Belmont Cameli On Playing The Vulnerable Lead And What Drew Him To The Character of Garrett Graham on Off Campus.
I was like, Oh, I hope it's not, if it's just like, you know, big man on campus, cool dude, like nothing affects him, that doesn't sound interesting to me. So when we spoke ( Belmont said in another interview that he did a 90 minute Zoom with the showrunners to talk about Garrett.), I found out about all these layers to Garrett. I thought it was going to be a really good opportunity to give a layered performance and play a character is like very masculine. You know, he's an athlete. You know, he lives in the house with the guys. He's got a lot of masculine qualities, but he's also deeply sensitive. He's a great listener. He's very thoughtful about the people that he cares about. Those elements at play were really what drew me to the character.
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Summary: Garrett is supposed to hate you by association. You’re dating his rival. You’re wearing the wrong colors. But he doesn’t look at you like you’re the enemy, he looks at you like he’s seeing something everyone else has learned to ignore. And when you run out of places to hide, his number is the only one you can think to call
Warnings: 18+ content, domestic violence, sexual assault, and trauma recovery
Read part one here
You wake up to sunlight streaming through unfamiliar curtains.
For a moment, you can’t remember where you are. The bed is too comfortable, the room too clean, the sheets smell wrong — not wrong, just different. Not like Cameron’s cologne and expensive detergent. Like something cleaner. Safer.
Then it all comes rushing back.
The napkin. The attack. Running through Boston in the freezing dark. Garrett’s voice on the phone, steady and sure. The apartment lobby. His car. This house.
You sit up slowly, every muscle in your body screaming in protest. Your throat feels like you swallowed glass. Your face throbs. When you catch sight of yourself in the mirror across the room, you barely recognize the person staring back.
The bruises are worse than you thought. Dark purple handprints wrap around your throat like a necklace. Your left cheek is swollen, a deep red-purple that’s going to turn black soon. There’s a split in your bottom lip you don’t remember getting.
You look like you went twelve rounds with a professional fighter.
You look like a victim.
The thought makes you want to throw up.
There’s a knock on the door — soft, hesitant.
“Y/N?” Garrett’s voice. “You awake?”
“Yeah.” Your voice comes out raspy, damaged.
“Can I come in?”
You pull the blanket up higher, suddenly aware you’re still in yesterday’s clothes. “Sure.”
The door opens and Garrett steps inside, carrying a tray. He’s showered and changed — different sweatpants, a clean t-shirt, hair still damp. He looks almost normal except for the dark circles under his eyes and the tension in his jaw.
“I brought breakfast,” he says. “Nothing fancy. Just toast and eggs and coffee. Tucker made it. He’s weirdly good at cooking for a guy who lives on protein shakes and beer.”
He sets the tray on the desk, and you see he wasn’t kidding. Scrambled eggs, buttered toast, a mug of coffee with cream. There’s even a glass of orange juice.
“You didn’t have to do this,” you say.
“I know.” Garrett leans against the desk, arms crossed. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I got hit by a truck.”
“Yeah. You look-” He stops himself. “Sorry. That came out wrong.”
“I know what I look like.”
There’s a long pause. Garrett’s looking at you with an expression you can’t quite read. Concern, maybe. Or pity. You’re not sure which is worse.
“I think you should go to the police,” he says finally.
Your stomach drops. “Garrett-”
“I know you’re scared. I know you think he’ll get away with it. But Y/N, look at yourself.” He gestures toward the mirror. “You have evidence. Documented injuries. That’s assault. That’s attempted murder.”
“His parents are lawyers-”
“I don’t give a shit if his parents are on the Supreme Court.” Garrett’s voice is hard. “What he did to you is a crime. You have rights. You have options.”
“And if he gets away with it? If they make me look crazy? If no one believes me?”
“Then at least you tried. At least there’s a record. At least the next time he does this — because there will be a next time, to you or someone else — there’s a paper trail.”
You want to argue. Want to explain all the reasons why this won’t work, why it’s pointless, why you should just disappear and hope Cameron forgets about you.
But Garrett’s looking at you with those dark eyes, and you can see the plea in them. The desperate need to do something, to fix this, to make it right.
“Will you come with me?” You ask quietly.
“Every step of the way.”
***
The police station smells like bad coffee and bureaucracy. You sit in a hard plastic chair in the waiting area, Garrett beside you, while an officer processes your intake paperwork.
“Someone will be with you shortly,” the desk sergeant says, barely looking up from his computer.
Shortly turns into twenty minutes. Then thirty. You’re about to suggest leaving when a female officer appears.
“Y/N Y/L/N?”
“That’s me.”
“I’m Officer Murphy. Come on back.”
She leads you and Garrett to a small interview room. It’s exactly like the ones on TV — gray walls, metal table, chairs that look designed to be uncomfortable. There’s a camera mounted in the corner.
“For documentation purposes,” Officer Murphy explains, following your gaze. “Everything we discuss will be recorded. Is that okay?”
You nod.
“I’m going to need verbal consent.”
“Yes. That’s okay.”
Officer Murphy sits across from you, pulls out a notepad. Garrett takes the chair beside you, close enough that you can feel the warmth of his body.
“So,” Officer Murphy begins. “You’re here to file a report about an assault?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me what happened? Start from the beginning.”
You take a breath. Try to organize the chaos of last night into something coherent.
“My boyfriend — Cameron Beck — he attacked me last night. At my dorm room.”
“What time was this?”
“Around eight PM, I think. Maybe a little after.”
Officer Murphy is writing everything down. “And what precipitated the attack?”
“He found a phone number in my bag. He thought I was cheating on him.”
“Were you?”
The question catches you off guard. “No. It was just—someone gave me their number and I kept it. That’s all.”
“Okay. So he found this number and then what?”
“He got angry. Started yelling. Threw my stuff everywhere. Then he-” Your voice catches. “He put his hands around my throat. Choked me until I couldn’t breathe.”
Officer Murphy’s expression doesn’t change. “Did you lose consciousness?”
“Almost. I thought I was going to die.”
“What happened next?”
“He let go for a second. Hit me. Across the face. Twice.” You point to your cheek. “Then he started choking me again.”
“How did you get away?”
“I kneed him. In the groin. He let go and I ran.”
“Where did you run to?”
“Just … ran. Down the street. I called for help.” You glance at Garrett. “He came and got me.”
Officer Murphy looks at Garrett for the first time. “And you are?”
“Garrett Graham. I’m-” He hesitates. “A friend. She called me and I picked her up.”
“You’re a student at BU as well?”
“No. Briar University.”
Something shifts in Officer Murphy’s expression. Recognition, maybe. “You play hockey.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And the boyfriend — Cameron Beck — he plays for BU?”
“Yes.”
Officer Murphy writes something in her notepad. You can’t see what.
“Okay, Y/N. I’m going to need to document your injuries. Is it alright if I take some photographs?”
Your stomach churns. “Do you have to?”
“It’s important for the case. Physical evidence of assault.”
You look at Garrett. He nods slightly, encouraging.
“Okay,” you whisper.
Officer Murphy pulls out a digital camera. “I’ll need you to remove your sweatshirt so we can see your throat and face clearly.”
With shaking hands, you pull off your sweatshirt. You’re wearing a tank top underneath, which means the bruises on your arms are visible too. The ones from before last night. The finger-shaped marks that have faded to yellow-green.
Officer Murphy’s jaw tightens. “How long has he been hurting you?”
“I don’t know. A while.”
“Months? Years?”
“About a year. It started small. Then got worse.”
“And you never reported it before?”
The judgment in the question makes you flinch. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I was scared. Because I thought I could fix it. Because he said no one would believe me.” Your voice rises. “Because I didn’t think it mattered.”
She starts taking photos. Flash after flash, documenting every bruise, every mark. Your throat from multiple angles. Your face. Your wrists. Your arms. You feel like a crime scene.
Which, you suppose, you are.
Garrett has gone completely still beside you. You can feel the tension radiating off him in waves.
“Alright,” Officer Murphy says finally, lowering the camera. “You can put your sweatshirt back on. I just need to get the rest of your statement.”
She asks you to walk through the entire relationship. When it started. When the abuse began. How often it happened. You try to remember specific incidents but they all blur together after a while. The time he threw your laptop across the room. The time he locked you in his apartment for two days. The time he pushed you down the stairs and then convinced everyone, including you, that you’d just tripped.
Officer Murphy writes it all down without comment.
Then she asks: “Did he ever sexually assault you?”
The room goes very quiet.
You can’t look at Garrett. Can’t bear to see his reaction.
“Yes,” you whisper.
“Can you describe what happened?”
“He would-” Your throat closes up. “He would force me. When I didn’t want to. When I said no.”
“How many times did this happen?”
“I don’t know. A lot. Too many to count.”
“Most recently?”
You close your eyes. “Yesterday morning. I woke up and he was already—he didn’t ask. He just-”
You can’t finish the sentence.
Beside you, Garrett makes a sound. Almost like a growl. When you glance over, his hands are clenched into fists so tight his knuckles have gone white. There’s something wet on his palms.
Blood.
His nails have cut into his skin.
“Garrett,” you whisper.
He doesn’t seem to hear you. His eyes are fixed on the table, jaw clenched so hard you can see the muscle jumping.
Officer Murphy notices too. “Mr. Graham, do you need to step outside?”
“I’m fine.” His voice is rough.
“You’re bleeding.”
Garrett looks down at his hands like he’s surprised to see them. Slowly, mechanically, he unclenches his fists. Crescent-shaped cuts mark his palms.
“I’m fine,” he says again.
Officer Murphy doesn’t look convinced, but she continues. “Y/N, I know this is difficult, but I need you to be as specific as possible about the sexual assaults. Dates, times, locations if you remember them.”
You do your best. You tell her about the times in his apartment. The time in his car. The time in a bathroom at a party when you were too drunk to consent. You tell her until the words stop meaning anything, until you’re just reciting facts like they happened to someone else.
Through it all, Garrett sits beside you, silent and bleeding.
When you’re finally done, Officer Murphy closes her notepad.
“Okay. This is what’s going to happen next. We’re going to issue a warrant for Cameron Beck’s arrest. Based on your statement and the photographic evidence, we have probable cause for assault, battery, strangulation, and sexual assault. Those are serious charges.”
“Will he go to jail?” You ask.
“That depends on a lot of factors. The DA will review the case and decide whether to prosecute. If they do, there will be a trial. You’ll have to testify.”
Your heart sinks. “I have to see him again?”
“In court, yes. But we’re also going to help you file for a restraining order. That means he can’t contact you, can’t come within a certain distance of you. If he violates it, he goes to jail immediately.”
“His parents are going to fight this,” you say. “They have money. Lawyers.”
“Let them fight. We have evidence. We have your testimony. And frankly, based on what you’ve described, this isn’t going to be a hard case to make.”
You want to believe her. Want to believe that for once, the system will work the way it’s supposed to.
But you’ve been disappointed so many times before.
“What do I do now?” You ask.
“Go home. Rest. We’ll contact you when we have more information. In the meantime, avoid any contact with Mr. Beck. If he tries to reach out, document everything and let us know immediately.”
“Okay.”
Officer Murphy stands, offers her hand. “You did the right thing, coming here. I know it doesn’t feel like it right now, but you’re incredibly brave.”
You shake her hand, but you don’t feel brave. You feel exhausted and broken and terrified of what comes next.
Garrett stands too, still favoring his bleeding palms. Officer Murphy notices.
“Mr. Graham, you should get those looked at.”
“They’re fine.”
“They’re not fine. There’s a first aid kit at the front desk.”
Garrett just nods, but you can tell he has no intention of doing anything about it.
You follow Officer Murphy out of the interview room, back through the station. At the front desk, she hands you a folder.
“Resources,” she explains. “Domestic violence hotlines, counseling services, legal aid. And my card. Call me anytime if you have questions or concerns.”
“Thank you.”
You walk out of the station into the gray February morning. The cold hits you like a slap. You don’t have a coat. You left everything at your dorm when you ran.
Everything except your phone and your life.
Garrett guides you toward his car with a hand that doesn’t quite touch your back. Protective but not possessive. It’s such a contrast to Cameron that you almost cry.
Once you’re both in the car, Garrett turns to face you. “Where do you want me to take you?”
You hesitate. “My dorm, I guess. My roommate should be back by now-”
“No.”
“What?”
“I’m not taking you back there. Not where he knows where to find you. Not where you’ll be alone.”
“Garrett, I can’t just hide forever-”
“I’m not saying forever. I’m saying until we know he’s been arrested. Until we know the restraining order is in place.” He starts the car. “You’re coming back to the house.”
“I can’t impose like that-”
“You’re not imposing. You’re surviving. There’s a difference.”
You want to argue. Want to insist you can take care of yourself. But the truth is, you’re terrified. Terrified Cameron will show up at your dorm. Terrified he’ll convince you to take him back again. Terrified of what he’ll do when he finds out you went to the police.
“Okay,” you say quietly.
Garrett drives back to his house in silence. His hands are tight on the steering wheel, and you can see the blood from his palms smearing the leather.
“You’re still bleeding,” you say.
“I know.”
“You should clean that.”
“I will.”
But he doesn’t sound like he cares. He sounds like he’s somewhere else entirely. Somewhere dark and violent.
When you pull up to the house, there are two other cars in the driveway. Garrett parks and turns to you.
“My roommates are home. They know you’re here — I told them last night. They’re cool, I promise. But if you want to go straight to the room and not deal with people, that’s fine too.”
“It’s their house. I should at least say hi.”
“You don’t owe them anything.”
“Still.”
You follow Garrett inside. The house looks different in daylight — messier but homier. There are hockey bags by the door, shoes scattered everywhere, a pile of mail on the hall table. It smells like coffee and something cooking.
“G, that you?” A voice calls from the kitchen.
“Yeah. And Y/N.”
Three guys emerge from the kitchen. You recognize one of them from Briar Hockey’s most recent post on Instagram — Logan, Garrett’s best friend. The other two you don’t know.
They all stop when they see you. You watch their expressions change as they take in your injuries — shock, anger, pity.
“Jesus,” one of them breathes. He’s auburn-haired, built like a tank. “He did that to you?”
You nod, unable to speak.
“I’m Tucker,” he says. “And when I see that motherfucker, I’m going to break every bone in his body.”
“Get in line,” Garrett mutters.
The third guy — tall, blond hair, kind eyes — steps forward. “I’m Dean. And you’re welcome to stay here as long as you need. Seriously.”
“I don’t want to be a burden-”
“You’re not.” Logan’s voice is firm. “Any friend of Garrett’s is a friend of ours. And anyone that piece of shit hurt automatically gets our protection.”
You’re overwhelmed suddenly. These boys — these strangers — are offering you sanctuary without hesitation. Without judgment. Without demanding anything in return.
“Thank you,” you manage.
“You hungry?” Tucker asks. “I made chicken noodle soup earlier this week.”
“I could eat,” you say.
“Good. Sit. I’ll heat it up.”
Garrett leads you to the dining table — a beat-up wooden thing that’s seen better days. You sit, and Garrett takes the chair beside you.
Logan grabs a first aid kit from under the sink. “Let me see your hands.”
“I’m fine,” Garrett says.
“You’re bleeding on my chair. Let me see your hands.”
Reluctantly, Garrett holds out his palms. The crescent-shaped cuts are deeper than you thought, still seeping blood.
“What the hell did you do?” Dean asks.
“Nothing.”
Logan starts cleaning the cuts with antiseptic. Garrett doesn’t even flinch.
“We went to the police this morning,” Garrett says. “She filed a report. They’re issuing a warrant for Beck’s arrest.”
The room goes quiet.
“Good,” Tucker says finally from the kitchen. “Fucking good.”
“Did they believe you?” Dean asks you.
“I think so. There’s evidence. Photos. My statement.”
“And if he tries to come near you?”
“Restraining order. But it takes time.”
“Until then, you stay here,” Logan says. It’s not a question. “We’ll make sure you get to your classes, get whatever you need from your dorm, whatever. But you don’t go anywhere alone.”
“I can’t ask you guys to do that-”
“You’re not asking. We’re offering.” Tucker brings over two bowls of soup, sets one in front of you. “Eat. You look like you haven’t eaten in days.”
He’s not wrong. You can’t remember the last real meal you had. You pick up the spoon, take a bite.
It’s delicious. Rich and warm and exactly what you need.
“This is really good,” you say.
“Told you.” Tucker grins. “Hockey and cooking. My only two skills.”
Despite everything, you almost smile.
Garrett’s still watching you with that intense expression. Like he’s memorizing every detail. Like he’s afraid if he looks away, you’ll disappear.
“You’re safe here,” he says quietly. “I know it doesn’t feel like it. I know you’re scared. But we’re not going to let anything happen to you.”
You look around the table at these four boys — these strangers who are treating you like family. Who are offering you protection without asking for anything in return. Who believe you, unconditionally.
“Why?” You ask. “Why are you all doing this?”
The boys exchange glances.
“Because it’s the right thing to do,” Logan says simply.
“Because that asshole deserves to rot,” Tucker adds.
“Because you deserve better,” Dean says.
Garrett doesn’t say anything. Just reaches over and squeezes your hand gently. Carefully. Like you’re something precious.
You squeeze back.
And for the first time since last night, you let yourself believe that maybe, just maybe, you’re going to be okay.
***
Three weeks feels like both an eternity and no time at all.
Garrett’s been counting down the days like a prisoner marking time on a cell wall. March 14th. The date he highlighted in his calendar. The date he’s been waiting for.
The date he’s going to make Cameron Beck pay.
He’s in the locker room now, lacing up his skates with mechanical precision. Around him, his teammates are going through their pre-game routines. Logan’s taping his stick. Tucker’s blasting music through his headphones. Dean’s doing some complicated stretching routine that looks like yoga.
Everyone knows what tonight is. What it means.
You filed charges. Cameron was arrested. And then, less than twenty-four hours later, he was released on bail. Fifty thousand dollars — pocket change to his parents. He walked out of that police station like nothing happened, posted some bullshit on Instagram about “false accusations,” and went right back to his life.
Including hockey.
Boston University’s administration reviewed the case. Looked at the evidence, the photos, your statement. And then decided that since Cameron hasn’t been convicted yet, he should be allowed to continue playing while awaiting trial.
Innocent until proven guilty, they said.
Never mind the handprint bruises on your throat. Never mind the records documenting your injuries. Never mind that you can barely sleep without having nightmares.
None of that matters to BU’s athletic department as much as their winning record.
Garrett’s jaw clenches so hard his teeth ache.
Coach Jensen appears in the doorway, clipboard in hand. “Alright, boys. Listen up.”
The room quiets.
“We all know what tonight is,” Coach says, his eyes scanning the team. “We all know who we’re playing. And I’m going to say this once: I don’t care about your personal feelings. I don’t care about drama. I care about hockey. You play clean, you play smart, you win the game. Got it?”
There’s a murmur of agreement.
Coach’s eyes land on Garrett. “Graham. My office. Now.”
Garrett stands, follows Coach down the hallway to his office. Coach closes the door behind them.
“Sit.”
Garrett sits.
Coach leans against his desk, arms crossed. “I know what you’re thinking.”
“Do you?”
“You’re thinking about that girl. About Beck. About what he did.”
Garrett doesn’t confirm or deny.
“I get it,” Coach continues. “I do. What happened to her is horrific. But Garrett, you’re the captain of this team. You’re a junior. You’re probably going to the NHL in a year. You can’t throw that away because you want revenge.”
“I’m not throwing anything away.”
“If you go after him tonight, you will be. You’ll get suspended. Maybe for the rest of the season. Maybe permanently. Is that really worth it?”
Garrett meets Coach’s eyes. “Yes.”
Coach sighs. “I can’t stop you. But I’m asking you to think about your team. About your future.”
“I have thought about it.” Garrett stands. “And I’ve made my decision.”
He walks back to the locker room. His teammates look up as he enters, reading his expression.
“Well?” Logan asks.
“Same as always. Play clean, win the game.”
“And are you going to play clean?” Tucker asks with a knowing smile.
Garrett doesn’t answer. Just pulls on his jersey — number 44, GRAHAM across the back in bold letters.
When it’s time to head to the tunnel, Garrett catches Coach Jensen’s eye one more time.
“Coach?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry.”
Coach’s brow furrows. “For what?”
“For the fact that the team will probably have to play without me for a few games.”
Coach opens his mouth to respond, but Garrett’s already moving down the tunnel. He can hear Coach calling after him, but the words don’t register. There’s only one thing on Garrett’s mind now.
The ice.
***
You’re sitting on Garrett’s bed, laptop balanced on your knees, streaming the game. You probably shouldn’t watch. Your therapist — the one the victim services advocate connected you with — said you should avoid triggers. And watching Cameron skate around like nothing happened, like he didn’t try to kill you, is definitely a trigger.
But you can’t help it.
You need to see this.
The arena is packed — a sold-out crowd for what the announcers are calling “one of the most anticipated matchups of the season.” Briar versus BU. First place versus second place in the conference standings.
They have no idea what else this game means.
The camera pans across the Briar bench. There’s Garrett, sitting between Logan and Tucker, face hard and focused. He looks dangerous. You’ve never seen him look like that before — like violence contained in a hockey uniform.
Then the camera cuts to the BU bench and your stomach drops.
Cameron.
He’s there. Number 14, sitting at the end of the bench, laughing at something one of his teammates said. Like this is just another game. Like he didn’t assault you. Like he didn’t rape you. Like he didn’t leave you so broken you still can’t look at yourself in the mirror without flinching.
The commentators are talking about him. About his stats, his performance this season, his NHL prospects. They mention, briefly, that he’s facing “personal legal issues” but don’t elaborate. Wouldn’t want to damage his reputation with something as trivial as the truth.
You feel sick.
The door opens and Beau, Dean’s best friend, pokes his head in. He promised the boys to keep an eye on you while they are at the game. “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t look okay.” He comes in, sits on the edge of the bed. “You know you don’t have to watch this, right?”
“I know.”
“But you’re going to anyway.”
“I need to see it.”
Beau nods like he understands. “Want company?”
“Sure.”
He settles in beside you, close enough to be supportive but not so close it feels invasive. It’s something you’ve noticed about all the boys — they’re incredibly careful about your boundaries. They never touch you without asking. Never get too close. Never push.
It’s the opposite of Cameron in every way.
The puck drops.
***
Garrett’s never been a dirty player. He plays hard, plays physical, but he doesn’t cheap shot. Doesn’t go for injuries. Doesn’t use his stick as a weapon.
Tonight’s going to be different.
He’s skating his shift, focused on the puck, when he sees Beck coming up the ice. Their eyes meet across the neutral zone and Beck smirks. Actually fucking smirks at him.
Garrett’s vision goes red for a second, but he forces it down. Not yet. He needs to wait for the right moment. Can’t just jump him in the middle of open ice or the refs will toss him before he gets a chance to do real damage.
The first period is surprisingly restrained. Both teams feeling each other out, testing boundaries. Garrett gets a few good hits in — all legal, all clean — but nothing that satisfies the rage burning in his chest.
Logan scores midway through the first. Dean gets an assist. Briar’s up 1-0.
The period’s winding down — about three minutes left — when Garrett finds himself lined up against Beck for a faceoff in the defensive zone.
They’re at the dot, sticks ready, waiting for the ref to drop the puck.
Beck leans in close.
“Hey, Graham,” he says, voice low enough the ref can’t hear. “How’s my girl doing?”
Garrett’s stick tightens in his grip, but he doesn’t respond.
“She still staying at your place?” Beck continues, that smirk playing on his lips. “That’s cute. Playing house. But we both know she’ll come back to me eventually. She always does.”
The ref’s getting into position.
“She’s a good fuck though, right?” Beck’s voice drops to a whisper. “Tight. Eager. Especially when she cries.”
Something inside Garrett snaps.
The puck hasn’t even dropped yet when Garrett rips off his gloves and launches himself at Beck.
His first punch catches Beck square in the jaw. Beck’s head snaps back and he goes down hard, hitting the ice, but Garrett doesn’t stop. He’s on top of him, raining down punches with methodical precision. Face, ribs, face again.
Beck tries to cover up, tries to fight back, but Garrett’s bigger, stronger, and absolutely fucking furious.
“You piece of shit-” Punch. “You fucking coward-” Punch. “You think you can talk about her like that-” Punch.
Beck’s nose breaks with a satisfying crunch. Blood sprays across the ice.
The refs are shouting, trying to pull Garrett off, but he shrugs them away. Gets in two more solid hits before two refs manage to grab his arms and haul him backwards.
Garrett’s still trying to get at Beck, still ready to throw more punches, but the refs have him locked down.
Beck’s on the ice, face a bloody mess. His teammates are rushing over. The crowd is going absolutely insane — some people cheering, some people booing, everyone on their feet.
One ref is talking into his mic. “Number 44, Briar. Five-minute major for fighting. Game misconduct. You’re done.”
Garrett doesn’t argue. Doesn’t protest. Just skates toward the tunnel, ripping off his helmet.
The Briar bench erupts.
Every single player starts tapping their sticks against the boards. The sound echoes through the arena like thunder. It’s the hockey equivalent of a standing ovation.
Support. Solidarity.
They know why Garrett did it. And they’re backing him one hundred percent.
Coach Jensen is standing behind the bench, shaking his head, but even he’s fighting a smile.
As Garrett disappears into the tunnel, he catches one last glimpse of the ice. Beck’s sitting up now, holding his face, blood pouring through his fingers. His coach is yelling at the refs, demanding Garrett be suspended, banned, arrested.
Garrett doesn’t care.
It was worth it.
***
You watch the whole thing happen in real-time.
One second, they’re lined up for the faceoff. The next, Garrett’s on Cameron like a feral animal.
Beau jumps up beside you. “Holy shit!”
You can’t speak. Can’t breathe. You just watch as Garrett hits Cameron again and again and again. Watch as the refs try to pull him off. Watch as Cameron’s face turns into a bloody pulp.
The commentators are losing their minds.
