You’d been doing ballet from the moment you could walk, so naturally you continued to dance in college. And while you were minoring in dance, you still chose a different major because while you loved ballet, you weren’t sure if you wanted to do that for a career.
However, tonight was Briar U’s first night of The Nutcracker. And you just happened to have scored the coveted part of the Sugar Plum Fairy.
Act I had gone smoothly and you were gearing up for your big moment. Little did you know your poor boyfriend was looking for you the entirety of Act I.
“Hand me that program again.” Beau whispers, earning some glares from the women in front of him. Dean passes the program to Beau.
“She’s listed as a principal, why hasn’t she come out yet?” Beau asks.
“Dude, I have no idea.” Dean whispers back.
“Did I miss her?” Beau asks rifling through the program again. Two women in front of him turn around glaring at him. No doubt for how noisy he’s being. Allie leans over Dean.
“Beau, the Sugar Plum Fairy doesn’t come out until Act II.” Allie says. “And shut up, your theatre etiquette is horrible.” She says shushing him. Beside her Hannah laughs quietly.
The house lights flicker before a voice comes over the intercom. “We hope you’re enjoying The Briar University Ballet Company’s production of The Nutcracker. At this time we will be breaking for a 20 minute intermission.”
“What!” Beau exclaims.
“Snack time man.” Dean says, getting up from his seat.
“What! I didn’t know ballet had a half-time.” Beau says. “I guess I’ll go buy more flowers.” He says.
The twenty minutes pass quickly and you’re buzzing as you take the stage. All of those practices leading up to this. You floated across the stage, every movement flowing effortlessly into the next. The hours spent bleeding through pointe shoes, the rehearsals that stretched late into the night, the corrections that had once reduced you to frustrated tears,they all culminated in this moment. When your Cavalier took your hand for the Grand Pas de Deux, you trusted him completely.
Everything went flawlessly, and it was finally time for curtain call. You step forward with Elliot, your Cavalier, as the crowd goes wild. You smile, soaking in the moment. Then a familiar voice cut through the entire theater.
“THAT’S MY GIRLFRIEND!” You froze for half a second before fighting back a laugh. Oh no. Beau.
“PLEASE CLAP!” He says. The audience burst into laughter. Someone wolf whistles. The applause somehow became even louder.
You looked toward the audience just in time to see Beau standing at full height, clapping over his head like he’d just watched Briar win a national championship. Beside him, Garrett laughs so hard he can barely stand.
Logan cups his hands around his mouth. “WOO!” Dean covers his face with both hands.
“I don’t know him,” he mutters to the women from earlier.
Allie laughs at Beau and the guys’ utter lack of theatre manners. Garrett stands to join Beau. Hannah elbows Garrett.
“You are not helping. Clap like a regular person.” She says in between laughs.
“Oh I absolutely am, she killed it!” He says. Garrett stands to join Beau, shouting toward the stage.
“LET’S GO, Y/N!” He yells. Another whistle echoes through the theater. What had begun as polite theater applause somehow transformed into the kind of ovation usually reserved for a game winning goal. You couldn’t stop smiling. Your cheeks ached as you curtsied once more. You couldn’t wait to find Beau after curtain call. He finds you first, three bouquets of flowers in his arms.
“Was that your boyfriend yelling, ‘That’s my girlfriend, please clap’ from the audience?” You bury your face in your hands.
“…Yes.” You admit. Elliot grins as Beau finds you, his face lighting up. Elliot turns to you.
“He’s adorable.” Elliot says eyeing your boyfriend up and down.
“He is.” You agree. Elliot sighs dramatically.
“It’s such a shame.” He says. You raise an eyebrow.
“What’s a shame?” You ask.
“That he’s aggressively heterosexual.” Elliot says. You burst out laughing as Beau approaches.
“Baby, that was insane!” Beau says, switching the flowers to one arm as he pulls you into him with his other. Elliot grins at the two of you.
“Okay, I’ve got to ask. Do you have a brother?” Elliot says. Beau’s brows furrow in confusion.
“Uh no, I have a sister.” Beaus offers. Elliot looks disappointed.
“Damn, that’s of no use to me.” Elliot says disappointedly. He considers for a moment.
“If you ever discover you’re bi,” he begins.
“Elliot!” You say, slapping his arm.
“What?” he asks innocently. “I’m just keeping the door open.”
Beau laughs. “I’ll take that as a compliment.” Elliot winks at him.
“Most definitely.” Elliot confirms, before walking over to some of his friends.
“Sorry, he’s a little forward.” You laugh. Beau laughs too.
“You did so good! These are for you of course.” He says handing you all three bouquets. Red roses, pink roses, and white roses. Every variation that was being sold at concessions.
“Thank you, baby.” You say.
“Beau stand with your awesome girlfriend and let me take your picture! That costume is to die for!” Allie says holding up her phone. You grin, feeling Beau’s arm wrap around your waist mindful of your tutu. You look up at him, thankful to have such a supportive guy by your side.
Summary: There are five key moments in yours and Beau's friendship where he knows you're it for him. There’s one moment where something is done about it.
Author’s Note: One shot based off this request.
The first words Beau Maxwell ever said to you were “I think I’m in love with you,” after he witnessed you throw your drink in the face of a man at the beginning of junior year. You were at Malone's supporting Hannah since you and Allie convinced her to sign up for one of the open mic nights. And while you were roommates with Allie and Hannah, you hadn't yet met any of their newly acquired friends.
Looking away from the mojito-soaked man at the sound of his voice, you locked eyes with him for the first time. A smirk tugged at the corner of your mouth as your eyes slowly traveled down him, assessing, before moving back up to his eyes.
“In that case, Maxwell, I’ll take another mojito,” you tell him as you push the now-empty glass into his chest. He wraps his hand around your hand still holding the glass, giving you a genuine smile. And he will never know that you stopped breathing for a second at the feeling of his warm hand touching you. His pupils are dilated so much you can barely tell his eyes are the warmest shade of brown; a shade that will soon become a new comfort.
"You know me?"
"Everyone knows you," you tease. And they did. Beau knew they did, but he'd never been truly happy to be known until he met you. And he made sure he did everything in his power to know you too, starting with buying you a new drink.
I
"I brought three kinds of medicine, two different movie choices, and hot tea, which I will be forcing you to drink," you firmly stated as you barged into Beau's room during a Thursday in November. He hadn't shown up for breakfast in the food hall and hadn't answered your texts, so when you found Dean waiting in line to pay for his food, you demanded to know where Beau was.
Beau's room was completely devoid of light, air stale. At the sound of your voice, he startled awake with a cough that sounded painful. You flinched. He squinted as he looked at you, trying to discern your figure in the darkness.
"Angel?" He asked in a scratchy voice that sounded nothing like him. The nickname he gave you because of your Halloween costume that year was followed by another coughing fit. He lets out a groan once the coughing subsided. You frowned at the state of him. He looked like he’d barely gotten sleep and he was actively shivering despite the heater turning the room into a sauna.
"Oh, my Beau," you placed what you brought on his dresser before making your way over to his bed. You chucked your hoodie off and then crawled in next to him.
"You'll get sick," he mumbled as you draped your arm over his stomach. You scoffed and gave him a quick kiss on his cheek.
"And then you can take care of me." He snorted and gave your thigh a squeeze.
"You have class."
"And you're sick," you countered. He rolled his eyes, trying to hide the smile threatening to grow on his face. Snaking his arm under your neck, he fell back asleep as you gently combed your fingers through his hair. Hours later, he wakes to him spooning you. Your back cemented against his chest. He felt his heart speed up as he heard you let out a soft sigh after he pressed a kiss to the back of your head. Burying his face in your hair, he fell back asleep with a smile on his face.
II
"Are you sure he won't mind me wearing his jersey, Dean? That seems like it might be crossing a line," you huffed as he tugged one of Beau's spare jerseys out of his bag and threw it directly at your face. You knew Beau was nervous about this game because they were playing against Harvard, a team with no losses yet this year.
"You are the only woman Beau would be okay with wearing his jersey tonight," Dean assured you. You stared down at the fabric in your hands, the "13" underneath "MAXWELL" stared up at you. You originally planned to make a sign like Allie was, but Dean insisted you had to do more.
"Fine," you agreed, trying to ignore the butterflies in your stomach at the thought of how Beau would react to seeing you.
The stadium is completely packed by the time the three of you arrived. You followed after Dean and Allie, settling into the seats Dean bought for the three of you before you even had a chance to look at the tickets. They were as close as you could get to the field.
The sound in stadium was deafening, so Allie had to practically shout in your ear when she told you, "He's going to go crazy when he sees you in that!" You rolled your eyes at her playfully.
"I doubt he'll care," you told her. You heard Dean scoff next to her and you narrowed your eyes at him before quickly looking back to the field when the music announcing the home team’s entrance starts. Beau is the first one who runs out, the matching jersey hugged his frame while the one on you flooded. As he made his way back to the side of the field, helmet in hand, you saw his eyes scanning the crowd.
The sound, as loud as before, seemed to dull as he finally found you. A huge smile stretched onto his face as he waved to you. His eyes fell to your chest, and you saw him freeze mid-wave. His brows furrowed, face becoming serious before he gestured for you to turn around. You pulled your hair over your shoulder and turned so he could read the back.
Looking over your shoulder, you saw the smile returned to his face before he blew a kiss to you and then looked over at Dean and gave him a thumbs up. You giggled at how giddy he looked and sat in your seat as he started getting ready for the game.
You were on his mind the whole game, not in a distracting way, but in a way where he wanted to impress you since you decided to wear his name and number across your back. Briar ultimately won, the stadium went absolutely crazy as it was one of their best games to date.
The three of you had joined in on the crowds' chants when Allie turned to you, a shit-eating grin planted on her face.
“You know, you could celebrate tonight by letting Beau take that off you." She wiggled her eyebrows at you. You gave her shoulder a light shove and reminded her that "Beau doesn't think about me like that, we've been over this."
And if you didn’t see the way Dean slapped his hand against his forehead, you'd blame it on you watching Beau run up the stadium's steps to get to you.
III
"And you're sure you don't mind me kissing you?" Beau rolled his eyes at you and then shook his head.
“For the last time, Angel, if it helps you land the audition, plant one on me!” You giggled at his exasperation.
“I just want to be sure that this won’t make things weird,” you said throwing your hands up in defense playfully. You handed him the script before you grabbed your own.
“Okay, just read the lines as best you can. Ready?”
He nodded. You took a deep breath, closed your eyes, let it out slowly, and then opened your eyes. The two of you started, the scene an argument between a married couple because the husband just lost his job. The husband begging the wife not to leave him even though he can’t keep a job.
You had to give it to Beau, the man could act. You almost believed there was real emotion charging his acting when he got on his knees, hands gripping the end of your dress as he begged you to just listen to him, that he’d fix everything if you just kept loving him as he loved you. You delivered your lines perfectly.
You finally turned away from him, making to storm across the room before you felt his fingers wrapped around your wrist, tugging you towards him. You spun into his chest, heart pounding in your ears. The hand not in his grip was placed on his chest as you stared up into his eyes.
Beau’s eyes drifted to your lips before looking back into your eyes. You nodded slightly giving him permission. And even though the script didn’t specify what kind of kiss it was, you didn’t expect that.
He placed his hands on the sides of your face before slamming his lips onto yours. And the moan he let out was definitely not in the script. He kissed you like he was starving, your lips finding his again and again.
“So I was thinking we could start getting rea-OH FUCK!” The two of you jumped apart at the sudden voice, your chest heaved as you tried to suck in air, fingers gently brushed your lips.
Allie stood in your room’s doorway, completely shocked by what she’d witnessed. You immediately started shaking your head at her.
“No, no, this isn’t what it looks like! I needed help for the audition. We were rehearsing lines, it was nothing else,” you explained hoping she wouldn’t press the matter. What you didn’t see was Beau’s devastated face because of the wording you’d used. The ache behind his ribs grew as the pressure from your kiss started fading.
IV
"It's two in the morning. Are you okay?" Beau asked concerned as he picked up the phone call immediately after the sound of the first ring jolted him out of sleep. He heard rustling from the other end of the line.
"Angel, I can't hear you," he yawned out as he sits up in his bed. And then he heard it. Moaning, you moaning. Muffled like the phone is under a blanket. Beau's breath hitched. And then came a man's voice telling you how good you're being for him.
And Beau hated himself for not hanging up as soon as he realized you'd somehow butt-dialed him in the middle of having sex, but he'd blame it on the shock if questioned. He heard the man tell you to get on your hands and knees, and only after he heard you beg the man in a whiny voice to stop teasing you and what he assumed was the man smacking your ass with a groan, did he yank the phone from his ear and end the call.
He didn’t realize how heavy he'd been breathing until he laid back down, cock throbbing, strained against his boxers. And it's not the first time he'd gotten off thinking about his best friend, but it's the first time he'd done it knowing exactly what you'd sound like underneath him.
V
"I just really, really love him," you cried into your cup. Hannah had been sitting next to you on the hockey house's couch, listening to you rant about Beau. At a certain point she had wandered off to the bathroom, but you felt her settle back down next to you. You hadn't looked at her because you had started tearing up after she left, and you knew the tears would fall if you looked at her.
"Wait, who?" You heard next to you in a voice that was definitely not Hannah. Your body froze, eyes widening as you slowly turned your head to look next to you, already knowing who would be sitting there.
Beau was staring at you with a frown on his face.
"Angel, you didn't tell me you're in love."
"I mean, we don't really talk about those things," you said quietly with an awkward laugh. You prayed he didn’t realize you’d been talking about him.
"We don't talk about our hookups, but of course I want to know if you're in love." And that was the first and only time Beau ever lied to you because he knew that he didn’t want to ever see you fall in love with someone else. But knowing that you had already fallen in love with someone felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. His mind focused immediately.
“It’s nothing serious. I would’ve told you if it was,” you promised, voice shaky. “He doesn’t love me back anyway.” You gave him a sad smile.
Beau felt like the worst person in the world for having felt relieved that whoever you were in love with wasn’t in love with you too. He immediately shoved all of his emotions to the side after he saw a tear roll down your cheek. He swiped it away before he gave you a kiss on your cheek.
“Well, he’s an idiot. Come on,” he told you as he stood, fingers wiggling at you. You laced your fingers through his and let him pull you up. He weaved you through the other people at the party.
“Where-” you started.
“Guest room, Angel. Party is over for us tonight.” He gave your hand a squeeze. And your heart physically ached at how much you feel for him while knowing he would never feel it in return.
The rest of the night consisted of Beau giving you the shirt he’d brought to sleep in, him gently wiping your makeup off, grabbing you both water, advil, and snacks, before the two of you finally climbed into bed.
“Mamma Mia?” He asked as he turned on the tv.
“Please,” you murmured as you threw another chip in your mouth. And that’s how the two of you fell asleep an hour later: tipsy, Mamma Mia playing quietly, chips spilled on the ground, and you curled up on top of him.
Now
Beau smelled you before he saw you. The theme for his and Dean’s joint birthday party being masquerade caused him to be vigilantly searching for you since the party started an hour ago. You had warned him that you wouldn’t be taking the theme lightly and that he’d have to find you. He realized now that you hadn’t been joking.
But as soon as your perfume, that blend of coconut and vanilla, hits his nose, he whips his head around to the woman walking towards the kitchen. You have on a short, blood red dress, dripping with rubies; a loan from the theatre’s costume department. The way it hugs your body has every man’s head turning to follow you. Beau’s jaw tightens at this revelation. Your toned legs are accentuated by the stilettos digging into your feet, and all he can think about is having them thrown over his shoulders.
As you get to the kitchen, you look back towards Beau over your shoulder, your mask covering enough of your face that most people wouldn’t know who you are.
But Beau isn’t most people, and he’ll be damned if any other man holds your attention tonight. With no hesitation, he moves through the crowd, eyes fixed on you, the smirk on your face growing as he gets closer.
“How long have you been here?” Is the first thing out of his mouth as he pulls you down the hall next to kitchen and crowds you against the wall. He’s not even trying to hide the way his eyes are cataloging every centimeter of you, something which doesn’t go unnoticed by you as your cheeks grow warm.
“Long enough to see you and Emily getting cosy,” you tell him, head cocking to the side, jealousy coating every word. He tugs your mask off your face before he dips his head, mouth next to your ear, and whispers, “I’m begging you to tell me that’s jealousy I’m hearing.”
Your breath hitches, head jerking back to look into his eyes. The smell of the alcohol lingering on his breath mixed with the cologne you had bought him for his birthday makes your head go fuzzy.
“Jealousy?”
“If this isn’t jealousy, I can always go see where Emily went off to.” Your eyes narrow looking up at him as your hand shoots down to wrap around his wrist. He lets out a chuckle.
“Don’t.”
“No?”
You firmly shake your head. He begins to smile before stopping, thinking back to the month before when you’d been crying over the man who didn’t love you. The two of you hadn’t discussed it again after that night, but he knew he wouldn’t survive trying to make a move finally if you still had feelings for another man.
“You still in love, Angel?” Your eyes flicker over his face. The open desperation painted on it knocks the air out of your lungs. How hadn’t you seen it? All the times Allie and Hannah, or even one of the hockey guys implied Beau felt the same way come rushing into your mind.
And that realization, coming from the wild look in his eyes, is what gives you the final push.
“With you, my Beau? Always,” you breathe. And his lips are immediately on yours. You kiss him back frantically, your hands settling on his shoulders, you slide one up the back of his neck, fingers tugging at his hair as he digs his fingers into your hips. His hands hold you firmly against the wall as he breaks the kiss, but then he starts sprinkling your face with light kisses until you’re giggling.
“Say it,” he begs, and when you don’t respond immediately, he adds in a, “please.”
“I’m in love with you, Beau Maxwell,” you whisper as you look into his eyes.
“I’m in love with you, Angel, desperately.” He rests his forehead against yours for a second.
“I know this isn’t romantic, but I am unofficially asking you to let me be your boyfriend,” he raises his finger to cut you off as you’d opened your mouth to question him, “Unofficially because I can’t wait for you to be mine, but I also know you deserve to be asked properly, so I’d like to prepare that.”
“I would love nothing more than for you to be my boyfriend,” you say, pushing up on your toes to kiss him again.
He stops you right before his lips touch yours and asks, “Just to be clear, I was the one you were in love with last month, right?”
when i take my phone case off i feel concern and fear knowing that some people just rawdog their phone like that like its so slippery girl you are carrying around a little fish
I feel like garret would be the biggest groveller 🙏🏾I was thinking something where the reader gets mad/ annoyed at him and ignores him to the point where’s he’s begging for her attention/forgiveness
better kiss me next time, bitch
summary - garrett forgets to kiss you one morning, so obviously you have to break up with him
pairing - garrett graham x girlfriend!reader
word count - 1.5k
“Baby, wake up.”
Garrett’s voice was the first thing that you became aware of as you woke up. You pulled the duvet up higher to your neck with a grumble in response.
Your boyfriend chuckled and you felt the bed dip next to where you were laying down.
“C’mon. I’ve got to go in five minutes.”
“No.” You mumbled, eyes closed and trying your hardest to go back to sleep. It was too early.
