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thoughtdaughtersworld

The Cure Part 2

Garrett Graham x f!reader

Summary: Garrett Graham is trying to figure out how to live without the girl he loves ,while you’re trying to convince yourself leaving him was the right thing to do. So far, neither of you seem to be succeeding

Word count: 11k+

Author's Note: Thank you guys so much for all the love on this story! It's very close to my heart, so it means a lot seeing people resonate with it. There's only one more part after this, which is where we get their happy ending. I wanted to show how hard the breakup was on both of them and sit with that pain for a little while before bringing them back together. Hopefully the angst is worth it!!

I also apologize for the slow updates. Work has been keeping me pretty busy lately, so I haven't had as much time to write as I'd like. Part 3 should hopefully be out by the end of next week.

Warnings: Angst, hurt/no comfort, self- worth issues

**************************************************

Thirty-two days.

It had been exactly thirty-two days since the breakup, though Garrett refused to think of it as counting, because counting meant admitting that each day had carved itself into him a little deeper, and he was not ready to admit just how badly this was still wrecking him.

Thirty-two days since he had watched you walk out of the hockey house with tears on your face and heartbreak in every step. Thirty-two days since he had stood at the top of the staircase, frozen and helpless, while the person he loved most left him behind. Thirty-two days since he had heard your voice saying things he still did not fully understand, things that had sounded too final to be real. Thirty-two days since he had seen you.

Life, infuriatingly, had not paused to match the shape of his grief.

Practice still started at six. Classes still demanded his attention. Games still had to be played. NHL scouts still came. The world kept moving as if nothing had split open inside him, as if one of the most important parts of his life had not just vanished overnight.

The first week had been the worst, because he kept waking up with the strange, hopeful instinct that maybe the breakup had only been a nightmare, only to remember, all over again, that it had been painfully real. He would reach for his phone before his eyes were even fully open, expecting a good morning text, a picture of your breakfast, a complaint about some professor, a reminder to eat something, and every single time he found nothing but silence. No little updates from your day. No random thoughts sent at odd hours.

Allie and Hannah refused to tell him anything. That had become its own special kind of torture. The only thing either of them had offered in thirty-two days was a flat, almost cruelly simple, “She’s alive”. Every time he tried to push for more, every time Dean tried to pry something useful from them, the answers dried up immediately, and as much as it drove him insane, he understood why. He couldn’t even be angry with them for protecting you from him, because if the roles were reversed, he knew he would have done the same. He would have taken anything they were willing to give him, and the desperation in that thought was humiliating enough to make his jaw clench every time he admitted it to himself.

By the second week, reality had started settling in with a dull, merciless weight. This wasn’t a fight that needed time to cool down. This wasn’t a temporary silence or a bad stretch or some ugly misunderstanding that would eventually untangle itself. You were gone, and the worst part was that you had left not because you stopped loving him, but because you loved him too much to believe you deserved to stay. Garrett still could not wrap his mind around that, could not understand how you could look at the kind of love he felt for you and still see only danger in it.

So he threw himself into hockey with a kind of grim desperation that made even Coach nervous. If he stayed busy enough, he thought, maybe the ache would stay quiet. If he practiced hard enough, skated until his lungs burned and his legs trembled beneath him, maybe exhaustion would drag him under before his thoughts could. He stayed on the ice longer than everyone else, pushed through drills until sweat soaked through his shirt, took extra reps, extra shifts, extra everything, as if effort alone could outrun grief. Instead, all it did was make him harder to ignore.

The guys assumed the extra skating was helping. It was not. Hockey was only a distraction, a way to keep his body busy while his mind kept bleeding out in the background. No matter how many hours he spent on the ice, he still found himself looking for your car when he crossed campus. He still knew which coffee shop you studied in. He still glanced toward the architecture building out of habit, still wondered whether you had eaten, whether you were sleeping, whether you were okay, whether you had ever looked at your phone and thought of him the way he thought of you every single day.

Coach started watching him with a worried look he didn’t bother hiding. Dean noticed Garrett had stopped joking around during practice. Logan noticed he had started volunteering for every drill that hurt. Tucker noticed the way Garrett could change the subject in half a second any time someone came close to saying your name.

Nobody brought you up after the third week, not after Garrett nearly snapped at a freshman who asked, with the kind of careless stupidity Garrett had no patience for, whether he was “finally over his ex.” He had not even realized he was moving until Dean grabbed his shoulder and shoved him back, but after that the lesson spread fast enough. Your name became a forbidden thing, something the guys tiptoed around like a bruise they did not want to press, but that did not stop him from thinking about you.

God, he thought about you constantly.

He missed the laugh that used to spill out of you when you were trying not to laugh. He missed the way you stole his hoodies as if they had always belonged to you. He missed finding your hair ties in strange corners of his room, the way you curled into his side when you were tired, the sound of your voice in the mornings, the soft, absentminded way you smiled at him over nothing at all. He missed the stupid little things too, the fries you swore you did not want until they were half gone, the way you always checked to make sure he ate before you did, the way you made his room feel warmer simply by being in it.

What haunted him most was how normal everything had felt before it ended. There had been no betrayal, no shouting match, no dramatic collapse, no one moment he could point to and say, there, that is where it all broke. One day he had been lying in bed with the girl he loved, and the next she had looked him in the eye and convinced herself he deserved someone easier. He had replayed that morning over and over in his head, every word, every pause, every look, and still he could not find the hidden answer, the thing he had failed to say, the thing he could have done to keep you from believing a lie that had been growing inside your own head for longer than he had realized.

Sleep became another casualty.

Garrett could not remember the last time he had rested properly. Every time he closed his eyes, his brain betrayed him. Some nights he dreamed about the breakup, and those were awful enough, but the dreams that hurt most were the ones where you were still there, where he came home and found you asleep in his bed, where your toothbrush still sat beside his sink, where your laughter still lived in the hallway outside his room, where nothing had changed and his heart had not yet learned how to brace itself. Then he would wake up, and the room would be empty, and that first second of forgetting would be followed by the brutal memory of remembering, which was somehow worse than the pain itself.

If you had fallen out of love, maybe he could have swallowed the loss and called it life. If you had cheated, maybe he could have hated you enough to survive it. If you had simply stopped caring, maybe time would have done the rest. But that was not what happened. You had cried in his bedroom and told him you loved him, and then you had walked away anyway, because somewhere along the line you had started believing your sadness was something he would eventually grow tired of carrying.

Garrett tightened his grip on his stick as he stood alone on the ice long after practice had ended. The arena was empty now, the overhead lights reflecting off the frozen surface in long, pale streaks, and the quiet made the pressure in his chest feel even worse. He could still hear your voice in his head, soft and broken, saying the words that had haunted him ever since.

You deserve somebody easy.

It still made him sick.

Because the truth was the exact opposite. Loving you had been the easiest thing he had ever done. The hard part had been convincing you that you were worth the effort, worth the patience, worth the kind of love that stayed when things got messy. And somehow, after a year of trying to show you that your sadness did not scare him away, he had still failed to make you feel safe enough to believe him.

A puck cracked sharply against the net at the far end of the rink, the sound bouncing back through the empty arena and cutting through the quiet like a slap. Garrett exhaled slowly and dragged a hand down his face before lifting his eyes toward the stands, almost expecting, for one impossible second, to see you there like you always used to be.

You had come to so many of his practices, sitting up in the same section every time and watching him with that soft, proud look that made his whole body feel lighter the second he spotted you. You never complained, never acted bored, never made him feel ridiculous for wanting you there, and he had always played harder when he knew you were watching because hearing you cheer for him had become one of the best parts of his day.

But the stands were empty now.

Just rows of darkness and silence.

He turned away and headed for the locker room, his skates loud against the floor in the quiet hallway, and when he got there he dropped onto the bench with a tired sigh and pulled out his phone. He didn’t even have to think before opening Instagram and finding your profile, because that had become its own kind of ritual by now, stupid and painful and impossible to stop. You still hadn’t been online in a month. Not once. He had posted stories more than he normally would have because some selfish part of him kept hoping you might see them, might tap through them, might remember him even if you were trying not to.

He scrolled through your page slowly, stopping at the photos of you like he always did. There was one in particular that made something in his chest ache, the one where the two of you were smiling together and looked so stupidly happy it almost hurt to stare at it. A small smile tugged at his mouth despite himself when he saw that you still hadn’t taken it down. He remembered that day perfectly, could replay it in his mind without even trying.

It had been the day he asked you to be his girlfriend, the two of you crammed into a photobooth and laughing until neither of you could keep a straight face, and then him asking the question with his heart in his throat while you looked at him like he had just handed you the world.

He could still hear your shocked little "Are you serious?"

Could still remember the way you'd thrown your arms around his neck before he'd even finished asking. He still kept those same photo strips in his wallet, folded a little from being carried around too much, because he had never really been able to let them go.

But the smile did not last. It slipped away as quickly as it had come, and his throat tightened. Before he could sink any further into it, his phone buzzed in his hand, and a message from the boys lit up the screen.

Dean: Anyone up for Malone’s in an hour? Tuck: yh thats cool Logan: G u down?

Garrett stared at the messages for a second, thumb hovering over the keyboard while a part of him immediately wanted to say no, wanted to go home and sit in the dark and think about you until the night swallowed him whole. But another part of him, the part that was growing tired of doing this alone, the part that was sick of the silence and the memories and the way his own room felt like a trap, didn’t want to spend another night moping around by himself either.

G: yh ill meet you there

Dean: Did i just hear right or did he agree? Tuck: i think he did Logan: alright see u there man

Garrett let out a breath that almost sounded like a laugh, though it didn’t feel like one, and set his phone down beside him before finally getting up and heading for the showers.

The drive to Malone's was short, but Garrett still spent most of it staring blankly at red lights and trying not to think about the fact that this was the first time he'd agreed to go out with the guys in weeks.

The second Garrett walked through the doors of Malone's, Dean nearly dropped the menu in his hands.

"Holy shit," Dean said, staring at him. "It's alive."

Garrett rolled his eyes immediately.

"Don't start."

"No, seriously," Dean continued, pointing at him dramatically. "I was beginning to think we'd have to put your face on a missing persons poster."

Logan snorted into his drink.

"Tucker had money on you cancelling at the last second."

"I still think he's gonna leave after one beer," Tucker said without missing a beat.

Garrett shook his head and slid into the booth across from them.

"Good to know you all have hobbies."

The waitress came over and he ordered a beer before leaning back against the seat. The second she walked away, he noticed all three of them were staring at him.

Garrett sighed heavily. "Alright, what?"

Nobody answered right away.

Dean looked at Logan.

Logan looked at Tucker.

Tucker looked like he was trying to figure out who was going to say it first.

"Guys."

Logan finally cleared his throat. "You know we love you, right?"

Garrett immediately groaned. "Oh God."

"No, seriously," Logan said. "We're worried about you."

Tucker and Dean nodded in agreement. "We know these past few weeks have been rough," Tucker said carefully. "And honestly? We get it. Nobody expects you to magically be okay."

"But you've kind of been shutting everyone out," Dean added. "Including us."

Logan leaned forward slightly. "We just want you to know we're here, man. If you want to talk, we'll listen. If you want a distraction, we'll do that too. If you want to punch Dean—"

"Hey." Dean immediately raised a hand.

"I'm making sacrifices here."

That earned the first genuine laugh Garrett had let out in days and the guys visibly relaxed when they heard it. Garrett shook his head and looked around at them, feeling something warm settle in his chest for the first time in weeks.

"Thanks, guys."

The sincerity in his voice made them all smile.

The conversation slowly shifted after that. Hockey came up. Then classes. Tucker complained about an assignment. Dean got roasted for something stupid he'd done earlier that week. Logan told a story that somehow got more dramatic every time he retold it.

And for a few hours, Garrett felt something he hadn't felt in a long time. Normal.

The ache was still there.

It hadn't disappeared, but for the first time in thirty-two days, the grief wasn't the only thing in the room. By the time they left Malone's later that night, he felt a little lighter than he had when he'd arrived.

And right now, that felt like enough.

***************************************************

The arena was loud in the way Garrett usually loved, loud with anticipation and adrenaline and the collective roar of a crowd that seemed to breathe with the game, loud with the kind of energy that used to settle him the second he stepped onto the ice because hockey had always been the one place where everything else could disappear for a while.

Tonight, though, none of it was reaching him. The noise should have been enough to pull him out of his own head, should have been enough to keep him focused on the puck and the shift and the next play, but his thoughts had been restless all night, skittering beneath the surface of everything he tried to do like something alive and impossible to pin down. The game had barely gotten going before he could already feel that familiar, ugly sense of distraction creeping over him, the same kind that had been haunting him for weeks, the same kind that showed up every time he thought too long about you.

Then the puck slid across the ice, Garrett intercepted it cleanly, and sent it over to Dean before turning toward the boards, and the crowd erupted a second later when Briar scored. He barely heard any of it.

His eyes had drifted toward the stands without him even realizing it, because apparently some part of him still did that now, still searched without thinking, still looked for the shape of you in every arena he walked into as if his body had not learned yet how to stop hoping. He did not know why he bothered anymore. It was probably habit. It was probably pathetic. It was probably the one stupid instinct he had never managed to break, the one that made him look up at every game like maybe, just maybe, you would be there again.

And then he saw you.

Section 104. Third row.

For a second he genuinely thought his brain had turned on him, that he had imagined you so often he had finally started seeing you where you weren’t, but then his heart lurched so violently in his chest that it hurt, and the world around him seemed to narrow to a single impossible point. You were there. Real. After days of silence, days of not knowing where to put the ache in his chest, days of wondering whether you were sleeping, eating, breathing, whether you had started feeling better or just gotten better at hiding it, there you were in the stands like the universe had decided to twist the knife one more time.

You looked alive. Close enough that he could make out the line of your smile, close enough to see the way you pushed your hair behind your ear, close enough that if he abandoned the game right then and ran up the stairs, he could reach you in seconds, and the thought hit him so hard it almost knocked the breath out of him.

And then his gaze dropped. You weren't wearing his jersey.

The realization hit harder than it should have. Every game for almost a year, you had worn his number. Something that belonged to him, now you were dressed in Briar colors like everyone else. No number. No sign of him anywhere.

It shouldn't have mattered, but it did.

The referee’s whistle cut through the air, and Garrett did not move.

“Garrett!”

Dean’s voice snapped him back to the present just long enough for the play to restart, and he pushed forward on instinct, but the second his skates bit into the ice again, he could already feel how far gone his focus was because you were not alone. A guy was sitting beside you, tall and dark-haired, someone Garrett didn’t recognize, and he was leaning close enough to make you laugh. The sight hit him so hard it felt physical, like a fist straight to the lungs. His stomach dropped, his mouth went dry, and everything in him went still for one awful, humiliating second while the guy said something to you and you smiled.

Garrett stopped hearing the game.

He stopped hearing the crowd, his teammates, the skate blades, the buzz of the lights overhead. All he could hear was the rush of blood in his ears, all he could see was you laughing beside somebody else while he stood helpless on the ice trying not to come apart in front of thousands of strangers.

Had it really only been thirty-six days?

The thought made him feel sick.

The puck came flying toward him a second later, and normally he would have taken it cleanly without even thinking, but his timing was off by a fraction, just enough for it to glance off his stick and skip away. The opposing team took possession almost instantly. He heard Logan shout his name, sharp and frustrated, but by then it was already too late. They scored.

The arena went quiet in that terrible, stunned way that always followed a bad goal, and Garrett stood there staring at the net, knowing exactly whose fault it was before the shame even had time to settle over him. Coach looked ready to strangle him from the bench. Garrett could feel it even from the ice.

And from there, everything only got worse.

His passes became sloppy. His instincts were late. He missed shots he normally would have buried without hesitation. It was like the ice had turned slick beneath him, like he was skating half a beat behind everyone else while his own head dragged him somewhere he did not want to go.

By the third period, even Dean was staring at him with the kind of concern that only showed up once things had already gone too far, but Garrett could not seem to recover. He was still looking up, still looking back, still making the same mistake over and over, and then the hit came so fast he barely saw the defenseman until his shoulder slammed into the glass hard enough to rattle his teeth. Pain exploded through him in a bright, blinding burst, and the crowd gasped as he hit the ice.

For one long second everything went white.

Then the noise came rushing back.

Whistle. Shouting. Skates scraping. Teammates calling his name.

And the first thing Garrett did, before he even fully understood where he was, was look up toward the stands.

Toward you.

Like an idiot.

Like a complete fucking idiot.

