your back. “I know.”

“I hate that I still wanted him.”

“That’s love,” she said quietly. “It doesn’t always leave when it should.”

You cried harder at that, because she was right. You thought you had moved past needing him like that. You thought if you got busy enough, successful enough, full enough, maybe you would not notice the missing parts so much. But then something happened, something beautiful or terrifying or important, and he was still the first person you wanted to tell.

You looked out the window, watching the city smear itself into streaks of white and red through the rain. Pittsburgh looked softer from inside the car, almost forgiving. Like it did not know what had happened to you tonight. Like somewhere behind all those lit windows, people were still coming home to each other.

“I’m sitting here with an award, a company people are saying might be worth a billion dollars, a baby I don’t even know how to feel brave enough for yet, and all I can think is that I wanted my husband to call me his girl one more time and mean it like nothing else in the world mattered.”

Mara reached for your hand.

You let her take it.

“I don’t know where to put all of this love,” you whispered. “That’s the worst part. I can leave the apartment. I can sign papers. I can sleep somewhere else. But what am I supposed to do with all the years I spent loving him?”

Mara squeezed your hand.

You looked down at your wedding ring.

“What if I spend the rest of my life missing him?”

The question was so quiet it barely felt spoken, but once it was out, there was no taking it back.

Jack came home at 2:38 a.m.

He opened the apartment door quietly, like quietness could make his absence smaller. The living room lamp was on. Your award sat on the coffee table, still gleaming, still heavy, still proof that the night had happened whether he had attended or not. Beside it were two envelopes. One cream, one white.

You were sitting on the couch in your gown. You had taken your earrings off. Your hair had loosened, soft pieces falling near your cheeks. Your lipstick had faded, and there were faint marks under your eyes where you had cried and carefully wiped the evidence away. Your heels were lined up beside the couch. Your bare feet were tucked beneath you.

Jack stopped near the door. “Hey.”

You looked up. “Hey.”

He closed the door and set his keys in the bowl by the entryway. The sound was small and domestic, so painfully normal that you almost laughed. How many times had you heard that exact sound? Keys in the bowl. Shoes by the door. His tired sigh. Your voice asking if he had eaten. Marriage had so many tiny rituals that survived even when the people inside them were falling apart.

“You’re still dressed,” he said.

“I know.”

“I thought you might be asleep.”

“I thought a lot of things tonight.”

Jack looked down. He was still in his scrubs under a dark jacket. His hair was messy from running his hands through it, and there was a line across his cheek from where a mask had pressed into his skin. He looked exhausted. He looked guilty. He looked like the man you loved.

That was inconvenient.

That was devastating.

He stepped farther into the room. “I watched your speech.”

You nodded.

“You were incredible.”

“Thank you.”

“I mean it. The way you talked about the system, the contracts, all of it. You were…” He stopped, searching for the right word. “You were exactly who you are.”

Your eyes filled, but you blinked the tears back. “That would have been nice to hear in person.”

Jack flinched. “I know.”

You looked down at your hands. Your rings caught the lamplight.

He came closer, stopping at the end of the coffee table. “I’m sorry.”

You smiled a little, but there was no warmth in it. “You say that so much.”

“I know.”

“I think that’s part of the problem.”

Jack sat in the armchair across from you instead of beside you. You appreciated that. At least he could still read a room.

“I didn’t want to miss it,” he said.

You looked at him. “I believe you.”

He seemed thrown by that. “You do?”

“Yes.”

“Then why do you sound like that?”

“Because wanting to be there and being there are different things.”

Jack rubbed both hands over his face. When he lowered them, his eyes were red. “Harper called. They were short. I thought if I went in early, I could help stabilize things and leave before dinner.”

“You thought.”

“I know.”

“You didn’t call me before deciding.”

“I didn’t want to stress you out while you were getting ready.”

You stared at him, and he heard it as soon as he said it.

“That’s not what I meant,” he said quickly.

“You didn’t want to stress me out, so you made the decision alone and told me after.”

Jack leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I made the wrong call.”

“You made the familiar call.”

He swallowed.

The room settled around those words. Rain tapped softly at the windows. Somewhere outside, tires hissed against wet pavement. The apartment smelled faintly like his hospital jacket and your perfume, like two lives still pretending they knew how to touch without hurting each other.

“You don’t understand what it’s like there,” Jack said quietly.

The words came out tired. Not cruel. Not even angry at first. Just exhausted enough to be careless.

You went still.

Jack looked at you and immediately seemed to regret it. “Y/N, I didn’t mean—”

“No,” you said softly. “Say it.”

He closed his eyes. “I just mean, when someone is dying in front of you, when there aren’t enough hands, when people are looking at you like you’re the last thing standing between them and the worst day of their life, it’s not easy to walk away.”

You nodded slowly. “I know.”

“I don’t think you do.”

That one hurt.

You stared at him for a second, and something in your face changed. Not anger. Not even shock.

Exhaustion.

The kind that comes when someone you love finally says the thing you always knew they believed underneath all the apologies.

“You’re right,” you said.

Jack opened his eyes. “What?”

“You’re right. I don’t know exactly what it’s like to be you.”

His mouth tightened. “That’s not what I—”

“But I know what it’s like to keep the lights on when a hospital can’t afford for them to go out. I know what it’s like to have people depend on something I built, something I signed my name to, something that could fail in ways that would haunt me. I know what pressure is, Jack. I know what responsibility is.”

His face softened, shame creeping in.

You looked at the award on the table. “And I know what it’s like to be surrounded by people congratulating me while my husband is on a television screen’s other side, using my work to save people, and still somehow unable to show up for me.”

Jack’s eyes shone. “That’s not fair.”

The words came out before he could stop them.

You laughed once, small and wounded. “There it is.”

“Y/N—”

“No, it’s okay. It’s not fair. Someone was dying. The hospital was short. Harper’s kid was sick. There was a trauma. There was a power issue. There’s always a reason, Jack. There is always a reason good enough to make me feel awful for being hurt.”

His jaw worked, but no words came.

You leaned forward slightly, your voice low. “You know what the worst part is? I believe all your reasons. I believe they’re real. I believe they matter. I believe you’re a good doctor and a good man and that people are alive because of you.”

Your eyes filled.

“But I also believe I have been lonely in this marriage. And you keep asking one truth to erase the other.”

Jack looked down.

You reached for the cream envelope on the table. Your fingers brushed over the thick paper, and Jack’s gaze followed the movement.

“What is that?” he asked.

You held it in your lap for a moment. Jack looked at you like he wanted to memorize you and beg forgiveness at the same time. You wondered if he knew how often you had done that to him.

Memorized him, you meant.

The slope of his shoulders when he came home defeated. The faint scar near his eyebrow. The way his hands looked too capable around a coffee mug, too gentle when they touched you, too absent when you needed them and they were somewhere else holding someone else together. You had loved his face through every version of your own disappointment. You had loved him in doorways, waiting for him to take off his shoes. You had loved him across dinner tables where his phone kept lighting up. You had loved him in bed while he slept beside you, too exhausted to notice you were crying.

You had loved him so thoroughly that leaving him felt less like choosing yourself and more like cutting your own heart out before it could beg you to stay.

“I don’t want you to be a lesson,” you said suddenly.

Jack’s brows pulled together. “What?”

You looked down at your hands. “I don’t want to look back one day and tell people you taught me what I deserved. I don’t want you to become some sad, useful story about growth. I wanted you to be my husband.”

His face broke.

You swallowed hard. “I wanted you to be the person I came home to. Not the reason I had to learn how to stop waiting.”

Jack stared at you, and for a moment, you saw the words land somewhere deep enough to hurt him. You almost hated yourself for noticing. You almost hated that even now, a part of you wanted to soften the blow.

“When you asked me to marry you, I thought I understood what you were asking,” you said.

Jack’s face shifted. “What does that mean?”

You looked at him, and the ache in your chest sharpened. “I thought you were asking me to share your life. I thought it meant we would make room for each other, even when it was hard. I knew your job would be demanding. I knew there would be nights you couldn’t leave. I knew I would have to be patient sometimes.”

Your voice stayed even, but Jack’s expression was already changing.

“I didn’t know I was signing up to become the easiest thing to cancel.”

He closed his eyes. “Y/N.”

“I didn’t know I would have to feel guilty for needing you.”

“You don’t have to feel guilty.”

“But I do. Every time. Because there’s always a patient, or a shift, or someone sicker, or something worse. And I know those things matter. I’m not pretending they don’t.”

You set the cream envelope on the table and slid it toward him.

“I just can’t keep living like my pain only counts if it’s an emergency.”

Jack stared at the envelope. For a few seconds, he did not touch it. Then he picked it up.

You watched him open it. You watched him read the first page. You watched the colour leave his face.

“Divorce,” he said quietly.

You folded your hands together so he would not see them shake. “Yes.”

He looked up at you, stunned. “You want a divorce?”

“I don’t want this version of marriage anymore.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

You breathed in slowly. “I know.”

Jack stood, then seemed to realize he did not know where to go, so he sat back down hard. “When did you decide this?”

You looked toward the window. The city lights reflected faintly in the glass.

“I think part of me has been deciding for a long time.”

He shook his head. “No. We’ve had hard months. I know that. But divorce?”

“You keep saying it like I’m being dramatic.”

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

“I’m trying to understand.”

“No,” you said. “You’re trying to find the part where I did this wrong, so you don’t have to look at how long you were doing it to me.”

Jack’s mouth tightened. “That’s not fair.”

The words left him fast.

Too fast.

You looked at him, and he looked like he wanted to reach across the room and take them back.

“Stop saying that to me,” you whispered.

His face cracked. “I’m sorry.”

“I am so tired of being told my pain has to be fair to yours.”

Jack covered his mouth with one hand and looked away.

You wiped your thumb over your ring. “I sat at that table tonight with your name card beside me. People kept asking where you were, and I kept making you sound noble because I didn’t want to embarrass you.”

Jack looked crushed. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“I know. But I did. Because I’m used to protecting you from how it feels to be married to you.”

His mouth opened, then closed again. That was the first time he really had no defense.

You continued, softer now. “I don’t think you’re a bad man, Jack. That would be easier. You’re kind. You care about people. You work yourself into the ground because you can’t stand leaving anyone unsupported.”

Your eyes met his.

“But somehow, I became the person you could leave unsupported because I was good at surviving it.”

Jack’s eyes shone. “That’s not how I see you.”

“I know. But it’s how you treat me.”

He pressed his palms together, his hands shaking slightly. “I can change.”

You looked at him with so much sadness that he almost looked away.

“I needed you to change before I had to beg myself to stop hoping.”

The room was quiet after that.

Then Jack noticed the second envelope. The white one. It sat beside the award, small and plain, with the doctor’s office logo in the corner.

His eyes stayed on it too long.

“What’s that?”

You felt your throat close. This was the part you had dreaded most. The part that made everything feel impossible.

You picked up the white envelope. Jack watched you like his body already knew what his mind did not.

“This is what I was going to give you tonight after the gala.”

His face went still.

You held it out.

He did not take it right away.

“Y/N,” he said, voice barely above a whisper.

“Please just open it.”

He took the envelope. His fingers were careful, almost gentle, as if the paper might bruise. He pulled out the test results, unfolded them, and read.

You watched the exact second he understood.

His lips parted. His eyes moved over the page again. Then again. When he looked at you, his face had fallen apart so completely that you had to look down.

“You’re pregnant,” he said.

“Yes.”

“How long have you known?”

“Since this morning.”

“This morning?”

You nodded.

Jack looked back at the paper, then at you. “You went alone?”

“I didn’t know if it was real yet. I took tests at home. Then I booked bloodwork.”

“You didn’t tell me?”

You laughed once, and it came out more like a sob. “You weren’t even there when I tried to tell you after.”

He took that quietly.

He deserved it, and he knew he did.

You pressed a hand to your stomach, more for comfort than anything else. “I had this whole plan. It feels stupid now.”

“It’s not stupid.”

“It was.” You wiped under your eye carefully. “I thought we’d get through the gala, and then maybe we’d go somewhere quiet. Maybe the balcony or the car. I thought I’d hand it to you and you’d look confused for a second, and then you’d understand. And I thought, for once, the night would feel like ours.”

Jack’s eyes filled. “I should have been there.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

He put the divorce papers and the test results down on the table with shaking hands, keeping them separate, like mixing them together would make the whole thing more unbearable.

“I want this baby,” he said.

Your face crumpled. “I know.”

“I want you.”

You shook your head slowly. “Jack.”

“I do.”

“I know you want me.”

“Then don’t leave.”

“That’s not how this works.”

He stood again, and this time he came around the coffee table but stopped a few feet away from you.

“I’ll do better,” he said.

You looked tired suddenly. Tired in a way he had never really let himself see.

“You’ve said that before.”

“I mean it differently now.”

“You always mean it.”

He swallowed hard. That hurt him because it was true.

You stood too, the black silk falling around you as you rose. Without the heels, you looked more vulnerable. Less like the woman from the news. More like his wife, barefoot in the living room, exhausted from being brave in public.

“I don’t want to punish you,” you said. “I need you to understand that. I’m not doing this because I want you to suffer.”

“It feels like suffering.”

“I know.”

“Then why?”

Your voice broke. “Because staying feels like disappearing.”

Jack’s face tightened as if he had been hit.

You looked down, trying to keep your breathing steady. “I don’t recognize myself anymore sometimes. I used to tell you everything. I used to get excited to share things with you. Then I started editing myself because I didn’t want to add pressure to your life. I stopped telling you when I was upset because you already looked crushed when you came home. I stopped asking for dates because it was humiliating to watch you check your phone the whole time.”

Jack closed his eyes. “I didn’t know it was that bad.”

“You didn’t ask.”

The words came out quietly, but they landed hard.

He opened his eyes again. “You’re right.”

That made you cry harder, because you had wanted him to argue. You had wanted him to give you something to push against. Instead, he looked at you with tears in his eyes and finally saw the damage.

“You’re right,” he said again, his voice rough. “I should have asked. I should have noticed. I should have made room for you without you having to keep proving you needed it.”

You covered your mouth for a second.

Jack looked at your hand, then your stomach. His voice softened. “Are you okay? Physically?”

That question broke something small inside you.

“I think so.”

“Any pain?”

“No.”

“Bleeding?”

“No.”

“Are you nauseous?”

“A little.”

He nodded, doctor mode flickering in, then dying immediately because he seemed to realize how badly timed it was.

“Sorry,” he said.

“It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not. I’m doing the thing.”

You let out a tiny, sad laugh. “Yeah. You are.”

Jack wiped his face with the heel of his hand. “I want to come to the appointments.”

“I know.”

“Will you let me?”

You looked at him for a long moment. “I don’t know yet.”

He nodded quickly, even though it hurt. “Okay.”

“I’m not saying no forever.”

“I understand.”

“I just can’t make promises tonight to make you feel better.”

He breathed in shakily. “Okay.”

You moved toward the chair near the hallway and picked up a small overnight bag.

Jack saw it, and panic crossed his face before he could hide it.

“You packed a bag?”

“Yes.”

“You’re leaving tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you going?”

“A hotel.”

“Which one?”

You looked at him.

He nodded once, backing off. “Right. Sorry.”

“I’m safe.”

“Okay.”

You slipped the bag over your shoulder. The movement was ordinary, almost boring, and somehow that made it worse. This was what leaving looked like. No screaming. No slammed drawers. Just a woman in a black gown picking up a small bag because she had reached the end of what she could carry.

Jack followed you to the entryway but kept a careful distance.

“Can I drive you?” he asked.

“No.”

“Can I at least walk you down?”

“No.”

He pressed his lips together, trying not to fall apart completely.

You put your hand on the doorknob. For a moment, neither of you spoke.

Then Jack said, “Do you still love me?”

You closed your eyes.

Of course he would ask the one question that did not save anything.

“Yes,” you said.

His breath caught behind you.

You turned back to face him, and there he was: wrinkled scrubs, red eyes, hands half-raised like he wanted to reach for you but had finally learned that wanting did not give him the right.