“Absolutely vicious attack by Graham — completely unprovoked — this is going to be a lengthy suspension-”
But it wasn’t unprovoked. You know that. Something happened at that faceoff. Cameron said something. Did something. Pushed Garrett past his breaking point.
And Garrett responded.
For you.
The camera follows Garrett as he skates toward the tunnel. His face is set, determined, completely unrepentant. Blood — not his own — is splattered across his jersey.
Then the camera cuts to the Briar bench and you see it. Every player tapping their sticks. The sound might not come through clearly on the broadcast, but you know what it means.
They’re supporting him.
All of them.
“Did you see that?” Beau’s grinning. “The whole fucking bench. They all know.”
“Know what?”
“Why Garrett did it. They’re telling him they’ve got his back.”
Your throat feels tight. Your eyes are stinging.
Garrett just got himself ejected. Probably suspended for multiple games. Maybe even kicked off the team. And he did it for you. Because Cameron said something about you. Because he couldn’t let it slide.
The game continues. BU gets a five-minute power play because of the major penalty, but Briar’s penalty kill holds strong. Dean blocks three shots. Tucker strips the puck from a BU forward and clears it down the ice.
When the period finally ends, it’s still 1-0 Briar.
You close the laptop.
“You okay?” Beau asks.
“I don’t know.”
“That was pretty intense.”
“He did that for me.”
“Yeah. He did.”
“He’s going to get in so much trouble.”
“Probably.” Beau shrugs. “But Garrett doesn’t care. You should’ve seen him these past three weeks. He’s been counting down to this game like it was Christmas.”
“I need to-” You stand up. “I need to call him.”
“He’s probably in the locker room or getting reviewed by the league officials right now.”
“I don’t care. I need to talk to him.”
You grab your phone, pull up Garrett’s number. It rings four times before going to voicemail.
“Hey, it’s Garrett. No phones allowed on the ice. Leave a message.”
Beep.
“Hey, it’s me. I just—I saw what happened. What you did. And I-” Your voice cracks. “Thank you. I know that probably sounds crazy. I know you’re probably in trouble and I should feel bad about that but I just—thank you. For standing up for me. For not letting him get away with it. For everything.”
You pause, trying to find the right words.
“I’ll be here when you get back. We can talk then. Just be safe, okay?”
You hang up.
Beau’s watching you with a soft expression. “You care about him.”
It’s not a question.
“He saved my life,” you say.
“That’s not what I asked.”
You sit back down on the bed. “I don’t know what I feel. Everything’s so complicated and messed up and I’m barely holding myself together most days. But yeah. I care about him. How could I not?”
“He cares about you too. A lot. Like, a scary amount.”
“What do you mean?”
Beau hesitates. “He doesn’t really talk about his feelings. None of us do — we’re athletes, we’re emotionally constipated. But the way he is with you? I’ve never seen him like that with anyone. He’s protective to the point of obsession.”
“I don’t want to be his redemption project,” you say quietly.
“You’re not. Trust me. If you were, he’d be treating you like a victim. Like someone who needs to be saved. But he doesn’t do that. He treats you like a person. Like someone who deserves respect and autonomy and choice.” Beau stands, stretches. “Anyway. I’m going to make some popcorn. You want some?”
“Sure.”
He leaves and you’re alone with your thoughts.
You pull the laptop back open, reload the stream. The second period is underway. Briar’s still up 1-0. BU’s pressing hard, trying to tie it up, but Briar’s goalie is playing out of his mind.
The commentators are still talking about Garrett’s ejection.
“We’re hearing that Graham will face supplemental discipline from the league. Likely a multi-game suspension. Possibly more serious consequences given the severity of the attack.”
Good, you think viciously. Let them suspend him. Let them punish him. It was worth it.
You think about Cameron’s face. The blood. The way he looked genuinely scared for the first time since you’ve known him.
You should feel bad about that. Should feel guilty that you’re glad Garrett hurt him.
But you don’t.
You feel vindicated.
***
Garrett’s in Coach’s office when the game ends. Briar won 3-1. Logan got another goal in the second, and Tucker scored an empty-netter in the third.
But Garrett wasn’t there to see it.
“The league’s reviewing the footage,” Coach says, arms crossed. “They’re talking about a five-game suspension minimum. Maybe more.”
“Okay.”
“That’s it? Just okay?”
Garrett shrugs. “What do you want me to say? I knew what I was doing. I knew there would be consequences.”
“Did you know Beck is in the hospital?”
That gets Garrett’s attention. “What?”
“Broken nose, fractured orbital bone, possible concussion. They took him out on a stretcher.”
Garrett should feel bad about that. Should feel some kind of remorse.
He doesn’t.
“Good,” he says.
Coach’s expression hardens. “Garrett-”
“He did horrible things to her, Coach. Too many times to count. He strangled her until she thought she was going to die. He made her so scared she couldn’t even function. And BU let him keep playing because they care more about winning than doing the right thing.”
“So you decided to take justice into your own hands?”
“Yeah. I did.”
“That’s not your job.”
“Maybe not. But someone had to do it.”
Coach is quiet for a long moment. “What did he say to you?”
“What?”
“At the faceoff. Right before you hit him. What did he say?”
Garrett’s jaw tightens. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does if it pushed you that far.”
“He talked about her. About-” Garrett can’t repeat the words. Can’t make himself say them out loud. “It was disgusting. Disrespectful. And I wasn’t going to let him get away with it.”
Coach sighs, runs a hand through his hair. “You know I have to suspend you from training as well. Team policy.”
“I know.”
“You’re probably done for the season.”
“I know.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
Garrett meets Coach’s eyes. “I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”
Coach studies him for a long moment. Then, surprisingly, he smiles. “You’re a good kid, Graham. Stupid as hell sometimes, but good.”
“Does that mean you’re not kicking me off the team?”
“I should. But no. You’ll serve your suspension and then we’ll see where we are.” Coach stands. “Now get out of here. I’m sure you’ve got someone waiting for you.”
Garrett doesn’t need to be told twice.
He showers quickly, changes into his street clothes. His hands are sore — he definitely bruised his knuckles on Beck’s face — but it’s a good kind of pain. Satisfying.
His phone has seven missed calls and twice as many texts. Most from teammates, congratulating him. A few from reporters, asking for comment. One from his dad, which he deletes without reading.
And one voicemail from you.
He listens to it in his car, sitting in the parking lot.
Your voice is shaky but sincere. Thanking him. Telling him you’ll be there when he gets back.
Something in his chest loosens.
He starts the car and drives home.
When he walks through the door, the house is quiet. Beau’s on the couch, watching TV.
“She’s in your room,” Beau says without looking up.
Garrett takes the stairs two at a time.
His door is closed. He knocks softly.
“Come in.”
You’re sitting on his bed, laptop closed beside you. You look up when he enters and something in your expression makes Garrett’s breath catch.
“Hi,” you say.
“Hi.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Are you?”
“I watched the whole thing.”
“And?”
You stand, walk over to him. You’re close enough now that he can see the fading bruises on your throat, the shadows under your eyes.
“Thank you,” you say quietly.
“You already said that. In your message.”
“I know. But I wanted to say it to your face.” You reach out, hesitate, then gently take his hand. Look at his bruised knuckles. “Does it hurt?”
“No.”
“Liar.”
The smallest smile touches his lips. “Maybe a little.”
You hold his hand carefully, like it’s something precious. “You’re probably suspended.”
“Yeah.”
“For multiple games.”
“Probably.”
“Because of me.”
“Because of him,” Garrett corrects. “Because he’s a piece of shit who deserved to have his face rearranged.”
You look up at him, and there’s something in your eyes Garrett can’t quite read. Gratitude, maybe. Or something deeper.
“No one’s ever stood up for me like that before,” you say.
“They should have.”
“But they didn’t. You did.”
Garrett wants to close the distance between you. Wants to pull you into his arms and promise that he’ll always protect you, always fight for you, always be there.
But he doesn’t.
Because you’re not his to protect. Not really. You’re just someone he couldn’t walk away from. Someone he couldn’t save until you decided to save yourself.
“Get some sleep,” he says instead. “We can talk more in the morning.”
You nod, but you don’t let go of his hand.
“Garrett?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m glad it was you. That night. When I called. I’m glad it was you who answered.”
Something in Garrett’s chest cracks open.
“Me too,” he says.
You finally release his hand and he steps back into the hallway, closing the door behind him.
He leans against the wall, closes his eyes, and lets himself feel everything he’s been holding back for three weeks.
The rage. The fear. The overwhelming need to protect you.
And something else. Something he’s not ready to name yet.
But it’s there.
Growing stronger every day.
***
The suspension comes down two days after the game: four games for “excessive violence and intent to injure.”
Garrett doesn’t even blink.
Four games. That’s it. He was expecting worse — six, maybe eight. The fact that the league went relatively light on him suggests that maybe, just maybe, someone up there knows what Beck did. Knows why Garrett did what he did.
“Four games,” Logan says, reading the official statement on his phone. “That’s nothing.”
“Could’ve been worse,” Garrett replies, sprawled on the couch with an ice pack on his still-swollen knuckles.
“Could’ve been better. Could’ve been zero games and a medal.”
Tucker walks in from the kitchen, protein shake in hand. “Did you see the prospect rankings?”
“What about them?”
“You moved up.” Tucker grins. “Apparently scouts love a forward who can put up points and throw down when needed. The Bruins are talking about you even more now.”
Garrett sits up. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope. Check Twitter. Hockey analysts are going crazy. Half of them are calling you a thug, but the other half are saying you’re exactly what the league needs. A player with skill and grit.”
Dean appears in the doorway. “There’s already a highlight reel of the fight on YouTube. It’s got like two million views.”
“Jesus.”
“You’re famous, man. In the best and worst way possible.”
Garrett doesn’t care about fame. Doesn’t care about the projections or the highlight reels or what analysts think. He cares about one thing: that Beck is in the hospital with a face that looks like ground meat, and everyone knows why.
You appear at the top of the stairs, wearing one of Garrett’s old Briar Hockey hoodies that swallows you whole. You’ve been staying in his room for three weeks now, and the house has adjusted around you. The boys treat you like a little sister — protective, teasing, careful. It’s the safest you’ve felt in over a year.
“What’s all the noise about?” You ask.
“Garrett’s trending on Twitter,” Tucker announces.
“For the fight?”
“For being a badass, apparently.”
You come down the stairs, curl up on the couch next to Garrett. It’s become natural now, this casual proximity. He doesn’t flinch when you’re near. You don’t panic when he moves. It’s taken weeks to build this comfort, but it’s there.
“How are the knuckles?” You ask.
“Better. Still ugly.”
“Battle scars.”
“Something like that.”
Your phone buzzes. You pull it out, check the screen, and Garrett watches your expression change. The color drains from your face.
“What?” He asks immediately.
“The DA. The trial date got moved up.”
“To when?”
“Three weeks from now.” Your voice is shaky. “April seventh.”
Garrett does the math. That’s right after his suspension ends. Almost like fate scheduled it that way.
“You okay?” He asks.
“I don’t know. I thought I’d have more time to prepare.”
“You’ve been preparing for weeks. You’re ready.”
“Am I?” You look at him, and there’s real fear in your eyes. “What if I mess up? What if I freeze on the stand? What if his lawyers tear me apart?”
“Then I’ll be there to put you back together.”
It’s a promise. Simple and absolute.
You lean into him slightly, and Garrett puts his arm around your shoulders. The gesture is still new enough to feel significant. Still careful enough that either of you could pull away.
But neither of you do.
***
The three weeks pass in a blur of preparation.
The DA — a sharp woman named Katherine Doherty who looks like she could argue a case in her sleep — meets with you six times. Goes over your testimony, prepares you for cross-examination, teaches you how to stay calm under pressure.
“They’re going to try to discredit you,” she says during one session, Garrett sitting quietly in the corner. “They’re going to imply you’re lying, that you wanted it, that you’re just trying to ruin his life because you’re bitter about the breakup. And you cannot let them see you break.”
“How do I not break?” You ask. “How do I sit there and listen to them call me a liar and not fall apart?”
“You remember why you’re doing this. You remember that you’re not just fighting for yourself — you’re fighting for every woman he might hurt in the future. Every girl who might think she deserves to be treated like he treated you.”
Garrett watches you absorb this. Watches you straighten your spine, lift your chin.
“Okay,” you say. “I can do that.”
“I know you can.”
The night before the trial, you can’t sleep. Garrett finds you in the kitchen at 2 AM, making tea with shaking hands.
“Hey,” he says softly.
You jump, nearly dropping the mug. “God, you scared me.”
“Sorry. Couldn’t sleep either.”
“Tomorrow’s the day.”
“Yep.”
You pour hot water over the tea bag, watch it steep. “What if he gets away with it?”
“He won’t.”
“But what if he does? His parents hired the best lawyers in Boston. They’ve got money and connections and-”
“And you have the truth.” Garrett moves closer, takes the mug from your hands before you spill it. “You have evidence. You have photos. You have medical records. You have me.”
“You can’t testify. You weren’t there.”
“No, but I can sit in that courtroom and make sure you know you’re not alone.”
You look up at him, and in the dim kitchen light, Garrett can see the fear and determination warring in your expression.
“I’m terrified,” you whisper.
“I know.”
“But I’m also angry. I’m so angry at him for what he did. For what he took from me. And I want him to pay.”
“He will.”
“Promise?”
Garrett shouldn’t make promises he can’t keep. Shouldn’t guarantee an outcome that’s out of his control. But looking at you — brave and broken and desperately needing something to hold onto — he can’t help himself.
“I promise.”
***
The courthouse is exactly as imposing as you imagined. All marble and high ceilings and the kind of quiet that feels heavy.
You’re dressed in a simple navy dress that Katherine helped you pick out. Professional but not severe. Respectful but not apologetic. Your hair is pulled back. Your makeup is minimal.
Garrett’s beside you in a suit that looks uncomfortable on him. He’s a jeans and hoodie guy, but today he looks like he walked out of a magazine. Dark suit, crisp white shirt, tie that Logan had to help him knot.
“You look good,” you tell him as you wait outside the courtroom.
“I look like I’m going to a funeral.”
“And still very handsome.”
He manages a small smile. “You ready?”
“No. But let’s do this anyway.”
Katherine appears, all business in her sharp pantsuit. “Alright, let’s go over this one more time. You tell the truth. You stay calm. You don’t let his lawyer bait you into anger. Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Remember, the evidence is on our side. The medical records, the photos, the police report. This isn’t a he-said-she-said. This is a he-said-she-said-and-she-has-proof.”
You nod, trying to absorb her confidence.
The courtroom doors open and you walk inside.
It’s smaller than you expected. Maybe forty seats in the gallery, half of them filled. You recognize some faces — your parents, who flew in from wherever they’ve been. Julie, who’s been your rock through all of this. Some of Garrett’s teammates.
And Cameron’s parents. Sitting in the front row, looking like they’re at a country club meeting instead of their son’s rape trial.
You don’t look at Cameron. Can’t. Not yet.
The bailiff calls the court to order and the judge — an older woman with gray hair and sharp eyes — takes her seat.
“The People versus Cameron Jameson Beck,” the bailiff announces. “Charges of rape in the first degree, assault in the second degree, and attempted murder.”
The words hang in the air like a death sentence.
The trial begins.
***
Garrett sits in the gallery, three rows back, and watches everything unfold.
The prosecution goes first. Katherine is methodical, building her case piece by piece. She presents the medical records — the photos of your bruises, the hospital documentation of your injuries. She presents the police report, Officer Murphy’s testimony about the state you were in when you came to the station.
She presents your Instagram, showing the jury the transformation from bright, happy student to hollow-eyed ghost.
Cameron’s lawyer — a smarmy guy named Robert Coburn who probably charges a thousand dollars an hour — objects to nearly everything. “Relevance, your honor.” “Speculation.” “Prejudicial.”
Most of his objections get overruled.
Then it’s time for your testimony.
You take the stand, right hand raised, and swear to tell the truth. Your voice is steady, but Garrett can see your hands shaking.
Katherine approaches with a gentle expression. “Can you state your name for the record?”
“Y/N Y/L/N.”
“And how old are you, Y/N?”
“Twenty.”
“And you’re a student at Boston University?”
“Yes. Junior. Journalism major.”
“Can you tell the jury how you met the defendant?”
You take a breath. “We met at a party. March of last year. He was charming. Funny. He asked me out and I said yes.”
“And when did the relationship turn abusive?”
“Gradually. It started with small things. Criticizing what I wore, who I talked to. Then it escalated. He’d grab my wrist too hard. Shove me. Call me names.”
“And did you tell anyone?”
“No. I thought I could fix it. Thought if I just tried harder, he’d go back to being the person I fell for.”
“When did the physical abuse become severe?”
“Last summer. He pushed me down a flight of stairs. Told everyone I tripped. I had bruises for weeks.”
Katherine presents photos. The jury studies them, and Garrett watches their faces shift from neutral to horrified.
“And the sexual assault. Can you describe what happened?”
This is the hard part. Garrett can see you steeling yourself.
“He would force me. When I said no, he’d do it anyway. He said I owed him. That it was my job as his girlfriend.”
“How many times did this occur?”
“I don’t know. Dozens. Maybe more.”
“And the incident on February nineteenth of this year. Can you describe that?”
You detail it all. The napkin. His rage. The choking. The fear that you were going to die.
By the time you finish, half the jury is crying.
Then it’s Coburn’s turn.
He stands, adjusts his expensive tie, and approaches you like a shark circling prey.
“Ms. Y/L/N, you claim my client raped you. Is that correct?”
“It’s not a claim. It’s a fact.”
“A fact. I see. And yet you never reported these alleged assaults until after you left him. Why is that?”
“I was scared.”
“Scared. Of what?”
“Of him. Of what he’d do if I told anyone.”
“But you told Mr. Graham, didn’t you?” Carlisle gestures toward Garrett. “A hockey player from a rival school. Isn’t it true that you were having an affair with Mr. Graham and fabricated these accusations to justify leaving my client?”
Garrett’s hands clench into fists.
“No,” you say firmly. “I never even met Garrett until the day before it happened. He saw Cameron hurting me after a game and tried to step in. And I didn’t fabricate anything, Cameron tried to kill me.”
“Allegedly tried to kill you.”
“There’s nothing alleged about it. He choked me until I blacked out.”
“Or perhaps you two had rough sex and you’re retroactively withdrawing consent because you regret it?”
Katherine jumps up. “Objection! Badgering the witness.”
“Sustained,” the judge says. “Mr. Coburn, watch yourself.”
But Coburn isn’t done. “You say my client raped you dozens of times. And yet you stayed with him. You continued to see him, to sleep in his bed, to appear with him publicly. Does that sound like the behavior of a rape victim?”
“Yes.” Your voice doesn’t waver. “It sounds exactly like the behavior of someone trapped in an abusive relationship. Someone who’s been manipulated and gaslit into thinking they deserve it.”
“Or someone who’s lying.”
“I’m not lying.”
“You expect this jury to believe that my client — a decorated student athlete with no prior criminal record — is a rapist and attempted murderer based solely on your word?”
“Based on my word and the medical evidence and the photos and the testimony of everyone who saw what he did to me.”
Coburn smiles. It’s not a nice smile. “No further questions.”
You step down from the stand and Garrett wants to go to you, wants to pull you into his arms and tell you how incredibly brave you are. But he stays seated, hands gripping the bench in front of him so hard his knuckles turn white.
The defense presents their case. It’s weak — character witnesses who talk about what a great guy Cameron is, how he volunteers and gets good grades and wouldn’t hurt a fly.
Cameron himself takes the stand. Denies everything. Claims you were the aggressive one, the unstable one. Says you threatened to ruin him if he ever left you.
It’s all bullshit and everyone in the courtroom knows it.
When both sides rest, the judge gives instructions to the jury. They file out to deliberate.
And then you wait.
***
Two hours feel like two years.
You’re in a conference room with Katherine, drinking terrible coffee and trying not to throw up.
Garrett’s there too, because they couldn’t make him leave. He sits beside you, not saying much, just being present.
“What if they don’t believe me?” You ask for the hundredth time.
“They will,” Katherine says.
“But what if they don’t?”
“Then we appeal. But they’re going to believe you, Y/N. The evidence is overwhelming.”
Your phone buzzes. It’s your mom, asking for updates. You ignore it. Can’t deal with her nervous energy on top of your own.
Garrett’s phone buzzes too. He checks it, smiles slightly.
“What?” You ask.
“Logan. He says if Beck walks, they’re going to handle it themselves.”
“That’s not helpful.”
“I think it’s sweet.”
Despite everything, you almost laugh.
There’s a knock on the door. The bailiff pokes his head in. “Jury’s back.”
Your stomach drops. “Already?”
“Quick verdicts are usually good for the prosecution,” Katherine says, standing. “Let’s go.”
You walk back into the courtroom on legs that feel like jelly. The gallery has filled up — more people heard about the verdict and came to watch.
Garrett takes his seat in the gallery. You sit at the prosecution table with Katherine.
The jury files in. You try to read their faces, but they’re all carefully neutral.
The judge addresses the foreperson. “Has the jury reached a verdict?”
“We have, your honor.”
“On the charge of rape in the first degree, how do you find?”
“We find the defendant guilty.”
The courtroom erupts. Cameron’s mother gasps. His father starts shouting. The judge bangs her gavel.
“On the charge of assault in the second degree, how do you find?”
“Guilty.”
“On the charge of attempted murder, how do you find?”
“Guilty.”
You can’t breathe. Can’t process. Guilty. Guilty on all counts.
The judge is talking about sentencing, but you can’t hear her over the roaring in your ears. You turn around, looking for Garrett, and find him already standing, pushing his way toward the railing that separates the gallery from the floor.
“Twenty-five years,” the judge announces. “With possibility of parole after twenty.”
Twenty-five years. Cameron won’t be out until he’s almost fifty.
Katherine is hugging you. Julie is cheering. You’re crying.
And then you’re moving, pushing past people, until you reach Garrett.
He meets you at the railing and you throw yourself at him. He catches you, arms wrapping around you, pulling you close.
“We did it,” you sob into his shoulder. “He’s going to prison.”
“You did it,” Garrett corrects, voice rough. “You were so fucking brave up there.”
“I was terrified.”
“But you did it anyway. That’s what brave means.”
You pull back just enough to look at him. His eyes are wet, you realize. Garrett Graham is crying.
“I’m so proud of you,” he whispers, tucking your head under his chin. “So goddamn proud.”
Behind you, bailiffs are handcuffing Cameron. Leading him away. He’s shouting something — probably threats, probably curses — but you don’t care. Can’t hear him over your own heartbeat.
You’re safe. Finally, truly safe.
You look up at Garrett and something shifts. Something clicks into place.
He’s looking at you with an expression you’ve seen before but never fully understood. Fierce and protective and something else. Something deeper.
“Garrett,” you whisper.
“Yeah?”
You don’t have words for what you’re feeling. Don’t know how to explain that this boy — this stranger who became your savior who became your friend — has somehow become everything.
So you don’t say anything.
You just reach up, cup his face in your hands, and kiss him.
For a second, he freezes. Surprised. Then his hands come up to cradle your face, gentle and careful, and he kisses you back.
It’s nothing like kissing Cameron. There’s no demand in it. No ownership. Just soft and sweet and full of promise.
When you finally pull apart, you’re both crying.
“Was that okay?” You ask, suddenly worried you misread everything.
“That was-” Garrett’s voice breaks. “Yeah. That was okay.”
Around you, the courtroom is clearing out. People are talking, crying, celebrating. But you and Garrett are in your own bubble.
His thumbs brush your cheekbones, wiping away tears. His touch is so gentle it makes your chest ache. You think about all the times Cameron grabbed your face — harsh, controlling, meant to intimidate. And then you think about this. About Garrett holding you like you’re something precious. Something worth protecting.
“Thank you,” you whisper. “For everything. For answering the phone that night. For believing me. For fighting for me.”
“You don’t have to thank me.”
“I do. Because you didn’t have to do any of it. You could’ve walked away. But you didn’t.”
“I couldn’t.” Garrett’s forehead touches yours. “Not from you.”
Katherine appears beside you, tactfully clearing her throat. “Sorry to interrupt, but there’s some paperwork we need to go over. And the press is outside — they’re going to want a statement.”
You take a shaky breath. “Can Garrett come?”
“Of course.”
You don’t let go of Garrett’s hand as you follow Katherine to another conference room. Don’t let go as she explains the next steps — the appeals process that Cameron will probably pursue, the restraining order that’s now permanent, the victim services available to you.
Don’t let go as you walk outside and face the cameras.
You read a prepared statement that Katherine helped you write. About believing survivors. About holding abusers accountable. About how justice, while imperfect, still matters.
The whole time, Garrett stands beside you. Not in front of you, not behind you. Beside you.
When it’s finally over, when you’re back in Garrett’s car heading home, you let yourself feel it. All of it. The relief and the grief and the rage and the hope.
“I can’t believe it’s over,” you say.
“It’s not over,” Garrett replies. “He’ll appeal. There will be more legal stuff. More healing you have to do.”
“But the worst part is over.”
“Yeah. The worst part is over.”
You look at him — really look at him. This boy who became a man in your eyes. Who taught you that not all strength is violent. That protection doesn’t mean possession.
“What happens now?” You ask.
“What do you want to happen?”
“I don’t know. I just know I want you in it. Whatever it is.”
Garrett reaches over, takes your hand. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
And for the first time in over a year, you believe that someone’s promise to you actually means something.
You believe in tomorrow.
You believe in healing.
You believe in love — the real kind. The kind that doesn’t hurt.
As Garrett drives you home, your hand in his, you think about that girl in the old Instagram photos. The bright, ambitious journalism student who wanted to change the world.
She’s not gone.
She’s been sleeping. Waiting. Healing.
And now, finally, she’s ready to wake up.
***
One year later.
You’re standing on the sidelines of Agganis Arena, camera crew behind you, microphone in hand, and you’ve never felt more alive.
The scoreboard reads 4-2, Briar. Opening game of the season, and your alma mater just got demolished by your boyfriend’s team. You should probably feel some kind of loyalty conflict, but honestly? You’re just happy to be here.