Someone grabbed his arm and hauled him upright, and when Garrett turned, it was Dean staring at him with a look half concern and half disbelief. “Jesus Christ, Graham.”

Garrett shoved him off automatically, more from instinct than actual irritation. “I’m fine.”

He wasn’t, and everyone knew it.

Briar lost anyway, 4–2, in what had to be the ugliest game of the season, and by the time Garrett got into the locker room after the final buzzer, the silence waiting for him inside was worse than the noise had been. It was the kind of silence that meant everyone was angry but nobody wanted to be the first to say it. He sat down heavily on the bench and started pulling off his gear with hands that felt too stiff and slow, his whole body sore, his shoulder throbbing, his mind still somewhere in section 104 where you had been laughing at somebody who was not him.

Nobody spoke at first.

Then Logan finally lost patience.

“What the hell was that?”

Garrett didn’t answer.

Logan laughed once, but there was no humor in it. “No, seriously. What the fuck was that?”

“Leave it alone,” Dean said, but even his voice sounded tired.

“No.” Logan’s gaze locked on Garrett. “Coach is ripping us apart right now because our captain forgot how to play hockey.”

Garrett’s jaw tightened. “Logan.”

“No.” Logan shook his head, frustration finally snapping clean through his usual restraint. “You were checked out the entire game.”

Garrett stood up immediately, the motion so fast it shifted the whole room, and every guy in there seemed to go rigid at once because they all knew he hadn’t been right since the breakup, even if no one had been stupid enough to say it out loud until now. Logan’s face was flushed with anger, his voice getting louder now as he pointed straight at Garrett like he was trying to force him to finally hear what everyone had been ignoring.

“You know what I think?” he demanded. “I think you saw her.”

The room went dead silent.

It was the kind of silence that made it obvious everyone understood exactly who Logan meant. Not a single person in the room needed clarification. Logan stepped forward again, his own frustration spilling over now that he had finally started, and his voice sharpened with every word.

“You saw her in the stands and spent the entire game staring at her instead of playing hockey.”

Garrett’s fists clenched at his sides. “Shut up.”

“No.” Logan’s expression tightened. “Because I’m tired of watching this.”

Garrett looked ready to swing, and Dean and Tucker moved between them immediately, one hand out toward Logan, the other hand toward Garrett like they were trying to keep the whole room from detonating. “Alright, that’s enough.”

“No, it isn’t,” Logan shot back, and then he looked around the room like he wanted someone, anyone, to disagree with him, but no one did. “We’ve spent over a month watching him destroy himself.”

Nobody said a word because everyone knew it was true.

“We get it,” Logan went on, his voice still edged with anger but quieter now, more frustrated than cruel. “You’re heartbroken. Fine. Be heartbroken. But you’re the captain, G. People depend on you.”

That one landed harder than the shouting.

“And she isn’t coming back just because you punish yourself enough.”

The words settled over the room with brutal finality, and for the first time all night Garrett didn’t look angry. He didn’t look defensive. He didn’t look like he wanted to argue or throw something or storm out. He just looked exhausted, drained down to the bone in a way that had nothing to do with the game and everything to do with missing you for too long.

When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet enough that the whole room had to lean into it.

“I know.”

***************************************************

You spent the entire week crying in your bed, replaying that morning over and over until every second of it felt carved into you, sharp and impossible to erase. You never really remembered how you got home. One moment you had been standing in Garrett’s bedroom, saying the words that had already started to feel like a mistake the second they left your mouth, and the next you were standing outside your apartment with shaking hands, fumbling for your keys so badly you could barely get the door open. The second you stepped inside, whatever fragile thing had been holding you together finally gave way.

You sank to the floor before the first sob even finished tearing out of your chest.

Hannah and Allie came running when they heard you, and the moment they saw your face, whatever questions they might have had died in their throats. Neither of them asked what happened. Neither of them pushed. They just dropped down beside you, one on either side, and pulled you in like they already knew the truth would be too painful to say out loud. Allie wrapped her arms around your shoulders while Hannah held you against her chest, and that was all it took for the grief to come spilling out in full force.

You cried until your ribs hurt. You cried until your throat burned raw. You cried because you had just walked away from the person you loved most, and for the first time since making that decision, there was nobody there to tell you it had been the right thing to do.

Heartbreak felt different this time. Worse, somehow. You hadn’t felt anything like it in years, not even when your father left, and the closest thing you could compare it to was losing your mum, though even that was not quite the same. When your mum died, there had been finality to it, a cruel and unchangeable certainty that made the pain unbearable but at least simple in one horrible way. She was gone. There had never been a version of the world where you could call her, or run into her on campus, or wake up one morning and find her knocking on your door with coffee and an apology.

But Garrett was still here. He was still breathing, still existing in the same city, still sleeping in the same bed you had spent countless nights beside him in. You could have driven to the hockey house right then and probably found him sitting exactly where you had left him, and the thought of that made your chest ache so badly you had to squeeze your eyes shut.

The days that followed blurred together into one long stretch of crying, exhaustion, and silence. You barely left your room. You slept at odd hours and ignored half the messages on your phone. You skipped meals until Hannah started practically forcing food into your hands, watching you with the kind of worried patience that made you feel both grateful and ashamed at the same time. Some days you were angry at Garrett for making you love him enough that losing him felt like being torn open. Some days you were angry at Dean and Logan and Tucker for being right, for noticing things you had tried so hard not to admit. Some days you were angry at your father for planting the kind of fear in you that taught you to expect people to leave. But most of the time, if you were honest, you were angry at yourself.

Because under all your reasons and all your justifications, beneath every explanation you had given Garrett that morning, there was one truth that kept clawing its way back to the surface no matter how hard you tried to bury it.

You missed him.

You missed him so badly it felt like a physical ache. You missed his voice, his stupid jokes, the way he reached for your hand without thinking, the way he looked at you like you were something precious and worth keeping safe. And no matter how many times you reminded yourself why you had done it, no matter how many times you told yourself that leaving him was for his own good, the same question kept circling back and back until it was impossible to ignore.

Was it worth it?

You asked yourself that question a hundred different ways during the first week. Every morning when you woke up and reached for your phone before remembering you had no right to expect him to be there. Every night when you lay in the dark staring at the ceiling, wondering whether he was okay, wondering if he was sleeping, wondering if he was still hurting as much as you were. Every time your fingers hovered over his contact before you forced yourself to put the phone down again. Was it worth it?

You tried to tell yourself yes. You tried to tell yourself that one day he would understand, that one day he would find someone easier, someone who didn’t carry grief and abandonment and fear around like extra weight strapped to her ribs. Someone who wouldn’t make him miss important things because she was falling apart. But every time you tried to picture him with someone else, your chest hurt so badly you could hardly breathe, and that was when the first terrible realization started to settle in.

You had left him because you thought it would make things better. But nothing was better.

You were still sad. Still grieving. Still carrying every wound you’d had before. The only difference now was that Garrett wasn’t there anymore, and somehow that hurt even more.

You kept reaching for your phone anyway.

Every morning. Every night. Every time something happened during your day. A funny sign on campus. A professor saying something ridiculous. A new coffee shop opening near the library. For months, Garrett had been the first person you told everything to, and now every instinct ended in silence. More than once you opened your messages and stared at his contact, your thumb hovering over the screen while your chest filled with that awful, helpless feeling that came right before tears. You never texted. Never called. But you stared.

The worst part was knowing that if he called right now, you would answer on the first ring. And that was not fair. You were the one who left. You did not get to break his heart and then expect him to put it back together for you. So you stayed away, cried when nobody was looking, and sometimes when people were.

The second week didn’t get easier.

It started with Allie walking into your room and freezing in the doorway. You were still in bed, the curtains still closed, an untouched plate of food sitting on your desk from earlier, and you hadn’t even realized how bad it looked until you saw her face. She stared at you for a second, then crossed her arms and said, “Get up.”

You pulled the blanket higher. “No.”

“Get up.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

She gave you a flat look. “You haven’t gone anywhere in twelve days.”

“I go to class.”

“You go to class and then come home and rot.”

You glared at her. She glared right back. Then Hannah appeared behind her holding a coffee and said, “Oh good, the intervention started without me.”

“There isn’t an intervention,” you muttered.

“There absolutely is,” Hannah said, stepping in like she had been waiting for her cue.

You groaned, but they ignored you completely. Forty minutes later you somehow found yourself sitting in a coffee shop with both of them, while Allie aggressively shoved a muffin toward you and told you that sunlight was not optional. “I’m getting sunlight,” you argued.

“You hissed when I opened your curtains,” Allie said.

“Because it was bright.”

“You looked like a vampire.”

For the first time in days, you laughed, and it caught you so off guard that it almost felt like someone else had done it. The sound slipped out before you could stop it, and for a few seconds all three of you just sat there staring at each other. Then Hannah smiled, soft and careful, and that was what did it. Your eyes stung almost immediately, because you realized it had been the first real laugh since the breakup, and that realization ruined the moment just enough to remind you how much was still broken.

The third week brought a different kind of misery, the kind that came from realizing the breakup had not fixed anything at all. You still missed your dad. Still struggled with your mother’s death. Still carried the same insecurities you had before. Still woke up anxious. Still felt sad. The only difference was that now Garrett wasn’t there to reach for your hand when your thoughts got too loud.

That realization followed you everywhere, especially at night, because despite your best efforts, despite refusing to ask questions and trying not to check his page, you still found ways. It started with Allie sitting beside you on the couch one night, scrolling through Instagram while you pretended not to care until you caught sight of Garrett’s profile picture. That was all it took. Just one glance, one stupid flicker of his name on a screen, and your stomach dropped.

“Can I see?” you asked before you could stop yourself.

Allie looked up immediately. “No.”

“Allie.”

“No.”

“Please.”

She sighed like she had expected this all along. “You know this is unhealthy.”

“I know.”

“You broke up with him.”

“I know.”

“You cried for three hours after the last story.”

“I know.”

Another sigh, then she handed over the phone.

You hated how quickly you took it.

The video was only fifteen seconds long. Garrett was on the ice, helmet on, laughing at something Dean said off camera, and that was it. Nothing dramatic. Nothing special. Nothing that should have meant anything. But your chest still tightened anyway, because he looked real. Not like a memory. Not like a photograph. Real.

You watched the story three times before handing the phone back.

After that, it became a habit.

A tiny, private one you never admitted out loud. A practice clip. A team photo. A stupid video of Tucker doing something dumb. Brief, impossible glimpses of a life that no longer included you. And every single time, without fail, your heart broke all over again.

By the time Wednesday rolled around, you were trying reluctantly to force yourself back into something that resembled a routine. It felt wrong in a way you could not quite explain, like putting on clothes that no longer fit properly and pretending not to notice the seams pulling at the edges. Every part of you still wanted to stay in bed and disappear under the weight of the blankets, to let the days blur together until they stopped asking anything of you, but after weeks of doing exactly that, you were beginning to understand that grief only got louder the more room you gave it.

So you got up.

You went to class. You answered a few texts. You even made yourself go to the library, telling yourself it was because exams were coming and your architecture exam was only a week away, that this had nothing to do with the fact that you were desperate for something, anything, to pull your thoughts away from Garrett for more than five minutes. It was a convincing excuse, maybe even to yourself, and for a while you managed to believe it.

The library was packed when you got there, every table crowded with stressed students surrounded by open books, cold coffee, and enough highlighters to make the whole place look fluorescent. After wandering the rows for several minutes, you finally found an empty table tucked into a quieter corner and sat down before your brain could talk you out of it. You spread out your notes, opened your sketchbook, and bent over the page like burying yourself in work might somehow keep the rest of your life from catching up to you.

For almost an hour, it worked.

Then someone said your name.

You looked up from your sketchbook and froze when you saw Tucker standing there with a small, uncertain smile, like he was trying very hard not to make this weird when both of you already knew it was weird.

“Hey,” he said, keeping his voice light. “Haven’t seen you in forever.”

You gave him a careful smile of your own, though it felt thin around the edges. You hadn’t seen any of the boys since the breakup, and even though you had told Allie she didn’t have to change her whole life for you or stop bringing Dean around, she had refused to hear any of it. She kept saying being around them would be too hard for you after what you had heard, you had told her and Hannah, and while she had been furious on your behalf at first, you had managed to calm her down by insisting there were no hard feelings, because the boys had only been worried about Garrett. You would have done the same for any of them.

“Yeah,” you said softly. “How are you?”

Tucker nodded, like he was choosing his words carefully. “Good. Hockey season’s stressful, but you know, it is what it is.”

The conversation stalled after that, just long enough for the silence to start stretching awkwardly between you. You glanced down at your sketchbook, then back up at him, because there was one question sitting in your throat now, heavy and impossible to ignore, and it felt as though Tucker already knew exactly what you wanted to ask.

Your mind fought with itself for a second. You almost let him go. You almost swallowed the question and pretended you did not care.

“I’m gonna get go—” he started, already shifting his weight like he meant to leave.

“How is he, Tuck?”

The words slipped out before you could stop them.

For a second, neither of you moved.

Tucker’s expression softened immediately, and you looked away at once, suddenly wishing you had not said anything, wishing you had kept your mouth shut and your pride intact, but the moment had already passed. There was no taking it back now.

“You don’t have to answer that,” you said quietly, staring down at the edge of your notebook as if that could save you.

Tucker sighed and then dropped into the chair across from you, the movement so casual and so deliberate that it made you look up again despite yourself.

“He’s practicing a lot.”

That wasn’t really an answer, and you both knew it.

“He’s sleeping?” you asked, because somehow that felt like the next thing to check, the next sign of whether or not he was okay.

There was a pause.

Which was answer enough.

Your throat tightened. “He’s eating?”

Tucker dragged a hand over the back of his neck and gave you a look that confirmed everything before he even opened his mouth. “Dean’s basically been forcing food into him.”

You stared down at your sketchbook, the lines blurring together until they stopped meaning anything.

“Tuck…” you said after a moment, your voice smaller now, quieter, and much more fragile than you wanted it to be. “Is he angry at me?”

That seemed to catch him off guard.

His eyebrows pulled together at once. “No.”

The answer came instantly, without hesitation, without even a second of thought.

You looked up. “He should be.”

Tucker shook his head. “Maybe.”

The word landed carefully, like he was trying not to upset you more than you already were.

“He’s angry,” he said after a beat.

Your heart dropped.

“But not at you.”

That somehow hurt worse because anger at you would have been easier to understand. Something you could put a name to. Instead, Tucker just looked tired in that deeply familiar way people do when they care too much about someone else’s pain and don’t know how to fix it.

“The guy’s been through it,” he said quietly.

You nodded, because you knew that. God, you knew that. You had been thinking about it nonstop for weeks, trying not to picture him hurting, trying not to imagine what he looked like when nobody was around to distract him from your absence.

The silence stretched between you again, heavier this time.

Eventually Tucker stood up, shoving his hands into his pockets like he was starting to feel the weight of the conversation too.

“I should get going.”

You nodded, though neither of you moved right away.

Then he reached out and squeezed your shoulder, gentle and brief, the kind of touch that said more than any speech could have.

“You’ll be okay too, you know.”

That nearly made you cry, because it sounded less like comfort and more like something he was hoping was true for both of you.

Tucker gave you one last look, then walked away, disappearing between the shelves.

You watched him go.

Then you sat there for another ten minutes staring at nothing at all, your hands resting uselessly on your sketchbook as you asked yourself again for the hundredth time if it was worth it

***************************************************

The conversation with Tucker stayed with you far longer than you wanted it to, because it was the first real piece of Garrett you had been given in weeks, and it still was not enough, also because knowing he was not okay did not bring you the relief you thought it would. That was what made the guilt so unbearable, because you had left for his sake, because you had convinced yourself that walking away would make things easier for him, and yet the thought of him hurting now sat in your chest like something heavy and sharp, refusing to let you breathe around it.

You tried to push it aside while you ate dinner, while you stared at the ceiling before bed, then again the next morning and the next after that, but it followed you everywhere, settling into the corners of your day until it became impossible to ignore.

By Friday, Hannah had finally had enough of watching you disappear inside your own head.

“You need to leave this apartment.”

You looked up from where you were curled into the corner of the couch, knees tucked close to your chest, and shook your head immediately. “No.”

“That wasn’t really a suggestion.”

“It wasn’t a good one either.”

Hannah rolled her eyes, and across from her Allie looked equally unimpressed, the two of them having spent the last month hovering over you like worried guards around something fragile, as though they were waiting for you to crack open if they looked away for too long. At first it had felt sweet, even comforting, but now it was becoming harder and harder to not feel cornered.

