Existential Crisis

Chapter Three. Are You Insane?

The pain wakes her before anything else does. A thick pulse beginning somewhere behind her right ear and spreading slowly forward, heavy enough that it seems to press against the backs of her eyes from inside. 

It drags her upward by degrees. First into the awareness of her own mouth, dry and faintly sour from sleep. Then the unfamiliar weight around her waist. The warmth at her back. The soft, uneven sound of someone breathing close enough that each exhale moves through the hair near her neck.

The dorm room is almost completely dark. A narrow strip of orange light slips beneath the blinds from the lamp outside, cutting across the carpet, the leg of her desk, the discarded sweatshirt Garrett had folded over the chair. Somewhere in the building, a pipe ticks inside the wall. The heater has gone quiet, leaving the air cool everywhere her body isn’t pressed against his.

Garrett is curled around her.

At some point after she fell asleep, the careful space he had left between them disappeared. His chest rests along her back now, knees bent behind hers, one arm tucked beneath the pillow while the other lies heavy across her middle. 

His hand is curled loosely against the front of her shirt, fingers gathered near her ribs without gripping, as though even unconscious he has remembered she’s injured and adjusted accordingly.

The realisation settles warmly through the ache. She stays still for a moment, listening to him breathe. Garrett has never been a particularly elegant sleeper. He runs hot, steals space with the unconscious confidence of a man whose body has always been welcomed wherever he puts it, and occasionally makes a tiny clicking sound with his tongue that he’s denied under oath despite extensive witness testimony. 

Tonight, though, he’s folded himself around the edges of her narrow dorm bed with surprising care, one foot probably hanging off the end and half his shoulder pressed into the wall.

Her head throbs again. She winces and rolls carefully onto her back, moving slowly enough that the room only tilts a little. Garrett’s arm loosens automatically to let her turn. It slides over her stomach and settles against the mattress between them as she continues onto her other side, facing him.

He doesn’t wake. His face is only a few inches from hers, softened by sleep and darkness until he looks younger than he has all week. His mouth is parted slightly. One curl has fallen over his forehead, the rest flattened badly against the pillow, and there’s a faint crease pressed into his cheek from the seam of the pillowcase. 

His lashes make darker little lines beneath his eyes. There’s stubble gathering along his jaw, soft-looking beneath the weak orange light.

She studies him. There’s something almost indecent about having Garrett Graham this close and not being required to perform any response to him. No need to look away before he catches her. No reason to sharpen her mouth around a joke or pretend the warm movement beneath her ribs is irritation. 

He’s simply here, asleep in her bed with one arm still curved toward the place her body had been, his expression emptied of everything except exhaustion.

She lifts one hand. Her fingers hover between them for a second before the tip of her index finger touches the bridge of his nose.

This is brain damage. It has to be. A proper neurological event. Somewhere beneath the sore patch at the back of her skull, a crucial section responsible for self-respect has swollen and begun pressing against bone.

She traces slowly downward anyway, following the straight line of his nose until her finger reaches the soft dip above his mouth. Garrett breathes out, warm air moving over her knuckle, but he doesn’t wake. Her fingertip travels along the upper curve of his lip, barely touching.

Definitely brain damage. She should tell the nurse. Add it to the symptoms. Headache, nausea, temporary loss of consciousness, irresistible compulsion to pet ex-boyfriend’s face like a domestic animal.

Her mouth twitches, though the almost-smile pulls faintly at the pain behind her eyes. She lets her finger settle near the corner of his lips.

He’s grown since they broke up. He’s grown in all the quieter places where she had once wanted him to and eventually stopped expecting him to.

He comes to her shows now. Early. He sits in the third row and watches the whole thing. He brings the right flowers. He remembers the name of the character she’s auditioning for and what the scene is supposed to do before it becomes sad. He knows sides are pages. He still reads them like a man relaying an emergency weather warning, but at least the vocabulary has entered his body.

He sends food when she tells him not to come over. He puts out his hand and waits. He asks before taking her bag, before helping her change, before climbing into the bed she had invited him into. 

He had lain beside her with his whole body held carefully apart until she closed the distance herself, as though the few inches of dorm-room mattress between them mattered more than what he wanted.

And she keeps putting him back at arm’s length. Not because she does not want him closer, that would be easier. She could survive not wanting him. People did it every day. Entire sections of campus moved through their lives without once needing Garrett Graham to look up from a crowded room and find them first.

She keeps him away because wanting him has never been the dangerous part. Wanting him is muscle memory. Automatic and humiliatingly intact. The dangerous part is how quickly closeness makes the old hurt begin negotiating with itself. 

How easily his hand at her back can persuade her body that the coffee shop didn’t matter, the parties didn’t matter, the nights she stood beside him feeling like an accessory he had forgotten to mention didn’t matter because he’s warm and sorry and here.

But they did matter. They still do.

Garrett’s mouth moves faintly beneath her fingertip. His brows pinch, a tiny crease appearing between them before he releases a soft, gravelly groan and opens his eyes. For the first second, he looks at her without recognition.

His gaze is unfocused and dark with sleep, moving over her face and then beyond her toward the room. She watches the pieces return. The narrow bed. The orange line beneath the blinds. Her desk. Her face. The clinic. The fall. Garrett blinks twice. His whole expression changes.

“Hi,” she whispers.

He hums, the sound low in his throat. “Hi.”

His voice is rough and quiet, shaped around sleep. He lifts his head slightly from the pillow, eyes narrowing as they search her face. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” She moves her head the smallest amount and regrets even that. “My head just hurts. Woke me up.”

Garrett is awake immediately, sleep leaves his body all at once. His gaze sharpens. One hand rises toward her face, stopping before it reaches the sore side of her head. “Worse than before?”

“No. Just throbbing.”

“You feel sick?”

“A little,” she murmurs. “But not more than before.”

“Dizzy?”

“Only when I moved.”

His mouth tightens. “What time is it?”

She glances toward the dark shape of her phone on the desk and immediately closes her eyes against the idea of looking at a screen. “Middle of the night.”

Garrett exhales softly through his nose. His hand settles against her upper arm for one brief squeeze, then he carefully pushes himself upright. The mattress shifts beneath his weight. Cool air moves into the space he leaves behind as he swings his legs over the side of the bed, sitting hunched for a moment with one hand dragging through the flattened side of his hair.

“Where are you going?” she asks.

“Your meds.”

The small lamp stays off. He uses the faint light from the window to squint down at the front page, holding it close enough to his face that she almost tells him he needs glasses. Then he checks the time on his phone with the brightness turned all the way down, shielding the screen with one hand so the glow does not reach her eyes.

“It’s been long enough,” he murmurs.

He finds the bottle of painkillers beside the water he left on her desk, shakes the correct dose into his palm, then comes back to the bed carrying both with the careful concentration of someone transporting evidence.

She pushes herself onto one elbow. Garrett immediately puts the water down and slides his hand behind her shoulder, helping her sit before the room can tilt far enough to become an argument. She takes the tablets from his palm and swallows them, the water cool and metallic from the dorm tap.

“Thank you,” she says, handing the bottle back.

“Yeah.”

He watches her for another second, apparently checking that the medication has successfully entered her body and will not attempt escape. Then he places everything within reach on the floor beside the bed and climbs back in.

The mattress dips. Garrett lies on his side facing her this time, one arm bent beneath his head, the other resting between them. He leaves space again. Not much, because her bed was built for one reasonably sized undergraduate and not a hockey player, but enough that his body doesn’t touch hers until she lowers herself onto the pillow and her knee brushes his.

His hand rises. He smooths her hair carefully away from her forehead. They lie quietly for a while.

The pain doesn’t disappear, but it begins to settle around the edges now that she’s still again. Garrett’s thumb moves once near her temple, holding a strand of hair away from her face. His eyes stay on her, dark and difficult to read in the room.

“You apologised before,” he says eventually.

Her stomach tightens slightly.

She knows what he means. The Jeep outside the clinic. Her face wet and aching while cold streetlights moved across the windows. I’m sorry. For everything.

“I remember,” she says. “I meant it.”

Garrett’s gaze drops toward the small space between them. “I know.”

There’s no defensiveness in his voice. He doesn’t take the apology and hold it up between them as proof the breakup had been equally weighted or mutually caused. He only lets it exist.

She curls one hand beneath her cheek. “I was horrible sometimes.”

His brow furrows. “You were hurt.”

“I was still horrible.”

“Sometimes,” he admits.

She gives him a look.

Garrett’s mouth moves faintly. “What? You want me to lie?”

“No.”

“You’d know if I lied,” he murmurs.

“I would.”

His thumb catches gently against one of the strands near her cheek, smoothing it back again. “You snapped at me.”

“I know.”

He sighs softly. “You said some fucked-up shit.”

“I know.”

“So did I.”

The quiet closes around them again. The heater clicks somewhere beneath the window but does not turn on. Garrett looks tired. Stripped down around the edges. His eyes move briefly toward her mouth before returning to her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

Her throat tightens. There’s no prepared shape to the words, nothing polished enough to suggest he’s rehearsed this in a mirror or workshopped it around the hockey-house kitchen table. Garrett looks uncomfortable, which makes it feel more honest. His fingers flex once against the sheet.

“For what?” she asks, although she knows.

“All of it.” He exhales and shakes his head slightly. “No. That’s too easy.”

She stays quiet.

Garrett looks down again. “I’m sorry I didn’t come to your stuff. Not properly. I came when it fit, or I’d show up late and act like being there at all meant you couldn’t be upset.” His jaw shifts. “And I’m sorry I made you feel like you disappeared when we were out. I knew you hated it. Maybe I didn’t understand all of it then, but I knew. I’d see your face change, and instead of doing something, I’d get pissed that you were upset.”

Her fingers curl tighter beneath her cheek.

“I kept treating it like you were accusing me of cheating,” he continues. “Like if I could prove I hadn’t technically done anything wrong, then you had to stop feeling like shit.”

She swallows.

Garrett’s eyes come back to hers. “You weren’t asking me to never speak to another girl. You were asking me not to make you stand there while people acted like you weren’t my girlfriend.”

The old pain moves beneath her ribs, but differently now. Less like a blade and more like touching the place after the bruise has begun to fade, checking whether it still hurts.

“I could’ve said it better,” she whispers.

“You did say it.”

“Not like that.”

“At first you did.” Garrett’s mouth pulls down at one corner. “You tried. I kept snapping at you.”

She looks at him.

“I made it so you couldn’t talk to me,” he says. “Every time you tried, I acted attacked. Then eventually you started coming in angry because you already knew I wasn’t gonna listen unless you made it loud enough.”

Her eyes sting. She blinks slowly, unwilling to cry because crying hurts her head and because she’s already done enough crying in front of Garrett for one evening.

“I’d snap too,” she says. “I wasn’t exactly walking into those conversations ready for a healthy exchange of perspectives.”

“You were twenty.”

“So were you.”

Garrett’s mouth twitches faintly. “We’re still twenty.”

“I’m almost twenty-one.”

“Right. Sorry. Very mature now.”

“Extremely,” she nods.

“Practically elderly.”

She nudges his shin with her foot. The movement is weak but effective.

Garrett’s smile appears for half a second, then fades back into something quieter. “Why didn’t you tell me about the shows?”

“I did.”

“No, I mean…” He rubs his thumb against the seam of the sheet. “Why didn’t you tell me how bad it felt when I missed them?”

She looks toward the strip of light beneath the blinds. “Because when I did, you’d say practice ran over.”

“I know.”

She raises an eyebrow. “And practice did run over.”

“That doesn’t mean you weren’t allowed to be upset.”

“It felt like it did.” She presses her lips together. “You had hockey. Important hockey. Coaches and scouts and your dad and everybody talking like the whole world would collapse if Garrett Graham arrived somewhere ten minutes late. I had theatre. Which everybody treated like dress-up until they wanted free tickets.”

“I didn’t think that.”

“You didn’t have to think it out loud.” She looks back at him. “Sometimes it felt like you wanted me when we were alone. Like I was really your girlfriend in your room or in the car or at the beach. Then we’d go somewhere, and you’d become Garrett Graham again, and I was just…” Her fingers make a small, useless movement near her face. “There.”

Garrett goes very still. The hurt moves across his expression without defence behind it. He closes his eyes for a second, then opens them.

“I’m sorry,” he says again.

“I know.”

“No, I’m–” His voice catches slightly, and he stops to lower it. “I’m so fucking sorry I made you feel like that.”

She watches him breathe. The instinct to soften it arrives immediately, to tell him she knew he loved her, that he had been young, that he did good things too. All of that is true. None of it needs to be used to rescue him from hearing the bad thing clearly.

After a few seconds, she says, “I should’ve talked to you instead of testing you.”

Garrett’s brows draw together. “Testing me?”

“I’d walk away at parties to see if you noticed. I’d go quiet and wait for you to ask what was wrong, then get angrier every minute you didn’t.” A miserable little laugh catches in her throat. “Sometimes I’d talk to another guy because I wanted you to come over.”

“That worked.”

“Yeah, but then you’d be angry, and I’d act like you were insane for being jealous.”

“You weren’t exactly subtle,” he mutters.

“Neither were the girls climbing you.”

His mouth twitches despite himself. “Fair.”

“I wanted you to prove it without me having to ask,” she says. “Which was stupid.”

“It wasn’t stupid.”

“It was a little stupid.”

“Maybe a little,” he admits.

She looks at him sharply. “You’re very brave.”

“I know you can’t hit me.”

“I could throw up on you,” she argues.

His expression sobers immediately. “Do you feel sick?”

“No.”

“Don’t joke about that.”

She stares at him, then her mouth curves despite the headache. “You’re ridiculous.”

“You hit your head.”

She rolls her eyes. “I’ve heard.”

Garrett’s hand shifts closer between them. The back of his fingers brushes hers, light enough that it might be accidental, except neither of them moves away. She watches the contact.

“I tried with other people,” she says.

Garrett’s fingers still.

“I know,” he says.

“No, not just…” She swallows. “Not that guy, that you saw.”

Garrett’s jaw moves. “Right.”

“There were a few.”

He huffs. “Great.”

She gives him a tired look. “We’re being… healthy. Mature.”

“I’m being healthy. Internally, I’m setting several buildings on fire, but that’s private.”

“Very evolved.”

“Thank you,” he nods.

She traces one finger along the edge of his knuckle, not quite holding his hand. “I tried. I thought if I kept doing it, eventually one of them would feel normal.”

Garrett says nothing.

“They were nice, mostly.” She looks down at their hands. “One of them talked through an entire movie, which was unforgivable, but he wasn’t evil.”

“Was it a good movie?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me,” he mutters.

She exhales, a little laugh escaping through her nose despite herself. “The point is, they weren’t you.”

Something in Garrett’s face changes. The words seem to hurt him.

She continues before she loses her nerve. “I couldn’t stomach it. Kissing them, touching them. Sometimes I’d be fine for five minutes and then they’d do something differently, or they’d put their hand somewhere you used to, and my whole body would just…” She presses her lips together. “No.”

Garrett’s gaze stays on her face.

“I’d compare everything,” she says. “Their mouths. Their hands. How they smelled. Which is deeply romantic and completely deranged.”

“I did the same.”

Her breath catches faintly.

Garrett looks toward the ceiling for a second, jaw set hard enough that she can see the muscle moving even in the dark. “I tried too.”

A small, hot twist moves through her stomach. She lets it pass without punishment. “I figured.”

Garrett’s eyes return to hers. “It never worked.”

“What happened?”

He looks embarrassed. Garrett, who has discussed sex with the shameless ease of somebody raised inside a locker room, looks genuinely ashamed. “I’d start thinking about you.”

Her fingers stop against his.

“Not just comparing,” he says. “I’d actually…” His mouth tightens. “I’d close my eyes and try to picture you instead.”

The admission sits between them, ugly and honest.

“I know that’s fucked up,” he adds quickly. “It was fucked up to them. I knew it while I was doing it, and I still–” He cuts himself off, dragging a hand over his face. “Jesus.”

She watches the shadow of his palm move over his mouth. “I did that too,” she says.

Garrett’s hand drops.

She lifts one shoulder. “Not every time.”

“Every time for me.”

The answer comes too fast to be performed. Her chest tightens.

Garrett looks suddenly furious with himself. “I’d feel sick afterward. Or during. Sometimes I’d stop, sometimes I wouldn’t, and then I’d feel worse because the person hadn’t done anything except not be you.” He swallows. “It was like my body knew before I admitted it. Nothing felt right.”

She presses her lips together. The room’s gone too quiet again, every sound from the hallway made distinct by it. A door closing somewhere above them. Water moving through pipes. Garrett breathing.

“I wanted you to fight for me,” she says.

His eyes lift sharply.

“That night,” she adds. “When we broke up.”

Garrett stares at her for a second, then pain moves visibly through his face. His brows pull together. “That’s not fair.”

“I know.”

“No.” His voice stays quiet, but there is strain in it now. “Baby, how could I have known that? You told me not to touch you. You told me you were done. You walked inside.”

“I know,” she whispers.

“You told me to go back to them.”

“I know, Garrett.”

His breathing has changed, not loud but shallower. “What was I supposed to do? Break into the dorm?”

“No.” She closes her eyes briefly against the throb behind them. “I know it’s fucked up.”

“Then why are you saying it?”

“Because it’s how I felt.”

Garrett goes quiet. She opens her eyes again. His face is tight, but he’s listening.

“I didn’t want you to ignore what I was saying or drag me back outside or keep touching me after I told you not to. I know you couldn’t have known.” Her throat pulls tight. “But some part of me wanted you to say something that made it impossible to leave.”

“I tried,” he whispers, voice hoarse.

“I know.”

“I told you I loved you.”

“I know.”

“I told you I’d fix it.”

She lifts one shoulder weakly. “And I didn’t believe you.”

Garrett’s mouth closes. She looks down at the space between them.

“I wanted you to want me,” she says.

His face folds slightly around the words. “All I’ve ever fucking wanted is you. I wanted you when we were together. I wanted you after. I want you now.” Garrett’s voice has gone rough, though he keeps it low for her head. “That was never the problem.”

“It felt like it was.”

“I know.” He exhales, eyes closing briefly. “Wanting you isn’t the same as making you feel wanted. I know that now.”

Her fingers curl around his. Garrett looks down at their joined hands, then back at her. He doesn’t squeeze immediately. He waits until her fingers tighten first, then closes his carefully around them.

She shifts closer. It’s only a few inches, her knee sliding between his, the pillow dipping as she moves her head toward the centre. Garrett’s breath catches almost silently. His free hand rises and settles against the side of her neck, palm warm beneath her ear, fingers spreading lightly into her hair without going near the injury.

He studies her face. He looks almost painfully focused, his thumb resting still beneath her jaw while his eyes move over her forehead, her nose, her lips, then return to her eyes.

She moves closer again until their noses brush. “I miss you,” she whispers.

Garrett closes his eyes for one second. When he opens them, his brows have drawn together. “You’re concussed.”

Her mouth tightens. “I’m fine.”

“You fainted six hours ago.”

“I know what happened.”

“You have brain damage.”

She huffs a breath. “That feels unconfirmed and rude.”

Garrett’s thumb moves once against the side of her neck. “I’m serious.”

“So am I.” She presses her forehead to his. The contact is careful, his skin warm against hers.

Garrett doesn’t move forward. His mouth is close enough that she can feel his breath across her lips. She tilts her face, letting her nose slide softly along his, and tries to close the last fraction of space.

Garrett draws back. Barely. An inch at most. Enough that her lips meet only warm air.

Her eyes open. “Garrett.”

“You’re concussed.”

“You’ve mentioned.”

“I’m not kissing you when you might wake up tomorrow and decide your brain was swollen.”

“My brain didn’t– didn’t invent wanting to kiss you tonight.”

His gaze searches hers.

“I wanted to kiss you before I hit my head,” she says. “At dinner. In the Jeep. On your couch when you put your hand out and waited for me to take it. Outside the theatre when you were carrying all my shit and trying not to look at my dress.”

“I was looking at the flowers,” he murmurs.

“You were looking at my tits.”

Garrett’s mouth betrays him, twitching faintly before he forces it still again. “Both can be true.”

“I wanted to kiss you then.”

His hand remains warm at her neck. “That doesn’t mean you should now.”

She moves closer again. Garrett stays where he is this time, but he doesn’t close the distance. Her lips ghost over his, barely brushing the fuller curve of his lower lip before he tips his head back another fraction.

The restraint in his face is almost worse than if he’d kissed her immediately. His jaw is clenched. His eyes have gone dark and soft at once, fixed on her mouth with a hunger he’s visibly holding behind his teeth.

She tries again. Her nose presses to his. Their breaths mix, warm and shallow between them. She lets her lips touch the corner of his mouth, a tiny, tentative contact that sends something bright straight down her spine.

Garrett makes a quiet sound in the back of his throat and stays still. “Baby,” he whispers.

The word is wrecked enough to tighten every muscle low in her stomach. “What?” she asks.

“You’re making this really fucking difficult.”

“I’m aware.”

“I’m trying to do the right thing.”

“You are,” she nods, voice low.

“Then stop.”

“No.”

His eyes close. A breath leaves him through his nose, almost a laugh and nothing amused inside it.

She keeps her forehead against his. “Ask me tomorrow.”

Garrett opens his eyes.

“I’ll tell you the same thing.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do.”

“You might not even remember this,” he whispers, voice tense.

“I remember you got drafted twenty-fourth and cried under fluorescent lighting.”

“I didn’t cry.”

“You absolutely cried.”

“I had something in my eye,” he mumbles.

“Emotion?”

His mouth curves despite himself, but the strain remains around it. “What did you have for dinner?”

“Thai food.”

“What did you eat?”

“Dumplings, curry, rice. You watched me chew like a prison guard.”

“What did the nurse say?”

“No driving, no drinking, no screens, no fun.” She presses her forehead harder into his. “I know where I am. I know who you are. I know why you’re here.” Her fingers tighten in the front of his sweatshirt, bunching the fabric beneath his collarbone. “And I know I want you to kiss me.”

Garrett’s throat moves. He stays just beyond her mouth, his thumb tracing once beneath her jaw now as if he cannot stop every part of himself.

She can see the fight in him. The old Garrett would have taken the invitation and trusted desire to make everything else irrelevant. This Garrett is holding himself back hard enough that the restraint seems to move through his whole body, shoulders tight, fingers careful, mouth parted around a breath he will not spend.

“Please,” she whispers.

His eyes lift from her lips.

“Please kiss me.”

For one stretched second, Garrett only looks at her. Then his hand shifts behind her neck, and he lowers his mouth to hers.

The kiss is so soft at first that she almost doesn’t understand it’s happened. A warm press. His lips resting carefully against hers, gentle enough that there is no jolt through her head, no sharp movement, only the quiet shock of recognition moving through her entire body at once.

Garrett.

Her fingers tighten in his sweatshirt. He doesn’t kiss like he’s trying to win now. There’s none of the old confident rush, none of the easy certainty that used to make every kiss feel like being swept into motion before she had decided whether she was ready to move. He kisses her like a question he’s willing to keep asking. His mouth shifts slowly over hers, pauses, waits for her to follow.

She does. The second kiss lands deeper. Her lips part beneath his, and Garrett breathes out against her mouth, the sound catching low and rough in his chest. His thumb moves along the line of her jaw while the hand holding hers loosens, sliding instead to her waist, palm spreading carefully over the fabric of her shirt.

Something inside her comes back online. Room by room. As though her body has been standing dark through a long winter, pipes cold inside the walls, every switch turned off to save whatever little warmth remained, and Garrett’s mouth finds the breaker. Light moving through hallways. Heat stirring beneath the floors. Every neglected part of her suddenly remembering what it was built to do.

She sighs into his mouth. Garrett’s lips part more fully. His tongue brushes hers, slow and tentative for the first stroke, and the familiar sensation moves through her with such immediate force that her toes curl beneath the blanket.

Her hand slides from his sweatshirt into his hair. The curls are soft and flattened strangely at the back, and when her fingers close gently near his nape, Garrett makes that sound again. The one she remembers. Low in his throat, half restrained pleasure and half disbelief.

His mouth deepens against hers. Still careful. Still slow. But the restraint changes shape now that she’s kissing him back, becoming something warm and deliberate rather than distant. His tongue slips into her mouth in an unhurried sweep, and she meets it, breath catching when his hand at her waist draws her the smallest amount closer.

Her body fits against his with insulting ease. Knee between his. Fingers in his curls. His palm warm at the side of her neck. Every part remembering its place before her mind has finished cataloguing the return.

She had forgotten how Garrett kisses when nobody is watching. How the cockiness disappears first. How he hums faintly when she opens for him. How his mouth softens at the corners even while the kiss grows deeper, as though some part of him is always smiling when he has her close.

She tilts her head carefully. Garrett follows immediately, lips dragging slowly over hers before his tongue finds her again. The kiss stretches, warm and wet and familiar enough to hurt somewhere tender beneath her sternum. Her thumb catches near his ear. His fingers flex at her waist.

There’s no urgency toward anything else. No hand moving beneath her shirt. No body pressing for more than she has offered. Only Garrett kissing her like he’s missed the shape of her mouth every day and has been given permission to remember it slowly.

Her lips begin to ache pleasantly. Her breathing grows uneven, and the pain behind her eyes makes a faint warning pulse when she chases his mouth too quickly. Garrett feels her wince.

He pulls back immediately. The loss of contact leaves her mouth cold. She makes a tiny, dissatisfied sound and follows him before remembering that movement is the enemy.

“Easy,” he murmurs, breathless.

“I’m fine.”

Garrett laughs softly. The sound moves warm across her lips. His forehead rests against hers, both of them breathing into the narrow space between their mouths. She can feel his smile before she fully sees it, the little shift in his cheeks, the way his nose brushes hers when he shakes his head.

“You’re unbelievable,” he whispers.

She smiles, pressing her forehead more firmly into his. “You kissed me.”

“You begged.”

“That’s a strong word.”

His laugh breaks again, quiet enough not to hurt. Garrett tips his head and presses a kiss to the top of her forehead, lingering there for a second before moving his mouth into her hair.

She tucks herself closer. Her cold nose finds the warm place beneath his jaw, and Garrett flinches. “Jesus.”

“You’re warm.”

“You’re freezing.”

She huffs. “Fix it.”

His arm closes around her waist immediately, drawing her in until her cheek rests against his chest and one of his legs shifts over hers beneath the blanket. She keeps one fist twisted in the front of his sweatshirt, gripping as though the room might tilt again if she lets go.

Garrett pulls the blanket higher over her shoulder. His hand begins moving slowly along her back, not quite rubbing, only tracing one warm path between her shoulder blades and waist. “You need to sleep,” he murmurs into her hair.

“So do you.”

“I was,” he says softly.

“You were making a weird sound.”

“I don’t make sounds.”

“You do. Those tiny mouth clicks.”

“That’s not real.”

“It is.”

“Shut up. You have a head injury.”

She buries her nose more firmly into his neck. “Convenient.”

Garrett’s chest moves beneath her cheek with one last quiet laugh. Then his mouth presses to the top of her head again.

For a while, neither of them says anything. The heater finally kicks on beneath the window, metal knocking once before warm air begins to move through the room. Garrett’s hand settles at the centre of her back. His breathing gradually slows beneath her ear, though every few minutes his fingers tighten faintly against her shirt, checking without waking fully that she is still there.

Just before sleep catches her again, his voice moves softly into her hair. “If your head gets worse, wake me.”

She’s already half gone, limbs heavy and warm where they’re tangled with his. She presses her face into the side of his throat, lips brushing his skin in something too sleepy to qualify as a kiss. “Promise.”

Morning arrives through the ache at the back of her head and the cold beside her. For several seconds, she doesn’t open her eyes. The room is pale behind her eyelids, no longer dark but not properly bright either, that weak winter-grey light that flattens everything before the sun has committed to being useful. 

Her body feels heavy beneath the duvet. Drained down to something soft and slow, every limb carrying the dense reluctance of a person who’s slept badly after frightening several people and mildly concussing herself in public.

The back of her skull hurts where it meets the pillow. Less of the deep internal throb from the middle of the night and more a concentrated tenderness now, a bruised little hill beneath her hair that objects whenever she shifts her weight wrong. 

Her mouth is dry. Her stomach feels hollow enough that the first thought moving through it is food, which seems like progress, though she doesn’t trust her body’s sudden interest after it spent yesterday quietly dismantling itself without submitting a complaint.

Then she remembers Garrett’s mouth.

Her eyes open. 

The ceiling stares back at her in bland white silence. For one full second, she lies completely still while the night returns in pieces too clear to blame on concussion fog. 

Garrett’s hand warm at the side of her neck. His forehead resting against hers while he told her no. Her fingers twisted into his sweatshirt. Please kiss me. His mouth finally lowering to hers, careful and slow and familiar enough that every part of her had answered before she found the sense to be frightened by it.

Holy shit. She kissed Garrett.

Technically, Garrett kissed her, though this distinction wouldn’t survive cross-examination when she had spent several minutes following his mouth around the pillow and begging. Her stomach shifts, not hunger this time.

Should she have done that?

The question slips in quietly and immediately begins touching everything with damp hands. They had talked. Really talked. He had apologised properly and she had too, and then she had crawled closer with an injured head and several months of badly suppressed longing. 

It would be extremely convenient to blame the whole thing on temporary neurological disruption. She could tell him the section of her brain responsible for Garrett Graham had swollen and pressed directly into the section responsible for Poor Choices.

Except it hadn’t felt like a poor choice. Nothing about the kiss had carried the frantic, hollow aftertaste of the other people she had tried. 

There had been no moment of closing her eyes and trying to force her body into cooperation, no immediate mental inventory of everything wrong with the mouth touching hers. 

It had felt frighteningly right. The things that happened before the kiss still existed this morning. The coffee shop. The parties. The long months after. The careful inches she had made Garrett cross one at a time.

But the kiss hadn’t erased them. It had happened beside them.

Her hand slides beneath the duvet toward the space where Garrett had been. The sheet is cold. The anxiety changes shape at once.

She turns her head too quickly, pain flashing dull and hot over the bruise, but the bed beside her is empty. The pillow still carries the faint hollow where his head rested. 

The blanket has been folded back neatly rather than kicked away. His sweatshirt is gone from the chair. So are his shoes.

Her chest draws tight before she can stop it. He left. He had morning skate. He had a life that began before she woke up and did not require remaining inside a dorm room after kissing his ex-girlfriend while she was concussed. 

Maybe he woke up and panicked. Maybe he had lain there afterward staring into the dark, replaying every medical instruction and deciding he had crossed a line even though she had practically dragged him over it by the mouth.

Maybe he regrets it.

She pushes herself upright carefully, duvet gathering around her waist while the room sways only slightly. Her phone sits facedown on the desk. No Garrett beside her. No note. 

The narrow room looks painfully ordinary, her audition packet spread beneath the lamp, yesterday’s clothes folded badly on the chair, two empty water bottles gathered near the wastebasket like evidence from a very dull crime scene.

She reaches toward her phone just as the door opens. Garrett slips through sideways with both hands occupied, one shoulder nudging the door before it can click against the stopper. 

He has a cardboard drink tray balanced precariously in one hand and two large paper bags hooked over the fingers of the other, both stretched heavy enough at the bottom that whatever he has bought could reasonably sustain a small touring company.

He closes the door quietly with his heel, still looking toward the hallway, then turns and sees her sitting up. Relief moves over his face so openly it stops her halfway through breathing.

“Hey,” he says, already crossing the room. “You’re awake.”

He sets the coffee tray onto the desk, shifts one of the paper bags away from the audition packet, then reaches into his jacket pocket and drops her key card onto the chest of drawers.

She stares at it. Then at him. “Uh…?”

“Okay.” He says it like she’s asked a completely different question. He unzips his jacket, pushes it off his shoulders, and begins unloading food with the focused speed of someone who has been handed a crisis and responded by buying carbohydrates. “You’ve gotta eat, baby.”

A warm cardboard box appears. Then another. Two wrapped breakfast sandwiches. A paper cup full of fruit. Yoghurt. Something in foil. Banana bread. A muffin large enough to alter tides. A small container of scrambled eggs. A second, inexplicable container of scrambled eggs.

She watches the desk disappear beneath breakfast. “Did you rob a café?”

“No.”

“Did they know you were taking all this?”

He looks almost offended. “I paid.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

Garrett ignores her, checking his phone while he opens one of the bags wider. He’s already dressed for the rink in black athletic pants, a Briar hoodie, and the heavy team jacket he hasn’t fully removed. His cheeks are pink from the cold. There is a tiny spot of coffee on one thumb.