Happy to be doing what you love.
Happy to be yourself again.
“Alright, Y/N, we’re live in thirty seconds,” your producer says through your earpiece.
You smooth down your blazer — BU red and white, professional but not stuffy — and check your notes one more time. Post-game interview with Briar’s captain and star center, who just scored a hat trick.
Who also happens to be the love of your life, but you’re trying to keep it professional.
“And we’re live in five, four, three …” The producer counts down with his fingers, then points at you.
You smile at the camera. “I’m here with Garrett Graham, captain of the Briar University hockey team, who just led his team to a dominant 4-2 victory over Boston University in tonight’s season opener. Garrett, congratulations on the win.”
Garrett’s in his full gear minus his helmet, hair damp with sweat, face flushed from exertion. He looks good. Unfairly good. But you keep your expression neutral, professional.
“Thanks, Y/N,” he says, and there’s the tiniest hint of a smile playing at his lips. “Feels great to start the season with a W.”
“You had three goals tonight. Walk me through that second one — the wraparound. That was pretty spectacular.”
“Yeah, I mean, their goalie was cheating to the far post, so I saw an opening and just tried to jam it in. Got lucky.”
“Lucky?” You raise an eyebrow. “That was pure skill and you know it.”
Now he’s definitely smiling. “Well, I’ve had some good coaching. Great teammates. It’s a team effort.”
“Speaking of team effort, this is your senior year. How does it feel knowing this is your last season playing college hockey?”
Something shifts in Garrett’s expression. Gets more serious. “It’s bittersweet, you know? I love this team. Love this school. But I’m also excited for what’s next.”
You consult your notes, but you’ve memorized these questions. Did the research like you do for every interview. The fact that you also know Garrett’s favorite breakfast order and the way he likes his coffee doesn’t matter right now. Right now, you’re a journalist doing your job.
“Your team has high expectations this year,” you continue. “Returning most of your starters, strong recruiting class. Do you think Briar can make a run at the national championship?”
“I think we’ve got the talent and the drive. We’ve been working our asses off—sorry, can I say that on air?”
You fight back a smile. “We’re cable. You’re fine.”
“Well, we’ve been working really hard in the off-season. Everyone’s bought in. Everyone wants it. So yeah, I think we’ve got a real shot.”
“And what about you personally? Any individual goals for the season?”
Garrett looks directly at the camera. “Honestly? I just want to make the most of it. Enjoy every game. Play for my teammates. And hopefully leave Briar better than I found it.”
It’s a perfect answer. Humble but confident. Team-oriented but ambitious.
You should wrap up the interview. Move on to the next player. But there’s something in Garrett’s eyes — a warmth, a familiarity — that makes you relax slightly.
“So,” you say, going slightly off-script. “Three goals on opening night. That’s got to feel pretty good, especially against BU.”
“Oh, especially against BU,” Garrett agrees, and now he’s definitely teasing. “No offense to your school.”
“Some taken. We did make it competitive for two periods.”
“You did. That third period though …” He makes a yikes face.
“Okay, rude.”
“I’m just stating facts. As a journalist, I thought you’d appreciate factual accuracy.”
You bite back a laugh. “I appreciate winning more.”
“Well, you’re dating a Briar guy now, so technically you did win tonight.”
Your producer is probably having a heart attack in the truck, but you can’t help it. You grin. “I suppose that’s true.”
“Plus I scored three goals. You should be very impressed.”
“Oh, should I?”
“Definitely. I expect appropriate celebration later.”
You feel your cheeks heat up. “Garrett, we’re on camera.”
“I know.” He’s absolutely shameless, that smile widening. “Just keeping things interesting for the viewers.”
“You’re impossible.”
“You love it.”
And okay, you do. You love this — the easy banter, the way he can make you laugh even in the middle of a professional interview, the way he looks at you like you’re the only person in the arena.
“Alright, I think that’s probably enough for tonight,” you say, trying to regain some semblance of professionalism. “Garrett Graham, congratulations again on the win. Best of luck for the rest of the season.”
“Thanks for having me.”
He starts to walk away, then turns back. Before you can react, he’s leaning in and kissing you — quick and sweet but definitely not professional — right there on camera.
When he pulls back, you’re frozen, face burning, completely flustered.
“See you at home,” he says with a wink, then jogs off toward the locker room.
You turn back to the camera, trying to compose yourself. Your producer is definitely going to kill you, but you can hear him laughing through your earpiece.
“And that’s … that’s the post-game report from Agganis Arena,” you manage. “Back to you in the studio.”
The camera light goes off and you let out a breath you didn’t know you were holding.
Your producer appears, shaking his head but grinning. “Well, that’s going viral.”
“I’m so sorry-”
“Are you kidding? That was gold. Adorable, authentic, exactly the kind of content people eat up.” He claps you on the shoulder. “Great job tonight, Y/N. Really great work.”
You pack up your gear, still blushing, and check your phone. There’s already a text from Julie: OMG I SAW THAT. YOU AND GARRETT ARE DISGUSTINGLY CUTE.
Then one from Logan: G’s getting chirped so hard in the locker room right now. Worth it though.
Then one from your mom: Sweetie, you looked wonderful! Very professional! Well, mostly professional 😊
You’re laughing as you head out to the parking lot. Your car is parked next to Garrett’s truck — you drove separately since you had to be here early for setup, but you’ll both end up at the same place.
Home.
It still feels surreal sometimes. That you’re here. That you’re happy. That you wake up every morning next to someone who treats you like you’re precious.
You drive home on autopilot, your mind replaying the interview. The way Garrett looked at you. The easy chemistry between you. The kiss that’s probably being GIF’d and memed as you drive.
When you pull into the driveway, his truck is already there. Lights are on in the living room.
You let yourself in — still a small thrill every time, having a key, being welcome, being home — and find Garrett on the couch, showered and changed into sweatpants and a Briar t-shirt.
“Hey, superstar,” you say, dropping your bag by the door.
He looks up, grins. “Hey, yourself. How’d the rest of the interviews go?”
“Fine. Though none of them involved impromptu kisses.”
“I couldn’t help it. You looked too good.”
You flop down beside him, and he immediately pulls you into his side. It’s automatic now, this casual affection. So different from the careful distance you maintained those first few months.
“You’re going to get me in trouble,” you say, but there’s no heat in it.
“With who? Your producer loved it.”
“With my professional reputation.”
“Your professional reputation is that you’re a talented journalist who asks great questions and happens to be dating the extremely handsome captain of Briar’s hockey team.”
“Extremely handsome? Really?”
“I’m just reporting the facts.”
You laugh, tilting your head up to look at him. “You played really well tonight.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. That second goal was beautiful. And the assist to Logan — perfect pass.”
“Are you analyzing my game?”
“I’m a sports journalist. It’s literally my job.”
Garrett’s expression softens. “You know what I love about you?”
“My devastating good looks?”
“Well, yes. But also that you never stopped chasing your dreams. Even after everything. You could’ve given up on journalism, on sports media, on everything. But you didn’t.”
You think about that. About the girl you were a year ago — broken, terrified, barely functional. About the slow, painful process of putting yourself back together. The therapy sessions. The nightmares that still happen sometimes. The moments of panic when someone moves too fast or raises their voice.
But also about the victories. Getting back on camera. Doing your first post-game interview. Continuing with your journalism degree. Landing the job with BU’s sports network.
Coming home to Garrett and feeling safe.
“I had help,” you say quietly.
“You did the work.”
“We did the work.”
Because it hasn’t been just you. Garrett’s been there for every step. Patient when you couldn’t be touched. Understanding when you had nightmares. Gentle when you needed gentleness and strong when you needed strength.
He’s been to therapy himself — dealing with his own trauma, his own guilt about his mother. Learning how to be supportive without being controlling. How to protect without possessing.
You’ve healed together.
“Come here,” Garrett says, pulling you fully into his lap. You go willingly, straddling him, your hands on his shoulders.
“Hi,” you whisper.
“Hi.”
He kisses you properly this time. Not the quick peck from the arena, but slow and deep and full of promise. His hands settle on your waist, thumbs rubbing gentle circles through your shirt.
When you break apart, you’re both breathing harder.
“I’m really proud of you,” he says. “For tonight. For everything. You were amazing out there.”
“It was just an interview.”
“It wasn’t just anything. You stood on that sideline in the arena where he used to play and you did your job like the professional you are. That takes guts.”
You hadn’t thought about it that way. Hadn’t consciously registered that you were in BU’s arena doing what you love without fear.
“He’s in prison,” you say. It’s a fact you remind yourself of sometimes. When the anxiety creeps in. When you wonder if he’ll somehow find you. “He can’t hurt me anymore.”
“He can’t hurt you anymore,” Garrett agrees. “And even if he could, he’d have to go through me first.”
“My fierce protector.”
“Always.”
You kiss him again, and this time it’s different. Deeper. More urgent. His hands slide under your shirt, warm against your skin, and you arch into the touch.
“Bedroom?” He murmurs against your lips.
“Bedroom,” you agree.
He stands, lifting you easily, and you wrap your legs around his waist. He carries you upstairs — something that should be cheesy but somehow isn’t, not with him — and lays you gently on the bed.
The first time you slept together, four months ago, you cried. Not from pain or fear, but from the overwhelming realization that intimacy could be tender. That sex could be about connection instead of control.
Garrett held you through it, whispered that you were safe, that you could stop anytime, that he loved you.
You don’t cry anymore. Now it’s just … good. Better than good. Amazing.
He takes his time with you now, kissing down your neck, your collarbone. His hands are reverent as he removes your clothes, piece by piece, checking in with every new touch.
“This okay?”
“Yes.”
“And this?”
“Yes.”
It’s something he always does. Always asks. Even a year into your relationship, even though you’ve done this dozens of times, he never assumes. Never takes.
Only gives.
He kisses the spot on your throat where Cameron’s handprints used to be. The bruises are long gone, but the memory lingers. Garrett knows this. Treats these places with extra care. Extra tenderness.
“Beautiful,” he whispers against your skin. “So fucking beautiful.”
You pull him up to kiss him properly, to tell him without words how much he means to you. How much this means.
Hours later, you’re both exhausted and sated, tangled together in the sheets. Your head is on his chest, his arm around you, fingers drawing idle patterns on your shoulder.
“What are you thinking about?” He asks.
“How different everything is.”
“Good different or bad different?”
“The best different.” You tilt your head to look at him. “A year ago, I couldn’t imagine being happy again. Couldn’t imagine feeling safe or loved or … whole.”
“And now?”
“Now I can’t imagine anything else.”
Garrett’s quiet for a moment. “I love you. You know that, right?”
“I know. I love you too.”
“I’m going to marry you someday.”
It’s not a proposal — just a statement of fact. But it makes your heart skip anyway.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. When you’re ready. When we’re ready. But someday, I’m going to put a ring on your finger and spend the rest of my life making sure you never doubt how loved you are.”
You should probably be scared by that level of commitment. Should feel trapped or pressured or uncertain.
But you don’t.
You feel safe.
“Someday sounds good,” you whisper.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He kisses the top of your head, and you settle back against his chest. Listen to his heartbeat. Let yourself drift.
You think about the girl in those old Instagram photos. The one who was bright and ambitious and full of dreams. The one who thought she could change the world.
She’s still here. She’s been here all along, just waiting to be found again.
And she’s got so much left to do.
Stories to tell. Games to cover. A career to build. A life to live.
But for now, in this moment, wrapped in the arms of someone who sees all of her — the broken parts and the healing parts and the parts that were never damaged at all — she’s exactly where she needs to be.
“Garrett?” You murmur, half-asleep.
“Hmm?”
“Thank you for answering the phone that night.”
His arms tighten around you. “Thank you for calling.”
Outside, the world keeps spinning. Tomorrow will bring new challenges, new victories, new moments to navigate. But tonight, you’re safe and loved and whole.
Summary: Garrett is supposed to hate you by association. You’re dating his rival. You’re wearing the wrong colors. But he doesn’t look at you like you’re the enemy, he looks at you like he’s seeing something everyone else has learned to ignore. And when you run out of places to hide, his number is the only one you can think to call
Warnings: 18+ content, domestic violence, sexual assault, and trauma recovery
Read part two here
The locker room smells like victory — sweat, ice, and that particular brand of arrogance that comes from stomping your rivals into the boards. Garrett sits on the bench, unlacing his skates with practiced efficiency, while his teammates celebrate around him like they’ve won the Stanley Cup instead of just another regular season game.
“Did you see Beck’s face when you scored that hat trick?” Dean practically shouts, still riding the high. “Dude looked like he wanted to murder you.”
“Beck always looks like that,” Logan says, toweling off his hair. “Guy’s got permanent asshole face.”
Garrett doesn’t join in the trash talk. He pulls off his skates and flexes his feet, working out the stiffness. Five to one. They demolished BU tonight, and while he should feel satisfied — while he does feel satisfied — something about the win feels hollow. Maybe it’s because Cameron Beck spent most of the third period playing dirty, throwing elbows when the refs weren’t looking, talking shit that had nothing to do with hockey.
“You don’t look good. You look like you’re planning someone’s funeral.”
Garrett manages a half-smile. “Just tired, man. It’s been a long week.”
It has been. Two midterms, practice every day, a game against Northeastern that went into overtime, and now this. He loves hockey — lives for it, really — but sometimes the weight of being captain, of being the guy everyone looks to, of keeping his grades up and his scholarship secure, feels like carrying a truck on his shoulders.
“Alright!” Coach Jensen’s voice cuts through the celebration. “Bus leaves in ten. If you’re not on it, you’re walking back to Briar.”
The team starts moving with renewed urgency, shoving gear into bags, pulling on sweatpants and hoodies. Garrett’s methodical about it, the way he is with everything. Skates in the bag, pads folded properly, stick secured. His mom taught him that — take care of your equipment and it’ll take care of you.
He pushes the thought away before it can dig in too deep.
“You riding shotgun?” Logan asks as they head toward the bus.
“Nah, you take it. I’m gonna crash in the back.”
The cold Boston air hits him like a slap when they step outside. February in New England is brutal, the kind of cold that gets into your bones and doesn’t let go. The team bus idles in the parking lot, exhaust forming clouds in the darkness. Most of the guys are already boarding, still loud, still buzzing.
That’s when Garrett sees them.
At first, it’s just movement in his peripheral vision — two figures near the back entrance of the arena, half-hidden in shadows. He almost doesn’t look. Almost keeps walking toward the bus because it’s cold and he’s tired and it’s none of his business.
But then he hears it. A voice, male, low and vicious.
“I told you not to embarrass me.”
Garrett stops walking. Tucker nearly crashes into him.
“Dude, what-”
“Hold on.”
He moves closer, his body reacting before his brain catches up. The angle shifts and he sees her clearly now — a girl, small, pressed back against the brick wall with her hands up in a gesture that Garrett recognizes instantly. It’s the same way his mom used to stand when his dad came home in one of his moods. Defensive. Placating. Terrified.
The guy is Cameron Beck. Even from fifteen feet away, even in the shitty parking lot lighting, Garrett knows it’s him. And Beck has his hand wrapped around your wrist, squeezing hard enough that Garrett can see you wince.
“Cameron, please-” Your voice is barely audible, thin and desperate. “I didn’t do anything-”
“You were talking to that guy. I saw you.”
“He asked me for directions to the bathroom-”
“Don’t fucking lie to me.”
Beck yanks you forward and you stumble, catching yourself against his chest. He grabs your other wrist and Garrett sees them clearly now — the bruises. Dark purple and yellow, finger-shaped marks that circle both your wrists like ugly bracelets.
Something white-hot ignites in Garrett’s chest.
“Hey!” His voice comes out harder than he intends, sharp enough to make Beck’s head snap up. “Get your hands off her.”
Beck doesn’t let go. If anything, his grip tightens. “Mind your own business, Graham.”
“I said, get your fucking hands off her.”
Garrett’s already moving, closing the distance. He’s vaguely aware of his teammates behind him — Tucker’s saying something, maybe Logan too — but all he can focus on is your face. You’re looking at him now, and your eyes are the most heartbreaking thing he’s ever seen. Wide and dark and absolutely terrified, but not of Beck. Of him. Of the situation. Of what’s going to happen next.
“This doesn’t concern you,” Beck says, but there’s an edge to his voice now. He drops your wrists and steps slightly in front of you, like he’s shielding you from view. Like he’s protecting you instead of hurting you.
You don’t move. Don’t run. Just stand there with your arms wrapped around yourself, and Garrett can see you shaking even from here.
“You always put your hands on people smaller than you?” Garrett asks, his voice deadly calm now. “Or just women who can’t fight back?”
“Watch your mouth-”
“Graham!” Coach Jensen’s voice cuts across the parking lot. “What the hell are you doing? Get on the bus!”
Garrett doesn’t move. He keeps his eyes locked on Beck, watching for any sign that he’s going to grab you again. Behind Beck, you’re barely breathing. You’re wearing a BU sweatshirt that’s too big for you and jeans that look painted on, and even though it’s freezing, you’re not wearing a coat. Your hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and there’s a bruise on your cheekbone that makeup can’t quite hide.
“Is he hurting you?” Garrett directs the question to you, but you don’t answer. Just stare at him with those haunted eyes.
“She’s fine,” Beck snaps. “She’s my girlfriend and this is between us, so why don’t you take your hero complex and shove it-”
“I wasn’t asking you.”
“Graham! Now!” Coach Jensen sounds pissed.
Tucker’s hand lands on Garrett’s shoulder. “Come on, man. We gotta go.”
“Not until-”
“There’s nothing you can do,” Tucker says quietly, meant only for Garrett’s ears. “Not here. Not now.”
Garrett knows he’s right. Knows that if he throws a punch at Beck right now, he’s the one who’ll get suspended. Knows that confronting Beck isn’t going to help you, might even make things worse once you’re alone again. But walking away feels impossible. It feels like the biggest betrayal in the world.
He looks at you one more time. Tries to communicate something with his eyes. I see you. I know what’s happening. This isn’t okay.
“I’m watching you, Beck,” he says finally. “You fuck up, and I’ll know about it.”
“Yeah, I’m real scared,” Beck sneers, but he doesn’t sound as confident as before.
Tucker practically drags Garrett back to the bus. The guys have all gone quiet now, watching. Logan looks grim. Dean looks confused. Some of the younger guys look uncomfortable, like they’re not sure what just happened.
“What the hell was that?” Coach demands as Garrett climbs the steps.
“Beck was hurting his girlfriend.”
“And you thought starting a fight in their parking lot was the solution?”
“I didn’t start anything. I told him to back off.”
“Sit down. We’re talking about this later.”
Garrett moves to the back of the bus and drops into a seat, his heart still jackhammering against his ribs. Through the window, he can see you — Beck has his arm around your shoulders now, steering you toward the parking garage. To anyone else, it probably looks almost normal. Protective, even. But Garrett sees the way you’re holding herself. Sees the careful distance you’re trying to maintain even while being pulled close.
The bus engine rumbles to life. They start moving, pulling out of the parking lot, and Garrett watches until he can’t see you anymore.
He punches the seat in front of him. Hard enough that his knuckles split, hard enough that pain shoots up his arm.
“Whoa!” Dean twists around. “Dude, what the hell?”
“Leave him alone,” Logan says quietly.
Garrett stares out the window at the Boston lights sliding past. His hand throbs. His chest feels tight. And all he can see is your face — the terror in your eyes, the bruises on your wrists, the way you didn’t say a word in your own defense.
He doesn’t even know your name.
***
You’re shaking so hard your teeth chatter.
“Get in the car,” Cameron says. His voice is controlled now, almost gentle. It’s worse than the yelling. So much worse.
“Cameron-”
“Get. In. The car.”
You slide into the passenger seat of his BMW and buckle your seatbelt with trembling fingers. The bruises on your wrists ache where he grabbed them. They’ve barely healed from last time, and now they’re going to be even worse tomorrow. You’ll have to wear long sleeves again. Find excuses not to go to the gym, where someone might see you change.
Cameron gets in the driver’s side and sits there for a moment, both hands on the steering wheel. You don’t look at him. You learned months ago that making eye contact during these moments is dangerous.
“That guy asked you for directions,” Cameron says finally.
“Yes.”
“To the bathroom.”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t think it was weird that some random dude was asking you instead of literally anyone else?”
Your throat feels like it’s closing. “I was just trying to be helpful.”
“Helpful.” He laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “You want to be helpful? Stop making me look like an idiot. We were in public, Y/N. People could see you flirting-”
“I wasn’t flirting-”
The slap comes so fast you don’t see it. One second you’re trying to defend yourself, the next your cheek is on fire and your eyes are watering. It wasn’t hard — Cameron knows better than to leave marks where people can see them easily — but it’s enough to shut you up.
“Don’t interrupt me.” His voice is still calm. Still controlled. “I’ve had a shit night. We lost five to one. Five to fucking one. And then I have to watch my girlfriend chatting up random guys like she’s single.”
“I’m sorry,” you whisper.
“What?”
“I’m sorry.” Louder this time.
“That’s better.” He starts the car. “We’re going back to my place. You’re staying the night.”
It’s not a question. It’s never a question anymore.
You stare out the window as he drives, watching Boston blur past. You used to love this city. Used to walk around campus with your camera, taking pictures for the journalism assignments that actually excited you. Used to have friends, plans, dreams. You were going to work for ESPN. You were going to be the next Erin Andrews, traveling with teams, doing sideline reporting, making a name for yourself.
That was before Cameron. Before he slowly, methodically, isolated you from everyone who cared about you. Before he convinced you that you were lucky to have him, that no one else would ever want you, that you were too sensitive, too dramatic, too much work.
Before you started believing him.
Your phone buzzes in your pocket. You don’t reach for it. Cameron has rules about phones when you’re with him. You learned that lesson too.
“Who is it?” He asks.
“I don’t know. I didn’t look.”
“Check.”
You pull out your phone with shaking hands. It’s your roommate, Julie. Where are you? You ok?
“Julie,” you say. “Asking where I am.”
“Tell her you’re with me. Tell her you’ll be back tomorrow.”
You type out the message exactly as instructed. Julie responds immediately. Call me when you can. Please.
She knows. Of course she knows. She’s seen the bruises, heard the excuses, watched you disappear into yourself over the past year. She’s tried to talk to you about it, tried to convince you to leave, but you’ve gotten good at deflecting. Good at lying. Good at pretending everything’s fine.
“Done?” Cameron asks.
“Done.”
“Good girl.”
The words make your stomach turn. He used to say them differently — warm, affectionate, after you’d aced an exam or nailed an interview. Now they’re just another way to control you. Another reminder that your worth is tied to your obedience.
You think about the guy from the parking lot. The hockey player who intervened. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with dark hair and eyes that looked almost black in the shitty lighting. But it was the way he looked at you that’s stuck in your head. Like he actually saw you. Like he recognized something in your terror that other people miss or choose to ignore.
I’m watching you, Beck.
Cameron’s hands tighten on the steering wheel like he’s remembering it too.
“That Graham kid is going to be a problem,” he mutters.
You don’t respond. You’ve learned that sometimes the safest thing to do is stay silent, make yourself small, wait for the storm to pass. You’ve gotten so good at it that sometimes you forget how to be anything else.
Sometimes you can’t remember what your real voice even sounds like anymore.
Cameron’s apartment is in one of the nicer buildings near campus — his parents pay for it, along with his car and his credit cards and pretty much everything else. He’s never had to work for anything in his life, which maybe explains why he thinks people are possessions. Things to own and control.
You follow him inside, toeing off your shoes by the door. The apartment is immaculate because Cameron has a cleaning service. There are hockey trophies on the shelves and a massive TV mounted on the wall. It looks like something out of a magazine. It looks nothing like the prison it’s become.
“I’m going to shower,” Cameron says, already pulling his shirt over his head. “You should be in bed when I get out.”
It’s not a suggestion.
You nod and he disappears into the bathroom. The second the door closes, you let out a breath you didn’t know you were holding. Your hands are still shaking. Your cheek still stings. Your wrists throb with every heartbeat.
You sit on the edge of his bed and stare at the wall.
This is your life now. This is what you’ve become. A girl who flinches at loud noises, who measures every word before speaking, who has nightmares about making her boyfriend angry. A girl who used to be bright and funny and ambitious but now can barely recognize herself in the mirror.
Your phone buzzes again. Julie. I’m worried about you. Please talk to me.
You want to. God, you want to. But what would you even say? That you’re too scared to leave? That you’ve tried twice and both times Cameron found you, convinced you to come back, promised he’d change? That you’re terrified of what he’ll do if you try again?
That part of you has started to believe you deserve this?
You delete the message without responding and put your phone on silent.
In the bathroom, the shower turns off. You have maybe three minutes before Cameron comes out, before you have to paste on a smile and pretend everything’s okay, before you have to be the version of yourself that keeps him happy.
You change into the clothes you keep here — sleep shorts and one of Cameron’s old t-shirts — and climb into bed. Pull the covers up. Make yourself small.
And you think about the hockey player one more time. About the way he looked at Beck like he wanted to break him in half. About the way he looked at you like you mattered.
Then you close your eyes and wait for Cameron to decide what happens next.
Because that’s all you do anymore.
Wait.
***
The dream always starts the same way.
Garrett is seven years old, small for his age, standing in the hallway of their old apartment in Manhattan. The wallpaper is peeling near the ceiling and there’s a water stain that looks like a dragon if you squint. He used to stare at that dragon for hours, imagining it coming to life and burning everything down.
His father is in the living room. Garrett can hear him before he sees him — that particular tone of voice that means his mom did something wrong. Or didn’t do something right. Or just existed in a way that pissed him off.
“I told you I needed my dress shirt ironed,” his dad says. Phil Graham, star defenseman for the New York Rangers, six-foot-three and two hundred pounds of controlled violence. “I have a fucking press conference in an hour, Lauren.”
“I know, I’m sorry-” His mom’s voice is small, apologetic. “I forgot, I was picking up Garrett from school and then I had to-”
“I don’t care what you had to do. When I tell you something needs to get done, it needs to get done.”