“I’m serious,” Hannah said.

“So am I.”

“You haven’t done anything except go to class and the library for weeks.”

“I went grocery shopping.”

“Once.”

You pointed at her like that settled the argument. “Still counts.”

“It really doesn’t.”

“Allie, back me up here.”

Allie snorted into her drink and made no attempt to hide her amusement, which only made you narrow your eyes at her harder.

“We’re worried about you,” Hannah said, and the fight went out of you almost immediately, because you knew they were. You knew every annoying comment, every insistence, every attempt to drag you back into the world came from a place of concern, and somehow that made it more difficult to argue, not less.

You let out a long breath and sank deeper into the couch. “I’m fine.”

Both of them stared at you in the exact same way, and you stared back for a beat before muttering, “Okay, fine. I’m functioning.”

“That is not the same thing,” Allie said flatly.

“I know that.”

Silence settled for a second, and then Hannah leaned forward like she had been waiting for the right moment to unleash whatever terrible idea she had been holding onto.

“I have an idea.”

You narrowed your eyes immediately. “No.”

“I haven’t even said it yet.”

“I know your ideas.”

“Rude.”

Allie laughed, and Hannah ignored her completely.

“One of my classmates has an extra ticket for something tonight.”

“No. Absolutely not”

“You still do not know what it is.”

“I don’t care.”

Hannah sighed like she had been personally burdened by your stubbornness. “It is not a date.”

That made you go still because unfortunately, that had been your first assumption.

“It’s not?”

“No.”

“You just said classmate.”

“Because he is my classmate.”

You frowned, suspicious all over again, but she kept going before you could stop her.

“He was supposed to go with a friend. The friend bailed. Now he has an extra ticket and I already told him you were not interested in dating, so do not start panicking.”

You dropped your head back against the couch with a groan. “This is a nightmare.”

“It is one hockey game.”

At that word, your whole body stilled.

You sat up slowly. “Hockey game?”

A quick, guilty glance passed between Hannah and Allie, and your stomach dropped before either of them even said anything. You already knew.

“It’s Briar.”

Your heart started pounding so hard it felt like it had moved into your throat.

“No.”

“Come on,” Hannah said. “You do not even have to stay the whole time.”

“No.”

“You do not even have to see him.”

That made you laugh again, but there was no humor in it, only that awful, brittle feeling that had lived inside you for weeks now. That was the problem, though, because you might see him. After spending so long carefully avoiding every possible chance of running into Garrett Graham, you were not sure your heart could handle seeing him in real life and not in a memory, not on a screen, not in someone else’s story.

Real.

The thought alone made your chest ache.

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can,” Allie said, and this time her voice softened just enough to make your defenses wobble. “You do not have to do anything except sit there and watch the game.”

You looked away because the truth was uglier than any of their encouragement could fix. A month ago, you would have done anything to see Garrett again. Now the thought of it made your stomach twist, because seeing him meant facing the fact that life had continued without you, and you were not sure which version of that truth would hurt more, seeing him miserable or seeing him happy.

You were tired. Exhausted, really, from grieving, from avoiding, from pretending the breakup had not carved a hole straight through the center of you.

So when Hannah and Allie kept looking at you with those hopeful, impossible faces, you finally let out a slow breath and said, “Fine.”

Hannah sat up so fast it was almost ridiculous. “Yes.”

You groaned. “Do not make me regret this.”

“No promises,” Allie said, and Hannah laughed like that settled everything.

But it did not settle anything.

Because somewhere deep inside your chest, underneath the fear and heartbreak and panic, something twisted painfully, and for the first time in thirty-six days there was a very real chance you were going to see Garrett again.

By the time six o’clock rolled around, you were regretting every decision that had led you here, especially the one where you had actually agreed to come. You had picked up your phone at least five times with every intention of cancelling, and each time you’d stopped yourself because you could already picture the look on Hannah’s and Allie’s faces, both of them worried enough as it was after spending the last month trying to drag you out of the hole you had disappeared into.

You stood in front of your mirror one last time, staring at the completely ordinary outfit you’d put together out of habit more than effort, jeans and a Briar hoodie that felt almost insulting in how normal it looked, and then your eyes drifted toward the back of your bedroom door where Garrett’s jersey still hung untouched.

Your chest tightened instantly.

This was the first hockey game in almost a year where you wouldn’t be wearing his number. The first time you wouldn’t walk into the arena with GRAHAM stretched across your back like it belonged there. It felt wrong in a way you couldn’t quite explain, like you had forgotten something important, like a piece of yourself had stayed behind even before you did.

Your phone buzzed.

Ethan.

Hannah had connected the two of you earlier in the week, and despite the fact that you had already exchanged several texts with him, you still somehow managed to blank on his name every few hours, which was embarrassing enough to make you want to disappear into the floor. The message simply said outside, and you let out a long breath before grabbing your keys and forcing yourself to leave the apartment before you could change your mind again.

A few minutes later, you stepped outside and spotted Ethan’s car waiting near the curb. Relief washed over you immediately when you noticed Allie climbing into the backseat, because you had practically begged her to come with you and also because she was going to watch Dean play.

The ride to the stadium passed in a blur of half-conversations and shallow breaths, but by the time the three of you made your way inside and climbed the stairs toward your seats, your stomach had already started to twist. Then you stopped dead.

It was the exact seat.

The one you had sat in at every home game. The one Garrett always knew how to find without even looking. The one where you had watched him score and celebrate and grin up at you from the ice like he could make the whole arena disappear just by glancing your way. The seat where he had pointed at you after wins. The seat where you had fallen in love with him in a hundred tiny moments that had once felt too small to matter and now felt impossible to forget.

For a second, you genuinely forgot how to breathe.

You just stared at it, unable to decide whether you wanted to laugh, cry, or turn around and walk straight back out of the arena.

The first period began exactly how you expected it to: loud, overwhelming, and so painfully disconnected from your own life that it almost felt like watching someone else’s world through glass. At first, you tried to focus on anything else, the game, the crowd, the sharp sound of skates cutting across the ice, the way the arena seemed to pulse every time Briar surged forward. Ethan turned out to be easier to talk to than you’d expected. He was quiet in a way that felt natural rather than awkward, and his humor slipped in so casually that you found yourself laughing before you had time to overthink it. He made a comment about the guy two rows down who looked personally offended by every missed pass, and to your own surprise, the sound that left you was real.

Allie noticed immediately and bumped your shoulder with a look that didn’t push, didn’t ask, just quietly acknowledged the fact that, for one brief second, you weren’t completely unraveling.

Then Briar scored.

The arena erupted, and you clapped because everyone else did, because it was easier than thinking about anything else, because your body still knew how to react even if your heart didn’t seem to belong to you anymore. Ethan half-stood in excitement before catching himself and sitting back down, laughing at himself when he realized he was the only one reacting that enthusiastically.

“You know,” he said, leaning closer so you could hear him over the noise, “I think I might be the only person here who doesn’t take this game personally.”

You shook your head, a small smile tugging at your mouth despite yourself. “You’re not wrong.”

“Good,” he said. “Because I was worried.”

“About what?”

“That I’d accidentally sat next to a secret hockey analyst.”

That earned a real laugh from you, and for a moment it almost felt normal. Almost.

But even while you were talking, your eyes kept drifting back down toward the ice, and that was when you noticed it.

Something was off.

Not in a dramatic, obvious way. Just a subtle wrongness, something you only caught because you knew Garrett too well to miss it. He wasn’t sloppy. He wasn’t making huge mistakes. But there was a hesitation in him, a fraction too long before every pass, a beat too slow every time he turned, as if his body was out there while his mind had wandered somewhere else entirely.

Dean barked something from the bench. Logan looked frustrated. Coach stood rigidly behind the glass.

Garrett still didn’t settle.

You frowned before you even realized it. “What’s going on?”

Ethan glanced toward the ice. “Looks like they’re off their rhythm or something.”

But that wasn’t it.

You knew him too well.

Even from the stands, even after all this time, you could tell when something was wrong with him. Garrett took a shot and missed wide. Then another. A low murmur rippled through the crowd, confused and uneasy, and the sound of it made the back of your neck go cold.

Then the hit came out of nowhere.

One second he was moving across the ice, and the next a defenseman slammed into him hard enough to send him crashing down, the impact echoing through the arena as the crowd gasped in one sharp breath. You were on your feet before you even realized it, your heart lurching painfully as Garrett hit the ice and stayed there for a split second that felt like an eternity.

And then he looked up right at you. The entire world seemed to stop.

You couldn't tell what was in his expression from this far away.

Then his gaze shifted to Ethan sitting beside you.

Something in his face changed so quickly you almost missed it, and then he looked away. Just like that the moment was over.

The referee’s whistle shrieked. The crowd stayed suspended in shocked noise.

Briar had lost the game.

Garrett pushed himself up and started toward the bench, and you watched him go with a kind of heartbreak so immediate and so sharp it felt almost physical. He disappeared into the tunnel a moment later, and you sat back down slowly, your hands trembling in your lap, because seeing him walk away shouldn’t have hurt that much, not when you were the one who had left, but it did.

Around you, the arena began emptying in waves. The disappointed noise of the crowd filled the space left behind by the game, strangers grumbling about missed passes and a team that had looked completely out of sync from the first period on. “

What the hell was wrong with Graham tonight?” someone muttered on your left.

“Worst game I’ve seen him play all season,” said another.

“He looked completely out of it.” You heard all of it. Felt all of it because you knew, or at least part of you thought you did.

Allie eventually peeled away to find Dean, which left you walking toward the parking lot with Ethan under a night that suddenly felt colder than when you’d arrived. Neither of you spoke for a few minutes. Then Ethan glanced over and asked, gently, “Are you okay?”

The question landed harder than it should have.

Were you okay?

The honest answer was no. You had not been okay for weeks. You had not been okay since the moment you walked away from Garrett. And standing there now, in a parking lot full of people leaving behind a game you could barely remember watching, you realized something with sudden, sick clarity.

You needed to see him.

Not tomorrow. Not next week. Now.

“Ethan,” you said, stopping so abruptly he had to stop too. “Thank you for tonight. I’ll take it from here.”

His brows pulled together. “What do you mean, you’ll take it from here?”

You swallowed, your throat tight. “It was really nice meeting you.”

You didn’t wait for him to respond. If you did, you knew you would lose your nerve. Instead you turned and ran back toward the arena, the cold air cutting at your lungs as your heart hammered against your ribs. Garrett’s face kept flashing through your mind, the way he had looked at you, the way his eyes had shifted to Ethan beside you, the way he had looked away as if whatever he’d seen had been enough to break the moment clean in half.

You had to tell him.

You had to make him understand that Ethan was nothing. That there was no one else. That there had never been anyone else. That leaving Garrett had not stopped you from loving him, it had only made you realize how badly you had ruined the one thing you had never meant to lose.

By the time you reached the hallway outside the Briar locker room, your lungs were burning and your pulse was thudding so hard it drowned out almost everything else. The corridor was mostly empty now, a few staff members moving through with tired, distracted expressions. You ignored the curious looks and sat down on a bench outside the locker room, trying to drag air back into your chest, trying to decide how on earth you were supposed to explain something like this.

How did you apologize for breaking the heart of the person you loved most?

How did you admit that leaving him had not been about falling out of love, but about loving him so much it scared you sick?

You were so deep in your own thoughts that you didn’t notice anyone stop in front of you until a shadow fell across your shoes. When you looked up, Logan was standing there.

Hope hit you instantly and you shot to your feet so fast your knees nearly clipped the bench. “Hey.”

Your eyes moved past him at once, toward the locker room door.

“Is he still in there?”

The question barely left your mouth before Logan’s expression changed.

“Logan?”

He looked exhausted, like the game had worn him down too. When he finally spoke, his voice was controlled in a way that made the words hit harder.

“Don’t you think this is a little unfair?”

You frowned. “What?”

He gave a short, humorless breath and shook his head once before looking at you properly, and since you’d known him, Logan did not look happy to see you.

“You can’t keep doing this to him.”

The words landed like a slap.

Your mouth parted. “What are you talking about?”

“You break up with him,” he said, still calm, which somehow made it worse. “You rip his heart out, and then you show up.”

“Logan—”

“No.” He cut you off immediately, and the sharpness of it made you flinch. “You didn’t see him after you left. You didn’t see what that did to him.”

His jaw tightened.

“He stopped sleeping.”

Your throat closed.

“He stopped eating properly. He’d sit in his room staring at his phone like an idiot, hoping you’d call.”

Each sentence hit harder than the last, sinking deeper with every word.

“And tonight?” Logan’s voice was still steady, but now it carried something raw underneath it. “Tonight was the first time I’ve ever watched Garrett completely fall apart on the ice.”

“He loves you.” The words came out sharp and immediate, like they had been waiting there the entire time. “As much as he did before.”

Your heart cracked again.

“But you don’t get to keep breaking him and then show up whenever you miss him.”

The silence that followed felt enormous. You could hear the muffled sounds of people leaving the arena, the faint scrape of shoes, the hum of fluorescent lights overhead. Everything felt too bright, too empty, too exposed.

“He’s always going to love you,” Logan said quietly.

Then, with a look that felt like it had been dragged out of somewhere painfully honest, he added, “That’s the problem.”

The words hung in the hallway long after he stopped speaking.

You stared at him, unable to look away, and for a long moment all you could think about was how carefully you had told yourself the story of why you left. You had left because you loved Garrett. You had left because he deserved better. You had left because you were afraid of being the reason he missed opportunities or gave too much of himself away until there was nothing left.

That had been the story.

But standing here now, hearing Logan defend Garrett with the kind of loyalty that came from loving him deeply, something inside you shifted.

What if it had never been only about Garrett?

What if part of it had been about you too?

Your fear. Your insecurities. Your certainty that people always left before you could be left first. Your desperate need to be the one who walked away before you got abandoned.

The realization twisted in your stomach.

Garrett had never wanted to leave.

Not once.

He had spent a year choosing you, every single day, and instead of trusting him, you had looked at the life he wanted and decided you knew better. You had decided what was best for him. You had decided what he deserved. You had decided what he would one day regret. You had made the choice for him.

And now, even here, you were trying to do it again.

Your gaze drifted toward the locker room door.

You could still go in. You could still tell him Ethan wasn’t your boyfriend. You could still tell him you loved him. That you missed him. That breaking up with him had not fixed a single thing. But for once, you stopped thinking only about what you needed.

You thought about Garrett.

Tonight he played the worst game of the season. He had seen you sitting beside another guy. He had spent the last month surviving the heartbreak you caused. And now you were sitting outside his locker room because you wanted relief from your own guilt.

The thought made your chest ache because showing up right now wasn’t some grand romantic gesture. It was selfish. It was only another way of asking Garrett to carry something for you.

Your eyes burned..

“You should go home,” Logan said, and this time his voice was gentle.

You looked at the locker room door one last time. Your heart screamed at you to stay, to fight, to do something, anything. But you stayed where you were only long enough to understand the truth you had been trying not to see.

Maybe loving someone wasn’t always about chasing them. Sometimes it meant giving them the space to hurt and accepting that you could not fix everything the second it became unbearable.

A tear slipped down your cheek, then another. You wiped them away quickly, but your gaze never left the door.

Somewhere on the other side of it was Garrett probably changing out of his gear, Sitting in front of his locker or hurting.

The thought nearly undid you..

You wanted one more conversation. One more chance. One more minute.

But that was the problem, wasn’t it?

There was always one more minute. One more excuse. One more reason to wait. And somehow Garrett always ended up paying the price for your hesitation.

You took a shaky breath and stepped backward.

Then another.

Each step felt wrong, like you were walking away from him all over again.

Logan didn’t stop you. He didn’t reach for you. He just watched, and that was somehow kinder than anything else he could have done.

Your throat tightened. “Tell him…”

The words broke apart before you could finish.

Tell him what?

That you had come looking for him?

That you had sat outside the locker room debating whether to walk back into his life?

That you still loved him?

None of it felt fair tonight.

So you swallowed hard, shook your head, and let the thought die there.

“Never mind.”

Logan gave a small nod. Nothing more.

You were grateful for that, because if he had offered you even a sliver of kindness, you weren’t sure you would have been able to leave.

You turned and kept walking, past the locker rooms, past staff and fluorescent lights and the hollow noise of the arena settling after a loss, until the cold night finally hit your face and made everything feel real again.

Only then did you stop.

The parking lot was almost empty. Behind you, the arena glowed against the dark like a warning, and somewhere inside that building was Garrett Graham, the boy who loved you, the boy you loved, the boy you had been trying so hard to protect that you never stopped to ask what he actually wanted.

