#bunnywrites

Finals week had reduced you to a concerning version of yourself. An intense, borderline doped up version of you that scared your roommates into hiding. 

At some point over the last ten days, you had consecutively survived almost exclusively on iced coffee and protein bars, cried in the library stairwell over a statistics quiz worth five percent of your grade, accidentally highlighted an entire textbook chapter because you stopped processing colour properly around three in the morning, and fallen asleep sitting upright against Logan’s shoulder while trying to explain some bullshit economic theory to him.

Which meant two things.

One: You were exhausted and so ready to finally dedicate more than ten minutes to washing your hair.

And two:

The entire hockey team had collectively decided about three days into you bear grylls level study marathon, that you would have to be, as they liked to call it, “reintroduced into society” the second said exams ended. 

Which was how you ended up tipsy for the first time in months, tucked against Logan’s side in the middle of some overcrowded off-campus party while music rattled the walls hard enough to make the floor vibrate beneath your shoes.

“You alive over there?” Logan asked, leaning closer so you could hear him properly.

You looked up from where your cheek was half pressed against his shoulder.

“Barely.”

“Yeah, I can tell.”

“You know,” you informed him seriously, “I think I deserve financial compensation for finals week.”

Logan snorted softly.

“I’ll let the university know.”

“You should.”

His hand stayed warm at your waist while people moved around you in loud, blurry motion. The house smelled faintly like cheap alcohol and somebody’s burnt pizza rolls, humid from too many people crammed into too small a space, but tucked into the corner of the couch beside Logan, everything felt strangely soft around the edges instead of overwhelming.

Mostly because he kept checking on you every five seconds. In a quintessential John Logan way, that made you feel unreasonably fuzzy inside.

Especially when he remembered how much water you’d had, quietly traded your vodka mixer for a weaker one halfway through the night without making a thing of it, and kept rubbing his thumb against your hip absentmindedly every time he noticed your eyes drifting shut.

“You tired?” he asked eventually.

“A little.”

“You wanna head back?”

You considered it seriously for approximately half a second before nodding.

“Can we order cheesy fries on the way home?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“How coherent you are right now.”

You gasped softly. “I’m incredibly coherent.”

“You tried to unlock the bathroom with your student ID .”

“That was one time.”

“It was four times.”

You laughed hard enough your forehead dropped briefly against his shoulder, and Logan’s mouth twitched immediately at the sound.

By the time Logan was steering you carefully out of the crowded basement party with one warm hand settled at your lower back, your brain felt pleasantly untangled for the first time in weeks, limbs loose and warm beneath your coat while cold night air hit your cheeks hard enough to make you laugh.

The walk back to the hockey house wasn’t far, cold night air cutting through the leftover warmth of the party enough to sober you steadily with every block. Logan kept his arm around your shoulders the entire time anyway, occasionally glancing down at you like he was recalculating your risk assessment every few minutes.

“You good?” he asked immediately, glancing down at you as you stumbled slightly against him on the sidewalk.

You grinned up at him.

“Perfect.”

“That sounded ominous.”

“It’s because I’m whimsical now.”

“You’re tipsy.”

“I’m whimsical and tipsy.”

“Mm.”

“And for the record,” you continued, poking lightly at his chest through his sweatshirt, “you also drank.”

“I had like two beers over four hours.”

“So you admit it.”

“I admit nothing.”

Logan tightened his arm around you automatically when you leaned more of your weight into him. The walk back blurred pleasantly around the edges, campus quieter now except for distant music and occasional bursts of laughter drifting from frat houses further down the street.

By the time the hockey house came into view, your head felt clearer than it had left the party, comfortably warm instead of blurry, thoughts slower around the edges but still fully there.

Your heels clicked unevenly against the pavement.

Logan slowed instinctively to match you, that stupid fond warmth settled in your chest again.

You stared at him for a second too long.

“What?” he asked.

“You’re very large.”

His eyebrows lifted immediately.

“…Thank you?”

“No like,” you continued seriously, squeezing his bicep, “you’re just kind of everywhere.”

He tapped your nose, “That’s usually how being six foot two works babe.”

“Crazy.”

The house itself was quieter than expected when you stepped inside, only faint light spilling from the kitchen and distant noise from somewhere upstairs, but most of the team had either passed out already or vanished with hookups hours ago. The bitterness of the alcohol had already started to fade, leaving a sweet taste in its wake. You weren’t dizzy anymore, just floaty in that magical post-party way that made everything feel so comforting.

“Miracle,” Logan muttered while gripping your wrist. Watching you carefully as you undid the straps of your heels while leaning on his shoulder for stability, “Nobody’s screaming.”

“Garrett’s probably dead.”

“One can hope.”

You laughed softly. Nudging your shoes, if they could be called that, into a semi-convenient space next to the door, but shrugged once they got stuck in the tangle of a thousand sports trainers.

You stayed over enough that nobody even questioned it anymore.

There were hair ties in Logan’s bathroom drawer. A skincare bottle next to his sink. Dean had once walked into the kitchen at eight in the morning, seen you wearing Logan’s shirt while making coffee, and simply said,

“Oh thank god, you live here now. Maybe you’ll stop him eating dry cereal for dinner.”

You’d stayed over enough times by now that his room already half-felt like yours anyway. 

Logan guided you up the stairs and into his room, the quiet settled differently when the door clicked closed, the comforting kind of silence that greets you after a weeks long holiday away from home.

He tossed his keys onto the desk before turning toward you immediately.

“You need water.”

“You sound like my doctor.”

“You’ll thank me tomorrow morning.” 

You smiled slightly while he crossed the room, “You’re really pretty tonight,” you murmur.

Logan laughs softly under his breath while digging through his dresser for one of his shirts to replace the dress you had on currently.

“Tonight specifically?”

“Mhm.”

“Good to know.”

“No, like-” your voice catches slightly around another laugh as you crawl onto the mattress behind him and grab one of his pillows, you bury into the clean scented cotton and angle your face towards him, moreso speaking to his back. “I mean it.”

He turns then, still holding the shirt loosely in one hand.

And something about the way you’re looking at him makes his expression shift. He had tugged his sweatshirt off sometime upstairs, leaving him in a dark grey t-shirt that stretched distractingly across his shoulders, curls messy from the cold outside air, cheeks still faintly flushed from alcohol and laughter.

Your chest squeezed unexpectedly.

“What?” he asked immediately.

“You’re just.. so pretty.” You breathe out, a tangled mix of a gasp and sigh, pushing yourself up slowly, hair messy and strewn across your face.

The corner of his mouth lifted automatically.

“Yeah?”

You crawled to the edge of the bed closest to him. “Like… genuinely.”

You could practically see the exact moment he realised you weren’t teasing him.

“You’re pretty all the time,” you continued quietly, reaching out toward him- fingertips outstretched and ghosting over the belt loop of his jeans. “I just don’t think I say it enough.”

He steps between your knees where you’re sitting, shirt still hanging forgotten from one hand while your palms slide slowly up his thighs.

“Pretty hands,” you whisper, mainly to yourself, tracing the calluses on his palm and the soft cuticles of his nails. You travel higher to his forearms, beckoning him to bend closer towards you- his knee coming up onto the comforter. Logan watches, his eyes still playful and face flushed.

“Pretty arms,” fingertips tracing over the veins in his forearms before guiding his large palms to lay flat on your hips, he exhales heavily, a crack in his breath punctuating the shift in his gaze from loving to lustfully curious. 

“Baby,” he said softly, “How tipsy are you right now?”

You looked up at him properly, “Enough to say this,” then smiled slightly, “But not enough to not mean it.”

You watched his throat move when he swallowed, eyes flicking down to your parted lips.

“Promise?” he asked quietly.

You nodded immediately.

“Promise.”

The tension in his shoulders eased after that.

And then you touched his face again.

“Pretty eyes,” you murmured softly, fingertips barely grazing the edge of his lashes in a way that makes his breath stall for half a second before he steadies it again.

“Pretty cheeks.”

Your hand cups his face now properly, softer than your words sound, thumb resting near his jaw like you’re holding him still just to admire. Your fingers graze his stubble and you itch to rub your face against his, like a cat, arching for attention.

He exhales again, slower this time, eyes fixed on yours- watching as your mind filters through every possibility, a dark, dirty loop. 

You can feel the shift before anything else changes - the room, the air, the space between you narrowing without either of you daring to move away, too transfixed on your next move. 

“And pretty hair.” You almost moan out, the memories of how you’d bury your hands in his hair and tug and scratch appreciatively in response to his actions. 

Your fingers slid into his curls, nails dragging lightly against his scalp.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered quietly

You bit your lip, teasing it between your teeth to hide the way your mouth watered at the blush that stained his cheeks. 

“Are you done?” he asks, somehow leaning even closer to you whilst not brushing his lips against yours. You almost snicker at the wrecked expression he has, but instead you let out a shaky breath when he uses his thumb to pry your bottom lip out from the grips of your teeth. 

“No,” you say immediately, you gulp thickly and continue your appreciation, “m'taking my time baby.” 

A shiver travels down your spine when his fingers move, dangerously slow to the hem of your dress that is already so far up your thighs that you aren’t sure there's a point in still having it on. But you lose most of your coherent thought train when his fingertips breach below the tight sequined fabric. 

You quickly stand, twist Logan into your space and push him down on the bed. He wipes a hand down his face and lets out a growl from the bottom of his throat, eyes raking up your debauched appearance,

“Is this how you feel when I manhandle you?” 

“Little bit, but you normally do that after I’ve come twice, so I’m not complaining." 

You take one of his wrists and pull him up so you can climb into his lap, knees settling carefully on either side of his thighs while Logan looks up at you like he couldn’t decide whether he’s overwhelmed or completely gone already.

Probably both.

“You know what your problem is?” you asked softly, wrapping his arms around you as you shuffle further up against him.

“What?”

“You don’t realise how hot you are.”

That finally got a real laugh out of him, breathless around the edges.

“Baby, I play hockey. Unfortunately that’s like ninety percent of my personality.”

“No,” you insisted, leaning closer. “I mean it.”

Your fingers drifted down his throat slowly, tracing the shape of his Adam's apple, before you brush your mouth against his jaw, he groaned at your featherlight touch, eyes screwed shut and control fraying at the edges.

“You’re stupidly pretty.”

Logan’s hands flexed harder against your waist, fingers digging into the swell of your hips.

“You cannot say shit like that and then not kiss me,” he muttered.

“Why?”

“Because I’m trying to behave.” That made you scoff out a chuckle against the corner of his lips.

“Baby,” he whispers, his voice serious as he holds your face in his hands, prying you away from his neck, “You’re not tipsy right now, right?”

You pull away and look at him carefully for a second, eyes softening as he studies your face. 

“Positive,” The hand that you had resting on his neck comes up to spread against his jaw, guiding his gaze to focus on yours, “I'm completely sober right now.” 

Logan’s silent for what seems like hours, watching, analysing you. How your once slightly tangy breath is now coming out in fresh puffs against his nose and the tipsy giddiness in your eyes is replaced with something calmer. 

“Okay.” He finally whispers, threading his fingers into your hair and pressing your forehead against his.

“I love you,” You whisper, giggling when he scoffs and kisses your cheek, “Where was I?”

He lets out a small breath when his hands finally slide up your back properly, warm palms flattening on your ass while he tips his head back to let you kiss along his throat. 

You grip the bottom of his shirt, “Can I take this off?” 

Logan nods, moving back so he can remove it in one fluid tug. You lean into his hands when they return to your back, pushing your weight into him so you can take in his bare skin, the healed over hockey scars and bruises hidden in the shadows of the room, the dips and slants of his muscles contracting which each deep breath- clearly visible in the glow of his lamp. 

“Really pretty shoulders,” You grip the thick muscle in question, nails digging in slightly as you grind down experimentally, “And chest, god, I really hit the jackpot here.”

You ignore the flustered heat radiating off of him and begin to kiss down his neck, wet open mouth kisses that leave glistening stamps on his tanned skin. They make a path of their own, winding around his throat and down to his clavicle, where you begin to lose composure, sucking and biting the skin, whimpers bleeding out in between each new lovebite; they continue to twist onto his chest, spiralling each pec until you can’t comfortably continue. That’s when you push him down and adjust his hands on your body, pulling up your dress to your waist so he can grip you harder. 

“Are you still behaving?” you whispered, punctuating the question with a bite to his abs. 

“Barely.”

You smile against his stomach, your lips meeting the line of brown hair that starts as a splattering at his abdomen. 

Logan swallowed hard from above you, one arm resting on his forehead- his hand balled into a loose fist, the other rested on your head, lightly scratching your scalp, fingers buried into your hair. 

His thighs flex beneath you and you sit up once again, “And your thighs baby, you have such pretty thighs”. You grind against the prominent bulge in his jeans, “So strong too.” You press your palms behind into his legs, arching your back into his chest as he sat up once more. 

“Baby-” He gasped, “You can’t just- shit” You ripped off your dress, or whatever rolled up and wrinkled version you had on, “You can’t just say shit like that.”

“But it's true Logan.” You let him pull down the cups of your bra, mouthing messily at your breasts as he slowly guides your hips against him. 

At this point, Logan’s lips were swollen and spit-slick from biting them and wetting them with his tongue. They were warm against your nipples, teeth a dull ache against the hardening buds as he rolled them, alternating between gentle kisses and tugs with his fingers to sharp sucks and pinches. 

You moan out loudly, pulling at his hair as your hips begin to quicken. Your hands shake from the pleasure coursing through your entire body, but your grip on his jaw is steady as you kiss him. Mouth engulfing him in an open mouth kiss, tongue plunging into his mouth slowly, he matches your desire, his own tongue tangling with yours, hot puffs of air bursting from each millisecond you take to breathe. 

Logan made this sound low in his throat that went straight through you, and suddenly you wanted more of it.

Your fingers tightened in his curls.

His grip on your waist sharpened.

The room felt warmer now, heavier somehow, every breath pulling slower than before while his mouth moved against yours with growing urgency.

“Baby,” he breathed quietly when you shifted in his lap without thinking.

“Your’e so pretty baby,” you whimpered softly before you could stop yourself, a mix of your saliva dripping from your lips.

Logan exhaled sharply against your mouth.

“fuck,” he panted, “What has gotten into you”

You shrug, thighs burning as he picks up the pace of the messy grinds against you, hands digging into your waist, “Just wanna appreciate my beautiful boyfriend, hah, my hot,” You kiss his neck and roughly thrust your hips, “sexy,” You switch sides, “amazing boyfriend.” 

His head tips back as he laughs.

“Jesus Christ.”

His mouth crashed back into yours harder this time, one hand diving into your underwear to press your clit whilst the other ran his nails up your spine, fingertips pressing into soft skin hard enough to make your breath catch.

“You’re killing me,” he muttered roughly against your mouth, “You’re so fucki-”

You kissed him again before he could finish the sentence, desperate to feel his lips against yours, to feel his tongue slip into your mouth and invade your taste buds. 

Your fingers gripped his neck, digging into the sensitive skin as you whimpered, “I forgot,” You lifted up suddenly, looking down to where your bodies were feverishly rubbing, his fingers still teasing your folds and rolling your clit beneath his thumb, “Your cock,” the lewd words were breathed against his ear, as your briefly slowed to press your fingers against the spot where his dick seemed to be straining against the zipper of his jeans, you were met with a damp patch, fingertips tracing the exact area, feeling it out since the darkness of the room wasn’t helpful in identifying just how badly he wanted you, “Your cock is so pretty baby.” 

Logan shuddered against you and you gasp coyly, “yeah? I knew you had a praise kink. You are really liking this.” 

You begin rolling your hips once more, this time directly on the mound that is throbbing against your cunt, warmth radiating through your ruined panties. Logan kisses you and smiles against your mouth, “Good thing I know just what you like,”

His fingers shifted, two digits now circling your hole, in response you arch your chest into him, “So pretty baby.” He snickers against your chest, slowly entering you, mouth parting in parallel with yours whilst a broken moan escapes your throat as he curls his fingers messily. 

The irony isn’t lost on you, his cheeky smile makes you slow your hips, rocking deeply instead of short and snappy movements- languidly drawing out low moans from your boyfriend, who is heavily groaning into your parted mouth. 

Both of you breathing into one another, wetness slipping down from your tongues into a messy, filthy mix against your chins. 

His eyes roll back, as do yours when you find the perfect angle at which his fingers can firmly plunge against the spongy place inside of you whilst you catch the tip of his bulge with each slow rock. 

You know he’s about to cum when short, barely audible whimpers leave his lips, his dark eyebrows pulled together in concentration as his mouth puckers to a shaky pout,

“You gonna cum baby?” You tease the coils of hair at the nape of his neck and watch him bite his lip hard, glancing down to where his hand disappears beneath the waistband of your panties, his fingers mutilating the soft lace in an obscene way. 

Logan shook his head sharply, “Need- fuck- need you to cum first.” His other hand that had been kneading your ass, now went to your waist, guiding your hips in tandem with his fingers that now grinded into you, the heel of his palm pressing into your pubic hair with enough pressure to make your body jerk.

“Oh,” you bit into his shoulder, teeth digging into the muscle, surely going to leave a mark, “I will, Logan, i’m cumming, fuck oh my god.”

The way you moan his name made his hips buck and chest seize up, stuttering whilst you felt the denim beneath you warm considerably. You cup his face, thumb just below his bottom lip as you kiss him slowly, perversely, all slow strokes of your tongue and drool smacking against both of your teeth.

