QUEEN RHAENYRA

Fire danced with a horrific, erratic grace across the blackened waters of the Gullet, transforming the vital shipping lane into a sprawling, floating graveyard. Flames leapt from ship to ship in hungry arcs, feeding on timber and pitch and the desperate prayers of drowning men. Beneath the merciless onslaught of Team Black’s dragons, mighty Triarchy war-galleys splintered like kindling, their hulls cracking open to swallow their crews whole. Great masts toppled into the waves with the slow, theatrical finality of falling monuments. And yet, this was no easy victory. No clean triumph etched into the history books with golden ink. Below, Lord Corlys Velaryon’s fleet fought with everything it had, attempting to trap the armada in the narrow, choking passage, buying time in blood and smoke and screaming iron.

The atmosphere was a living thing, a suffocating shroud woven from the sharp salt tang of brine, the acrid bite of billowing smoke, the unmistakable iron-sweetness of fresh blood, and the sickening, almost honeyed stench of burning pitch. It coated the throat and burned the eyes.

High above the carnage, roaring through the roiling tempest of fire and ash, rode Prince Jacaerys Velaryon.

He sat astride Vermax like a man born to the sky because he was. The great emerald dragon cut through the smoke-choked air like a gleaming blade, his scales catching the hellish firelight below, wings spread wide. Jace’s riding leathers were already dark with spray and soot. His dark curls whipped against his face. He did not notice. His eyes were fixed on the battle, calculating and measuring, feeling the terrible weight of command settle across his shoulders with the intimacy of something he had worn all his life.

He had locked his mother in her chambers at Dragonstone before leaving. Had stood outside the door and listened to her pound against it, her voice cracking on his name. The sound had nearly unmade him entirely. But she was the queen. She was the cause. She could not be lost, and Jacaerys Velaryon had long since made peace with the arithmetic of that.

She lives. Therefore, I go.

Beside him, Baela streaked across the smoke on Moondancer fierce and brilliant, her silver hair streaming behind her like a war banner. And then, piercing through the mist like something half-imagined, a new silhouette emerged. Jace’s eyes snapped to it. His stomach lurched with shock before his heart swelled with a pride so fierce it nearly hurt.

Rhaena. Flying the wild dragon Sheepstealer.

Of course she was.

Together they were three dragons raining hell from the heavens, and for one blazing, exhilarating moment, Jace believed they might actually win this despite Sheepstealer almost knocking him out. He watched their collective fire devastate Admiral Lohar’s vanguard below, great tongues of flame consuming the armada’s leading ships, sending men screaming into the sea. He felt the savage triumph of it. The rightness.

Then the heavy, rhythmic thrum of scorpions began.

Massive iron bolts tore through the clouds around them. The Triarchy fleet was enormous, he had known this, had known it academically the way one knows a thing from maps and reports but knowing it and watching it materialize below him in all its terrible scale were entirely different experiences.

He pressed Vermax into a steep, dangerously low dive.

Below, through the roiling chaos, Jace had spotted Lord Corlys’s flagship being violently rammed by Lohar’s vessel. The silver-haired sea snake, his grandfather by every measure that mattered, surrounded and struggling. Jace made his decision in the space of half a breath. He would break the enemy lines. He would fly low. He would end this.

He flew too close to the water.

His focus had narrowed to a single burning point, the ships, the threat, the duty and so he did not hear the volley until it was already too late.

A heavy iron shaft sliced violently through the membrane of Vermax’s right wing with a sound like tearing cloth and screaming metal fused together. Another slammed directly into the dragon’s chest with a concussive, world-shaking force that Jace felt through every bone in his body.

Vermax screamed.

The sound ripped through Jace like a physical blade. Not a roar, not the magnificent, terrible declaration of a dragon in battle. A scream. Raw and agonizing and so deeply personal that Jace felt his own lungs seize in sympathy, as though the bolt had pierced him too. The great emerald body shuddered beneath him. The massive wings faltered, losing the steady rhythm that held them aloft. The world tilted.

They were falling.

“No-”

Jace yanked desperately on the reins, his boots straining hard against the stirrups, body thrown forward as the sea rushed upward to meet them with terrifying speed. Wind screamed past his ears. The fire and the smoke and the battle became a chaotic blur of sensation.

“Vermax, fly!”

The dragon fought. Even now, even broken and burning, Vermax fought. A beast born of fire, refusing absolutely to yield to the water. One wing beat heavily, then another. The torn membrane fluttered uselessly, a tattered rag of what it had been, but still Vermax tried, and something in Jace’s chest shattered at the sight of it.

“Soves!” His voice broke on the word, all royal dignity stripped away, reduced to something raw and helpless and very young. “Soves, Vermax! Please-”

One final, agonizing beat of the wings.

It was not enough.

Freezing, brine-heavy water swallowed Jacaerys Velaryon whole. It was not like diving, it was like being struck by the earth itself, like the sea had become solid in the last instant before collision, and he felt the shock travel up through his ankles, his knees, his spine, rattling his teeth in his skull. The sheer velocity of the crash tore his fingers from the saddle. The weight of his armor dragged at him immediately, a slow, patient, lethal pull downward into the dark.

Primal instinct flared.

He unhooked himself and practically clawed upward. His lungs burned. The cold was absolute, the kind that doesn’t feel cold at all but rather feels like being unmade, like the sea was simply erasing him a layer at a time. He could see nothing, only dark water and distant fire and the enormous bulk of Vermax somewhere below him, a shadow become a nightmare. He burst through the surface with a gasp so violent it tore his throat.

“Vermax!”

He spun in the churning water, hair plastered to his face, salt burning his eyes. The battle raged on around him, ships groaning and splitting, men screaming, iron raining from all directions. The world had not paused for him.

“Vermax!”

Through the haze of cresting waves, he found him. His dragon, his Vermax, who had carried him since boyhood, who had grown as he had grown, who had been as much a part of him as his own heartbeat was desperately trying to swim. The damaged wings beat uselessly to try to swim up. His great neck was straining upward. His eyes, when they met Jace’s from below the water, held something that a person with less grief in them might have dismissed as imagination. They did not look like the eyes of an animal.

They looked like the eyes of someone saying goodbye. A massive anchor, or debris, Jace could not tell which, tangled around Vermax’s exhausted body. The sea accepted its offering. With a final, sorrowful look that Jacaerys Velaryon would carry with him for the rest of his life.

He never resurfaced.

Something inside Jace broke. Not cracked. Not bent. Broke, the way an old bone breaks, the kind that doesn’t ever quite knit back the same way. He hauled his upper body onto a large piece of floating wreckage with the determination of a body that had not yet received the message from his mind that none of this mattered anymore. His chest heaved in ragged, desperate gasps. He was shaking. He was exhausted in a way that reached all the way down into whatever part of him had believed, until this moment, that he might survive this.

He had not brought enough of that belief. He saw that now.

He thought of his mother.

The image of her face, proud and terrified and trying not to show either rose unbidden. He had done this for her. Had done all of it for her. He hoped she would understand, someday, that locking her in her chambers had been the most love he had ever offered anyone.

He thought of Baela. Of Rhaena.

He thought of-

A sharp, dull impact struck his upper back.

Jace lurched forward with a sound that was almost nothing, barely a breath. Confused, of all things, not yet understanding, he glanced over his shoulder. A heavy crossbow bolt protruded from his shoulder blade at an angle that his mind catalogued with strange, distant calm, the way one notices a detail in a painting.

Slowly, numbly, he turned his head toward the source. A Triarchy war-galley drifted just yards away. Lined along the wooden railing stood a row of Admiral Lohar’s soldiers, unhurried, methodical, their crossbows leveled at the figure in the water.

They knew exactly who he was. There was no urgency in their posture, no battlefield fever. This was an execution.

The heir to the Iron Throne, stranded and defenseless. A second bolt flew. It slammed into his chest. He heard it before he felt it.

Then a third...straight to the neck.

A strange, sudden calm washed over him.

The deafening roar of the battle receded, becoming muffled, distant, the way sounds narrow when one goes underwater. The sea rocked him gently now, almost tenderly, as if it had been waiting all along to offer this small mercy at the end. He had not expected kindness. He was grateful for it.

He thought of his mother, safe on Dragonstone.

He thought of Baela’s laughter.

He thought of his brothers.

And he thought with a softness that surprised him, with something that might have been the very last warmth his body could generate, of you. Of a future that would not be built. Of a promise he was not sure, now, that he had ever been given the chance to make.

The last image to imprint itself on the fading mind of Jacaerys Velaryon was that reflection.

A burning sky, mirrored in the water.

Beautiful.

Tragic.

Then everything went black.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.

Jacaerys bolted upright with a gasp that felt like surfacing.

His eyes flew open. His hand flew to his chest and then to his neck, pressing hard against his sternum, feeling for something, a wound, an absence, a bolt buried in bone and found nothing but the soft cotton of his t-shirt and the solid, living rhythm of his own heart. He sat there for a long moment, chest heaving, and simply stared at the ceiling.

White plaster. Crown moulding. A small water stain shaped vaguely like a continent.

No smoke.

No dragon.

No sea.

No battle.

Just a bedroom. His bedroom.

Morning sunlight filtered through floor-to-ceiling windows in long, clean shafts, illuminating the warm disorder of his life: the desk buried under business textbooks and notebooks with pages dog-eared and margins crowded with his handwriting, his laptop open from the night before with a lecture slide still visible on the screen, a hoodie slung over the back of his desk chair. Outside the windows, King’s Landing stretched endlessly in the early light, the city already stirring, glass towers catching the sun.

His alarm clock flashed 7:00 AM.

No swords or the banners of House Targaryen. Jace pressed the heels of both palms against his eyes and breathed.

The memories were still there. That was the wrong word for them, memories. They did not feel like the soft, dissolving stuff of ordinary dreams that faded on the edges as soon as you tried to examine them. They felt like the other kind of remembering, the kind that lives in the body rather than the mind. He could still feel the cold of the Gullet in his fingers. He could still smell the smoke. He could still feel the weight of dragon-riding leathers across his shoulders, the particular pull of Vermax’s movement through the air, the way the saddle had sat against the backs of his thighs.

He could still feel the bolts.

Just a dream, he told himself. The words felt inadequate in his own mouth, like trying to describe a storm with the word weather. He muttered them anyway, pressing his face harder into his palms.

“Just a dream.”

A dream where he had been a prince.

A prince who had died.

His stomach dropped with a physical lurch. The alarm was still beeping. He silenced it with a slap and sat on the edge of the bed for one more moment, just one, breathing in the ordinary scent of his ordinary room.. Then his brain supplied the information he had been avoiding.

Classes.

Shit.

He was already late.

He moved through his morning routine with the efficiency of someone running on instinct rather than thought, shower, clothes, a cursory battle with his curls that ended, as it always did, in a draw. He emerged from the bathroom in jeans and sneakers and his favorite dark hoodie, his hair doing exactly what it wanted. There wasn’t time to argue with it. There was rarely ever time.

The smell of coffee reached him in the hallway. It pulled at something in his chest and he followed it through the penthouse to the kitchen.

His steps halted in the doorway.

Rhaenyra stood at the island counter, reading something on her tablet with the focused, slightly stern expression she wore when she was processing information she found annoying. A coffee mug steamed beside her elbow, forgotten. She was already dressed soft grey, elegant, effortlessly so in the way that had always seemed to come naturally to her and she looked exactly as she always looked in the morning, tired by all the corporate bullshit.

CEO of Targaryen Corporation. One of the most influential women in King’s Landing. The most formidable person he had ever known.

His mother.

The word hit him somewhere unsteady. Something twisted painfully in his chest, relief so acute it nearly hurt, threaded through with the dreaming grief of a boy who had watched her face in his mind as the water closed over him, who had spent his last conscious moment believing she was safe, needing her to be safe, and had been right without ever knowing he was right. He crossed the room before he had consciously decided to.

He wrapped his arms around her.

Rhaenyra nearly dropped her coffee.

“Jacaerys-”

She caught herself, setting the mug down with a firm clink on the marble countertop, and then without hesitation, because she had always been this, whatever else she was, she wrapped her arms around him and held him back.

“Sweet boy.” Her voice was softer now. Her fingers found their way into his curls the way they had when he was very small. “What’s the matter?”

Jace swallowed against the tightness in his throat. The dream came rushing back through him like a tide, the war, the weight of a crown his mother should have inherited without blood, the desperate, bone-deep need to protect her. The image of her face as he had walked away from Dragonstone, toward the dragon, toward the battle, toward the Gullet. The way he had looked back.

He shook his head against her shoulder.

“I’m fine.”

“You are clearly not fine.”

Her hand moved in slow, soothing circles against his back. Despite himself, despite everything, Jace felt something in him begin to loosen.

He laughed. A weak, slightly broken sound, but genuine. “I just…” His voice cracked on the nothing he was trying to say.

Rhaenyra pulled back slightly to look at him. Not the way she looked at her board of directors, or at rivals across conference tables, or at the city from thirty floors up. The other way. The private way, that only he and his brothers ever saw.

“What happened?”

He wiped his eyes quickly, hoping she wouldn’t comment on it and took a breath.

“I had the most vivid dream.”

“What kind of dream?”

He hesitated. There was something strange about saying it. As though speaking about it aloud would make it either more real or less, and he wasn’t sure which outcome he wanted.

“I was a prince,” he said.

Rhaenyra blinked. Whatever she had been expecting, it was not that.

“A prince?”

“Yeah.” A small smile found its way onto his face, unwilling, almost involuntary. “You were a queen.” Something passed across her expression something soft, something she would never have allowed in a meeting room. “Oh?”

“I died fighting a battle for you.”

Silence.

She looked at him for a long moment. Then she reached up and brushed a curl from his forehead with the gentleness that had no performance in it, something she reserved for the three of them and no one else.

“Well,” she said finally, her smile warming to something that was almost, almost teasing. “That sounds exhausting.”

Jace stared. “That’s all you’ve got?”

“You are standing in my kitchen wearing yesterday’s hoodie and telling me about dragon wars, Jacaerys.”

He opened his mouth to protest then closed it. “Fair.” She squeezed his shoulder. “It was only a dream.”

“You know,” said a new voice from the doorway, “some families start their mornings with good morning.”

Luke wandered in carrying a cereal box like a trophy, nineteen years old and permanently, professionally smug. He surveyed the scene with the cheerful heartlessness of a younger brother who had found ammunition and intended to use it.

“Did Jace finally lose his mind?”

Behind him, Joffrey, fourteen and grinning with the particular delight of someone who had been waiting for this squeezed past into the kitchen. “About time.” Jace rolled his eyes so hard it was almost an athletic achievement. “There he is.”

“Dreaming about being a prince?” Luke plucked a bowl from the cupboard with casual ease. “That’s because you’re already treated like one.”

The napkin Jace threw hit him square in the face. Luke threw it back. Rhaenyra sighed with the air of a woman who had calculated exactly how many more years of this lay before her and found the number disheartening.

“My sons,” she said, picking up her coffee. “Truly intellectual giants.”

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

Breakfast passed with the comfortable velocity of mornings that had been rehearsed through repetition until they ran themselves. Luke complaining about something, Joffrey eating cereal in quantities that defied his size, Rhaenyra reading from her tablet while simultaneously tracking all three of them with the peripheral attention of someone who had never once been entirely off duty.

Jace was reaching for his coffee when Rhaenyra glanced up.

“Are you still picking up your girlfriend?”

He froze.

The coffee cup remained halfway to his face, arrested in mid-air.

“…My what?”

Luke’s head snapped up. The expression that crossed his face was one of pure, unalloyed joy. He looked like he had been handed a gift.

Rhaenyra stared at her eldest with the patient, faintly incredulous expression of a woman who had not expected to be performing this particular reality check on a Tuesday morning.

“Your girlfriend.”

“Oh.” Jace set the cup down carefully. “Right.”

You.

He had a girlfriend.

A beautiful girlfriend, and she was his girlfriend, and she had been his girlfriend for- he was briefly lost in the arithmetic of it, which was itself a kind of answer and she was wonderful, she was brilliant, she made him laugh, and somehow in the space between waking up with the sea in his lungs and standing in his mother’s kitchen in yesterday’s hoodie, he had momentarily forgotten she existed.

And then, because his brain was apparently in full catastrophic mode this morning: betrothed. Not yet. Not technically. But the word had been sitting in the back of his mind ever since he woke up from his dream.

Heat flooded his face with spectacular completeness. Luke nearly choked on his cereal.

“Oh my God.”

“Shut up.”

“You forgot your girlfriend.”

“Only briefly.”

“Only” Luke dissolved entirely, shoulders shaking. Across the table, Joffrey watched with the dignified appreciation of a connoisseur.

Rhaenyra shook her head slowly. “Honestly, Jace.” “It was a very intense dream,” he said, with as much dignity as one can muster while slowly turning the color of a sunset.

“You forgot your girlfriend.”

“The dream had dragons, Mum.”

She gave him the look. The specific look, the one that had been making him feel twelve years old since he was actually twelve years old. “She’s a lovely girl. I wish you’d bring her home more often.”

Jace stood from the table with the decisive energy of a man drawing a conversation to a close. “I was planning to.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“Today?”

“…Possibly.”

“Good.” Rhaenyra returned to her tablet, the slight smile at the corner of her mouth saying everything she was too dignified to say aloud.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

The underground parking garage was cool and dim, smelling of concrete and oil and the expensive quiet of a building where people took the lift rather than the stairs. Jace’s Porsche sat in its usual spot, Oak Green Metallic, catching the fluorescent light.

Vermax.

He had named the car Vermax which now sounded so ironic to him.

He stood beside the driver’s door for a moment, hand on the handle, the thought arriving fully formed and then sitting there in his chest with an odd weight. He had named his car Vermax years ago. He had thought it was because he liked the sound of it, or because it was the name of a character in a book he’d read, or because of some half-remembered reason that had never quite solidified into anything coherent.

He looked at the car. The deep green of it. The long, low lines of it, built for speed, built for the sky-

Built for the sky.

A strange feeling settled over him, the kind of not-quite-vertigo that comes with recognizing something without being able to name what it is you’re recognizing. Like seeing an old friend across a crowd before you’ve registered their face.

He shook it off. Got in and drove.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

The street outside your house was quiet in the way that Tuesday mornings in King’s Landing occasionally managed to be, with the morning light that made ordinary things seem briefly considered. Jace pulled to the curb and sat for a moment with the engine idling, window down.

Then the front door opened and you stepped out. He got out of the car.

The morning light caught your hair the way it always did, making you look almost angelic in Jace’s eyes in that moment. You were still in the act of adjusting the strap of your bag when you spotted him, and the smile that crossed your face. Happy just to see him.

And for one strange, suspended moment, another image overlapped the morning like a transparency laid over a photograph. A figure standing on the cliffs of Dragonstone. The sea grey below and the wind pulling at dark fabric. Watching him leave. The expression on her face, your face, heartbroken and resolute and trying to be neither.

Waiting for him to come back.

The image dissolved as quickly as it had arrived. The morning reasserted itself. You were walking toward the car, your bag settled on your shoulder now, your smile still in place, and Jace found himself already stepping forward already moving toward with certainty that was less decision than gravity.

Before you could say a word, he took your hand and raised it, and pressed a kiss against your knuckles. Deliberatea and unhurried. Like he’d done it a thousand times before, in other rooms, in other centuries.

“How are you, my beloved?”

You stopped.

Looked at the hand.

Looked at him.

And then, because you were you, you laughed, the bright, surprised sound of someone caught genuinely off guard. “What has gotten into you this morning?” you questioned him.

Jace grinned, and the grin felt more like him than anything else had all morning. “I genuinely have no idea.”

“You’re being sooo weird.” You studied him with the narrowed eyes trying to grasp his words and actions. “How weird is this going to get?”

“I had the wildest dream.”

“Oh?” Already your expression was shifting into the one you wore when you were preparing to be entertained. He leaned forward and kissed you softly quick, warm and certain.

“In it,” he said against your smile, “you were my princess too.”

Your cheeks went pink with entirely gratifying speed. “Oh my God.”

“You asked.”

“I asked what was wrong with you, not-”

“Details.”

“Jacaerys Velaryon, I am going to need you to be normal for the next five minutes-”

“I make no promises.”

He opened the passenger door for you, still grinning, and the morning felt lighter than it had when he’d left the penthouse.

The dream wasn’t entirely terrible, he thought, settling behind the wheel. If nothing else, it had done this, sharpened his vision, made ordinary things brilliant again. Made you more vivid than you’d already been, which was saying something considerable. He found himself smiling the entire drive to university.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

University should have felt normal.

Instead, Jace spent the entire morning convinced he was losing his mind by degrees as new details of his dream would hit him.

The dream lingered with a persistence that ordinary dreams did not have, the kind he usually forgot by the time he reached the kitchen. This one clung. Every corridor he walked reminded him of castle hallways, the echo of footsteps on stone, and the smell of torch smoke. Every crowded lecture hall conjured the geometry of noble courts; the subtle theatre of power performed through proximity. His Strategic Management lecture had an entire section on resource allocation that kept pulling his thoughts sideways, toward councils and war rooms and Dragonstone. He stared at his notebook.

He had written, in the margin: Corlys was right about the Gullet.

He had no idea when.

“You’re disassociating again.”

Jace blinked.

Across the seminar table sat Cregan Stark, regarding him with the expression he used on everything: tall, dark-haired, slow-blinking, fundamentally and constitutionally unimpressed by the world and all its events. He was from Winterfell like genuinely, actually from Winterfell, which Jace had always found slightly funny without ever quite being able to explain why.

They’d been best friends since secondary school, the friendship that had calcified into something so much more. They were like brothers in every sense. Also, he looked almost exactly like the Cregan from the dream.

Same jaw. Same eyes. Same expression, the one that said I am listening to you and I find you exhausting. Same, in other words, as he always looked well except his had slightly shorter hair.

“What?” Jace managed.

Cregan raised one eyebrow. “You’ve been staring at me for ten seconds with an expressionless face.”

“Sorry.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “I had a strange dream. I feel like I keep repeating these words over and over again.”

“You texted me at four in the morning.”

Jace went very still.

“I did?”

Cregan reached for his phone with the patience of a man who had long since resigned himself to the chaos of being Jace Velaryon’s closest friend. He scrolled briefly, then began reading aloud in the flat, informational tone of a news anchor delivering a weather report.

“‘Brother, imagine if we were medieval nobles.’”