You wrapped your arms around yourself and stared at the building for a long moment.

The thing was Garrett had never needed you to decide what was best for him. He had only ever asked you to trust that he knew what he wanted and the cruelest thing you'd done wasn't breaking his heart. It was loving him so much, and still never believing him when he said he loved you back.

#garrett graham x reader

finelinevogue

i like you, in case you that wasn’t clear

summary - you cancel your first date with garrett, because you get in your own head & believe you aren’t worth his time

pairing - garrett graham x reader

word count - +3.2k

a/n - lowkey just wrote this one for me & all my pmos girlies :((

It was hard to believe that you were going on a date with Garrett Graham.

Like THE Garrett Graham, who notoriously doesn’t do girlfriends, had asked you out after (apparently) secretly pining for you for months.

You can’t even remember when your friendship had started with him, but now you couldn’t imagine a life without him in it. He made you feel safe and comfortable, whilst also being able to have a good laugh and make-fun of each other.

Garrett was someone who had bettered your life.

Which is why you felt awful, sitting on the edge of your bed, phone clutched tight in your hands, drafting a message for a rain-check. An eternal rain-check.

#garrett graham x reader #PMOS REPRESENTATIONNN

xximperioxx

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nothxbb

HEYYY SO I JUST FINISHED UR "MR GRACE HAS RIZZ?" FIC AND WHAT IF YOU MADE A PART TWO WITH READER COMING IN FOR CAREER DAY AND ON OF THE SINGLE PARENTS TRYING TO FLIRT WITH HER AND GRACE GETS JEALOUS???

DID THIS MAKE SENSE??? AND IM NOT SHOUTING I JUST LIKE TYPING IN ALL CAPS

BTW I RLLY LIKED THE FIC!!!

OKE BYEE🩷🩷🩷🩷🩷

HA okay this is less dialogue because I DON'T KNOW how to write it apparently. thanks for reading!!

Mr. Grace has rizz? pt. 2 ~ ryland grace x reader

1.5k words, fluff

summary: it's career day! ryland has his students trained on professionalism but it doesn't extend to their parents

Part 1

--------------------------------

Career day had been marked on your calendar for weeks, your manager was more than happy to give you a morning off for it, saying something about inspiring the next generation of workers. You didn’t love that phrasing, but the capitalist wheel turns no matter the willingness of the cog, you supposed. You had a short presentation ready, choosing to talk about the coolest parts of being an architectural engineer. The goal was to get the students excited about science, though whether that was for their benefit or Ryland’s, you weren’t totally sure.

Either way, you were standing in Ryland’s classroom, mingling with the handful of other professionals there to talk about their own work. An L&D nurse and a firefighter, both parents to students in the class, and a photographer who travels for a living. It was a good mix of the arts and sciences, Ryland did well finding such different perspectives to present to the kids.

#ryland grace x reader

bibigo-lover

eridian logic!

summary: your heart-to-heart with rocky leads to a lot of unnecessary teasing targeted towards grace. you can't help it—he just makes it so easy (based on this textpost // @viviennejinx!)

pairing: ryland grace x gn!reader

word count: 4.3k

tags: fluff and humor, not actually unrequited love, mutual pining, bad flirting, basically teasing to death, flustered!grace, developing relationship, platonic!rocky x reader, first kisses, gn!reader

cross-posted to ao3

Grace is off in the crew quarters trying to take a nap. He’s been all tuckered out, you think, since Rocky decided to start co-habitating with the two of you on the Mary. Though it’s probably the most efficient way to work altogether—instead of moving to and from the midpoint of your ship and Rocky’s—it’s clearly driving Grace crazy. Boundaries, he keeps telling Rocky, There’s a delicate line that’s being crossed. More than crossed. Hopped and skipped. And still, Rocky’s insistent on moving in. You don’t have any major objections, considering that Rocky is a positive change to your usual routine.

It isn’t the most convenient arrangement in the world, but Rocky is having you lug xenonite boxes and panes of glass into the Hail Mary from the connector tunnel. You have to wait a half an hour each for the materials to cool down before you can pick them up, so there’s a whole lot of get-to-know you time. After the first batch of belongings, Rocky is sure to ask you about the basics—what Earth is like, what humans are like, and your expertise on the project. The second batch is exponentially more personal. Rocky asks about how you came to be on the ship, where on Earth you belong to, and if you miss your loved ones.

And, on the third and last batch, you and Rocky are sitting in the connector tunnel on a pile of empty storage crates, effectively repurposed into seating. It’ll be a short break, now, for you to catch your breath. You’re trying to get a good stretch out of your arms and legs as you sit on the slanted crate. You’re certainly expecting to be sore after all the strenuous labor of carrying Rocky’s things. Meanwhile, Rocky is rolling back and forth, back and forth—still testing out the mobility on his new xenonite ball. He seems pleased with the development. Or, bored. You can never tell what he’s thinking when he gets all roll-y. It only becomes apparent here when he decides to ask you: “Is Grace mate, question?”

“Wow. Presumptuous,” you punch out. It’s a nice shock to your senses, the forwardness of Rocky’s inquiry. It’s not like you haven’t thought about it, but obviously, it seems that Rocky’s confident that he’s got it all figured out. “Where are you getting that from?”

“Grace make all effort to do bad science jokes. Is baaad.” Rocky says. “But laugh like Grace mate.”

“That could just be me being polite,” you test. “It’s really important for morale, you know, laughing.”

Rocky pauses for a moment, stilled in his xenonite casing. Then, he tries again: “Is it same for heart rate too, question?” He chirps in a repetitive manner, something akin to a chuckle. There’s not much you can do to disprove the physiological facts. Rocky’s as clever as you’d expect—and it isn’t like you’re trying to conceal the nature of your relationship with Grace.

#ryland grace x reader

sasaririri

heyy i haven't written in a while but i had to do something with Dean and Logan no matter what, requests are open!! hope you enjoy xoxo

She Always Won.

summary: you dressed like a princess for him. turns out the kingdom was never yours to begin with.

warnings: cheating, unrequited love, heartbreak, crying, emotional pain

a/n: dean di laurentis really said "i'll be the perfect boyfriend except for the part where i'm still in love with someone else" and i had to write about it

I never meant to cause you any sorrow

I never meant to cause you any pain

I only wanted to see you laughing

I only wanted to see you laughing in the purple rain

— Prince, “Purple Rain”

(Because nothing says “true love” like handing your whole heart to a guy who’s still mentally fucking his ex while you play dress-up as his emotional rebound.)

The dress weighed on me like a damn sentence. Dark red velvet that fell in heavy cascades all the way to the floor, with gold and blue embroidery that sparkled under the dim lights of the hall. The corset squeezed my ribs, reminding me with every breath that I was here, dressed up like a princess at a party that didn’t feel like mine. The bell sleeves swayed with every step, and the pearl necklace Dean had put on me that afternoon kept brushing against my collarbone like a constant reminder of his warm fingers.

“You look gorgeous. Like you were born to wear that,” he’d told me in front of the mirror, with that crooked smile that always melted me. His blue eyes had lingered on me a second longer than usual, and I, like an idiot, had taken it as a promise.

Dean was dressed as a knight. The deep red wine doublet hugged his broad chest and strong shoulders, with those gold details tracing the lines of his body like they were made for him. The white shirt underneath puffed out at the sleeves, and the leather belt cinched his waist. He looked… imposing. Dangerously hot. The kind of guy that would make anyone lose their mind. And I was. Crazy about him.

He was a good boyfriend. Fuck, he really was. He brought me coffee exactly how I liked it—two sugars and a splash of vanilla. He’d fuck me against the wall of his room when I came back stressed from class, his big hands gripping my hips while he whispered in my ear how tight and hot I was. He’d hug me from behind while we cooked and Tucker bitched about us ruining his kitchen, kissing my neck until I laughed. He listened to me complain about my professors, sent me stupid memes in the middle of the night just to make me smile. Charming. Attentive. Real.

But Allie Hayes was the ghost that never left.

Every time her name came up in conversation, even casually, Dean would shut down. His eyes would go glassy, his jaw would tighten, and he’d get this dark look, like part of him had gone somewhere else. Somewhere I didn’t exist.

And I knew it. I’d seen it a thousand times.

The Drama Department party was in full swing. Warm lights, music with lutes and drums, people in costumes dancing in the middle of the floor. The air smelled like cheap wine, sweat, and sweet perfume. I was standing on the edge with a cup in my hand that I’d barely touched, scanning the room for Dean. He’d walked off about ten minutes ago to “get more drinks.” Ten minutes that felt like forever.

And then the stares started.

I felt the eyes on me. Pity. Straight-up sympathy. A girl dressed as a maiden whispered something to her friend and they both gave me that “poor thing” look. My stomach twisted. The pressure in my chest grew, like an invisible hand squeezing tighter.

I turned my head toward the dance floor.

There they were.

Dean and Allie.

Him in his red knight’s doublet, the dark cape falling down his back. Her… fuck, she was stunning. A fairy dress in burgundy and gold tones that clung to her body like a second skin, translucent shimmering wings that caught the light, her hair loose over her shoulders. Beautiful. Magical. Unreal.

They were dancing.

Dean’s hand was on her waist, firm, possessive. Allie’s rested on his chest, right over his heart. They were looking into each other’s eyes and laughing. That intimate laugh, the kind shared by people with a thousand memories I’d never have. Dean’s eyes were shining in a way that tore me apart inside. Like Allie was the most precious thing in the world, the one he’d lost and finally had back in his arms. He’d never looked at me like that. Not once. He looked at me with affection, with desire, with tenderness… but never with that absolute devotion.

I felt ridiculous. Pathetic. A fake-ass princess standing there in my red dress and pearls while the real queen of his story danced with him.

Allie stepped closer. Their bodies pressed together. They looked at each other for one more second, loaded with everything they used to be. Then she rose onto her tiptoes, grabbed the back of his neck with that familiarity only people who’ve kissed a thousand times have, and kissed him.

Their lips met.

Dean froze… and then kissed her back. Just for a second, but I saw it. His mouth moving against hers, his hand tightening on her waist. The world dropped out from under me. The noise disappeared. All that existed was that kiss, that moment when my heart shattered.

Suddenly Dean pulled away like he’d been electrocuted. He blinked fast, looked around with wild panic in his eyes, searching the crowd… until he found me.

Our eyes met across the dance floor.

I saw the guilt. The horror. The instant regret. But it was already done. He’d already destroyed me.

I took a step back. Tears burned my eyes. People were staring. Someone whispered my name. I didn’t care. I turned around and started shoving through bodies, the dress tangling between my legs, making me stumble, the corset suffocating me. I made it out into the cold hallway, then outside.

The night air hit me like a slap.

With shaking hands, I started ripping off the pearl necklace. The clasp resisted and I yanked hard; the pearls scattered across the ground like white tears. I pulled the pins out of my hair, letting the curls fall wild and messy. I felt suffocated. I wanted to rip off my skin, the dress, everything that reminded me of this night.

“Wait! Please, baby!”

His voice. Desperate. I heard his boots running after me.

He grabbed my arm. Hard. His fingers dug into my skin.

“Let go of me,” I hissed, yanking with everything I had.

I broke free. I kept walking toward the parking lot, tears already falling freely down my cheeks. Dean followed. He didn’t say anything else. Just his heavy, ragged breathing.

We got to the car. He opened the passenger door. I got in. He walked around and sat in the driver’s seat. The silence was a dead weight between us.

He started the engine.

The streetlights blurred past the window. I stared outside, silent tears rolling down one after another. I wasn’t making any noise. I was just crying. Inside, I was dying. My chest hurt so bad I thought it was going to split in half.

I thought about that night a few weeks ago.

We were in his bed, curled up after fucking. His warm body against mine, my head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat. The room smelled like sex and his cologne. I felt safe. Loved. And the words slipped out in a whisper against his skin:

“I love you, Dean.”

I felt his body go rigid instantly. His muscles tensed under my cheek. His breathing cut off for a second. He didn’t say anything. Absolutely nothing. He just stayed there, breathing into my hair, his hand still on my back. I pretended to fall asleep. Pretended his silence hadn’t stabbed me in the soul. But that night I knew the truth: he was never going to say it back. Because his heart still belonged to someone else.

And now, in this car, with the silence screaming between us, it all came rushing back.

We got to my dorm. He parked. Turned off the engine.

“I’ll walk you up,” he murmured, his voice broken.

He tried to get out. I raised my hand.

“No.”

I got out. He did too, desperate. He caught up in two strides and grabbed my shoulders, turning me around. His eyes were red, shiny. He looked destroyed. Good. Let him suffer a little.

“Please… let me explain. It was a mistake, I didn’t… she—”

I looked him straight in the eyes. Those eyes I’d loved so much.

“You never loved me, did you?”

The question came out like a croak. My voice was wrecked.

He opened his mouth. Closed it. Swallowed.

“I don’t even know why I’m crying,” I continued, the words spilling out in a broken rush. “Because I knew, Dean. I always knew. The way you’d shut down every time someone mentioned her name. The way you looked at her tonight… like she was the fucking air you breathe. Like I never even existed. You never looked at me like that. Not when you were fucking me, not when you held me, not when I told you I loved you and you froze like a damn statue.”

The tears fell faster. I wiped my face angrily, but they wouldn’t stop.

“I’m so fucking pathetic… I dressed up like a princess for you. I thought this time, maybe, you’d choose me. That I could compete. But there was never a competition. She always won. Even when she wasn’t there, she won. She was in your head all the time. In your heart. I was just… the replacement. The one who helped you forget, but never enough.”

Dean had his eyes closed. A tear escaped down his cheek. I’d never seen him cry. Seeing it now only made everything worse.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. His voice was shaking. “I’m so fucking sorry, baby…”

That was it.

Two empty words.

I looked at him one last time. I saw the guy who made me laugh until my stomach hurt. The one who held me when I had nightmares. The one who kissed my forehead in the mornings. And I also saw the one who was never really mine. The one who always looked at Allie like she was his home.

“Take care, Di Laurentis.”

I turned around. I walked toward the dorm entrance. I heard him shout my name once, twice, his voice cracked and desperate. I didn’t stop. I opened the door and disappeared into the darkness of the hallway.

The sound of his car door slamming behind me felt like the end of a story that should’ve never started.

I climbed the stairs like a ghost. Every step was agony. The red dress dragging, the pearls lost, my hair a total mess. I got to my room, closed the door, and slid down to the floor, hugging my knees.

And there I cried. I cried like my soul was being ripped out. Gut-wrenching sobs that left me gasping for air, my chest heaving, my face swollen and wet. I rocked back and forth, feeling the huge emptiness where love used to be. An emptiness that hurt more than anything.

Dean Di Laurentis had never loved me.

And I’d been stupid enough to believe he someday would.

Prince · Purple Rain · Song · 1984

#dean di laurentis x reader

harryssattelitestomper

Dean Di Laurentis ✴ Wrong Number, Right Person

Pairing: Dean Di Laurentis x fem!reader WC: ~ 7.5k A/N: never done a concept like this before, so let me know if you liked it! off campus masterlist

#dean di laurentis x reader

isbellah

Collide

garrett graham x reader

summary . . . At Briar University, hockey isn’t just a sport—it’s a religion, and the players are its saints. As the anonymous writer behind Offside, you set out to expose the toxic culture surrounding Briar’s obsession with its hockey team. What starts as observation turns into a viral column that sparks chaos across campus—and puts Captain Garrett Graham directly in the centre of it. But anonymity has a cost. When a second article drops, sharper and more personal than the first, the line between journalism and betrayal begins to blur. Suddenly, the hockey house isn’t just a place you visit for coverage—it’s a place you’re no longer sure you belong in. And Garrett? He’s starting to look at you like he’s trying to solve a mystery he’s terrified to finish.

warning . . . enemies to lovers, anonymous identity mystery, media vs athlete conflict, betrayal (perceived), emotional tension, miscommunication, social media/public backlash, anxiety, confrontation, slow-burn romance, toxic campus culture critique, reputation damage, angst-heavy themes, mild swearing

author’s note . . . part one is basically the chaos era. this is where everything is messy on purpose—intentions get misunderstood, emotions get louder than logic, and nobody has the full picture (including the characters themselves). offside was never meant to be about destruction, but once it gets out into the world, it stops belonging to the writer. and yeah… garrett is hurt. a lot. but so is she, just in a quieter way. part two is where things get real.

word count . . . 11.7k

part one: offside

part two: collide

The email arrived at 8:12 on a Thursday morning.

