sasari🎧

Steve Harrington.

Not his problem.

I won't let you go, please don't ask me to.

Panic Frequency.

My Moon and My Man. My Moon, My man and My sun.

The Weight of Air.

Jack Abbot.

Things you learn without meaning to.

The quiet kind of wanting (or the cruel way tbh)

still yours.

You are not the exception.

Dean Di Laurentis.

She Always Won. --- Intervention.

Sharp Edges

John Logan.

Please stop the music. Don't dare stop the music.

10 reasons not to tell him i love him (and why none of them were enough)

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pairing: John Logan x reader fem

summary: so the guy kisses you. after months of whatever-the-hell-you-two-were, after every unsaid thing and every rule you made up just to feel safe, he kisses you. and what's the most logical, reasonable, emotionally mature response your brain comes up with? running. literally running. out the door, into the cold, full sprint from the best and worst thing that's ever happened to you. naturally, this leads to: months of pretending you're fine, a whiteboard titled "operation livers", becoming his unofficial relationship coach for the girl that isn't you, and eventually saying everything you should've said the night you ran — way too late, in the worst possible moment, to the worst possible outcome. a love story, technically. just not the kind anyone would put on a poster.

warnings: angst, late confession, not good ending

a/n: okay so i wrote this in TWO DAYS without stopping because i could physically feel the idea slipping away and i knew if i didn't get it out i was never going to write it and it would just live in my head forever haunting me. i'm still reading all your requests i promise i see every single one and i WILL get to them — also still taking more dean requests because i simply cannot stop myself!!! anyway i really hope you guys like this one, i put my whole heart into it (and lost some sleep over it but that's fine that's fine). I'm sorry if u see any mistakes, my first language is spanish, sryy. Lots of love for you all xoxo 🤍

btw 13,265 words this time. i think i got a little carried away. jiji

Maybe you're right, maybe this is all that I can be — but what if it's you, and it wasn't me? What do you want from me?

— The Neighbourhood, W.D.Y.W.F.M?

(nothing to say this time. i messed up.)

I love, love.

I love it the way you love a movie: from the most comfortable spot on the couch, with a blanket over your legs and something warm between your hands. You clap at the good parts, cry a little at the bad ones, and when it ends, you turn off the TV and go on with your life. No consequences. No one can hurt you.

I watched my parents’ love fall apart. I watched my best friends get their hearts broken. I saw my mom’s frustration. I saw people crying over “love.”

So I drew my own conclusion.

Love is beautiful precisely because you can watch it from the outside. From there, it’s safe—you can study it, admire it, understand exactly why it works without having to put any of yourself into it. You’re a spectator. And spectators don’t lose anything when the lights come on and the theater empties.

From that seat, I loved everything.

I loved the movies where they meet in the rain. I loved the novels where someone crosses an ocean for another person. I loved the Taylor Swift albums Fran would play at two in the morning after one of her epic romantic disasters—which were frequent. I loved Fran, who falls in love every two months with an intensity I almost see as a form of bravery—though I’d never tell her that, because it would go straight to her head. I admired her from my seat, with my blanket and something warm between my hands.

I never wanted to step inside.

But here’s the part I’ve never told anyone.

The problem was never just the fear of losing. The problem was something smaller and harder to explain: deep down, I had never placed myself inside the equation. Other people’s love was something they built together, specific and unrepeatable, like a song that only works when those two particular voices sing it. I watched from the outside and thought how beautiful, the same way you think how beautiful standing in front of a painting in a museum—with sincere admiration and the calm certainty that it’s not yours and never will be.

Fran fell in love every two months with an intensity I saw as almost brave, though I’d never tell her that because it would go to her head. She had this ability to love people with an ease I observed like a language I had never learned to speak. And I watched them all and clapped from my seat.

Never once asking if there was a leading role waiting for me on the other side.

Because there wasn’t. Those things happened to other people. People who knew how to receive that kind of love without freezing completely. People who didn’t need fifteen minutes of mental preparation before someone took their hand. People who didn’t catalog every kind gesture looking for the trap.

Love was for other people. I was the spectator. I had always been the spectator, and that was perfectly fine.

What I didn’t calculate was that there’s a difference between choosing not to step inside and discovering you’ve already been inside longer than you realized.

That there are people who settle into some part of you without asking permission, without announcing themselves, without doing anything extraordinary. That one day they’re just the guy you see to satisfy a purely primitive need, the one you had strict rules with: No feelings. No jealousy. No exclusivity. No emotional relationship between us. No kissing. We weren’t even “friends with benefits.” I thought he was too talkative for my taste, pretty irritable. He always broke the “no emotional stuff” rule. He used to piss me off on purpose so I could take it out on him however I wanted on our weekly day. I never really knew when it became a problem.

That irritation and something completely different can feel almost identical when you’ve gone long enough without wanting to see the difference.

We had always been part of the same group—Fran (my best friend, who was in a pretty stable relationship with John “Cute” Tucker), Garrett Graham and his gorgeous girlfriend Hannah, Dean Di Laurentis and his wild, charming girl Allie, John Tucker, and him. Same university, same social circle, same parties. John Logan had been the background noise of my life for as long as I could remember—constant and inevitable, like the cold in January.

And I had never looked at him any other way. We were… fuck buddies? No. Fuck-something. I didn’t even know what we were.

Until I did. Imagining him with someone else was driving me insane. And that’s when I realized it was already too late to go back to my seat.

The farther away love stays, the less it can leave you with empty hands.

The covered garden in December had that cold the glass roof made bearable but didn’t eliminate. From here you could see the snow falling like drizzle. The white lights we’d wrapped around the columns gave everything an unreal glow that made familiar places feel momentarily outside of time.

Inside, the Wham! song was on what must have been its fifteenth loop.

I heard the door open and turned my head to see who it was.

Logan stepped out, hands in his pockets, that casual posture he always had, like nothing ever affected him. Great, I thought, annoyed. John Logan, coming to bother me as usual. Because that was our thing: we pretended to hate each other—constant jabs, sarcastic comments—like we couldn’t be in the same room without clashing. In private, we craved each other.

He didn’t look drunk, but what did I know? The vodka had me foggy, and maybe he just wanted to chase me down to make some joke at my expense.

But when he spoke, his voice was soft, worried. He frowned slightly as he approached.

“Hey. I saw you leave with a face like something bit you. You okay?”

I shrugged, rubbing my arms against the cold, not wanting to admit that my parents not being able to—or wanting to—spend this time of year with me had hit me hard.

“Just… my stomach feels off. I got nauseous,” I murmured, staring at the floor to avoid his eyes.

“You lie terribly,” he said, coming over to the railing and leaning beside me. He gave me a gentle, playful nudge with his elbow. I turned toward him, surprised for some strange reason. “But okay, I won’t push. Want to talk about something dumb to distract you?” he offered, with that lopsided smile. It wasn’t that weird—we were acquaintances, after all, even if we constantly poked at each other.

“Sure,” I gave in, sitting on the nearby bench. The cold from the wood seeped through my dress. He sat next to me, close enough for me to feel his warmth, but not invasive. “Like what?”

He smiled, pleased I’d agreed, flashing a huge grin as he joined me on the bench and leaned back with an exaggerated sigh. He started telling stories from his childhood, how he used to pretend he was his dad’s boss. I laughed in spite of myself. The sound came out freer than I expected as I pictured him as a bossy little kid. I burst out laughing, the knot in my chest loosening a bit. He was actually great when he wasn’t busy being an asshole.

Fuck. I feel weird.

Logan noticed the shift. His expression softened, and he nodded with understanding, letting his hand rest gently on my thigh, tracing circles with his thumb, trying to comfort me.

Uh… he was achieving everything but comfort. Damn, you’ve got some hands, buddy.

He went quiet suddenly. The air thickened between us. His laugh died in his throat like something had hit him from the inside. He didn’t say anything else. He just… looked at me.

“What?” I asked, wiping away the tears my little laughing fit had caused. His sudden silence made me look straight at him.

His dark eyes traced my face, brow furrowed, like he was searching for something that had escaped him, something he couldn’t name. It wasn’t his usual playful look. It was deeper, glassy from the alcohol and whatever else had been released inside him. His eyes moved over every inch of my face—the curve of my lips still trembling with laughter, my cheeks wet with tears that weren’t just from laughing. And then, without warning, he took a strand of my hair between his fingers, gently, almost reverently, twirling it slowly, all while never stopping looking at me.

“Nothing,” he said, but his smile twisted, that mole moving with it. He shook his head, thinking about his next words. “Actually, you look fucking good tonight.” He shrugged like it was the most normal thing in the world.

What?

My heart flipped so hard I thought it was going to jump out of my mouth.

What the hell did he just say?

Okay, this was weird. I’d never heard two compliments from Logan in one night. It had to be the alcohol. It had to be the vodka.

“Did you just compliment me? Relax, bro, that’s two in one night,” I said, raising an eyebrow and crossing my arms like a shield, as if that could keep the sudden distance I felt I needed.

“Weird, right?” he murmured, his voice low, almost amused, but with something else underneath.

“Truth be told, I don’t know how to take it,” I replied, trying to sound sarcastic. “You’re so drunk you’re seeing me like one of those cheesy posters you have stuck on your bedroom wall.”

He stepped closer, that playful smile that always disarmed me curving on his lips, but now it felt heavier, more real. His voice came out hoarse, low, like he was confessing something he’d kept for too long.

“I feel drunk every time you walk into a room. So I don’t think it’s new.”

The air grew thick, sticky. His cologne—that mix of wood and citrus that always smelled like him—wrapped around me, mixed with the whiskey on his breath. The world tilted a little, but it wasn’t the alcohol. It was him. It was the way he looked at me, like I was the only thing that mattered on that freezing night.

What the hell does he think he’s doing? I thought, my heart racing like I’d run a marathon. This isn’t real.

But then he said, almost in a whisper:

“You’ve had me crazy since the day I met you. You have no idea how much.”

And he kissed me. Breaking the most important rule of our deal.

His hand moved from my thigh to my cheek, warm against my cold skin. A soft brush at first, then deep, desperate. His lips against mine like he’d been waiting years for this moment.

And I… kissed him back.

My hands flew to his shoulders, holding on without thinking. I opened my mouth under his, responding with the same urgency, the same hunger I didn’t know I carried inside. Our tongues met, clumsy and perfect at the same time. I felt his low groan vibrate against my lips, his fingers tangling in my hair, pulling me closer. Our breaths mixed, ragged and hot against the cold night. I forgot everything. Only he existed: the heat of his mouth, the wild beat of his heart against mine, the taste of whiskey and Logan.

When he pulled away, panting, he looked down at my lips. The silence hit me like a bucket of cold water, sobering me completely.

What have I done?

I shot up like a spring, stumbling back two steps. The bench creaked behind me. The cold bit at my legs, but it was nothing compared to the fire burning inside me.

He stayed seated, motionless, but his eyes… God, his eyes followed me. They shone brighter than usual, glassy with something that seemed to hurt in his chest. He didn’t blink. He just stared, jaw tight, lips slightly parted like he wanted to say something but the words were stuck in his throat. It was the same look he had when he lost something important, but multiplied by a thousand. Sad. Lost. Like I had just broken something without touching it.

No. Don’t look at me like that. You can’t look at me like that.

“Sorry,” he whispered, his voice cracked, almost inaudible. “I… I shouldn’t have—”

“Forget it,” I cut him off, my voice shaking, sharp like a knife to keep the distance.

He tried to stand but stopped halfway, hands braced on the bench like he needed something to hold on to. His eyes never left me for a second.

“Wait, I’m really sor—”

“Forget it,” I repeated, louder, crossing my arms so he wouldn’t see how my hands were trembling.

“Just let me expl—”

“Forget it, John,” I insisted, the name snapping like a whip. “It was a mistake. We’re drunk. It’s fine. Forget it.”

He reached out toward me, slowly, as if afraid I’d vanish if he moved too fast. His eyes stayed locked on mine, bright, pleading without words, and that hurt more than the kiss itself. Because it wasn’t the look of the idiot who stole my fries or soda.

“Logan…”

“No,” I said, stepping back again, my chest so tight I could barely breathe. “Forget it.”

I couldn’t take it anymore. I ran out of that house without looking back, without saying goodbye to anyone. The cold slapped my face, snow crunching under my shoes, hot tears rolling down and freezing instantly.

The street was quiet. Christmas lights twinkling in the windows, roofs with a thin layer of white. The whole lifelong neighborhood looked different with the fresh snow and the late hour.

Later, once I was sure everyone had gone home, I carefully pushed open the front door. I took the stairs two at a time and went straight to my room. I closed the door slowly without turning on the light. I lay on my back on the bed without even taking off my coat. The snow in my hair melted onto the pillow and the cold from the coat seeped into my bones, but I didn’t move. I just stared at the dark ceiling and started thinking about him.

John Logan.

I covered my face with my hands.

No. No. This can’t be.

And then I admitted it.

In a low voice, almost soundless, against the palm of my hand:

“I like John Logan.”

In that exact second, as if the universe had been waiting for that confession from the girl who mocked love the most, fireworks exploded outside. It was midnight. Christmas. The sky filled with colors—reds, golds, blues—explosions lighting up my room through the window like flashes from an old movie. The light came in intermittent bursts, illuminating my tear-streaked face.

God. I’ve been such an idiot. I’ve treated him so badly all this time… I’ve been so stupid. A huge, proud, blind idiot.

I lay back down with my heart racing and my face wet, while the fireworks kept exploding.

What a fucking idiot you are.

I got up, tore off my coat like it was burning me, and quickly put on my pajamas. I slipped under the sheets and started tossing and turning like crazy, my heart beating so hard it felt like it would break my ribs. What the hell did I just do? I turned and turned, my face burning with shame and my stomach in knots, until finally, exhausted from all the inner drama, I fell into a deep sleep.

I came back from my parents’ house in January with a suitcase, an emotional hangover of biblical proportions, and the firm conviction that the new year was going to be different.

Not different in the “I’m going to change my life, do yoga, and read fifty books” way—that’s language for people who still believe in New Year’s promises with a naivety I find touching. Different in the sense that I was going to do something. I was going to stop being the spectator. I was going to sit on the other side and see if love from there would kill me or just leave me looking really, really ridiculous.

One of the two. Probably the second, but I had decided that embarrassment was an acceptable price.

I like John Logan, I told myself for the fourteenth time, testing how it sounded. The first time I’d said it against the palm of my hand, almost silently. By day three I could say it at normal volume to the empty room without my pulse racing.

Progress.

The problem was that I hadn’t spoken to him in weeks.

Since Christmas night we had existed in parallel universes with apparent mutual agreement, without either of us saying it out loud—which was basically how I handled one hundred percent of the uncomfortable things in my life. He hadn’t texted me. I hadn’t texted him. Fran had asked me twice if I was okay and both times I’d said yes, perfectly fine.

I wasn’t perfectly fine. I was in that specific not-fine state where you function with apparent normality but one part of your brain is exclusively dedicated to replaying a twelve-second moment on loop.

Twelve seconds. I’d replayed it, I calculate, about four hundred times.

But now in January I had decided that was over. When I got back to Briar I was going to do something. Talk to him, tell him something, I don’t know—act in some way that wasn’t continuing to watch from the most comfortable seat on the couch with the blanket over my legs.

The plan was solid.

And there really is a difference between knowing something and understanding it.

I knew, for example, that what we had was nothing. I knew it the same way you know the hallway coffee machine coffee is a crime against humanity but you still buy it because it’s eight in the morning and the January cold in Briar doesn’t give you alternatives.

The deal was simple. So simple we had never needed to say it out loud, which was already a sign of something, although at the time I had cataloged that sign as efficiency and not cowardice—which is basically the story of my adult life summarized in one sentence.

No feelings. No exclusivity. No conversations that complicate things. We saw each other when we saw each other, which was almost always when he texted and I replied, and in between we existed in parallel universes that crossed just long enough to remember why we crossed again.

It was a perfect system.

On Monday, which in my schedule meant Comparative Literature at ten, then research seminar at noon, followed by the four hours of slow death that was Monday afternoon at Briar when everyone was still in weekend mode but you couldn’t afford to be because you had two papers due the next week and an existential crisis pending.

I was in the library at three in the afternoon, laptop open to a document that had been blank for forty minutes and a coffee that had gone cold half an hour ago, when my phone vibrated.

I looked at it without moving.

Logan.

The first thing I thought when I saw his name was: shit. Fuck.

I breathed through my nose, the way I do when I need two seconds before doing something that scares me. I stared at the phone for the time it took to convince myself there was no reason John Logan’s words should have the effect of someone opening a window in winter from the inside. Sudden cold. Involuntary. Then I picked it up.

Hey. Can I talk to you?

I typed: sure and deleted it because it sounded too casual and I wasn’t casual, I was the opposite of casual. I typed yes and deleted that too because it was too short and would seem like I was annoyed. I typed hi, yeah, what’s up? and stared at it for five seconds before sending it before I could change my mind.

He replied in thirty seconds.

You in the lib?

I looked around as if I needed to confirm it.

Yes.

Coming.

And that was exactly the verbal economy of someone who had never needed to use more words than necessary to get what he wanted—something I had observed over nine months of whatever-this-was with that specific mix of admiration and exasperation that almost everything he did produced in me. I turned the phone face down on the table. Then face up because I needed to be able to see it. Then I put it in my bag because if I kept looking I was going to do something stupid like reread the message another forty times looking for subtext.

There’s no subtext, I told myself. It’s Logan. Logan says things directly or doesn’t say them.

Functional, I thought. You are a functional person.

It took him eight minutes. I saw him before he saw me—he was coming from the main entrance with his backpack on one shoulder, hands in the pockets of his Briar jacket.

He saw me. Gave that minimal chin lift he sometimes did. Sat across from me.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi.” He set his backpack on the floor. “Been here long?”

“A while.”

Silence. Brief. The kind of silence that exists between people who know each other well enough that silence isn’t awkward—except today it was. Today the silence had that specific weight of conversations that haven’t started yet.

“What’s up?” I asked.

Logan ran a hand through his hair. That gesture. The one he made when he was figuring out how to say something that wasn’t easy. It was so rare to see it in him that the two previous times I’d noticed it, I’d just stared without knowing what to do with the information.

“I need to tell you something,” he said, resting his elbows on the table. He clasped his hands. Looked at his clasped hands for a second like he was deciding the order of the words.

“Okay,” I said. My voice came out perfectly normal.

“This.” He made a vague gesture that encompassed the space between us, and there was nothing in that space except air and half a meter of distance and nine months of whatever-this-was that suddenly felt like so much more. “Us. It has to end.”

The room didn’t move. I didn’t move. Outside, someone walked down the hallway, quick steps on the cold linoleum, and the sound faded. Farther away, the subtle buzz of the library continued, reminding me the world kept turning with total normality. Except for me, the silence now had a different weight. All that bravery I had built up was cracking, making a deafening noise in my head as it shattered completely.

Us. It has to end.

It has to end, as if there had been a “us” real enough…

Ah. Here we go.

“Okay,” I said.

I felt something move in my chest, something that wasn’t exactly fear but wasn’t exactly bravery either—it was that in-between space where you live when you’re about to do or hear something irreversible.

Logan blinked. He hadn’t expected that. Good. If I was going to sit there feeling like the floor had dropped three inches without warning, at least I could have the dignity of not letting him see the blow.

“Okay?” he repeated.

“Yes.” I shrugged with the indifference of someone who has perfected the art of looking unaffected. “That’s what we agreed. No complications. If it gets complicated, it ends.”

“It didn’t get complicated,” he said, too quickly.

“Then why are you here?”

Another pause. Longer. He was looking at me with that attentive gaze of his that I hated—the one that saw too much, the one completely incompatible with the nature of what we supposedly were. He exhaled and said:

“There’s a girl.”

I stayed perfectly still. Ah. Ah, no.

The brain sometimes shorts out at the exact moment you need it. Mine did—a second of absolute internal silence, clean, a white void before everything started working again and the sentence landed with its full weight, crushing my ribs.

There’s a girl. There’s a girl.

“Yeah?” I said. My voice came out fine. That was the good thing about years of being the spectator: I knew how to sound calm when I wasn’t. I’d practiced it since I was seven, watching happy endings from the most comfortable couch in the world and clapping at the good parts with completely still hands while inside I turned to ash.

“Her name’s Grace.” Pause. “Grace Ivers.” His voice was calm, direct. He had decided the only way to say this was without beating around the bush and he was executing it with the same determination he went after the puck on the ice. “I don’t know how to explain it. It’s different.”

“Good.” I said it with the conviction of someone pretending they mean it, because that’s what I did: I said “good” and “how nice” and “I’m happy for you” with sincere admiration. That’s what I knew how to do. It was the only thing I knew how to do so no one would discover I was bleeding out in silence. “What about her?”

Pause.

Please don’t say it. Don’t. Say. It.

“I really like her. For real. It’s not like… it’s not the usual thing.”

I knew exactly what the usual thing was. The usual thing was the Puck bunnies, Friday parties, and the long history of girls who never went anywhere because Logan didn’t want them to. The usual thing was our silent pact not to touch each other’s hearts, the unbreakable rule of that first kiss I had run from terrified. The usual thing was the system. The system he knew perfectly and was now throwing away for someone else.