“Oh, God.”

“‘You would have loved Winterfell.’”

“Cregan-”

“‘You were Lord of the North.’” He glanced up briefly. “I’m from Winterfell, Jace. I grew up in Winterfell. I know what Winterfell is.”

“Please stop-”

‘I miss Vermax.’

Cregan lowered the phone.

“I don’t know what Vermax is, if its not talking about your car.” he said.

Jace buried his face in both hands and made a sound that was less a word than a comprehensive statement. “You were never meant to read those.”

“You sent them to me.”

“I was apparently not fully conscious at four in the morning. I don’t remember doing this at all.”

“That’s concerning.”

“Yes.”

“Are you okay?”

The question arrived without ceremony, Cregan always asked things he actually wanted to know, dropped into a conversation like a stone dropped into water, watching to see what it displaced. Jace hesitated for long enough that the silence became its own answer.

“Yeah,” he said. Then, quietly: “Not entirely.”

Cregan nodded. He didn’t push. This was something Jace had always valued about him, the Stark capacity to hold space without filling it.

“Tell me later,” Cregan said, and turned back to his laptop.

Mostly, Jace thought. He was mostly okay. ┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

You found him outside the business building at noon, materializing from the flow of students and your smile arrived before you did.

Jace felt the thing in his chest that had been clenched since 7 AM ease, slowly, like a hand opening. There was something about you that operated on him this way, had always operated on him this way, since the beginning. A quality of presence that grounded him, that made the world’s coordinates make sense again. He’d never found quite the right words for it. He’d stopped trying.

You slipped your hand into his without ceremony.

“Better than this morning?”

“A little.”

“Still thinking about your prince dream?”

He laughed, the sound freer than he expected. “Unfortunately.”

“You are such a nerd.”

“I was literally fighting a war.”

“You were dreaming about fighting a war.”

“Details.”

“Jacaerys Velaryon, if this dream becomes your entire personality, I want it on the record that I tried to prevent it-”

“Noted and rejected.”

You rolled your eyes with magnificent feeling. “I make no promises about what I tell your mother.”

Together you walked toward the café nearby. A small, overcrowded place called something Jace could never quite remember but it had had excellent coffee and terrible lighting and was perpetually full of students and professors who had clearly rather be somewhere else. The place that existed to absorb the ambient anxiety of a university and convert it, through caffeine, into something marginally more functional.

You had barely settled into your seats when a familiar voice arrived from approximately two tables away, belonging to someone who had apparently been watching for them.

“Well, if it isn’t my favorite nephew.”

Aegon Targaryen dropped into the empty chair beside Jace with the comfortable confidence of a man who owned, and this was literally true, approximately half the building they were sitting in. Twenty-six, blond, expensive, reliably catastrophic. His jacket probably cost more than Jace’s car maintenance for the year, and he wore it with the carelessness never once considering the cost of anything.

He was nothing like the monster from the dream. The dream-Aegon had been something Jace couldn’t fully bring himself to examine yet. Jealous and bitter and capable of terrible things. This Aegon was mostly known for throwing parties that became local legend and mysteriously managing to avoid all professional consequences for anything he did, ever. Jacaerys supposed that has something to do with his mother and his uncle Aemond keeping these things contained.

“To what do we owe the honor?” Jace asked.

Aegon’s attention had already moved to you.

“And how are you?”

“Good,” you said politely.

“Still putting up with him?”

You smiled. “Barely.”

“Excellent answer.”

Jace groaned. Aegon looked absolutely delighted. “You’re blushing,” Aegon observed, with the tone of someone reporting a natural phenomenon.

“I’m not.”

“You absolutely are.”

You leaned over the table, and Jace recognized the look on your face immediately. The collaborative look. The look that meant you had identified an ally.

“He was calling me his beloved this morning.”

Aegon’s chair nearly lost him. He grabbed the table.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“In what context?”

“He kissed my hand. In the street. Before nine in the morning.”

Aegon looked at Jace the way someone looks at an archaeological discovery with facination, slightly appalled, deeply pleased. “This is the greatest thing that has ever happened.”

Jace contemplated his options. Leaving. Changing his name and moving to Braavos. Committing entirely to the persona of someone who had never been caught calling his girlfriend my beloved at eight forty-five on a Tuesday.

None of these were practical.

He reached for his coffee and said nothing, which Aegon correctly interpreted as total defeat.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

After Aegon eventually wandered off, ostensibly to a meeting, credibly to cause chaos somewhere else and so the café settled back into its ordinary rhythms. Students came and went. Espresso machines hissed. The ambient noise absorbed itself.

You and Jace remained at your table, and the laughter faded naturally, the way good laughter does, not dying but simply becoming something quieter.

He was staring into his coffee again.

You watched him for a moment.

“You never told me the whole dream, since it has you in a weird mindset today.” you said quietly.

His fingers tightened almost imperceptibly around the cup. He was aware of you looking at him, with your full attention, which had always been more like listening than looking, patient and genuine and without agenda.

“To put it simply, there was a war,” he said.

You didn’t ask him to explain. You waited.

“A civil war.” He looked up briefly, then back at the table. “A war over who would rule over Westeros. My mother was supposed to inherit as was the rightful heir to the throne but there were those who didn’t accept it. Didn’t accept her.”

“And you fought for her.”

“Of course.”

The images came without invitation, Dragonstone’s grey halls, the council table, the maps spreading the whole kingdom out before them like a wound. The feeling of duty that had lived in his chest since childhood, not as a burden but as a definition. This is who you are. This is what you do.

You reached across the table and took his hand. He continued.

“I flew a dragon. I know this sounds no so scary but-” Despite everything, he heard the ghost of wonder in his own voice. “Vermax. He was- he was mine. Since I was a boy. He knew me.” The wonder curdled, softened into something heavier. “He died with me.”

Your thumb moved in a slow arc across his knuckles. “The last thing I remember,” he said quietly, “was dying. Floating in the sea, after everything.” He paused.

“It was strange. It wasn’t- it wasn’t the way I would have imagined. It wasn’t terrifying.”

“What was it?”

He thought about it honestly.

“It was sad,” he said. “But calm.”

You were quiet for a moment. Then you reached up, and the gesture was so unexpected that he went still, your hand cupping his cheek, steady and warm, thumb tracing a line beneath his eye.

He leaned into it without thinking.

“I’m glad it was only a dream,” you said softly trying to calm his anxieties that he didn’t want to confess out loud.

“I’m glad you’re here.”

The tightness in his chest released, not all at once but in stages, like a knot worked loose over time. He turned his head slightly, pressing his lips briefly to your palm, and you let him, and neither of you made anything of it. She’s right, he thought. Whatever that was. Whatever it meant.

He was here. Alive. With his family, with his best friend, with his girl.

Maybe that was enough. Maybe that was, actually, everything.

The afternoon passed.

Classes ended. The university slowly emptied like it did every day at dusk, students and professors releasing themselves back into the city like a pressure valve opening. The parking lot filled briefly with the usual chaos and then thinned.

“My mother wants you over more often,” Jace mentioned, as they walked toward the Porsche.

“Apparently she likes you.”

You brightened immediately. “Really?”

“She said so unprompted. First thing this morning.”

“Good.” You smiled with satisfaction. “I’m charming.”

Jace looked at you sideways. “You are deeply smug about this.”

“I’m charming,” you repeated, pleasantly. He laughed. “Come over tonight?”

You looked at him, with that look you had, the one he’d never found a word for, the one that made him feel simultaneously seen and unsteady in the best possible way. Made him feel a bit giddy.

“I’d love to,” you said.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

The penthouse was unusually quiet when they arrived. Rhaenyra was visible through the glass of her home office, phone tucked between her ear and shoulder, reading from a document with the focused intensity and it was clear that the woman needed a break from everything. Luke had evaporated somewhere. Joffrey was reportedly studying, a claim no one in the household had ever been successfully able to verify.

You and Jace settled at the dining table with laptops and scattered notes and the collective fiction of productivity.

For forty minutes, it was remarkably functional. Jace had his economics module open. You were working through something, he didn’t ask, didn’t need to and the sound of quiet typing and the occasional turn of a page created a kind of companionable silence that he had always thought of as the specific luxury of being comfortable with someone. presence. You could simply be in it.

He was reading about capital allocation.

“Jace.”

He looked up.

“You’re getting lost in your mind again.”

“I’m not what are you talking about?” he said automatically. Then, because honesty was something he’d apparently committed to today: “I was thinking about- uhhh. Economics?”

“That is not better.”

“You look pretty,” he said simply.

The silence that followed had a distinct texture. You looked at him for a long moment. Then you slowly, deliberately, closed your laptop.

“No,” you said.

“What?”

“You don’t get to say things like that when I’m trying to study.”

“I was simply making an observation.”

“You are impossible.”

He was very pleased with himself. He did not bother hiding it.

An hour later, the economics module had not progressed. The textbooks had been consolidated into a single pile and pushed to the far end of the table, a gesture that meant these exist and will eventually be addressed, which was as much as either of you were willing to commit to. A film had been agreed upon via negotiation.

Blankets appeared.

The overhead lights went off.

And somehow, as these things always somehow managed, you ended up curled against his chest on the enormous sectional, his arm around your waist, the film playing distantly while neither of you particularly watched it. Your breathing slowed first. His heartbeat was steady and familiar beneath your ear.

The city moved quietly outside the windows.

You didn’t remember falling asleep.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

The prince stood before you.

The wind came off the sea like a cold hand, whipping through his dark, curling hair, pressing his black riding coat against his frame. Behind him, Dragonstone rose in its glory against a steel-grey sky, all sharp towers and dark stone, magnificent and terrible, built by people who had never believed in half measures. The sea crashed against the rocks far below. Dark clouds gathered on the horizon with the patient, deliberate advance of something inevitable.

“No.”

Your voice came out broken.

“No, please.”

He looked at you the way he always looked at you as if you were the clearest thing in a world that had lately become very unclear, like looking at you was the one thing he could do without effort in a life that had demanded extraordinary effort from him since the moment he was old enough to understand what he was.

“I have to go.”

“You don’t,” you said, even though you knew it wasn’t true. Even though somewhere beneath the desperate present tense of the argument, the truer, older part of you already knew exactly what was coming. Already knew the shape of this farewell.

His hands found yours.

They were warm. Strong and real, so real that makes their loss so much more brutal than the loss of things you never fully believed in.

“You can stay,” you said. Your voice was steadier than you felt. “You can let someone else-”

“I cannot.” His voice was gentle but stern. He was stubborn and so if he made peace with this decisions, he wouldn’t have it any other way.

Tears burned behind your eyes. The fear inside you was almost unbearable and burning, it was twisted and layered, because you knew. You already knew. This was not a premonition, not a vague presentiment. It was knowledge, carried somewhere beneath language, beneath memory, in whatever part of you had been this person before.

You knew what awaited him at the Gullet.

Fire.

Water.

“You promised.” The words escaped before you could decide to say them.

His expression shifted. Something moved across it, grief, tenderness, the ache of a man who loves something too well to pretend it isn’t breaking. “And I will keep that promise but this is a battle I must fight for both myself and my mother.”

He stepped closer, and you let him, and he pressed a kiss to your forehead so gently it barely qualified as a touch at all.

Then he rested his brow against yours. His eyes never left yours.

“If I do not return- which I intend to,”

The world seemed to hold its breath.

“I will find you.”

A tear escaped. Traced the line of your cheek. He watched it with eyes that were very dark and very steady.

“In every lifetime if not this one. I promise.”

The words landed somewhere deep in you, somewhere wordless, somewhere older than the language you used to think with. A promise that had the weight of truth rather than intention.

You memorized his face. The curls. The strong jaw. The eyes, brown and earnest and alive, so alive.

He smiled.

Then he stepped away.

He turned toward the waiting dragon.

Toward the dark water below.

Toward a destiny that was also a death.

And all you could do was watch him leave. ┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

You woke with a gasp that tore itself from somewhere past your chest.

For several seconds, you could not find the room. Could not find yourself in it. There was only the dream...the cliffs, the wind, his forehead against yours, the sound of his footsteps retreating and the grief of it, which was specific and devastating and nothing at all like the vague emotional residue of ordinary sleep.

Tears burned behind your eyes. Your heart was pounding.

You pushed yourself upright. A blanket tangled around your legs. The room was dim, the film long since ended, the television showing a menu screen. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, King’s Landing glittered in the full dark of night, the city’s lights reflected upward in a warm wash against the low clouds. Jace must have moved you to his room when you fell asleep.

The bedroom door opened.

Jace stepped in carrying two mugs, steam rising from both. He had apparently, at some point during your sleep, been productive.

The moment he saw your face, he froze.

“Hey.”

The concern in his voice was immediate, the shift from normal to careful happening in the space of a single syllable.

“What’s wrong?”

You didn’t answer. The words were somewhere on the way, but in the meantime your body had already decided what it needed, and what it needed was to close the distance between you and him as quickly as possible.

You stood.

Crossed the room.

The mugs barely survived. He caught them against the edge of the side table with an impressive reflex, setting them down quickly before his arms came around your waist, and you buried your face against the side of his neck, and breathed him in.

“Sweetheart?” Low and careful. His chin came to rest on top of your head.

You stayed there for a moment just letting the reality of him replace the dream of him. The warmth of him. The solidness.

Then you pulled back. Not far. Your forehead came to rest against his, which put you close enough to feel his breath and see the small crease of worry between his brows.

“I had a dream,” you said. It seems it was your turn to utter those words.

Something moved across his face. He went very still in the way that meant he was paying every variety of attention he had.

“What kind of dream?”

“I saw a prince.”

His breath caught. You felt it.

“I saw him leaving for a battle. He was going to fight-”

Your voice faltered, then steadied. “He knew he might not come back. And he said-” You stopped.

Jace’s arms tightened around you, almost involuntarily. “He said he would find me,” you continued. “That if he didn’t return-” Your eyes met his, and something in your chest recognized something in his. “He would find me in every lifetime.”

Silence.

Complete, absolute silence.

Jace stared at you.

Because those were the exact words. Not a version of them, not a paraphrase but the exact promise, the exact phrasing, the exact scene, the stone of Dragonstone under grey skies and wind coming off the sea. He had lived it from one side and you had lived it from the other, and here you both were, in a penthouse above a city that did not have dragons, with the memory of them living in your bones.

His throat moved.

You smiled softly with tears still bright at the corners of your eyes. Your hand lifted, your fingers moving gently through his curls, the same gesture that felt simultaneously new and ancient.

“I don’t know what any of that means,” you said.

“Neither do I.”

“But if it was real-”

His forehead pressed more firmly against yours.

“You kept your promise,” you whispered.

He felt his throat close.

And for the first time since he had woken to the sound of an alarm clock and a bedroom that wasn’t the sea, he stopped wondering whether the dream had been real. He stopped wondering whether he was grieving something imagined or something true. He stopped needing to know.

Because you knew.

You had been there.

You rose onto your toes.

Your lips met his.

It was slow and gentle. He kissed you back like someone returning to something, like a navigator finding a landmark in familiar water.

Like he had been waiting centuries and perhaps his soul had waited for this moment. The moment to return to her. ┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

The knock was soft.

They both startled apart with the excellent reflexes of guilty consciences, then immediately demonstrated the dignity of two people pretending they hadn’t. Jace cleared his throat. Rested his forehead against yours for one final second. His breath was unsteady in the best way.

Another knock.

“Jacaerys?”

Rhaenyra’s voice, measured, carrying through the door with the easy authority of a woman who managed board rooms and board members and the shenanigans of three sons as a single uninterrupted professional skill.

“Dinner is ready.” They heard the muffled voice of his mother.

Jace answered at a volume calibrated for normalcy “We’ll be there in a minute!”

A pause that had weight.

“Five minutes,” his mother’s voice returned, drier than a desert, and entirely aware of everything and perhaps making a wrong assumption of you two being alone in his room.

You laughed, pressing your face briefly against his shoulder to muffle it. He was already smiling.

“Your mother doesn’t trust you.”

“She absolutely does not.”

“And honestly?” You poked his chest. “I don’t blame her.”

“You wound me.”

“Good.” You pulled your hand back, but he caught it, quick and easy, and pressed a kiss to your knuckles again. The same gesture as that morning. The echo of it traveled through both of you clearly.

Your cheeks went pink.

He watched it happen with a feeling in his chest that was too large and too simple to require any examination at all.

There she is, he thought. My girl.

My princess.

He took your hand properly, fingers laced and led you toward the dining room.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈ They heard the argument before they reached the dinner table.

Luke and Joffrey, seated across from each other in the arrangement that the family had collectively accepted as a flaw, were conducting a debate with the commitment of two people who had come to win.

“No, because you’re objectively wrong-”

“I’m objectively right-”

“You don’t even know what objectively means.”

“I literally do.”

“You used it wrong.”

Joffrey groaned with his whole body. “I hate this family.”

“You are this family,” Luke pointed out.

Joffrey considered this. “Exactly.”

Rhaenyra, at the head of the table, was pinching the bridge of her nose with annoyance. This was her normal and yet it was tiring.

The moment she saw you, her face entirely changed.

“There she is.”

You smiled. “Hi.”

She stood and pulled you into a hug with a warmth that was, Jace thought privately, rather more enthusiastic than his own homecoming greeting most mornings. “I was beginning to think my son had invented you.”

“Mum.”

“What? He never brings you over.”

“That’s his fault,” you said.

“Traitor,” Jace said.

“You’re literally my boyfriend.”

“Exactly.”

You smiled sweetly. “I’m allowed.”

Rhaenyra looked delighted in the specific way she allowed herself to look delighted when she was genuinely pleased, a rarity outside this apartment. Luke immediately leaned toward you.

“See? This is why she’s my favorite.”

“I’m sitting right here.”

“Unfortunately.”

Jace threw a bread roll at him.

Luke threw one back.

The war began immediately, and lasted approximately five seconds before Rhaenyra’s single sharp look ended it. She had a look for this. It was very effective.

“Sometimes I wonder,” she said, settling back into her chair and accepting a bread roll from the basket with the serenity of someone who had already mentally exited the building, “if I raised wolves.”

“That’s insulting,” Joffrey said.

Everyone looked at him.

The fourteen-year-old shrugged with the composure of someone who had thought this through. “Wolves are smarter.”

The silence held for two seconds before Luke’s expression cracked. Jace looked at the ceiling. Rhaenyra’s attempt at severity collapsed at its foundations.

You sat beside Jace with your hand warm against his under the table, and you were already laughing, and the sound of it filled the room the way laughter does when a room is already full of people who are glad to be there.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

Dinner found its rhythm.

Conversation moved in the easy, overlapping way it does with people who have logged enough hours together that they no longer need to manage it consciously. Luke complained about a group project with the vivid resentment of having decided the problem was everyone else.

Joffrey explained something about a game or a film or a historical period but the audience could not quite keep up, but that seemed to be part of the experience. Rhaenyra complained, with great economy, about company politics, and then told a story about a colleague that had everyone at the table paying full attention (It was Aemond who everytone is afraid of in their company).

You listened to all of it.

Jace, mostly, watched.

He had not expected this. Had woken this morning in the sea, or the memory of it. Had spent the drive to university with the dream still active in his body, had sat through lectures half-present, had carried the weight of Vermax’s last look in his chest all day like a stone.

And now.

He watched his mother smile at something you said. He watched Luke do the thing he did when he was actually amused, which was different from when he is pretending. Watched Joffrey explain something to you directly, having apparently determined that you were worth the effort, and watched your face do the thing it did when you were genuinely interested in something, slightly forward, slightly bright, entirely present.

You fit here. Not as a guest, not as someone being accommodated. As someone who belonged. He thought of the dream again.

Remembered standing at the dragonpit of Dragonstone with his armor on and the dragon saddled and the sea grey behind him, and looking back at everything he was leaving, his mother, his brothers, you, the stone halls and the cold salt wind and the ordinary miracle of a morning that didn’t require a king’s son to die for it.

He had wondered, in those last seconds at Dragonstone, if he would ever see any of them again. He had his answer now.

The realization settled in his chest quietly, without drama. Not a revelation, something more like a confirmation. A peace he hadn’t known he was looking for, finding him here, at a dinner table with a bread roll dent in the tablecloth and Joffrey currently holding forth on something no one else understood.

No war. No dragons. No succession. No battles. Just family. Just love.

Just this.

Halfway through dessert, Joffrey’s phone lit up. “Oh!” He reached for it with the speed of receiving news they’d been waiting for. “Dad’s calling.”

Jace felt himself smile before the screen even showed Laenor’s face.

It appeared a moment later, that face, familiar and warm and slightly tanned by whatever sun was currently shining on whatever harbor on whatever coast he was sailing toward. Behind him, a bright blue sky suggested somewhere in Essos, probably. The man was perpetually in motion, perpetually somewhere else and yet found time for them. He was not their real father, but he might as well have been. After Harwin passed away, Rhaenyra had remarried Laenor as more of a deal since Laenor wasn’t interested in anything but he cared for Rhaenyra platonically and it seemed to have worked out great and that’s all that mattered.

“There are my favorite children.”

Luke snorted. “We’re your only children.”

“And yet somehow still my favorites.” Laenor’s gaze found you across the table, and his face smiled “There she is.”

You laughed. “Hello.”

“Good. Finally, someone sensible has arrived.”

“Hey!” Three voices, simultaneous.

Laenor continued as though he hadn’t heard. “How are you, darling?”

“I’m well, thank you.”

Jace groaned. “Why does everyone in my family like her more than me?”

“Because,” Laenor said, and the timing was beautiful, “she has manners.”

The table erupted. Even Rhaenyra, which was a significant achievement.

Laenor spent twenty minutes on the call, chatting about his route, trading insults with. He heard both Luke and Joffery’s rambling. He asked Rhaenyra about the board meeting she’d complained about, and listened to her answer. He asked you about your studies, and remembered something you’d mentioned three calls ago, and asked a follow-up question about it.

The man had walked into their lives years ago and simply decided, without announcement or conditions, that these were his sons. No performance of it. No documentation. Just- love, extended to fill the available space.

Dream Laenor had disappeared. The thought arrived gently, without bitterness. The dream-Laenor, who had been present mostly in his absence, who Jace had barely known, who had been lost before Jace could understand what losing someone meant. This version was here. This version showed up.