“Your next dose is at nine-thirty,” he says. “Not before, because you took the last one at three-twenty-seven.”

She blinks. “You know the exact time?”

“I checked.”

“At three-twenty-seven?”

He ignores her. 

“You’ve got rehearsal at eight.” Garrett picks up one of the breakfast boxes and brings it to the bed, setting it carefully over her lap before returning for the coffee. “I’m driving you after morning skate, so you need to get ready now. You’re coming to the rink with me. You can sit somewhere comfortable, Tuck’s organising something, and then I’ll take you straight to rehearsal.”

Her fingers hover uncertainly over the lid of the box. “Garrett–”

“No, baby, listen.” He places the coffee within reach but not directly beside her knee, then begins searching through the second bag. “You’ve got three days until your audition. Three. We’re getting you ready for it, okay? But you can’t rehearse if you pass out again, and you can’t audition if your brain leaves your body, so you’re eating breakfast, you’re taking your meds at nine-thirty, and you’re not walking anywhere alone until you can stand up.”

“I can stand.”

“You nearly fell over sitting up last night.”

She frowns. “I was dizzy.”

“Yeah. That’s exactly my point.”

He pulls a banana from the bag and places it beside the coffee as if assembling some sort of nutritional perimeter. She looks from the banana to Garrett, who is now typing something into his phone with both thumbs, mouth faintly pursed in concentration.

A calendar reminder appears briefly across the screen before he angles it away.

Her eyes narrow. “Did you add my schedule to your phone?”

Garrett scoffs far too quickly. “What? No, baby. Eat your food.”

“You did.”

“I didn’t.”

She tries to peer at his phone. “You just added something.”

“It was unrelated.”

“At seven in the morning?”

His mouth shifts. “I have… a rich personal life.”

“Garrett.”

He points at the cardboard box on her lap. “Food.”

She looks down. Inside is a toasted croissant filled with scrambled egg, cheese, and bacon, cut neatly in half. Beside it sit roasted potatoes, still steaming faintly, and a little packet of ketchup she would normally reject on principle but currently considers edible.

Her stomach tightens with actual interest. Garrett watches until she picks up half the croissant.

“Happy?” she asks.

“Take a bite.”

“You’re being frightening.”

“Bite.”

She bites. The croissant flakes immediately over the duvet. Butter and salt hit her tongue, followed by the egg, warm cheese, bacon crisp enough that it doesn’t drag itself free in one humiliating strip. Her stomach wakes up harder around it.

Garrett visibly unclenches. “Good,” he says, turning toward her wardrobe. “Keep doing that.”

“I know how breakfast works.”

“Evidence suggests otherwise,” he mumbles.

She chews while he opens the wardrobe doors and stares inside with the grim, bewildered focus of a man discovering that women’s clothing doesn’t arrive preassembled into outfits. 

Dresses hang beside jackets, skirts pressed between cardigans, two scarves suspended from a hanger they have been slowly dragging toward collapse for months.

Garrett touches a pink sweater, considers it, then looks over his shoulder. “Baby. You want this?”

She takes another bite, watching him hold the sweater up against himself like the answer might emerge through comparison. “No. Um, those baggy jeans. The dark ones. And that long-sleeve shirt, please.”

He looks toward the stack she indicated. “This one?”

“The other one.”

Garrett pulls out a black shirt.

“The other other one.”

His head turns slowly. “How many long-sleeve shirts do you own?”

“Several.”

He gestures loosely. “That’s the same shirt.”

“One has a square neckline.”

He looks down at the shirt in his hand, then back into the wardrobe. “Right.”

“You asked what I wanted.”

“I’m trying to execute the vision.”

“You’re doing amazing.”

Garrett finds the grey shirt and lays it across the chair with the jeans, smoothing the fabric once as though presentation might improve his performance review. “Keep eating.”

“I am,” she grumbles.

He glances over to confirm. Her second bite is apparently sufficient. “Good. How’s your head this morning?”

“Just bruised.” She lifts one hand toward the back of her skull and presses experimentally through her hair, immediately finding the tender lump. Her face tightens. “Doesn’t feel too bad. Just lumpy.”

Garrett crosses the room before she lowers her hand. “Don’t keep poking it.”

“I was checking.”

“You checked. It’s still there.”

His fingers move carefully through her hair, separating the strands near the sore spot without touching it directly. He tips his head, inspecting the back of her skull with enough seriousness that she wonders whether he has quietly completed medical school between practice and the café.

“How lumpy?” she asks, taking another bite. 

“Normal amount.”

“What’s the normal amount of skull lump?”

“I don’t know,” he mutters. “Stop moving.”

“Very reassuring, Dr. Graham.”

Garrett brushes her hair back over her shoulder, his hand lingering briefly near the side of her neck. Up close, he looks tired. There’s a faint purple shadow beneath his eyes, and the crease from her pillow is still visible along one cheek beneath the stubble.

She looks up at him, half amused and half unable to understand how he’s been awake long enough to purchase an entire breakfast menu, construct a recovery schedule, coordinate with Tucker, and memorise her medication times.

“You’re being insane,” she whispers.

Garrett’s shoulders drop. The momentum leaves him all at once, he seems to recognise himself from outside the operation. He rubs one hand over the back of his neck and exhales.

“Sorry.” His mouth pulls faintly. “Good morning, baby.”

Then he bends. The kiss is gentle enough to feel separate from the ones in the dark. No long pause with their mouths nearly touching, no trembling restraint, no months of wanting finally being allowed somewhere to go. 

Only Garrett’s lips pressing softly to hers, warm and careful, one hand resting lightly against the side of her face. Her whole body still notices.

The kiss lasts barely a second. He draws back before she can decide whether to follow, eyes moving over her face with a quiet question he doesn’t ask.

“Morning,” she murmurs.

Garrett’s thumb brushes once along her cheek before his hand falls. He glances down at the box in her lap. “Food okay?”

“Really yum.” She looks at the bitten croissant, appetite already beginning to retreat now that the initial hunger has been answered. “I’m just not that hungry. Or I thought I was, but now I’m eating, I don’t feel as hungry.”

His expression tightens immediately, though he does not tell her to finish it all. “How much can you eat?”

“I don’t know,” she shrugs. 

“One half?”

“Maybe.”

“Potatoes?”

“A couple.”

“Fruit?”

She gives him a look. “This feels like negotiating with a toddler.”

“I’m good at toddlers.”

“Have you met one?”

One side of his nose scrunches up. “No, but I’m captain.”

“That’s not transferable.”

Garrett lifts the fruit cup from the desk and places it beside the box anyway. “Eat what you can. At least take the coffee to go, okay? And the banana bread.”

She nods, because arguing about portable baked goods requires more energy than she currently owns. “Mhm.”

“Good.”

He reaches across her to tap her phone where it lies on the desk, presumably checking the time again. The screen lights beneath his finger.

Garrett goes still. She follows his gaze.

Her lock screen is a photograph of the peonies he brought after Romeo and Juliet. She had taken it the morning after the show while they sat in a glass vase on her desk, soft pink petals opened wide beneath the winter light, the brown paper folded beside them and one pale stem leaning slightly away from the rest. 

Garrett blinks. “Are those the flowers I got you?”

She snatches the phone from beneath his hand and turns it facedown. “Don’t.”

His mouth begins changing.

“No,” she warns.

“You made your wallpaper the flowers I got you?”

“They’re pretty.”

“Mhm.”

“They are,” she insists. 

“No, course.” Garrett bites the inside of his cheek, but the smile still presses outward, brightening his eyes in a way that makes her immediately resent the existence of cameras and sentimental floral photography. “They’re pretty.”

“Shut up.”

He nods, far too solemnly. “Right. Pretty flowers. Nothing else going on there.”

She smacks the back of her hand lightly against his stomach. Garrett catches her wrist before she can withdraw it, grin escaping completely now.

“Violence,” he says. “Against your primary caregiver.”

“You bought breakfast. You’re not Florence Nightingale.”

“I’m better-looking.”

She rolls her eyes. “That’s debatable.”

“Is it?”

She attempts to tug her hand free. Garrett lets her go immediately, though his fingers brush across her knuckles on the way, a small contact that hangs around after his hand drops.

For one second, neither of them says anything. The kiss remains in the room with them. Present beneath the breakfast boxes and Garrett’s impossible schedule, close enough to be touched and carefully left alone.

His eyes flick briefly to her mouth, then away. “Go get ready,” he says, softer now.

She closes the breakfast box over what remains of the croissant. “You’re very bossy this morning.”

“You like it sometimes.”

Her eyes narrow. “Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

Garrett’s expression shifts only slightly. The grin stays, but he steps back to give her space before she has to ask for it.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he says.

She slides carefully from beneath the duvet, pausing when the floor feels colder and farther away than expected. Garrett’s hand hovers near her elbow but doesn’t close around it. 

She notices. She notices that he notices her noticing, and then both of them look elsewhere with the quiet coordination of people standing beside something tender and pretending not to crowd it.

Her feet settle against the rug. The room stays still. “See?” she says. “Vertical.”

Garrett picks up the banana bread and tucks it into the outer pocket of her bag. “Historic.”

She walks toward the bathroom with the clothes folded over one arm and his coffee warming the room behind her. At the door, she looks back.

Garrett is packing the food with methodical concentration, separating what she can carry from what can go into her fridge. His phone buzzes facedown beside him. He glances at it, then at her.

“What?” she asks.

“Nothing.”

The screen lights again. From where she stands, she can just make out the calendar notification.

Garrett reaches over and flips the phone farther away before she can read anything else. She stares at him.

He points toward the bathroom. “Get ready, baby.”

“You added my schedule.”

“Concussion confusion.”

“You’re such a liar.”

“Three days,” he reminds her, already opening the fridge. “We’ve got shit to do.”

She closes the bathroom door before he can see her smile.

The first sign that something is wrong is the freshman waiting outside the rink doors with a pillow. Standing beneath the concrete overhang in a Briar tracksuit with a full-sized pillow tucked beneath one arm and the anxious posture of someone who’s been stationed there under threat of death.

The morning is cold enough that her breath fogs in front of her. Garrett’s hand rests near the centre of her back as they cross the car park, hovering close enough to catch her if the pavement develops violent intentions. 

Her coffee is warm between both palms. The paper bag containing the banana bread has been tucked into her tote with the precision of emergency medical equipment.

The freshman sees them and straightens so sharply the pillow nearly slips from his grip. “Morning, Cap.”

Garrett nods. “Morning.”

The freshman looks at her. His face changes, a small widening around the eyes. The subtle alarm of someone finally encountering the civilian at the centre of a classified military operation.

“Ma’am,” he says.

She stops walking. Garrett doesn’t.

He gets two full steps ahead before noticing the absence beside him and turning back, one brow lifted. “You good?”

Her gaze remains on the freshman. “Did you just call me ma’am?”

The poor boy looks instantly toward Garrett for help. Garrett, traitor and architect of whatever this is, only adjusts the strap of her tote higher over his shoulder.

“I–” The freshman swallows. “No?”

“You did.”

“Sorry, ma’am.”

Her eyes narrow.

“Shit.” His face goes pale. “Sorry. Sorry.”

Garrett presses his lips together. She turns slowly toward him. “Why does he have a pillow?”

“Tuck found one.”

“That doesn’t answer the question.”

“You said you were tired,” he replies. 

“I am tired.”

“So.” Garrett gestures toward the pillow as if its presence has now been fully justified by science. “Pillow.”

The freshman nods quickly. “There’s a blanket too.”

She closes her eyes for one second. The movement presses faintly against the bruise behind her skull. Enough to remind her that she’s been awake for less than an hour and is already standing outside an ice rink interrogating nineteen-year-olds about bedding.

When she opens them again, Garrett has moved closer. His expression has softened beneath the amusement, gaze checking her face. “You dizzy?”

“No.”

“Head worse?”

“No.”

“Nauseous?”

She glares at him. “No, Garrett.”

“Okay.” He pauses. “You sure?”

“I’m about to develop symptoms specifically to hurt you.”

The freshman looks down at the pillow like it might offer witness protection. Garrett’s mouth pulls faintly at one corner. “Come on, baby.”

He reaches for the door. The freshman darts ahead immediately and catches it first, hauling the heavy rink entrance open with both hands. “Thank you,” she says as she passes.

“Yes, ma’am.”

The words escape him on instinct. He shuts his eyes. She keeps walking. Behind her, Garrett says quietly, “You’ve gotta stop doing that.”

“I know, Cap.”

“She’s gonna think I threatened you,” he hisses. 

The freshman says nothing. She looks back over her shoulder. Garrett is staring at him. The freshman looks at the ceiling.

Interesting.

The rink smells the way it always does in the morning: cold metal, sharpened ice, old coffee, damp equipment, and the faint chemical sting of whatever industrial cleaner is losing a long war against hockey. 

The sound reaches her from deeper inside the building before the ice does. Sticks knocking against boards. Skates cutting hard through the surface. A whistle. Someone shouting something that echoes up into the concrete rafters and becomes impossible to understand.

Garrett leads her through the side corridor instead of toward the stands. The freshman follows with the pillow held in front of his body like a ceremonial offering.

“Tuck set you up upstairs,” Garrett tells her. “Team lounge. It’s warmer than the stands, and you can still see the rink through the glass.”

She stares at him. “I’ve sat in the stands before.”

“Yeah.”

“And survived.”

“Debatable.”

She looks at the back of his head. “I’m not dying.”

“I know.”

“You’re behaving like I’m dying.”

“I’m behaving like you passed out yesterday.”

She holds up one finger. “Once.”

Garrett turns his head enough to give her a look. “I don’t think you get points for only doing it once.”

They pass the mouth of the locker-room hallway. Three players are gathered near the benches in partial gear, shoulder pads widening them into strange, armoured versions of themselves while they adjust tape and argue over something on a phone. All three stop talking when she appears.

One nods gravely. “Morning.”

Another says, “Hi.”

The third, visibly panicked by the lack of a coordinated greeting, blurts, “You look better.”

She slows. Garrett keeps one hand at her back. “Keep moving.”

“Why are they being weird?”

“They’re hockey players.”

Her eyes narrow. “That’s not new.”

One of the players clears his throat. “Glad you’re okay.”

“Thank you,” she says carefully.

All three nod. Serious, collective nods. The solemn acknowledgment of men who have received a briefing and signed something.

She looks at Garrett again. “What did you tell them?”

“Nothing.”

“Garrett.”

He lifts one shoulder. “I said you hit your head.”

“And?”

“And not to be loud around you.”

A fourth player rounds the corner carrying two sticks, sees her, and immediately lowers both of them as though sticks are naturally loud objects. “Morning,” he whispers.

Her brows draw together.

Garrett guides her toward the stairs before she can begin questioning the entire roster. The freshman with the pillow follows close behind. Halfway up, she hears someone below ask, “Is she good?” and another voice hiss, “Shut the fuck up, she can hear you.”

She stops on the step.

Garrett’s palm settles lightly at her waist. “What?”

Her eyes narrow up at him. “Nothing.”

The team lounge overlooks the rink through a long wall of glass. It’s usually an aggressively masculine room full of mismatched couches, game footage playing on mute, abandoned athletic tape, and the persistent smell of protein powder no matter how often Tucker opens the windows.

This morning, it appears to have been staged by a deeply anxious hotel concierge. The largest couch has been cleared completely. A thick grey blanket lies folded over one arm. A bottle of water waits on the table beside a second coffee, a sports drink, a packet of crackers, two cereal bars, painkillers, a banana, tissues, and what appears to be a handwritten schedule.

She stares at it.

She turns slowly. Garrett has the decency to look slightly embarrassed.

The freshman places the pillow carefully at one end of the couch. “Captain said you like the softer ones.”

Her gaze snaps to Garrett.

He lifts both hands. “I didn’t know what kind of pillow was up here.”

“So you sent someone to find me one?”

“Tuck sent him.”

Her eyes flash. “Tucker knew which one I like?”

“No. I knew.”

The answer arrives too simply for her to do anything useful with it.

Garrett steps closer and lowers her tote beside the couch. “You don’t have to follow the schedule exactly.”

She picks up the handwritten page. “You’ve scheduled my food.”

“That was Tuck.”

She sighs slowly. “Of course it was.”

Garrett raises a shoulder. “He likes structure.”

“I know Tucker likes structure,” she replies. “I’ve watched him organise a refrigerator.”

“He’s good at it.”

She lowers the page. Garrett’s eyes have begun doing that careful movement over her face again, checking for pain hidden between irritation.

“You okay up here?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“You’ve got your water.”

She raises her eyebrows. “I can see it.”

“Coffee’s still warm.”

“I have one already.”

“That one has less caffeine.”

She looks between the cup in her hand and the second cup on the table. “You bought me… a medically supervised coffee?”

“It’s half-caf.”

Her mouth practically drops open. “You’re sick.”

He nods. “Tuck said no caffeine would give you a headache.”

“My head already hurts.”

“Exactly.”

She presses her lips together, partly because she doesn’t know whether to laugh and partly because something inside her has begun pulling too tight. Garrett is trying. They all are. 

She understands the shape of it. Garrett had arrived at the clinic with panic carved openly into his face, and the boys love him with the loud, badly disguised devotion of men who would rather stage an entire recovery command centre than ask whether he’s scared. Tucker has made a schedule. Dean has written a joke on it. 

It’s kind. It’s also too much.

She and Garrett kissed less than five hours ago. They’re not back together. No conversation has happened about what the kiss means outside the dark, or whether the good-morning kiss has upgraded it into something with daylight jurisdiction. Yet his entire team seems to have accepted her as a returned captain’s girlfriend and begun handling her accordingly.

She can feel the old impulse pushing up behind her ribs. Smile. Make it easy. Don’t make Garrett regret caring. Don’t become difficult after everybody has gone to trouble for you. The feeling itself irritates her.

“I’m fine,” she says.

Garrett’s gaze lingers. He seems to hear the word differently now than he once did, no longer accepting it immediately but no longer challenging it like an accusation either.

“Okay.” He nods toward the couch. “Try to sleep.”

“I will.”

“I’ll come get you when we’re done.”

She takes a deep breath. “I know.”

“And I’m sending someone up before then.”

Her eyes narrow. “Why?”

“To check on you.”

“I don’t need checking.”

He blinks. “You hit your head.”

“We’ve established this.”

“What if you feel sick?”

“I’ll text you.”

“You’re not supposed to use screens.”

She shoots him a look. “Then I’ll throw myself through the window onto the ice.”

Garrett looks at the glass, briefly and genuinely assessing whether this is physically possible. “Don’t.”

She laughs despite herself, which makes his mouth soften. He reaches for her face, then hesitates. The pause is small enough that the freshman busies himself aggressively with adjusting a pillow that requires no adjustment.

She tips her chin up. Garrett bends and presses his mouth carefully to her forehead. The kiss is warm and brief. His fingers touch lightly beneath her jaw before falling. “Rest,” he murmurs.

She pokes his stomach. “Go skate.”

He nods, then turns toward the stairs. The freshman follows.

“Wait,” she says. Both men stop. She points at the pillow. “You can leave that.”

The freshman looks relieved. “Yes, ma’am.”

She sleeps for nineteen minutes before the first person checks on her. Sound travels strangely through the wall of glass, muted but constant: blades carving into ice, pucks striking the boards, the shrill cut of Coach’s whistle. Every so often, a shout reaches the room clearly enough to become a name. Graham. Logan. Again. Move.

Still, she manages to curl beneath the blanket with the pillow tucked carefully away from the bruised back of her skull, one knee drawn toward her chest and Garrett’s half-caf coffee cooling untouched beside the recovery schedule.

The couch smells faintly like detergent and hockey house. Tucker, probably. Clean cotton, old fabric, and the tiny ghost of someone’s deodorant embedded too deeply in the cushions to ever leave.

She closes her eyes and tries not to think. This lasts perhaps four seconds.

Garrett kissed her. Again. This morning. A good-morning kiss. Awake. Standing beside her bed while she ate breakfast and tried to understand why he had declared war on malnutrition.

It had been soft. Deliberately small. The kind of kiss people exchanged when kissing was already normal between them. Except it isn’t. Not again. Not yet.

She adjusts her cheek against the pillow. The bruise pulls faintly beneath her hair. Her body feels tired all the way through, not only sleepy but used up, every reserve burned across the last week until even lying down feels like an activity she needs to recover from.

Three days until the audition. Three mornings. Three rehearsals. Three nights in which she has to somehow rebuild her body, trust every choice she has made about Mara, and enter the audition room looking like she hasn’t recently collapsed beside a prop shelf.

Her stomach tightens. She opens her eyes. Through the glass, the team moves across the ice in fast dark shapes. Garrett is easy to find even from above. His body carries intention differently from everyone around him, every turn sharp, every stride powerful without appearing heavy. He cuts toward the net, receives a pass, shoots. The puck cracks into the boards when the goalie deflects it.

Garrett circles out. His helmet turns toward the lounge. She cannot see his face through the cage and distance, but she knows he’s looking for her.

She lifts one hand from beneath the blanket. Garrett watches for half a second, then turns back toward the drill.

The door opens behind her, and she looks over. A freshman stands there, breathing as though he has sprinted up the stairs. “Captain asked me to check on you.”

She stares at him. “Did he send you directly from the ice?”

The boy bends forward slightly, hands braced on his thighs. He’s still wearing skates. Hard plastic guards have been snapped over the blades, and his helmet sits crookedly over sweat-dark hair. “He said now.”

She presses her lips together. “Of course he did.”

The freshman straightens, trying to recover enough oxygen to perform whatever assessment Garrett has assigned him. “Are you okay?”

“Yes.”

“Head?”

“Attached.”

“Feel sick?”

“No.”

“Dizzy?”

“No.”

He nods with grave concentration, committing each answer to memory. “Okay.”

She pulls the blanket higher over her shoulder. “Tell your captain I’m fine.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And tell him I can’t sleep if he keeps sending freshmen up here to check whether I’ve silently died.”

The boy’s eyes widen. She waits. He remains beside the door, visibly uncertain whether the absence of death concludes his duties.

“You can go,” she says.

“Yes, ma’am. Sorry– shit. Sorry.” He disappears so quickly the door swings shut behind him.

She stares at it for a moment, then drops her face into the pillow with a quiet groan.

Seven minutes later, Tucker arrives. Unlike the freshman, Tucker doesn’t look out of breath or afraid. He comes through the door carrying a small paper cup and the steady competence of someone who would remain calm during both a natural disaster and Dean attempting flambé.

“Morning,” he says quietly.

She lifts her head. “Did Garrett send you?”

“No.”

She gives him a look.

Tucker places the cup on the table. “Coach did.”

“Coach sent you to check on me?”

“No. Coach sent me off the ice because I took a puck to the ankle.”

“Oh.” Her eyes drop. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” Tucker lowers himself into the armchair opposite her and begins unlacing one skate. “Garrett did tell me to look in while I was here.”

She closes her eyes.

“He’s worried.”

“He’s insane,” she groans.

“Also true.”

Tucker removes the skate, rolling his sock carefully down over the swelling near his ankle. It’s already turning pink along one side.

“What’s that?” she asks, nodding toward the paper cup.

“Oatmeal.”

“I’ve eaten.”

“Garrett said you ate half a breakfast sandwich and two potatoes.”

Her eyes open slowly. “How does he know the exact number of potatoes?”

“You ate in front of him.”

“And then reported it to you?”

Tucker lifts one shoulder. “We’re coordinating.”

Her eyes narrow in suspicion. “Coordinating what?”

Tucker looks at her as if the answer is obvious. “Getting you through the audition.”

Her brows pull together. “Why are you involved in my audition?”

“Because Garrett’s at practice.”

“That doesn’t answer anything.”

“It answers some of it.”

She pushes herself higher against the couch arm, blanket gathering at her waist. “Tucker.”

He looks up from his ankle. Tucker’s expression is calm, but there’s a faint caution in it now, as if he has finally recognised the unstable material underfoot.

“What exactly are you coordinating?”

Before he can answer, the door opens again. Dean walks in carrying a charger, a packet of gum, and an ice pack pressed to the back of his neck.

She stares at him. “What happened to you?”

“Occupational hazard. I got hit by Logan.” Dean drops onto the other end of the couch and extends the charger toward her.

“I have a charger.”

“This one’s longer.”

“My phone is fully charged.”

“Great. Preparedness is working.”

She looks between him and Tucker. “Did Garrett send you?”

Dean pauses. “Define… send.”

She presses her fingertips to her temples. “Did he tell you to come up here?”

“He mentioned you might need something.”

“What would I need from you?”

Dean looks genuinely offended. “Emotional support. Wit. Beauty. Emergency gum.”

She turns to Tucker. “How many people are coming up here?”

Tucker considers lying, decides against it. “Logan’s scheduled for seven-fifteen.”

“Scheduled?”

Dean closes his eyes briefly. Her gaze moves toward the recovery plan on the table. There are marks along the side she didn’t notice before. Initials beside fifteen-minute increments.

She picks up the page.

Dean’s mouth opens. “In our defence–”

“Why am I under hourly surveillance?”

“Quarter-hourly,” Tucker corrects.

She looks at him.

“Sorry.”

Dean leans forward, forearms resting over his knees. “Okay, it looks bad when you put it like that.”

She points to the page. “It looks bad written down.”

“That too.”

“I am trying to sleep,” she says through gritted teeth.

“We know,” Tucker says.

“Then why are you all coming up here every fifteen minutes?”

“So we know you’re sleeping and not unconscious,” Dean says.

She stares at him.

Dean lifts both hands. “There’s a distinction.”

She points at the door. “Get out.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Both men stand immediately. Tucker takes the oatmeal. Dean leaves the charger. She points at it. “Take that too.”

He picks it back up.

At the doorway, Tucker pauses. “Nine-thirty for your meds.”

“I know.”

“And you should eat again around ten.”

“I know.”

“Garrett packed the banana bread.”

She points at the door harder. “I know, Tucker.”

He nods. “Right.”

Dean catches the door before it closes. “For what it’s worth, you look much less grey.”

She reaches for the nearest cereal bar. He vanishes.

Logan comes up at seven-fifteen exactly. He opens the door three inches, puts his face through the gap, confirms she is alive, and says, “Good.”

She throws the cereal bar. It hits the door after he closes it. Nobody checks on her again.

For forty uninterrupted minutes, she drifts in and out of sleep beneath the grey blanket. The rink noise becomes part of the room, rising and falling with drills. At some point, the painkillers begin doing something useful. The ache behind her eyes dulls. Her stomach remains uncertain but no longer empty, the half sandwich and potatoes settling without revolt.

When the final whistle goes, the sound travels cleanly through the glass. She opens her eyes. Below, the players begin gathering pucks and moving toward the bench. Garrett pulls off one glove with his teeth, says something to Coach, then looks up toward the lounge.

She’s already sitting. He lifts one hand, palm toward her. She gives him a single, unimpressed finger. Even from above, she can see his shoulders move with laughter.

By the time she gets downstairs, the locker-room corridor is filling with steam, noise, and men in various stages of undress. She stays near the wall outside the main door, arms folded beneath her chest, tote resting against one boot. The blanket remains upstairs. So does the pillow. If Garrett wants to bring his mobile concussion suite home, he can collect it himself.

Players begin coming out in small groups, hair wet from showers, team bags hanging from their shoulders. The strange behaviour resumes immediately.

“Morning,” one says.

“Feeling better?” another asks.

She glares at him. “Yes.”

“Good.”

A defenceman she has spoken to perhaps twice in her life gives her a solemn nod. “Ma’am.”

Her eyes narrow. “Don’t.”

He disappears down the corridor.

Another player follows, sees her expression, and visibly revises whatever greeting he had planned. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

He keeps walking quickly.

The freshman with the pillow emerges carrying his gear bag and stops when he sees her. “Captain says he’ll be five minutes.”

“Thank you.”

“Yes–” His mouth closes. He nods instead. Progress.

She waits while the corridor gradually empties. Skates clatter against concrete inside the locker room. Shower taps shut off one by one. Voices become easier to separate as the team thins.

Garrett’s comes first. “She needs to eat before rehearsal.”

“I already put the banana bread in her bag,” Tucker says.

“Yeah, but she’s gotta actually eat it.”

Logan answers, “We can make the freshman watch.”

“No more freshmen,” Dean says. “She’s going to kill one.”

“She threw food at me,” Logan says.

“You deserved it.”

“I opened a door.”

She slowly uncrosses her arms. Inside, a locker slams.

Garrett says, “Tuck, can you text Allie and make sure they stop every hour?”

“No,” Tucker replies immediately. “You text Allie.”

“She hates me.”

“Allie doesn’t hate you,” Dean says. “She thinks you’re emotionally illiterate and has expressed interest in hitting you with a lighting rig.”

Garrett sighs. “Exactly.”

Dean seems to think for a moment. “She likes you more now.”

“Enough to answer?”

“Probably.”

Logan says, “What’s after rehearsal?”

“Class,” Garrett answers. “Then events office from two to five, but she’s not going.”

She goes still.

Tucker asks, “Does she know she’s not going?”

A pause. Garrett says, “Not yet.”

Dean makes a sound of deep concern. “Oh, you’re gonna die.”

“She can’t work.”

“Correct,” Tucker says. “Still gonna die.”

“We can call her manager,” Logan offers.

“No one is calling my manager,” she says from the hallway.

The locker room goes silent. Completely. A clean, immediate absence of sound, as if somebody has removed the room’s power supply. She steps through the doorway, and four heads turn toward her.

Garrett sits on the bench in black compression shorts and a clean long-sleeved shirt, one skate still unlaced near his feet. His damp curls have been pushed back from his forehead, though several are already falling forward again. 

Tucker stands near his locker, towel looped around his neck. Logan is halfway through pulling a sweatshirt over his head, face briefly trapped inside it. Dean sits shirtless on the opposite bench with one sock on and the other hanging from his hand.

All four look guilty. Schoolchildren discovered beside a broken window guilty.

She lets the door swing shut behind her. “What the fuck is going on here?”

Nobody answers. Logan frees his head from the sweatshirt.

She looks at him first. “No, genuinely. Are all four of you fucking stupid?”

Dean lowers the sock.

“Were you dropped on your heads as babies?” she continues. “Repeatedly? Did your parents get together, compare notes, and decide basic boundaries were an optional developmental milestone?”

Tucker looks down at the floor.

“Sorry, ma’am,” Dean says quietly.

Her head snaps toward him. “Do not ma’am me.”

“Sorry.”

“What are you scheming?”

“Nothing,” Logan says.

She points at him. “You had a surveillance shift.”

His mouth closes.

“You came upstairs, opened the door with your stupid face, looked at me, and left.”

Logan lowers his gaze. “Sorry.”

“And you.” She turns toward Tucker. “You made a schedule.”

Tucker nods once. “Yes.”

“You scheduled my medication, meals, sleep, transport, and allocated grown men to check whether I had stopped breathing at fifteen-minute intervals.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

His eyes flick briefly toward Garrett. She turns. Garrett straightens slightly on the bench.

“Oh, no.” She points at him now. “Do not look at Tucker. This is your psychosis.”

“Yes, baby.”

“Don’t baby me either.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She stares at him.

“Sorry.”

Dean bites the inside of his cheek.

She catches it. “And you. What the fuck did you think you were contributing?”

Dean sobers immediately. “A charger.”

“I have a charger.”

He shrugs. “I know that now.”

“And your emotional support?”

“In hindsight, it lacked sensitivity.”

She clenches her jaw. “In hindsight?”

“Yes, ma’am. Sorry. Sorry.”

She moves farther into the room, boots striking hard against the rubber floor. None of them looks directly at her for longer than a second. Four of the most physically intimidating men at Briar have folded inward beneath the force of one tired theatre student with a lump on her head and three days until an audition.

“I hit my head,” she says. “I did not lose legal capacity. I am a grown woman. I can decide when I eat, where I go, whether I attend my own job, and how many concussed minutes I can survive without one of Garrett’s terrified little freshmen bursting through a door to call me ma’am.”

Garrett nods. “Of course.”

“No. Shut up. I’m not finished.”

His mouth closes.

She turns toward Logan again. “You are not assigning first-years to monitor me.”

“I didn’t assign them.”

“Who did?”

All three boys look at Garrett. Garrett looks at his knees. “Me.”

She lets out one slow breath through her nose. “Unbelievable.”

“They listen better when I tell them things,” he offers quietly.

“Because you threatened them.”

“I didn’t threaten them,” he mutters.

“Did you tell them you’d bag-skate them until they vomited if they let me leave the lounge alone?”

Garrett pauses. Dean studies the ceiling.

“Did you?”

“I said… there would be consequences.”

