High Maintenance
Garrett Graham x Female!Reader
Warnings: alcohol use, drinking to cope, anxiety, angst
Summary: You've been falling apart quietly for three weeks and you're very good at making sure nobody notices, especially your boyfriend Garrett. You're less good at it after four drinks and one overheard conversation you were never supposed to hear.
Author's Note: Thx for all the love on my first Garrett fic! I'm doing an OC rewatch rn and just felt like I needed to get this one off my chest. I <3 bestie Dean fr.
Eight months in and you still hadn't figured out what to do with being someone's favorite thing.
Garrett wasn't subtle about it. That was the thing, he had absolutely no interest in being subtle about it. He'd find you across a dining hall full of people and his whole face would do something embarrassing. He'd mention you to his teammates with the casual frequency of someone who didn't realize he was doing it, which, according to Dean, he wasn't. He'd show up at your dorm with soup when you were sick, uninvited, unashamed, completely certain he was welcome. He was always welcome. That was the other thing.
Eight months. Long enough that his hoodie had more or less permanently become part of your wardrobe. Long enough that you knew exactly which toothpaste brand he preferred, and that he took his coffee wrong, and that he looked up at the stands exactly once per game - same moment every time, right after warm-ups - just to find you.
You were, by every reasonable metric, fine. Good, even. Happy.
You were also, quietly and without telling anyone, coming apart at the seams.
It hadn't started with anything dramatic. That was the part that made it hard to explain. There was no single thing to point to, no moment where it all went wrong. Just a bad exam grade, then another. Readings piling up in two classes, then three. A cold that moved into your chest three weeks ago and apparently liked it there, the kind of tired that sleep didn't touch.
You'd cancelled plans with Garrett twice. Both times he'd said it's okay, babe, seriously, without missing a beat, and both times something in you had gone slightly sideways, because of course he had. Of course he was fine about it. He was always fine about it, which somehow made it worse, because it meant he was noticing, and adjusting around you, and that meant you were someone who needed adjusting around.
He'd started checking in more. Texts a little more often. Soup you hadn't asked for, dropped off with a knock and a smile like it was nothing.
It was nothing. That was the problem. To him it was nothing, and to you it was accumulating into something you didn't have a word for yet.
Too much, something in the back of your head had started saying. Quietly at first. Then less quietly. You're too much right now.
You were good at ignoring things. You'd been ignoring this for three weeks. You were, it turned out, not as good at it as you'd thought.
The party was Garrett's idea. Well, it was everyone's idea. Briar had won the game 4-1, and the hockey house was the kind of loud that rattled inside your skull pleasantly, all bass and laughter and the clatter of the boys being celebratory and stupid. The living room smelled like beer and Axe and the particular chaos of hockey players who were very pleased with themselves.
You'd smiled through most of it. You were good at that, too.
Garrett had kept you close the whole first hour, arm slung around your shoulders, pressing a kiss to your temple every time someone stopped to talk to him, like punctuation. Hannah had found you at some point and the two of you had ended up in the kitchen with drinks you weren't really finishing, talking about nothing, which was nice.
But Garrett had gotten pulled away - something about Dean needing him, something about the highlight reel someone had pulled up on the TV - and you'd drifted. Which was fine. You were fine.
You'd ended up on the back porch without fully meaning to.
The night air was cold as you leaned against the railing, tipped your head back, and breathed.
You're okay. You're fine. You're at a party celebrating your boyfriend's win and everything is fine.
You heard them before you saw them. Two girls tucked into the corner of the porch, half-hidden by the shadows. You hadn't noticed them when you came out.
You recognized one of them.
Kendall. You'd heard the name in the careful, neutral way girls mentioned names when they meant something. She and Garrett had hooked up before. Before you. It wasn't a big deal. You knew it wasn't a big deal.
You turned slightly away, meaning to go back inside, meaning to just not be here for whatever this was.
But her voice carried.
"-no, I just mean, look at her. She's been off all night."
A murmur from the other girl. You went very still.
"I'm not being mean, I'm just - Garrett has a lot going on. He's got scouts looking at him, he's got finals coming up, and now he's got-" a pause, something that wasn't quite a laugh, "-one more thing to manage."
One more thing to manage.
The words landed somewhere below your sternum and just sat there.
"She seems kind of high maintenance," Kendall continued, quieter now. "I heard she's been sick, like, for weeks, and he's been running over there constantly. He doesn't have time for that. He doesn't have time for someone like- I mean, it's Garrett Graham. He could have-"
You stopped hearing the rest.
Not because they stopped talking, you just stopped being able to take anything in. The world narrowed down to the railing under your hands and the cold air in your lungs and the feeling of something fracturing very quietly behind your eyes.
One more thing to manage.