Which was already offensive. Nothing good happened before nine. The hour existed solely for people with discipline and healthy sleep schedules and functional alarm clocks-qualities you possessed absolutely none of. Your brain at 8:12 was still essentially soup, your eyes crusted with the remnants of another night spent staring at a glowing screen, your room cold in that particular way that dorm rooms got in November, when the heating system hadn't quite committed to winter but the outside had.

You stared at the sender.

Professor Lewis.

That was strike one. Lewis didn't do casual emails. Lewis didn't do "checking in" or "just wanted to say" or any of the soft language other professors used. Lewis communicated exclusively in demands, deadlines, and devastating observations.

You opened it.

Strike two arrived immediately.

Need to see you. Today.

No greeting. No explanation. No context. No softening phrase or reassuring emoji. Just four words that felt like a door slamming shut behind you, trapping you in a room you hadn't realized you'd entered.

Academic terrorism. Pure and simple.

Fantastic.

You found him in the photography department an hour later, your stomach churning with coffee and dread. The studio smelled like chemicals and printer ink, that particular combination of acrid and artificial that clung to your clothes and hair. The walls were covered with student exhibitions and half-finished projects, images pinned haphazardly with pushpins, some color-corrected, some raw, all of them watching you with the judgmental gaze of art you didn't understand.

Professor Lewis stood beside a light table examining contact sheets through a magnifying loupe, his gray hair catching the overhead fluorescents. He didn't look up when you entered. Didn't acknowledge your presence. Just kept studying whatever tiny image held his attention, leaving you standing in the doorway like a supplicant waiting for an audience.

Without looking up, he said, "Sit."

"That sounds threatening."

"It should."

You dropped into the chair opposite him, the metal cold against your legs even through your jeans. The light table cast an eerie blue glow upward, illuminating his face from below like a horror movie.

"What did I do?"

Lewis finally looked up, his eyes pale and sharp behind wire-rimmed glasses. "Nothing."

"Then why am I here?"

He smiled. A terrible sign. Lewis smiling meant either you'd done something brilliant or something catastrophic, and the odds were never in favor of brilliance.

He slid a folder across the desk. Manila. Standard department issue. Completely innocuous.

You immediately recognized the Briar Hockey logo stamped in the corner.

Your stomach sank through the floor, through the building's foundation, through the earth itself.

"No."

Lewis's smile widened. "You haven't even opened it."

"I don't need to."

"You're going."

"I literally haven't agreed to anything."

"Excellent. Then we're having a productive conversation."

You hated professors. All of them. Every single one, with their arbitrary power and their cryptic emails and their ability to ruin your life with a single manila folder.

Lewis ignored your glare, turning back to his contact sheets. "The hockey team leaves tomorrow."

"Wonderful."

"You'll be joining them."

"No."

"Yes."

"No."

"Yes."

You crossed your arms. He crossed his. The standoff lasted nearly ten seconds-silent, intense, a battle of wills that you were destined to lose because he had tenure and you had nothing.

You lost. As usual.

Lewis opened the folder with deliberate slowness, each movement designed to maximize your discomfort. "This isn't optional."

You groaned, the sound coming from somewhere deep and hopeless. "Why?"

"Because your hockey series has become the strongest project in the department."

You immediately frowned. That wasn't what you expected. You'd expected punishment, criticism, some devastating observation about your lack of focus or your questionable life choices.

Lewis continued, his voice losing some of its edge, gaining something almost like respect. "The final exhibition is approaching."

"What does that have to do with an away game?"

"Everything."

He leaned forward, the light table casting strange shadows across his face. "You understand the arena. You understand the players." He paused, watching you carefully. "But you don't understand what happens when they leave."

Your mouth opened. Then closed. Damn it. That was annoyingly good. Annoyingly perceptive. The kind of observation that made you feel seen in ways you didn't want to be.

"You need the road trip," he continued. "You need to see them outside their environment. See what the pressure looks like when there's no home crowd, no familiar routines. See who they are when nobody's watching."

You looked down at the folder. The destination sat printed in bold letters three hours away. Overnight stay. Team hotel. Bus ride. Media access. Hours of proximity to Garrett in enclosed spaces with no escape routes.

Absolutely not.

Lewis wasn't finished. "You're also partnering with someone."

You immediately hated that sentence. The word "partnering" felt like a threat. "Why?"

"Because journalism and photography work together."

"I do both."

"You also never sleep." He held up a hand before you could argue. "Fair point. But this project needs both, and you can't be in two places at once."

Lewis pointed toward the studio door.

A tall guy stepped inside carrying two cameras around his neck like jewelry, their straps crossing his chest in an X. Dark hair fell across his forehead in that artfully messy way that suggested either product or complete indifference. Broad shoulders. Easy smile. The kind of casual confidence that came from being good at something and knowing it.

Photography student. Wonderful. Just what you needed. Another person to lie to. Another observer to avoid. Another variable in an equation that was already dangerously unbalanced.

"That's Noah."

Noah waved, his smile reaching his eyes. "Hey."

You waved back cautiously, your hand feeling heavy.

Lewis continued, relentlessly. "He's producing exhibition photography."

You blinked, the pieces slowly assembling into a picture you didn't want to see. "What am I producing?"

"The written piece."

Oh. Oh no.

A collaborative project. Even worse. Someone else's timeline. Someone else's vision. Someone else's questions and observations and potential discoveries.

"You'll travel together," Lewis said, closing the folder with finality.

Noah grinned, adjusting one of his cameras. "Road trip."

You wanted to throw yourself through the nearest window. The glass looked thick, but you were reasonably confident you could generate enough momentum.

The hockey house discovered the news that evening.

Predictably.

It happened during dinner, because of course it did. The universe had a sense of timing that could only be described as malicious. You were halfway through stealing fries from Allie's plate-technically she'd said you could have "some," and you were interpreting that generously-when Dean looked up from his phone with the particular expression of someone who had just seen something interesting.

"Dude."

Never a good start. "Dude" from Dean meant either disaster or entertainment, and the two were often indistinguishable.

You sighed, a fry halfway to your mouth. "What?"

Dean turned his screen around. The away-game media list. Your name sat near the top in plain black text, undeniable and exposed. Alongside Noah Foster. The entire table noticed immediately, of course they did. Nothing escaped this house, this group, this collection of people who seemed to share a single collective consciousness when it came to gossip.

"You're coming?" Allie asked, looking excited. Too excited. The kind of excitement that suggested she saw opportunities you didn't.

Hannah looked curious. Dangerously curious, her blue eyes narrowing slightly as she processed the information.

Dean looked entertained. Predictably.

You looked exhausted. Eternally, irrevocably exhausted.

Before you could answer-before you could construct some plausible explanation or deflection-Garrett spoke.

"Who's Noah?"

The question came casually. Too casually. The kind of casual that sounded practiced, rehearsed, deliberately light. The entire table noticed. Including you. Including Hannah, whose gaze immediately shifted between you and Garrett with the sharpness of someone who missed nothing.

You looked toward him. Garrett sat across from you, elbows resting on the table, his posture deceptively relaxed. Waiting. His dark curls fell forward slightly, shadowing his expression, but you could see his eyes. Fixed on you. Intense in a way that felt suddenly, viscerally dangerous.

You suddenly found the fries fascinating. "Photography major."

Dean immediately grinned. Dangerously. "Oh?"

You kicked him under the table. Hard. Your boot connected with his shin with satisfying force. He nearly choked, his grin transforming into a wince. Worth it.

Garrett didn't laugh. Which was unusual. Garrett laughed at everything, defused every tension with humor, turned every moment into something lighter. But his attention remained fixed on you, unwavering, the intensity of it like standing too close to a fire.

"You're working together?" he asked.

"Apparently."

The answer sounded defensive even to your own ears. Sharp. Edged. Great. Now you sounded guilty. For absolutely no reason. You were doing a project. With a classmate. This was normal. This was fine.

Garrett's jaw tightened slightly. Just enough for you to notice. A small movement, a muscle jumping, the only crack in his composure. Not enough for anyone else to see. Except maybe Hannah. Who immediately looked between both of you with the expression of someone who was assembling a theory.

Shit.

"You hate group projects," Garrett said quietly. Like an observation. Not a question. A statement of fact that he had no right to know, no reason to remember.

You stared. Because that was true. You complained about them constantly, the inefficiency, the scheduling conflicts, the way other people's procrastination became your emergency. And because he'd remembered. For some reason that felt dangerous. Intimate. Like he'd been paying attention to things you hadn't realized you were revealing.

The room suddenly seemed much smaller. Much warmer. The air thick and difficult to breathe. Across the table, Garrett held your gaze for a second too long. Then two. Then three. Long enough for you to notice the flecks of gold in his brown eyes, the small scar through his eyebrow, the way his throat moved when he swallowed.

Before finally looking away.

The conversation moved on. Dean started talking about hockey, his voice loud and performative, deliberately breaking the tension. Allie rolled her eyes. Hannah laughed, but her gaze kept returning to you, curious and calculating. Normal. Everything looked normal.

But later that night, lying awake in bed with your laptop casting blue light across your ceiling, you couldn't stop thinking about the way Garrett had asked:

Who's Noah?

Not because he was curious. Not because he cared about the project or the exhibition or your academic career.

Because he cared.

And somehow-that was worse. That was infinitely worse. Because you were about to spend an entire weekend trapped on a bus with a hockey team, a suspicious best friend, a photography student who would be watching everything, and a secret that was getting harder to keep by the day.

Especially now that you knew Garrett was watching too.

The hockey bus smelled exactly how you'd imagine.

Coffee, dark and bitter, the dregs of cups left too long in cupholders. Rubber, that particular synthetic scent of hockey equipment bags and athletic tape and shoes worn too many times without washing. Protein powder, vanilla and chemical, clinging to the air like humidity. And underneath it all, the unmistakable aroma of poor decisions-the kind that started with "we can sleep on the bus" and ended with someone trying to tape a teammate to the luggage rack.

You paused at the bottom of the steps, duffel bag slung over one shoulder and camera case digging into your hip with the persistence of a bad memory. The parking lot stretched around you, empty except for the bus and the team and the predawn darkness that felt almost oppressive. Immediately regretting every choice that had led you here. Every article written. Every observation made. Every moment when you'd thought this was a good idea.

Around you, players loaded equipment beneath the bus while coaches barked instructions through the freezing morning air. The sky was still dark, that particular shade of pre-dawn black that felt less like night ending and more like night refusing to leave. The parking lot lights reflected off wet pavement, creating pools of orange illumination that seemed to float on the surface like oil. It was six-thirty in the morning. Nobody should be alive at six-thirty in the morning. The hour existed solely for emergencies and regret.

Especially not athletes. Athletes needed sleep. Recovery. Eight hours of REM cycles and proper nutrition and whatever else the sports science people were recommending this week.

Yet somehow they were all here. Loudly. The bus was already vibrating with energy, with voices overlapping and music playing and the general chaos of twenty young men who treated exhaustion like a personality trait.

Dean spotted you first. Of course he did. Dean had a radar for interesting situations, for moments of potential entertainment, for any opportunity to make someone's life more complicated.

"Media!"

You groaned, the sound coming from somewhere deep and hopeless. "Go away."

Dean grinned, the expression bright and dangerous in the parking lot lights. "No."

Unfortunately, that was a complete sentence for him. A philosophy. A way of life.

Behind him, Garrett glanced up from where he was helping unload equipment. The moment his eyes found yours, something shifted. Not dramatic. Not obvious. Just recognition. Like he'd been waiting to see if you'd actually show up. Like he'd wondered, even knowing you were assigned, even knowing there was literally a faculty approval form sitting in some administrative file somewhere.

Which was ridiculous. You'd been assigned to come. This wasn't a choice. This was academic obligation dressed as opportunity.

Still.

His gaze lingered a second too long before he looked away. You hated how much you noticed. How your brain cataloged the moment, filed it away, replayed it before you'd even fully processed it.

"Ready?" Noah appeared beside you carrying enough camera gear to survive a war zone. Three cameras. Two bags. A tripod slung over his shoulder like a weapon. He looked annoyingly alert for someone who'd presumably also been awake since dawn.

You nodded. "Thrilled."

"Liar."

"Correct."

Noah laughed, the sound easy and genuine, and the two of you climbed onto the bus together. And immediately realized every good seat was already taken.

Fantastic.

The front belonged to coaches, territory marked by clipboards and coffee thermoses and the general aura of authority. The back belonged to chaos, to the players who'd claimed their territory early and were already spreading across two seats each like territorial house cats. The middle was a no-man's-land of equipment bags and duffels and the general debris of travel.

Noah pointed. "Here?"

A pair of empty seats sat halfway down the aisle, separated from the nearest occupied row by a single bag. You dropped into the window seat, pressing your forehead against the cold glass in a gesture that felt almost prayerful. Noah sat beside you, arranging his camera gear with the precision of someone who'd done this before.

Problem solved.

Or so you thought.

Forty minutes later,

Problem not solved. Not even slightly.

You were editing photographs from last week's game, your laptop balanced on the tray table, when someone appeared beside your seat. You didn't look up, focused on adjusting exposure, on cropping, on making the image match the memory.

"Go away, Dean."

Silence. Then-

"That's rude."

Garrett. Of course. The voice was unmistakable, even after only a few weeks of knowing it. That particular cadence, the way he could make two words sound like an entire conversation.

You looked up. He stood in the aisle holding a sports drink, the bottle condensation-beaded in the warm bus air. Looking annoyingly good for someone who'd been awake since dawn. His dark curls were slightly flattened from a beanie, his eyes bright despite the hour, his posture relaxed in a way that suggested he was exactly where he wanted to be.

"What do you want?"

"Nice to see you too."

You sighed dramatically, the sound carrying over the bus noise. "What. Do. You. Want."

Garrett pointed toward your laptop. "Working?"

"Groundbreaking observation."

He ignored that, leaning slightly into your space. Close enough that you could smell his soap, something clean and simple. "You've been staring at that photo for ten minutes."

Your stomach dropped. Had you? Apparently. Because the photo currently displayed on your screen was-

Him.

Wonderful. Just wonderful. The image caught him mid-celebration, arms raised, face turned toward the lights, joy written across every feature. You'd taken it during the game last week, before you'd known him, before you'd understood what you were really capturing.

Luckily it was an action shot. Nothing suspicious. Probably.

"Occupational hazard."

Garrett leaned slightly closer, close enough that you could see the small scar through his eyebrow, the one you'd noticed in your research. "That one's terrible."

You gasped. Actually gasped. The audacity. "The composition is excellent."

"The lighting sucks."

"The lighting is artistic."

"The lighting is bad."

You narrowed your eyes. Garrett smiled, the expression reaching his eyes in a way that felt almost like a victory. The asshole.

Then Noah spoke beside you, his voice mild and unthreatening. "I think the lighting works."

Garrett finally noticed him.

The shift was immediate. Subtle. Tiny. But there. The atmosphere changed, some invisible quality of the air adjusting around you. You felt it. Noah felt it. Probably the entire bus felt it, some collective awareness that something had shifted in the ecosystem.

"Oh." Garrett nodded once, the gesture controlled and deliberate. "You must be Noah."

Noah smiled politely, the expression professional and untroubled. "You must be Garrett."

The conversation somehow became a competition. Without anyone officially declaring one. Without any rules being established. Just two people circling each other with words, testing boundaries, establishing territory.

Men were exhausting.

An hour later,

The bus stopped at a roadside diner, the kind that existed in the liminal space between cities, all neon and chrome and the promise of coffee that tasted like burnt rubber. Everyone piled out. Half asleep. Hungry. Complaining about the cold, the hour, the fact that breakfast wasn't included. The usual.

You sat in a booth with Noah reviewing photo concepts for the exhibition, your laptop open between you, images cycling on the screen. The assignment itself was actually interesting. Which annoyed you. Because you preferred being dramatic about it. Preferred treating it like an imposition rather than an opportunity.

"You've got the human side already," Noah said.

You looked up. "What?"

"The team." He gestured toward your photos, toward the images you'd taken and edited and somehow made feel intimate despite the distance of the lens. "You don't photograph hockey."

You frowned. "I'm literally photographing hockey."

"No." He shook his head, his dark hair falling across his forehead. "You're photographing people who happen to play hockey."

The comment hit harder than expected. Because that was exactly what Offside was. Exactly what you'd been trying to do. Notice the people beneath the performance. Find the humanity inside the hero narrative.

Across the diner, laughter erupted from another booth. You glanced over automatically, your body responding before your mind could stop it.