I was thinking about movies again, how they prepare you for hard moments with music and light and the right camera angle so the pain looks aesthetic. In real life there was none of that. In real life there was a cold library, coffee gone cold forty minutes ago, and John Logan looking at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read because it was new. Something between nervous and hopeful, a light in his eyes completely alien to the darkness I had in my chest right then.

Until the name Grace sounded briefly familiar.

Piper, one of those girls who existed in the hockey game ecosystem with the specific energy of someone who knows exactly what she wants and has no shame getting it, had been telling half of Briar that a girl was spending too much time around Logan. I’d heard it in passing, without meaning to, in the hallway after class—Piper’s shrill voice floating like a warning I had decided to ignore. To the poor girl’s misfortune and misery, Piper had been right. Logan’s world had already shifted while I remained frozen in the same place.

“Ah,” I said, tasting the bitter flavor of humiliation in my mouth.

“Yeah.”

“How did you meet her?” I asked, because if I was going to be an adult about it, I was going to be one completely, all the way, with all the consequences. Even if every question felt like sticking a pin in an open wound.

“At a party.” He paused. “Before the break.”

Before Christmas.

While all that was happening, there had been a freshman girl named Grace who already existed.

That was good, I told myself. It simplified everything. Lie. It didn’t simplify anything. It complicated everything in a different way, but sometimes you need a narrative, even a partially false one, to keep functioning, and this was the one I had available.

“I’m happy for you.”

Logan hesitated. I saw his shoulders tense before he ran his hand through his hair, a worn-out gesture I already knew by heart. He did it whenever nerves got the better of him and he desperately searched for how to say something without it sounding like what it really was.

“Can you do something for me?” he said. The firmness in his voice didn’t quite cover the doubt.

I blinked, swallowing the knot rising in my throat. “What do you need from me?”

He sighed, a broken sound that seemed to cost him effort. He shrugged, shedding that confidence that always surrounded him, and looked at me with an intensity that hurt in my chest.

“I want you to help me do things right. With Grace.” His voice sounded lower, almost a plea. “Please.”

I stared at him, feeling the weight of his words floating in the dense library air. I let out a small, bitter laugh, a dry sound that drowned between the wooden shelves.

“Sure,” I said, resting my elbows on the table. “Though you can do it on your own. Even if you’re a pain in the ass, Logan, you can achieve anything you set your mind to.”

“Good,” he said, and a spark of relief crossed his eyes. Then he added, “Thanks.”

“I haven’t done anything yet.”

“Yeah, but…” He shrugged. “Thanks anyway.”

He grabbed his keys and backpack from the table. The unmistakable gesture of detachment. I stayed exactly where I was, anchored to that rigid chair, and mentally counted to three because I needed to convince my body not to fall apart on the floor. My mind wanted to beg him to stay, but my legs only wanted to run, to run as fast as the first time.

Then Logan extended his hand toward me. A formal, neat movement.

I extended mine mechanically and he gave me a handshake. His palm against mine, warm and firm. What irony. The last time our skin had recognized each other, our mouths had been touching, the world had been burning, and panic had made me run from his side. We had agreed on distance. We had sworn the “no kissing” line was the only border keeping us safe. And now he was sealing the end with the greeting of two strangers who share a business. The contact burned my skin like a punishment.

He walked toward the exit of the stacks aisle. Reached the threshold.

And then he turned, right before stepping into the main hallway, and looked at me with that smile of his—the easy one, the usual one, the killer grin I’d seen him use in awkward situations and that now bloomed here, in the middle of my ruin—and said in a whisper, careful not to disturb the peace of the place:

“Hey.”

“What?”

“Now that we’re done… the rules don’t matter anymore, right?”

I looked at him, feeling the air turn to glass in my lungs. “What rules?”

“Ours.” A pause. “What we agreed on.” Another, shorter pause. “That means we can be friends now, right?” And he had the tone of someone explaining the obvious, of someone cleaning up a mess with a dirty rag and smiling because the stain is no longer visible. “Help me out for old times’ sake.”

Old times’ sake.

Nine months reduced to ashes in the time it took him to say three words, with that damn smile, from the doorway.

My thoughts crowded together in a violent mess, a silent scream clawing at my ribs. Friends? Is it really that easy for you? I ran from you because one single kiss from you felt like the end of the world, because breaking that rule meant accepting that I liked you enough to destroy me. I built a stone system to protect us from ourselves, and you reduce it to an expiring contract? How can you ask me for friendship from the very edge of the abyss you pushed me into? I don’t want your damn old times. I don’t want to be the spectator clapping while you walk over the rubble of what we forbade ourselves to be.

But the subtle buzz of the library was still there, floating like dust in the afternoon light, reminding me that my catastrophe was irrelevant to the rest of the world.

I looked at him for a second that lasted an entire eternity. A second where my dignity hung by a bleeding thread.

“Sure,” I said, and my voice sounded so alien, so cold, that I barely recognized it. “Friends.”

The smile widened a little. He nodded, turned around, and left. His silhouette dissolved behind the heavy shelves. It was like when you finally decide to pick up your pieces and stand up, someone else had already taken your spot, and the floor was flat again, as if you had never fallen.

There was an afternoon when he arrived with his hair still damp from practice.

I don’t know why I noticed that. I noticed it with the same idiotic precision with which I noticed the way he rested his weight on his left elbow when reading something, or how his hands occupied the space on the table as if it belonged to them by right. My brain had been cataloging John Logan for months with a thoroughness that would have been useful if I had applied it to my Comparative Literature exams.

He sat down, opened his backpack, looked at me.

Friends see each other. Friends talk. Friends text at eleven thirty at night saying things like hey, do you think it’s weird that I like movies more than parties? and you have to reply no, Logan, it’s not weird, most people prefer movies to parties and he answers but you preferred parties and you stay staring at your phone screen in the darkness of your room longer than you should before typing I preferred going where you went and then deleting it and writing depends on the night and sending it before you regret it.

“Hey. There’s a party at Fitzy’s on Friday. Do you think I should invite her?”

I set my pen down on the notebook. Carefully.

“Have you hung out alone yet?”

“Twice.”

“And?”

“Good.” A pause. That pause of his, the one he used when there was more he didn’t know how to say. “Really good. Too good, if you know what I mean.”

A sharp cold ran down my spine, leaving me breathless. Too good. I knew exactly what he meant. You didn’t have to be a genius to decode the subtext in Logan’s voice, that almost floating lightness of someone who had just crossed a sacred border with someone.

Really good. Two words. A new territory to which I had no map, no compass, no right of entry. And in the middle of that territory, the weight of my own reality crushed my chest with overwhelming force. Nine months. Months in which my body had only known his. Months in which my skin had remained suspended in the memory of his hands, unable even to conceive of looking at anyone else. I was still trapped in his orbit, intact and exclusive in my own misery, while he was already undressing in other rooms, erasing my traces with the haste of someone starting a clean life. The asymmetry of our pain stung in my throat like a physical humiliation, pure and alive.

“Then no,” I said, surprised my voice didn’t break into pieces on the table. “Don’t take her with the team yet. Fitzy and the rest are noise and alcohol, and you can’t build anything real in that context. You need her to see you in places where you can be yourself without the version of Logan everyone expects you to be.”

He looked at me with that new intensity that still didn’t resemble anything I knew from before.

“How do you know these things?”

“Because I read a lot of books,” I said. “And I observe. And I have the luxury of not being in love with anyone, so I think clearly.”

I said it with perfect naturalness. With the same naturalness with which you say that tree leaves eventually rot on the ground. Mechanical, gray truths spoken out loud only to fill the void.

He nodded slowly.

“The luxury of not being in love with anyone,” he repeated, testing the weight of the phrase, letting the words float between us like smoke.

“Exactly,” I said.

I picked up the pen. I kept writing, pressing the tip against the paper with ridiculous force, trying to anchor my entire existence to that stroke of ink. I never looked up, but I didn’t need to. I felt his gaze. I felt the weight of his eyes fixed on me, tracing the line of my jaw, my forehead, my hands. A dense, suffocating attention that burned my skin and forced me to hold my breath so I wouldn’t give myself away. I knew he was searching for the trace of a lie, but I stayed rigid, carved in stone, holding the mask while my mind sabotaged the silence by unearthing the beginning of everything.

I remembered the night it all started. Fran had dragged me to a faculty party just to officially introduce me to Tucker and the rest of the hockey guys. At first, Logan and I clashed immediately. He looked at me with that unbearable smugness and started hitting on me with poorly delivered lines. I gave him such a cold, completely indifferent look that I could see the exact moment his pride faltered. He realized I wasn’t just another girl, and from then on he only tried to irritate me, poke me, break my facade. And for strange reasons born from that violent friction, we ended up tangled against the bathroom tiles of that house. A chaotic impulse that became the first piece of our system. Nine months of bodies fitted together, of shared breaths in the dark, only to end up here: holding a pen like it was a shield.

The following Tuesday he arrived with the face of someone who had slept little and a story he told me in the wrong chronological order, as he always did when he was nervous and didn’t want it to show.

The short version was that they had talked on the phone for two hours. The long version was the same but with the details he released one by one, like someone handing over someone else’s treasures, which I received with the trained expression of someone listening without bleeding.

He had told her about the workshop. About his dad. About his brother and the deal.

A sudden cold froze my fingers. The words got stuck in my throat.

“You told her about your dad’s workshop?” I said, and for the first time my voice faltered, betraying the distance I had worked so hard to fake.

“Yeah.” He looked at me, surprised by my reaction. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” I breathed, but the air felt like ground glass. “It’s just… that’s something of yours, Logan. Something important.”

“I know.” He shrugged, but the movement was too stiff to be casual. “That’s why I’m saying it.”

I looked at him while the world reconfigured around me in a painful blink. I felt a pang of disbelief and helplessness that emptied my stomach. I hadn’t known. Months of whatever-this-was, months of entire nights where our skin knew each other by the millimeter, and I had never known about the workshop. I knew nothing about his father, or the promises, or the weights that sank his shoulders when he stayed quiet staring at the ceiling after we’d been together.

He was telling me now, in the library, weeks after destroying everything, like mentioning a trivial fact on any afternoon. But the real blow wasn’t that. The real blow was understanding the terrible irony of our intimacy: we had hooked up for almost a year under the premise that we were an exclusive secret, but the reality was that I was the only one living in ignorance. Most people at Briar, his teammates, the people floating in his periphery, knew more about his life than I did. My exclusivity was a deception. I only had rights to his surface, while to her—to Grace—he had handed over the keys to his basement over the phone, in the middle of the night.

It’s different, he had said that day. It’s not like the usual thing.

Yes, I thought, feeling the dead weight of my own blindness. The usual thing had been using me as anesthesia so he didn’t have to talk to anyone.

“It’s good,” I said, and my voice sounded mechanical, like the echo of an empty body. “That you told her. It means you trust her.”

“Yeah,” he said, and that light in his eyes returned, the hungry one, the one that already had a destination. “I think so.”

I was happy for him with all the conviction I could scrape from my ruins, which that afternoon wasn’t much, but it was what was left.

And then, in a blind impulse my pride couldn’t defend against, my hand moved across the table. It was an unconscious act, an animal reflex for survival. My fingers sought his and I took his hand. The contact was a warm spark in the middle of my winter. Logan tensed barely a millimeter, but he didn’t pull away. On the contrary, he turned his palm a little, catching mine in a gentle grip, and we stayed looking. It was an eternal second, suspended in the cold library air, where time stretched until it became a taut rope between us. His eyes searched mine with desperate, almost painful intensity, as if trying to decipher the secret language we had spoken for nine months in the darkness of that bathroom. We were so close I could hear the broken rhythm of his breathing.

Until the table vibrated.

The dull buzz of his phone broke the spell like an ax blow. I looked away abruptly, feeling the pull of the cold air as I let go of his hand, and my eyes inevitably fell on the lit screen.

Grace.

The name shone with insulting clarity, claiming what was already hers. I felt a pang of humiliation coloring my cheeks, a brutal reminder of my place in his new life. But Logan didn’t even look at the phone. His gaze stayed fixed on me, heavy, dense, fixed on my face as if the call was nothing more than irrelevant background noise. He was waiting. Waiting for me to say something, to break the system, to ask him not to do it.

I swallowed the knot of bile choking me and forced my lips into a cold, distant line.

“You should answer,” I said, and my voice sounded so empty and lifeless it seemed like a ghost’s.

“You’re right.”

The thing with Logan was that when he talked about Grace—when he really talked about her, without the armor of humor and sideways comments—his face did something I hadn’t seen before. It went still. Not with the stillness of someone hiding, but with the stillness of someone looking at something they still don’t quite know how to name.

Sometimes I wondered if his apparent clumsiness wasn’t just refined cruelty. If he was forcing me to guide him toward her as a form of conscious torture, releasing every private detail just to see which part of me broke first under his gaze. Or maybe it was worse. Maybe there was no malice in his eyes, just absolute ignorance of my pain, and it was only that small sick and hopeful part of my chest that invented the illusion that he was provoking me to see if, finally, I dared to claim him.

He told me everything. That they had gone out. That it had gone well. That then he had said something awkward—he didn’t specify what, just something awkward, you know how I am—and that she had pulled back in a way he didn’t know how to close the distance without making it worse.

“What exactly did you say to her?” I asked.

“Something about a girl at Garrett’s party.”

“Logan.”

“I know.”

“Why the hell did you tell her that?”

“I don’t know! She asked if I’d been with anyone lately and I answered honestly and—”

“Honesty has its moment,” I said. “And that moment is not when someone you like asks if you’ve been with other people. That moment is never. Or much later. Much, much later.”

He looked at me. We stayed looking. It was an eternal second, suspended in the cold library air, where time stretched until it became a taut rope between us. His eyes searched mine with desperate, almost painful intensity, as if trying to decipher the secret language we had spoken for nine months in the darkness. We were so close I could hear the broken rhythm of his breathing.

Then a strand of my hair came loose and fell across my cheek, breaking the line of my face. Logan didn’t think. He slowly raised his hand, with a slowness that froze my blood, and his fingers brushed my skin as he tucked the strand behind my ear. His touch was a warm burn, a ghost of the nights when his hands didn’t ask permission. The brush lingered a millimeter too long, enough for the tension in the air to become dense, suffocating, a high-voltage cable about to snap.

Logan cleared his throat, pulling his fingers away abruptly as if he’d burned himself, and broke the spell.

“Okay,” he said when it passed. “What do I do?”

“Apologize. No excuses. No context. No explaining why you said it.” I leaned on the table, hardening my voice to cover the tremor his touch had left. “Just: I’m sorry, it was stupid, it won’t happen again.”

“And if she wants to know why I said it?”

That night Fran was on the couch with a cup of something hot and her laptop on her knees when I got home, and she looked at me exactly once before turning her eyes back to the screen.

That was the good thing about Fran. She knew when to ask and when not to, and that afternoon her social survival instinct told her, correctly, that it was a no-questions night. After all, she had been there the day of the party. She remembered perfectly how she had dragged me toward Tucker and how Logan had tried to corner me with his arrogance before we ended up in that bathroom.

“There’s pasta on the stove,” she said, without looking away from the screen.

“Later,” I said.

“Sure.”

I went into my room. Closed the door.

I stood in front of the whiteboard.

OPERATION LIVERS, it said at the top, in the big, slightly crooked letters from a January night that now felt like another century.

Grace Ivers, Logan. Livers. It was obvious.

Below the title was a list. Not very long. But not very short either. I had added to it with fleeting thoughts that crossed my mind when we saw each other.

Don’t lose composure in front of him.

Listen. Don’t interrupt. Don’t make faces.

Don’t think about the kiss. (NEVER think about the kiss)

Be useful. Be reasonable. Be the person he needs right now.

Don’t be the person you want to be.

Don’t look at his hands.

Don’t think about how he laughs.

Don’t think about how he laughs (with you)

Remember that spectators don’t lose anything. (Remember that you already lost something.)

Below the nine points, the blank space I had left because at some point I thought I would need more.

I had been right. I needed more.

I picked up the marker. Uncapped it. And then I stayed still, cap in hand and tip on the green surface of the whiteboard, without writing anything.

What was I going to write? He told her about his dad? Nine months touching each other blindly? You’re not in love with anyone and you said it out loud and it sounded completely true and completely false at the same time?

I capped the marker again.

I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at point nine until the letters stopped making sense.

Was it ever real with me?

Yes. That.

That was exactly the problem and I had written it with my own hand. It had seemed honest and brave to me, and a week later it just seemed like physical proof of my own humiliation. I had believed that keeping my distance kept me in control, when in reality it had only made me invisible to him.

From the other side of the door I heard Fran close her laptop. Her steps toward the kitchen, the sound of the microwave, the clink of a spoon.

“You sure you don’t want pasta?” she called out without approaching, with that tact of hers of offering without invading.

I wiped my face with the back of my hand, swallowing the bitter knot clawing at my throat.

“Yeah,” I said. “Give me five minutes.”

“No rush,” she said.

I stayed sitting on the bed for another two minutes. Then I got up, went to the bathroom, splashed cold water on my face, and looked at myself in the mirror long enough to convince myself I looked moderately functional. It wasn’t entirely true, but it was convincing enough to hold the mask.

I went out to the hallway.

Fran was in the kitchen serving two bowls, without asking if I wanted any or how much, simply putting double as if she had already decided. That small, everyday, completely hers gesture squeezed my chest in a way that had nothing to do with Logan and everything to do with the specific relief of having someone who takes care of you without forcing you to bare your wounds.

I sat at the table.

Fran sat across from me with her bowl. The subtle buzz of the apartment was the only thing filling the space. She looked at me intently, with those eyes that saw too much through my cracks.

“You okay?” she asked simply.

The question floated between us, loaded with a silent suspicion she didn’t want to force. I felt the impulse to disarm myself right there, to remind her of that party where it all started in the bathroom, to confess that the system had collapsed and that what hurt me more was what I had never known about him than his departure. But the discipline of being a spectator was a muscle too well trained.

“Yeah,” I said, forcing a light smile as I picked up the spoon. “Fine.”

We ate in silence for a while. The kind of silence that exists between people who have been together long enough to know that some truths are better not touched when the wound is still open. Fran looked back at her bowl and didn’t say anything else, filing away my lie with delicacy.

Later, when she went to her room and the house sank into shadow, I went back to my room and stood in front of the whiteboard again. The walls seemed to close in on me, reminding me of the loneliness of my own script.

This time I did uncap the marker. I wrote in the space below the nine, in the irregular handwriting of someone writing while breaking inside:

Don’t confuse knowing what someone needs with being what someone needs. They are different things. You’ve spent months not understanding the difference.

I read it. Each word felt like a silk line cutting my throat.

I erased it with the green felt eraser hanging on the side of the whiteboard, leaving a smudged trace.

And then I wrote it again. Because erasing it didn’t make it any less true, and I, apparently, still had intact that masochistic instinct to look at things directly even if they took my breath away.

I got into bed with my clothes on, sinking into the mattress as if the floor kept giving way under my feet.

The party at the guys’ house was a swarm of music too loud, red plastic cups, and the sour smell of spilled beer on the wood. A subtle buzz of shrill laughter and shouts that I found unbearable. In the middle of the mass of bodies, I saw them.

I crossed the room dodging bodies until my eyes, with that masochistic aim that characterized me, found them.

There was Logan. And next to him, a blonde girl laughing at something he had just said. He looked at her with that hungry light, the one that already had a destination, and moved a cup away from her hand with a gesture so incredibly protective it turned my stomach. I let out a shaky sigh, a sound immediately drowned by the party music, and looked for the most distant corner. I dropped into a faded wingback chair, sinking into the worn fabric, wishing the earth would swallow me.

A few meters away, Fran was laughing with Tucker near the bar. Honoring our silent pact, my friend kept throwing glances at me every so often, making sure my facade was still intact, that I hadn’t left yet. I gave her a vague wave to let her continue with her thing.

The cushion of the chair sank beside me. Someone had sat down. I didn’t bother turning my head. I kept my eyes fixed on my own sneakers, tired of the world.

“You hiding too?” asked a female voice, soft, tinged with light amusement.

I let out a dry, bitter laugh without looking away from the floor.

“I’m just tired of thinking,” I answered, leaning my head back on the chair, closing my eyes.

“And why do you say that?” the stranger insisted, with a genuine curiosity that caught me with my defenses down, worn out by the noise and the cheap gin.

I opened my eyes halfway, fixing my gaze on the ceiling, on the shadows cast by the party lights. The knot I had been swallowing for weeks in the library, the poison of every piece of advice, overflowed all at once. I no longer had any dignity left to protect in front of a stranger. In that moment, the mask of the perfect spectator who claps at happy endings cracked completely. The pressure in my chest was so great that the words came out in a poetic, painful torrent, like a scream I had carried stuck in my throat for months.