High maintenance.
He doesn't have time for someone like-
You turned around and went inside.
You went for the kitchen.
There was a handle of something on the counter - vodka, cheap, the kind that came in a plastic bottle - and you poured it into whatever cup was closest without really looking at what was already in it. You drank it faster than you should have. Poured another.
This was not something you did. You were not, by nature, a drink-until-it-goes-away person. You'd watched enough people use that particular coping mechanism to know better. You knew better.
You poured a third.
The thing was, and you understood this even as you were doing it, which somehow made it worse, that the words were just sitting there. One more thing to manage. Right in the center of your chest, perfectly placed, like Kendall had known exactly where to aim. And you needed them to move. You needed them to blur, or soften, or stop feeling so much like the thing you'd already been thinking at three in the morning for the past three weeks.
So you drank.
Hannah found you twenty minutes later, laughing too loudly at something a guy from the lacrosse team had said. She gave you a look, the kind that meant how many is that, and you smiled wide enough that she let it go. Or seemed to. You slipped away before she could ask a follow-up question.
The party had taken on that particular underwater quality that meant the alcohol was working. The edges of everything softened. The bass felt further away. You moved through the living room with the careful precision of someone who knew they were drunk and was trying very hard not to show it, which probably meant you were showing it completely.
Garrett was somewhere in this room. You could feel it the way you always could, that low awareness, like a compass needle swinging north. Normally you'd find him without thinking.
Tonight you turned the other direction.
You grabbed someone's abandoned drink off the end table. You didn't know whose, you didn't care, which was so unlike you that some distant sober part of your brain flinched, and made your way to the other side of the room. Someone pulled you into a conversation about something. You nodded. You laughed when they laughed. You were very good at performing fine, even now, even like this.
But Garrett kept appearing at the edges of things. You'd see his shoulder, the back of his head, catch a flash of his smile across the room, and something in your chest would do that terrible thing it always did.
So you kept moving.
You ended up in the hallway. Then near the stairs. Then, without fully deciding to, on the stairs themselves, sitting halfway up with your cup.
You sat for a while.
The alcohol had moved past the useful stage and into something messier, the kind of drunk where everything felt slightly too large and slightly too true at the same time. Your eyes were doing something embarrassing. You pressed the back of your wrist to them, hard.
You're fine. You're not going to do this here.
You stood up. Gripped the railing. Made it to the top of the stairs on the second try.
The upstairs hallway was dark enough that it felt like breathing room. You leaned against the wall and closed your eyes for a second, just long enough to get your legs back under you. Your dorm key was in your jacket pocket. Your jacket was downstairs. You needed to find it and leave before Garrett realized you'd been avoiding him for an hour, because if he looked at you right now with that face - the one he made when he was worried - you were going to fall apart in the middle of his own party, and you would not do that to him, you refused to do that to him tonight...
You pushed off the wall.
Misjudged the distance to the opposite side of the hallway by about four inches.
The door swung open before you could knock properly, or maybe you knocked wrong, and suddenly there was light and Dean Di Laurentis was right there, some girl half visible behind him, and all three of you stared at each other.
"Bathroom," you said, except it came out slightly sideways.
Dean blinked. Looked at you. Looked at the cup in your hand, mostly empty. Looked back at your face.
Something shifted in his expression, fast and uncharacteristically serious.
"Babe." Not to you. He was already half-turning to the girl, his voice dropped low. "I need a minute."
"You're kidding-"
"I'm really not." A beat. Something in his tone that left no room for argument. "Please."
The girl left in the precise way people left when they were furious and had decided to be graceful about it anyway. You watched her go down the hallway and felt vaguely guilty about it.
Dean stepped back from the doorway. "Get in here."
"I don't need-"
"You just walked into my door."
"I knocked."
"With your face, a little bit." He looked at you levelly. "Get in here."
You got in there.
He closed the door. The noise from downstairs dropped to a murmur.
"How much have you had to drink?"
"That's a weird opener."
"It's a normal question for someone who just almost fell through my door." He crossed his arms, leaning against the wall, "How much."
You thought about lying. Decided it wasn't worth the effort. "Enough."
"Enough," he repeated, in the tone of someone doing math. His eyes moved over you, assessing. Quick and thorough the way athletes were sometimes, used to reading situations fast. "You don't drink like this."
"People drink at parties."
"Not you. Not like-" he gestured vaguely at the cup still in your hand, "-whatever this is." A pause. "What happened?"
"Nothing happened. I'm fine."
"Okay."
You stared at him. He stared back. He did not appear to be in any rush whatsoever.
You hated that. You hated the waiting.
"I overheard something," you said, and the words came out a little slurred at the edges. "On the porch. Kendall - you know who that is?"