When Logan is able to control his body once again, he kisses you back, his fingers that never stopped, only slowed- picked up the pace. Making you jump, and gasp, “Logan,” you babble out obscenities:

“Yes, fuck right there, please dont stop.”

“So good, baby- need it so bad.”

His chest heaves when you do break around his digits, spasming wildly as wetness coats his knuckles and dribbles down into his palm, he croons at your blissed out expression, face glowing with sweat. He pushes your hips back slightly to pull out his hand, an empty feeling replacing them but soon it disappears when you watch him through hooded eyes, lips parting to welcome his glistening fingers into his mouth. 

By the time you found yourself face-down, cunt-up in front of Nagito Komaeda on the dingy floor of the old, once-abandoned building, you had only known him for two weeks. 

It was a flurry of mishaps and fumbles that seemed to happen in a blink of an eye, even when trying to recall it all to make sense of it. Even within the limited (tiny, frankly) amount of time you’d known him, you chalked it up to his luck without a second thought. You’d seen the spills he’d taken with Mikan- though, this, of course, was more than that.

“Fuu- uhh- uck,” You whined out, voice bouncing in time with the way Nagito desperately pistoned his hips back and forth, burying himself inside of you again and again at a dizzying speed. You hadn’t even had the time to fully remove your panties, which hung off of one thigh haphazardly, much less your clothes. The two of you had pushed your skirt and his jacket out of the way without a second thought.

It had started with a couple of touches that Nagito lingered on for just a millisecond too long, just enough for you to feel a base, instinctual reaction to realizing your silly, fleeting, once-thought-unrequited attraction was mutual. You remembered that morning, how you laughed at yourself for feeling a flutter of butterflies in your stomach when chores were being delegated at breakfast when you found out you’d be cleaning the building with him. But even then, you had just pictured brushing hands, maybe making him laugh, perhaps even engaging in a little banter that toed the line of flirty- but not this.

“S- so good, so good,” He whimpered. “You’re so in- incredibly tight- I never imagined- oh-” And you were more than inclined to agree with him. It was the bad teenage judgment and hormones that made it feel so good. The flush on your face, his panting breath, the hands on you that you couldn’t exactly call familiar but could no longer imagine ever thinking strange, it all ignited so quickly. The flash of well-fueled kindling given the right spark.

And of course- you couldn’t believe it was him. Nagito, with his soft smiles and self-deprecating comments and his stupid wallet chain. Over the course of the long, long days on the island gathering materials bright and early, finding Hope Fragments, and sharing meals and conversations together late at night, it felt like you’d known him- wanted him- for so much longer. 

“Komaeda,” Your fingers scratched against the tacky carpeting, trying to find purchase. Your knees were surely already rug burned and bruised. Still, you pleaded with him, “Fuck me, fuck me- oh, yes! H- harder!”

*

Within the room the Neo-World project pods were still held on the real Jabberwock Island, you peeked through your fingers as you held your hands over your face in shame at the explicit scene playing on one of the large screens. The quality of the speakers and graphics had been sacrificed slightly during the setup. It was clear the three leaders of the project had made do with what hardware they could find. It was perfectly serviceable, but the slightly grainy quality of it all only made it feel more like you were watching a homemade porno, or worse, the voyeuristic taping of a young couple by some pervert. The fact that it was you only made it a little better.

This was surely not what the Future Foundation had wanted when they’d asked you and your partner to sort through the old footage for key moments of the rehabilitation program.

“Oh God, we weren’t even on a first-name basis yet.” You groaned. Besides you, your boyfriend was watching with a distinct lack of shame you’d come to expect from him. He chewed at his knuckles absent-mindedly, the way he did when he focused in on something or became aroused in public. You wondered which one it was now. 

“...I suppose this is fortunate, in a way.” Nagito said finally, not taking his eyes off the screen. “I’m sure very few people can say they’ve captured a moment as intimate as losing their virginity on film.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure no one wants a tape of that!” You said shrilly. Of course, you had come to expect and admire his ability to find optimism in especially the strangest circumstances.

“Though, this was technically the second time we did that,” He murmured, almost to himself. It was too easy for your mind to bring back the once-faded memories of your time at Hope’s Peak, where many sessions of heavy petting finally culminated in working up the courage to bare yourselves fully to each other. On screen, Nagito was laughing breathlessly, mindlessly, as he swept back the hair that had begun to fall into his eyes.

“...so like, is it weird to find teenager you attractive now, or…” You trailed off as you listened to the much more full, musical sound of laughter spill from Nagito’s lips. You couldn’t help but admire him here, now, too. He’d only grown out his hair more, now tied back into a messy ponytail at the nape of his neck. The jutting angles of his bony body had filled out a bit and he wore his button-down quite well, even if he’d never broken the habit of wearing his collar and tie only half-done. His smile was warm and easy as he leaned back, relaxed in the rolling office chair, something you’d never seen back then. 

A particularly raucous set of moans distracted you from your admiration, and on-screen the both of you began to finish. He came across the curve of your ass with a blur of a hand and a bitten lip that did nothing to stifle him. It dripped down your legs and you moaned like it was the best part of it all.

“What a gentleman. Pulling out without asking.” You smirked. You hadn’t meant it as a tease, but it was clear he took it as one.

“Even then, I knew… with my luck…”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.”

*

“Mmnn… ahh- ah…!” The moans and obscene wet noises coming from Nagito’s mouth echoed through the darkened dining hall. It was late, though perhaps not late enough to be splayed out across one of the tables for your boyfriend to be eating you out on his knees like a man starved. You were doing your best to keep quiet. You kept both hands clamped down- one was over your mouth, though the other had an iron grip on Nagito’s hair, pressing his face hard into your positively soaking core. However, this was likely the more discrete option, rather than letting him babble on like he tended to when overwhelmed.

You were dripping down onto the table; this was not exactly a part of your after-dinner cleaning duties, so to speak. But you had splashed water all over your skirt while doing the dishes and flashed him multiple times while trying to dry yourself off. Despite his best efforts, his hard-on was clear to you, and it had all been downhill from there.

His tongue lapped at your entrance lovingly, swirling his tongue over it and diving it deep within at sporadic moments, like he was trying to coax out any more of your wetness for him to taste. He himself was making more than enough with the way he was drooling. The mixture covered the bottom half of his face. When you caught glimpses of it, in between the long licks along the length of your slit, it shined in the dim lighting. 

His own hands struggled to keep up with two competing desires. Sometimes he dug his fingers into the skin of your thighs or spread your lips out to further delve into you, other times he palmed himself through his jeans, though he never unbuttoned the article of clothing, almost like he’d forgotten he could.

When you came a second time, your legs shook enough for both of you to struggle to keep them open. Finally, you pulled Nagito off of you. You both took a moment to simply catch your breath.

*

“Aww, I remember that one.” You cooed, continuing to slide your closer hand up and down Nagito’s thigh slowly, carefully. You went further and further up each time, but carefully avoided his bulge. “Do you remember? You came in your pants just eating me out.” He swallowed hard. Neither of you took your eyes away from the screen. He shifted in his seat and his legs spread a bit wider. He rubbed the back of his neck. He was trying to stay calm, to play the game, but it was clear he was restless already. The video in the background wasn’t any easier to pay attention to.

“Yes, I- I remember. I think I could tell when it happened, actually.” He mused. Without a word, he began to pull your seat closer to his. You couldn’t help but giggle as he wrapped his arm around your shoulders. “I couldn’t help it. I could barely contain myself already… I think you can see that.” He glanced pointedly at the screen. The two of you were hurriedly trying to clean up and leave, but were smiles and giggles the whole time, stealing kisses and distracting each other in equal measure.

“Yeah? And do you think you’re any better now?” You cocked your head- just enough to question him, just enough to kiss him. His face was only inches away from yours. His eyes flickered down to your lips. You moved your hand over his zipper, sliding just your fingertips over the outline of his cock experimentally, watching his expression closely. His eyelids threatened to flutter closed, but he resisted the urge. 

Slowly, he leaned in for a kiss, but just barely ghosted his lips over yours, close enough to feel him breathe. Neither of you closed the gap, instead choosing to simply look at the other, having fun with this game of chicken. His hand slid up the back of your shirt, his fingertips skimming across the sensitive skin there. Your back arched, inadvertently making you pull back just an inch. He cocked his head back at you- just enough to tease you, just enough to get away with it.

“Maybe time has given me a little more self-control.” He pressed a quick kiss to your lips and pulled away to queue up another portion. “We have more footage to go through.”

*

“N- Nagito! I think that’s enough!”

“Hmm? Oh, not at all.” The two of you sat beneath a large beach umbrella. You sat back to front, with Nagito’s chin resting on your shoulder, fitting neatly alongside you as he ‘helped’ you apply more sunscreen. It had started on your back, but soon his hands moved around to your arms… then your stomach… and now they toyed underneath the edges of your bikini top. His hands roved over your skin at his leisure. His touches threatened to give you a wardrobe malfunction more and more with each passing section. You looked out towards the sea, where a couple of your friends were. It was surfing day, which meant that Akane and Nekomaru had taken a few people out. It also meant that they were pretty far out. You could barely make out who was who.

“I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if you ended up burned when I could have prevented it.” He was being very thorough, making sure nothing on you went untouched- your shoulders, your sides, the top of your chest left exposed by your swimsuit- nothing he didn’t happily rub cream into.

“I think you’ve done a much better job than I would have already- w- wait!” Nagito began to completely disregard what was covering your skin. His hands moved under it and massaged and groped your breasts. He clicked his tongue at you disapprovingly.  

“What a large spot to miss. Don’t worry, I’ll get it for you.” He purred, nuzzling into your neck. His hands continue spreading the sunscreen around onto your breasts, gliding over your skin easily, rubbing over your nipples as he did so. You pressed your legs together as the sparks his touches lit in your chest shot through your body. His thumbs circled over your buds attentively, slowly, interspersed with rolling them between his fingers. Then, all at once, his hands disappeared. “Ah, I’ll need more.” You tried to regain your mental footing as he grabbed the tube, and with his in front of you, squirted a generous amount into his hands and spread it evenly over them. Despite the heat, you shivered with anticipation. “There we go.” He ducked his head to kiss your neck. You squirmed at the sensation, only feeling even more tingly. While you were distracted, his hands snuck once more back under your swimsuit.

The cream was cold again on your skin, barely warmed by Nagito’s hands. You hissed at the sensation, though it broke into a moan halfway through as he continued to cover you with the cream. You glanced back at your friends. They seemed to be occupied with the large waves coming in. The luck of it all didn’t escape you. It was hard to relax with them in sight, but Nagito seemed determined to have you do exactly that.

“Your body is amazing, you feel so wonderful,” He gushed, “I don’t know why you trusted me with this task, but I’ll make sure it turns out as well as it can for you.”

“You’re- you’re doing a lot more than what I asked.” You tried to scold him, but your voice shook. The sight of the cream all over your chest conjured mental images of much more. The sudden, perverted impulse from Nagito was admittedly intoxicating, and he sounded more than happy about it. He felt more than happy about it; his bulge pressed against your back. If you were less frustrated with the time and place he’d chosen to do something like this, perhaps you would have ground against it. As it stood, you refused to help him move this along.

He ignored your comment. “Hmm, this is getting in the way.” He pulled at your top. “I’ll just have to… ah, but my hands are occupied.”

“I’m not taking it off!” You half-whispered, despite nobody being nearly close enough to hear you.

“That’s alright, you won’t have to lift a finger. In fact, stay exactly as you are.” He pressed his lips against the back of your neck. You swallowed hard, thinking he was going to kiss you once more, but instead, you felt him move in a pattern you didn’t understand. That is, until you felt the strings of your bikini tug and then loosen all at once-

“Nagito!” You gasped, as your top fell off. You rushed to cover yourself, pulling it against your chest as best you could, inadvertently trapping his hands against you. “You- you- eek!” He only began his ministrations once more. “W- wait, we could- let’s turn around-”

“I don’t believe you’re supposed to tense so much during a massage.” He pushed your arms away. You tentatively let your arms and the clothing drop. Your face and frankly, entire body felt hot and you knew you couldn’t blame it solely on the sun. You pulled your knees up, hoping it would cover you enough. Your bare chest was now out in the open, though shaded by a tilted umbrella and shielded from view by your legs and boyfriend’s hands. “Much better.” He chirped, all too smugly. Now, however, you were slightly worried that if anyone approached from the ocean, they’d be able to see the huge wet spot in your bottoms. You supposed you should take it one problem at a time.

*

“You were absolutely… incorrigible that day.” You swallowed hard. You gripped the edges of the desk tightly, watching the footage recorded on the camera that had been at the perfect angle to catch you two in the act. After all of this, you were starting to wonder if the man whose lap you were perched atop had wanted to be seen on the cameras. You wouldn’t have doubted it. You pulled at the hem of your skirt, hoping what was on the tops of your legs was enough to cover what was happening underneath, and Nagito’s own unbuttoned and undone pants. You squeezed the walls of your pussy around him, but of course, did not otherwise move from your spot with his cock all the way inside you. 

He let out a shaky breath. “It- It was the first time I’d seen you in your swimsuit. I- I couldn’t help myself.” His leg bounced rapidly, trying to contain himself. He wasn’t much better at that, even now. It had only been a couple of minutes after you’d pushed your panties aside and taken a seat on his cock, but he seemed practically ready to burst. You mused that you’d have your fun regardless of if he needed to cum like this or if he could hold out to fuck you when you were satisfied.

“Yeah, you were never that handsy again.” You took his hand and kissed his knuckles. He shuddered. His hips twitched. You rocked your own the tiniest bit as punishment. He squeaked and dug his fingers into your sides. 

“I guess I got it out of my system.” His strained voice said. In truth, you also adjusted because you simply couldn’t take how deep he was inside of you. He was more than stretching you out- you could feel the head of his cock reaching as far as you could take it. It almost didn’t seem real how much was inside of you, how snug everything was, how it felt like he was just shy of too big to be doing this. You had to move so he wasn’t pressed so much against your cervix. You were sure that by now, you were starting to drip around the base of his cock. You hoped it wouldn’t stain his pants. It wouldn’t be too much longer, now.

*

“You- you- you!” You shoved Nagito hurriedly inside the beach house, still clutching your untied top to your chest until you were inside. Nagito finally looked guilty as you pressed him against the wall with your free hand. “I- I am so- you-” You sputtered. He shrank a bit, clearly waiting for you to berate him. You dropped to your knees and pulled down his swim trunks.

Nagito gasped and moaned at once as your hand wrapped around his cock. You stroked it quickly, pausing only for a second to spit into your hand for lubricating. His knees buckled and he sank a bit down against the wall.

“Is this what you wanted?” You huffed, licking him up from base to tip with no warning. He cursed under his breath. “Is this what you were hoping for?” You squeezed your grip a bit harder, tightening up as you worked him. It twitched in your hand. His cock was flushed, hard, and clearly eager. You heard his nails scratch at the wall. He could only whimper in response to your questions. Only moans fell from his lips. “Naughty boy.” You met his eyes as you kissed the tip of his cock, flicking your tongue out to lick up the large bead of precum that had formed there. He was panting, face flushed, and mouth open in both disbelief and pleasure. “But such a cute one.” You opened your mouth and took as much of him as you could all at once. He cried out in surprise. You didn’t give him a second to get adjusted before beginning to bob your head back and forth around it.

His dick was hot and heavy in your mouth. He smelled like his musk and sunscreen. You liked blowing him when he let you- and he was the only man you’d ever met who would refuse a blowjob- for all the little things you noticed each time. The way he shifted and squirmed when you used your mouth on him, though you hadn’t realized just how abashed he was about it until the first time that he’d had to cover his mouth with his hands. Something about it and the knit in his brows made you understand exactly why he was always so bright red. 

Nagito would never ask you to do this, but he clearly loved it. When he wasn’t covering your face, his hands would shake as they hovered around your head anxiously, doing his best not to grab at you, or do anything that would rush you in anyway (despite how much you wanted to see it). And when you surprised him enough, you would get to see just how quickly you could make him hard. He would forget to keep himself quiet, and Nagito was already a very vocal person in and out of bed. You got to hear everything unfettered. Today, however, he was more than already in the mood.

You used your hand to stroke what you couldn’t fit in your mouth so easily. You moved it in sync with your quick rhythm. Your other hand absent-mindedly bunched into his trunks, something to ground yourself with as you lost yourself to pleasing him.

“You’re amazing, oh! your mouth is- your mouth is so amazing- ah, I don’t deserve to even s- see you on your knees, much less th- this- yes, yes, yes, yes-” He finally stopped babbling when you changed your pattern up to get your lips wrapped all the way around the base of his cock. You gagged slightly and had to pull off. It was fine, because the way you’d been drooling around him made it even easier to jack him off. You licked at the underside of his head, a place you knew he was particularly sensitive. He rewarded you with an extra loud keen- one that if you had any rational brain left would have made you wonder if they could hear you outside of the room. However, right now, you had only one thought on your mind.

“You should let me do this more often.” You said, before you were sucking his cock once more.

*

“I was r- right-” Your mouth fell into a sloppy grin as your boyfriend bent you over the desk. You shoved papers and electrical appliances on the table onto the floor that you already knew would be a bitch to clean up later. He had slipped out of you while you’d gotten adjusted, but you were so wet it was easy for him to push right back into you. You sighed with satisfaction. You’d felt quite empty in the couple of moments he wasn’t in you. 