“Because I do a lot of things for people I care about,” I blurted out, and my voice sounded strange, broken, suspended in the dim corner. “All the time. Thinking I’m going to fill this stupid void that only one person can fill. And when I knew it… God, when I realized what it meant, I literally ran. I ran like a coward. And now… now I’m helping him conquer someone else. I give him advice. And every time I wake up, I feel emptier. I feel like I have nothing. Like I’ve been left with nothing.”

The silence that fell between us was thick, almost sacred in the middle of the party’s roar. I expected the girl to get up uncomfortably, but she didn’t. She took her time, weighing my ruins with a maturity that froze my blood.

“Sometimes we run from things that scare us because we think that way we keep control,” the stranger said, and her words sounded like an ancient proverb, wise and sharp. “But distance doesn’t erase the fire, it just leaves you watching the smoke from afar. If you spend your life building bridges for others, you’ll end up forgetting what it feels like to be on the other side. You can’t save someone from their own blindness if you refuse to look yourself. You have to stop being the collateral damage of a story you’re writing yourself.”

Her words hit me with the force of naked truth. I sat up slowly in the chair, shocked by the lucidity of her words, and finally looked at her directly. She had clear eyes with soft freckles adorning her gentle face, fixed on me with a strange compassion.

“What’s your name?” I asked, my heart beating in my throat.

The girl held my gaze for a second that stretched like gum. I saw her eyes travel from my face to the notebook sticking out of my bag, and then, with startling slowness, toward Logan’s figure still on the other side of the room. Recognition crossed her features like lightning. Her expression changed—a spark, as if an equation that had been incomplete had just solved itself—and then, slowly, a small smile formed. Not mocking. Not triumphant. Just the smile of someone who has just understood something they should have seen before. The compassion transformed into monumental surprise, followed by absolute understanding. She lowered her gaze for a moment. Murmured something under her breath, so low I almost didn’t hear it.

“Damn blind people.”

Before I could process the insult or the strangeness of her reaction, the girl stood up. She gave me a firm, brief squeeze on the shoulder—a physical contact that felt like both a goodbye and a warning at the same time—and walked away, disappearing into the crowd toward where Logan was.

I stayed completely petrified in the chair, the cold of her hand still marked on my clothes. The realization hit me like a bucket of ice water, paralyzing my lungs. It was her. It was Grace. I had fucked up. God, I had told everything to the only person who shouldn’t know.

I desperately searched for Fran with my eyes, eyes wide with panic, feeling like the floor of the party had dropped three inches without warning and that this time everyone was going to notice the blow.

I found him in the kitchen.

I didn’t look for him on purpose, or at least that’s what I told myself in the three seconds it took me to cross the entire party dodging people with my eyes fixed on the back of his neck. He was leaning on the counter with a beer in his hand and Garrett beside him saying something that made him laugh—that laugh of his I knew by heart even though I had spent months trying to forget it. I saw him and thought no and then yes and then I simply acted before either part of my brain could reach an agreement.

I grabbed his hand.

I didn’t say anything. I just grabbed his hand and pulled.

He cut off mid-laugh, surprised, and looked at me with that what the hell is happening expression I had never seen because I never did this kind of thing. I was the one who stayed still, the one who observed, the one who never pulled anyone anywhere.

“Hey—” Garrett started.

“One moment,” I said without looking at him.

And Logan let me pull him. That was what surprised me later, thinking about it. That he let me pull him without asking where we were going.

The back porch was empty.

The music was muffled from inside like background noise that belonged to no one. I let go of his hand as soon as we stepped out. I turned around. He was looking at me with his hands now in his pockets, brow slightly furrowed, that posture of his of waiting without pressuring that I knew and that at this moment felt unbearable.

“What’s up?” he said.

I opened my mouth.

And everything I had kept in the place I didn’t allow myself to examine came out all at once, without order, without the rehearsed speech I hadn’t rehearsed, without anything except the raw truth that is the only thing left when you’ve carried it alone for too long.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “About Christmas. I’m sorry.”

He blinked.

“You don’t have to—”

“I was scared.” I cut him off, because if I didn’t say it now I never would. “I was scared of what you made me feel. Because what I felt for you was new, Logan. It was really new. I had never—” I stopped. Breathed. “I had never been in love. With anyone. In my whole life. And I know it sounds like a lie and I know you might not believe me and I know that after everything I did it doesn’t matter what I say now, but I wanted you to know. I needed you to know. That’s why.”

“Stop,” he said.

His voice sounded strange. Flat, controlled, the kind of voice people use when they’re holding on to something they don’t want to let go.

“I can’t keep being your friend,” I continued, because there was no turning back now and the precipice was there and I had already jumped. “I can’t. I can’t have another conversation with you and think I’ll never be yours. I can’t sit across from you in that library and listen to you talk about her and pretend that’s not killing me inside. I let you go and it was a mistake. The biggest mistake I’ve made in my life and I’m going to hate myself for what I’m about to say, I’m going to hate myself, but—”

“Stop,” he repeated, more tense. “Stop, you can’t do this.”

“I don’t want the Logan I could only sleep with,” the words came out on their own, one after another, without me being able to stop them. “I don’t want that. I want your fears. I want your achievements. I want all your phases, the ones I already know and the ones I don’t. I want to be with you. I want the real Logan, the whole one, not the one you gave me because that’s all we had agreed on. And I know it’s too late and I know you have Grace now and I know this is a disaster but I needed to tell you because I couldn’t anymore—” I broke there, just for a second, and pulled myself together. “I love you, Logan.”

The silence that followed lasted an eternity.

He didn’t move.

He had his jaw clenched, eyes fixed on me, and on his face there was something I couldn’t read, something that was too many things at once and none of them was what I needed it to be.

Then he shook his head. Slowly.

“Why now?” he said.

His voice came out different. Not flat. Broken at the edges, with something underneath that wasn’t cold but the complete opposite: an echo of old anger that scratched my ears.

“Logan—”

“Why now?” he repeated, and this time there was something in his tone that closed my throat, a dull violence that made me take a step back. “Months. We’ve had months. I’ve had you in front of me every damn week, every afternoon in that library, and you said nothing. Nothing. You listened, you nodded, and you helped me to…” He cut himself off abruptly, running his hand through his hair with a frustration that seemed to hurt him physically. “And now. Now that there’s someone. Now that for the first time in a long time I have something that works, now you tell me this.”

“I didn’t—”

“Don’t tell me you love me now.” He took a step toward me, cornering me against the cold wall. “Not after Christmas. Not after months of making me believe you were fine, that you were my friend, that everything was perfectly under control.”

“I know,” I said, and the frozen air tasted like bile. “I know and I’m sorry—”

“You’re sorry?” The laugh he let out had no humor in it. It was a dry, heartbreaking crack. “Do you have any idea what it is to carry you in your head for months without being able to get you out? Do you know what it is to try to build something with someone while there’s a part of you that keeps obstinately looking at the same place as always?” He stopped abruptly. As if he had just heard himself. As if he had just confessed a weakness he had sworn to bury. “No. I’m not doing this.”

“Logan—”

“Always.” The word came out on its own, with the dead weight of something that had been without a place for too long. “Fucking always sabotaging yourself. And then you show up right when you feel like you’re losing my attention, right when there’s something to lose, and suddenly you can say everything.” A short pause. With the edge of a scalpel. “Where were you in January? Where was all this truth every afternoon you sat across from me and could have said something and said nothing?”

“I was scared—”

“Everyone’s scared.” He said it with an intensity that emptied my lungs. “I was scared too. You think I wasn’t? You think it was easy to come find you in that library and tell you it had to end while the only thing I wanted was for you to tell me no? You think it was easy to wait, week after week, for you to say something, anything, and hear nothing?”

I stayed completely still, feeling the floor giving way under my feet.

“I waited,” he said, and now his voice came out different, lower, more broken, with a helplessness that was almost unrecognizable coming from him. “I waited for you. And you said nothing. So I moved on. What the fuck was I supposed to do? Stay paralyzed in the cold waiting for you to decide if I mattered enough for you to risk it?”

“Logan, I—”

“You know what’s the saddest part?” he said, and his voice came out so low I had to strain to hear it over the music filtering from inside. “That I don’t even know if this is real or if you just can’t stand that there’s something in my life that doesn’t revolve around you.”

The air disappeared. Not all at once. Little by little, like when something crushes your chest so slowly you don’t realize you’re suffocating until you can no longer breathe.

“Logan…” I whispered.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he said, and he said it in a low voice, which was worse than if he had shouted it, much worse, because shouts dissolve but things said in a low voice stay engraved in your bones. “Seriously. What the fuck is wrong with you? You’ve spent months watching me build something with another person, sitting there, perfect, giving me advice, and at no point—not one—were you able to say anything. And now that it’s done, now that you can’t control it, you show up with this.”

I swallowed, feeling my throat bleeding inside.

“It’s not like that—”

“No?” His eyes on mine, direct, stripping me with no escape. “Then tell me how it is. Explain to me why now. Explain to me why not on Christmas, why not in January, why not any of the afternoons you sat across from me in that library and could have said it and didn’t.” He paused, and when he spoke again his voice had something broken inside that made it infinitely worse. “You can’t. Because the answer is that you waited until there was something to lose to decide that you cared.”

The words pierced me completely, leaving me in ruins. I said nothing. Not because I didn’t have an answer, but because I had too many and none were enough to save me. He kept looking at me with those eyes I knew by heart and that now held something I had never seen: pure pain, without any covering, an open and exposed wound that was unbearable to look at.

“And the worst part,” he continued, and now his voice came out completely broken, without edge, without anger, reduced to pure exhaustion and something that looked too much like surrender. “The worst part is that right now, listening to you, a part of me wishes all this were different. That I wish you had said this months ago. That I still…” He cut himself off. Shook his head, as if wanting to tear the thought out. “And that’s what I can’t forgive you for. That you come now and make me feel this now, when I can no longer do anything with it. When I no longer have the right. Tell me. What do you want from me?”

The silence that followed was the kind of silence that doesn’t resemble any other: an absolute void where you could hear the echo of our own disaster.

I saw on his face the exact moment his own words reached his chest. I saw him close his eyes for a second. I saw something cross his face that wasn’t anger, but its exact opposite: the pain of someone who has just hurt himself without meaning to in the act of destroying another person.

He extended his hand toward me. Slowly. Like someone who knows it’s already too late but can’t help the instinct to try to hold what is falling.

I stepped back one step. Just one. My body moving by pure survival reflex, because I no longer had anything left inside with which to decide anything.

He stayed with his hand halfway, suspended in the freezing air. Eyes fixed on me. And on his face there was something I couldn’t look at directly because if I looked I would understand things I couldn’t allow myself to understand here, on this porch, with everything too broken to touch without hurting us more.

“I’m sorry,” he said. In a low voice. And he meant it, that was the worst, he meant it completely. “I’m sorry.”

And he left.

Without looking back. Without finishing the gesture. Without giving me anything to hold on to except that I’m sorry that was real and that changed absolutely nothing, and that somehow was the most devastating thing of everything he had said that night.

The door closed with a dull thud. The noise of the party returned from inside. The music. The voices. An insulting normality that kept turning while I stayed behind.

I stayed still for a moment I didn’t know how to measure. Then I sat on the porch step without deciding to, my knees giving way on their own under the weight of my own humiliation, hands tucked between my legs, feeling the cold of the wood seeping relentlessly through my clothes.

I don’t know how long I was on that step.

Long enough for the cold to stop biting me and start numbing me, which was worse, because numbness doesn’t hurt but it also doesn’t warn when it ends. Long enough for the music from inside to change twice and for someone to open the door at some point and close it again without saying anything.

Long enough for Fran to find me.

She didn’t announce her arrival. She didn’t say anything at first. She just came out, closed the door slowly behind her, and stood looking at me for a second before coming down the two steps and sitting beside me in the cold, without anyone asking her to.

She looked at me. I kept my eyes fixed on the emptiness of the yard.

“We’re leaving,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“I’m fine,” I lied, and the word sounded like a glass breaking in the freezing air.

“Yeah.” She stood up and held out her hand with a firmness that didn’t admit reply. “We’re leaving.”

I didn’t have the energy to argue. I took her hand, let her pull me up, and followed her along the side of the house to the street, with the noise of the party fading like a distant echo behind us and closing around us like an ice coffin.

The car was parked halfway down the street. Fran opened the passenger door first, pushed me inside with that implacable efficiency of when she has made a decision and there’s no turning back, then walked around the hood and sat in the driver’s seat.

She didn’t start the engine. She turned toward me.

She looked at me with that expression I had only seen on her a few times in all the years we had been what we were. A look that contained no pity, but something much harder to bear: an absolute, clear presence that stripped me completely.

“Stop pretending to be strong,” she said softly. “You’re shaking.”

And something in those five words, in the absolute absence of judgment or drama, broke the last barrier I had left.

I cried. Not in the contained and strict way you allow yourself to cry when you want to save dignity. I cried for real, with that violent crying that is born in the pit of your stomach and, once it breaks open, has no off switch. I covered my face with my hands while my shoulders shook convulsively, letting out that horrible, sharp, undignified sound of someone who has spent months swallowing the rubble.

Fran didn’t pull away. She put a firm hand on my back and stayed there, still, letting me flounder.

And then I told her everything. Without order, without structure, without any of the neat, rehearsed versions with which I had tried to deceive myself in the library. I let it out in pieces, with loose threads, repetitions, and humiliating truths that made no sense outside my head. I told her about the STUPID months-long deal, about the rejection on the porch, and about the absolute certainty that he was right: he had waited for me and I had stayed sitting in my own script.

Fran listened to every word without interrupting me once. When I finished, the silence inside the car felt so heavy we could barely breathe.

“Just breathe,” she said. “In and out. I’m right here.”

I tried to imitate her, swallowing the cold air that burned my chest. After a long moment, Fran moved her hand from my back, looked me straight in the eyes, and asked me the question I feared most:

“Why didn’t you ever tell me you felt like this?” There was no reproach in her voice. It was the pure desolation of someone who would have walked into the fire for me if only I had told her I was burning. “You’ve spent months living in this official spectator car, breaking into pieces every night in our kitchen, and you made me believe everything was under control? I thought it was us against the world. I don’t understand at what point you decided you had to go through your worst winters alone.”

“I don’t know,” I whispered, and my voice hurt in my throat. “I don’t know, Fran. I was so scared that if I named it, it would become real…”

“I’m tired,” I added, and the words came out with the urgency of poison finding an exit. “I’m tired of feeling like this. Why do I feel so fucking sad? Why can’t I stop breaking? I prefer to be like before. I prefer to feel nothing. I prefer to go back to when all this didn’t matter to me, when I could watch other people’s love, clap from my corner, and stay in my place. I don’t want this. I don’t want this pain. Take my heart out, Fran, seriously, rip it out, because I can’t live like this.”

Fran looked at me, and her clear eyes filled with a sadness so deep it broke my soul. She leaned toward me, took my face between her hands with brutal tenderness, and forced me to hold her gaze.

“Listen to me carefully,” she said, and her voice trembled barely a millimeter. “I’m not going to take your heart out. And you’re not going back to being who you were before, because the one before was dead and was only pretending to breathe. It hurts like this because you’ve finally come to the surface, because risking loving someone cuts like fucking glass, but it’s the only way to know you’re alive.”

She paused, and her fingers wiped my tears with a softness that hurt more than the cold.

“Your mistake wasn’t falling in love with Logan, nor was it being afraid. Your mistake was believing that your only role in this world was to sit in the back row watching others be happy. You built yourself a whiteboard, a script, and stupid rules to protect yourself from life, and the only thing you achieved was becoming invisible in your own story. Logan didn’t see you because you decided not to let yourself be seen. You spent months giving him maps so he could find another person because you were too terrified to ask him to stay with you. You can’t spend your life being the architect of other people’s bridges and then cry because you stayed stranded on the shore. If you don’t dare to claim your space, the world is going to keep passing by, and you can’t get mad at it for giving you exactly the silence you yourself demanded.”

Each of her words entered clean, sharp, destroying the last vestiges of my lies. It was advice I didn’t want to hear, but it was the only truth that could save me from the bottom of the well.

“Logan is gone,” Fran continued, her voice now pure balm. “And it’s going to hurt. You’re going to wake up tomorrow and feel like your chest weighs a ton. But you’re not going to die of cold. Because love doesn’t end just because he didn’t want it. The love is still yours. Now put it somewhere else. Put it in yourself. Stop being the damn spectator of your own ruin.”

She looked at me for one more second and then, simply, opened her arms.

I went in without thinking, disarmed, stripped of all the defenses that had brought me here. I buried my face in her neck and she wrapped me with a force so solid that I felt, for the first time in nine months, that the ground beneath me stopped giving way. She pressed me against her chest, letting me cry out the last remains of my pride, and didn’t say anything else because she had already said everything. Because sometimes the only answer that exists is this: someone who stays with you in the middle of the rubble and doesn’t ask you to pull yourself together before it’s time.

Outside, the streetlights flickered in the gloom, oblivious to the collapse of my universe.

Inside, the sound of my crying slowly faded, transforming into a slow, heavy breathing, into a silence that finally brought some peace. Fran’s hand stroked my hair with a constant rhythm.

“I’m here,” she whispered against my forehead. “You’re not going to be left alone on the shore. I’m here.”

And I stayed like that, folded over myself in the passenger seat, with my heart completely shattered and, at the same time, in a small, imperceptible, and poetic way, a little less cold than ten minutes ago.

Which was, for that night, the only thing I needed to survive.

.

.

.

pairing: John Logan x readerfem

summary: When you confessed your love to the idiot on the hockey team and he rejected you like a coward… only to write you 22 letters later, ignore your silent treatment, and confess everything to you in the rain like he’s in a Nicholas Sparks movie. Because of course, talking like a normal person is too hard, but declaring eternal love while soaking wet is totally reasonable.

warnings: Prepare yourself for some angst with a happy ending, fueled by heavy pining and absolute emotional constipation. This story features miscommunication (but make it dramatic) and, yes, literal kisses in the rain. Expect Logan being a simp in denial, lots of crying in aprons and on shoulders, and friends who consistently give much better advice than the main characters actually listen to. Fair warning: you will experience severe secondhand embarrassment, endure excessive dramatic monologues, and encounter plenty of swearing along the way.

a/n: hey guys, I’m back! I hope you like it. You have no idea how fucking much I love kisses in the rain. Sending you a kiss — I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. xoxo

part one.

'Cause all I know is we said, "Hello" And your eyes look like comin' home All I know is a simple name And everything has changed

(Guys, you lost me.)

I don’t know what to do with this. With all this love I have for him. I don’t know where to put it now.

The world kept spinning like nothing had happened. And I hated it a little for that.

Every morning I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror of my room with that question stuck somewhere inside me, unanswered, with nowhere to go. Love doesn’t disappear just because you want it to. It doesn’t work like that. There’s no switch, no drawer where you can stash it and lock it away. It was just there, huge and useless, taking up space that no longer had anyone to belong to.

When was the last time I actually slept?

I couldn’t remember.

I wasn’t trying to be dramatic, but fuck, not talking to him had hit me hard.

I washed my face with ice-cold water until my cheeks burned to bring down the swelling, then I put on concealer under my eyes and a little blush so I wouldn’t look so dead. War paint, I told myself. As if calling it that turned it into something that required courage instead of just the small, sad act of trying to look like a functional person.

Today I finally decided to leave my cave—my incredible, comfortable bed—to dignify myself with going to work. One of the perks of your mom being the owner is that she really doesn’t care if you miss work. I think she’s even at peace when I’m not at the café. It must be exhausting to see me moving around like a ghost in an apron.

The walk was twelve minutes. Janis was still at the car wash, so I had no choice. I usually didn’t mind walking, but now I couldn’t stand those twelve minutes alone with my thoughts. Before, I’d spend them with music or my phone in my hand, answering Logan’s messages like a dumb teenager. Now I just wore the headphones without playing anything. Just the dead weight of them as an excuse for no one to talk to me. So I could be, for those twelve minutes, exactly as broken as I was before having to pretend I wasn’t.

I’d been replaying the same moments all weekend. The feeling of his lips against mine. His big, warm hands closing around my hips. The way he looked at me right before he kissed me, like he’d been holding back for years. The hoarse sound that escaped his throat when I kissed him back. Everything played on loop, sharp, cruel, perfect.

And then came the memory of the next morning. His voice in the kitchen.

“I fucked everything up.”

“I need you to leave.”

I shook my head and picked up my pace, as if I could leave the memories behind on the sidewalk.

“The only thing I learned that night,” I muttered, dropping my forehead onto the table with a dull thud, “was that I should’ve stayed home.”

We were sitting at one of the outdoor tables in the central courtyard at Briar, under a sun that felt way too cheerful for my mood. I had a coffee that had already gone cold between my hands. Sarah was nibbling on an apple with a bored face, and Alison was stirring her chocolate milkshake with a straw while listening to me repeat the weekend story for the thousandth time.

Sarah let out a snort and ran her hand down my arm in a caress that was supposed to be comforting but mostly looked like she was holding back laughter.

“What if he’s gay and just hasn’t realized it yet?” she whispered mischievously, leaning toward me.

Alison let out a short, dry laugh.