It was in fact a very reasonable time for you to wake up, but Garrett knew not to disturb you on those days where you wanted an extra lay in.
“Okay. I’m gonna go now.” He caressed your cheek delicately.
“Mhm.”
You thought about how Garrett’s imminent kiss was going to help you drift back off to sleep very nicely. There was something about his morning kisses - so tender and soft - that you wanted to wake up every morning forever with them.
So you were absolutely devastated when his lips never met your cheek and his door clicked shut behind him.
Your eyes shot open at the sound.
You threw back the duvet with a petty scoff.
Okay, sure, you’d refused to wake up to say goodbye to your boyfriend but the absolute cheek to leave without giving you your morning kiss. It was hard not to take it to heart.
Was he actually upset with you?
Was he messing with you?
Or did he genuinely just forget?
——
Garrett had been sweating by the time he finished practice.
His hair was wet and dripping, and his clothes were sticking to him like a second skin. Thank God the locker rooms had showers, because there was no way he was going home to you smelling like a sewer drain.
After Garrett had finished his shower, he wrapped his white towel around his hips and walked back into the main changing area.
He wasn’t expecting his teammates to be surrounding each other, watching something on Dean’s phone.
They all looked up at him… guiltly? No… empathetically?
Why were they all looking at him?
“Yes?” Garrett prompted.
Tucker nudged Dean, who then nudged someone else, who then nudged another person, until everyone was nudging each other and whispering about who would be the one to tell Garrett whatever.
“Can someone just please tell me what the hell is going on?”
It was Logan that came over to him, handing Garrett his phone.
Garrett looked down at the screen and saw your face. He frowned and nervously swallowed, looking up at his onlooking teammates one more time before hitting play.
It was a video uploaded onto the Fifth Line.
Jules was clearly filming and you were the only person in shot.
“I hear you have some big news for us, Y/N?”
“Yes.” You smiled sadly.
Garrett felt a punch to the heart at your sad face. He was going to knock out the idiot who took the smile from your face away.
Your eyes welled up then, and Garrett’s heart started to race. He was mentally counting how long it would take for him to get changed and get home to you.
“I’m now single.”
What?
Garrett’s jaw physically dropped, and his mind couldn’t process anything long enough to tell himself to close it.
Garrett couldn’t look away from the video, but he felt his best friend, Logan, wrap an arm around his shoulder in solidarity.
“So you and Garrett?” Jules asked.
“We’ve parted ways.” You nodded.
“Any particular reason?”
“He knows what he did.”
Garrett was so confused. Confused by the entire video and situation, but also confused on how to feel. One moment he felt sad for you, the next he was plain confused and now he was anxiously trying to recount what the hell you could be talking about?
Was this breakup even mutual?
What the actual fuck was going on?
“Y/N asks for privacy during this time.” Jules said before the screen turned black.
Garrett’s gaze kept focused on the phone.
He couldn’t move. He couldn’t even process a single thought. He was completely broken.
“It’s okay, man.”
It was Logan’s voice matched with someone squeezing his arm that made him flip out of his daze.
“No. No. What the fuck.” Garrett mumbled, walking over to his changing space.
He discarded his towel without any regard for all his teammates watching him - their captain. He pulled on a hoodie and threw on his sweatpants without so much considering pulling on underwear too.
It took Garrett less than five minutes to get ready to leave, whilst his teammates hadn’t moved a muscle.
“Have none of you got anything better to do?” He shouted out rhetorically as he left the locker room to go and find you.
You. His girlfriend.
Did he miss the memo of when you broke up?
You had slept over just last night. He’d left you in his bed this morning, wearing his clothes. Your underwear was in his washing basket because you were over at his house more than you were at your own dorm.
There was no way you had broken up.
And if you had, by some miraculous event, broken up, then he was about to become the world’s most needy and relentless ex-boyfriend.
——
The knock on your door sounded angry.
You bookmarked your current read, slipped out of your bed and walked across the wooden floor of your dorm to the door.
You had barely flicked the lock open before it was dramatically swung open to reveal Garrett, his hand splayed wide open to keep your door open.
You barely got to look at him before he moved towards you, cupped your cheeks firmly and kissed you like it was the last thing he’d ever get to do.
It took a moment for you to realise what was happening before you started kissing him back.
Garrett walked you backwards and somehow managed to also close your door behind him, without ever breaking the kiss. You moaned as he tilted your face to kiss you deeper, the desire in the pits of your stomach only growing.
Your hand touched his chest, your fist curling the material of his hoodie as he kissed you harder.
Your touch must have triggered something, though, because he stopped kissing you a moment later.
Both of your cheeks were flushed and lips fucked.
Your breathing was heavy. Your chest heaved as you locked eyes with his.
He kept his distance close to you as he spoke.
“You’re not breaking up with me.”
“W-what?” You asked. Your brain felt completely messed up from the kiss.
“We’re not breaking up. End of story.”
“Garrett—.”
“I saw your video on Fifth Line.” He cut you off.
“All of it?” You questioned, eyebrows furrowing as you tried to understand what was happening.
“Yes.”
“Okay, then you know I was making a joke.” Your hand let go of his hoodie and you pulled a little further away from him.
Clearly there was a misunderstanding or miscommunication happening right now, because you and Garrett were very clearly not on the same page.
“Hang on a minute.”
You pulled out of his hold completely in search for your phone. Garrett reluctantly let you go, but followed close behind you like a lost puppy.
After pulling up the Fifth Line on your Instagram, you opened the video that had already amassed three times the views of anything else, and pressed play.
Garrett came to stand close behind you, the side of his cheek pressing against the side of your head.
You watched the video with him, jaw dropped when the video stopped.
“I don’t understand.” You said quietly.
“Well that makes two of us.” Garrett agreed.
You put your phone back down and turned around to face him. “Jules recorded me saying that bit, and then also another bit saying how it was all a joke and that we’re very much together. I didn’t want any dick-picks sliding into my DMs.”
“Might be too late for that, baby.”
“Fuck.” You sighed, covering your face with your hands, “It was meant to be a joke.”
“Hey, hey. C’mon.” Garrett wrapped his arms around you to hold you close. The feeling of his arms encompassing you made you feel very safe. “Bit of a shit joke though, baby.”
Your head nestled out from his hold so you could look at him.
“Bit of a shit morning though.” You retaliated.
“Hmm?”
“You know what you did.”
“Well, clearly I don’t.” Garrett laughed.
“You didn’t kiss me.” You pouted.
“I didn’t kiss you?” Garrett’s eyebrows raised and you hoped that it was because he was shocked at his bad behaviour.
“No.”
“My poor baby.”
“Mhm.”
“In all fairness, you were half dead… I mean, asleep.” Garrett joked, because he teased you all the time about how you’re practically dead when you sleep.
“Well still…”
“Still what?”
“Better kiss me next time, bitch.”
“As long as we don’t break up. Can’t kiss you if we break up.” Garrett proposed.
c/w ౨ৎ massage, marking (with nails), unprotected p in v, #JustTheTip, hickeys, est. relationship, possessive!garrett, praise, daddy kink adjacent, riding, hand around the throat, post-sex fluff, pet names (baby, pretty, princess, daddy + no y/n), language, locker room chirping + a complete lack of willpower ⋆✴︎˚｡⋆
Garrett had just finished showering, his hair curling at the ends as he walks over, already reaching for your hands. “Lemme see,” he murmurs, taking your fingers in his own. He turns them over, inspecting your fresh set like it’s the prettiest thing in the world.
“Like ‘em?”
“Love ‘em.” A smile tugs at one corner of his mouth.
“Approved?” You ask, winking like you even needed to beg the question in the first place.
“Definitely approved.”
You smile, hands resting heavy on his chest. “Good. They were expensive.”
Garrett snorts, fingers running through his wet hair. “Good thing I paid for ‘em then.”
“Thank you, baby,” you whisper, rising on your tiptoes for a kiss. His hands lift, taking two handfuls of ass, humming against your mouth when your arms wrap lazily around him.
“Anything for you.” His hands squeeze your hips. “Your week sucked. Glad you finally got to relax.”
“How was morning skate?” You ask curiously, and like clockwork, he starts rolling out his neck and his shoulders, wincing in pain. You raise your brow at him, trying not to laugh at his predictability.
Your nails drag, just a tease, tracing the line of his necklace until your fingers find the clasp, nudging it back to center. And, with that little touch, the man practically purrs, rocking ever so slightly with you like he just got exactly what he wanted. Or at least a tiny taste.
Garrett just shrugs, feigning innocence. “You know how it goes,” he says through a boyish smile.
“Mhmm…” You reach for the hem of his shirt, helping him out of it as always.
Garrett’s skin is still warm from the shower, his tight muscles melting already beneath the slightest touch from you.
As soon as he hits his bed he lets out a deep, contented sigh, lazily sprawling out on his stomach. His curls are still damp from the shower, flattened slightly on one side where his head disappears into the comforter. His chain hangs loose against the back of his neck, glinting every time he shifts.
His brown eyes follow you as you crawl onto the bed; his smile spreads wider as he glances at you over his shoulder. You straddle him, running your fingers down his strong back, watching as goosebumps spread across his dewy skin.
“Oh my god.” His voice comes out low and rough.
“You’re so easy,” you tease, dragging your nails over his broad shoulders before pressing them into the tight knots you knew you’d find.
“Shittt,” he huffs, exhaling sharply as you nail that perfect spot, working out the tension. “Feels so fucking good, pretty.” His face presses deeper into the bed, big body softening with it.
You let your fingers drift into his damp hair, scratching your manicured fingers against his scalp. “Mpfhh…” He turns his heavy head slightly, eyes half-lidded. “I love when you get your nails done,” he murmurs, utterly relaxed beneath your touch as he lets out a little yawn.
You smile, winding one of his curls around your finger. “Yeah?”
“Oh fuck.” One of his legs kicks lazily against the mattress. “Damn, princess, they’re kinda sharp. You should keep ‘em like this forever.”
Leaning down to press a kiss to the side of his neck, feeling his slow, leveled pulse thump under your lips. “I’ll think about it.”
Garrett settles deeper into the mattress, already halfway asleep, completely at peace. “Gotta keep me up,” he huffs. “I’m gonna pass the fuck out.”
You press your nails a little harder into his back, making his muscles tense for a second before he softens into the mattress. “Too much?” You ask, pausing slightly.
“No—No, keep goin’.” His fingers flex against the comforter. “S’perfect.”
You smile as you watch the faint red marks appear where your nails dragged down, bright against his skin.
“Fuck,” Garrett hisses as you find yourself so caught up in your thoughts that you didn’t realize how hard you had dug into his skin until it had already happened.
“Oh, shit—” You gasp, but Garrett just laughs, shifting slightly underneath you as he looks back at you.
“Don’t stop. C’mon,” he whines, wiggling his shoulders impatiently beneath you.
“I created a diva,” you whisper, and he sighs blissfully.
“Don’t even recognize myself anymore. You ruined me.”
You chuckle and shake your head, letting your nails trail more deliberately over his tight skin. Your fingers trace from shoulder blade to shoulder blade, following the line of his tattoo.
“Y’know,” he murmurs against your knuckles, smiling to himself. “I don’t think anybody’s ever been this excited to put scratches on me.”
You chuckle and his shoulders flex beneath your hands. Your thumbs press into a particularly stubborn knot, making him wince before a low moan follows, a weak laugh slipping out because it hurts so good.
You tilt down, lips brushing against the shell of his ear, tits pushed against his back, and he angles his neck to get a little closer.
“What did you say?” You ask sweetly.
“I—” He clears his throat, swallowing hard. “I said I don’t think anybody’s ever been this excited to put scratches on me—”
“Which is odd.” You cut him off, your voice soft and distracted, scratching your initials in, watching as they shift red. “‘Cause it sounds like you’re talking about other women right now. Couldn’t possibly be.”
“Just talkin’ out of my ass,” he mumbles. “No one but you. Only you.”
“Mhmm…” You giggle, nails running in a little heart over the expanse of his back. Your fingernail swirls and swoops, drawing a lazy little “mine”.
Garrett buries his face in the mattress. “I know what you’re doing, baby.”
You giggle breathily, rubbing out a little more tension when he catches you in the shameless act.
“Yeah,” you whisper, dipping down again, trailing soft kisses down his neck. You pause when you find the perfect spot, just above where the collar of his jersey will sit.
“That’s my girl.” He doesn’t stop you, instead slithering his hand behind his back, slipping under the band of your shorts and panties.
You suck down on his neck as he rolls his fingers on top of your pussy, groaning when he feels just how wet you are; knowing this close to the game time, he’ll have to wait to sink his thick dick deep, but he loves to tease just as much as you do.
“On your back,” you whisper, watching as Garrett obeys without hesitation, stuffing a pillow under his head. His fingers find you fast, slipping your little shorts to the side this time. Garrett dips the tip of his thick finger in your soaked hole, his eyes rolling back at how warm and wet you are.
You tilt in, pressing your lips to his, lingering there for a second before he pulls you closer, his other hand slipping beneath the waistband of your shorts, gripping your ass.
“Baby,” he mumbles. “You gotta keep these on.”
“Okay.”
“I’m already losin’ this fight,” he breathes, pulling them down despite what he’s saying, chuckling against his mouth as you help him do it.
“You’re doing great, Gar—” His name trips up in a gasp as he presses his hand against your pussy, his middle and ring fingers thrusting deep.
“So jealous of my fuckin’ hand right now,” he grumbles, laughing at how pathetic he sounds as he pumps them in and out.
You grind into him, fucking yourself on his hand. The movement makes the muscles in his stomach tighten. His hair is already drying in messy curls around his forehead, one falling into his eyes before he blows it away with an impatient breath.
“You better keep this fuckin’ top on, alright?” He whispers when a soft satin strap falls. He lifts his hand to cup your cheek, brushing the other off your shoulder, sending the material sliding to your waist. “My mistake,” he whispers.
Your forehead falls against his and he sinks his fingers deeper, groaning at the feeling of your slickness dripping down to his wrist.
“I don’t know why I do this to myself,” he drags a hand down his face as he continues to torment himself with the thought of ruining you before his game, reluctantly pulling his hand away for the moment. “I gotta focus. Just make it so hard on me,” he smiles.
“Oh?”
“Baby,” he mumbles.
“Mhmm,” you hum, rocking against the stiff bulge between his thighs instead.
You whisper his name as you roll your hips. Your head falls back, hands sliding over your chest, and Garrett shuts his eyes for a second like he’s trying to remember every reason he wasn’t supposed to be doing this.
“Just—Fuck. Just the tip, okay?” He mumbles sheepishly.
“What?” You ask teasingly, looking down at him. He’s so gone he’s practically begging with his eyes.
“Just a little,” he breathes needily, hooking a hand around your neck, pulling you down to his lips.
“Garrett Graham,” you whisper. “You said no sex before games.”
Garrett’s head presses deeper into the pillow, his hips shifting beneath you as you grind against him.
“I say a lot of stupid shit,” he mumbles under his breath. “I don’t know what you thought was gonna happen,” he rambles and he tugs his clothes down, his cock hitting his bare skin with a slap.
"Only the tip," you breathe as you thrust your hand between the two of you, taking hold of his cock.
"I'll take it," Garrett whispers as his head meets your pussy. A rough sound rumbles through his chest as he looks up at you again. "This is for me?" He asks shakily.
"Yes, daddy."
“I can’t do this,” he mutters, huffing out a breath, palms slapping over his eyes. “Don’t say that unless you’re tryin’ to start shit, alright?”
He takes control, gripping his dick in his fist, running his fat tip through your slick folds, swirling softly on your clit.
He slows down slightly, a smile spreading on his lips as he glides lower.
"Mmm... Right there," you whisper against his mouth as his head toys with your entrance. His lips press against yours as you widen your thighs, dropping down on his tip, feeling a big stretch.
"Fuck me," he pants.
"Feels so good, Garrett," you whimper. His hold on your hips tightens, muscles trembling like he’s fighting against himself. His heels sink deep into the mattress, press up just enough to stroke just a little.
“So damn good. It’s not fair.” His eyelids fall and his jaw locks tight.
His blunt fingernails dig into your flesh, his gaze dropping to the place where you barely connect, his long thick dick throbbing, your slickness rolling in a tear down the side of his cock.
He pulls you down a little farther on his length and your gaze snaps to him.
“Shhhh—Shh,” he whispers, pulling you down to his lips. “Let me—Just fucking take it, alright?”
Garrett squeezes his eyes shut for a second before finding your mouth again, gripping your hips when you’re all the way down.
He pushes you down a little more, making your eyes roll back in your skull, filled to the brim with him. The sight of your pleasure is almost too much to take.
“Ride me,” he mumbles, lips dragging against yours.
You sit up, knees sunk into the mattress, nails dragging down his strong chest as he draws a heavy breath. The gold chain around his neck slides across his skin as his head tips back into the pillows. His throat works around a swallow before his eyes find you again.
You start to ride him, grinding slowly, like the pace alone will make up for his lack of self-control when it comes to his little pregame rule.
Garrett drags a breath through his nose, his voice rough when he whispers, “Jesus Christ,” he mutters, shaking his head once. “My willpower’s fuckin’ shot when it comes to you.”
You shift your weight and he groans low in his throat, his hands tightening on your hips as you circle them.
“That’s it.” His thumbs drag over your hips. "Easy, baby. Just like that."
Your nails dig into his chest as you begin to move, slow and steady at first, your body finding its rhythm while his muscles tense beneath your palms, his mouth falling open.
“Call me that shit again.” His eyes squeeze shut for a second. "Wanna hear it."
Your hands drift a little higher, thumb resting the hollow of his throat with your hands wrapping and squeezing.
“Daddy.”
"Christ. Yeah. Fuck yeah. Tight... Tighter," he moans as you ride him, your hips finding a deeper rhythm as your hands tighten around his neck, his eyes fluttering open just enough to find yours, fighting to stay open like he doesn't want to miss a second of it.
You lean back slightly, hands braced on his strong thighs as he fills you over and over again. His praise slips from his lips between gritted teeth.
You feel your orgasm building, sharp and fast, the pressure coiling in your stomach, and he feels it, too. Garrett sits up, wrapping his arm tight around your waist, the other twisting in your hair again as your body trembles uncontrollably. You gasp, swiveling your hips, grinding down as he presses his face into the crook of your neck, breathing heavy.
"Cum for me, baby. Let go. Show me how perfect you are, huh?”
Your whole body clenches, back arching as you cry out, pulsing hard around him, your orgasm triggering his own. Your name falls from his lips, hips jerking as he buries himself deep, cumming hard, holding you so close.
Garrett melts back into the mattress, pulling you with him, finding his lips for a tender kiss.
"Christ, baby," he breathes. "You’re so good to me, baby. You know that?" He whispers as his hands hold your cheeks, forehead resting against yours.
“Mmm—You are so, so good to me,” you whisper, feeling him smile into your kiss.
You pull back ever slightly, eyes falling enough to see the dark mark blooming where your lips had been, the soft red hue of where your hands were wrapped blushing on his skin as well. You rub your thumb across it, trying your best to catch your breath.