“I love you,” you said, and the truth of it nearly ruined you. “I love you so much that I stayed long after I started feeling alone. I love you so much that I kept making excuses for you because I knew you were tired, because I knew your work mattered, because I knew you were good.”

Jack’s eyes filled again.

“But I can’t keep giving you access to me just because you’re sorry after,” you whispered. “I can’t keep building a home out of promises you only remember once I’m already hurt.”

“I don’t know how to fix this,” he said.

“I know.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

You looked at him for a long moment. You thought of the gala. The black dress. The empty chair. The envelope. The baby. All the nights you had waited and waited, feeding yourself on old versions of him, surviving on memories like they were meals.

“Be someone our child can count on,” you said. “Start there.”

Jack nodded, crying silently now. “I will.”

You wanted to believe him.

God, you wanted to believe him so badly that for one dangerous second, your hand almost left the doorknob.

But then you remembered the chair.

You remembered your name being called in a room full of people while the place beside you stayed empty.

You remembered that love had not been enough to bring him there.

So you opened the door.

The hallway outside was quiet and softly lit. Somewhere down the hall, a neighbour’s television murmured behind a closed door. Life was still going on in all the ordinary ways.

Jack said your name once more.

You looked back.

He stood in the entryway with your award visible behind him on the coffee table and the two envelopes lying open beside it.

“I’m proud of you,” he said.

You gave him a small, broken smile. “I know.”

And that was what made it worse.

Because you knew.

You knew he loved you. You knew he was proud of you. You knew he would miss you when the apartment went quiet and the hospital could no longer give him somewhere else to run.

But knowing had never been the same as being held.

So you stepped into the hallway. This time, when you walked away, you did not wait for him to follow. You heard the door close gently behind you, and the softness of it hurt more than a slam would have.

After you left, Jack did not move for a long time.

The apartment stayed quiet around him. The lamp hummed softly. Rain touched the windows. Your heels were still by the couch, lined up neatly, as if even your heartbreak had manners.

On the coffee table, the divorce papers sat beside the pregnancy results.

The ending and the beginning.

Both addressed to him.

Jack picked up the remote with a hand that did not feel like his and opened the news replay. He did not know why. Maybe because grief made people stupid. Maybe because some part of him thought if he watched the night properly, he could punish himself into becoming the man who should have been there.

The video loaded.

There you were again.

Black dress. Soft hair. Bare shoulders. That careful, beautiful smile.

He watched you enter alone. He watched you answer questions alone. He watched you sit at the table alone. Then the camera panned, briefly, almost accidentally, to the empty chair beside you.

His name card was clear.

Dr. Jack Abbot

Jack paused the screen.

The room went silent.

There it was.

Not a feeling. Not an argument. Not your sensitivity. Not his schedule. Not bad timing.

Proof.

A chair with his name on it.

A space he had promised to fill.

Jack sat on the couch slowly, still staring at the frozen image. His face crumpled, but no sound came out at first. He had cried before. He had cried after losing patients. He had cried in stairwells, in supply closets, in the shower with one hand braced against the tile.

This was different.

This was not the grief of failing to save someone he had only just met.

This was the grief of realizing he had been losing you slowly while calling it survival.

His eyes moved from the frozen screen to the divorce papers.

Then to the pregnancy result.

Then back to your face.

“How do I forget you?” he whispered, but there was no one there to answer.

The apartment seemed to hold the question for him.

Your perfume still lived faintly in the room. Your mug was still in the sink. Your cardigan was still folded over the back of the chair. The book you had been reading was still open on the side table, a receipt tucked between the pages because you hated using proper bookmarks. There was a sticky note on the fridge in your handwriting reminding both of you to buy more oat milk. There was a pair of your socks half-hidden under the coffee table because you always kicked them off when you were working late. There was a framed photo from your courthouse wedding on the console, both of you laughing because Jack had been unable to get the ring onto your finger at first.

You were everywhere.

That was the cruelty of it. You had left, but the life you had built with him remained behind like a house still waiting for its owner to come home.

Jack covered his mouth with one hand and bent forward, shoulders shaking.

For once, no one was paging him. No one was asking him for help. No one was bleeding, crashing, coding, crying out, reaching for him from the other side of a curtain.

For once, there was no emergency left to run toward.

Only the life he had kept meaning to choose.

Only the wife he had loved too late.

Only the baby he had learned about on the same night he learned she was leaving.

Only the empty chair beside you, waiting on a screen for a man who never came.

And the worst part, the part that finally broke him open, was that Jack knew this would not be a clean grief. He would not miss you once. He would miss you in places. In the kitchen when the coffee brewed too strong. In the car when he passed the hotel downtown and remembered black silk under gold lights. In the emergency department when the power held steady because of the system you built. In every waiting room, every hallway, every quiet elevator ride where he would think of you standing somewhere else, living a life he was no longer trusted to enter.

He would miss you when the baby came.

He would miss you when your child had your eyes.

He would miss you when people asked about his wife and he had to learn how to say your name without saying mine.

Jack stared at the empty chair until the screen blurred.

For the first time all night, he understood that you had not left because you stopped loving him. You left because you were terrified you would spend the rest of your life loving him from a room he never came home to.

And Jack, too late, finally knew what it meant to wait. Not for a patient. Not for a shift to end. Not for the next crisis to pass. But for a woman who might never come back.

The television stayed paused on his name.

The apartment stayed still around him.

And Jack sat there in the home you had built together, finally surrounded by all the love he had assumed would wait forever.

Brendon Park was notoriously an asshole. everyone who worked at the PTMC knew that first hand. he could make you cry with just a single, unimpressed stare. he knew he was one. It came with the job of being a surgeon.

Surgery required the upmost precision because the human body was a machine. It required perfection and nothing less.

With a high stress job that required him to be perfect in every single aspect that he did, he expected the same thing from his colleagues. Including naive, stupid medical students and residents. He had no patience for incompetence-excuses.

Perfection meant everything to Brendon. It meant that there was no room for mistakes. Mistakes were a luxury reserved for people who weren't good enough. Every single decision made in his OR had to be deliberate.

Every incision had to be exact. He expected-no, he demanded excellence because anything less than that had consequences.

Residents called him ruthless. Others called him an asshole. What they failed to realize was that he simply had standards. Standards that they failed to reach. If they wanted him to coddle them, they should've chosen a different field of medicine. If they wanted encouragement, they should've stayed downstairs and sought out Abbot or Robby.

Because to him, excellence was expected not rewarded.

He had no time for coddling. He had no time for making other's feel better about themselves for their lack of discipline. He wasn't interested in intentions, potential, or excuses. Results and accuracy were all that truly mattered to him. The operating room wasn't a classroom. It certainly wasn't a therapy session. It was a place where the excellent thrived. It was a place where if you hesitated, you were done. It wasn't a place for the ordinary.

Because patients did not care if a resident's feelings were hurt. They did not care if you thought, if you didn't know, if Brendan looked at you like you were nothing.

What they cared about is if they would be able to walk again. They cared about whether their arm would be back to normal. They cared about whether they could play football again—if their career could potentially be over.

If someone couldn't handle criticism (and disdain in Brendan's case), then they had no business being in his OR. The scalpel didn't care about feelings. Anatomy didn't care about feelings. The unconscious patient with an amputated arm certainly did not care about feelings either.

And most importantly, neither did Brendon.

Because if he smelled a single hint of hesitation, then he was out for blood. Hesitation meant uncertainty. It meant that there was gaps in your knowledge that needed to be filled before you even stepped into his OR.

It meant that you didn't study enough, weren't prepared enough, and hadn't practiced enough.

You were simply not enough.

And Brendon did not need someone in his OR, being uncertain. Uncertainty led to mistakes. Mistakes that could have been prevented if you didn't second-guess the knowledge that should have been drilled within you before you entered his OR.

And for that matter, he expected excellency.

Orthopedics was precision. Measurements mattered.

Alignments mattered. Angles mattered. If a screw is placed a few millimeters off, a reduced fraction would not heal properly. It would be permanent. It would mean patients would live with the consequences that was created in his OR after everyone else got to go home like nothing.

He had spent years of studying until the backs of his eyes burned and until his mind felt numb. Years of refining techniques, repetition after repetition, understanding the human physiology-until precision stopped becoming an effort. It became natural to him and expectation.

And everyday, he maintained that standard. He expected the same thing from his residents, his fellows.

In his field, there was no room for guesses or approximations. A crushed femur or patella wasn't fixed with intention. It was fixed with alignments, measurements, and perfect execution. Because millimeters, angles, alignments, and stability mattered the most. Every single screw that's required to stabilize a bone had its own purpose. Its own position. Every reduction of a fracture had to be exact.

Years ago, when he had made a mistake-small, practically insignificant, fixable, and forgettable in everyone's eyes.

But he remembered it clear as day.

He corrected it immediately. His old attending-now retired-had laughed and patted him in the back. It's okay, he had said. Years of teaching unprepared, unconfident residents had made him accustomed to seeing mistakes.

But it wasn't okay. Not to Brendon at least. It didn't make him breathe easier knowing that his old mentor wasn't upset. It ruined his day. And he punished himself internally for making a simple, insignificant mistake.

He never made another one after that.

So yes, while his standards and expectations may be exceedingly high and unattainable in many eyes-Brendon saw no reason to lower them. He believed patients deserved excellence and nothing less. No one should expect that from him either.

He was respected, feared, and avoided. His word was absolute-it was law. Residents learned quickly to steer clear of him, to speak when spoken to, and to keep conversations very brief. He didn't want to have small talk. He wasn't interested in knowing how your day was or how you were doing today.

He preferred to conversations that were purely medical, nothing personal. It had to be the point, precise, and clear. Because if something could be said in five words easily, then it was unjustified for you to speak ten more.

And according to the unlucky ones, asking him if he had any plans on Christmas was apparently enough to land you on his shit list.

His OR wasn't silent because he expected silence. It was only silent because he was silent. The only noise that was constant was the sound of him brutally hammering a screw into the bone and the sound of music playing.

Music that depended entirely on his mood.

On very rare occasions, he did allow you, the anesthesiologist, to choose. Those were rare occasions.

Those were not moments of generosity. They were controlled exceptions and were rare for a reason.

(The day this happened, it took an ounce of willpower for the surgical crew to not openly gape at Brendon. To them, this was an act of generosity. They understood this was Brendon playing nice. A form of an olive branch. He was being nice!)

It wasn't a courtesy, or a gesture of familiarity but because you had earned a level consistency he respected. Because you both had a mutual understanding of precision, perfection. Your decisions were consistent. They were precise. You did not hesitate when it mattered and you didn't speak when it didn't.

You understood what needed to be done and you never faltered in your decision-making.

Everything you did was concise. Your actions were deliberate. Controlled. It did not matter if it challenged the dynamics of his OR. If it was correct, than it stood.

You did not disrupt it without reason.

He recognized the type of person you were because he was exactly like you. While he had his expectations in his department, you had yours within yours. He's seen you with your own students. You weren't as harsh as Brendon but your words carried their own weight. You didn't just correct mistakes, you exposed them. They lingered. They hurt. And your residents remembered them long after the moment had passed.

You upheld your own expectations. You wanted just as much perfection as Brendon because patients deserved excellency. They did not deserve mediocrity. They did not need to hear excuses. Because they did not care what you felt or what you thought. They cared if they would survive a surgery, if the operation succeeded, if they would feel the pain that would come from a scalpel under anesthesia. Because they trusted you with their lives.

Therefore, they deserve nothing but the best. More than the best.

You're sitting in your chair by head of the operating table, next to your anesthesia machine and monitors. You have a cross word puzzle book in your lap, held steady your pink clipboard. Like every other anesthesiologist, you're calm. But not in the way you blend into the background.

It's more deliberate than that. Your presence is quiet, not absent.

You do not position yourself to be noticed unless the situation requires it. You do not fill the silence with unnecessary speech like other anesthesiologists. You stay within your means, crossing out words with your pink highlighter, anchored to head of the table.

He's in the middle of reducing a fracture fragment when Brendon inhales sharply through his nose at the sight of blood filling the surgical field.

Immediately the sound of beeping fills the room. The numbers of the monitor are dropping significantly. You lower your puzzle book down on your chair. Your eyes shift to numbers beside, focused and immediate. You stand up.

Everyone near Brendon stiffens. They recognize it instantly that something was going wrong. You gaze over the surgical curtain and look at Brendon.

"BP's dropping." You state calmly.

He doesn't look at you. His eyes never stray away from his hands and what he's mechanically doing with them.

Without breaking a sweat or focus. Brendon motions to his surgical tech.

"Gauze."

There's a brief hesitation before she places it in his hands. He looks at her briefly, scrutinizing her for daring to even hesitate.

She freezes and quickly mutters a quiet, "Sorry.." He ignores her apology and continues what he's doing.

Again, you're looking at the monitors before looking back him. "Saturation is at 92."

"Noted." He says. He continues what he's doing. He's done this multiple times. He knows what he's doing and he knows what the numbers on the monitors say.

He doesn't panic, he isn't worried. He could tell that the resident next to him is sucking in his breath, sweating profusely. If he wasn't so focused, he'd roll his eyes. Fear would only cripple you in these case. And that meant making mistakes because you can't think.

You're still standing, staring at him expectantly as he works diligently to fix the current issue.

"BP is still trending down. 88 systolic."

"Cause?" Again, his eyes still don't stray away to look at you.

“Likely retraction. Volume is unchanged." You respond.

"Ease retraction."

The resident holding the retractors hesitates for only a second before he complies, loosening his hold. This mere second was enough for him know that hesitation didn't go unnoticed. He knows-just as everyone in the room knows-that this will be corrected later. Outside this room, in a different context, there will be consequences.

The sound of rushed beeping slowly dissipates into a more rhythmic sound. You look at the monitor one last time. Satisfied, you give a small nod at Brendon before grabbing your pink clipboard, then sit back down in the chair.

For a fraction of a second, his gaze wanders and it lands on you. You’re sitting there, pink highlighter in your hand as you cross out another word. You’re composed and unaffected by the tension that follows him.

It's silent again in the room. The only constant is the music. Tension and perhaps anxiety lessens in small increments. Even the resident exhales a small, very quiet sigh of relief and his shoulders lower.

Outside of his service, the silence was never the same.

You weren't always the anesthesiologist that would be assigned to his cases. Sometimes you were pulled in at nights with Walsh. Other times, you would be with Shamsi. Normally it was for a day where you wouldn't be on his case. It was never more than a day.

It often varied. You didn't seem to mind. You liked the variety. Every surgeon was different and the music taste was sometimes interesting.

But people began to notice something. When you weren't assigned to his case, the difference in Brendon was immediate.

Resident's noticed first. They noticed how the atmosphere shifted, how it deteriorated quickly under him if your presence wasn't there to stabilize the rhythm of the room. Small mistakes seemed to be corrected loudly. His silence was heavier, borderline uncomfortable. It was demanded.

Unfortunately for them, you wouldn't be on his cases for a week or maybe longer. You'd been on call for the night shift. It was then that they truly noticed the change in his behavior.

He became worse.

Your absence became the bane of residents' existence.

His OR, despite already having its own expectations, became brutal. It was unforgiving in the way where the most experienced scrub nurse that had been working under Brendon for years began to hesitate. Residents quickly learned that during your absence, things like breathing too loudly or moving too slowly would be enough to be scrutinized.

Sometimes, it would be enough for them to get removed off the case.

Brendon knows something is wrong with him. He understands that his behavior has been borderline aggressive, even for his standards. He finds himself feeling irritated by little things. Residents have been dismissed for insignificant mistakes he normally would have corrected. His routine felt disrupted and he didn't know what it was that was causing it.

At first, he blamed the cases. Then the residents. Then it was the schedule.

Until he caught himself lifting his gaze lift from his surgical field to the head of the operating table. Again.

And again, every single surgery. Only to find a different anesthesiologist sitting there. Not you.