And Jace was, quietly and completely, grateful for that. The call ended. The dessert finished. The evening moved toward its natural conclusion with the comfortable inevitability of all good evenings. Luke vanished in the direction of his room. Joffrey disappeared with a quantity of snacks that could feed a whole army. Rhaenyra retreated to finish what she’d started, she always had something she was finishing, this was simply who she was and the penthouse settled into quiet

Which left you and Jace, alone on the balcony.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

King’s Landing stretched below them without end. The city was all light from up here, not the individual lights, not streets and windows and the moving points of cars, but the collective glow of it, the warmth of a few million people living their lives in proximity, translated upward into something that looked, from this height, almost like its own kind of fire.

A cool breeze moved through the dark, carrying the city’s particular nighttime mixture of warm pavement and distant food and the faint, improbable ghost of something floral from a rooftop garden somewhere below. It found its way into Jace’s curls and did what it wanted with them.

You stood beside him. Close enough that your shoulders touched.

Neither of you spoke. Neither of you needed to. The city was enough, for a while.

Then you broke the silence the way you often did when a thought entered your head.

“Do you think it was real?”

He didn’t ask what you meant.

The dreams. The prince and the princess. The battle. The promise made at the edge of the world on the morning of an ending. The specific weight of standing on Dragonstone and knowing.

“I don’t know,” he said.

You slipped your hand into his. Your fingers were cool from the night air. He closed his hand around yours.

“But it felt real,” you said.

“It did.”

Another silence, this one richer. Weighted, but not heavily, weighted the way a good book is heavy, in a way you want.

“If it was real…”

Jace looked toward you. The city’s light caught you from below, softening the angles, turning you luminous in the warm way of a portrait painted with care. The same thing he’d thought this morning returned, effortlessly, as though it had simply been waiting for the right lighting.

Radiant.

The same as the princess from the dream. The same, and also entirely herself.

“If it was real,” you continued, a smile finding the corner of your mouth, “I think she’d be happy.”

“Who?”

“The princess.”

Your fingers squeezed his.

“Because she got her prince back.”

Something moved in his chest and he felt a giddy sensation.

“And he got his princess,” he said quietly.

The smile you gave him in return was the specific, undone kind that he privately thought was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He doubted this would change.

“You know,” he said, after a moment, “I’ve spent all day thinking about the battle.”

“The Gullet?”

“Yeah.” He looked down at the city. “The part where I died.”

You were quiet beside him.

“And?” you said, finally.

He looked back through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the penthouse.

His mother, visible in her office, signing something. The small movement of her hand showing her actions. Luke in the hallway beyond, typing away at his phone aggressively with determinations of someone looking to win an argument even if he may be wrong.

Joffrey somewhere in his room planning a prank on his mother.

And all of it, all of this life, this ordinary, extraordinary life, glowing warm behind glass thirty floors above a city that had never known a dragon. His family.

“I think that prince would’ve liked this,” he said.

You followed his gaze.

You understood immediately. He could see it in the way your face softened, not with sadness but with tenderness that recognizes grief and holds it carefully.

A life without war. Without the weight of a crown.

Without sacrifice, the kind that swaps one beloved thing for another in an endless, devastating ledger.

Just family.

Just love.

Just peace.

You rested your head on his shoulder.

He turned his head and pressed a kiss to your hair, slow and quiet.

Neither of you saw it.

But just for a moment, a breath, almost a blink, the glass of the balcony door held a reflection that was not quite yours.

Two figures. Side by side. Dressed in black and red, the colours of a house that had once held the world.

Standing exactly as you were standing. Looking out at exactly what you were looking at.

Smiling.

At each other, and at this, and at everything that had managed, against all odds, to survive.

Then the image dissolved.

The glass held only the room behind it, warm and lit and full of the sound of Luke losing the argument.

And Jace, and you.

Exactly where you were always meant to be.

⬩➤ Want to read more? Check out my MASTERLIST!

Garrett laughs behind her, low and warm against the back of her shoulder, and the sound loosens something in her chest that had been sitting there since she spotted Nathan by the beer pong table twenty minutes ago. 

Garrett’s sitting on the kitchen counter behind her, one knee hooked loosely at either side of her hips while she stands between his legs with her back tipped into him like it happened by accident and not because his hand found her waist three seconds after she walked in and kept her there. 

He has a beer in one hand and the other at the back of her neck, thumb moving in slow, absent circles over the tender place where her shoulder meets her spine, like he’s decided her body is something he can keep track of without looking at it.

“They’re sandwiches, Tuck,” Logan says, leaning one hip against the island and reaching for one.

Tucker smacks his hand away. “They’re meant to be dipped. That’s the point.”

“In what?” she asks, because she loves Tucker and because she is weak.

Tucker brightens at her like he’s finally found a reasonable member of the group. “There’s au jus.”

Dean’s face twists. “There’s what?”

“Au jus,” Tucker repeats.

Garrett’s thumb pauses at the back of her neck. “Bro, did you make a French dip sandwich and then cut it into little slutty rectangles?”

She chokes on a laugh, and Tucker points at her with immediate betrayal. “Not you too. Don’t stoop to their level.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, not sounding sorry at all. “Little slutty rectangles was actually a strong contribution.”

“Unbelievable,” Tucker mutters, turning back to his plate with the wounded dignity of someone surrounded by people too stupid to appreciate innovation. “Fine. None for any of you.”

Logan already has one halfway to his mouth. “Too late.”

It should be enough. This, Garrett’s knee warm against her thigh, Tucker in front of them with a plate of sandwiches he has emotionally overinvested in, Dean loose-limbed and loud, Logan eating in a way that suggests he has never once feared choking. 

It should be enough to keep her here, properly here, in the kitchen with the counter digging lightly into Garrett’s palm beside her hip and the whole house smelling like beer and aftershave and cheap chips and winter cold.

But every so often, her body remembers Nathan’s in the house. A quiet tightening under her skin whenever his voice comes close enough to recognise. The back of her throat going dry for half a second. Her stomach making one slow, unpleasant turn when she catches sight of him leaning in too close to some girl near the living room archway, smiling with that exact mouth he used to make her feel stupid for needing anything. 

She’s over him. She knows that. She has done the therapy-adjacent late-night self-reflection, the crying in the shower, the deleting screenshots, the learning how to take a compliment without waiting for it to become a trap. She's rebuilt too many little pieces of herself to mistake disgust for longing.

Still. Seeing him makes her feel like she needs to wash her hands. 

Garrett’s thumb presses a little more firmly into the back of her neck, and she realises, with a small, guilty jolt, that she’s gone still.

“Still sore from yesterday?” he murmurs, his mouth brushing the bare curve of her shoulder because her top has slipped slightly and because Garrett’s incapable of seeing available skin without acting like it exists for him personally.

She nods, letting the answer be easy because that’s what he’s asking about and because she would rather talk about a pulled shoulder than the way Nathan’s laugh keeps snagging at the edge of the room. “A little.”

Garrett’s hand shifts, fingers sliding beneath her hair to rub slow circles into the muscle. It hurts enough to make her inhale and feels good enough to make her want to lean back harder. “There?”

“Mhm.”

Dean watches the movement with narrowed eyes. “Are we witnessing foreplay or physiotherapy?”

“Could be both,” Garrett says.

“Clinical dual-purpose,” she adds, and Logan snorts hard enough to cough.

Tucker, because he’s the only person in the room with any decency, points a sandwich knife at all of them. “Can one kitchen interaction in this house not become sexual?”

“No,” Dean says immediately.

“No,” Logan agrees.

Garrett leans down and kisses the top of her shoulder, his grin pressing briefly into her skin. “Probably not.”

She laughs, and for one second it works. The room warms properly around her. Garrett’s body is solid behind her, his hand large and careful on her neck, and Nathan’s a thing somewhere else. A bad smell through a window. A person she used to know badly. Nothing more. Then he walks into the kitchen.

Nathan comes in with one of his friends behind him, shoulder first through the crowd, laughing at something already, like the house belongs to him because he’s decided to move through it. He looks the same in a way that feels almost rude. 

Same neat hair. Same watch he used to tap when she was late, even if late meant she'd stayed back on placement because someone coded and she couldn’t exactly tell a dying man to hurry up. Same pale blue button-down that probably took more effort than it wanted to admit. His eyes flick over the kitchen and land on her. Garrett’s hand stops moving.

It’s so quick she nearly misses it. Nathan’s gaze dips to where she’s standing between Garrett’s knees, to Garrett’s hand on her neck, to the easy, intimate line of her body leaning back into his. His mouth twitches.

She hates that she knows that twitch. He turns toward his friend as they pass the island, heading for the sink where half the drinks are buried in ice, and coughs something under his breath. Enough that it could be denied, just enough that the words are meant to land like spit without the inconvenience of accountability.

Dean hears something. She knows because the lazy angle of his body changes at once, his spine straightening, one hand dropping from the counter. “What’d you say, man?”

The kitchen thins in a way no one else seems to notice at first. Tucker looks up from the sandwiches. Logan’s chewing slows. Garrett’s fingers spread over the back of her neck.

Nathan looks back at Dean like he’s surprised to be addressed, which is rich, considering Nathan’s whole personality is built on saying things softly enough to make other people look crazy for reacting. “Nah, man. Nothing.”

Dean’s face goes very calm. It’s a bad calm. A Dean calm that belongs right before some guy at Malone’s realises he’s miscalculated the pretty one. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Nathan says, lifting both hands, one beer bottle hanging loose from his fingers. “Just grabbing a drink.”

Dean nods once. “Get the fuck outta my kitchen.”

Nathan’s friend mutters something, but Nathan only gives a thin little smile, the one that always used to make her stomach drop because it meant he would punish her later for something he had started. “All good,” he says, and backs out with the beer.

For a second, nobody speaks. The music from the living room fills the space badly. Someone yells at the TV even though the TV is only playing a muted sports recap. Garrett’s hand has moved from her neck to her waist, his arm coming around her middle like he’s pulled her back without thinking.

“What was that about?” Logan asks, eyes still on the doorway.

Dean looks at her for half a second, not long enough to make it obvious to everyone, but long enough that she knows. Long enough that something sour and hot slides down the back of her throat.

He heard. Maybe not all of it, but enough. Dean, who jokes like breathing is optional, looks at her like he’s measuring whether to tell Garrett and deciding, maybe, that detonating him in the kitchen is not the right play.

“Nothing,” Dean says, taking a drink and looking away first. “All good.”

It isn’t, but she lets him have the lie. Garrett’s chin lowers slightly, his mouth close to her ear. “You okay?”

She makes herself nod before her body can make a whole production out of it. “Yeah. Shoulder’s just being annoying.”

Garrett doesn’t believe her. She can feel that in the way his hand settles more securely over her stomach, palm warm through her top. But he lets it go for now, kissing her shoulder again, once, slower this time. “Same as yesterday?”

“Yeah.”

Logan blinks, grateful for the normal subject or maybe just willing to accept the one she hands them. “What’d you do?”

“Oh, uh.” She clears her throat and reaches for one of Tucker’s sandwiches mostly so her hand has a task. “Patient came in unconscious yesterday. We were shifting him from the gurney to the bed when he started waking up, and he moved weird, and I kind of caught the weight wrong.” She lifts one shoulder, immediately regrets it, and makes a face. “Tweaked it a little. It’s fine. Just stiff.”

“Jesus,” Tucker says, concern creasing his forehead. “You okay?”

“Yeah, genuinely. Nothing compared to you guys throwing yourselves into walls.”

“Hey,” Logan says. “We get scholarships for that.”

Garrett’s thumb resumes the slow work at her shoulder, but his body hasn’t relaxed behind her. His beer sits forgotten beside him on the counter now, sweating into a little ring. “You should’ve told me.”

“I did tell you.”

“After I noticed.”

“That still counts.”

“It counts less.”

She tips her head back against his chest to look up at him, forcing the corner of her mouth to lift because the alternative feels like letting Nathan keep something. “Are you going to be difficult about a stiff shoulder?”

Garrett looks down at her, jaw still tight, eyes too attentive. “I’m good at difficult.”

Dean makes a disgusted sound. “God, you two are nauseating.”

“You’re just jealous nobody wants to stand between your knees while you threaten medical neglect,” Logan says.

Dean crosses his arms. “Plenty of people want to stand between my knees.”

“Name two.”

“Your mom, for one.”

Logan throws a piece of bread at him. Tucker yells about waste. Garrett laughs against her hair, and she lets herself be folded back into the noise because the kitchen moves on around her, because Nathan is gone, because for a while that's enough.

The night loosens by degrees without ever becoming good. People keep drinking. The music gets louder as if volume can correct a bad final score. The boys split apart eventually, pulled into different conversations and arguments and games she doesn’t track. 

Garrett disappears toward the back porch with Logan and two guys from the team, his hand sliding off her waist only after he bends to murmur, “Come find me if your shoulder gets worse,” which makes Dean make such a vile kissing sound that Garrett shoves him on the way past.

She ends up in the living room with two girls from anatomy and one from her clinical group, talking about a professor who pronounces duodenum differently every lecture like he’s trying to keep them on their toes.

It helps. It really does. The room is warm and crowded, and someone has shoved a drink into her hand that she keeps forgetting to drink, and for ten full minutes she is almost normal.

Then Garrett’s voice cuts through the house. “The fuck did you just say to me?”

The conversation around her falters. Her head turns before she’s fully processed why her stomach has dropped. Garrett’s near the archway between the living room and hall, shoulders squared, one hand fisted at his side, the other pushing Nathan back by the chest hard enough that Nathan stumbles into someone behind him. Logan’s two steps away, already moving. Dean, by the couch, goes still in a way that makes the whole room feel suddenly smaller.

Nathan laughs. He’s drunk enough now that the edges of him are sloppy, his face flushed, hair falling out of its careful shape. “I’m just saying, bro. She’s fucking insane. You haven’t gotten to the part where she has a nervous breakdown every time–”

Garrett shoves him again. Harder. “Say that shit again.”

A low sound moves through the room, like everyone’s inhaled at once and forgotten the exhale.

“Garrett,” she says, but it disappears under the music and the blood rushing in her ears.

Nathan’s eyes flick past Garrett and land on her. It’s awful, how bright he gets when he sees her watching. Like this is what he wanted. Like all the soft, careful little comments, all the rumours, all the muttered half-words in kitchens and hallways and under his breath, had been leading toward the moment he could drag her into the middle of a room and make her feel sixteen inches tall again.

“There she is,” Nathan says, spreading his arms slightly. “Slut of the hour. Been wanting to talk to you.”

Her fingers go cold around her cup. Garrett turns his head just enough to see her face, and whatever is left of his restraint thins to a thread.

Nathan either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. His smile pulls wider. “Hey, Graham, does she do that thing when she sucks yo–”

Garrett hits him before the sentence finishes.

The sound is horrible. Clean and thick and immediate, Garrett’s fist catching Nathan square in the jaw with enough force to snap his head sideways and send his beer flying out of his hand.

For one suspended second, everyone freezes. Then Nathan’s friend lunges, Dean moves like someone released him from a leash, and the whole living room comes apart.

Dean catches Nathan’s friend by the shirt and drives him backward into the wall with a crash that knocks a picture frame crooked. Someone screams. Someone else yells, “Oh shit!” like they’re at a sporting event instead of watching a felony assemble itself in real time. 

Nathan swings wildly and catches Garrett’s shoulder, but Garrett barely seems to feel it. He shoves him back over the coffee table, follows him down, and the next punch lands against Nathan’s cheek. Then another. And another.

For half a second, some ugly, honest part of her likes it. It flares through her so fast she feels sick with it, hot and vindictive and horribly human. Nathan on the floor, finally not smiling. Nathan with his mouth split instead of using it. Nathan taking one clean consequence after months of turning her name into something dirty in other people’s mouths.

Then Garrett’s knuckles hit him again, and the thought snaps in half.

“Garrett!” She pushes forward, but the room is bodies and arms and spilled beer. “Garrett, stop!”

He doesn’t hear her. Or he hears and can’t get to it. His face isn’t the face from the kitchen, not the boy with his thumb at her shoulder and his beer forgotten beside him. His jaw is locked, eyes bright and empty with rage, every line of him driven toward the next punch like the world has narrowed to Nathan’s face and the words he almost got to finish.

This could be bad. The thought arrives clinical and brutal. His draft. The team. The school. Coach. Phil. The Bruins. Everything people are already waiting to hold against him because men like Garrett are allowed to be violent on the ice only when someone else is keeping score.

“Logan,” she says, grabbing his sleeve as he passes. Her voice cracks around the urgency of it. “Get him off!”

Logan looks at her once, then at Garrett, and whatever he sees makes his face go grim. “G!” He moves in fast, Tucker right behind him, both of them grabbing Garrett under the arms and around the shoulders. “Walk it off, man. Come on.”

Garrett bucks against them so hard Tucker swears, Garrett's elbow catching him in the ribs. “Did you hear him?” Garrett snaps, voice wrecked and furious. “You didn’t– did you fucking hear what he said?”

“I heard,” Logan says, jaw tight, hauling him back with everything he has. “I heard, okay? But you gotta walk it off.”

“He’s a piece of shit!”

“I know.”

“You didn’t hear what he said before–”

“I know,” Logan says again, sharper now, because Garrett’s still trying to surge forward and Nathan is coughing blood onto the carpet and Dean’s being dragged off Nathan’s friend by two defensemen who look like they’re not having a great time either. “Garrett. Look at me. You’re done. You hear me? You’re done.”

Garrett’s eyes cut to her.

The whole room seems to tilt around that look. He’s breathing hard, chest heaving, curls falling into his eyes, blood on his knuckles that might not be his. The rage is still there, hot and awful, but underneath it something else flickers when he finds her standing in the middle of the room with her cup still in her hand and her shoulder drawn too high and her mouth slightly open like she’s forgotten what shape to make.

For a second, he looks almost scared. Then Nathan groans from the floor, and Garrett surges again.

“Upstairs,” Tucker says, voice tight. “Get him upstairs.”

Dean, still red-faced and furious, points at Nathan from across the room while Beau keeps a hand on his chest. “Get that fucker out of my house.”

“Dean,” Logan snaps.

“No, get him the fuck out.”

Garrett’s shoved toward the stairs more than guided, Logan at his shoulder, Tucker at his back, both of them talking low and fast. Garrett keeps looking back. Not at Nathan now, at her. Like he can’t decide whether leaving her downstairs is another thing to be angry about.

She can’t move immediately. For three, maybe four seconds, she stands there while the room reorganises itself around the damage. Nathan’s friend is yelling. Dean’s yelling louder. Someone is crouching beside Nathan, asking if he can open his mouth, which makes her student nurse brain twitch with absurd, unwanted competence. 

The girls from anatomy are around her suddenly, one hand touching her elbow, another voice saying, “Hey, are you okay?” in that careful way people speak when they realise they’ve walked into someone else’s history without a map.

She looks at Nathan on the floor. There’s blood at the corner of his mouth. His eye is already swelling. He looks smaller than he used to. Or maybe he was always this size and she had just been made to feel so much smaller beside him that she forgot how to judge distance properly.

He turns his head slightly, makes eye contact with her and spits red onto the carpet. “Crazy bitch,” he mutters.

The girl beside her inhales sharply. Something in her goes very still, a clean little line drawn through the middle of her body.

She sets her cup down on the nearest shelf because her hand’s shaking now and she doesn’t want anyone to mistake that for weakness. Then she steps around the coffee table, careful of the broken glass, careful of the beer soaking into the rug, and looks down at him. Nathan’s eyes lift to hers, dazed and hateful.

“You need to leave,” she says. Her voice is quieter than she expects. It works anyway.

Nathan laughs, or tries to. It comes out wet. “Yeah? Gonna get your boyfriend to hit me again?”

“No,” she says. “I’m going to go check on him. You can bleed on someone else’s fucking floor.”

For once, Nathan has nothing ready. His mouth opens, then shuts, and the silence that follows is so much better than anything she could have made him say. She turns before he can recover.

The stairs feel longer than usual. Her legs are steady until she reaches the landing, and then they’re not, a little, the adrenaline making her knees feel too loose under her. She hears Garrett before she sees him, voice rough behind his bedroom door.

“I’m fine.”

Logan’s answer is immediate. “You’re not fine.”

“I said I’m fine.”

“And I said you just tried to turn her ex into ground beef in our living room, so maybe I'm not over the moon about leaving you alone right now.”

She pushes the door open.

Garrett’s standing near the bed with Tucker in front of him and Logan by the door like he’s prepared to physically block an exit. Garrett’s right hand is bleeding across the knuckles. His shoulder is tense under his shirt. His face is flushed, jaw still working like he's chewing through the last of the fight.

All three boys look at her when she steps in. Garrett’s expression changes first. “Baby,” he says, and the word comes out rough enough that it almost undoes her.

Logan looks between them, then exhales. “We’ll be outside.”

Garrett’s head snaps toward him. “No, you don’t have to–”

“Yes, we do,” Tucker says gently. “Bathroom’s across the hall if you need first aid stuff.”

“I know where the bathroom is,” she says automatically.

Tucker gives her a tiny, exhausted smile. “Right. Yeah. Sorry.”

Then they’re gone, the door clicking shut behind them and leaving the room suddenly too quiet around her and Garrett.

For a second, neither of them moves. The music downstairs is muffled now, mostly bass and shouting. Garrett stands by the bed with blood drying over his knuckles, chest still rising too fast, looking at her like he expects her to take one good look and leave.

She hates that. She hates that the anger is already curdling into fear in his face. “Sit down,” she says.

His mouth twists. “Are you okay?”

“Sit down, Garrett.”

He does, because her voice has gone into the place it goes when she has no interest in negotiating with hockey players, concussed or otherwise. He sits on the edge of the bed, elbows braced on his knees, hand held awkwardly in front of him like he has only just remembered it exists.

She crosses to him and takes it carefully. His fingers twitch once, like he almost pulls away. She doesn’t let him.

“You’re bleeding,” she says, because it's easier to start with what her hands know how to fix.

“It’s not mine.”

“Some of it is.”

Garrett looks down at their hands, then away. “Did he touch you?”

“No.”

“Did he say anything else to you?”

She sighs softly. “Garrett.”

His eyes snap back. “Did he?”

She looks at him for a second, at the fury trying to relight itself because it's easier than whatever else is waiting in the room. “Not anything that matters.”

“All of it fucking matters.” 

The answer lands hard enough that she has to look down at his hand. The skin over two knuckles is split, red and swelling. 