“You know,” he starts, his voice low and rough, “you always tease me for liking to mark you up…”
“Because you do.”
A smirk spreads on his kiss-swollen lips as he studies you a little. “Yeah, I do—” Knock. Knock.
“G, you alive?” Logan calls from the other side of the door. Garrett groans, dropping his head to your shoulder.
“No,” he mumbles and you giggle, tilting your head to rest it against his. Knock! Knock!
“C’mon, Romeo. Car leaves in five,” Logan tries again.
“Leave without me.”
“Can’t,” he laughs, “Coach likes goals. Get your ass movin’.”
He blows out a breath as you lift off him nice and slow, thighs trembling, making him chuckle breathily. You roll your eyes and drop to the mattress, wrapping yourself up in his blanket.
You watch him step into his dark slacks, tugging them up his thighs before fastening the button. Your gaze drifts higher, catching on the sharp lines of his waist disappearing beneath the waistband of his slacks, the chain hanging against his chest, the way the damp ends of his curls are already starting to dry around his ears.
A smile starts pulling at one corner of his mouth when he catches you staring.
He gives you a quick wink.
“Stop,” you mumble, fighting your own smile.
Garrett shakes his head to himself before turning slightly, checking the fit of his pants. His attention catches on the scratches.
It’s impossible not to look.
His hands slide into his front pockets, broad back tightening as he shifts, the scratches standing out even more against his skin.
“Garrett.”
“Hmm?” He asks, still looking, fully distracted.
“Garrett Graham?”
“Pretty girl?” His jaw tilts slightly, laughing through his nose when he sees the little mark on his neck, fussing with his chain.
“You love it.”
His bottom lip tucks between his teeth as he’s caught in the act, reaching for his black dress shirt hanging nearby.
“M’not gonna sit here and pretend this shit doesn’t look good, baby,” he mumbles.
The shirt slides over his biceps, draping over his shoulders. His chain catches the light against his chest as he fastens each button, chuckling under his breath like he’s tucking away a secret.
He reaches for the tie draped over the back of the chair, looping it around his neck, turning on his heels.
You crawl on the bed as he walks toward you, making your way to the edge. You rise up on your knees and his hands find your hips.
You fasten a knot in his tie, a little smile playing on your lips.
“Wait for me outside the locker room, yeah?” He asks.
“Garrett,” you sigh.
“What?”
“I’ve been waiting outside that locker room after every home game all season.”
“True,” he hums proudly. “Very true.”
“You really asking?” You chuckle and he smiles when the knot presses up to his throat.
“Just like hearin’ you say it, pretty.”
Your hands smooth the tie flat against his chest before brushing down the front of his shirt.
“Of course I’ll be there.”
“That’s my girl.”
Garrett reaches his stall and pulls off his jersey, dragging it over his head slowly, pulling himself out of his shoulder pads next. The scratches down his back earn about half a second of silence before the chirping starts.
“Jesus, G,” Logan laughs. “You get in a fight we didn’t see?”
Garrett looks over his shoulder like it’s news to him, which only riles the guys up even more.
“Nah, those aren’t from the game, boys,” Dean smiles, stating the obvious as Garrett rolls his eyes, reaching for a towel as another teammate whistles low.
“Weren’t there yesterday,” another teases, and heat climbs up Garrett’s neck.
“My girl got her nails done, alright?” He mutters, staring into his stall instead of turning around to hide the fact that he loves this shit.
“You better have paid for them, buddy. That’s how we’re doin’ it,” Dean laughs.
“Maybe I did.”
“Daddy,” Tucker adds, pointing toward Garrett when he finally turns around. “Addin’ that one to the playbook—”
“Enough,” Garrett mumbles smugly.
“She’s got Garrett Graham breaking all his rules.”
“A couple back scratches never hurt anybody,” Garrett breathes.
“Mhmm… That’s all that happened. We all believe you, G. You can stop gettin’ all red.”
“That hickey appeared on its own too, by the way,” Tucker piles on.
“Blushing like a slut, Graham,” Dean snickers, and that finally sends the room over the edge.
“No I’m not.” Garrett drags a towel over his face, trying to hide the grin that won’t leave his lips.
“He fuckin’ loves it—”
“Maybe I do. Now what?” Garrett mutters, back to the boys. He doesn’t even bother arguing because they’re right.
He fuckin’ loves it.
Garrett drops onto the bench, still shaking his head as the chirping starts to die down.
He reaches for his phone, trying to settle into a normal rhythm.
. ݁₊ ⊹ 📱.ᐟ.ᐟ 𝙶𝚊𝚛𝚛𝚎𝚝𝚝: 𝙸 𝚠𝚊𝚜 𝚐𝚎𝚝𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚜𝚘 𝚖𝚞𝚌𝚑 𝚜𝚑𝚒𝚝.
He bites the inside of his cheek as the text bubbles come in fast.
Garrett groans, dropping his head into one hand, the other resting on his knee. He chuckles under his breath, rolling his eyes when he catches Dean smirking from the corner of his eye.
“Don’t,” Garrett grunts.
Dean just smiles, wrapping a fresh towel around his waist as he heads toward the showers.
pairing – garrett graham x nursing student!reader
summary – garrett’s father shows up at a game, and the aftermath hurts worse than the black eye.
warnings – mentions of domestic violence, abusive father, childhood trauma, emotional breakdown, crying, panic response, hockey injury/black eye, strong language
notes from me – i've had a few requests for this moment, and wanted to write it v carefully! i took a lot of inspiration from the scene where garrett tells hannah abt his dad <3
word count – 7.5k
navigation – masterlist |
The thing about sitting in Garrett Graham’s letterman jacket at a Briar hockey game was that it made people stupid. Not her, obviously. She was being incredibly normal about it. Mature, even.
She'd only rolled her eyes twelve times since they’d left the parking lot, which, considering Lucy had made a full production out of tugging the jacket collar up around her face and going, “Oh my God, babe, do you smell that? Commitment,” felt like a real exercise in restraint.
Monique had been worse, because Monique had a quiet voice and a deadpan delivery. She kept looking over with her chin tucked into her scarf, eyes flicking from the jacket to the ice, then back again, like she was watching an organism evolve in real time.
“He is not my boyfriend,” she said, for what had to be the fourth time, settling deeper into her seat like the plastic could open up and swallow her if she pressed hard enough.
Lucy, sitting on her left with her knees angled toward her and a cup of something hot steaming between both hands, made a sympathetic little noise that had absolutely no sympathy in it. “Of course.”
“He isn’t.”
“Right,” Monique said. “He just kissed you goodbye in front of half the hockey house and gave you his jacket because you shivered once.”
“I was cold.”
“And he, famously, is the only man at Briar with access to outerwear.”
She huffed, sinking her chin into the collar because the arena was freezing and because, unfortunately, Garrett’s jacket was stupidly warm. It smelled like cold air and detergent and that clean, sharp soap from the bathroom at the hockey house, with something underneath that was just him in a way she was trying very hard not to examine in public.
“You’re both being unbearable.”
Lucy brightened. “Because we love you.”
“Because you’re obsessed with my downfall.”
“Same thing.”
Down on the ice, the team was warming up, bodies cutting through the pale scratch of skate marks, pucks snapping hard off sticks and boards, the sound ricocheting up into the stands like little bursts of thunder.
It always amazed her a little, how different Garrett looked out there. Like someone had taken the boy who sprawled across the couch at the hockey house with his knee nudging hers, stealing fries from her plate, and sharpened him into something clean and fast and almost vicious. He moved like he belonged to the rink. Like the cold had been made for him.
She spotted him before he spotted her, which felt like winning something small and embarrassing. He was skating backward near centre ice, helmet tipped enough that she could see the dark mess of his curls escaping beneath it, mouth moving around something he was saying to Logan.
Logan shoved him lightly with one gloved hand, Garrett shoved him back harder, and then Garrett’s gaze drifted up toward their section like he’d felt her looking. It was ridiculous, how quick his face changed.
One second he was all hockey captain focus, jaw set, shoulders loose, stick held easy in one hand. The next, his grin cracked open bright enough that Lucy made a tiny gagging sound beside her. He lifted his chin at her, smug and warm at the same time, and she gave him a wave that was supposed to be casual and came out entirely too fond.
His eyes dropped, caught on the jacket around her shoulders, and the grin did something worse. Softer. More private. Like he was trying to pretend he didn’t like it and failing so badly he should’ve been embarrassed.
“Oh, babe,” Monique said under her breath. “That is a boyfriend.”
“Shut up.”
“He saw you in his jacket and almost forgot he had legs.”
“Shut up.”
Lucy leaned over her knees, waving down at the ice with a wide grin like she was trying to get them married before the first whistle. “Garrett! We think you’re very brave for not having a girlfriend!”
Her stomach dropped straight into her shoes. “Lucy.”
Garrett, mercifully too far away to hear, only pointed his stick up in their direction before turning back toward the drill. But he was still grinning. The asshole.
By the time warmups started winding down and the arena filled properly, the air had shifted into that restless pre-game buzz that made even the metal railings feel charged. Students packed into rows with painted faces and cheap signs, somebody behind them was already yelling at a player who hadn’t done anything yet, and the announcer’s voice came in and out over the speakers while the lights washed everything in cold white.
She had just turned her head to answer Monique, who was asking if she wanted to split fries at intermission, when an older couple paused at the end of their row.
The man looked familiar in the vague, unsettling way people did when you’d seen their face somewhere but couldn’t place the context. He was tall, broad through the shoulders even under his coat, with a square jaw, silver threaded through his hair, and the kind of presence that made space feel like it ought to rearrange around him.
The woman beside him was polished, pretty in a neat, expensive way, her smile already prepared before she’d fully made eye contact.
“Oh– sorry,” she said automatically, shifting toward Lucy to make room. The jacket bunched at her elbows as she moved. “There’s space here.”
The man shook his head once, not dismissive, but close enough to it that her body noticed before her brain did. “It’s fine.”
He stepped past her, his knee brushing the edge of the row, then stopped halfway through lowering himself into the seat when his eyes landed on the jacket. The Briar lettering, Garrett’s number stitched into the sleeve.
Something in his expression flickered. Recognition, maybe. Possession, almost, though that was a strange thing to think about a jacket.
“Graham?” he said.
Her hand tightened slightly around the cuff before she realised she was doing it. “Mhm.”
He looked at her properly then. It was a quick look, assessing, the kind of look she’d seen from attending physicians when they walked into a room and decided in half a second whether you knew what you were doing. It didn’t feel rude enough to call rude, which made it worse somehow.
“Phil,” he said, holding out his hand. “Garrett’s father.”
For a second her brain went perfectly blank, like someone had dropped a sheet over every thought she owned. Phil. Garrett’s father. Garrett’s father, sitting next to her, with his hand out, while she was wearing Garrett’s jacket and had spent the last twenty minutes arguing that he wasn’t her boyfriend.
“Oh,” she said, and immediately wanted to walk into traffic. “Uh. Hi.”
His hand was firm around hers. Too firm, maybe, or maybe she was being ridiculous because her nervous system had just been handed a situation it hadn’t studied for.
She gave him her name, then remembered to smile, then hated that she had to think about smiling, because there was nothing actually wrong. People met parents. Normal people met parents. Girls met the parents of boys who were not their boyfriends all the time, probably. Maybe. Fuck.
Phil repeated her name like he was filing it away. “This is my fiancée, Cindy.”
Cindy leaned forward slightly, her smile warmer than his but still careful around the edges. “Lovely to meet you.”
“You too,” she said, and meant it enough. Cindy seemed nice. She had a gentle voice, pretty earrings, a hand resting lightly in her lap. Normal. Fine. Everything was fine.
Lucy, to her credit, had gone unusually still beside her, which meant either she was trying not to say something insane or she had also felt the temperature around them change by a few degrees. Monique gave a polite smile and then looked at the ice with the laser focus of someone pretending very hard not to eavesdrop.
The lights dropped. The crowd roared. The starting lineup began. She did what she always did when Garrett’s name came over the speakers. She cheered, because she liked seeing him win and because he was impossible not to cheer for when he skated out with his chin lifted and that loose, cocky glide like the entire arena was a room he’d already talked his way into owning.
He came over the boards with his stick in one hand, shoulders squared, helmet low over his eyes, and she cupped her hands around her mouth, yelling loud enough for Lucy to laugh beside her. “Graham!”
Garrett looked up. For half a second, he found her and everything was exactly the way it had been during warmups. His face opened, instinctive and bright, because he had seen her. Then his gaze moved one seat over.
The grin fell off his face so fast it barely looked like an expression changing. It looked like something had been cut. Her hands lowered slowly from her mouth.
His body went wrong in this tiny, awful way, one shoulder tightening, his stick hand flexing once, jaw locking hard beneath the cage of his helmet. From this far away, with the arena loud and the lights sharp and bodies moving everywhere, nobody else would’ve noticed, but she noticed.
She noticed because she had watched Garrett relax under her hands on a couch, had watched him half-asleep in a kitchen at midnight, had watched him come back from games buzzing and smug and high on adrenaline. She knew the way his confidence usually sat in his body.
This wasn’t that. His eyes flicked back to her. Sharp. Caught. Like he’d walked into a room and found a door missing. She lifted her hand a little, uncertain, the motion barely more than a question.
Garrett’s mouth moved around something she couldn’t hear. Then Logan skated into his shoulder, saying something to him, and Garrett snapped his head away like he’d been caught staring. The anthem started. Everyone around them stood.
She stood too, because her body knew what to do even if the rest of her had gone strange and cold.
“You okay?” Lucy murmured, so low it barely made it past the noise.
“Yeah,” she said, eyes still on Garrett. “I just– yeah.”
Phil didn’t say anything. He stood with his hands folded in front of him, looking down at the ice with a flatness that made the fine hairs at the back of her neck lift.
The first period was bad. Bad in the way Garrett wasn’t where he was supposed to be inside his own body. His skating was still sharp, his passes still clean enough that anyone else might not have caught the seams coming loose, but she could see it in the half-second too late he turned his head, the unnecessary shove after the whistle, the way he kept taking contact like he wanted it to hurt.
He was playing with his shoulders too high, jaw too tight, head whipping up toward the stands every time the puck moved out of his reach. Toward her. No, not toward her. Toward the seat next to her.
The first time he slammed another player into the boards hard enough to make the glass rattle in front of a whole section of screaming students, Lucy jolted beside her and muttered, “Jesus Christ.”
Monique’s mouth pressed into a line. “That was… a lot.”
She didn’t answer. Her fingers had found the edge of Garrett’s sleeve and were worrying at the stitching, rubbing the seam back and forth under her thumb until it started to feel raw.
She kept waiting for Phil to react like a father. To lean forward. To swear under his breath because his son was losing his head. To look worried, even annoyed in a normal sports-parent way. Phil only exhaled through his nose.
It was quiet, almost nothing beneath the noise of the crowd, but she was close enough to hear it. Then he shook his head once, slow and disappointed, like Garrett had missed an open net in a peewee game instead of driving himself visibly off the rails in front of everyone.
Cindy glanced at him. “Phil.”
“He knows better,” Phil said, eyes still on the ice.
The words came out too controlled, worn smooth by use, like they belonged in a room where nobody else was supposed to hear them.
On the ice, Garrett clipped someone behind the play and got shoved back for it. The whistle blew. A ref’s arm went up. The crowd erupted into boos before the penalty was even fully called.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Logan barked from somewhere near the boards, loud enough that she caught it more by shape than sound.
Garrett didn’t look at the ref. He looked up. Right at her.
His face was flushed from exertion, mouth open around a hard breath, but his eyes were too dark from here, too fixed, and something in them made the noise around her go thin and far away. She could feel Lucy watching her now. Monique too. Phil was perfectly still beside her. The ref pointed Garrett toward the box.
Phil’s mouth tightened. “Undisciplined.”
It landed in her chest in a way it shouldn’t have. One word. Nothing, really. But her body did that quiet, clinical thing it sometimes did on placement, when a patient said something that didn’t match their injury, or a family member answered too quickly, or a bruise sat in the wrong shape under someone’s sleeve. Her brain started lining up details without asking permission.
Garrett didn’t talk about his dad. Garrett joked about everything until he didn’t. Garrett, who let her steal his hoodies and his food and half his bed, had never once said, You should meet my father.
Garrett, who could take a chirp from Dean, a shove from Logan, a full-body collision from a six-foot-three defenseman and grin through it, had looked up at the stands and gone pale under the arena lights because his father was sitting beside her.
The penalty clock started. She swallowed, and it felt like trying to get down a mouthful of cotton.
“I’m gonna…” she started.
Lucy touched her wrist under the jacket, gentle and immediate. “Yeah.”
Monique nodded once, already shifting her knees aside. “Go.”
She slipped out of the row with the awkward, whispered apologies of someone trying to move through packed seats without making a scene. Phil didn’t stand. He didn’t even really move his legs. She had to squeeze past him, Garrett’s jacket brushing his coat, and the whole time she could feel his attention on the side of her face.
“Nice meeting you,” Cindy said softly, and it was the first thing anyone in that little pocket had said that sounded human.
“You too,” she managed, then kept going.
The stairs down from the stands felt longer than usual, steeper, the concrete humming with the crowd above her. The arena had always seemed fun from the seats – cold and loud and bright, full of ritual and noise – but underneath it, past the ushers and the concession smell and the taped signs pointing toward restricted areas, it became something else. More industrial. Cinderblock walls, rubber mats, the metallic tang of skate blades and old ice, the sour-sweet smell of sweat and gear drifting from the corridor that led toward the locker rooms.
She wasn’t technically supposed to be there. She knew that. She also knew enough of the arena by now, had been kissed against enough back hallways and walked past enough equipment carts with Garrett’s hand warm at the small of her back, that nobody stopped her when she hovered near the mouth of the corridor and tried to look like she belonged.
The first period ended with the buzzer tearing through the building. A few seconds later, the team came off the ice in a rush of blades and noise and male anger, helmets shoved up, sticks clattering, voices overlapping. Someone slammed a glove into the wall. A coach barked something she couldn’t make out.
Logan came through first, red-faced and furious, snapping, “What the fuck is up your ass, G?” over his shoulder.
Garrett followed behind him. He looked worse up close. He wasn’t hurt, not physically, anyway, aside from the usual flush and damp curls plastered to his forehead and the little nick at his cheek where someone’s glove must’ve caught him.
But there was something too tight about him, something barely leashed beneath the pads and jersey, his breathing hard enough that his chest moved like he’d been sprinting. His eyes were flat with anger until they hit her. Then it all broke at the edges.
He stopped so abruptly Dean nearly ran into the back of him. “Jesus, Graham–”
Garrett shoved his gloves and helmet into Logan’s chest without looking at him.
Logan caught them on instinct, still scowling. “Yeah, sure, I’ll just hold your shit. Great talk.”
Garrett was already moving. She barely had time to step forward before he was in front of her, too close and somehow not close enough, his hands coming up like he wanted to touch her everywhere at once and couldn’t decide what was allowed.
He settled on her waist first, then her elbows, then the sides of the jacket like he was checking that it was still around her. His palms were damp through the sleeves. His breathing was loud between them.
“Hi,” he said.