Nagito grabbed your arm, pulling it behind you to find leverage. His other hand pressed against the desk.“You were incredibly right.” He said in a voice that made you think he would have agreed to anything he said. But, as he thrusted into you, deep and sudden, you felt rather agreeable yourself. The movement sent a jolt through your body, pushing your face up. Your eyes fell naturally back onto what was happening.

You hadn’t gotten to see Nagito’s expression well while you were on your knees, but you could see his lips curved into a dazed-looking, open-mouthed smile. It was probably a lot like the one you had on your face now. You also hadn’t realized exactly how Nagito was looking at you- soft, besotted and adoring. Had he looked at you like that all this time?

“Please,” Nagito begged on screen. He was finally clutching your hair. His head moved back and forth, trying to keep up with the feeling. “Please, please, please, please-” You couldn’t even tell what he had been begging for- not then, not now. But just like then, it turned you on to no end. Nagito groaned particularly loudly behind you. It seemed he agreed.

“I- I should have been on my knees for you-”

“You did that in- in the other one.” You managed to say. The desk dug into your hipbones. On screen, you dug your fingers into Nagito’s hip bones. “It’d be b- boring!” Your voice moved in time with the way he fucked you, like he was pushing buttons you didn’t know about. You arched your back for him. It reminded you of the first video of the two of you had seen. You knew now exactly how much he’d liked it then.

“Are you gonna cum, pervert?” You teased him on screen. Your hand was relentless on him. “You wanna cum all over my chest?”

“Oh- oh- this is- is going to kill me-” He responded.

“I’ll take that as a yes.” You snickered. You popped the tip back into your mouth and didn’t stop. Behind you, Nagtio sped up. He took the hand behind you with his, lacing your fingers together and squeezing. 

“You were so b- beautiful then, you’re so beautiful now- so tight-”

“I’m glad that’s still true,” You grinned at the screen, even though he couldn’t see it. The Nagito you could see was shaking visibly. You knew those desperate little squeaks anywhere. “Oh look at you,” You groaned, feeling a rush of lust. “You’re about to cum- why have we not made a sex tape on purpose?” Nagito laughed behind you. You squeezed his hand back.

“I- I’m gonna-” On screen Nagito warned. It was all the had to say before you were pointing his cock over your chest and open mouth. With one particularly high-pitched moan, he began to cum all over you, and you accepted it eagerly. You got to see yourself covered in Nagito’s cum. How debased you looked, how much he enjoyed it.

“You were covered in my- you let me- you wanted-” Your boyfriend babbled behind you. “Hah… it’s h- having the same effect even now,” His voice was thick with a loving tone that reminded you of the expression he’d made in the video. You realized that he still looked at you like that.

“Inside, inside, inside,” You pleaded, moving your hips to meet him in his thrusts. You were also close.

“Yes, yes!” The desk shook with the force of his movements. You could hear files and supplies rattling around in their drawers. If you were going to have to fix everything, you wanted to do it with Nagito’s cum still dripping out of you.

“Nagito, Nagito- ah- I- I love you- ohh!”

“I love you,” He echoed at once, “I love you, I love you, I love you- I-” With that, he fulfilled your request, burying himself inside of you as he came, filling you up even more with it. Your eyes rolled up at the feeling and you followed him soon after. Your hands both trembled within each other’s, but held firm nonetheless. Even after all this time, Nagito made you feel that hot, addictive feeling you couldn’t find anywhere else. Your mind blanked save for his words, which echoed around your head. Even still, Nagito filled you with that hot, Nagito didn’t stop until a long moment had passed and he began to soften. You recovered hand-in-hand. Finally, he spoke again. But after, you wished he hadn’t.

“...Do you think they asked us to sort through these because of all of the, er, time we spent together?”

It was a normal, intimate night between the two of you. You rocking rhythmically on his lap while his hands gripped tightly beneath your jeans, fingers pressing into your ass hard enough that it would 200% leave a mark in the morning.

He slipped out of your pants to drag up your shirt slowly, hissing appreciatively through his teeth at your bra choice, " jesus, it's like you're tryin' to kill me."

You giggle breathlessly against his lips, leaning back to tease him, " dunno what you mean baby," your finger slips coyly past your unbuttoned waistband and into the lace band of your thong, the pretty blue peaks out behind the denim, just enough for Logan to bite his lip and glance up at you from below his lashes.

"yea?" He grips your wrist and hooks the elastic under his thumb, snapping it against your abdomen- laughing when you jolt and moan under your breath, "y'sure you have no idea what I mean?"

you shake your head and slink off his lap, "not a clue." you planted your knees onto the carpet and lay your cheek against his thigh, pushing your elbows together and boosting your tits up, presenting a shameful image for him to admire.

Logan threads his hands through your hair, "what d'ya want pretty? hmm?" he strokes your face, pushing the odd strand away from your eyes and tucking it behind your ear.

you shuffle a little beneath him, biting your lip.

Logan grins down at you, "you thinking about something baby?" you nod your head slowly, "you can tell me. it's just us here."

"wantyoutoslapme" you mumble, your fingers playing with the zipper of his fly, barely noticing the obvious tent brushing against your nose- more occupied with the sudden dryness of your throat and the burning of your cheeks.

Logan tilts his head, squinting at you, "might need you to enunciate a little darling." his index finger taps your pouted lips, pretending to not enjoy your embarrassment, he definitely didn't feel his head swim at the way your chest heaved with the weight of his stare and he swears that the sight of your pressing your thighs together didn't make his dick even harder than it was.

You glare at him, but there wasn't any heat behind it, "I said it clearly enough."

"I dont think you did baby," He leans down to peck your mouth, holding himself back from licking into your mouth and devouring that sweet, peachy taste of your lipgloss.

you whine and almost bury your head into the crook of where his thigh meets his pelvis, ignoring how he stifles a laugh, eventually you sigh. What did your mother always say? closed mouths dont get fed.

You don't really want to be thinking about your mum right now, but she always had words of wisdom that were multi-faceted.

"I want you to..." you blink up at him, "slap me."

Logan pauses above you, the hand that was playing with the ends of your hair and running along your shoulder froze.

"what?"

"see I knew you'd do that-" You huff, noncommittally shrugging your shoulders "it's fine, take off your pants, I'm more than happy-"

Your fingers are held in place with his, "let a guy buffer for a bit baby. It's not everyday your girlfriend asks you to slap her."

"yea but not in like a weird way" you justify, "in like a kinky way. you don't need to full palm bitch slap me, just like. a little one."

"a little one?"

"yea, try it"

"now?"

"babe start acting your IQ and slap me"

Logan huffs, and against every single nerve in his body, against his rational judgement, against his brothers parenting and beatings into his brain that under no circumstances do you ever lay your hand on a woman, jackass.

"okay..." he brings his hand up and pulls back very slightly.

well to him it was.

but you jerked back as you watched him bring his hand out, further and further like a rubber band and you weren't prepared to feel snap against your face.

"woah!" you grab his wrist and place it, maybe 4 inches away from your cheek, "the fuck you winding up for?"

"I'm not" he jumps, "babe I dont want to hurt you, I dunno how I feel about hitting you."

you cock your head at him, "I get that, but you're not hurting me, its more like.." you chew your lip racking your brain for an example, "oh."

you slap his thigh.

Logan hesitates, staring at the spot that you slapped, "huh..." he nods slowly. It wasn't so much of a slap than a firm pat against his skin, sure his muscles tingled a little beneath his jeans, but the area warmed just as quickly. maybe he could see the appeal.

you rush to interrupt his thoughts, "sorry- that probably was so random. and I won't force you to do anything you dont want to, I'm more than happy with what we do right now plus we can find other things."

"no..."

"no?"

"no- I mean yes- no." He shakes his head and wraps his hands around your shoulders, "I'll slap you."

What a weird sentence, and whats weirder is that your panties flooded almost instantly.

"yea?"

"yea ill slap you."

"ok, but don't like warn me before, it's the surprise that-"

you swallow the rest of your words with a gasp, your cheek burned deliciously and Logan's hand hovered by the area in question. Slowly you returned back to your position, your breathing stutters and fingers quake as red, hot pleasure burns through your body.

"like that?" Logan's cocky smirk makes you want to simultaneously stick your fingers down his throat and beg him to fuck the living daylights out of you.

"yea, just like that. do it again. m'dont care that it hurts"

He does it again, gaining confidence- instead of hovering and waiting for your approval his hand forms a choker over your neck, his fingers bracing against your jaw, "pretty baby doesn't care that it hurts huh? Just wants me to slap her" He brushes his knuckle against your face, "So fucking gorgeous, fuck, you wouldn't think that you're such a filthy girl from your face darling."

You whimper, barely noticing that your hand had started to slip under your panties and rub slow circles over your clit.

"turns y'on? never would've thought that you're into this, not in my wildest dreams." Logans eyes flutter from your face, where moans slip from your puckered lips to your fingers that begin to quicken.

He tsks, watching your hips roll into your palm, "naughty girl," He slaps the other cheek. Not letting you register the tingles blooming through your face before he manhandles you onto the bed.

You laugh, sitting up onto your shoulders as Logan kneels between your legs, dragging his arms backwards to slide off his t-shirt, gripping the neckline and throwing the article somewhere onto his floor.

He lowers himself, staring up at you predatorily, his lips dragging up from your stomach, biting the skin until you fall back with an appreciative hum- head bouncing on the soft pillow beneath you. He lifts again, one palm pressed to where his lips were teasing you, the other caressed your neck, pushing your hair away.

"this," he murmurs lowly, pointer finger ghosting from your throat down to your cleavage and circling your nipple through the flimsy fabric. The bud hardened and you arched into his touch- gasping softly, "off." he flicks the puckered nub.

You struggle to contort your arms to your clasp, shoulders straining against the stretch.

Eventually it falls limp and you graciously throw it in the general direction of where his shirt was carelessly thrown on the floor.

Logan hums from above you, "hmmm, this is the perfect view, in fact.." he trails off, grabbing your jeans and tugging them harshly down your legs, contributing to the pile on the other side of the room. You moan when he presses a finger against the ruined fabric of your panties, "there she is..my pretty girl."

You blush and attempt, albeit pathetically, to whine against his arms placing your legs wide apart, bending at the knee so he can slot comfortably between them, still rubbing and teasing you over the lace of your underwear.

The protests die on your tongue when he pulls the barrier to the side and delivers another slap, this time to your pussy, which clenches hopelessly around nothing. Logan brings his hand up in awe, fingers glistening under the yellow glow of his lamp.

"oh my god" he glances at you, grinning when he sees you nearly at the point of tears, "you are so into this. The whole tough guy, dominant thing really does it for ya?"

You shield your face from his teasing, "I didn't fucking know asshole," you peak at him between your fingers, "and don't act like you dont love this." you angle your knee to grind into his bulge.

"you play dirty, baby," he punches out, gripping your knee in place while he taps against the hand covering your mouth.

You lower your palm hesitantly and startle against his fingers that bury themselves into your mouth, the taste of your arousal bursts over your tongue, and you delicately hold his wrist, keeping the two digits firmly in place as you coat them with a thick layer of your saliva.

he hisses, watching you intently make a show out of sucking his fingers, tongue swirling and weaving in between the knuckles. Logan chuckles to himself when you try to force more into your throat, barely gagging when your swollen lips meet the webbing of his hand.

"what's got you so worked up pretty?" you roll your eyes and discreetly shift your hips towards him- the answer is pretty obvious, but Logan decides to toy with you a little bit more.

Maybe he really is loving this whole dominant thing.

He takes his fingers gently from your mouth, skimming them down your body and into your underwear.

"fuck! Logan," Your hand shoots down to grip his forearm, eyes rolling back and fluttering shut when he rolls your clit between his soaked fingers.

"nuh uh baby," He breathes against your lips, arm bracketing over your head to hold himself up, "look at me. wanna see your gorgeous eyes." his fingers drum against your temple until you meet his gaze.

You jump forward and bite his lip, not hard enough to hurt, but firm enough to drag him closer to you while free hand snakes under his arm, digging your nails into his back.

Logan swears against your mouth, "or you could do that." You laugh at his surprise, but it turns into a guttural moan when he delves into your face, mouth devouring yours whilst his tongue strokes and licks any inch of you he can reach.

"please" you whisper when you break apart for air, breathing into each others mouths, "Logan, you gotta do something- pleaseeee," you whine and buck your hips when his fingers stop circling your clit and tease your hole.

"patience baby," He snickers, thoroughly enjoying watching you suffer.

"fuck you, and fuck your patience." you grit out, squeezing your eyes shut when he barely breaches you with the tips of his digits, "fuck you more than your patience, ohmygod, god I'm going to kill you logan. As soon as we're done fucking, and we fuck a little bit more, I'm breaking up with you. How humiliating is this, I'm so wet baby- please come on."

Logan nods along, almost condescendingly to your babbles, eyes widening in the right places and pouting his lips at the better ones. But when your voice breaks into that breathy whine, his resolve shatters along with it and he can't help but swallow the gasp you let out when he sinks in, knuckles deep.

"fuckkk" you both say in unison, granted yours is more muffled because you've arched so far back that your mouth is in the pillow, but Logan compensates, his voice is significantly deeper than when you started and the obscenity is breathed against your sternum- where his mouth is peppering kisses whilst watching your chest bounce with each hard thrust of his wrist.

Your moans are choppy and sound more like sobs when Logan sits up onto his haunches, staring at where his fingers disappear inside of you, a wet trail left along them every time he pulls back.

"You're doing so well baby," he bites his lip, angling the hell of his palm into your clit, so with each push the bundle of nerves is bumped with the calloused skin, "look at you, doing so well f'me." he leans down briefly to kiss your pussy, but stays longer when he feels how wet you are against his lips.

"Logan," you whimper warningly, both hands scratching his scalp as you fight against the momentum to trap his head between your thighs, "Logan m'gonna cum if you do that."

He glances up at you, almost as if he forgot you were present whilst he got lost in your pussy, the lower half of his body now bent along and off the bed- it seems he took you with him, your knees now hooked onto his shoulders.

"I mean I'm not complaining," He shrugs, huffing in amusement when you roll your eyes, which widen comically when one of the hands that was wrapped around your thigh and rested on your hip came down in a harsh smack.

You let out a broken moan when his head dips again, this time working in tandem with his fingers. The sounds are lewd and you feel inexplicably sorry for whatever poor soul was getting the free show- but it was overshadowed by the overwhelming amount of pleasure that spiked through your entire body.

Logan slurped and nipped at your pussy, tongue lavishly stimulating your clit with harsh sucks that ended in debauched pops, making your head spin and cheeks flush.

"what were you saying pretty?" he mumbled against you, removing his mouth to kiss the inside of your thigh. You whimpered in response, barely able to bring your head up to meet his gaze, "what?"

"that," His fingers sped up and mouth parted when you jolted, gripping your breasts whilst gaping at him, " 's soon as we're done fucking, and we fuck a little bit more,' " his voice is pitched slightly higher, mimicking you, breaking at bits when he leans down to spit on down onto your hole where his fingers disappear, "what was the end bit? I cant seem to remember."

His fingers slow, much to your dismay, as he waits for your response,

"No! nono, baby," you words are slurred as you blindly reach for his wrist, "baby," you coo at him, stroking his hair, "I don't even remember, you know what they say, bitches be crazy. all that jazz."

He snorts at you, "really?"

"yea, but I'm bitches. please make me cum."

"You're not a bitch pretty," He kisses your cheek.

"John," You grind your hips down into his fingers, "Can we talk about the feminist meaning of the phrase and the wider effect on society. after you make me cum."

"Oh so I'm John now?" He pecks your hip, curling his fingers slowly.

"No," You stroke his face and whisper, "Logan."

He hums happily, increasing the pace slightly whilst crowding over you with his body, "And?"

Your chests brush together as you grind out a deep groan, hands limply hung from his shoulders.

You hook your ankles over his hips, welcoming him into your space, "Baby," You murmur, noses brushing together. Logan speeds up, plunging fast inside of you, the promiscuous sound of your wetness makes you arch your back.

"Anything else?" He prompts, breath fanning over your neck- you moan and bury your finger in your hair,

"F-fuck" You legs quiver around his torso, "I don't fucking know, daddy? sir?"

Logan nips at your throat, "Not what I was looking for, but I'll take it." He takes a nipple into his mouth, sucking harshly and rolling it between his teeth.

"Shit," Your hands fly to cradle his face against your breast, "cumming, yes Logan, don't stop" You sob into his hair, body convulsing against his.

A silent scream parts your mouth as wetness gushes onto Logan's fingers, you twitched and writhed as he continued to fuck you with slow thrusts- his fingers making hollow and wet sounds against you.

Only when your orgasm subsided is when he removed his fingers, eyes glistening as he sucked off your arousal. You watched, heavy pants still billowing out between your lips.

"So..." He slumped next to, already moving to grab a wet wash cloth, "You got any other requests for me?"

fainting had always been a little bit inconvenient.

not dramatic enough to be cinematic, not predictable enough to properly prepare for - just inconvenient in the kind of way that slowly embeds itself into every aspect of your life until you stop noticing how abnormal it actually is. It all started in high school, the first time it happened was arguably horrifying- 3rd period math class, and your crush had just offered you a pen and flashed you a crooked smile. Your heart raced, like a hummingbird wild and erratic and before you knew it, one minute you were bashfully giggling at his jokes about quadratic equations- the next you were face first in your notebook. The doctors told you Vasovagal Syncope, which in your opinion sounded like a hard metal rock band, but you took their blood pressure medicines from that day onwards. 