She runs her thumb lightly around the edge of it, not over the broken skin, and Garrett sucks in a breath through his teeth. “That hurt?”

“No.”

“Liar.”

His mouth almost moves. Almost. It doesn’t make it to a smile.

She goes to the bathroom and comes back with the little first aid box she’s now reorganised three times. Garrett stays where she left him, which feels like a miracle or a warning. When she sits beside him on the bed, close enough that her knee touches his thigh, his eyes stay on her face.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

She pauses with an antiseptic wipe halfway open.

Garrett swallows, throat working hard. “I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t have– fuck, I know. I know it was bad. I know what that looked like.”

She sets the wipe down unopened for a second. “What do you think it looked like?”

His laugh is short and ugly. “Like exactly what everyone thinks I am when I get pissed off.”

The room shifts around the words. Phil’s shadow under Garrett’s skin, waiting for any evidence it can use.

She turns toward him fully. “No.”

“You didn’t see my face.”

“I did.”

“No, you didn’t.” His voice cracks with frustration. “You saw after. You didn’t see what I– I couldn’t stop. I heard him say that shit about you, and I couldn’t stop. I– I blacked out. I wanted to fucking kill him.”

She doesn’t flinch. That feels important, so she makes sure of it. She sits there with his bleeding hand in hers and the open first aid box on the bed and makes herself stay steady, because Garrett is watching for fear like his life depends on finding it before it finds him.

“You stopped,” she says.

His eyes flash. “Because Logan dragged me off.”

“And because you let him.”

Garrett looks away, jaw clenching.

She picks up the wipe again and tears the packet open. “This is going to sting.”

“I don’t care.”

“I know. I’m saying it anyway.”

She cleans his knuckles carefully. Garrett hisses once and then has the audacity to pretend he didn’t, staring at the wall like the wall has asked him to perform masculinity. 

She would make fun of him on any other night. On this one, she only holds his hand more securely and works the dried blood from the torn skin until she can see what belongs to him and what doesn’t.

“He was shitty,” she says, after the silence has stretched too thin.

Garrett’s breathing changes.

She keeps her eyes on his hand. “Not just, like, bad breakup shitty. He was… he made everything feel really small.” Her thumb steadies the back of Garrett’s hand when his fingers start to curl. “Me, mostly. The things I liked. The way I talked. What I wore. Who I spoke to. If I cried, I was manipulative. If I didn’t cry, I was cold. If I needed reassurance, I was needy. If I pulled away, I was punishing him. It was always something. And then after we broke up, he started saying things because he knew I hated making scenes enough that I wouldn’t correct him.”

Garrett’s face has gone dangerously still.

She glances up. “Do not go back downstairs.”

“I’m not.”

“You look like you’re planning an escape route.”

His eyes flick to hers, and she can see the exact moment the anger gives way to something worse, something softer and more helpless.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks.

It could sound accusing from anyone else. From him it just sounds hurt.

She folds the wipe into a small square because her hands need something to do. “Because I didn’t want to bring him into this.”

Garrett’s brow creases. “Into what?”

She looks at him then, and the room gets too warm and too quiet all at once. His hand is still in hers. His knees are still angled toward her. There’s blood on the wipe, music through the floor, and a fight downstairs with her name at the centre of it. 

Whatever this is has been refusing a name for weeks, living in Garrett’s bed and his kitchen and the passenger seat of his car, wearing his hoodies and eating his pizza and saying I’m not your girlfriend with his thumb tucked into her waistband.

“This,” she says.

Garrett’s face shifts, small and aching.

She looks back at his hand because it is safer. “I didn’t want to feel like I was handing him proof. Like he still mattered enough to affect something good. And I didn’t want you to look at me differently.”

“Baby,” Garrett says, rough.

“I know that’s stupid.”

“It’s not.”

“I’m over him.”

“I know.”

“No, I am.” She says it too quickly, then has to stop and take a breath because her chest has gone tight in a way she resents. “I am. I don’t want him. I don’t miss him. I don’t even care what he thinks of me anymore, not really. But seeing him still makes my skin feel weird. Like I’m waiting to be corrected.”

Garrett closes his eyes.

She tapes gauze over his knuckles with more care than is probably necessary. “And then you hit him, and part of me was like… good.” Her mouth twists with the honesty. “Which is not a very healing, future-healthcare-professional reaction.”

Garrett gives a broken little huff. “I don’t think healthcare professionals have to be saints.”

“No?”

“No.” His hand turns carefully under hers, catching her fingers. “Especially not when some asshole calls them that in my living room.”

She studies his face. “You can’t do that again.”

“I know.”

“I mean it.”

“I know.”

“No, Garrett.” Her voice firms, not loud, but enough that his eyes stay on hers. “He’s not worth your team. He’s not worth hockey. He’s not worth giving anyone a reason to say you’re out of control.”

Something painful crosses his face.

She softens immediately, her thumb moving once over the edge of the tape. “And he’s not worth making you feel like this.”

Garrett looks down at their hands. “I scared you.”

“No.”

His jaw tightens. “Don’t lie to make me feel better.”

“I’m not.” She shifts closer, her knee pressing more firmly into his thigh. “You didn’t scare me. The situation scared me. What could happen to you scared me. The way you looked at me after scared me because you looked like you thought I was going to run.”

Garrett doesn’t answer.

She reaches up with her free hand and turns his face gently toward hers. He lets her, but barely, his eyes dark and wet in a way that makes her chest hurt. “You didn’t make me afraid of you.”

His breath leaves him unevenly.

“I was afraid for you,” she says. “That’s different.”

Garrett’s eyes close for half a second under her hand. When they open again, the fight has drained out of him enough to leave the tired underneath. He leans forward slowly, like he's giving her time to move away even now, and rests his forehead against her shoulder.

She brings her hand to the back of his head immediately. His curls are warm under her fingers, damp at the roots from the party heat and whatever adrenaline is still burning out of him. His good hand comes around her waist. Proof, maybe. Or asking for it.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, muffled against her shirt.

“I know.”

“I just heard him and I–”

“I know.”

“He doesn’t get to talk about you like that.”

Her throat tightens. She turns her face into his hair for a second and lets herself breathe him in, the beer and soap and sweat and Garrett underneath it all, so familiar now it makes something in her ache. “No,” she says quietly. “He doesn’t.”

Garrett’s arm tightens around her, then loosens at once like he’s checking himself. She hates that too, so she shifts closer until he can’t mistake it, one hand sliding down to his shoulder, her cheek resting against his temple.

“You can hold me,” she murmurs.

He goes still.

“I’ll tell you if it’s too much.”

A breath shudders out of him. Then he pulls her in properly, both arms around her now, careful of his taped hand but tight enough that she can feel the last of the tremor in him. It’s not the confident, lazy hold from the kitchen.

It’s not the smug arm around her waist in front of some guy he’s trying to intimidate. It’s messy and tired and a little desperate, his face tucked against her neck like he can’t look at her while needing her this much.

She lets him. More than that, she holds him back. Downstairs, someone shouts. Dean, probably. Then Logan’s voice cuts through, sharp and managerial, which means the cleanup has reached the stage where property damage is being assessed by people who have no business assessing anything.

Garrett lifts his head slightly. “Is he still here?”

“No. Dean was having him removed from the premises with… enthusiasm.”

Garrett’s mouth twitches against her shoulder. “Good.”

“Dean also fought his friend.”

“Yeah, I saw.”

“Really committed to the bit.”

“Dean likes a group project.”

She laughs before she can stop it. It comes out small and shaky, but it’s real, and Garrett pulls back just enough to look at her like the sound has physically touched something in him.

There’s blood near his collar, a bruise starting along his jaw that she hadn’t noticed before, and his eyes are still too bright. He looks wrecked. He looks guilty. He looks like the boy from the kitchen and the man from the fight and something younger underneath both, waiting to see whether the room will stay safe.

She brushes her thumb lightly over the unbruised side of his jaw. “You’re an idiot.”

His mouth moves. “Yeah.”

“A huge idiot.”

“I know.”

“With terrible emotional regulation.”

That finally gets the edge of a smile, weak but there. “Coming from the girl who diagnoses herself with being hungry instead of sad.”

“That’s a valid nursing assessment.”

“It’s not.”

“It absolutely is. Half of this house is one snack away from psychiatric stability.”

Garrett huffs, and the sound loosens the room by an inch. His hand lifts to her waist, thumb rubbing once through the fabric in the same absent pattern from earlier, like his body remembers tenderness even when his head is still catching up.

“I should’ve asked you,” he says after a moment. “About him. Before.”

She shakes her head. “You didn’t know there was anything to ask.”

“I knew you got weird when his name came up.”

“I get weird when people say wound vac too.”

“That’s different.”

“It’s a gross phrase.”

His eyes stay on her, too serious for the joke to fully land. “I’m sorry you had to deal with him alone.”

She swallows. “I’m not alone now.”

Garrett’s face changes so fast she nearly looks away. The words sit between them, too plain, too close to something they have both been circling with sex and rides to placement and coffee in his kitchen and sleeping pressed together like denial is a blanket they can share.

He touches her chin, careful with his taped fingers. “No,” he says quietly. “You’re not.”

Her chest aches. She wants to make a joke. She wants to say something about him being concussed by his own fist or reckless in a way that should be charted. Instead she leans in and kisses him.

It’s soft because his lip is split a little and his jaw is sore and the whole night has been too sharp already. Garrett makes a sound against her mouth, one hand sliding to the back of her neck like he wants to keep her there and is still remembering to ask.

She lets the answer be in the way she moves closer, in the way her hand settles over his chest, in the way she kisses him again when he starts to pull back.

When they separate, his forehead stays against hers.

“I’m still mad,” he whispers.

“I know.”

“I want to go downstairs and kick him again.”

“He’s gone.”

“I can find him.”

She gives him a look.

Garrett exhales, eyes closing. “Kidding.”

“No, you’re not.”

“No,” he admits. “But I won’t.”

“Good.”

His thumb moves once beneath her jaw. “You staying?”

She pulls back enough to look at him. “After that? I kind of have to. Someone should monitor you for post-fight stupidity.”

“That a real condition?”

“In this house? Endemic.”

He smiles properly then, real enough that something unclenches behind her ribs. She reaches for his hand again and checks the tape, pressing the edge down where it has started to lift.

Garrett watches her do it. “You’re really okay?”

She pauses, because the easy answer is there. Fine. Good fine. The one they both know how to use when the room is too full.

Then she thinks of Nathan on the floor, small and bleeding and still trying to make her feel dirty from beneath Garrett’s bloodied knuckles.

She thinks of the kitchen, Tucker’s dippables, Dean’s sudden calm, Logan dragging Garrett back because he understood the stakes before Garrett could. She thinks of Garrett’s face after, terrified of himself in a way he has never made her feel of him.

“I’m… a little grossed out,” she says. “And tired. And I probably want to shower even though he didn’t touch me, which is annoying.”

Garrett’s eyes soften painfully.

“But I’m okay,” she says, because this part is true too. “I think I’m okay.”

He nods slowly. “Okay.”

“And you’re going to sit here for a minute before you go anywhere near stairs.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And you’re going to ice your hand.”

His brows pull together. “I just beat the shit out of a guy for you and now you’re giving me homework?”

“You beat the shit out of a guy for yourself too, Graham. Don’t get noble.”

His mouth opens, then closes. “Fair.”

“Thank you.”

He looks at her for a beat, then his mouth tilts faintly. “You’re kind of scary when you’re right.”

“I’m almost always right. You’re just new here.”

Garrett laughs, and it hurts him. She knows because his face twitches and his hand comes up toward his ribs like he can somehow protect every sore part at once.

She clicks her tongue before she can help it. “See? Post-fight stupidity.”

“I’m fine.”

She stares at him.

He sighs. “Manageable.”

“Better.”

Garrett reaches for her before she can get up fully for ice, catching her gently around the waist and pulling her back between his knees, echoing the kitchen without the noise, without the party version of themselves, without Nathan’s eyes from across the room.

His forehead drops to her stomach for a second, arms around her hips. She stills, then brings both hands to his hair. “I’ve got you,” she murmurs, because it’s the only thing that fits.

Garrett’s grip tightens once. Then, so quiet she almost misses it under the bass downstairs, he says, “I’ve got you too.”

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By the time the remaining stragglers had gathered their things and headed outside to their cars, it was already getting late, and the near-empty arena had descended into an almost eerie silence.

Once the coast was clear, you slipped out of your hiding place in the green room then quickly made your way through the building by memory, footsteps echoing in the empty hallways as you headed to your destination.

The air in the men’s dressing room hung heavy with steam and the faint scent of lingering cologne as you shrugged off your shirt and stepped out of your jeans, safely stowing them away in one of the nearby empty lockers.

Ignoring the anxious butterflies that fluttered in your stomach, you tiptoed past the benches and player’s lockers, following the muted sound of running water in the distance. As you rounded the corner to enter the showers, you held your breath, unsure of what might await you on the other side. But all of your nervousness melted away in an instant when you beheld the glorious sight of the naked man before you.

Garrett’s back was turned—body wet, slick and shining. Each toned facet of his muscular form flexing in unison and accentuated by the stark overhead light.

Unaware of your presence, he hummed a quiet tune to himself as he lathered his body with soap—the sudsy rivulets trailing down over the well-defined pecs and abs that tapered to a chiseled v-line, perfect for tracing with your tongue.

When he turned to the side, his thick cock bobbed with the motion, impressive even in its semi-erect state. Mouth parted in wonder, you couldn’t tear your eyes from how it swayed above the heavy balls that were framed by neatly trimmed thatch of dark hair.

It was as if his body was a feast on display and you were starving, your insatiable eyes unsure of where to look first.

Eventually he turned around to face you, head tilted back to use both hands to rinse his hair, the action drawing your gaze to biceps that looked like they’d been sculpted by the hands of the gods themselves.

Suddenly you were overwhelmed with visions of falling to your knees under the streamy spray and worshipping him the way a true work of art deserved.

As if reading your mind, a cocky smile graced his lips when he opened his eyes and caught you staring. “Well, well. Look who’s here.”

He didn’t seem fazed at all by your presence, standing proudly before you without an ounce of shame. In contrast, your cheeks started to burn when you caught his eagle eyes darting down to where you’d clenched your thighs together in an effort to lessen the growing ache between them.

Regaining some of your composure, you raised an eyebrow and shrugged. “Guess this means I win.”

When you’d been texting each other the night before, he’d bet that you wouldn’t have the guts to sneak into the locker room showers to hook up after practice—a risky proposal that you’d taken some time to consider. Of course, all of the prodding and teasing that followed had only made you more determined to prove him wrong—something that was par for the course in your relationship with Garrett.

Since meeting each other a few months prior in one of your shared classes, sparks had flown between you and the flirty star athlete who was known on campus as an unapologetic Casanova. You’d started out comparing your scores on tests and assignments, trying to outdo each other’s grades. But it hadn’t taken long before you, and your competitiveness, had made its way to the bedroom.

Even though your feelings for Garrett grew stronger every day, you knew that to him it was all just a game. Which you told yourself was fine as long you were having fun.

And oh, what fun you had.

As lovers, the two of you were perfectly matched in every way, but as competitors, you were even better. And there was no way in hell you were going to back down from one of his challenges—especially not one with such a tantalizing prize.

As you took a step closer, he drank in the sight of the black sheer lace bra and panties you’d recently purchased in his favorite color. A racy set that fit your body like a glove.

“Didn’t see you in the stands. Figured maybe you chickened out,” he teased, eyes flashing with mischievous fire. He loved nothing more than to rile you up and get you going.

You scoffed at him, “Not a chance. What kind of pussy do you take me for, Graham?”

Chuckling at your crude response, he let a hand run down his glistening chest, a smug grin overtaking his face as he watched your eyes follow its path.

He took another step closer, face mere inches from yours. Full lips so close you could almost taste them. “You kiss your dates with that mouth?”

Biting down on your lower lip, you shook your head. “Not exactly.”

Then taking that as your cue, you sank down onto your knees on the wet floor before his feet. Grinning up at him, you bounced back on the balls of your heels to make your breasts jiggle in the delicate lace cups.

“You like my new bra, Garrett? I wore it just for you.”

Wet curls fell into his face as he watched the soft motion of your tits beneath the sheer material. “Yeah, you gonna take it off for me too?”

Smiling, you reached behind your back to undo the clasp then let the straps slowly drape down your shoulders. He wet his lips with the tip of his tongue as he watched your breasts bounce free of the cups, nipples stiffening to firm peaks despite the humid air of the shower.

“You’re so fucking hot,” he murmured in approval as you shuffled a bit closer on your knees. From your position on the floor, he looked like a giant towering over you with his broad shoulders and thick muscular thighs covered in a soft dusting of dark hair.

Running your hands from his calves up to his thighs, you let the sharp tips of your nails sink into the flesh just a little. Just enough to make him groan out loud.

“Can I have my prize, now?” you implored in a cloyingly sweet voice while batting your lashes in the way that always got you what you wanted. “I won the bet, so it’s only fair.”

With his dark gaze locked on yours, he reached down to give himself a few lazy strokes. “Yeah? You think you can take it?”

In response, you opened your mouth and stuck out your tongue so that he could tap the head of his cock against the warm muscle. He was already hard and oh so pretty—longer than average with a thick and veiny girth that landed heavy on your tongue with a satisfying weight.

With a whimper of impatience, you reached up to replace his hand with yours. His cock was still slick and wet from the shower so your palm glided with ease as you stroked him a few times with a practiced flick of your wrist. You grinned to yourself when his hips jerked slightly to chase the slow thrust of your hand.

“Look at me,” he commanded in a soft voice and you obeyed, tilting your head back to gaze up at him with wide eyes already blown out and glassy with desire.

Leaning forward, you pressed a few soft kisses to his leaking tip as you stroked him, licking your lips and humming in satisfaction at the salty tang of his precum. Then he inhaled a sharp intake of breath as you flattened your tongue and proceeded to lick him slowly from base to tip, tracing a path along the thick vein on the underside of his shaft.

“Oh fuck—” he groaned, spreading his feet slightly wider apart to broaden his stance and keep his balance.

Spurred on by his reaction, you leaned in to wrap your glossy lips around him, hollowing out your cheeks to take him as deep as you could into your eager mouth. Soon you found a steady rhythm, slowly swirling your tongue around the ridges of his head then bobbing up and down his length, using your hand to stroke whatever you couldn’t swallow.

Garrett stared down at you, breath ragged and uneven, mesmerized by the sight of your pretty lips stretched so tight around his cock. The powerful muscles of his buttocks clenched and flexed as he fought to hold himself back from spilling into your mouth right away and ending things too soon.

He reached down to rest a hand on the top of your head, the gentle weight guiding you further onto his length. At one point his hips jerked slightly and when his tip hit the back of your throat, you gagged and pulled off, leaving you panting and out of breath.

Garrett looked down, tutting his tongue at the tears streaming down your cheeks.

“What’s the matter, can’t take it all?” he taunted from above as you narrowed your eyes at him and huffed with frustration, once again determined to prove him wrong.

In an effort to take him deeper than before, you gripped onto his thighs as you slowly worked him into your mouth and throat, inch by inch, until your nose was nestled in the soft hair at his base.

The soft masculine scent of his natural musk and soap filled your senses as he let out a low grunt of approval, watching himself slowly disappear in your warm, wet mouth. When he spotted the buildup of tears threatening your lash line, he reached down and swiped a tender thumb along your cheek. “Yeah, that’s it, baby. Doing so good.”

Even though he’d had his share of girls down on their knees for him in the past, no one had ever made him feel as good as you in that moment. In fact, if he was being honest with himself, no one else could ever compare to you—which was probably why he hadn’t fooled around with anyone else in months.

The dares and bets between the two of you were fun and kept things exciting, but after spending so much time together, the challenge of winning your heart had become his most coveted prize.

What had started out as just a game with the cute girl from his class had soon become an all-consuming obsession. Every time you left his bed, it was getting harder for him to wait until the next time he could get you alone. He’d never done the relationship thing before, but he wanted to try it with you—if you were interested. Most girls who pursued him weren’t looking for anything more than a one-time fling.

He’d been waiting for the right occasion to tell you how he felt, nervous about exposing his heart to someone for the very first time. Of course, having you down on your knees worshipping his cock in the meantime was more than fine by him.

Using your free hand, you reached up to gently caress his balls, rolling the soft globes in your palm as he choked out a moan, throwing his head back and raking a hand through his wet curls.

“Oh god—keep doing that,” he breathed.

You pulled off his length with a slick pop, still stroking him with your hand while you let your tongue tease and lick his sensitive balls. Sucking them into your mouth, you felt his cock throb in your palm as the combined sensations rapidly pushed him to the edge.

“I’m gonna cum,” he warned. “Where do you want me?”

You debated for a moment before releasing him from your grasp and sitting back on your heels with a coy smile.

“Want you to cum on my tits,” you purred, bringing your hands up to pinch and squeeze your nipples. “Think you can do that for me, Graham?”

He grinned, face flushed and eyes dark as he reached down to grasp himself.

“Fuck yeah,” he grunted. His cock was still slick and shiny with your saliva and his strokes became faster and more uneven with each thrust of his fist, increasing in desperation as he stared down at you.

“Oh shit—” he groaned just before he came undone, painting your chin, neck and chest with hot ropes of his pearly cum. Extending your tongue, you tried to catch whatever stray drops you could and then licked your lips clean, reveling in his taste.

Once he was finished, he stood back and sighed with satisfaction as he gazed down at the sight of you kneeling before him covered in his cum.

“Holy shit,” he murmured in a hoarse, almost-whisper. “You look so hot like that.”

You giggled, swiping a finger down between your breasts to gather some of his cum to bring it up to your lips. “Do you always make such a big mess of all your bunnies, Garrett? Or am I special?”

Your comment gave him pause as he attempted to catch his breath. “Wait—what?”

He could hardly believe what he’d just heard. Did you really think that was all he thought of you? That you were just some random puck bunny who meant nothing him?

Even though you had clearly been teasing him with your comment, he could sense the vulnerability behind your smile as it faltered for a second. His thoughts started to spin out of control, aware that he needed let you know how he really felt.

As you stood up to rinse yourself off in the shower, he followed to join you under the hot water, using the opportunity to work your panties down over your hips, leaving them in a pile of black lace on the floor.