It was so wildly, heartbreakingly wrong as an opening that she almost laughed.
“Hi,” she said, much softer.
His eyes moved over her face, quick and frantic in a way he was clearly trying to hide and failing. “You okay?”
That made her hand come up on its own. “Me?”
“Yeah.”
“Garrett.” Her fingers slid into the damp curls at his hairline, pushing them back from his forehead the way she had done half a dozen times in rooms where his biggest problem was pretending he didn’t like being fussed over. “Baby, what happened?”
His eyes shut for a second when she touched him, like his whole body had been waiting for permission to unclench and could only manage it in pieces. When he opened them again, they were still too bright, too focused.
“Please move.”
Her stomach dropped. Her hands started to come away from his face. “Oh. Yeah, sorry–”
“No.” His hands caught hers immediately, fast enough that she startled, but he softened his grip the second he realised. He brought her hands back to his face himself, pressing her palms to his cheeks like he could anchor her there. “No, not– fuck. Not you. Seats. Don’t sit there.”
She stared at him. “What?”
“Get your friends and move. Don’t sit there.” His voice cracked around the last word, barely, but she heard it. Garrett heard it too; she watched the flash of frustration cross his face, aimed inward, sharp and embarrassed. “Please.”
Behind him, the corridor was still moving. Players filing past, coaches calling, Dean hovering near the locker-room door with his helmet tucked under one arm and his brow furrowed in a way that looked too serious on him.
Tucker had slowed a few feet away, his mouth set, eyes flicking between them like he was noticing more than he wanted to. Logan, still holding Garrett’s gloves, had gone quiet.
She tried to keep her own voice low. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. He just sat next to me, and then he saw the jacket, and I didn’t–” Her fingers tightened slightly against his jaw. “I didn’t mean to overstep if you didn’t want me to meet him.”
Garrett shook his head before she’d even finished. “It’s not that.”
“I swear, I wasn’t trying to make it a thing.”
“I know.” He said it too quickly. Fierce, almost. His thumbs moved once against her wrists, a small, restless stroke, like he was trying to reassure her while standing there with every muscle in his body pulled tight enough to snap. “I know. I don’t care that you met him. I mean, I care, but not like that. I just–” He stopped, jaw working. His eyes cut toward the tunnel that led back to the ice, then back to her. “I don’t want you sitting next to him.”
The fluorescent light overhead hummed. Somewhere down the hall, a coach yelled, “Two minutes!”
She looked at Garrett’s face. Really looked. There were things she could ask. A normal girl might have asked them. What do you mean? Why? What happened with your dad?
But she wasn’t standing in a normal moment, and she wasn’t stupid, and the body learned its own language when you spent enough time reading other people’s fear in hospital beds.
She knew what a person looked like when they were angry because anger was easier to hold than panic. She knew the tiny, devastating difference between protective and afraid. She knew what it meant when a grown man couldn’t stop checking the location of another grown man in a crowded building.
Her mouth went dry. She didn’t let her face change too much. That felt important. Garrett was watching her like he expected something to happen if she understood too quickly.
“Okay,” she said.
His shoulders moved with a breath he didn’t quite release. “Okay?”
“Yeah.” She nodded, slow and steady, because something in him needed steady more than it needed questions. “I’ll text Lucy and Monique. We’ll move sections.”
His fingers flexed at her waist. “You don’t have to leave the game.”
“I know.”
“I just don’t want–”
“I know,” she said again, and she didn’t know the details, not really, but she knew enough for now. Enough to understand this wasn’t about him being embarrassed. Enough to understand that whatever Phil Graham was, whatever he had been, Garrett didn’t want him beside her in a place where he could see but not reach. “We’ll move. I promise.”
Garrett’s mouth pressed shut. He turned his head just enough to kiss the centre of her palm. The gesture was so soft it hurt.
He shuddered on the breath after, barely visible under all the pads and noise and anger, and she had the sudden, awful urge to take him somewhere quiet and lock every door between him and the rink.
Instead, she brushed her thumb over the cheekbone beneath his eye, feeling the damp heat of him, the faint scrape of stubble, the hard pulse ticking at his jaw.
“Graham,” Dean called from the locker-room doorway, voice rougher than usual. “We have a fucking game to play, man.”
Garrett didn’t look away from her. “Yeah.”
“Now would be good.”
“Yeah, I heard you.”
Dean’s eyes flicked to her. For once, he didn’t make a joke. That, more than almost anything else, made her chest tighten.
She lifted her brows at Garrett, trying for something like normal because normal was a gift she could give him in pieces. “You okay?”
The answer was obviously no. They both knew it. Garrett nodded anyway, because he was Garrett and because there was a game and because whatever had just opened between them was too raw to put words inside with half the team watching.
“Yeah,” he said, then swallowed. “We’ll– tonight, okay? I’ll–”
“Don’t explain now.” Her thumb moved once more over his cheek, and she let her voice soften around the command, because he listened better when he thought she wasn’t letting him off the hook entirely. “Just go win.”
Something in his face loosened by a fraction. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He bent before she could decide whether that was a terrible idea in the middle of a hallway full of hockey players and coaches and fluorescent lighting, and kissed her properly.
It wasn’t the kind of kiss he usually gave her in public, quick and obnoxiously smug, designed to make her roll her eyes and make his friends groan.
This was quieter. Messier at the edges. His mouth warm and urgent on hers, one hand sliding up to the side of her neck, the other still fisted in the side of his own jacket around her. She kissed him back because there was nothing else to do with all the feeling in her chest, because if he needed to come back to himself through her mouth for three seconds in a cinderblock corridor, she could give him that.
When he pulled back, he didn’t go far. His forehead rested against hers, helmet gone, hair damp, breath warming her lips. “Thank you,” he said, so low it barely existed.
She swallowed. “Go, babe.”
His mouth twitched. It was tiny. Barely there. But it was Garrett enough that she felt her own lungs remember what they were for.
“Graham,” Dean snapped, but there was relief threaded through it now. “I swear to God, if you make me drag you into this room by your jockstrap–”
Garrett huffed, the sound scraping out of him half-laugh, half-breath. He kissed her forehead once, quick and hard, then stepped back. His hands lingered until the last second, fingers sliding off her wrists like he hated letting go, and then he turned, caught his gloves when Logan shoved them at his chest, and jogged toward the locker room.
Logan watched him go, then looked at her. For a beat, neither of them said anything. Then Logan lifted Garrett’s helmet slightly, like a sad little toast. “He’s gonna be less of a dick now, right?”
She let out a breath that nearly became a laugh. “God, I hope so.”
“Cool. Because he was doing the whole tortured captain thing and it was fucking up the vibe.”
“Logan,” Tucker said quietly.
“What? It was.”
Dean, from the doorway, pointed at her with two fingers. “You. Move seats. Tell your friends too.”
“I know.”
His expression softened, quick and uncomfortable, like sincerity made his skin itch. “Good.”
Then they were gone, swallowed by the locker room and the burst of voices inside, the door swinging shut behind them.
For a few seconds, she just stood there in the corridor with Garrett’s jacket heavy around her shoulders and the cold from the rink crawling along the floor. Her hands drifted up to the top of her head, fingers interlocking there, elbows out, like she needed to physically hold herself in place. The breath left her in one long, uneven puff.
“Holy fuck,” she whispered to no one.
“So that’s…” Garrett’s voice thinned out before it reached the end of the sentence, like it had snagged somewhere behind his ribs. He was sitting with his back against the headboard, one knee bent under the covers and one stretched out in front of him, still in the black sweatpants he’d pulled on after his shower, his hair damp and curling messily over his forehead. The bruising around his left eye had darkened since they’d left the arena, blooming purple-black beneath the bone, the skin there swollen enough to make him look a little unfamiliar if she stared too long. “Yeah.”
The hockey house had finally settled beneath them, the late-night noise thinned down to the occasional creak of floorboards, the muffled thump of someone closing a cabinet downstairs, the low murmur of voices from the living room that would rise for a second and then sink again like the boys were trying, badly, to be subtle about giving Garrett space.
His bedside lamp was the only light on, soft and yellow across the rumpled sheets, catching on the water glass on his nightstand, the edge of his phone, the pile of discarded gear near his closet that still smelled faintly like ice and sweat and the metallic air of the rink.
She was sitting beside him with one leg folded underneath herself, close enough that her hip pressed into his thigh. Her hand had been in his hair for the last few minutes, fingers moving slowly through the damp strands at the back of his head, not because she had any real plan for comforting him, but because stopping felt impossible. Like if she stopped touching him, the room might tilt too far in one direction and take him with it.
She took a breath, careful and quiet, then leaned in and pressed her mouth to the bare slope of his shoulder. His skin was warm beneath her lips. Too warm, maybe, or maybe her body was just paying attention to everything now – the tension in his neck, the way his hand was curled loosely against the sheet, the uneven drag of his breathing as he stared at the wall opposite his bed and looked like he was seeing something that wasn’t there.
“Thank you for telling me,” she said.
Garrett nodded once. His throat moved. “Yeah.”
She let her mouth rest against his shoulder for another second before lifting her head. There were a hundred things she could have said, and almost all of them felt either too small or too big. I’m sorry felt thin. That’s awful felt obvious. You didn’t deserve that felt true, but she didn’t know if truth was something he could hold yet without flinching.
So she stayed beside him, fingers still working gently through his hair, and asked the question that had been sitting carefully in the back of her mouth since he’d started talking. “Does anyone else know?”
His eyes flicked down to the duvet. The corner of it was caught beneath his hand, twisted tight in his fingers now, white-knuckled in a way he probably didn’t even realise.
“Logan,” he said after a moment. “Just Logan. I mean…” He swallowed, the sound rough. “The guys know I don’t–” His mouth pulled in a faint, humourless line, like even the phrase felt ridiculous for the size of it. “They know I don’t get along with my dad. They know he’s a dick. That’s all.”
She nodded, because that made sense in a way that made her chest hurt. Garrett could live with people thinking Phil Graham was an asshole. He could live with sharp jokes, with vague references, with a clean, manageable version of the story that didn’t require anyone to look too closely.
He could live inside the gap between what the guys knew and what had actually happened, because Garrett was good at taking pain and turning it into something people could stand to be near. A chirp. A closed door. A shrug that said nothing to see here.
She pressed another kiss to his shoulder, softer than the first. “Okay.”
Garrett made a sound that was barely a breath. At first she thought he was going to speak. His mouth opened slightly, his brow drawing together, and she felt him pull in air against her side like he was trying to push something down before it could come up.
Then his face changed. A crack through the careful flatness he’d been holding since the words had started coming out of him. His eyes squeezed shut, his lips pressed together, and his chin dipped toward his chest with this tiny, defeated shake like he was angry at himself for not being able to stop it.
“Oh, Garrett,” she whispered, and that was all it took.
He broke quietly. His shoulders folded inward first, as if his body was trying to make itself smaller despite every inch of him being built like a wall, and then the first sob dragged through him so hard she felt it before she heard it.
He turned toward her like he wasn’t fully deciding to, like some older, younger part of him had simply reached for the nearest safe place, and she caught him before he could apologise for needing it.
“Come here,” she murmured, already pulling him in.
Garrett went with a kind of helplessness she’d never seen from him. His forehead dropped into the curve of her shoulder, his arms coming around her waist, fingers fisting in the back of her shirt like he needed something to hold onto and hated that he did.
She wrapped herself around him as much as she could, one hand sliding up to the back of his head, palm firm over the damp curls, the other across his shoulders where all that muscle and strength was shaking under her touch.
He was too big for her to hold the way she wanted, too broad, too solid, but she tried anyway. She tucked her cheek against his temple and kept him there while he cried into her shirt, each breath leaving him broken and uneven.
“You’re okay,” she said, low and steady, though her own throat felt tight enough to bruise. “I’ve got you. You’re okay.”
He shook his head against her. “I couldn’t–” His voice tore on the word, and his hand tightened at her back. “I couldn’t protect her.”
Her eyes closed.
“My mom,” he said, and it came out smaller than anything she had ever heard from him. “I tried. I swear to God, I tried, but I was–” He sucked in a breath that didn’t go anywhere useful. “I was a kid. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t make him stop.”
She held him harder, her fingers pressing into his hair, her other hand spreading wide over the back of his shoulder. “Garrett.”
“I’d hear it and I’d just– fuck, I’d just stand there sometimes. I’d freeze. Or I’d go in and he’d look at me, and I knew it would be worse, but I still–” His voice collapsed into another sob, rough and furious and devastated all at once. “I couldn’t protect her.”
She shook her head against his, because the blame in his voice was so old and so deep that it made her stomach turn. It had lived in him for years, packed behind his ribs, disguised under trophies and goals and that bright, cocky grin he wore like armour.
“You were a child,” she said, and her voice came out firmer than she expected. “Garrett, you were a kid.”
He didn’t answer. His breath stuttered into her neck.
“You shouldn’t have had to protect anyone from him,” she said. “That was never supposed to be your job.”
His fingers flexed in the fabric of her shirt, and for a second she thought he might pull away. He didn’t. He stayed folded into her, face hidden against her shoulder, and she kept her hand at the back of his head because he seemed to need the pressure there. Something to push against. Something that told him where the room was.
“I don’t want to be him,” he said, almost inaudible.
She pulled back just enough to try to see his face, but he kept his eyes down, lashes wet and clumped, the bruising under one eye making everything about him look rawer. His mouth trembled once before he clenched his jaw like he could force it still.
“I don’t want to be him,” he said again, more ragged this time. “I don’t want that in me. I get so fucking angry sometimes, and tonight I was–” He dragged a hand roughly over his face, then winced when his knuckles caught near the bruise. “Fuck.”
“Hey.” She caught his wrist before he could do it again, thumb slipping over the inside where his pulse hammered too fast. “Look at me.”
He shook his head, but only barely.
“Garrett,” she said, softer now. “Please.”
It took him a second. It took three. Then he lifted his eyes. She hated what she saw there, because someone had put that kind of fear in a boy and then let him grow around it like it was just another bone.
Garrett Graham, who could strut across campus like he owned gravity, who could grin his way through almost anything, who could charm a room without even standing up straight, was looking at her like he was waiting for her to realise he was dangerous.
She brought his hand to her lap and held it between both of hers.
“You’re not him,” she said.
His face twisted.
“You’re not,” she repeated, and she didn’t make it soft this time. She made it certain. “You're not him.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
“You don’t.”
“I do,” she said again, because this was one thing she could give him without hesitation. “I know you. I know how careful you are with people even when you’re pretending you aren’t. I know how you move Logan’s shoes out of the hallway when he’s drunk so he doesn’t trip over them. I know how you check the stove when Tucker falls asleep on the couch. I know you pretend Dean annoys you and then still save him the last slice of pizza because he gets pissy when he’s hungry. I know how you touch me.” Her voice caught, but she swallowed around it, leaning closer until her knee pressed into his thigh. “Garrett, you have never made me feel afraid of you. Not once.”
His eyes went wet again.
“You’d never hurt someone like that,” she said. “You’d never hurt me like that.”
The sound he made then was worse than the first sob because it sounded like relief and pain arriving at the same time. His face crumpled before he could stop it, and he folded back into her, harder this time, arms wrapping around her so tightly she almost couldn’t breathe.
She didn’t care. She let him hold on. She held him back, one hand cupping the back of his head, the other moving slowly over his spine, feeling each shudder work through him and disappear into the space between their bodies.
For a while, there was only that. His breath against her neck. Her fingers in his hair. The lamp humming faintly. A car passing outside and washing headlights briefly across the ceiling. The ordinary world continuing in rude little pieces while Garrett cried.
Eventually, the sobs thinned. His breathing stayed uneven, but the worst of it loosened, leaving him heavy against her, drained in a way that made him feel younger and older all at once.
She kept touching him until he shifted, and even then she didn’t let go immediately. He was the one who pulled back first, dragging in a rough breath and wiping at his face with the heel of his hand.
“Sorry,” he said, hoarse. “Fuck. Sorry.”
She shook her head.
He looked away, jaw tight again, embarrassment rushing in to fill the space grief had left behind. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to–”
“Hey.” She caught his face between her hands before he could retreat all the way into himself. Carefully, because of the bruise. “No.”
His eyes flicked to hers.
“No,” she said again, quieter. “You don’t have to apologise.”
Garrett let out a shaky breath through his nose, like he wanted to argue and didn’t have enough left in him to do it properly. “I just–”
“I know.”
“I hate this.”
“I know.”
He closed his eyes under her hands. For a second he leaned into her palms so fully that her chest ached. Then he opened them again, gaze dropping to her mouth, her chin, anywhere but directly into whatever softness he was afraid she had for him.
“I’m sorry about tonight,” he said. “At the game. I’m sorry I acted like that.”
She brushed her thumb lightly along the unbruised side of his face. “You were freaked out.”
“That doesn’t make it okay.”
“No,” she said, because he was right and because she cared for him too much, in whatever unnamed, inconvenient way that lived between them, to pretend otherwise. “But I get why it happened.”
His throat moved. “I didn’t want him near you.”
“I know.”
“I saw you sitting there, in my jacket, and he was right there, and I couldn’t–” He broke off, frustration pulling at his mouth. “I couldn’t think. I just kept looking up and thinking, get away from him. And then I’d look back at the play and I’d be out of position, and then I got mad because I was out of position, and then I–” He shook his head. “It was stupid.”
“It wasn’t stupid.” She kept her hands on him, steady even when he looked like he wanted to fold away from the tenderness. “It was a lot.”
He let out something close to a laugh, but there was no humour in it. “That’s one word for it.”
She leaned forward until her nose nudged gently against his, careful of the swelling near his eye. “And you still came through.”
His brow creased.
“You did,” she said. “You moved me. You went back out. You played. You won.”
His mouth trembled, just once. He looked down, and she watched him fight the tears coming back, his face tightening with the effort of keeping it together. “Yeah.”
“Yeah,” she echoed.
A long breath left him. His shoulders dropped a little with it, not relaxed, but less braced. He looked exhausted now, the adrenaline gone, the game gone, the confession gone, leaving only the boy under all of it sitting in the low light with a black eye and red-rimmed lashes and too many years of silence sitting open between them.
She slid one hand down to his chest, feeling the slow, uneven thud of his heart beneath her palm. “Do you need anything?”
Garrett shook his head.
“You sure?”
He looked at her for a moment, and there was something unguarded in it that made her breath catch. Then he reached for her, one hand settling at her waist and pulling her closer by degrees like he was asking without words. “Just this.”
Her eyes softened. “Okay.”
He shifted down the bed first, moving slowly like every part of him hurt more now that he had stopped holding himself so tight. She went with him, letting him guide her into the space beside him as he eased onto his back, then his side, then changed his mind and pulled her against his chest.
It was clumsy in the way exhaustion made things clumsy, knees tangling under the covers, his breath hitching when her elbow brushed a sore spot from the game. She murmured an apology, and he shook his head into her hair, arm tightening around her middle.
The room settled around them again. She tucked herself against him carefully, cheek resting above his heart, one hand laid flat over his ribs. His skin was warm through the thin cotton of his shirt, his breathing still uneven but gradually finding a steadier rhythm under her ear.