Every time he would enter his OR, his eyes would instinctively search for your pink clipboard that would be balanced on your lap. Instead he was greeted by a book of sudoku.

The irritation would unfold almost immediately.

Brendon Park does not do idle chit chat. That is well known amongst his peers and those that work under him. He does not care about what is polite and what isn't. He doesn't care about how you are doing. He does not care about what your plans for Fourth of July will be.

He cares about getting to the point without beating around the bush. He cares about clarity and things that could be said within five words or less. He wants to know the vitals of patients. Whether the amputation sight was clean. What bones required surgeries.

But he finds himself wanting to speak to you. To indulge in the simplicities of small talk. Of knowing how your day is going. If you had any plans for Fourth of July. His interactions with you outside of the OR become simple.

Questions that are direct, they're straightforward and they wouldn't beat around the bush.

Of where you were. Of who had stolen you from right under his nose for their own needs.

He finds you sitting in the nurses' station in his department on a chair with a tablet in your hands. Next to you is a cup of coffee, to which he identifies is from the break room. Your pink clipboard is also next to you.

"You weren't on my service last week."

You look up upon hearing his deep voice and small smile appears on your face once you realized it was him. It's subtle. Uncomplicated. He thinks that you look beautiful.

The realization is immediate and unwelcomed. It makes him clench his jaw.

You turn your body fully to him and lower your tablet down to give him your full attention. If you're surprised that he started a conversation with you, you don't show it.

Most people did.

You look tired. Not physically tired-though he's sure that you are-but weighed down in a way he doesn't know how to identify. The bags under your eyes are slightly darker than usual. Your shoulders seem to carry a tension that certainly wasn't there a week ago.

He noticed it immediately from just this interaction. It's just noticeable. It's a detail that he's sure other surgeons would be able to notice. Small details, minor deviations, out of the norm. Just a change that other's possibly overlooked.

He hadn't.

A part of him questioned why he paid so much attention to this. He didn't remember the last time he paid this much attention to anyone outside of his OR.

Because that's what made him a good surgeon, he reason. Able to notice minute details like this while other's couldn't. That's all it is. It's so obvious.

"No, I was on call for nights."

"Neurosurgery?" He asks.

You blink in surprise. You didn't think he noticed you.

Rather, you didn't think he even cared enough to notice.

You nod in response, unsure whether to answer him vocally. The rumors of Park The Shark and his issues with small talk didn't go unheard for you.

Brendon studies you for another moment. He wants to ask you things. Things that were uncharacteristic of him.

Subjects that he normally strayed away from because he didn't care to know. But he wants to know. He wants to know so terribly that it's leaving a disgusting taste in his mouth. That makes him want to smack himself in front of a mirror because he isn't like this.

Past romantic interactions like this never left him like this. He feels like his body is malfunctioning and that he needs to somehow perform a factory reset because - this isn't him.

Attraction was simple. It was predictable. It was easy to understand and compartmentalize.

"You look exhausted." There is no sympathy in his tone.

It was a statement of fact. It was an easy observation.

The same way he could easily identify a hairline fracture on an x-ray.

Yet, this doesn't feel like it's meaningless.

Your smile widens into something more. He doesn't know how to describe it. It's genuine, he supposed. It's terrifyingly beautiful. He feels hooked, lost in it.

"I'm exhausted, yes. The night shift does that to you, yknow? Especially having to listen to jazz on repeat for days."

A grin pulls at your lips.

"I think I still prefer your playlist a lot more than other surgeons so far. Dr. Park."

You tilt your head up and look at him. And you really do look at him, your eyes scan his stone-cold face and observe him. You take all of him in. You're not afraid of him. You don't look like you want to run away from this interaction. Your shoulders are relaxed and you lean into your chair more as you really look at him.

You're amused. "I actually feel alive in your OR, Dr. Park."

Brendon stares at you. For a moment, he forgets to answer. The sense, the feeling of malfunctioning is stronger now. It's almost like he is unable to respond.

Which is the most concerning because he always has a response.

Finally, he inhales through his nose.

"That's because my playlists are actually better."

These words left him before he could think. Before he could stop himself from speaking them. It was dry, so matter-of-fact. He realized too late that it was his lame attempt at a joke. At teasing. But the horror is instant.

A brief moment of silence.

Your eyes widen ever so slightly for only a fraction of a second. A laugh slips out of you before you can stop it.

Brendon doesn't react outwardly. But he registers the way your expression shifts from recognition to amusement.

He had made a joke. You laugh once more much more quietly until you settle down with a soft smile on your lips. You look like you've accepted something that he hasn't.

"Oh, yeah? I'll trust your medical opinion on that then." Brendon exhales through his nose but the corners of his lips twitch ever so slightly. A detail that didn't go unnoticed by you.

The interaction didn't take long for it to be shared amongst his department. It only took one nurse and a resident to notice. A shift in tone they weren't supposed to notice. A sound that didn't belong in the halls that Brendon Park walked in. Laughter was shared between nurses, techs, and residents. It was never shared with Dr. Park.

But curious minds that had nothing better to do stayed curious.

They spoke in hallways. In the break rooms. In shared on-call rooms.

"Did you hear that Dr. Park made a joke?"

"What- There's no way!"

"Well, she laughed."

"And he smiled!"

A pause. A beat of disbelief. To them, it was just a rumor A pause. A beat of disbelief. To them, it was just a rumor made by one bored nurse and resident. Because there was no way that the renowned, asshole of an orthopedic surgeon with a major stick up his ass was capable of cracking a joke. Let alone making someone else laugh.

Or even smile.

But the consensus amongst his residents was clear.

"Brendan Park-The Shark-practically smiled."

The news spread quickly like rumors often do in hospitals. He hears about it the same way he hears other rumors. Indirectly. It starts with an R4 hesitating to speak to him. A nurse nearly smiles at him before deciding not to.

Even Abbot and Robby pause when they see him in the corridor of the ED. A joke was forming between them-Brendon can clearly see the way they glance at each other with knowing smirks.

But it never comes out. They focus on the incoming trauma that they called him to look over. He registers the way Ahemed tries to shift his position in front of the betting board. The way Perlah, Santos, and Princess stare at him and whisper to each other in Tagalog. The word "anesthesiologist" doesn't go unnoticed by him either.

He continues moving through the department as he always does-precise and unaffected in appearance. This was out of his control. Things were unraveling and he already disliked it.

He's sure you're aware of it as well.

If the way you looked at him sometimes-amused, calm, and equally unaffected by whatever everyone around you was overanalyzing —is any indication. You meet his gaze too easily in passing corridors. Long enough to mean something between the two of you. But not long enough for others to deem is provocative.

Because you both move on as if it meant nothing. As if it was just two colleagues greeting each other politely.

This, specifically more than anything, was what made people notice.

You smile when he nods at you in greeting. It's brief, practically unnoticeable because of the way your expression smooths over as if your smile was never there to begin with. It was deliberate. It was for him to notice.

But your residents noticed. They quickly pick up on it first. A glance of one of your R2s in his direction then one towards you when you pass by. Some will look at both you for a brief second before looking back down to their charts with a knowing smile.

As of now, you look better than the last interactions you've had. Your shoulders no longer seem to bear that tension you had before. He pauses in his stride as you both come across each other in an empty corridor.

"Dr. Park," you greet him. Your expression is composed-professional-but the small smile that seemed to be reserved only for him flickers in and out before you suppress it.

He nods at you. "Tomorrow. You're on my service."

You let out a soft exhale that resembled a quiet laugh, your smile widens briefly.

"You're getting very predictable, Brendon."

You said his name. It's simple. Casual but lands with more weight than it should. Brendon stops and for a moment, what he feels is akin to a robot malfunctioning—he really looks at you. His head is turned slightly to stare at you. He doesn't speak. He simply takes all of you in.

It's affecting him in a way he doesn't have a logical explanation to. He is well aware that these new found sensations in his body are becoming exceedingly difficult to compartmentalize, which is the problem. Because Brendon Park does not operate without it.

For the first time again, he isn't sure how to respond None of the options in his head feel correct. He could ignore it. He could pretend that he didn't hear the way his name rolls off the top of your tongue perfectly.

You hold his gaze, knowingly.

"Don't use my name like that." He isn't reprimanding you. He isn't upset by the use of his name. It's a more of a constraint for him. A warning of what would happen if you continue doing it.

You tilt your head slightly. You're clearly amused by him again. You don't step back or get intimidated by his response. You should. Everyone else would. You're studying him and it feels like you're stripping him down to his core. Like you know what he truly meant.

Somehow, he feels that's worse.

Brendon sharply inhales through his nose, his eyes still haven't left yours. A beat passes by.

"...Not here."

He doesn't elaborate any further. He doesn't explain what these last two words truly mean. He continues walking to the opposite direction of you. Leaving you left to your own thoughts, amusement rather.

His next surgery is with you. It's on Wednesday.

He knows this because he looked at the OR schedule ahead of time. Once. Then once more. Then again. Until he was positive that no one had changed your name overnight. He knows his behavior is ridiculous. It's unbecoming of a surgeon of his caliber.

Brendon Park does not need to double check a surgery schedule. He looks at them once and memorizes them and moves on. There was no need for him to triple check if your name was there.

You are assigned to his case and that should be the end of it.

But it isn't. Because he finds himself looking forward to seeing you in your chair and your pink clipboard. Seeing you cross out words you found in your crossword with the bright neon pink highlighter you always bring. To see the way you would smile at him-subtle and only meant for him. You are aware of the effect you have on him.

But seeing your name on his cases isn't important as the real reason he's been checking your schedule. For the past few weeks, everyday. And everyday for these past few weeks, you both had different days off. Nothing was aligned and lately, his residents have noticed the mood he's been in because of that.

But today he checked the schedule. Every Sunday, the schedules get updated. And immediately he goes to find your name-hoping to find aligned days off.

You're both walking out of his OR simultaneously down the corridor that led you to the elevator. You're both silent but maintaining the aura of professionalism you both normally keep. He waits to say something until you're both in the elevator.

"You have tomorrow off." He states. "And the day after."

Matter-of-fact as always. As if it was the most obvious thing in the world. It was accurate. It was direct. He knew your schedule because he memorized it.

You blink at him and you nod, slowly and for the first time-you are confused. This dance between the two of you has been predictable, in a way. You have learned the language that comes with understanding Brendon Park.

The nuances and the significance of his words, his attention.

You're not understanding him. His jaw clenches and he exhales slowly.

"You've been working a lot of hours." Brendon says. "Too many, actually."

And immediately, the fact was wrapped with concern.

No, it was care. His wording was precise. It was deliberate like it always was with Brendon. You finally understand and you look at him with more than amusement, you smile. This time it's wide and it wasn't subtle. It was loud.

You're beautiful, he thinks.

"You know, normal people would just ask me to get dinner, Brendon."

Brendon pauses and he stares at you. His gaze is heavy and his fingers twitch. He's sure of himself this time. For the first time, he knows exactly what he wants to say.

There is no hesitation. No uncertainty that would cloud his judgement and years of knowing. For the first time in a long time of knowing you, the answer comes easily.

"Would you say yes?"

You grin widens instantaneously. Finally, no more subtle glances in the OR. No more interpreting intent and words like they contained double meanings. No more pretending that what this is was purely professional.

Especially when the lines of professionalism have slowly blurred for the both of you.

You bring your palm forward and you squeeze his bicep.

You're bold but it doesn't matter anymore. Not when he already has the words he wants to say. The feelings he wants to express.

"What do you think?" You ask teasingly.

"You've been checking my schedule for weeks, haven't you?"

Brendon closes his eyes and exhales loudly. Then for the first time since you've known him, he looks at you with almost fondness mixed with exasperation.

"My schedule hasn't lined up with yours."

You stare at him with awe. Then you burst into loud laughter because he didn't even deny the fact. His response was an admission. That he was obsessively checking when your days off would align. To prepare for this.

"That's really your defense?"

"It's a factual statement." He responds.

"Yes-" You pause. "but you've been checking."

He holds your gaze and he clenches his jaw, inhales sharply at your statement.

"Yes."

His admission landed harder than anything you've heard.

It was real and it was profoundly like Brendon to not beat around the bush. To cut to the chase. To not make excuses. He was precise with his words.

The grin on your face couldn't get any bigger. This was the real you. The side that not many got to see. Just as this side of him was the side that no one but you got to see. It was reserved for you, jusy like the side you only showed him was reserved for him.

"Dinner." Brendon says.

You raise a brow at him. "Dinner?"

"And coffee." Brendon nods. "Tomorrow."

“Oh, and coffee? You really want to see me twice in a day, huh?” You grin. "So you're finally asking me out?"

Immediately, Brendon sighs and brings his hand to his face. "Apparently, yes."

You beam at him and you give his bicep one more squeeze as the elevator doors open to your floor. You wave at him as you exit the elevator.

"It's a date then!"

Warmth settles in the pit of his stomach as he stares at your face before the doors close. He presses his back against the wall and he looks down at the floor. It's quiet and it is just him. Slowly, a smile makes its way to his face and lets out breath that resembles a soft laugh.

You understood this in the first week. The girl who came before you, Liana, had walked you through everything: cameras, angles, schedules, the way the athletics department liked their content formatted. But had failed to mention that the players would not look at you so much as look through you at first. Like you were part of the furniture. A tripod with a heartbeat.

In a way, that was fine. Being invisible was a perfectly good way to do the job. Players acted more naturally when they forgot the camera was there, and natural content was always better than posed content. This was something you had understood instinctively from the beginning.

You had been doing this job since the beginning of fall semester. It had come to you not accidentally but not exactly sought either, you had always followed the team, always been a genuine fan. Liana, the former social media girl, was a friend from a very boring Thursday morning class you had both suffered through together. When she came close to graduating she recommended you for the job. You had been working the library circulation desk before that. When the athletics department called it had seemed like a no-brainer.

A few months in, you knew the inner workings of the team the way you knew the layout of your own apartment. Their training schedule, their game schedule, the subtle social architecture of a group of people who spent most of their waking hours together. You knew which players were camera shy and which ones had a natural appeal and actively enjoyed being filmed — cough Dean cough — and by now you knew everyone's best angle, best light, best moment.

Which brought you to Logan.

You were also, which was a separate and entirely unrelated issue, completely down bad for one of the players.

It had not happened all at once.

You had known who John Logan was before you got the job, everyone who followed Briar hockey knew who he was, which was most of the campus, but knowing of someone and being in the same building as them four times a week were different things entirely.

You had known about his escapades too. His romantic history was the kind of thing that Olivia, your friend and a woman of genuinely exceptional gossip quality, had mentioned more than once with the relish of someone who considered this information a public service. Before the job, you had laughed about it the way you laughed about things that had nothing to do with you.

Now that you actually knew him, not knew knew him, but saw him daily, which was its own specific category, you thought about his former, and hopefully past, escapades and felt something uncomfortably close to jealousy.

The crush had consolidated gradually and against your will, the way water finds its way through things. A practice here. A post-game there. The specific way he looked when he was focused on something, the way he talked to his teammates, the way he sometimes looked directly into your camera with an expression that suggested he had briefly forgotten it was there and was just looking.

And then there was the other thing, which was honestly the worst part: he was so unfairly polite. He said good morning and good afternoon. He smiled when he caught you filming something. He said goodbye when he left and apologized if the puck flew in your direction, which it occasionally did, and each time he said sorry about that with the specific sincerity of someone who actually meant it.

You knew you had a crush on him. Obviously. That part was not new information.

What was new information was the following Tuesday, late after practice, the rink mostly empty, you sitting in the stands with your laptop open and the tiredness of someone who had been on their feet for three hours. The players were filtering out through the doors and you were reviewing footage on autopilot, not really watching, when you looked up without thinking about it.

You were looking for Logan before you had decided to look for him.

When you found him, he was at the boards, removing his helmet and pushing a hand through his hair.

Fuck me, you thought.

And then it seemed like he had heard you, because he lifted his eyes and looked straight at you across the empty rink and smiled.

You smiled back and closed your laptop.