Seven-year-old Garrett peers around the corner. His mom is standing by the ironing board, one hand pressed to her chest like she’s trying to hold herself together. His dad is looming over her, still in his Rangers sweatpants, hair wet from the shower.
“Don’t fucking cry,” his dad snaps when his mom’s eyes start to water. “Jesus Christ, you’re so dramatic. All I asked was for you to iron a goddamn shirt-”
“I’ll do it now, it’ll only take a minute-”
His dad grabs the iron. For a second, Garrett thinks he’s just going to do it himself, but then his mom flinches and Garrett knows — knows with the certainty that children who grow up in war zones develop — that something bad is about to happen.
“You think this is hot?” His dad asks, holding the iron close to his mom’s face. Not touching, not yet, but close enough that Garrett can see her leaning back, trying to create distance. “You think this is as hot as I’m going to be standing in front of those cameras looking like an idiot because my wife can’t do the one fucking thing I asked her to do?”
“Phil, please-”
The iron moves closer. His mom’s breath comes in short, panicked gasps.
“Stop!” Garrett shouts, but his voice is tiny, insignificant. He runs into the room, grabs his dad’s arm with both hands, tries to pull him away. “Leave her alone! Leave her alone!”
His dad shoves him backwards. Not hard — never hard enough to leave marks where people can see — but enough to send seven-year-old Garrett stumbling into the coffee table. Pain explodes in his hip.
“Go to your room, Garrett.”
“No! Stop hurting Mom!”
“I said go to your fucking room!”
But Garrett can’t move. Can’t do anything but watch as his dad turns back to his mom, as she raises her hands in that defensive gesture Garrett will see repeated a thousand times over the next ten years, as his dad-
The dream shifts.
Now Garrett isn’t seven anymore. He’s twenty-one, standing in a parking lot in Boston, and it’s not his mom against the wall. It’s you. The girl from the parking lot. You’re looking at him with those terrified eyes and Cameron Beck has his hands around your wrists and Garrett can see the bruises blooming under Beck’s fingers like ugly flowers.
“Help me,” you whisper.
Garrett tries to move but his feet are cement. He’s frozen, useless, watching it happen all over again.
“I’m watching you, Beck,” he hears himself say, but it sounds hollow. Meaningless.
Beck laughs. “Yeah? What are you going to do about it?”
You’re crying now. “Please. Please help me.”
“I can’t,” Garrett says, and the words feel like they’re being ripped from his chest. “I can’t, I’m sorry, I can’t-”
Beck’s hands tighten. You scream. And Garrett just stands there, seven years old again, helpless, watching someone he should protect get hurt and doing nothing, nothing, nothing-
He wakes up in a cold sweat, gasping like he’s been drowning.
His dorm room is dark except for the numbers on his alarm clock: 4:19 AM. Garrett’s sheets are tangled around his legs and his heart is trying to punch through his ribcage.
He sits up, runs both hands through his hair, tries to breathe.
It’s been years since he had the dreams this bad. Years since he woke up feeling like this — angry and helpless and so fucking furious at the world that he wants to break something. After his mom died, after he finally got away from his dad and came to Briar on a full ride, he thought he’d left this behind. Thought he could bury it under hockey and classes and being the kind of captain his team needs.
But one look at that girl’s face and it all came roaring back.
He grabs his phone from the nightstand, squints at the brightness. No new messages. Nothing from anyone who would be awake at this hour.
He opens Instagram.
He’s not even sure what he’s looking for. Closure, maybe. Confirmation that what he saw was real and not some manifestation of his own trauma. Proof that you exist, that you’re okay, that he didn’t just imagine the terror in your eyes.
But he doesn’t know your name. Doesn’t know anything about you except that you’re dating Cameron Beck and you’re in trouble.
Garrett’s never been one for social media stalking — he barely posts on his own accounts — but he navigates to Beck’s profile with the grim determination of someone going to war. The guy’s profile is exactly what Garrett expected: carefully curated photos of hockey wins, parties, expensive shit his parents bought him. Every caption is some variation of “living my best life” or “grind never stops” or other meaningless bullshit.
Garrett scrolls back through months of posts, his jaw getting tighter with each one, until finally … there.
A photo from last summer. Beck at some beach, tanned and shirtless, arm slung around a girl in a yellow bikini. You’re smiling at the camera but it doesn’t quite reach your eyes. The caption reads Summer vibes with my girl.
You’re tagged. @yourusername
Garrett clicks through so fast he almost drops his phone.
Your profile loads and he feels something in his chest twist. Your bio is simple: BU | Journalism | Boston Born & Raised. Your profile picture is you in a Bruins jersey, grinning at whoever’s taking the photo, eyes bright with genuine happiness.
He starts scrolling.
The most recent post is from four months ago. You at some coffee shop, mug raised in a half-hearted toast, smile that looks more like a grimace. The caption is just a coffee emoji. Before that, five months ago: you and another girl at what looks like a BU football game. You’re wearing sunglasses but Garrett can see the tension in your shoulders, the way you’re leaning slightly away from the camera.
He keeps scrolling back and the transformation is devastating.
Eight months ago: you holding up an acceptance letter, caption reading INTERNSHIP AT WEEI SPORTS RADIO! Dreams coming true! Your smile is radiant. Real.
Ten months ago: a whole series of posts from what looks like spring break. You and a group of friends at various beaches, bars, tourist traps. You’re laughing in most of them, mid-sentence, caught in moments of unselfconscious joy.
A year ago: you with a camera around your neck, press pass visible, standing on the sidelines of what looks like a hockey game. First day covering BU hockey for the Daily Free Press! Living the dream!
Garrett stops on that one. Studies your face. You look so young, so excited, so full of potential. This was before Beck, he realizes. Or maybe early in the relationship, before it turned bad. Before you learned to make yourself small.
He keeps scrolling, going further back. You playing intramural soccer. You at journalism club meetings. You with your family at what looks like a Thanksgiving dinner, squeezed between an older couple who must be your parents. You’re wearing a sweater and you’re laughing at something off-camera.
The last post from freshman year shows you standing in front of a BU dorm building, suitcases at your feet, arms spread wide. The caption reads Let’s do this, Boston! 📚🎓
You looked so hopeful.
Garrett closes Instagram and stares at his ceiling. Outside, he can hear the first birds starting their morning songs. The world is waking up and he hasn’t slept at all, and all he can think about is the difference between the girl in those old photos and the girl he saw in the parking lot.
You used to be so alive.
What the fuck did Beck do to you?
***
You’re running through a hallway that never ends.
Behind you, Cameron is gaining ground. You can hear his footsteps, heavy and relentless, can hear him calling your name in that tone that makes your blood freeze.
“Y/N! Get back here!”
You’re trying to scream but nothing comes out. Your legs feel like they’re moving through water. There are doors on either side of the hallway but when you try the handles, they’re all locked. Every single one.
“You can’t run from me,” Cameron says, and suddenly he’s right behind you, his hand closing around your arm, spinning you to face him. “You’re mine. You’ll always be mine.”
He’s not angry. That’s the worst part. He’s smiling, calm, like this is all perfectly reasonable.
“Please,” you manage to whisper. “Please let me go.”
“I can’t do that. You know I can’t do that.” His grip tightens until you can feel your bones grinding together. “Who else is going to love you? Who else is going to put up with you?”
“Someone,” you sob. “Anyone.”
“No one wants damaged goods, baby.”
The scene shifts. Now you’re in his apartment, in his bed, and he’s on top of you and you’re trying to say no, trying to push him away, but your arms won’t work. Your voice won’t work. Nothing works except the part of your brain that’s screaming this is wrong this is wrong this is wrong-
And then you’re in the parking lot again, pressed against the cold brick wall, and Cameron’s hands are around your throat and you can’t breathe, can’t breathe, can’t-
The hockey player appears. The one from last night. He’s reaching for you, mouth moving, saying something you can’t hear over the roaring in your ears.
Help me, you try to say, but Cameron’s grip gets tighter.
The hockey player turns away.
Everyone always turns away.
You wake up to pain.
At first, you can’t process what’s happening. Your body registers it before your brain does — the invasion, the wrongness, the way your body is being used without your consent. Again.
Cameron is inside you.
You’re lying on your side, facing away from him, and he’s behind you, one hand gripping your hip hard enough to bruise, moving with steady, selfish rhythm. You’re not ready. He didn’t prepare you, didn’t wake you, didn’t ask. Just took what he wanted because in his mind, you’re his to take.
You stare at the wall and let it happen.
Fighting makes it worse. You learned that months ago. Crying makes it worse. Asking him to stop makes it worse. So you just lie there and wait for it to be over, counting the seconds in your head, disassociating so hard you might as well be floating on the ceiling.
One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi.
Cameron’s breath is hot on your neck. His grip tightens.
“So good for me,” he murmurs, like this is romantic. Like this is consensual. “My perfect girl.”
A single tear slides down your cheek and disappears into the pillow.
Forty-eight Mississippi. Forty-nine Mississippi.
He finishes with a grunt, pulling out and rolling away from you like you’re a tissue he’s done with. You feel the wetness between your legs, feel the ache that’s going to linger all day.
“Morning, babe,” Cameron says, already reaching for his phone. “I’m thinking pancakes for breakfast. You want pancakes?”
You don’t answer. Can’t answer. Your voice is buried somewhere so deep you’re not sure you’ll ever find it again.
“Y/N? Pancakes?”
“Sure,” you whisper.
“Cool. There’s that place on Comm Ave we like. Get dressed.” He’s already out of bed, completely unbothered, heading for the bathroom. “Wear that blue dress I got you. The one that shows off your legs.”
The bathroom door closes. The shower turns on.
You lie there for another minute, staring at nothing, feeling nothing. Then you get up because that’s what you do. You get up and you put yourself back together and you pretend everything is fine.
In the bathroom mirror, you look like a ghost. There are dark circles under your eyes that makeup won’t fully hide. Your hair is a mess. The bruises on your wrists have darkened overnight, deep purple now, unmistakable.
You brush your teeth. Wash your face. Try to find some version of yourself in the reflection that you recognize.
She’s not there.
You get dressed like Cameron asked — the blue dress that you used to like before it became a costume, before it became something you wear to keep him happy. It’s February and freezing but you add tights and a cardigan and hope that’s enough to satisfy him.
When Cameron comes out of the bathroom, he’s in a good mood. That’s almost worse than when he’s angry. When he’s angry, at least you know where you stand. When he’s happy, you’re constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“You look beautiful,” he says, kissing your forehead like he didn’t just violate you twenty minutes ago. “Ready?”
You nod.
Breakfast is performative. Cameron orders the biggest thing on the menu — some ridiculous stack of pancakes with whipped cream and berries — and expects you to do the same. You order oatmeal because your stomach is churning and you know you won’t be able to eat much anyway.
“That’s all you’re getting?” Cameron frowns. “Come on, babe. Live a little.”
“I’m not that hungry.”
“You’re never hungry anymore.” He reaches across the table, takes your hand. To anyone watching, it looks sweet. Loving. They can’t see the way his thumb digs into your bruised wrist. “You’re getting too thin. It’s not attractive.”
“Sorry,” you say automatically.
“It’s fine. We’ll work on it.” He releases your hand and pulls out his phone. “Shit, I have a meeting with my advisor at ten. Can you be ready to leave in twenty?”
“Yeah.”
You pick at your oatmeal while Cameron scrolls through his phone, occasionally showing you memes that aren’t funny, highlights from last night’s game that you don’t care about. He’s talking about the playoffs, about how BU is definitely going to make it even though they lost to Briar, about how that Graham kid got lucky.
“Cocky bastard,” Cameron mutters. “Someone needs to put him in his place.”
You think about the way Garrett Graham looked at Cameron last night. The absolute fury in his eyes. The way he stepped between you like he actually gave a shit about a stranger.
“Did you hear me?” Cameron asks.
“Sorry, what?”
“I said you can’t come to the next game. After the way you embarrassed me last night, I think you need a break from being around the team.”
Relief floods through you so fast you feel dizzy. “Okay.”
“Don’t sound so happy about it.”
“I’m not—I didn’t mean-”
“Relax. I’m kidding.” He’s smiling but his eyes are cold. “Jesus, you’re so tense all the time. Maybe you should see someone about that.”
By someone, he means a therapist. He’s suggested it before, usually right after he’s the reason you need one. The implication is always clear: you’re the problem. You’re too sensitive, too anxious, too broken. Never mind that he’s the one who broke you.
You make it through breakfast. Through the ride back to campus. Through Cameron walking you to your dorm like he’s some kind of gentleman.
“I’ll text you later,” he says, kissing you goodbye on the steps. “Love you.”
“Love you too,” you say, because that’s the script.
***
Garrett can’t focus on anything Professor Harris is saying about Kant’s categorical imperative. He’s sitting in the back row of his Philosophy 301 lecture, laptop open to a notes document that’s completely blank except for the date, phone hidden behind his screen.
He’s still on your Instagram.
He’s gone through every post now, read every caption, studied every photo. He’s built a timeline in his head: You started dating Beck around March of last year. The first photo of you two together was from spring break. You looked happy then. Cautious, maybe, but happy.
By summer, something had changed. You started posting less. Your smiles looked forced. The photos with Beck became more frequent but you looked less comfortable in each one.
By fall, you barely posted at all. And the few photos that are there — you look hollow. Like someone reached inside and scooped out everything that made you you.
The last post, from four months ago. You haven’t shared anything since.
Garrett wonders if Beck made you stop. If he isolated you so completely that you don’t even have the autonomy to post on social media anymore.
His hand tightens around his phone.
“Mr. Graham.”
Garrett’s head snaps up. Professor Harris is looking at him expectantly, along with the rest of the class.
“Sorry, what?”
“I asked if you could explain the practical imperative.”
Garrett has no idea. He was a good student once — still is, technically, maintaining the 3.5 GPA his scholarship requires — but right now his brain is full of you and Beck and the sound of his mom’s voice saying please in his nightmares.
“I … uh …”
“Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means,” Logan says from two rows ahead, saving his ass.
Professor Harris nods, apparently satisfied, and turns back to his lecture.
Garrett shoots Logan a grateful look. Logan just raises his eyebrows in a what the hell is wrong with you expression.
Garrett goes back to his phone. He knows he should stop. Knows this is bordering on obsessive. But he can’t shake the feeling that if he can just find you, if he can just talk to you, he can help. He can do what he couldn’t do for his mom.
He opens Beck’s Instagram again, goes back through the tagged photos, looks for clues. Where do you go? What do you do? How the fuck is he supposed to find one girl in a city of seven hundred thousand people?
Class ends at 11:30. Garrett packs up his stuff mechanically, mind still churning.
“Dude.” Logan falls into step beside him as they file out of the lecture hall. “You good? You’ve been weird since last night.”
“I’m fine.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it.”
They walk across campus in silence. It’s brutally cold, the kind of February day that makes you question why anyone lives in New England. Students hurry past with their heads down, buried in their coats.
“That girl last night,” Garrett says finally. “Beck’s girlfriend. I can’t stop thinking about her.”
“Yeah, that was fucked up.”
“I should’ve done more.”
“G, you did what you could. What were you supposed to do, kidnap her?”
“Maybe.”
Logan stops walking. “Are you serious right now?”
“No. I don’t know.” Garrett scrubs a hand over his face. “I just … I’ve seen this before. I know how it ends.”
Logan’s expression softens. He knows about Garrett’s mom. They’ve been friends since freshman year, and you can’t live with someone for that long without learning their ghosts.
“You can’t save everyone,” Logan says gently.
“I couldn’t save her either.”
“You were a kid.”
“I’m not a kid anymore.”
They resume walking. Practice is at 2:00, which gives Garrett a couple hours to grab lunch and pretend to study. But he knows he won’t be able to concentrate. Won’t be able to think about anything except you and those bruises and the terrified look in your eyes.
“What are you going to do?” Logan asks.
“I don’t know yet.”
But he’s lying. He knows exactly what he’s going to do.
***
Practice is brutal. Coach Jensen runs them into the ground — suicides, bag skating, drills until Garrett’s legs are shaking and his lungs are burning. It’s punishment for last night, for the altercation in the parking lot, for drawing attention to the team in a way that doesn’t involve winning games.
Garrett welcomes the pain. Uses it to clear his head.
By the time they’re done, it’s almost 5:00 PM and the sun is setting. The team staggers to the locker room, everyone too exhausted to do more than grunt at each other.
Garrett sits on the bench, peeling off his gear, when he remembers.
Colin Monroe.
Monroe transferred from BU to Briar at the start of the season — some issue with playing time, Garrett never got the full story. He’s a sophomore defenseman, solid player, keeps mostly to himself. But he spent a year and a half at BU before transferring.
He would know where BU students hang out.
Garrett waits until most of the team has cleared out, until it’s just him and Monroe and a couple other guys. He approaches casually, like the thought just occurred to him.
“Hey, Monroe.”
Colin looks up from tying his shoes. “Yeah?”
“You were at BU before you transferred, right?”
“For a year and a half, yeah. Why?”
Garrett tries to sound casual. “Just curious where you guys hung out. Like, where do BU students go? Coffee shops, bars, whatever.”
Monroe gives him a weird look. “Why do you want to know?”
“Just thinking about checking out some new spots. You know, off-campus stuff.”
“You’re asking me for Boston recommendations? Dude, you’ve been here longer than I have.”
Fair point. Garrett pivots.
“Okay, fine. I’m looking for someone.”
“Who?”
“A girl from BU. I need to talk to her.”
Monroe’s expression shifts from confused to amused. “Oh shit, did you hook up with someone from the rival team? That’s bold.”
“It’s not like that.”
“Then what’s it like?”
Garrett debates how much to say. Monroe is a good guy, not a gossip, but this feels too personal to share. Too raw.
“I just need to find her,” Garrett says finally. “It’s important.”
Monroe studies him for a long moment, then shrugs. “Alright, man. BU kids are all over Comm Ave and Kenmore. There’s this coffee shop called Pavement that’s always packed with journalism and comm students — it’s right on Commonwealth, you can’t miss it. There’s also The Castle, this pub on Brighton Ave that does trivia on Wednesday nights. And if she’s into the athletic crowd, they’re usually at The Dugout on game days.”
“Yeah, it’s like, the spot. Everyone’s always in there working on articles or whatever.”
Something clicks in Garrett’s brain. Your Instagram bio. Journalism.
“Thanks, man. I appreciate it.”
“Sure. Good luck with your mysterious BU girl.” Monroe grins. “Let me know if you need a wingman.”
“I will.”
Garrett grabs his bag and heads out before anyone else can ask questions. His car is parked in the lot behind the arena, and he sits in the driver’s seat for a minute, engine running, heat blasting.
He pulls up Pavement Coffee on Google Maps. It’s a twenty-minute drive from Briar. He could go now. Could drive over there and camp out and wait to see if you show up.
But then what? Walk up to you? Say what, exactly? Hey, I saw your boyfriend abusing you last night and I’ve been stalking your Instagram all day, want to grab a coffee and talk about your trauma?
Garrett drops his head against the steering wheel.
This is insane. He knows it’s insane. You’re a stranger. You probably don’t want his help. You probably think he’s some white knight psycho who needs to mind his own business.
But he can’t stop seeing your face. Can’t stop thinking about the way you looked at him like he was your last hope and then watched him walk away.
His phone buzzes. Text from Tucker: Be back for dinner? I promised to make wings.
Garrett texts back: Can’t tonight. Have something to do.
Tucker: Everything ok?
Garrett: Yeah. Just need to take care of something.
He puts the car in drive and heads toward Boston, toward Pavement Coffee, toward you.
He doesn’t let himself think about what he’s going to do when he finds you.
He just knows he has to try.
***
Pavement Coffee is exactly what Monroe described — packed with students hunched over laptops, the air thick with the smell of espresso and stress. Garrett stands in the doorway for a moment, scanning the crowd, heart hammering against his ribs.
He almost doesn’t see you.
You’re tucked into a corner table near the window, laptop open, surrounded by papers and highlighters and what looks like a half-empty cup of something that’s probably gone cold. Your hair is down today, falling like a curtain around your face, and you’re wearing an oversized BU sweatshirt that swallows your frame. From this distance, you look like any other college student cramming for an exam or working on an assignment.
But Garrett knows better now.
He weaves through the crowded café, dodging backpacks and chairs, his palms suddenly sweating. He hasn’t thought this through. Hasn’t planned what to say. All the speeches he rehearsed in his car on the drive over evaporate the moment he’s standing in front of your table.
You don’t notice him at first. You’re too focused on whatever you’re reading, highlighter poised mid-air, bottom lip caught between your teeth in concentration.
Garrett clears his throat.
Nothing.
He pulls out the chair across from you and sits down.
That gets your attention.
You look up, and for a split second, there’s confusion in your eyes — like you’re trying to place where you know him from. Then recognition hits, and Garrett watches your entire body go rigid. The highlighter slips from your fingers. Your eyes go wide, that same terror from the parking lot flooding back into them.
“Please don’t-” Your voice comes out in a whisper, barely audible over the ambient noise of the café. “Please, you can’t—he’ll-”
“Hey, hey.” Garrett raises both hands, palms out, like he’s approaching a spooked horse. “It’s okay. I’m not here to cause trouble. I just want to talk.”
“You need to leave.” Your eyes dart toward the door, then back to him, then to the other customers like you’re checking to see if anyone’s watching. “If Cameron finds out-”
“He’s not here.”
“That doesn’t matter.” You’re gathering your stuff now, shoving papers into your bag with shaking hands. “He has friends everywhere. Someone could see us. Someone could tell him-”
“Then let them.” Garrett leans forward, keeping his voice low and calm. “What’s the worst he can do?”
The look you give him is so devastated it makes his chest ache.
“You don’t understand,” you say quietly.
“Then help me understand.”
You freeze, hands still on your laptop. For a moment, Garrett thinks you might actually open up. Might tell him everything. But then you shake your head and go back to packing.
“I need to go.”
“Wait. Please.” Garrett reaches across the table like he’s going to touch your hand, then thinks better of it. “Just five minutes. That’s all I’m asking.”
“Why?” You look up at him, and there are tears gathering in your eyes now. “Why do you even care? You don’t know me.”
“You’re right. I don’t.” Garrett runs a hand through his hair, trying to find the right words. “But I know what I saw in that parking lot. And I know that if I just let you walk away right now, if I don’t at least try to help, I’m going to regret it for the rest of my life.”
You’re staring at him like he’s speaking a foreign language.
“I’ve seen this before,” Garrett continues, his voice rough. “I’ve watched someone I love get hurt over and over by someone who was supposed to protect them. And I couldn’t stop it. I was too young, too small, too powerless. But I’m not powerless anymore, and neither are you.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” But you’ve stopped packing. Your hands are still on the table, fingers twisted together.
“Don’t I?” Garrett nods toward your neck, where he can see the edge of something dark peeking out from under your sweatshirt collar. “What’s that?”
Instinctively, your hand flies to your neck, pulling the collar up. But it’s too late. Garrett’s already seen it — hand-shaped bruises, finger marks pressed into your skin, covered with what looks like concealer that’s been rubbed away throughout the day.
The rage that floods through him is white-hot and immediate. His hands curl into fists under the table. He wants to find Beck right now, wants to make him feel every ounce of pain he’s inflicted on you, wants to-
“Breathe,” you whisper, and Garrett realizes he’s stopped breathing entirely.
He forces air into his lungs. Forces his hands to unclench. Forces himself to stay seated when every instinct is screaming at him to go find Beck and end this.
“I’m okay,” you say, which is such an obvious lie it would be funny if it weren’t heartbreaking.
“You’re not okay.” Garrett’s voice comes out harder than he intends. “And we both know it.”
You flinch, and immediately he wants to take it back. Wants to rewind and try again with more gentleness, more care.
“I’m sorry,” he says quickly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—fuck. I’m really bad at this.”
“At what?”
“At …” He gestures vaguely between you. “This. Helping. I don’t know how to do this without being an asshole about it.”
You almost smile. It’s barely there, just a tiny quirk of your lips, but it’s something.
“You’re not an asshole,” you say quietly.
“Beck would probably disagree.”
“Cameron thinks anyone who doesn’t worship him is an asshole.”
It’s the first time you’ve said anything even remotely critical of Beck, and Garrett latches onto it like a lifeline.
“He hurt you.” It’s not a question.
You don’t answer. Just look down at your hands, at the bruises on your wrists that match the ones on your neck.
“How long?” Garrett asks.
“That’s not—I can’t-”
“How long has he been hurting you?”
Your jaw tightens. “It’s complicated.”
“It’s really not.”
“You don’t understand-”
“Then explain it to me.” Garrett leans forward, desperate now. “Because from where I’m sitting, this looks pretty simple. He’s hurting you. You’re letting him. And if you don’t stop this, if you don’t get out, it’s going to kill you.”
“I can’t just leave.” Your voice breaks on the last word.
“Why not?”
“Because-” You stop, swallow hard. “Because he loves me.”
Garrett feels like he’s been punched. “That’s not love.”
“You don’t know him like I do.”
“I know that love doesn’t leave bruises.” Garrett points to your neck, your wrists. “I know that love doesn’t make you look over your shoulder every five seconds. I know that love doesn’t turn someone as bright and alive as you clearly used to be into-” He stops himself, but it’s too late.
“Into what?” Your voice is cold now. “Into what, Garrett?”
He’s surprised you know his name. Surprised and oddly touched.
“Into someone who’s afraid to exist,” he finishes quietly.
You look away, but not before he sees the tears spill over. You wipe them away quickly, angrily, like you’re mad at yourself for showing weakness.
“You looked at my Instagram,” you say.
“Yeah.”
“That’s creepy.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know you wanted to work in sports media. I know you had an internship at WEEI. I know you used to smile like you meant it.” Garrett’s voice softens. “I know that girl in those photos wouldn’t recognize the person sitting in front of me right now.”
You’re quiet for a long moment. The café noise fills the silence — the hiss of the espresso machine, the murmur of conversations, the click of laptop keys.