She kissed the edge of his jaw because it was there and because she couldn’t reach every place in him that hurt, but she could reach that.
Garrett’s fingers flexed once at her back, then smoothed slowly over the fabric of her shirt, not quite a caress, more like he was reminding himself she was real.
For a long time, neither of them spoke. She stared at the soft blur of his room in the darkened edges beyond the lamp – the open textbook on his desk, the half-empty bottle of water, the heap of hoodie on the chair, the game tape paused on his laptop from earlier in the week – and tried to make the pieces of him fit around what he had told her.
The boy who had tossed her his jacket that afternoon because she’d shivered. The captain who had come apart on the ice at the sight of his father beside her. The child who had stood in a house and listened for his mother. The man holding her now.
Her training wanted to make categories. To name responses. To trace the line between trigger and reaction, between fear and anger, between what a body remembered and what a mouth could bear to say.
But this wasn’t a case study, and Garrett wasn’t something to be understood from a distance. He was under her cheek, breathing carefully, his arm heavy across her back, his fingers curled into the side of her shirt like he might wake up and need proof she had stayed.
So she let the clinical part of her go quiet. She pressed her palm a little more firmly to his ribs.
Garrett’s chin dipped, lips brushing the top of her head. “You okay?” he whispered.
The question hurt, somehow. That he could be lying there hollowed out and still asking after her.
She nodded against him. “Yeah.”
“You sure?”
She closed her eyes. “I’m sure.”
His hand moved once over her back. She waited until his breathing had slowed more, until the tension in his stomach eased under her hand, until the house beneath them was nothing but distant pipes and settling wood and the occasional muffled voice.
Then she lifted her head just enough to press a kiss to his chest, above his heart, and settled back down.
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Summary: A new face on the team has left Garrett Graham reconsidering himself.
Pronouns: He/Him/His, M!Reader
CW/TW: Typical Off Campus warnings, sexual content, bicurious!Garrett, brief Phil Graham mention
Here ya go heathens. I will hopefully resume OFL soon
~~~
Puzzlement had been an emotion Garrett Graham had grown acquainted with since the beginning of the semester when the Briar Hawks received their newest batch of bright, talented faces.
Almost all of them had been rooks; eighteen to nineteen-year-olds who still had baby fat clinging to their cheeks and the bright look of eagerness in their shining eyes. Almost all of them.
(Y/N) (L/N) was new to Briar, but he was far from a rookie freshman who'd yet to get a taste of real on-ice battles.
He was a transfer from another university, one far enough that it wasn't in the roster of teams they usually faced off against, but a school with a good enough team that Garrett tried to keep an eye on the players in case he ever went against one once he went pro.
(Y/N) was good. Fast enough that he shot across rinks like a bullet fresh out of the chamber, and so sharp on turns that it was well-known not to follow too closely unless you wanted to ram face-first into the boards.
It'd been a no-brainer for them to accept him onto the team and for Dean to practically coax him into rushing Sig Tau.
For a young guy destined for a hearty career as a pro-athlete who was part of a fraternity... (Y/N) (L/N) was an enigma.
He kept to his room for most hours of the day, unless he was heading out for classes or practice, and he scarcely attended parties unless Sig Tau hosted them. He was a ghost, moving quietly from room to room, leaving things undisturbed and puck bunnies ignored, unlike the rest of the guys.
But his reclusiveness hadn't become the object of Garrett's puzzlement. No, he understood the desire to keep to oneself pretty well, especially with so much spotlight and pressure riding on their shoulders.
Some of his most relaxed moments were spent lying in bed with his earbuds in and letting the music guide him into a brief moment of calm where he could forget about everything riding on his shoulders and pretend not to notice his father's insistent calls.
What puzzled him was the fact that he couldn't get the damn guy off his mind.
Each time his ears picked up the soft creak of weight on the floorboards, his head would tilt up and away from the television screen, his eyes locking on the staircase's landing with his thoughts drifting to (Y/N).
Sometimes, he'd eat his breakfast slowly, waiting for (Y/N) to descend the stairs with sleep weighing his eyelids. Other times, his eyes would part while kissing a puck bunny on the couch, searching for that familiar face in a party.
In the locker rooms, when the air would be heavy with exhaustion or electric with anticipation, his attention would roam around the room to search for (Y/N), tracking him while he walked around or fiddled with his gear.
Garrett had managed to memorize the routine (Y/N) had for gearing up and getting undressed, which spot on the benches he preferred, and the little pre-practice habits he had, like tapping his stick three times between his feet.
He realized quickly that (Y/N)'s face would often be slack with neutrality, his lips in a relaxed line and his eyes faintly lidded, as if he were drowsy. His smiles were always lazy, polite enough, and he barely uttered words in the locker room.
He often nodded along to whatever Birdie said to him, his brows slightly furrowed and lips pursed like he was caught between paying genuine attention or not.
Garrett found it amusing, watching (Y/N)'s attempts at being polite, at being a good, active listener for his teammates, who were more often than not bragging about which girl they'd slept with or laughing about whatever dumb shenanigans they'd been up to the day prior that would have their coach scowling with disapproval.
He tried, to his credit, but he'd blink a couple times after the conversations ended as if asking himself what the hell that was about.
Dean always elicited the most confusion from (Y/N), but that was just Dean being Dean. Garrett liked the furrowed-brow, slightly pouty bottom lip look that came over (Y/N)'s face whenever he was baffled by his teammates. He wondered how many times a week (Y/N) regretted joining Sig Tau.
He suspected (Y/N) regretted it then, while he stood in the kitchen, attempting to grab a beer can from beneath the curtain of dirty blonde hair belonging to some girl Dean had propped up on the counter to make out with.
The corner of Garrett's lip quirked at (Y/N)'s fifth attempt at reaching for the can he desired, and then bit back a chuckle when he finally wrapped his fingers around the girl's hair and lifted it for a moment.
The girl laughed out her apology, hardly apologetic at all, given the grin on her face, but (Y/N) shrugged her off, his annoyance at the inconvenience brief. Though much to Garrett's amusement, he took a moment to grab the hem of his shirt and wipe the top of the can where her hair strands had brushed over.
The crack and hiss of the can opening were lost in the mixture of overlapping conversations and "Collard Greens" playing from the speakers. (Y/N) disappeared into the backyard, the back door closing behind him gently.
Garrett's attention darted back to the pretty girl in front of him (Molly? Dolly? Polly? Something like that, he was sure), and he offered her a closed-lip smile, trying to focus on the dimples that appeared when she smiled and the coy graze of her knee against his. Her mouth moved, but Garrett's ears refused to listen to a word she spoke.
"Uhm," He cleared his throat and pushed himself off the edge of the dining table, setting the shiny plastic red cup down. "You're great-" Shit, what was her name? "-but I have to go talk to one of the guys about tomorrow's practice. Rain check?"
Light brown brows lifted, but her red-tinted lips curled upward understandingly. "Ah, Captain Graham reporting for duty, I see." She flicked some hair over her shoulder and nodded, taking a step out of his way. "We can pick this up later."
"Great."
Garrett's feet led him to the back door before he could come up with a good enough excuse as to what actually prompted him to follow (Y/N) outside.
The door rattled shut behind him, and he took a quick survey of the backyard, finding it surprisingly empty aside from (Y/N), who sat sprawled out over a lawn chair with the can hanging loosely from his fingertips.
"Hey." Garrett greeted, his hands sliding into the pockets of his jacket. (Y/N)'s eyes slid open, and his head tilted backward to peer up at him. The warm back porch light illuminated his face in a golden glow. "You okay? You've been... tired lately. You're doing great in practice, but we need you-"
"I'm fine, Graham," (Y/N) sighed out, the soles of his sneakers pressing into the ground to push himself up a little straighter. "Insomnia's a bitch, but I know how to deal with it."
"Oh." Duh. Garrett almost rolled his eyes at himself. "Anything we can do to help? I can tell Dean to keep it down when he has girls over. Sharing a wall with him has to be..." Garrett trailed off with a crinkle of his nose. He'd rather lose his mind than lose sleep having to listen to Dean with his catch of the night.
(Y/N) chuckled, his fingers brushing over his forehead. "I actually don't hear much most of the time. I'm just glad I never learned how to unclog a drain. Dunno how I'd feel about fishing out condoms."
His head shook lightly, and the memory of Logan's lecturing flashed in Garrett's brain. His exasperated words always fell on deaf ears. They all knew it would happen again... and again... and again.
"Yeah," Garrett laughed, raising his hand to dig his fingertips into the back of his neck, soothing the tension there. "Logan's not happy about it, I'll tell you that much."
Garrett lowered himself onto the lawn chair beside (Y/N)'s, repressing a shudder when the night's chill curled around his collarbones. He attempted to keep his head trained forward, to focus on the foliage wrapped around the fence and the gym equipment that'd been left out on the grass, but his head eventually turned to gaze at (Y/N).
His eyes were still open, but they were directed downward toward his lap, contemplating. The tip of his tongue poked out, dragging over his lips, leaving a wet gleam behind. Garrett stared at his lips. They looked soft, the skin slightly split from gentle, repetitive nipping.
The overwhelming urge to drag his thumb across them was startling.
"I guess..." (Y/N) began with another sigh, his head lolling to the side. "I'm a little down, maybe. I, uh... My boyfriend and I broke up before I transferred. Long-distance wouldn't work for us. I was willing to give it a try, but he was firm about it. I think I miss sleeping next to someone."
Boyfriend. Boyfriend. Boyfriend?
"You're..." Garrett trailed off again, not wanting to assume, not wanting to offend, not wanting to look as if he'd forgotten that was an option.
Gay? Bisexual? Pansexual? There were so many labels, so many terms. He'd never really stopped to consider them. He'd always observed the community from afar, from what he perceived as a respectful distance.
(Y/N) looked at him, his eyes slightly crinkled and his lips up in a little, close-lipped smile. Garrett probably looked like a fool, sitting there with his mouth agape, the words caught in his throat.
"That's- That's not a problem."
Of course, there were hockey players in the community. There were queer men everywhere, in every sport, in every position. He'd just... hadn't given it much thought before, the possibility of being queer and in hockey. Everywhere he looked, he'd spot one of his teammates locking lips with some pretty girl or blushing at the prospect of talking to a puck bunny.
Embarrassed heat crept up his neck. Maybe he hadn't been paying good enough attention to the people around him.
"I don't care, really, and none of the guys do either," Garrett reassured him, despite the lack of need to do so.
After Jules came out, Logan made himself and his protective stance on the community clear. If someone had something negative to think or say, they kept that shit to themselves.
"If anyone gives you shit, you tell me, and I'll handle it, yeah?"
"Uh-huh. I can take care of myself, Graham. I'm not a little kid who needs defending." (Y/N)'s laugh was light, gentle, a hint teasing. The heat worsened, and something coiled in Garrett's gut. His fingers felt jittery. "I know how to throw a punch."
"Still." Garrett insisted, his shrug tight and rigid. It was irritating how easily his body betrayed him, as if he'd never spoken to another person in his life before. He'd made out with Kendall just a couple of hours prior without issue. "I'm your captain. It's what captains do."
"Mm."
Silence.
Garrett made himself look away, made himself stare down at the blades of grass near their feet. Truthfully, hockey had consumed so much of his day-to-day life that the idea of exploring never crossed his mind. He always had something on his plate, something taking up his time and attention.
The rare times he was free, he spent them trying to ease away the tightness that never left his chest.
Sex was easy to get with a face and reputation like his, so those needs were always met, but... what if he liked more than girls? He considered the guys, but they were his bros.
They were all attractive and with distinct qualities that made them each unique; anyone with working eyes could see that, but attraction hardly bubbled in his stomach when he thought about them.
"How did you... know?" Garrett asked, his voice growing quieter, the rest of his body tensing. Newfound territory that he felt queasy about entering. His father would surely freak if he ever caught wind of his words, of his newfound curiosity. "Did you, uhm, always know? Or..."
"It crept up on me, I think. There are a lot of expectations with hockey, and it's so time-consuming that I only realized I wasn't as excited about chicks like the rest of my teammates in high school."
(Y/N)'s head tilted backward to gaze up at the drifting clouds that briefly blocked the moonlight. Garrett's eyes trailed away from the side of his face, down to his neck. He considered what it'd be like to lean in and brush his nose over his neck, to take in a deep breath. (Y/N) always smelled nice, clean and fresh.
"Girls are great, don't get me wrong. Most of the time, I get along better with them than guys, and they make better friends than dudes do. But.. I don't know. I never felt butterflies for them. I've never looked at one and wondered what it'd be like to date her or- or sleep with her. I've never daydreamed or been excited over spending one-on-one time with one, either."
Garrett tugged his hand free from his pocket to rake his fingers through his hair. He definitely liked women. He liked kissing pillowy lips and brushing his fingers through soft, conditioned hair. He hardly minded the smell of perfume or the feeling of nails scratching his shoulders. He liked breasts and curves and delicate faces.
(Y/N) had strong legs that propelled him through the ice and strong arms that swung hockey sticks with enough power to do serious damage if the puck hit someone.
Garrett still admired him the way he'd admire Kendall or some other beautiful girl. Maybe he was his exception.
"But.. you do with guys?" Garrett's brows raised slightly.
"Yeah." (Y/N) nodded, his teeth finally showing with his following smile. It was somber, nostalgic. Garrett assumed the break-up had hit pretty hard. "But, contrary to what a lot of guys think, I'm not automatically interested just because I'm gay. I have standards, and a lot of these knuckleheads fail to meet those standards."
"Dean will be disappointed," Garrett said, hoping his voice sounded amused, that his tone sounded light-hearted. His thoughts were muddled. "He thinks he's hot shit."
"Dean's nice to look at, but.." (Y/N)'s nose scrunched up playfully, a little chuckle escaping his lips. Garrett smiled at the sound. "I've never dug blonds."
"Yeah?" Garrett's eyes darted upward to meet his gaze again. His breath nearly caught in his throat. "What do you like?"
(Y/N)'s signature smile, the lazy one, greeted him. His brow lifted, one finger tapping on the side of the can. "Why do you want to know?" He asked, lifting the can to his lips and taking an audible sip. He licked his lips again afterward and propped the can on his thigh, his knee swaying from side to side.
"Just curious."
(Y/N) hummed, drawn out and slow. With an air of mystery and a smile like his, he probably knew all about other guys 'curiosity' and the dance that came with it.
"I make you curious?" He took another swing of the can, his jaw shifting slightly while he poured the drink into his mouth before crushing it in his hand.
Garrett grinned, and he felt some of his usual suave confidence return. "A little." He confirmed, propping his elbow on the armrest and leaning forward, his eyes flickering between (Y/N)'s. "Do I make you curious?"
A breathless laugh, and the start of an eye-roll. "I don't know," (Y/N) admitted, and Garrett tried to keep his shoulders from slumping.
He knew most girls liked him, or at least thought he was handsome. He, like Dean, considered himself everyone's type, but he hadn't considered that some guys probably preferred more feminine dudes.
Garrett was tall and broad, with defined arms and a hard stomach he worked hard to keep. He lacked curves and daintiness. He was the opposite of petite and cute.
(Y/N) pushed himself up from the lawn chair with a quiet grunt and tossed the can into the nearby garbage can that needed to be dragged out to the end of the driveway.
"I thought you were as straight as they come." He told Garrett with a lopsided shrug. Garrett had thought so, too. "If you want to mess around... see if you're into guys or not.. I don't mind."
The chair scraped against the pavement when Garrett stood up, his brows raised and his lips parted with surprise. "Really? You'd want to?"
"Why not?"
Garrett only realized then that he'd never set foot in (Y/N)'s bedroom after he moved in. The door was always shut, unlike Dean's, which remained open nearly 24/7, regardless of whether or not he was in bed with someone.
The place was tidy, thankfully clean, with a couple of textbooks scattered over the desk tucked against the wall.
Garrett nudged the door shut with the heel of his shoe and turned the lock, the noise sounding surprisingly loud despite the party continuing on downstairs. (Y/N) glanced over his shoulder at the sound of it, and a sheepish chuckle slipped out from Garrett.
His fingers curled around the hem of his Briar U hoodie, which he tugged up and over his head, a few black curls tumbling over his forehead that he brushed back.
"You've never been with a guy before, right?" (Y/N) questioned, slipping his phone out of his pocket and setting it on the nightstand.
He kicked his sneakers off and faced him, bending down slightly to tug the nightstand drawer open. Garrett nodded. Not even a drunken kiss.
"It's not rocket science."
"Oh, really? I was hoping to get some nuclear launch codes while I was here."
Garrett flashed a grin, and (Y/N) rolled his eyes, his mouth pulling into a small smile. Despite his easy-going words, nerves manifested into a fluttery feeling in his stomach. He felt like a virgin again: excited by the prospect of getting laid, but anxious about fucking it all up and embarrassing himself.
(Y/N) set a bottle of lube on the nightstand that he'd taken out of the drawer. Something bitter like envy dug its teeth into Garrett's throat when he noticed he was a used bottle. (Y/N) stayed out of their way so much that it was hard to tell when he had company over, if he ever did.
Garrett was certain there were plenty of guys who quietly considered themselves puck bunnies, too. He swallowed down bitterness, bitterness that he hoped was brief, and he reached down to undo his shoe laces.
"What're you comfortable with, Graham?"
(Y/N) approached him, the palm of his hand dragging over Garrett's shoulder, his fingers gingerly massaging his clothed skin. It slid down to his bicep when Garrett straightened up again, his feet easily sliding out of his sneakers.
"Some guys are comfortable with starting with the little things first."
Garrett swallowed. "Well, I've never been pegged before, so..." He trailed off, his lips twitching upward, the humor helping with his stuttering heartbeat. "Maybe.. we try that another time? If that's good with you. I don't know. You're the expert here." (Y/N) snorted. Garrett winced. "Sorry. That was- That was dumb."
"I'm good with anything," (Y/N) replied, his palms cupping the sides of Garrett's neck, calloused fingers rubbing pleasantly over his skin. His eyes were inquisitive, warm with comfort. Garrett allowed himself to relax, to breathe. He felt lighter around him. "Kissing okay?"
"Definitely."
(Y/N) tasted like the mildly sweet beer he'd been drinking, the flavor clinging to his tongue when it brushed against Garrett's and sending a chill down Garrett's spine.
His hands settled over (Y/N)'s hips, squeezing and bringing him closer, knocking their hips together. His arms curled around him, one of his hands slipping beneath his shirt to grope along his back, pleased to feel his muscles flexing.
A groan vibrated in Garrett's chest when (Y/N) fisted some of his curls, the tug gentle enough to avoid pain, but the act sent heat spiraling down to Garrett's lower belly. Instinctively, he pulled his hand out from (Y/N)'s shirt and brought it down over his jeans, groping at his clothed ass next.
His chest tightened, but before he could take his hand away and apologize for potentially overstepping, (Y/N) laughed against his mouth and soothed the worries. Sighing softly with relief, Garrett mouthed at (Y/N)'s jawline, his arms releasing him so he could fiddle with both their jeans, popping the buttons and tugging at the zippers.