Time to go home and think about John Logan in bed.

You reached for your camera on the tripod — force of habit, you always checked the last few shots before packing up — and opened the gallery.

Logan drinking water. Logan laughing at something Garrett said. Logan tying his skates. Logan high-fiving Tucker after a good drill. Logan making a face directly at the camera, having clearly just noticed you filming him, looking entirely unbothered about it.

You stared at the screen.

Oh.

Oh no.

The real problem came later.

The game was at Harvard, which meant the bus, which meant a situation you had been successfully avoiding for six months. You never took the team bus, too much male energy, too many large people occupying space in a way that made you feel like you had accidentally wandered into someone else's environment. You usually went with the student bus, which was fine, which was your preferred option.

The student bus had a mechanical issue and couldn't make the drive in time.

So you, along with the other team staff, boarded the team bus with approximately forty hockey players and the quiet resignation of someone who had lost a negotiation they hadn't known they were in.

The game itself went fine, nothing groundbreaking, but Briar won, which was all that mattered. You packed up your equipment and joined the line filing back onto the bus, looking for the same seat you'd had on the way there.

You were making your way down the aisle when you spotted Logan sitting alone.

You slowed down. Made the calculation. Gave yourself approximately four seconds of internal encouragement.

A freshman defenseman sat down next to him before you could finish the thought.

You did not pout. You were a professional.

"Aw, look who it is." Dean's voice came from the seat directly behind Logan. He was sitting in the aisle seat, legs stretched out, watching you with the expression of someone who had seen everything. "You can sit with me."

"Sure," you said.

"Geez, don't look so happy about it." He pulled his legs in so you could slide past. "I even let you have the window."

"What a gentleman," you said, settling in and pulling your laptop from your bag.

"Are we watching a movie?" Dean pointed at the laptop.

"No. I'm working."

"Bummer," he said, shifting in his seat to get comfortable. Dean was a broad person and the seats were not designed with broad people in mind, which meant that when you sat down you were immediately, unavoidably in contact, arms pressed together, shoulders touching. You had briefly considered putting the armrest down for some personal space, but Dean seemed completely unbothered by the proximity, which somehow made it easier to be unbothered yourself.

This was the thing about Dean that had surprised you most when you first started the job: there had never been an awkward phase. No stiff introductions, no careful professional distance, no period of working out who you were to each other. He had simply decided you were friends and proceeded accordingly, and somehow six months had passed and it felt like you had known each other much longer than that.

You connected your camera to the laptop and started pulling up photos from the game. Selected the best ones. Started uploading them to the shared drive.

"Uh oh," Dean said, leaning over. "That's not my best angle."

You looked at the photo. He was facing almost entirely away from the camera.

"Shut up," you said, lightly slapping his hand away from the screen. "What do you mean not your best angle? Are you not proud of your very nice backside?"

This was a callback, and Dean knew it. He had said something similarly direct about you at a party two months ago in the shameless way that Dean said most things, and you had decided that the only appropriate response was to give the same energy back.

 "I am," he said, "but the front is much better. You should check it out sometime."

"Are you referring to your face as the front of your backside?"

Dean repeated the question back to you in a mocking tone.

You opened the photos and started scrolling through them, and approximately three seconds later you noticed the pattern and began praying, quietly and sincerely, that Dean would not notice it too.

Too late.

"Why do you have so many pictures of Logan?" He was looking at the screen with his eyebrows raised. "There are like ten Logan pictures for every one of anyone else."

"Logan just photographs well."

"He photographs well."

"Yes."

"That's your explanation."

"That's my explanation."

Dean looked at you with the expression of someone assembling a conclusion. "You have the hots for Logan."

"The hots? Dean, what is this, a Disney Channel movie? And no. I don't."

"Yeah? Explain the hundred photos of him drinking water. Sorry, but you can't use those for Instagram." He paused. "Unless you're using them for something else. Like, I don't know. Your spank bank."

You gasped and punched his arm. "Shut up."

"Admit it."

"I plead the fifth."

"That's not how that works."

"I don't want to talk about it."

"You have to. I'm your best friend."

"No you're not. It's Olivia."

"On the team, I meant."

"It's probably Tucker."

"Tucker?" Dean looked genuinely wounded. "Tucker? Don't try to change the subject."

You closed the laptop.

"Go to sleep, Dean."

"This conversation is not over."

"Yes it is."

"No it's not."

"Yes it is."

"No it's not," he said, adjusting himself against the seat with the decisive energy of someone settling in for a nap. You let your head fall back against the window. A moment later his head dropped onto your shoulder with the comfortable weight of someone who had decided this was acceptable.

"Do not drool on me," you said.

"I bet if it was Logan you wouldn't mind," he said, eyes already closed. Of course not.

"Don't be disgusting."

"And by the way —" he opened one eye "— he has the hots for you too."

"Oh my god," you said. "Stop talking like this is iCarly."

He closed his eye again.

The bus moved through the dark and you sat there with Dean's head on your shoulder and the laptop closed on your knees and tried very hard not to look at the back of Logan's head in the row in front of you.

Oh no, you thought, again, for the second time that week.

A couple of weeks later, Dean found you setting up the tripod in the corner of the film room before pre-game interviews.

"So," he said, appearing at your elbow with the energy of someone who had been waiting for the right moment. "I saw that you didn't RSVP to the invitation for mine and Beau's birthday bash. And it's tomorrow."

You winced. You had been avoiding this topic.

"I have a thing," you said, very casually, adjusting the tripod height without looking at him.

"A thing." He repeated it back with the tone of someone who found this deeply insufficient. "What thing could possibly be more important than my birthday?"

"They painted a new wall in the hallway of my apartment so —"

"Shut up," he said, moving closer. "You're coming. Also —" he said it with the specific energy of someone deploying their strongest argument "— Logan is going to be there."

You kept your eyes on the tripod. "I would assume so. Since you live together."

"You know what I mean."

"I really don't."

"Yes you do."

"I'm working tomorrow night," you said.

"It's a Saturday."

"Content doesn't take weekends off."

"You literally schedule everything in advance and you know it." Dean leaned against the wall with his arms crossed. "Come to the party. Talk to him. He's going to be right there."

"I talk to him all the time. It's my job."

"Yeah, but when you talk to Logan you do the thing."

You looked up for the first time. "What thing."

"The thing." He gestured vaguely at your face. "The thing where you forget to be normal."

"I am always normal."

"You called his assist last Tuesday 'genuinely cinematic.'"

"It was a good play."

"To his face."

"As a professional observation —"

"He smiled about it for the rest of practice." Dean looked at you steadily. "Come to the party."

You turned back to the tripod.

"I don't think Logan has the hots for me, you know," you said. "He's like a hot athlete. And I'm like the social media nerd."

Dean stared at you with the expression of someone who had just heard something that offended him on multiple levels simultaneously.

"Geez," he said. "You're not the girl in every romcom who doesn't know she's pretty." He paused. "Also you may be a nerd but — with all due respect to you and to my buddy Logan — you're pretty hot."

You pushed his shoulder and muttered a low stop.

"I'm being sincere!" He caught himself on the wall, laughing. "Party. Tomorrow. Eight o'clock. Logan will be there." He pointed at you one more time. "You will also be there."

He walked away before you could respond.

You looked at the camera. The camera looked back at you.

Genuinely cinematic, you thought, mortified.

You were definitely not going to that party.

The thing about watching two people be completely oblivious to each other was that it was, at first, entertaining.

Dean had found it genuinely funny in the beginning, the way you would track Logan across a room without realizing you were doing it, the way Logan would find reasons to be wherever you were without announcing that was what he was doing. It was like watching a nature documentary.

It had been funny for approximately three weeks.

It was now week seven and Dean was losing his mind.

It was a Thursday practice, nothing special about it. Dean was on the ice going through drills with Tucker when he caught it, the peripheral awareness of someone who had been watching a situation develop for too long.

You were in your usual spot in the stands, laptop open, camera on the tripod, doing the thing you always did where you looked like you were reviewing footage but were actually, if you knew what to look for, tracking Logan across the ice without moving your head.

Logan, for his part, was doing the thing he always did where he skated past your section of the stands more than was strictly necessary for any drill that had been assigned.

"He's done that four times," Tucker said, appearing at Dean's elbow.

"Five," Dean said. "You missed one while you were talking to the coach."

Tucker watched Logan complete another unnecessary loop near the boards. "Are they ever going to do something about that?"

"Apparently not," Dean said.

On the ice Logan slowed near the boards not stopping, that would have been too obvious, just slowing and said something up toward the stands. You looked up from your laptop and said something back. Logan smiled. You looked back at your laptop immediately, in the specific way of someone using a screen as a shield.

Logan skated away looking slightly more cheerful than he had thirty seconds ago.

"It's painful," Tucker said.

"It's excruciating," Dean agreed.

"Wow, that's a big word" Tucker said mocking Dean and skating away.

After practice Dean was still thinking about it in the locker room.

He was unwrapping his tape when Garrett sat down across from him.

"You have a face," Garrett said.

"I'm thinking."

"About what."

"Logan and the social media girl, or as I call her, (Y/N)"

"So her name—" Garrett replied.

Garrett looked at him with the mild, steady expression he used when he was waiting for someone to either say something sensible or stop talking. "And?"

"And they've been doing this for like seven weeks and nothing is happening and I'm tired of watching it."

"So tell him to do something about it."

"I've told him." Dean had, in fact, told Logan approximately six times in varying tones of directness. "Telling doesn't work. Logan needs a push."

"A push," Garrett repeated.

"A significant push."

Garrett looked at him for a long moment. "What kind of push."

"A financial one," he said.

"Dean —"

"Hear me out."

"I don't think I want to."

"A thousand dollars," Dean said. "I bet him a thousand dollars that he won't ask her out. He needs the money, he likes her, this solves both problems simultaneously. It's elegant."

Garrett stared at him. "It's really not."

"It gets him to do the thing he already wants to do."

"By paying him."

"By incentivizing him."

"Those are the same thing."

"Garrett," Dean said, in the tone of someone who had considered the counterarguments and dismissed them. "They have been doing this for weeks. At this rate they'll still be doing it at graduation. I'm helping."

Garrett looked at the ceiling briefly. "You shouldn't do this," he said finally.

"Noted," Dean said.

He did not change his mind.

Logan came in from the showers to find Dean sitting on the bench across from his locker with an expression that meant something was coming.

Tucker was in the corner pretending to check his phone. Garrett was lacing his shoes with more focus than the task required.

"What," Logan said.

"I have a proposition," Dean said.

Logan looked at Tucker. Tucker looked at his phone. Logan looked at Garrett. Garrett looked at his shoes.

"What kind of proposition," Logan said.

"A thousand dollars," Dean said. "All you have to do is ask her out."

He didnt't have to specify who the her was.

The locker room was quiet.

Logan opened his locker. Got his jacket. "No."

"Logan —"

"No, Dean."

"You like her."

"That's not —"

"You've skated past her section of the stands five times today during drills that don't require you anywhere near the boards." Dean's voice was completely even. "I counted."

Logan said nothing.

"You check her posts before anyone else on the team," Dean continued. "You know her schedule better than your own. You said sorry to her last Tuesday when the puck went near her even though it didn't come close to actually hitting her." A pause. "You apologized preemptively."

"I was being polite."

"You were being in love with her," Dean said, simply. "Which is fine. Great, actually. And fixable. With one conversation and a thousand dollars."

Tucker made a small sound that was not quite disapproval and not quite agreement.

Garrett said nothing, which was its own kind of answer.

Logan looked at his jacket in his hands. He thought about the time that had passed, the practices and bus rides and the specific way you closed your laptop when you were trying to hide something. He thought about his bank account, which was having a difficult semester. He thought about the rent that was due. The equipment he needed.

He thought about asking you out, which he had been meaning to do, which he had been telling himself he was going to do, which he had not done.

I was going to do it anyway, he told himself. The money doesn't change what I was going to do anyway.

"Fine," he said.

Tucker made the sound again, slightly louder.

Garrett looked up from his shoes for the first time. His expression was not angry, not exactly. More like a person watching a decision being made and knowing already how it was going to cost someone.

Dean produced a check from somewhere — written on the back of a receipt, which was so Dean that Logan almost laughed — and held it out.

Logan took it.

He folded it once and put it in his jacket pocket and did not look at Garrett again.

I was going to do it anyway, he thought.

He almost believed it.

The subject of the party was a sore one.

Part of you wanted to go and part of you didn't, and the two parts had been arguing since Dean walked away from the tripod, and by the time you got back to your apartment you had resolved nothing except that you needed to talk to Olivia about it.

Olivia listened to the full recap of the Dean conversation with the focused attention of someone taking notes. When you finished she was quiet for approximately three seconds.

"We're going," she said.

"I said I wasn't sure —"

"I've made up my mind. You were invited so you need to go, and I'm coming with you because—." She looked at you with the expression of someone who had already decided the fun they were going to have and was simply waiting for logistics to catch up. "What's the theme?"

"Dynamic duo."

"Perfect for us." She was already opening her laptop. "I know exactly what we're wearing."

"I don't even know what to wear," you breathed out, dropping flat onto your bed and staring at the ceiling. "What kind of theme even is that? Dynamic duo? That's so vague."

"It's not vague, it's versatile." She turned the screen to face you. "Clueless. Cher and Dionne. The plaid."

You looked at the screen. You looked at Olivia.

"Obviously," you said.

You walked into the party in matching plaid ,short skirt, blazer, the whole thing and felt immediately, objectively, like you had made the right costume choice. Olivia walked in beside you with the confident energy of someone who had never had a bad entrance in her life.

The house was full and warm and smelled like every college party you had ever been to. You did a quick scan of the room in the completely professional way of someone who was not looking for anyone specific.

You found him in approximately four seconds.

Logan was in the kitchen with Dean, drink in hand, laughing at something. He was wearing a sleveless gray shirt with a pair of wings.

You gave a small wave in their direction. Dean spotted you first and his face did something immediately, and then he clapped a hand on Logan's back and pushed him in your direction with the subtlety of a person who had never heard the word subtle.

Logan crossed the room.

"Hey —" His eyes moved over you and something in his expression shifted slightly. "Clueless?"

"Yeah," you said, nodding perhaps a few more times than necessary.

Beside you, Olivia made a sound that she converted, barely, into a cough. She had been documenting your inability to form complete sentences in Logan's presence for approximately three months and found it genuinely hilarious.

"You look very pretty," Logan said.

"Oh — thanks." The blush arrived before you could do anything about it. Compose yourself.

Logan seemed to remember that you were not alone. "You too, Olivia."

"Yeah, right," Olivia laughed. "I'll go get a drink."

She disappeared into the crowd. As she passed behind Logan she turned to face you and mouthed make a move with the enormous unsubtle energy of someone who had been waiting three months to say it.

You looked back at Logan.

"I'm glad you came," he said. "Dean mentioned you weren't sure."

"I had some content to edit," you said.

"This is more important," he said, lightly, like a joke, but with something underneath it that wasn't entirely a joke.

"Yeah," you said.

And then you were both just standing there. Drinks in hand, the party moving around you, talking the way you had discovered you talked when you were alone together, which was easily, which was the specific ease of two people who had been in the same orbit long enough to have figured out each other's rhythms without officially acknowledging it.

"So what are you supposed to be anyway?" you asked, taking the opportunity to look at him properly. The gray shirt. The wings. The arms, which were — you looked at his face instead. "Jacob Elordi in Saltburn?"

Logan laughed — a real one, surprised and warm. "Bird and the bee. I'm the bird. Tuck's the bee."

"Oh," you said. "That tracks."

"Does it."

"The bee has better energy," you said. "No offense to you."

"I'll tell Tucker you said that."

"Please don't."

Dean chose this exact moment to appear between you.

"Hello, you two." He looked between you with barely concealed delight. "What are we talking about?"

"The birds and the bees," you said, and watched Dean's eyebrow go up in real time.

"Oh, I like where this is headed."