“Need you,” he breathed against your lips, pushing you back against the wall with an urgency that surprised you. One of his large hands tilted your chin so he could capture your lips, while the other traced down your side, pulling you closer. “Need you so bad.”

His still firm cock pressed hot against your skin as he held onto you so tight that it almost felt as if he was worried you might float away.

“Garrett!” You giggled. “You just…um, is that even possible?”

“Just give me like ten minutes and I can go again,” he panted against your lips with a cocky smile.

“Ten minutes, hmm?” You smiled wrapping your arms around his slippery waist as warm water rained down on your entangled bodies. “And what are going to do until then?”

In response, he stepped back and gave you a devilish smirk before dropping to his knees. Then reaching for one of your legs, he helped you lift it over his shoulder while his other hand helped keep you balanced against the wall.

He pressed a soft kiss to the inside of your knee before looking up at you.

“Hmm…what to do,” he pondered, pretending to be deep in thought as he started to kiss a slow path along your inner thigh. “I guess I’ll eat my girlfriend’s pussy, if that’s ok with her?”

Your eyes widened in disbelief as the soft smacking of his lips left delicious tingles on your skin, the pleasant sensation still not enough to distract you from what he’d just said.

“Your girlfriend?” Your heart skipped a beat as you looked down at him with your eyebrows drawn together in surprise.

His smile was almost bashful as he gazed up at you, warm eyes filled with naked adoration. “Yeah, but only if you think you’re up to the challenge?”

what did he have to be upset about? you were the one who got demoted to something even less than casual . . . whatever that was.

sighing, you slammed your textbook shut, resisting the urge to roll your eyes when everyone in the library shushed you.

they were acting as though you had just opened your mouth and screamed from the top of your lungs.

glancing around, your eyes narrowed when they spotted the big mouthed gossip that had outed his own best friend loitering in one of the aisles.

dean didn’t exactly seem like the type to even know what a book was, nevermind actually read one.

as if he could sense your eyes on him, he turned around, his expression changing to one you couldn’t quite decipher.

“please don’t come over here” you repeated to yourself almost silently, crossing your fingers under the table as if it was an absolute solution.

dean hesitated for a moment before rolling his eyes, pushing off the bookshelf as he headed in your direction.

“shit” you cursed, regretting your choice to study in the library instead of your isolated dorm room.

he tutted at you and shook his head, “i heard that, and here’s me thinking you were a lady”

you scoffed at him, “jesus, you’d know all about the ladies wouldn’t you? manwhore”

he perked up, grinning brightly as he sat down across from you, “thanks, gorgeous”

oh, did he think that was a compliment-

gritting your teeth, you clicked on the end of your pen in annoyance, “is there something you wanted? other than to piss me off, of course”

dean looked around the library and gestured for you to lean in closer.

you happily obliged so you could get this over with, resting your arms on the table and leaning in closer.

“you need to fix whatever high-school drama you have going on with g. i shouldn’t even be talking to you about this shit but we need our captain back” dean whispered, acting like someone could be spying on the two of you.

you were about to tell dean to mind his own business, but the sound of someone clearing their throat made you jump back in your chair.

the two of you turned your heads towards the sound, a beat of awkward silence now circling the room.

garrett graham was standing at the end of your table, and he looked pissed.

of course garrett was here right now! you had never even seen these idiots in the library before, and now you suddenly you couldn’t escape them.

it felt like someone was sat behind a big screen, laughing and pointing at you as if this was some sort of joke.

“can we help you?” dean says, trying to fight the mischievous grin that was forming on his face.

garrett looked between the two of you in annoyance, “what do you mean can we help you? why the fuck are you huddled together”

this whole interaction felt like a bad case of déjà vu, feeling a little too similar to the events of the last time all three of you were together.

you shrugged, “we were just having a chat, no need to get your panties in a twist”

dean snorted loudly, getting up and offering his empty seat to garrett who was still stood there with his arms crossed.

“i’ll leave you to talk and for fuck sake graham, be a man for once” dean says, patting garrett on the back before pushing the library doors open, winking at the two of you as he left.

garrett looked tired - he had dark circles under his eyes, his brown hair was a mess, and he had a face full of stubble which told you he hadn’t bothered to shave in a while.

pursing your lips, you tapped your pen against the stack of papers in front of you and waited for him to stop standing there like an idiot.

garrett eventually gave in, taking his jacket off and slinging it over the back of the chair as he sat down.

his tall frame made the chair look small, leaning back with his arms behind his head and his knees apart.

the way his muscles bulged through the thin material of his plain white t-shirt had you distracted, not even registering the words he was saying.

“and yeah, allie and dean slept together last night” he says, trying to pull your from your perverted daydreaming.

“that is the biggest lie i have ever heard! you could’ve picked something more believable” you huffed, slightly annoyed that his tactics worked.

garrett shrugged and his lips tilted up in a smug smile, “yeah, no shit - but it worked didn’t it?”

“ugh, whatever. are we going to talk about the elephant in the room or not?” you asked, feeling impatience start to creep in, wrapping around your mind like poison ivy.

he dragged his hands down his face like he was feeling the same impatience, “i don’t know what else there is to say”

unbelievable.

one minute garrett was supposedly “in love” with you and the next minute he was saying that you had been around “too much” lately.

there was plenty to say, you were just trying to remember a library was not the place to start anything more heated than a light discussion.

”do you love me, garrett?” you asked outright, not caring whether his answer was yes or no - you just wanted the truth for once.

“you can’t just ask someone if they love you” garrett exclaimed, throwing his hands up in frustration.

the air turned colder as the seconds ticked by, almost as if nature could feel the thick tension too.

“it’s a simple-“, “it is not a simple question at all and don’t pretend like it is” garrett says, cutting you off.

the people sat at the table next to you shushed the two of you.

“goddamnit, we’re having a conversation. if you don’t like it, fuck off” garrett whisper shouted in their direction, staring them dead in the eye.

they murmured amongst themselves before getting up and pushing their chairs in, heading for the exit.

he pushed his brown curls away from his face as he tried to find the right words to say, “look, i know i like spending time with you. my friends clearly seem to like you too which is the biggest achievement of all”

he huffed out a sigh of amusement and disbelief as he continued, “dean and his big fucking mouth”

you nodded in agreement, “dean and his big fucking mouth”

he gave you that dimpled smile that could melt icebergs as well as hearts, “you’re the first person i’ve wanted more than sex with. i just don’t know what that means yet” garrett admitted.

“uh, thanks?” you say.

he rolled his eyes dramatically, “you know what i mean”

you did know what he meant, he just had a very garrett graham way of saying it.

and although it felt like garrett still wasn’t telling you the whole story, it wasn’t up to your or dean to force it out of him.

“how about you take me on a date first before you kill me with these panty dropping declarations?” you say, wanting to lighten the mood, tired of the darkness that’s been following you like a shadow lately.

this caught his attention, “jesus, don’t talk about panties right now” he groaned, his mind going somewhere else, just like a typical man.

”or what?” you say, tilting your head in defiance as you looked up at him through your lashes.

he grabbed your hand that was flat against the wooden table, pulling you up and guiding you round until you were stood in front of him.

your ass was perched on the edge of the table and garrett placed his hands on your thighs, pulling them open so he could slot his body between them.

he fit perfectly, like he was made to fill any empty spaces you created.

garrett pulled you towards him and you landed on his lap, a squeal escaping your mouth at the unexpected move.

his gaze landed on your lips, a gruff groan leaving his mouth when your tongue darted out to wet them.

“fuck it” garrett said, hand wrapping around the back of your next as he pulled you in for a breathtaking kiss.

his other hand slid up the back of your t-shirt, his warm skin against your own feeling euphoric after going so long without touching him.

you could feel his arousal, the loose basketball shorts he was wearing doing nothing to conceal what he was feeling for you right now.

you were so wrapped up in each other that you didn’t hear the door creak open.

“damn, y/n. i didn’t know you had it in you” dean says, arms crossed as he leaned against the doorframe.

garrett’s hands slipped from your body as your heads simultaneously whipped to the side at the sound of deans voice.

“what the fuck?” you both say at the same time.

“when i said sort it out, this wasn’t exactly what i meant” dean whistled humourously, his watchful gaze full of heat.

garrett reached around you to grab one of your books from the table and threw it in deans direction, “why are you lurking like a fucking pervert, dude?

the book was just short of hitting dean, much to garrett’s annoyance.

“some of us have exams to study for, g. whatever, i’ll just come back later and leave you lovebirds to it” dean says, voice laced with mock sadness.

as if. everyone knew dean didn’t study, he just wrote what he thought was right and prayed for the best.

garrett closed his eyes and took a deep breath, looking like he was ready to chase dean out of the door himself.

“wrap it before you tap it, graham! i’m not ready to be an uncle yet” dean says, not turning back around as he headed out of the door, leaving you alone with garrett once again.

you rested your head on garrett’s shoulder, your body shaking with laughter at the blonde hair menace who always had the worst timing in the world.

when you were finally out of laughter, you pulled back and nodded at garrett to which he nodded back, coming to a mutual understanding without even having to say anything.

“hey, and no more secret meetings with dilaurentis because he’ll end up corrupting you with his bullshit. deal?”

“deal” you murmured in agreement.

this was a temporary resolution, but it wasn’t like love was the first thing on your mind either considering you hadn’t even been out with garrett off campus yet.

although, a date with a man known for one night stands was as close to love as you could get. for now at least.

Dean Di Laurentis, who had never been her boyfriend, which was a legal technicality he clung to with the same lazy confidence he seemed to apply to everything else in his life.

Dean had been a mistake with good hair and a trust fund. A mistake with a grin. A mistake that had lasted a few times longer than it should have because he was pretty and shameless and very good at looking at a girl like he had personally invented bad decisions and would be thrilled to walk her through the beginner course.

But Dean wasn't a girlfriend kind of guy. Dean was Six Flags. You rode the ride, screamed once or twice, maybe bought the photo after, and then got off.

She knew that. She had known that then, technically.

Dean had a way of appearing in her life at the least dignified possible moments looking pleased with himself, and she had a way of refusing to let him be pleased without penalty.

Like the time she found him coming out of a women’s bathroom stall at Malone’s with a girl in a denim skirt. She had been washing her hands at the sink, glanced up in the mirror, taken in his flushed face, his rumpled shirt, the girl fixing her hair behind him, and said, “Hi, whore,” with the flat calm of someone greeting a neighbour at the mailbox.

Dean, because shame had never successfully attached itself to his nervous system, had only chuckled and leaned one shoulder against the stall door. “Hey.”

That was the whole thing. Mostly joking. Mostly old bruised pride dressed up in insults because that was easier than admitting he had maybe gotten under her skin for a minute and then left muddy footprints on his way back out.

Garrett wasn't supposed to be part of that. Garrett had happened after a party, which was already a bad sign because nothing good ever began at two in the morning in a hockey house kitchen with tequila and Dean singing the wrong words to a song everybody else knew. 

It had been loud and hot and stupid, the whole house sticky with beer and laughter and bodies pressed into doorways. She had ended up outside on the back steps because the kitchen had started spinning, and Garrett had come out five minutes later with two waters and an expression that suggested he was trying very hard not to ask whether she was going to puke on his sneakers.

He had sat down beside her instead.

Garrett had looked at her sideways when she laughed at one of his jokes, and something in his face had changed. Garrett’s face was a practiced thing, mostly grin and charm and captain-boy confidence, but this had slipped underneath it. A quiet little interest. A flicker. Like he had found something he wanted to pay attention to and was already annoyed about it.

Then, later, in the upstairs hallway, she had been trying to find the bathroom and he had been trying to find Logan, because Logan had stolen his phone to send a voice note to Coach that began with “hypothetically, if a man loved hockey but hated cardio,” and somehow Garrett’s hand had ended up on her waist. Warm through her shirt. Steadying her when someone shoved past in the hall.

“Careful,” he had said, close to her ear.

She had turned her head, too drunk to be clever and too annoyed by how good he smelled to be normal. “I’m always careful.”

Garrett’s eyes had dropped to her mouth for half a second, then lifted again with that awful amused heat. “Uh huh.”

The first kiss had been an accident. His room had been closer than the bathroom. His door had shut behind them. His mouth had been warm and confident and so immediately, horribly good that she had pulled back after ten seconds just to stare at him like that might make the situation less offensive.

Garrett had grinned down at her, lips a little swollen already, one hand still at her waist. “What?”

“You kiss like you know you’re good at it.”

He’d shrugged. “I am good at it.”

“That’s a disgusting thing to say.”

“Wasn’t really a denial, though.”

She had meant to hate that. Truly. She had tried. 

The first time they almost got caught, she was riding him with her hands braced on his chest and Garrett’s mouth at her throat, and the only thought in her head was a soft, stunned, repeated oh that seemed to have lost all connection to language.

His room was too warm despite the window cracked open behind the desk, the cold night air barely managing to move through the heat they had made under the sheets. The lamp was off. Some blue-white spill from the streetlight outside cut through the blinds in thin, broken lines over the wall and across Garrett’s shoulder. 

His chain had slipped sideways against his collarbone. His hair was a wreck from her fingers. His mouth was open against her neck, kissing up under her jaw with the kind of lazy, devastating precision that made her thighs shake around him before she could stop them.

“Garrett,” she breathed, and then immediately louder, because his hands had shifted to her hips and guided her down harder. “Oh my God.”

His hand flew up before the sound had fully escaped, palm covering her mouth, his other hand tightening at her waist. “Jesus, baby,” he said, voice low and rough and entirely too amused for a man currently participating in the same crime. “You trying to get me murdered?”

She made a muffled noise against his hand that was meant to be a curse and came out humiliatingly close to a whimper. Garrett’s grin flashed in the dark, teeth catching briefly, eyes bright and smug and so pleased with himself she nearly hated him. Nearly. 

It was hard to maintain moral outrage when his thumb was pressed lightly against her cheek and his hips were still moving, slow and deep and mean in the way only a man with a scoreboard in his soul could be mean.

“There we go,” he murmured, kissing the side of her jaw while his palm stayed over her mouth. “Can’t be announcing it to the whole house, right?”

She glared down at him, or tried to. It probably lost some effect when her eyes fluttered halfway shut because he lifted his hips again and hit exactly the wrong place, which was to say exactly the right one.

Garrett laughed under his breath, quiet and filthy with satisfaction. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”

She bit the inside of his palm.

His brows shot up. “Oh, we’re biting now?”

She nodded against his hand with as much dignity as a girl could manage while naked on top of him and very actively losing a fight against her own volume.

“Cool,” he whispered. “Very healthy. Super mature.”

She would have laughed if she had any air left. Instead her body gave her away again, a soft, trapped sound catching under his palm as he sat up suddenly, changing the angle and dragging her with him until she was pressed chest-to-chest with him, knees bracketing his hips, his mouth at her ear.

“Shh,” he said, but the edge of laughter in it ruined the authority. 

He was enjoying this too much. Enjoying her like this, messy and desperate and trying very hard to be quiet because if anybody found out she was in Garrett Graham’s room, in Garrett Graham’s bed, after Dean Di Laurentis had spent the better part of the semester behaving like her eventual return to his mattress was a scheduling issue rather than a question, the whole house would become unbearable overnight.

Then the hallway floor creaked. Both of them froze. Him still inside her, both still overheated, still breathing too hard into the tiny space between them. Garrett’s hand stayed clamped gently over her mouth. Her fingers dug into his shoulders. His eyes lifted toward the door, and in the blue-dark she watched every cocky line in his face vanish into immediate, sharp focus.

Outside, Logan’s voice drifted close enough to curdle the air. “Yo– Dean. Is that who I think it is in there?”

Her stomach dropped so fast it was almost physical. Garrett’s eyes snapped back to hers.

For one suspended, insane second, they only stared at each other. She could feel his heartbeat hard against her chest. Could feel where they were still joined, which her body had the absolutely perverse audacity to notice in detail despite the fact that John Logan was currently holding a one-man investigation outside the door. Garrett’s hand loosened slightly over her mouth. Her lips parted against his palm. He held his finger up to his own lips, and she had nodded quickly.

He reached blindly toward the bedside table with one hand, the motion chaotic and deeply unathletic for a man who made a living looking graceful under pressure.

His fingers knocked something over. A bottle cap, maybe. His watch. A textbook hit the floor with a soft thud. She bit down on a laugh before it could get out, which was dangerous because laughter at that moment felt like shaking a soda bottle with the cap still on.

Garrett found his phone at last, thumb flying over the screen. For half a second there was nothing. Then the speaker on his dresser exploded to life with Cherry Pie so loud the whole room seemed to jump.

She slapped both hands over her own mouth now, eyes wide, shoulders shaking immediately with silent laughter. Garrett stared at the ceiling like he could not believe this was the solution his brain had selected and was, worse, proud of himself anyway.

In the hallway, Logan went silent. Then he burst out laughing. “Oh shit– sorry, G! Guess not!”

A second later Dean’s voice, farther away and deeply suspicious, called, “What?”

“Nothin’, man,” Logan said, still laughing. “Keep walking.”

Footsteps retreated. The music kept blaring. Garrett turned it down with the ferocious speed of a man who had made his point and no longer wanted Warrant narrating his sex life. The second the volume dropped, she folded forward into Garrett’s shoulder and started laughing for real, breathless and helpless, her whole body shaking against his.

Garrett’s arms closed around her automatically. Then he started laughing too, quiet and disbelieving into her hair. “Fuck.”

She lifted her head, face hot, eyes watering, and whispered, “Cherry Pie?”

“It was the first thing that came up.”

“You panic-played Cherry Pie?”

He huffed out a laugh. “It worked.”

“That’s not the same as being good.”

“It worked,” he repeated, grinning now, smugness returning by the inch because survival had restored him. His hands slid to her hips again, warm and possessive and much too confident. “And for the record, if Logan thinks you’re in Dean’s room right now, I might throw myself out the window.”

She pressed her lips together, trying and failing not to smile. “Jealous?”

Garrett’s eyes narrowed. “Careful.”

The word landed low in her stomach. Warm and bright and stupid. She leaned down and kissed him before he could see too much of it on her face, and he kissed her back still smiling, still breathing laughter into her mouth, both of them a little shaky now for a different reason.

“Too close,” she murmured against him.

“Yeah,” Garrett said, one hand coming up to the back of her neck, holding her there. “Maybe stop trying to wake the neighbours.”

“You’re the one playing stripper music at full volume.”

“Because you’re loud.”

“Because you’re annoying.”

His grin was all teeth in the dark. “Baby, just before? That wasn't an annoyed sound.”

She shoved at his chest, and he fell back on the mattress easily, gesturing for her to come closer with two fingers. The stupid warmth of it made her go quiet in a way that was much more dangerous than the moaning had been.

The second time they almost got caught, she was drunk enough that focusing on standing upright had become a full-body project.

The house belonged to some guy from one of Dean’s classes, or maybe one of Logan’s, or maybe no one knew and they had all simply agreed to occupy it until dawn. It smelled like beer, perfume, damp coats, and the kind of carpet that had seen too much and forgiven nothing.

She stood in the upstairs hallway with one shoulder against the wall, phone in hand, trying to read the same text from Garrett for the third time.

Garrett: You good?

It was a simple question. Easy. Very Garrett, actually. Casual on the surface, but sent because he had been watching her across the room ten minutes ago with that narrowed captain look he got whenever she reached the stage of drunk where her smile became too slow and her balance became hypothetical.

She typed, yes.

Then deleted it because the letters looked suspicious.

Then typed, yed.

Then stared at that for a long time.

Beside her, a cluster of girls in tiny tops and hockey-adjacent enthusiasm had been having one of those conversations that floated around the party like perfume: who was hot, who was overrated, who was secretly huge, who had commitment issues so severe they should probably be peer-reviewed. 

She ignored it for as long as she could because she had bigger concerns, namely that if the bathroom door did not open in the next thirty seconds she was going to have to start making decisions about where else she could throw up.

Then one of them said Garrett’s name. Her eyes lifted off her phone before she could stop them.

The girl speaking was blonde, glossy in a way that seemed expensive even if nothing she was wearing necessarily was, with a little white top and the high, pleased expression of someone enjoying the sound of her own anecdote. 

“No, I’m serious,” she was saying, one hand pressed to her chest like she was giving testimony. “Last night was the best night ever. Like, Garrett knows what he’s doing. He made me come, like, three times.”

The hallway did a small, drunken tilt.

The problem wasn't even jealousy at first, not properly. The problem was logistics. Garrett had been in her room last night. Garrett had been in her bed last night, sprawled diagonally like he owned both the mattress and several surrounding counties, one arm hooked around her waist while she tried to sleep and he mumbled something into her hair about setting an alarm for practice. 

Garrett had stolen half her blanket and then looked offended when she kicked him in the shin. Garrett had kissed the back of her shoulder at five in the morning before climbing out of bed, half-dressed in the dark, whispering, “Go back to sleep, baby,” like he had any right to sound that soft before sunrise.

So unless Garrett had discovered cloning between midnight and breakfast, the blonde girl was lying.

The girl noticed her staring, because drunken staring was rarely subtle and this particular stare had been delivered with the blank intensity of a haunted doll.

The blonde’s smile faltered into something confused but still sweet, which was somehow worse. “Um… hi, babe. You okay?”

Another girl beside her leaned in slightly, brows lifting. “Did you need some water?”

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Her phone was still in her hand, Garrett’s unanswered text glowing uselessly against her palm.

“You weren’t with Garrett last night,” she said.

The sentence came out too clear. Too certain. Sober-sounding, even, which was deeply unfair given the fact that her inner ear was currently behaving like a loose shopping trolley.

The blonde blinked. “What?”

“You weren’t with Garrett last night.” She frowned, genuinely trying to make the pieces fit and failing so hard that social caution had gone missing in the wreckage. “Why are you lying?”

The air around the bathroom line shifted. A couple of girls looked over. Someone’s mouth dropped open a tiny bit. The blonde’s face did that quick, ugly thing people’s faces did when embarrassment arrived and pride immediately tried to tackle it before it spread.

“And how would you know?” she asked, voice sharpening with a laugh around the edges. “Are you, like, his secretary?”

Her drunk brain, slow but not entirely dead, caught up with the fact that she was standing in a hallway full of girls, defending Garrett Graham’s whereabouts during the exact hours he had spent in her bed, while actively participating in a secret that depended on not doing that.

Her mouth opened. Nothing came out. The blonde’s brows rose.