“She’s gone,” you finally whisper.
“She’s not. She’s just hiding.”
“You don’t understand what it’s like.” You look up at him, and the devastation in your eyes is unbearable. “He didn’t start out this way. He was sweet. He was charming. He made me feel special, like I was the only person in the world who mattered. And then gradually, so slowly I didn’t even notice at first, things changed. He started criticizing little things. The way I dressed. The way I talked to other guys. My friends. My ambitions. He said it was because he cared. Because he wanted me to be the best version of myself.”
Garrett’s jaw tightens, but he doesn’t interrupt.
“And I believed him,” you continue, your voice getting smaller. “I thought if I just tried harder, if I just did what he wanted, things would go back to how they were. But they never did. They just got worse. And by the time I realized what was happening, I was so isolated, so cut off from everyone who might have helped me, that I didn’t know how to get out.”
“You get out by leaving.”
“I tried.” The words come out in a rush. “Twice. Both times he found me. Both times he convinced me to come back. He cried, Garrett. He got down on his knees and cried and promised he’d change and I believed him because I wanted to believe him.”
“And did he change?”
You laugh, but it’s a broken sound. “What do you think?”
Garrett wants to flip the table. Wants to scream. Wants to grab you by the shoulders and shake you until you understand that you deserve better than this, deserve better than him.
But he knows that won’t help. Knows from watching his mom that you can’t force someone to leave. They have to choose it themselves.
“If you go back to him,” Garrett says carefully, “you’re going to die. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But eventually. Either he’ll kill you, or he’ll kill everything that makes you you until you’re just this empty shell going through the motions. Is that what you want?”
“Of course that’s not what I want.” Your voice cracks.
“Then leave.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can.”
“You don’t understand-”
“My mom said the same thing.” The words are out before Garrett can stop them.
You go still.
“She said she couldn’t leave my dad,” Garrett continues, staring at a spot on the table between them. “Said it was complicated. Said he didn’t mean it. Said things would get better. She said that right up until the day she died.”
“Garrett-”
“Cancer,” he says. “Lung cancer. And you want to know the fucked up thing? When she was in the hospital, when she was dying, he still found ways to hurt her. Still found ways to make her feel small and worthless. And she let him. Right up until the end, she let him.”
He looks up, meets your eyes.
“I was eleven when she died,” he says. “And I spent the next ten years hating myself for not being able to save her. For not being strong enough or brave enough or smart enough to make her leave. But the truth is, I couldn’t have saved her. She had to save herself. And she never did.”
You’re crying openly now, tears streaming down your face.
“Don’t be her,” Garrett says, his voice urgent. “Don’t be the person who gives up everything for someone who doesn’t deserve it. Don’t let him win.”
“I’m scared,” you whisper.
“I know.”
“He’ll come after me.”
“Let him.” Garrett’s voice hardens. “And when he does, you call the cops. You get a restraining order. You press charges for assault. You do whatever it takes.”
“It’s not that simple-”
“It is that simple. You just don’t want it to be.”
The words hang between you like an accusation. Garrett knows he’s pushed too hard, knows he’s being too aggressive, knows he should back off and try a gentler approach.
But he’s so fucking tired of watching people destroy themselves for love that isn’t love at all.
You shake your head. It’s the tiniest movement, barely perceptible, but Garrett sees it. Sees the resignation in your eyes, the defeat.
You’re not going to leave.
Not today. Maybe not ever.
The realization settles over him like a weight.
“Okay,” he says finally, sitting back in his chair. He wipes a hand down his face, exhausted suddenly. “Okay.”
“I’m sorry,” you whisper.
“Don’t apologize to me. I’m not the one you’re hurting.”
You flinch like he’s slapped you.
Garrett reaches across the table, grabs one of your pens before you can stop him. He pulls a napkin from the dispenser and scribbles something on it, then slides it across to you.
“That’s my number,” he says. “When — not if, when — things get bad enough that you’re ready to leave, you call me. Day or night, I don’t care. You call me and I will help you. I will come get you, I will find you a safe place to stay, I will stand between you and him if I have to. But you have to make the choice. You have to be the one to decide you’ve had enough.”
You stare at the napkin like it’s a bomb.
“Take it,” Garrett says.
Slowly, hesitantly, you reach out and pull the napkin toward you. Your fingers brush his for just a second and Garrett feels something electric pass between you. Recognition, maybe. Or possibility.
“Thank you,” you say quietly.
“Don’t thank me yet.” Garrett stands, shouldering his backpack. “Thank me when you use it.”
He starts to walk away, then stops. Turns back.
“You said he didn’t start out this way,” Garrett says. “That he was sweet and charming and made you feel special.”
You nod.
“That’s what they all do,” Garrett says. “That’s how they get you to stay. They show you the person they could be, and you spend the rest of the relationship trying to get back to that version. But that person was never real. It was just bait.”
He can see from your expression that the words land. That some part of you knows he’s right.
“I hope you figure that out before it’s too late,” Garrett says.
Then he walks to the counter, cutting through the line with an apologetic nod to the students waiting. The barista looks annoyed until Garrett starts talking.
“See that girl in the corner?” Garrett nods toward you. “Blue sweatshirt, by the window?”
The barista glances over. “Yeah?”
“I want to buy her a drink. Whatever your best latte is. And …” Garrett scans the pastry case. “That cranberry scone.”
“You want me to bring it to her?”
“Yeah. Don’t tell her who it’s from.”
The barista looks skeptical. “Dude, if this is some creepy stalker thing-”
“It’s not. I promise. She’s …” Garrett struggles for the right words. “She’s having a hard time. I just want to do something nice for her.”
Something in his expression must convince the barista because he shrugs and rings up the order. Garrett pays, leaves a generous tip, and steps away from the counter.
He looks back one more time.
You’re still sitting at the table, the napkin with his number clutched in your hand. You’re staring at it like it’s the answer to a question you haven’t figured out how to ask yet.
Your coffee has gone cold. Your laptop is closed. Your papers are still scattered across the table, but you’re not working anymore. You’re just … sitting there. Existing in whatever complicated hell Beck has created for you.
Garrett wants to go back. Wants to sit down and try again, find better words, make you understand.
But he knows that won’t help. Knows he’s already said everything he can say. The rest is up to you.
So he turns and walks out into the February cold.
***
You sit at the table long after Garrett leaves, his words echoing in your head.
Don’t be her. Don’t be the person who gives up everything for someone who doesn’t deserve it.
Your hands are shaking. The napkin with his number is crumpled from how hard you’re gripping it. Your chest feels tight, like there’s not enough air in the room, and you can’t stop crying even though you’re in public, even though people are starting to stare.
You know he’s right. God, you know he’s right.
But knowing something and being able to do something about it are two different things.
“Excuse me?”
You look up. The barista is standing there with a latte and a scone on a small plate.
“I didn’t order this,” you say, your voice hoarse.
“Someone bought it for you.” He sets it down on your table.
“Who?”
The barista just shrugs and walks away.
But you know. Of course you know.
You look toward the door, but Garrett’s already gone. Just the ghost of him, the weight of his words, the impossible choice he’s asked you to make.
The latte is still hot. The scone looks fresh. It’s such a small gesture, such a simple kindness, and somehow it breaks something open inside you.
You pull out your phone with trembling fingers.
You should delete his number. Should throw the napkin away. Should pretend this conversation never happened and go back to Cameron and the safe, familiar horror of your life.
But instead, you carefully input the numbers into your contacts.
You save it under a name Cameron won’t recognize if he looks. Boston Pizza.
Then you put your phone away, pick up the latte, and take a sip.
It’s perfect.
And that almost makes it worse.
Because now you know there’s someone out there who sees you. Really sees you. Who looked past the makeup and the excuses and the carefully constructed lies and saw the truth.
Someone who cares enough to try to save you.
Even if you’re not ready to save yourself.
You sit there until the latte goes cold again, turning Garrett’s words over and over in your mind.
When things get bad enough that you’re ready to leave, you call me.
Not if. When.
Like he has faith in you that you don’t have in yourself.
You pick up the scone and take a bite.
It tastes like possibility.
And that’s the most terrifying thing of all.
***
You make it back to your dorm around 8:00 PM, the latte from Pavement long gone but the napkin still in your tote bag. You tucked it into the side pocket, hidden beneath a pack of gum and your lip balm, somewhere Cameron would never think to look.
Except Cameron always thinks to look.
He’s waiting for you when you open the door to your room, sitting on your bed like he owns the place. Your roommate Julie is nowhere to be seen, which means she either left or he made her leave. Your money’s on the latter.
“Hey, babe.” He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Where’ve you been?”
Your heart starts hammering. “Library. Studying.”
“Really? Because I texted you like three hours ago and you didn’t respond.”
You pull out your phone, check your messages. Sure enough, there’s a text from Cameron from 5:32 PM. Where are you? You were at Pavement then, talking to Garrett, too distracted to check your phone.
“I had my phone on silent,” you say, which is true. “I didn’t see it. I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry.” Cameron stands up, and the temperature in the room seems to drop ten degrees. “You’re sorry that you ignored me for three hours?”
“I wasn’t ignoring you, I was studying-”
“Bullshit.” He’s across the room in three strides, grabbing your tote bag before you can stop him. “Let me see your phone.”
“Cameron, come on-”
“Let. Me. See. Your. Phone.”
You hand it over with shaking hands because refusing will only make this worse. He scrolls through your messages, your calls, your social media.
“Library, huh?” Cameron looks up from your phone. “Then why do you have a text from Julie asking if you’re still at that coffee shop?”
Fuck. You forgot about that text.
“I stopped for coffee on my way to the library,” you say quickly. “I was only there for like twenty minutes-”
“Don’t fucking lie to me.”
He throws your phone onto the bed and starts rifling through your tote bag. Books, pens, highlighters, notebooks — everything gets dumped onto the floor. You watch in horror as his hand closes around the side pocket.
“Cameron, please-”
He pulls out the napkin.
For a moment, he just stares at it. At the ten digits written in Garrett’s messy handwriting. Then he looks at you, and the rage in his eyes makes your blood run cold.
“What the fuck is this?”
“It’s nothing-”
“WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?”
You flinch, stumbling backward until you hit the wall. “I can explain-”
“You’re cheating on me.” His voice is eerily calm now, which is somehow worse than the yelling. “You’re fucking cheating on me.”
“I’m not, I swear-”
“Then whose number is this?”
“Nobody’s-”
“WHOSE FUCKING NUMBER IS IT?”
“A guy from the coffee shop!” The lie spills out in a rush. “He was hitting on me and I took his number to be nice but I was going to throw it away, I swear-”
“You expect me to believe that?” Cameron crumples the napkin in his fist. “You expect me to believe that you just happened to run into some random guy at a coffee shop and he gave you his number and you kept it?”
“I didn’t keep it, I forgot about it-”
“Stop lying!”
He’s on you before you can react, hand closing around your throat, slamming you back against the wall. Your vision goes spotty immediately, your lungs screaming for air.
“Cameron—can’t—breathe-”
“You made me do this,” he hisses, his face inches from yours. “You made me into the bad guy. All I’ve ever done is love you, and this is how you repay me? By whoring around behind my back?”
“Not—cheating-” you manage to gasp out.
His grip loosens slightly, just enough for you to suck in a desperate breath. Then his other hand comes up and slaps you across the face so hard your ears ring.
“Don’t lie to me!” Another slap. “Don’t you fucking lie to me!”
You’re crying now, trying to twist away, but he’s got you pinned. His hand goes back to your throat, squeezing harder this time, and the edges of your vision start to go dark.
This is it, some distant part of your brain thinks. This is how you die.
Cameron’s face swims in and out of focus above you. He’s saying something but you can’t hear it over the roaring in your ears. Your lungs are burning. Your fingers claw uselessly at his hands.
And then, like a gift from whatever god might still be listening, his grip shifts. Loosens just enough that you can move.
You bring your knee up as hard as you can.
It connects perfectly.
Cameron makes a sound like all the air has been punched out of his lungs and stumbles backward, hands going to his crotch. You don’t wait. Don’t think. Just grab your phone from the bed and run.
“You bitch-” Cameron’s voice follows you into the hallway. “Get back here!”
But you’re already running, flying down the stairs because the elevator is too slow, too risky. You can hear him behind you, cursing, his footsteps heavy and angry.
You burst out of the dorm building into the February night. It’s freezing — you’re not wearing a coat, just your sweatshirt and jeans — but you don’t stop. Can’t stop. If he catches you, he’ll kill you. You know that now with absolute certainty.
You run down Commonwealth Avenue, dodging other students, nearly getting hit by a car. Behind you, you can still hear Cameron shouting your name.
Your phone is clutched in your hand. You fumble with it as you run, trying to unlock it with shaking fingers. The cold is making everything harder. Your hands won’t work right.
Finally, the screen unlocks.
You pull up your contacts, scroll frantically until you find it. Boston Pizza.
You hit call.
It rings once. Twice. Three times.
Pick up, you think desperately. Please pick up please pick up please-
“Hello?”
Garrett’s voice, rough with sleep, is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever heard.
You try to speak but all that comes out is a sob.
“Hello? Who is this?”
“Garrett-” Your voice cracks. “It’s—it’s me-”
There’s a pause. “Y/N?”
“Please-” You’re running down a side street now, looking for somewhere to hide. “Please, I need-”
“What’s wrong?” His voice changes completely, all traces of sleep gone. “Where are you?”
“I don’t know—I’m running—he found the napkin and he-” Another sob cuts you off.
“Slow down. Take a breath. Are you hurt?”
“I think—I think he was going to kill me-”
“Fuck. Okay. Okay, listen to me.” Garrett’s voice is steady, authoritative. “I need you to find somewhere safe. A store, a dorm building, anywhere with people. Can you do that?”
“I’m trying-” You’re on Brighton Ave now, you think. Everything looks unfamiliar in the dark. “All the buildings are locked-”
“Keep trying. Share your location with me. Do you know how to do that?”
“Yes—hold on-”
You pull the phone away from your ear, fumbling through the menus with numb fingers. Finally, you find the option and send him your location.
“Got it,” Garrett says. “I’m leaving right now. I’ll be there in twenty minutes, maybe less. Stay on the phone with me, okay? Don’t hang up.”
“Okay.” You’re in front of an apartment building now. You try the door. Locked. “Fuck!”
“What?”
“The building’s locked. They all need codes-”
“Try another one. Just keep moving.”
You run to the next building. Also locked. The next one. Locked.
Behind you, somewhere in the darkness, you hear Cameron calling your name.
Panic surges through you. “He’s coming—I can hear him-”
“Stay calm. Keep trying the doors.”
The fourth building — a newer apartment complex with a fancy glass entrance — you try the handle and nearly cry with relief when it opens.
“I’m in—I found one-”
“Good. Where are you exactly?”
“The lobby. There’s nobody here-”
“Hide. Find a corner or a hallway or something. Stay out of sight.”
You look around frantically. The lobby is all glass and exposed, but there’s a hallway to the left that leads to what looks like a mail room. You duck around the corner, pressing yourself against the wall.
“I’m hidden,” you whisper.
“Good. Good girl. I’m in my car. I’m coming as fast as I can.”
You can hear the engine revving through the phone. The sound is oddly comforting.
“I’m sorry,” you say, your voice small. “I’m so sorry-”
“Don’t apologize. You have nothing to apologize for.”
“I should have listened to you. I should have left-”
“We’ll talk about that later. Right now I just need you to stay safe, okay? Stay on the phone with me. I’m about fifteen minutes away.”
You slide down the wall until you’re sitting on the floor, knees pulled to your chest. Your whole body is shaking — from cold, from fear, from adrenaline crash. Your throat hurts where Cameron choked you. Your face throbs where he hit you.
“Talk to me,” Garrett says. “I need to know you’re okay.”
“I’m here. I’m-” Your voice breaks. “I’m so scared.”
“I know. I know you are. But you’re safe right now. He doesn’t know where you are.”
“What if he finds me?”
“He won’t. And even if he does, you’re in a building with other people. You can scream. You can call 911.”
“He’ll talk his way out of it. He always does-”
“Not this time.” Garrett’s voice is hard. “Not fucking this time.”
You can hear traffic sounds through the phone, the occasional horn. You try to focus on that instead of the fear clawing at your chest.
“Garrett?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you. For answering. For coming.”
“You don’t have to thank me.”
“I didn’t know who else to call.”
“I’m glad you called me.” There’s something in his voice — relief, maybe. Or vindication. “I meant what I said. Day or night. You call me.”
You close your eyes, let his voice wash over you. Somewhere above you, you can hear footsteps. Someone’s TV playing too loud. Normal apartment sounds. It helps ground you.
“I’m about twenty minutes away,” Garrett says. “Maybe less. Traffic’s not bad.”
“Are you speeding?”
“Definitely.”
Despite everything, you almost smile. “You’re going to get a ticket.”
“I don’t give a shit.”
The minutes stretch out. You keep listening to Garrett’s breathing on the other end of the line, the sound of his car. It’s the only thing keeping you from completely falling apart.
“Okay, I’m about two minutes out,” Garrett says. “What’s the address of the building you’re in?”
You peek out from behind the corner, looking for a sign or a number. “Um … 6209 Brighton Avenue, I think?”
“Got it. I see it. Stay where you are, I’m pulling up now.”
Thirty seconds later, you hear a car screech to a stop outside. A door slams.
“I’m coming in,” Garrett says.
The front door opens and then he’s there — Garrett Graham in sweatpants and a Briar Hockey hoodie, no coat, hair disheveled like he literally just rolled out of bed. Which he probably did.
You step out from behind the corner.
When Garrett sees you, his entire face changes.
You must look worse than you thought. You can see the horror in his eyes as he takes in your appearance — the handprints on your throat, the swelling on your face, the way you’re shaking so hard you can barely stand.
“Jesus Christ,” he breathes.
He starts toward you, hand outstretched, then stops himself. Lets his hand fall.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he says softly. “I promise. I just want to help.”
You nod, but you can’t seem to make yourself move.
“Can I come closer?” Garrett asks.
Another nod.
He approaches slowly, carefully, like you’re a wild animal that might bolt. When he’s close enough to touch, he holds out his hand.
“Come on. Let’s get you out of here.”
You take his hand. His skin is warm, his grip gentle but steady. He leads you toward the door, but you balk when you see the street outside.
“What if he’s out there?” Your voice is barely a whisper.
“Then I’ll handle it.” Garrett’s jaw is set, his eyes hard. “He’s not going to touch you again. I promise you that.”
You let him guide you outside, into his car. It’s still running, heat blasting. He opens the passenger door and helps you in like you’re made of glass.
But before he closes the door, you grab his arm.
“What?” Garrett asks.
You can’t put it into words — the gratitude, the relief, the overwhelming sense that this stranger has just saved your life. So you just hold onto his arm for a moment, looking up at him.
“Thank you,” you manage.
His expression softens. “Don’t thank me yet. Let’s just get you somewhere safe.”
He closes your door and runs around to the driver’s side. As soon as he’s in, he locks the doors and checks his mirrors. You can’t help doing the same thing — looking back down the street, expecting to see Cameron appear at any moment.
“He’s not coming,” Garrett says, but his hands are tight on the steering wheel. “And even if he does, I’ll kill him.”
He says it so matter-of-factly that you believe him.
Garrett pulls away from the curb and starts driving. You don’t ask where you’re going. Don’t care. Anywhere is better than where you were.
“I’m taking you to my place,” Garrett says after a few minutes. “I live with my teammates. Three other guys. They’re good people, I promise. You’ll be safe there.”
“Okay.”
“In the morning, we can figure out next steps. Police report, restraining order, whatever you want to do. But tonight, you just need to rest.”
You nod, but the word makes your stomach churn. Cameron’s parents are lawyers. Rich, connected lawyers. The last time you tried to leave, he threatened to have them destroy you. Said they’d make you look crazy, make sure no one believed you.
And you believed him. Just like you believed everything else.
“Hey.” Garrett glances over at you. “You with me?”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize.”
The drive to Garrett’s place takes about fifteen minutes. He lives in a house off-campus, the kind of place that definitely houses multiple hockey players based on the Briar Hockey flags in the windows and the hockey sticks on the porch.
He parks in the driveway and turns to you.
“Okay, so fair warning: the place is kind of a mess. We’re college guys. But it’s safe, I promise.”
“I don’t care about the mess.”
“Good.” He gets out, comes around to your door, and opens it for you.
You follow him up the walkway, up the porch steps. Your legs feel like jelly. The adrenaline is wearing off and everything hurts.
Garrett unlocks the door and leads you inside. The house is dark except for the kitchen light. It’s quiet — everyone’s probably asleep.
“Let me give you the quick tour,” Garrett says softly. “Living room, kitchen, bathroom’s down that hall. Upstairs are the bedrooms. Mine’s the second door on the left.”
“I can sleep on the couch-”
“No.” His voice is firm. “You’re taking my room.”
“Garrett, I can’t-”
“Yes, you can. It’s got a lock on the inside if you want to feel safer. Clean sheets, bathroom right next door. I’ll bunk with Logan.”
You’re too tired to argue. Too broken to do anything but nod.
He leads you upstairs. The hallway is covered in hockey photos and what looks like a championship banner. Garrett’s room is at the end, exactly as he described.
It’s neater than you expected. A queen-sized bed with navy sheets. A desk covered in textbooks and hockey equipment. A Briar Hockey poster on the wall.
“Bathroom’s through there,” Garrett says, pointing to a door. “There should be towels and stuff. I can get you some clothes to sleep in-”
“This is fine.” You’re still in your sweatshirt and jeans, but the thought of changing feels impossible right now.
“Okay. Well, if you need anything, I’ll be with Logan. His room is the first door on the right. Just knock.”
You nod.
Garrett lingers in the doorway, looking like he wants to say something else. “You did the right thing. Calling me. Running. You saved your own life tonight.”
The words hit you harder than they should. You feel tears pricking at your eyes again.
“Get some sleep,” Garrett says gently. “We’ll figure everything else out in the morning.”
He closes the door behind him, and you’re alone.
You stand in the middle of his room for a long moment, just breathing. Then you go to the door and turn the lock. The click is oddly reassuring.
You should probably shower. Should probably wash the day off. But you can’t seem to make yourself move. Instead, you sink onto Garrett’s bed, still fully clothed, and pull the blanket around yourself.
It smells like him — clean, masculine, safe.
You close your eyes and let yourself cry.
***
Garrett makes it to Logan’s room and closes the door before he loses it.
“Dude, what the fuck-” Logan sits up in bed, squinting at him. “It’s like 1 AM-”
“I need to bunk with you tonight.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s someone in my room.”
That wakes Logan up. “What?”
Garrett runs both hands through his hair, pacing. “That girl. From the parking lot. Beck’s girlfriend. She called me. He hurt her, Logan. Really fucking hurt her.”
“Shit. Is she okay?”
“I don’t know. She’s-” Garrett’s voice cracks. “You should see her throat. He strangled her. She’s got bruises all over her face, her neck. If she hadn’t gotten away-”
“Fuck.”
“I want to kill him.” Garrett’s hands are shaking now, adrenaline and rage coursing through him. “I want to find him and beat him so badly he never gets up again.”
“Garrett-”
“I should have done more. At the parking lot. I should have made her leave then-”
“You did what you could.”
“It wasn’t enough!” Garrett slams his fist into the wall, then immediately regrets it when pain shoots up his arm.
Logan gets out of bed, walks over to him. “Look at me. Look at me, G.”
Garrett forces himself to meet Logan’s eyes.
“She called you,” Logan says. “When she was in trouble, when she needed help, she called you. That means you did everything right. You gave her an option and she took it. That’s huge.”
Garrett wants to believe that. Wants to believe he did enough. But all he can see is your face — the terror, the pain, the way you flinched when he reached for you.
“She looks like she’s halfway to dead,” Garrett says quietly.
“But she’s not dead. She’s here. She’s safe.”
“For now.”
“For now is all we’ve got.” Logan claps him on the shoulder. “Come on. You can take the beanbag.”
“I’m not sleeping.”
“Fine. Then you can not-sleep on the beanbag.”
Garrett collapses into the oversized beanbag chair in the corner of Logan’s room. It’s not comfortable, but he barely notices. His mind is racing, playing the phone call over and over. The sound of your voice — terrified, desperate. The way you were gasping for breath.
The fact that you thought Beck was going to kill you.
Because he was. Garrett knows that now with certainty. If you hadn’t fought back, if you hadn’t gotten away, Beck would have killed you.
“What are you going to do?” Logan asks from his bed.
“I don’t know. Call the cops. Get her a restraining order. Press charges.”
“You think she’ll do it?”
“I don’t know.”
That’s the truth. You’re terrified of Beck, terrified of his family’s power, terrified of what he’ll do if you fight back. Garrett’s seen it before — the way abuse victims get trapped in this cycle of fear and dependency.
His mom never pressed charges against his dad. Not once. Even when she had evidence, even when people offered to help, she always backed down.
And look where that got her.
“He’s going to come looking for her,” Garrett says.
“Then we’ll deal with it.”
“We?”
“You think I’m going to let some abusive piece of shit show up at our house?” Logan’s voice is hard. “Fuck that. He tries anything, he’s going through me, Dean, and Tucker. And you know Tucker will lose his shit.”
Despite everything, Garrett almost smiles.
“We should tell them,” Garrett says. “In the morning. They need to know.”
“Agreed.”
Garrett leans his head back against the wall and closes his eyes. But every time he does, he sees you — trembling in that apartment lobby, handprints on your throat, looking at him like he’s the only thing standing between you and death.
“I should have done more,” he says again.
“You did enough.”
But it doesn’t feel like enough. It feels like he’s still that seven-year-old kid watching his mom get hurt and being powerless to stop it.
Except this time, he’s not powerless.
This time, he can fight back.