"No — I mean his costume," you said quickly. "What are you supposed to be?"

"Maverick." He pointed across the room to where Beau was talking to a very beautiful brunette. "Beau's Goose."

You considered this. "Was there not a dynamic duo where one of them didn't have a tragic ending? You could have been Ice."

"Ice and Maverick hated each other," Dean said.

"No they didn't! In your own words they had the hots for each other."

Dean opened his mouth. Closed it. Pointed at you. "That is actually a fair point."

"Thank you."

"You're insufferable," he said, smiling. He looked between you and Logan one more time. "I'm going to go find Beau. You two —" he gestured vaguely at the space between you "— continue."

He disappeared back into the crowd.

You looked at Logan. Logan looked at you.

"He's not subtle," you said.

"No," Logan agreed. "He really isn't."

The party continued around you. At some point you had moved slightly closer together. Neither of you had announced it. At some point his hand had found the small of your back, briefly, when someone pushed past in the crowd. It had stayed there a moment longer than strictly necessary. You had not moved away.

At some point Olivia had caught your eye from across the room and given you a look of such unrestrained triumph that you had been forced to look at the floor to keep from laughing.

"So —" Logan started. He stopped. Tried again. "I've been thinking. For a while actually." He looked at you with the expression of someone abandoning a rehearsed script entirely in favor of just saying the thing. "Would you like to go out? With me. On a date."

Inside your chest, something that had been very carefully managed for months made a sound like:

YESYESYESYESYESYESYESYES —

"Yes," you said, with great composure. "I'd like that."

Something settled in his expression warm and certain. "Good. I was hoping you were going to say that."

"I was hoping you were going to ask," you said.

He smiled. Not the polite one, not the team-photo one the real one, the one you had forty-seven saved clips of and only eleven of them were for work.

Across the room, completely uninvited into this moment, Dean let out a noise of triumph loud enough that Tucker turned around to look.

You and Logan both looked at Dean.

Dean pointed at both of you, then at himself, then gave two thumbs up with the energy of a man who had absolutely no shame about any of this.

"He planned this," you said.

"Obviously," Logan said.

You looked at Dean, who was now saying something to Beau that was making Beau look confused and Dean look extremely pleased with himself.

"I'm going to delete all his content," you said.

"Probably," Logan said. "But maybe tomorrow."

You looked back at him.

"Yeah," you said. "Maybe tomorrow."

What you did not know — what you would not know for three months — was what had happened two hours before that conversation.

The first date was a Tuesday.

Logan had asked on a Saturday and then spent the intervening three days being completely normal about it, which meant he had checked his phone approximately forty times and suggested three different restaurants to Dean who had not asked for his opinion and had given it anyway.

He picked you up at seven. You had worn something simple and he had looked at you the way he sometimes looked into the camera, direct, unhurried, like you were something worth paying attention t, and said you look great in the specific voice he used when he meant things, and you had said thanks, so do you and meant it, and the evening had been easy in the way that things were easy when they had been building for a long time and had finally found the right outlet.

You talked for three hours. Not about anything important about the team, about your job, about the things you had noticed about each other without ever saying so. He told you about the preemptive puck apology before you could bring it up and looked slightly embarrassed about it, which you found endearing in a way you did not make him aware of. You told him about the forty-seven saved clips and watched his expression do something warm and complicated.

He walked you back to your dorm. He kissed you at the door — soft and unhurried, the specific patience of someone who had been waiting a while and had decided that arriving was enough for now.

You went inside and stood in the hallway for a moment.

Oh, you thought. Not oh no this time. Just — oh.

What followed was three months that assembled themselves quietly and completely, the way good things tended to do when you stopped trying to manage them.

You learned the specific rhythm of being with Logan, which was different from the rhythm of being near Logan, which you had spent seven months memorizing from behind a camera. Being with him was easier. Less careful. The things you had noticed from a professional distance — the way he focused, the way he was with his teammates, the particular quality of his attention when he was genuinely listening were the same up close, just without the glass between you.

He remembered things. That was the detail that accumulated the most weight over three months small things you had said once, in passing, that he filed away and produced later in the specific way of someone who had been listening more carefully than you knew. The coffee order. The fact that you hated the overhead lights in the film room. The name of the professor whose class you had shared with Liana.

You told Olivia about the coffee order detail on a Thursday night and she looked at you with an expression that said everything she was choosing not to say out loud.

"Don't," you said.

"I'm not saying anything," she said.

"You have a face."

"I have my normal face."

"Olivia."

"I'm just glad," she said simply, and went back to whatever she was doing, and you sat with that for a moment and found that you were too.

Logan was also, three months in, still thinking about the check.

Not constantly. Not the way he had in the beginning, when it had surfaced at inconvenient moments, the first dinner, the first time you laughed at something he said, the first time you fell asleep on his shoulder watching something neither of you were paying attention to. Those early weeks it had been a persistent background noise, a low-level static of something he should have said and hadn't.

But the weeks had passed and the static had gotten quieter, the way noise does when you choose not to listen to it long enough. He had paid his rent. He had replaced the equipment. He had told himself, again and again, that he had been going to ask you out anyway, that the money had been incidental, that what they had built in the three months since was real regardless of how it started.

All of that was true.

The part that was also true, the part he didn't let himself look at too directly, was that you didn't know. And not knowing was its own kind of thing, a thing that existed in the space between you without you being aware of it, that he was aware of every time you said something honest to him, every time you looked at him the way you looked at him.

He had meant to tell you. In the beginning. There had been a window, early on, when it would have been a small thing — by the way, Dean made a bet, it's a whole thing, I was going to ask you anyway—. He had rehearsed it. He had not said it. The window had closed, and then it had been a week, and then a month, and then three months, and now saying it felt like dropping something large into a quiet room.

So he didn't say it.

He told himself it didn't matter because it hadn't changed anything real.

He was getting better at believing that.

It was a Saturday afternoon in February, the specific grey-white quality of a winter afternoon that had given up pretending it was going to improve, and you were in Logan's room doing nothing in particular.

This had become one of your favorite things — the doing nothing in particular. You had a tendency, left to your own devices, to fill time with productivity, with scheduled content and edited footage and the general sense that unoccupied time was time being wasted. Logan had, over three months, introduced you to the concept of lying on a bed on a Saturday afternoon and simply existing, which you had resisted and then accepted and now found genuinely necessary.

He was on his back, one arm behind his head, reading something on his phone. You were beside him, legs tangled, working your way through a Cosmopolitan from 2003 that you had found at the thrift store the previous weekend when you had gone with Allie. It had a younger Jennifer Lopez on the cover and approximately forty pages of advertisements for perfumes that no longer existed, and you had bought it for fifty cents because something about it felt like an artifact.

"Listen to this," you said.

"Mm."

"It's a quiz." You held up the magazine. "Is your relationship ready for the next level? I feel like we should take it."

"I feel like that magazine is older than some of our teammates."

"That's what makes it valuable." You turned back to the page. "Okay. Question one. When you picture your future, does your partner feature prominently? Options are: always, sometimes, or only when I'm feeling optimistic."

"Always," Logan said, without looking up from his phone.

You looked at him sideways. He was still reading, expression neutral, like he had answered a question about the weather.

"Okay," you said, and looked back at the magazine, and did not make anything of it, because making something of it would have required acknowledging that it had landed somewhere specific and stayed there.

You worked through several more questions — about communication, about conflict, about shared values — Logan answering in the same unhurried, matter-of-fact way, like the answers had already been decided and he was simply reporting them.

And then you got to the last one.

"Okay, last question." You shifted onto your side to face him. "If your partner made a serious mistake — something that hurt you — what would it take to make things right? Option A: a heartfelt conversation and genuine apology. Option B: time, space, and proof of change. Option C —" you paused, because option C was very 2003 "— a grand romantic gesture. Flowers, candlelight, the whole thing."

You said it like it was funny. You said it with the lightness of someone reading from an old magazine on a Saturday afternoon.

Logan put his phone down.

He looked at the ceiling for a moment. Then he turned his head and looked at you with an expression that was doing something complicated underneath the surface.

"What would you pick?" he said.

You considered it. "Honestly? C, but private. Like not in front of everyone. Just — showing up. With flowers, or peonies, they are my favorite. And meaning it." You paused. "The meaning it is the important part."

Logan looked at the ceiling again.

"Many flowers," he said. His voice was even. Carefully even.

"Like an unreasonable amount," you said. "Like someone made a decision about it."

"Right," he said.

He was quiet for a moment. You looked at him — at the careful evenness of his expression, the specific stillness of someone sitting with something — and almost asked what he was thinking about.

Then he turned back to you with the warm unhurried expression you knew, and kissed your temple.

"Good to know," he said.

You looked back at the magazine. Jennifer Lopez looked back at you, unbothered.

You did not know, lying there on a grey February Saturday, that you had just handed him the exact shape of something he was going to need.

Logan knew.

He stared at the ceiling after you looked away and thought about a check written on the back of a receipt and a conversation in a locker room and the specific, settling weight of something that had been waiting a long time to be said.

Too many flowers, he thought. Private. Meaning it.

He closed his eyes.

I have to tell her, he thought.

He did not tell her.

Allie had not been looking for information.

She had been in the kitchen at the off campus house on a Wednesday evening, waiting for Dean to finish getting ready so they could go to dinner, scrolling through her phone with the patience of someone accustomed to waiting for Dean to finish getting ready. She was not listening. She was not paying attention to anything except the particular injustice of being told seven-fifteen and it being seven-thirty-two.

And then Dean's phone rang on the counter.

She glanced at it automatically. Logan.

Dean came out of the bathroom still pulling on his jacket and picked it up. "Hey. What's up."

Allie went back to her phone.

"What do you mean you need to tell her." Dean's voice had shifted into something lower, more careful. "What's — Logan. Logan, have you not told her yet?"

Allie looked up.

Dean had his back to her, one hand pressed to the counter, the specific posture of someone having a conversation they hadn't prepared for. "It's been three months, man. How have you — okay. Okay, calm down. Just — tell me what happened."

A pause. Dean listening.

"So tell her," Dean said. "Just — tonight. Call her and tell her. It's been long enough, she'll —" another pause "— Logan, I know it's not going to be easy but you can't just — yes I know you actually love her, that's not the — okay, listen —"

Allie set her phone down on the counter very carefully.

"What," she said.

Dean turned around.

The expression on his face moved through several things in quick succession — surprise, recalibration, and then the specific, flattening look of someone who understood exactly what had just happened.

"Allie —"

"What did you do," she said. Not a question.

Dean lowered his phone slowly. On the other end Logan was saying something, unaware.

"Dean." Her voice was very even. "What did you do."

He told her.

He told her all of it — the bet, the thousand dollars, the locker room — and Allie stood in the kitchen and listened with the stillness of someone who was getting progressively more furious in a way that had not yet found its exit.

When he finished she said nothing for a moment.

"She's my friend," she said finally.

"I know —"

"She is my friend and you let her date him for three months without telling her."

"It wasn't supposed to —"

"Dean." She picked up her keys from the counter. "Do not follow me."

"Allie, please just —"

"I have to tell her," she said. "She's my friend. I'm not going to —"

"Please," Dean said, and his voice had lost all its usual confidence, stripped down to something that was just — asking. "Please just give me a chance to fix it. I'll tell Logan to tell her tonight. Just give me —"

"You had your chance to fix it three months ago," Allie said. "And two months ago. And last month." She looked at him for a long moment. "I love you. And you did something really wrong. And she needs to know."

She left.

Dean stood in the kitchen alone and listened to Logan's voice still coming from the phone in his hand.

He put the phone to his ear.

"She already knows," he said.

You were in your aparment when Allie knocked.

She told you everything standing in your doorway, quickly and directly, the way Allie did things — no preamble, no softening, just the facts arranged in order. The bet. The thousand dollars. The locker room. Three months.

You stood very still while she talked.

When she finished you said nothing for a long moment.

"Get your keys," you said.

"(Y/N) —"

"Get your keys, Allie."

The drive to the off campus house took four minutes. You did not speak. Allie drove and you looked at the road ahead and felt cold clarity of someone who had moved past the part where things hurt and into the part where they simply had to be dealt with.

The lights were on when you pulled up. Of course they were.

You didn't knock.

You walked in and Logan was already in the hallway, like he had heard the car, like some part of him had known — and the expression on his face when he saw you was the expression of someone who had been waiting for this and was still not ready for it.

Dean was behind him. Tucker and Garrett further back, in the doorway of the living room, with the expressions of people who understood the room and had decided to stay very still.

"Hey —" Logan started.

"Did you take a bet," you said, "to ask me out."

The hallway was very quiet.

"Yes," Logan said.

The word landed.

"How much," you said.

"A thousand dollars."

You looked at him. This person. This person whose coffee order you knew, whose preemptive apologies you had found endearing, whose smile you had forty-seven saved clips of and only eleven of them were for work.

"You had to be paid," you said. Your voice was very quiet. "Someone had to pay you. To ask me out."

"It wasn't —"

"A thousand dollars," you said. "That's what it cost. That's what asking me out was worth to you. A thousand dollars and someone else's idea."

"That's not —"

"I told you I loved you." The words came out steadier than you expected. "Three weeks ago. In your room. I told you I loved you and you said it back and the whole time —" you stopped. Started again. "The whole time there was a check. There was a check and you knew and you said it back anyway."

"I meant it," Logan said. "I mean it. I love you, that has nothing to do with —"

"It has everything to do with it." Your voice cracked slightly and you pushed past it. "Because maybe you do. Maybe you actually do love me. But I will never know that now. Do you understand that? I will never know which part was real and which part was a thousand dollars because you didn't tell me. You had three months to tell me and you didn't."

"I was going to —"

"When?" you said. "When were you going to tell me? After another month? After a year? Were you ever actually going to tell me or were you just going to keep it and hope I never found out?"

He said nothing.

"That's what I thought," you said.

You turned to Dean.

Dean was standing very still with an expression that had none of his usual ease in it, stripped down, uncomfortable, genuinely ashamed in a way that you recognized as real and that made it worse rather than better.

"I thought you were my friend," you said. Your voice was different now, not cold, something more broken than cold. "I thought — you were supposed to be my friend. I told you things. I told you how I felt about him and you used it. You turned it into a transaction and then you watched me fall in love with him and you said nothing."

"I know," Dean said. His voice was very quiet. "I know."

"I taught you how to use the camera," you said, which was not what you meant to say but came out anyway, and somehow it was the most honest thing — the small specific intimacy of it, the way you had shown him the angles and the settings and he had been genuinely interested and you had thought this is what a friend looks like. "I showed you everything. I thought you were —"

"I was," Dean said. "I am. I'm so sorry."

"Don't." You picked up your bag. "Don't apologize right now. I can't — I need you to not talk to me right now."

You looked at Logan one more time. He was standing in the hallway with his hands at his sides and the open, devastated expression of someone who had run out of words and knew it.

"Please," he said. Just that. Just the word, quiet and without any of the composure he usually wore like a second skin.

"I have to go," you said.

"Please just let me —"

"Logan." Your voice broke on his name, just slightly, and you steadied it. "I have to go."

You walked to the door. Behind you you heard him take a step.

You opened the door.

"You two fucking suck," you said, to the hallway, to both of them, to the three months of Tuesday practices and bus rides and magazine quizzes and I love you said and meant and received by someone who was keeping a check in his jacket pocket the whole time. "Never talk to me again."

You walked out.

Allie was waiting by the car. She took one look at your face and said nothing, just unlocked the doors, and you got in, and she drove, and the campus moved past the windows dark and quiet and entirely indifferent.

You did not cry until you got back to your aparment.

And then you did, for a while, with Olivia sitting beside you saying nothing because there was nothing to say, just being there the way people who actually loved you were there when things went wrong.

You had to be paid, you thought, in the dark.

A thousand dollars.

The house was very quiet after you left.

Tucker and Garrett had retreated to the living room. Nobody was saying anything.

Dean sat on the bottom step of the stairs and put his head in his hands.