Something crossed his face. "Yeah. I know who that is."
"She was talking about me." The cup in your hand felt very heavy suddenly. You set it down on the nearest surface. "She said I was one more thing Garrett had to manage." The words tasted exactly as bad coming out as they had going in. Worse, maybe, because you were saying them out loud now, making them real. "That I was high maintenance. That he didn't have time for someone like me."
Dean was quiet for exactly two seconds.
"She said that."
"She's not wrong, that's the thing." You laughed, and it came out wrong, too bright and too brittle. "I've been sick for like three weeks, and stressed, and he keeps showing up for it, and I keep letting him, and he has scouts and he has finals and I just-" You stopped. The room was doing something slightly unsteady. You pressed your fingertips to the dresser behind you. "I just didn't want to feel it. I didn't want to stand there in the middle of his party and feel like that, so I-" You gestured at nothing. At the cup. At yourself.
"So you drank a stranger's leftovers."
"I don't know whose cup it was."
"Yeah, that's the part I'm stuck on." Dean pushed off the wall and grabbed the desk chair, set it down in front of you, and sat in it backwards, arms folded over the top, looking up at you with an expression that was not quite his usual one. "Sit down before you fall down."
"I'm not going to fall-"
"You're leaning."
You looked down. You were, in fact, leaning slightly. You sat on the edge of his bed.
Dean watched you with the particular patience of someone who had decided they weren't going anywhere.
"She's not-" You exhaled, stared at your hands. "She's not some villain. She just said the thing I've already been thinking. And I couldn't-" Your throat tightened. "I couldn't stand there and keep smiling, so I thought if I just-"
"Drank enough that it blurred out?"
"I wasn't going to phrase it like that."
"But yeah?"
A beat.
"Yeah," you said, very quietly.
Dean rubbed the back of his neck. Looked at the ceiling. Then back at you, and something in his face shifted into something more serious, more deliberate, the version of him he mostly kept underneath all the noise he usually made.
"Can I tell you something without you getting weird about it?"
You made a helpless gesture.
"Garrett talked about you at practice last week," he said. "Full cringe, by the way, I'm doing you a public service by telling you this. Tucker asked how you were doing - just like, making conversation - and Garrett stopped mid-drill to answer. Like, stopped skating. Coach blew the whistle. Garrett didn't even flinch, just full-on answeredTucker like they were at brunch." He paused. "It was genuinely awful. The guys made fun of him for four days."
You stared at him.
"He said - and I am going to say this exactly once and then never again - that being with you was the first time in his life that coming home from a game felt better than the game itself." Dean's expression was the one people made when they'd eaten something sour. "Verbatim. He said that. To the whole team. In the locker room. While wearing his pads."
Your eyes were burning again, for a completely different reason.
"He talks about you like-" Dean exhaled through his nose. "Look, I've lived with that guy for three years. I have never, not once, seen him like this. And I mean the whole team. We all, okay, this is going to sound really weird-"
"Just say it."
"We all kind of think of you as ours too. Like, you're around all the time, and you're funny, and you ate nachos with us during the game and didn't complain about the TV volume once-" A pause. "That matters more than you think."
A noise came out of you that was almost a laugh. Wasn't quite.
"Kendall doesn't know what she's talking about," Dean said, and his voice had gone flat again. "She's not a bad person, she's just... she wanted something she didn't get, and that makes people say stupid things. It doesn't make the stupid things true."
Your eyes burned. You pressed the heel of your hand against one of them, hard, like you could physically hold it back, and for a second you almost managed it. Then your breath hitched and you didn't.
You hated it. You hated this, you hated that you were sitting in Dean Di Laurentis' room at your boyfriend's party with someone else's alcohol in your bloodstream, falling apart. This was not you. This was so profoundly, embarrassingly not you - and yet here you were, doing it anyway.
"I hate this," you said, rough.
"The crying or the drinking?"
"Both." You dragged your wrist across your face. "I don't do this. Either of this. I keep it together, and I've been keeping it together for weeks, and then one person says one thing and I'm-" You gestured at yourself. At the whole situation. The cup on his dresser. Your face. "This."
"You can't hold it together forever and then wonder why it comes out somewhere inconvenient." Dean's voice was even. "That's not strength. That's just pressure building."
You looked at him.
"Real talk," he said. "You've been running on empty, you've been pretending you're fine, and tonight cracked it open. And instead of letting yourself feel it, you drank half a mystery cup and were about to walk home alone in the cold." He raised an eyebrow. "Which we are going to circle back to."
"I wasn't going to walk home."
"You were absolutely going to walk home."
You didn't answer.
"Also," he said, and the sarcasm slid back in like he genuinely couldn't help it, "if you tell anyone I said any of this, I will deny it completely. I have a reputation and I'd like to keep it."