“Men,” she said ironically, clinking the ice in her drink. “Tell them you love them and you’ll never see them again. They disappear faster than my patience on a Monday morning.”

“God, my life sucks,” I lamented, letting out a pitiful groan against the cold wood of the table.

The silence lasted barely two seconds before Sarah leaned in closer.

“For God’s sake! You’re twenty-two years old, what do you know about life?” she exclaimed, though her voice had that protective tone she always used when she saw me like this. “You’re beautiful, smart, and never apologize for feeling things, for setting boundaries, or for having ambitions, babe. Got it?”

I lifted my head enough to look at her. Sarah had that kind of confidence I envied with all my soul: short hair, sharp gaze, and a tongue that could destroy male egos in less than ten words. Alison was the same, only more cruelly funny. Both of them were like a man’s ego put into the bodies of beautiful, fearless women. The exact opposite of me right now.

“Besides,” Alison continued, pointing at me with her straw, “if John ‘Eat Me’ Logan is dumb enough to let you go after you told him you loved him, then fuck him. There are more guys at Briar. Most of them are worse, but at least some know how to use their mouths for something more useful than babbling excuses.”

I tried to smile, but it only came out as a crooked grimace. I knew they were saying it to cheer me up. I knew their words came from a good place. But none of that took away the weight I felt in my chest.

“Who needs therapy when I have you guys? Hooray…” I said in a tired but sincere voice.

But then I saw him.

Logan was walking along the path that crossed the courtyard with that stride of his I knew by heart—not too fast, not too slow, that way of moving that had always felt somehow inevitable. Tucker was beside him talking about something, hands in his pockets, and Logan had his head slightly tilted toward him with no expression at all.

And then he looked up.

I don’t know if it was instinct or bad luck, but his eyes went straight to mine. Without searching. Without hesitation. Like he already knew exactly where I was before he looked.

His brown eyes locked onto mine.

And I saw everything on his face in the space of a second: the impact of finding me there, the tension that rose up his jaw, something that could have been relief or pain or probably both at the same time. He had dark circles. A tight line between his eyebrows that I hadn’t seen before, or maybe I had and just didn’t know what it meant at the time.

Now I did.

He stopped dead.

Tucker took two more steps before realizing and turning around. I saw the exact moment he processed the situation—his eyes going from Logan to me and back to Logan—and something in his face closed off with an expression that wasn’t exactly pity but was too close for my comfort. Logan watched me with a mix of pain, regret, and something else I didn’t dare name. He took an involuntary step toward our table, like his body reacted before his brain. Tucker, beside him, noticed immediately and grabbed his arm firmly, stopping him.

Logan didn’t even look at him.

His eyes moved quickly over mine, my mouth, the line of my jaw, scanning my expression with an urgency that almost hurt.

He didn’t even like me. Why was he torturing me like this?

His lips parted slightly and then closed. I could see him working inside, the tension in his shoulders, the way his fingers briefly clenched into a fist and then opened. His entire posture was a question. Almost a plea.

Give me something. Anything.

I felt my heart rise to my throat and stay there, huge and inconvenient, pulsing with a force that I’m sure showed on my face.

No. I’m not going to be the one who does it this time.

I can’t be the one again.

I looked away with effort, breaking the contact like I was tearing off a piece of my own skin. I lowered my head and tightened my fingers around my coffee cup until my knuckles turned white.

“I’m not taking the first step,” I whispered, more to myself than to them, though the words came out loud enough.

“Bravo girl, Bravo” Sarah said proudly, giving me a gentle pat on the back. “Let him crawl this time.”

----

J.L

I sat on the edge of the bed with my head in my hands, feeling like my chest was going to explode. In my head, the same image played on loop without stopping: the way her eyes filled with pain. And then she looked away. Like looking at me burned her. Like I was something she could no longer stand.

Like I was something she could no longer stand.

The three of them looked at me in silence. It was weird seeing the guys so quiet. Disturbingly weird. Normally Dean would’ve already said some shit to lighten the mood, but even he didn’t dare. Garrett had his arms crossed and his jaw tight, staring at the floor. Tucker was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, looking at me… with a lot of pity.

How fucked up was I?

“…I ruined everything,” I muttered, my voice hoarse.

Dean let out a dramatic sigh and threw himself onto my bed like it was his.

“Yeah, we already know that. The question is: what the hell are you going to do about it?”

I stayed quiet for a long time. The knot in my throat was choking me. I ran my hands through my hair, pulling harder than necessary, as if the physical pain could organize the chaos inside me.

“I’m in love with her,” I admitted almost angrily. “I love her eyes… fuck, I love the way she looks at me like I’m someone decent. I love her hair, the way it falls in her face when she’s focused. I love her smile when she hears the stupidest thing that comes out of my mouth… like I’m the best thing that’s ever happened to her.” My voice was shaking by the end. I stood up without really knowing why. I needed to move, I needed to do something with my body because if I stayed still I was going to explode. I stood in the middle of the room like an idiot. “She confessed everything to me… and I told her I couldn’t. What kind of son of a bitch does that? After what happened that night?”

Dean, for the first time in a long time, didn’t make a joke. He just looked at me seriously.

“Bro… you’re really fucked.”

Garrett moved.

He’d been silent the whole time, staring at some point on the floor, and that silence from Garrett was what had me the most nervous since they arrived.

He leaned forward. Looked straight at me.

“So what are you going to do now? Because avoiding her and looking at her like a lost puppy isn’t working.” He said it without cruelty, but without softening it either. “Listen to me, Logan. You’re a mess, I know. But you can’t go dump all of this on her at once.” He paused, choosing his words. “She’s hurt. Really hurt. If you go now and tell her everything you’re feeling, she’s going to think it’s pity or that you’re confused. You have to take it slow… but don’t drag your feet. Do it right. Approach her little by little. Start by asking for forgiveness. Be honest, but gentle. Give her room to breathe.”

Garrett continued:

“You know where she works. You should go. Not like an ambush, just you. Order a coffee, sit down… and talk to her. On her turf. No pressure.”

Tucker pushed off the wall. He nodded slowly.

“Fast, but careful. Show her with actions that it wasn’t a mistake.” His voice was calmer than Garrett’s, quieter, but just as firm. “That she wasn’t a mistake.”

-

-

-

I stood in front of the café door for almost ten minutes, hands in the pockets of my jeans, my heart pounding against my ribs like it wanted to get out. The smell of fresh coffee and sweet bread reached me from inside, but it didn’t calm me. It did the opposite. It reminded me of her. Of her hands moving with that calm motion behind the counter, of how she bit her lower lip when she focused on making a latte.

Breathe, Logan. Don’t fuck this up again.

I pushed the door open and the little bell sounded way too loud in my ears. There weren’t many people. A couple of occupied tables and her behind the counter, cleaning the espresso machine. She was wearing the black apron she always wore, her hair pulled back in a loose ponytail with some strands falling in her face. God… she looked beautiful.

I approached the counter with heavy legs. She looked up for a second, her eyes passing over my face without stopping, like I was just another customer. No surprise. No pain. Nothing. Just cold indifference.

Ouch. I deserve that.

“A black coffee, please,” I said, my voice rougher than I intended. 

She nodded without meeting my eyes and turned toward the machine. Her shoulders were tense. I knew that body language. She was holding herself back.

Say something, John. Now.

“…I need to talk to you,” I murmured, lowering my voice so only she could hear. “Alone. Please.”

She didn’t respond. The sound of the espresso machine filled the silence between us. She served the coffee with precise movements, placed the cup in front of me, and wrote something on the order slip like I hadn’t said a word.

“That’ll be four fifty,” she said, looking at a point over my shoulder.

“Hey… please,” I insisted, leaning a little over the counter. “Just five minutes. I know I don’t deserve even that, but…”

She took the bill I held out without brushing my fingers. She gave me the change with the same empty expression, like she was serving a stranger. Her eyes didn’t meet mine even once. It was worse than if she had screamed at me. That indifference was destroying me inside.

She’s hurt. Really hurt. Shit, Garrett was right.

“I understand that you don’t want to see me,” I continued, almost in a whisper. “But I can’t keep going like this. What I did… was shitty. I was shitty. I need to explain…”

“Here’s your change,” she cut me off in a neutral voice, placing the coins on the counter. Then she turned back to the machine and started cleaning again, giving me her back.

The knot in my throat tightened so much I thought I was going to choke. I stood there like an idiot, the coffee burning my hand and my chest on fire. I wanted to jump over the counter, grab her by the arms, and force her to look at me, to see everything that was eating me alive inside. But I couldn’t. Not after what I’d done to her.

I took the coffee and sat at one of the tables in the back, where I could see her. I wasn’t moving from there. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not for as long as it took.

I’m not giving up on you. Even if you ignore me. Even if you look at me like I no longer exist. I’m going to prove to you that you weren’t a mistake. That you never were. That you’re the only thing I want in this fucking life.

-

-

-

“Hey, kid!”

A strong, decisive voice snapped me out of my sleep. I blinked, confused, my cheek stuck to the table and a trail of drool that didn’t even embarrass me. The café was empty. The chairs were already up on the tables and the main lights were off. Only the dim light from the counter remained.

In front of me was her mom. And fuck… she was just as pretty as her daughter. The same expressive eyes, the same way of tilting her head when she was half amused and half serious, the same hair falling softly over her shoulders. Seeing her was like seeing a more mature, confident version of her. It hurt my soul.

“What, you think this is a hotel?” she said in a half-mocking, half-annoyed tone. “You’ve been sleeping there for like three hours, drooling on my table. We closed a while ago.”

I sat up quickly, wiping my mouth with my sleeve, my face burning. I looked around desperately.

“Did she… already leave?” I asked, my voice thick.

She let out a soft, almost maternal laugh and shook her head while picking up a rag.

“My daughter left a while ago. She said she had things to do.” She looked at me for a second longer, with that warmth she’d always had toward me. “You okay? You look… tired.”

Ma’am, I’m trying to prove to your daughter that I’m not a complete son of a bitch.

“Yeah, I’m… I’m fine,” I lied, standing up. My neck hurt like hell. “I just wanted… to talk to her for a bit.”

She pointed at the door with the mop. “Come on, out. I have to open early tomorrow and I’m not leaving you here as decoration.”

I got up unsteadily, still half-asleep and with a sore neck. I tried to keep some dignity, but it was hard with the table mark on my cheek and my hair a mess.

She took the mop and gave me a gentle but firm push toward the door, like she was shooing out a big, clumsy dog that didn’t want to leave.

“Ma’am, I just—”

“Out, out,” she cut me off playfully, opening the door. “I open early tomorrow and I’m not tripping over you drooling on my tables. I don’t know what happened between you and my daughter, but I hope you can fix it soon. It kills me to see her walking around like a ghost. Good night.”

The cold of the night hit me as I stepped out. The door closed behind me with that cheerful little jingle that now sounded like mockery.

I stood there on the dark sidewalk, running my hands over my face.

How pathetic. Ugh.

---

“Hi…” The low, close voice startled me so much I let out a small scream and nearly dropped the cup from my hands. I spun around, heart hammering in my throat.

Tucker took a step back and clutched his chest with one hand, eyes a little wide.

“Fuck… you scared me,” he muttered, breathing deeply, clearly surprised by my reaction. “Got a minute?”

I didn’t answer. Instead I stood there, pressing the cup against my chest like a shield. My pulse thundered in my ears.

He ran a hand over the back of his neck, uncomfortable, and looked down for a second before speaking. “I’m sorry,” he said simply, with that calm but heavy voice. “I’m sorry about what happened.”

I looked at him in silence. Tucker had always been the quietest. Seeing him here apologizing squeezed something in my chest.

“It’s not your fault, Tucker,” I answered quietly, forcing a weak smile. “Really. You didn’t do anything. You don’t have to apologize for something that wasn’t your responsibility.”

He frowned slightly, like he didn’t fully agree, and still insisted, but before he could say anything I beat him to it:

“It’s okay,” I added, trying to sound firmer than I felt. “I’m fine. I don’t need anyone carrying this. Not you… not anyone.”

What a huge lie. I’m not fine. Nothing is fine. But what else can I say?

Tucker nodded slowly, still with that pitying look I hated so much. He stayed one more second, like he wanted to add something, but in the end he just murmured:

“How are you feeling?” he asked quietly. “Don’t lie to me.”

Crack.

I couldn’t hold it anymore.

The knot that had been tightening in my throat for days, weeks, broke all at once. Tears flooded my eyes and I started crying uncontrollably, right there. Everything came out in a shaky, broken torrent.

“I really… I really didn’t want to like him,” I sobbed, covering my face with one hand. “I didn’t want to, Tucker. I tried not to… but it just happened. And now I miss him so much it hurts to breathe. I miss his stupid voice, the way he looks at me… I miss feeling safe with him. But he told me he couldn’t and… and I had to walk away. I needed to walk away. I don’t know how to keep pretending I’m okay when everything reminds me of him. He’s been coming nonstop, leaving these stupid letters I haven’t even bothered to open, and fuck, it complicates everything when I see him on campus… I’m drowning. I regret going to that stupid party. I regret confessing my feelings. If only… if only I’d held back a little.”

The tears kept falling, soaking my cheeks and my apron. I felt pathetic, exposed, but I couldn’t stop.

Tucker walked around the counter without saying anything. His steps were quiet, steady. Suddenly his arms wrapped around me carefully, pulling me against his chest in a warm, protective hug. I tensed for a second, but then I collapsed against him, crying harder into his sweatshirt.

“Shh… it’s okay,” he murmured against my hair, rubbing my back with slow, comforting strokes. “Cry as much as you need. You don’t have to be strong all the time.”

I felt pathetic. I admit I really tried not to cry, but I just couldn’t hold it back anymore.

When will this suffering end?

I had to rip it out by the roots.

Maybe not right now. When I’m ready.

“Eight days!?”

They said it at the same time. Both of them. With the same incredulous face that made the lady at table three look up from her newspaper and stare at me like I was the problem.

“Shh, lower your voices.” I leaned on the counter with my arms crossed and waited for the echo to fade. “Eight days in a row,” I confirmed, lowering my voice.

Alison and Sarah were sitting on the high stools in front of the counter, their half-finished milkshakes in front of them and that look on both their faces that meant they weren’t letting me out of this conversation easily. The café was quiet at that hour, only four tables occupied and my mom in the kitchen making muffled clattering noises from the back. It was the kind of afternoon I normally liked. Calm. Manageable.

Until they showed up.

“And what does he do?” Sarah asked, raising an eyebrow while pointing at Logan’s table with her straw.

“He writes.”

“He writes?” Alison repeated, like the word didn’t quite fit, looking at me with a “Seriously?” face.

“He sits down, takes out paper, and writes. At first I thought he was studying, taking notes, whatever. Something normal.” I grabbed the rag from the counter and unfolded it, wiping the drops of chocolate Sarah’s straw had left. “But then on the third day he slipped a folded letter into the tip jar when he left.”

Both of them looked at the jar. It was there in its usual spot next to the register, completely innocent.

“In the tip jar?” Sarah pointed out, still not believing it.

“In the tip jar.”

“Why there?”

“Because I was giving him the silent treatment and every time he tried to talk to me I found something super urgent to do in the kitchen.” I folded the rag. Unfolded it. “So he stopped trying and found another way.”

Alison turned her stool slightly toward Sarah. Then looked at me.

“And what do the letters say?” Sarah asked.

“I don’t know.”

Silence.

“What do you mean you don’t know?” Alison said slowly, her voice showing that something didn’t add up.

“That I haven’t opened them.”

“None of them?”

“None.”

Alison stared at me. Then at Sarah. Then back at me.

“How many letters total?” she asked, and something in her tone told me she was already bracing for the answer.

I wiped a part of the counter that was already perfectly clean.

“Twenty-two.”

The silence lasted exactly two seconds.

“Twenty-two,” Alison repeated, toneless.

“Sometimes he leaves me three in one day. He sits, writes, folds the paper, puts it in the jar, and starts again. Like he always has something more to say.”

“But why?” Sarah frowned, not in judgment but with the genuine confusion of someone trying to solve a puzzle. “I mean, what’s the point of him writing you letters if he’s the one who told you no?”

“Exactly what I keep asking myself.”

“And you have no idea what they might say?”

“None.” I shrugged, though the gesture came out a little forced. “Maybe it’s an apology. Or he wants us to stay friends and doesn’t know how to tell me in person. Or he just feels guilty and this is how he’s dealing with it. I don’t know.”

“Or maybe,” Alison said finally, measuring her words, “they say something that has nothing to do with any of those things?”

“Alison.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Well, don’t say it.” I grabbed the rag again. “He made it pretty clear where things stood. The letters will be what they are, probably something I don’t need to read, and when I get the courage I’ll open them and that’s it.”

Sarah rested her chin on her hand and looked at me with that calm of hers that always felt slightly destabilizing.

“Do you have them on you?” she asked.

Of course I had them on me. I’d been carrying the wad folded in my apron pocket since Monday, but I had no explanation that made me look good. I took them out and placed them on the counter between the two milkshakes.

Alison and Sarah looked at them.

“Can we take a look?” Alison asked.

I glanced sideways at the table in the back. Logan was sitting with Dean Di Laurentis, a ridiculously hot blond who had always seemed almost unfairly attractive. They both had muffins they’d ordered a while ago in front of them. Logan was saying something with his elbows on the table and Dean was listening, leaning back in his chair with that half-smile of his, like he found the world generally entertaining. Neither was looking at me.

I shrugged.

“Whatever you want,” I said, and turned to clean the coffee machine. “They’re probably just apologies or something. I don’t think they’re a big deal.”

I heard the rustle of paper unfolding.

Silence. More silence.

The kind of silence you notice because there should be some comment and worryingly there isn’t. There should’ve been an “aw how sweet” or “look at his handwriting” or anything, but there was nothing, and that nothing started to itch somewhere I tried to ignore.

I turned around.

Alison had the letter in her hands and an expression I’d never seen on her. It wasn’t exactly surprise. It was something quieter, deeper, something that had settled on her face while she read and hadn’t moved when she stopped. Her eyes were still fixed on the paper.

“Oh,” she said.

Just that.

Oh.

Oh?

She passed the letter to Sarah without looking at her, pointing to a specific spot with her finger. Sarah read. I saw the exact moment she reached that part because her shoulders dropped a centimeter, she let out a very slow breath through her nose, and then she looked at me with an expression that was half tenderness and half something pretty close to “oh, sweetie.”

“This…” she started.

“What?” I said.

“This is pretty…”

I leaned over the counter without realizing it.

“Pretty what?”

The two of them looked at each other like accomplices and let out a small laugh.

“Give it to me,” I said.

Alison picked up the letter from Sarah’s hands.

“No.”

“Alison.”

“Nope.”

“Come on, it’s probably just a long apology—”

“It’s not an apology.” She said it without thinking and then closed her mouth like she’d said too much. Sarah pinched her.

I stayed still for a moment.

“What do you mean it’s not an apology?”

“Nothing, forget it.”

“Alison, if it’s not an apology then what—”

“When you’re ready you’ll read it and that’s it.” She leaned on the counter with a firmness that left no room for negotiation. “And don’t look at me like that, I’m serious. This is something you have to read alone and at the right moment, not here in the middle of your shift because we pressured you.”

“But I didn’t even want to know—”

“And now you do, right?”

I shut up. She was right. Damn it, she was right, because ten minutes ago I was perfectly convinced those letters were probably some elaborate apology or a request to stay friends and I didn’t need to read them to know they’d hurt anyway. And now I was leaning over the counter with my heart doing weird things because Alison had said “it’s not an apology” in that voice and—

A shadow fell over the counter.

The three of us looked up at the same time.

Dean Di Laurentis was standing on the other side of the counter. He didn’t say anything. He simply reached out, took the letter from Alison with a calmness that left no room for argument, grabbed another from the stack still on the counter, and placed them in front of me with startling ease.

I looked at him.

He held my gaze for a second, nodded slightly like he’d just done the most reasonable thing, then turned his head toward Alison.

And winked at her. Slowly. With total and absolute premeditation.

And he walked back to his table with his hands in his pockets like he hadn’t just dropped a grenade, leaving calmly.

The silence he left lasted exactly three seconds.

Sarah and I looked at each other.

Alison’s cheeks were flushed. Alison, who had once told a guy trying to hit on her at a party that his technique was conceptually deficient. Alison, who in the three years I’d known her had never lost a millimeter of composure in front of any male human being.

She had flushed cheeks.

She picked up her milkshake. Took a long, absolutely deliberate sip while looking out the window.

“Don’t even think about it,” she muttered.

Sarah opened her mouth.

“Don’t. You. Dare,” Alison repeated without looking at her, with a calmness that didn’t match someone with cheeks that color.

Sarah closed it. But no one could wipe the smile off her face.

I looked down at the two letters in front of me on the counter. White paper, folded in three, nothing written on the outside. Just the paper. And underneath all of that, that phrase spinning nonstop: it’s not an apology.

If it wasn’t an apology, then what was it?

I didn’t want to know. Lies. Yes, I did.