The hockey team. Dean was telling some ridiculous story, his hands moving in broad gestures, his voice carrying across the space. Allie looked exhausted, her head resting on her hand, her coffee untouched. Hannah was laughing, but her eyes were sharp, scanning the room with the particular attention of someone who missed nothing.

And Garrett-

Garrett was already looking at you.

Your breath caught. Just slightly. Enough. The moment stretched, time doing that strange elastic thing where seconds felt like minutes, where you were aware of every heartbeat, every breath, every small movement of his expression.

Then Dean noticed. His eyes widened. Immediately dangerous. Oh no. No. Absolutely not.

Dean's grin appeared instantly. The grin of a man about to make everyone's life harder. He leaned toward Garrett, said something you couldn't hear but could absolutely imagine. Garrett shoved his shoulder. Dean laughed harder, the sound bright and delighted and completely unhelpful.

Wonderful.

Back on the bus, things got worse.

Because apparently the universe hated you. Had some personal vendetta. Had decided that your life needed more complications, more near-misses, more moments of cardiac stress.

You returned from the bathroom to find Noah talking with another photography student several rows ahead, their heads bent together over some piece of equipment. Your seat sat empty, your laptop still on the tray table where you'd left it.

You dropped into it gratefully. Pulled out your laptop. Opened a fresh document. Started writing.

The article deadline loomed. The blinking cursor mocked you, that steady rhythm that seemed to say you're running out of time you're running out of time you're running out of time. You typed. Deleted. Typed again. Deleted again. Nothing sounded right.

Maybe that's the problem with heroes.

The sentence sat there. Incomplete. Waiting. You stared at it, thinking. Thinking about pressure. Expectations. Garrett. The team. The impossible standards everyone carried, the weight of being watched, being needed, being expected to perform.

You became so focused you didn't hear someone sit beside you. Didn't notice the shift in the seat, the warmth of another body, the subtle change in the air.

Until-

"That looks painful."

Your soul left your body. Immediately. Ascended to whatever afterlife existed for idiots who wrote thinly veiled confessions about people sitting right next to them.

Garrett sat beside you. Relaxed. Comfortable. Like he belonged there. Like this was his seat now, his space, his territory to claim.

"What happened to your seat?"

He shrugged, the movement easy and unbothered. "Dean talks too much."

Fair. You couldn't even argue. Dean did talk too much. Dean would talk through a nuclear apocalypse, providing commentary and asking questions and generally making silence impossible.

Garrett glanced toward your laptop. You immediately tilted the screen, the movement suspiciously fast. Again. Your second near-miss in as many hours.

His eyebrows lifted. Dangerous. Very dangerous. "You know," he said, his voice dropping slightly, becoming something almost intimate in the bus noise. "People usually only hide things when they have something to hide."

You laughed nervously. A mistake. Because Garrett noticed. His gaze sharpened, that observant quality you'd seen in interviews, the way he read reporters and adjusted his answers accordingly.

"You are unbelievably suspicious lately."

Your heart began sprinting. The article sat open. Three paragraphs from disaster. One accidental glance from exposure. You closed the laptop entirely, the click of the latch loud in the sudden quiet between you.

"No idea what you're talking about."

"Liar."

The word came automatically now. Like breathing. Like habit. Like he knew you. Which somehow made everything worse. Made the lie feel transparent. Made the secret feel obvious.

The bus rolled onward beneath gray winter skies, the landscape blurring into white and brown and the occasional flash of bare trees. Conversation buzzed around you. Music played somewhere near the back, something with bass that vibrated through the floor. Dean was yelling about something. Probably hockey. Probably nonsense.

Yet somehow the space beside you felt strangely quiet. Comfortable. Like the rest of the bus had receded, leaving just you and Garrett and the warmth of shared breath.

Garrett stretched his legs into the aisle, his knee brushing yours briefly before settling. "Can I ask you something?"

You immediately regretted existing. "Depends."

"What are you scared of?"

Your head snapped toward him. "What?"

"You said average." His voice was quiet, almost lost in the bus noise. "In the library. You said you were scared of being average."

Your chest tightened. The library conversation. He remembered. Of course he remembered. Because apparently Garrett Graham stored random conversations in a vault somewhere, preserved and cataloged and ready for deployment at the most dangerous possible moments.

You looked out the window. Snow drifted across distant fields, the world blurred white, indistinct, soft. For a moment neither of you spoke. The silence stretched, not uncomfortable, but heavy with something you couldn't name.

Then quietly, the words escaping before you could stop them: "What if I never become who I thought I'd be?"

Garrett didn't laugh. Didn't tease. Didn't joke. Instead-

"Yeah."

Just that. Yeah. Understanding. Simple. Honest. The sound of someone who'd thought the same thing, who'd stood in the same uncertainty, who'd wondered if the person they were becoming would measure up to the person they'd imagined.

You looked at him. Really looked. The exhaustion beneath his eyes. The pressure in his posture. The expectations that seemed to sit on his shoulders like physical weight. The fear he hid behind humor and charm and the constant performance of being Garrett Graham, campus hero, future NHL player, everyone's favorite person.

Maybe not so different after all.

Garrett smiled softly, the expression small and private and nothing like his public grin. "You're gonna be fine."

The certainty in his voice nearly hurt. Because he believed it. Without hesitation. Without doubt. Without any evidence beyond whatever he'd seen in you that you couldn't see in yourself.

And somehow-you wanted him to be right. Wanted it with a fierceness that surprised you.

Outside, snow continued falling, the flakes catching the bus lights like sparks. Inside, the distance between you felt smaller than it ever had before. Like something had shifted. Like some wall had cracked, letting light through.

And somewhere near the back of the bus-

Dean watched the entire thing unfold. The way you leaned toward each other. The way Garrett's voice dropped. The way neither of you seemed to notice anyone else in the world.

Then immediately texted Hannah.

DEFINITELY SOMETHING GOING ON

Hannah looked up from her phone. Saw Garrett sitting beside you. Saw you smiling, the expression unguarded in a way you rarely allowed. Saw the way neither of you seemed to notice anyone else.

And suddenly-

She wasn't just suspicious about Offside anymore.

She was suspicious about everything.

The hotel looked nothing like Briar.

No banners hanging from every available surface, no screaming crowds vibrating with school spirit, no students painting their faces in school colours like war paint, transforming themselves into something fierce and collective and slightly unhinged. No history. No weight. No accumulated years of tradition pressing down on every moment.

Just glass doors that reflected the gray afternoon sky, polished floors that squeaked beneath athletic shoes, and the kind of quiet that made everything feel slightly too real. The kind of quiet that didn't care about your reputation or your record or your future. The kind of quiet that asked uncomfortable questions about who you were when nobody was watching.

You stood in the lobby holding your bag, the strap digging into your shoulder with familiar persistence, watching the hockey team spread out like they owned the place anyway. They always did that. Even off campus. Even exhausted. Even half-dead from a bus ride that should've been illegal, that had crossed some invisible line between "team bonding" and "human rights violation."

Dean was already yelling something at reception, his voice carrying across the marble floors with the particular volume of someone who'd never learned that indoor voices were a thing. Allie was laughing at him, her head thrown back, her exhaustion temporarily forgotten. Hannah was checking her phone, calm as ever, her thumb moving across the screen with the efficiency of someone who was actually processing information rather than just scrolling.

Garrett-

Garrett was watching you.

Of course he was. You could feel it before you saw it, that particular weight of attention that made the back of your neck warm. When you finally let yourself look, his eyes were already there, steady and considering, like he'd been waiting for you to notice. Like he'd been tracking your movements since you walked through the doors, cataloging your reactions, filing them away for later examination.

You looked away first. Obviously. Because that's what you did. That's what you'd always done. Look away first. Retreat first. Protect yourself first, before anyone else could decide to hurt you.

A coach called out room assignments, voice echoing through the lobby with the authority of someone who controlled your immediate future. You expected chaos. Expected confusion, complaints, the general negotiation that happened whenever humans were asked to follow rules. You got worse.

Order. Efficiency. Rules.

"Media team," the coach said, scanning his list with a finger moving down printed names. "You're with Wells and Foster."

Your stomach dropped. Slow. Immediate. Unavoidable. Like an elevator with cut cables, that sickening moment of free fall before impact.

Hannah. And you. Together. In a room. Overnight. With your secret sitting in your bag, on your laptop, in every glance you tried to hide.

You turned your head slightly. Hannah met your eyes. Smiled. Too sweet. Too knowing. The smile of someone who'd been waiting for this, who'd suspected something and now had opportunity to investigate.

Perfect. You were going to die here. Not dramatically. Not heroically. Just slowly, over the course of a night, as Hannah Wells dismantled your carefully constructed lies with observation and patience and terrifying intelligence.

Noah bumped your shoulder lightly, grounding you. "Guess we're neighbors."

"Unfortunately," you muttered, the word barely audible.

He laughed. You didn't.

Because across the lobby, Garrett was still watching. And for the first time since this whole thing started, you couldn't tell if that was a good thing or the worst thing that could possibly happen.

The room was small. Too small. The kind of small that made privacy impossible, that turned every movement into performance, that ensured you would be constantly aware of another person's presence whether you wanted to be or not.

Two beds with thin comforters in that particular shade of beige that hotels chose to hide stains. One desk barely wide enough for a laptop, its surface already scratched with the initials of previous guests. One chair that looked like it had already given up on life, its fabric worn thin, its frame slightly crooked, as if it had been sat upon too many times by too many people carrying too many burdens.

Hannah dropped her bag onto the bed closest to the window with a casualness that felt deliberate. You claimed the other one immediately. No negotiation. No discussion. No trust. Just the territorial claiming of space, the unspoken rules of temporary cohabitation.

Noah had gone down to grab equipment info from the coach. Which meant-

Silence.

Just you and Hannah. And the weight of everything unsaid between you.

You unpacked carefully. Deliberately. Each item removed from your bag placed with precision, creating a small fortress of belongings on your bed. Laptop. Camera. Notebook with its pages filled with observations you couldn't let her see. Folded hoodie. Chargers coiled like defensive snakes. Everything arranged like a defence system, like barriers, like the walls you were always building.

Hannah watched quietly. Too quietly. She sat on her own bed, legs crossed, phone face-down beside her, and simply observed. You could feel her attention like physical pressure, like warmth against your skin, like the sensation of being studied under microscope lighting.

Then she spoke.

"So…"

You didn't look up. "No."

She smiled. You could hear it in her voice. "You didn't even know the question."

"I did." You kept your eyes on your laptop, on the familiar motions of setup, on anything that wasn't her.

Hannah leaned back against her pillows, the movement creating a soft rustle of cheap fabric. "You've been weird."

"I've been busy." The words came automatically, rehearsed, practiced.

"You've been disappearing." Her voice didn't change. Still casual. Still conversational. Still dangerous.

You froze slightly. Just for half a second. Then continued unpacking like your life depended on it. Because it did. Because Hannah was getting closer to something, circling it like a predator testing fences, and you needed to be very careful about which direction you ran.

Hannah shifted. The bed creaked. "You write a lot at night."

Your hands paused for half a second. Then kept moving. Casual. Normal. Harmless. "Sometimes."

"That's interesting," she said.

You finally looked at her. Couldn't help it. Needed to see what she was doing, what she was thinking, how much she suspected.

Hannah's expression was soft. Too soft. Which made it worse. Made it feel like she was handling you carefully, like you were fragile, like she was being gentle before she broke something.

"I don't sleep much either," she added.

You exhaled slowly. Dangerous conversation direction. Too intimate. Too revealing. You changed the subject fast, desperate for safer ground. "Where's Allie?"

"With Dean."

"Of course."

Hannah smiled faintly. A pause stretched between you, elastic and tense. Then-

"You like hockey more than you pretend to."

You nearly dropped your charger. The plastic slipped in your fingers, recovered at the last moment. "What?"

"I said what I said." Hannah's voice was mild. Unbothered. Like she hadn't just detonated something in the center of the room.

You narrowed your eyes. "That's not even a sentence."

"It is when you say it right."

Silence. Long. Heavy. Filled with the hum of the hotel's heating system and the distant sound of other guests and the particular quiet of two people who were not saying what they were actually thinking.

Then Hannah rolled onto her side. Facing you now. Direct. Unavoidable. "Do you like Garrett?"

Your heart stopped. Completely. Not metaphorically. Not emotionally. Physically stopped functioning, seized by panic, by the sudden vertigo of being seen. Then restarted aggressively, hammering against your ribs, loud enough you were certain she could hear it.

"No." Too fast. Way too fast. The word came out like a reflex, like a door slamming shut, like every defence mechanism you'd ever learned activating simultaneously.

Hannah watched you carefully. Her eyes were brown and warm and saw absolutely everything. "That was quick."

"I like accuracy."

"Mhm."

You grabbed your laptop. Opened it. Stared at the screen without seeing it. "I'm working."

"You always are."

And somehow-that was worse. Because it was true. Because the work was the excuse, the shield, the reason you gave for disappearing, for being unavailable, for never quite being present in the ways that mattered. Because if you were always working, nobody could ask what you were actually doing. Nobody could wonder why you were exhausted at strange hours. Nobody could connect the dots between your late nights and the articles that appeared the next morning.

You were safe in your busyness. Until you weren't.

Until Hannah Wells decided to start paying attention.

The hallway was quiet. Too quiet. That particular hotel silence that felt manufactured, artificial, like someone had sucked all the life out of the air and left only emptiness behind. You couldn't sleep. Obviously. Because your brain hated you, because it was 2 a.m. and your thoughts were running in circles like hamsters on a wheel, because the room was too small and Hannah was too observant and the walls felt like they were closing in.

You slipped out of the room with your hoodie pulled tight, the fabric soft and worn against your chin, laptop under your arm like a shield. Walked down the corridor until you found the small balcony off the stairwell, the one with the emergency exit sign glowing green above it. Pushed through the heavy door.

Cold air hit immediately. Sharp. Real. The kind of cold that cut through exhaustion and anxiety and left only sensation. Good. Something real. Something that didn't require you to be anyone other than exactly who you were in this moment: tired, scared, hiding.

You leaned against the railing. The metal was freezing even through your hoodie, biting against your forearms. Below, the parking lot stretched empty and dark, a few cars scattered like forgotten toys. Beyond that, the highway hummed with distant traffic, the sound constant and indifferent.

Opened your laptop. The screen glowed blue-white in the darkness, illuminating your hands, your keyboard, the document already waiting.

Offside draft sitting there. Cursor blinking. That steady rhythm that seemed to mock you, to ask what you were doing, why you were doing it, when it would finally be enough.

You started typing. The words came easier here, in the cold, in the quiet, where nobody could see you.

Pressure is funny because it doesn't feel like pressure until it breaks something. We think we're handling it, think we're managing, think we're fine fine fine, until suddenly we're not. Until suddenly the thing we love becomes the thing we fear. Until the ice feels like a stage and the crowd feels like a verdict.

Then-

Footsteps.

You froze. Didn't look up. Didn't move. Your heart hammered against your ribs, every instinct screaming to close the laptop, to hide, to run, to do anything but sit here exposed with evidence spread across your screen like a confession.

Garrett's voice came from behind you. Quiet. Tired. Resigned. "You're everywhere I go now."

You turned slowly. He was standing in the doorway, backlit by the hallway's emergency lighting, hands buried in his hoodie pockets. He looked exhausted. Always exhausted. The kind of exhaustion that went deeper than sleep could fix, that lived in the shoulders, in the jaw, in the way he held himself like he was constantly bracing for impact.

You sighed. The sound came out more relieved than you wanted it to. "I could say the same."

He stepped outside. The door clicked shut behind him, sealing you both in the cold and the dark and the strange intimacy of shared insomnia. Joined you at the railing, close enough that you could smell his soap, something clean and simple, close enough that you could feel the warmth radiating from him despite the chill.

Neither of you spoke for a moment. Just wind. City lights in the distance, blurred and indistinct. The particular silence of a hockey trip, where everyone was supposed to be sleeping but nobody actually was.

Then Garrett leaned forward. His elbows rested on the railing, his posture open in a way that felt rare, vulnerable. "Elaborate question."

You frowned. "What?"

"You always talk about pressure like it's something outside people put on athletes." He didn't look at you. Just kept his eyes on the distant lights, on the darkness, on something you couldn't see. "But sometimes it feels like it's just… inside."

That hit differently. Too differently. You looked at him, really looked, at the exhaustion etched into his face, at the way his fingers tightened on the railing, at the admission he'd just made without fanfare or performance.