“I– uh.” She looked down at her phone like it might offer legal counsel. Garrett’s text still sat there, accusatory and simple. “Never mind. Actually.”

Then she stepped out of the bathroom line. There was a slight shoulder bump with the wall and a near-collision with a guy carrying two beers, but she made it away from the girls and around the corner with most of her dignity still technically attached. 

Her heart was thudding stupidly hard for a hallway interaction, heat crawling up her throat and into her cheeks. Not jealousy, she told herself. She was just offended by misinformation. Academically. On principle. People should not be allowed to lie.

Her phone buzzed again as she reached the top of the stairs.

Garrett: Seriously. Where are you?

She stared at it for a second, then typed, need bathroom.

Then, after a pause, added, girls are liars.

His response came almost immediately.

Garrett: What

She squinted at the screen.

Garrett: Baby where are you

The baby landed warm even through the alcohol, which was annoying. She looked back over her shoulder toward the hallway, where the bathroom line and the blonde and the whole stupid conversation still existed. Then she started down the stairs, one hand on the railing, the phone clutched in the other, already scanning the crowd below for Garrett’s dark curls and the broad, familiar shape of him.

She found him near the kitchen archway, and he was already looking for her. He caught sight of her halfway down the stairs, and his face shifted at once, amusement and concern colliding so fast that neither won cleanly. He moved through the crowd before she even reached the bottom, one hand lifting to her elbow as she stepped off the last stair.

“Hey,” he said, ducking close so she could hear him. “You okay?”

She looked up at him very seriously. “You were in my room last night.”

Garrett paused. His eyes moved over her face, then over the stairs behind her, then back down. “Yeah.”

“Like the whole night.”

His mouth twitched. “Most of it, yeah.”

“So that girl is a liar.”

A slow understanding dawned across his face. Then, because he was Garrett and therefore terrible, he started to smile. “What girl?”

She jabbed a finger somewhere upward. “The blonde. She said you made her come three times.”

His brows jumped. “Did I?”

“Garrett.”

“What? I feel like I’d remember.”

She crossed her arms. “She was lying.”

“Sounds like it.”

“She looked me in the face and lied.”

Garrett’s hand slid from her elbow to her waist, steadying her when she swayed half an inch in outrage. “You say anything?”

She stared at him.

His eyes narrowed, still smiling but sharper now. “What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

“Baby,” he whispered.

“I said she wasn’t with you last night.”

Garrett closed his eyes for one second. Just one. When he opened them again, he looked like he was fighting for his life against laughter. “Right.”

“She asked how I knew.”

“Okay.”

“And then I left.”

“Good call.”

“I almost said because you were with me.”

His grin did something helpless then, softer under the smugness, like the idea pleased him before he had time to make it a joke. “Yeah?”

She frowned at him. “Don’t look happy. I nearly compromised the mission.”

“The mission?”

“Our secrecy mission.”

“Our secrecy mission isn’t going great if you’re interrogating women in bathroom lines about my location.”

“She started it.”

“Sure.”

“She did,” she whined, dragging the second word out.

“I believe you.” He didn’t, not entirely. Or maybe he did and was simply enjoying himself too much to be decent about it. His hand squeezed once at her waist, warm and grounding. “You still need to pee?”

Her face fell. “Yes.”

Garrett’s mouth twitched again. “Come on. There’s a bathroom downstairs.”

“You know that?”

“I’m observant.”

“You’re a slut.”

“I’m helpful.” He leaned in, his lips brushing her ear, voice dropping into that low teasing register that made her stomach flip despite the fact that she was seconds away from becoming a medical emergency. “And for the record, next time I make you come three times, I’m expecting a better cover story than that.”

She turned her head slowly to glare at him. Garrett looked deeply pleased with himself.

The third time they almost got caught, she was in the hockey house kitchen at three in the morning wearing Garrett’s t-shirt with absolutely no plan.

It was after a loss, which meant the whole house had gone strange and heavy by midnight. The kind of subdued where the TV stayed on without anyone really watching it and the boys drank beer not to party but to have something to do with their hands.

Garrett had barely spoken when he came out of the locker room earlier, jaw tight, lip split, a bruise already blooming near his cheekbone, that restless, furious energy still moving under his skin like the game had not fully let go of him.

She hadn’t been supposed to come over. That was the rule. One of the rules. There were several now, apparently, all of them made by two people with a strong shared interest in pretending they had control over anything. 

No arriving together. No leaving together. No obvious texts when the guys were around. No sitting too close at parties. No looking at each other for too long in kitchens, which was quickly becoming the hardest one because Garrett Graham had a deeply inconvenient face and an even more inconvenient habit of watching her mouth when she was trying to speak.

And definitely no sneaking into his room after midnight through the window like a raccoon because he’d lost a hockey game and she wanted to crawl into bed with him.

So, naturally, she had done exactly that. Garrett’s window wasn't as easy to access as she had expected it to be. 

She had nearly died twice, scraped her knee on the siding, and whispered, “This is so stupid,” to herself with feeling before finally pushing the window up and tumbling into his room with all the grace of a bag of laundry.

Garrett had been lying on his bed in the dark, shirtless, one arm over his face. He hadn’t even startled properly. He had just shifted the arm enough to look at her, eyes bleary and bruised with exhaustion, and said, “Baby, what the fuck.”

“I’m being supportive.”

“You broke into my room.”

“I prefer… entered creatively.”

He had stared at her for another second, then lifted the edge of the blanket.

For all the jokes, all the swagger, all the please-don’t-call-this-what-it-is of him, he made room for her too easily. Like his body knew before the rest of him had finished filing objections. She crawled in beside him, careful of his ribs and the angry bruise darkening along one side of his stomach, and he rolled toward her with a wince he tried to hide and a hand that found her hip immediately under the blanket.

“Hi,” he had murmured after a while, lips brushing her hair.

She had smiled into his chest. “Hi.”

Now, hours later, she woke up with her mouth dry enough to qualify as an emergency and Garrett’s arm heavy across her middle.

The room was dark and cold around the edges, the cracked window letting in a thin stream of winter air that made the discarded clothes on the floor look like shadows. Garrett was dead asleep behind her, breathing rough through his nose, body warm and heavy and completely gone in the way only athletes after a bad game seemed capable of being. 

One of his hands was tucked under the hem of the shirt she’d stolen off his floor. She swallowed once. Painfully. Then again. Still bad.

She shifted carefully. Garrett grunted and tightened his arm, which would have been sweet if it had not also trapped her in a dehydrated prison.

“Baby,” she whispered.

Nothing.

“Garrett.”

A deeper grunt this time. His face pressed into the back of her neck.

“Baby,” she tried again, softer. “Can you get me water?”

Garrett’s answer was a long, sleep-mangled sound that might have been English in a previous life. She waited. 

“Garrett. Please. I’m really thirsty.”

“No,” he mumbled into her hair.

She turned her head as much as she could. “No?”

“M’sleep.”

“You’re talking.”

“Sleep talking.”

She groaned softly. “You’re the worst.”

“Mm.”

She lay there for another thirty seconds, hoping thirst might pass. It did not. Eventually she eased his arm off her waist inch by inch, freezing every time he made a noise, and rolled over to look at him properly.

The sight softened her irritation before she could defend against it. His face was turned toward her on the pillow, hair falling messily over his forehead, lashes low against his cheek. The split in his lip had dried dark at one corner. The bruise near his ribs looked ugly, even in the low light. Another mark curved along his stomach where he’d been slammed into the boards hard enough that the crowd had made a single collective ooooh.

He wasn't getting up. She sighed and climbed out of bed.

The floorboards were cold under her bare feet. Garrett’s t-shirt hit high on her thighs, soft and oversized and smelling like detergent and him. She paused at the door, listening. The house had finally gone mostly quiet. No TV. No shouting. No Dean wandering around half-drunk asking philosophical questions about hot girls and mortality. Only the hum of the fridge downstairs and the occasional tick of the heating.

She slipped into the hall and padded down the stairs, one hand trailing lightly along the wall because the dark made everything look unfamiliar. The kitchen waited at the bottom, dim and blue with moonlight through the window over the sink. Someone had left a pizza box open on the counter. There were three empty beer bottles near the stove and a hoodie slung over one of the chairs. The house smelled like stale chips, laundry, and the faint metallic cold of nighttime.

She found a glass in the cabinet after opening the wrong one twice, filled it at the sink, and drank half of it in one go with her eyes closed.

Then the light snapped on. She spun around so fast water sloshed over her hand.

Tucker stood in the doorway in sweatpants and a faded t-shirt, one hand still on the light switch, hair flattened on one side from sleep. He blinked at her. She blinked back.

For one full second, neither of them moved.

Then Tucker looked at the oversized shirt. Her bare legs. The glass in her hand. The stairs behind her.

“Well,” he said slowly. “Shit.”

Her stomach dropped.

“No,” she said immediately. “Please don’t–”

Tucker rubbed one hand over his face, looking more tired than scandalised. “Damn. I owe Logan ten bucks.”

That derailed her panic so thoroughly that she stared at him. “What?”

He gave her a sympathetic look that somehow made everything worse. “I can’t believe you slept with him again.”

Her mouth opened. Closed. The silence that followed wasn't her best work.

Tucker’s brows lifted. “Dean? Obviously?”

Oh.

The relief arrived so hard it nearly made her dizzy, followed immediately by the horrible understanding that she now had to let Tucker think she had climbed out of Dean’s bed at three in the morning. Her brain, which had been half-asleep and mostly water-focused three minutes ago, scrambled for purchase.

“Right,” she said, too quickly. “Yeah. Dean. Obviously.”

Tucker’s expression softened in a way that made guilt stab straight through the middle of her chest. “Oh. Uh. Sorry. I didn’t mean to make it weird.”

“No, it’s–” She swallowed, clutching the glass with both hands. God bless darkness. God bless Tucker being half-asleep. God bless the fact that Dean’s entire personality was plausible cover for almost any bad decision within a thirty-foot radius. “Please don’t say anything.”

Tucker frowned. “I won’t.”

“No, seriously. Please.” She made her eyes wide because she could, because she had been underestimated by men before and did occasionally enjoy the practical benefits. “It’s so embarrassing. I wasn’t going to. I don’t even know why I– God.” She looked down, shook her head, and gave a small, miserable laugh that deserved an award from whatever committee evaluated female deception in shared kitchens. “Please don’t tell Logan. Or anyone. Especially Dean. Actually, fuck, especially Dean.”

Tucker, who possessed the inconvenient decency of a man who hated watching people feel bad, visibly faltered. “Hey. No, yeah. Totally. Your secret’s safe with me.”

She nodded, still performing devastated shame with one hand wrapped around a stolen water glass. “Thank you.”

“Do you… need anything?”

The kindness almost killed her. “No. I’m good. Just water.”

“Okay.”

Another awkward beat passed. Then Tucker stepped aside from the doorway with the solemn discomfort of someone allowing a ghost to pass through. “Night.”

“Night,” she whispered, and scurried toward the stairs with the glass held carefully against her chest.

She didn’t breathe properly until Garrett’s door shut behind her.

He was still asleep when she climbed back into bed. Useless. Beautiful, bruised, useless man. She set the glass on his nightstand and stared at him for a second in the dark, still buzzing with adrenaline. Then she smacked his shoulder.

Garrett flinched awake with a strangled noise, eyes half-opening. “What– fuck– what?”

“Tucker caught me downstairs.”

That woke him a little more. “What?”

“He thinks I slept with Dean.”

Garrett went very still. Then his face did something fascinating in the dark. Sleep disappeared. Pain disappeared. Every exhausted, post-game softness sharpened into offended disbelief. “He thinks you what?”

“I had to go with it!”

“You had to?”

“Yes, Garrett, because the alternative was saying actually I’m sneaking out of Garrett’s room after cuddling with him because we’re both very normal and secretive and weird.”

He pushed himself up on one elbow, immediately winced, then tried to pretend he hadn’t. “Why the fuck would he think Dean?”

“Because of Dean!”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s kind of the whole answer.” She climbed back under the blanket, still whispering harshly. “You wouldn’t get me water.”

“I was asleep.”

“So I went downstairs and got caught and had to improvise.”

Garrett stared at her, jaw working. Even bruised and half-dead, he managed to look jealous in a way that made her want to laugh and kiss him and maybe shove him a little. “Tucker thinks you left Dean’s room wearing my shirt?”

“I don’t think he was doing t-shirt analysis at three in the morning.”

Garrett dropped back against the pillow with a quiet, pained groan, one hand dragging over his face. “Great.”

She settled beside him, taking a long, triumphant sip of water. “Your fault.”

“My fault?”

“Yes.”

“For being asleep after getting hit, like, forty times tonight,” he said, eyes wide in the dark. Then he groaned. “Fuckin’– Dean?”

She smiled despite herself. “You’re jealous.”

“I’m not jealous.” He was very obviously jealous. His arm came around her waist and tugged her closer with enough care not to hurt himself but enough insistence to make the point. “I just don’t love Tucker thinking you’re sneaking out of Dean’s bed.”

“Technically, he thinks I’m sneaking out of Dean’s bed and deeply ashamed.”

Garrett made a noise of disgust. “Jesus.”

She pressed her face into his shoulder to hide her smile. “Poor Tucker was very sweet.”

“I don’t want to hear about sweet Tucker right now.”

“You’re so easy.”

“I’m injured.”

“You’re possessive.”

He was quiet for half a second. Then, low against her hair, “Maybe don’t make me hear Dean’s name when you’re in my bed.”

She lifted her head. In the dark, Garrett’s expression was harder to read, but she could feel him looking at her. Could feel the tension under the joke, under the jealousy, under the secret they kept pretending was only fun because fun was easier than looking directly at whatever else had started living between them.

“Okay,” she whispered.

His hand moved under the shirt, warm at her back. “Okay?”

“Yeah.” She nudged her nose against his jaw, soft. “No Dean.”

His breath left him slowly. “Good.”

“You still should’ve gotten me water.”

“Go to sleep.”

“You’re mean.”

“You broke into my room.”

“You let me in.”

“Mm,” Garrett murmured, already pulling her closer, careful around his ribs, his mouth brushing her forehead. “I know.”

The fourth time they almost got caught, Garrett took her on a date three towns over and still somehow managed to know someone there.

It was a cute restaurant. Cute in a way that made both of them a little awkward for the first ten minutes because hooking up in secret at parties and sneaking through windows had not prepared either of them for menus with seasonal specials and candles in little glass holders. 

The place sat on a narrow street with string lights outside and fogged windows and a hostess who smiled at Garrett for two seconds too long before noticing the girl beside him and recalibrating. Garrett noticed the recalibration. His mouth twitched as they followed the hostess toward a booth in the back.

“Don’t,” she muttered.

“I didn’t say anything.”

She crossed her arms. “You were about to.”

“I was gonna say the soup smells good.”

“You were not.”

Garrett laughed, warm and low, and slid into the booth beside her instead of across from her without asking. They were far enough from Briar that no one should have known them, tucked into the back corner of a restaurant full of older couples and small groups and a table of women laughing over wine near the bar.

It made the whole thing feel suspended, like they’d stepped out of the rules for a few hours and could sit too close without having to perform distance for anyone.

His thigh pressed against hers under the table. Their shoulders brushed every time one of them moved. Garrett kept stealing fries off her plate even though he’d ordered his own, and she kept pretending to be offended while pushing the plate half an inch closer because dignity had left with the appetizer.

At some point his hand found hers on the booth seat between them. His fingers sliding over hers, playing with them idly while he told her about a freshman on the team who had tried to tape his stick with what Logan called the confidence of a man raised by wolves.

She laughed into her drink, and Garrett looked at her in a way that made the restaurant feel suddenly much smaller.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“No, you’re doing the face.”

His thumb moved over her knuckles. “Just like hearing you laugh.”

That shut her up immediately. Garrett’s eyes flickered over her face, and she hated him for noticing the way the words landed. Hated him more for softening instead of making a joke out of it. For a second they just sat there, fingers tangled on the seat between them, candlelight catching along the edge of his jaw and the chain at his throat, his knee warm against hers.

Then she looked down at the table because she had limits. “That was gross.”

“Yeah?”

“You should be embarrassed.”

He sucked at his teeth gently. “I’m not.”

“No. I know. That’s one of your worst qualities.”

He grinned and lifted her hand, pressing a quick kiss to the back of it. “Top five, maybe.”

She was smiling despite herself, leaning in closer, when a voice came from the side of the booth.

“Graham?”

Garrett’s hand froze around hers. A tiny, immediate stillness that went through him faster than any expression on his face could catch. His smile stayed in place when he looked up, but she felt the change in his body first. The slight tightening at his shoulder. The way his hand shifted off hers and came to rest on his own thigh. The casual posture assembling itself a second too late to be real.

A guy stood at the end of the booth, tall and broad, with the unmistakable haircut of a hockey player and a jacket with Eastwood stitched over the chest. Recognition hit Garrett’s face, then something flatter underneath it.

“Parker,” Garrett said, easy enough if you weren’t pressed against him and listening to the mechanics of the lie. “What’s up, man?”

The Eastwood player grinned and held out a hand. Garrett slid out of the booth halfway to shake it, and she sank approximately two inches lower in the seat.

Which was stupid. Very stupid. If she wanted to avoid notice, shrinking into the booth like a child hiding from a substitute teacher wasn't a subtle approach. But the whole night had gone bright and hot behind her ears. She took an intense interest in the remaining fries on her plate and prayed for invisibility.

No such luck. Parker’s eyes flicked to her with polite curiosity. The interest of someone who had stumbled into a scene and wanted to know the category. Date? Hookup? Cousin? Hostage?

Garrett, because his life was apparently a sport in all directions, stood in front of the booth with one hand settling briefly on his hip before moving up to scratch along his jaw.

Nervous.

She noticed it instantly. Garrett Graham didn’t usually look nervous. He looked cocky, amused, focused, pissed off, hungry, occasionally concussed, but not nervous. Yet there he was, smiling and doing all the tiny, useless things his body did when he wanted to seem casual too badly: thumb brushing under his nose, hand dragging through his curls, weight shifting onto one foot and then back again.

“What are you doing out here?” Parker asked.

Garrett shrugged. “Dinner.”

“Yeah, no shit.” Parker laughed, looking around. “Didn’t expect to see you this far out.”

“Had to get off campus for a minute.”

The sentence was true enough to pass. It made something soft and stupid open in her chest, because Garrett had wanted to get off campus with her. Not to hook up quickly before someone knocked. Not to drag her upstairs at a party. Dinner. A booth. His fingers playing with hers beside the cushion. The whole quiet normal shape of it.

Parker’s gaze flicked to her again. Garrett saw it and shifted half a step, not blocking her, but angling himself between the attention and her face in a way that made her want to press her forehead to the table.

“This is–” Garrett started, and then stopped.

Her heart gave one hard kick, because there was no good ending there. This is my friend sounded insane. This is the girl I’m sleeping with sounded worse. This is the girl Dean hooked up with and now I am secretly, catastrophically gone for sounded accurate but logistically challenging.

So Garrett, genius athlete, captain of the Briar men’s hockey team, man with a GPA that proved his brain did occasionally participate, did the only thing available. He smiled wider and said, “We’re just eating.”

She closed her eyes.

Parker blinked once, then, mercifully, either understood enough to leave it alone or decided he didn’t care. “Cool, cool. Good to see you, bro.” He clapped Garrett once on the shoulder. “See you on the ice.”

Garrett’s grin sharpened into something more familiar. “Looking forward to it.”

“Yeah, I bet.”

They did the aggressive male handshake thing again, all knuckles and shoulder tension and mutual threat disguised as friendliness, then Parker left toward the bar.

Garrett stood for one second after he was gone, watching him go. Then he slid back into the booth beside her, and both of them sat completely still.

She stared at the table. Garrett stared straight ahead. Then, at exactly the same time, they both exhaled.

“Jesus Christ,” she whispered.

“Yeah,” Garrett said. “That was– yeah.”

She turned her head slowly. “We’re just eating?”

His jaw tightened. “I panicked. What was I supposed to say?”

“I don’t know, Garrett. Fuck.”

His hand found hers again, but this time under the table, fingers lacing through hers with a little more urgency than before. “Too close?”

She looked down at their joined hands. His thumb was moving over hers, once, twice, like he was calming himself as much as her. “Way too close.”

“Yeah.”

“And you were nervous.”

He scoffed and shook his head once. “I wasn't nervous.”

“You scratched your jaw like nine times.”

“My jaw itched.”

Her eyebrows raised. “And your nose?”

“Itched too,” he shrugged. 

“And your hair?”

“Whole body’s falling apart, apparently.”

She huffed a laugh, and his hand tightened around hers. When she looked up, he was watching her with that softer thing again. The thing that kept sneaking in around the edges of their jokes and making them both go quiet.

“Hey,” he said, lower. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“For making it weird.”

“It is weird.”

“Yeah.” His mouth pulled at one corner. “But I like this weird.”

The warmth hit so hard she had to look away toward the candle. “You can’t say stuff like that after calling me an eating companion.”

“I didn’t call you that.”

“You kinda did.”

Garrett laughed, then leaned in and kissed her temple because out of town meant he could do that. Could sit beside her in a booth and kiss her hair and hold her hand under the table and look at her like the secret was starting to bother him not because he wanted out of it, but because he wanted out of the hiding part.

She let herself lean into him for half a second. Just half. 

The fifth time, the time they were finally caught, she didn’t think at all, and that was probably why it happened.

Afterward, she would be able to admit there had been options. Reasonable options. Normal options. She could have waited outside the locker room like other people did. She could have texted him. She could have asked Logan if Garrett was okay, which would have been embarrassing but survivable. 

She could have done any number of things that didn’t involve slipping past the edge of the crowd after the game and walking straight into the tunnel like she had a right to be there.

But Garrett had been wrong all night. He had played well in flashes because Garrett Graham could probably play well during a natural disaster if someone gave him skates and a reason. But there had been something jagged in him from the first period. 

Too sharp on the checks. Too quick to shove back. Mouthguard hanging between his teeth while he stared down some Eastwood winger with a look on his face that made her hands go cold around the railing.

He got sent off twice. Once for roughing, once for a fight that started so fast the crowd seemed to notice it only after Garrett already had a fist tangled in someone’s jersey. The second time, even Coach looked furious in that controlled way that made grown men behave like children caught setting fires.

She watched Garrett in the box with his jaw clenched and blood bright at the corner of his mouth, his chest rising hard under the pads, eyes fixed somewhere across the ice but not really on it.