It was past midnight. I was sitting on the floor of my room in my pajamas, with the twenty-two letters spread out on the rug around me in roughly chronological order of when Logan had left them in the tip jar. They formed a semicircle that completely surrounded me. From the outside it probably looked pretty bleak, but there was no one watching so it didn’t count.

I’d taken them out of the drawer where I’d been saving them one by one, with that weird mix of care and denial that didn’t make much sense if you analyzed it. I’d organized them. I’d been staring at them for a while, convincing myself that as soon as I opened them I’d find something manageable. An apology. Maybe several apologies, one per letter, with different wording because Logan had always been that meticulous when he wanted to be. Something that would hurt a little but that I could fold back up, put in the drawer, and move on with my life.

It’s not an apology.

Damn Alison.

I picked up the first letter.

I held it for a moment without opening it, fingers on the fold of the paper, staring at it like I could read through it. Logan had spent eight days sitting in the café writing things I didn’t understand why he needed to write.

He had told me no. He had chosen to reject me. Those were concrete, verifiable facts and there was no reason for any of this to mean something different from what I had already assigned it.

No reason.

I unfolded it.

Logan’s handwriting was exactly as I remembered, a little careless at the edges with some words crossed out and rewritten.

I read the first line.

I froze completely. This can’t be real.

“Oh, shit,” I said out loud.

Hockey.

I wasn’t really into hockey until I met Logan. Before, it was just that sport they showed on TV that my dad sometimes watched and that I completely ignored. Noise, ice, guys crashing into each other at speeds that made no sense. I didn’t get the appeal.

Now I know exactly how many points the team needs to advance to the next round. I recognize the plays. I can tell for sure when a referee is calling too many penalties and when a defenseman is being deliberately dirty. Which says a lot—and nothing good—about what John Fucking Logan does to a person’s critical judgment.

I sighed and sank deeper into my seat.

The stadium smelled of popcorn and that weird mix of sweat and excitement that exists in sports venues. The stands were full, Briar colors everywhere, and the noise was that constant, dull kind that after a while just becomes pressure. Sarah was gripping her soda cup with both hands like it was the only thing anchoring her so she wouldn’t lose her mind, while Alison had been taking pictures of a certain player wearing number sixty-six for twenty minutes.

Meanwhile, I just couldn’t stop looking at player number twenty-two.

You’re an idiot.

My conscience scolded me. We’ve hurt each other and I’m still sighing and staring at him like an idiot. Why can’t feelings have an off button? What’s the point of loving him if he doesn’t feel the same about me?

“You okay?” Alison leaned toward me with genuine concern that, in the three years I’ve known her, had never once fooled me.

“Perfect.”

“Sure,” Sarah said from my other side, without taking her eyes off the ice. “That’s why you have that face.”

I didn’t answer because I didn’t have a response that didn’t incriminate me. Technically, it was the idiot with number twenty-two skating on the ice who had unfinished business with me. Though “unfinished business” was a very generous way to describe a situation that basically boiled down to: I had made the huge mistake of feeling things I shouldn’t, he had told me he simply couldn’t (or didn’t want to) be with me, and since then I’d been trying to disappear from my own life as discreetly as possible.

I shouldn’t have come.

I knew it since this morning. I knew it the exact moment I opened the reminders app to see what I had pending and found “Briar Game — 8pm” marked in red. I’d written it down weeks ago, in another life almost, when Logan and I were still whatever we were before I ruined everything by being honest. And then, without meaning to, without looking for it, with that masochistic tendency I have and should probably work on with a professional, I went to the messages.

Just to see. Just to remind myself why what happened was the right thing.

And there it was, among three unanswered messages I had left on read with absolute cowardice. One that simply said: Hope to see you tonight.

The message that made me want to check my reminders list and the reason I was here tonight.

I should have ignored it. I should have stayed home with a movie, a pack of cookies, and some dignity intact.

Instead here I was, in the stands at Briar’s stadium, flanked by Alison and Sarah who were pretending—not very effectively—not to monitor me every thirty seconds, with my stomach in knots and my eyes fixed on one spot on the ice so I wouldn’t keep unconsciously searching for number twenty-two.

Because I was searching for him. That was the worst part. That despite everything, despite the days avoiding him and the speeches I’d given myself and the times I’d repeated that I was fine, my eyes found him on their own. Like they had their own memory. Like no one had told them the memo.

Logan skated well. That was the fundamental problem—that he was really good and knew it without being arrogant about it, and when he moved on the ice there was something about him that settled, that relaxed.

I looked away.

The scoreboard was two to one in favor of Briar and the atmosphere had that electricity of the final minutes of a close game. Alison had put her phone down and was standing without realizing it. Sarah was muttering something under her breath.

And then it happened.

Logan intercepted the puck in the offensive zone. He dodged the first defenseman with a turn that seemed physically impossible, the second with an acceleration that made the whole crowd collectively hold its breath, and shot.

Score.

The stadium exploded.

I stood up with everyone else. I clapped without thinking. Alison grabbed my arm screaming something I couldn’t hear over the shouts. Sarah whistled with her fingers in her mouth.

Then Logan raised his hockey stick.

He turned toward the stands with a smile—that smile I knew by heart and that right now was doing damage to me that had no name—and I saw it before I could prepare myself.

He pointed at me. What the fuck is that supposed to mean.

Straight. Unmistakable. With his arm extended and his eyes locked exactly where I was standing, like there weren’t three hundred other people in the stadium, like there was no chance he was pointing at anyone else, like he wanted to make sure there was absolutely no doubt.

The stands made that collective sound. That “oooh” people make when they smell drama from afar. And the commentator, the damn commentator, didn’t miss the moment:

“Looks like one of our favorite guys had his heart stolen tonight, ladies and gentlemen. Don’t cry all at once, girls—there are still more players on the ice—”

Heat shot up my neck to my ears in about half a second.

Alison let go of my arm.

Sarah turned her head toward me very slowly, still looking stunned at what had just happened.

They both looked at me. They didn’t say anything. They didn’t need to. And thank God they didn’t.

“No,” I said.

I grabbed my jacket from the seat. I put it on wrong, one arm inside out, and fixed it with more violence than necessary. My stomach was in a tight knot, my cheeks were burning, and my ears were ringing. I needed to get out of there.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” I lied.

“Sure,” Alison said, glancing sideways at Sarah, who returned a worried look.

Neither of them made a move to follow me.

I went down the stands almost tripping twice, dodged three groups of people still celebrating, pushed the exit door with both hands, and the cold air hit me in the face the second I stepped out. Honestly, it was a relief. I needed that hit. I needed something to remind me that it was real, that I was real, that what had just happened inside that sweaty, noisy stadium had also been real.

He had pointed at me. In front of everyone. What the fuck.

I’m overthinking this.

I shouldn’t let it affect me. I shouldn’t let it break my decision to stay away from him.

I closed my eyes for a second and the commentator’s voice came back like a horrible echo: “Looks like one of our favorite guys got shot by Cupid tonight, don’t cry ladies—”

I wanted to die. For real. Not metaphorically. I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me whole and not even spit out the bones.

I started walking fast. Then faster. The parking lot was dark and the streetlights made those blurry orange spots that multiplied on the wet asphalt, and I was only thinking about getting to the car, getting inside, and crying with dignity where no one could see me. I had parked Janis in the fifth circle of hell because I arrived late and there were no spots nearby, so when I finally found her I was going to be completely soaked.

Good. Perfect. Great. And it was raining.

Not just raining. Pouring. Like the entire universe had decided that tonight wasn’t humiliating enough and needed a little more drama. The water soaked my hair in seconds, ran down my neck, my shoulders, got into my shoes. Good. Perfect. Great.

I kept walking.

I had spent entire days convincing myself that what we had was just a friendship I had misinterpreted, that I had seen things where there was nothing, that when he told me no—when he simply told me he couldn’t give me what I wanted—it was the most honest truth anyone had told me in a long time. I had forced myself to accept it. I had forced myself to keep functioning.

And then he scored and pointed at me. Son of a bitch.

“Wait!”

I stopped.

I didn’t want to have stopped. It was a reflex, a betrayal by my own body recognizing that voice before my brain could tell it no, to keep walking, to pretend to be deaf, to die a little.

I turned slowly.

Logan was running toward me. With his hair completely stuck to his face and still in his team uniform darkened by the water, and his eyes—God, his eyes—searching for me with an urgency I didn’t understand, didn’t want to understand. Didn’t want to understand.

Wait.

Did he just leave his game? Just to talk?

“Stop,” he said when he reached me, breathing hard. “Please, stop.”

I looked at him. I tried to make my face say nothing. I tried to be a wall. I swear.

“Logan.” My voice sounded calmer than I felt. That was the only miracle of the night. “Seriously, you don’t have to do this. You don’t have to apologize or explain anything, okay? It was me. I misread things, I was stupid, and—” I swallowed. “And when you told me about Hannah and I felt this bad, that was my problem. Not yours. So really, seriously, you can go back inside and—”

“For God’s sake, shut up.”

I blinked.

“Excuse me?”

“Shut up.” He didn’t say it cruelly. He said it with something like desperation, jaw tight, eyes bright, rain running down his face like it didn’t exist. “Don’t regret anything. Please. Don’t.”

“Logan, I just—”

“I realized too late that she wasn’t you.” His skin was wet from the rain too (obviously), and one drop hung from the tip of his nose, about to fall. His brown eyes traced my face, moving over my eyes, my cheeks, and my mouth, before he said in a hoarse voice:

“I ruined everything.” He ran a hand through his soaked hair, a nervous, desperate gesture, like he didn’t know what to do with his own body. “I didn’t want Hannah. I never did. I just wanted someone to love, someone to spend the rest of my days with, and I was such an incredibly idiot, so completely blind, that I didn’t realize the person I actually loved was standing right in front of me.”

“Logan, stop—”

“It’s you.”

Oh God. My heart stopped. Literally. I swear it stopped.

“Stop—”

“And if your feelings are still the same, if you still love me, then right now—” his voice cracked a little there, just a little, but I heard it, I heard it clearly over the rain—“right now I’m telling you I want to spend the eight thousand seven hundred and sixty hours, the five hundred and twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes of every one of the three hundred and sixty-five days with you.”

The rain was starting to get heavier. The parking lot lights became orange and white spots behind him and I didn’t know if what was running down my cheeks was water or tears and honestly it didn’t matter anymore because no one was going to notice anyway.

“Don’t pity me,” I said, and my voice was no longer calm. “Don’t. You don’t have to—” I bit my lip. I was nervous, mostly because I really wanted to tell him how I felt and what I wanted. I took a deep breath and he cut me off instantly.

“Every single one,” he continued, like he hadn’t heard me, or like he had heard me perfectly and decided to ignore it. “No exceptions. No conditions. If I stay quiet, if I let another day go by without telling you that you’re the only thing that has made constant sense, I’m going to spend the rest of my life unable to forgive myself.”

“Stop, Logan, seriously, stop—”

“And I’m not going to let you give this story that ending.”

He took one step closer. Just one. But I felt it in my chest like he had closed miles.

“Nor will I allow myself to give our story an ending.” His voice had something broken and something completely certain at the same time and I didn’t understand how those two things could coexist. “A story that hasn’t even begun and that I’m already anxious to know the next chapter of. I’d rather die tomorrow knowing I loved you than live a hundred years wondering what it would’ve been like to be with you.”

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.

“Even it would be an honor if you broke my heart. Over and over, as many times as it took. Because even broken, even in pieces—” he paused and looked at me, and in his eyes there was something I had never seen before, something I recognized because it was exactly what I had felt all these months—“my heart would come back to you. Thirsty. Without conditions. Without holding anything back.”

My hands were shaking.

“I’ve always been a better person when I’m near you.” He said that lower, almost to himself, and it was what hurt me the most because I believed him. I believed him without wanting to. “And that’s something I haven’t told anyone until now. Because my heart is yours. Not from today. From way before I had the courage to admit it.”

He closed the last few feet between us.

“Forgive me. I’m asking you please.”

I shook my head. I tried to articulate something coherent.

“Don’t… don’t do this to me.” It came out broken, fuck. “Don’t do this to me now that I had already… that I had already…”

“What do you want me to do?” he cut in, and there was something urgent in his voice, something bordering on a plea. “Do you want me to pull the fucking moon down for you? I’ll become an astronaut for you. Tell me. Tell me what you want and I’ll do it. I’ll do anything.”

The rain pounded my shoulders.

“But I love you,” he said. “And that’s not going to change.”

I don’t know how long I stood there without saying anything. It could have been ten seconds or ten years and neither would have surprised me. I only heard the rain and my own breathing and the beating of something I had been trying to kill for weeks by ignoring it.

It was still there.

Stubborn. Damn stubborn heart. Damn body that doesn’t listen. Damn it.

I threw myself at him, wrapped both arms around his neck, and pressed my lips to his. The smell of his cologne mixed with the rain and completely intoxicated me. John froze for a second, motionless while my mouth was pressed against his. I thought, too late, that maybe he didn’t.

Shut up. He literally just bared his heart to you.

But then, as if lightning had struck him, John took a breath and cupped my face with his hands. He was kissing me back. I was kissing John Logan and he was kissing me. I went from being scared and breathless to a fire burning inside me in an instant.

John tilted his head and kissed me the way John was supposed to kiss—wild, and sweet, and entirely too confident in himself, all at the same time. He knew exactly what he was doing when his big hands slid into my hair, but it was the shudder in his breath and the slight tremble in his hands that drove me crazy. The fact that he had lost control as much as I had.

John pulled me even closer until we were pressed together, chest to chest. For the first time in my life, I understood why people said they could forget where they were, and he gave me a little bite on my lower lip, and then I touched his face, felt the rigid solidity of his jaw, and he kissed me like it was his job and he wanted a raise. He made a sound when I sank my fingers into his hair, like he liked it, and I wished it would keep raining like this forever, and never stop. Until he said my name, until he whispered it against my lips three times, I didn’t come back to reality.

“Huh?”

I opened my eyes, but my vision was unfocused.

Logan laughed. Softly, with his forehead almost resting against mine, his thumbs still on my cheeks, he laughed in that way of his that crinkled his eyes and that I had secretly collected for months like they were worth something.

They were. God, how much they were worth.

“Your name,” he said, his voice still hoarse. “I was calling you by your name.”

“Yeah.” I blinked. “I know. It’s just…”

“What?”

I looked at him. With his hair completely soaked and stuck to his forehead and that expression on his face I had never seen and now couldn’t stop looking at. The rain kept falling on both of us with that absolute indifference water has, that doesn’t distinguish between the most important moment of your life and any other Tuesday.

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

“Look,” I said, “I’m not… I mean, I’m not good at this. At saying things. The important things, I mean, the ones that really…” I made a vague gesture with my hand that meant nothing concrete. “You just told me a bunch of really big things and I’ve spent weeks convinced that this was all in my head and that you didn’t… that there was nothing and…” I breathed. “And right now my brain is completely fried and the words aren’t coming out in the right order.”

Logan didn’t say anything. He just looked at me.

“But I love you,” I blurted out, all at once, without elegance, without the firm voice I would have wanted. “I mean, I love you a lot. Too much, probably. For longer than I think is smart to admit out loud. And I tried to let it go, I really did, but it turns out I’m pretty bad at letting go of things that matter to me and you matter to me an amount that frankly seems excessive for my own well-being and—”

“Hey,” Logan said.

“What?

“Shut up.”

And he kissed me again. And for the first time I was glad I had parked Janis so far away.

.

.

.

Babe, I’m literally writing it right now and I’d love to share a fragment that I personally loved!!

Probably today!!

Enjoy ☺️ (is in Spanish)

pairing: Dean Di Laurentis x readerfem.

summary: what is a hockey player doing as my figure skating partner? your guess is as good as mine. and of course it had to be him. because apparently the universe has a sense of humor and i have done something terrible in a past life.

warnings: enemies to lovers'??, Past history / childhood friends to enemies, forced proximity, shared bed, angst, a mother who should not be a mother, and two idiots who really need to learn how to talk to each other.

a/n: shit this is so long, okay i had been trying to finish this for days and i finally did it, if you like it please let me know, it really motivates me to write so much more, thank you so much for all the support and your sweet comments. sorry if you notice any grammar mistakes or if some things feel unclear, my first language is spanish. hope you enjoy it. Request are open!! xoxo

well, how did we get here when i used to know you so well?

— paramore, decode

(good question, hayley. i'd like to know too.)

The ice was perfect that morning. Smooth, shiny, without a single mark breaking its surface. Just how I liked it. I loved being the first one on the rink. I’d shown up an hour early just to have the arena empty and get my head straight. My last shot. The final one. I couldn’t afford to screw it up.

I didn’t know anything about my new partner, only that it was a punishment handed down by the university. Some idiot from the hockey team who’d fucked up royally. The dean didn’t give me a name. Just said he’d show up today and that I had no choice.

I’d already done two full laps when the doors at the far end slammed open with a sharp bang that echoed through the empty arena. I didn’t need to turn around. The sound said it all—not someone entering, but someone barging in. I finished my lap, executed the closing spin, and when I finally stopped in the center of the rink with my arms crossed, breathing slowly, I looked up.

The world dropped out from under me.

No.

It couldn’t be.

Dean Di Laurentis.

He walked like he owned the place, hands shoved into the pockets of a hockey hoodie. His hair was a mess, like he’d just rolled out of bed, and he had the expression of someone about to puke from having to be here.

I stopped in the center of the ice, skates planted, arms crossed. The cold seeped through my black mesh, but it was nothing compared to the temperature that plummeted between us when our eyes met. The exact second he recognized me.

He froze at the edge of the ice.

“Fuck…” he muttered, almost laughing in disbelief. “You?”

I didn’t move. The cold from the ice crawled up my legs, but it was nothing compared to the ice that settled in my chest.

“You’re twenty minutes late,” I said, my voice low and sharp. “Impressive. You haven’t even started and you’re already sabotaging shit.”

Dean let out a dry, humorless laugh.

“They didn’t tell me. I swear they didn’t tell me it was you. If I’d known…” He dragged a hand down his face, clearly pissed. “Is this a fucking joke? Are they seriously making me do this?”

“What?” I cut him off, skating slowly toward him until I was just a few feet away, staring at him from the ice like he was shit stuck to my blade. “Would you have preferred they kicked your golden-boy ass out instead of having to skate with me? How touching.”

Dean clenched his jaw. His blue eyes flashed with a mix of rage and something darker. Recognition. History. Everything we’d been as kids and everything we’d become since.

“I can’t believe this,” he growled. “They’re really forcing me to be your pairs partner? Me?”

I stopped right in front of him, glaring at him from the ice with every ounce of contempt I could muster.

“And I have to trust my career—my last chance—to a fucking neanderthal on skates. Life’s got a sick sense of humor.”

I shrugged slowly, deliberately.

“Welcome to my personal hell, Richie. I didn’t ask to be chained to a caveman in skates either.”

He stepped closer to the edge, looking at me like I was the punishment, not the other way around. His blue eyes burned with pure contained fury.

“I’m not wearing fucking tights. No goddamn way.”

“Nobody’s asked you to put on tights yet, big guy. But if you keep up that wounded-dick attitude, I’m going to enjoy watching you eat ice in front of the whole team. And trust me, they’ll record it.” I smiled without it reaching my eyes.

Fuck… Of all people, it had to be this asshole.

Dean clenched his jaw. For a second I saw the kid I remembered from years ago—the one who made fun of my tutus and threw pebbles at my hair when he thought I wasn’t looking. Now he was bigger, broader, and an even bigger asshole.

“Look,” he said, “let’s be real. I don’t want to be here. You don’t want me here. So I suggest we do the bare minimum to keep the system happy and spend as little time as possible in the same physical space.”

I watched him for a moment. His jaw was tight, shoulders hunched up to his ears—the posture of someone who’d been pissed off for days.

“You done?” I asked.

“This isn’t gonna work,” he said, practically spitting the words. “You and me. Skating together. It’s fucking ridiculous.”

“Oh, finally we agree on something.” I took a couple short glides toward him and stopped right at the barrier separating us. “But unlike you, I don’t have a choice. My old partner bailed. You trashed the dean’s property or fucked the wrong daughter—I don’t care which. The result’s the same: we’re fucked together.”

“I’m not doing this,” he said through gritted teeth. “Not with you.”

I leaned forward slightly, lowering my voice to an icy whisper.

“Oh, but you are,” I replied with a cold, sarcastic smile. “Because if you don’t, goodbye to your last semester and goodbye to your precious hockey. And me… I’ll lose the only thing I have left. So swallow your pride, Richie… And if you ruin this, Dean—if your ego costs me Nationals—I swear I’ll make you regret the day you were born.”

For a split second, something crossed his face. Recognition? Pain? Rage? It disappeared as fast as it came.

“You’ve always been a bitch, you know that?” he muttered, almost to himself.

“And you’ve always been a rich kid with the maturity of a fifteen-year-old. At least that hasn’t changed.”

For a second we just stared at each other. The hatred was so thick you could’ve cut it with a knife. But underneath it… was the past. Childhood afternoons. Fights. Tears I never showed him. All of it coming back to fuck us over in the worst possible way.

Dean yanked off his hoodie in sharp movements, left in a tight t-shirt that showed off every muscle he’d earned. He threw the garment on the floor like it burned him.