"What do you mean?"

Garrett shrugged. Like it was nothing. But his voice wasn't nothing. It was small and honest and nothing like the confident persona he wore in daylight.

"I'm scared I'll stop being good at it." The words came slowly, like he was pulling them from somewhere deep, somewhere he didn't visit often. "I'm scared I'll have one bad game, then another, then suddenly I'm not the prospect anymore, I'm not the future, I'm just… done."

Silence. Heavy again. Different now. The weight of confession.

He didn't look at you. Just the city. "I don't know who I am without it."

You swallowed. That one hurt. More than it should've. Because you understood. Too well. Because you were writing anonymous articles about hockey players at 2 a.m. because you didn't know who you were without the words, without the observation, without the secret identity that made you feel like you mattered.

"I think you'd still be you," you said quietly. The words surprised you. The honesty of them. The way they slipped out before you could stop them.

Garrett laughed once. Soft. Not amused. Just honest. "You say that like you know me."

You didn't answer.

Because you did.

More than you should.

More than was safe.

And somewhere in the silence that followed, you both understood that something had shifted. That the space between you had become smaller, warmer, more dangerous. That the balcony had become a confessional, and you were both leaving pieces of yourselves behind.

The team was loud again. Too loud. Always too loud. The hotel restaurant had become a temporary annex of Briar's athletic culture, complete with the same chaos, the same energy, the same sense that you were witnessing a phenomenon rather than just eating breakfast.

You sat with Noah at a small table near the windows, reviewing photos from the trip. Normal. Professional. Safe. The familiar rhythm of work, of critique, of technical discussion that required nothing from you except competence.

Noah leaned over your laptop, his shoulder brushing yours, his finger tracing the edge of the screen. "This one's good."

You nodded, keeping your eyes on the image. A player mid-shot, the puck frozen in motion, the concentration etched into his face. "Lighting's better than the last game."

"You're improving." Noah's voice was warm. Encouraging. The kind of voice that made you feel seen for your skills rather than your secrets.

You smirked slightly, the expression feeling almost natural. "Don't get used to compliments."

He laughed. You almost relaxed.

Across the room-

Garrett was watching.

Not obvious. Not loud. Not demanding attention the way Dean would, the way the others did. Just watching. His coffee cup held loosely in one hand, his posture deceptively casual, his eyes fixed on your table with an intensity that felt like touch.

You felt it before you saw it. That particular weight of attention, the warmth of being observed, the dangerous thrill of knowing someone was thinking about you.

Dean noticed immediately. Of course he did. Dean had a radar for interpersonal tension, for moments of potential entertainment, for any situation that could be made more complicated or more interesting or more chaotic.

Dean leaned toward Garrett, his mouth moving close to his ear, his grin visible even from across the room. You couldn't hear the words, but you could imagine them. Could see the shape of them in Dean's smile, in Garrett's sudden stillness, in the way his jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.

"You jealous or something?"

Garrett didn't look away. Didn't break eye contact. Didn't do anything to suggest Dean's comment was wrong or ridiculous or worth denying. Just kept watching you with that steady, considering gaze.

"No."

The word was simple. One syllable. But the way he said it-the certainty, the lack of defensiveness, the quiet admission wrapped in denial-made your stomach flip.

Dean smirked. The expression of a man who had just confirmed something he'd suspected, who had baited a hook and watched someone bite. "Sure."

Garrett finally looked away then. Took a sip of his coffee. But the moment had already happened. The observation had been made. The suspicion had been confirmed.

And somewhere across the restaurant, Hannah was watching all of it. Her phone held loosely in her hand, her breakfast untouched, her eyes moving between you and Noah, you and Garrett, cataloging the triangle of glances and tension and unspoken things.

She didn't smile this time.

She just noted.

Filed away.

Waited.

Briar lost. Not close. Not dramatic. Just… lost. The kind of loss that felt inevitable, that settled over the team like humidity, heavy and inescapable. The kind that made the bus ride back feel longer than the trip there, even though the miles were identical.

You sat in the hotel lobby waiting for checkout, your bag packed, your camera secured, your laptop heavy with photos you hadn't reviewed yet. The team moved around you like ghosts, quieter now, the energy drained out of them, leaving only the hollow shells of athletes processing failure.

Garrett walked past. Didn't stop. Didn't look at you. His shoulders were tight, his jaw set, his whole body radiating the particular tension of someone who was holding himself together through sheer force of will. He'd played badly. You'd watched. Everyone had watched. The future NHL prospect, the captain, the hero, missing passes, losing puck battles, looking half a step slow.

The media would eat him alive. You knew because you'd written those articles, those hot takes, those instant analyses that forgot human beings were involved. You'd contributed to the machine that would now consume him.

Hannah appeared beside you. Silent. Observant. She'd been watching too. Always watching.

"Rough game," she said quietly.

You didn't answer. Just kept your eyes on the middle distance, on the hotel's generic art, on anything that wasn't the weight of what you knew.

"He's usually better," Hannah continued. Her voice was mild. Casual. The voice of someone making conversation rather than gathering evidence. But you knew better. You'd seen her work. Seen her circle topics like a shark, patient and predatory.

"Everyone has bad games," you said. The words came out defensive. Too defensive. You softened your tone, tried again. "Pressure gets to people."

Hannah hummed. A noncommittal sound. "You'd know."

Your stomach tightened. "What?"

"About pressure." She turned to look at you, her expression open and curious and terrifying. "You write about it a lot. In your articles."

You froze. The articles. She'd read them. Of course she'd read them. Everyone read them. That was the point. But hearing her say it, hearing her connect your name to those words, felt like standing on ice that was beginning to crack.

"I read a lot of things," you said carefully. "For research."

"Mm." Hannah's eyes stayed on you. Steady. Unblinking. "You seem to understand Garrett especially well. His psychology. His pressure." A pause. Weighted. "Almost like you know him."

Your heart hammered. "I observe. That's my job."

"Is it?" Hannah tilted her head slightly. The gesture was almost birdlike, predatory. "Or is it something else?"

You stood abruptly. Too fast. The movement jerky and obvious. "I'm going to check us out."

Hannah let you go. Didn't follow. Didn't call after you. Just watched you retreat toward the front desk with the satisfaction of someone who had confirmed a suspicion, who had seen the crack in your armor and filed away its location for future use.

And as you handed over the room keys with shaking hands, one thought repeated like a mantra.

She knew.

Not everything. Not yet. But she knew something. And that was always how it started. That was always the beginning of the end.

The hockey house was louder than it had any right to be for a team that had just lost.

Not celebration loud. Not even coping loud. Just… displaced energy. The kind that had nowhere to go, so it turned into slammed cupboards, half-laughs that didn't land, and music that no one was really listening to. The bass thumped through the floorboards anyway, aggressive and hollow, like the house itself was trying to convince everyone that everything was fine.

The loss sat in the walls with them. Briar hadn't just lost a game. They'd lost momentum. Confidence. That easy sense of inevitability they wore when things were going right, that swagger that made them walk differently, talk differently, exist differently. Now everything felt slightly off-centre. Like a photograph with the horizon tilted just enough to make you nauseous if you stared too long.

Dean was on the couch flicking through his phone, his thumb moving with mechanical repetition, not actually processing anything. Allie was curled up beside him, quieter than usual, her usual commentary absent, leaving gaps in the conversation that no one filled. Garrett stood in the kitchen, hands braced on the counter, staring at nothing. The muscles in his forearms were tight, veins visible, tension radiating off him in waves that you could feel from across the room.

He hadn't said much since the bus. He didn't need to. Everyone could see it on him-the way he carried the loss like personal failure, like he'd disappointed not just the team but some invisible audience he was always performing for.

Then-

Hannah walked in.

No announcement. No hesitation. Just calm. Controlled. Like she'd been carrying something the entire bus ride and had finally decided it was time to set it down in front of everyone. The door clicked shut behind her with a finality that made Dean look up from his phone, made Allie uncurl slightly, made Garrett's shoulders tense even further.

She didn't sit. She didn't smile. She just looked at them, her gaze moving from face to face with the methodical precision of someone checking items off a list.

And said-

"I know who writes Offside."

The room changed instantly. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just… still. The music kept playing, but it felt distant suddenly, like it was coming from another house, another world.

Dean blinked. "What?"

Hannah's eyes didn't move. "I know who it is."

Allie frowned, her confusion genuine, her head tilting in that way she had when she was trying to catch up to a conversation that had already left her behind. "That anonymous column thing?"

Hannah nodded. Just once. Small. Definitive.

Garrett didn't move. But something in his posture shifted. Subtle. Sharp. Dangerous. The kind of shift that happened before a storm broke, before violence erupted, before someone did something they couldn't take back.

Hannah continued, her voice steady, almost gentle. "It's not random. It's not a student journalism experiment." A pause. Weighted. "It's her."

Silence. Thick. Heavy. The kind of silence that pressed against your eardrums.

Then Dean laughed once. Short. Disbelieving. "Her who?"

Hannah finally looked at him. And said your name.

The air left the room. Not metaphorically. Actually. Everyone stopped breathing for just a moment, suspended in the revelation, in the implications, in the sudden recontextualization of every interaction they'd had with you.

Allie sat up slowly. "You're joking."

"I'm not."

Garrett's voice cut through the room immediately. "No."

One word. Final. Absolute. But there was something underneath it-something that sounded less like denial and more like damage control.

Hannah turned toward him. "You didn't see it?"

Garrett's jaw tightened. The muscle jumped. "No."

But he didn't look at her. He looked at the counter. At his hands. At anything that wasn't Hannah's knowing gaze. And in that avoidance, there was something-guilt, maybe. Or recognition. Or the careful mask of someone who'd already suspected and had been hoping no one else would figure it out.

Hannah stepped closer now. Calm. Precise. "She writes about you constantly. Your pressure. Your patterns. Your behaviour under stress." Her gaze flicked across the group. "She's been observing all of you, but especially you."

Garrett's hands clenched on the counter. White-knuckled. "That's not proof."

Hannah reached into her bag. Pulled out printed pages. Lay them on the table with the care of someone laying out evidence in a courtroom. Offside articles. Annotated. Highlighted. Compared. Dates circled. Phrases underlined. A constellation of observation that pointed unmistakably to one source.

Dean leaned forward despite himself, his curiosity overriding his usual performance of not caring. Allie's eyes scanned the page, moving quickly, her lips moving slightly as she read.

And Garrett-

Garrett didn't move at first. Then he read. One page. Then another. Then stopped breathing slightly.

Because Hannah was right. It wasn't just writing. It was familiarity. Too much familiarity. The kind that came from proximity. From attention. From knowing.

But also-

The kind that came from being told.

Garrett looked up slowly. "That doesn't prove it's her."

Hannah didn't flinch. "It's her voice."

Dean frowned. "How the hell do you know her voice?"

Hannah finally hesitated. Just for a second. A crack in her certainty. "I pay attention too."

That landed heavier than anything else she'd said. Because it wasn't just accusation. It was admission. It was Hannah saying, I've been watching too. I've been gathering. I've been building this case while you were all looking elsewhere.

But also-

It was Hannah deflecting. Because she hadn't answered the question. Hadn't explained how she knew your voice specifically. Hadn't explained why she'd been collecting articles, comparing them, building this theory in secret.

Garrett pushed off the counter. "This is insane."

"No," Hannah said quietly. "What's insane is that she's been writing about you while sitting in the same rooms as you and you didn't notice."

That did it. Something in Garrett snapped. "Enough."

The room went silent again. His voice wasn't loud. But it carried. Authority. Finality. The voice of a captain, of someone used to being obeyed.

"You don't get to do this."

Hannah didn't back down. "I'm telling you the truth."

"No," Garrett said sharply. "You're guessing."

"I'm connecting patterns."

"You're accusing her."

"I'm observing her behaviour."

Garrett laughed once. Cold. Sharp. Broken glass in sound form. "You sound like her."

That hit. Even Hannah paused. Just briefly. Her eyes flickered-uncertainty, maybe. Or the realization that she'd overplayed, that she'd revealed too much of her own obsession, that she was standing in glass houses throwing stones.

Then Garrett grabbed his jacket. "Where are you going?" Dean asked.

Garrett didn't look back. "I'm going to talk to her."

Allie stood. "Garrett-"

But he was already gone. The door slammed behind him with a finality that made the windows rattle. And in the silence he left behind, Hannah stood alone with her evidence, her certainty, and the growing suspicion that she'd just made everything worse.

Because Garrett hadn't been surprised. Not really. He'd been angry, defensive, protective-but not surprised. And that meant something. That meant he'd known, or suspected, or been told.

And Hannah wondered, for the first time, who had really been deceiving whom.

Garrett trudged through the November night like the world had forgotten how to be gentle. The cold had stopped being a temperature and started being a taste: metallic, bitter, acrid at the back of his throat. It caught in his sinuses and stung his cheeks, every gust of wind a slap that left no mark but carried a message anyway. The air bit through the fabric of his hoodie, past the layers he’d piled on by instinct and habit, settling against his skin in a way that felt deliberate. Personal, even. Like the weather itself had a vendetta, and he was the only target left in the open.

He hunched deeper into his clothes and walked faster, boots crunching over the gravel with a sharp, irregular rhythm. Each step landed too loud, echoing in the near-abandoned lot, filling up the silence with a violence that felt both necessary and wrong. Sodium lamps buzzed overhead, their light anemic and sickly, painting long shadows that warped with every movement. Even the night seemed to recoil from itself, pressing in on all sides with a pressure that had nothing to do with air and everything to do with the way it made his thoughts feel dense, suffocating.

The parking lot behind the gym looked like a crime scene after everyone had already left and the danger was gone, but the dread lingered anyway. He remembered standing out here after practice with Hannah, both of them pretending the cold didn’t matter, both of them talking around whatever it was neither wanted to name. She’d always had this way of laughing that started small, like she was afraid it would embarrass her, then got louder and clearer until it drew every stray eye in the vicinity. He could picture the way she’d toss her ponytail over her shoulder, the way her eyes crinkled when she was about to say something that would definitely get her in trouble. He remembered the way she used to look at him, like she was waiting for him to be something, someone, he wasn’t sure he could be.

Now every memory of her felt suspect, like it might have been faked or borrowed. He didn’t want to believe that, but it kept happening anyway. His mind kept replaying every moment, every casual brush of her hand, every too-long glance, filtering them through this new, ugly lens. The silence of the night wasn’t peaceful. It was a vacuum that made every internal noise impossible to ignore. His heartbeat pounded in his ears, uneven and panicked, as if his body was trying to warn him about something he already knew but refused to accept.

Inside his head, the thoughts didn’t just race—they collided. Collapsed into each other until he couldn’t separate anger from disbelief, or disappointment from the raw, bruised thing underneath. The anger came first. Hot, immediate, alive in a way nothing else was. It started in his jaw, where he found himself clenching until his teeth ached, and radiated down into his fists, balled deep in his pockets. He wanted to punch something, break something, do anything that would make the world rearrange itself into a shape he could manage. But there was nothing to hit except his own confusion, and that didn’t bruise the way he wanted it to.

Confusion was worse than anger. Anger had purpose; confusion just dissolved him from the inside out. It made the world feel like a lie, made every memory slippery and unreliable. He tried to remember what Hannah had said, the exact words, the tone of her voice, the look on her face, but it all kept shifting, slippery as oil. Had she been sorry? Had she even meant it? He couldn’t tell. He couldn’t even decide if he wanted to believe her or if he needed her to be lying. Every piece of evidence existed in a kind of Schrödinger’s box: both true and false, depending on how he looked at it.

He kept walking, not because he had anywhere to go, but because stopping felt like surrender. The wind was stronger out in the open, pushing him sideways, but he leaned into it, letting it numb his face and hands. He remembered the first time he’d ever heard of Offside. Someone had shown him the account on their phone during lunch, and they’d all laughed at the latest post, at how weirdly specific and accurate it was. He’d laughed the hardest, because that was how you survived: you laughed before anyone else could laugh at you. But now every post felt like it had been aimed straight at him, like every inside joke was actually about him, and he’d just been too stupid to notice.

The evidence stacked up in his mind, relentless. Hannah’s weird hours, her offhand comments about “knowing things,” the way she seemed to always be in the right place to overhear something. All the times she’d asked him about his teammates, about his coach, about the stupid drama that kept the team barely functional. It all made sense, too much sense, and that made it worse. Because if it was true, then he’d never really known her at all. He’d just been a source. A data point. Part of the story, but never the audience.