Logan skated by once and said something. Garrett didn’t smile. Didn’t chirp back. Didn’t do any of the things he usually did to make violence look like part of the game and not something older moving through him.

So after the final buzzer, after Briar won, despite Garrett trying to personally fistfight the entire opposing roster, after the crowd started spilling into the aisles and everyone around her buzzed with post-game noise, she moved.

The tunnel was colder than the stands, all concrete and rubber matting and the damp, metallic smell of hockey gear. Voices echoed from the locker room ahead, overlapping male noise and equipment hitting benches and someone laughing too loudly in that exhausted post-adrenaline way.

She slipped past a staff member who was too busy looking at a clipboard to care, turned the corner, and found Garrett standing alone near the wall.

He was still in most of his gear. Helmet off. Gloves gone. Hair damp and flattened at the sides, curls sticking up where he had run his hands through them. His head hung forward, both palms braced on his knees like he was trying to breathe the game out of himself and failing. Blood had dried at his lip again. His jaw worked once. Twice. The tendons in his neck stood out under the harsh tunnel light.

Her chest tightened so fast it hurt. “Garrett.”

His head snapped up. The second he saw her, everything in his face changed. He came back by inches, like her voice had reached into whatever ugly room he was in and opened a door.

“Hi,” he said, breathless, already straightening. Then again, rougher, like the first one had not been enough. “Hey.”

She closed the space before either of them had time to remember they weren’t supposed to do this where people could walk by. 

“Hey.” Her hands went to his face immediately, careful around the split lip, thumbs brushing at the damp edges of his cheeks. “You good? What happened?”

Garrett let out a breath, eyes closing. His hands came up to cover hers for one second, pressing them harder to his face like he needed the contact more than he wanted to admit. “M’fine.”

“No, you’re not.”

His chest was still moving hard, the pads making him look even bigger, all post-game heat and sweat and the raw leftover violence of whatever had been eating at him on the ice. She slid one hand up into his hair, fingers pushing through the damp curls at his temple. His exhale shook.

“You alright?” she asked again, softer now.

He nodded, but it was a bad nod. A nod made out of stubbornness and breath and the fact that he had no idea what to do with her looking at him like this in a tunnel. His jaw shifted. His eyes opened, finding hers, and whatever he saw there made his whole face pull tight for half a second.

“Baby,” he murmured.

That did it. Here, in the tunnel, with the locker room noise around the corner and blood on his mouth and his breathing still rough from whatever fight he had nearly brought home from the ice, the word hit somewhere deeper.

She rose onto her toes and kissed him. It was meant to be small, it really was. A check-in. A reassurance. A brief press of her mouth to his.

Garrett made a low sound the second her lips touched his, and then his arms were around her waist, pulling her in properly, pads and all, crushing the space between them like he’d been waiting the whole night for something solid enough to hold.

The kiss turned immediately. His mouth opened under hers, hungry and rough and not careful enough at first, then careful all at once when she brushed his split lip and he hissed softly into her mouth.

She pulled back half an inch. “Sorry.”

“Don’t care,” he said, and kissed her again.

Everything from the game poured into it. The hits. The fights. The awful, tight look in his eyes from the penalty box. Her hands cold on the railing. The secret they’d been carrying around like something light when it had gotten heavier every time he looked at her across a room and didn’t come closer. Garrett’s fingers dug into her waist. Hers stayed in his hair, tugging lightly. He kissed like he was trying to get back into his own body through her mouth. And she let him.

Then someone behind them said, “Ohhhh shit.”

They broke apart so fast it was almost violent. Logan stood ten feet away with a towel slung around his neck, hair wet, mouth open in the kind of delighted grin usually reserved for a successful prank or Tucker injuring himself in a deeply avoidable way. 

His eyes moved from Garrett’s arms around her waist, to her hands still caught in Garrett’s hair, to Garrett’s swollen mouth, and then back again. For one second, no one spoke.

Garrett’s arms didn’t leave her waist. She noticed that through the panic, through the sudden rush of heat to her face, through the knowledge that the entire delicate architecture of their secrecy had just been bodychecked into open air by John Logan and his shit-eating grin.

Garrett kept holding her.

Logan’s grin widened. “Was comin’ to check on the captain, but… shit.” He lifted both hands, backing away already, eyes bright with the kind of joy that meant the locker room was about to become a crime scene. “Guess he’s alright.”

“Logan,” Garrett said, low warning.

Logan only pointed at him, walking backward. “Nope. No. Don’t Logan me. You have been weird as fuck for weeks, man.”

Her stomach dropped and flipped at the same time.

Garrett’s jaw tightened. “Don’t–”

But Logan had already turned toward the locker room, voice rising with unholy glee. “You’ll never fucking guess what I just saw!”

The sound that came from the locker room was immediate. A burst of voices. Dean’s laugh cutting through first, bright and vicious. Tucker saying something too low to catch. Someone yelling, “What?” and Logan answering with, “Graham!” in the tone of a man unveiling evidence at trial.

She closed her eyes. Garrett dropped his forehead to hers.

For a second, neither of them moved. His breath was warm against her mouth, still uneven. Her hands had slipped from his hair to the sides of his neck. His gear pressed awkwardly against her chest. 

Somewhere around the corner, the locker room erupted again, Dean’s voice now unmistakable. “No fucking way!”

Garrett exhaled, eyes closing. “Fuck.”

She huffed, because there was nothing else to do. A laugh, almost. A sigh. The sound of a girl watching the secret blow up and realising, somewhere under the horror, that she wasn't as upset as she should be.

“Yeah,” she whispered. “Fuck.”

His hands flexed at her waist. He didn’t move back.

This was the moment he could step away. Where he could put space between them and run a hand through his hair and say something easy, something Garrett-shaped and evasive, something that made the kiss look smaller than it was. 

He could make it a joke before anyone else did. He could hide behind Logan’s big mouth and Dean’s inevitable commentary and the whole familiar machinery of the hockey house turning one private thing into public entertainment.

Instead he stayed with his forehead against hers, breathing hard, thumbs pressing into her waist through her coat.

Then Dean appeared around the corner, because the universe couldn’t let them have more than three seconds without sending in a rich boy with terrible timing. 

He leaned one shoulder against the wall, grinning like Christmas had come early and wearing only half his gear. Logan popped up behind him, still delighted. Tucker stood a few steps back with his arms folded, looking resigned and not remotely surprised.

Dean’s eyes flicked over the two of them, still pressed together, Garrett’s hands still on her waist. His grin turned wicked. “Well, well, well.”

She groaned. “Don’t.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Dean said, hand over his heart. “I would never.”

“You absolutely would.”

“I absolutely will,” he corrected. His eyes slid to Garrett, bright with evil. “Graham. Buddy. Pal. Teammate. You’ve been sneaking around with my ex?”

“She’s not your ex,” Garrett said immediately.

Dean’s grin widened. “Oh, interesting. Strong feelings from the captain.”

“She’s not,” Garrett repeated, jaw tightening.

She shouldn’t have enjoyed that. She did anyway.

Dean’s gaze moved to her, faux-wounded. “I thought we had something beautiful.”

“You were sleeping with six other girls while sleeping with me. You’re a pig.”

Logan made a strangled sound. Tucker’s mouth twitched.

Dean pointed at her. “See? This is why I missed you.”

Garrett’s hand tightened at her waist. “Dean.”

“Oh, relax.” Dean lifted both hands, but he was still grinning. “I’m not poaching. I have respect.”

Logan leaned around Dean, eyes shining. “So how long?”

“Nope,” Garrett said.

“How long?” Logan repeated, louder.

She looked at Garrett. Garrett looked at her. For one brief, stupid second they both seemed to consider lying. It was a beautiful instinct, really. Loyal to the end. Completely useless now that Garrett’s mouth was visibly swollen from kissing her and his hands had still not left her body.

“Three weeks,” she said.

Garrett’s head snapped toward her.

“What?” she said. “He was going to keep asking.”

Logan’s mouth dropped open. Dean shouted, “Three weeks?” Tucker just closed his eyes, nodding once to himself.

“I knew something was up,” Tucker said.

Garrett looked at him sharply. “You did not.”

Tucker opened his eyes. “She came downstairs for water in your shirt and let me think she’d slept with Dean.”

Dean turned slowly. “I’m sorry, what?”

She winced. “That was strategic.”

“You were in my house,” Dean said, pointing at himself, “using me as a slutty decoy?”

“Yes.”

Dean looked moved. “Honoured.”

Garrett made a sound under his breath. “Jesus Christ.”

Logan clapped Dean on the shoulder. “Come on. Let the lovebirds emotionally process before Coach catches Garrett making out in a tunnel like a freshman.”

Garrett finally looked over. “Dude.”

“What? That was supportive.”

Dean pointed at her as Logan started dragging him backward. “We’re talking later. I have questions. Boundary-respecting questions, but questions.”

“No, we’re not,” she called back.

“We absolutely are.”

Tucker gave her a small, sympathetic nod as he turned. “Congratulations. And good luck.”

“Thanks,” she said, because honestly that seemed appropriate.

The three of them disappeared back toward the locker room, taking the noise with them in pieces. Logan already yelling something that sounded like, “Three weeks, boys!” Dean making wounded noises. Tucker telling someone to put on pants.

Garrett laughed, low and real, and the sound loosened the last tight thing still sitting under her ribs. She looked up at him, at the bruise on his cheek and the split in his mouth and the ridiculous, beautiful, inconvenient boy who had somehow gone from secret bad idea to the person she walked into tunnels for without thinking.

“So,” she said, brushing her thumb carefully under the cut at his lip. “Guess we’re blown.”

His grin came back slowly, cocky at the edges and warm all the way through. “Yeah.”

“And you still have to explain why you were trying to fight half of Eastwood tonight.”

The grin faded by a fraction, but he didn’t look away. “Later?”

She studied him for a second, then nodded. “Later.”

His arms tightened. “Okay.”

“Okay.”

Then Garrett kissed her again, because being exposed to the entire hockey house hadn’t cured him of bad timing. She kissed him back anyway, smiling into it when the locker room erupted once more at whatever Logan had just announced.

This time, when Garrett’s hand slid openly to the small of her back and held her there, neither of them moved away.

Bishop didn’t want to overthink anything, he overstepped a line he shouldn’t have even touched in the beginning. You were very nice and kind as a person, never put up a fight unlike Angel or insurance troubles like Magick. To him, you were perfect. You were the last thing he would see before going to sleep and the first thing he thought of when he woke up. It’s like you were a drug to him, he knew he shouldn’t keep doing it, but he did, it made him feel good.

Some weeks passed where you would do things differently. You started to pay attention the days Bishop would come to the club, with Alamo or alone. You bought brand new lingerie, two pieces and bikinis in all colors and designs. Three new heels and an ankle bracelet Tish gave you because it wasn’t her style. When you would perform you made sure you did everything correct, not a single mistake. You were flirtier with the customers, nicer with the bartenders, overall you were going for employee of the month.

Bishop could’ve cared less, at least he wanted to.

He was growing impatient; you were driving him crazy. He would subtly see your performances in the club, looking away if you made eye contact. He would also see the men that asked you for dances on the booths, feeling his heartbeat faster when they would grope your tits and waist, made you move how they would want to as if you were a toy. He hated it when they spanked you when you walked by, all the time. Seeing those hands grab the fat of your butt just filled him with rage. But it’s not like he couldn’t do something about it. You weren’t his. At least not yet.

꧂

Thursday afternoon, Bishop was at Alamo’s mansion in his usual corner while he had a meeting with Big Eddy, G in a corner counting some money. “Honestly this a real good line up of girls we’ve had in a while.” Alamo’s desk was splattered with photos of the dancers from Silver Slipper, including you. “This one a real winner.” Alamo raised your photo, a picture of you smiling with an orange bikini, facing it to Bishop, “I bet this bunny loves to bounce bounce bounce!” Alamo erupted with laughter.

Fucking pig, Bishop thought to himself.

“She’s been good, I’ve had guys tell me they’d pay the double to get a section with her.” Big Eddy talked while taking some notes. “Bishop suggested to have her do more dances with the snake, maybe by the end of the month.” Alamo answered taping a photo of Tish. “She need a boob job.” He muttered.

“Should check if she’d be good doing a private, like a test run.” G spoke up, “And why the fuck would I do that?” Alamo asked, thrown off at G’s request. “Listen, I’m not gonna throw none of the girls under the bus, but some of these hoes just don’t got the love in when it comes to doing private dances. No coordination, no charisma...Magick is the less that gets asked that’s all I’m going to say.” G responded, his last sentence being the quickest to push out. “I won’t mind checking on Bunny tonight.” Alamo chuckled, “I’ll check on her real good.”

Bishop really didn’t want to interfere, he wanted to promise himself that you were nothing but another dancer. It was known that Alamo would take advantage of these women, he was practically a pimp. But the back of Bishop’s head kept telling himself that you were different, you were worth something.

“You’ve said that with each dancer, you only end up fucking them.” Bishop said with that monotone voice of his, making the three men look to him, Alamo visually angry. “And what the fuck do you want to mean by that?” “We test the girls for the public, not for us. Not every man that comes in the club is coming for a fuck, some just simply want a private dance.”

And everyone knew Bishop’s point was right. Alamo would do it based off his own personal interests, not for the public, which is why G suggested to really test the girls out. Alamo grunted, not having a comeback or an excuse for Bishop’s observation. “Let’s have her do a private with you then.” Alamo faced to G, who started laughing at Alamo’s demand.

“Nahh— have Bishop do it, she’s got a little crush on him.” Bishop’s heart dropped, looking directly at G, “Does not.” “Does too! She always bats her eyes in such a way, changes the tone of her voice, she’ll be like— Hello Bishop, how you doing?” G mimicked you, having Alamo and Big Eddy laugh with him.

“Bunny with a little crush, she’s adorable.” Big Eddy said wiping a tear out his eye. “I don’t wish to receive a private dance from Lola.” Bishop replied, he knew it wouldn’t be the right thing to do, especially when he’s trying to push down the emotions, he’s had building up for you. “It was your idea, B. Put it to the test, or we can go back my way.” Alamo responded, standing up fixing his attires.

“Make Tish, get earlier than usual to talk about driving her for a boob job, and tell Lola Bunny she’s doing a private dance.” Alamo assigned Big Eddy while making his way out, “Bishop, call that bitch Laurie to do some orders for a party I’m planning soon.” Alamo added before heading out. Bishop took a deep sigh, glaring at G who was still quietly giggling, then looking to Eddy, who held your picture towards him. “10:30, be there or be square.”

꧂

“Could it be his birthday?” “That man is not a Aries, Tish.” All the girls were surrounded by the board, you included. On your schedule it was written quite big, ‘PRIVATE: BISHOP 10:30PM’ and you had no idea why, but it wasn’t that you weren’t excited. “Y por qué yo tengo nada? The fuck?” Magick scoffed, her schedule being just one performance at 9pm. “At least you can just relax around.” Midnight, one of the dancers, laughed, her hand resting on your shoulder, she taps it. “Damn, Lola the chosen one this month.” You laughed, hiding your nerves, “I don’t know why.” You softly answered.

“And why Bishop? Is he like retiring?” Angel asked from her seat, counting money. “Nadie sabe, Eddy’s stupid anyways.” Magick said, clearly upset that her schedule was so clear. Tish walked in, stepping hard on the floor, “I’m getting my boobs done.” The room erupted with squeals and cheers, Angel standing up to hug her. “Yeah, yeah say your goodbyes cause this girl going to Mexico.” Big Eddy said, making his way to the office before being stopped by a whistle from Magick.

“What’s this schedule? You hate me? Why the fuck is your Babadook friend getting a private? Para qué?” “You talk too much.” He muttered resting on his office doorway. “We doing a new thing, gonna test out how you girls do on private dances.” Big Eddy explained, for once having many of the girls’ attention. “This just a draft, Bishop doing it cause Alamo nor G available tonight. Lola was our pick.” “Lola can dance on a stick, and it would even have more emotion than that man.” Angel said, having the girls giggle.

You hadn’t said anything. You were trying to place if it had something to do with the conversation you had with Bishop at the diner. “Y’all barely know this fool.” Eddy spoke, “Do you even know this fool?” Magick mimicked, still very, very pissed. Big Eddy just grumbled, taking a quick look at the girls before going to his desk, “No bullshit tonight.” He yells.

You sat at your chair looking at your reflection. Your pupils were huge, you could see goosebumps forming on your arms, your heartbeat so loud it was coming out your ears. “You’ve done privates before, right?” Angel asked you. You sure had, it wouldn’t be professional of a strip club to not serve that in their job. “Here and there, extra money with some blowjobs or handjobs.” You weren’t proud, but money was needed on some certain nights at your old place.

But Silver Slipper was different, you felt like a princess. And tonight, you could prove that you were an outstanding dancer, not just for everyone, but for Bishop.

꧂

Bishop rarely drank, like ever. Only at his house or surrounded by his close peers. But tonight, he needed to not let anything get to him, especially you. Sitting on the bar, Tylenol in hand, he shoved it down his mouth, followed by an Old fashioned. “You acting like a hippopotamus giving you a dance.” G was beside him, having a cold whiskey and eating peanuts. “I do not know what she wants from me.” Bishop said, looking down at his drink.

“She’s beautiful though.” G looked around the club, looking at Bishop, he whispered, “You should find out how tight that pussy is.” Bishop shoved G off him, hearing his cackles grow loud. Settling down, G patted his shoulder getting off his sit. “What’s up, doc...here come the girl of the night.” G walked away, making Bishop turn around, looking for you. And you were hard to miss.

Flirting with a table, you stood proudly in your red glitter six-inch heels, a blood red lingerie set, the side of your panties being this decorative golden chains. Your bra was fully bedazzled accompanied with fringe, the lights of the club making you shine with every movement. You had gemstones on your eyes with a light gold eyeshadow. A red lip. You were unbelievable to Bishop, a walking angel from the sky.

Accepting the money from the man you were talking to on top of your bra, you made your way to Bishop, who was already looking at you, standing by the entry. You focused on his wardrobe, a white button up with stripes paired with a dark red tie, dark brown pants, and dark blue trench coat. As always, he carried his prayer beads, he never let go of them. Finally, the two of you were face to face. It almost felt like it was just the two of you in the whole world.

“Bishop.”

“Lola Bunny.”

“Are you ready for me?”

“It’s 10:27.”

“I won’t charge the extra minutes.”

“…Lead the way.”

꧂

The private rooms were all different, for different usages. You led Bishop to your assigned room. It was spacious, a pole in the center with a small platform. In front of the pole was a couch pushed against the wall that was a mirror. A mini bar facing the left side of the room, another couch on the right side.

You turned to Bishop, the biggest smile on your face. “I’ll make you a drink!” Heels clacking their way to make him a drink. Bishop didn’t say anything, instead he placed his beads on the doorknob, and took one of the chairs from the corner, dragging it till he reached the security camera. Placing himself on top, he took the tape he had out of his pocket, biting a piece of tape, he covered the camera. He wasn’t going to let Big Eddy see this humiliation ritual they did to him.

“What are you doing?” You hadn’t turned your head, making him a vodka soda, a vodka cranberry for you. “Don’t worry about it.” He replied, dragging the chair back to its place. Feeling his presence on your left, you looked at him, you were practically the same height with the help of your heels. Holding both drinks in your hands, you kept that sweet smile. “You smell good.” “Make it quick.” Bishop replied, grabbing his drink, and making his way to the couch. You rolled your eyes, taking a quick chug of your drink, you made your way to the platform, squatting down to the speaker.

Bishop took off his coat, taking his gun from his back, he unloaded it and placed it on the small coffee table in front of him. “Would you like grade this?” You asked from the stage, holding onto the pole. “Yes,” He crossed hands between his legs, “just dance like you do outside, Bunny.” You cleared your throat, a quick nod to yourself. Showtime.

You were a true masterpiece when it came to pole dancing. You displayed all the techniques you knew with your performance; every step was perfect with the beat of the music, Bishop was engaged. He watched your every move, not a single mistake. He barely blanked every time you twirled around the pole, your knees hooked to the back of the pole, you looked so care free. Bishop wanted to ignore the erection he has growing between his legs. He was too grown to be getting a boner from a pole dance.

“Are you enjoying it?” You asked, so innocently, as if you weren’t dancing barely dressed with a pole with a Rihanna playlist playing all for him. “I am.” “You’re such a liar.” You mumbled, sitting on the edge of the stage. It was Bishop, what was he even going to do with your performance? “Is that all?” He asked, you shrugged, getting shy out of nowhere, looking down. “This is the part I give you a lap dance.” You looked up; Bishop hadn’t moved a muscle. He straightens his back, “I’m not stopping you.” You felt your cunt flutter, you were actually doing this.

You stood up, getting a glance of yourself though the mirror. Strutting your way to Bishop, it’s like your footsteps got louder, your breathing got shorter. Shaky but firm hands grasped on Bishop’s shoulders, straddling him. He slowly dragged his hands to your hips, making you shudder at the touch of his cold hands in your warm body. You moved your hips in slow circles, moving your hands to his chest. Bishop couldn’t believe he was letting this happen. Feeling your cunt through his crotch was heaven, he wants to believe this is the closest the two of you will get on an intimate level.

“I can feel you.” You whispered so low, so low Bishop almost didn’t catch what you said. But you both knew; you both knew Bishop’s cock was poking hard through his pants. “Don’t get excited.” Bishop whispered back, looking up when he heard you giggle. “I shouldn’t get excited? You and your bud—” You pressed down harder, making his breath hitch, “...would be leaving me alone.” You have no idea what came over you, you felt like you were on top of the world.

Moving your hands on top of Bishop’s, you leaned to his face your mouth grazing his, “You wanna see them, B?” Bishop didn’t even have time to analyze what you asked him. He did see how your hands reached for the center of your bra, a quick clasp and you were taking your top off. Bishop couldn’t hear his thoughts to this point, everything was happening so fast.

He moved his hands to your abdomen, his eyes not leaving your now exposed breasts, nipples perked up because of how cold the room was. God you were so beautiful. “You’re doing really good.” Bishop said, trying to remember this was overall a test, that he wasn’t feeling any type of pleasure from this. “Yeah, I’d figured.” You stood briefly, not a single moment had Bishop’s hands left your body.