Over time, you learnt how to live with it. Sometimes it was manageable. Sometimes it was just dizziness and blurry vision making you sit down on the nearest surface before your body decided to humble you publicly. Sometimes it was waking up to panicked faces hovering over you while you tried to convince everyone around you that no, seriously, this happened all the time.

which, unfortunately, was true.

Allie and Hannah learned the quickest, being roommates would do that to you. The boys learned soon after. By junior year, there was practically a system in place for it - water bottles shoved into your hands, someone grabbing your bag before you hit the floor, Garrett texting Logan before you were even fully conscious again.

Logan, however, never quite adjusted to it the way everyone else did.

he tried to.

God, he tried.

but there was something uniquely horrifying about loving someone whose body could go slack in your arms without warning. Something deeply unsettling about the way you always laughed it off afterwards, brushing it aside with flushed cheeks and a quiet, "I'm okay,” while his heart was still somewhere near his throat.

because to you, fainting was normal.

to John Logan, it never would be.

But here are the two times he dealt with it..somewhat normally. And the one time he didn’t

𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝟏

The library at Briar had a very specific kind of silence.

Not actual silence - that would’ve been impossible considering half the student population seemed physically incapable of existing without aggressively whispering every thought that crossed their mind - but the sort of hushed atmosphere that made every dropped pen sound like a gunshot.

You were currently trying very hard not to contribute to that atmosphere by murdering John Logan with a highlighter.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Logan muttered from across the table, long legs nudging yours beneath it.

You didn’t look up from your notes, underlining a sentence in your physiology textbook hard enough to nearly tear the page. “Because,” You whispered sharply, “you’ve tapped your foot against mine for the last fifteen minutes.”

“That’s because my feet are freezing.”

“That sounds like a you problem.”

“It became my problem when you shoved your icy ass converse under my legs.”

A snort came from beside you. Hannah quickly disguised it as a cough when you glared at her over your laptop screen.

Across from her, Garrett looked deeply unbothered by the entire interaction, lazily flipping a page in his philosophy textbook while Hannah slowly collapsed into silent laughter against his shoulder.

“You two are disgusting,” Allie informed you quietly from the end of the table.

You blinked. “We’re literally studying.”

Logan hummed, not even pretending to pay attention to the stats worksheet in front of him anymore, “Yeah baby, real filthy behaviour.”

Heat crawled up your neck instantly.

The word baby wasn’t exactly new. Logan had been throwing it around for months now, slipping it into conversations with such casual ease that you’d stopped reacting outwardly somewhere around week three, despite the fact every single time still felt like someone plugging your nervous system directly into a live wire.

“You’re staring again,” You muttered.

“I’m allowed to stare at my girlfriend.”

Allie gagged dramatically.

“Oh my god,” She whispered loudly, “he’s gotten even more annoying.”

“Impossible,” Hannah replied solemnly.

Garrett barely glanced up from his book. “Give it a week. They’ll become one organism.”

“We already basically are,” Logan said casually.

You finally looked up at him then.

That was the problem with Logan. The reason you’d fallen for him so spectacularly despite your better judgement.

He said things like that so easily. Like it was obvious.

obviously he’d started keeping protein bars in his backpack because you forgot to eat when you were stressed. obviously he waited outside your exam halls even when he had practice. obviously your legs ended up over his lap every time you sat together for longer than ten minutes.

Your chest tightened softly.

And because apparently the universe enjoyed humiliating you whenever you got too emotionally comfortable, your vision blurred slightly at the exact same moment.

You frowned. That was… inconvenient timing.

The words on your laptop screen swam for half a second before sharpening again. Your heartbeat fluttered unpleasantly.

Not enough to panic over yet. You subtly shifted in your seat, rolling your neck and readjusting your posture- hoping to god that it would be enough, trying to ignore the familiar lightheadedness curling at the edges of your body.

“Hey.”

Logan’s voice dropped quieter instantly.

You looked over.

His brows had pulled together slightly, eyes scanning your face with terrifying precision.

“How long?” He asked softly.

Damn him.

Most people didn’t notice until you were actively halfway unconscious.

“I’m okay,” You whispered automatically.

A look crossed his face. Because he knew that tone. Knew what it meant when you said I’m okay in that specific careful voice. Your boyfriend leaned back slightly in his chair, completely ignoring the fact that Garrett was now openly watching the interaction over the top of his textbook.

“When was the last time you ate?”

You blinked once.

Logan sighed immediately. “Baby.”

“I had coffee?”

Allie dropped her pen onto the table. “Oh my god.”

“You can’t survive on caffeine and academic validation,” Hannah hissed.

“I literally can though.”

“No,” Logan said flatly, “you literally cannot. That’s the whole issue.”

Despite yourself, you laughed quietly.

Wrong decision.

The movement sent dizziness crashing through you harder this time, your stomach dipping sharply as black spots burst across your vision. Logan was moving before you could even process it properly. One second you were upright, the next his hand was wrapped around your wrist while the other steadied your shoulder.

“Hey,” He said immediately, voice calm enough that someone who didn’t know him wouldn’t notice the tension underneath it, “look at me.”

Your body felt frustratingly floaty all of a sudden.

“I’m fine,” You murmured weakly.

“Yeah, sweetheart, that sentence is losing credibility.”

Garrett was already standing.

“I’ll get water.”

Hannah reached for your bag without needing to ask while Allie shoved your laptop aside to make room.

The horrifying thing was how practised everyone looked doing it.

Like this had become routine.

Which, unfortunately, it kind of had.

“I hate all of you,” You mumbled as Logan carefully crouched in front of your chair.

“You love us deeply,” Allie corrected.

“Stockholm syndrome maybe.”

“You literally chose to date one of them,” Hannah pointed out.

“That weakens your argument significantly,” Garrett called over his shoulder.

Logan ignored all of them.

His thumb pressed lightly against your pulse point while he watched your face with that same concentrated expression he got before hockey games. Like he could somehow prevent your body from betraying you if he paid enough attention.

Your chest ached.

“Hey,” You whispered softly once your vision finally started stabilising again.

Logan looked up immediately.

You reached out without thinking, fingers brushing against the crease between his eyebrows. The tension sitting there.

“I’m okay.”

He closed his eyes for half a second. Then he turned his head slightly and pressed a quick kiss into the centre of your palm before standing back up.

The library collectively chose that exact moment to become aware of the fact that the hockey team’s second line centre was looking at you like you personally held his heart hostage.

“Oh my god,” Allie whispered dramatically.

Hannah looked emotional.

Garrett looked disgusted.

“Suddenly we’re all trapped in a Nicholas Sparks novel,” he muttered.

Logan didn’t even glance away from you.

“Shut up,” He said absentmindedly, still watching your face carefully, “she almost passed out.”

“I did not almost pass out.”

“That’s not medically valid.” Logan shot.

You flicked his forehead, “You’re not medically valid,” 

You stared at him for two seconds before bursting into startled laughter.

And just like that, some of the fear eased out of his shoulders.

𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝟐

The thing about the hockey house was that it never really felt like anyone was visiting it.

It felt like everyone was always a part of this little ecosystem, even if half of them technically still had their own places and the other half only owned two plates and a concerning number of energy drinks that nobody could fully account for.

Tonight was one of those nights where everything blurred into something almost domestic in a way you loved. Garrett and Hannah were folded into each other on the armchair in the corner, Hannah scrolling absently while Garrett spoke over her shoulder in low, easy comments about something on his screen that she kept pretending not to care about but clearly did. 

Dean and Allie were on the floor near the coffee table, Allie leaning against him in that casual way that somehow always ended with her stealing his hoodies and Dean acting like he was personally offended by affection while still adjusting her position when she shifted too much.

And then there was Tucker, occupying the remaining space , talking at a volume that suggested he had forgotten walls existed.

You were on the couch.

Logan was on the couch too, your legs resting across his lap, your head resting on the back of the couch. His hand had found your ankle at some point during the evening and had simply stayed there, like it had decided that was where it belonged and saw no reason to reconsider.

“Have you eaten today?,” Logan murmured into your ear, not looking up from his phone.

You didn’t look away from the conversation Dean was having with Allie about whether cereal could be classified as a personality trait. “Hmm?”

“Did you eat today baby?” He dropped his phone into his lap and caressed your hair.

“I think so.”

A pause.

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“It does if you really think about it.”

Hannah glanced over from the armchair. “She’s lying.”

“I am not lying.”

Garrett didn’t look up. “You had toast and emotional distress.”

“I had toast and a very normal amount of stress.”

Logan’s thumb pressed lightly against your ankle once, absent and automatic, but his attention had shifted to you properly now. Not fully concerned yet, but already recalibrating the room around your answer the way he always did when he thought something might be off.

“Baby,” he said quietly, like it was a habit more than a warning.

You finally turned your head slightly toward him. “Don’t start.”

“I’m not starting anything.”

“You’re absolutely starting something.”

Across the room, Allie made a sound of exaggerated disgust without even looking up. “I can feel the health lecture forming.”

Dean nodded. “It’s in the air.”

Logan ignored them completely. “You said you had toast this morning.”

“I did.”

“And then what.”

You hesitated.

Which was apparently answered enough.

Hannah sighed. “Oh my god.”

“I had coffee,” you admitted finally, because there was no point pretending anymore.

Garrett closed his eyes briefly like he was praying for patience. “That’s not food.”

“It has beans in it.”

“That’s not how nutrition works,” Logan said, though his voice was still calm, still even, like he was trying very hard not to make it into a bigger thing than it already was.

You shifted your legs slightly on his lap, rolling your eyes. “You’re all obsessed with me.”

“Yes,” Allie said immediately.

“That’s not-”

“Yes,” Dean repeated, “we are.”

You opened your mouth to concede and hop to the kitchen, go grab whatever tucker had made and stored in the fridge, but the words didn’t come out as smoothly as they should have.

It wasn’t immediate. It never was, much to your annoyance. It was subtle in the way your body always was about these things, like it preferred to give you enough time to be pissed before it betrayed you properly.

A slight softening at the edges of your vision first, like the room had decided to lose definition without informing you. The low hum of conversation didn’t change, but it felt slightly further away, like you were listening to it through water.

You frowned. This was inconvenient.

You shifted your weight on the couch instinctively, trying to ground yourself without drawing attention to it, but Logan noticed anyway. Of course he did.

His hand tightened slightly around your ankle.

“You good?” he asked, quieter now.

You nodded automatically. “Yea,” pushing off the sofa, hoping the movement would reboot your brain,”... yeah im fine.”

It came out too fast. Logan’s expression changed imperceptibly, the way it always did when he didn’t believe you but hadn’t yet decided whether to challenge it in front of everyone.

“Hey,” he said again, softer, his hand wrapped around your wrist- following you away from your seat.

You tried to laugh it off, but it didn’t quite land properly even in your own ears. “I’m finally listening to you guys, just going to grab something to eat.”

You pushed yourself to step away.

That was when it hit properly. Your body simply decided that it was no longer participating in the conversation. The room loosened, like the edges stopped agreeing with each other and in between the gaps your brain filled with black spots.

You reached out without thinking, fingers brushing the back of the couch as your knees went weak in a way that didn’t feel like anything at first, until it did.

“Hey-”

Logan’s voice cut through immediately, sharper now, closer than it had been a second ago, but it was already too late for clarity.

There was so much movement all at once.

Someone swearing.

A water bottle being cracked open.

The shuffling of sneakers and socks against the floor.

Coming back was always the worst part.

Because there was always a moment where you could hear everything before you could properly exist inside it again. Voices layered over each other, closer this time, less casual.

“I’ve got her,” Logan’s voice said, low and controlled in a way that didn’t quite match the tension underneath it.

“She’s out cold?” Dean asked, like he was trying not to panic but also deeply failing.

“She’s not- don’t say it like that,” Allie snapped immediately.

“Water,” Garrett said somewhere to the side, already moving.

And then your vision finally returned in pieces.

Ceiling first.

Then faces.

Then Logan.

He was closest.

Crouched in front of you, one hand steadying your shoulder, the other still holding your wrist like he hadn’t fully decided whether letting go was allowed yet. His expression wasn’t dramatic in the way people expected panic to be.

He was focussed on you, in a way that made your chest tighten before you even fully remembered why. You blinked slowly.

“Oh,” you muttered. “That was annoying.”

Relief flickered across Allie’s face instantly. “She’s alive.”

“Barely,” Dean said.

“I heard that,” you murmured.

Logan didn’t smile, “you scared me,” he said finally. You swallowed, trying to sit up, but his hand immediately steadied you again, firmer now.

“Don’t,” he said softly.

“I’m fine,” you replied automatically, accepting the water from garrett with a smile, you reach over to your bag and search for an energy bar. You hated the nutty torture snacks, but Logan insisted on you carrying them around for emergencies.

Everyone around you had relaxed, Hannah, Garrett and Tucker went to the kitchen, animatedly chatting about dinner whereas Allie and Dean went back to their places on the floor, already scrolling through her phone. 

Logan hadn’t moved, his fingers drumming against your knee. Your fingers moved without thinking, brushing lightly against his sleeve.

“I’m okay,” you said again, softer this time, like it might mean something more if you said it gently enough.

Logan exhaled through his nose, eyes flicking briefly shut like he was trying to steady something in himself. He shook his head, as if the movie had been unpaused and he had momentarily lost the plot. 

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “I know.”

𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝟑

Logan got the message in the middle of something he would not later be able to reconstruct properly, not because it wasn’t important, but because everything that happened immediately after replaced it so completely that the original context never stood a chance of surviving in his memory.

His phone buzzed incessantly on his desk breaking his concentration from whatever his professor was droning about ,to the group chat notifications exploding on his phone screen. It was Hannah’s name first, then Garrett’s, then Allie’s, all stacked on top of each other in a way  that made him unlock his phone and scroll through hurriedly. 

you fainted. properly. you're awake now. come back.

He read it once without reacting in any visible way, which was what made it worse in hindsight, everything else that he had been doing was irrelevant, as though the idea of continuing it belonged to someone else entirely, and he was no longer that person.

By the time he got back to the house, his hoodie was half-zipped because he had started putting it on properly and then stopped halfway through, his cap still backwards and slightly uneven like he had forgotten it was there at all and his hair underneath it flattened in places that suggested his hand had been through it more times than he had noticed.

Logan shut off his ignition and ran up the stairs, two at a time until he was bursting through the front door- his bag hanging from one shoulder as he scanned the scene in front of him. Garrett stood near the kitchen counter with a glass of water he had clearly forgotten to drink from, Hannah sat on the couch angled slightly forward in a posture that suggested she had not yet decided whether she was allowed to relax, Allie hovered somewhere between the hallway and the living room in a way that made it clear she had been going back and forth between checking on you and giving you space, and Dean existed in that familiar state of pretending not to be paying attention while absolutely paying attention.

And you were on the couch. Your eyes were open but not fully anchored yet, blinking slowly in that delayed way that made it clear your body was still catching up to where you were. Your shoulders were slightly hunched forward as if you were trying to find the correct posture for being awake again and your hands were loosely folded in your lap before you noticed him properly.

The moment you did, everything in you shifted in a way that was immediate and familiar, like muscle memory rather than thought. You sat up, twisting over the couch to meet his eyes and smile with your hand outstretched- that was when the collective inhale happened, like even the house was waiting to see what he would do.

His eyes stayed on you without breaking, taking in the fact that you were sitting there, awake, conscious, present, and yet his brain still hadn’t stopped running like a hamster on a wheel, rotating again and again through all the scenarios he had plagued himself with on the drive over- a broken movie reel that fluttered between bad, worse and catastrophic.

You saw him, the way his eyes darted all over your face, how his hand was tightening and loosening against his bag strap. 

“Hey,” you said, your voice slightly rough, but it jumpstarted him to begin slowly approaching you, like a wounded animal. Your first instinct whenever he looked like that, as if you could smooth the edges of his expression back into something manageable by making yourself smaller within it, which was something you did without hesitation, like it was part of a pattern you had both already agreed to without ever discussing it.

He let you. 

Let you intertwine your fingers with him and pull him closer next to you. Let you kiss his hands, then knuckles and then the side of his wrist. He let you ground him before he could process anything.

“I’m fine,” you said quickly, already aware of how the room was still holding itself slightly tense, and your voice tilted into something apologetic without fully meaning to, “I’m sorry guys, I must not have realised how stressed I was. I didn’t mean to scare anyone, I just didn’t eat properly and I got a bit dizzy and I didn’t realise it would turn into anything, it won’t happen again, I promise.”

Around you, the room began to release itself in pieces.

Garrett exhaled and shifted his weight like he had been waiting for permission to stop bracing, Hannah leaned back into the couch again as her shoulders loosened, Allie moved a step closer to you and immediately started talking in that half-joking, half-relieved tone about electrolytes and how she was “putting you on a schedule if this ever happens again,” and Dean, finally, contributed something about how he shouldn’t have asked about how your paper went, and he’ll let you run him over with his car to relieve stress next time, which was unhelpful but normal in a way that helped everyone else reset.

You leaned into Logan without thinking, still holding his hand, your body molding into his as you rubbed circles on his knuckles and pressed your hand into his thigh

You looked up at him, already softer, already slipping back into the version of the evening where everything was normal again. But what you couldn’t see was the way his emotions swirled thunderously in his mind, how he couldn’t begin to relax like everyone else did- in fact he was baffled they were so normal so quickly. He barely heard you ask about his class, or notice when you peppered soft kisses to his jaw and say that you missed him- how boring it was when he wasn’t there. As though the structure of his day mattered more than anything.