Her mouth falls open. “You are insane.”

“Yes, baby.”

“I told you not to baby me!”

“Yep. Sorry.”

She presses both hands over her face for half a second. The locker room smells like soap, damp towels, and the lingering cold of the rink. Somewhere inside one of the showers, a tap drips at steady intervals. “I do not need four idiots organising my life.”

Tucker nods. “Understood.”

“I don’t need anyone calling my manager.”

Logan nods. “Understood.”

“I don’t need Allie receiving scheduled medical briefings.”

Garrett’s head lifts slightly. “Can I still text her normally?”

She stares at him.

He lowers his head again. “Sorry.”

“I have three days until my audition. I know that. It’s my audition. I am the person who has been preparing for it. Not you. Not Tucker. Not the entire Briar hockey team and its terrified supply of freshmen.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Tucker says.

She points at him without looking. “Stop that.”

“Sorry.”

“And I know I need to rest. I know I need food. I know I scared everybody.” Her voice catches faintly around the last sentence, irritation pressing tight against something more uncomfortable beneath it. She pushes through before any of them can look up properly. “But you don’t get to take over because I fucked up once. You don’t get to decide I’m incapable of making choices because my body gave out before I admitted I needed help.”

Garrett’s face changes. The guilt arrives first. Then understanding. His shoulders lower beneath it. “You’re right,” he says.

She narrows her eyes. “I know.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Good.”

He nods. “I should’ve asked what you wanted.”

“Yes.”

“I panicked.”

“I know.”

He picks at the edges of his thumbnail in his lap. “That’s not an excuse.”

The words come quickly, before she can make them for him. Something inside her loosens by one small degree.

“No,” she says. “It isn’t.”

Garrett nods. “I’m still sorry.”

Dean’s gaze remains fixed on his sock. Tucker has found a fascinating mark on the rubber floor. Logan stands with both hands buried in the front pocket of his sweatshirt, shoulders rounded like a boy outside the principal’s office.

She looks at each of them in turn. “And all of you are fucking weird.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Logan says.

“Sorry,” Tucker adds.

“Deeply sorry,” Dean says.

She huffs once, sharp and exhausted, the final air leaving the argument now that there is nothing left to strike. Her head has begun pulsing faintly again, not enough to worry her but enough to shorten whatever closing statement she might have made.

The boys wait. Garrett’s eyes lift carefully toward her face. He doesn’t move.

She folds her arms again. “Garrett.”

“Yes?”

“Get my bag.”

He’s on his feet before she finishes the sentence. “Yes, ma’am.”

Garrett grabs his shoes, shoves his feet into them without socks arranged properly, then reaches for his jacket and her tote in one fast movement. His whole body has sharpened with immediate purpose. He looks chastened, obedient, and far too awake for a man who just got verbally dismantled in front of his friends.

His gaze catches on her for half a second as he straightens. Something dark and distinctly unrepentant moves through it. Her stomach gives a small, traitorous twist.

Dean sees. His eyes move from Garrett’s face to hers, then back again, comprehension arriving with such vivid horror that his mouth opens. “No,” he says.

Garrett turns sharply. “Shut the fuck up.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were going to.”

Dean presses his lips together.

She looks between them. “What?”

“Nothing,” Garrett says quickly, swinging her tote over one shoulder. “Ready, baby?”

Her brows lift.

He corrects himself at once. “Ready?”

“Yes.” She looks toward the other three. “I’m going to rehearsal. Nobody is contacting my manager. Nobody is contacting Allie. Nobody is sending a freshman after me with emergency oatmeal.”

Tucker nods. “Understood.”

Logan nods too. “Yes.”

Dean lifts his sock in surrender. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

She turns and walks toward the door. Garrett follows closely behind, carrying her bag, his jacket still unzipped and one shoe visibly not tied properly. 

As they pass Dean, he reaches out and catches Garrett lightly by the elbow. His voice stays low, but not low enough. “You’re into this.”

Garrett jerks his arm free. “I’m going to kill you.”

She stops at the doorway. Garrett freezes. Dean looks delighted with his own survival instincts.

She turns her head slowly toward Garrett. His ears have gone red. The colour climbs from the collar of his shirt and disappears beneath his damp curls while he stares at Dean with a promise of future violence. Her eyes move down Garrett’s body and back up again.

He clears his throat. “Your rehearsal.”

“Mhm.”

“We should go.”

“Mhm.”

She holds the door open. Garrett moves past her, careful not to brush against her while the other three watch with the unbearable stillness of men witnessing something they intend to discuss at length the second the hallway clears.

She follows Garrett outside. The door swings shut behind them. For three silent steps, Garrett walks at her side with her tote over his shoulder and his jaw held tight.

Then she says, “Yes, ma’am?”

His eyes close briefly. “Please don’t.”

The laugh gets out before she can stop it, warm and quiet despite the ache in her head.

Garrett looks over. The embarrassment remains high across his cheekbones, but something softer reaches his mouth when he hears her. He slows slightly to match her careful pace, one hand hovering near her back without touching.

She lets him hover. For now.

notes from me – OKAY I KNOW SOME OF YOU WANTED GARRETT TO SUFFER FOR LONGER BUT PLS TRUST!!! let me cook i promise i promise!! but anyway i was so so nervous to post this chapter so i really hope you enjoy it babes!! please let me know your thoughts and ideas and everything, i love hearing all your thoughts!! 💌

to be notified when i post new fics, follow @kooksandpearls-library and turn on notifications! i no longer use a taglist for garrett fics.

She follows Sophie’s line of sight mostly because the girl is already waving both arms like she’s flagging down a rescue helicopter.

A group of guys is coming toward them through the foot traffic, broad shoulders and dark coats breaking apart the smaller bodies moving the opposite way. Dean Di Laurentis is the easiest to recognise. His coat is open despite the cold, his hair still perfectly arranged, one hand lifted in answer to Sophie’s wave.

Beside him are Tucker and Logan, both familiar enough from Briar parties and the occasional photograph Dean has posted from some ski trip or boat or stupidly expensive dinner. Beau is there too, laughing at something Logan says.

And then there’s Garrett Graham. Her eyes pass over him once, then come back. Then, humiliatingly, leave and return for a third time as if the first two inspections could not possibly have collected enough evidence.

Oh. The plot has thickened.

Garrett had been hot at the hockey house. Obviously. She hadn’t mistaken him for an accountant while he leaned against the wall in his own team sweatshirt and tried to call her Madison. 

She had seen the curls, the shoulders, the grin. She had noticed enough to let him spend nearly an hour asking around for her name rather than simply walking away and forgetting he existed.

But that had been hockey-house hot. Campus hot. A little drunk beneath ugly lighting with a red cup in his hand and an entire building arranged to remind everyone he was important. This is something else. 

The dark knit sweater sits snug across his chest and arms, fitted enough to show exactly how much body is hidden beneath it. A thin chain catches at the base of his throat whenever he moves. His jeans are loose, riding low over heavy tan Timberlands, and he walks with an easy, grounded weight that makes the women coming toward him shift aside before they consciously decide to.

He walks, she thinks faintly, like whatever is happening beneath those jeans requires consideration.

Which is a disgusting thought to have on a public street. She has it twice.

Garrett sees her just as Dean reaches them. There’s a flicker of recognition across his face, quick but unmistakable, before his mouth curves. 

Dean sweeps Sophie into a hug and kisses the side of her head. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I live here, idiot.”

“No, you don’t. You live at school nine months of the year and terrorise Manhattan recreationally.”

Sophie rolls her eyes. “That’s still living here.”

He laughs and turns, attention landing on her. “There she is.”

Dean hugs her with the easy familiarity of someone she has known through Christmas parties, charity dinners and summers where both their families kept ending up in the same places without anyone admitting they had coordinated it. He smells expensive and cold from outside.

“Your mother told mine you were home,” he says as he releases her.

She scrunches up her nose. “That sentence made me want to walk into traffic.”

“Yeah, well, our mothers are obsessed with each other,” Dean grins, then gestures carelessly at the men behind him. “You know everyone, right?”

She looks past him. Garrett’s still watching her.

“Yeah,” she says, because her voice has apparently decided to become perfectly normal at the least convenient moment. “More or less.”

Logan leans in for a quick hug, Tucker offers her a warm, slightly apologetic smile as though he already knows whatever Dean is planning will become everybody’s problem, and Beau greets Sophie by name. Garrett waits until last.

Up close, the sweater is worse. His shoulders are worse. The little glimpse of chain at his collar is so much worse she briefly considers whether she has been unknowingly ovulating for the entire length of Mercer Street.

“Hockey boy,” she says.

His smile pulls wider. “Manwhore girl.”

Her friends go silent with the speed and precision of animals spotting movement in tall grass. She arches one brow. “That isn’t what I called myself.”

“No, but it’s the only name you gave me.”

“I gave you my actual name eventually.”

“After I conducted a campus-wide investigation.”

She rolls her eyes. “It was forty minutes.”

“Forty-seven.”

She stares at him. “You timed it?”

Garrett’s eyes move over her face, dark and amused, then dip for one brief second to the fur folded at her throat. “Maybe.”

“Oh, that’s embarrassing for you.”

“It worked.”

Before she can answer, Dean looks between them. His head turns once toward Garrett, once back toward her, his expression brightening with a level of interest that should legally require a permit. “You two know each other?”

“Barely,” she says.

“At a deep spiritual level,” Garrett says at the same time.

She gives him a flat look. “You forgot my name while speaking directly to me.”

“And then I learned from adversity.”

Tucker makes a quiet sound that might be a laugh. Logan looks delighted already. Dean, naturally, looks ready to cancel every other plan he has ever made. “Okay. Great. We’re all going out together.”

“We’re already going out,” Sophie points out.

“Perfect. So are we.”

“To where?” her other friend asks.

Dean gestures vaguely down the street, as if New York has been waiting for him to choose from it. “Next place.”

“That’s not a place,” Tucker says.

“It will be when we get there.”

There’s some discussion about a club downtown that Sophie knows, another place Logan heard about from a guy on the team, and whether the table Dean has access to is real or the result of him once again treating his surname as a universal keycard.

She hears almost none of it. Garrett has shoved his hands into his pants pockets, which pulls the knit tighter over his arms. He’s standing half-turned toward Dean, listening, his weight settled back on one heel. 

Every now and then his eyes return to her, not lingering long enough to be called staring, but doing it often enough that she feels each glance like the brush of fingers along the exposed skin above her dress.

It’s been a little while since she has had sex.

Not an alarming length of time, nobody needs to establish a welfare committee. She’s been busy, and the last man she entertained spoke about venture capital for twenty-two uninterrupted minutes.

Still. It’s been long enough. Getting back on the horse is healthy. Sensible, even. Her eyes drift down Garrett’s body once more, taking in the heavy boots and the loose denim and the sheer size of him.

That’s a very large horse.

“Are you coming?” Garrett asks.

Her gaze snaps to his face. His mouth is twitching.

She narrows her eyes. “Where?”

“The club.”

The bastard knows she was looking. She steps closer as the rest of the group starts moving, letting the fur coat fall open just slightly at her throat. Garrett’s eyes drop before he catches them. Better.

“Try not to lose track of my name on the way,” she says.

His smile turns slow. “Think I’ve got it now.”

The club is beneath a hotel with no sign outside and a doorman who looks at Dean for approximately two seconds before unclipping the rope.

“See?” Dean says, glancing back at Tucker as they descend the narrow stairwell. “Real table.”

The music reaches them before the room does, bass climbing through the stairs and into the bones of her feet. Downstairs, everything is low red light and mirrored walls, bodies packed beneath a ceiling deliberately made to feel too close. 

Someone takes their coats. Someone else appears with champagne Dean insists he didn’t order, which means he absolutely ordered it.

She turns away from the coat check, smoothing one hand down the side of her dress. Garrett stops speaking.

It’s subtle enough that nobody else catches it. Logan is arguing with Dean about the table. Beau has already disappeared toward the bar. Her friends are being drawn into a conversation with girls they know from Spence. But she sees Garrett’s mouth close.

The coat had hidden most of the dress. Without it, the black silk skims close over her body and ends high against her thighs, while lace climbs over her chest in thin, delicate shapes that reveal skin. The back dips low. She had chosen it because it made her legs look excellent and because her mother had once called it a little severe, which had been all the encouragement required.

Garrett looks from her heels to the lace at her chest, then drags his eyes back to her face with visible effort.

She pretends to check her bag. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

She tilts her head, smiling. “You look confused.”

“I’m adjusting.”

“To what?”

His gaze flicks down once more, quick and unrepentant now. “New information.”

Heat slides pleasantly beneath her skin. “Try to keep up.”

He huffs a breath. “I’m trying.”

Dean pushes a glass of champagne into Garrett’s hand, breaking the line between them. Garrett takes it without looking away from her.

The first half-hour passes around them rather than through them. Their group expands and contracts as people recognise Dean, then Logan, then Garrett. Girls approach the table with that particular bright confidence athletes attract, already knowing the answer they want before asking a question.

Garrett is polite. He smiles. He leans down to hear people over the music. He doesn’t touch anyone. She notices this despite having absolutely no reason to.

She also notices when he notices a man at the bar offering to buy her a drink. Garrett’s jaw shifts once before he lifts his own glass to his mouth.

Interesting.

She refuses the drink, because she already has one and because the man has a scarf tied around his neck indoors. Then she turns back toward the table and catches Garrett watching.

“What?” she asks when she reaches him.

“Nothing.”

“That looked like something.”

He takes a slow sip of whiskey. “Thought you might’ve found your next victim.”

She glances back at the scarf. “Please. I have standards.”

Garrett looks down at her. “Do you?”

Her mouth opens in theatrical offence. “You’re standing dangerously close for someone who’s saying things like that.”

The music shifts, something heavier moving through the speakers. Around them, the dance floor packs tighter, hands lifting through red light, the mirrored wall flashing pieces of skin and jewellery and open mouths.

Garrett leans closer, his voice warm near her ear. “You gonna threaten me all night?”

A shiver moves over the back of her neck, too quick and fine to hide. She turns her face toward his. They’re close enough now that she can see the faint shadow along his jaw, the small movement of his throat above that stupid chain.

“Depends,” she says. “Are you going to do anything worth threatening?”

His eyes drop to her mouth. Something settles over his face, darkening the amusement without removing it.

“You tell me,” he says.

She could stand there and keep sparring with him. She could let the entire night collect itself in little looks and unfinished sentences, then return home alone and think about his shoulders while pretending she had made a point.

Instead, she puts her glass on the table and holds out her hand. “Come dance.”

Garrett looks down at her fingers, then back up. “You ask everyone like that?”

“No.” She curls her fingers once. “I usually don’t have to ask.”

His hand slides into hers, large and warm enough to swallow it entirely. “Lucky me.”

She leads him into the crowd before her body can do anything humiliating about the contact. The dance floor is hotter near the centre, all perfume and sweat and the sweet chemical fog spilling from a machine above them. 

Garrett stays close behind her as they move through, one hand briefly touching the small of her back whenever somebody presses too near. It should feel presumptuous. It feels useful. Worse, it feels natural, his palm broad and steady against the bare dip above her dress.

She finds a pocket of space and turns to face him. For the first minute, they’re almost respectable.

Garrett moves better than she expects. Easy in his body in the way athletes tend to be, shoulders loose, weight shifting naturally beneath the music. His eyes stay on her, mouth curving whenever she catches him watching.

She steps closer. He looks down at the diminishing space between them. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

“You always this friendly in New York?”

She smirks. “I’m being welcoming.”

“To the city?”

“To you.”

Garrett’s eyebrows lift. “That so?”

She turns before answering, putting her back to his chest. His hands catch her hips on instinct. The reaction moves through both of them at once. She feels it in the way his fingers tighten against the silk, then deliberately loosen as if he’s giving her space to change her mind. She doesn’t. She settles back, letting the music move through her knees and hips, the hard length of him aligned behind her.

Jesus Christ. He’s even bigger from this angle.

His chest brushes her shoulders when he bends, mouth near her ear. “This your idea of welcoming?”

She grins, though he cannot see it properly. “You complaining?”

“Trying to understand local customs.”

“Keep your hands where they are and you’ll learn.”

A laugh leaves him, low and warm against her neck. His thumbs move once over her hips, almost absent, and her stomach tightens. She starts slowly because she’s not completely cruel. Then the chorus drops, bodies surging around them, and she rolls her hips back into him.

Garrett’s breath stops. It’s only half a second, a small interruption against her hair, but she feels it. Feels the way his hands clamp more securely around her, the heavy press behind her turning unmistakable beneath those baggy jeans.

There you are.

She does it again.

His mouth touches her ear when he says, “You’re doing that on purpose.”

“Doing what?”

He laughs without much humour. “Right.”

She turns her head just enough that her cheek brushes his jaw. “You seemed very confident at your party.”

“I am confident.”

“Are you?”

His fingers spread over her waist, thumbs nearly meeting beneath the lace at her sides. “You want proof?”

The words settle low in her body. Heat pulses between her thighs, thick and immediate, and suddenly the red wine explanation seems stupid. The pavement hadn’t made him look better. The city hadn’t done anything. Garrett is simply built like a personal failing and currently hard against her ass.

She looks back at him over her shoulder. His eyes are darker now, the teasing dragged thin beneath something focused and hungry. He’s still letting her control it. Still waiting, even with his hands on her and his body saying something much less patient behind her.

That restraint does more to her than it should. She turns in his arms. Garrett makes room, but his hands remain at her hips. Their bodies stay close enough that the lace over her chest brushes his sweater with each breath.

She slides her hands up his chest, feeling the dense muscle beneath the knit, and nearly loses the next sentence to the fact that he’s even harder than he looks. “Come home with me.”

Garrett goes very still. The music keeps pounding around them, light moving over his face in red and black. His hands tighten once at her waist. “How much did you drink?”

The question surprises her enough that she blinks. “Excuse me?”

“You were drinking before, and champagne here.”

“I had two glasses of wine over dinner and approximately four sips of champagne because Dean ordered one that tastes like shit.” She tilts her head. “Are you rejecting me?”

Garrett’s mouth twitches, but he doesn’t let the joke move him off the point. “I’m asking.”

She studies him for a moment. The confidence is still there, but it’s no longer careless. He wants her. She can feel exactly how much. He’s simply not going to make wanting her the only relevant fact in the room.

Something unexpectedly warm shifts beneath her ribs. “I’m not drunk,” she says. “I’m making a completely sober bad decision.”

“That supposed to reassure me?”

“No. It’s supposed to get you into a car.”

His grin returns slowly. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah.” He bends until his mouth is near her ear again. “Let’s make your bad decision.”

They don’t tell everyone immediately because Dean would become unbearable. She retrieves her coat while Garrett finds his. By the time they reach the stairs, Tucker has noticed anyway. His eyes move from Garrett’s face to her hand wrapped around his sleeve, then lift with quiet understanding.

“You leaving?” Tucker asks.

Garrett nods once. “Yeah.”

Tucker glances at her, not judgemental, only checking something she cannot quite name. She gives him a small, easy smile.

“Have fun,” he says.

Logan hears that and turns. “Who’s having fun?”

“No one,” Garrett says.

Dean looks up from the table. His eyes sharpen instantly. “Wait.”

She pulls Garrett toward the stairs. “Goodnight, Dean.”

“Wait. Are you guys–”

The music swallows the rest as the door shuts behind them. Outside, the cold hits her hot skin so violently she laughs. Garrett looks down at her while the attendant brings their coats, his cheeks faintly flushed from the club, curls pushed messier than before.

“What?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

“You keep looking at me weird.”

She accepts her coat, then lets Garrett hold it while she slides her arms into the sleeves. His hands settle briefly at her shoulders, adjusting the fur around her before stepping back.

“I’m processing new information,” she says.

He recognises his own line and laughs. “About?”

Her eyes travel pointedly down the front of him.

Garrett’s face changes. “Jesus Christ.”

“What?”

“You’re not subtle.”

“I’m wearing lace to my waist in December. Did I seem committed to subtlety?”

The car ride uptown is fifteen minutes of concentrated poor judgement. She takes the middle seat despite there being no reason to, her thigh pressed along Garrett’s while Manhattan moves silver and black outside the windows. His hand rests near his knee at first.

Then she places her own over it. His fingers turn beneath hers, threading through. It’s a strangely intimate thing to do on the way to have sex with someone she barely knows. 

That thought arrives, waits for her to feel alarmed, then leaves when Garrett’s thumb strokes once along the side of her finger.

Her building rises above the park in pale limestone and glass, every window lit warm against the dark. The doorman greets her by name, opens Garrett’s door and very carefully doesn’t look at their joined hands.

Garrett tips his head back as they cross the lobby, taking in the stone, the enormous arrangement of white flowers, the chandelier descending through three floors of open space. “This is where you live?”

“One of them. This where I live when I’m home.”

The private elevator doors open. She steps inside and presses the button for the penthouse. Garrett looks at the single option above the lobby, then at her.

She folds her arms. “Don’t.”

His laugh bounces softly off the mirrored walls. “One of your homes is the most– like, Dean answer you could’ve given.”

“Do not compare me to Dean while I’m trying to sleep with you.”

“That’s fair.” Garrett steps closer as the elevator begins to rise. “Really kills the mood.”

She looks up at him. “Is the mood dead?”

His gaze drops to her mouth. “Not even a little.”

He kisses her before the doors open. There’s no careful beginning to it. His hand comes around the back of her neck, warm beneath her hair, and his mouth finds hers with the confidence he’s been holding behind his teeth all night. 

She catches the front of his sweater in both fists, dragging him closer until her back touches the mirrored wall and his body settles against hers. He kisses like he talks: a little smug, a little demanding, deeply pleased whenever she pushes back.

Her lips part beneath his. Garrett makes a low sound into her mouth when she bites his bottom lip, and the noise sends a quick, molten rush through her. One of his hands slips from her neck to her waist, pulling her flush against him.

The elevator chimes. They separate by approximately two inches, and the doors open directly into the penthouse.

Garrett looks past her at the dark sweep of the living room: floor-to-ceiling windows, the park below them, pale furniture arranged around a low marble table, art her mother bought because somebody in Paris said it mattered.

“Holy shit,” he says.

She grabs his hand and pulls him inside. “Don’t make it weird.”

“I’m not making it weird. Your elevator opened into your house.”

She nods seriously. “Our neighbours are very dangerous.”

His head whips toward her. “Your neighbours can access your living room?”

“No, but it sounded mysterious.”

He laughs as the doors close behind him. The apartment is silent. Her parents are in Palm Beach until after New Year’s, the staff gone for the night, every lamp controlled by a panel she cannot operate properly despite growing up here. She hits three buttons before the lights near the windows soften on.

Garrett shrugs out of his coat. She takes it and drops both of theirs over a chair that’s almost certainly not meant to hold coats. His eyes track the room once more, curious but not impressed in an overeager way. He doesn’t start asking what things cost. He does not look at her differently.

Instead he glances at the enormous abstract painting above the fireplace and says, “That supposed to be anything?”

“My mother says it’s about grief.”

“It looks like ketchup.”

She stares at him for one second, then laughs so suddenly she has to press her lips together.

“What?” Garrett asks.

“Nothing. I’ve been saying that for four years.”

“So I’m right.”

She shoots him a look. “You’re definitely not cultured enough to be right.”

He steps closer. “You gonna throw me out?”

“Maybe.”

“Before or after?”

Her breath catches slightly.

Garrett’s gaze drops to the lace over her chest. He reaches up, not quite touching, one finger tracing the air near the delicate edge at her collarbone. “This dress has been making my life difficult for two hours.”

“Only two?”

“Started when the coat came off.”

She slides both hands beneath the hem of his sweater, palms meeting warm skin at his waist. His stomach contracts beneath her touch.

“And the sweater?” she asks. “That was an accident?”

Garrett glances down at himself. “It’s a sweater.”

“It’s working very hard.”

His mouth curves. “You’ve been staring all night.”

“So have you.”

“Yeah.” He takes her face in both hands, thumbs resting near her jaw. “I have.”

Then he kisses her again. They nearly knock over the lamp beside the sofa. Garrett catches it one-handed without taking his mouth completely from hers, setting it upright with a muffled laugh when she pushes him back into the console behind him.

“That expensive?” he asks against her lips.

“Probably.”

“Great.”

“Stop backing into things,” she murmurs, her lips brushing his.

His hands slide up her dress, then stop. “Bedroom?”

She looks toward the hallway. “That’s very efficient.”

“I’m trying to protect your furniture.”

She smiles. “How responsible.” She takes his hand again and leads him down the hall.

Her room has barely changed since she left for college, except that her mother replaces things whenever she decides they no longer represent the adult daughter she imagines having. 

The bed is enormous and neatly made, the windows looking south over the city, her old photographs arranged beside newer perfume bottles and jewellery trays. Garrett pauses in the doorway.

She turns. “What now?”

His eyes move over the room, then settle on a framed photograph of her at sixteen in riding clothes, one hand resting on the neck of a chestnut horse.

A grin spreads across his face. “You ride?”

She follows his gaze. “Don’t.”

“You actually ride horses.”

“I used to.”

She grabs his sweater and pulls it over his head. The laugh disappears. So does most of her ability to form language.

Holy fuck.

His body is broad in a way clothing had only suggested, shoulders packed with muscle, chest solid and warm beneath her hands. His stomach is leaner, cut deeply above the waistband of his jeans, a faint trail of dark hair disappearing beneath the loose denim. She stares.

Garrett drops the sweater near his feet. “You okay?”

“No.”

His eyebrows lift.

She reaches for the button of his jeans. “This has become a much more serious situation.”

He catches her wrist, smiling. “Thought you had standards.”

“I have eyes.”

“That’s romantic.”

“I’m not trying to romance you.”

“No?” His hand slides around her waist, fingers finding the zip at the back of her dress. “What are you trying to do?”

She leans closer until her mouth brushes his. “Take a guess.”

Garrett pulls the zip down. The dress loosens over her body, silk slipping from her shoulders beneath his hands. He watches it fall, and this time the expression on his face is not playful at all. His eyes move slowly over the black lace beneath, over her waist and hips and bare thighs, the look so open and concentrated that her skin warms everywhere it touches.

“Fuck,” he says quietly.

The single word does more than an entire prepared speech could have. She steps out of the dress and pushes him backward toward the bed. Garrett lets her. Mostly. His hands remain on her hips as he sits, pulling her between his knees.

Up close, his lashes look offensively dark. His mouth is already swollen from kissing her. She puts one hand beneath his chin and tilts his face up.

“You’re very pretty,” she says.

Garrett’s hands tighten. “Pretty?”

“Mhm.”

His brows furrow. “I’m six-two.”

“Congratulations.”

“I play hockey.”

“I’m sorry.”

He laughs and turns his head, kissing the inside of her wrist. The gesture is so casually soft that she goes still for half a second.

His eyes lift to hers. “Still good?”

The warmth beneath her ribs deepens by a degree. “I’m good.”

His mouth presses to her stomach just above the lace, then lower, one slow kiss near her hip. Her fingers slide into his curls before she’s decided to touch him there.

Garrett looks up. “You want me to slow down?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“I invited you into my parents’ home and took off your clothes.”

“Technically, you only took off my sweater.”

She reaches for his belt. “Do you want to keep arguing?”

“Little bit.”

She opens the buckle. “I can send you back to Dean.”

Garrett immediately catches her around the waist and flips her onto the bed.

A startled laugh breaks out of her as her back hits the duvet, his body coming over hers without crushing, one knee pressing between her thighs. “That was rude.”

“You threatened me.”

Her brow arches. “With Dean.”

“Exactly.”

His mouth finds her neck. She turns her head, giving him more room before she can pretend otherwise. The first drag of his lips beneath her jaw sends heat rushing down her spine. Garrett kisses lower, slower than she expects, one hand spreading over her waist while the other braces beside her head.

For someone with manwhore energy, he’s irritatingly attentive. He watches every small reaction. The way her stomach tightens when his fingers skim beneath the lace. The hitch in her breathing when his mouth closes over her breast through the fabric. The sharp little pull of her hand in his hair when he finally moves the lace aside and takes her nipple into his mouth.

“Garrett,” she breathes.

His eyes lift. The smugness there is unbearable.

“Don’t look so pleased with yourself.”

He drags his tongue slowly, making her back arch before she can stop it. “Hard not to.”

She tugs his hair. Garrett groans against her skin, and the sound goes directly between her legs.

“There,” she says, breathless but triumphant. “Better.”

“You like hurting people?”

“Only athletes.”

“Specific.”

“You’re very annoying,” she gasps.

His hand slides down her stomach. “You’re very wet.”

Her next answer disappears. Garrett pauses at the edge of her underwear, eyes on her face. She nods before he asks, and his fingers move beneath the lace.

The first touch is slow. Almost cautious. Then he feels exactly how ready she is and his forehead drops briefly against her ribs. “Jesus.”

She smiles at the ceiling. “Problem?”

“No.” His fingers slide through her again, gathering the slick heat there before pressing with more purpose. “Just adjusting to new information.”

Her laugh catches when one finger eases inside her.

“Still funny?” he asks.

“Still hate you.”

“Sure.”

He takes his time, which she both appreciates and resents. One finger, then two, curling until the pressure catches somewhere that sends her hand flying to his shoulder. Garrett watches her face as though this is the only subject he’s ever studied seriously, his thumb moving in slow circles that make her thighs tense around his wrist.

It’s been a while. Her body is making that information humiliatingly clear.

Garrett bends and kisses her, swallowing the sound that escapes when he finds the angle again. She grips the back of his neck, dragging him closer, kissing him harder because every careful little stroke of his hand is pulling her apart too quickly.

“You always this impatient?” he murmurs against her mouth.

“You always talk this much?”

“Usually more.”

She bites his lip. His fingers press deeper in retaliation.

Her hips lift. “Fuck.”

“There she is.”

“Don’t start.”

“At the party you looked at me like I was wasting your time.”

“You were,” she mumbles.

His thumb moves faster. “Am I wasting it now?”

The answer breaks into a moan before it becomes a word. Garrett’s mouth curves against her throat, but whatever smug thing he might have said stays there. His other hand slips into hers against the mattress, fingers locking, and he keeps touching her until the tension low in her stomach twists too tight to hold.

It hits quickly enough to embarrass her. Her thighs close around his hand, breath breaking as the room goes white and soft at the edges. Garrett kisses beneath her ear, his fingers slowing but not stopping, working her through the sharpest part until she pushes weakly at his shoulder.

“Okay,” she gasps.

He lifts his head. “Okay good or okay stop?”

“Stop.”

His hand stills immediately. The obedience of it lands strangely. Comfortably. She lies beneath him breathing hard, skin hot against the cool sheets, and Garrett waits without crowding her, pressing a brief kiss to her jaw.

“You good?”

She looks up at him. His hair is wrecked from her hands, mouth damp, shoulders filling the space above her. “Very irritatingly good,” she says.

His grin flashes. “Yeah?”

“Take your jeans off before I reconsider.”

Garrett stands beside the bed, and she props herself onto her elbows to watch. He opens the button. Pushes the jeans and boxers down together. Her eyes widen.

Oh.

Oh, he had not been exaggerating through the denim.

Garrett catches her expression and looks down at himself, then back at her. “What?”

“You’re kidding.”

A laugh escapes him. “That bad?”

She considers the size of him with the grave concentration of someone reviewing building plans. “I have things to do tomorrow.”

He drops his head, laughing into one hand. “Holy shit.”

“This isn’t funny!”

“It’s a little funny.”

She points at him. “You should disclose that before leaving the house.”

“Put it on my medical alert bracelet?”

“Something tasteful.”

Garrett climbs back over her, still smiling. “We can stop.”

She wraps one leg around his waist. “Don’t be stupid.”

His expression settles. “Condom?”

She points toward the bedside drawer. “There.”

He reaches for it, finds the box and glances at her. “You keep these in your childhood bedroom?”

“I’m wealthy, Garrett, not irresponsible.”

“Very inspiring.”

Her eyes narrow at him. “You have one in your wallet, don’t you?”

He pauses.

She gasps. “Of course you do.”

“I went out with Logan and Dean. It felt responsible.”

“Manwhore,” she mutters.

“You started it.”

He tears the packet open, then looks at her again when he is ready, the humour easing from his face. “Tell me if you want me to slow down.”

“I will.”

“Or stop.”

“I know.”

Garrett settles between her thighs, one hand beneath her knee. The first press of him makes both of them go quiet.

She’s warm and loose from his fingers, but he’s still a lot, the stretch sharpening enough that her nails catch at his shoulder. Garrett stops immediately. “Too much?”