And if Cameron Beck shows his face anywhere near you again, Garrett’s going to make sure he regrets it.
pairing – garrett graham x reader
summary – a secret hookup with garrett graham turns into four close calls, one locker room scandal, and feelings neither of them are hiding very well.
warnings – 18+, smut, alcohol, jealousy, secret hookups, hockey violence/injuries, swearing.
notes from me – thank u for the request, anon!! this was so cute i got carried away lol <3
word count – 9.4k
navigation – masterlist
The thing about keeping Garrett Graham a secret was that Garrett Graham was, in almost every available category, a terrible secret.
He was too tall for it, for one. Too broad. Too recognisable from the back, from the shoulders, from the mess of dark curls and the stupid confident way he moved through a room like gravity had signed some private agreement to make him look good from every angle.
He was also, tragically, friendly. Friendly in that Garrett-specific way that meant everybody on campus felt like they knew him well enough to yell his name across a party, slap his shoulder at Malone’s, stop him in the hall to talk about last night’s game or next week’s line-up or whatever else men said to one another when they wanted to bask briefly in proximity to a local legend and pretend it was a conversation.
And she wasn't exactly anonymous either. Not anymore. Not after Dean.
Dean Di Laurentis, who had never been her boyfriend, which was a legal technicality he clung to with the same lazy confidence he seemed to apply to everything else in his life.
Dean had been a mistake with good hair and a trust fund. A mistake with a grin. A mistake that had lasted a few times longer than it should have because he was pretty and shameless and very good at looking at a girl like he had personally invented bad decisions and would be thrilled to walk her through the beginner course.
But Dean wasn't a girlfriend kind of guy. Dean was Six Flags. You rode the ride, screamed once or twice, maybe bought the photo after, and then got off.
She knew that. She had known that then, technically.
Dean had a way of appearing in her life at the least dignified possible moments looking pleased with himself, and she had a way of refusing to let him be pleased without penalty.
Like the time she found him coming out of a women’s bathroom stall at Malone’s with a girl in a denim skirt. She had been washing her hands at the sink, glanced up in the mirror, taken in his flushed face, his rumpled shirt, the girl fixing her hair behind him, and said, “Hi, whore,” with the flat calm of someone greeting a neighbour at the mailbox.
Dean, because shame had never successfully attached itself to his nervous system, had only chuckled and leaned one shoulder against the stall door. “Hey.”
That was the whole thing. Mostly joking. Mostly old bruised pride dressed up in insults because that was easier than admitting he had maybe gotten under her skin for a minute and then left muddy footprints on his way back out.
Garrett wasn't supposed to be part of that. Garrett had happened after a party, which was already a bad sign because nothing good ever began at two in the morning in a hockey house kitchen with tequila and Dean singing the wrong words to a song everybody else knew.
It had been loud and hot and stupid, the whole house sticky with beer and laughter and bodies pressed into doorways. She had ended up outside on the back steps because the kitchen had started spinning, and Garrett had come out five minutes later with two waters and an expression that suggested he was trying very hard not to ask whether she was going to puke on his sneakers.
He had sat down beside her instead.
Garrett had looked at her sideways when she laughed at one of his jokes, and something in his face had changed. Garrett’s face was a practiced thing, mostly grin and charm and captain-boy confidence, but this had slipped underneath it. A quiet little interest. A flicker. Like he had found something he wanted to pay attention to and was already annoyed about it.
Then, later, in the upstairs hallway, she had been trying to find the bathroom and he had been trying to find Logan, because Logan had stolen his phone to send a voice note to Coach that began with “hypothetically, if a man loved hockey but hated cardio,” and somehow Garrett’s hand had ended up on her waist. Warm through her shirt. Steadying her when someone shoved past in the hall.
“Careful,” he had said, close to her ear.
She had turned her head, too drunk to be clever and too annoyed by how good he smelled to be normal. “I’m always careful.”
Garrett’s eyes had dropped to her mouth for half a second, then lifted again with that awful amused heat. “Uh huh.”
The first kiss had been an accident. His room had been closer than the bathroom. His door had shut behind them. His mouth had been warm and confident and so immediately, horribly good that she had pulled back after ten seconds just to stare at him like that might make the situation less offensive.
Garrett had grinned down at her, lips a little swollen already, one hand still at her waist. “What?”
“You kiss like you know you’re good at it.”
He’d shrugged. “I am good at it.”
“That’s a disgusting thing to say.”
“Wasn’t really a denial, though.”
She had meant to hate that. Truly. She had tried.
The first time they almost got caught, she was riding him with her hands braced on his chest and Garrett’s mouth at her throat, and the only thought in her head was a soft, stunned, repeated oh that seemed to have lost all connection to language.
His room was too warm despite the window cracked open behind the desk, the cold night air barely managing to move through the heat they had made under the sheets. The lamp was off. Some blue-white spill from the streetlight outside cut through the blinds in thin, broken lines over the wall and across Garrett’s shoulder.
His chain had slipped sideways against his collarbone. His hair was a wreck from her fingers. His mouth was open against her neck, kissing up under her jaw with the kind of lazy, devastating precision that made her thighs shake around him before she could stop them.
“Garrett,” she breathed, and then immediately louder, because his hands had shifted to her hips and guided her down harder. “Oh my God.”
His hand flew up before the sound had fully escaped, palm covering her mouth, his other hand tightening at her waist. “Jesus, baby,” he said, voice low and rough and entirely too amused for a man currently participating in the same crime. “You trying to get me murdered?”
She made a muffled noise against his hand that was meant to be a curse and came out humiliatingly close to a whimper. Garrett’s grin flashed in the dark, teeth catching briefly, eyes bright and smug and so pleased with himself she nearly hated him. Nearly.
It was hard to maintain moral outrage when his thumb was pressed lightly against her cheek and his hips were still moving, slow and deep and mean in the way only a man with a scoreboard in his soul could be mean.
“There we go,” he murmured, kissing the side of her jaw while his palm stayed over her mouth. “Can’t be announcing it to the whole house, right?”
She glared down at him, or tried to. It probably lost some effect when her eyes fluttered halfway shut because he lifted his hips again and hit exactly the wrong place, which was to say exactly the right one.
Garrett laughed under his breath, quiet and filthy with satisfaction. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”
She bit the inside of his palm.
His brows shot up. “Oh, we’re biting now?”
She nodded against his hand with as much dignity as a girl could manage while naked on top of him and very actively losing a fight against her own volume.
“Cool,” he whispered. “Very healthy. Super mature.”
She would have laughed if she had any air left. Instead her body gave her away again, a soft, trapped sound catching under his palm as he sat up suddenly, changing the angle and dragging her with him until she was pressed chest-to-chest with him, knees bracketing his hips, his mouth at her ear.
“Shh,” he said, but the edge of laughter in it ruined the authority.
He was enjoying this too much. Enjoying her like this, messy and desperate and trying very hard to be quiet because if anybody found out she was in Garrett Graham’s room, in Garrett Graham’s bed, after Dean Di Laurentis had spent the better part of the semester behaving like her eventual return to his mattress was a scheduling issue rather than a question, the whole house would become unbearable overnight.
Then the hallway floor creaked. Both of them froze. Him still inside her, both still overheated, still breathing too hard into the tiny space between them. Garrett’s hand stayed clamped gently over her mouth. Her fingers dug into his shoulders. His eyes lifted toward the door, and in the blue-dark she watched every cocky line in his face vanish into immediate, sharp focus.
Outside, Logan’s voice drifted close enough to curdle the air. “Yo– Dean. Is that who I think it is in there?”
Her stomach dropped so fast it was almost physical. Garrett’s eyes snapped back to hers.
For one suspended, insane second, they only stared at each other. She could feel his heartbeat hard against her chest. Could feel where they were still joined, which her body had the absolutely perverse audacity to notice in detail despite the fact that John Logan was currently holding a one-man investigation outside the door. Garrett’s hand loosened slightly over her mouth. Her lips parted against his palm. He held his finger up to his own lips, and she had nodded quickly.
He reached blindly toward the bedside table with one hand, the motion chaotic and deeply unathletic for a man who made a living looking graceful under pressure.
His fingers knocked something over. A bottle cap, maybe. His watch. A textbook hit the floor with a soft thud. She bit down on a laugh before it could get out, which was dangerous because laughter at that moment felt like shaking a soda bottle with the cap still on.
Garrett found his phone at last, thumb flying over the screen. For half a second there was nothing. Then the speaker on his dresser exploded to life with Cherry Pie so loud the whole room seemed to jump.
She slapped both hands over her own mouth now, eyes wide, shoulders shaking immediately with silent laughter. Garrett stared at the ceiling like he could not believe this was the solution his brain had selected and was, worse, proud of himself anyway.
In the hallway, Logan went silent. Then he burst out laughing. “Oh shit– sorry, G! Guess not!”
A second later Dean’s voice, farther away and deeply suspicious, called, “What?”
“Nothin’, man,” Logan said, still laughing. “Keep walking.”
Footsteps retreated. The music kept blaring. Garrett turned it down with the ferocious speed of a man who had made his point and no longer wanted Warrant narrating his sex life. The second the volume dropped, she folded forward into Garrett’s shoulder and started laughing for real, breathless and helpless, her whole body shaking against his.
Garrett’s arms closed around her automatically. Then he started laughing too, quiet and disbelieving into her hair. “Fuck.”
She lifted her head, face hot, eyes watering, and whispered, “Cherry Pie?”
“It was the first thing that came up.”
“You panic-played Cherry Pie?”
He huffed out a laugh. “It worked.”
“That’s not the same as being good.”
“It worked,” he repeated, grinning now, smugness returning by the inch because survival had restored him. His hands slid to her hips again, warm and possessive and much too confident. “And for the record, if Logan thinks you’re in Dean’s room right now, I might throw myself out the window.”
She pressed her lips together, trying and failing not to smile. “Jealous?”
Garrett’s eyes narrowed. “Careful.”
The word landed low in her stomach. Warm and bright and stupid. She leaned down and kissed him before he could see too much of it on her face, and he kissed her back still smiling, still breathing laughter into her mouth, both of them a little shaky now for a different reason.
“Too close,” she murmured against him.
“Yeah,” Garrett said, one hand coming up to the back of her neck, holding her there. “Maybe stop trying to wake the neighbours.”
“You’re the one playing stripper music at full volume.”
“Because you’re loud.”
“Because you’re annoying.”
His grin was all teeth in the dark. “Baby, just before? That wasn't an annoyed sound.”
She shoved at his chest, and he fell back on the mattress easily, gesturing for her to come closer with two fingers. The stupid warmth of it made her go quiet in a way that was much more dangerous than the moaning had been.
The second time they almost got caught, she was drunk enough that focusing on standing upright had become a full-body project.
The house belonged to some guy from one of Dean’s classes, or maybe one of Logan’s, or maybe no one knew and they had all simply agreed to occupy it until dawn. It smelled like beer, perfume, damp coats, and the kind of carpet that had seen too much and forgiven nothing.
She stood in the upstairs hallway with one shoulder against the wall, phone in hand, trying to read the same text from Garrett for the third time.
Garrett: You good?
It was a simple question. Easy. Very Garrett, actually. Casual on the surface, but sent because he had been watching her across the room ten minutes ago with that narrowed captain look he got whenever she reached the stage of drunk where her smile became too slow and her balance became hypothetical.
She typed, yes.
Then deleted it because the letters looked suspicious.
Then typed, yed.
Then stared at that for a long time.
Beside her, a cluster of girls in tiny tops and hockey-adjacent enthusiasm had been having one of those conversations that floated around the party like perfume: who was hot, who was overrated, who was secretly huge, who had commitment issues so severe they should probably be peer-reviewed.
She ignored it for as long as she could because she had bigger concerns, namely that if the bathroom door did not open in the next thirty seconds she was going to have to start making decisions about where else she could throw up.
Then one of them said Garrett’s name. Her eyes lifted off her phone before she could stop them.
The girl speaking was blonde, glossy in a way that seemed expensive even if nothing she was wearing necessarily was, with a little white top and the high, pleased expression of someone enjoying the sound of her own anecdote.
“No, I’m serious,” she was saying, one hand pressed to her chest like she was giving testimony. “Last night was the best night ever. Like, Garrett knows what he’s doing. He made me come, like, three times.”
The hallway did a small, drunken tilt.
The problem wasn't even jealousy at first, not properly. The problem was logistics. Garrett had been in her room last night. Garrett had been in her bed last night, sprawled diagonally like he owned both the mattress and several surrounding counties, one arm hooked around her waist while she tried to sleep and he mumbled something into her hair about setting an alarm for practice.
Garrett had stolen half her blanket and then looked offended when she kicked him in the shin. Garrett had kissed the back of her shoulder at five in the morning before climbing out of bed, half-dressed in the dark, whispering, “Go back to sleep, baby,” like he had any right to sound that soft before sunrise.
So unless Garrett had discovered cloning between midnight and breakfast, the blonde girl was lying.
The girl noticed her staring, because drunken staring was rarely subtle and this particular stare had been delivered with the blank intensity of a haunted doll.
The blonde’s smile faltered into something confused but still sweet, which was somehow worse. “Um… hi, babe. You okay?”
Another girl beside her leaned in slightly, brows lifting. “Did you need some water?”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Her phone was still in her hand, Garrett’s unanswered text glowing uselessly against her palm.
“You weren’t with Garrett last night,” she said.
The sentence came out too clear. Too certain. Sober-sounding, even, which was deeply unfair given the fact that her inner ear was currently behaving like a loose shopping trolley.
The blonde blinked. “What?”
“You weren’t with Garrett last night.” She frowned, genuinely trying to make the pieces fit and failing so hard that social caution had gone missing in the wreckage. “Why are you lying?”
The air around the bathroom line shifted. A couple of girls looked over. Someone’s mouth dropped open a tiny bit. The blonde’s face did that quick, ugly thing people’s faces did when embarrassment arrived and pride immediately tried to tackle it before it spread.
“And how would you know?” she asked, voice sharpening with a laugh around the edges. “Are you, like, his secretary?”
Her drunk brain, slow but not entirely dead, caught up with the fact that she was standing in a hallway full of girls, defending Garrett Graham’s whereabouts during the exact hours he had spent in her bed, while actively participating in a secret that depended on not doing that.
Her mouth opened. Nothing came out. The blonde’s brows rose.
“I– uh.” She looked down at her phone like it might offer legal counsel. Garrett’s text still sat there, accusatory and simple. “Never mind. Actually.”
Then she stepped out of the bathroom line. There was a slight shoulder bump with the wall and a near-collision with a guy carrying two beers, but she made it away from the girls and around the corner with most of her dignity still technically attached.
Her heart was thudding stupidly hard for a hallway interaction, heat crawling up her throat and into her cheeks. Not jealousy, she told herself. She was just offended by misinformation. Academically. On principle. People should not be allowed to lie.
Her phone buzzed again as she reached the top of the stairs.
Garrett: Seriously. Where are you?
She stared at it for a second, then typed, need bathroom.
Then, after a pause, added, girls are liars.
His response came almost immediately.
Garrett: What
She squinted at the screen.
Garrett: Baby where are you
The baby landed warm even through the alcohol, which was annoying. She looked back over her shoulder toward the hallway, where the bathroom line and the blonde and the whole stupid conversation still existed. Then she started down the stairs, one hand on the railing, the phone clutched in the other, already scanning the crowd below for Garrett’s dark curls and the broad, familiar shape of him.
She found him near the kitchen archway, and he was already looking for her. He caught sight of her halfway down the stairs, and his face shifted at once, amusement and concern colliding so fast that neither won cleanly. He moved through the crowd before she even reached the bottom, one hand lifting to her elbow as she stepped off the last stair.
“Hey,” he said, ducking close so she could hear him. “You okay?”
She looked up at him very seriously. “You were in my room last night.”
Garrett paused. His eyes moved over her face, then over the stairs behind her, then back down. “Yeah.”
“Like the whole night.”
His mouth twitched. “Most of it, yeah.”
“So that girl is a liar.”
A slow understanding dawned across his face. Then, because he was Garrett and therefore terrible, he started to smile. “What girl?”
She jabbed a finger somewhere upward. “The blonde. She said you made her come three times.”
His brows jumped. “Did I?”
“Garrett.”
“What? I feel like I’d remember.”
She crossed her arms. “She was lying.”
“Sounds like it.”
“She looked me in the face and lied.”
Garrett’s hand slid from her elbow to her waist, steadying her when she swayed half an inch in outrage. “You say anything?”
She stared at him.
His eyes narrowed, still smiling but sharper now. “What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
“Baby,” he whispered.
“I said she wasn’t with you last night.”
Garrett closed his eyes for one second. Just one. When he opened them again, he looked like he was fighting for his life against laughter. “Right.”
“She asked how I knew.”
“Okay.”
“And then I left.”
“Good call.”
“I almost said because you were with me.”
His grin did something helpless then, softer under the smugness, like the idea pleased him before he had time to make it a joke. “Yeah?”
She frowned at him. “Don’t look happy. I nearly compromised the mission.”
“The mission?”
“Our secrecy mission.”
“Our secrecy mission isn’t going great if you’re interrogating women in bathroom lines about my location.”
“She started it.”
“Sure.”
“She did,” she whined, dragging the second word out.
“I believe you.” He didn’t, not entirely. Or maybe he did and was simply enjoying himself too much to be decent about it. His hand squeezed once at her waist, warm and grounding. “You still need to pee?”
Her face fell. “Yes.”
Garrett’s mouth twitched again. “Come on. There’s a bathroom downstairs.”
“You know that?”
“I’m observant.”
“You’re a slut.”
“I’m helpful.” He leaned in, his lips brushing her ear, voice dropping into that low teasing register that made her stomach flip despite the fact that she was seconds away from becoming a medical emergency. “And for the record, next time I make you come three times, I’m expecting a better cover story than that.”
She turned her head slowly to glare at him. Garrett looked deeply pleased with himself.
The third time they almost got caught, she was in the hockey house kitchen at three in the morning wearing Garrett’s t-shirt with absolutely no plan.
It was after a loss, which meant the whole house had gone strange and heavy by midnight. The kind of subdued where the TV stayed on without anyone really watching it and the boys drank beer not to party but to have something to do with their hands.
Garrett had barely spoken when he came out of the locker room earlier, jaw tight, lip split, a bruise already blooming near his cheekbone, that restless, furious energy still moving under his skin like the game had not fully let go of him.
She hadn’t been supposed to come over. That was the rule. One of the rules. There were several now, apparently, all of them made by two people with a strong shared interest in pretending they had control over anything.
No arriving together. No leaving together. No obvious texts when the guys were around. No sitting too close at parties. No looking at each other for too long in kitchens, which was quickly becoming the hardest one because Garrett Graham had a deeply inconvenient face and an even more inconvenient habit of watching her mouth when she was trying to speak.
And definitely no sneaking into his room after midnight through the window like a raccoon because he’d lost a hockey game and she wanted to crawl into bed with him.
So, naturally, she had done exactly that. Garrett’s window wasn't as easy to access as she had expected it to be.
She had nearly died twice, scraped her knee on the siding, and whispered, “This is so stupid,” to herself with feeling before finally pushing the window up and tumbling into his room with all the grace of a bag of laundry.
Garrett had been lying on his bed in the dark, shirtless, one arm over his face. He hadn’t even startled properly. He had just shifted the arm enough to look at her, eyes bleary and bruised with exhaustion, and said, “Baby, what the fuck.”
“I’m being supportive.”
“You broke into my room.”
“I prefer… entered creatively.”
He had stared at her for another second, then lifted the edge of the blanket.
For all the jokes, all the swagger, all the please-don’t-call-this-what-it-is of him, he made room for her too easily. Like his body knew before the rest of him had finished filing objections. She crawled in beside him, careful of his ribs and the angry bruise darkening along one side of his stomach, and he rolled toward her with a wince he tried to hide and a hand that found her hip immediately under the blanket.
“Hi,” he had murmured after a while, lips brushing her hair.
She had smiled into his chest. “Hi.”
Now, hours later, she woke up with her mouth dry enough to qualify as an emergency and Garrett’s arm heavy across her middle.
The room was dark and cold around the edges, the cracked window letting in a thin stream of winter air that made the discarded clothes on the floor look like shadows. Garrett was dead asleep behind her, breathing rough through his nose, body warm and heavy and completely gone in the way only athletes after a bad game seemed capable of being.
One of his hands was tucked under the hem of the shirt she’d stolen off his floor. She swallowed once. Painfully. Then again. Still bad.
She shifted carefully. Garrett grunted and tightened his arm, which would have been sweet if it had not also trapped her in a dehydrated prison.
“Baby,” she whispered.
Nothing.
“Garrett.”
A deeper grunt this time. His face pressed into the back of her neck.
“Baby,” she tried again, softer. “Can you get me water?”
Garrett’s answer was a long, sleep-mangled sound that might have been English in a previous life. She waited.
“Garrett. Please. I’m really thirsty.”
“No,” he mumbled into her hair.
She turned her head as much as she could. “No?”
“M’sleep.”
“You’re talking.”
“Sleep talking.”
She groaned softly. “You’re the worst.”
“Mm.”
She lay there for another thirty seconds, hoping thirst might pass. It did not. Eventually she eased his arm off her waist inch by inch, freezing every time he made a noise, and rolled over to look at him properly.
The sight softened her irritation before she could defend against it. His face was turned toward her on the pillow, hair falling messily over his forehead, lashes low against his cheek. The split in his lip had dried dark at one corner. The bruise near his ribs looked ugly, even in the low light. Another mark curved along his stomach where he’d been slammed into the boards hard enough that the crowd had made a single collective ooooh.
He wasn't getting up. She sighed and climbed out of bed.
The floorboards were cold under her bare feet. Garrett’s t-shirt hit high on her thighs, soft and oversized and smelling like detergent and him. She paused at the door, listening. The house had finally gone mostly quiet. No TV. No shouting. No Dean wandering around half-drunk asking philosophical questions about hot girls and mortality. Only the hum of the fridge downstairs and the occasional tick of the heating.
She slipped into the hall and padded down the stairs, one hand trailing lightly along the wall because the dark made everything look unfamiliar. The kitchen waited at the bottom, dim and blue with moonlight through the window over the sink. Someone had left a pizza box open on the counter. There were three empty beer bottles near the stove and a hoodie slung over one of the chairs. The house smelled like stale chips, laundry, and the faint metallic cold of nighttime.
She found a glass in the cabinet after opening the wrong one twice, filled it at the sink, and drank half of it in one go with her eyes closed.
Then the light snapped on. She spun around so fast water sloshed over her hand.
Tucker stood in the doorway in sweatpants and a faded t-shirt, one hand still on the light switch, hair flattened on one side from sleep. He blinked at her. She blinked back.
For one full second, neither of them moved.
Then Tucker looked at the oversized shirt. Her bare legs. The glass in her hand. The stairs behind her.
“Well,” he said slowly. “Shit.”
Her stomach dropped.
“No,” she said immediately. “Please don’t–”
Tucker rubbed one hand over his face, looking more tired than scandalised. “Damn. I owe Logan ten bucks.”
That derailed her panic so thoroughly that she stared at him. “What?”
He gave her a sympathetic look that somehow made everything worse. “I can’t believe you slept with him again.”
Her mouth opened. Closed. The silence that followed wasn't her best work.
Tucker’s brows lifted. “Dean? Obviously?”
Oh.
The relief arrived so hard it nearly made her dizzy, followed immediately by the horrible understanding that she now had to let Tucker think she had climbed out of Dean’s bed at three in the morning. Her brain, which had been half-asleep and mostly water-focused three minutes ago, scrambled for purchase.
“Right,” she said, too quickly. “Yeah. Dean. Obviously.”
Tucker’s expression softened in a way that made guilt stab straight through the middle of her chest. “Oh. Uh. Sorry. I didn’t mean to make it weird.”
“No, it’s–” She swallowed, clutching the glass with both hands. God bless darkness. God bless Tucker being half-asleep. God bless the fact that Dean’s entire personality was plausible cover for almost any bad decision within a thirty-foot radius. “Please don’t say anything.”
Tucker frowned. “I won’t.”
“No, seriously. Please.” She made her eyes wide because she could, because she had been underestimated by men before and did occasionally enjoy the practical benefits. “It’s so embarrassing. I wasn’t going to. I don’t even know why I– God.” She looked down, shook her head, and gave a small, miserable laugh that deserved an award from whatever committee evaluated female deception in shared kitchens. “Please don’t tell Logan. Or anyone. Especially Dean. Actually, fuck, especially Dean.”
Tucker, who possessed the inconvenient decency of a man who hated watching people feel bad, visibly faltered. “Hey. No, yeah. Totally. Your secret’s safe with me.”
She nodded, still performing devastated shame with one hand wrapped around a stolen water glass. “Thank you.”
“Do you… need anything?”
The kindness almost killed her. “No. I’m good. Just water.”
“Okay.”
Another awkward beat passed. Then Tucker stepped aside from the doorway with the solemn discomfort of someone allowing a ghost to pass through. “Night.”
“Night,” she whispered, and scurried toward the stairs with the glass held carefully against her chest.
She didn’t breathe properly until Garrett’s door shut behind her.
He was still asleep when she climbed back into bed. Useless. Beautiful, bruised, useless man. She set the glass on his nightstand and stared at him for a second in the dark, still buzzing with adrenaline. Then she smacked his shoulder.
Garrett flinched awake with a strangled noise, eyes half-opening. “What– fuck– what?”
“Tucker caught me downstairs.”
That woke him a little more. “What?”
“He thinks I slept with Dean.”
Garrett went very still. Then his face did something fascinating in the dark. Sleep disappeared. Pain disappeared. Every exhausted, post-game softness sharpened into offended disbelief. “He thinks you what?”
“I had to go with it!”
“You had to?”
“Yes, Garrett, because the alternative was saying actually I’m sneaking out of Garrett’s room after cuddling with him because we’re both very normal and secretive and weird.”
He pushed himself up on one elbow, immediately winced, then tried to pretend he hadn’t. “Why the fuck would he think Dean?”
“Because of Dean!”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s kind of the whole answer.” She climbed back under the blanket, still whispering harshly. “You wouldn’t get me water.”
“I was asleep.”
“So I went downstairs and got caught and had to improvise.”