He tried to answer at first, his words bubbling to the tip of his tongue, but it didn’t take long for him to realise they wouldn’t come out in a smooth, caramelised way that would flow into the calm atmosphere of the room. He gently let go of your hand, in a decisive way that made you furrow your brows and scan his face.

“Logan?” you said, quieter now, not fully alarmed but already sensing the direction this was going.

He rubbed his hands together, throat working thickly as his adams apple bobbed. Everyone else had noticed the shift, conversations slowed. Dean stopped mid-sentence. Allie’s expression changed slightly as she looked between the two of you. Hannah went still in a way that suggested she was no longer sure whether to intervene or wait.

Logan turned to you, his hair falling in specks along his forehead, “I need a minute.” He got up and went upstairs, footsteps heavy along the ceiling of where you all stayed frozen until his bedroom door clicked closed; you blinked a few times, looking at your friends who met you with confused, concerned shrugs and shakes of their heads.

Your expression tightened and you pushed yourself up to follow him, ignoring whatever advice your friends were half-heartedly giving you. 

When the door creaked open under your hand, you found him sitting on the edge of his bed, hands braced on his knees and holding his head, as though he needed something solid to hold the weight of his thoughts. His cap lay discarded on the floor, shoulders slightly lifted in tension that he was not releasing, and when you entered the doorway he did not look immediately, as if he already knew what would happen if he looked at you too quickly.

When he did meet your eyes, it was not anger that you saw first, but something more difficult to place because it did not sit cleanly in any single emotion. It looked like a strain held in place for too long.

“You shouldn’t apologise like that,” he said, and you frowned slightly, stepping inside and shutting the door behind you. Trapping whatever conversation you were about to have within these four walls.

“I wasn’t- I just didn’t want everyone worrying,” you said, still trying to smooth it over in the same way you had in the other room, still trying to keep it within something manageable. The bedframe creaked under you, as if warning you from crossing your legs and sinking into this situation.

But he shook his head once, not dismissive but overwhelmed, and when he spoke again his voice had shifted into something quieter but sharper at the edges, “You were apologising for being unconscious.”

That made you stop, properly stop, because it didn’t match the version of the moment you had been holding onto, and he saw that in your face immediately.

“I wasn’t here,” he said, and there was something in the way he said it that made it clear that time had not been abstract for him in the same way it was for you. “You were just gone, and I found out from my phone blowing up, messages that had sat there for god knows how long because…” He grit his teeth, “I just had to turn it on silent for class. And I get back to everyone telling me it was fine, that you’re fine, like that changes anything.”

You try to re-anchor him in proximity the same way you always did, your hand finding his again, your voice softening as you said, “You can’t always be there Logan, I don’t want you to always be on edge. I’m okay.”

But when he looked at you this time, there was something in his expression that did not settle with that reassurance.

“I know,” he said quietly, and it came out with more restraint than anything he had said earlier, like it was something he had been holding back for a long time and could no longer keep contained in the same shape. “I just don’t know how to stop thinking about what it looked like when you weren’t.”

You cup his cheek, turning him towards you, “I’m right here baby,” You kiss him, imprinting the taste of you onto his mouth, the feel of your lips together as a way to tell him that you’re still there with him, “I’m not going anywhere.”

Logan held your wrists, his fingers shaking against your skin, “I..” his eyes were wide, pupils flicking between yours, “I never know when you aren’t going to be here.”

He tugged at your hands and you let him, nails digging into the bedsheet uselessly next to you. Your breath caught in your throat, face quaking and crumbling at the edges, eyelashes fluttering- beating away the bubbling tears forming on your lashline. 

“I think I’ll sleep at the dorm tonight,” you said eventually, and your voice was softer than it had been before, tired in a way that didn’t fully belong to the moment.

Logan looked up at that, but he didn’t stop you, just watched with a shattered look in his eyes, his lips pursed and pressed against his hands that were clasped together. You collected your things as seamlessly as possible, and given that you’d stayed over for the entire weekend, it was proving to be harder than you thought. But you huffed and puffed with each new article that got shoved into the shoulder bag until the room looked as if you’d never stepped foot in there. 

You’d already begun to calculate how many trips it would take to empty out the clothes from his dresser and toiletries from his bathroom. 

Logan still hadn’t said anything, his eyes widening by a fraction when he realised just how much you had erased from his space, but he stayed silent when your fingers hesitated against the door handle and didn’t dare to say anything when you turned back to him- eyes begging him to stop you, to cradle you in his arms and work it out. He ignored it all, looking through you and barely flinching when you shut the door harder than necessary. 

You adjusted your bag strap over your shoulder with careful hands, stilling when you realised everyone was staring at you as you emerged from the stairwell, “I’m heading home guys..” 

Your throat tightened but you shook your head and forced a smile onto your face, it felt plasticy and fake to force the expression over your eyebrows that tightened together and nose that burned with each deep breath you took. 

You added lightly, “I’ve got that test tomorrow anyway, and it’s probably better if I just- yeah. I’ll head back.”

Allie and Hannah both turned slightly, breaking out of the pitying trance when you grabbed your keys and headed for the door. 

Neither of them said anything at first, because there was a specific kind of silence that settles when two people are trying very hard to behave like nothing irreversible has happened only a floor above them.

“Okay,” Allie said finally, careful but not pushing, “Text us when you get in?”

You nodded quickly.

“Yeah, of course.”

Hannah’s eyes lingered on you a little longer, not interrogating, just observing, like she was storing away the way you were holding yourself more tightly than usual, the way Logan wasn’t following you to the door, barely letting you out of his hold with attacks of kisses and whispers in your ear. 

But neither of them asked.

Because to everyone else in the house, it still looked like something that could be explained away by stress and timing and too much noise and not enough food.

You said goodbye in a way that was deliberately light, stepping out with your usual version of composure stitched back together over something slightly less stable underneath it.

Back in the living room, the energy eventually returned in fragments, Logan had rejoined the group nearly an hour after the girls had left. 

Allie and Hannah left together not long after you, mumbled goodbyes were exchanged and worried whispers about Logan along with promises to update them over text had gotten them out the door, and back to you .

And once the door closed behind them, the house settled into a quieter version of itself.

Dean was the first to fully break the tension, dropping onto the couch with the kind of exaggerated movement that only made sense when someone was actively trying to remind a room how normal they were allowed to be. Tucker followed soon after, already halfway into a joke about how “Briar parties are medically unsafe environments” that no one really responded to but still helped reset the tone anyway.

Logan stayed silent for a moment too long in the doorway before eventually sitting down on the arm of the couch, not fully joining the group, just occupying space near it without integrating into it. The others kept talking for a while, but their volume softened slightly in the way it does when people unconsciously recognise that something heavier is still present in the room.

Eventually, Dean stretched and yawned in an overly theatrical way.

“Right,” he said, pushing himself up. “I’m calling it before I start thinking about my own mortality again.”

Tucker followed immediately, clapping Logan on the shoulder on his way past like nothing meaningful had just been discussed at all. “Don’t overthink it, man,” he added lightly, already heading upstairs. “She’s been doing that since high school apparently. She’s fine.”

Garrett didn’t follow them right away.

Logan just exhaled once, slow, like something had tightened in his chest at the phrasing.

Once the footsteps disappeared upstairs and the house settled properly, Garrett stayed behind in the spot next to Logan, leaning against the couch and pretended not to be boring holes into the side of his best friend's face. Logan was still on the arm, staring somewhere that wasn’t really the room.

For a while, neither of them spoke.

“I can’t imagine it,” Garrett broke the silence, voice quieter now, stripped of the earlier group energy, “loving someone and knowing that at any point they might just not respond.”

Logan’s jaw tightened slightly at that, but he didn’t interrupt.

Garrett looked down at his hands briefly before continuing, “I know everyone’s saying she’s used to it and it’s normal for her or whatever, but… that’s not really the part that sticks, is it?”

That landed differently.

Logan looked down finally, his hands loosely clasped together, and when he spoke his voice came out lower than before, less controlled in the way it had been earlier.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said, and there was no performance left in it now, no attempt to hold anything in place. “I love her so much it actually hurts, and I can’t… I can’t keep doing that thing where I pretend I’m okay when she’s-”

He stopped. Swallowed slightly and pressed his fingers to his eyes. Logan exhaled again, slower this time, like the words were physically difficult to keep forming.

“But I also can’t go on like this,” he finished, quieter.

That silence that followed wasn’t uncomfortable in the way earlier ones had been. It was just heavy with the absence of an answer. Garrett nodded once, slowly, like he understood that there wasn’t a clean solution sitting anywhere in reach.

“I think,” Garrett said carefully after a moment, choosing each word like he was placing it somewhere fragile, “it might actually be harder to let her go than it is to keep reminding yourself she wakes up every time.”

Logan turned to Garrett, and nodded slowly- a row of tears fell from his chin and onto the soft cashmere beneath him, “I just don’t know how many times I can do it.”

The hockey house was always, somehow, loud. Loud in that pre-party way on a Friday night that made your head spin and bring a giddy smile to your face. The warm-up stage, if you will. Everyone half-distracted and talking over each other while deciding what the night was actually going to become.

Which was exactly why Dean had decided it was the perfect time to ruin your life.

“No seriously,” your brother insisted from across the kitchen island, pointing his beer bottle at you like he was presenting a business proposal to investors instead of actively setting his sister up on a date, “this guy is perfect for you.”

You stared at him flatly and leaned on your elbows, the stool you were sat on tipped dangerously.

“Every time you say that, I suffer.”

“That’s because you keep picking emotionally unavailable weirdos.”

Everyone partially ignored Dean, he was always doing this- offering to set you up with the next eligible bachelor that he had scouted in his classes, or mutual friends, one time he set you up with one of his ex-hookup’s hookup. That one didn’t go as well as the majority of your brother’s matchmaking pursuits.

From the couch, Logan’s ears perked up and he choked slightly on his drink; he glanced around hoping nobody noticed, and it didn’t seem like they did.

Except Garrett.

Garrett glanced up from his phone, eyes moving from Logan to you and then back to Logan again with the expression of somebody who had just noticed a bomb underneath the dining table.

Your eyes flicked to Logan, a secret twinkle in them before you steeled and ignored him. Dean, fortunately for you didn’t even notice and continued talking.

“He’s pre-law,” he said proudly.

Logan rolled his eyes and scoffed before he could stop himself. He didn’t even recognise the noise that he made, but he stilled when he felt the group’s eyes on him.

Allie frowned from where she sat cross-legged on the floor. “Why did you react like that?”

Logan shrugged quickly, leaning further back into the couch cushions beside Tucker. “I didn’t.”

“You literally scoffed.”

“I breathed.”

“That was a judgmental breath.”

“It’s pre-law,” Logan muttered, finger running along the rim of his beer bottle.

Dean narrowed his eyes immediately, “What’s wrong with pre-law?”

Logan took another sip of his drink like he hadn’t just entered the conversation voluntarily. “Sounds evil.”

Tucker barked out a laugh from beside him. “Bro, weren't you considering law for a bit?”

“We don’t about that dark time of my life,” Logan muttered, he nodded silently as the yeasty alcohol slipped down his throat- his eyes flicked to you but he refocussed on the conversation at hand.

You bit the inside of your cheek hard enough to stop yourself smiling.

The two of you had agreed on the secrecy together.

Mostly because your friends were all deeply nosy and incapable of minding their own business for longer than six consecutive minutes, but also because you and Logan had somehow slipped into dating without fully meaning to and then panicked slightly once you realised how serious it had become.

Now here you were.

Four months deep into a relationship that you couldn’t reveal, unless you wanted to bring about the next Dean-meltdown. The last one almost ended with him moving to Australia and making a life with the kangaroos. 

Which meant that every time somebody tried setting one of you up with another person, you both had to sit there pretending it was completely normal.

You liked to think that you had been handling it significantly better than Logan.

“All I’m saying,” Dean continued, oblivious to the psychological warfare occurring three feet away from him, “is that he’s smart, he’s tall, he cooks-”

“That’s manipulative,” Logan interrupted.

The room went quiet.

You looked at him.

Dean looked at him.

Even Hannah slowly lowered her phone.

“What?” Dean said eventually.

Logan blinked once like he had only just realised he’d spoken aloud.

“What?” he repeated.

“You think cooking is manipulative?”

Logan shifted slightly in his seat. “Sometimes.”

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

“Neither does pre-law.”

Allie turned fully toward him now, deeply suspicious. “Why do you care?”

“I don’t.”

She narrowed her eyes at him, “You seem weirdly invested.”

“I’m not invested.” He quickly replied. 

Garrett spoke without looking up from his phone.

“You wanna explain why you’re reacting like a divorced father who just found out his ex-wife is dating again?”

Tucker physically folded over laughing.

Logan pointed at Garrett immediately. “See? This is why nobody likes you.”

“People love me.”

“Your own girlfriend looks tired.”

Hannah snorted into her can of coke and ran her hand through her boyfriend’s hair, who was staring daggers at Logan until he melted into her touch.

You looked away before you snorted at Logan’s antics, which probably in hindsight wasn’t the best idea, because the second your attention drifted away- you could feel him boring holes into the side of your face, like he was trying to telepathically communicate his annoyance across the room.

Your phone buzzed against the counter and you grabbed it quickly before someone noticed the way you grinned to yourself, biting down on your lip you checked the notifications; even though you already knew who it was.

Hockey boy 💗 stop smiling at dean about another guy before i lose my mind

Across the room, Logan stared at his own phone with the deeply concentrated expression of someone trying not to commit homicide.

You typed back carefully, intentionally slower so as not to alert your brother- who was now chattering with his girlfriend across the room. 

You: you are being unbelievably dramatic rn

Hockey boy 💗 he said the guy cooks

You: so…do you?

Hockey boy 💗 yeah but i do it sexier

You physically had to cough to disguise the laugh that escaped you.

Hannah looked over instantly.

“What?” she asked suspiciously.

“Nothing.”

“You just giggled at your phone.”

“I did not.”

“You literally did.”

Dean pointed at you accusingly. “Wait. Is there already another guy?”

You jumped so hard that your knee hit the island and you hissed. Logan had sat up straighter, fast enough that it alarmed Tucker, who was sunken into the couch next to him.

“No,” he said immediately.

The entire room turned toward him.

A beat passed.

Logan slowly leaned back again, cringing and half hoping the universe would grant him reprise in the deepest black hole it could create.

“I mean,” he added poorly, “how would I know?”

Garrett finally looked up fully now, staring directly at Logan with open fascination, his eyes widening as he properly studied the both of you. His mouth popped open in an O shape.

Your heart launched into your throat as you met the captain’s eyes, half pleading that he was as slow as his stereotype allowed him to be. But before Garrett could elaborate further, Dean steamrolled right over the moment.

“Whatever,” he said dismissively, already pulling out his phone again, “look at this guy and tell me I’m wrong.”

He shoved the screen in your direction, you squinted and slumped forward, hitting your older brother with a dead look.

You hated how attractive the man was.

Tall. Dark hair. Nice smile.

One of those annoyingly clean-looking corporate boys that somehow always smelled expensive.

Before you could stop yourself, your eyes flicked instinctively toward Logan. If there was a bigger mistake you could've made, it would be murder. Because he was already looking at you, his eyes inquisitively blinking between you and Dean.

Waiting.

You raised one eyebrow slightly, teasing him and Logan narrowed his eyes immediately. Then, because apparently self-preservation had abandoned him entirely tonight, he muttered,

“He looks like he moisturizes too much.”

Dean stared at him, baffled that this was coming from the same man who probably owned 500 different types of skincare. What Dean didn’t know is that each time a new product would pop up on his sink, it was actually yours. 

“All humans should moisturize.”

“Not that much.”

“John,” Hannah said slowly, “you own more hair products than me.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

Logan opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

“It just is.”

“You are such a fucking hater,” Tucker wheezed.

Logan looked genuinely offended, looking at the group, whipping around like a broken spinning top, “I’m not a hater.”

“You’re beefing with a man none of us have met.”

“I’m not beefing with him.”

“You called his face moisturized in a derogatory way.”

Logan rolled his eyes and slumped again, tapping at his phone. Yours buzzed against your thigh- it seems secrecy had flown out of the window tonight. Four months of perfect sneak-ins, disguised dates and unknown sleepovers flushed away.

Hockey boy 💗 if he touches you im transferring schools

You stared at the text for a full three seconds before looking up, Logan was already messing with his hair absently, jaw tight, eyes narrowed at absolutely nothing.

God.

He was unbelievable, you tried not to gape at him while tapping on your phone,

“He wants to meet tonight?” You ask Dean, feigning interest as you squinted at the phone over the lip of your cup. 

Dean perked up and texted this guy, Ethan, Evan? You didn’t care, “He says…” Dean held the room still with his hands outstretched, “He’ll be over in an hour!” Your brother jumped triumphantly into Beau, who had missed the entire debacle when he disappeared into the toilet.

That gave you the perfect window to meet Logan’s gaze, which had flared considerably. You shrugged and winked at him, biting your cheek when he blushed and huffed, turning away to down the rest of his drink. 

You managed to escape upstairs under the guise of getting ready for this date- far away from Tucker, who had gotten into the habit of critiquing your outfit choices like he was one planned ensemble away from Vogue.