“Let’s get this over with. This is gonna be a fucking disaster,” he said.

“No,” I corrected, spinning on my skates and gliding away toward the center of the rink. “We’re going to start. And you’re going to do exactly what I say, when I say it.” I stopped in the center. I smiled without any joy. “Welcome to my hell, Di Laurentis. Try not to destroy everything like you always do.”

I extended my hand with fake elegance, even though inside I was shaking with rage and something much more dangerous.

“Let’s begin. And pray I don’t kill you before Nationals.”

He blew air out through his nose, dropped his bag with a deliberate thud, and started changing his shoes.

“I hate this,” he grumbled.

“Good,” I replied, cold as the ice under our feet. “Because you have no idea how much I hate having you here.”

And just like that, with that truth hanging between us like a blade, we started our first practice.

Neither of us knew yet how much we were going to destroy each other in the process.

The first real practice was a glorious disaster.

And I’d expected it. I’d mentally prepared myself for the disaster. I’d told myself in front of the mirror at five-thirty in the morning while I tied my hair back: it’s going to be a disaster and that’s fine, disasters can be fixed, that’s why coaches and patience and painkillers exist.

I watched him put on the skates with his usual arrogance. I crossed my arms and waited. Dean really thought he could annoy me with this.

How pathetic.

“I technically already know how to skate,” he announced without looking up from the skates, like that was enough.

“How wonderful for you! We’re ready for Nationals! Hooray!” I replied, giving him sarcastic applause.

All for Nationals. I need to make Nationals. I repeated it to myself.

He put one foot on the ice. Then the other. For exactly four seconds, it seemed like the experience might be tolerable. But the truce didn’t last long: a moment later he went backward like the ground had asked for it—please!—arms flailing uselessly, and ended up sitting hard on the ice with a loud thud that echoed through the whole arena.

“Fuck…” he growled from the floor.

Two of the girls from the team looked up from the other end of the rink. One of them skated a few steps closer, tilting her head with a mix of genuine concern and barely contained amusement.

“You okay?” she asked, her voice swinging between real worry and the urge to laugh.

Dean looked at her for a second, a crooked smile playing on his lips. From the floor, leaning back on his elbows, he slid a slow, exaggerated look up and down her body.

“Am I in heaven?” he murmured in a deliberately theatrical whisper that carried way too far. “Or why am I seeing angels?”

The girl blinked. Her cheeks turned pink instantly, her mouth opening slightly as she struggled for words. She took a small step back, wobbling on her skates, while a nervous laugh escaped between the fingers she brought to her lips.

Without a word, I turned my head toward her. I met her eyes for just a second, eyes narrowed, jaw set. I didn’t even need a harsh gesture—she dropped her gaze immediately, turned around, and went back to the other end with her friend, who was already giggling.

“I’m fantastic,” Dean replied, still on the floor, completely oblivious. “This is what they call active recovery.”

“This,” I said mockingly as I skated toward him, “is the result of having zero technical foundation. Hockey skates and figure skates aren’t the same. The center of gravity is different. If you don’t fix your posture in the next ten minutes, you’re going to spend the next three weeks falling exactly like that.”

“Hey,” Dean said once he was finally back on his feet, more or less stable, extending a hand toward me like he expected me to take it. “Aren’t you supposed to teach me or something?”

“You’re supposed to listen. Those are two different things.”

I ignored the hand I hadn’t offered and glided toward the center of the rink. Behind me, I heard him trying to follow. I heard the skates scraping the ice in ways that physically hurt me. I heard what might have been a quiet curse.

I didn’t turn around.

But I heard it. The metallic scrape of a blade skating wrong, the creak of a knee tensing to keep from falling, the frustrated huff that escaped him anyway. I smiled to myself.

I stopped and turned to check his progress, finding him with a furrowed brow, gripping the railing like it was his lifeline, shooting me a look that was trying to be murderous.

It wasn’t working. With his cheeks flushed from the cold and his hair stuck to his forehead, he looked more like an angry puppy than a threat.

“I didn’t remember you being so…” he started, then trailed off, searching for the word.

“Useful?” I finished, raising an eyebrow.

“Bossy,” he finished, trying to keep that insolent smile, but it wobbled just like his skates.

I stopped in front of him slowly, skating a tight semicircle that barely whispered across the ice. I looked him up and down, letting the silence do the work.

“Let go of the railing, Di Laurentis. You’re not gonna learn to fly hanging on like a beginner. Let. Go. Of. The. Railing.”

He let go reluctantly. As soon as he did, his knees started shaking again. He tried to take a step and nearly went down. This time I grabbed his forearm on pure reflex. It was warm, solid, packed with muscle.

Our eyes met.

For a second, neither of us said anything. It just felt… too much. His scent. His closeness. The heat coming off his body against the cold ice.

I let go like he’d burned me.

“Don’t grab onto me like I’m your fucking crutch,” I snapped. “Fix your posture. Knees slightly bent, weight on the balls of your feet, back straight. You think you can manage that or does your hockey brain only work for throwing punches?”

Dean smiled arrogantly, though you could tell he was frustrated.

“You know… I always imagined you giving me orders in bed. Not on an ice rink.”

“Keep dreaming, asshole.”

He tried to move forward. His skates screeched horribly against the ice. He wobbled but didn’t fall this time. As he passed me, his shoulder brushed mine. A short, electric brush. Angry.

He laughed, but it was a dark laugh.

“Always so sweet, huh?”

I moved in front of him, skating backward so I could look him in the face while he tried to follow, trying to ignore what he’d said.

Shit.

“Now we’re going to try something basic. Forward crossovers. Follow my feet.”

“This is humiliating,” he muttered.

“Good. Because watching you fall on your ass every two minutes is the only thing making my day better.”

Dean clenched his jaw and, for the first time, actually focused. His movements were clumsy and stiff, but there was power. A lot of it. Too much for a discipline as delicate as figure skating. That big, strong body was going to be a problem… and an advantage, if he could control it.

From the back of the arena came low laughs and comments. Logan, Garrett, and Tucker. The three hockey idiots, leaning against the barrier with their arms crossed, grinning like they had front-row seats to a circus.

“Come on, D!” Garrett shouted, the tallest of the three, with that deep voice that always sounded like it was mocking the world. “Move with grace, Princess D! You’re representing the team, bro. Don’t let us down.”

This was going to be a disaster.

What nobody tells you about training with someone you hate is that your body doesn’t get the memo.

My brain had the protocol perfectly clear: I hated Dean Di Laurentis. I’d hated him for years with the same consistency and dedication he put into being an asshole. It was a system that worked. An efficient system. And then Dean had to go and ruin everything by doing something completely unforgivable.

Improving.

Not all at once. Not obviously. But we’d been training for forty minutes and there was something different in the way he clenched his jaw when he messed up—not to throw a comment at me, but to try again. Like he actually wanted to do it right.

No. Stop. Don’t give him that.

“Bend your left knee more,” I said, skating backward so I could face him. “Your right one’s good. It’s the left that’s giving you away.”

Dean looked at me with that expression that clearly said are you seriously talking to me about knees right now, but he bent the knee. And the crossover came out clean.

Not perfect. But clean.

We both stayed quiet for a second, which was basically a biblical miracle.

“You did that well,” I said, because he really was trying.

He raised an eyebrow very slowly.

“Excuse me?”

“You did the crossover well, Di Laurentis. Don’t get excited, I didn’t say you’re good. I just said that was decent.”

Dean opened his mouth, closed it, then let out a short laugh. Not the sarcastic one he used as armor. Something smaller. More involuntary. The kind of laugh that slips out before you can catch it.

No. Not that either. Especially not that.

“Again from the top,” I said, looking toward the other end of the rink.

We started moving, and for a while the only sound was the blades on the ice. It was almost tolerable. Almost civilized. A kind of undeclared truce that neither of us mentioned because naming it would’ve broken the spell.

When we finished, Dean sat on the bench to take off his skates. I was packing my stuff when I heard his voice, without its usual edge:

“You’re still doing that spin. The same one as always.”

I stopped.

“The scratch spin,” I said neutrally. “Yeah.”

“Back at the club when we were kids.” A pause. “You’d go to the center and everyone would back off. Not because the coach said so. They just did.”

The silence that fell after had a different weight than all the silences we’d had in the past few weeks. Those were cold-war silences. This was something else. The kind of silence that happens when someone says something true without meaning to.

“That was a long time ago,” I said.

“Yeah.” And then, quieter, almost to himself: “Too long.”

I didn’t answer. I put on my blade guards, grabbed my bag, and left the ice before my face could give me away.

Great. Now he’s nostalgic. Awesome. Perfect. This is exactly what I needed.

The next few days were a constant battle.

Dean wasn’t failing out of clumsiness. He was failing on purpose. He showed up late with that crooked smile that made me want to slap it off his face. He made the movements too big, too rough, like figure skating was an insult to his hockey-player masculinity.

Once, during a simple lift, he lifted me well… and then let go a second too early just to watch me wobble.

“Oops,” he said in that husky, mocking voice while I recovered my balance. “My bad, princess.”

I spun toward him with so much rage I almost actually fell.

“You’re such a piece of shit,” I hissed. “You want to sabotage me? Fine. But at least have the balls to admit it instead of playing funny.”

Dean skated closer, invading my space. His eyes shone with challenge and something darker.

“Relax. I’m just doing the minimum. Or did you want me to treat you like a little princess?” He leaned in a bit, lowering his voice. “Although… I gotta admit you look really hot when you’re pissed.”

I shoved him in the chest. Hard. “This isn’t a game! It’s the only thing I have left!”

“And why the fuck should I care about what you have left?” he shot back, his voice low and venomous. “You never cared about what I had left when you disappeared. Or did you already erase that part from your perfect memory? When shit exploded between me and Miranda, where the fuck were you? Oh right… you were the one who spread it, weren’t you? And then you disappeared like the coward you’ve always been.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I held his gaze, teeth clenched, patience at its limit. “I’ve told you a thousand times over the years and it still doesn’t get through your thick skull: I. Never. Did. That.”

Dean got right in my face, almost nose to nose.

“You’re a selfish bitch,” he spat, letting out a bitter, cruel laugh as he turned to leave the ice. “You always were. The perfect little girl who only cared about her spins and her medals. When I really needed you, when everything was falling apart for me, where were you? Oh right… you disappeared. Like you always do when shit gets hard. You know what? Fuck you. You disappeared then and I wish you’d stayed gone.”

He left me standing there alone in the middle of the rink. Feeling every word stab deep. God, I wanted to cry.

This was shit.

Dean was improving technically, yeah. But he was still a fucking asshole. He’d replaced physical clumsiness as his sabotage method with words so venomous they made smoke come out of my ears. After the fight we had, neither of us mentioned the subject again.

Every day he skated better, his movements gained precision, his strength was a brutal advantage in the lifts… but his attitude stayed poisonous. And I hated him more for it. Because the better he skated, the closer we had to be. And the closer we were, the more I wanted to kill him.

We’d gone twenty minutes without speaking to each other. Again.

After the fight during the last practice we’d gone back to “just the basics.” He skated. I corrected. End of story.

Dean was sitting on the bench taking off his skates when he said, without looking at me: “There’s a party at my place tonight.”

“Great for you,” I replied without looking up from my bag.

“The coach says going out together off the ice helps with chemistry,” he added, clearly skeptical. “So technically it’s ‘mandatory.’”

“It’s not mandatory,” I said.

“Technically it is,” he insisted, yanking a lace harder than necessary.

I looked at him. He was still focused on his skates, like the conversation bored him.

“I don’t feel like going to a hockey party, plus I’m buried in homework,” I said in a monotone.

Dean finally lifted his head. He held my gaze for two seconds, then shrugged.

“Whatever. I told you. Do what you want.”

He stood up, grabbed his bag, and left without waiting for a response.

What a generous fucking asshole.

The house was packed when I got there. Loud music, low lights, and the smell of cheap beer. As soon as I walked in I spotted Dean at the back of the living room. He was wearing a white shirt with blue jeans, sunglasses hanging from the collar of his tee, hair messy, talking to Tucker and another guy. He had a red cup in his hand and yeah, sometimes I got why the puck bunnies went crazy.

I sighed and went to the opposite side. I found a half-broken armchair in a corner near the fridge. I poured myself a drink that smelled like vodka and juice and sat down. Forty minutes later I was still there, relatively calm.

Until my traitorous eyes searched for Dean again. I saw him with a tall blonde, pretty, in tight jeans, laughing at something he said while she touched his forearm. He wasn’t pulling away. He was giving her that crooked smile while looking her in the eyes.

I squeezed my cup. It wasn’t my problem. It shouldn’t matter. But the knot in my stomach said otherwise.

What the fuck is wrong with me?

“Hey.” Logan dropped onto the arm of the chair without asking, beer in hand and already a little drunk. “You been sitting here alone all night? I’m surprised you left your cave,” he said, turning his head to look at me.

“I’m resting,” I answered.

“Right.” He stayed quiet for a bit, looking around the room. It was weird how comfortable it felt to just be silent with him.

“Hey,” he said after a moment, “can I ask you something?”

“Depends,” I replied, raising an eyebrow, nervous about what was coming.

Please don’t let it be what I think it is.

“What’s going on between you and D? Because it’s obvious there’s history. He won’t talk about it, but every couple of minutes he keeps looking over here.”

Shit.

“He’s not looking over here,” I said automatically.

“Sweetheart, you might not notice but I feel like I’m gonna end the night with a bullet in my forehead,” he replied, rolling his eyes.

I waited a few seconds and, like an idiot, turned my head.

Dean wasn’t with the blonde anymore. He had his back to me, talking to Tucker, but the second I looked, he turned like he’d felt me and our eyes locked.

I spun back around so fast I almost spilled my drink.

“That doesn’t mean anything,” I mumbled, staring at my cup. Fuck, the alcohol was already hitting me. I’d never been good with drinking.

“I didn’t say anything…” Logan glanced at D out of the corner of his eye, amused, then slid an arm along the back of the couch behind me and sat so close. I made a confused face.

“What are you doing?”

“I need to test something.”

“Logan, what—?”

“Oh shit, he’s coming over.” He stood up laughing.

“Huh?” I asked dumbly.

“I’m getting another drink. Want something?”

“Don’t leave me here alone—” I stayed quiet as he stood up and walked away happily.

I followed him desperately with my eyes, but a body blocked my view. A body I hated knowing so well. My gaze traveled up his chest, his neck, until I reached his eyes, which looked a little darker and shinier under the lights.

“Can I sit with you?” he asked.

“No.”

He chuckled a little before dropping down next to me. I could feel the heat of his body against mine. I was even more confused because a few days ago we couldn’t stop hurting each other and now here we were.

We stayed quiet for a while. The music thumped and someone yelled because they’d spilled a beer.

“You okay?” he asked finally.

“I’m fine.”

“You’ve been sitting here all night.”

“I’m fine, Dean.”

Another silence.

“What was Logan saying to you?” he asked.

“Stuff.”

“You got something to say or did you just come to bother me?” I asked quietly.

“I’m glad you came.”

I looked at him in surprise. He didn’t have that usual crooked smile. He was just looking at me directly, with something on his face I couldn’t name but recognized from when we were kids and hadn’t learned how to hurt each other yet.

“Things between us are…” He stopped. Blew air out through his nose. “I don’t know. I want them to stop being like this.”

I didn’t answer right away. I looked at my cup, then the room, then him.

“Me too,” I said finally.

I really did. We’d drifted apart because we were stupid kids who didn’t know how to communicate. Everything went to shit at the same time for both of us and we didn’t know how to handle it. What a fucking mess.

That was it. Two words. But Dean nodded slowly, like they were enough, and looked forward again.

We didn’t talk much more that night. But I stayed in the armchair, and he stayed next to me, and for the first time in weeks I didn’t feel like I needed to be on guard.

Just a little. Enough to breathe. I remembered what it felt like to be with him. Fuck, I missed Dean a lot.

The first road trip was to Boston. Just the two of us.

The coach had decided we needed “chemistry on ice” before the first exhibition show. Eight hours in a car together. Hotel with only two rooms… and one of them had a broken heater. We ended up sharing a room because “there was no other option.”

The lights were off. Only a little orange streetlight came in through the curtains. I was lying on my side of the bed, as far from him as possible. Dean was on his back, one arm behind his head. The silence was thick.

“What the fuck did you do…” I asked suddenly, my voice low and genuinely curious, “…to make the dean force this punishment on you?”

Dean let out a loud laugh. “He caught me fucking his daughter on his desk.”

I stayed quiet for a second, processing.

“Real classy,” I muttered, not bothering to hide the disgust in my voice. “That’s what rooms are for, Richie.”

He turned his body so he was facing my back. I could feel his eyes on my neck. “Wow…” he said in that lazy, husky voice. “The little princess still has no sense of fun.”

I didn’t answer. I just clenched my jaw and stared at the unlit lamp on the nightstand, refusing to give him the satisfaction of a reaction.

The silence stretched between us. I could hear his breathing, calm and deep, like he was too comfortable for my liking.

After a while, Dean spoke again, this time more curious, almost provocative:

“And you? What did you do to your ex-partner to make him bail?”

“Nothing,” I answered dryly.

Dean let out a low, skeptical laugh.

“Tell me the truth.”

I shrugged, even though I knew he could barely see it. I turned slightly until we were facing each other. “He’s selfish. He left. End of story.”

Dean huffed, a short, rough sound that filled the darkness.

“What a short answer,” he said ironically. “Weird for you. Usually you don’t stop talking when you’re trying to avoid saying something important.”

I felt my body tense. I frowned, glaring at him even though I could barely make out his features.

“I don’t have to tell you about my life, Dean. We’re not friends.”

He shifted on the bed, putting his arm under his head and moving a little closer. Now I could see his expression better: the slightly raised eyebrow, that crooked smile that always drove me crazy, and the dangerous glint in his eyes.

“We were,” he replied quietly, almost a murmur. “We were good friends,” he said softly. No accusation.

“Yeah,” I admitted. “We were.”

And look how that turned out.

The silence that followed was thicker, heavier. Neither of us looked away. The air between us seemed to vibrate with everything we weren’t saying: resentment, curiosity, and something much darker that neither of us wanted to name yet.

Until a loud, clear moan came through the wall from the next room.

“Ah… yes… fuck…”

Another higher-pitched moan followed. Clearly a woman. And clearly enjoying herself. They got louder, more obscene. The rhythmic thump of the headboard against the wall marked an uncomfortable beat that made the air feel even heavier.

Incredible. Just what we needed.

Dean let out a long, heavy sigh. The little orange light from the street lit half his face, leaving the rest in shadow. His brow was slightly furrowed, jaw tight, but his eyes no longer had that cruel spark from before.

“Hey…” he murmured, his voice lower and rougher than usual. “About what I said on the ice the other day… I was a piece of shit. I shouldn’t have dumped all that crap on you. It was a low blow, and I know it. You were pissed, and I… unloaded everything I had bottled up. It wasn’t right.”

I looked at him in silence for a moment. His expression was serious, almost vulnerable. There was no trace of mockery on his mouth, just a straight line and a muscle ticking in his cheek.

I took a deep breath, feeling my chest tighten. Our faces were closer than they’d been in years. I could smell his body wash and that warm scent he’d always had.

“I’m sorry I was so hard on you.”

Dean held my gaze. His dark eyes softened just a fraction, only for a second. He nodded slowly, almost imperceptibly, and his hand moved a little on the sheet, like he wanted to touch me but held back.

“It’s okay,” he said finally, quietly. “We both fucked up.”

“Yeah,” I whispered. “We both fucked up.”

Neither of us added anything else. The subject stayed there, suspended between us like a fragile white flag. We didn’t want to open that wound any further. Not that night.

The silence returned, broken only by the increasingly loud moans from the couple next door. Dean let out a low, bitter laugh, shaking his head slightly.

“Jesus…” he muttered, running a hand down his face. “This is surreal.”

Despite everything, a small smile escaped me. It was involuntary, but he saw it. His eyes dropped to my lips for a second longer than necessary. The tension changed color: it was no longer just anger. There was something heavier, hotter.

I bit my lower lip without realizing. Dean followed the movement with his gaze and his breathing got a little deeper. His free hand clenched into a fist on the sheet, like he was holding himself back.

“Try to sleep, princess,” he finally said, voice rough, turning back toward the ceiling. “Tomorrow we have to skate like we don’t want to kill each other.”

“Like that’s easy,” I replied, also turning onto my back.

But neither of us closed our eyes right away. We kept staring at the ceiling, aware of the space between our bodies, the heat coming off his skin, and that for the first time in a long time, we’d said what needed to be said… even if it was only a little.

The first exhibition show in Boston was a complete disaster.

The music started.

Miraculously, we’d learned the choreography successfully after disagreements and falls. We just had to focus on doing the lifts, spins, and jumps correctly.

The first throw went well. I spun in the air and he caught me at the exact moment. Our coordination on the jumps and spins was the result of many hours training together. The hardest landings were when he threw me so I could spin and land alone. That had been the most complicated part of pairs skating. I’d been very wrong when I thought the only difference between skating with someone and skating alone was coordination. The reality was a whole different world.