Garrett stared at her, jaw working. Even bruised and half-dead, he managed to look jealous in a way that made her want to laugh and kiss him and maybe shove him a little. “Tucker thinks you left Dean’s room wearing my shirt?”
“I don’t think he was doing t-shirt analysis at three in the morning.”
Garrett dropped back against the pillow with a quiet, pained groan, one hand dragging over his face. “Great.”
She settled beside him, taking a long, triumphant sip of water. “Your fault.”
“My fault?”
“Yes.”
“For being asleep after getting hit, like, forty times tonight,” he said, eyes wide in the dark. Then he groaned. “Fuckin’– Dean?”
She smiled despite herself. “You’re jealous.”
“I’m not jealous.” He was very obviously jealous. His arm came around her waist and tugged her closer with enough care not to hurt himself but enough insistence to make the point. “I just don’t love Tucker thinking you’re sneaking out of Dean’s bed.”
“Technically, he thinks I’m sneaking out of Dean’s bed and deeply ashamed.”
Garrett made a noise of disgust. “Jesus.”
She pressed her face into his shoulder to hide her smile. “Poor Tucker was very sweet.”
“I don’t want to hear about sweet Tucker right now.”
“You’re so easy.”
“I’m injured.”
“You’re possessive.”
He was quiet for half a second. Then, low against her hair, “Maybe don’t make me hear Dean’s name when you’re in my bed.”
She lifted her head. In the dark, Garrett’s expression was harder to read, but she could feel him looking at her. Could feel the tension under the joke, under the jealousy, under the secret they kept pretending was only fun because fun was easier than looking directly at whatever else had started living between them.
“Okay,” she whispered.
His hand moved under the shirt, warm at her back. “Okay?”
“Yeah.” She nudged her nose against his jaw, soft. “No Dean.”
His breath left him slowly. “Good.”
“You still should’ve gotten me water.”
“Go to sleep.”
“You’re mean.”
“You broke into my room.”
“You let me in.”
“Mm,” Garrett murmured, already pulling her closer, careful around his ribs, his mouth brushing her forehead. “I know.”
The fourth time they almost got caught, Garrett took her on a date three towns over and still somehow managed to know someone there.
It was a cute restaurant. Cute in a way that made both of them a little awkward for the first ten minutes because hooking up in secret at parties and sneaking through windows had not prepared either of them for menus with seasonal specials and candles in little glass holders.
The place sat on a narrow street with string lights outside and fogged windows and a hostess who smiled at Garrett for two seconds too long before noticing the girl beside him and recalibrating. Garrett noticed the recalibration. His mouth twitched as they followed the hostess toward a booth in the back.
“Don’t,” she muttered.
“I didn’t say anything.”
She crossed her arms. “You were about to.”
“I was gonna say the soup smells good.”
“You were not.”
Garrett laughed, warm and low, and slid into the booth beside her instead of across from her without asking. They were far enough from Briar that no one should have known them, tucked into the back corner of a restaurant full of older couples and small groups and a table of women laughing over wine near the bar.
It made the whole thing feel suspended, like they’d stepped out of the rules for a few hours and could sit too close without having to perform distance for anyone.
His thigh pressed against hers under the table. Their shoulders brushed every time one of them moved. Garrett kept stealing fries off her plate even though he’d ordered his own, and she kept pretending to be offended while pushing the plate half an inch closer because dignity had left with the appetizer.
At some point his hand found hers on the booth seat between them. His fingers sliding over hers, playing with them idly while he told her about a freshman on the team who had tried to tape his stick with what Logan called the confidence of a man raised by wolves.
She laughed into her drink, and Garrett looked at her in a way that made the restaurant feel suddenly much smaller.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“No, you’re doing the face.”
His thumb moved over her knuckles. “Just like hearing you laugh.”
That shut her up immediately. Garrett’s eyes flickered over her face, and she hated him for noticing the way the words landed. Hated him more for softening instead of making a joke out of it. For a second they just sat there, fingers tangled on the seat between them, candlelight catching along the edge of his jaw and the chain at his throat, his knee warm against hers.
Then she looked down at the table because she had limits. “That was gross.”
“Yeah?”
“You should be embarrassed.”
He sucked at his teeth gently. “I’m not.”
“No. I know. That’s one of your worst qualities.”
He grinned and lifted her hand, pressing a quick kiss to the back of it. “Top five, maybe.”
She was smiling despite herself, leaning in closer, when a voice came from the side of the booth.
“Graham?”
Garrett’s hand froze around hers. A tiny, immediate stillness that went through him faster than any expression on his face could catch. His smile stayed in place when he looked up, but she felt the change in his body first. The slight tightening at his shoulder. The way his hand shifted off hers and came to rest on his own thigh. The casual posture assembling itself a second too late to be real.
A guy stood at the end of the booth, tall and broad, with the unmistakable haircut of a hockey player and a jacket with Eastwood stitched over the chest. Recognition hit Garrett’s face, then something flatter underneath it.
“Parker,” Garrett said, easy enough if you weren’t pressed against him and listening to the mechanics of the lie. “What’s up, man?”
The Eastwood player grinned and held out a hand. Garrett slid out of the booth halfway to shake it, and she sank approximately two inches lower in the seat.
Which was stupid. Very stupid. If she wanted to avoid notice, shrinking into the booth like a child hiding from a substitute teacher wasn't a subtle approach. But the whole night had gone bright and hot behind her ears. She took an intense interest in the remaining fries on her plate and prayed for invisibility.
No such luck. Parker’s eyes flicked to her with polite curiosity. The interest of someone who had stumbled into a scene and wanted to know the category. Date? Hookup? Cousin? Hostage?
Garrett, because his life was apparently a sport in all directions, stood in front of the booth with one hand settling briefly on his hip before moving up to scratch along his jaw.
Nervous.
She noticed it instantly. Garrett Graham didn’t usually look nervous. He looked cocky, amused, focused, pissed off, hungry, occasionally concussed, but not nervous. Yet there he was, smiling and doing all the tiny, useless things his body did when he wanted to seem casual too badly: thumb brushing under his nose, hand dragging through his curls, weight shifting onto one foot and then back again.
“What are you doing out here?” Parker asked.
Garrett shrugged. “Dinner.”
“Yeah, no shit.” Parker laughed, looking around. “Didn’t expect to see you this far out.”
“Had to get off campus for a minute.”
The sentence was true enough to pass. It made something soft and stupid open in her chest, because Garrett had wanted to get off campus with her. Not to hook up quickly before someone knocked. Not to drag her upstairs at a party. Dinner. A booth. His fingers playing with hers beside the cushion. The whole quiet normal shape of it.
Parker’s gaze flicked to her again. Garrett saw it and shifted half a step, not blocking her, but angling himself between the attention and her face in a way that made her want to press her forehead to the table.
“This is–” Garrett started, and then stopped.
Her heart gave one hard kick, because there was no good ending there. This is my friend sounded insane. This is the girl I’m sleeping with sounded worse. This is the girl Dean hooked up with and now I am secretly, catastrophically gone for sounded accurate but logistically challenging.
So Garrett, genius athlete, captain of the Briar men’s hockey team, man with a GPA that proved his brain did occasionally participate, did the only thing available. He smiled wider and said, “We’re just eating.”
She closed her eyes.
Parker blinked once, then, mercifully, either understood enough to leave it alone or decided he didn’t care. “Cool, cool. Good to see you, bro.” He clapped Garrett once on the shoulder. “See you on the ice.”
Garrett’s grin sharpened into something more familiar. “Looking forward to it.”
“Yeah, I bet.”
They did the aggressive male handshake thing again, all knuckles and shoulder tension and mutual threat disguised as friendliness, then Parker left toward the bar.
Garrett stood for one second after he was gone, watching him go. Then he slid back into the booth beside her, and both of them sat completely still.
She stared at the table. Garrett stared straight ahead. Then, at exactly the same time, they both exhaled.
“Jesus Christ,” she whispered.
“Yeah,” Garrett said. “That was– yeah.”
She turned her head slowly. “We’re just eating?”
His jaw tightened. “I panicked. What was I supposed to say?”
“I don’t know, Garrett. Fuck.”
His hand found hers again, but this time under the table, fingers lacing through hers with a little more urgency than before. “Too close?”
She looked down at their joined hands. His thumb was moving over hers, once, twice, like he was calming himself as much as her. “Way too close.”
“Yeah.”
“And you were nervous.”
He scoffed and shook his head once. “I wasn't nervous.”
“You scratched your jaw like nine times.”
“My jaw itched.”
Her eyebrows raised. “And your nose?”
“Itched too,” he shrugged.
“And your hair?”
“Whole body’s falling apart, apparently.”
She huffed a laugh, and his hand tightened around hers. When she looked up, he was watching her with that softer thing again. The thing that kept sneaking in around the edges of their jokes and making them both go quiet.
“Hey,” he said, lower. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For making it weird.”
“It is weird.”
“Yeah.” His mouth pulled at one corner. “But I like this weird.”
The warmth hit so hard she had to look away toward the candle. “You can’t say stuff like that after calling me an eating companion.”
“I didn’t call you that.”
“You kinda did.”
Garrett laughed, then leaned in and kissed her temple because out of town meant he could do that. Could sit beside her in a booth and kiss her hair and hold her hand under the table and look at her like the secret was starting to bother him not because he wanted out of it, but because he wanted out of the hiding part.
She let herself lean into him for half a second. Just half.
The fifth time, the time they were finally caught, she didn’t think at all, and that was probably why it happened.
Afterward, she would be able to admit there had been options. Reasonable options. Normal options. She could have waited outside the locker room like other people did. She could have texted him. She could have asked Logan if Garrett was okay, which would have been embarrassing but survivable.
She could have done any number of things that didn’t involve slipping past the edge of the crowd after the game and walking straight into the tunnel like she had a right to be there.
But Garrett had been wrong all night. He had played well in flashes because Garrett Graham could probably play well during a natural disaster if someone gave him skates and a reason. But there had been something jagged in him from the first period.
Too sharp on the checks. Too quick to shove back. Mouthguard hanging between his teeth while he stared down some Eastwood winger with a look on his face that made her hands go cold around the railing.
He got sent off twice. Once for roughing, once for a fight that started so fast the crowd seemed to notice it only after Garrett already had a fist tangled in someone’s jersey. The second time, even Coach looked furious in that controlled way that made grown men behave like children caught setting fires.
She watched Garrett in the box with his jaw clenched and blood bright at the corner of his mouth, his chest rising hard under the pads, eyes fixed somewhere across the ice but not really on it.
Logan skated by once and said something. Garrett didn’t smile. Didn’t chirp back. Didn’t do any of the things he usually did to make violence look like part of the game and not something older moving through him.
So after the final buzzer, after Briar won, despite Garrett trying to personally fistfight the entire opposing roster, after the crowd started spilling into the aisles and everyone around her buzzed with post-game noise, she moved.
The tunnel was colder than the stands, all concrete and rubber matting and the damp, metallic smell of hockey gear. Voices echoed from the locker room ahead, overlapping male noise and equipment hitting benches and someone laughing too loudly in that exhausted post-adrenaline way.
She slipped past a staff member who was too busy looking at a clipboard to care, turned the corner, and found Garrett standing alone near the wall.
He was still in most of his gear. Helmet off. Gloves gone. Hair damp and flattened at the sides, curls sticking up where he had run his hands through them. His head hung forward, both palms braced on his knees like he was trying to breathe the game out of himself and failing. Blood had dried at his lip again. His jaw worked once. Twice. The tendons in his neck stood out under the harsh tunnel light.
Her chest tightened so fast it hurt. “Garrett.”
His head snapped up. The second he saw her, everything in his face changed. He came back by inches, like her voice had reached into whatever ugly room he was in and opened a door.
“Hi,” he said, breathless, already straightening. Then again, rougher, like the first one had not been enough. “Hey.”
She closed the space before either of them had time to remember they weren’t supposed to do this where people could walk by.
“Hey.” Her hands went to his face immediately, careful around the split lip, thumbs brushing at the damp edges of his cheeks. “You good? What happened?”
Garrett let out a breath, eyes closing. His hands came up to cover hers for one second, pressing them harder to his face like he needed the contact more than he wanted to admit. “M’fine.”
“No, you’re not.”
His chest was still moving hard, the pads making him look even bigger, all post-game heat and sweat and the raw leftover violence of whatever had been eating at him on the ice. She slid one hand up into his hair, fingers pushing through the damp curls at his temple. His exhale shook.
“You alright?” she asked again, softer now.
He nodded, but it was a bad nod. A nod made out of stubbornness and breath and the fact that he had no idea what to do with her looking at him like this in a tunnel. His jaw shifted. His eyes opened, finding hers, and whatever he saw there made his whole face pull tight for half a second.
“Baby,” he murmured.
That did it. Here, in the tunnel, with the locker room noise around the corner and blood on his mouth and his breathing still rough from whatever fight he had nearly brought home from the ice, the word hit somewhere deeper.
She rose onto her toes and kissed him. It was meant to be small, it really was. A check-in. A reassurance. A brief press of her mouth to his.
Garrett made a low sound the second her lips touched his, and then his arms were around her waist, pulling her in properly, pads and all, crushing the space between them like he’d been waiting the whole night for something solid enough to hold.
The kiss turned immediately. His mouth opened under hers, hungry and rough and not careful enough at first, then careful all at once when she brushed his split lip and he hissed softly into her mouth.
She pulled back half an inch. “Sorry.”
“Don’t care,” he said, and kissed her again.
Everything from the game poured into it. The hits. The fights. The awful, tight look in his eyes from the penalty box. Her hands cold on the railing. The secret they’d been carrying around like something light when it had gotten heavier every time he looked at her across a room and didn’t come closer. Garrett’s fingers dug into her waist. Hers stayed in his hair, tugging lightly. He kissed like he was trying to get back into his own body through her mouth. And she let him.
Then someone behind them said, “Ohhhh shit.”
They broke apart so fast it was almost violent. Logan stood ten feet away with a towel slung around his neck, hair wet, mouth open in the kind of delighted grin usually reserved for a successful prank or Tucker injuring himself in a deeply avoidable way.
His eyes moved from Garrett’s arms around her waist, to her hands still caught in Garrett’s hair, to Garrett’s swollen mouth, and then back again. For one second, no one spoke.
Garrett’s arms didn’t leave her waist. She noticed that through the panic, through the sudden rush of heat to her face, through the knowledge that the entire delicate architecture of their secrecy had just been bodychecked into open air by John Logan and his shit-eating grin.
Garrett kept holding her.
Logan’s grin widened. “Was comin’ to check on the captain, but… shit.” He lifted both hands, backing away already, eyes bright with the kind of joy that meant the locker room was about to become a crime scene. “Guess he’s alright.”
“Logan,” Garrett said, low warning.
Logan only pointed at him, walking backward. “Nope. No. Don’t Logan me. You have been weird as fuck for weeks, man.”
Her stomach dropped and flipped at the same time.
Garrett’s jaw tightened. “Don’t–”
But Logan had already turned toward the locker room, voice rising with unholy glee. “You’ll never fucking guess what I just saw!”
The sound that came from the locker room was immediate. A burst of voices. Dean’s laugh cutting through first, bright and vicious. Tucker saying something too low to catch. Someone yelling, “What?” and Logan answering with, “Graham!” in the tone of a man unveiling evidence at trial.
She closed her eyes. Garrett dropped his forehead to hers.
For a second, neither of them moved. His breath was warm against her mouth, still uneven. Her hands had slipped from his hair to the sides of his neck. His gear pressed awkwardly against her chest.
Somewhere around the corner, the locker room erupted again, Dean’s voice now unmistakable. “No fucking way!”
Garrett exhaled, eyes closing. “Fuck.”
She huffed, because there was nothing else to do. A laugh, almost. A sigh. The sound of a girl watching the secret blow up and realising, somewhere under the horror, that she wasn't as upset as she should be.
“Yeah,” she whispered. “Fuck.”
His hands flexed at her waist. He didn’t move back.
This was the moment he could step away. Where he could put space between them and run a hand through his hair and say something easy, something Garrett-shaped and evasive, something that made the kiss look smaller than it was.
He could make it a joke before anyone else did. He could hide behind Logan’s big mouth and Dean’s inevitable commentary and the whole familiar machinery of the hockey house turning one private thing into public entertainment.
Instead he stayed with his forehead against hers, breathing hard, thumbs pressing into her waist through her coat.
Then Dean appeared around the corner, because the universe couldn’t let them have more than three seconds without sending in a rich boy with terrible timing.
He leaned one shoulder against the wall, grinning like Christmas had come early and wearing only half his gear. Logan popped up behind him, still delighted. Tucker stood a few steps back with his arms folded, looking resigned and not remotely surprised.
Dean’s eyes flicked over the two of them, still pressed together, Garrett’s hands still on her waist. His grin turned wicked. “Well, well, well.”
She groaned. “Don’t.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” Dean said, hand over his heart. “I would never.”
“You absolutely would.”
“I absolutely will,” he corrected. His eyes slid to Garrett, bright with evil. “Graham. Buddy. Pal. Teammate. You’ve been sneaking around with my ex?”
“She’s not your ex,” Garrett said immediately.
Dean’s grin widened. “Oh, interesting. Strong feelings from the captain.”
“She’s not,” Garrett repeated, jaw tightening.
She shouldn’t have enjoyed that. She did anyway.
Dean’s gaze moved to her, faux-wounded. “I thought we had something beautiful.”
“You were sleeping with six other girls while sleeping with me. You’re a pig.”
Logan made a strangled sound. Tucker’s mouth twitched.
Dean pointed at her. “See? This is why I missed you.”
Garrett’s hand tightened at her waist. “Dean.”
“Oh, relax.” Dean lifted both hands, but he was still grinning. “I’m not poaching. I have respect.”
Logan leaned around Dean, eyes shining. “So how long?”
“Nope,” Garrett said.
“How long?” Logan repeated, louder.
She looked at Garrett. Garrett looked at her. For one brief, stupid second they both seemed to consider lying. It was a beautiful instinct, really. Loyal to the end. Completely useless now that Garrett’s mouth was visibly swollen from kissing her and his hands had still not left her body.
“Three weeks,” she said.
Garrett’s head snapped toward her.
“What?” she said. “He was going to keep asking.”
Logan’s mouth dropped open. Dean shouted, “Three weeks?” Tucker just closed his eyes, nodding once to himself.
“I knew something was up,” Tucker said.
Garrett looked at him sharply. “You did not.”
Tucker opened his eyes. “She came downstairs for water in your shirt and let me think she’d slept with Dean.”
Dean turned slowly. “I’m sorry, what?”
She winced. “That was strategic.”
“You were in my house,” Dean said, pointing at himself, “using me as a slutty decoy?”
“Yes.”
Dean looked moved. “Honoured.”
Garrett made a sound under his breath. “Jesus Christ.”
Logan clapped Dean on the shoulder. “Come on. Let the lovebirds emotionally process before Coach catches Garrett making out in a tunnel like a freshman.”
Garrett finally looked over. “Dude.”
“What? That was supportive.”
Dean pointed at her as Logan started dragging him backward. “We’re talking later. I have questions. Boundary-respecting questions, but questions.”
“No, we’re not,” she called back.
“We absolutely are.”
Tucker gave her a small, sympathetic nod as he turned. “Congratulations. And good luck.”
“Thanks,” she said, because honestly that seemed appropriate.
The three of them disappeared back toward the locker room, taking the noise with them in pieces. Logan already yelling something that sounded like, “Three weeks, boys!” Dean making wounded noises. Tucker telling someone to put on pants.
Garrett laughed, low and real, and the sound loosened the last tight thing still sitting under her ribs. She looked up at him, at the bruise on his cheek and the split in his mouth and the ridiculous, beautiful, inconvenient boy who had somehow gone from secret bad idea to the person she walked into tunnels for without thinking.
“So,” she said, brushing her thumb carefully under the cut at his lip. “Guess we’re blown.”
His grin came back slowly, cocky at the edges and warm all the way through. “Yeah.”
“And you still have to explain why you were trying to fight half of Eastwood tonight.”
The grin faded by a fraction, but he didn’t look away. “Later?”
She studied him for a second, then nodded. “Later.”
His arms tightened. “Okay.”
“Okay.”
Then Garrett kissed her again, because being exposed to the entire hockey house hadn’t cured him of bad timing. She kissed him back anyway, smiling into it when the locker room erupted once more at whatever Logan had just announced.
This time, when Garrett’s hand slid openly to the small of her back and held her there, neither of them moved away.
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summary - the hawks have won a game and are celebrating in Malone’s, where you work, and then everything goes wrong
pairing - garrett graham x girlfriend!reader
word count - +3.6k
The Hawks had won yet another game.
They were getting closer and closer to winning all their games this season. This of course meant two things; 1) A fuck load of celebrations and 2) A very happy boyfriend for you.
You were working the late shift when news of Briar U’s win came through, which instantly alerted you to prepare for an influx of people. Everyone knew the Hawks watering hole after a game was Malone’s. And they also knew it was only because their captain’s girlfriend worked there.
Garrett and the rest of the guys walked through Malone’s doors just after 8PM.
A chorus of cheers erupted through the small diner. You cheered and clapped from behind the counter.
Garrett smiled as people patted him on the back but his eyes instantly searched for you. It was as if his hold demeanor lit up when he saw you.
Your boyfriend wasted no time cutting through the throngs of people and around the counter, and you wasted no time bringing him down to your height for a celebratory kiss.
The cheers only got louder.
Your hands threaded through the curls on the back of his neck as you kept his lips pressed against yours. The kiss was sweet and sticky.
Garrett’s hand was just about to cup over your ass, but Della whipped it with a towel before he had the chance.
Garrett pulled away from your kiss reluctantly, causing you to actually whine.
“What the— Della!”
“She’s on the clock.” Della raised her eyebrows at Garrett, as if he was the one who initiated the kiss and not you. You could never do any wrong in Della’s eyes.
“But…”
“Ah ah. Get.” She chased him out from behind the counter.
You had to hide a laugh, because seeing Garrett get chased away from you by a woman twice his age was quite the spectacle.
Garrett got sucked back into the crowds of people celebrating.
He looked over his shoulder at you as Logan pulled him away, pouting like a child who had just lost their favourite toy. You smiled at him before returning to work.
——
A couple of hours later, you were still busy.
You hadn’t had a chance for a break, which was making you cranky, and you were doing your best to ignore the girls who had swarmed your boyfriend.
Garrett, of course, looked very uninterested with them and was mainly interacting with his friends, but it didn’t stop the simmering jealousy building up inside you.
“Another beer.” A guy appeared in front of you, slamming down his empty glass on the counter.
The guy looked completely drunk. His eyes bloodshot red and a mix of drink and dribble down his blue top.
“Was there a please in there somewhere?” You asked sarcastically.
“Just get me another beer.” He sneered.
Okay… If he wanted to be a prick, so could you.
“ID?”
You held out your hand.
“What?”
“ID, please.”
“You didn’t need my ID before.” He scoffed.
“Well I do now.”
The guy slammed his hands down on the counter and you tried your best not to flinch. You’d dealt with pricks like this before.
“Hey. Everything okay?” Garrett appeared next to the guy, arms folded across this chest.
If it weren’t for the fact that you were severely hangry and your patience wasn’t being tested by this guy, you might’ve swooned over how hot your boyfriend looked without his jacket on. There was a reason you always (jokingly) bit on his biceps.
“She won’t give me a beer.” The guy slurred.
“Maybe you don’t need another.” Garrett was clearly trying to deescalate the situation for you.
“It’s her job to serve beers.”
“And I said—.”
“Garrett, it’s fine.” You sighed, putting a new pint of beer in front of the guy.
“There we go. Now that wasn’t hard, was it princess?”
Garrett unfolded his arms, looking ready to punch this guy into next week - which was terrifying, considering it was only Wednesday.
You knew that if Garrett started something he would hate himself later, so you were only protecting him when you snapped, “Garrett. I said it’s fine.”
“Yeah, listen to your bitch Graham.”
Garrett couldn’t hold himself back then.
He used both of his hands to pull the guy up by his disgusting shirt. The guy - who’s name was still a mystery to you - physically whitened as it suddenly dawned on him that he’d messed with the wrong guy.
Garrett was taller than the guy, which gave him the upper hand to talk down to him to remind him of his place.
“Speak to her like that again and I’ll make sure you’re never able to speak again.”
“You won’t touch me.” The guy tried to act brave, but his lips trembled as he spoke.
“There’s more than one way to silence a man.”
Garrett let the guy go roughly.
You took note of how many onlookers there were, who clearly thought there was going to be a more interesting fight than there was.
This is exactly what you didn’t want.
You took the beer back from the counter as the guy scrambled to leave Malone’s.
Garrett looked like he was still trying to evaporate his anger when he turned back to face you.
“Baby—.”
“Why couldn’t you just leave it?” Your tone was angry as you wiped the counter down, and continued with other jobs.
“He was being a dick.”
“Yeah, most guys in a bar are.”
“Well, sorry for stepping in?” Garrett questioned, leaning against the bar.
You stopped what you were doing to stand in front of him from the other side of the bar.
“I said it was fine. You should’ve left it.”
“Well, I didn’t like the way he was speaking to you.” Garrett scoffed.
“I can handle myself.”
“I didn’t say you couldn’t.”
“You didn’t have to.” You said, effectively ending the conversation by walking away into the kitchen to get away.
You’d never been good at the difficult parts of a relationship, or in other words ‘the real stuff’. It was difficult trying to understand and accept that you had someone else on your side, and they weren’t expecting anything in return.
Garrett was the first boyfriend you’d had who was willing to defend you and it be as simple as that. It was hard to wrap that concept up in your brain.
“You good honey?” Della asked.
You realised you were standing in the way of the kitchen door, after having come through to catch your breath for a moment.
“Yeah.”
You weren’t even sure you’d convinced yourself.
“Jonah’s agreed to lock-up if you want to finish at midnight, rather than close?” She asked you. You knew with Della, though, that this wasn’t a request but rather her telling you to finish at midnight.