“No.” Her eyes close briefly. “Just wait.”

His hand smooths over her thigh. “Okay.”

He stays there, perfectly still despite the tension running through his body, mouth pressing slow kisses to her cheek, her jaw, the corner of her lips. Her body eases around him by degrees.

She opens her eyes. “You can move.”

“You sure?”

“Garrett.”

“Right.”

He pushes in slowly. The breath leaves her in a long, shaking pull. Garrett’s forehead drops to hers, his own breathing rougher now, control showing in the hard line of his shoulders and the careful grip of his hand at her thigh.

“Fuck,” he whispers when he is finally all the way inside her.

She cannot make fun of him because her entire nervous system is busy reorganising itself around the fact that he feels even bigger than he looked, which seems unfair.

“You okay?” he asks.

Her eyes narrow faintly. “I’m good. You’re just… whoa.”

His laugh comes out strangled. “Whoa?”

“Move before I insult you properly.”

The first stroke is slow, drawing nearly all the way out before he pushes back in. Her head tips into the pillow. His mouth catches hers, kissing her through the second, then the third, each movement loosening into something deeper and steadier as her body adjusts.

He feels good. Good in a way that catches her by surprise. The weight of him over her. The broad palm holding her thigh. The warmth of his mouth and the small, involuntary sounds he makes whenever she drags her nails over his shoulders.

She had expected a performance from him. Something polished and self-satisfied, Garrett Graham proving why half the campus knows his name.

Instead he gets messy. His curls fall into his eyes. His breathing breaks whenever she tightens around him. His jaw goes slack when she pulls him closer with both legs and he drives deeper, the practiced control slipping just enough to show her what she’s doing to him. That’s better than confidence.

She scratches lightly down his back. Garrett’s hips snap forward, harder than before. The bed shifts beneath them.

“Oh,” she says, delighted despite the breathlessness. “You like that.”

His eyes open. “Careful.”

She does it again.

“Fuck.” He drops his face into her neck, laughing once without humour. “You’re a problem.”

“You followed me home.”

“You dragged me.”

Her laugh turns into a sharp moan when he changes the angle, lifting her thigh higher over his arm. Garrett’s mouth curves against her throat.

“Not funny now?”

“You’re still annoying.”

“But?”

She digs her nails into him. “Don’t fish for compliments.”

He kisses her hard, rhythm roughening as the humour burns back into heat. The headboard begins tapping softly against the wall. His chain swings between them, cool metal brushing her chest before warming against her skin.

Her hands move everywhere they can reach: his back, his hair, the hard line of his arm beside her head. Garrett watches her whenever he can, eyes dark and intent, catching each shift in her body until he recognises the pressure beginning to build again.

His hand slips between them. The first circle of his thumb makes her hips jerk beneath him.

“Yeah?” he murmurs.

“You sound smug.”

“I sound focused.”

“You sound–” The next word disappears when he does it again, pressure firm and exact while he keeps moving inside her.

Garrett’s mouth finds her ear. “What do I sound like?”

She turns her head and bites his jaw.

His groan shudders through both of them. “Jesus Christ.”

“There,” she breathes. “Now you sound better.”

He laughs, ruined and low, and thrusts harder. The room narrows around them. The dark windows. The city spread in lights beyond the glass. The expensive quiet of her parents’ apartment being steadily dismantled by the soft knock of the bed and Garrett breathing her name against her throat.

Her orgasm climbs slower this time, building beneath every stroke until her entire body feels pulled tight around it. Garrett senses the change. His arm slides beneath her back, holding her closer, his mouth moving along her jaw in kisses that become less coordinated with every breath.

“Come on,” he murmurs. “I’ve got you.”

The words should be too intimate from him. They’re not. Her legs tighten around his waist. The pressure breaks bright and hot, dragging a cry out of her before she can swallow it. Garrett kisses her through it, hand steady between them, body moving until she starts trembling beneath him.

“Fuck,” he breathes. “That’s it.”

She clings to him through the aftershocks, nails biting into his shoulder. Garrett’s rhythm loses its careful shape. His face presses into her neck, breath coming apart against her skin.

“Where?” he asks, voice rough.

“Inside.” She catches his jaw, making him look at her. “Condom, remember?”

Something flashes through his eyes. “Yeah.”

A few more uneven thrusts and his whole body locks over hers, mouth falling open around a low, broken sound. She watches the last of his control go, watches his brows pull together and his forehead drop to hers as he comes.

For several seconds, neither of them moves. Garrett’s weight settles carefully onto one elbow. His chest rises hard against hers, chain lying warm between them. She can feel the rapid beat of his heart where their bodies meet.

He lifts his head eventually. His hair is a disaster. There’s a red mark beginning near his shoulder from her nails. His mouth looks thoroughly kissed and slightly stunned. She smiles before she can stop herself.

Garrett narrows his eyes. “What?”

She traces the scratch with one fingertip. “You look a little less confident.”

He glances down at her, still beneath him, legs tangled with his. “Do I?”

“A little.”

“Interesting.” He rolls his hips once, barely. Her breath catches. Garrett’s grin returns.

“You’re deeply irritating.”

He laughs and kisses the heel of her palm before carefully pulling away.

She watches him deal with the condom, expecting the strange shift that sometimes follows. The sudden awareness of a near-stranger in the room. Clothes on the floor. The body beside hers no longer obscured by wanting.

It doesn’t arrive. Garrett comes back with water from the bathroom, naked and completely comfortable, passing her the glass before climbing into bed again.

“You found the glasses?” she asks.

“There were twelve beside the sink.”

“My mother thinks hydration should feel formal.”

He settles against the headboard. “Your bathroom’s bigger than my bedroom.”

“Don’t tell Dean. He’ll become competitive.”

“Dean’s bathroom’s probably bigger than my house.”

She drinks, then hands him the glass. Garrett takes a long swallow from the same side without thinking about it. That shouldn’t feel intimate either.

She shifts beneath the sheet, studying the scratches along his shoulder. “Did I hurt you?”

Garrett looks down. “No.”

“You hesitated.”

“It stings.”

Her brows lift. “So I hurt you.”

“You say that like you’re proud.”

She tilts her head. “I’m… collecting information.”

“About?”

She drags one nail lightly over his chest. Garrett’s stomach tightens. “New information,” she says.

His gaze drops to her hand. “You planning a follow-up study?”

She looks at him. This was supposed to get him out of her system. That had been the point somewhere between the restaurant and the club, before the sweater came off and his hand stopped the second she asked and he kissed her like her reactions mattered more than his reputation.

Instead, Garrett’s sitting naked in her childhood bed, drinking from her water glass, hair destroyed by her fingers, looking far too pleased by the possibility that this might happen again.

The plot hasn’t merely thickened. The plot has developed shoulders, put on a chain and followed her home.

She takes the glass from his hand and sets it on the bedside table. “Maybe.”

Garrett catches her waist when she moves toward him, guiding her into his lap beneath the sheets.

“Good,” he says.

She settles over his thighs, trying not to react to the first unmistakable sign that they might not be finished for the night. “Don’t get cocky.”

His hands move slowly up her back. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

He’s lying, obviously. She kisses him anyway.

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it was something you rarely noticed half the time. you could have made a list on when jack clicks his tongue.

every time he’d slip his cock inside of you, every time you had an orgasm, every time you did something he usually would correct (both in bed and at work), and every time you let out a whimper because he had done something you’d particularly enjoyed.

you never questioned it. either because you were too caught up in your pleasure to care, or you were too caught up in your pleasure to hear.

no matter the reason he did it, you didn’t care to ask or know. it was just another one of your boyfriends weird quirks to you.

today was the day you found out why.

you were doing your normal rounds of patients in the ER, talking to the ones who seemed lonely and making your visit quick and simple for the ones who wanted to do anything but talk.

you bumped into jack while you were walking down the hall, head down and distracted by the chart you were reading in your hands.

jack reached out to steady you by your shoulders, raising his eyebrows in amusement.

“it would be helpful if you looked where you were going.” he teased, but you gave him a half smile in response. it was nothing against him or something he’d done, you were simply distracted in returning some results to the nurses station.

jack knew this is exactly the moment he’d been waiting for ever since he started clicking his tongue when you were around.

he discovered clicker training by complete accident. he had overheard two patients talking about it when he entered their exam room, and his curiosity got the better of him. he asked them what that was, assuming it was for their pets at home.

his curiosity and interest only grew when they pair flushed and became avoidant with their eyes and answers. he didn’t push the couple, but it was the first thing he researched when he got off his shift.

and that’s how jack abbot formed the idea to attempt to clicker train his girlfriend.

and he was about to find out if his months of discreet training had paid off.

jack shook his head and clicked his tongue, watching with a smug smirk as you instantly straightened up and met his eyes with almost alarming attention.

“what?” you asked sharply, shifting nervously. “i’m sorry, jack. i’ll pay proper attention next time.” you apologised profusely, trying to ignore the sudden rush of heat in your cheeks and the pulse between your thighs.

you looked confused and nervous when jack started laughing. “what?” you urged, biting your inner cheek as he crossed his arms. “what are you laughing at?”

jack didn’t respond, he only reached up his hand to ruffle your hair in a way that felt condescending. “nothing, sweetheart. i’m just glad i didn’t do all of that work for nothing.”

that made you frown even harder. “what does that mean?” you demanded, pushing his bicep teasingly.

jack bent down so he was close enough to whisper in your ear. “just continue with your rounds. maybe if you’re good i’ll tell you later.” he murmured.

you watched as he turned to walk away, a puzzled expression taking over the embarrassed one.

you only realised what he was referring to when he clicked his tongue again, and you realised how immediately you straightened yourself.

your boyfriend had clicker trained you without you knowing.

Jack looked up at the ceiling, shaking his head as his hands went to rest on his hips. When he looked back down, he found you walking toward the nurse and it suddenly made complete sense. 

He let out a sigh. “This has to be a joke.”

His eyes, as they did more often than was appropriate, caught on you, hair coming down loose from where you’d pinned it, the scrubs lopsided at one hip, riding lower than where they’d started at the beginning of the night. You turned to say something to the guy quickly, and the movement caught the slip, your scrub top moving up half an inch, and Jack’s eyes went there before his brain could tell him that was wrong, some groove in him that noticed you before it noticed anything useful. He had a second of pure, unhelpful distraction before his brain reminded him that he was an attending and had things to do. 

“I actually think it’s funny,” Lena said, shrugging.

Of course it had something to do with you. He should’ve figured it out the second he saw the guy standing there with his hands in the pouch of his scrubs, rocking heel to toe like the floor was just too exciting to be standing on. Nobody loitered around the ambulance bay at midnight for good reason. People came through those doors bleeding or they didn’t come through them at all, and this guy had shown up with nothing wrong with him, except maybe a case for some lovesickness. 

“I’m gonna make this stop,” Jack said, already pushing himself away from the nurse’s station.

Lena’s eyes widened slightly. “Don’t say anything that gets you sat down with HR.”

“She can goddamn try me,” he said, and went. Also because Jack was fairly sure you would never report him to HR. 

He crossed the floor and caught the tail-end of your conversation as he closed in.

“ — just tell me when you’re free, that’s all I’m asking,” the guy was saying.

You were already half-turned, already gone as you waved a hand loosely beside you. “I don’t know, I just don’t think we should try again.” 

Jack blew out a breath, standing a few feet short of you, your back facing him. Why was he not surprised? He’d been keeping tally without meaning to, and he knew that was embarrassing. There was the radiology fellow who’d started hand-delivering films that very well could’ve gone through the system; the travel nurse who’d washed through in six weeks and left the floor faintly weird in his wake; the anaesthesia resident who now took the long way around the department if he saw you at the end of it, as though he were a dog who’d learned the fence was electric. And now this one, apparently, Peds with his whole hopeful heart hanging out in Jack’s department. 

“You’re so sweet for coming down here,” you practically crooned at him, shifting on your heels, eyes flicking down to the form in your hand. “But I really do have a whole long night ahead of me, and I know my answer’s not gonna change, so I won’t make you wait around for it, okay?” 

Jack fought the urge to roll his eyes when you said the words with the upward lilt of a woman sending a toddler back to his mother. He wanted to laugh a little when he saw that the guy had taken it standing up like it was a gift. 

The hell of it was that Jack understood the man. He understood every last one of them because he stood next to you fifty hours a week, had been doing so for three years, and whatever the department thought of him after his consistent therapy, he was not carved out of stone. 

Jack was afraid that if he hadn’t been your attending these last four years and a little younger, wearing his heart on his sleeve, he’d have been eating out of the palm of your hand. 

You gave the guy a there-there pat, and it was only then did his eyes land on Jack, who he probably knew was your fucking attending. You turned then, and immediately said, “Oh, Dr. Abbot, I’ve got the guy in six’s labs back, the potassium —”

“Mhm.” Jack’s hands came up and landed on your shoulders before you’d finished the sentence, squaring you off the spot where you stood and turning you bodily back toward the floor like you were a gurney. 

“It is four-point-nine, but the EKG’s good, so I was gonna recheck in —” 

“Let’s recheck it now,” he said. He kept you moving, his palms broad through the cotton of your scrubs, steering you a few feet till your own feet caught onto the idea. 

You grumbled something under your breath, and once he’d stopped you right in front of six, you turned to face him with your brows raised.

“Say something?” he asked, tipping his chin down.

“You seem like you’re mad at me,” you said. 

“Huh. I do?” He let go of your shoulders — noticing, distantly, the exact second his hands came off and suddenly felt too empty — and reached past you to pluck six’s chart off the tray, more to have something to do with them than needing it. “You’re right. You should recheck in ten minutes.”

“You’re mad at me,” you said again, crossing your arms over your chest. 

He blew out a breath, and suddenly felt just a little silly at getting worked up over a nurse by the doors when there was a large, glowing board behind him full of names that needed his complete, undivided attention. 

You were a senior resident, after all, four years deep, one of his sharpest — you’d treated the guy in six, hadn’t you, you’d flagged it and called for the EKG and made the right call on the recheck before he’d even asked, all while dismantling some man’s hopes. Somehow, your mess and competence ran on the same current. You never let the first touch the second. He’d have loved, some nights, to have an excuse to be mad — a missed lab, a blown line, anything he could write up and point at — and you kept declining to hand him one. All of this meant he was left with this vague swampy irritation, and Jack wasn’t the sort of mentor who liked to hound upon that. 

“No, sweetheart, I just love it when you get random men hanging around the department,” he settled on saying, feeling his shoulders visibly loosen a fraction.

You winced, eyes darting over to the emptiness in front of the doors now. “Sorry.” 

“You’d say it won’t happen again, but we both know better.” He shrugged. Then, he reached out his hand — he wasn’t sure why, except that it just happened naturally — and patted you once on the shoulder, then on the second turned you to face the curtains leading to your patient. “Doctor up.”

And you did, the loose, embarrassed shape of you being replaced in the space of a single breath, being replaced by something Jack had watched grow into you over the years and still hadn’t quite gotten used to. 

Trauma called it in nine minutes later, an MVC, unrestrained driver, GCS dropping in the field. Jack was working on a laceration in four when he heard the crackled warning, and by the time he’d looked up out the curtains, you were already moving, gowned and at the head of the bay calling out assignments like you’d been doing this for a decade.

“I need two units O-neg before he rolls in,” you said, voice pitched high enough to carry without yelling, cutting clean through the perpetual noise of the department. “Somebody get me a second eighteen-gauge ready, and I want an ultrasound in here.”

Donnie and Mateo were already moving, and so were the people around you, falling into your orbit like the room had easily reorganized itself around your voice the second it went up. Jack stood by the curtain, gloves from the lac still on, and found he couldn’t make himself move just yet.

The doors banged open. EMS wheeled the stretcher through fast, calling out vitals over each other, and you were already on the patient’s side before the gurney had fully stopped moving, hands moving on his neck, chest, eyes scanning his pupils in a matter of ten seconds. He began walking over, catching your voice as you called out your reads as someone hung the blood and someone else prepped the ultrasound wand. “Page neuro now.”

“On it,” Mateo said, already moving.

You had both hands on the patient, running the primary survey quickly, confirming, checking, discarding possibilities out in short, clipped sentences Jack recognized as the sound of your brain running six steps ahead of your mouth. Sweat had started on your hairline. You called out for OR to be on standby, eyes flickering around the room and landing on Jack. “OR, please,” you said, aimed at him, brows going up. 

“On it,” Jack said, because there was no way he was going to let you be wrong about needing something and didn’t make sure you got it.

The next six minutes went by fast and loud, in bursts and then suddenly quiet, the room narrowing down on functionality. You stood at the center of it; you called it and ran it. You got the man upstairs stable enough that Walsh didn’t sound worried for one second, and that was a compliment from her. 

Jack watched the whole thing from four feet back, arms crossed, and chipping in when your brain had snagged. He was feeling a heat in his chest helplessly and entirely unprofessional, it was always present when he was able to see, in real-time, how far you’d come from your first day of residency when your hands were a second too slow on the central line and how your voice would pitch up at the end of every read, asking for permission every time instead of stating it like a fact, eyes finding him across the room each time, checking.

There was none of that left in you now, he realized, had done so a long time ago. He thought, watching you now, that this was the closest thing he’d let himself do to falling in years, standing uselessly riveted as he watched a woman he’d taught outgrow the need for him in real time, and finding that instead of the loss he’d expected to feel when the day finally came, all he felt was warm and terrifying and too much like pride. 

When the room had started clearing out, he watched your mouth drop open as you let out a heavy breath, eyes going over to him. The second he watched you realize he was still there, your face shifted, the relief turning into something sharper. 

“Why didn’t you jump in?” You crossed the floor toward him in four hard strides, gloves already peeled off and balled tight in one fist, snapping the second one free with a motion that looked terrifyingly like it wanted to be aimed at him. “His pressure tanked for thirty seconds and you just watched.”

“You had it.”

“You didn’t know that,” you said, voice going up an octave, adrenaline still thrumming through you, hands coming up the gesture at the blood-streaked floor. “I could’ve missed something. You’re the attending, Jack, you’re supposed to catch if I missed something —”

“I would’ve,” he interrupted, stepping in close enough that you had to tilt your head back to keep glaring at him properly. “The second you needed me, I would’ve stepped in. I wasn’t gonna take it from you before you did.” 

“You can’t gamble like that with a patient —” Your chest was rising and falling fast, gloves now crushed in your fist, and he could see the fear catching up now that everything around you had gone quiet enough to let it, something that looked more like fear of yourself than for the patient. “What if I’d frozen —?”

“I knew you wouldn’t.” He reached his hand out, thumb catching a smear of the blood at your jaw you’d accidentally smeared on yourself, wiping it off carefully with the pad of his thumb, and felt you go still under it. “You don’t trust my judgement?”

“You know I do. You just could’ve said something.”

“I could’ve. He dropped his hand from your jaw only to catch your wrist instead. “Didn’t wanna interrupt you being brilliant. Kinda liked watching it happen.”

Your mouth opened, surely to let out some unnecessary retort, and died there when he pressed one slow stroke of his thumb against your wrist, raising a brow. 

“Relax,” he said, voice going rough as he leaned in a little, forcing you to meet his eyes properly. “Just take the win. That’s an order.”

“Now you wanna give orders,” you mumbled.

He barked out a short laugh, letting go of your wrist. “Only when you’re being stubborn for no reason.”   

It was sometime during the second year of your residency when he’d started catching your drift. It had started with a random Friday shift. He’d seen you at the station, elbows on the counter, telling Lena something conspiratorially. Jack was meant to be reading a chart but couldn’t help how his ears had perked up. Anything to get through the shift, he supposed.

“ — no, but he was perfect on paper,” you were saying, “kept his house clean and everything. He told me he kept his plant alive for six years —”

“So, what happened?” Lena said flatly, like she already knew what you were going to say but wanted to hear anyway. 

“He wanted to take me bowling on the second date,” you said through a sigh. “I know how it sounds, but you’ve gotta hear me out —”

“I’m genuinely not going anywhere.”

“ — for the first date, bowling’s fun. But he took me to a nice dinner the first time, he set a standard, and then the second date he goes bowling, which means the effort’s already —” You created a little downward slope with your hand. “And if it’s already sliding on date two, where’s it at on date two hundred? I can already see my marriage with him and it’s bad.”

It seemed you had a criteria, Jack learned then. It was proven even more when he’d heard you talk about your other failed dates, seen them, and learned — without ever wanting to — what they were, to an extent. 

He knew you couldn’t stand a man who ordered for you without asking. He knew you’d written off a fellow for the way he talked about his mother, and another one — an accountant, a rare specimen who had no clue what an EKG was — over a text message you’d read aloud to Ellis in a voice of complete horror, though Jack had never caught what it actually said, only your face while you read it. He knew you gave people precisely three dates, that this was a rule you held if the first and second date went well, three apparently being the magic number at which a person could no longer hide the demon they were going to turn out to be (your words).

He knew, too, that you only allowed one kiss after the first date, if even that. It was never up for negotiation, no matter how beautifully the night had gone, for you never wanted to end up “emotionally overdrawn on an account you hadn’t even opened yet.”

He knew you a man lost real points if, over the three dates, if it involved drinks, he ordered the same one. He knew a man gained them, silently and instantly, for being able to sit in a lull without narrating his way out of it, and that you considered this the single rarest trait in modern dating.

He knew you were looking for something you had no name for and would recognize on sight, which struck him as a hell of a way to run a search.

He’d have told you, if you asked, that he tuned most of the station chatter out as a matter of survival, for while he enjoyed the occasional gossip, he couldn’t very well absorb everyone’s business. And that was true about everyone’s business but yours, apparently, because yours came in clear.

Your business he retained against his own better judgement, and he realized — once, during a slow shift — that he could’ve drawn you a better map of your taste than you seemed to carry yourself. He could’ve told you, if you asked, exactly the kind of man who’d finally clear your bar, and exactly why he had yet to show up. 

It was almost nice, some nights, watching you try anyway. The ER was a place where everyone was kept tethered to the world by a thread, and everyone who worked in it long enough to develop some version of the same calluses. Jack had grown his years ago, and he wore them invisible, occasionally aching, and had come to terms with it being permanent.

Love, for Jack, had stopped being a real noun before you’d shown up, somewhere between things he used to want and things he’d decided weren’t for him anymore.

You still believed in it. You’d watched this place take everything soft out of grown men twice your seniority and somehow walked through the same fire hopeful, still convinced, against every scrap of evidence, that somewhere there was a person worth all that hoping.

For that reason, he had decided to not interrupt your endeavors, not until now, when he noticed you during hand-off before your night shift with him started, in front of Robby, of all people. 

While Jack loved Robby like a brother, he had a documented, department-wide, actuarially reliable seven-week expiration date on every woman he charmed out of this building. He’d heard intra-departmental gossip about him. There was, Jack was fairly sure, a running joke about it that predated your residency by years. 

He knew you definitely were not finding love in his best friend. But Jack felt the buzzing in his mind go quiet and mean watching how you with him.

You laughed at something and Jack lost, for one humiliating second, the thread of what he’d walked over to say. It happened sometimes, more than he’d admit to anyone. Ordinary noises out of you hit him somewhere in his chest before the better part of him flagged it as a problem, and he had to physically clear his throat before finding his footing again. 

“ — Italian’s always good after pulling a double,” Robby was saying. “But I do love some microwave ramen, too, when I’m missing my med student days.” 

“Oh, so your standards have been raised being chief?” you said, and Jack could hear the smile and wariness in it. 

“For sure —”

Jack let out a huff, something resembling a laugh, as his feet planted him between the two of you. He was close enough that his shoulder nudged yours and you had to step back to keep your balance. He felt your weight land for a second against him with a satisfaction he had no, absolutely no business feeling for something so small. So childish.

He turned to Robby, spreading his hands wide, mock outrage. “My resident.”

Robby looked mildly amused, unbothered, so Jack added, before he could respond, “Go home before I report you to HR.”

“You’d do that to me?” 

“In a heartbeat. Have some shame.” Jack kept his shoulder where it was still angled half in front of you, an old, unexamined instinct keeping the line drawn even though Robby had already backed off.

He tipped his head toward the doors, toward the gold light coming up in them, the day shift draining out around you both. “There’s a whole rich life waitin’ for you out there.”

Robby just smiled and pushed off the counter, giving you a small wave before he left.

Jack turned to you then, brows furrowed. “Seriously?”

You let out a short laugh. “Work hard, play hard?” 

“Soundin’ a lot like a frat brother right now. Never have those words been said in an ER,” Jack said. 

“I wasn’t actually going to do it,” you said, rushing the words out with something more honest in them. “For the record. I know what — he’s got a reputation.” You picked at the counter. “I was just talking to him. He’s funny.”

Jack had to recalibrate for a second. “You were talkin’ sweet to him.” 

“I talk sweet to everyone.” You lifted a shoulder, completely unbothered. “You should try it sometime.”

He rolled his eyes at that. He reached over for your cup of coffee sitting between you — closer to his elbow than yours — and drank a sip, eyes going up to the ceiling at the sheer volume of syrup you’d decided you needed in your bloodstream today. “The hell?” he muttered, turning the cup slightly as if that would help. “Are you trying to embalm yourself?”

“Give it back.”

“In a minute.” He took a second sip, slower this time, and watched you over the rim of the cup. Then, he set it back a few degrees off how you’d had it, just to see your jaw tick.

You pulled the cup back in, thumbed it around until the lid faced you again, and drank from it without breaking your explanation. “I’m offended you think I’ll get wine and dined by the chief attending.” You tilted your head. “Give me some credit here. I won’t be his seven weeks.”

“Huh.” He rubbed the back of his neck, which was warm. “Well, good. Don’t think he’ll clear your bar anyway.”

“See, you get it,” you said, pointing a finger at him. “At least someone around here does.” 

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, tipping his head slightly forward that even he hadn’t realized that he had shifted the distance just slightly. “Better than most.”

Your eyes widened slightly at that, and Jack took that as his cue to step back, clear his throat, as he jerked his chin toward the board.

“Alright, time to work. Stop the play,” he said, trying to get his voice the right level. “Go look at chest pain on three.”

“So bossy,” you said, but you were already turning around to go to three.

Well, that’s what he was, wasn’t he? For some reason, he had to remind himself that. 

It was what he had to remind himself as his hands hovered your trembling ones as you tried to pump air into Mrs. Foley’s lungs, knowing she was already gone — had been for a while now, if he was honest — longer than it took you to admit. He knew it, he’d grown the grim ability to recognize when a body stopped being a patient and being someone you were performing compressions on for the family’s sake, for your own need to have done everything. 

He’d let it run anyway, because you hadn’t accepted it yet, and he’d wanted to give you that extra minute to arrive at it on your own. 

Mateo had come up to Jack’s side, snapping his gloves off, the sound of it overshadowed by your own heaving. 

“She has to call it,” he murmured. “You want me to —”

“No.” Jack’s eyes, he felt, could not move away from your distress. “I’ve got her.” 

Mateo looked at him for a moment longer than the moment warranted, and then he stepped back and let Jack be. You were still going, your compressions had gone harder, faster, less like genuine medicine and more like you were pleading with Mrs. Foley herself now. Sweat had gone to the hair at your temple. Your jaw was set in a clench Jack recognized all too well, and for a moment, Jack wished that he didn’t have to be so acutely tuned into watching what the job did to others, the same way it did to him. 

He stepped in behind your shoulder, close, and brought his hand down over yours where they were locked on the old woman’s chest.

“Look at the clock,” he said quietly into your ear.

“One more round —” 

“You’ve done plenty.” He pressed, gently, until your hands stilled under his, and felt your entire body resist it. “You know she was gone before we could’ve even done anything —”

“She’s been my patient for years —” 

Jack knew then that while you may have been an excellent doctor, his senior resident that had bloomed under his mentorship but still could’ve gone without him and done just the same, it wasn’t a good feeling to wonder if the job would dim you the way it had him. 

“I know.” He kept his hands over yours with enough pressure so as to not let you drive them down again. “That’s why it’s yours to call. But you’ve gotta call it, Doctor.”

Your breath hitched as you turned your neck to face him, and there was a pool brimming on your lashline that you kept at bay, nodding. Your hands under his stopped straining upward, and he felt the exact second you accepted it, for it moved through your shoulders and down your spine and left you a little smaller standing there, the fight trickling into the moment after, which Jack always thought was worse. 

“Time of death,” you said, forcing your voice back into the procedural tone, “oh-three-forty-one.” You peeled your gloves off finger-by-finger.

His hand found the small of your back after taking the minute, leading you to the little family consult room with the boxed tissues and fake ficus with a couch that had absorbed more bad news since longer than you or he had worked there. He shut the door with the flat of his hand and let the floor’s noise cut to a hum through the drywall. 

You stood in the middle of the room with your arms crossed, holding yourself, and stayed silent. 

Jack propped himself against the table, arms folded, as he breathed out a small sigh through his nose. He knew you weren’t a talker after the bad ones. Some residents came out of a loss with their mouths running, narrating it into something survivable, and some went quiet and small and had to be waited out, and you were the second kind. So he waited.

You broke it eventually, like he always knew you would have. “I’ve got a butterscotch she gave me seven months ago in my locker still,” you murmured, craning your neck so you were looking at the ceiling. You wiped under your eyes with the heel of your hand roughly. 

“Think I’ve got one, too,” he murmured, wincing as he tried to shift his weight. 

It had been building up for the past few hours, a hot ring of wrong down below the knee where the socket had gone slick and furnace-warm because it was past hour fourteen, when he’d sweated the fit and never changed the liner because there’d been no window that wasn’t already accounted for. He shifted his weight off it, trying again, and reached down to thumb the release, breaking the seal. 

He let out a short, punched out sigh as he pulled himself down onto the chair behind him, one hand balancing himself on the table. “Sorry,” he gruffed out, jaw clenching. 

Your eyes flickered down to the prosthetic limb he was balancing against the pole of the table and you were already moving before he could finish apologizing. You never asked if he needed a hand. You’d learned sometime during your second year that asking him gave him a chance to say no, and you’d quit handing him that chance sometime during your second year, so now you just came. You went down on one knee at the pole of the table.

“Don’t say sorry,” you mumbled, eyes not meeting him.

His jaw stayed tight and he didn’t fight it, fight you. That was a formality and you both knew it, a thing he did with his shoulders and not his hands, but he watched the top of your head and thought — like he always did, each time, and never said out loud — there was no one else on god’s green earth he’d let do this in the way you did. Not the prosthetist, who did it clinically. Not the VA, who did it tired. You did it each time like it was nothing and everything at once, as though this something not worth remarking on. 

He very badly wanted to thank you, despite how small he always felt when you did this. He wanted to tell you that you were, without question, better at this than anyone who was paid to do it.

Your fingers found the socket and went for the liner because you knew the fit went bad and the sweat before it went bad anywhere a person could see, knew he’d have to run it slick and furnace-hot than spend the fourteen minutes off the floor. You rolled it back with the flat of your thumb, easing the trapped heat out of it, and he felt the pressure of the ring of raw below his knee and had to clench his jaw to not let the relief show on his face. You spared him anyway by keeping your eyes down where they’d been.

“You’ll strip your skin doing this,” you said conversationally, the roughness still present in your voice from the code. “You know that. You keep running it past twelve and one of these nights it’s cellulitis and I’m admitting you.” 

“If only I could be so lucky.”

He ducked his head slightly, a part of him wanting to catch the reaction, and he saw how one corner of your lip was barely turned up. 

You thumbed a line of red where the socket’s edge had bitten in, checking it, and your touch went careful around there. “This is new. The edge is catching higher than it was.”

“Went to a new liner last month,” he said, voice low. “Not broke in yet.” 

“Then you break it on your days off. Not on a fourteen hour.” You finally looked up at him, shaking your head with this flat, fond expression he’d come to realize was your favorite way to look at him. “You’d write me up for less.” 

“I’d write you up for a lot less,” he agreed, thinking back on the time you’d fought him tooth-and-nail over staying through a migraine, refusing, point-blank, to hand off a soft rule-out chest pain at eleven when the migraine had started very visibly began creeping up on you. 

He’d caught you before you’d said a word about it because you’d begun squinting at the numbers and pressed the heel of your hand against one eye for a moment too long between patients, thinking nobody was watching. He was, he realized, always watching you in some way.

“Go home,” he’d said quietly, catching you by the elbow outside the curtain. “That’s not a request.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’ve got a migraine.”

“I’ve got a job.” Your jaw had clenched, stubbornly, and Jack had thought that even if he’d put all his strength into it, he wouldn’t have been able to unclench it for you. “I’m not handing off a chest pain because my head hurts. This guy has waited long enough for a bed. I’m not the priority here.”