The first lift was simple. He lifted me by the waist and spun me around him. But the routine got more complex as the song played. The second lift also went well. I was above his head and he held me with one hand while we turned.

I heard people let out relieved breaths when my skates were back on the ice.

The last lift was a real challenge and the final big element. The end came and the pressure was suffocating. We shared a look for a microsecond before he lifted me over his head and I could see the doubt still in Dean’s eyes. Shit.

We had to do three positions: front, side, and overhead.

The first two went perfectly. But when he had to hold me only by hooking his palm on the curve of my lower back and ass, something failed. I slid down his arm and my hand gripping him wasn’t enough to stop the fall.

Those were the longest seconds of my life.

We ended up in second place.

Fuck.

I’d ruined it.

In the locker room, the tension exploded.

“What the fuck was that?” Dean roared, throwing the water bottle he had in his hands. “You almost broke my fucking knee!”

“Me?” I yelled, spinning toward him with my fists clenched. “You dropped me crooked, asshole! I felt you lose control!”

“Because you won’t stop moving like a fucking hysteric!”

I was breathing hard and my cheeks were wet. I took a step back, feeling like I was suffocating in that locker room.

I need to get out of here. I need to get out.

“I can’t do this anymore,” I muttered.

I turned sharply toward the door, ready to leave. But before I could open it, Dean grabbed my arm firmly, stopping me.

“You gonna run away again?” he said in a low, cutting voice, almost a growl. “Just own the fucking mistake.”

I turned around with so much violence I almost lost my balance. I looked him in the eyes, furious.

“Mistake?” I spat. “Now I’m the mistake? You’re the one dragging me through this shit over and over!”

Dean took another step closer, invading my space. His hand was still gripping my arm tightly, fingers digging into my skin.

“Because you never stay to face anything,” he growled, his jaw so tight the muscles stood out. “You always run. Like right now.”

“Because every time I stay I end up destroyed by you!” I shouted, shoving him in the chest with my free hand. “You treated me like garbage! You believed I was capable of betraying you without even listening to me! And now you want me to stay? Fuck you, Dean!”

Our breathing mixed, fast and hot. His eyes dropped to my lips for a second. Mine to his. The air between us was pure poison and fire.

“You’re a fucking coward,” he whispered with rage.

“And you’re a selfish piece of shit.”

I don’t know who moved first.

Our mouths crashed together brutally. It was a kiss full of hate, built-up frustration, and pain. Dean pushed me against the closed door with his body, holding my face with both hands while he devoured my mouth. I bit his lower lip hard and he groaned, responding with more aggression. His tongue invaded mine without mercy, punishing and claiming me at the same time.

My hands tangled in his shirt, pulling him so hard I almost ripped it. He slid one hand down to my hip, pressing me against his body roughly, making me feel every inch of his tension. The kiss was wild, wet, desperate. Our teeth clashed. I moaned into his mouth, half rage, half desire.

For a few seconds, everything disappeared. There was only his mouth punishing me, his hands marking me, and the fire burning between us.

Then we broke apart suddenly, panting.

Dean took two steps back like my body burned him. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth with disgust. His eyes were still burning with rage.

“This doesn’t mean shit,” he said in a cold, rough voice. “It was just the heat of the moment. Don’t get any ideas.”

His words hit me like a slap. I felt my chest tighten.

He shook his head, taking another step back.

“I can’t do this with you,” he muttered, more to himself than to me. “I don’t want this. I… I can’t be here.”

He opened the door and walked out of the locker room without looking at me again, leaving me there alone, leaning against the door. I brought my fingers to my lips, still hot from his kiss. The tears started falling silently.

I don’t want…

I closed my eyes tightly, breathing shakily.

But the truth was much crueler.

The feelings I’d once had for Dean Di Laurentis were coming back.

I’m so fucked.

The days after Boston were a silent hell.

We trained together, but we were ghosts to each other. We followed the coach’s orders like robots, without a single unnecessary word. Dean had improved technically like crazy: his lifts were more powerful, his spins more precise, his strength undeniable. But he never looked me in the eyes. Not once.

Every time he lifted me, his gaze fixed on a point above my shoulder, like looking at me was unbearable. That constant rejection hurt more than any fall. It was a dull, deep pain that settled in my chest and wouldn’t let me breathe. Every practice felt like a slow, deliberate humiliation.

Until he started missing sessions. He’d been gone for days.

One afternoon, I stayed alone in the stands after a failed practice. Dean had missed for the fourth time in a row. I was sitting with my knees to my chest, staring at the empty ice, when I heard footsteps.

Garrett came up the stands and sat next to me, looking guilty.

“Hey… I wanted to apologize,” he said quietly, with a hint of humor. “I didn’t mean to steal your partner. But come on, Dean isn’t cut out for choreography and you know it.”

I froze. The air caught in my lungs. Garrett continued, unaware of the blow he’d just delivered:

“He’s been training with us for the past several days. The season’s coming up and… well, you know how Dean is with hockey.”

The silence that followed was brutal. Garrett frowned when he saw my face and my silence.

“Shit. Wait… you didn’t know?”

I shook my head in complete silence. I just stared at the ice with my jaw clenched, swallowing the humiliation and rage.

“Fuck…” Garrett muttered, running a hand down his face. “I’m sorry. I thought he’d told you. You want me to talk to him? I can tell him to at least finish the commitment properly. He’s an asshole for leaving you hanging like this.”

“No,” I answered in an icy voice, not looking at him. “Don’t tell him anything. Let him do whatever the fuck he wants.”

I stood up without saying more and walked down the stands with my legs shaking. I couldn’t breathe, the tears taking over fast.

I was an idiot. A fucking idiot.

Two days later, Dean showed up for the first time in a week.

He appeared with messy hair, wearing his hockey hoodie and boredom written all over his face, like being there was pure torture. But all his arrogance evaporated when he reached the edge of the ice and stopped dead.

I was in the center of the rink… with another guy.

Liam, a pairs skater from the B team, held me by the waist as we glided across the ice. We executed a simple press lift: he lifted me onto his shoulders in a clean movement, extending his arms steadily while we held the balance. Liam didn’t have Dean’s brute strength, but at least he was there.

As I came down, the ice crunched under my blades. I immediately transitioned into three quick spins: a perfect twizzle that made me rotate on one foot with millimeter precision, followed by a loop spin that closed my path with absolute elegance.

That’s when I saw him.

Dean had frozen at the edge of the rink, hands in the pockets of his hoodie, jaw so tight it looked like it might break. The surprise in his eyes lasted barely a second before it turned into fury.

“What the fuck is this?” he asked loudly. His voice, cracked with disbelief, cut through the air of the arena as he strode toward the barrier.

I separated from Liam with total calm. I stopped smoothly, letting a fine spray of frost hit the wall. I looked at him from the ice, shoulders relaxed and an indifference so cold it rivaled the rink.

“This,” I murmured with a shrug, “is practice. And you’re no longer part of it.”

Dean let out an incredulous laugh, a dry sound that reverberated in my chest.

“You already got a replacement? That fast?”

“As fast as you left without saying anything,” I replied. My voice sounded strangely calm. “Don’t worry, Di Laurentis. I don’t need you anymore.”

He clenched his teeth. His blue eyes flashed, but beneath the rage I caught a glimpse of confusion.

Please, don’t make me laugh.

“I came to tell you I’m quitting,” he spat through gritted teeth.

You’re late, I thought.

“Good,” I said, shrugging with an indifference that cost me my life to fake. “Quit. You don’t need to explain anything to me.”

Liam took a couple steps behind me, tense from the hostility in the air. Without looking at him, I raised a hand to stop him. This was my territory and my fight; I wasn’t going to let Dean think, even for a second, that I needed anyone to protect me from him.

Dean stared at me, frozen. The air between us became so thick and loaded with resentment that I had trouble breathing. I felt the pressure of his eyes burning me, demanding a tear, a scream, anything.

“Just like that?” he asked. His voice dropped to a dangerous, wounded whisper.

“Just like that,” I confirmed, holding his gaze without blinking. “Go back to your hockey team and your regular life. Thanks, but I don’t need you anymore.”

I turned, giving him my back with a clean fluidity that hid the trembling in my legs. I went back to the center of the rink where Liam was waiting, holding his breath.

“Let’s go from the top again,” I told Liam, forcing a professional tone, pretending my world hadn’t just fractured in two.

Behind me, the violent echo of Dean’s palm slamming the barrier rang through the empty arena. Then the metallic sound of the rink door slamming shut.

Only then, when the certainty of his absence filled the place, did I let myself collapse inside. I let out all the air I’d been holding, a shaky sigh that threatened to buckle my knees. I forced my blades into the ice hard so I wouldn’t fall. Dean was gone, this time for real.

“You okay?” Liam whispered, looking at me with concern.

I swallowed the lump in my throat and looked at him steadily.

“I’m perfect. Let’s go.”

There were only two days left until Nationals.

The arena was in deathly silence, broken only by the constant hiss of blades cutting the ice. Liam and I had been training hard for over an hour. Exhaustion bit at our muscles and the pressure hung in the air like thick fog, but we couldn’t afford to slow down. Not now.

From the shadows of the upper stands, Dean watched everything.

He’d just finished his own hockey practice and was still in full gear: the Briar jersey that added bulk, the rigid shoulder pads, and his blond hair damp with sweat, stuck to his forehead. He sat in the second row, arms crossed over his chest, with an unreadable expression fixed on the ice. Watching us.

Liam took me by the waist to execute the twist lift. The impulse was clean, he lifted me into the air and I completed the rotation against his chest smoothly. The execution was perfect… until the descent.

In the millisecond my feet touched the ice, Liam stepped wrong. His right ankle buckled inward at a sickening angle. The dry crack of bone or ligaments echoed through the empty arena before gravity did its job. We both crashed hard onto the frozen surface.

“Ah, fuck!” Liam grunted. The pain in his voice was instant and heartbreaking as he curled up on the ice, clutching his ankle.

I ignored the dull impact that ran through my hip and back. I got up immediately, crawling on my knees to his side.

“Liam? Liam, are you okay?”

“Shit… it hurts,” he managed between gritted teeth. The color had drained from his face, leaving him a sickly white. “I think I fucked it up bad.”

Up in the stands, Dean shot to his feet.

The sound of his plastic seat snapping back rang like a gunshot. He stood with savage abruptness, body tense and fists clenched so tight his knuckles turned white. For one eternal second, our eyes met across the distance.

He stayed frozen, standing under the fluorescent lights of the arena, watching Liam writhe in pain. Then Dean’s jaw hardened like stone. He turned slowly and started down the steps—but in the opposite direction. Toward the back exit.

He didn’t come closer. Not one question, not an attempt to help. Nothing.

Liam let out another muffled groan as he tried to shift position.

“This is bad…” he murmured, eyes glassy with frustrated tears. “I won’t be able to put weight on it. I’m not making Nationals.”

The weight of his words hit me in the stomach, but I swallowed the panic. I helped him up as best I could. Liam put an arm over my shoulders, putting almost all his weight on me as he limped, dragging his blade. Every inch forward was physical torture for him and psychological torture for me.

Before we crossed the barrier door to leave the ice, I forced my eyes to search the upper stands one last time.

Dean was already gone.

All that remained was the dull echo of the swinging doors closing in the distance, confirming we were completely alone.

Nationals smelled like burnt ice, hairspray, and the slow agony of a dream falling apart.

We arrived broken. There was no more accurate or painful word. Dean and I hadn’t spoken since the afternoon I yelled that I didn’t need him anymore, a desperate attempt to save the last shred of my dignity. Two weeks of icy silence followed, a void that pierced my chest every time I stepped on the ice. I swallowed my tears and forced myself to keep going.

Until Liam’s ankle gave out, and with it, my last hope.

Seeing the coach—a man who had always been my rock—with red eyes from frustration, swallowing his pride to beg Dean to come back, broke my soul. The coach pleaded. Not just for the team, but for me; he asked him not to leave me alone at the worst moment of my career. And that was the real humiliation: knowing Dean only came back out of pity, contractual obligation, or maybe the twisted pleasure of proving that without him, I was nothing.

He showed up at the competition hotel with no explanation, no attempt at an apology. He walked into the room dragging his sports bag with a coldness that cut me to the bone. He looked at me once—a look loaded with such heavy reproach I struggled to breathe—and said in a monotone voice:

“Let’s get this shit over with.”

No are you okay?, no trace of the boy who once cared about me. We were just two strangers forced to touch each other.

Now we were in the center of the main stadium rink. The blinding spotlights hurt my eyes and I felt the weight of thousands of people judging the corpse of our connection. The music started.

We knew every note, every breath, every damn step. But this time the ice felt like a field of thorns.

On the first twist lift, Dean grabbed me by the waist. There was no gentleness, just brute force, almost punitive. His hands burned through the lycra, reminding me of everything we’d lost. When he threw me in the air, the lack of trust betrayed me; when I came down, my blades landed crooked, scraping the ice with a screech that exposed my panic. The crowd held its breath. The ground shook under my feet, and for a second I thought I’d fall.

“Don’t fuck this up,” he growled in my ear when we linked up in a sequence of steps. His hot breath brushed my cheek, but his words had the edge of an iceberg.

“Shut up and skate, Di Laurentis,” I replied, my voice broken and a fake smile painted on my face, trying to hide that I was bleeding out inside.

The tension between us was so thick it hurt physically. Seconds later, the lack of synchronization cost us: in a tight spin, my hip deviated by just a few millimeters. We lost symmetry. The judges noted it immediately. Every mandatory touch in the choreography felt like an open wound; every time the routine forced me to look him in the eyes, I didn’t find the partner who took care of me, but an implacable judge who enjoyed my fall.

When the last notes of the music died and we struck the final pose, the crowd’s applause was a distant, pitying echo. Almost insulting.

In the waiting area, the screens confirmed what we already knew: a mediocre score. We weren’t eliminated, but gold was now impossible. We stepped off the ice careful not to even brush our jackets, keeping a safe distance like the other was poison.

As we walked down the hallway toward the locker rooms, Dean couldn’t hold it anymore. He ran his hands through his hair, digging his fingers into the damp strands as he let out a groan of pure frustration. He was furious, but beneath his anger, what I really saw in his eyes was deep disappointment. We looked at each other in silence, and the pain of knowing we’d destroyed each other was much worse than any fall on the ice.

The music for the long program started. It was a slower, darker melody; the notes of a solitary violin that seemed to claw at the soul and tear through the stadium’s silence.

This time it was different. From the first touch, from the first brush of his fingers against mine, I knew Dean had changed the rules. He was no longer skating like a resentful robot. His hands no longer held me with that professional, aseptic distance that had frozen my chest the day before. He grabbed me with desperate strength, trapping me in his orbit like he hated me and needed me with the same fucking intensity.

The lifts came out brutal. Powerful. Almost violent. In one of the lifts, he held me above his head in a perfect extension, defying gravity longer than necessary. He forced me to look him directly in the eyes for the first time in weeks. The wall of ice he’d built between us had evaporated; now there was only raw fire, a blaze that threatened to burn us both.

And then came the critical moment.

We entered the spin sequence. I was in front, leaning my torso forward to execute a camel spin. My free leg extended back, parallel to the ice, as I began to rotate. The world became a blur of lights and faces, and it was in that second of isolation that everything crashed down on me: the suffocating pressure, the panic of failing, the lacerating pain of having lost him, the bleeding wound of him abandoning me when my world was collapsing.

My legs, at the limit of exhaustion, trembled. The spin lost momentum and destabilized. For one horrible, eternal second, I lost my axis. I felt the void. I was about to slam into the ice.

But Dean didn’t let me.

He appeared like a whirlwind, breaking his own trajectory to intercept mine. He grabbed me by the waist with brutal, colossal strength, stopping my fall dead in the middle of the spin. Our bodies collided with a dull impact that knocked the air out of me. Chest to chest. His hand dug into my lower back, sinking into my skin through the fabric, pressing me to his body with a possessiveness that made me dizzy. The music kept playing around us, but the entire stadium shrank to just the two of us.

“Look at me,” he ordered in a low voice, rough, broken, fucking desperate. “Look at me, fuck.”

I lifted my gaze, locking it with his. His blue eyes were blazing, wild, filled with a mix of panic and fury.

“I’m not letting you go,” he said, practically spitting the words against my lips. “You hear me? I’m not letting you go.”

Something broke inside my chest for good. The armor shattered.

We started gliding again, but it was no longer a rehearsed choreography; it was a war. It was pure rage. It was accumulated pain. It was every reproach, every sleepless night, and every swallowed tear, vomited out in every movement, every stride across the ice.

Our touches became obscene, loaded with sexual and emotional tension that bordered on dangerous. His hands slid lower than regulation on my hips, pressing me against his body with an urgency that made us lose control. When he guided me into the death spiral, I dropped back; I spun so fucking close to the ice I felt the cold brushing my nape, but his arm—the only anchor keeping me safe—didn’t tremble even a millimeter. He held me like he’d rather the ice swallow him alive than let me go.

The chemistry was a living, electric force. The crowd knew it. A reverent, deathly silence fell over the stands; thousands of people held their breath at the spectacle of two people destroying and saving each other at the same time.

We reached the final lift, the most complex in our routine. Dean lifted me onto his shoulders with clean, enormous power. My legs extended in the air, drawing a perfect line in space, while my whole body trembled.

We struck the final pose with ragged breathing. Seconds later, the big screen lit up the arena with the final scores.

We’d placed fourth. We’d lost Nationals. The podium and the gold had vanished forever.

As soon as we crossed the swinging doors into the locker room hallway, away from the cameras, the bubble of the choreography burst.

“You’re a fucking disaster, Di Laurentis!” I screamed, spinning around violently in the empty hallway, frustrated tears finally spilling from my eyes. “You fucked up the last goddamn step of the sequence! Because of you we lost technical points! It was the only thing I had left and you’ve ruined everything!”

Dean stopped dead. He ripped off his gloves with savage contempt and slammed them against the wall. His blue eyes burned with destructive fury, bloodshot.

“My fault? Are you fucking kidding me?!” he roared, taking three violent strides toward me until he completely invaded my space, forcing me to back up until my back hit the metal lockers. “I saved you from smashing your face on the ice during the spins! I nearly broke my arms holding you up when your damn legs couldn’t take it anymore! I gave up my team, I put up with your insults, and I came crawling back to this shit just so you can blame me for your own weaknesses!”

“You never wanted to be here!” I screamed in his face, shoving him hard in the chest, though he didn’t budge.

“I wish I’d never come back!” he spat, his jaw so tight the veins in his neck looked ready to burst. He got so close his hot breath burned my skin. “I wish I’d let you eat ice with your stupid replacement! I gave you everything I had left out there. Everything. But nothing’s ever enough for you, is it, princess? You’re still the same selfish, spoiled little girl you’ve always been.”

“You’re a selfish piece of shit, Dean! You always have been!”

The words came out like a torrent I couldn’t stop:

“You never let me explain anything! Not once! When everything exploded with Miranda, I wasn’t even there. You know where I was? Locked in a fucking ice rink from five in the morning until ten at night! My mom had me repeating the same program over and over until my feet bled. I had no idea what was going on!”

Dean stayed still, jaw tight.

“When I found out, I tried to reach out,” I continued, my voice breaking more and more. “But my parents forbade me from everything. ‘Don’t go near that boy.’ And when I finally managed to sneak out… it was too late. Someone had been spreading around the whole school that I was the one who started the rumor. Me! Miranda knew I liked you, Dean. She’d known for months. She used everything out of jealousy. So when someone started talking, I was the perfect person to pin it on. And you… you believed it without question. You looked at me like I was the worst trash in the world. You treated me with so much contempt that I had no choice but to pull away.”

Dean’s jaw was clenched so hard the muscle stood out.

“O’Shea said that—”

“O’Shea heard his daughter’s version,” I cut him off. “And his daughter told him what suited her. That I was the one who talked. That I’d ruined her relationship with you.” I paused. “And you never gave anyone a chance to tell my side. So my parents decided the best thing was to move. And I left. And I guess you got exactly what you wanted.”

“That wasn’t what I wanted,” he said, his voice very low.

“No?” I let out a laugh with zero humor. “Because what I remember is you looking at me like I was the worst thing that had ever happened to you.” My voice cracked at the edge and I hated it, I hated it so much. “You let me leave believing I’d betrayed you. Do you know what it’s like to carry that?”

The silence that followed was the longest of all we’d had.

I turned around again to leave when the locker room door burst open.

“What the hell happened out there?”

My mom walked in with firm steps, making me back up. She was still wearing her impeccable coat, her hair pulled into a perfect bun. Her eyes, the same color as mine, looked at me with such deep disappointment I felt myself shrinking inside.

Not again.

“Mom…” I started, but she raised a hand.

“Out, Di Laurentis,” she ordered Dean without even looking at him.

Dean hesitated for a second but ended up leaving and closing the door behind him. As soon as he was gone, my mom came toward me quickly. She grabbed my face hard, her fingers digging into my cheeks. The pain was immediate.