(Y/N)'s hands bunched up Garrett's shirt, and he took a few steps back, dragging Garrett along with him until he bumped against the end of his bed. He turned them around and lightly shoved Garrett back onto the bed, pulling the shirt off him and tossing it aside blindly.
The bed groaned beneath the sudden weight, and then again when Garrett leaned back on his elbows, his hips raising off the mattress to help (Y/N) peel his jeans and briefs off.
Garrett's breathing grew heavier with anticipation, sweat already beginning to gather along his temple and back. (Y/N) lowered himself down onto his knees, his hands gripping Garrett's calves to drag him a little over the bed's edge. He flushed. It was rare for him to be the one manhandled.
"Oh, fuck." Garrett hissed when wet warmth engulfed the tip of his cock, and his thighs tensed, toes curling within his socks.
(Y/N)'s eyes fluttered shut, his features relaxed and content, as if he were suckling on a popsicle on a warm summer day rather than swallowing his captain's cock in his bedroom.
Garrett's head dropped back, his mouth parted with grunts and deep sighs, his hands in fists because he felt unsure of what to do with them when it came to (Y/N).
A low noise came from deep within his chest when (Y/N) wrapped his fingers around him to stroke him, a subtle wet noise reaching Garrett's ears from the saliva coating him. Garrett's nostrils flared, his brows tightening into a furrow once (Y/N) wrapped his wet lips around one of his balls, his tongue massaging it with the finesse of someone who'd done it plenty times before.
His ex was a fucking dumbass.
With his other hand, (Y/N) continued massaging and toying with his balls, rolling them between his fingers. He touched Garrett with casual curiosity. A lot of his hook-ups often felt like a performance from the other party, a desire to impress.
(Y/N) seemed more focused on discovering which buttons existed and which ones elicited better responses. Less of an act, more of an experiment.
"You want to try something?" (Y/N) asked him abruptly, his tongue flicking over the dribbling tip of Garrett's cock.
Garrett's abdomen tensed, and he sucked in a breath, swimming through the pleasure flooding his body in order to reply. "Sure."
"Pass the lube."
Blindly, Garrett reached toward the nightstand, patting around until his fingers bumped against the bottle and he handed it over. He looked down at (Y/N) through his bleary vision, blinking until it focused again. He wet his lips nervously, swallowing thickly as he watched (Y/N) squirt some lube onto his fingers.
"If you don't like it, we can stop, yeah?" Garrett nodded, but (Y/N) only raised his brows at him. "Use your words."
Garrett almost laughed. He'd uttered that exact sentence many times before, and he finally understood why girls always blushed. The butterflies fluttering around his stomach made him lightheaded. "Yeah, yeah, we- we can stop. I'll- I'll let you know."
Satisfied with his response, (Y/N) nudged Garrett's knees upward, and Garrett reached down to grasp the back of his thighs. His back pressed flat against the mattress, leaving him to stare up at the ceiling, his breathing picking up.
His idea of masturbation had always been jerking off. Fingering himself never came to him as an option. Would it feel strange?
"Relax, Garrett," (Y/N) cooed, and heat pinched Garrett's cheeks. He liked the way his name rolled off (Y/N)'s tongue when it was spoken so softly, so reassuringly. "Deep breaths."
Garrett took a deep breath and melted into the mattress, but the relaxation proved short-lived when a slick finger pressed against his entrance. His teeth nipped at his bottom lip, and he concentrated again, breathing in and out. Slowly.
Relax. Relax. Re- Jesus Christ.
"Oh-"
Garrett's heart leapt to his throat at the feeling. It was... weird, and his body fought the confusing intrusion. It was hardly unpleasant, but not immensely pleasurable, either... until (Y/N) curled his finger, and Garrett nearly shouted, his body almost curling into itself at the shock of pleasure that went through his body.
(Y/N) continued to prod at what Garrett deduced was his prostate, and fuck.. Garrett's mouth fell open, quiet moans flowing from it in a broken song, his whole body tensing and relaxing, unable to settle on what to do. His mind blanked into nothing but white noise.
Each time (Y/N) brushed over that bundle of nerves, his body jerked, and it took everything in his being not to let out noises that would surely attract attention.
He could only imagine what it'd be like to have something bigger, heavier, hitting that spot over and over again.
Without warning, Garrett's hips buckled, and warm spurts of come splattered over his stomach and chest, coating his skin in pearly white. Heat flooded his face, and he released his grip on the back of his thighs.
"I can last longer." He exhaled quickly, embarrassed, and he pushed himself up into a sitting position after (Y/N) slid out. He almost missed the feeling. "I swear."
"It's fine."
(Y/N) laughed and stood up, ridding himself of the rest of his clothes. His bulge was evident against his briefs, and Garrett reached down to slowly drag them down his legs. His cock sprang up once released, and Garrett took another deep breath, tracing it down to the hairs at the base.
"You don't have to."
"I want to," Garrett assured him.
How hard could it be?
Gently, Garrett wrapped his hand around the base, squeezing lightly, curiously. (Y/N)'s hand settled over the top of his head, running his fingers through the loose curls and scratching his short, blunt nails against his scalp. Garrett hummed pleasantly, and he leaned in, wrapping his mouth around the tip.
(Y/N)'s hips drew back, leaving a string of saliva connecting his cock to Garrett's lips, and Garrett looked up at him questioningly. "I don't think you like it," (Y/N) said, reaching down to pick up the bottle of lube from the floor before he straddled Garrett's hips.
Another feeling that he found himself unable to describe. Unsurprisingly, dicks tasted like skin and faintly of sweat. Nothing otherworldly about it, but the heaviness on his tongue was nice.
He suckled a bit, ran his tongue over grooves, and while (Y/N)'s quiet noises had him hardening again, he couldn't find what made some people go crazy over blowing someone.
"It's not... I don't know."
Garrett's hands roamed over (Y/N)'s thighs until they reached his ass, grabbing a handful and squeezing. (Y/N) rolled his hips in response, grinding their wet cocks together slowly. Garrett shivered, goosebumps rising over his arms.
"I can try again-"
"It's okay, Garrett." (Y/N) kissed the corner of his mouth and giggled when Garrett chased after his lips for a proper kiss. "There are things you'll like, and things you won't be into. Not everyone likes giving blowjobs. That's fine."
Licking his lips, Garrett took the bottle from (Y/N) and coated his own fingers in the lube. He spread (Y/N) with one hand and reached around, messily rubbing his fingers over (Y/N)'s hole with the determined desire to pleasure him.
(Y/N)'s lips stretched out into a grin, and he pressed his body against Garrett's, pining their cocks together as he began to roll and grind against him.
They sighed and moaned against each other's mouths, and Garrett soaked up the sight of (Y/N)'s back faintly arching when he pushed his finger past the rim of his slicked-up hole.
He was warm and tight, and Garrett's head reeled as he thought about how it'd feel to sink into him. Garrett leaned in, attacking (Y/N)'s throat with wet kisses and nips, half-tempted to cover him in hickies that'd take ages to fade.
"Garrett..."
The soft moan prompted him to add a second finger, confident that (Y/N) would take it with ease, and he picked up the pace until the wet noise was downright pornographic. Each slow roll of his hips was teasing, meant to drive him wild with each little wave of pleasure, and it worked perfectly.
Needy desire clouded Garrett's mind within seconds.
"Fuck." He hissed, whipping his head around toward the nightstand and reaching for the condoms stored inside.
(Y/N) gave a quiet, almost purposeful whine when Garrett slipped his fingers out, and then giggled breathily once he noticed Garrett fumbling with the condom. With an irritable huff, Garrett brought the plastic wrapping to his lips and tore it open with his teeth, tossing it aside and rolling the condom over himself.
(Y/N) planted his palms over Garrett's pecs and shoved him back down onto the mattress, lifting himself over Garrett's hips and reaching between them to grip Garrett while he added some more lube. A gasp ripped from Garrett's chest when (Y/N) lowered himself onto him with ease, his head rolling back as Garrett sank into him.
Without waiting for Garrett to gather his bearings, (Y/N) began riding him. It was a mixture of grinding down on him until his ass was flush against Garrett's hips, and digging his knees into the mattress to lift himself up and down.
He picked up the pace, and Garrett's fingers dug into his thighs hard enough to bruise, more than happy to lie back and let (Y/N) use him however he pleased.
The heat canvassing his body was unbearable, and there was sweat on every inch of his body. He fought to keep his mind from fleeing him, from embarrassing himself again.
Garrett Graham could go for at least an hour or two, he could last long enough for his partner to have two or three orgasms, and he refused to let his reputation be ruined.
But then (Y/N)'s hand trailed down, squeezing his chest and running his fingers over Garrett's hardened nipple, a touch that felt electric. Garrett groaned, low and vibrating, his head digging back into the mattress.
His curls stuck to his temples and forehead, and his heels dug into the edge of the mattress, half-heartedly attempting to thrust up to regain some control.
"Your ex is so fucking stupid." Garrett blurted out through heavy pants, and despite his barely contained keens and whines, (Y/N) laughed heartily. "I'll take care of you. I'll take care of you. Fuck him. You don't need him."
(Y/N) leaned down to press their mouths together in a messy, open-mouthed kiss full of saliva, both of his hands tangling themselves in Garrett's hair.
He stilled, and Garrett readjusted his footing on the bed, one arm curling around (Y/N)'s waist to keep him still before he began thrusting up into him. (Y/N) cursed sharply, nearly digging his teeth into Garrett's bottom lip.
"C'mon, Cap." (Y/N) clung to Garrett's shoulders, his eyes bright and pupils wide. "Prove it. Prove it."
Garrett pushed himself with his elbows and rolled them over, pinning (Y/N)'s body down against the mattress and hiking one leg up, half-determined to fuck (Y/N) through the bed.
The sound of sweaty skin slapping together was obscene and loud, thankfully drowned out by the people downstairs drunkenly screaming the lyrics to "Trap Queen" without a care in the world.
(Y/N) clenched around him, tight like a vice, his body arching into Garrett as he coated both their stomachs with his release. Garrett wrapped around him, holding him through it, babbling barely thought-out praises before he groaned into his shoulder with his own second release.
He managed to reluctantly pull out and rid himself of the soiled condom, tossing it into the nearby trash can before he collapsed atop (Y/N).
His cheek pressed against (Y/N)'s chest, his eyes half-lidded and brain fuzzy with contentment. (Y/N) toyed with his hair, twirling a curl around his finger while he caught his breath, his heart thumping against Garrett's cheek.
They were sweaty and dirty, but there were only three bathrooms in the house, and Garrett's bedroom was the only one with a connecting bathroom.
Garrett had rules with the people he slept with, boundaries he refused to let be crossed. At the top of the list of rules? No sleepovers. But his body was wrung out, and (Y/N)'s chest made the perfect pillow.
"We should-" He cut himself off with a yawn. "Wait for the party to end."
"Mhm." (Y/N)'s other hand ran up and down Garrett's spine. "Well... think you know whether you're straight or not?"
"I don't know... I think I'll need to check again later. Just to be sure." Garrett lifted his head with a cheeky grin and pressed a kiss to (Y/N)'s collarbone, feeling the vibrations of his tired chuckle. "What do you think?"
˚⁎⁺˳ . ⊹ you're dean di laurentis's best friend. the issue is that you're also a lot of people's best friends, and dean has spent the last three years at briar u fighting for your attention. so it's only natural that he feels jealous whenever you look at someone else, right? and it's only natural that he wants to be close to you — in more ways than one, these days.
˚⁎⁺˳ . ⊹ university!au, male!reader, reader is the captain of the briar u hockey team (sorry garret). referenced sex; nothing explicit. featuring goodboy!dean di laurentis *the crowds applaud* SHES MULTIMEDIA NOW
˚⁎⁺˳ . ⊹ part one, part two
˚⁎⁺˳ . ⊹ taglist: @florizota
“You want something to drink?”
Dean fidgets awkwardly from where he’s leaning back against the island, arms crossed defensively over his chest. You’re so used to him being cocky and loud; nervous is an unnerving departure from normal.
“Uh, I’ll take a…” He trails off, craning his neck to look around your frame and into the fridge. You shift slightly to the side. “Coke.”
You nod, grabbing two cans from the fridge — regular for you, Cherry for him — and pop the tab on both.
“Here,” You say, handing it to him. He takes it from the bottom, in a weird sort of claw-grip, so that your fingers don’t touch. You raise an eyebrow, slightly amused, and step further into his space, pinning him back against the island.
“Uh —”
“So bold in the car, but now you can’t even touch me, huh?” You’re roughly the same height, so when you drop your hands onto either side of the counter, enclosing Dean, your head drops down to his neck. You grin, leaning in, breath ghosting against his skin. “Thought you were a sex savant, Di Laurentis.”
“I — I didn’t expect you to agree so easily!” He groans, tipping his head back, eyes falling closed. You smile at how pliable he is, nosing gently at the skin of his neck. You can’t help but remember wiping lipstick off of it the night before, and feel a similar urge to mark him up.
“No?” You ask, stepping back. His eyes snap open, and you hide your smile in your Coke can.
He shrugs his shoulders, still slightly off-kilter, but regaining ground quickly. “Should’ve known you wouldn’t miss a chance to get your dick wet.”
“So crass,” You grin.
“You love it,” Dean responds, just as cocky. He polishes off the Coke easily, crushing the can in a casual show of strength. You shamelessly ogle that way his forearm flexes with the motion, and he smiles.
“Mm. Maybe,” You say. Truthfully, you’re still a little thrown from just how bold he’d been, propositioning you in the car. Sure, you’d said. Like he hadn’t just asked you to have sex with him. Sure.
“So… my room?” Dean asks, and you raise an eyebrow.
“That’s a fucking public safety hazard, Di Laurentis. No shot. And Mona’s crashing in mine, so —”
“Mona’s in your fucking bed?” Dean interrupts. This time, he pins you, advancing until you’re shoved between Dean’s chest and the cabinets. Not a bad place to be, you muse.
“Down, boy,” You laugh, reaching down to squeeze his hip. “Apparently, her roommate’s boyfriend is visiting and she got sexiled. Not a big deal.”
“She’s sexiling me, now. Where are we supposed to hook up, the couch?” Dean complains, dropping his head into the crook of your neck. Your other hand comes up to scratch at his hair. It’s an awfully intimate position for “bros,” but you don’t say anything.
“Why not? It’s not like Graham and John don’t do it, and neither of ‘em are gonna be home. Graham’s out with Kendall, and Tucker’s passed out upstairs.”
“...I guess,” Dean says, quietly. You tilt your head and pick his head up with your index and middle finger.
“We don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to, Dean. Just fun, yeah?”
Dean exhales, then tips his head down to bite at your fingers. You laugh, pressing down on his tongue. He sucks once, hard, then draws back. “I know, Y/n. I want to. Just fun, promise.”
“Alright,” You grin. “Go meet me on the couch, then, yeah?”
Dean leverages off you obediently, turning and walking to the couch.
“Such a good boy,” You shout after him, mock wolf-whistling. He flips you off over his shoulder.
You snag your drink and follow him. He looks annoyingly comfortable on the couch with his legs spread wide. His eyes track you as you approach, but he doesn’t make any other indication that acknowledges your presence.
“Comfy?” You ask, setting your drink down on one of the coasters Tucker’s dad had dropped off for the House in a vain attempt to maintain a semblance of cleanliness.
“The comfiest,” Dean shoots back, still infuriatingly calm. You can tell he’s performing, now: this is the Dean Di Laurentis of campus legend. It’s a bit annoying. You feel further from him than you have the entire night.
Two can play at this game, then.
You flop onto the couch next to him, throwing an arm over the cushions behind his head, barely grazing his skin. “You gonna put something on, then? Are we just gonna jerk off?”
Dean turns to look at you, blinking. “What? No, I thought… I thought it was just going to be us.”
You let your head loll to the side, keeping your expression purposefully placid. “Yeah? You going to hold my attention, then?”
Dean sputters. “Hold your attention? What the fuck?”
“Well, I’ve heard so many stories about the great Dean Di Laurentis. Are you going to live up to them? If not, we might as well just watch one of Garret’s shitty pay per views.”
“You’re being an asshole.” Dean spits, but you can see him shifting, trying to hide how hard he’s getting in his jeans.
“Seems to be doing it for you,” You note, still detached. Your heart’s pounding, though, and it’s taking a conscious effort to smooth out your face. Fuck, you want to get your mouth on him.
“Fine. You want something to hold your attention?”
He stands, shoving your legs apart roughly with one hand until he’s standing between them.
Your pulse is roaring in your eyes. You wonder if he can hear it.
“Bravo,” You hear yourself say, voice mocking.
“Bravo,” Dean repeats, and then drops to his knees.
“Fuck,” Dean mutters, after, laying panting on your chest. “That was so fucking good.”
“Mm,” You mumble back, fingers in his hair. “Eh. I’d give it a solid 7/10. Head needs work. Too much teeth.”
Dean jolts immediately, picking his head up and propping his chin on your chest to shoot you an appropriately dirty look. “Fuck you. Your technique was hardly better.”
“We’ll just have to practice,” You tease back, wiping some sweat from his forehead with a sweep of your thumb. “Lucky for you, I’m a very hands-on learner.”
At breakfast, you try not to let it show on your face that you now know exactly how fucking good Dean Di Laurentis looks when he comes. You’re not exactly sure if you succeed.
You hadn’t even kissed — something about it had felt too intimate. You find yourself wishing now that you’d been brave enough, wishing you knew what his mouth tasted like. Cherry cola?
“You two are being quiet,” Tucker says pointedly, as he slides some eggs onto a plate. You accept it gratefully when he hands it to you.
“Are we?” You say, taking a sip of your coffee and eyeing Dean from over the rim. “Just tired, I guess.”
Tucker grins. “Yeah? You score last night? I ran into Mona when she was leaving.”
Dean’s face tenses. He hadn’t been happy sending you back to Mona last night, but you’d refused to crash with him in his room, citing what you were sure were no less than three used and discarded condoms scattered around the space.
“I did,” You muse, watching as Dean jolts. “Not with Mona, though. This girl had a real nice mouth. Awful pretty, too.”
“You fucking dog,” Tucker grins, clapping his hands over his ears. “Nope. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
Dean clears his throat. “Don’t objectify women like that, Y/n.”
A sharp laugh barks out of your throat. “Oh?”
“Maybe she’s more than just a nice mouth,” Dean says, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “She also has a real nice chest, for one.”
Tucker mimes throwing up in his mouth. “Oh, god, Dean. Did you also sleep with her?”
“Eiffel-tower,” You faux-whisper to Tucker. “Dean had to take a Vicodin, too. Pretty sad at such a young age.”
Dean splutters. “No, I didn’t! I mean — no, we didn’t!”
Tucker drops the egg pan into the sink and raises his hands in mock surrender. “Whatever you say, bro. I really don’t want to hear about it.”
“No, Tuck!”
“No! Stay away from her!” You shout, trying to inject the appropriate amount of panic into your voice.
Allie shoots you a look from behind the camera, eyebrows raised. “Wow, you really are fucking terrible. Worse than Sean, even.”
“Hey, now,” You say. Low blow.
Allie glances at her watch. “Maybe we run it a couple more times? I just need to send this self-tape in. I’ll try very hard not to let you drag me down.”