He’d wanted to tell you that you were, actually, that you were exactly the priority, and watching you white-knuckle forms with your pupils blown different sizes from pain scared him more than any board full of critical pains ever had. But he’d just pulled down the light two notches, told the nurses to shadow eleven’s discharge, and put a bottle of water and two Tylenol on your desk without a word. And thank god, you’d taken the Tylenol and finished the shift standing up because sitting made the room tilt worse, and only taken on non-critical cases. You’d refused until the end that you should’ve gone home three hours earlier.  

Now, you huffed something that was nearly a laugh, your first real once since the code, and went back to setting. And Jack sat there with his arms crossed in the dark with your hands on the worst-guarded part of him and the door shut against the whole floor, and thought about how he believed nobody deserved you. People were vile and sucked and cut in line and let doors swing shut behind them, and you handed out three dates to men who wrote sonnets in your voicemail and couldn’t clear a bar you’d never once lowered for anyone. He’d thought, more nights than he liked to admit, that these people had no idea what they were auditioning for. 

His eyes snagged on you because there was nothing else in this small room worth looking at. There was still salt dried in your lashline from the code. You were a wreck and you were fixing his leg anyway, still half-shaking from a woman you couldn’t save, and it hadn’t occurred to you to stop and put yourself back together first. It never did. Jack had seen the care run out of you before you ever decided to spend it. 

“I’m sorry about Mrs. Foley,” he said.

You shook your head, face still angled down, thumb pausing mid-motion. “I’ll be okay,” you murmured, lifting up one shoulder. “I just hate that she couldn’t get here sooner.”

“You did nothing wrong,” he said plainly. “Family said she’s been feeling off for two days now.”

“I know.” Your voice cracked, betraying the flatness you were trying to present. “Doesn’t make it easier.”

You lifted your head for a moment, then, looking at him with a sad smile he knew you were painting on to get him to stop talking.

He nodded stiffly, tipping his chin down. “Alright. Finish my leg and we’ll run this floor together.”

Up in radiology a few nights later, Jack had gone himself to sort out a reading that had been sitting long and he’d cornered a tech and got what he needed and was already halfway out the door, jacket sleeves still rolled from the last set of compressions, when he saw the guy standing off by the light boxes. 

Younger. A resident, he supposed, in scrubs a size too crisp for someone who’d actually been on the shift long enough to earn wrinkles in them. He’d been watching Jack the whole time — Jack could feel it, the itch of being observed — shifting his weight heel to toe against the linoleum floor. 

“Somethin’ on my face?” Jack said flatly because he really did have to get back to the floor.

“You’re — sorry, you’re Dr. Abbot, right?”

“Last I checked.” 

The guy’s hand came out of his jacket’s pocket, and there was a piece of folded paper in it. Jack looked at it like it was a spider, hoping — no, praying — it had something to do with work.

“Could you give this to her?” the guy asked, and Jack’s hope died, as he stepped closer. “The senior resident on your shift. She’ll — she’ll know who it’s from.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jack murmured, brows pulling in together. “You ever heard of texting, kid?” 

“I did,” he said, and Jack could practically feel the heat radiating off of him. “She stopped answering, so I figured, maybe on paper, she’d actually —”

“Take the hint,” Jack grumbled, snatching the paper out of his hand. Then, as he turned to the door, he said, “You know I work in the ER?” When the guy only nodded quickly, he added, “You know she works in the ER?” 

“I — yeah. Obviously.”

“Then you know she doesn’t need this.” He held up the paper between him and the guy. “She’s got enough on her plate without some guy too chicken to call her handing me a note like I’m her mailman.”

The guy opened his mouth, nose scrunching at Jack’s words, but nothing came out. 

“Yeah.” Jack was already walking, note tucked in his pocket, done with the conversation. “Try calling next time. Or don’t.” 

The guy looked at least a little sheepish, a little ashamed, and Jack thought good, he should feel ashamed. He wasn’t sure what the protocol in dating was now — he’d been just a little rusty and out of the stretch for a stretch of years he preferred not to count in single digits — but he was fairly certain that whatever the rules had curdled up to, this could not possibly be inside them.

He rode the elevator down with the note in his pockets, and he could feel the small stiff square of another man’s hope pressing over the outside of his thigh. 

He found you at your desk, hands running restlessly through your hair as you spoke into the microphone, charting. The words were coming out of you bluntly, mechanic and after saying the same variation a thousand times over. There was a pen behind your ear you’d forgotten about and the residue of a lab value gone blue across the back of your hand where you’d scrawled it hours ago and never washed off.

He stood there for a second before you noticed him, and thought — not for the first time and with the same low irritation he always felt about it — that he had no earthly business being the man this got routed to.

Jack leaned down so his head hovered beside yours, scanning your work on the screen, close enough that his shoulder nearly brushed yours, head tilted to read your screen at an angle that had nothing to do with actually needing to see it. 

“The man wants an espresso martini?” he asked, furrowing his brows as he read over your notes, right by your ear. 

You jumped just slightly and swivelled on your stool to face him, then back at the screen. “Shit — Jack. Announce yourself.” You scanned the words on your notes, shaking your head and already backspacing. “No, that was me talking to myself. Stupid mic picked it up.”

“Long as it’s just the one,” he drawled, staying there in your space a little longer, watching the side of your face instead of the screen now. “Those things sneak up on you.”

“Speaking from experience?” You turned on your stool to face him fully, chin tilting up to meet his eyes, something playful and a little challenging in it. 

“I’ve got a couple decades on you. Everything’s snuck up on me.” 

You held his gaze a little longer, then looked away first, tongue coming out over your lips for a second. He took a small satisfaction in not being the one who blinked first. 

He blew out a breath through his nose, remembering, with reluctance now, what he’d actually come here to do. “Speaking of sneaking up.” He pulled out the note from his pocket. “I got something to deliver to you —”

You furrowed your brows when he handed it to you. “Secret admirer?” you asked jokingly. 

He barked out a short laugh. “Nothin’ secret about it. You ignoring some radiology fellow?”

You grimaced, opening the note and scanning over the words quickly. He could’ve left, but stayed instead and watched you read it. The frown only pulled deeper, and he saw your eye twitch once as you scanned the words.

Against his better judgement, he murmured, “That bad?” 

“Uh — no, it’s okay.” You shrugged stiffly. 

“Huh,” he breathed out, studying you outright now. “Wonder what you’re doin’ to these guys to get them so wound up.”

You chuckled, mostly to yourself. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”  

His chest tightened at that. It was unfair how you could make anything to him sound like something he’d been waiting to hear. He swallowed. “Suppose I would.”

“That an offer, Dr. Abbot?” 

“Might be,” he said, shrugging one shoulder. 

You laughed — surprised, the tension in your shoulders breaking slightly — and shook your head, folding the note back up. “You’re ridiculous. Well, thank you for getting it to me. I’m sorry he bothered you with this —” You swivelled, placing the note on your desk before picking up your phone. “That’s really weird.” 

“That’s one word for it,” Jack said, and left it there, because you’d already turned and had your phone in one hand and the microphone in the other. The small furrow was back between your brows, and he’d learned there was a point past which pushing you got him a brighter, smaller version of whatever you were covering. 

He drifted toward the far end of the station where Mateo was crouched at the crash cart running his palm along the drawers, checking seals, restocking and checking the fact of it on slower nights like this. 

“She okay?” Mateo asked, snapping the drawer, seemingly having caught the interaction. 

“Oh, you know.” Jack leaned a shoulder into the wall, arms crossing. “The belle of our ball. Can’t clock in without collecting a proposal.”

Mateo huffed. “She loves love.”

“That she does.” Jack watched you across the station, the phone lit against your ear now. “Don’t know why she keeps doing that to herself, though.”

“She’s an optimist.” Mateo clicked a seal into place, then moved down the cart. “Thinks someone’s gonna turn out different.”

Jack hummed, then, because the question had been sitting low and unlovely for a couple hours, he asked, “You two give it a run ever?” 

Mateo turned his neck to look up at Jack. “Me and —” He jutted his thumb behind him to vaguely gesture at you. “Her?”

“Mhm.” Jack kept his eyes on you. “You’re close.”

“Nah.” Mateo went back to the cart, shaking his head as he chuckled softly. “I don’t think I’d pass a single one of her tests. Besides, I got my eye on someone.”

“Apparently I don’t make the list either, I guess,” Jack murmured.

Mateo laughed through his nose, eyeing Jack with something new now. “You want to?” 

Jack caught it, reaching his palm and smacking it against Mateo’s curls with no force. “No. Now, do your job.”

“I am —” He laughed through the words, eyes scanning over Jack’s stiffened posture now. “It’s good you don’t, then. Couldn’t handle her anyway.” 

“Sure, I could,” Jack said immediately. 

Mateo’s head turned again, lips curving upwards at Jack’s words, and he felt momentarily blindsided by his own mouth, entirely too honest for something that had started as a joke. 

“Sure, you could,” Mateo teased, drawing out the words.

“Shut it.” Jack grabbed a box of gloves off the cart and set it down two shelves lower than it needed to go, purely to do something with his hands that didn’t involve reaching for Mateo’s collar. “Wasn’t a real question.”

Couldn’t handle you? As if he didn’t know, without having to think about it, that you took the stairs two at a time instead of the elevator when you were annoyed and needed somewhere to put your extra energy, or that you’d started drinking your coffee black on nights a patient reminded you of someone, syrup and cream abandoned, like sweetness felt wrong to have that shift. As if he hadn’t noticed, months ago, that you hummed the same four off-key notes from a jingle neither you nor Jack could place when a chart was boring you to death, or that you double-checked every single IV line now, ever since one bad mistake in your first year. He could very well handle you, he simply hadn’t been given the chance to do so.

Most of the time, Jack was fine with watching your love life play out in 3D. More often than not, he knew they’d never work out. You were just too good for anyone who came sniffing, and there was a grim comfort in that, in knowing the fellows and the nurses would wash through and out and leave you exactly where he found you, three feet down the counter from him, close enough to keep.

Tonight the comfort wasn’t coming. Mateo’s accidental interrogation had rubbed Jack wrongly, somewhere he had yet to fully locate yet, and was sitting in his chest like a splinter he kept forgetting was there until he turned the corner over the night, saw you, and noticed it was there. He should’ve let it stay as nothing, but his brain had apparently decided three hours later was the correct time to relitigate the whole exchange, turning it over at odd intervals between patients like a tongue worrying a chipped tooth.

It was the bad sort of slow in the ER, the sort that let his brain fill up with things he’d have no time for on a real night. Ellis had wandered over to your desk with two energy drinks and placed her arms loosely beside your computer.

Jack was distantly aware he had misplaced labs to hand back to you because they’d gotten lost in the system, and he told himself that was the whole reason his body had started moving in your direction. 

“I got a rundown from Marge,” Ellis said, dropping into an empty stool beside you. “Apparently he wrote it out of the OR.”

“You’re joking,” you muttered. “I don’t understand it.” 

Jack stood there with the labs in his hand, close enough to hear it. 

“I’m still wondering if I should respond,” you were saying, half into your hands. “Is this romantic? This one’s never happened before.”

Ellis laughed slightly with you, and the two of you had built one of those small pockets that slow nights sometimes allowed, thirty seconds of being people instead of clinicians.

Jack set the labs down at the edge of your keyboard harder than he meant to, the papers slapping flat against the desk, and both of you looked up at him like he’d grown two heads. Fuck — had he? It sure felt like he was operating off of whatever chemical cocktail his brain had whipped up for nights like this, some ugly little compound of jealousy and exhaustion. He was fairly sure if you pulled his labs right now they’d look like a man in the middle of a bad reaction to something not yet figured out in the scientific world. 

“Labs on eight got lost.” His palm stayed on the sheet for a few seconds too long, some instinct telling him to keep his hand on something solid before the rest of him did something stupid. “You’ll want to recheck the trop.” 

His eyes cut, against every ounce of better judgement he had left, to the note still folded in your hand, the same one he’d carried down like it was radioactive, the same note that had clearly done something for you that four years of Jack standing next to you clearly hadn’t. An unreasonable, low feeling creeped up behind his ribs at the sight of it, hot and out of proportion to a piece of folded-fucking-paper. 

Ellis’s smile went uncertain as he felt her gaze snag on him. 

You blinked up at him, and whatever had been sitting easy in your face a second ago curdled itself away, the corners of your mouth retreating. He knew this same retreat, had watched you recalibrate your muscles, swiftly, built to be unreadable against anyone who hadn’t spent four years learning your face. 

His stomach dropped and heat climbed up the back of his neck, jaw tightening on its own. He hated that his body had learned to answer you the way it answered a motor alarm. He hated more that some raw, cornered part in him — still smarting about Mateo’s offhand comment and sore from that folded note — felt it wasn’t soothed.

You blinked up at him, and the laugh faded off your face, and you said, easily, warm, “Yeah — course. I’ll get right on that.”

He shrugged up one shoulder, lips pressing into a thin line. He turned, already walking away. “Whenever there’s a gap on your social calendar, I guess.”

He heard the small silence that opened behind him, and he could practically imagine you and Ellis looking at each other. Then, he heard you push back from the desk, the stool wheels catching, and your footsteps coming after him like he’d known they would, because you were the last person to let something like that go. 

“Hey.” You fell into step beside him, voice pitched low, still giving him more benefit than the doubt had earned in the last ten seconds. “What was that about?”

“Nothing.” He tilted his neck up slightly to do a quick scan of the board, some stubborn muscle in his neck refusing to let him meet your eyes. “Got a department to run.”

“And you’ve been running it great. You just became weird right now.” He could feel you working it over beside him, shifting on your feet as you toed the line between resident and the hard-won territory neither of you had ever named. “Jack.” 

“You want to laugh about your shitty dates, that’s your business,” he said instead of letting it go, sounding too far from the man who’d had his hands hovering over yours an hour ago, watching you put in a chest tube, telling you that you’d done well. “Do it a little quieter. This is an ER, not a lunch table.”

His words stopped you for half a step. Jack kept walking, an ugly, cowardly momentum carrying him three more steps before you caught back up.

He heard you recalibrate your voice in real time when you said, “I was charting on a slow shift,” carefully. “You’ve made worse jokes when it’s even more busy. What’s this about?”

“It’s about you treating this place like it’s your dating pool and not your place of work.” The words came out much uglier than he meant, and he didn’t have it in him to call them back. “It’s not professional. It reflects on the department. Reflects on me. Somebody’s gotta say it, and apparently that’s me, since you clearly enjoy it too much to stop.” 

You stopped walking altogether this time. He turned to face your stillness whole, then, and found your eyes narrowed at him, looking like you’d been hit from a direction you hadn’t been completely guarding against. 

He let out a breath, fingers going up to his forehead to wipe at sweat that wasn’t there. “I’m just saying what —”

“I’m sorry,” you said, voice going level and courteous, as you nodded quickly. “You’re right. You’re my attending, it reflects on you. I’ll keep my personal life out of work.” 

“That’s not —” he tried, but you were already turning away, shoulders squared and chin level, professional armor snapping into place just like he’d told you to. It should have made him feel better to watch you take it so cleanly, to not make a big deal out of it. All it made him feel was like something had been surgically removed from him. 

“Stop —” he tried again, to your back now, and the sentence died somewhere between his teeth and the air. That was okay. There was no end to the sentence that didn’t sound worse than the beginning anyway. 

He blew out a sharp breath through his nose, standing in the middle of the floor with his hand still half-raised toward you, fingers curling back into his palm when he realized you weren’t there to reach. Jack felt, distantly, uselessly, like the only thing standing still in the entire building. 

“Great going,” he heard Lena say, trailing past him, a tray tucked against her hip, not even breaking stride. “You got rid of the one entertainment we’ve got around here.”

His shoulders stiffened, and he caught up with her in three steps, jaw working around words that wanted to spill out defensively and came out simply tired. “It’s not entertainment if she keeps getting hurt,” he grumbled. “She’s not a show. Stop treating her like one.” 

“Didn’t look like she was the one getting hurt tonight,” she said, rounding a corner and leaving him standing there.

Jack let out a low groan, running a palm down the lower half of his face, and dropped his hand only when he’d scrubbed enough friction into his jaw to feel it sting a little, which was at least a sensation he’d chosen, at least tonight. He stood there a second longer, staring at nothing in particular. His hands found his hips on reflex. 

“Fuck,” he muttered to himself, and dragged both hands back through his hair, gripping once at the roots before letting go. 

He rolled his neck, felt it pop unsatisfyingly, and pushed off the wall he hadn’t even realized he was leaning against. His leg fucking ached, the burn starting behind his knee. He ignored it like he always did and started walking anyway, jaw still held tight, hands shoved deep into his pockets like he could physically hold himself together with the seams of his own black scrubs.

It was by the lockers after hand-off that Jack saw you next. Both of you had conveniently managed to work over-time; he because there was nothing to get home to, and you — he’d heard through the grapevine — because one of your patient’s little sister was coming in toward close, and you simply wanted to talk with her instead of handing the situation off to one of the day residents.

Usually, nobody had asked you to stay when you did. Most times, there was no version of staying that showed up in your favor; he and Shen were gone, so there was no attending grading you on it; no hours that counted. It was just for a kid who was going to get bad news from a face she’d seen before, so you cost yourself hours of sleep you most definitely needed to be the soft spot for a stranger’s little sister, and hadn’t mentioned it to a soul, and he knew you would’ve been embarrassed if he brought it up. 

He found you using the little mirror inside your locker to apply some kind of pink-tubed gloss with one hand while the other ran its fingers through your hair. Jack pursed his lips, eyeing you from the doorway, because he was pretty sure you’d done something different to it in the last ten minutes. 

“Look nice,” he tried, biting the bullet and walking toward his own locker. “Goin’ somewhere?” 

You caught his eyes in the mirror instead of turning around. “Just breakfast,” you said, and there was none of the earlier lilt in it, the warmth that you’d always aimed at him gone functional. You capped the gloss with more force than it needed and dropped it into your bag. 

Jack stood there a second too long with his hand over his own locker without opening it. He’d expected — and he knew he was more optimistic than usual for doing so — your easy back-and-forth, his slip-up from earlier forgotten. He wasn’t sure what to do with the quiet or you not looking at him properly, hairbrush working through your hair in short strokes. 

He’d saved around thirty lives tonight, and that was what he was good at. He was not good, and had never claimed to be good, at the aftermath of hurting a person he’d have put his own body between a stretcher and wall for, without meaning to, over something that had never been about the radiology fellow at all. 

He opted out of opening his locker and chose instead to lean his bicep against the locker, eyeing you in front of him. “Mad at me?” he murmured. 

You let out a short breath, shaking your head, and he tracked all your micro-expressions through the mirror. “On the clock?” 

“Well, we’ve both been off it for a while now,” he said, watching the shape of your mouth in the mirror, waiting for it to give something away. It didn’t. “But no. Asking as your —” He stopped himself, because ‘friend’ seemed not to be the honest word though it was the first one that popped up. “Off the clock. Whatever I am to you right now.”

You set the hairbrush down on the little shelf with more care than the moment needed. “It’s okay, Jack,” you said, shaking your head.

“Don’t think it is. Try again.”

You watched him for a second in the mirror, then you turned. 

“It’s just embarrassing,” you said, and the words came out smaller than anything he’d heard out of you in years. You crossed your arms over your chest. “I respect you and I hate that you’d think for one second I don’t take this place seriously.” Your voice cracked on the last word, just barely, and you pressed your lips together. “So, yeah. It’s embarrassing to have my attending confirming I’m exactly what people think I am.”

He was shaking his head before you could even finish the sentence. “Nobody thinks —”

“You do,” you said, voice rising slightly. “So, off the clock, I’m embarrassed, and tonight, I’m going to be your resident. Because I agree with you. It’s been unprofessional of me to keep dating within the hospital —” You threw your arms up halfway by your side, and you let out a short laugh that came out dry and wrong. “And I hate that you’ve probably been thinking it for four years.”

“I haven’t,” he said too fast. God, he’d come here to make tonight better for you, not to make you re-evaluate all your years working with him. “Sure, I thought it was none of my business how you spend your good nights off. Didn’t stop me from thinking they didn’t deserve ‘em.” 

You rolled your eyes. “You’re just saying that now ‘cause you feel bad.”

“Wish it were that simple,” he said, and chose to leave it unelaborated because it wasn’t that simple and he had no intention of explaining exactly why. “Half the time, you know it’s not gonna work out. You’re breaking my heart by making me watch you break yours.” 

You blinked, and he watched the fight loosen out of you by inches. “It’s just a free breakfast, Jack. Nothing to get your heart broken over.” 

Jack let out a huff through his nose, mouth opening to say what, he didn’t know. “Is that all? ‘Cause I can get you free breakfast for the rest of your life.” 

You laughed, disbelieving, through your nose, some of the night’s weight finally cracking off of you. “You’ve got a weird way of apologizing.” 

“Just to my favorite resident.” He pointed his index finger at you, lazy, and pushed himself off the lockers. His shoulder blades left a faint dust-print on the metal where he’d been leaning. He thumbed in the combination without looking at the dial — muscle memory, years of the same locker — and the door swung open with a rusted squeak. He pulled out his bag. “So?” 

“So what?” 

“You ditch the fellow.” He slung the bag up over his shoulder, close enough now that he caught the tail-end of the perfume you’d lightly spritzed over yourself. “I buy.”

You looked at him for a second too long, lips pushing to one side, as though you were gauging whether this was a bit or not, another line he’d tossed and wanted to let die on its own. He stood there, jaw set and features relaxing to show you he did mean it, more than he wanted to admit, if he was being honest with himself. 

“You’re serious.” 

“Do I look like I’m not?” He nodded once at your locker, your bag sitting on the shelf. “Grab your stuff. We’re going.” 

“Fine,” you said finally, reaching over and zipping your backpack all the way before throwing it over one shoulder. “Can you drive? I’ve been taking the subway.”

“Why?” he asked drily. “You’ve got a car.”

Jack realized, as he watched you slide in across from him and folding both hands around the coffee before it was all the way poured, that he’d never once been on a date where the woman had no idea it was one. 

It wasn’t lost on him what that made him, a man old enough to know better, letting a thing be one thing on his side of the table and another thing entirely on yours, saying nothing to square the difference. But he’d meant what he’d said, and he was going to feed you. 

You ordered a short stack, eggs, hash brown, decaf on loop. She wrote it down, definitely having heard worse from better.

“Thanks for the treat, Jack,” you said when Dina left, bringing the rim of your cup to your lips. “Don’t think I could’ve done another breakfast to let him down gently.”

“We have to make some changes to your lifestyle,” Jack replied, voice rough, as he eyed you. 

“Oh, yeah?” you murmured. “We?” 

“Well, I did have to deliver a note to you today. In all my life working here, that’s never happened.” 

You laughed around the rim of your cup. “In my defense, I don’t think anyone’s wrote me a note out of an OR either. That’s a first for both of us.”

“Glad we share the experience.”

Dina came by with a pot and topped you off without being asked, and placed the food in front of you. Jack watched you reach for the salt before your fork had even touched the eggs, shaking it twice over the plate.

“You’re gonna give yourself a stroke by forty.”

“You’re gonna give me a stroke right now if you comment on my food.” But you set the shaker down after the third shake, which he noticed and had to bite back a smile.

Dina dropped his plate in front of him — bacon, eggs, no pancakes — and you were reaching for it with a piece of your fork before she’d even finished setting his fork down. He gave you a faux-frown, picking up his fork and, without looking, spreading a piece of your hashbrown off the opposite plate in trade. He wasn’t sure when the two of you had started stealing bites and sips off of each other’s stuff, only that it’d started somewhere and calcified into something neither of you mentioned. 

“Rude,” you said, mouth already full.

“Learned it from you,” he muttered, nudging his plate an inch closer to your side of the table, which you took full advantage of. 

Dina’s radio crackled through something twangy and close-to-familiar behind the counter, competing with the clatter of a skillet somewhere in the back, the whole place smelling like batter and grease soaked into decades of countertop, syrup that had dried a hundred small amber rings nobody had ever fully scrubbed off. 

“I’ve never been here before.” You absentmindedly cut the hashbrown in half as your eyes raked over the place. “This a regular spot for you?”

“Since before you joined,” he said easily, but his brows furrowed as he realized he’d been coming here alone for years. He was in the same booth when he could get it, ordered the same order, and it struck to him only now, watching you eat your hashbrowns, how much smaller and less lonely a booth felt with you taking up the other half of it. “Used to be the only quiet I got on some weeks.” 

You hummed. “And now?”

“Guess the quiet’s pretty negotiable.” He shrugged. “I can go without it.”

You smiled down at your plate, something easy working at the corner of your mouth. A thread of syrup had gathered at the seam of your lips — you hadn’t noticed, too busy considering his answer — and before he’d cleared the impulse with the rest of himself, his thumb was already moving, catching it at the corner quickly, no different than when he swiped under your lashline for salt after a bad night.

You stayed still, having gotten used to his hands somewhere during your residency.

“You’re a mess,” he said, wiping his thumb off on the paper napkin folded under his elbow. 

“You’ve got coffee on your scrub top,” you said, eyes flicking down to his chest. His brows furrowed and he looked down, and you were right. “Pot, kettle.”

He’d been about to say something else, he could’ve sworn it, but had lost every word of it watching you smile so unguarded, free enough to let him look at you. He had to reach for his coffee just to have something to do with his hands. 

When the check came, folded in its little plastic tray, you both reached for it at once. Your hand landed flat over his knuckles. Neither of you moved it for a second, for his hand stayed exactly where it was, broad and unmoving under yours, and something unspoken passed through the two inches of fornica between your faces as he raised a brow at you. He slid the tray out from under you slowly.

“Said I’m buying,” he said, shaking his head slightly.

The drive back had been quieter than the one there had been. It was nearing ten in the morning, and he knew both of you had stayed up longer than intended, especially for two people who had to clock back in in a shorter amount of time than he deemed plausible to reset completely.

He’d cracked the window down an inch, and the air coming through carried the smell of wet pavement and the sound of a garbage truck grinding its gears three streets over. Your neighborhood, he was learning, woke up slow; there was a paperboy on a bike, a guy in scrubs different from yours locking up his own car after a shift that wasn’t at the PTMC, and Jack drove through it with two fingers loose over the wheel. Neither of you had bothered with the radio.

You’d gone somewhere billowy around your third cup of decaf, all the sharp edges of the night replaced with something looser and sleepier, and you gave him directions in a voice gone thick from exhaustion as you were likely starting to feel it behind your eyes. 

He pulled his car along the curb and let it idle, one shoe braced against the floorboard, watching the numbers of your building.

“Gonna sleep?” he asked.

“Gonna try.” You were already working the bag strap over your shoulder, hair falling loose out of the knot you’d put it up in at some point at the diner, strands of it catching the early light. “I’ve got no idea how you do this then take SWAT calls.”

“You’d be able to do it, too, if I put you on the field.” 

You mumbled something, letting your head drop against the window for a second, before picking itself back up. “Stop threatening me, Jack.” 

He watched you fight your eyelids, his mouth pulling up at the corners at the sight. “C’mon. Get inside before I gotta carry you up.”

You snorted, half-hearted. “You can’t. You’d throw your hip out.”

“Try me.” He was already rounding the hood before you’d gathered your bearings, boots loud on the quiet street, and you let out another laugh and let him get there first, too tired to argue about who gets to open what.

He walked you up the cracked path, palm settling at the small of your back, and you leaned back into it, half your weight given over without you noticing it. 

At the door, you fumbled with your keys out from under a granola wrapper and a capless pen, missed the lock twice, and gave up trying on the third. You turned to face him instead with your back against the frame and your bag slowly sliding off one shoulder.

“Thank you,” you said, words coming out loose and filtered by the exhaustion even as you tried to meet his eyes head-on. “For the — everything. The explanation. And the breakfast.” 

Jack felt his lips curve up, fingers flexing at his sides. “Anytime.” 

“And for driving me there — thank you. And for the drive back.” 

“Uh-huh. You gonna go inside?” he said, voice going quieter as he looked down at the ground, at how the toes of your shoes were almost touching. “Or keep thanking me until you fall asleep standing up?” 

You cocked your head to the side, your lips moving upwards into a fuller smile. His own mouth curved as he shifted on his feet slightly, closing the barely-there inch between his shoes and yours. 

“Jack?” 

He hummed, and you went up slightly onto your toes before he’d finished deciding what to do with you. Or maybe he’d moved in first, or maybe there was no real order to it at all. His mouth found yours somewhere in that uncertainty, slowly despite it, because he’d already worked out every version of this moment and this one had simply appeared in front of him.

His hand came up to cradle the side of your jaw, thumb settling into the soft hollow just beneath your ears. Your skin was warm despite the cold snap in the air, much softer than he’d let himself imagine, and he felt the exact second your breath caught against his mouth, a small stutter that made his fingers curve around your jaw, index resting against your cheekbone. 

He kept it slow, it was the only thing he had any real control over right now, the pace of it instead of the fact of it. He used what little he had left, dragging his mouth against yours, like he could somehow make up for four years of nothing by refusing to rush the first thirty seconds of something. His other hand found your waist, and his palm felt how your back curved into him, the hitch of your ribs on an inhale, and he pressed you back the last inch against the doorframe more to ground himself. 

Your fist found the front of his canvas jacket, dragging him in the last stubborn space he’d been too careful to close himself, and a sound came out of his chest that embarrassed him a little. He felt you smile against his mouth, and his entire body felt warm at having been caught enjoying this entirely as much as he was. 

He tilted his head so his forehead pressed against yours and pulled his mouth away. His lips jutted out slightly, feeling suddenly empty and unwilling to put the full distance back between the two of you.

Your eyes were still shut, and you were breathing unevenly. “Thank you,” you murmured. 

He huffed a short laugh, and in it, realized how breathless he, too, was. 

You tipped your chin back up, already chasing him.

Jack felt the want knot up inside him, greedy and unreasonably leaning back in to meet you halfway before the rest of him had caught up and made him stop. He made a small sound in his throat and pinched his eyes shut, letting you get right up to the edge of it, breath already tangling with his, wanting so badly to just let it happen, before his finger came up between you, pressed light against your bottom lip to stop you a hair short. It was more for his own sake than the words he remembered you telling someone years ago ringing in his head.

“Ah-ah.” His voice came out rough with want, entirely at odds with his actions. “Your rule. Only one kiss after the first date. I’m trying —” he exhaled hard, almost dramatically, “— trying real hard here to make it to the second.”

“Huh?” Your eyes peeled open. “This was a date?” 

“Best one you’ve had I’m guessing, with the way you’re breaking your rules.” His finger stayed right where it was, and he watched your eyes struggle to focus, still glassy from the kiss. He could feel the warm huff of breath breaking unsteady against his fingertip, could feel your mouth soft and parted underneath it, waiting on him. 

You pressed a peck against his finger instead, your mouth barely dragging against his skin as a shy smile formed behind it that he felt more than saw. “Maybe.”

“Well, good.” He smiled, despite himself, and pushed himself off your forehead, opting instead to press his lips there. “Get some sleep,” he murmured against your hairline, lips lingering a little longer there. “Might be able to get a full seven hours.” 

“Will you?” 

“Doubt it.” He pulled back enough to look at you properly, thumb tracing a line along your cheekbone — his touch feather-light, tracking the exact curve of it, memorizing the route — before he made himself drop his hand entirely, fingers curling loosely at his sides because suddenly he had no idea what to do with them without you under them. “Kinda got a lot on my mind now.”

“Yeah?” You bit back a smile, still not quite steady on your feet. “Anything you wanna share with the class?”

“Not a chance.” He bent a fraction and hooked two fingers under the strap of your bag where it’d slid down to your elbow, dragging it slowly back up to your shoulders, knuckles grazing your arms the whole way. “You’ll find out. Eventually.”

He forced himself to step off the mat — one step back, then the second, putting real distance between you now — forcing ease into his expression that he definitely wasn’t feeling. He stopped a few feet away from you anyway, unable to fully commit to walking away, watching you stunned and still in your doorway, mouth a little kiss-soft. He felt so completely helpless and pleased at the sight. “Text me when you’re up and I’ll get to planning date two.” 

You raised a hand into a wave, fingers curling in the air.

“Bye, Jack,” you said, and his name came out of your mouth softer than you probably meant it to, smooth and cushy the way it never sounded on shift.

Every few passes across the room, Rafe bounces him slightly harder, less from necessity than impatience.

“He knows you want him asleep,” she says, leaning closer to the mirror as she drags mascara carefully through her lashes. 