“Thank you.”
You looked at the clock in the kitchen, which told you you only had an hour left of this shift.
You could do this.
——
Turns out, you could not do this.
Your bad mood only worsened with time.
You hadn’t eaten since lunchtime. You hadn’t sat down in so long you couldn’t even take a guess how long it had been. You’d dealt with rude customers all night - one of which had subsequently caused an argument to happen with your boyfriend. And perhaps worst of all, you’d had to watch girls throw themselves at Garrett all night.
He was very publicly unavailable.
That didn’t seem to stop these girls though.
There had been one girl that had been really trying hard with him all night. She was everything you weren’t. Her hair, face, height and everything in between were the complete opposite to you.
She had you feeling insecure for no reason.
The girl had managed to squeeze herself onto the end of the booth, next to Garrett, and had been chatting to him for a good twenty minutes now.
He didn’t even look annoyed that she was there.
Was he punishing you for being a bitch to him before?
“Y/N, doll, will you collect dirty glasses please?” Della asked you.
“Sure.”
You picked up an empty crate tray and made your way around the counter, venturing into the belly of the diner for the first time tonight.
You started picking glasses up closest to the door, slowly making your way around the room.
In your head it was very obvious to everyone else in the room that you were saving Garrett’s table until last, because you were dreading it, but obviously no one else was actually thinking that.
The tray was nearly full when you reached Garrett’s table.
“Y/N!” Dean shouted, starting a chorus of cheers from the guys.
Logan stood beside the booth and pulled you into a side hug when he saw you.
Normally you would’ve melted into the hug and hugged him back, but you really weren’t feeling it tonight.
The anxiety in your stomach from the argument with Garrett was bubbling over-time. It didn’t help that the girl was still sitting beside him even though you’d come over.
You tried your best to smile as you took their empty glasses from the table and stacked them on your tray.
“Can we get another round of drinks?” The girl asked before you could leave.
Yet another person who had impeccable manners.
“Sure.” You nodded.
“Garrett, what are you drinking?” She asked, daring to put her hand on your boyfriend’s forearm.
“He only has one drink—.”
“One drinks my max—.”
You and Garrett both spoke at the same time.
You looked at him to find him smiling at you, a sort of truce lingering in the air between you both.
“Yeah, okay. Still another round of drinks.” The girl said.
As soon as you turned to walk away you heard her laugh with her friends. Normally you wouldn’t care, but you were pretty sure she was laughing at you.
She shouldn’t have tested you when you had so little patience left.
You slammed the crate of drinks on the nearest table and turned back to her, making everyone in the space around you stare.
The commotion had set Garrett on high alert.
You walked back to the table, stopping in front of her.
“Anna, is it?” You asked.
“Paloma.” She snickered, offended that you didn’t know her name.
“Right. Well, Paloma, I would appreciate it greatly if you could stop fawning over my boyfriend.”
The smile you gave her was anything but nice.
“Your boyfriend?”
You nodded.
“Your boyfriend is Garrett Graham?” She laughed. Her friends beside her also laughed.
You breathed out through your nose heavily, trying to keep your emotions in check. It was proving difficult.
And because you were so high on anxiety and adrenaline, you couldn’t help what your next few words were, “You come across as a bit of a slut when you’re trying to latch onto a guy who’s taken.”
You felt instant regret at your choice of words. Even the guys in the booth looked taken aback, because they’d never seen this side of you before.
Paloma scoffed, before standing up from the booth.
“Ohhh shit.” Tucker said quietly.
The rest of Malone’s had gone quiet after seeing the rising tension between you and Paloma.
“What did you just call me?”
“I’m sorry - I shouldn’t have said that.” You sighed.
“Sorry is what you’re about to be.”
Your reflexes were a second too late as Paloma struck you around the cheek with her hand.
Your head physically turned from the force of her hand, causing you to stumble so far back that somehow you ended up tipping over the tray of dirty glasses you’d collected, triggering your inability to balance and fall onto the floor with the glasses smashing all around you.
There was a collection of shocked gasps and screams from the fallen drinks.
It had only taken about five seconds to happen.
“What the fuck!” Garrett shouted.
The rest of the guys pitched in with the swearing and other girls swarmed Paloma like she was dead meat.
Whilst the chaos ensued around you, you tried your best to process what had just happened.
Your hands pricked with pain as you picked them up from the floor where they’d softened your fall. Tiny shards of glass were stuck in your palms and there was a fair amount of blood too.
Your cheek stung like hell.
It was inevitable that when the moment caught up to you, your eyes started to pool with tears.
Garrett immediately came into focus in front of you, crouching so he didn’t kneel in the broken glass.
“Hey. Hey, baby look at me.” He said softly, cupping the cheek you didn’t just get bitch-slapped in and turning your face towards him.
He took note of how red your cheek was, a slight cut there from where Paloma’s nails must’ve caught. He looked so worried. You could tell, because he wasn’t focusing on your eyes or lips for once.
Your eyes looked down at your palms, the stinging sensations increasing tenfold.
“Everyone out!” Della shouted from somewhere.
People started scrambling around you, which made you flinch in panic that someone may trample you.
“It’s okay. I’ve got you.” Garrett said calmly. “You’re okay.”
“Di Laurentis, make yourself useful.” Della handed Dean a broom.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“C’mon. Let’s move out of the way.” Garrett said.
He scooped his arms underneath you and picked you up.
You wriggled a little, not wanting your boyfriend to feel like he had to carry you - especially after a brutal game of hockey where, no doubt, his limbs were still aching from.
“Hold still.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve said that about ten times tonight and none of them have been true.”
It was so annoying when he was right.
You settled into his hold as he carried you over to sit down in a booth far away from the mess. The last few stragglers were leaving now, except for yours and Garrett’s friends who were helping to clean up.
You guys were all like family, so you understood why none of them were leaving.
Garrett thanked Tucker when he brought over a small first aid kit, before he left you two alone again.
Your head was resting on Garrett’s shoulder as he had you sitting sideways on his lap. Your bruising cheek was visible for Garrett to see and wince at the intensity of it.
Garrett started pulling bits out of the first aid that he needed.
“I shouldn’t have called her a slut.”
“Maybe so, but she never should have hit you.”
“Oh, like you and that guy.” You reminded him of earlier.
“That was different. I just lightly threatened him.”
You didn’t want to start another argument about how it wasn’t different. Not when you felt like shit.
Garrett gently took one of your hands and started carefully picking out the shards of glass with some tweezers. He was so focused, eyebrows furrowed and lips pursed.
You let yourself close your eyes for a moment.
It was insane that you’d been waiting for a break all evening and yet this was how you were receiving it - bloodied and exhausted in the arms of your boyfriend. It was slightly bittersweet.
“I hated her.”
“Paloma?”
You nodded and looked up at him. “She wouldn’t leave you alone.”
“Baby…”
“I know she wasn’t your fault. You weren’t even encouraging her. But I was right across the room from you and I… I just felt so stupid.”
“That’s not stupid.” Garrett continued plucking out glass, “For the record, I felt stupid too.”
“You did?”
“I should’ve just backed off when you told me too.”
“Garrett…” Your eyes softened.
“No. I still would’ve kicked his ass if he had touched you, but I should’ve listened to you.”
An understanding passed over you both.
Neither of you had done the right or wrong thing. You’d both just been humans making human mistakes, but it was owning up to and fixing them that made you just right for each other.
You brought out the best side to each other.
Garrett went back to removing the glass chips from your palms and you closed your eyes again, sitting in the quiet of the moment with him.
“You better not be crashing out on me.” Garrett mumbled.
Your eyes stayed closed as you smiled, your face protesting from the movement.
“I’m not.”
It was a few minutes later when Garrett had finished pulling the glass out of both your palms.
“This might sting.” He said.
You winced as he wiped over your cuts with antiseptic wipes. He kissed the top of your forehead with a quiet apology each time you flinched.
“Let me see you for a minute.”
“You are seeing me.”
“I want to see your eyes.”
You opened them slowly. No doubt they still looked a little glassy from the build up of tears that you were too stubborn to let out.
Garrett’s eyes were focused on yours. He was looking deep into your soul, like he was really trying to make sure that you were doing better.
A curl had fallen onto his forehead and you reached up to push it back. It was only then that you noticed he’d placed an obscene number of plasters all over your palm, which you couldn’t help but laugh at.
“This might be overkill.” You snickered.
“There’s no such thing.”
“There’s one, two… Five plasters.”
“Exactly. It’s not overkill.”
You rolled your eyes playfully.
Garrett caught your hand in his, covering yours entirely with the large span of his. It was little things like that which made you feel entirely safe with him.
“You know, I wasn’t trying to make you look weak earlier.” Garrett said, breaking the silence around your argument.
“I know.” You looked up at him so he could see the truth in your eyes.
“Then why were you so pissed?”
You shrugged, “I was tired.”
“Baby…”
“Genuinely. I promise. I was hungry. That girl, Paloma, was driving me insane. We had argued and it felt like everything was a little too much. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“No it wasn’t okay to snap like that. I’m sorry so please forgive me.”
“I already have.”
He leant down to kiss you. It was way less passionate than earlier on in the night, but with the burning pain from your cheek this was about all you could manage.
Garrett was very careful and gentle. He pulled back when you’d winced one too many times. Once again, you whined from the loss of contact.
“Need to be careful, baby.” He smiled as you puckered your lips to try and kiss him again.
“I am.”
Garrett gave you one more kiss to satisfy you, before pulling away entirely.
“Let’s get you home, yeah?”
“Okay.”
——
You all got back to the Off Campus house a little after midnight, since Della let you go home early.
You were tucked into Garrett’s side on the sofa downstairs, his oversized college hoodie on and your favourite comfortable joggers on too.
He hadn’t let you separate from his side since the whole showdown with Paloma.
“Thank you.” You said to Tucker - ever the caregiver - as he handed you a cup of tea.
Garrett nodded his head to his friend in thanks.
“That was a gnarly fight, L/N.” Dean said as he played Mario Kart with Logan.
“Dean.” Garrett warned.
“Sorry dad.” Dean joked, causing Garrett to launch a pillow at him.
“Seriously. Are you okay though?” Tucker asked as he settled down on the other side of you.
“I’m okay, Tuck.”
“Cause we’ll beat down her brother.” Dean suggested.
You turned to Garrett, peering at him around the hood you’d pulled up over your head, “Is he serious?”
Garrett made a face that told you Dean may-or-may-not be serious.
“Just say the word and we’ll ride at dawn.” Dean said, making you laugh.
Garrett welcomed the feel of your body moving from laughter, tugging you closer into his body with his arm. You couldn’t physically get any closer to him and yet somehow he managed it.
“You’re going to look so badass with that bruise.” Tucker said.
“Tuck… Garrett’s going to ride at dawn if you don’t stop saying shit like that.” Logan piped up, causing Tucker to cower and Garrett nod his head in agreement. Of course he wouldn’t, but he didn’t mind holding the threat over Tuck’s head either.
“How can I look badass when I’ve been wrapped in so many plasters that you can’t even see my skin anymore?”
“You always look badass.” Garrett squeezed your arm.
“Now you’re just getting corny, Graham.” You rolled your eyes and tried to hide the smile on your face.
“I’m okay with that.” He kissed the okay side of your face, “Worth it to see that smile.”
As the guys returned to the game of Mario Kart, with Tucker giving unfiltered commentary, you closed your eyes as you lay against your boyfriend.
You calmed down a while ago. The anxiety had left your body, but it didn’t hurt to still be kept safe against Garrett.
With your eyes closed you could feel the hood of Garrett’s hoodie being peeled back from your cheek. It was no surprise when you opened your eyes to see Garrett doing a quick check of your cheek.
“Stop checking if it’s still there.”
“Can’t help it.” He pouted.
“I’m okay.”
“And I believe that now.”
You hummed unconvinced.
Garrett only smiled before tucking the hood back around your face.
He still checked on the bruise throughout the rest of the night anyway.
Warning(s): Fluff, mild body insecurity/anxiety, Garrett being an absolute sweetheart.
The invitation had been taped to the fridge for a week, a glossy cardstock reminder of your impending doom: The Annual Briar Hockey Kickoff Pool Party.
To anyone else, it sounded like the event of the semester. Sun, music, free alcohol, and a house full of elite athletes. But to you? It felt like a public execution.
You stood in front of the full-length mirror in Garrett’s bedroom, staring at your reflection in your swimsuit. The fabric dug in slightly at your hips, and every perceived flaw, every soft curve, and every insecurity you usually hid beneath oversized sweaters felt magnified under the harsh bedroom lighting.
Everyone there is going to look like a Sports Illustrated model, your brain whispered. You’re going to stick out like a sore thumb.
A wave of sudden, suffocating panic washed over you. Your throat tightened, and before you could stop them, hot tears spilled over your eyelashes. You quickly sat on the edge of the bed, burying your face in your hands, trying to breathe through the sudden tightness in your chest.
You didn't hear the door click open, but you definitely felt the shift in the room when Garrett walked in.
"Hey, beautiful, Tucker is downstairs honking his horn like a maniac because—" Garrett stopped dead in his tracks. The easy, cocky grin vanished from his face, replaced instantly by pure concern. He dropped his gym bag to the floor with a heavy thud. "Hey. Hey, what's wrong?"
In a second, he was on his knees in front of you, his large hands gently prying your wrists away from your face. His gray eyes scanned your tear-stained cheeks, full of a fierce, protective worry.
"I can't go," you choked out, your voice small and thick with embarrassment. "I can't go to the party, Garrett. You should just go without me."
Garrett frowned, his thumbs softly wiping away the tears tracking down your cheeks. "What do you mean I should go without you? I don't want to go without you. Did someone say something? Did Tucker open his mouth? Because I will punch him, I don't care if it's preseason—"
"No! No, no one said anything," you interrupted, looking down at your lap because looking at his perfect, sculpted chest—already shirtless and clad in boardshorts—was making you feel infinitely worse. "It's just… the swimsuit. And the party. Everyone is going to look perfect, Garrett. The hockey girls, the cheerleaders… and then there’s me. I just don't feel good. I feel… big. And soft. And I don’t want people looking at me and wondering why you're with me."
The room went dead silent.
For a terrifying second, you thought you had annoyed him. But when you finally dared to look up, Garrett wasn't annoyed. He looked completely heartbroken.
"Is that really what you think?" he asked, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly register.
You shrugged miserably, a fresh tear escaping.
Garrett let out a long breath, leaning forward so his forehead rested against yours for a brief, grounding moment. When he pulled back, his hands moved from your face down to your waist, his palms warm against your skin. He didn't pinch, he didn't adjust—he just held you, his grip firm and steady.
"Look at me," he commanded softly. You met his gaze. "You are hands down the most beautiful person in every single room you walk into. And I’m not just saying that because I’m your boyfriend and it’s my job. I’m saying it because it’s a fact."
"Garrett—"
"Nope, shut up, I’m talking," he interrupted, a faint, tender smile tugging at the corner of his lips. "You think I give a shit about what anyone else at that party thinks? Half of those guys are idiots who couldn't find a book in a library, let alone dictate what’s attractive. And the girls? They aren't you. I don't want them. I want you."
His hands slid back up to cup your face again, forcing you to take in the absolute sincerity radiating from him. Garrett Graham was a lot of things—cocky, competitive, a golden-boy captain—but he never lied to you.
"Every single inch of you is perfect," he murmured, his eyes dropping to your lips before snapping back to yours. "If anyone dares to look at you and wonder why I’m with you, it’s because they’re wondering how a guy like me scored someone so completely out of his league. Because that’s the truth. I’m the lucky one here."
Your breath hitched, the tight knot of anxiety in your chest finally starting to unravel under the sheer weight of his devotion. "You really mean that?"
"With everything I've got," he said fiercely. He leaned in, pressing a soft, lingering kiss to your lips. It tasted like mint and felt like safety. When he pulled away, he gave your waist a playful little squeeze. "Now, if you want to stay home, we will stay home. I’ll text Logan and tell him we’re out, and we can order a pizza and watch whatever terrible reality TV show you want. I don’t care about the party. I just care about you."
You looked down at your swimsuit again. It didn't magically change, and the insecurities didn't completely vanish—that's not how anxiety works. But looking at Garrett, seeing the absolute worship in his eyes, made the voice in your head feel a whole lot smaller.
You wanted to go. You wanted to see him be the captain, wanted to laugh with his friends, and honestly? You wanted to wear the damn swimsuit.
"Can we… can I wear one of your oversized button-downs over it? Just for a bit?" you asked quietly.
Garrett’s face lit up with a brilliant, blinding smile. "You can have my entire wardrobe. Hold on."
He bounced up, walking over to his closet and tossing a lightweight, unbuttoned white linen shirt onto the bed. "Here. It'll look hot on you anyway."
You let out a wet laugh, wiping your eyes one last time as you slipped your arms into the shirt. It smelled entirely like him—mahogany, cedarwood, and clean laundry. It draped down past your hips, giving you the perfect amount of comfort.
"Better?" Garrett asked, walking back over and wrapping his arms around your waist from behind, looking at your joint reflection in the mirror. He rested his chin on your shoulder, his chest pressed flat against your back.
You looked at the two of you in the glass. He looked big and protective; you looked safe and held.
"Better," you whispered, turning your head to kiss his cheek.
"Good," Garrett smirked, his usual playful arrogance returning now that he knew you were okay. He nipped playfully at your earlobe. "Because you look incredible. And honestly, I’m probably going to spend the whole night trying to keep my hands to myself, so really, you’re the one causing the problems here."
"Oh, shut up, Graham," you laughed, shoving his chest playfully as you grabbed your sunglasses.
"Never," he grinned, taking your hand and lacing his fingers tightly through yours as he led you out into the afternoon sun.
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✶ you make garrett believe he forgot about date night.
002. WARNINGS !
✶ garrett calls you ‘honey’. another old tiktok trend.
word count : 1,6k
gif by @clary-jace
Garrett was staying at your dorm after a long day of hockey practice.
It was one of your favourite routines. He’d show up exhausted, his hair still slightly damp from a post-practice shower, and immediately collapse onto your bed beside you. The two of you would curl up together, pick a movie, and inevitably end up falling asleep halfway through it. Between your classes and his practices, you were usually both too tired to make it to the credits.
But today, you had a different idea.
Today, you had let boredom take the reins and found yourself influenced by a viral trend.
Your boyfriend was one of the most attentive men on the planet. In fact, you’d go as far as to say he was the most attentive. Which meant him forgetting about date night was simply impossible.
If Garrett made a commitment to you, he followed through. Every single time.
Sometimes, it was honestly a little annoying how attentive he could be, because he remembered everything.
The day you first kissed. The first time you said “I love you”. Even the exact moment you stole one of his hoodies and never gave it back.
You weren’t sure if he kept some secret list hidden somewhere or if an entire section of his brain had simply been taken over by thoughts of you, but one thing was certain: if there was a date night planned, Garrett Graham would remember it.
Which was exactly why it would be so funny to convince him he’d forgotten one.
You could already picture the confusion and disbelief on his face. The way he’d rack his brain trying to figure out how he could have possibly let something like that slip his mind.
A few minutes later, a knock sounded at your door.
You quickly adjusted the black dress you were wearing—far too formal for the quiet movie night you’d originally planned with Garrett—and crossed the room to answer it.
The second you opened the door, a smile tugged at your lips.
Your boyfriend stood there, bag slung over one shoulder, looking unfairly handsome for someone who had just spent hours getting checked into boards by grown men.
Almost immediately, his brows drew together as his gaze swept over your dress. But before he could ask any questions, you rose onto your toes and pressed a soft kiss to his lips.
The effect was immediate.
His bag slipped from his shoulder and hit the floor with a dull thud as one hand found the small of your back, pulling you closer. He kissed you back without hesitation, already melting into the familiar greeting.
When you finally pulled away, you tilted your head.
“Is that what you’re wearing?”
Garrett blinked, then he looked down at himself. Gray sweatpants and a black hoodie. Standard post-practice attire.
“Uh... yeah?” He said slowly. “Why?”
You arranged your features into the best combination of confusion and disappointment you could manage. “Did you forget?”
His frown deepened as he stepped inside, shutting the door behind him and shrugging off his hoodie. Beneath it was the black compression shirt he always wore after practice.
A criminal piece of clothing, in your humble opinion.
The fabric stretched across his shoulders and arms far too well, making it significantly harder to stay focused on your prank. For a brief moment, you considered abandoning the whole thing altogether in favour of admiring your boyfriend.
Unfortunately for Garrett, you were committed to the bit.
“Forget what, honey?”
His eyes drifted around your dorm room, taking in details automatically. From the makeup bag spread across your vanity, to the leather jacket draped over your desk chair that looked suspiciously similar to the one currently missing from his closet.
Then his attention returned to you.
“Our date?” You said, tilting your head as if he was the one being ridiculous. Which was especially unfair considering you had invented this entire situation purely for your own entertainment.
You watched him go completely still for a second.
Then, very slowly, he repeated, “...Our date?”
“Yeah.” You smiled brightly. “I’m really excited. You picked a good spot.”
“I did?”
The uncertainty in his voice nearly made you break. He bent down to grab his phone from his bag before sitting on the edge of your bed.
“Yeah,” you said casually, settling onto your desk chair in front of your makeshift vanity. “You didn’t really forget, did you?”
“No. No...” He shook his head, already scrolling through his phone. “Just checking our reservation.”
You bit the inside of your cheek to stop yourself from laughing.
“I’m so glad you picked that restaurant. We haven’t been there in forever, and their food is amazing.”
Continuing your performance, you grabbed your mascara and began applying it as if this conversation were completely normal.
Across the room, Garrett was staring at his phone with the concentration of a man trying to defuse a bomb.
“What did you…” He lowered the phone and cleared his throat. “What did you order last time?”
“We ordered a bunch of things to share, remember?”
He hummed, the sound coming out noticeably higher-pitched than usual.
To be fair, it wasn’t an incredibly descriptive answer. Garrett’s appetite was enormous thanks to hockey, and you could never decide what looked best on a menu. Most date nights ended with the two of you ordering half the restaurant and splitting everything between yourselves.
Still, you could practically see him filing the information away, desperately trying to determine whether this was a real memory he’d somehow lost or one you were creating in real time.
“You’ve been looking forward to this for a while, huh?”
“Mhm.”
His eyes narrowed slightly.
“Do you remember the last time we went?”
“Not really, no.” You unscrewed your lip gloss and began applying it. “But it’s been a while.”
“Huh.” A few seconds passed, then he asked, “And I can’t wear what I’m wearing right now?”
“Garrett, you planned this date.” You turned in your chair to look at him. “You specifically told me to dress semi-formal.”
“Yeah, obviously. I know.” The immediate response was reassuring, but the lingering frown wasn’t. “Just checking,” he added quickly. “Keeping you on your toes and all that.”
You stared at him and he stared right back, attempting what was perhaps the worst act of confidence you'd ever seen.
“Sure…” you said slowly, fighting to keep a laugh from escaping.
Garrett nodded once, as if he’d successfully recovered the situation, immediately grabbing his phone again. Apparently, whatever fictional reservation he was searching for had yet to reveal itself.
“Are you excited?” You asked innocently. “Because from where I’m sitting, you don’t exactly look excited for our date night.”
His head snapped up.
“What? I’m so excited.”
Before you could respond, he pushed himself off the bed and crossed the room, coming to stand behind your chair.
“Honey,” he said, resting his hands on your shoulders, “This is going to be the best date of your life.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really.” The answer came in the most ‘duh’ tone imaginable.
As if the very suggestion that he wouldn't be excited to take you on a date was completely absurd. As if he hadn’t spent the last ten minutes conducting a full-scale investigation into a restaurant that didn't exist.
You bit the inside of your cheek.
At that point, you decided it was probably best to abandon the prank before things escalated any further. Because now Garrett Graham had something to prove.
And knowing your boyfriend, that was a dangerous thing.
Another five minutes and he’d probably be making dinner reservations, buying flowers, and somehow chartering a helicopter just to demonstrate that he was, in fact, capable of pulling off the best date night of your life on a moment's notice.
“It's just…” You rose from your chair and turned to face him, leaving only a few inches between you. Tilting your head back, you met his gaze. “How can you be excited for a date that doesn't exist?”
For a second, Garrett simply stared at you, and then you watched the realization hit in real time. Confusion flashed across his face first, followed quickly by suspicion, before finally settling into understanding as all the pieces clicked into place and he realized exactly what you’d been doing.
His eyes narrowed at the burst of laughter that spilled from your lips.
“Baby, there’s no date,” you admitted, burying your face against his chest as you wrapped your arms around his waist. Looking up at him, you were immediately met with the most offended expression you’d ever seen on your boyfriend.
His mouth opened, then closed again as he searched for a response. For a moment, it looked like he was about to launch into an argument, but instead he simply shook his head, pulled you closer, and wrapped his arms around you.
“There can be, though.”
Another laugh escaped you.
“It’s okay. It was just a prank.”
“Yeah, but you’re already dressed up for that fake date, so…”
“So?” You prompted.
“I’m taking you out.”
You blinked. “Oh, really?”
“Yup.”
The answer came without a second of hesitation. Still holding onto you with one arm, he reached over and grabbed the leather jacket hanging from your chair, along with his bag.
“Let’s go,” he said matter-of-factly. “We’ll stop by my place so I can change, and then we can go to that place you’ve been wanting to try.”
You huffed out a laugh.
“There is no place, Garrett.”
“Then make one up.” He slung his bag over his shoulder and pointed at you. “You’re the one who invented an entire date night. Surely you can invent a restaurant, too.”
You laughed again as he reached for your hand.
Somehow, despite being the one who’d gotten pranked, your boyfriend had still found a way to turn it into an actual date.
Which, admittedly, was a very Garrett Graham thing to do.
NOTE : listened to ‘girls’ by kid laroi basically on loop while writing this. also, tell me if these tiktok trend pranks are something you guys like and want to see more of! (and tell me which pranks you’d like to read…). let’s wake up the garrett graham is the boyfriendest boyfriend agenda.