You slipped into the bathroom, starting to wash your face with products that Logan had shamelessly claimed as his, just so you could keep more of your stuff over on his shelf. 

You towel dried your face when the door to the bathroom cracked open with a dull knock. You didn’t turn around immediately, mostly because you already knew who it was.

“Baby.”

There it was, you huffed, hands barely pausing their circular movements of rubbing moisturizer into your skin. You glanced over bemused with the puppy act that Logan was currently playing at the doorway. That tone is exactly the tone he used on you when he was not happy about what your secret relationship brought along with it- it was low, annoyed in a way that immediately made warmth crawl up your spine despite your best efforts

Adjusting one of your earrings in the mirror and pressing your lips together with a new layer of lipgloss, you watched him click the door behind him and lean against it- bashfully looking at you from below his eyelashes

“You know following me upstairs while I’m getting ready for another guy is objectively making this situation weirder.”

He crossed his arms over his chest as you adjusted your skirt.

“Another guy,” he repeated flatly.

You met his eyes through the mirror.

Your boyfriend looked deeply unimpressed by the entire concept of tonight, which was slightly ironic considering he’d spent the last few months allowing Allie to continuously set him up with girls under the assumption he was still hopelessly into Hannah.

“You’ve literally gone on three dates this month,” you reminded him.

“They barely count.”

You turned around fully then, eyebrows lifting. “One of them took you mini golfing.”

“She talked about her ex for forty minutes.”

“That’s still a date.”

“It was psychological warfare.”

You snorted and planted your hands on your hips, your resolve barely holding when his eyes softened slightly at the sound, that was part of the reason you both worked. No matter how irritated he got, no matter how jealous or grumpy or territorial he became, there was always this underlying tenderness to him around you that completely gave him away if you paid attention for long enough.

And you were always paying attention to him. 

His gaze dragged over you slowly now. Taking in the dress, your hair, the shimmer of your lipgloss that he interrupted the application of. Your eyes widened when his jaw tightened

“Oh my god,” you laughed quietly, shaking your head, “you’re actually jealous.”

“I’m not jealous.”

“You compared his moisturizer usage to shooting puppies.”

“He looks slippery.”

“That is not a real critique.”

“It could be.”

You laughed again, properly this time- Logan’s expression immediately worsened, as if he couldn’t believe that you were going to look like that for a guy that wasn’t him.

“You look too pretty for this,” he muttered.

Your stomach flipped, your laugh settling to a soft smile. Logan always spoke like that, somehow injecting sincerity into everything he said even when he was irrationally possessive.

You tried very hard not to melt visibly.

“Well unfortunately,” you said lightly instead, stepping closer to him, “our friends are insane and think you’re still in love with Hannah.”

“I haven’t liked Hannah in like 6 months.” Your eyebrows lifted slightly with a grin

“6 months?”

Logan realised his mistake immediately.

“Don’t do that,” he warned.

You cheekily bit your tongue, “Do what?” 

“That thing where you look smug.”

“I’m not smug.”

“You’re literally smirking.”

You were doing the mental maths, because if Logan stopped liking Hannah almost 6 months ago.. Well. 

You’d started sleeping together six months ago and got together two months after that.

Interesting timeline.

Your boyfriend stepped closer before you could weaponize that information further, hands finding your waist automatically like muscle memory. Like he physically couldn’t stand within arm’s reach of you without touching you somehow.

“You better not actually like this guy,” he muttered.

You blinked once. Twice. Then brought your arms to his shoulders- comfortingly rubbing the soft flannel

“John Logan,” you said slowly, “are you trying to establish rules for a date I didn’t even want to go on?”

His hands tightened slightly against your waist.

“No.”

“Yes you are.”

“No I’m not.”

“You’re literally pouting.”

“I don’t pout.”

You reached up immediately and pressed your thumb against his lower lip, his eyes darkened. 

“There,” you whispered sweetly. “That. That’s pouting.”

Logan grabbed your wrist before you could pull away, dragging you flush against him in one smooth movement that made your breath catch embarrassingly fast.

“You think this is funny,” he said quietly.

“A little bit.”

“That’s concerning.”

“You’re being insane.”

“I’m being reasonable.”

“You called him slippery.”

“He is slippery.”

You dissolved into laughter again, forehead dropping briefly against his chest. Logan exhaled heavily above you, one hand sliding up your spine slowly - exposed from the cutout of your dress. His fingers curled at the back of your neck.

“Don’t let him kiss you,” he murmured.

You tilted your head back immediately and grinned at him- as if you would ever consider the ridiculous idea.

“Oh my god.”

“I’m serious.”

“You are unbelievable.”

“I mean it.”

Your amusement faded slightly then, into something gentler that settled underneath your expression, beneath all the jealousy and dramatics and weird comments about moisturizer, you knew what this actually was.

Logan wasn’t angry, he was scared. Not of you cheating- you’d threatened him enough that you’d need to be held at gun point for the thought to even breach your mind. He was worried that someone better would come along, someone more charming, someone who was a part of your world. The world that Dean and you shared along with the ultra elite trust-fund babies.

Your expression softened.

“You know I’m yours, right?” you asked quietly.

The change in Logan's face made your chest hurt ever so slightly- he sighed and dropped his forehead against yours,

“Yeah?” he asked softly.

You swallow away the knot in your throat and kiss his nose, “Yeah.”

Logan smiled at the feeling of your lips on his face, grinning at the triumphant look on your face. And for a second, neither of you moved, just basking in the feeling of each other's closeness. Then his hand slid properly into your hair and he kissed you, and just like every time this man kissed you, your knees felt weak and you leaned into him.

His mouth moved against yours slowly at first, careful and lingering and familiar enough to make your sigh slightly before he deepened it with the quiet sort of desperation that always seemed to sneak into him around you, you hum softly into his mouth, fingers curling into the front of his hoodie.

“John,” you whispered when he kissed down your jaw.

“Hm?”

“If you leave a mark on me before my date I’m actually going to kill you.”

Logan kissed your neck again deliberately then started nipping at the skin purposefully, you whacked his head, groaning when he soothed over the stinging skin with his tongue.

“You asshole.”

“You said no marks,” he murmured smugly against your skin, “these are just... friendly reminders.”

You were seconds away from shoving him when Dean’s voice suddenly echoed up the stairs.

“HEY!”

You gasped and jumped apart violently, his hands tightened on your waist and you could feel his heartbeat thumping wildly below your hand.

“IS MY SISTER READY YET OR IS SHE MAKING THIS GUY WAIT ON PURPOSE?”

Logan inhaled sharply, squeezing his eyes shut . You bit down on your smile and turned to fix your makeup, your lipgloss smudged to your chin and all over his mouth. You usher him towards the mirror to wipe it off.

Then Dean yelled again,

“AND LOGAN WHERE THE FUCK DID YOU GO?”

The two of you stared at each other, a short moment of silence passed, then you both had to stifle laughs against the other, your mouth pressed into his shoulder as he cradled your head and pressed a hand to his lips. 

Logan dragged one hand down his face. “I hate everyone in this house.”

“You live here.”

“Don’t remind me.”

You grinned and reached up, gently fixing the collar of his shirt where you’d wrinkled it. His eyes softened again immediately and he smoothed out your hair,

“Go on your stupid date,” he muttered, rubbing away the last of the lipgloss from your chin.

“You’re adorable when you’re jealous.”

“I’m not jealous.”

“You followed me upstairs.”

“I was stretching my legs.”

“Through my tonsils?”

Logan rolled his eyes and kissed your forehead

If you were to be objective about the situation your brother had put you in- you’d have to say that he did an annoyingly good job. You’d never tell him that of course, you’d prefer to use Logan’s pliers to rip your teeth out individually. 

But the guy sitting across from you was genuinely perfect on paper.

Ethan was funny in that easy, socially polished way corporate aspirants somehow always were, where every joke sounded rehearsed enough to land properly but natural enough that you couldn’t call him out on it. He opened doors without making a huge deal out of it, remembered details from previous conversations Dean had apparently told him about you, and somehow managed to make expensive restaurants feel casual instead of pretentious.

Worst of all. He was genuinely attractive. You could think of at least 5 of your girlfriends who would happily take the inconvenience out of your hands.

Dark hair slightly messy in that intentional way rich men cultivated, broad shoulders underneath a fitted black sweater, stupidly nice hands that looked like they belonged in a watch advertisement.

You hated how much Dean would enjoy being right about this.

“And then Di Laurentis told me,” Ethan laughed lightly, leaning back in his chair, “that if I hurt you he’d apparently feed my body to the hockey team.”

You snorted into your drink. “Yeah, that sounds like my brother.”

“He’s weirdly intimidating for a guy that owns that many tank tops.”

“He weaponizes confidence.”

Ethan grinned and held eye contact with you while he sipped from his whiskey glass. And you stumbled into the same feeling you had been experiencing the entire evening, everytime Evan smiled- your brain automatically compared it to Logan.

Ezra’s smile was clean, polished and pristine. You’d go as far as to say it was pretty under most lighting.

You couldn’t help the comparison. Logan’s smiles made your stomach flip and consciousness flutter in a way only he could manage. Split lips after hockey games- stretched into victorious laughter, crooked smirks when he was about to say something unbelievably annoying and your favourite, the devastatingly soft grin he got only around you, like his entire body was tuned to your reactions. 

Your throat dried and you worked hard to keep an uncomfortable grimace at bay.

“So,” Eli said, resting his chin against his hand slightly, “Dean says you practically live at the hockey house.”

You nearly choked on your drink.

The statement itself wasn’t inaccurate, you did spend a lot of time at the house. But if Elijah knew how much of that time you’d spent in John Logan’s bedroom, you’re pretty sure he would evaporate on the spot.  

“Yeah.. They’re my brother’s teammates, we all just ended up becoming friends,” you said carefully.

“You and Logan seem close.”

Your heart skipped once at the mention of his name and you fought against the natural instinct to bite back a smile, instead you kept your expression neutral with the kind of effort that deserved academic recognition.

“Logan?”

“Yeah.” Everett shrugged lightly. “He looked like he wanted to kill me earlier.”

You laughed too quickly, waving off the notion that Logan would be anything but jealous.

“He’s just weird.”

Eric nodded thoughtfully, studying your face in a way that made you send an impromptu prayer up to God that he wasn’t putting the badly veiled pieces together, then he grinned and shrugged.

“I figured.”

The waiter arrived then, setting down your desserts while Edward thanked him politely. You mentally facepalmed, again, this guy was objectively perfect. But you had to stop yourself from recoiling away when his hand brushed yours, gentle and hesitant across the table.

Your mind flashed back to the most recent date Logan took you on, a small, independent coffee shop outside of the Briar locality- away from prying, gossiping eyes. He had grimaced as he paid for your drink and stifled his love for it when you made him take a sip, your hands were intertwined the entire time, a carefree momentum settled in your conversation whilst he played with the rings on your fingers, openly, unabashedly. 

The memory hit you so suddenly you almost laughed. Dean had hit gold with this guy, you could read Erik like an open book, and the entire time he had been nothing but sweet, smart at points and attentive nearly the entire length of the date. Your friends would probably start planning a big, upper-east side wedding by next week.

But still your mind drifted back to the only man you could see yourself marrying, and how much he would absolutely hate this restaurant. The excess of cloth napkins would make him tense, the dim lighting irritating him enough to make his entire face scrunch up and the lack of fries would be considered diabolical. 

But you knew, with absolute certainty, that if you wanted to dine in a restaurant like this, he would suffer an eternity in these four walls if it meant he was with you.

Your phone buzzed against your lap, breaking your chain of thought. 

Hockey boy 💗: Are you home yet?

You stared at the carousel of messages prior to this, and the timestamps

9:14 PM. 9:26 PM. 9:41 PM. 9:57 PM.

Four separate messages.

Your lips twitched helplessly, all of them were as performatively nonchalant as the others.

Hockey boy 💗 If this Egbert guy touches you, I'm keying his daddy’s jeep. 

Hockey boy 💗 Don’t ask how i know this but his linkedin is not very impressive- not good enough to date my girl that’s for sure. 

Hockey boy 💗 I miss you.

Ethan noticed immediately, the way your eyes softened and a huff made your lips part in a ghost of a smile.

“Boyfriend?” he asked casually.

Your head snapped up.

“What?”

He smiled, cocking his head slightly, “You’ve checked your phone every five minutes since we got here.”

Heat crawled up your neck instantly and you furrowed your brows in apology,

“No,” The lie felt bitter on your tongue, but you silenced your phone and set it down face first on the table.  Eran hummed like he didn’t fully believe you, but thankfully let it go.

The rest of the date shifted slightly after that, not awkward since poor Edmund hadn’t let the clarifying moment put a dent in his enthusiasm. It just meant that his hand hadn’t touched yours since you replied to Logan.

You wanted to apologise to him, to say that it wasn’t working out for any reason that didn’t involve Logan. But you opted for polite, self-explanatory silence on the matter. Letting Edwin slip on your jacket for you and engaged in a cursory side hug that made you both cringe a little, but it was easier than explaining to him that instead of his simple affection, you wanted the idiot currently losing his mind back at the hockey house over a pre-law major named Elton.

Logan would honestly rather take a hundred slapshots straight to the ribs without pads than listen to Dean brag about what a 'good guy' he’d set his sister up with.

It started with a passing comment, then a phone lighting up on the coffee table which led to Dean half-paying attention to the loud conversation being had in the living room while scrolling. This cumulative, slow motion train crash in front of Logan’s eyes, meant he had gone suspiciously quiet in the midst of the heated debate between Allie and Tucker and was now focussing on his friend who was grinning like a Cheshire cat at his phone.

Dean eventually spoke, stretching back into the couch like he owns it, a triumphant look spread across his face. The group quietens when they notice the smug expression, which either meant he was about to announce something gross or he was going to be an ass about being right. 

“She just got dessert,” he casually reports, looking around the room, like a king would look at his subjects- pompous and on the highest horse possible.

Logan does not respond immediately. He just leans forward slightly, fiddling with the loose thread fraying from the cuff of his sleeve, when he does decide to grace Dean with an answer- it takes everything in him to keep his voice steady and flat in a way that should come across as disinterested. 

“That’s nice.” His tone was clipped, a stark difference from his usual charismatic demeanor. The rest of the group makes up for his lack of enthusiasm, the girls giggled and congratulated Dean on finding such a catch, the guys laugh and speculate that in the dating world- getting dessert is equivalent to a perfectly timed, public, flash-mob proposal. 

Logan prayed for it to end there. It normally would’ve, Dean hadn’t said anything that would invite continuation. You had ordered dessert and that meant Logan would need to become a world class pastry chef as soon as possible. Case closed. Goodnight. 

“And he says she’s laughing a lot.” 

A badly stifled suffering sigh escapes Logan’s lips, his body briefly pauses, as if it had forgotten how to act normal and instead decided to shut down.

He recalibrated, ignoring the ugly, curling sensation that lurched in his stomach and instead, rather stiffly, managed to say,

“Good for her,” he says. Perfect. His voice was still intensely calm, still controlled and his answer invited no follow-up.

Across the room, Tucker glances up from his seat with the vague expression of someone who is only half following the conversation but is starting to sense that the topic was sprinting full speed down an unexplored path . Hannah leans toward Allie, lowering her voice.

“Why is he talking like that?” she asks.

Allie glances between them. “Like what?”

Hannah thinks for a second, “Remember the time he walked in on you and Dean?”

Allie sighs dreamily at the memory, obviously not remembering the avoidant, distasteful tone that Logan had adopted for the rest of that night.

“Ohhhh,” Allie nodded slowly, the specifics hazy in her mind, but she could clearly remember Logan looking like he would let Garrett shave off the outer layer of his eyeballs with his skates.

Dean hears this and instead of doing the smart thing for everyone in the vicinity, he contributes to the analysis,

“That’s what it is!,” he snaps his fingers and points at Logan, who glanced at the perky blonde out of his periphery and slapped his outstretched fingers with his palm. 

Garrett in the middle of the exchange has stopped pretending entirely that he is not listening. He doesn’t dare react, but his attention splits between Logan and Dean regularly, as if he was the first to picture something that everyone else had not yet realised. 

Dean’s phone vibrates in his hand, “Oh,” he says after a moment, like he is remembering another detail. “He also says she’s really pretty when she’s concentrating.”

Logan exhales through his nose, slow and controlled, and finally looks down at his hands as if the table in front of him has suddenly become more interesting than anything else in the room, focussing more on the worn out grain and the used fibres of the carpet beneath it. When he speaks again, his tone is still even, but it takes slightly longer to form the sentence.

“That’s… nice.”

Hannah slowly sits up a little straighter, her brows knitting together in mild confusion rather than concern.

“Am I crazy,” she mutters, “or does this feel weird?”

“You are always slightly crazy,” Tucker replies automatically but he shares the same, puzzled look.

“That is not helpful.”

Allie is also watching Logan, like she is trying to decide whether this is something she is allowed to comment on or whether it falls into the category of things that will resolve themselves without intervention.

Garrett still says nothing, opting to sit with his discovery in unparalleled superiority. 

The room continues as if it is trying to behave normally around something that it does not fully understand yet. Dean scrolls again, far too unaware of the pressure building in the man beside him.

“Oh,” he adds, like he has found another harmless detail. “She keeps fixing her hair when she laughs.”

Logan stills, properly this time. A eerie calm settles over his body, because he was internally cursing himself for being in this situation, damn his friends and their nosey tendencies and damn you for being the sister of his teammate.