“Let me just call someone,” You sigh, collapsing back on Allie’s bed and groping for your phone on her nightstand. “I’m fucking hopeless.”
“The first believable thing you’ve said all night!” Allie exclaims, jumping on top of you. You groan at the impact, but drape your arms obligatorily over her, texting above her head. “Who’re you gonna call? Dean? He’ll just be worse.”
“Mm, I was gonna ask Beau, but Jo says he’s shit too. Have I ever introduced you to Mona?”
“Your ex-girlfriend?” Allie asks, propping her chin on your chest. You feel a little dizzy; it’s the exact position Dean had been in last night. You put a gentle palm on her head, guiding her cheek back to your chest. That felt almost like it was just for Dean.
“My best friend,” You correct, pulling up your text thread with Mona. “She’s a fucking phenomenal actor. Got us upgraded on a flight once by creating this whole Honeymoon fake reality. I wasn’t allowed to talk.”
“Yeah, ‘cause you sound like you’re being held at gunpoint whenever you try to read a line.”
“Alright, alright,” You laugh, shoving Allie off of you. She lands on her back with a huff. “Great. Mona’s on her way.”
“Fantastic. Want to look at my sex calendar while we wait? “
“Uh, yeah.”
You spend the next thirty minutes waiting for Mona, laughing at the obscene positions in the sex calendar. Mona raps at the door as you’re both tilting your heads, trying to figure out the logistics of September.
The first thing that Mona says when Allie swings open her door is: “You are so pretty. Why do you have a loser boyfriend?”
Allie sputters, but she’s blushing. “What?”
“Y/n has told me. Sean, right? What is it with hot girls and lame as fuck men? Like me and this one. At least he’s pretty,” She says, pointing at you. Allie looks genuinely lost for words.
“Yeah, you’re a real pleasure too, princess.” You say, swinging your legs over the edge of Allie’s mattress, arms braced behind you. Mona rolls her eyes, but still saunters over to you, throwing her purse on the mattress and flopping down into your lap. Your arms go easily around her waist.
Allie grins. “Ex-girlfriend? Really?”
“He is just nice to fuck. Not so nice to keep around,” Mona grins, patting you on the cheek.
You roll your eyes. “Just do the line reading, please.”
“Yes, pretty girl, let us do the line reading,” Mona says, holding out a hand for a script. Allie hands it to her, then collapses back behind the camera. Mona pushes off of you, settling in front of Allie and clicking the play button.
“No, Jackson! Stay away from her!”
“Dean!” You shout, spotting him and Beau in the parking lots outside the dorm, clambering out of Dean’s car. Allie and Mona walk behind you, arm in arm, heads close together. He perks up immediately, whirling around.
“Y/n?” Beau shouts, spinning as well. You wave.
“Hey, man! Long time no see.” Beau’s been visiting Jo for a bit; you haven’t seen him for a few weeks. “Uh, one sec.”
You rummage for your keys in the pockets of your jeans, then toss them in an easy arc to Mona, who snatches them out of the air in a flash of red acrylic nails. She continues to lead Allie to your car, then bundles them both into the backseat. You roll your eyes — looks like you’ll be playing Uber.
When you’re close enough, Beau reaches out and claps your shoulder. Dean sways slightly into your space, makes an aborted reach out, then rocks back onto his heels. You raise an eyebrow, but ignore it.
“How’s Jo?” You ask Beau instead, who beams back at you.
“She’s great. Tired, man, but doing real well.” He says. He’s looking at you a bit strangely — not badly, by any means, but with a definite air of appraisal. He keeps cutting his gaze back over to Dean.
“Great to hear,” You say, genuine. You like Jo. “Uh, well, we’re heading out to dinner, if either of you wants to join.”
Beau glances amusedly at Dean, then reaches up to rub apologetically at his temples. “Gonna have to grab a raincheck, Y/n. Migraine. I’m crashing with a friend; Dean’s just dropping me off.”
“Oh, alright. No problem,” You say. “Dean?”
“Absolutely. Your treat, right?” Dean grins, already walking backwards towards your car. You roll your eyes.
“Yeah, sure,” You say, then turn back to Beau, shaking your head slightly. “Three passenger princesses, man.”
Beau laughs. “Never heard Dean described as a passenger princess.”
“He’s certainly pretty enough for it,” You muse out loud.
“That he is,” Beau agrees. “That he is.”
As you watch him wrench open the door to your car, arms flexing and hair reflecting the slowly bleeding sunlight, you’re a bit struck with the truth of it. He really is gorgeous. Fuck.
⤿ DEAN HEYWARD-DI LAURENTIS was the boy no one could get enough of. The thing was, you just didn't get it... until you did.
!! wc: 2.8k. fluff. fem!reader. enemies to lovers ish. flirting. innuendo. dean being dean. dean fell first and hard. reader lowkey nonchalant w it. COME TO ME MY FELLOW OFF CAMPUS LOVERS. i will die for this series and briar u and the kids series. taglist open. off campus masterlist coming soon. ENJOY.
By the time you realized Dean Heyward-Di Laurentis was flirting with you, it was already too late to do anything about it.
Not because he was subtle, because he absolutely was not, but because Dean flirted with everyone in a way that made him difficult to read at first. He smiled too easily, leaned too close during conversations, carried this effortless warmth around with him that made people naturally gravitate toward him without even realizing they were doing it. Most girls at Briar noticed him immediately, and most of them reacted exactly the same way whenever he walked into a room.
You hadn’t.
That alone seemed to fascinate him more than it should have.
The first time you met him had been at a party during your sophomore year, one of those overcrowded hockey house parties where the music was too loud and the floors were sticky from spilled alcohol, where bodies moved shoulder to shoulder through dim lighting while somebody shouted along terribly to music in the kitchen.
You’d been standing near the back porch trying to escape the heat inside when Dean stepped out beside you holding two beers.
At the time, you only knew of him as one of Briar’s hockey players, though that was nearly impossible not to know considering how often everyone at this damn school talked about that team.
“You look miserable,” he’d said casually, offering you one of the beers.
You glanced at it before looking back at him. “You offer drinks to unhappy strangers at all of your parties?”
“Only the pretty ones.”
You had laughed then despite yourself, mostly because he’d said it so naturally that it didn’t even sound rehearsed.
“That line probably works on a lot of people.”
“It works better when they don’t immediately insult me after.”
“You survived.”
“Barely.”
There was something unfairly likable about him up close. Maybe it was the confidence that was accented by dimples, or maybe it was the fact that unlike some of the other hockey players, Dean actually listened when people spoke to him. Conversations with him felt easy in a dangerous sort of way, the kind that slipped by too quickly without you noticing.
You ended up talking with him for nearly an hour that night.
Then somehow he started appearing everywhere afterward.
Sometimes it was accidental. Other times it very obviously was not.
You’d find him outside one of your lecture halls leaning against the wall waiting for Garrett or Logan only for him to fall into step beside you afterward, like it was the most natural thing in the world. He’d steal the seat next to yours in class despite it being a lecture hall with plenty of open seats.
He'd distract you while you studied, complain dramatically whenever you refused to help him with assignments he definitely could have done himself if he tried hard enough.
And slowly, without either of you acknowledging it outright, he became part of your life.
It happened in pieces so small you barely noticed them.
Dean texting you first whenever something funny happened.
Dean showing up at your apartment with coffee because you mentioned once that you hated mornings.
Dean touching the small of your back absentmindedly when he moved around you in crowded rooms.
Your friends noticing the shift long before you did.
“He likes you,” your roommate had told you one night while you got ready for bed.
You rolled your eyes immediately. “Dean likes everyone.”
“No,” she drawled carefully, “I think he really likes you.”
At the time, you brushed it off.. mostly because the idea felt ridiculous.
Dean Heyward-Di Laurentis was charming in a way that belonged to everyone around him. He laughed with everybody, flirted with everybody, made people feel wanted so effortlessly that it was hard to imagine any of it meaning something deeper.
And maybe that was the problem.
Because you never realized how serious it had become for him.
Not until much later.
Not until the night everything finally cracked open between you.
It happened in late November after one of Briar’s home games, when the campus had already started settling into winter, and the air outside the arena carried that sharp cold that made your lungs ache when you breathed too deeply.
You waited near the parking lot while students poured out around you in loud groups, bundled in jackets and scarves while snow flurries drifted lazily through the streetlights overhead.
You had almost decided to leave by the time Dean finally emerged from the arena.
The parking lot outside Briar’s hockey rink had thinned considerably over the last fifteen minutes, the loud clusters of students slowly disappearing into the snowy dark while the cold deepened around you in sharp, biting waves.
The game had ended almost half an hour ago, but postgame celebrations always dragged on longer after a win, especially when the team played the way they had tonight. They were fast and aggressive and good enough to keep the crowd screaming well into the third period.
You stood near the edge of the sidewalk with your hands shoved deep into your coat pockets, shifting your weight occasionally to keep warm while snowflakes drifted steadily from the sky overhead. They gathered in the sleeves of your coat and melted against your skin, dampening pieces of hair near your face while your breath curled visibly in the freezing air.
Your phone screen lit briefly in your hand.
11:42 PM.
You should probably go home at this point. Plus, why stick around anyway? The only people who stuck around this long were family, significant others, and girls who were hoping to get lucky with a player. You were none of the above.
That thought had crossed your mind at least four times already, especially considering Dean had no idea you were even waiting for him out here in the first place. You could still leave now before he came outside and preserve at least some of your dignity, because standing alone in a freezing parking lot after nearly midnight waiting for a boy who smiled at you a little too nicely was not behavior you were particularly proud of.
Still, your feet stayed planted where they were.
Which was embarrassing to unpack if you thought about it too hard.
The arena doors finally swung open again a few seconds later, releasing another burst of noise and warmth into the cold night air as several players filtered out alongside a few students lingering near the entrance. You looked up automatically, more out of instinct than intention.
Then you saw him.
Dean Heyward-Di Laurentis, himself, walked out laughing at something one of his teammates said, hockey bag slung over one shoulder while exhaustion visibly weighed through the line of his posture. His damp hair curled slightly from sweat beneath the harsh overhead lights, and even from a distance, you could see the fatigue sitting heavily across his face after the game.
Then his eyes landed on you.
And his entire expression changed.
It was subtle enough that most people probably would not have noticed it unless they were looking carefully, but you did.
The exhaustion softened first.
Then his shoulders loosened slightly beneath the weight of his bag, tension easing from him in real time as warmth spread slowly across his features. The tiredness didn't disappear entirely, but something gentler replaced it now, something so immediate and instinctive that it sent an annoying little flip through your stomach before you could stop it.
“There you are,” Dean said once he reached you, his voice roughened slightly from yelling over the game and the freezing night air.
Something about the familiarity of it settled strangely in your chest.
Not the words themselves, but the way he said them, easy and certain, like he had expected to find you waiting for him outside the arena all along. Like your presence beside the rink after every home game had become something reliable to him, something normal.
You tried not to think too hard about why that affected you as much as it did.
Instead, you shoved your hands deeper into your coat pockets and forced yourself to sound casual when you said, “You played decent tonight, Di Laurentis.”
Dean immediately looked offended.
“Decent?” he repeated, adjusting the strap of his hockey bag higher onto his shoulder while he stared at you in disbelief. “That’s what I get after scoring twice? And defending my goalie after he got knocked? And pointing to you after I scored? And cheering G up in the locker room?”
You shrugged, though his grin was already making it annoyingly difficult to hold onto your composure for very long. “You want me to lie and say you were amazing?”
“Yes, actually, that would be nice.”
The laugh that slipped out of you came easier than you intended, soft and visible in the cold air between you.
For a second, Dean just looked at you.
Not in the careless, charming way he usually looked at people, but openly because your amusement was something worth paying attention to. Snow caught lightly in his light hair and along the shoulders of his jacket, while the harsh lights from the parking lot reflected faintly across his face. Despite the exhaustion still lingering around him after the game, there was some playful warmth creeping back into his eyes.
The look on his face made your chest tighten in a way you were trying very hard not to examine too closely.
Without really discussing it, the two of you started walking toward Malone's together.
The arena noise slowly faded behind you with every step, swallowed by the quiet stillness settling over Briar this late at night. Snow crunched softly beneath your boots as you moved side by side down the sidewalk, your shoulders brushing occasionally whenever one of you drifted too close. The roads nearby had mostly emptied by now, leaving only the occasional headlights cutting through the dark or the distant sound of voices carrying across campus.
The snow had started sticking properly sometime during the third period.
Now it dusted across the ground in thin white layers and gathered along Dean’s hair in uneven flakes, catching briefly in his lashes whenever he glanced over at you. The cold had turned the tip of his nose pink, though somehow it only made him look more unfairly attractive.
“You waiting long?” he asked after a moment.
“Not really.”
“Bullshit. That's a total lie.”
You glanced sideways at him despite yourself. “Fine, maybe a little.”
His mouth twitched immediately, like he was trying not to smile too hard at that answer.
Then something in his expression shifted. The teasing faded first.Then the easy confidence.
What replaced it was quieter somehow, more focused, and the sudden intensity of his attention made your stomach tighten unexpectedly.
“You came to every game this month,” he said.
The observation landed softly between you, but your pulse reacted instantly anyway.
You forced yourself to shrug. “I support Briar athletics, I love that my tuition money goes towards the team throwing free shirts into the stands and paying for your overpriced locker room. I figured I should get my money's worth.”
“Bullshit, again.”
You looked away too quickly, trying to hide the smile already pulling at your mouth, but Dean noticed anyway. Of course he did.
“That smile means I’m right.”
“You’re so annoying after wins.”
“I’m annoying all the time.”
“That’s... Actually, yeah, that's true.”
His laugh came low and warm beside you before he nudged his shoulder lightly against yours.
The contact lasted barely a second.
Still, warmth spread slowly through your chest anyway, familiar now in the worst possible way.
Because that had become the real problem with Dean lately.
Not the flirting.
Not the confidence.
Not even the fact that nearly every girl at Briar looked at him like he personally hung the moon.
The problem was that he made everything feel like more than it was. Truthfully, that could have been because, in your heart, you didn't want to believe you'd fall for an athlete's charm so easily. But based on what everyone around you said, you weren't delusional in thinking that it was more than it seemed.
Every glance lingered slightly too long. Every touch carried enough softness behind it to leave you thinking about it afterward. Even his attention felt different from other people’s somehow, steady and deliberate in a way that slowly worked its way beneath your skin before you even realized it was happening.
Being around Dean felt dangerously similar to standing too close to a fire in the middle of winter.
Comforting at first.
Then overwhelming before you noticed yourself getting burned.
And lately, whatever existed between the two of you had started drifting dangerously close to becoming something real.
Neither of you talked about it.
Maybe because acknowledging it aloud would ruin the fragile balance you’d fallen into together.
Or maybe because both of you were too afraid the other person didn’t feel it too.
“You know,” Dean said eventually, quieter now, his gaze fixed ahead on the snowy sidewalk instead of on you, “Tuck thinks I’m in love with you.”
Your entire body nearly short-circuited.
You missed a step slightly before catching yourself again, your head swiveling in a double-take. “Sorry.. what?”
Dean let out a huff of a laugh under his breath, though this time there was tension underneath it that hadn’t been there before.
“That reaction’s making this just a little harder for me.”
You stopped walking for half a second before hurrying to catch up beside him again. “You’re joking.”
“I’m not.”
The simplicity of the answer made your stomach twist sharply.
Snow continued drifting lazily around the two of you while silence settled heavily between your footsteps. Your pulse suddenly felt uneven beneath your ribs, loud enough that you were half convinced Dean could hear it if he stood any closer.
For several long seconds, neither of you spoke.
Then finally, carefully, you looked over at him. “And what did you say?”
Den exhaled slowly through his nose.
The faint smile that touched his mouth this time looked different from his usual ones somehow, smaller and quieter, almost disbelieving.
“I told Tuck he was an idiot.”
“That sounds more believable.”
“Yeah,” he murmured softly. “Except I think he might’ve been right.”
Everything inside you seemed to still at once.
Not dramatically.
Not like movies where music swelled and the entire world stopped turning.
Just enough that suddenly every detail around you became painfully sharp all at once.
The sound of snow beneath your boots. The cold wind brushing against your face. The uneven rhythm of your breathing. The way Dean was looking at you now.
And maybe the strangest part of all was realizing he looked nervous.
Dean Heyward-Di Laurentis, who could walk into any room and immediately own it without trying, who flirted effortlessly and smiled without hesitation, looked genuinely nervous standing beside you on a dark, snowy sidewalk.
Like you had the ability to hurt him.
“You don’t have to say anything,” he added quickly after the silence stretched too long, his voice quieter now, rough around the edges in a way you had never heard from him before. “Seriously, I just…” He broke off briefly, glancing away before laughing once under his breath. “I got tired of pretending this feels casual to me when it doesn’t. And trust me, it's just as crazy for me to say that as it is for you to hear that.”
Your chest tightened painfully at the honesty in that.
Because suddenly the last few months rearranged themselves inside your head into something entirely different.
Dean waiting outside your classes even when his own were across campus.
Dean memorizing your coffee order after hearing it once.
Dean always finding you first in crowded rooms.
Dean texting you every night before playing an away game.
None of it had been accidental.
None of it had ever been casual.
And maybe the worst part was realizing yours hadn’t been either.
“You fall hard, huh?” you asked quietly.
A surprised laugh escaped him then, softer than before, carrying something almost embarrassed underneath it.
“You got no idea.” He drawled, his hands pushing his hair back in more of a 'I-Don't-Know-What-To-Do-With-My-Hands' way than anything else.
The honesty of it hit you harder than anything else had tonight.
Because Dean wasn’t teasing now. Wasn’t flirting. Wasn’t charming his way through another conversation with that easy confidence everyone associated with him.
He meant it.
And standing there beside him while snow gathered slowly across the shoulders of his jacket and melted into your hair, you realized with sudden, terrifying clarity that somewhere along the way, without meaning to, you had fallen hard too.
pairing – garrett graham x reader
summary – a secret hookup with garrett graham turns into four close calls, one locker room scandal, and feelings neither of them are hiding very well.
warnings – 18+, smut, alcohol, jealousy, secret hookups, hockey violence/injuries, swearing.
notes from me – thank u for the request, anon!! this was so cute i got carried away lol <3
word count – 9.4k
navigation – masterlist
The thing about keeping Garrett Graham a secret was that Garrett Graham was, in almost every available category, a terrible secret.
He was too tall for it, for one. Too broad. Too recognisable from the back, from the shoulders, from the mess of dark curls and the stupid confident way he moved through a room like gravity had signed some private agreement to make him look good from every angle.
He was also, tragically, friendly. Friendly in that Garrett-specific way that meant everybody on campus felt like they knew him well enough to yell his name across a party, slap his shoulder at Malone’s, stop him in the hall to talk about last night’s game or next week’s line-up or whatever else men said to one another when they wanted to bask briefly in proximity to a local legend and pretend it was a conversation.
And she wasn't exactly anonymous either. Not anymore. Not after Dean.
Dean Di Laurentis, who had never been her boyfriend, which was a legal technicality he clung to with the same lazy confidence he seemed to apply to everything else in his life.