You sat back down, having your back facing him, sitting directly on his growing erection. It didn’t even feel like you were doing a lap dance anymore. You grabbed his knees spreading them even more, having your butt grind right against him. “Fuck—” Bishop muttered under his breath, hoping you didn’t hear him. You were creating a friction in such an intense way, he couldn’t keep his eyes away from you.

And then you moaned, that’s when Bishop realized how your movement changed from a sensual dance to you grinding yourself against his cock, chasing pleasure. A professional act would’ve been for Bishop to tap out, hand you his money, thank you for the dance and leave. But Bishop also knew he had time left, and that testing out your private dance was the only thing Alamo had asked him to do for the Thursday night.

Would it hurt to add more fuel to the fire?

He sat up, and pulled you closer, having you gasp. “Bishop—” “Don’t freak out and I won’t freak out.” He whispered against your ear. It felt like a movie, a very soft porno movie if you will. Bishop’s right hand made its way to your panties, going upward until it connected to your right boob, instantly you placed your hand on top of his. “Would you let this to happen?” He asked so slowly, making his left hand make the same movement, your hand following.

With Bishop’s hands on top of your breasts, you were still grinding on top of him, not once did you think about stopping. “I don’t know...” You whimpered, “it- it feels good.” “I know baby.” Bishop said. Baby. He had never called you that, your heart was fluttering. “You haven’t answered.” Bishop placed a light kiss on your shoulder. You knew his question was about the men you would dance to if you did private dances, if you’d allowed them to place you in such a vulnerable position like the one you were in right now.

“Nu uh...” You answered, fastening your movements. “No? Then why are you doing it, Bunny?” Bishop kept leaving small kisses all over your shoulders and neck. You were so lost in the feeling of your grinds that made your clit bump against Bishop, you hadn’t noticed how he traced his hand down to your panties, this time making his fingers go inside you. You gasped loud when you felt him on your cunt, lightly placing his fingers, doing the smallest circles since the movement of your hips were already giving you that pleasurable sensation. Two of his fingers made his way inside your tight cunt.

“Bunny…” Bishop spread his fingers slightly, ignoring your whimpers. “You’re so wet...who let you get this wet?” Whimpers and moans were the only thing coming out of your mouth. You turned your head back, facing Bishop. With little patience inside your body, you finally crashed your lips against his. And it felt so fucking good.

Bishop was fingering you, slowly dragging them to your clit, he would then grope your boob and kiss you, swallowing all your moans and whimpers with his mouth. You couldn’t stop pushing back against him, you were practically begging for Bishop to push you to the couch, pull your panties and shove his cock inside of you and destroy you.

A loud bang was heard from outside the room. You wanted to gasp— you did gasp, but Bishop was quicker to put his hand over your mouth. The two of you stayed still, in this very intimate position, waiting to see of something was to occur. Hearing yells and ruckus outside, you whimpered, making your hips circle on top of Bishop again.

“Bunny…” Bishop whispered in a tone that was telling you ‘We should stop’, yet, his fingers were still rubbing your folds, and you were getting so close. “Please B…I don’t want you to stop.” You whimpered going faster than before. He groaned, placing a hand on your hip, he kept the your clit with his other hand.

“Can’t believe you’re letting me do this.” He whispered, “You know Alamo could kill me if he saw what you’re letting me do to you?” You moaned, feeling your climax get closer. “He’d be furious to know I got to you first, that you’d be this easy to break.” You felt it just then, your coil snapping. You had no idea how to react with the combination of Bishop’s words and his quick fingers on your cunt.

“Bishop—!” You moaned while you came, his free hand quickly covering your mouth. Even though the room was soundproof, you were quite loud. I mean who are you to blame? He was working unforgettable movements and the last time a guy made you cum must’ve been ages ago. Your moans turned into whimpers, turned into deep breaths. It hits you now, it hits you hard. Bishop made you cum, on his lap, while you were supposed to just give him a lap dance. What the actual fuck?

Bishop moved quicker than you, pushing you out his lap, he stayed still for a moment. Looking down at his hands, one covered in the wetness of your orgasm and the other one with slight lipstick marks from your mouth. He turned to look at you, bare chest heaving and that scared look you always tend to give him. Like a person that was caught doing something wrong. “Get dressed.” Bishop stood up, throwing your bra at you while he put his gun and coat back on.

You were still processing basically everything, but you knew Bishop wasn’t going to pillow talk you from just fingering you. Once the two of you got dressed, he made his way to the door, taking his prayer beads in hand, you behind. “What are you gonna tell Alamo?” You finally spoke up, before he could get his hand to open the door. He slowly turned to you, a look in his face that told you he didn’t have time for this. But he wanted to tell you, he wanted to just talk to you and stay with you for the rest of the night.

“Go make money, Lola.” Was all he said.

But you couldn’t just accept that, like you really couldn’t accept that. You knew these feelings weren’t just some tension you and Bishop were building up. You know this had to be something more. It’s why you the moment he reached to the doorknob, you put your hand on his, and leaned in to kiss him. Your soft lips crashed against Bishop, and that’s when he kissed back. Grazing his fingers slightly at your stomach, he pushed you against the door so softly.

You pull away, looking for a new expression. Bishop’s eyes had softened, looking more tender at you. “I think you’re gonna be a problem for me.” He whispered. The door opens making you walk backwards till you got outside. “I’ll make sure I won’t be complicated, B.” You smiled. Bishop’s name was being called out there, God knows for how long. Slowly he made his way out, his eyes never leaving yours. Standing alone you felt like coming back from a roller coaster.

Would it hurt to go for a second ride?

.𓈒𓂂𓏲܀.𓈒𓂂𓏲܀.𓈒𓂂𓏲܀.𓈒𓂂𓏲܀.𓈒𓂂𓏲܀.𓈒𓂂𓏲܀.𓈒𓂂𓏲܀.𓈒𓂂𓏲܀.𓈒𓂂𓏲܀.𓈒𓂂𓏲܀.𓈒𓂂𓏲

You and John Tucker are what people would say to be polar opposites.

You’re carefree and go with the flow, while he’s attentive and meticulous. He plans events and schedules parties, while you show up with a six pack of alcohol and hopes of having a good time. He’s a sweetheart, yet more shy and anxiety-ridden, while you’re outgoing and able to chat with just about anyone.

Technically, the two of you shouldn’t mix well, but you’ve always secretly hoped so badly that somehow you could.

You’d just finished telling the group surrounding you in the quad a joke, and everyone was laughing. Well, everyone except Tucker, that is.

He had his hands stuck in his jean pockets, looking around at anyone and everything besides you. Your heart stopped momentarily, smile immediately slipping from your lips and shoulders dropping slightly.

“Damn, Y/N, that was a killer!” Dean praised, clapping you on the shoulder.

“I agree.” Allie chimed in. “You always know just how to make us laugh when we need it.”

“Oh, thanks! What can I say, in another life I was a stand-up comedian, I’m sure of it.” Your conversation continued with the group, but you couldn’t help your eyes from straying over to Tucker every second. He still hadn’t met your gaze once.

You’re being really annoying again. Stop talking before everyone gets sick of you. Tucker hates it when you ramble. Just let other people take the lead and shut up for a bit.

“Hey, are you heading to the fair tonight?” Hannah asked you. “It’s only in town this weekend. Garrett and I were going to go for a bit if you wanted to stop by.”

You pondered the idea for a second, before suddenly remembering there was one big flaw in the idea of attending. “Maybe. Logan’s got my car in the shop though, so I’d have to walk there.”

“Tucker will take you! He doesn’t have anything going on. You guys can take my truck. Grace and I won’t be going until tomorrow night.” Logan told you, looking over at Tucker with what seemed to be a shit eating grin.

Tucker snapped his head in Logan’s direction, shooting him a glare. “Oh, uh, actually, I have to make those appetizers for the party on Sunday.” He rambled, now facing entirely away from you. “What kind of host would I be if I left my guests hungry?”

He was lying and you knew it. Garrett had told you days prior that Tucker had spent the first few days of the week going crazy in the kitchen, getting all the food prepared and ready to go.

Feeling defeated and forlorn, you sighed, letting out a meek, “I get it. Listen, I’ve gotta go; I’ll see you guys later.” You turned on your heel, speedwalking towards your next class while hiding the tears of frustration welling in your eyes. Some of your friends called out their goodbyes, to which you held up a hand weakly behind you as a form of waving.

If you had stayed even a minute longer, you might’ve caught Dean’s “Really, man? ‘Appetizers’? When are you finally going to get the balls to ask her out?” Followed by Tucker’s “I know, man! I got nervous! I want to ask her out the right way.” “That was the right way right fucking there, genius.”

Instead, you sank into your seat in the classroom, heart hurting at the presumed fact that you were just too much for him to be able to love.

(Unknown Number); Hey, it’s Tucker!

(Unknown Number): Sorry for the random texts. Hannah gave me your number so I could talk to you. Hope that’s okay.

(Unknown Number): Anyway, I ended up finishing the appetizers way sooner than expected, and I was wondering if you wanted to go to the fair with me? I can pick you up.

(Unknown Number): No pressure, though, obviously

y/n: oh hey, Tuck! absolutely! you can pick me up around 6 if you want.

Tucker :): Great! Looking forward to it.

You could burn a hole through your carpet with how much you were pacing back and forth. Your heart was racing, nervous enough that you could feel the sweat in your palms.

You couldn’t stop the nagging voice in the back of your head from wondering if he was only doing this out of pity for you. After all, he’d shown almost no interest in you until an hour ago, never fully having a conversation together or connecting on a deeper level.

Two polite knocks at your door had you running to turn the knob, stopping yourself just short of it. Play it cool, he won’t like it if you’re hyper.

Taking a deep breath, you opened the door to Tucker standing there with a bouquet of pink roses clutched tightly in one hand.

“Hey,” He greeted, outstretching his arm in your direction. “These are for you. I know you probably think it’s weird I got you pink roses, but they signal admiration and I wanted to make sure you know how much I admire you. If you don’t like them I can probably go buy some red-“

“Tucker.” You cut off his nervous rambling with a reassuring smile. “I love them. You really didn’t have to do that.”

Where was the Tucker from this morning who wouldn’t even glance in your direction? Who you’d barely spoken more than a few sentences with at a time?

You decided you really liked this version of him. Maybe you were wrong about him thinking you were a nuisance.

“Oh, don’t be silly. Of course I did. I’m taking one of the most gorgeous girls on campus to the fair with me, which has just made my entire year, by the way.”

You moved in the direction of your kitchen, pulling down the one vase your friend had gifted you (“You never know when a hot guy will swoop in and try to win you over with flowers!”) and setting the roses inside.

“Should we get going then?”

“Of course. After you, my lady.” He gestured toward the door, hand settling on your lower back as the two of you exited your dorm. He grabbed every single door for you on the way out, even stepping ahead of you to open and close your passenger door of Logan’s truck.

“I was taught to mind my manners.” The sheepish grin that accompanied his statement only made your heart flutter even worse. “When you’re out with a pretty lady, she shouldn’t have to lift a finger. At least not with me.”

The entire drive to the fair, he kept glancing in your direction, as if he couldn’t believe you were in the truck with him. His hands twitched as if he were trying to restrain himself from reaching out to touch you; not that you would’ve minded regardless.

As he pulled into a parking spot on the lawn just outside of the fair, you glanced at each other simultaneously, sharing a nervous, sweet smile before he hopped out to come open your door for you.

A part of you still couldn’t wrap your head around the fact that everything had changed so fast between the two of you. Just this morning you were convinced he hated you, and now you almost thought the exact opposite. You bumped shoulders as you walked side by side, sharing easy conversations and sharing excited looks.

“Hey, look who decided to join the party!” Garrett called from his spot on one of the picnic tables next to Hannah. “What took you so long?”

“Had to finish my appetizers, remember?” Tucker responded, waiting until you sat on the bench opposite the other couple before sitting down himself.

“Yeah, if by appetizers you mean pacing in front of your mirror for hours trying to make sure everything’s perfect for your crush…”

“Alright, that’s enough.” Hannah chided, whacking Garrett on the arm and receiving an exaggeratedhuff in response. “Now, who wants to go on some rides before it gets too late?”

The four of you spent the next two hours riding everything you possibly could. Tucker tried to casually throw his arm around your side of the Himalaya ride, which ended up with you being pressed tightly to him as it spun faster in circles. The same could be said for the zipper, except he grabbed your hand that time and held it even after you’d gotten off.

You tried to ignore the butterflies every time he became affectionate with you, or the way you’d feel warm inside every time he gave you a soft look, but trying to hold down your feelings was useless.

Eventually, you ended up at the Ferris wheel. Hannah and Garrett had hopped on the cart before yours, sending you a secret thumbs up while smiling and him giving Tucker a wink.

As your cart ascended the wheel, you decided that now would be as good of a time as ever to get your feelings out into the open.

“You know, I thought you hated me until tonight.”

He almost choked on his own spit, stuttering out a “W-what? How could you think that?”

“Yeah, I really did. I figured you were annoyed by how much I talk and stuff. You never looked my way before now and treated me like I had the plague or something.” You shrugged. “I would’ve understood either way. I know I can be a bit much sometimes.”

He reached forward on instinct, taking your hands and grasping them in his own.

“Hey, no, don’t talk about yourself that way. You’re not a bit much whatsoever. If I’m being honest here, I’ve been too nervous to talk to you because to me, you’re perfect.”

It was your turn to be shocked, stuttering out a huh? of your own.

“Sweetheart, I’m sorry I’ve been so distant. I shouldn’t have made you feel annoying, that’s completely my fault and I’ll spend the rest of my days trying to prove to you that you’re truly my dream girl. I’m so far gone for you that it turned into a running joke between the guys, making jabs at me for not asking you out any chance I could. I’m head over heels in love with you and I’m ready for the whole world to know it.”

He inched closer to you in the cart, moving to your side and cupping your face in his hands.

“Will you let me make it up to you somehow? I’ll do anything, baby. Just say the word and it’s yours. Everything within me is yours for the taking.” He laughed softly. “Well, everything besides my heart. That was already yours from the beginning.”

“Well, I could think of something…” you teased.

“Name it, baby. I’ll do it.”

“Can you please just kiss me already?”

His smile grew impossibly wider, nodding before leaning in to join your lips in a kiss that left you breathless and aching for more.

Hannah and Garrett leaned down from the cart above you, trying to maneuver themselves to be able to see what was happening between the two of you.

“Ouch, that’s my foot you’re you stepping on!” Garrett hissed.

“Shush! I need to see what’s happening!”

“I knew letting you plan this scheme would be a bad idea.”

“You take that back right now! Look, it really worked! They’re kissing!”

Hannah held her phone dangerously far outside of the cart, trying to catch a shot of your special moment. She squealed louder than she should have upon seeing you two locked in a sweet, passionate embrace, snapping a picture and sending it to the group chat that had everyone besides the two of you in it.

Han Han: (image attachment)

Safe to say Operation: Tucker’s in Love was a huge success <3

<3

Your hand shook as it hovered over the wood of Grace’s sophomore apartment door, trembling. You had asked a few times over the last few weeks, Hannah and Allie to tell you how Grace was doing but they didn't want you to feel bad. For someone who was in so much pain, you worried about Grace more than yourself.

You held your breath out in the hall of Grace's apartment. You shut your eyes. This is a bad idea. Garrett’s words echoed in your head like a warning siren: “Don’t be a fucking idiot okay—you know she doesn't want to see you. I'm not trying to make you feel bad. It's just not a good idea, got it?.” He was trying to protect you. He was trying to protect everyone, because that’s what Garrett Graham did when his friends started spinning out of control. You glared at him as he scolded you after you had shared your plan to try to fix things - and you just wanted to make sure Grace was okay.

You and Logan weren't speaking. You avoided him and there was no real conversation since the day at Malone's after he walked out. He had texted a few times, Hannah and Allie had told you about his fight about you, in the backyard with Garrett. This has been the longest you both have had not spoken in all time of knowing, if you don't count the time that you had a persistent sore throat for 2 weeks straight last winter - but nothing like this. This felt like you'd never speak to him again - and you regretted the way you spoke to him in Malone's that day. If you had acted normal, pushing down your feelings and if you hadn't caused this all to ripple - none of this would have been happening.

The silence between you and Logan was a vast, and felt almost irreconcilable. How do you ever recover from something like this? How could you face anyone after you indirectly were the reason the kindest, sweetest girl was crushed by your lack of boundaries and your blurred lines with Logan? You were grieving him, it felt like a death. You couldn't sleep or eat. You're lucky that you had only had two finals left when all this erupted. You were mourning the loss of the person who always saw the goodness in you when you could had lived like you didn't value your life, he knew you better than anyone, who couldn’t let you go until the universe forced his hand.

But as much as your heart felt physical, literal pain, Grace’s was the one that have every right to feel this way - way more than you. Logan had been hers. He belonged to her, and she had been caught in the middle as unfortunate collateral damage, unspoken entanglement - that none of you knew was even happening until that day - that she never asked or ever would agree to be a part of.

Holding the painkillers, electrolytes and tea packets in the small bin holding them - you had brought them for Grace, not as a peace offering but these were the things helping you so you extended it to her too - just in case. Taking a sharp breath before you could lose your nerve, you gently knocked.

The silence that followed was heavy. For a second, you thought she might ignore it. But then came the soft click of a lock, and the door creaked open, with Grace peering out from behind, almost hiding.

She looked fragile. Her usual bright energy was dimmed, her eyes slightly puffy, wearing an oversized sweatshirt that you painfully recognized as Logan’s. When she saw you, her expression didn't harden into anger. It just... fell. She starred at you for a second, like it was dream like - like there would be no way you were standing at her door right now.

"Y/N," she breathed, "Hi," her voice small. "W-what are you doing here?"

"Sorry - Garrett told me not to bother you and I probably shouldn't be here right now but I just needed to say some things to you. S-sorry, I can-I can leave"you said quickly, your throat tight. "I know you don't want to see me-" you whispered painfully. "I just-" There was no malice in her eyes, just a profound, exhausting sadness. "That's-it's okay, I don't not want to see you," she said opening up the door a bit more, a bit more relaxed. She looked up at you with almost hopeful glassy grey-blue eyes.

"Oh," you said surprised. Your shoulders relaxing for a second. You didn't expect her to say that. "Well, I need you to hear this, Grace." You took a breath. "I'm not saying this because I want to fix any of it because I know I can't. But I just need you to know that you are so incredibly special, Grace," you were so genuine, you just needed her to hear it.

"You're- you're a good person, Grace. You're kind, funny, the prettiest person I have ever seen honestly. Everything about you. You are just so special. You are not broken, there's nothing wrong with you, there's nothing about you that isn't good enough," your eyes pleaded that she heard you with an earnest tone in your weak voice.

"It was never your fault. None of this was because of you, and I'm really sorry you're hurting. I wish I could take it away. It's my fault, I should have been clear with my boundaries - I tried to distance myself and I already stepped away when I could. I-I should have been clearer. It wasn't fair to you. I just need you to know that you didn't deserve any of this and you can hate me if you want-"

"I don't-" Grace interrupted you, "I don't hate you, y/n...It's not your fault," Even when she was suffering she was gracious and kind.

You took a small quiet breath, stepping back to give her space.

"I just...I just wanted you to know that I think you're wonderful and that I am sorry," your voice stammered, her eyes welled up with glossy tears. "You deserve every good thing."

She looked up at you, her eyes searching your face. There was no hatred there—just the mutual, tragic understanding of two girls who had loved the same boy, both left bruised in his wake.

"Thank you, y/n/n," Grace whispered, her voice trembling but steadying, her using your nickname as a sign of the glimpse of girlhood you shared. She reached out to squeeze your hand in silent agreement that she indeed did not hate you, and actually still had kind care for you.

You gave a small smile with tears in your eyes.

"I’m not going to ," you said quietly. "I’m not going to keep being friends with Logan."

The words hung in the quiet apartment, heavy and absolute. Grace’s eyes widened slightly, a flicker of shock crossing her face. "Y/N... he's your best friend."

"And look what it did," you replied with a sad, final shake of your head. "It just hurts people, and it just wrecks things."

"...Y/N, you don't have to, I already knew." She sighed. "Knew what?" you were confused. "I already knew he loved you." You both were silent.

You didn't know what to say. "Wait. Sorry - this wasn't me trying to-I didn't-this wasn't me trying to make myself feel better to get your forgiveness or anything like that. I didn't mean to make it like that-" "No, y/n. It's okay. I know you."

"I already knew he loved you. He talked about you like you were the best part of his day. I knew he had written your exam days in his calendar because he knew you got anxious. I knew you were on his mind, most of the time - even when we were together, I know he said you were his family but I don't even think he let himself believe anything otherwise - I know he didn't do this on purpose," you nodded, trying to process what she had said, you didn't even know that he was in contact with your dad, or had your test dates written down, you didn't know he was doing a hundred little things - he never told you, he never took credit for any of it - it was like a reflex of his to take care of you.

"I know he never meant to hurt you, I haven't spoken to him at all - but I know he feels awful..." you weren't trying to defend him, but you both knew John Logan's heart - and he'd never intentionally harm the both of you. He'd never do that.

She nodded, almost letting out a small laugh, "Yeah, he's pretty stupid," you laughed too, "The worst."

You handed her your small care package, "Thanks for caring about me, y/n," as she held the box in her hands, you gave her a weak smile. "See you in the fall?" You said hopeful, that Grace would still want to be your friend after some time. She nodded, and you were turned to leave, "I'm visiting my mom in Paris again," she called out, "I'm leaving next week after my last final on Tuesday," you turned back, surprised she shared that - you were glad she got to go, she was a euro-sunkissed princess after all- just like you had exclaimed drunkenly to Garrett at the party a few weeks back.

"Hope it's wonderful. I know it's your favourite."

She reached out to grab your hand, stopping you from leaving, "You're allowed to love who you love, y/n," she blurted out all of a sudden as if she had wanted to say that the whole time. "You deserve the love you give to everyone else too. You're allowed to have good things too"

You didn't say anything. You just stared at her, shocked. She let go of your hand gently, and stepped back a bit, "See you in September, y/n," beginning closing the door, "See you...see you, Grace," as the door shut quietly in front of you.

You walked back to your apartment which was about 15 minutes away. Unsure of what just happened, like it was a psychedelic dream. She meant everything you said - you genuinely think that she deserves every good thing.

The insane thing was that, grace ivers - an angel of a person, thinks after all that you've done - deserved good things still.