And yet. Underneath all of it, there was something else, something quieter but heavier, like a bruise that hadn’t surfaced yet but would hurt ten times worse when it did. The part of him that stubbornly, humiliatingly, still wanted to believe in her. To believe that she hadn’t lied, or at least hadn’t meant to. That the person he’d built out of all those little moments was real, and not just an alias for something sharper and meaner. He kept thinking of the way she’d looked at him the last time they’d talked. He couldn’t remember the words, but he remembered the silence after, the way she’d looked away, like she already knew this was how it would end.

He kept walking, even after his fingers went numb and his ears started to burn. He circled the empty lot again, and again, and again, searching for something—a reason, a clue, anything that would let him rewrite what he knew. But the night gave him nothing. Just cold, and silence, and the echo of his own boots in a world that had decided, finally and thoroughly, to stop being kind.

The worst part was that it felt like betrayal before he even knew if it was real. Like he’d lost something precious, and the only person who could tell him if it mattered was the one who’d taken it in the first place.

He closed his eyes, let the cold do its work, and told himself he’d figure it out.

The media building was still lit when Garrett found it, a harsh white glow spilling from the glass windows and painting the concrete with cold stripes that seemed to erase the night. He stood outside for a full minute, watching the fluorescent buzz and the flicker of overhead bulbs, and tried to convince himself he had no idea what he would find. That lie lasted until he stepped inside and saw her, small and hunched over a desk littered with so much paper it looked like a snowdrift had settled there. He felt the old, involuntary ache in his chest, the one that came every time he watched her work, but tonight it twisted into something harder, heavier—like disappointment and longing melted together and set to cool.

She was focused in that intense, dissonant way she always was, face lit from underneath by the blue-white of her laptop, headphones pressed over her ears. Her whole body radiated a strain that he would have missed if he hadn’t spent months learning how to find the cracks in her armor. There was no music playing; he could see the cord dangling, unplugged, a useless prop for privacy. Even her posture was off, one shoulder higher than the other, back rounded like she was bracing for impact. For a second, he wanted to walk away, to let her have this last quiet moment before he shattered it. But the truth was already in him, and it wouldn’t leave.

He lingered in the doorway, letting his eyes adjust to the unnatural brightness, and told himself he was waiting for her to notice him. Really, he was just stalling, waiting for the anger to return so he could use it as a shield. He wanted to feel righteous, wanted to confront her with the full force of his indignation, but all he felt was tired. The kind of tired that crawled into your bones and waited there.

When he finally stepped inside, the door clicked behind him, a soft but absolute sound that seemed to close off the rest of the world. She looked up instantly, eyes wide and sharp in the sterile light, and in that moment he saw not the girl he’d rehearsed this confrontation with, but the stranger who’d written about him with such surgical precision. Her mouth opened slightly, then snapped shut, and she pulled her headphones off with a slowness that made his skin itch.

“Hey,” she said, voice careful, measured. Like she’d been expecting this, and was already mapping every possible route the conversation might take. He wondered how many times she’d run this scenario in her head. He wondered if she’d ever imagined what it felt like on the other side.

He didn’t answer. He just stared at her, at the ink stains on her hands and the bitten skin along her thumbnail, at the way her hair fell across her face, a curtain she could retreat behind if she needed to. He searched for any sign of the apology he wanted, but all he found was the same wary intelligence that had first drawn him in. He hated her for that, for being exactly herself even now.

He heard his own voice, flat and unfamiliar: “Is it you?”

She blinked. There was a pause, almost imperceptible, but enough that he saw the mask slip. Her lips parted, and he watched her swallow the instinct to deny. “What?” she said, but her tone made it clear that she already knew exactly what he meant.

He took a step forward, careful to keep his movements controlled, deliberate. The last thing he wanted was to give her the satisfaction of seeing him lose it. “Offside,” he said, the word hanging in the air like a challenge. “Is it you?”

He saw the tremor in her hands before she could hide them beneath the desk. The blue glow of the laptop made her skin look translucent, veins dark and obvious under the surface. She let out a laugh—too high, too brittle, a note that didn’t belong in this room. “Where is this coming from?” she asked, but even she could hear the tremor in her voice.

He repeated the question, softer now, almost pleading: “Is it you?”

Her fingers dug into the edge of the desk, and for a moment he thought she might actually tell the truth. But then she said, “No,” too fast and too sharp, the syllable a knife thrown in self-defense.

He knew her tells. He knew them better than anyone. The way her jaw set, the way her gaze flicked away and then back, as if daring him to call her bluff. “Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not.” But her voice betrayed her, and he saw the crack run through her like a bolt of lightning.

He looked away for a second, tried to gather the pieces of himself that were still intact, then forced his gaze back to her. “You write about me like you know me.”

She bristled at that, sat up straighter, and the old competitive edge sharpened her words. “I observe people. That’s literally my job.” She sounded almost smug, but there was a desperation behind it that made his throat tighten.

“That’s not an answer.”

She stood up, the chair scraping back with a screech that set his teeth on edge. Her hands trembled as she leveled her gaze at him. “Why does it matter?”

He hadn’t expected that. He’d come ready for denial, for anger, for all the defenses she was so good at building. But this—this quiet, raw question—left him off-balance. “I thought I knew you,” he said, voice barely above a whisper. He didn’t mean for it to sound so broken.

She flinched, as if the words had landed somewhere soft. He saw her fighting for composure, saw the struggle play out across her face like a time-lapse of a collapsing building. “I didn’t write it to hurt you,” she said, and her voice wavered on the last word. “I wrote it because I didn’t know how to explain you without people twisting it into something easier to understand. You’re not just the captain or the expectations or the draft pick everyone’s waiting for—you’re also the person who looks like he’s carrying something too heavy even when you’re standing in a room full of people. I saw that. And I didn’t know how to make anyone else see it without putting it into words.”

He felt every sentence like a bruise pressed by a thumb. He wanted to hate her for it, but he couldn’t, not when she was standing there shaking, not when she looked so small and so real.

He moved closer, not even sure why, just that it felt necessary. “That’s not what I asked.”

She stopped, breath uneven. “Then what do you want to know?”

He searched her face for a sign, any sign, that what he was about to say wouldn’t destroy them both. “Was any of it real?”

Her answer came in two parts, a denial and a confession spaced just far enough apart to make him question which was true. “No.” A beat, then, “Yes.”

He let it hang there, the contradiction, the uncertainty. It was the most honest thing she’d ever given him.

She ran a hand through her hair, eyes squeezed shut. “It wasn’t about you the way you think. It started as observation. Distance. Something safe. Something I could control.” She hesitated, voice dropping to a whisper. “Then it stopped being safe.”

He tried to remember the first time he’d read Offside, the first time he’d seen himself reflected back in her stories. They’d felt too sharp, too intimate, like someone had taken his insides and held them up for everyone to see. He hadn’t wanted to admit how much it mattered, how much it hurt. He’d told himself it was just writing, just words. But now, standing here, he knew that was a lie.

He studied her, the way she wouldn’t meet his eyes, the way she folded her arms across her chest as if to keep herself from unraveling. “Then what changed?”

She looked up at him, and he saw the answer before she said it. “You did.”

The words landed between them, heavy and final. He felt the weight of them settle in his lungs, making it hard to breathe. He wanted to ask what that meant, wanted to demand an explanation, but he already knew. He’d felt it, too.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, and the vulnerability in his voice surprised even him.

She laughed, but it was a sound made out of broken glass. “Because I didn’t know how to exist around you without it turning into this.”

He nodded, slow and resigned, like someone accepting a verdict they’d seen coming all along. “I hate that I care about this,” he admitted, and he saw her flinch again.

She stepped closer, arms still folded, but her eyes meeting his now. “I know.”

He wanted to reach out, to touch her, to close the distance, but he didn’t. Instead he looked down at his hands, at the scars on his knuckles, and wondered if there was a version of himself that didn’t end up here, in this endless loop of wanting and resenting and never quite letting go.

He looked up again, and this time he let her see all of it—the hurt, the confusion, the need. “And I hate that I still want to trust you.”

She inhaled sharply, and for a second he thought she might cry. But instead, she stepped closer, closing the gap between them until he could feel the heat of her skin, the faint shiver in her breath. “I never wanted to be something that hurt you,” she said quietly.

He believed her. That was the worst part.

A pause, then: “But you are.”

She nodded, and the movement was so small, so fragile, he thought she might disappear if he looked away. “I’m sorry.”

He took her hand, not because he forgave her, but because he needed to feel something real. Her fingers were cold, but they wrapped around his with a strength that surprised him. They stood like that, suspended in the sterile light, neither of them sure what came next.

Outside, the wind battered the windows, and the world felt very far away.

Inside, it was just them, and the impossible space between what they were and what they could be.

He didn’t know if he could cross it. But for the first time, he wanted to try.

#garrett graham x reader

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alierecss

I said "I love you". You say nothing back | John Logan

summary: the arrangement was simple: keep it casual, don't catch feelings, don't ask for more than what's on the table. 338 days later, you're starting to think simple was never really an option with john logan.

notes: hii, i'm back!! i was genuinely so overwhelmed by the response to my first one shot. you guys are so kind and it inspired me to keep writing. so here we are, back with more yearning, more angst, and more logan being an idiot about his feelings. my requests are open if you have any ideas or characters you want to see i'd love to hear from you. thank you so much for reading and enjoy ❤️❤️

warnings: swearing, alcohol, light angst, situationships, a puck bunny accusation and a confession in the rain.

word count: 8k

The thing with Logan had started exactly 338 days ago. Almost one year. One full lap around the sun. You knew because you had been counting, the days and the hours and even the minutes since this situationship from hell, as your dear friends had taken to calling it, had installed itself in your life like an antivirus app you hadn't downloaded and couldn't figure out how to delete.

It had started on Halloween, and at the time it hadn't seemed like a bad idea. It was just past eleven and the house off campus that your friends had dragged you to smelled like dry ice and weed, and you were tired and ready to leave, which was an anomaly. You were usually the last one standing, your friends had given you the nickname ending antagonist for a reason. In hindsight, that probably should have been a warning sign. The one night you wanted to go home early was the night everything started.

#john logan x reader

chanelnara

off limits | part 3

Paring: John Logan x Graham!reader

Summary: Logan knows better than to fall for his best friend's little sister.

wc: 7.10k not sorry; graham!reader; figure skater!reader; brother’s best friend; best friend's sister; hockey player x figure skater; tw: underage drinking (for americans)

Part I | Part II

#john logan x reader

lushfruit

you’re losing me - john logan

Pairing: John Logan x fem!reader

summary: Being in love with your childhood best friend was no easy feat, but it was manageable. Until it wasn’t. When John Logan breaks a crucial promise, he’s forced to confront what’s been standing in front of him all along.

based on this request! i hope i did it justice <3

content: so.much.angst. like, so much. unrequited love, reader is a stem major. the characters are more accurate to their book counterparts occasionally, namely tucker. oops. some things may be ooc but it is for the sake of the plot. logan is unknowingly an asshole.

#john logan x reader

itneverendshere

definitely, undeniably, googly-eyed - john logan.

#john logan x reader

sasaririri

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

pairing: John Logan x reader fem

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

warnings: angst, late confession, not good ending

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

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

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

— The Neighbourhood, W.D.Y.W.F.M?

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

I love, love.

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

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

So I drew my own conclusion.

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

From that seat, I loved everything.

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

I never wanted to step inside.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fuck. I feel weird.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What?

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

What the hell did he just say?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But then he said, almost in a whisper:

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

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

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

And I… kissed him back.

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

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

What have I done?

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Wait, I’m really sor—”

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

“Just let me expl—”

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

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

“Logan…”

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

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

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

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

John Logan.

I covered my face with my hands.

No. No. This can’t be.

And then I admitted it.

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

“I like John Logan.”

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

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

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

What a fucking idiot you are.

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

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

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

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

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

Progress.

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

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

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

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

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

The plan was solid.

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

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

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

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

It was a perfect system.

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

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

I looked at it without moving.

Logan.

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

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

Hey. Can I talk to you?

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

He replied in thirty seconds.

You in the lib?

I looked around as if I needed to confirm it.

Yes.

Coming.

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

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

Functional, I thought. You are a functional person.

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

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

“Hi,” I said.

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

“A while.”

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

“What’s up?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

Us. It has to end.

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

Ah. Here we go.

“Okay,” I said.

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

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

“Okay?” he repeated.

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

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

“Then why are you here?”

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

“There’s a girl.”

I stayed perfectly still. Ah. Ah, no.

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

There’s a girl. There’s a girl.

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

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

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

Pause.

Please don’t say it. Don’t. Say. It.

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

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

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

Until the name Grace sounded briefly familiar.

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

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

“Yeah.”

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

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

Before Christmas.

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

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

“I’m happy for you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I haven’t done anything yet.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hey.”

“What?”

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

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

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

Old times’ sake.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I set my pen down on the notebook. Carefully.

“Have you hung out alone yet?”

“Twice.”

“And?”

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

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

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

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

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

“How do you know these things?”

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

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

He nodded slowly.

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

“Exactly,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until the table vibrated.

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

Grace.

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

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

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

“You’re right.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Logan.”

“I know.”

“Why the hell did you tell her that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Later,” I said.

“Sure.”

I went into my room. Closed the door.

I stood in front of the whiteboard.

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

Grace Ivers, Logan. Livers. It was obvious.

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

Don’t lose composure in front of him.

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

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

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

Don’t be the person you want to be.

Don’t look at his hands.

Don’t think about how he laughs.

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

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

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

I had been right. I needed more.

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

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

I capped the marker again.

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

Was it ever real with me?

Yes. That.

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

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

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

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

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

“No rush,” she said.

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

I went out to the hallway.

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

I sat at the table.

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

“You okay?” she asked simply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Damn blind people.”

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

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

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

I found him in the kitchen.

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

I grabbed his hand.

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

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

“Hey—” Garrett started.

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

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

The back porch was empty.

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

“What’s up?” he said.

I opened my mouth.

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

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

He blinked.

“You don’t have to—”

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

“Stop,” he said.

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

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

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

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

The silence that followed lasted an eternity.

He didn’t move.

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

Then he shook his head. Slowly.

“Why now?” he said.

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

“Logan—”

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

“I didn’t—”

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

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

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

“Logan—”

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

“I was scared—”

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

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

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

“Logan, I—”

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

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

“Logan…” I whispered.

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

I swallowed, feeling my throat bleeding inside.

“It’s not like that—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And he left.

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

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

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

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

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

Long enough for Fran to find me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Neighbourhood · I Love You. · Song · 2013

#off campus x reader #john logan x reader

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𝒻𝑒𝒶𝓉𝓊𝓇𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝙳𝚎𝚊𝚗 𝙳𝚒 𝙻𝚊𝚞𝚛𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚒𝚜⁶⁶ + 𝙹𝚘𝚑𝚗 𝙻𝚘𝚐𝚊𝚗²²

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Transferring schools after your breakup with your ex-boyfriend was a reckless escape plan made somewhere between crying in your childhood bedroom and panic-applying to another university at two in the morning. You needed distance, a new city, a clean slate. A life free from hockey boys—newly traumatized by the nightmare of an ex you left behind.

You didn’t realize you’d somehow tumbled right back into the same shit until you stepped into the house and stumbled over a hockey stick or five with a box in your hands. Random roommates with Dean Di Laurentis, Garrett Graham, and John Logan.

Garrett came first, opening the door for you when you came back in with your luggage, taking the heavier bags from your hands before you could even argue. Logan thoughtfully reassembled your bedframe before you could ask, focused and quiet while you unpacked. Dean, on the other hand, came rolling in after everything was already done, towel wrapped low around his hips, all abs and a smile. And you knew you were in trouble.

The entire house revolves around hockey. Early morning practices, wet gear draped across the laundry room, loud pregame meals, and even louder post-game celebrations.

After week one they taught you how to play NHL on Xbox so they could play 4-on-4. They love mic’ing you up because you might be smarter than the four of them combined and your chirping skills have yet to be matched against the middle school boys that have been kicking their ass for the last 2 years running.

Your stuff is constantly stolen—blankets, water bottles, chargers, chapsticks. What’s yours is theirs, and as much as it annoys you, you know they just love having a piece of you. Watching you finally realize something’s missing and start chewing them out is just the cherry on top. The three of them usually bite back smiles, looking down at you lovingly—tauntingly at times—when you tell them to stop.

Dean flirts shamelessly, stealing kisses like that’s something “friends” do, laughing against your mouth at parties just to get the other two riled up like he somehow scored you first.

#garrett graham x reader #dean di laurentis x reader #john logan x reader

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