Logan stood in the hallway where you had left him and looked at the closed door and thought about everything — the check, the locker room, the first dinner, the magazine quiz on a grey February Saturday, too many flowers, private, meaning it — and underneath all of it, constant and quiet, the thing he had known for three months and had managed to convince himself didn't matter:

You had deserved to know.

You had deserved to know from the beginning and he had chosen not to tell you and you stood in his hallway and said I will never know which part was real and he had had no answer because there was no answer that fixed that.

Garrett appeared in the doorway of the living room. He looked at Logan for a long moment.

"I told you not to," he said. Not unkindly. Just said.

"I know," Logan said.

"From the beginning. I told you."

"I know, Garrett."

Garrett looked at him for another moment. Then he went back to the living room without saying anything else, which was somehow the most devastating response available.

Logan sat down on the floor of the hallway with his back against the wall and stared at nothing.

I have to fix this, he thought.

He had absolutely no idea how.

The email to the athletics department went out the following morning.

It was professional and brief — you cited personal reasons, thanked them for the opportunity, offered to train your replacement, gave two weeks notice. You sent it before you could think about it too hard, before the part of you that loved the job could talk the other part out of it.

You were not going to sit in that rink anymore. You were not going to film those practices or those games or stand in that corridor outside the locker room with your tripod and your equipment bag and pretend that everything was the same as it had been before.

Your phone had messages from Logan and Dean by noon. You read none of them.

The football team's social media coordinator reached back out by the end of the day.

You started the following Monday.

The football team was different from the hockey team in ways that were both obvious and unexpected. Louder, in some ways. Different rhythms, different energy. The guys were nice and the work was interesting and you were good at it, because you were good at this, that had never been in question.

You were fine.

You were getting finer by the day, which was either progress or a very convincing impression of it.

Allie texted. Garrett texted — I'm sorry, for what it's worth I told him not to — which you appreciated more than you could say. Tucker sent a single text that just said I tried to talk him out of it and you believed him and told him so.

You did not respond to Logan.

Logan's days had a new shape to them and he hated it.

Practice was the same, same drills, same ice, same team, but the stands were wrong. The spot where you always sat, third row back on the left side, was empty now, and he knew it was empty without lookin. He looked anyway. Every practice, every morning skate, every film session, he looked, and the spot was empty, and he looked away.

Logan texted you every three days. Not long messages, just checking in, just your name sometimes, just I know you don't want to hear from me right now but I'm sorry. He did not expect responses. He sent them anyway because not sending them felt worse.

He watched your football content. Every post, every reel, every behind-the-scenes clip. He watched the way you filmed the new team — the same eye, the same instinct for the right moment, the same ability to make something look like something worth watching — and felt the specific, particular ache of someone who understood what they had lost because they had been paying attention to it the whole time.

He had always been paying attention.

That was the thing that made it so much worse.

Three weeks after you left, the hockey team got a new social media person.

Her name was Jade. She was a sophomore, enthusiastic, slightly overwhelmed, and she had asked you to walk her through the setup on a Tuesday morning when the team had a late practice, which meant you were in the rink, with your old equipment, showing someone else how to use the angles you had spent seven months learning, when the team came off the ice.

You had not planned for this. You had assumed they would be gone by the time you were done.

They were not gone.

You heard them before you saw them, he familiar noise of the team coming out of the locker room corridor and then Tucker saw you first and stopped walking so abruptly that Garrett walked into him.

"What —" Garrett looked up. Saw you. His expression did something complicated.

The rest of the team filtered out around them, and then Dean, and then Logan, and the corridor went through a specific collective recalibration.

You kept your face completely neutral. "Hey," you said, to the general group. "This is Jade. She's taking over the social media. I'm just showing her the setup."

Jade waved cheerfully, unaware of the atmospheric pressure of the corridor.

"Taking over?" Tucker said slowly.

"Yes," you said. "I moved to football." You said it simply, like it was information and not anything else. "Jade is great, she's going to do a really good job."

The team was looking at you with various expressions. Tucker looked pained. Garrett looked like he was doing math.

Dean was looking at the floor.

Logan was looking at you with the expression of someone watching something leave that they had already lost and were only now understanding the full shape of. You could feel it without looking directly at him. You had spent seven months learning the specific weight of his attention.

"You're actually leaving," Tucker said. "Like permanently."

"I already left," you said. "This is just the handover."

"But —" Tucker started.

"Tuck," you said, gently. "It's fine. Jade is great."

Jade smiled again.

"We kind of made you leave," Tucker said, in the specific tone of someone who had been holding something for three weeks and had finally said it out loud.

"Tucker —"

"No, like —" he stopped. Looked at Dean. Looked at Logan. Looked back at you. "We made you leave. That's what happened. And I just — I'm sorry. I don't know what else to say but I'm sorry."

The corridor was very quiet.

"You didn't make me leave," you said carefully. "You tried to talk him out of it. I know that."

Tucker nodded. Still pained.

"Right," Garrett said finally, in the tone of someone deciding to be graceful about something painful. "Good luck with football."

"Thanks," you said.

You turned back to Jade and kept going with the walkthrough, and the team filed past, and you did not look at Logan as he walked by even though you could feel him slowing down, even though you could feel him wanting to say something.

"Hey," Logan said. Very quietly. Just that.

You kept your eyes on the camera settings you were showing Jade.

He stood there for a moment. Then his footsteps continued down the corridor.

You exhaled very quietly and kept talking to Jade about angles.

Behind you, fading, you heard Dean say something low and urgent to Logan that you couldn't make out. And Logan's response, quieter still:

"I know."

Logan started showing up.

Not to you, he respected the never talk to me again enough not to push himself into your space. But he started showing up in the ways that were available to him.

He fixed the tripod mount in the storage room that had been broken since October — the one you had mentioned once, months ago, in passing, because it made the camera angle slightly off and you had learned to compensate for it. He left a note on it that said finally fixed it. sorry it took so long. No signature. He didn't need one.

He started showing up to the football team's games.

Not every game. Not in a way that was dramatic or obvious. Just there, in the stands, with the quiet patience of someone who had decided that if the mountain wouldn't come to him he would go to the mountain and sit in the stands and watch from a respectful distance.

Olivia told you the second time it happened.

"He was there again," she said carefully.

You said nothing.

"He's not doing anything," she said. "He's just — there. Watching."

You said nothing.

"I thought you should know," she said.

You knew.

You knew because you had clocked him the first time — third row back, left side,— and you had kept filming and not said anything and thought about it for three days.

He texted you after the third game.

logan: you got a good shot of the QB in the third quarter. the one right before the play call. it was good.

You stared at the message for a long time.

yn: how would you know

logan: i was there

A long pause.

logan: i'll keep coming if that's okay. i won't bother you. i just want to be there.

You put your phone down.

You picked it up.

yn: it's okay

Dean did not sleep the night you found out.

He lay in his bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about the specific expression on your face when you said I thought you were my friend — not angry, which would have been easier, but broken, which was not easier at all.

At four in the morning he picked up his phone.

dean: allie

allie: i'm awake

dean: i know i really messed up

allie: yes

dean: i don't know how to fix it

A long pause.

allie: you start by not trying to fix it. you start by just being sorry.

dean: i am

allie: i know. she needs to hear it from you. not a text. not through anyone else. you.

dean: she said never talk to her again

allie: i know what she said. give her time. and then go.

Dean put his phone down.

He stared at the ceiling until it got light outside.

You took your own sweet time.

Not to feel better, you were not operating under the illusion that time fixed everything, but to feel what you needed to feel without an audience. You went to classes. You went to work. You filmed the football team's Tuesday practice and focused on the angles and the light and the professional satisfaction of a job done well, and you did not think about hockey, and you did not look at your phone when certain names appeared on the screen, and you let Olivia bring you food and watch bad television with you without making you talk about it.

On the fourteenth day Dean was waiting outside your lecture hall.

He looked terrible. Not dramatically terrible — Dean was constitutionally incapable of looking terrible — but tired.

You stopped when you saw him.

He held up both hands. "I'm not here to make excuses," he said. "I know you said never talk to me again. I know. I just — five minutes. And then I'll go and I won't bother you again if that's what you want."

You looked at him for a long moment.

You stepped to the side of the path, out of the flow of people. He followed.

"Say what you have to say," you said.

Dean looked at you with the expression you had never seen on him before, no performance, no charm deployed at the right moment, nothing managed. Just a person who had done something wrong and knew it and was standing in front of the person he had done it to.

"I've never had a friend like you before," he said. "Like — actually. I have guy friends. I have girls I've hooked up, almost dated or whatever. But I've never had a girl who was just — a friend. Who I talked to and who talked to me and who I could be around without it being anything else." He paused. "And I took that and I made it into a scheme. And I told myself I was helping and maybe part of me was but part of me just — didn't think far enough ahead. Didn't think about what it would mean to you if you found out. Didn't think about you at all, honestly, which is the thing I'm most sorry about." He held your gaze. "I thought about Logan being in love with you and I thought about the bet being clever and I didn't think about you being a person who deserved to know the truth. And I should have. You should have been the first thing I thought about."

The path had mostly emptied. A bird somewhere was doing something aggressively cheerful.

"I miss my friend," Dean said. "I know I don't get to just say that. I know. I just needed you to know that it's real. You are actually my friend and I actually miss you and I'm actually sorry, not sorry like I feel bad, sorry like I understand what I did."

You looked at him.

You thought about the bus and his head on your shoulder and on the team, I meant and the way he had looked genuinely wounded when you said Tucker was probably your better friend on the team.

"It's going to take time," you said finally.

Something in his expression shifted — careful, not quite hope yet.

"I know," he said.

"You don't get to just be normal yet. We have to rebuild that."

"I know."

"And you have to actually be different," you said. "Not just sorry. Different."

"I will be," he said. "I already am. Or I'm trying to be." He paused. "Is that enough to start with?"

You looked at him for a long moment.

"It's enough to start with," you said.

The careful-not-quite-hope became something more than that.

"Thank you," he said quietly.

"Don't thank me yet," you said. "We have a long way to go."

"I know," he said. "I'll go as slow as you need."

You looked at the path ahead.

"I have class," you said.

"I know. Go."

You went.

It was a start.

Logan was harder.

Not because you were angrier at him — you were, if you were being honest, angry at both of them in equal measure, just differently. Dean had betrayed a friendship. Logan had betrayed something larger, something that had your name on it, something you had handed him on a grey February Saturday when you said I love you and meant it with everything you had.

You saw him at the football games. Third row back, left side, every time. Not looking at you directly, just there, present, with the quiet patience of someone who had decided that showing up was the only thing available to him and had committed to it without reservation.

He sent you a text after every game. Not about him, not about them, about your work. Good shot in the second half. The one where you caught the receiver right before the snap. The slow motion reel you posted was really good. The timing was perfect. Small specific things that said I was paying attention without saying anything else.

You read them all.

You responded to some of them.

Small things. Thanks. I almost didn't post that one. Nothing that opened a door, just acknowledgment. The acknowledgment of someone who was not ready and was not pretending to be and was also not entirely gone.

He was not pushing. That was the thing you noticed most. He had shown up to three football games and fixed a broken tripod mount and sent careful specific texts about your work and he had not once asked for anything in return. Had not once said I think we should talk or please give me a chance or any of the things that would have made it easier to keep the door closed.

He was just — there.

Being different.

The grand gesture arrived on a Thursday, five weeks after the fight.

You were in the football team's equipment room going through footage on your laptop when someone knocked on the door. One of the managers looked in.

"There's someone outside asking for you," he said, with the specific expression of someone who had seen something and found it notable.

You went outside.

The path outside the athletics building was where you found him — Logan, in the cold, with flowers. Not a bunch. Not a normal amount. An amount that represented a decision — sunflowers and peonies and something small and white, wrapped loosely in paper, assembled with the specific intention of being too many, more than one person could reasonably carry, held in both arms with the careful energy of someone who had thought about this and decided it was not enough and added more anyway.

You looked at the flowers. You looked at him.

He looked tired in the same way he had looked tired since the night you left — not dramatic, not performing it, just genuinely worn down in the way of someone who had been carrying something for five weeks without putting it down.

"You said private," he said. "Too many flowers. Someone made a decision." He paused. "I made a decision."

Your throat did something inconvenient.

"Logan —"

"I'm not asking you to forgive me today," he said. "I just you said meaning it was the important part. And I needed you to see that I mean it. That's all. I'm not asking for anything."

You looked at the flowers. Peonies. He had gotten peonies specifically.

"You remembered the peonies," you said.

"You mentioned them once," he said. "A long time ago."

"You were paying attention," you said.

"I was always paying attention," he said quietly. "That was never the problem."

You stood there in the cold outside the athletics building and thought about I will never know which part was real and the third row left side and the texts about your work and five weeks of him being different without being asked to prove it.

"This isn't enough," you said.

Something flickered in his expression.

"I know," he said.

"I need more than flowers."

"I know," he said again, steadily. "Tell me what you need. Whatever it is. I'll do it."

You looked at him for a long moment.

"I need time," you said. "Real time. Not rushing. Not us going back to how things were because it was comfortable and we missed each other. Actually starting over and doing it right."

"Okay," he said.

"I need you to keep showing up," you said. "Not just when it's easy. When it's hard and uncertain and you don't know if it's working. You keep showing up anyway."

"I will," he said.

"And I need you to understand that I might get angry again," you said. "Even after I've forgiven you. It might come back and I might need to say something and you have to let me say it without shutting down."

"I will," he said. "I'll listen. Every time."

You looked at him.

"The texts," you said. "About my work."

"Yeah."

"You were at every game."

"Yeah."

"Third row back. Left side."

He looked at you quietly.

"I know," you said. "I noticed."

Something in his expression shifted.

"I was always going to ask you out," he said. "I need you to know that. Not as an excuse. Just as a true thing. The money didn't change what I felt. It just — it gave me a reason I shouldn't have needed and I took it and I'm sorry. But what happened between us was real. Every single part of it was real."

"I know," you said, which surprised you slightly, because you hadn't known you knew until you said it. "I know it was real. That's what made it hurt so much."

He nodded.

"Give me the peonies," you said.

He carefully extracted the peonies from the arrangement and held them out. You took them.

"The rest you can take home," you said.

"Okay."

"And Logan —" you paused. "The showing up. Don't stop."

Something broke open in his expression — not dramatically, not loudly, just quietly and completely, the expression of someone who had been holding something for five weeks and had finally been given a place to put it down.

"I won't," he said. "I promise."

You looked at him for one more moment.

"Slow," you said.

"As slow as you need," he said. "I'm not going anywhere."

You went back inside.

You stood in the equipment room with the peonies and thought about everything — the check and the bet and the fight and five weeks of third row left side and too many flowers on a Thursday afternoon in the cold.

You were not okay yet.

But you were standing with peonies, which was somewhere.

It was enough to start with.

The getting back together did not happen all at once.

It happened the way the crush had happened — gradually, against nobody's will this time, the way things did when they had been building for a long time and had finally found the right conditions.

The first time you went back to the rink it was not for work.

It was a Saturday game, mid-March, the kind that mattered for standings, and you had told yourself you were going because Allie and Hannah were going and Olivia was going and it was a group thing and had nothing to do with anything else.

You brought your camera.

Not the work camera your personal one, the smaller one you used when you were filming for yourself rather than for a content schedule. You told yourself it was habit. You told yourself you just liked having it.

You sat third row left side.

The thing about watching hockey when you actually knew what you were looking at was that it was a completely different experience from watching hockey when you were just there for the atmosphere. You knew the plays. You knew the patterns. You knew which moments were about to become something before they became something, the specific pre-motion stillness that preceded a good play, the way certain players telegraphed their intentions without knowing they were doing it.

You knew Logan's tells better than anyone.

Which was why you had your camera up and ready when he got the puck in the second period the slight shift of his weight, the way his head came up a half second before anyone else's, and then the play unfolding exactly the way you had known it would, clean and fast and entirely worth watching.

You got the shot.

Forty-three seconds of it, actually.