Rafe glances at Banks, who opens one eye with the deep suspicion of somebody being discussed behind his back. “He’s tired.”

“He was tired an hour ago.”

“Yeah, well.” Rafe adjusts him higher, patting his back with a rhythm too deliberate to be soothing. “He’s being difficult.”

Banks makes a small, congested sound into his neck. She smiles at their reflection. “Don’t talk about him like he isn’t there.”

“He can’t understand me.”

“He understands tone.”

Rafe’s eyes lift to hers through the mirror. “You would know.”

The smile disappears from her mouth slowly enough that he sees it happen. His own expression shifts, something alert and cautious beneath the irritation he’s been carrying all afternoon.

She turns back to the mirror and reaches for her lip liner. “Hope the strippers like your tone.”

Banks stirs at the word, or maybe at the way Rafe’s hand stops against his back.

“There it is,” Rafe mutters.

“What?”

“You’ve brought it up six times.”

“I haven’t brought anything up.” She traces the edge of her mouth with careful precision, refusing to look at him. “I hope you have a lovely night. You, Topper, Kelce and however many women you’ve paid to put their asses near your face.”

Rafe’s jaw tightens. “You said you were getting strippers first.”

“Because you mentioned them.”

“I made a joke.”

“So did I,” she says, glaring at her own reflection.

“Didn’t sound like a joke.”

“Well, neither did yours.”

Behind her, Banks lifts his head and looks between them with wide, sleepy eyes, his hair flattened into a soft brown sweep on one side. Rafe glances down, then resumes bouncing him with the stiff patience of a man being forced to parent through an argument with his future wife.

“You’d already booked yours by then,” he says.

Her stomach dips, stupidly, because this is the exact point at which she could end the whole thing. She could tell him there are no strippers.

She could tell him the rented house has two bartenders, a private chef Sarah found through somebody from Chapel Hill, an enormous bathtub nobody intends to use responsibly, and enough champagne to remove several years from their collective life expectancy. 

She could tell him the wildest thing planned is a game involving printed photographs of his face and several deeply personal questions about their sex life.

Instead, she folds one leg over the other and raises her eyebrows. “Why do you care?”

Rafe stares at her. Banks stares at her too, though with considerably less accusation and more interest in the shiny clasp of her robe.

“I don’t,” Rafe says finally.

It lands so badly that even he seems to hear it. Her mouth presses into a thin line. “Great.”

“Great.”

“Then we’re both happy.”

“Yeah.”

“Perfect.”

Rafe turns away and walks Banks toward the windows, where the last of the evening light is stretched peach and gold across the marina. Their rental is small enough that he only gets four paces before needing to turn again.

Banks watches the ceiling fan move overhead, his grip loosening from Rafe’s shirt while his father glares through the glass at absolutely nothing.

They’ve been together long enough that she knows the exact shape of Rafe’s jealousy before he admits it exists. It starts in his shoulders, climbs into his jaw and then settles around his mouth, where every word becomes too casual. 

In high school, he once spent an entire football game pretending not to care that a boy had asked for her number, then shoved the boy into a drinks table at an after-party for a completely unrelated reason involving disrespect. 

At twenty-two, with their son drifting asleep against his chest and a wedding six weeks away, he’s developed almost no additional dignity.

She turns back to the mirror and begins blending powder beneath her eyes. The skin there still carries the faint tired shadows Banks has given them both since birth, though hers are easier to cover. 

Pregnancy changed her in a hundred quiet ways nobody had warned her would remain after the baby arrived. Her hips are softer. Her breasts sit differently in dresses. There’s a pale little mark near her navel and a thin silver line low across one side of her stomach where her skin stretched faster than it could forgive her.

Rafe has never once looked at any of it as damage. If anything, he’s become more unbearable, hands always finding her waist when he passes, mouth pressing against the soft curve of her stomach like it belongs to him twice now. 

But the image arrives anyway: some polished, impossible woman with smooth skin and professional confidence bending over him beneath coloured lights while Topper and Kelce howl themselves stupid.

The mascara wand slips. She catches it before it marks her cheek.

“You okay?” Rafe asks immediately.

She looks at him in the mirror. “Fine.”

His gaze moves over her face, searching long enough to make her feel exposed. Then Banks gives one final sigh and goes heavy against his chest, saving them both. Rafe lowers his voice. “He’s out.”

“Thank God.”

“Wheezie texted. She’s downstairs.”

She nods and caps the mascara. “Can you put him down?”

Rafe doesn’t move. “You’re wearing that?”

Her eyes lift. “My robe?”

“The dress.”

She turns slowly. “Yes.”

He looks toward the garment bag with open dislike. “It’s short.”

“It’s my bachelorette party.”

“Yeah, I know what it is.”

“Do you?” she asks sweetly. “Because yours seems to involve significantly less clothing.”

Rafe’s nostrils flare. Banks shifts against him, and he immediately cups the back of the baby’s head, his fingers gentle despite the rest of him.

“Have fun,” he says.

She smiles without showing teeth. “You too.”

“I will.”

“Make sure you tip.”

“Make sure you keep your hands to yourself.”

She lets out a laugh that contains no amusement. “They’re being paid to put their hands on me, Rafe.”

His face changes. It’s small, but satisfying enough that warmth sparks briefly through the jealousy in her chest. His eyes narrow; his grip shifts beneath Banks; the muscle beside his mouth jumps once.

Rafe stands there another second, furious in complete silence, then carries their sleeping son from the room with the careful, controlled steps of a man leaving before he says something that cancels a wedding.

Wheezie is sitting cross-legged on the couch downstairs when they emerge, a bowl of cereal balanced on her knee and the television low enough to suggest she has already received several instructions from Rafe. 

She’s sixteen and trying desperately to look bored by the responsibility of keeping her nephew alive, though she has brought an overnight bag large enough for a week and arranged Banks’ bottles in the fridge by time.

“He went down?” she asks.

“Finally,” Rafe says, checking the baby monitor on the coffee table despite having checked it less than a minute ago.

Wheezie looks between them. Her eyes linger on Rafe’s dark expression, then move to the way her future sister-in-law is fastening one earring with slightly too much force. “You guys fighting?”

“No,” they say together.

Wheezie takes another spoonful of cereal. “Okay.”

Rafe points at the monitor. “If he cries longer than five minutes, call me.”

“I know.”

“If he feels warm–”

“I know.”

“Don’t give him the red pacifier. He hates it.”

“I know, Rafe.”

“And if somebody knocks–”

“Don’t answer unless it’s Sarah, call the police if they don’t leave, and never tell anyone I’m here alone.” Wheezie looks up at him. “You made me write it down.”

He ignores that and bends to kiss the top of her head, then bends again when she ducks away too late. “Don’t invite anybody over.”

“As if I’d invite someone here while your baby’s asleep upstairs and you’re acting like you’re in the Secret Service.”

“Our baby,” his fiancée corrects from the doorway.

Rafe’s eyes find her immediately. She’s changed into the black dress. It fits close through her waist and hips before ending high against her thighs, the neckline soft and low without being dramatic. 

Her hair falls loose around her shoulders, glossy from the curling iron, and the heels make her legs look longer than they have any right to inside their own home.

His gaze drags from her face to her chest, down her stomach and legs, then back up again with an intensity that makes Wheezie sigh loudly and focus on the television.

Rafe’s mouth parts. “No.”

Her brows lift. “No?”

“You’re not wearing that.”

She looks down at herself. “Seems like I am.”

“Baby.”

“Your strippers will be wearing less.”

“That’s different.”

The silence after it is immediate and lethal. Wheezie lowers her spoon.

Rafe closes his eyes briefly. “That came out wrong.”

“Did it?”

“I meant–” He gestures once, already losing ground. “They’re working.”

Her face goes blank. “Oh, good. I’m glad you respect their profession.”

Wheezie presses her lips together, shoulders beginning to shake. Rafe looks at her. “Go upstairs.”

“I’m babysitting.”

“Do it upstairs.”

“You said not to leave the monitor.”

He points toward the stairs anyway. “Wheezie.”

She collects her cereal and the monitor with no urgency at all, pausing beside her future sister-in-law to whisper, “You look really hot,” before disappearing into the hallway.

“Thank you,” she calls after her, then looks at Rafe. “Somebody appreciates me.”

Rafe steps closer, his hands finding her waist before either of them acknowledges the movement. His palms settle warm against the fabric, thumbs pressing into the curve above her hips while his eyes move over her face.

“I appreciate you,” he says.

“Mm.”

“Too much, probably.”

“You’ll survive.”

His gaze drops to her mouth. For one second, the fight thins beneath the familiar pull between them, all the stupid jealousy and wounded pride making space for the fact that she looks beautiful and he’s Rafe, which has always been a difficult combination for his self-control.

Then a car horn sounds outside. Her friends.

Rafe’s hands tighten once. “You gonna let some guy touch you?”

She stares at him. “Are you gonna let some woman touch you?”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Neither was yours.”

The horn sounds again, followed by Sarah yelling her name through an open window.

She slips out of his grip, takes her small handbag from the side table. At the door, she turns back. Rafe’s still standing beside the couch, broad and tense in a black button-down with the sleeves already pushed to his forearms, looking less like a groom going out with his friends than a man attending a meeting where somebody may have insulted him in advance.

“Have a nice time,” she says.

His jaw shifts. “You too.”

“And don’t worry. I’ll make sure the stripper knows I’m engaged.”

Rafe’s eyes flash. “Real funny.”

She smiles, opens the door and steps into the warm night before he can see how badly she wants him to stop her.

The house Sarah rented sits behind a private gate on the sound, all white stone, high windows and expensive furniture chosen by somebody who has never spilled anything in their life. By nine, the furniture is already in danger.

There are balloons twisted around the stair railing, flowers crowded over every available surface and a hand-painted banner over the kitchen island that reads SAME DICK FOREVER in gold lettering. 

Two bartenders in white shirts are making cocktails beneath pendant lights while music rolls through the open doors toward the pool. Somebody from college has brought a disposable camera and has taken twelve photographs of Sarah drinking directly from a champagne bottle.

Her high-school friends have filled the dining room with gifts, matching silk pyjamas and enough lingerie to make her regret telling anyone her size.

It’s fun. Genuinely, loudly fun. She dances barefoot in the living room with a plastic veil clipped badly into her hair. She drinks something pink with rosemary floating in it, takes photographs beside the pool, cries once when Sarah gives a speech about how she has loved Rafe longer than any reasonable person should have been expected to, then threatens to drown Sarah for mentioning the time she and Rafe broke up and continued sleeping together anyway.

Still, every time the front gate opens or one of the bartenders carries a tray through the room, her stomach tenses before her mind catches up.

At ten-thirty, she’s sitting on the kitchen counter with her heels abandoned below her, turning the stem of a champagne glass between her fingers while Sarah and two of her college friends argue about whether Topper would book tasteful strippers or terrifying ones.

“Topper doesn’t know what tasteful means,” Sarah says. “He thinks boat shoes are formalwear.”

“He’d probably get, like, matching blondes,” one of her friends says.

Her fingers stop around the glass. Sarah notices. She’s spent too much of her life watching Rafe’s face and has become unfortunately skilled at reading the people attached to him too.

“Hey,” she says, pushing away from the island. “They don’t have strippers.”

She looks at her. “You don’t know that.”

“I know my brother.”

“You know he’s an idiot.”

“Yes, but he’s an idiot who’s been obsessed with you since, like, he grew facial hair.”

One of the girls nods seriously. “Before that, probably.”

She stares into the pale gold bubbles rising through her drink. “It’s not even that I think he’d do anything.”

“Obviously,” Sarah says.

“I know he wouldn’t. I just–” She draws in a breath and looks down at the dress gathered slightly over her thighs. “They’re strippers. That’s their whole thing. They’re supposed to look perfect and know what they’re doing, and I’m–”

“A literal smoke show,” somebody interrupts.

She laughs weakly. “I’m a… mother.”

The words leave a strange, embarrassed ache behind them. Banks has rearranged every room inside her, physical and otherwise, until she no longer remembers what life felt like before the weight of him sleeping against her chest. and she wouldn’t have it any other way. 

But motherhood has made her body feel public in ways she still isn’t used to – examined by doctors, touched by nurses, changed by a baby, needed at all hours.

Some nights she feels beautiful because Rafe looks at her like he could start a religion around the sight of her in an old t-shirt. Other nights, she catches herself in the bathroom mirror and doesn’t recognise where the girl from high school went.

Sarah steps between her knees and takes the champagne glass away. “Okay. First of all, Rafe has stared at you so hard at family dinners that Rose has asked him to stop.”

“That is true,” one of the girls says.

“Second, he threatened Topper at your baby shower because Topper said you looked good pregnant.”

She rolls her eyes. “He said I was glowing.”

“Rafe heard the word good and stopped processing language.” Sarah puts both hands on her knees. “And third, you had his baby. Do you genuinely think that made him less insane about you?”

She swallows.

Sarah’s mouth softens. “He checks your face before he checks Banks. He walks into a room and looks for you like somebody’s going to hide you behind a curtain. A woman could take every item of clothing off directly in front of him and he’d still be thinking about whether you ate dinner.”

“That doesn’t mean he wouldn’t look.”

“Well, he has eyes,” Sarah says reasonably. “But he also has fear. Specifically of you.”

A laugh breaks out of her before she can stop it.

Sarah squeezes her knees. “You are hot. You are marrying the worst person on this island. You won.”

She scrunches up her nose. “That feels insulting to both of us.”

“It should.”

Across town, Topper is standing on the leather seat of a private booth with one hand wrapped around a bottle of tequila and the other raised like he’s announcing the beginning of a war.

“To Rafe!” he shouts over the music.

Rafe sits below him with his elbows on his knees, staring into a glass he hasn’t touched for several minutes. The club is crowded and expensive and loud enough that the bass seems to thud directly through his teeth. 

Kelce is speaking to a girl near the railing. Three guys from high school are arguing about whether they can convince the bartender that Topper is famous. A bucket of champagne sweats onto the table despite none of them wanting champagne.

Topper lowers himself heavily into the booth. “You’re gonna love the next part.”

Rafe looks at him. “What next part?”

Topper grins.

Rafe’s entire body goes still. “What’d you do?”

“The entertainment.”

Kelce turns from the railing. “You actually got strippers?”

Topper looks offended. “It’s a bachelor party. Rafe organised them.”

“There are no strippers,” Rafe says.

Topper laughs. Then he sees Rafe’s face and stops. “What?”

“There are no fuckin’ strippers.”

“But you said–”

“I lied.”

Kelce blinks. “To us?”

“To everyone.”

Topper slowly puts down the tequila. “Why?”

“Because my fuckin’ fiancée said she was getting one.”

Topper frowns. “So you booked one too?”

“No.” Rafe leans back, dragging both hands over his face, then taps at his temple. “Jesus Christ, are you listening?”

“You… told your fiancée you were having strippers at your bachelor party,” Kelce says, piecing it together with painful care, “because… she told you she was having strippers at hers.”

“Yeah.”

“But you’re not.”

“No.”

Topper’s brows rise. “But she is.”

Rafe’s hands stop against his face. The club seems to become louder. Somewhere behind them, a glass breaks and people cheer. Coloured light moves over the table in slow blue strips.

Kelce grimaces. “Shit.”

Rafe looks between them. “What?”

Topper sits down properly now. “Do you think she actually got one?”

Rafe’s jaw shifts. “She said she did.”

“Girls say stuff,” Kelce offers.

“She had a whole house rented,” Topper says. “That’s prime stripper territory.”

Rafe looks at him with open hatred. “Prime stripper territory?”

“I’m saying there’s, like, space.”

Kelce nods reluctantly. “They’ve probably got poles and shit they bring with them.”

“Why do you know that?” Rafe asks.

“I don’t. I’m guessing.”

Topper leans closer, concern slowly overtaking his excitement. “Those guys are, like, professionals.”

Rafe’s expression darkens.

“They’ve got moves,” Kelce adds.

“Stop talking.”

“I’m just saying, regular guys can’t compete with that shit. They can pick women up and–”

Rafe stands so abruptly the table shakes.

Topper grabs his wrist. “Where are you going?”

“Home.”

“You can’t go home. She’s not there.”

“Then I’ll go to the house,” Rafe gets out through gritted teeth.

“And do what?” Kelce asks. “Fight a stripper?”

Rafe looks as though the idea hasn’t been ruled out.

Topper tugs him back toward the booth. “Sit down, man. You’ll look crazy.”

“I am not sitting here while some oiled-up asshole puts his hands on my fiancée.”

Kelce’s mouth twitches. “Oiled up?”

Rafe points at him. “I’ll kill you first.”

Topper manages to get him seated again, though only because two members of security have begun watching them from across the club.

“Okay,” Topper says, keeping one hand on Rafe’s shoulder. “Think about this logically. She loves you.”

“That’s not the point.”

“She had your kid,” Topper tries.

“Also not the point.”

“She’s marrying you even though everybody told her not to.”

Rafe turns slowly. “Who told her not to?”

Topper pauses. “Figure of speech.”

“Who?”

“Nobody.” He takes a drink. “Everybody’s very supportive.”

Rafe stares at the dark screen of his phone. He’s checked it twelve times. Her last message is a photograph sent two hours ago of Banks asleep in his cot, forwarded from Wheezie with the caption our perfect angel, followed by a second message thirty seconds later: unlike his slutty father.

He types, Rude. Then, You good? Then deletes both.

Kelce watches over his shoulder. “Text her.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not giving her the satisfaction.”

“Of… knowing you care whether she’s being dry-humped by a stranger?” Topper asks.

Rafe looks up. “You’re real close to gettin’ left here.”

At one the following afternoon, she lets herself into the rental with her shoes in one hand and her overnight bag dragging behind her. The house is cool, quiet and dim except for the television playing softly in the living room. 

Her head aches behind one eye. Her mouth tastes like champagne and the greasy breakfast sandwich Sarah forced into her before putting her in a car. There’s glitter inside her bra, though she cannot remember anybody using glitter.

Then Banks squeals from the floor, and everything in her softens at once. “There’s my baby!”

He’s sitting astride Rafe’s stomach in only a nappy and one sock, both hands planted on his father’s face while Rafe lies flat on the rug beneath him, visibly hungover and making no effort to defend himself. 

His hair is crushed sideways from sleep. There’s a faint purple mark near his wrist that looks suspiciously like a nightclub stamp, and his eyes open only halfway when she enters.

Banks slaps both palms against his cheeks. Rafe exhales. “Yeah, buddy. Great.”

She drops the bag by the door and crosses the room, the ache in her head briefly forgotten beneath the warm little burst in her chest. “Hi, my babies.”

Rafe’s eyes move to her first, even with their son sitting directly on his throat. They drag slowly over her bare legs, yesterday’s dress beneath Sarah’s oversized cardigan, the smeared shadow beneath her eyes. Something in his face loosens, though his mouth stays careful.

“Hey,” he says.

She lowers herself to the rug beside them and immediately folds into his side, pressing her face against his shoulder. Rafe’s arm comes around her by instinct, hand settling over her back while Banks makes an outraged sound at being excluded.

She laughs and pulls him down between them. “Hi, my love. Were you good for Auntie Wheezie?”

Banks grabs both sides of her face, fingers pressing into her cheeks with ecstatic force.

“Gentle,” Rafe murmurs, guiding one tiny hand away from her eye.

She kisses Banks’s palm, then his wrist, then the soft warm crease beneath his chin until he begins squealing and kicking his feet against Rafe’s ribs. Rafe grunts, but his hand remains against her waist, thumb moving absently beneath the cardigan.

She closes her eyes and lets herself fit there for a moment. Her boys. Her house. Banks’s warm body wriggling between them and Rafe smelling faintly of soap, stale liquor and the baby lotion he claims he hates but uses too much of.

Somewhere beneath the relief, an image tries to form – Rafe seated beneath nightclub lights, a woman’s breasts level with his face, his hands possibly on a waist that isn’t hers. She presses her mouth harder against Banks’s hair until it goes away.

Beside her, Rafe looks at the crease where her dress has ridden higher over her thigh and thinks about a man with professionally developed abdominal muscles placing his hands there. His jaw tightens.

Banks catches a fistful of his shirt and tries to climb higher. Rafe looks at him. “Your mother had fun.”

She hears the accusation beneath the words and lifts her head. “Your father did too.”

“Mm,” he hums, eyes narrowing.

“Mm,” she repeats mockingly.

Banks looks between them, delighted that the tension has returned.

It lasts until that night. Banks goes down easily, exhausted from a day spent using Rafe as furniture, and the house settles around them before eleven.

She showers until the last of the hairspray loosens from her scalp, changes into one of Rafe’s shirts and climbs into bed while he finishes brushing his teeth.

Neither of them mentions the party.

Rafe switches off the bathroom light and gets beneath the sheet beside her, broad and warm and freshly clean, his hair still damp at the temples. She immediately moves toward him because her body has no loyalty to her pride, stretching across his chest with one leg caught between his and her chin resting on her folded hands.

His palm settles over the back of her thigh. For a minute, they lie there in the blue-dark room listening to Banks breathe through the monitor. Rafe’s thumb moves slowly against her skin. She watches his face, tracing the tired shadows beneath his eyes, the faint roughness at his jaw, the mouth that has spent the entire day behaving suspiciously.

“So,” she says.

His thumb stops.

She lifts her chin slightly. “Your stripper.”

Rafe clears his throat. “What about her?”

The pronoun hits like a pin sliding beneath her nail.

Her smile becomes very still. “What was her name?”

He looks toward the ceiling. She waits.

“Uhhh.” Rafe swallows. “Tracy.”

“Tracy.”

“Yeah.”

Her stomach twists. A normal, friendly name. A woman named Tracy has apparently put her breasts near the father of her child and probably asked him what he wanted while moving in ways she learned in an actual class.

“Pretty?” she asks.

Rafe’s eyes flick toward her. “What?”

“Was she pretty?”

His hesitation lasts less than a second. It’s still fatal. “She was–” He shifts beneath her. “You know. Fine.”

“Fine.”

“Baby–”

“And what did Tracy do?”

Rafe’s mouth opens. Nothing arrives.

She pushes herself higher on his chest, hair falling around them. “What did she do, Rafe?”

“Well, there was–” His gaze moves quickly over her face, trying to calculate the safest route through a situation that has none. “There was Tracy, and then–”

Her whole body goes rigid. “And?”

He blinks.

“And?” she repeats, louder now. “Rafe Cameron, you had multiple strippers?”

His eyes go wide. “No.”

“You just said and.”

“I know, but–”

“You fucker.” She shoves off his chest, tangled immediately in the sheet. “Multiple? You sat there while multiple women put their– what, their tits in your face?”

“Wait, wait.” Rafe catches her around the waist before she can get off the bed. “Baby, I lied.”

She turns in his grip. “You lied?”

“I lied!”

“About which part?”

“All of it.”

Her face empties.

Rafe pushes himself upright, keeping both hands around her as though she may attempt to escape through the wall. “There were no strippers.”

She stares at him.

“None,” he says quickly. “Not Tracy, not anybody. Tracy’s not real. I panicked.”

She blinks. “You invented a stripper?”

“I needed a name.”

“Why?”

“Because you asked me!”

She opens her mouth, closes it, then opens it again. “You told me you had strippers.”

“Because you said you were getting one.” His voice climbs before he remembers their sleeping child down the hall and drags it back into an urgent whisper. “You mentioned it first, and I thought you were serious, and I wasn’t gonna sit there looking like some pathetic asshole while you had some guy’s dick swinging around your face.”

Her eyes widen. “That’s not what strippers do.”

“How would I know?”

“You said you were hiring them!”

“I was lying!”

She pulls back slightly, still caught between his hands. Rafe’s face is open now in the particular, reluctant way it only becomes when embarrassment has finally overpowered self-protection.

His cheeks are faintly flushed beneath the low light. His jaw keeps shifting. He looks furious, but not at her. At himself. At the imaginary male stripper. At the entire concept of entertainment.

“You really didn’t have any?” she asks.

“No.” His fingers tighten at her waist. “Ask Topper. Ask Kelce. Ask every guy who was there. Topper thought there were gonna be some because I lied to him too, and then he started talking about professional moves and I almost left.”

Despite herself, her mouth twitches. “Professional moves?”

“Don’t.”

“Rafe–”

His eyes search her face, frantic. “Did you have one?”

She looks down at the small gold chain resting against his chest. “No.”

“What?”

“I lied too.”

For several seconds, nothing in the room moves except the numbers glowing faintly on the baby monitor. Rafe’s hands loosen around her waist. “You didn’t have a stripper.”

“No.”

“Not one?”

She shakes her head. “No.”

He studies her face with deep suspicion. “Swears?”

“Swears.”

Rafe stares at her, then drags one hand down his face. The breath that leaves him sounds as though he has been holding it since yesterday afternoon. “Oh, thank God.”

Her shoulders drop at the exact same time. “I know.”

His eyes return to hers. “You really swear?”

She holds out her little finger. Rafe looks at it.

“Pinky swear,” she says.

His mouth twitches despite himself. He hooks his little finger around hers, the gesture absurdly delicate between his large hand and hers.

“No strippers,” she says.

“No strippers,” he agrees.

“Ever.”

“What if we’re at somebody else’s–”

She sighs. “Rafe.”

“Right. Never.”

They hold the promise another second longer than necessary, both of them staring at their joined hands with the solemn relief of people who have survived something entirely self-created.

Then she lets go and wraps both arms around his shoulders. Rafe catches her hard, pulling her across his lap until her knees settle on either side of him and her face fits into his neck.

His palm slides up her back beneath the shirt, warm and broad over bare skin. For a moment, neither of them says anything. She breathes him in, clean soap and familiar heat, and feels the last tight little knot beneath her ribs finally loosen.

“I love you so much,” she murmurs against his throat. “You’re such an idiot.”

His mouth presses into her hair. “You lied too.”

“I know.”

“So you’re an idiot.”

“Not as badly.”

“Same lie.”

“Different motivations.”

Rafe draws back enough to look at her. “Your motivation was making me think some guy was gonna rub himself on you.”

“Because you were talking about strippers.”

“As a joke.”

“So was I.”

His expression flattens. She presses her lips together. For one suspended second, they look at each other.

Then Rafe laughs – quiet at first, breath moving warm across her mouth, then helpless enough that his head drops forward against her shoulder. 

Her own laughter follows, muffled into his neck so it won’t carry down the hallway, both of them shaking beneath the sheet over forty-eight hours of jealousy aimed at people who have never existed.

“You made up two,” she whispers.

“I panicked.”

“You said Tracy and then almost gave me another one.”

“I was building a believable story,” he groans.

“You are genuinely frightening.”

He grins. “You believed me.”

“Because you’re a slut.”

Rafe lifts his head, offended. “I have been with one person for, like, six years.”

“Temporary breakup.”

“Still you.”

Her smile softens before she can protect it. Rafe sees. His hand comes to the side of her face, thumb resting beneath her cheekbone while his expression changes around the edges, humour giving way to something quieter and more exposed.

“Never wanted anybody else,” he says.

The words are simple enough to hurt. She leans into his palm. “Me neither.”

“Not even the imaginary stripper?”

She tilts her lips down in thought. “He had great moves.”

Rafe’s fingers tighten gently against her jaw. “Careful.”

She smiles and kisses him. The kiss lands soft, almost apologetic, but neither of them has ever been good at keeping anything between them small.

Rafe’s hand slides into her hair. Her arms tighten around his shoulders. The relief moves through them both as heat, deepening the press of his mouth until she shifts closer across his lap and he makes a low sound against her lips.

When they finally pull apart, her forehead stays against his. His breath is warm and uneven. One hand remains spread at her waist as though he still needs the reassurance of finding her there.

“No more talking about strippers,” she whispers.

“Ever,” he agrees.

“No fake names.”

“Yeah.”

“No Tracy.”

He waves a hand. “Tracy’s dead to me.”

“She was never alive.”

He grins. “Even better.”

A laugh catches in her throat. Rafe kisses it from her mouth, once and then again, smiling against her lips when she curls both arms more tightly around him. From the monitor, Banks sighs in his sleep. They both go still automatically, listening.

When the room remains quiet, she settles back against Rafe’s chest and feels his arms close around her, secure and familiar and a little too tight. Outside, the marina shifts softly against its ropes. Their discarded party clothes are still heaped across the chair. 

Her wedding dress is waiting at Sarah’s house, the invitations are half addressed downstairs, and in six weeks she will become the thing Rafe claimed she would be long before either of them had earned the confidence. His wife.

She presses her mouth against the centre of his chest.

Rafe looks down. “What?”

Her smile grows against his skin. “You’re gonna be my husband.”

His expression warms slowly, pleased in the same young, impossible way it always does when the future proves him right. He strokes his thumb along her back and pulls her higher against him.

He presses his cheek to the top of her hair. “Told you that you’d be my wife.”

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She makes it halfway across the patch of grass before the smell reaches her. Warm bread, roasted chicken, something garlicky. Her stomach pulls painfully beneath her ribs, reminding her that breakfast had been half a piece of toast eaten while standing over the kitchen sink because she’d misplaced her other shoe. “What did you bring?”

Garrett’s grin starts. “Hi to you too.”

“Hi.” She stops between his knees, and he catches her automatically by the hips, pressing his mouth to the centre of her stomach through her cardigan before tipping his head back to look at her. “What did you bring?”

“Lunch.”

“That’s not specific.”

He tilts his head to the side. “That’s because you’ll start negotiating before I show you.”

“I don’t negotiate.”

“You told me yesterday you only wanted something small.” His hands remain at her waist while he looks up at her, dark curls disturbed by the wind and one faint crease still pressed beside his cheek from whatever lecture he’d spent resting his face against his fist. “You’ve been here since seven.”

“Eight.”

“You left the house at seven.”

“That’s different.”

“It’s worse.”

She tries to look stern, but Garrett pulls her closer until her knees touch the bench and kisses the little strip of skin beneath her scrub top where it has ridden up. It’s difficult to maintain authority while Briar’s hockey captain is kissing her stomach beside a sign asking patients not to smoke within five metres of the building.

“Sit down,” he says. “I brought chicken wraps, those potatoes you like and actual fruit because Tucker said grapes don’t count as a side dish.”

“Tucker’s becoming controlling,” she grins.

“Tucker packed the grapes.”

“Oh.” She sits beside him at once. “Tucker’s an angel.”

Garrett hands her the container with a look of deep personal betrayal. “I drove it here.”

“You’re useful too.”

“Thank you.”

She’s halfway through her first bite when the side door opens again. Janelle, the practice nurse supervising her placement, steps outside with a mug in one hand and a lanyard tangled around the other. She’s in her forties, quick-moving and kind in the specific way of nurses who can reassure an anxious parent while opening six packets with their teeth.

“There you are,” Janelle says, then notices Garrett and smiles like she has been expecting to eventually find the source of the lunches arriving in increasingly respectable containers. “You must be Garrett.”

Garrett stands immediately, because beneath the hockey-house manners and constant obscenity there’s something in him that responds to older women with professional authority like a student unexpectedly called on in class. “Yeah. Hi.”

“I’ve heard about the food.”

She closes her eyes briefly. “Oh my God.”

Janelle laughs, then looks back at her. “You did really well this morning, by the way. Especially with the twins. Vaccinating one four-year-old is hard enough without the other one providing live commentary.”

Heat moves quickly from beneath her collar to her face. The fork in her hand pauses over the potatoes. “Oh. Um. Thank you.”

“You kept both of them calm, and you explained everything to Mom without drowning her in information. That’s good.” Janelle takes a sip from her mug, already turning back toward the door. “Enjoy your lunch. Don’t let us steal you before one.”

The door closes behind her. For a few seconds, Garrett says nothing. That’s worse than if he had immediately started being annoying. She looks down and spears one potato with more concentration than it deserves, aware of his face angled toward her, his knee pressing warmly against hers.

“What?” she asks.

“Nothing.”

“You’re staring.”

“My girlfriend vaccinated twins this morning.”

She rolls her eyes. “I assisted with vaccinations.”

“Four-year-old twins.”

“Under supervision.”

“And one of them was heckling you?”

“She kept telling her brother the needle was going to be enormous.” Her mouth twitches despite herself. “Then she screamed before anyone touched her and scared him so badly he started crying.”

Garrett’s grin breaks wide and bright. “And you handled it.”

She shoots him a look. “I gave her a sticker.”

“Medical genius.”

“She liked stickers,” she mutters.

He nudges his shoulder into hers. “You were good.”

The praise catches in the same difficult place Janelle’s had, somewhere high beneath her breastbone, warm enough to feel almost uncomfortable. She looks down at the container. “I didn’t do much.”