He ruminates on the choices that brought him here today, coming to the conclusion, that he'd rather be trapped in an endless, no-whistle bag skate at five AM than endure these idle, cheerful updates. A bag skate ended eventually. This felt like it never would.

But Tucker leans slightly toward Hannah and whispers, “Is he doing okay?”

Hannah whispers back, “I think we are all missing something.”

Allie does not take her eyes off Logan, morbidly fascinated at the fact that the world’s most suave person, had his lips pressed against his hands and had managed to end up with a raincloud over his head in the middle of July. “Something is definitely happening.”

Garrett shifts against Hannah, still choosing to be an idle spectator in Logan’s ruin, but even he could muster up a sympathetic grimace when Dean chose to continue the narration. 

Logan finally cuts in.

“Can you stop reading that out loud.”

Dean looks up, “Why?”

A pause.

“Just tired. Honestly, I’d rather coach put us through a three-hour gauntlet drill right now than hear any more details about your sister’s love life. It’s weird, man.”

Dean’s eyes widened by a fraction, “Woah, is everything alright?” He looks genuinely concerned and that just makes Logan want to run into a wall at full speed. Because the whole room was staring at him, blinking like a flock of owls that were studying their latest choice of prey.

He scratches the back of his neck, hoping that nobody notices the nervous tick, “Sorry..” Logan grabs his hoodie as he takes his leave, “My coursework has been killer lately, must not be getting enough sleep. My bad man.” He pats Dean’s shoulder once and moves towards the staircase.

The entire house seemed to be suspended in awkward confusion- and Logan was prepared to add homicidal undertones as he reached the top step and Dean’s voice fluttered after him,

“Allie-cat what kind of girls have you been setting him up with? Maybe I should take over his matchmaking”

Logan groans and flops into his bed the minute the door creaks shut behind him, too dejected to glance up when his comforter vibrates beneath him.

The window is not the traditional avenue to enter a room, you realised that throughout the entirety of your senior year of highschool. It always requires a small negotiation with physics, a bit of careful balance, and the kind of confidence that suggests you have done this before and will probably do it again.

Which you admittedly have, given that you had memorised the best notches in the brick to wedge your foot into and where not to grab unless you wanted to end up face to face with a view directly into your brother's window.

When you finally reach your destination and fiddle with the window enough to coax it open, a soft creak permeates in the summer breeze- which you immediately curse because you had dedicated a solid 20 minutes to convince yourself that you were being quiet and the window very clearly disagrees.

You pause with your knee digging into the frame, listening as your heartbeat hammers in your ears. The night answered you, a dainty chirp of a cricket paired with the whirring of traffic further away in the city made you relax, continuing your journey into the room.

Inside, the lighting is low in a way that makes everything feel softer than it probably is in reality.

A desk lamp glows in the corner, throwing warm light across the room, and Logan is sitting on the edge of his bed like he has been doing exactly that for a while without moving very much at all.

Logan looks up when he hears your pants replace the faint buzz of the house, he doesn’t startle- just rushes over as silently as possible to grab your waist before you nosedive into his bedside table.

“Woah.” He steps back whilst keeping his hands firmly planted on your waist, watching you topple slightly on your heels, “What are you doing here?”

You look up at him, your lips downturning in a confused smile, “Hello to you too,” a peck to his lips interrupts your answer, “You said you missed me, so I'm here.”

The dress you had on stretches in tandem with your movements, stepping out of his loose hold to flop onto his bed- which protested slightly with a pained squeak, “You could say the feeling was mutual” You grinned up at him, leaning back onto your hands in the process.

He purses his lips, trying to hide a smile- which he does worryingly well. The neutrality in his eyes makes your spine rigid.

“You used the window,” he says, glancing at his curtains that now flitter along the wall.

You blink at him. “Yeah… Like I’ve done since we started hooking up”

Logan exhales through his nose, but it doesn’t fully commit to being a sigh.

“You could’ve used the door,” he clarifies.

“I didn’t want to wake anyone,” you reply, finally swinging your leg onto the duvet leaving your heel to topple uselessly to the floor with a dull thud. 

Logan stays where he is for a second longer, watching you like he is trying to decide whether to stay where he is or act like a normal person and come closer. You match his gaze cheekily, shrugging off your bag while taking the room in, “God I love your room baby, it's so you.”

He stands up from where he was leaning against his desk, and crosses over to you in that slightly controlled way he gets when he is pretending he is not emotional, while very obviously being emotional in a quiet, annoyed-at-himself kind of way.

“You were gone longer than you said,” he mutters.

You pause mid-unzip of your dress.

“I said I’d be out for a bit.”

“That is not a time.”

You finally look at him properly.

There it is, a signature Logan pout. You’d gotten used to every version of them, since he knew how to use his artillery- but this one wasn’t one that sat well with you, it buried its way into your chest and blossomed into a pang of anxiety.

“Oh my god,” you say mainly to yourself, pushing up so you could stand chest to chest with him, inspecting his face.

Logan barely tilts his head to meet your scrutiny, “What?” he asks, like he already knows he is about to lose this conversation.

You shake your head, “You’re pouting.”

“I’m not pouting.”

“You are absolutely pouting.”

“I’m not-”

He stops mid-sentence, watching your hands come up to his face and gently squish his cheeks just enough that his expression breaks in a way that is immediately unfair to him.

“There,” you say softly. “That one.”

His brows knit together.

“This is not-”

You lean in and press a quick kiss to the corner of his mouth.

He pauses.

You do it again, slightly higher this time, like you are correcting the unhappy crease of his lips. His hands hover for a second like he is deciding whether to be annoyed or affectionate and then, predictably, choose neither and both at the same time as they settle lightly at your waist.

“I don’t like it,” he says finally.

You hum.

“What part?”

His eyes flick to yours properly now.

“The part where you go out with someone else and come back smiling like it’s normal.”

You blink once, then your expression softens in a way that is very deliberately not taking him seriously, even though you absolutely are.

“Logan,” you say, gently.

He looks at you like he is bracing for impact, the undeniable pain of defeat, of losing you to the suave guy who apparently was very focussed on your dessert choice. You lean your forehead against his chin. 

“I was thinking of you the whole time,” you say simply, biting the inside of your cheek when you feel his shoulder drop just a fraction. 

His voice, when he speaks again, is quieter.

“That’s not fair.”

You smile.

“Why?”

“Because I had to be normal about it in front of everyone,” he mutters.

You laugh softly at that, genuinely amused now, and he immediately looks offended by your amusement, which only makes it worse.

“You were not normal about it,” you say.

“I was.”

“You were sitting here brooding like a Victorian man in a tragic novel.”

“I was not brooding.”

“You were brooding.”

He opens his mouth to argue again, but you cut him off by pulling him closer by the front of his hoodie. His protests die unspoken on his lips, as they always do whenever you pull that move.

“There,” you say, softer now, kissing his cheek, then his jaw, deliberately unhurried. “Better?”

Logan exhales, arms coming up to wrap around your shoulders, pressing you tightly against him.

“You’re distracting,” he murmurs into your hair.

You snort against his neck, “That’s kind of the point.”

A short pause takes over the conversation, a lull in his displeasure as you dig your fingers into the plush material that stretched over his back.

Then, Logan sighs and very quietly, in the dark of his room admits, “I didn’t like imagining you laughing at someone else’s jokes.”

You pull back slightly just to look at him, hes looking down at nothing in particular, half of his face glowing a soft amber in the pool of light spilling out from his lamp, the other half hides in the shadows- he turns his head fully into the darkness when you cup his cheek and rub placating lines with your thumb against his stubble. 

“Oh,” you whisper. “You were jealous, jealous.”

“I was not-”

He stops, because you kiss him again a quick, gentle press of your lips against his- barely anything but enough to make him smile slightly and shake his head.

“You’re annoying,” he says again, but there is no heat in it.

You hum, watching how his caramel curls wrap around your fingers as you brush your hand through them. 

“You likeeeee me.” You tease, your voice barely a hushed whisper, “Baby, I don’t even have a way to contact that guy- he could tell I wasn’t into the date.”

Logan blinks at you, “Wait, what?”

“I mean- I made him swear not to tell Dean, but I think it was somewhere between me replying to you every five minutes and the fact I flinched when he tried to hold my hand” You bite your lip sheepishly, “Great guy though! I might have a friend for him.”

He finally smiles properly, small and unwilling, like it slipped out by accident, “Yeah? He can date all your friends,” His hands press against your spine, curving you into him at last. 

Logan ghosts his lips over yours, turning his head out of the shadows and back into the light. Your fingers hover over his jaw, studying the new look in his eye- a twinkle of affection that makes you melt completely into him as he whispers into your mouth, “as long as he doesn’t dare to look at you.”

𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐮𝐞

You woke up to the morning light personally burning your eyelids open, which probably serves you right for not bothering to shut the curtains last night. But you were slightly pre-occupied, which was evident at the string of clothes that littered the floor, you blinked sleepily whilst tracing the journey the different articles went on, leading up to the bed. 

Your bra and his shirt were intertwined by his desk while your dress lay pooled at the foot of the bed along with his sweatpants and boxers, the only thing you couldn’t account for were your underwear. 

Strange.

The birds chirped in a messy orchestra by the window, the sharp sound made you groan and stretch lazily, wincing at the delicious ache that licked down from your thighs to your toes and up through your arms. The perpetrator of these pains was still sound asleep, tucked into your shoulder with an arm flung over your bare middle, fingers twitching slightly as you rubbed your eyes and intertwined your legs with his beneath the covers. 

Logan mumbled into the pillow, or your hair, perhaps both since he was face first into the area that had been taken over by the thick fan of wispy strands, “g’morning baby,” His hands tightened on your waist, holding you still as you looped your arms around his neck. He pecked your shoulder, then the curve of your neck and ended up stifling a deep laugh against your jaw when you smacked his arm.

“I will literally snap in half if you start something mister.” You scolded softly, your words not matching your actions entirely, since your fingers had began to scratch his neck softly, grinning when he all but purred at your touch. 

“I didn’t hear you complaining last night.” He mumbled, play-biting your dewy skin. You had wiped up the obvious mess in a sleepy haze, but the dampness of sex still clung to your pores like a condensation on a can. 

You gasped theatrically and flipped the pair of you over, so you were now resting your face on his sternum, “I don’t think you would've heard much since you had me pressed into the pillow.” Your fingers traced the splattering of hair that tickled your face,

Logan smirked down at you, stroking your hair, “Once again I fail to hear a complaint.”

“You-”

“YO LOGAN!” The both of you jumped at the interruption.

“Shitshitshitshitshit” you began whispering hurriedly, your gaze whipping around the room for possible escape plans that involved leaving the premises immediately. 

It was not looking good to say the least, since Logan would probably prefer to get caught than for you to consider sneaking out of his window sans clothes. 

Dean pounded on the door, “HAVE YOU SEEN MY SISTER AROUND? I WANTED TO ASK HER ABOUT THE DATE.”

Logan groaned and was close to petulantly kicking his legs like a toddler reminded about their bedtime, “Dean I think I have more knowledge about bird sphincters than I have about your sister or her sex life.”

You gape incredulously at him and mouth, “Bird sphincters?”

Logan silently stutters and shrugs his shoulders, his hands settling on your bare hips,

You heard Dean thump his head against the door, jiggling the handle but the lock held well against his attempts, “WELL ADAM HASN’T SAID ANYTHING HAPPENED AFTER THE DATE, SO IT MUST'VE GONE BADLY.”

A beat passed where you and Logan stared at each other, “His name was Adam?”

One thing you learnt about Hannah Wells, being one of her best friends and all, was that she was normally- a very reasonable person. She was the one to keep electrolyte sachet’s in her bag during a night out, the one to book the uber a day in advance and the one to always text check-ins on the group chat during finals week. 

That was her, normally. 

Unfortunately, ever since she decided to become the first hockey WAG in the group, the captain she shared a bed with had spent their entire relationship testing that theory. The relationship was undoubtedly adorable, some may say to a disgusting, how-to-lose-a-guy-in-10-days level, but sometimes Garrett would feel the need to use Hannah's tightly strung mental stability as a pair of chopsticks.

“Just, tell me again why we’re doing this?” You watched Hannah with a concerned expression, she was aggressively highlighting a sentence that had absolutely nothing to do with the paragraph she'd just read.

The yellow highlighter squeaked angrily across the page,"You know why," She gritted out. 

"No, I know why you're angry,” You pointed at the highlighter.

"I'm asking why that textbook is suffering for it."

The answer never came, but that was attributed to the fact that Hannah was still busy glaring at her notes like they had personally offended her. Beethoven was a bitch. 

The study room had fallen suspiciously quiet about twenty minutes ago, with Allie laying on the sofa in the corner going through a script for class and you and hannah sitting on the large table in the centre of the glass box, you scribbling out statistics equations and Hannah trying to compose a new piece. 

The initial productivity went out the window when Hannah began to complain about Garrett, either of you could have stopped her, put a pin in it and dealt with it at home. Instead, Allie and you happily discarded your work and quipped helpful bits of advice during her rant. 

"You know what his problem is?"

You exchanged a glance with Allie, both of you knew it was better if nobody answered- experience had taught you this was a trap.

"He says he'll call me."

Hannah pointed at her phone that she had flung across the table at the beginning of her speech, "then doesn't call me."

You nodded, the man had a habit of saying he’ll call after practice- then take hours in the locker room with the boys. Your own boyfriend had done that more times than you could count, but you made peace with it very early on; assuming it was because the boys were engrossed in some weird, hockey bro hangout while they changed. 

It was nonetheless a reasonable complaint, because the team was AWOL for nearly the entire day, and the three of you were suffering for it. Ever since Garrett returned from the bench, after the fight that led to his suspension, training was 24/7 and you were lucky to get a morning kiss at the crack of dawn and a small whisper of seeing you later before the door shut, leading their phones seeming to have fallen off the face of the planet.

So, if Graham had promised he’d “see his girl tonight” because he “missed her so much” and then had the gall to not reply to her messages for half an hour. You were prepared to ride at dawn, and steal his skates to rub against concrete for as long as your drill sergeant ordered. 

However, currently the drill sergeant was pink in the face and grabbing at her phone, stretching herself over her textbook to wave the device angrily. 

"And then when I text him asking where he is-"

You already knew this wasn't going to end well.

"He sends me a thumbs up."

The silence was immediate, you gaped at Allie, she gaped back. It was two fishes staring at each other while Hannah slumped into her chair.

It shouldn't have been shocking, it was exactly the sort of thing Garrett would do. But he was an idiot for deciding to not fight against his nature during this trying time. 

Allie lowered the script she had folded against her legs, flopping it onto her chest as she sat up. Slowly, carefully, as if she’d been told there was a rabid animal that could sense her fear.

"A thumbs up?"

"A thumbs up."

"Oh."

"Exactly."

You shook your head and closed your eyes. This was rough, like Liverpool F.C rough. 

"I know he meant well."

That sentence was somehow worse, because she was trying to be rational. And when Hannah was angry and tried to be rational, it usually resulted in disaster. 

"Did he think?"

Allie's contribution was deeply unhelpful.

Hannah jumped and gave her a thankful clap, "THANK YOU."

"I'm just saying."

You groan and give her a look of deep regret, "You are not helping."

"I wasn't trying to." She grinned at you.

Hannah dropped her head onto the table, face first into her music sheets. The universal sign of academic and emotional defeat. 

You watched her lie there for a moment.

Then another

Then-

"I am going to kill him."

You roll your eyes and cross your arms, there it was. The threat you’d all been waiting for, Allie checked her phone, nodding her head.

"Only ten minutes."

"A personal best." You added.

Hannah stood up immediately, the chair scraped obnoxiously against the floor- as if warning her not to do the thing she was absolutely going to do. Both you and Allie looked up, concerned at the way she blinked quickly, the cogs in her head turning so fast that you were sure smoke would start spilling from her ears. 

You recognised the look on her face, a dangerous determination, masked by an eerie calm. In actuality it was a complete loss of common sense

"Hannah." Allie started, warningly. 

"No."

"You haven't even heard the question."

"I know the question."

The smile spreading across Hannah's face made your stomach drop. It was a Hannah Has An Idea smile and historically speaking, those had a terrible survival rate.

You racked your brain for what she could possibly be plotting. Then your face fell.  Practice had ended approximately fifteen minutes ago. Which meant the boys were currently finishing up at the rink. A fact that should've been irrelevant, so painfully ordinary that it was similar to breathing. Instead, it somehow became the most important detail in the room.

“Hannah, no-”

She had already grabbed her bag and started walking towards the door. Allie scrambled to her feet, shoving her stuff into the tote she randomly picked up when you left that morning. You did the same, not caring that you messily crumpled up your work into your bag, instead more focussed on watching Hannah strut out of the library, stomping through the isles- not paying you any mind. 

You panted when you caught up to her, dragging a hand through your hair,

"Oh no."

"Oh yes."

"Hannah."

"No."

"Hannah."

The door to the outside world opened and Allie squinted against the golden hour glow, Hannah’s smile widened dangerously, 

"I am going to find my boyfriend."

The first sign this was a terrible idea came when Hannah ignored the boys leisurely walking out of the athletes' building, their hair damp from showers, you recognised a few, some from the calisthenics club, you waved at the girls on the swim team and pointedly flipped off the lewd comments from the lacrosse team. Eugh. 