You lowered the camera and looked at what you had captured and felt something settle in your chest that was warm and quiet and entirely familiar.

Genuinely cinematic, you thought, and smiled at the ice.

Briar won.

The team filtered out of the locker room in the usual way in ones and twos, loud and post-game, spilling into the corridor where the usual group had gathered. Allie found Dean. Hannah found Garrett. Tucker found someone to complain to about a call in the third period.

You were reviewing footage on your camera when you felt someone stop beside you.

You looked up.

Logan was still in half his gear, hair damp, and he was looking at you with the expression you had forty-seven saved clips of — the real one, the one that had nothing managed about it — except that now you were allowed to look at it directly, which was still something you were getting used to.

"You came," he said.

"I came," you confirmed.

"You brought your camera."

"I brought my camera."

He looked at it. He looked at you. "Did you get anything good?"

You turned the camera around and hit play. The second period play unfolded on the small screen — the weight shift, the half second of stillness, the clean fast movement of something that knew exactly where it was going.

Forty-three seconds of it.

Logan watched it. Something in his expression went soft in the specific way it did when he was actually feeling something and had decided not to manage it.

"That's —" he started.

"Genuinely cinematic," you said.

He looked at you.

You looked back at him.

And then he kissed you right there in the corridor.

It was warm and certain and tasted like relief of something that had been a long time coming and had finally, simply, arrived.

When you pulled back he was smiling the real one, the one you had been filming without quite admitting why for seven months.

"So," he said.

"Yeah," you said. "We're back together." You pointed at him. "Don't fuck up."

Logan laughed a real one, surprised and warm, the kind that carried down the corridor and made Tucker laugh too without knowing why.

"I won't," he said.

"I mean it."

"I know you mean it."

"Good." You tucked your camera back into your bag. "Buy me food. I've been at a hockey game for two hours and I'm starving."

"Done," he said immediately.

You started walking and everything was different from before, which was the whole point, which was exactly what you had asked for.

Better. Not the same. Better.

Behind you, fading, you heard Tucker say something to Garrett.

"Called it," Tucker said.

"You called nothing," Garrett said.

"I said they'd get back together —"

"You said that last week —"

"Which was a call —"

"Tucker —"

You and Logan kept walking.

"Do they ever stop?" you said.

"No," Logan said.

"Good," you said. "I missed it."

He looked at you sideways. That expression.

note: i may or may not do a part two, my motivation fluctuates! hope you enjoy because this was super sad to write.

He’s looking at her.

His arm rests along the back of the couch, the sensation of it familiar enough that you barely notice it anymore. Every few minutes, when someone says something particularly funny, his hand shifts and his fingers brush against the exposed skin of your shoulder blade. It’s casual, absent-minded contact. It means nothing to him and everything to you.

Around you, the boys’ house is lively. Tucker is arguing with Birdie about the game they’ve been at for hours on the TV. Every once in a while, someone tells them to shut up. They do that for a total of five minutes before someone inevitably raises their voice, leading the other to do the same.

You should be finishing up your story. It was a stupid tale, one about falling asleep during a lecture.

Instead, you’re watching him.

Or rather, you’re watching where he’s looking.

His gaze drifts across the room so often that you’ve begun anticipating it, finding yourself following the path before he’s even finished turning his head. It happens during conversations. During periods of silence. During moments when he’s supposed to be paying attention you.

His eyes always find the same person.

You wonder if anyone else notices.

Maybe they don’t. Maybe they haven’t spent nearly ten years studying every version of John Logan.

Ten years.

Long enough to remember the cracked sidewalks of your hometown and the suffocating certainty that neither of you belonged there. Long enough to remember sitting on the roof of his garage at thirteen years old, passing back and forth what was always bag of Hot Cheetos while making promises far too big for kids your age.

You had been determined to leave.

And somehow, against every odd stacked against two middle-schoolers with seemingly unattainable dreams and no real plan, you did.

You earned your place through a STEM scholarship that had consumed countless nights and enough caffeine to raise alerts towards your cardiovascular system. He earned his through hockey, through early mornings and bruises and a relentless dedication that you supported him all throughout.

Different roads, same destination.

For nearly a decade, the two of you had existed side by side.

And for six of those years, you’ve loved him.

You weren’t sure when you realized it, but once you did, it felt as though things finally clicked into place. There had always been that speculation from others that you two were something beyond a mere friendship—but there was no weight to it. Not while it wasn’t true, anyway.

You thought it may have been the puberty. John was no longer a scrawny kid who you hovered over. He’d grown into himself as the years passed—taller, stronger, more confident. It was a simple crush that came as a result of change, you told yourself.

But you had began to think it was more than that, that it always had been. Once the feeling arrived, it made no effort to fade—settling into the empty spaces between inside jokes and late-night phone calls, between shared victories and devastating failures. It lodged itself so deeply within your bond that you stopped looking for where friendship ended and something else began.

Maybe that was your mistake.

Across the room, Hannah laughs.

The sound is soft enough that most people would miss it beneath the chatter, but John hears it.

Of course he does.

Hannah Wells has a way of drawing attention effortlessly. Her smile comes easily, brightening her entire face like a Christmas tree. Honey-brown hair spills over one shoulder as she speaks. Her deep cerulean eyes crinkle when she laughs. Hearing her sing for the first time made it no better.

And she is so kind.

She remembers your birthday, she asks you questions on a subject you think had long been over. She makes you feel seen.

It’s impossible to blame him for looking.

The problem is that lately, he hasn’t seemed capable of looking anywhere else.

His fingers brush your shoulder again, mindlessly.

Across the room, Hannah says something to Allie that you can’t quite make out.

Logan smiles.

And suddenly, despite his arm around you and his knee pressed lightly against yours and nearly ten years of friendship sitting comfortably between the two of you, you’ve never felt further away from him.

Tucker notices your shift in mood before Logan does. You like Tuck the most out of all of Logan’s friends. He’s a year below the rest of you, though you like to say he’s the most mature out of all of them. He’s observant, you learned.

He tilts his head at you, silently asking if you’re okay. You send him a half-hearted thumbs up. Something clicks for him and he accepts your answer, redirecting his attention to the game.

You think Tucker knows about your crush on John. A part of you hopes he doesn’t, but another part of you knows that he does.

At some point, Logan notices you’ve stopped talking. By the time he has, you’re fiddling with your bracelet. He frowns, glancing at his own matching one on his left wrist. You were both surprised they had never broken. Logan enjoyed referring to it as a testament to your long-standing friendship. The blue and purple embroidery of both your bracelets have become a halo of fuzz, but they remain intact nonetheless.

Logan glances back at you, studying you once again—knit eyebrows, lip tucked between your teeth. You’re upset.

“What’s wrong?”

You meet his doe eyed gaze and hate yourself for thinking about drowning in them. He knows you as well as you know him. So much so that you can’t lie and pretend you’re okay. He’s read you and he’s decided that you’re not.

So you do the next best thing.

“It’s just stuffy in here,” you reply passively, maintaining a poker face when you push off the couch and his fingertips leave your shoulder blades. “I’m gonna get some air.”

The cool evening air hits you the second the front door clicks shut, but it does nothing to clear the sudden suffocating weight in your chest. You walk over to the edge of the porch, gripping the wooden railing just to have something solid to hold onto.

Behind you, the front door opens and shuts. Familiar footsteps thud against the wood. You don’t need to turn around to know it’s him, you’d know the specific cadence of his stride anywhere.

"Hey," Logan says softly, stepping up beside you, jacket in his hand. He leans his forearms against the railing, his large frame blocking out the slight breeze. "You left your jacket inside. It’s freezing out here."

You make no effort to retrieve the coat from his grasp. You don’t look even at him. Instead, your eyes fixate on a tiny, industrious spider crawling across the top of a plastic patio chair a few feet away. It is small, frantic, and entirely unaware of the shifting plates of your universe, completely consumed by the monumental task of weaving a web between two cheap slats of faux-wicker. You envy it. You want to be anything else—a spider, a piece of dust, a thread on your frayed bracelet—anything but the girl standing under the porch light, slowly unraveling.

"I'm fine," you tell him, the words slipping out easily, rehearsed from a decade of practice.

"You're not fine," he insists softly. It’s not an accusation. It’s a statement of fact.

"I am fine," you repeat, but your voice is uneven.

You always are, somehow. It’s a reflex by now. Burn the midnight oil until your vision blurs, crash through exams on three hours of sleep, watch the boy you’ve loved for six years slip through your fingers like water—the answer is always the same: I’m fine.

"Don't do that," Logan mutters, turning his head to look at you. His eyes are swimming with an earnest yet frustrating concern that always makes you want to spill your guts. "We don't do that. Talk to me. Did someone say something inside? Did I do something?"

You let out a breath that cuts like a laugh, though there’s no humor in it. You look out at the dark front yard, at the dead leaves scattering across the pavement.

You finally turn your head to look at him. You note the exact way the yellow porch light catches the bridge of his nose, the slight shadow of stubble along his jawline. You know every iteration of this face. You know the childhood version, the teenage version, and this current, devastatingly handsome collegiate version.

And yet, looking at him right now, he feels like a stranger wearing your best friend's skin.

"That's just it, Logan. You haven't done anything." Your voice drops, stripped of its usual warmth. "You haven't been doing anything. Not with me, anyway."

He blinks, a small, defensive crease forming between his eyebrows. "I don’t understand.”

“I know you don’t,” you murmur.

“Then explain it to me.”

"It means you’re pulling away," you say directly, the words tasting like copper in your mouth, but you force them out anyway. You don't mention Hannah. You don't have to bring up the way his eyes track her, or the way his laugh sounds higher when she’s in the room. This isn't about her. This is about him. This is about the space where your best friend used to be. "You’re always somewhere else. I talk to you, and it’s like I’m throwing words into an empty room. You look right through me lately. You’re right here, and it feels like there’s a thousand miles between us."

Logan stiffens. For a second, his mouth opens to deny it, the knee-jerk reaction of a guy who prides himself on being loyal. But as he looks at you—at the tight line of your jaw, at the way you're holding onto your own arm like you’re trying to keep yourself from falling apart—you can see the fight slowly leave him.

The silence stretches, punctuated only by the joyous yells of your friends inside.

"I didn't. . .” Logan starts, his voice dropping an octave. He rubs a hand over the back of his neck, looking down at his shoes. "I didn't realize I was making you feel like that. I swear to God, I didn't."

"Well, you are." Your voice trembles just a fraction, and you hate yourself for it, pulling your shoulders back to overcompensate. "I know that friends drift. But I don’t wanna be background noise in your life.”

Logan steps closer, closing the small physical gap between you. He reaches out, his large hand wrapping around your forearm—right over the frayed threads of your bracelet. You pray he doesn’t notice the hitching of your breath.

"You're not background noise," he says sincerely, his desperate eyes searching yours. "You could never be. I'm sorry. Seriously. I've had. . . I’ve just had a lot on my mind lately, and I’ve been distracted. I’ve been a shitty best friend, and there’s no excuse for it. I’m so sorry."

You look at his hand on your arm. You look at the genuine regret pulling at the corners of his eyes. He doesn't know that the distraction is killing you for an entirely different reason. He just knows he hurt his person, and he wants to fix it.

You swallow the ache in your throat, nodding slowly. You let the anger go, because holding onto it hurts worse than forgiving him does.

"It’s okay," you assure him. "Just don’t forget about me, dork.”

"Never," he promises, squeezing your arm before letting go. A small, relieved smile tugs at his lips, the tension leaving his shoulders. He makes no effort to back away from you. It’s all the more suffocating. "I promise. Hey, you still have that big winter showcase coming up in two weeks, right? For your department?"

"Yeah," you say, a genuine spark of nervousness lighting up your stomach. "It’s the Friday after this upcoming one."

"I'll be there," Logan says instantly, his voice full of the certainty that usually makes you feel safe. "Front row. I'll even wear a stupid button-down shirt so your professors think I'm respectable. Deal?"

You look at him, wanting so badly to trust the boy who used to share bags of Hot Cheetos on a garage roof.

"Deal," you agree.

The fluorescent lights of the auditorium are blinding. It is 5:30PM. The STEM showcase had officially kicked off at five, the culmination of sleepless semesters, data sheets that blurred into meaningless code by three in the morning, and enough stress to permanently alter your brain chemistry.

Your phone sits completely dark and powered down in the bottom of your tote bag. You hadn't sent Logan a reminder text today. You hadn’t wanted to seem needy, and besides, you figured he’d remember.

He knew what this meant to you. He’d been the one to hold you on the floor of your bedroom a week ago ago when the overthinking caught up to you, his large hands rubbing slow circles into your back while you sobbed into his chest, terrified that it wouldn’t be enough. He’d promised then, just like he’d promised on the porch, that he’d be here.

Last night, you had even swung by the hockey house, your presentation slides printed out and shaking in your hands, just looking for a final bit of reassurance to quiet the jitters. But Logan wasn't there. He’d been at Malone’s, helping Hannah setup tables and banners for the upcoming weekend showcase she offered to host for music majors.

It was fine, you told yourself. It really was. He was trying to be better, and you could see the effort. The crush was still a persistent ache in your ribs, but he hadn't let it bleed into your friendship the way he had before. You understood what it was like to be at someone’s beck and call—hell, you’d been at his for six years. You couldn't blame him for falling under Hannah’s gravitational pull.

Logan hadn't been there last night, but Tucker had.

Tucker had stopped chopping vegetables, wiped his hands on a dish towel, and sat you down at the kitchen island. He listened to you stumble through your abstract, giving you a supportive nod when you finished. When you told Tucker he didn't have to worry about coming tomorrow since it was so last minute and Logan would be there anyway, Tucker had just given you an easy smile.

“Then you’ll have two of us cheering you on," he’d promised.

Now, standing by your trifold and your laptop, the nerves are a sickening weight in your stomach. You’ve just finished presenting to the final round of judges. Your mouth is dry, your throat tight, but you’d gotten through it just fine.

Tucker had slipped into the back of the room right before your time slot, his broad shoulders cutting a reassuring silhouette against the crowded aisle. Seeing his familiar face had kept your knees from buckling.

But Logan’s seat in the front row—the one he’d promised to occupy in a stupid button-down shirt—remained completely empty.

It hurts. A sharp, localized sting right beneath your breastbone. You hadn't told anyone else in your life about the showcase because public speaking made you feel entirely naked, meaning Logan and Tucker were your only safety nets.

Everyone else would most likely be at Malone’s. You didn’t want them to choose between you and Hannah, because you knew they’d try to compromise, complicating things. You didn’t want a whole crowd, you were okay with just one person being there.

But you swallow the lump in your throat and smooth down the fabric of your slacks. It’s fine. Logan probably just got caught in campus traffic, or he had a handyman gig that kept him late. He missed the actual presentation, yeah, but there’s still time. The showcase goes until eight.

As long as he shows up before the winners are announced, it’ll be fine. He’ll still be there to celebrate with you. He has to be.

Two hours later, the auditorium is a blur of echoing applause and bright flashing cameras.

When the department head speaks your name into the microphone, announcing you as the first-place recipient of the showcase, the room erupts. Your peers are cheering, clapping you on the back as you walk up the stage, but the sound feels like it’s happening underwater.

Even the heavy glass they hang around your neck and the oversized novelty check—grant money that will entirely fund your next semester of research—do nothing to lift the leaden weight in your chest.

Tucker maneuvers through the crowd as soon as you’ve left the stage, a massive, proud smile lighting up his face as he pulls you into a bone-crushing hug. He hoists you slightly off your feet, laughing, telling you he always knew you had it in the bag.

But when he pulls back, his smile falters. He looks at your eyes, watery and strained, and the pride in his expression softens into a deep concern. He knows. He can tell exactly how badly you're hurting.

But even now, with a first-place medal heavy against your sternum, you find yourself building a fortress of excuses for John Logan.