Garrett doesn’t argue immediately. He reaches over instead, takes the fork from her hand and uses it to gather a piece of chicken she had pushed toward the edge. “You’ve gotta stop doing that.”

“Doing what?”

“Turning every nice thing someone says about you into something else.” He holds the fork near her mouth. “That nurse was there. She probably knows if you did well.”

“She does.”

“And she said you did.”

She looks at the chicken, then at him. Garrett’s expression is easy, but there’s something steady underneath it, no teasing escape built into the moment. She opens her mouth and lets him feed her mostly because refusing would make this into a larger emotional event beside the staff car park.

After she swallows, she says, “I did do pretty well.”

Garrett leans in and kisses her temple.

Wednesday

By Wednesday, Garrett has been recognised by reception. He discovers this when the woman behind the front desk sees him through the glass doors carrying two containers and presses the release button without making him use the intercom.

He gives her a small wave as he crosses the foyer, and she points toward the side exit with the expression of someone directing a regular delivery.

His girlfriend emerges four minutes later with her stethoscope still around her neck and a smear of something pale across one sleeve. Garrett eyes it as she drops onto the bench beside him. “What’s that?”

She follows his gaze. “Dressing adhesive, probably.”

“Probably?”

“Nothing infectious.”

His nose scrunches. “That’s not as reassuring as you think.”

She lets her head tip onto his shoulder while he opens the first container. Today it’s soup in a sealed thermos, two toasted sandwiches wrapped in foil and a yoghurt Garrett has selected because the label contains the word protein in lettering large enough to appeal to him.

“I only have twenty minutes,” she murmurs.

“You said thirty.”

“Mrs. Patterson’s wound review ran over.”

Garrett unwraps the sandwich and places it into her hand before she can decide she isn’t hungry enough. “Bad?”

“No. It’s actually healing really nicely.” Her voice changes on the last part, tiredness thinning out beneath interest. “She had a skin tear on her shin that got infected, but the redness has come down and there’s way less exudate. I got to clean it and redress it today.”

He’s learned enough nursing vocabulary through forced exposure not to make a face at exudate. “That good?”

“Very.”

“So you fixed her leg.”

She snorts softly. “I didn’t fix her leg.”

“You helped.”

“I helped,” she nods.

The side door swings open before he can improve the claim. Dr. Shah steps out with his phone in one hand and a set of car keys in the other, a slim man with silver beginning at his temples and the permanently hurried posture of someone who’s been running fifteen minutes behind since medical school.

He sees her and slows. “Good work with Mrs. Patterson.”

Her shoulders pull in by less than an inch. Garrett feels it because they’re pressed together from hip to knee, because he’s become embarrassingly fluent in the small movements she thinks nobody notices.

“Thank you,” she says, a little too quickly.

“You were gentle, but you didn’t hesitate. Patients notice when you’re nervous, particularly with painful dressings.” Dr. Shah nods once, like the matter is settled. “She asked whether you’ll be here for her next appointment.”

Her fingers tighten around the foil. “She did?”

“She likes you.” His phone begins ringing. He glances at it and sighs with his whole body. “Enjoy lunch.”

Garrett waits until Dr. Shah has crossed the car park before turning his head.

She’s staring down at her sandwich. The tip of one ear has gone pink. “Don’t,” she warns.

Garrett takes a drink from his coffee and tries, unsuccessfully, to flatten his mouth. “Mrs. Patterson requested my girlfriend specifically.”

“She asked if I’d be there,” she grumbles.

“Requested.”

“She probably just doesn’t want to explain the whole wound history again.”

“Or she likes you.”

“She barely knows me.”

“She knows you don’t rip bandages off her leg like you’re waxing a car.”

“That’s not how anyone removes dressings,” she replies.

“You said one of the nurses at the hospital did.”

She holds up a finger. “One nurse, one time.”

He looks down at her, taking in the tired little shadows under her eyes, the escaping strands of hair around her face, the stethoscope bumping lightly against her chest each time she moves. “You know you’re good at this, right?”

Her chewing slows. Garrett lets the question stay where it lands. He doesn’t push it toward a joke or ask her to say something she cannot yet make fit comfortably in her mouth.

Eventually, she swallows and wipes her thumb over the corner of the foil. “I’m getting better.”

“Yeah,” he says. “You are.”

Her gaze lifts to his, cautious at first, then warmer when she realises he means the answer exactly as she gave it. She’s getting better. At dressings. At talking to patients. At hearing something kind without immediately dismantling it for parts.

Garrett bends and kisses her once, slow and ordinary, tasting faintly of coffee when she kisses him back. Her phone alarm goes off between them.

She groans into his mouth. “I hate employment.”

“You don’t work here.”

“I hate unpaid employment more.”

He gathers the containers while she stands, then catches the back of her scrub top before she can escape and pulls her in for one more kiss. “Text me when you’re done.”

“I finish at five.”

“Text me anyway.”

“You’ll be at practice.”

“My girlfriend always says phones work in locker rooms.”

She narrows her eyes. “I’ve never said that.”

“Pretty sure you did,” Garrett shrugs.

“That sounds nothing like me.”

Garrett kisses her forehead and lets her go. “My girlfriend’s also very argumentative.”

The side door closes on the sight of her giving him the finger.

Friday

On Friday, the bench is wet from morning rain, so Garrett brings a towel. This is apparently the final stage of whatever has happened to him. He arrives with lunch in one hand, a folded beach towel in the other and Dean’s voice still ringing in his ears from the kitchen that morning.

“Do you hear yourself?” Dean had asked while Garrett packed pasta into a container. “My girlfriend likes the pesto. My girlfriend hates raw tomato. My girlfriend says I need more fibre. You’ve become a doll with one phrase.”

“She does hate raw tomato.”

“We know,” Logan had said from the table. “We all know everything about your girlfriend. Against our will.”

Tucker, slicing strawberries at the counter, had quietly pushed a second container toward Garrett. “She’ll need more than pasta if she’s there until six.”

Garrett had looked at Dean. Dean had pointed the knife he was using to spread peanut butter. “Don’t.”

“My girlfriend–”

“I’ll kill you.”

Now she sits on the towel beside him, one knee tucked toward her chest, eating pesto pasta while the medical centre moves through its afternoon behind them. Cars roll in and out of the lot. Someone’s toddler is crying near the pharmacy entrance. Garrett has practice in forty minutes, but his gear is already in the back of the car and the rink is seven minutes away.

She looks exhausted. It’s in the small things: the way she keeps rubbing her thumb over the side of her index finger, the slow blinks, the faint crease between her brows even while chewing. 

Garrett puts the strawberries closer to her without mentioning it. “Eat those too.”

She glances at the container. “You sound like Tucker.”

“Tucker packed them.”

“Of course he did.”

A nurse comes out carrying an empty mug, sees them and smiles. She’s younger than Janelle, maybe late twenties, with bright blue glasses and a name badge that says MELANIE, RN.

“There’s our lunch visitor.”

Garrett lifts his hand. “Hey.”

Melanie looks at her. “I meant to tell you before you disappeared– you were excellent with Noah this morning.”

She straightens slightly. “The asthma review?”

“Mhm. His mom said nobody’s ever explained the spacer properly without making her feel stupid.” Melanie shifts the mug between her hands. “You gave her time to ask questions. That’s harder to teach than people think.”

Her fingers curl lightly around the plastic fork.

“Thank you,” she says.

No apology attached. No immediate reason it didn’t count. Just thank you, quiet and a little pink around the cheeks.

Melanie grins. “You’re welcome. See you inside.”

When the door shuts, Garrett looks down at his own lunch because he knows better now than to turn every moment into an audience. Beside him, she takes another bite, chews, then says, almost carefully, “I was good with them.”

His whole chest seems to shift forward. He keeps his eyes on the container for another second so he doesn’t frighten her by looking as pleased as he feels. “Yeah?”

She nods. “The little boy wasn’t using the spacer right, and his mom thought she’d been doing something wrong, but nobody had actually shown her. So I demonstrated it, and then I got him to teach it back to me with his teddy first.” Her hands start moving as she talks, fork drawing small shapes through the air. “He kept putting the mask over the teddy’s whole face, which was, like, completely ineffective, but he got it eventually.”

Garrett watches her now. He cannot help it. The tiredness is still there, but something brighter has pushed through it, colour high in her cheeks and the words coming faster because she knows this, because she had been useful in the middle of somebody’s confusing morning and knows exactly how.

“You taught a teddy bear how to use an inhaler,” he says.

She gives him a look, but her mouth has already betrayed her. “Technically.”

“That’s huge.”

“It’s a bear.”

He shrugs. “Could’ve died.”

“It was stuffed.”

“Still. Brave work.”

She laughs, leaning sideways until her head rests against his shoulder. Garrett puts his container down and slides an arm around her, his hand settling over the soft cotton at her waist. She smells like hand sanitiser, rain caught in her hair and the faint medicinal sweetness of whatever soap sits beside the clinic sinks.

For a minute, neither of them speaks. She eats one strawberry from the container in his lap, then another. Garrett watches a leaf drag along the wet pavement near his shoe and thinks, with an intensity that would make Dean genuinely ill, that there may be nothing better than this. 

Her weight against him. Food packed by Tucker. Practice waiting. A plastic fork balanced crookedly across her container. The knowledge that people inside that building see what Garrett sees when she talks about work with her whole face.

She nudges her nose into the shoulder of his jacket. “What?”

“What?”

“You’re doing that thing.”

“What thing?”

She smiles up at him. “Looking pleased with yourself.”

“I’m not pleased with myself.”

“No?”

Garrett turns his head and presses his mouth to her hair. “I’m pleased with my girlfriend.”

She groans, but her body folds closer, one hand slipping into the pocket of his jacket like it belongs there. “The boys must hate you.”

“They’re jealous.”

“They’re exhausted,” she sighs.

“Tucker supports me.”

“Tucker feeds you so the rest of the house survives.”

He takes a moment to consider this. “That’s still support.”

Her break alarm sounds from inside her cardigan pocket. She doesn’t move immediately. Neither does Garrett. They sit through the first three beeps with her cheek against his shoulder and his thumb moving slowly over her side.

Then she sighs and lifts her head. Garrett catches her chin before she can stand and kisses her, gentle at first, then a little firmer when her fingers curl into his jacket and pull him closer.

When they separate, she keeps her forehead against his. “Thank you for coming all week.”

“Course.”

She presses her forehead against his harder. “You don’t have to come every day.”

“I know.”

“You have classes and practice.”

“I know.”

“And Dean said you missed lunch with them yesterday,” she murmurs.

“Dean was offended because nobody wanted to hear his story about a girl from his economics class.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. I was having lunch with my girlfriend.”

She closes her eyes. “There it is.”

Garrett grins and kisses the corner of her mouth. “Go be good at your job.”

“Placement.”

“Mm. Go be good at that.”

She gets up, gathers her stethoscope and starts toward the side door. Halfway there, she turns. Garrett’s still sitting on the towel with the empty containers stacked beside him, watching her like he plans to keep doing it until the building physically removes her from view.

She lifts one hand. “Bye, baby.”

“Bye.” He waits until her fingers touch the door handle. “Hey.”

She looks back. 

Garrett’s grin spreads slowly, helplessly, all bright teeth and curls and entirely too much feeling for a staff car park at one-thirty on a Friday afternoon. “Proud of you.”

She rolls her eyes so hard it should hurt, but she’s smiling when the door closes behind her.

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“Oh, baby,” he says, voice rough with sleep and immediate alarm. “Jesus.”

She would tell him she’s fine if she could force enough air around the cough to lie convincingly. Instead, she makes a horrible spluttering sound that causes his other hand to close around her upper arm, steadying her while she curls farther over herself.

“Easy,” he murmurs. His palm moves slowly up and down her back, never patting, never thumping at her, just following the cramped movement of her lungs beneath the fabric. “Breathe when you can. Don’t fight it.”

She coughs until her throat burns and her stomach muscles begin to shake with the effort. Every attempt at an inhale catches against something thick in her chest and turns into another fit, her forehead nearly touching her knees while Rafe stays beside her, one hand rubbing between her shoulders and the other keeping her upright.

It finally begins to loosen by degrees. One cough instead of four. A breath that reaches almost all the way in. Another smaller cough that scrapes painfully through her throat before leaving her hunched and watery-eyed, gulping the cold bedroom air like she’s been underwater.

“Holy shit,” she groans.

Rafe’s hand slides to the back of her neck, thumb pressing into the damp hair there. “Yeah. Sounded real healthy.”

She turns her head enough to glare at him, which only starts another cough, though this one is short and miserable rather than life-threatening. Rafe’s mouth tightens immediately, the joke disappearing from his face as he reaches across her for the water on the nightstand.

“Here.”

She takes two careful sips. The water hurts going down, cold against the raw strip of her throat, but it settles something enough that she can breathe without her chest rattling quite so dramatically.

Rafe watches every swallow. He flew home from Charleston that afternoon after Banks called him from school and casually mentioned that she’d fallen asleep sitting upright at the kitchen island while waiting for the kettle to boil. 

By six, Rafe had been through the front door with his suitcase still in one hand, furious at the entire household for not having informed him sooner and especially furious at her for using the phrase little cold over the phone.

Now he puts the glass down and shifts behind her. “C’mere. Lean back.”

“I’m disgusting,” she mutters, wiping beneath her eyes with the heel of her palm.

“You’re my wife.”

“That doesn’t answer what I said.”

“Yeah, it does.” Rafe braces himself higher against the headboard, rearranging the pillows behind his shoulders with one irritated shove, then guides her carefully onto her side against his chest. “Come on.”

She lets him move her, he settles her with her cheek beneath his collarbone and one arm curved around her waist, his body propped at enough of an angle that she’s almost sitting up while still lying against him. His hand returns to her back, moving in slow circles now, warm through the shirt.

The position opens her chest slightly. She exhales and feels some of the pressure ease, though every rib still aches as if the children have spent the week kicking her from the inside rather than coughing directly into her face.

“Better?” Rafe asks.

“Mhm.”

“That mean yes?”

“It means stop making me talk.”

His mouth presses into her hair. “Bossy when you’re dying.”

“Not dying.”

“You scared the shit out of me.”

She feels the admission in the way his arm tightens around her. Rafe has never been particularly talented at fear unless he can disguise it as annoyance, household management or yelling at an airline employee until they find him an earlier flight.

Before she can answer, a soft sound comes from the hallway. Bare feet against wood. Slow, uneven little pats, followed by the faint scrape of something being dragged behind them.

Their bedroom door pushes open by several inches, and Lila appears in the gap with her hair flattened on one side and her stuffed rabbit hanging from one hand by an ear. “Mama?”

Rafe’s palm stills against her back. “Mama’s okay, baby. She’s just got that same cold you had last week, remember?”

Lila stands there considering this, small and solemn in pink pyjamas patterned with strawberries. Then she crosses the room without invitation and begins climbing onto the bed, knees and elbows everywhere.

Rafe catches her beneath the arms before she can plant one directly into his wife’s spine. “Careful.”

“I am careful,” Lila whispers loudly, offended by the accusation.

“Sure.”

She crawls across Rafe’s legs and holds the rabbit toward her mother. “For Mama.”

Her chest aches for a different reason now. She takes the rabbit and lays it against herself, its fur worn thin around the nose from three years of being loved aggressively. “Thank you, sweet girl.”

Lila tucks herself into Rafe’s other side, fitting beneath his arm as though the space has been left there specifically for her. She reaches across him to pat the rabbit where it rests on her mother’s chest, her small hand landing with grave little taps. “Sleep, Mama.”

A laugh escapes her and catches painfully at the back of her throat. “Thanks, baby. I will.”

Rafe looks down at both of them, his wife wrecked and fever-warm against one side, his youngest daughter wedged beneath the other with one foot already shoved under his thigh. Then he bends to kiss the top of Lila’s head before pressing another kiss into his wife’s hair.

Neither of them minds the crowding. Banks is fourteen now and reacts to physical affection as though his parents are attempting to embarrass him for their entertainment. Marlowe, at ten, will still lean against her mother during movies but insists she is absolutely not cuddling and usually puts a cushion between them as protection.

Lila still comes running. She still offers the most important thing she owns when somebody is sick and climbs into their bed without asking whether she’s wanted there.

She closes her eyes, the rabbit soft beneath her hand and Rafe’s chest rising steadily behind her. His palm resumes its slow path over her back while Lila’s breathing begins to deepen against his side, the three of them propped awkwardly beneath the blankets like a badly assembled piece of furniture.

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His hair is flattened on one side from sleep and curling wildly on the other, a line from the pillow still faintly visible along his cheek. The thin chain around his neck catches the grey morning light coming through the window above the sink each time he reaches for something, flashing briefly against his chest before settling again.

He’s been trying to make coffee for six minutes. She’s been preventing him from completing any individual step for more than twenty seconds.

Garrett reaches for the mugs. She hooks her foot more securely around the back of his knee and pulls. It doesn’t move him far, because he has the stability of a building designed to withstand coastal weather, but it gets his attention. 

He glances over his shoulder, the corner of his mouth already shifting. “What?”

She lifts her brows. “Nothing.”

“Your foot’s trying to climb into my pants.”

“It likes you.”

Garrett turns properly then, abandoning the mugs with the weary acceptance of a man who understands the coffee is no longer the main task. His hands settle on either side of her thighs, palms warm against the cold stone counter, and she catches his chain between two fingers before he can say anything else. 

It’s a gentle pull, barely enough pressure to bring his mouth closer, but Garrett follows immediately, chin tipping down until his breath moves warm over her face.

“Needy this morning,” he murmurs.

She studies the chain rather than him, thumb moving over the small metal links. “That’s rich.”

“Is it?”

“You tried to follow me into the bathroom.”

“You were gone a long time.”

“I was brushing my teeth.”

His mouth twitches. She gives the chain another small pull, and Garrett leans in the last inch without making her ask. 

The kiss lands soft and warm, morning-slow rather than hungry, his mouth tasting faintly of toothpaste and sleep. His hand slides from the counter to the outside of her bare thigh, thumb passing once along the hem of her shorts while she kisses him again because the first one feels too brief now that she has him there.

The new title hasn’t changed the mechanics of Garrett’s mouth. It hasn’t altered the weight of his hand or the rough-soft brush of his curls beneath her fingers or the way his body fits into the space between her knees like it has been doing so for months without formal permission. 

Still, something in her keeps testing it. Pulling him back when he moves away. Touching the chain at his throat. Catching his shoulder when he turns toward the cupboard. 

Because he’s her boyfriend now and her body has interpreted that as unrestricted access to his general vicinity.

Garrett seems to have reached the same conclusion. He kisses her once more, then presses his mouth to the corner of hers, her cheek, the warm place beneath her ear where the jersey collar slips wide over one shoulder. 

His hand spreads over her thigh as she tips her head to give him room, and the small pull through already-tender muscles makes her inhale differently.

Garrett stops. It’s almost irritating, how quickly he catches it. His mouth lifts from her neck, eyes moving over her face with the immediate focus of someone who’s spent enough time in hospitals around her to believe every bodily sound comes with follow-up questions.

“You sore?”

She looks at him. “You’re smug.”

“I’m asking.”

“You’re asking smugly.”

“Can you answer, baby?”

Her fingers stay looped loosely in his chain. “A little.”

Garrett’s mouth curves.

She narrows her eyes. “Don’t.”

He kisses her forehead, the smile still pressing into her skin. “You want ibuprofen?”

The question comes out so sincerely practical that a laugh slips through her before she can stop it. Her throat objects halfway, roughening the sound, and Garrett’s grin deepens into something unbearable.

“Oh, wow.”

She presses her palm over his mouth. “Don’t.”

Garrett kisses the centre of her hand.

“That’s not an invitation to become worse.”

His fingers circle her wrist, holding her hand against his face as he says, muffled into her palm, “Your voice is gone.”

“My voice is fine.”

“You sound like Dean after a three-day bender.”

She pulls her hand away to glare properly. “I worked an eleven-hour shift yesterday.”

“Mhm.”

“I was tired.”

“Right.”

“The heating dries out my throat,” she argues. 

“Baby.”

She catches his chain again, hard enough this time to bring his mouth down before he can finish whatever deeply self-satisfied contribution was coming next. 

Garrett laughs into the kiss, one hand sliding behind her neck while the other grips her thigh more firmly. She bites lightly at his bottom lip because he deserves it. He makes a rough sound and steps closer until the soft fabric of his sweatpants brushes between her knees.

The coffee machine clicks off behind him. Neither of them moves.

Then a floorboard groans in the hallway, followed by the dragging sound of someone approaching the kitchen with no meaningful interest in surviving the morning. 

Garrett pulls back by half an inch. She keeps her fingers around his chain, mostly because releasing him would suggest shame and she’s currently too comfortable for that.

Dean appears in the doorway wearing black sweatpants, one sock and no shirt, his hair standing up at the back as though he’s been electrocuted. He makes it three steps into the kitchen before seeing them. 

His gaze moves from Garrett standing between her knees to her hand wrapped around Garrett’s chain, then to the coffee machine like it has personally betrayed him by placing this scene along the route.

“No,” Dean says.

Garrett doesn’t turn. “Good morning.”

“It isn’t.”

She smiles at Dean over Garrett’s shoulder. “Morning.”

Dean’s expression changes immediately. “Morning, sweetheart. Sleep okay?”

Garrett pulls back enough to stare at him. “What the fuck?”

Dean ignores him and crosses to the cupboard, opening it with the careful dignity of a man refusing to engage with something below his moral standards. “There any coffee?”

“I just made it,” Garrett says.

“Great.” Dean reaches for a mug, pauses, then glances at Garrett’s bare back. “Didn’t realise you still had the upper-body strength. Good for you, man.”

Her face warms instantly. Garrett lets go of her thigh and turns around, placing himself between her and Dean as though modesty can be installed retroactively by shoulder width. “Can you not?”

Dean blinks at him. “Can I not get coffee?”

“You know what you’re doing.”

“I’m standing six feet from the kitchen counter because there’s a private event happening near the mugs.”

She presses her lips together.

Garrett looks back at her, catches the beginning of the laugh in her face and points one warning finger. “Don’t encourage him.”

“I haven’t said anything,” she says smiling.

“That’s because you can’t,” Dean says pleasantly, pouring coffee.

Garrett’s head snaps toward him. “Dude.”

Dean brings the mug to his mouth and blows across the top with complete serenity. “What?” Dean’s eyes widen with exaggerated innocence. “I was expressing concern about the house’s dry air.”

She folds in on herself, laughter catching silently in her chest as she presses her forehead to Garrett’s shoulder. His skin is warm beneath her face. 

Garrett mutters something that sounds like unbelievable and reaches automatically, one hand settling at the side of her neck to hold her there even while he glares at Dean.

Another set of footsteps sounds on the stairs, quicker and heavier. Logan comes into the kitchen in a backwards cap and a faded Bruins shirt, scratching one hand over his stomach. 

He stops beside Dean, takes in the arrangement and looks toward the ceiling. “Huh,” he says. “Still structurally intact.”

Garrett’s shoulders tighten. “Morning to you too.”

“I genuinely thought your headboard was going through the wall.”

“That headboard’s cheap,” Garrett grumbles.

“That headboard’s loud,” Tucker says from the hallway before appearing behind Logan, hair rumpled, grey hoodie pulled over sleep shorts. He carries his phone in one hand and looks more awake than the rest of them. “Or it was last night.”

Garrett turns enough that she can see his face. “Why does everyone keep talking about the headboard?”

The three boys stare at him.

Dean takes another slow drink of coffee. “Did you smack your head?”

She makes the mistake of laughing aloud. Her voice cracks visibly enough that Logan’s mouth drops open.

Garrett points at him immediately. “Don’t.”

Logan shuts his mouth, cheeks puffing as he holds the comment inside. His eyes water with the effort. Tucker looks toward the refrigerator with the strained neutrality of someone witnessing a minor car accident. Dean lowers his mug and bites down on his own knuckle.

“Oh my God,” she groans, putting both hands over her face.

Garrett steps closer at once, crowding between her knees again as he reaches up and catches her wrists. “Hey. They’re assholes.”

“No,” Dean says. “You’re the asshole. We’re witnesses.”

“Hostages,” Logan corrects.

“Tucker made popcorn,” Dean adds.

Tucker’s brows pull together. “I was hungry.”

“You made enough for everyone.”

“You were all downstairs.”

“Because nobody wanted to risk the upper floor.”

Garrett looks at Tucker. “You too?”

Tucker has the decency to appear slightly apologetic. “The vents carry sound.”

“The vents,” Logan repeats darkly. “A design flaw.”

Garrett releases one of her wrists but keeps hold of the other, thumb passing over the inside as he turns back toward the boys. “Okay, why are you all chirping me?”

Dean glances toward her. “Because you’re here.”

“So is she.”

All three faces change. There’s only a small, collective stillness, like Garrett has asked why they don’t kick puppies for sport and the room has to recalibrate around the moral deficit required to form the question.

Dean lowers his mug. “Don’t be dumb.”

Garrett frowns. “What?”

“We’re not chirping her.”

“Why not?”

Logan looks offended now. “Because we have manners.”

Garrett stares at him. “You told a campus cop his moustache looked like a cry for help.”

“He was harassing Tuck.”

“He asked Tucker to move his car,” Garrett argues.

“It was the tone.”

Tucker opens the refrigerator and peers inside. “Also, she’s our friend.”

Dean points his mug toward her, careful not to spill. “She’s basically my little sister.”

Her hands lower from her face. “Basically?”

Dean looks at her with immediate sincerity. “Emotionally. Not biologically. I would’ve remembered you at Christmas.”

“You got Tucker a gas-station gift card for Christmas.”

“He loves fuel.”

“I do drive,” Tucker says, taking the eggs from the fridge.

Garrett’s still looking between them, genuinely bothered by the imbalance. “She was up there too. Louder than me, actually.”

The comment earns him a smack to the stomach. 

“No,” Logan says.

Garrett’s brows draw together. “What do you mean, no?”

“I mean I didn’t hear anything.”

“You just said–”

“Heard you,” Logan says. “Loud and clear. Like a fucking podcast.”

Dean nods. “Mostly you announcing relationship updates.”

Her stomach drops with a warm, humiliating lurch. Garrett’s hand tightens reflexively around her wrist.

“What relationship updates?” she asks grinning, though her voice comes out rough.

Dean’s mouth twitches. “Couldn’t tell you, sweetheart.”

“Selective hearing,” Tucker says, setting the eggs on the counter.

“It’s a trauma response,” Logan adds.

Garrett looks at all three of them, then back at her. His expression has gone from annoyed to openly betrayed. “You were saying it too.”

The boys look away simultaneously. Dean studies the inside of his coffee mug. Logan becomes fascinated by the magnets on the refrigerator. Tucker opens a drawer and begins searching for a spatula that has lived in the same place for two years.

Garrett’s eyes narrow. “Oh, fuck all of you.”

She laughs again, quieter this time, and lets him step back between her legs. He places both hands on her knees, looking up at her like she has personally failed to defend him in court.

“They love me more,” she whispers.

“Apparently.”

“Maybe I’m nicer.”

“You’re not.”

Her foot hooks around the back of his calf again. “Maybe I’m prettier.”

Garrett’s gaze moves over her face, then drops briefly to the jersey hanging loose over her body and the small strip of thigh above the cotton shorts. His annoyance softens around the edges in spite of himself. 

“Yeah,” he says. “That one’s probably true.”

She catches his chain and pulls him in. This kiss is smaller, mostly the press of her smiling mouth to his, but Garrett’s hand moves to her waist like no part of him understands the concept of casual contact anymore.

Dean makes a disgusted sound into his coffee. “See, this is what I mean. She’s being cute. You’re disgusting.”

Garrett kisses her once more before turning his head. “I’m making coffee.”

“You stopped making coffee ten minutes ago.”

“The coffee is made.”

“For her,” Logan says, spotting the second mug near the machine. “You made exactly two coffees.”

Garrett follows his gaze. “Make your own.”

Dean lifts the mug he is already drinking from. “I did.”

“Then why are you still talking?”

“Because your girlfriend’s funny.”

Garrett’s mouth presses together. She can feel the retort building in him before he gets it out, but Tucker interrupts by setting a pan on the stove.

“Eggs?”

“Yes, please,” she says.

Garrett glances at her. “You hungry?”

She makes a considering noise. “Starving.”

Dean opens the bread bag and takes out two slices. “You want toast?”

“Oh– I’m okay.”

He puts the bread in the toaster anyway. “That wasn’t the question.”

Garrett gestures toward her as though presenting evidence to a jury. “There. Chirp her for that.”

Dean gives him a flat look. “We’re feeding her.”

“That’s not chirping,” Garrett frowns.

“She works eleven-hour shifts and thinks crackers are a food group,” Logan says, reaching around Tucker for the orange juice. “There’s no sport in it.”

“It’s actually sad,” Dean adds.

She presses one bare foot against Garrett’s stomach. “Defend me.”

Garrett catches her ankle, palm circling it easily. “Eat the toast.”

“Traitor.”

“Girlfriend.”

The word is quiet, almost absent-minded, but it lands with embarrassing precision anyway. Her toes curl slightly against his skin. Garrett feels it. His eyes lift to hers, and something pleased moves slowly through his expression.

Dean watches both of them and sighs. “I hate that one word has made this worse.”

“You made this worse,” Garrett grumbles. 

“You were excited last night,” she reminds him.

“I was excited that you finally made an honest man out of Graham,” Dean corrects. 

Garrett snorts. “What does that even mean?”

“I don’t know. It’s what people say when a woman saves some asshole from himself.”

“That’s not what happened.”

Dean looks at her. “Is that not what happened?”

She considers Garrett’s hand still warm around her ankle, the coffee cooling behind him because he has once again forgotten to hand it to her, the way he stood outside the hospital asking whether a title could turn him into someone allowed to know she was safe. 

Her chest draws tight around something too soft to expose before breakfast. “Little bit,” she says.

Garrett looks up at her, deeply wounded. “Baby.”

She smiles and draws him closer with her foot until his hips bump lightly against the counter. “But you’re very trainable.”

Logan nearly chokes on the orange juice.

Tucker slides scrambled eggs onto plates while Dean handles the toast with the reckless confidence of someone who didn’t contribute to cooking it. Logan takes bacon from a container in the refrigerator, sniffs it, receives three immediate objections and puts it back. 

The kitchen fills gradually with heat and the warm, buttery smell of eggs, coffee and bread, everyone moving around one another with the unspoken choreography of people who have shared too many mornings in too little space.

Garrett finally remembers her mug. He pours in the small amount of milk she likes without asking, stirs it once and places it into her hands. She takes a sip and makes a soft sound of approval.

“Good?” he asks.

She nods, and he reaches up to push a piece of hair behind her ear. The motion is so gentle and ordinary that it catches somewhere strange. 

His knuckles brush her cheek. His fingers linger near her jaw for half a second before dropping to her knee, and he looks at her with the quiet attentiveness that usually comes after pain, bad shifts or arguments, except nothing is wrong. 

Nobody is bleeding. No doors are locked. His father is nowhere near them. Garrett’s only standing in his kitchen on a cold morning, shirtless and sleep-creased, touching his girlfriend because he can.

She takes another sip to give herself something to do with her mouth.

Garrett’s thumb moves once over her knee. “Away game this weekend.”

Her eyes lift to his.

“You coming?”

The question is casual enough that it could almost disappear into the noise of Dean complaining that Tucker has overcooked one side of the eggs, but Garrett’s attention stays fixed on her face. 

She thinks through her schedule first. No placement. Assignment work she can technically carry with her and then absolutely ignore in a hotel room. The drive is manageable. The ticket probably is too. Then the hotel cost arrives.

Her mouth pulls to one side. “I can’t afford the hotel, baby.”

He smiles immediately. It’s the smile of someone who already encountered this problem in his own head and quietly removed it before asking the question. “I’ll sneak you into my room.”

From inside the refrigerator, Logan says, “Whoa.”

Garrett doesn’t look away from her. “What?”

Logan straightens with a yoghurt in one hand. “Your room?”

Garrett’s thumb continues moving over her knee. “Yeah.”

“Our room,” Logan corrects.

There’s a brief silence.

Garrett glances at him. “You can stay with Dean.”

Dean’s head lifts from his toast. “Why am I being volunteered?”

“Because you love him.”

“I don’t love him enough to sleep beside him.”

Logan looks offended. “We’ve shared rooms before.”

“You kick,” Dean argues.

“You talk in your sleep.”

“I narrate.”

“You said, ‘No, officer, the horse consented,’ at three in the morning,” Logan says, shooting him a look.