The second sign came when she didn’t listen to your warnings.

The third came when she barely blinked at the coach giving her a confused greeting.

By that point, frankly, the universe had done everything it reasonably could.

"Hannah."

No response.

"Hannah."

Still nothing.

The woman marched through the arena, stumbling sharply against the chairs. You inched through behind her, holding Allie's hand as she huffed and whipped her bangs out of her eyes, glaring at Hannah, who was already at the bottom of the staircase, about to turn into the back corridor. 

Neither of you were particularly interested in letting your best friend commit relationship homicide without witnesses.

"Hannah."

"What."

The answer arrived instantly. She stilled just before the dim pathway towards the locker room, hands braced on her backpack straps, her shoes tapped on the floor expectantly. 

"You do realise practice literally just ended."

"Correct."

"You do realise hockey players are probably changing."

"Correct."

You looked at Allie, whose eye was twitching at her best friend's unwavering need for vindication. 

"You're concerning me."

She rolled her eyes and dashed down the hallway, you recognised this part of the training facility instantly, it was embarrassing the amount of times you had waited here, leaning against the wall for Logan to emerge, his chain glinting in the yellow lighting as he hauled equipment over one shoulder, the other carried his own gear. 

He would kiss you quickly, mumbling against your lips about missing you, and then dump all the random sticks and bags of pucks into the storage before slinging an arm around your shoulder, slowing to a leisurely stroll as you recounted your day. 

You rounded the corner, and froze. Allie bumped into you, whining as she rubbed her nose. 

The locker room doors sat at the end of the corridor. You stared ahead, and blinked when Hannah barely stopped- charging forward.

"Hannah."

"No."

"Hannah."

You cupped your hands around your mouth and shouted after her, jogging behind. "What exactly is your plan here?"

"I am going to find Garrett."

"Then?"

"Then I am going to explain why sending a thumbs up was stupid."

Allie threw her hands up and blocked her pathway to the door, "Hannah."

"No." She tugged down Allie’s arms, and pushed the girl out of the way. Before either you or Allie could stop her, Hannah grabbed the door handle, and it was like the world slowed.

"HANNAH!"

The door opened and you immediately regretted the day you were born. The silence hit you like the torrential stream of water in a car wash, burning your eyes as a gasp got stuck in your throat. 

Then your brain caught up with what was in front of you- because unfortunately, disastrously, hockey practice had ended, extremely recently. So recently in fact, that half the team were still in the showers hooting and hollering, while the other half were dripping wet in front of their cubbies. Staring straight at you, towels paused mid-dry.

You froze.

Hannah froze.

Allie froze.

The hockey team froze.

Time itself appeared to freeze.

"Oh my God." Allie giggled shrilly, her eyes wide as her hand came up to stifle a mix between a gasp and sob.

It wasn’t the shirtless hockey players that disturbed you. It was the penis’.

Everywhere. 

Anywhere. 

Dicks floor to ceiling, no matter where your troubled eyes would take you, it was phallic body parts all around. A sight that would haunt you until graduation.

The team were the first one to snap out of the trance, some of them barely phased at the intrusion, the other half silently covered their junk and shouted brokenly for the people you were actually looking for. 

“What?” Logan’s voice shouted from beyond the showers, luckily you were far enough away to avoid the sight of your boyfriend and his teammates in the steamy, tiled cheap porno setting. 

You accidentally made eye-contact with one of the freshmen on the team, and he winked at you. The expression on your face must've been unbelievably unimpressed because he rushed to get dressed immediately after his failure. 

That made your survival instincts finally activate.

You spun around immediately, a sensible decision on your part. 

Unfortunately, Allie had chosen the exact same strategy.

The two of you collided at full speed.

"OW."

The yelp escaped simultaneously. One second you were turning around, the next your shoulder crashed into Allie's.

Your foot caught on your other ankle, and suddenly gravity joined the party. The floor rushed upwards, the world tilted and you were convinced this was your rapture. 

Two seconds away from meeting your untimely demise, strong arms caught you before impact.

"Oh my God, babe?" The voice sounded familiar and you braced yourself for his bewildered expression when you squinted your eyes open. Logan’s face was approximately six inches away and you felt the towel he had hurriedly wrapped around himself slip low down his hips against your waist. 

"Nope, don’t ask." You closed your eyes against the water droplets splashing onto your face from his hair. The tickle of his silver chain against your cheek made you wave your hands between the two of you. You could feel him gearing up to ask something, 

A finger wag in his face and a simple, "Nope." made him laugh as he hoisted you up. 

Across from you, Dean had already reached Allie, looking equally concerned and delighted.

"Are you okay?" His arms were bound securely around her, pressing in front of him.

Allie flicked his forehead, "Stop smiling."

"I'm not smiling."

"You absolutely are."

Dean was moments away from framing the incident and hanging it on a wall, it was when Allie had steadied herself and stepped fractionally away from him that you noticed Dean hadn’t managed to grab a towel. And stood naked, right in front of you. As bare as the day he was born. 

You retched loudly and tried to run out the door, forgetting that Logan was still holding you upright, an arm around your waist- hand steadying your shoulder.

Deeply and violently, you groaned- accepting that this was your life right now,  "Please tell me I died."

The laughter around you doubled in volume, a few of the guys chirping at you.

Somewhere behind Logan, Garrett appeared, towel around his waist- completely oblivious to the chaos playing out with his team. 

"What happened?"

The silence that followed was immediate, the boys pursed their lips together, you and Allie were engrossed in anything that didn't involve Hannah. 

She glared at him slowly, dangerously. Garrett took one look at her expression, and his eyes ping ponged around the changing area, the open door, the duo of embarrassed girlfriends- one of them looking at her boyfriend seductively, the other hiding her face in her hands. And finally the boys, Dean who was playing into Allies flirting- butt naked. And Logan who was stifling a laugh against your shoulder as you shook your head silently into your palms.

Understanding dawned, making him rush over to his bag and dig out his phone, his eyes widening at his girlfriend, "Oh."

The idiot actually laughed. Hannah looked ready to gouge his eyes out with his stick.  And somehow, unbelievably, things were about to get worse.

By dinner the same day, everybody knew, not just the team, not just other teams. The entire student population. 

People in your classes, people in the library, people in the campus cafes. Somehow all of them must've collectively received an email.

You still didn't know how, no matter how hard you searched the gossip account, your dm’s, hunted through stories. There was no way to determine how the hell the situation had reached every set of ears at Briar. You'd spent the better part of twelve hours trying to figure it out.

The incident had happened at approximately 9 am that morning.

By six-fifteen, two members of the lacrosse team had smirked at you in passing.

By seven, somebody in a study group asked if you were "recovering."

By eight-thirty, a girl in your dorm-block had winked.

"Tell me again why I haven't transferred,” You dropped your forehead onto the cafeteria table.

Across from you, Hannah looked equally traumatised as she picked at her dinner, Allie looked murderous as another pair of irrelevant students giggled as they passed by. 

The three of you had spent the entire day suffering.

Allie slumped in her chair, "Because we're seniors."

You stabbed aggressively at your salad. "Unfortunately,” mouth half-full of lettuce you continued, "You know what the worst part is?"

Nobody answered, mostly because nobody wanted to encourage you.

"The fact we literally didn't do anything."

"THANK YOU."

Allie pointed dramatically.

"THANK YOU."

The cafeteria table rattled slightly, you winced and gave her an accusing stare. While the passion was appreciated, the volume was not.

"We walked into a room." Hannah shrugged

"Accidentally." Allie added.

"Then left."

"Immediately."

You threw your hands up, "And somehow everyone is acting like we joined an orgy."

The three of you sat in offended silence, completely justified silence. Silence that lasted approximately four seconds.

Then somebody cleared their throat and you closed your eyes, praying to whatever god that put you in that situation this morning, wasn’t just deciding to test your self control.

You swore, if you opened your eyes, and the person who you thought it was, was standing in front of you. There would be a search warrant for your name, and a blown up ice rink in your wake. 

"No."

Across the table, Hannah groaned and Allie made a sound like she was ready to throw something. The answer came before you opened them, pressing your lips to your hands that were held together in a praying position, you shook your head, "No."

Because standing directly behind you was, Dean who was grinning so wide, you’d think Santa Clause gifted him a dildo, Garrett, currently more occupied in flashing his puppy dog eyes at Hannah and Logan, the only useful one, who came bearing gifts with an apologetic yet amused smile on his annoyingly handsome face.

The Three Horsemen of Making Things Worse.

"Oh, come on.” Dean looked genuinely offended, hand on his chest as he pulled out the seat next to you, in front of Allie.

She threw one of Hannah’s chips at his face, which he caught in his mouth, "We came to support our girlfriends! amidst their public cancellation from society."

"You came to laugh at us." You corrected, ignoring the paper container that slid in front of your tray and the weirdly shaped Logan entity that sat on the other side of you. 

The smile on Dean's face widened, "How ‘bout both?"

Hannah dropped her fork and lunged at him, only held back by Garrett- who had two fingers looped into her belt loop. 

During this, you peeked into the container, flicking open the lid to see a slice of your favourite cake- red velvet from the bakery just outside campus.

You glanced at Logan and stuck your tongue out at him in response to his pleading expression. There it was, you thought- your eye twitching, the complete lack of shame astounded you.

You hated the smug bastard. A deep, passionate hate. But you still gave him a quick peck, intertwining your hands beneath the table and placed them on his thigh. He suppressed a grin and leaned back in his chair watching you cut into the pastry with your fork.

"How's recovery going?" Dean rested his chin on his palm, twirling a blonde strand with his finger.

Allie flipped off her boyfriend, "Leave."

Garrett laughed immediately, "You have to admit-"

"No." Hannah interrupted, hands slapping at his wrist which comfortably kept his hand looped into her jeans. 

"You don't even know what I was going to say."

"Because it doesn't matter."

"It was funny."

"It wasn't."

"It really was."

The idiot looked entirely too pleased with himself, which was particularly annoying because he wasn't even the one receiving the worst of it.

That honour belonged to you and Allie. Specifically because both of your boyfriends had apparently become the main characters of the story. A fact you deeply resented.

"You know what?" You sat up, “How come nobody is talking about Hannah?”

The entire table went quiet.

Hannah blinked.

"Oh my God." Allie said slowly, "You're right."

"I know."

Hannah immediately looked suspicious, "Why aren't they talking about me?"

Then Allie pointed dramatically, "THAT'S WHAT I'VE BEEN SAYING."

"You haven't said that."

"I've been thinking about it."

Somehow, the entire college manipulated the story into a desperate cliche- that you and Allie were dying to see your boyfriend’s and just. couldn't. wait. for them, so you burst into the changing room, ovulation phase at it's peak and boned down in front of the entire team.

Completely cutting out the bit where you both were trying to stop Hannah from social suicide.

Mission accomplished apparently. The problem now, was that you’d stepped in front of the bullet, and forgot that it meant you’d get shot. 

"You started the whole thing." You whined at her.

"EXACTLY."

Dean and Garrett looked delighted.

"You stormed across campus." You held up one finger.

"Correct." Hannah nodded.

"You opened the door." Another finger.

"Correct."

"You ignored approximately fourteen warnings." A third.

"Correct."

"And somehow everyone else became the main characters." You harrumped and slumped back into your seat, glaring at Logan whose arm came up to rest behind you- but you didn’t pull away when he pecked your forehead.

Hannah looked genuinely aghast at her lack of involvement within the gossip mill, "You know what?" She folded her arms, "That is offensive."

"There she is." Dean blew an exaggerated kiss at her, "The victim complex."

Hannah threw a napkin at him.

The situation somehow got worse, a possibility you never thought could be true.

By Wednesday morning, people had started inventing details, ones that didn’t even make sense. Especially because the original story was already embarrassing enough.

Now there were rumours.

Terrible rumours.

Wild rumours.

Factually incorrect rumours.

"I heard somebody say we were recording."

Hannah looked flabbergasted, the pen in her hand creaked as her first tightened.

Across the corridor, Allie stopped walking, "We weren't?"

"Exactly."

"We were too busy being surrounded by cockfest 2026."

The three of you continued toward class, united by shared trauma- forged entirely through public humiliation. 

The campus buzzed around you, students heading between lectures, athletes carrying equipment bags, people drinking coffee they absolutely couldn't afford. The usual. Until somebody shouted out your name, the voice was gratingly familiar in a way that made you want to spit out your tonsils. 

The guys sitting outside the student centre weren't even subtle about it, the one who called out for you nudged another, the second looked up and smirked.

They were two guys from the lacrosse team. Arguably, you’d think such a fancy sport would produce gentlemen, but the game manufactured slime-balls like the two currently snickering at your deadpan expression. 

"Oh look." The smile spread, "The locker room girls."

You stopped mid-step, and you’d known it was a mistake the minute your foot paused, because now they knew you'd heard. The embarrassment hit instantly, like a slap to the face that reached down your throat, hot in a way that made your body burn. 

Beside you, Hannah looked ready to throw hands, her eyes narrowing at the boys. 

“You got only fans? We’d love to see what happened in the locker room.” 

Allie grit her teeth and just as she was about to bite back, a voice interrupted her.

"Say that again."

The atmosphere chilled behind you, one second the lacrosse pair were giggling like little goblins, the next, their faces were frozen with teetering smiles. 

You felt an arm wrap around your shoulders. Logan stood next to you, his thumb rubbing soothingly on your arm. 

Dean was walking up to Allie, his hands still cupped around his mouth from his interruption. Garrett hung back, but welcomed Hannah into his side when she begrudgingly shuffled up to him. 

They had apparently finished a team strategy session, an unfortunate coincidence for the boys in front of you, who suddenly looked significantly less dick-ish. 

The one with slicked back, blonde hair looked to his friend- who shrugged and patted him on the shoulder, his lip visibly quivered when he spoke, "What?" the question came out weak.

Dean smiled, two hands braced on his girlfriend's frame. Leisurely almost. "Oh, don't do that." He tilted his head with a pout, "You were really confident thirty seconds ago."

Nobody answered.

Garrett called out, still maintaining a generous distance from the situation- probably not wanting to get too involved with another team as the captain, “You seem like the type to be on only fans Jackson. Is that what you do when you lose to Eastwood?” The disappointment in his voice somehow made it worse.

"Seriously,” Dean shook his head, "Dude, if you're going to talk shit about my girlfriend at least be creative." Allie smacked the front of his chest, but nodded in agreement. 

Then Logan spoke, "Find something else to talk about."

Jackson, and the other guy- equally as greasy, dissolved into pitiful excuses and throwaway comments, scoffing as they retreated into the building.

"Holy shit."

Dean grinned, "You're welcome."

"You enjoyed that." Allie poked him accusatorially, leaning up on her toes to kiss his cheek a few times, leaving lipstick prints against his dimple. 

"I enjoyed that immensely."

Nearby, Garrett wrapped an arm around Hannah's shoulders and joined the rest of you.

"You know," Garrett said thoughtfully, "I feel like people would've stopped talking about it sooner if Dean hadn't told literally everyone."

The silence was beautiful. The three of you slowly turned to look at Dean, who was gritting out threats at Garrett, a horrified expression gracing his features as he timidly caressed Allie's hair. 

"I did not."

Logan punched his shoulder jokingly, like bros talking about whose basketball team won last night, "You absolutely did."

"I told one person."

The universe was finally smiling down on you, since Tucker walked up to the six of you, pushing his curls out of his face.

"You told Tucker." Garrett laughed. 

Tucker blinked between the two, who were now engaged in a heated conversation using their eyes. 

"That's still one person."

"Dean."

"One person."

"You told the biggest gossip on the hockey team that our girlfriends walked into the changing room after practice and saw everyone's dicks. by accident."

Tucker finally nodded his head with an affirmative sound, “Oh yeah, I’m just annoyed I left practice early for a doctor's appointment.” He patted Dean on the shoulder, grinning as he stirred the proverbial pot, “luckily Dean here, my best friend, the person who tells me everything. Recounted it in perfect detail.”

An argument exploded instantly, involving Allie smacking Dean upside the head and she bickered about how the last 48 hours had been a living hell.

Hannah wasn’t letting Garrett off the hook easily, nagging him that if he had just “replied to her goddamn messages” the three of you wouldn’t have been in there, she quietened and blushed when he whispered in her ear.

Tucker had joined Allie in bashing Dean, but the three of them groaned when Dean promised, “mind-blowing orgasms on every surface of the house”. Allie didn’t say anything further, just glared at him when he hooked a hand onto her waist and pulled her in.

They drifted ahead while they bickered. Leaving you slightly behind with Logan, who had somehow presented an iced coffee from behind his back and was watching you sip it. 

"You didn't have to do that." You said mid-sip.

Logan looked over, "What?"

"That."

You gestured vaguely toward the now-empty student centre steps. Logan’s expressions softened slightly as he took your bag from your shoulder and pulled you into him, tucking a hand into your back pocket. 

"Yeah." he paused, "Actually, I kind of did."

Your stomach performed a deeply inconvenient little flip.

"Why?"

Logan looked ahead, then to the ground in an almost bashful kind of way, then he shrugged. Like the answer was obvious, "I don't like people making you feel bad."

You cooed at him, grabbing his face with your free hand and squishing his face between your fingers, “You’re such a softie.” 

Smacking a kiss to his stubbly cheek, you returned to the drink, gulping it down appreciatively.

He snickered to himself and added unhelpfully, “Plus, kind of owed you since you saw Dean’s cock.”

“Logan!”