A sound came out of you that was almost a laugh. Wasn't quite. But almost.
"Drink some water," he said, standing, already moving to the mini fridge in the corner. He tossed you a bottle without looking. "And hey-"
You looked up.
"He's been looking for you for twenty minutes. Downstairs, increasingly frantic. You should talk to him."
You found Garrett's room because it was the only one with the light on.
The door was cracked. You pushed it open and stood in the doorway for a second, holding onto the frame slightly. The water Dean had given you was helping. A little. The edges of things were still slightly wrong.
You made it to the bed. Sat down. Put your face in your hands.
You heard him on the stairs before the door opened - that particular weight and rhythm, two at a time the way he always took them. And then Garrett was there, filling the doorway, and he stopped.
Just for a second.
Long enough for you to see it, the relief flooding in so fast it almost looked like something else. And underneath it, the residue of the twenty minutes before. He'd been worried. Not panicked, not Garrett, but worried. You could see it in the set of his jaw, the way he exhaled.
Then his eyes moved over you and his expression shifted into something different.
"Hey," he said carefully. "How much did you drink?"
You laughed, and it came out wrong. "Dean already asked me that."
"Dean texted me that you'd had a lot and that you were upset and to be..." he paused, "gentle. His word."
"Dean used the word gentle?"
"I was also surprised." He crossed the room and dropped to his knees in front of you, and it was such a Garrett thing to do - not sitting beside you, not keeping distance, just immediately down to your level, hands finding yours - that your throat tightened all over again. "Look at me."
You did.
He looked back, and he didn't rush it. Just looked at you the way he sometimes did when he thought you weren't paying attention. His thumb rubbed circles on your knuckles.
"I'm okay," you said. Force of habit.
"I know you're not." Not a judgment, just a fact. "Talk to me."
Your jaw worked. "I don't want to..." The words snagged. "I don't want to be something you have to manage, Garrett."
He went very still.
"I heard something tonight." Your voice came out thinner than you wanted, and you couldn't tell anymore how much of it was the alcohol and how much was just you: exhausted, hollowed out, finally out of room to hold it. "Someone saying I was... that I'm a lot right now. That you're running yourself into the ground for me, and you don't have time for someone like..." You stopped. "I've been thinking it for weeks. She just said it out loud."
"Who."
"It doesn't matter."
"It matters to me."
"Garrett." You shook your head, and the room moved slightly with it. "That's not the point. The point is that I believed it. That I heard it and something in me just - yes, obviously, correct. And I hated that. So instead of finding you and telling you I was upset like a normal person, I-" You gestured vaguely at yourself. At the state of you. "This."
He looked at you for a long moment.
"You've been carrying this for weeks," he said. Not a question.
"I didn't want to make it your problem."
Something crossed his face. "You are not a problem."
"You have scouts. You have finals. You've been coming to my dorm every other day with food I didn't ask for-"
"Because I wanted to."
"-and I keep letting you, and I feel like I'm taking something, like I'm-"
"Stop." His hands tightened around yours. "Listen to me. I come over because I want to be there. I text you because I want to know how you are. That's not- it's not labor, it's not obligation, it's not me managing anything. It's me." He exhaled slowly. "You're it for me. You know that."
"You can't just say that."
"I say it constantly. The guys are sick of hearing it."
"Dean told me about the locker room thing."
"Of course he did." No heat in it. Just resignation, and something softer underneath. "It was embarrassing. I meant every word."
You looked at him, and your eyes were burning again, and this time you let them. You were too tired and too drunk and too emptied out to hold that back too.
Garrett rose off his knees and sat beside you on the bed and pulled you into him without any hesitation.
You leaned.
That was the hardest part, always. The leaning. Letting someone else take some of the weight.
You were so tired of holding yourself upright.
"You're not too much," he said, into your hair. "You have never been too much."
You didn't answer.
"I mean it."
"I know you do," you said, very quietly.
He held you tighter. The party carried on below, muffled and oblivious, bass thumping through the floor, and up here it was just this. His arms. The familiar smell of him. The particular exhaustion of something finally, finally spilling over after being held too long.
You didn't feel better.
Not exactly. Not the way you'd maybe hoped. The shame of the drinking wasn't gone - that would probably be worse in the morning, honestly.
But Garrett didn't let go.
He kept one hand moving, slow and steady, through your hair, the way he did when you were half-asleep and he thought you weren't noticing. Like this was something he wanted to do. Like you were something worth being careful with.
You didn't know how to explain what that did to you.
You weren't sure you had to. At least not tonight. Not to Garrett.
Tonight, you closed your eyes and let him hold you, and tried to remember how to just be here. Without managing, without performing.
Just be here.