Dean’s expression remains completely composed. “Sounds contextual.”

Tucker closes his eyes. “Why was there a horse?”

“It was a dream,” Dean says.

“That doesn’t answer anything.”

Garrett turns back to her as the argument begins widening behind him. His hand slides from her knee to the outside of her thigh, warm and steady beneath the jersey hem. “Come.”

The single word moves through her more softly than it should. She looks past him at Logan, who has now begun negotiating room compensation in the form of Garrett paying for all road snacks. 

Dean’s objecting on principle to having his sleeping arrangements treated like a public utility. Tucker’s trying to determine whether the hotel beds are doubles or queens, believing accurate dimensions may restore order.

Then she looks at Garrett. His hair still flattened strangely from sleep. The faint scratch she left near one shoulder visible when he turns. The chain she’s been using as a personal retrieval system all morning lying warm against his chest. 

He’s watching her without trying to hide how much he wants the answer to be yes. Her foot catches around the back of his leg again.

“Yeah,” she says, smiling before she can stop it. “I wanna come.”

Garrett nods once, like something has settled exactly where he wanted it. His hand squeezes her thigh. “Good.”

She lifts her brows. “Good?”

“Yeah.” He steps closer, fitting between her knees again despite having never moved especially far. His free hand comes up to her face, thumb passing lightly over her cheek. “Want you there.”

There’s nothing polished in the way he says it. Only the plain, warm weight of want you there, spoken while Tucker scrapes eggs from a pan and Logan tries to extort minibar privileges in exchange for losing his bed.

Her chest tightens anyway. She curls two fingers into Garrett’s chain and draws him in, kissing him slowly enough that his hand slides from her cheek to the back of her neck.

Behind them, Logan says, “Okay, but I’m serious. Where exactly am I sleeping?”

Garrett’s mouth stays against hers when he answers, “Not my problem.”

“It becomes your problem when I climb into the other bed at three a.m.”

She laughs into the kiss. Garrett pulls back enough to glare over her shoulder. “You do that and I’m locking you in the hallway.”

Dean picks up one of the plates Tucker has made and brings it toward her. “Here, sweetheart.”

Garrett turns back. “Why are you serving her?”

Dean sets the plate carefully beside her on the counter. “Because you made coffee and then spent fifteen minutes letting her lead you around by the necklace.”

She looks down at the chain still curled around her fingers. Garrett looks down too.

Dean gives a small, vindicated nod. “Exactly.”

Tucker hands Garrett another plate. “Eat.”

Logan takes the final one and leans against the opposite counter, yoghurt abandoned. “I still think I deserve compensation.”

“You’re getting a whole room with Dean,” Garrett says.

“That’s not compensation.”

Dean points his fork at him. “You’re lucky I’m taking him at all. What do I get?”

Garrett looks at her. “Privacy.”

Dean follows his gaze, then closes his eyes briefly as though receiving spiritual guidance. “Right. Yeah. Fine. Separate room. Far end of the hall, ideally.”

“Different floor,” Logan says.

“Different hotel,” Tucker adds.

She hides her smile behind her coffee. Garrett catches it anyway, his hand returning to her knee beneath the edge of the counter.

“See?” he says quietly. “They’re assholes.”

“They’re helping you smuggle me into a team hotel.”

“They’re still assholes.”

Dean points his fork toward Garrett without looking up from his eggs. “And yet we’re not the reason she can barely talk.”

Garrett throws a dish towel at his head.

Dean catches it one-handed and places it politely beside his plate. “Violence won’t restore your dignity.”

“I have dignity.”

Logan looks around the kitchen. “Anybody seen it?”

Tucker shakes his head. “Not since last night.”

Garrett mutters something beneath his breath and turns toward her, clearly expecting support. She takes another bite of toast, chewing slowly as if considering the available evidence.

“Sorry,” she says once she swallows. “Selective hearing.”

For one beat, Garrett only stares. Then his hand tightens around her knee, and she laughs as he leans in, crowding her back slightly against the cupboard. 

His mouth finds her cheek first, then the corner of her smile when she turns her face, the kiss warm and full of the grin he’s trying not to give her.

“My own girlfriend,” he murmurs.

She hooks her heel behind his thigh and keeps him there. 

Across the kitchen, Dean groans so loudly the refrigerator hum briefly loses the competition. Logan throws a crumpled napkin at Garrett’s back. Tucker moves the pan off the warm burner.

Garrett kisses her anyway, one hand sliding into her hair and the other steady on her bare thigh, while coffee cools in her mug and the boys complain around them and plans for the weekend form in pieces across the kitchen: tickets, rides, room keys, Logan’s threatened exile. 

The house is loud again now, properly awake, full of cupboards shutting and forks scraping and Dean insisting he never consented to becoming part of anybody’s romantic logistics.

She keeps Garrett close with two fingers in his chain. He lets her.

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Chapter Two. Stand There Like A Ghost.

The audition is six days away. Six days is nothing. 

Six days is also long enough to ruin every choice she’s made about the scene, rebuild it from scratch, ruin the new choices, and arrive at the audition carrying six incompatible versions of the same woman in her body.

She wakes before her alarm with one cheek stuck to the corner of her audition packet and the yellow highlighter still uncapped beneath her hand. 

Grey morning sits flat against the dorm window. Her neck hurts. The inside of her mouth tastes like the coffee she drank at eleven-thirty and the mint she chewed afterward in a failed attempt to convince herself this counted as dental care.

For several seconds, she stays folded over the desk and watches the circulation return to her fingers. The memory of Garrett’s hand slips in with it. 

His pinky beneath hers on the hockey-house couch. The cautious little curl when she touched him. The way he had stayed completely still while she laced their hands, as though even breathing too differently might turn the moment into something she had not offered.

She straightens before her mind can do anything embarrassing with that.

The audition packet is still open to the second scene. Mara stands alone in her mother’s kitchen, speaking to a half-dead houseplant because everyone else in the house has become too frightening to tell the truth to. 

On paper, it’s funny. It’s supposed to be funny, at least at first. Mara threatens the plant with eviction, accuses it of emotional manipulation, gives it a better childhood than her own through three tablespoons of tap water and an increasingly unstable monologue about sunlight. 

Then the scene turns by degrees until the audience understands she has been talking about herself the whole time.

The production itself belongs to Briar, technically. It will rehearse in the same black-box theatre where someone has been promising to fix the backstage sink since her freshman year, and the department will still use student volunteers to sell programmes and direct confused parents toward the bathrooms. None of that makes the audition small.

Once a year, the department brings in an outside director for the spring industry production, chooses a play that can travel cleanly between theatre and screen, and fills the invited performances with every person whose job title makes undergraduates briefly forget how to breathe. 

Alumni agents. Regional artistic directors. Casting associates from New York and Boston. A manager who had found one of last year’s seniors in the lobby afterward and signed her before graduation. 

The official department email described them as industry guests, which was the sort of neat, bloodless phrase universities used when they didn’t want students throwing up in public.

If she gets the role, and if she is good enough, and if the right person happens to be looking in the right direction at the exact second she becomes impossible to forget, something could happen.

Something was a safer word than Broadway. Safer than television, film, representation, meetings in rooms with bottled water she would be too nervous to open. Something didn’t make her sound like a child standing on her bed with a hairbrush microphone and a belief system built largely from cast albums.

She closes the packet, showers in six minutes, and leaves with wet hair pressed dark against the back of her coat.

Her week begins running before she does. By nine-fifteen, she’s delivered a presentation in Professor Martin’s class while privately trying to release the tension in her jaw. 

At ten, she’s across campus in the movement studio, lying on a floor that smells faintly of dust and other people’s feet. 

At eleven-thirty, she buys a coffee large enough to qualify as an organ and forgets it on the windowsill outside Studio B until the ice melts into a pale, undrinkable soup.

At twelve-oh-seven, her phone buzzes inside her bag.

Garrett: Did you eat?

She stares at the message while standing in the costume shop with three safety pins between her lips and a measuring tape looped around her neck. She removes the pins carefully.

coffee.

His reply comes almost immediately.

Garrett: Not food.

it had milk.

Garrett: Deeply compelling defence.

She smiles before one of the first-years drops an entire box of buttons behind her and the room fills with the sound of several hundred tiny plastic objects escaping toward freedom.

By two, she’s forgotten the exchange. By four, she’s also forgotten the cereal bar in the side pocket of her bag and the fact that she agreed to meet Allie outside the library before rehearsal. 

Allie finds her halfway across the quad, walking while reading the audition scene and nearly colliding with a campus tour.

“You’re going to kill a prospective student,” Allie says, catching the back of her coat and steering her away from a family looking nervous beneath a Briar admissions umbrella.

“She should’ve committed to the bit.”

Allie takes the pages from her hand. “You’re not allowed to read while crossing roads anymore.”

Her phone buzzes again while Allie’s still carrying the packet above her head like confiscated contraband.

Garrett: Drive tonight?

Then, before she can answer. 

Garrett: Twenty minutes. No destination. Minimal chance of murder.

Her chest loosens so quickly it feels almost suspicious. She pictures the Jeep warm and dim, Garrett’s hand loose over the steering wheel, the road passing black beyond the windows while neither of them has to decide what the time means. 

She wants it with a sharpness that briefly makes the rehearsal building ahead of them feel like an obstacle placed there personally.

“What?” Allie asks.

“Nothing.”

Allie reads her face with insulting ease. “Garrett?”

She types before Allie can begin making noises.

i can’t tonight. rehearsal until nine and then i need to work on my audition.

Garrett: I could come read with you after. Garrett: I’ve improved. Promise.

debatable.

Garrett: I can be extremely boring and helpful.

The smile comes again, smaller this time. She can almost see him saying it, eyebrows lifted, committing himself bravely to an evening of being uninteresting. She types, deletes, then types again.

i want to. i just really can’t lose the time.

There’s a pause long enough for Allie to hand back the pages and open the rehearsal-room door.

Garrett: Okay, baby.

Another message follows.

Garrett: Kick its ass.

She reads both twice before locking the screen.

Garrett doesn’t argue. He doesn’t offer to sit silently in the corner or appear outside rehearsal with the confident assumption that she will be happy once he’s already there. 

He doesn’t tell her she needs a break, though he’s clearly begun considering himself an unlicensed medical authority on her sleep schedule and nutritional intake. He says okay and lets the no remain exactly where she put it.

The absence of pressure should make it easier to return her attention to the scene. It doesn’t.

By Wednesday, Garrett has started appearing in the small spaces around her life without physically appearing much at all.

A coffee waits at the events-office desk when she arrives for her shift, the order correct down to the syrup she changes depending on whether the day feels cold enough to justify it. The receipt has her name on it and, beneath that, a note written in the special-instructions box.

ACTUAL FOOD NEXT. THIS IS NOT A LOOPHOLE.

She sends him a photograph of the cup beside a packet of vending-machine crackers.

Garrett: I’m reporting you.

to who?

Garrett: Tucker.

She pauses.

you wouldn’t.

Garrett: Try me.

At rehearsal, there’s a fresh packet of throat lozenges tucked into the front pocket of her bag. She assumes Allie put them there until Allie sees the box and says, “Oh, Jesus. He’s fully courting you.”

“He’s not courting me.”

Allie picks up the box and reads the label. “Honey and lemon. Intimate.”

“Give me those,” she mutters. 

“Do you think he asked the pharmacist for the sexiest flavour?”

She snatches them back, but the laugh gets out before she can prevent it, landing bright and brief in the dim hallway.

Garrett’s busy too. She knows because the group chat never permits mystery when it could provide public harassment instead. Extra skate at six. Film review. Classes. Weights. A captain’s meeting. 

Still, he texts between them.

Garrett: How’d rehearsal go?

Garrett: Logan says plants don’t count as scene partners because they can’t feed you energy. Dean says Logan has never fed anyone energy in his life.

Garrett: I said you’d probably hit both of them.

She answers when she can. Sometimes three hours later. Sometimes after midnight, when the building has gone quiet and the light from her desk is the only one left beneath the dorm-room door.

badly. and tell dean he’s right.

Garrett: Screenshotting this.

do and i’ll deny it.

Garrett: Theatre has taught you nothing about integrity.

By Thursday evening, the humour takes longer to reach her. Her temples have developed a low, persistent ache. 

At the campus café, she asks for the chicken thing and has to gesture helplessly toward a sandwich sitting eighteen inches from her face. During rehearsal, she misses an entrance she hasn’t missed once all semester and stands in the wing for a full second while Allie hisses her name through a fixed stage smile.

Dexter calls a break and finds her near the prop shelves, pressing both thumbs into the muscles beneath her eyebrows.

“You’re thinking too loudly,” he says.

“I’m not thinking at all, actually. I think something has died.”

Dexter considers her face, then softens by one degree. On anyone else, it might not be visible. “Go home after this.”

“I have work.”

“You have an audition.”

“I also have expenses. I have to live.”

“Babe.”

She looks away first, toward the rehearsal room where someone is moving a chair three inches downstage and immediately moving it back. “I’m fine.”

Dexter exhales through his nose. Her phone buzzes in her coat pocket.

Garrett: Let me steal you for half an hour tonight.

She shuts her eyes.

Garrett: Drive. Food. I’ll return you to your audition spiral before anyone notices.

Her body wants to say yes before the rest of her can begin listing reasons. She wants his car, his warmth, the stupid old guitar music he keeps low enough for conversation. She wants him looking over from the driver’s seat with that small, private smile he has started giving her instead of the full campus version. She wants thirty minutes in which nobody asks her to be open, grounded, bookable, emotionally available, or off-book.

She also has a shift until nine, rehearsal notes to rewrite, the scene to run, and a monologue that has begun feeling less true every time she touches it. Her thumb hovers over the keyboard.

i want to.

She watches the words sit there for a second, too naked on their own, then adds:

but i can’t. i’m sorry.

Garrett answers quickly.

Garrett: Don’t be sorry. Garrett: You sure I can’t come by later?

She looks at the packet folded and refolded inside her bag. She types with both thumbs.

no no. i really need to focus tonight.

Garrett: Okay.

That’s all. She locks the screen and returns to rehearsal.

At nine-forty, she leaves the campus events office with a tote bag cutting into one shoulder and the strange, papery feeling of having moved through too many fluorescent rooms without seeing daylight. Her dinner has been half a packet of crackers and three sour candies Allie found beneath the seats in the black box and claimed were probably recent.

The dorm is overheated. Somebody on the second floor has burned microwave popcorn so badly the hallway smells like electrical grief. She drops her bag beside the desk, pulls off her coat, and opens the audition packet before taking off her boots.

For forty minutes, she works. Or she tries to. She reads the first line six times and hears none of them. Marks a beat, erases it, marks it again half an inch farther down as though emotional truth might be hiding in the margin. She records the monologue on her phone, plays it back, and hates the deliberate break in her voice so much she deletes the file before it finishes.

At ten-thirty-two, she checks her messages. Nothing from Garrett.

That’s normal. Garrett’s allowed to possess an evening. He has practice in the morning. He’s already asked twice to see her and been told, with increasing clarity, not to come. The reasonable part of her understands this.

Something lower in her body doesn’t.

The silence sits oddly after several days of him occupying every small pause. No ridiculous update from the hockey house. No photograph of Logan doing something concerning. The phone remains dark beside her elbow while she runs the first page again.

She makes it four lines before looking at the screen. Still nothing.

Her stomach pulls inward, though that may simply be hunger finally becoming articulate. She presses the heel of one hand beneath her ribs and reads the next line aloud.

“I’m not avoiding you,” she tells the imaginary plant on her desk. “I am giving you the dignity of privacy while you die.”

The line lands dead.

“Great,” she mutters. “Good. Broadway’s calling.”

Her phone stays quiet.

Maybe she’s been too careful. Maybe every time Garrett steps toward her, she moves the boundary another inch and calls it caution. Dinner, but not upstairs. His hand, but only in the car. The hockey house, but no conversation about what any of it means. Come for a drive. No. Let me help. No. Can I see you? No, no, I really need to focus.

She had wanted him to listen when she said no. She had needed that from him. She hadn’t considered how quiet the room might become when he did.

The knock at her door makes her jump hard enough that her knee hits the underside of the desk.

“Fuck.” She pushes back from the chair, rubbing the sore spot above her kneecap. Her roommate is spending the night at her girlfriend’s, and nobody sensible visits a dorm room after ten-thirty without first sending a warning.

The knock comes again. Two quick taps. She approaches with all the confidence of a woman carrying a highlighter as her primary defensive weapon and opens the door three inches.

A guy in a red delivery jacket stands in the hallway holding a large brown paper bag. “Uh, delivery?”

She stares at him. He checks the receipt. Says her name.

“That’s me.”

He offers the bag.

“I didn’t order anything.”

The delivery guy looks down at the receipt again with the exhausted patience of someone whose job routinely places him between hungry people and their own memory. “It’s paid for.”

“Oh.” She still does not take it. “Are you sure it’s this room?”

He reads the number aloud.

“That’s this room.”

“Cool.”

“Sorry.” She accepts the bag at last. It’s warm against her forearms, heavier than expected, and the smell reaches her immediately through the folded paper. Garlic, chilli, fried dough, something sweet and sharp underneath. Her stomach contracts so suddenly it’s almost painful.

The delivery guy gives her a nod that suggests his role in this mystery has reached its limit, then walks back toward the stairs. She closes the door with her hip and carries the bag to the desk.

Inside are dumplings from the Thai restaurant near Hastings. The good ones, thin-skinned and crisp at the edges, packed beside the sauce she likes. There’s curry, rice, and the cucumber salad she had stolen most of from Garrett’s plate at dinner despite insisting she didn’t want her own. Enough food for tonight and tomorrow, possibly the entire theatrical department.

She looks for a receipt. Her name is printed across the top. Beneath it, folded once and tucked between the containers, is the receipt and small delivery note.

Her mouth changes before she can stop it. It settles first at one corner, then warms slowly across the rest of her face until she has to press her lips together and look down at the note again.

He had listened. He hadn’t come over. Hadn’t turned food into an excuse to stand in her doorway looking handsome and wounded until she invited him inside. He hadn’t asked for thirty minutes in exchange, or a phone call, or proof that the care had landed where he wanted it to.

He had only fed her.

She sits cross-legged on the rug because the desk is buried beneath pages and there is something too formal about eating this food at a chair. The paper bag stays beside her knee. She opens the dumplings first, steam lifting faintly against her face, and bites into one before locating a fork.

Her whole body seems to recognise food at once. Heat moving down into the empty, sour space in her stomach. Salt and garlic waking her mouth up. The ache beneath her ribs loosening enough to reveal how tightly she’s been carrying herself all evening. She picks up her phone.

thank you.

The message delivers. Three dots appear almost immediately.

Garrett: Eat.

She looks down at the open containers around her.

bossy.

Garrett: You like it.

Her thumb pauses.

sometimes.

Garrett: Oh yeah?

She can see his face too clearly. The way his eyebrows would lift, hope trying to disguise itself behind amusement. She takes another dumpling and lets him wait exactly twelve seconds, because she may be exhausted and emotionally compromised, but she still has standards.

sometimes, graham.

Garrett: I’ll take it.

Her fingers smooth once over the folded delivery note where she’s placed it beside the audition packet.

you ordered too much.

Garrett: I know you.

The answer presses somewhere tender. She looks around the floor at the curry, the rice, the dumplings she has already eaten too quickly, and the cucumber salad she is absolutely going to finish despite its alleged status as tomorrow’s food.

debatable.

Garrett: Eat the dumpling, baby.

She laughs under her breath, picks up another one, and returns to the scene with the warm container balanced over one knee. The next time she reads the opening line, it sounds a little less like an actress trying to prove she understands pain and a little more like a girl making a joke because the truth is still too large to say directly.

Beside her, Garrett’s note rests against the page.

At least eat, baby.

Four days before the audition, her alarm goes off at four in the morning. Vibrating until the sound drags her out of sleep with one cheek pressed into the pillow and her heart already behaving as if she’s missed something.

The dorm room is dark except for the thin green light of the charger beside her bed. Her roommate is still away, leaving the other mattress smooth and undisturbed beneath the window, and for several seconds she lies there beneath the duvet with one hand curled near her face, trying to remember why any person would choose to be conscious at this hour.

Then the audition arrives fully formed in her mind. Four days. The scene. The monologue. The director whose previous production transferred from Boston to New York. The casting associate whose name had appeared on the guest list circulated through the department yesterday afternoon. 

The role waiting somewhere beyond a room she hasn’t entered yet, existing or not existing for her depending on what her body does with twelve minutes under fluorescent lights.

She sits up. Her head feels packed with cotton, her shoulders stiff, but the exhaustion is still young enough to be bullied. She pulls on leggings and a sweatshirt in the dark, twists her hair into something technically off her face, and drinks half a bottle of water while standing beside the desk.

Garrett’s delivery note is tucked against the edge of the mirror.

At least eat, baby.

The containers from last night are stacked neatly in the little dorm fridge. There’s curry left, rice, two dumplings she had protected from herself through an act of restraint she now considers misguided. 

She looks at them while tying one shoe, already calculating whether she can eat cold rice in the gym car park without creating a new low point in the human experience. She will eat after.

The thought arrives cleanly. Reasonably. It has no visible connection to every other after that will replace it before the sun comes up. She leaves with coffee in a travel cup and the audition packet folded into her gym bag.

At four-twenty, the campus fitness centre belongs to insomniacs, athletes, and people conducting private wars against themselves. Most of the overhead lights are still dimmed. The treadmills hum in a row beneath silent televisions playing overnight sports recaps, the closed captions moving over footage of men celebrating goals she’s too tired to identify. 

A cleaner pushes a wide mop across the basketball court. Somewhere near the weight racks, metal strikes metal with the ugly, disciplined clang of someone who’s never once mistaken sleep for a priority.

She starts on the treadmill. The first five minutes are awful. Her calves feel heavy, her lungs insulted by the hour, the coffee moving too warm and acidic in her empty stomach. 

Then her body catches the rhythm. Feet landing. Belt turning. Breath in, breath out. The room narrowing into repetition until there is finally nothing to solve except the next step. She runs Mara’s monologue silently while she moves.

I’m not avoiding you.

Three breaths.

I am giving you the dignity of privacy while you die.

Four breaths.

By five-fifteen, she’s on the floor beside a bench, stretching one hamstring while reading the second page. Sweat cools beneath the back of her sweatshirt. Her phone lights up inside the open gym bag.

Garrett: Why are you awake?

She looks at the time beside his name and almost laughs. Five-sixteen.

why are YOU awake?

Garrett: Practice. Garrett: Your turn.

gym.

The three dots appear immediately.

Garrett: At five in the morning?

technically i got here at four twenty.

Garrett: That’s not better.

She smiles down at the screen while rolling her ankle slowly.

Garrett: Did you eat first?

Her thumb stills.

She considers lying in the loose, automatic way she considers moving a chair onstage when the blocking begins to feel wrong.

coffee.

Garrett: Baby.

it’s early. food feels illegal.

Garrett: Food has no business hours.

She can see him somewhere across campus in the rink corridors, curls still flattened on one side from sleep, gear bag over his shoulder, already frowning at his phone with the full disapproval of a man who had ordered enough Thai food to feed her for two days and expected his logistical work to be honoured.

i’ll eat after.

Garrett: Pinky swear.

She looks at the words for a second.

pinky swear.

The lie feels small enough to forgive when she sends it.

At six-thirty, she’s showered, dressed, and walking into Professor Martin’s lecture with damp hair freezing at the ends beneath her coat. At seven-forty-five, she’s in the library with three articles open across her laptop and no memory of opening the third. At nine, she gives up her seat to a girl waiting nearby, carries her coffee down two flights of stairs, and reaches the bottom before realising the cup is empty.

Breakfast, she thinks. Then her professor stops her outside class to ask whether she’s considered applying for the spring research placement. The conversation lasts eleven minutes. By the end of it, she’s late to movement lab and spends the entire walk eating two mints from the bottom of her bag because they’re the first thing her fingers find.

Her phone buzzes twice during class. She feels it through the canvas of her tote where it rests against the wall, but doesn’t look. They’re doing partner work, and Dexter has already accused her of keeping part of her attention on a little electronic leash, which is rich coming from a man who checked a dating app during notes yesterday and then announced that desire was part of his process.

At eleven-fifteen, she opens the messages while crossing the quad.

Garrett: Practice done. Alive. Garrett: Logan got hit in the throat with a puck and says his voice sounds sexier now. Garrett: It doesn’t.

There’s also a photograph. Logan sits in the locker room with an ice pack held against the front of his neck, middle finger raised toward the camera, his expression deeply offended by both hockey and documentation. Dean’s blurred in the background, laughing hard enough to require assistance from a bench.

Her mouth twitches. She begins typing a reply, then somebody calls her name from the theatre-annex steps. It’s one of the costume assistants asking whether she can cover an extra hour before rehearsal because a zipper has broken, three hems remain unfinished, and the phrase dress emergency has been used with complete sincerity.

She locks the screen. The reply stays unfinished.

At noon, she sits at a sewing machine with the audition packet open beside the presser foot, repeating lines beneath her breath while guiding pale-blue fabric beneath the needle. 

At one, she runs to the events office and spends three hours answering emails, printing lanyards, correcting a room booking, and explaining to a student society president that no, the university cannot provide a live falcon for a medieval-themed fundraiser regardless of how central it is to the vision.

At three-twelve, her phone lights again.

Garrett: How’s your day?

Then, fifteen minutes later:

Garrett: Alive?

At three-fifty:

Garrett: Send proof of life please.

She sees all three while standing beside the printer with forty-eight name tags warming beneath her palm. She means to answer. She even opens the conversation, but her manager asks whether she can stay an extra half-hour, and then the printer jams, and then one of the theatre first-years texts that Dexter has moved the rehearsal call fifteen minutes earlier.

By four-thirty, her phone is back in her bag, unanswered. The first rehearsal lasts just under two hours and feels like six.

Dexter stops the same transition nine times. Allie loses a shoe during a movement sequence and performs the next thirty seconds in one heel out of spite. Someone knocks over the prop lamp. She runs her scene three times and hates a different thing on each pass.

“Stop protecting the end,” Dexter tells her after the third run, standing in the centre aisle with one hand pressed over his mouth. “You know where she ends up, but she doesn’t.”

They run it again.

At six-fifteen, she leaves rehearsal, changes shirts in a bathroom stall, and returns to the events office because somebody has called in sick and the evening supervisor needs help setting up a faculty reception in the alumni hall.

There’s food at the reception. Small sandwiches with the crusts cut off, fruit arranged in geometric little rows, cheese on slate boards with handwritten labels informing guests which region had produced it. She carries three trays from the service corridor into the hall and doesn’t take anything because the guests haven’t arrived yet and eating the display feels criminal.

She will grab something before she leaves. Then someone spills sparkling water over the sign-in table. A lecturer cannot connect his laptop to the projector. The keynote speaker arrives early and wants the chairs rearranged. 

By the time she takes her coat from the staff room, the catering trays have been cleared and the few remaining sandwiches are already sealed inside plastic tubs being carried toward the kitchen.

Her stomach gives one tight, hollow pull as she walks back toward the theatre annex. She mistakes it for nerves.

The second rehearsal begins at seven.

The studio has become too warm during the break. The mirrors are clouded faintly near the bottom, the air carrying that specific rehearsal-room mixture of dust, sweat, old wood, and the artificial citrus of the cleaning spray used badly between classes. 

Bags lie open along one wall. Water bottles cluster near the door. Somebody has left a banana on top of the speaker, growing softer by the minute beneath the heat.

She sits cross-legged on the floor with her script spread across her thighs. Her body feels oddly distant below the neck, legs heavy, fingertips cold despite the warmth of the room.

There’s a faint sourness at the back of her throat that she keeps swallowing against. Every few lines, her eyes lose their place and return half a paragraph higher, forcing her to trace the text with one finger like a child learning to read.

Allie lowers herself onto the floor beside her with a quiet grunt, tugging one knee toward her chest. She studies her face for a second too long.

“Babe.”

She hums without looking up.

“You okay?”

“Mhm.”

Allie doesn’t move. She can feel the stare against the side of her face with the uncomfortable clarity of stage light. “You don’t look great.”

“Thank you,” she murmurs. “That’s exactly the feedback an actress needs four days before an industry audition.”

“I don’t mean ugly.”

“Excellent clarification.”

“You look…” Allie pauses, searching for a word. “Grey.”

She lifts her head. “Grey?”

“Like, pretty grey.”

“That’s not better.”

“It’s a flattering grey.” Allie reaches over and presses the back of two fingers briefly against her cheek. “You’re cold.”

“The room’s cold,” she mumbles.

Allie’s brows draw together, humour losing ground around them. “Did you sleep last night?”

“Some.”

“How much is some?”

She looks down at the script again. The words have started swimming slightly near the edges, though she can still force them still by narrowing her eyes. “Enough.”

“That means no.”

“I slept.”

Allie exhales through her nose. “Have you eaten?”

The question reaches her through several layers. Her finger stops beneath the third line. She tries to remember. The morning has become disconnected little rooms in her head. Gym. Coffee. Lecture. Library. Costume shop. Work. Rehearsal. Work again.

Coffee. The mints. Nothing else arrives.

“Oh,” she says.

Allie goes still. “Oh?”

She looks up slowly. Her stomach seems to recognise the answer at the same time she does, giving another tight, unpleasant twist beneath her ribs. “I think I forgot.”

“You forgot to eat?”

“I was busy.”

“It’s seven o’clock.”

“I know what time it is,” she grumbles.

“You’ve eaten nothing since yesterday?”

“I had coffee.”

Allie’s eyes close. “I’m going to kill you.”

“Get in line.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. The department’s very competitive.”

Allie doesn’t laugh. She leans closer, voice lowering while the rest of the cast moves around them, people stretching, laughing, running bits of dialogue beneath their breath. “Do you feel sick?”

She presses her lips together, checking the inside of her body as if it belongs to somebody else and she’s only now been asked to assess the damage. Her head aches behind the eyes. There’s a greasy little wave moving through her stomach. Her skin feels too tight over her face.

“Just…” She rubs one palm over her sternum. “Yuck.”

“Helpful.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re obviously not.”

“No, no. I am.” She shifts the script higher on her knees and forces her eyes back onto the page. “I just need food.”

Allie gives her a long look. “I have a protein bar.”

“Great.”

“In my bag.”

She nods, though the motion makes something inside her skull lag half a second behind. “I’ll get it.”

“I’ll get it.” Allie plants one hand on the floor and pushes herself upright, then pauses when Dexter calls her name from across the studio.

He’s standing beside the lighting lecturer with both arms folded, gesturing toward the taped marks near centre stage.

“One second,” Allie says. She points two fingers at her own eyes, then toward her face. “Do not move.”

She lifts the script in a weak little salute. “Go.”

Allie crosses toward Dexter, already asking what he wants before she reaches him.

For a few seconds, she stays exactly where she is. She breathes through her nose. The room seems too loud now, every separate sound arriving at once – the scrape of a chair leg, a bottle hitting the floor and rolling, Dexter’s voice, the lighting lecturer answering, somebody laughing near the mirrors. Her pulse has become noticeable in her throat.

She looks toward Allie’s bag. It sits near the opposite wall, black canvas, one strap folded beneath it. Not far. Fifteen feet, maybe.

The protein bar will help. Sugar. Something dense and artificial and capable of getting her through another hour.

She places the script on the floor and uncrosses her legs. Pins and needles move down both calves. She puts one hand beside her hip and pushes herself up.

The room changes before she gets fully vertical.

Heat rushes over her face and chest in one hard wave, immediate enough that sweat breaks cold beneath the back of her shirt.

Her vision tightens. Black gathers softly at the edges, the mirrored wall narrowing into a bright strip in front of her.

She catches the floor beneath one foot and cannot seem to locate the other properly.

“Hey, Al,” she says.

Her own voice sounds strange. Too quiet, coming from somewhere several feet behind her. Allie turns.

She reaches one hand vaguely in her direction. “Can I–”

The rest of the question disappears. Every sound in the studio pulls away at once, voices thinning into muffled shapes at the end of a long corridor.

The air feels both freezing and unbearably hot against her skin. Her stomach drops, though she’s standing still. Or believes she is.

Allie says her name. The floor rises fast toward her. Or she goes down. There’s no useful difference by the time everything goes black.

Consciousness returns badly.

First there’s light, white and flat through her eyelids. Then sound: the soft electronic pulse of something nearby, rubber soles moving over vinyl, paper rustling. Then pain arrives behind both, a thick, ugly throb beginning near the back of her skull and pushing forward until it sits behind her eyes.