“Is this what I’ve taught you?” she hissed, her face inches from mine. “To fall like a beginner in front of everyone? To humiliate yourself in such a pathetic way?”

Her nails dug a little deeper into my skin. I tried to pull away but she squeezed harder, forcing me to look at her.

“You’ve been training for this for years. Years. And you go out there and skate like some random amateur. Do you know what you looked like? A scared little girl. An embarrassment. Do you think anyone’s going to want to sponsor you after that ridiculous performance? I thought you’d learned the last time this happened.”

Every word was a blow. I felt my eyes fill with tears but I blinked hard. I wasn’t going to cry in front of her.

“Look at me,” she demanded, shaking my face slightly. “Is this what I am now? The mother of a mediocre skater who falls at the most important moment? I won’t allow it. Fix it. I let you play too much at Briar. Don’t make me look like an idiot.”

She let go of my face suddenly, almost pushing me. I stumbled back a step, my cheek burning where her fingers had been.

When I looked up, I saw Dean standing in the doorway, which had been left ajar. His expression was frozen: furrowed brows, lips slightly parted, like he’d just witnessed something he hadn’t expected. His eyes met mine and I saw something like guilt in them.

My mom turned, looked at him coldly, and walked out of the locker room without another word, leaving the door open behind her.

The silence that remained was deafening.

Dean took a step inside.

“Hey… I’m sorry,” he said quietly, closing the door behind him. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you like that. It was my fault on the lift, I—”

I didn’t let him finish.

“You’re sorry?” I shouted, advancing toward him with unleashed fury. “Now you’re sorry? After sabotaging me for weeks, after treating me like garbage, now you come with ‘I’m sorry’!”

I shoved his chest with both hands. Hard.

“You’re such a fucking hypocrite! This is all your fault! Because of your shitty attitude, because of your resentment, because you can’t let the past go!”

I pushed him again. And again. Dean didn’t move. He didn’t raise his hands. He just let me hit him, jaw tight and eyes fixed on me.

I stormed out, slamming the door behind me.

.

.

.

pairing: John Logan x readerfem

Summary: She's been in love with her best friend for longer than she'd like to admit. He's been hung up on someone he can't have. One Halloween party later — everything falls apart in the best and worst way possible.

Some lines were never meant to be crossed.

Warnings: Alcohol consumption, mutual pining, angst with no immediate resolution, best friends to lovers, and a staircase scene that will genuinely mess you up.

a/n: Hey guys!! I really hope you enjoy this 🤍 I wrote this originally in Spanish and honestly it just hits different in Spanish, but I hope the English version does it justice anyway.

Also John Logan lives in my head rent free and has for a very long time. He is one of my obsessions and I will be taking request!

part two.

"You know I'm such a fool for you..."

( Oh sure, because nothing screams self-respect like still being hung up on someone who looks at you like a mistake he already regrets by morning)

I hated parties.  

I always thought of them as dreadful, dark, and horrible… College parties.  

Well, actually, the problem wasn’t the party itself. The problem had brown eyes, had a smile —fuck, it made your panties slide off like butter— and was labeled as my best friend, which made him a problem on most days of the year.  

John Logan was, with complete objectivity, the worst thing that had happened to me since Janis —my little and beloved 2009 Civic, named that way for the pure chaotic energy of her personality— decided that a pole was her archenemy and crashed into it at twelve kilometers per hour. 

It had been an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. I was coming from my shift at my mom’s café with cinnamon flour still on my cheeks and a carton of whole milk in the passenger seat, and suddenly, bam. Janis against the world, the world winning as always.  

And then he appeared.  

I don’t really know how it happened. I guess he was parked on the same block, or walking by, or emerging dramatically out of nowhere like he usually did. The only thing I remember is that a very tall guy in a hockey team hoodie planted himself in front of Janis, crouched down to inspect the damage, and said, with a voice that sounded like honey spilled over hot asphalt:  

“Hey, that’s fixable. Do you know anyone at Mike’s ?” He looked at me quite attentively, his brown eyes scanning me up and down a second longer than necessary. I felt my cheeks burn. I didn’t know if it was Janis that was slightly steaming from the radiator or if it was me who was about to melt right there.  

“No,” I murmured.  

“I do.” He took out his phone as if he already knew he was going to solve the problem. “What’s the model?”  

“What?”  

“The car.”  —“The car,” he repeated, pointing at Janis with his chin.  

I blinked, feeling completely out of place.  

“Janis. It’s a 2009 Civic.”  

He looked up from the phone he had just taken out and stared at me for a long second, as if he were evaluating whether I was very weird or the kind of weird he found entertaining. Then he let out a soft, genuine laugh, shaking his head.  

“Janis,” he repeated, savoring the name. “Well chosen.”  

His smile tilted only on one side, but it was enough. A direct hit to my cardiovascular system. Something in that arrogant and amused expression made my stomach do a dangerous flip.  

That’s how it all started. That stupid, that insignificant, that definitive. 

It had been his idea to dress up as Snoopy and Charlie Brown.  

Mine, I mean. My idea. Which, in retrospect, should have given me a clue of how completely gone I was, because who voluntarily suggests spending Halloween stuffed into a black and white dog costume when I could have been, I don’t know, a sexy witch like any mentally stable person?  

Me, apparently.  

And now I was standing on the threshold of a Halloween party in a Snoopy costume that made me look like a white sausage with ears. Logan had gotten lost in the crowd a while ago; right now he was on the other side of the room. There he was, leaning against the back wall in his yellow zigzag shirt that should have made him look ridiculous but somehow made him look like the most attractive guy in the room.  

“Snoopy, what the fuck?” Dean appeared beside me with his typical shit-eating grin, dressed as something that looked like a sexy demon, quite sexy. “Was that your idea or did Logan force you? Because if it was your idea, I need to know how drunk you were when you had it.”  

“It was my idea,” I admitted, falling under the Di Laurentis effect.  

Dean burst out laughing.  

“Poor Logan… having to put up with a best friend with such bad taste in costumes.” He winked at me. “Though the snout looks good on you.”  

“Go to hell, Dean.”  

“With pleasure, but first I’m going to find someone who wants to sin tonight.” He patted me on the head as if I were a real dog and disappeared into the crowd. Tucker followed behind him, shaking his head.  

“Hey, Snoopy.” Tucker leaned against me with a beer in each hand, looking me up and down with a little smirk that meant he was about to say something awful. “Great costume, wrong place.”  

“Thanks, Tucker. What would I do without your insightful observation.”  

“I’m just saying that if you’re trying to get someone to see you as something more than the best friend, going dressed as a pet might not be the best strategy—”  

“Can I?” I interrupted him, taking one of the cold beers from his hand without waiting for an answer.  

“That was Logan’s,” Tucker replied, raising an eyebrow.  

“Yeah.” I took a long, deep swig, feeling the icy liquid go down my throat. “Perfect.”  

Tucker watched me in silence for a few seconds, with that look of his between worried and resigned that he had been perfecting for months. That look that said “I know you’re about to do something stupid and I don’t know how to stop it.”  

It had all started one night of absolute weakness, after seeing Logan flirting with a girl at the café. In a drunken attack of honesty, I confessed to Tucker that I was in love with his best friend. To Tucker. Of all the people in the world, I told one of John’s best friends that I was dying for him. I still regretted it every time I remembered.  

The Hannah Wells thing was the reason Logan needed this party.  

He never mentioned it to me, of course. Logan didn’t say things like that; he already felt like shit for liking his best friend’s girl. And he carried it all in silence, as if admitting it out loud made it more real. What he said was: “I need to get drunk and forget about everything for a few hours,” which translated from Logan language meant exactly the same.  

Hannah Wells. 

Garrett’s girlfriend.  

She was pretty, smart, and had a quiet sweetness that made Logan look like a lost puppy every time she was around. I couldn’t hate her. Hannah wasn’t to blame for anything. The problem was him, who had fallen in love with the wrong girl without being able to help it, and now he punished himself for feeling something he never planned to act on.  

He told me while I was decorating pumpkin cupcakes. His voice came out low, almost defeated.  

“She loves Garrett, I’m really very happy for my friend but… I’m still here, feeling like a son of a bitch for not being able to get her out of my head.”  

I continued spreading the frosting in perfect circles, swallowing the bitter knot that had formed in my throat. And I thought, with a shame that burned me alive: maybe if I were enough… maybe if he looked at me that way.  

God. What a disgusting thought. What a disgusting me.  

“Are you okay?” Tucker asked, pulling me out of my thoughts. His voice sounded softer than usual, as if he already knew the answer.  

“I’m fantastic,” I answered automatically, with a smile so forced my cheeks hurt.  

Tucker looked at me a second longer than necessary and let out a sigh.  

“You lie terribly.”  

“Tucker.”  

“What?”  

“Shut up.”  

I said it without force, almost in a murmur. I didn’t have the energy to argue. He just shook his head, leaning his shoulder against the wall next to me, watching me as if he feared I was going to break at any moment.  

“You don’t have to do this, you know?” he murmured after a while, giving me a comforting pat on the arm before leaving.  

The problem with getting drunk at a Halloween party while trying to forget your crush is that it requires an alcohol consumption that no sensible liver would approve. And the additional problem with doing that next to your best friend who is secretly in love with you is that it generates a level of built-up tension that no sensible nervous system would approve either.  

We were somewhere in the second hour when the situation got complicated.  

Not suddenly. It’s never sudden. It’s gradual, like the temperature of the water when you raise it little by little: you don’t realize you’re boiling until it’s too late to jump.  

“Hey,” Logan said, leaning his shoulder against the wall next to me. His glass was almost empty and his cheeks had that typical red. “Are you okay?”  

“Perfectly,” I answered, and took a long sip of my drink. It was too sweet, it had too much alcohol… and it was too good.  

Logan studied me for a second. His hair was slightly messy, his face sweaty from the heat of the party, and yet —and yet, which was the central problem of my existence— he was still the most ridiculously handsome guy in the room.  

It was a cosmic injustice.  

“You don’t look perfectly,” he said.  

“And you look very interested in my emotional state for someone who’s been avoiding looking toward where Garrett is for two hours.”  

Shit. Silence.  

Too direct. I knew it the moment I said it, but alcohol has this horrible thing of removing my filter and well, it wasn’t like I was doing great either.  

Very bad idea coming. I shouldn’t have come.  

Idiot. Idiot. Idiot.  

“God…” I murmured, closing my eyes for a second. “That was wrong. I shouldn’t have said it like that. I’m sorry,” I added quickly, feeling the annoyance with myself rising in my chest. “It wasn’t for me to throw it in your face. You told me in confidence and I…”  

“No,” he cut me off softly, running a hand over the back of his neck. “You’re right.”  

We both stood looking at the same wall in front in an uncomfortable silence. On the other side, two girls dressed as cats were arguing about something the music wouldn’t let us hear. The plastic spiderwebs on the ceiling had started to come loose and hung crooked, just as pathetic as I was in that moment.  

“You know what I need?” he said, cutting the tension, and turned with that crooked smile that always disarmed me.  

“More alcohol?” I answered, half joking.  

“To dance.”  

I looked at him, surprised. I had barely opened my mouth to respond when a guy walked past us with a tray full of shots. Logan didn’t think twice: he reached out, grabbed two glasses and handed me one without saying anything.  

“Cheers,” he said, and downed it in one gulp.  

I hesitated for half a second, but the alcohol had already won the battle. I drank it in one go too. The liquid burned my throat and warmed my chest instantly.  

Without waiting for a response, Logan closed his fingers firmly around mine. His hand was warm, a little rough, and that simple contact accelerated my pulse more than the shot I had just taken.  

“Come on, we’re the most ridiculous duo at this party.” He extended his hand. “Perfectly matched.” he murmured, and pulled me toward the center of the room without giving me a chance to protest.  

It was a mistake.  

Let me say it clearly: it was a big mistake, and I should have seen it coming from the first note of the song. Because the universe, that son of a bitch, has an absolutely incredible sense of humor and decided to play Don’t Stop the Music right at that moment.  

We were already quite drunk. The shot we had taken in one gulp had hit us fast, and the heat of the party made everything feel more intense, closer, more dangerous.  

Logan pulled me to the center of the makeshift dance floor and started moving with me. At first it was something clumsy and fun, laughing at how badly we danced. But when the chorus came and Rihanna sang that part…  

Your hands around my waist…

oh shiiiiit.

He didn’t think about it. Or maybe he did. His hands slid down naturally and closed around my fluffy waist, pulling me toward him until our bodies were pressed together. The contact was electric. His fingers pressed gently against the fabric of my costume, firm, hot.  

I looked up and found him staring at me. There was no laughter in his eyes anymore. Just that drunk intensity that makes everything blurry and too sharp at the same time.  

Without realizing it, my hands went up to his chest, feeling how it moved under the shirt. We swayed together, slow and sensual, as if the music were giving us permission to cross a line we had never crossed. His breath brushed my temple. My hips responded against his almost by instinct, following the rhythm and the heat growing between us.  

This is wrong, I thought, even though my body said the complete opposite.  

It’s Logan.  

But in that moment, with his hands around my waist and his body pressed against mine, none of those reasons seemed to matter.  

“Hey,” Logan murmured, his voice hoarse and low, almost lost in the music.  

“Hi,” I replied.  

Completely useless as a response.  

Perfectly honest as a response.  

And then he kissed me.  

It wasn’t a soft or sweet kiss. It was hot, desperate, as if he had been holding it in for years and the alcohol had broken all the barriers. His hands moved from my waist to my back, pulling me hard against his body while his mouth claimed mine. He tasted like alcohol and something sweeter, more dangerous. His lips were demanding, almost aggressive, and I responded with the same intensity, tangling my fingers in his messy hair.  

The world disappeared. There was only the heat of his mouth, the way his tongue brushed mine, the low moan that escaped his throat and vibrated against my lips. We kissed as if we were drowning and the other was the air. His hands moved a little lower, pressing me against him, and I melted into that kiss, completely forgetting that this was a line we shouldn’t cross.  

He pulled away for barely a second, just the time for a ragged breath. His forehead stayed pressed against mine, eyes closed, and he murmured something that sounded like my name halfway, like a question he didn’t dare finish.  

I responded by standing on my tiptoes and kissing him again, harder.  

Logan let out a low sound, almost a growl, and pulled me against his body with more force. His lips became slower, more deliberate, as if now he wanted to learn every detail of my mouth. As if he had all the time in the world to do it.  

I don’t even know how we got to his room.  

I remember laughter in the hallway, his clumsy hands searching for the keys while I laughed against his neck, and then the door slamming shut behind us. The world was still spinning a bit, but it didn’t matter anymore. Only we mattered.  

Logan gently pushed me against the door as soon as we entered, kissing me again with that drunk desperation that had consumed us on the dance floor. Our mouths crashed between laughter and ragged breaths. We kissed badly, with teeth, with tongue, with desire. Every time one laughed, the other silenced them with a deeper kiss.  

“Turn around,” he murmured against my lips, his voice hoarse and amused.  

I obeyed between laughs, still with the Snoopy ears crooked on my head. I turned, placing my hands against the door. I felt his clumsy fingers struggling with the zipper and buttons of my costume. He was too drunk. We both were.  

“Shit… how the fuck does this open?” he growled, frustrated, while pulling without success.  

I laughed, resting my forehead against the cold wood.  

“Logan, you’re a mess…”  

“Shut up,” he said, laughing too, and gave another harder tug.  

A clear and satisfying riiiiiip was heard.   The costume tore down the back from the shoulder almost to the waist. The cold air hit my exposed skin and I let out a surprised laugh.  

“Logan!”  

“Oops,” he murmured, not sounding sorry at all.  

Instead of apologizing, he leaned in and started kissing my bare back, moving down my spine with hot, wet kisses. His big hands slipped through the opening he had just created, circling my waist and moving up my ribs. His mouth returned to my neck, biting gently while I sighed and arched against him.  

“I’ll buy you another one,” he whispered against my skin, his voice thick. “Tomorrow… or next week… I don’t know.”  

I turned in his arms, still laughing, and kissed him with the same urgency. My hands pulled at his shirt while he kept touching me as if he couldn’t believe this was happening. The torn costume hung ridiculously from my body, but neither of us had the coordination or desire to take it off properly.  

Logan pulled away just enough to look at me. His eyes were dark, glassy from alcohol and desire. Without saying anything else, he slowly knelt in front of me, his hands sliding down my hips, dragging what was left of the costume to the floor.  

He looked at me from below for a second, with that expression of pure desperation, as if he had been waiting for this all night… or all his life. His hands trembled slightly when he opened my legs.  

“John…” I whispered, not knowing if it was a warning or a plea.  

He didn’t respond with words. He just let out a low moan and buried his face between my thighs, kissing me with the same desperate urgency he had had in my mouth seconds before.

The next morning, the sun was a crime against humanity.  

I woke up with my eyes still closed, on that threshold of consciousness where you know exactly where you are but still have the fraction of a second to pretend you don’t. The sheets were thick cotton. The smell was different: wood, something that was only from this room, him.  

I reached out my hand. Cold.  

The side of the bed where he should have been was cold.  

I opened my eyes.  

Logan’s room, which I knew from being here at his desk helping him review papers, from being here on his floor watching hockey games, felt completely different with the morning light coming through the blinds. The Snoopy costume was on the floor, perfectly ironic in its abandonment. My shoes by the door, very neat for the result of something so messy.  

I sat up slowly.  

There were no immediate noises. Just the party that still echoed downstairs, muted, the sound of people who hadn’t left yet or had decided to sleep where they fell.  

I dressed in one of his hoodies. I tied up my hair as best I could. I grabbed my shoes, the Snoopy costume folded under my arm because it was the only thing I had to carry, and opened the door.  

I told myself: go out, go down the stairs, open the front door, leave.  

Simple. Executable. One foot after the other.  

I reached the landing of the stairs.  

And then I heard Logan’s voice.  

It came from the kitchen. Clear under the muted murmur of the party, with that tone of someone speaking in a low voice but too agitated to control it completely.  

I should have kept going down.  

I know.  

I knew it then too, on the landing, with my hand on the railing and my feet on the first step. I should have gone down the sixteen steps that separated Logan’s bedroom from the ground floor, crossed without looking and gone out into the November morning without hearing anything else.  

But I heard my name.  

And I froze.  

“I don’t know what the fuck happened, Tucker.” Logan’s voice, tense, low. “I woke up and… God. I fucked up. I fucked everything up.”  

A pause. Tucker responding something I couldn’t hear.  

“Yes. I know I was drunk, but that doesn’t…” A dull sound, as if he had leaned something against the counter. “If she comes down, tell her I went for a run or something. That I won’t be here. I need her to… I need her to leave before I have to—”  

I didn’t hear the rest.  

Not because it stopped. But because something in my chest made a noise that wasn’t literally audible but should have been. Like something giving way in an orderly manner: one line first, then another, then another, like the structure of something that had been held up for too long with too little.  

I need her to leave.  

I fucked everything up.  

Sixteen steps. I counted them one by one because it was the only thing I could make my brain focus on without slipping toward the rest. Tucker was with his back to me when I reached the kitchen, and he turned when he heard me. His face said an entire paragraph: the beginning of an apology, something he wanted to tell me and didn’t know how to start.  

I didn’t let him.  

I went down the last steps, crossed the house without looking at Tucker and walked out the front door.  

“Hey,” Logan called behind me.  

I stopped.  

“Wait,” he said, approaching. “Please.”  

I turned around.  

“You don’t have to say anything,” I said. “We were drunk, I was drunk, something happened that neither of us planned and we both know it.”  

Logan stayed silent. And that silence hurt me more than any words.  

“I’m in love with you,” I blurted out suddenly. The words came out without permission, but I couldn’t stop them anymore. “I’ve been in love with you for a long time. And I know this is the worst possible moment to tell you, I’m really sorry if it sounds weird to you,” I kept my voice steady out of pure stubbornness. “But I needed you to know.”  

I saw how his eyes widened, confused, almost scared. He opened his mouth. Closed it. “What? Well, I… I… I can’t.”  

I felt my face burning, but I continued:  

“I’m not asking you to feel the same. I just… needed you to know. Because after last night I can’t go back and you have no idea,” I started.  

“Don’t do that.”  

“…of what your friendship means to me,” I said anyway. “I’m sorry for misinterpreting things. I’m very grateful to have met you. But I can’t do this.”  

The November cold got into my bones. I felt everything we had built falling apart in front of me and I had just accelerated it.  

Logan ran a hand through his hair, visibly lost.  

“I… I can’t,” he murmured. “I don’t know what to tell you. I can’t give you what you want.”  

You can’t. Of course you can’t.  

I nodded, swallowing the knot in my throat.  

“I understand,” I said quietly. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to force you into anything. It’s just… I can’t lose you, Logan. But I also can’t keep destroying myself pretending I’m fine.”  

I turned around and started walking.  

“Wait,” he called, following me. “Please, just a second.”  

“No,” I answered without stopping. “Don’t ask me to stay so you can give me explanations you don’t feel. I don’t need your pity.”  

I left him there, in the middle of the sidewalk, with my heart in pieces and the feeling that I had just lost my best friend and the boy I loved in a single morning.

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