You give him the benefit of the doubt, because the alternative is unendurable. He’d never do this intentionally. Not after last week. Not to you. Something had to have happened. A family emergency with his mom. Something with Jules. Maybe he’d taken a brutal hit at practice and was sitting in the training room with a concussion, his phone locked away. He had to be hurt. He had to be incapacitated.

"Let's get you out of here," Tucker says softly, his hand settling on the small of your back, shielding you from the lingering crowds as you pack up your laptop. "I can walk you back to your dorm."

"Actually," you say, your voice tight as you zip your tote bag, "can you take me back to the house? Honestly, after the day I’ve had, I’m dying for a home-cooked Tucker special. I need some real comfort food."

You try to make it sound like a casual request, but Tucker’s hand goes entirely still against your back. He doesn't laugh it off. Instead, an uncomfortable hesitation washes over his features. He looks away, his jaw tightening as he stares out at the emptying auditorium.

In that single beat of silence, a cold and sickening realization dawns on you.

Perhaps Logan isn't sick. Perhaps he isn't hurt. He isn't in a hospital or dealing with a family crisis. Tucker knows exactly where he is.

He forgot.

The thought devastates you, a physical blow that leaves you in theoretical agony, but right on the heels of the sadness comes a sharp, blistering wave of fury. You’re a winner. You just secured your future for the next semester. This should be one of the greatest nights of your life, and yet Logan has latched himself so deeply into the fabric of your existence that he can still ruin it without even being in the room. You hate yourself for letting him have that much power over you.

"You sure you want to go to the house right now?" Tucker asks, his voice uncharacteristically quiet, laced with a warning he isn't entirely voicing.

You stop, staring at him. Your chest heaves. "Why? Is he there?"

Tucker looks at you, his brown eyes full of a grim, reluctant pity. He stays silent. He doesn't say a word, but his silence tells you everything you need to know. He's there. He's perfectly fine, at the hockey house while you were standing on a stage alone.

A hot, dangerous spark ignites in your blood.

"Take me there," you say, your voice dropping all the compliance, hard as flint. He begins to say your name, but you don’t allow him to. "Tucker. Take me to the house."

The ride to the hockey house is quick, though you believe that’s a product of the heavy thrum of your own pulse. Tuck keeps one hand on the steering wheel, your grim mood proving itself to be contagious.

Every few minutes, his voice breaks through the quiet of the truck, telling you to take a breath, telling you to try to calm down. But you can hear the sharp undercurrent of his own anger fueling the engine. He’s pissed on your behalf, but you don't have the capacity to appreciate it right now. You just stare straight ahead.

When the truck comes to a stop in the driveway, you don't wait for Tucker to kill the ignition. You throw the door open and march up the steps, completely ignoring him as he calls your name.

You push the door open, not so much that it was disruptive, but it was noticeable nonetheless.

The warmth of the house hits you first, along with the loud, easy cacophony of a Friday night wind-down. The TV is on, and everyone is scattered across the living room. Allie, Garrett, Dean, and Hannah.

And Logan.

The sheer normalcy of the scene feels like a slap to the face. You stand in the entryway, the first-place medal swinging slightly against your chest, dressed in the gray slacks and blouse you’d picked out so carefully. For a fraction of a second, looking at their relaxed posture and happy faces, you feel entirely microscopic. Like an ant on the back of someone’s boot, completely insignificant to the world revolving around them.

Then, the room goes quiet.

Dean is the first one to look up from the couch. His eyes take in your sharp posture, the formal attire, and finally, the heavy piece hung around your neck catching the ambient light. A grin breaks across his face, completely ignorant of the storm cloud rolling off your shoulders.

"Look at that," Dean announces, raising his cup in a mock toast. "The prodigal daughter returns!"

He’s trying to be supportive. Under any other circumstance, you’d smile, you’d thank him through narrowed eyes. You know he doesn't know. He has no idea what Logan promised, or what it cost you to stand on that stage alone.

But you don't look at Dean. You don't look at Garrett or Allie or Hannah.

Your eyes lock onto Logan.

He’s sitting on the edge of the cushions, and the exact moment your gaze finds his, the color drains completely from his face. It’s like watching a man realize he’s stepped off a cliff. His eyes drop to the medal on your chest, then snap back up to your face, wide and absolutely crushed. The realization of what he’s done hits him in a ton of bricks.

Usually, that look on his face would undo you. Usually, seeing John Logan look that miserable would trigger every protective instinct you’ve harbored for him, making you want to soften the blow, to tell him it’s fine, to smooth it over.

But tonight, you feel absolutely nothing.

The reservoir of sympathy has completely dried up, replaced by a fury that has been bubbling beneath the surface for months.

He hadn't just missed a presentation. He had broken a promise. He had lied to your face on the porch, sworn he was back, and then willfully chose to be somewhere else.

You stare at him, the silence in the room turning suffocatingly loud as the others finally catch onto the tension, and the only thought roaring through your mind is how completely invisible you’ve been to him.

That look of shame is enough gratification for you. If he can feel only a fraction of the pain you’d allowed yourself to endure these past few years, that was good for you. You couldn’t stand staring into the eyes of the man you once thought you knew anymore.

You turn your heel against the floorboards, every instinct screaming at you to walk out that door, to erase John Logan from your life, and to leave him standing in the wreckage of a ten-year friendship.

"Wait," his voice cracks through the silence of the room as he calls your name. "Please wait. I’m sorry. Just—please, just wait!”

You halt entirely. Your flats glue themselves to the floor, the medallion thudding against your chest like a pendulum swinging into a dead stop.

Sorry?

The word tastes rancid just hearing it bounce off the walls of the hockey house. You hadn't known what you wanted him to say when you walked through that door.

You hadn't known if there was a combination of vowels and consonants in the English language that could possibly fix this. But hearing his apology serves as nothing other than gasoline thrown directly onto a grease fire.

Slowly, you turn back around.

Your friends look horrified. You almost feel bad that they’re forced to witness this. You almost want to turn around and leave, leaving this argument for when you’re less heated, less hurt.

But you can’t. He needs to hear you. If not last week or the week before that, now.

Logan takes a step toward you, his hands raised slightly as if approaching a wild animal. "I lost track of time. The showcase at Malone’s—"

"Shut up," you say quietly.

The words aren't screamed. They are quiet, sharp, and dripping with an edge that makes Logan freeze in his tracks.

"Just. . . shut the hell up, Logan." You take a step forward, your shoes clicking against the hardwood. "Don't you dare use that as an excuse for being a pathetic, spineless coward."

He glances at the group that has gone dead silent. You don’t know if what he says next is for your sake or his, but you can’t bring yourself to care.

“Let’s go outside,” he offers, his tone resembling something of a plea. “We can—“

“No!” you spat harshly. “You’re gonna listen to me.”

You’d never spoken to him this way. Not in such a venomous tone, stripped from all warmth. For once, Logan does exactly what you’ve asked of him—to listen. His lips part but no words escape them.

"You sat on the porch two weeks ago," you continue, your voice rising now, the heat finally breaking through the ice. "You held my arm, and you looked me in the eyes and promised me you’d change. Do you have any idea what today was?"

Logan swallows hard, his brown hues welling with a desperate, pathetic panic. "It was the department showcase."

"It was the biggest night of my academic career!" you explode, the anger tearing out of your throat. "I have spent months working on this! I broke down sobbing over this because of how tired I was, and you were the one who held me! You knew exactly how terrified I was. You knew I didn't invite anyone else! What would’ve happened if Tuck wasn’t there?"

You gesture wildly to the medal around your neck.

"I stood on that stage alone, John. I scanned that auditorium for two hours, giving you the benefit of the doubt. I thought something had happened. I thought you were lying in a ditch somewhere or bleeding out in a hospital, because that is the only reason the John Logan I grew up with would ever miss this!"

A tear escapes his eye, rolling down his tanned cheek. "I messed up. Fuck, I know I messed up. Let me make it up to you, please—"

"You didn't mess up, you chose!" you hiss, stepping right into his space, forcing him to look down at the fury burning in your eyes. "You’ve made it perfectly clear where I rank on your list of priorities."

"I am wearing a first-place medal," you continue, your voice trembling with a devastating mix of triumph and agony. "I just won enough grant money to pay for my entire next semester of research. This should be the happiest night of my life. But all I can think about is how my best friend couldn’t show up when I needed him.”

"Please," Logan chokes out, reaching a trembling hand toward your shoulder, his fingers twitching to make that familiar, absent-minded contact. "Just—“

You snap your shoulder back, avoiding his touch as if his hand were coated in acid.

But as you jerk away, the zipper of his jacket catches on the frayed, fuzzy threads of your embroidered bracelet. There is a sudden rip. The threads give out all at once, unraveling in a split second as the broken token of your childhood slips from your wrist and flutters uselessly to the floor.

Logan freezes, his eyes dropping to the colorful, ruined heap of strings resting on the hardwood between you two.

It’s symbolic, you think.

"Don't touch me," you say, your voice dropping into a flat, dead register. You stare at him, washing away every ounce of the six years of love, every ounce of the ten years of friendship, until there is absolutely nothing left between you but a void.

"Don't talk to me. Not now. Not tomorrow. Not ever. You’re dead to me, John."

You turn on your heel and march straight out the front door into the freezing night air.

Logan doesn’t even think before stepping forward to follow after you, but Tucker shuts the door, preventing him from doing so.

He doesn't yell. Instead, he steps into Logan’s space, grabs a fistful of his shirt right at the collar, and shoves him backward into the hallway leading toward the bedrooms. Logan doesn't even try to fight it—he stumbles back, his eyes wide and vacant, completely numb from the fallout.

Tucker slams the door of his room shut, but he doesn't bother locking it. He doesn't need to.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Tucker demands, his voice a growl that vibrates through the walls. He isn’t screaming, but he’s not exactly whispering. “Because right now, I’m having a hard time recognizing one of my best friends.”

“Tuck, I didn’t mean for any of this to happen—”

“You made her a promise, man!” Tucker cuts in sharply. “You told her you’d be there. You looked her dead in the eye and gave her your word. Do you have any idea what today was like for her?”

“I lost track of time. Hannah—”

“Don’t do that,” Tucker says, his eyes narrowing. “Don’t make this about Hannah. This is about you. You screwed up. You’ve been taking that girl for granted for long enough, and she’s been in your corner through every stupid decision you’ve made. Last night, I was the one sitting with her while she practiced that presentation because you were too busy being handyman.”

“She stood on that stage tonight. Every time those judges walked up to her, she checked those doors. Every damn time. She thought something happened to you, because that’s the only reason she could come up with for why you’d break your word to her. And the whole time, you’re moving tables at Malone’s? That’s your excuse?”

“I know I messed up,” Logan chokes out. “I know. I’ll fix it. I’ll talk to her—”

“No, you won’t,” Tucker says immediately. “Not today. Not anytime soon.”

He takes a step back, folding his arms across his chest.

“She told you to stay away. So for once, stop thinking about what you want and listen to what she asked for. You made this mess. If you actually want a shot at fixing it, give her some space and hope she decides you’re worth talking to when she’s ready.”

“Tuck—”

“I’m serious, Logan. Leave her alone. The last thing she needs right now is you showing up trying to make yourself feel better.“

You didn't really think about it, the first time it happened. You'd been halfway through a chart, awareness pitched somewhere behind you in case someone needed you — someone always did, eventually — and when you heard the name Sharkbait, you knew instinctively Santos was talking to you. She's always giving out nicknames like that, and you didn't have one yet, and people had taken to dragging you over to present for Park the Shark, because apparently you were the only one who could handle him without getting your head bit off.

You didn't really get what the big deal was. It wasn't hard to figure out how to deal with him — that's what you do, after all, assess people and then figure out how to deal with them. He wants clear, concise answers, and respect, so you give him both. Easy.

He's not the kind of person you'd joke with, or get chummy with, not unless he crossed that line first. Even then, best to tread carefully.

But he's not complicated, and he's certainly not scary the way everyone seems to think he is — though you would categorize him as intense. Focused. It's what makes him such a good surgeon.

And sure, maybe he trains his laser focus on you more than anyone else in the ED. Maybe his attention is less sharp when it settles and finds you on the receiving end.

It doesn't mean anything, surely, but that didn't stop Santos from noticing, and it didn't stop her from making a shitty nickname, and if you were thinking a little more clearly, you'd have realized that you should've shut that shit down. Park is your much older, much more attractive, incredibly no-nonsense indirect boss, not to mention, you actually kind of like the guy. He probably wouldn't take lightly to everyone going around implying he's trying to get in your pants, and even if Santos is mean, she's not evil. She'd back off if you needed her to.

But you'd been tired, and distracted, and you hadn't really thought about it that hard. And when she called out "Sharkbait, get over here!" you hadn't corrected her.

Instead, you'd tapped out the last line of your sentence and carelessly called back, "Sharkbait, ooh-haha." It wasn't even a conscious decision.

It's from some fuckass movie you watched when you were eight, and you hadn't thought about it in years, but apparently that one word had been enough to trigger the call and response you learned in second grade. It shouldn't have stuck, either, but then Whittaker had called you Sharkbait while you were talking to a patient, and you'd muttered it under your breath, and now you just can't stop.

Everywhere you went, people called you Sharkbait. Even Robby does it sometimes, when he's calling you over to observe procedures. And you, in a true show of human adaptability, do not stop to think about why it's such a mistake. You hadn't caught it the first time, and you hadn't caught it the second time, and by the third it simply became another thing in the background. Another name, another title, none of them really you.

Everywhere you went, you'd parrot it back. Mostly it was an announcement, a way to say I'm here, I'm paying attention, tell me what you need, without quite so many words. In the more serious situations, it was a half-whispered thing under your breath, a reminder that there would be time where things weren't falling apart, and you would be capable of joy and whimsy again.

Either way, it always came.

Unless Brendan Park was in the room. The Shark walked in, and suddenly everyone was calling your full name like you're George fucking Bush. Even the mention of a consult from him was enough to dissuade the use of it for a few minutes.

All of which led to twenty minutes ago, when you'd been hunched over a trash can, shoveling a granola bar down your throat with such ferocity that you felt simultaneously like a starved horse and the kind owner feeding it.

You'd caught a glimpse of Park gliding through the ED like Moses parting the Red Sea, and had stuffed the last of your precious calories into your mouth in a desperate bid to be done by the time he reached you. Even when you weren't called over to present, he rarely came down without stopping by, so you'd gotten used to putting on your best face on a dime.

You could see that Dennis was going to call you over before he actually did it, so you'd already been shuffling over to the hand sanitizer when you it happened. "Sharkbait! Whittaker says you should present this one."

Your mind knew it was a bad idea — tried to stop your mouth from following through — but habit is a bitch. "Sharkbait, ooh-haha," you fired back, just loud enough to be heard over the ambient noise of the ED.

For a half-second, everyone froze.

Park turned to you, molasses slow. Arched an eyebrow. "You like that stupid nickname?"

You'd blinked at him. Refused to shrink under his gaze, or his tone, or the way it all made your blood sing and your skin burn. Forced your voice smooth and even, just as unbothered as he sounded about... well, everything. "I haven't really thought about it all that much, honestly. Mostly just reflex by now."

Maybe he genuinely believed you. Maybe it's because you've always been honest and efficient. Maybe he just doesn't think you have the balls to lie to him. Whatever it is, he hadn't commented on it further, so you didn't either.

You both pretended it never happened, right up until he disappeared back upstairs, and you allowed yourself a single moment to acknowledge the fact that you may have just lost all your goodwill with the best orthopod in the hospital.

What you don't know is that Park had been the one to start it with an offhand comment to Garcia about the ED dangling you in front of him like sharkbait every time he went down there. She'd repeated it to Santos, and soon it had spread like wildfire. Not what he'd intended, and he'd considered snapping at the mousy boy when he'd drifted by and heard him calling you that a few weeks ago — only to be stopped dead by your sweet little call-and-response, like you were fucking taunting him. Practically begging him to come bite.

The fact that you had the balls to do it with him right in front of you — and then look him dead in the eyes and call it reflex — has just cemented what everyone else already knows.

He wants you.