Dean had been a mistake with good hair and a trust fund. A mistake with a grin. A mistake that had lasted a few times longer than it should have because he was pretty and shameless and very good at looking at a girl like he had personally invented bad decisions and would be thrilled to walk her through the beginner course.
But Dean wasn't a girlfriend kind of guy. Dean was Six Flags. You rode the ride, screamed once or twice, maybe bought the photo after, and then got off.
She knew that. She had known that then, technically.
Dean had a way of appearing in her life at the least dignified possible moments looking pleased with himself, and she had a way of refusing to let him be pleased without penalty.
Like the time she found him coming out of a women’s bathroom stall at Malone’s with a girl in a denim skirt. She had been washing her hands at the sink, glanced up in the mirror, taken in his flushed face, his rumpled shirt, the girl fixing her hair behind him, and said, “Hi, whore,” with the flat calm of someone greeting a neighbour at the mailbox.
Dean, because shame had never successfully attached itself to his nervous system, had only chuckled and leaned one shoulder against the stall door. “Hey.”
That was the whole thing. Mostly joking. Mostly old bruised pride dressed up in insults because that was easier than admitting he had maybe gotten under her skin for a minute and then left muddy footprints on his way back out.
Garrett wasn't supposed to be part of that. Garrett had happened after a party, which was already a bad sign because nothing good ever began at two in the morning in a hockey house kitchen with tequila and Dean singing the wrong words to a song everybody else knew.
It had been loud and hot and stupid, the whole house sticky with beer and laughter and bodies pressed into doorways. She had ended up outside on the back steps because the kitchen had started spinning, and Garrett had come out five minutes later with two waters and an expression that suggested he was trying very hard not to ask whether she was going to puke on his sneakers.
He had sat down beside her instead.
Garrett had looked at her sideways when she laughed at one of his jokes, and something in his face had changed. Garrett’s face was a practiced thing, mostly grin and charm and captain-boy confidence, but this had slipped underneath it. A quiet little interest. A flicker. Like he had found something he wanted to pay attention to and was already annoyed about it.
Then, later, in the upstairs hallway, she had been trying to find the bathroom and he had been trying to find Logan, because Logan had stolen his phone to send a voice note to Coach that began with “hypothetically, if a man loved hockey but hated cardio,” and somehow Garrett’s hand had ended up on her waist. Warm through her shirt. Steadying her when someone shoved past in the hall.
“Careful,” he had said, close to her ear.
She had turned her head, too drunk to be clever and too annoyed by how good he smelled to be normal. “I’m always careful.”
Garrett’s eyes had dropped to her mouth for half a second, then lifted again with that awful amused heat. “Uh huh.”
The first kiss had been an accident. His room had been closer than the bathroom. His door had shut behind them. His mouth had been warm and confident and so immediately, horribly good that she had pulled back after ten seconds just to stare at him like that might make the situation less offensive.
Garrett had grinned down at her, lips a little swollen already, one hand still at her waist. “What?”
“You kiss like you know you’re good at it.”
He’d shrugged. “I am good at it.”
“That’s a disgusting thing to say.”
“Wasn’t really a denial, though.”
She had meant to hate that. Truly. She had tried.
The first time they almost got caught, she was riding him with her hands braced on his chest and Garrett’s mouth at her throat, and the only thought in her head was a soft, stunned, repeated oh that seemed to have lost all connection to language.
His room was too warm despite the window cracked open behind the desk, the cold night air barely managing to move through the heat they had made under the sheets. The lamp was off. Some blue-white spill from the streetlight outside cut through the blinds in thin, broken lines over the wall and across Garrett’s shoulder.
His chain had slipped sideways against his collarbone. His hair was a wreck from her fingers. His mouth was open against her neck, kissing up under her jaw with the kind of lazy, devastating precision that made her thighs shake around him before she could stop them.
“Garrett,” she breathed, and then immediately louder, because his hands had shifted to her hips and guided her down harder. “Oh my God.”
His hand flew up before the sound had fully escaped, palm covering her mouth, his other hand tightening at her waist. “Jesus, baby,” he said, voice low and rough and entirely too amused for a man currently participating in the same crime. “You trying to get me murdered?”
She made a muffled noise against his hand that was meant to be a curse and came out humiliatingly close to a whimper. Garrett’s grin flashed in the dark, teeth catching briefly, eyes bright and smug and so pleased with himself she nearly hated him. Nearly.
It was hard to maintain moral outrage when his thumb was pressed lightly against her cheek and his hips were still moving, slow and deep and mean in the way only a man with a scoreboard in his soul could be mean.
“There we go,” he murmured, kissing the side of her jaw while his palm stayed over her mouth. “Can’t be announcing it to the whole house, right?”
She glared down at him, or tried to. It probably lost some effect when her eyes fluttered halfway shut because he lifted his hips again and hit exactly the wrong place, which was to say exactly the right one.
Garrett laughed under his breath, quiet and filthy with satisfaction. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”
She bit the inside of his palm.
His brows shot up. “Oh, we’re biting now?”
She nodded against his hand with as much dignity as a girl could manage while naked on top of him and very actively losing a fight against her own volume.
“Cool,” he whispered. “Very healthy. Super mature.”
She would have laughed if she had any air left. Instead her body gave her away again, a soft, trapped sound catching under his palm as he sat up suddenly, changing the angle and dragging her with him until she was pressed chest-to-chest with him, knees bracketing his hips, his mouth at her ear.
“Shh,” he said, but the edge of laughter in it ruined the authority.
He was enjoying this too much. Enjoying her like this, messy and desperate and trying very hard to be quiet because if anybody found out she was in Garrett Graham’s room, in Garrett Graham’s bed, after Dean Di Laurentis had spent the better part of the semester behaving like her eventual return to his mattress was a scheduling issue rather than a question, the whole house would become unbearable overnight.
Then the hallway floor creaked. Both of them froze. Him still inside her, both still overheated, still breathing too hard into the tiny space between them. Garrett’s hand stayed clamped gently over her mouth. Her fingers dug into his shoulders. His eyes lifted toward the door, and in the blue-dark she watched every cocky line in his face vanish into immediate, sharp focus.
Outside, Logan’s voice drifted close enough to curdle the air. “Yo– Dean. Is that who I think it is in there?”
Her stomach dropped so fast it was almost physical. Garrett’s eyes snapped back to hers.
For one suspended, insane second, they only stared at each other. She could feel his heartbeat hard against her chest. Could feel where they were still joined, which her body had the absolutely perverse audacity to notice in detail despite the fact that John Logan was currently holding a one-man investigation outside the door. Garrett’s hand loosened slightly over her mouth. Her lips parted against his palm. He held his finger up to his own lips, and she had nodded quickly.
He reached blindly toward the bedside table with one hand, the motion chaotic and deeply unathletic for a man who made a living looking graceful under pressure.
His fingers knocked something over. A bottle cap, maybe. His watch. A textbook hit the floor with a soft thud. She bit down on a laugh before it could get out, which was dangerous because laughter at that moment felt like shaking a soda bottle with the cap still on.
Garrett found his phone at last, thumb flying over the screen. For half a second there was nothing. Then the speaker on his dresser exploded to life with Cherry Pie so loud the whole room seemed to jump.
She slapped both hands over her own mouth now, eyes wide, shoulders shaking immediately with silent laughter. Garrett stared at the ceiling like he could not believe this was the solution his brain had selected and was, worse, proud of himself anyway.
In the hallway, Logan went silent. Then he burst out laughing. “Oh shit– sorry, G! Guess not!”
A second later Dean’s voice, farther away and deeply suspicious, called, “What?”
“Nothin’, man,” Logan said, still laughing. “Keep walking.”
Footsteps retreated. The music kept blaring. Garrett turned it down with the ferocious speed of a man who had made his point and no longer wanted Warrant narrating his sex life. The second the volume dropped, she folded forward into Garrett’s shoulder and started laughing for real, breathless and helpless, her whole body shaking against his.
Garrett’s arms closed around her automatically. Then he started laughing too, quiet and disbelieving into her hair. “Fuck.”
She lifted her head, face hot, eyes watering, and whispered, “Cherry Pie?”
“It was the first thing that came up.”
“You panic-played Cherry Pie?”
He huffed out a laugh. “It worked.”
“That’s not the same as being good.”
“It worked,” he repeated, grinning now, smugness returning by the inch because survival had restored him. His hands slid to her hips again, warm and possessive and much too confident. “And for the record, if Logan thinks you’re in Dean’s room right now, I might throw myself out the window.”
She pressed her lips together, trying and failing not to smile. “Jealous?”
Garrett’s eyes narrowed. “Careful.”
The word landed low in her stomach. Warm and bright and stupid. She leaned down and kissed him before he could see too much of it on her face, and he kissed her back still smiling, still breathing laughter into her mouth, both of them a little shaky now for a different reason.
“Too close,” she murmured against him.
“Yeah,” Garrett said, one hand coming up to the back of her neck, holding her there. “Maybe stop trying to wake the neighbours.”
“You’re the one playing stripper music at full volume.”
“Because you’re loud.”
“Because you’re annoying.”
His grin was all teeth in the dark. “Baby, just before? That wasn't an annoyed sound.”
She shoved at his chest, and he fell back on the mattress easily, gesturing for her to come closer with two fingers. The stupid warmth of it made her go quiet in a way that was much more dangerous than the moaning had been.
The second time they almost got caught, she was drunk enough that focusing on standing upright had become a full-body project.
The house belonged to some guy from one of Dean’s classes, or maybe one of Logan’s, or maybe no one knew and they had all simply agreed to occupy it until dawn. It smelled like beer, perfume, damp coats, and the kind of carpet that had seen too much and forgiven nothing.
She stood in the upstairs hallway with one shoulder against the wall, phone in hand, trying to read the same text from Garrett for the third time.
Garrett: You good?
It was a simple question. Easy. Very Garrett, actually. Casual on the surface, but sent because he had been watching her across the room ten minutes ago with that narrowed captain look he got whenever she reached the stage of drunk where her smile became too slow and her balance became hypothetical.
She typed, yes.
Then deleted it because the letters looked suspicious.
Then typed, yed.
Then stared at that for a long time.
Beside her, a cluster of girls in tiny tops and hockey-adjacent enthusiasm had been having one of those conversations that floated around the party like perfume: who was hot, who was overrated, who was secretly huge, who had commitment issues so severe they should probably be peer-reviewed.
She ignored it for as long as she could because she had bigger concerns, namely that if the bathroom door did not open in the next thirty seconds she was going to have to start making decisions about where else she could throw up.
Then one of them said Garrett’s name. Her eyes lifted off her phone before she could stop them.
The girl speaking was blonde, glossy in a way that seemed expensive even if nothing she was wearing necessarily was, with a little white top and the high, pleased expression of someone enjoying the sound of her own anecdote.
“No, I’m serious,” she was saying, one hand pressed to her chest like she was giving testimony. “Last night was the best night ever. Like, Garrett knows what he’s doing. He made me come, like, three times.”
The hallway did a small, drunken tilt.
The problem wasn't even jealousy at first, not properly. The problem was logistics. Garrett had been in her room last night. Garrett had been in her bed last night, sprawled diagonally like he owned both the mattress and several surrounding counties, one arm hooked around her waist while she tried to sleep and he mumbled something into her hair about setting an alarm for practice.
Garrett had stolen half her blanket and then looked offended when she kicked him in the shin. Garrett had kissed the back of her shoulder at five in the morning before climbing out of bed, half-dressed in the dark, whispering, “Go back to sleep, baby,” like he had any right to sound that soft before sunrise.
So unless Garrett had discovered cloning between midnight and breakfast, the blonde girl was lying.
The girl noticed her staring, because drunken staring was rarely subtle and this particular stare had been delivered with the blank intensity of a haunted doll.
The blonde’s smile faltered into something confused but still sweet, which was somehow worse. “Um… hi, babe. You okay?”
Another girl beside her leaned in slightly, brows lifting. “Did you need some water?”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Her phone was still in her hand, Garrett’s unanswered text glowing uselessly against her palm.
“You weren’t with Garrett last night,” she said.
The sentence came out too clear. Too certain. Sober-sounding, even, which was deeply unfair given the fact that her inner ear was currently behaving like a loose shopping trolley.
The blonde blinked. “What?”
“You weren’t with Garrett last night.” She frowned, genuinely trying to make the pieces fit and failing so hard that social caution had gone missing in the wreckage. “Why are you lying?”
The air around the bathroom line shifted. A couple of girls looked over. Someone’s mouth dropped open a tiny bit. The blonde’s face did that quick, ugly thing people’s faces did when embarrassment arrived and pride immediately tried to tackle it before it spread.
“And how would you know?” she asked, voice sharpening with a laugh around the edges. “Are you, like, his secretary?”
Her drunk brain, slow but not entirely dead, caught up with the fact that she was standing in a hallway full of girls, defending Garrett Graham’s whereabouts during the exact hours he had spent in her bed, while actively participating in a secret that depended on not doing that.
Her mouth opened. Nothing came out. The blonde’s brows rose.
“I– uh.” She looked down at her phone like it might offer legal counsel. Garrett’s text still sat there, accusatory and simple. “Never mind. Actually.”
Then she stepped out of the bathroom line. There was a slight shoulder bump with the wall and a near-collision with a guy carrying two beers, but she made it away from the girls and around the corner with most of her dignity still technically attached.
Her heart was thudding stupidly hard for a hallway interaction, heat crawling up her throat and into her cheeks. Not jealousy, she told herself. She was just offended by misinformation. Academically. On principle. People should not be allowed to lie.
Her phone buzzed again as she reached the top of the stairs.
Garrett: Seriously. Where are you?
She stared at it for a second, then typed, need bathroom.
Then, after a pause, added, girls are liars.
His response came almost immediately.
Garrett: What
She squinted at the screen.
Garrett: Baby where are you
The baby landed warm even through the alcohol, which was annoying. She looked back over her shoulder toward the hallway, where the bathroom line and the blonde and the whole stupid conversation still existed. Then she started down the stairs, one hand on the railing, the phone clutched in the other, already scanning the crowd below for Garrett’s dark curls and the broad, familiar shape of him.
She found him near the kitchen archway, and he was already looking for her. He caught sight of her halfway down the stairs, and his face shifted at once, amusement and concern colliding so fast that neither won cleanly. He moved through the crowd before she even reached the bottom, one hand lifting to her elbow as she stepped off the last stair.
“Hey,” he said, ducking close so she could hear him. “You okay?”
She looked up at him very seriously. “You were in my room last night.”
Garrett paused. His eyes moved over her face, then over the stairs behind her, then back down. “Yeah.”
“Like the whole night.”
His mouth twitched. “Most of it, yeah.”
“So that girl is a liar.”
A slow understanding dawned across his face. Then, because he was Garrett and therefore terrible, he started to smile. “What girl?”
She jabbed a finger somewhere upward. “The blonde. She said you made her come three times.”
His brows jumped. “Did I?”
“Garrett.”
“What? I feel like I’d remember.”
She crossed her arms. “She was lying.”
“Sounds like it.”
“She looked me in the face and lied.”
Garrett’s hand slid from her elbow to her waist, steadying her when she swayed half an inch in outrage. “You say anything?”
She stared at him.
His eyes narrowed, still smiling but sharper now. “What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
“Baby,” he whispered.
“I said she wasn’t with you last night.”
Garrett closed his eyes for one second. Just one. When he opened them again, he looked like he was fighting for his life against laughter. “Right.”
“She asked how I knew.”
“Okay.”
“And then I left.”
“Good call.”
“I almost said because you were with me.”
His grin did something helpless then, softer under the smugness, like the idea pleased him before he had time to make it a joke. “Yeah?”
She frowned at him. “Don’t look happy. I nearly compromised the mission.”
“The mission?”
“Our secrecy mission.”
“Our secrecy mission isn’t going great if you’re interrogating women in bathroom lines about my location.”
“She started it.”
“Sure.”
“She did,” she whined, dragging the second word out.
“I believe you.” He didn’t, not entirely. Or maybe he did and was simply enjoying himself too much to be decent about it. His hand squeezed once at her waist, warm and grounding. “You still need to pee?”
Her face fell. “Yes.”
Garrett’s mouth twitched again. “Come on. There’s a bathroom downstairs.”
“You know that?”
“I’m observant.”
“You’re a slut.”
“I’m helpful.” He leaned in, his lips brushing her ear, voice dropping into that low teasing register that made her stomach flip despite the fact that she was seconds away from becoming a medical emergency. “And for the record, next time I make you come three times, I’m expecting a better cover story than that.”
She turned her head slowly to glare at him. Garrett looked deeply pleased with himself.
The third time they almost got caught, she was in the hockey house kitchen at three in the morning wearing Garrett’s t-shirt with absolutely no plan.
It was after a loss, which meant the whole house had gone strange and heavy by midnight. The kind of subdued where the TV stayed on without anyone really watching it and the boys drank beer not to party but to have something to do with their hands.
Garrett had barely spoken when he came out of the locker room earlier, jaw tight, lip split, a bruise already blooming near his cheekbone, that restless, furious energy still moving under his skin like the game had not fully let go of him.
She hadn’t been supposed to come over. That was the rule. One of the rules. There were several now, apparently, all of them made by two people with a strong shared interest in pretending they had control over anything.
No arriving together. No leaving together. No obvious texts when the guys were around. No sitting too close at parties. No looking at each other for too long in kitchens, which was quickly becoming the hardest one because Garrett Graham had a deeply inconvenient face and an even more inconvenient habit of watching her mouth when she was trying to speak.
And definitely no sneaking into his room after midnight through the window like a raccoon because he’d lost a hockey game and she wanted to crawl into bed with him.
So, naturally, she had done exactly that. Garrett’s window wasn't as easy to access as she had expected it to be.
She had nearly died twice, scraped her knee on the siding, and whispered, “This is so stupid,” to herself with feeling before finally pushing the window up and tumbling into his room with all the grace of a bag of laundry.
Garrett had been lying on his bed in the dark, shirtless, one arm over his face. He hadn’t even startled properly. He had just shifted the arm enough to look at her, eyes bleary and bruised with exhaustion, and said, “Baby, what the fuck.”
“I’m being supportive.”
“You broke into my room.”
“I prefer… entered creatively.”
He had stared at her for another second, then lifted the edge of the blanket.
For all the jokes, all the swagger, all the please-don’t-call-this-what-it-is of him, he made room for her too easily. Like his body knew before the rest of him had finished filing objections. She crawled in beside him, careful of his ribs and the angry bruise darkening along one side of his stomach, and he rolled toward her with a wince he tried to hide and a hand that found her hip immediately under the blanket.
“Hi,” he had murmured after a while, lips brushing her hair.
She had smiled into his chest. “Hi.”
Now, hours later, she woke up with her mouth dry enough to qualify as an emergency and Garrett’s arm heavy across her middle.
The room was dark and cold around the edges, the cracked window letting in a thin stream of winter air that made the discarded clothes on the floor look like shadows. Garrett was dead asleep behind her, breathing rough through his nose, body warm and heavy and completely gone in the way only athletes after a bad game seemed capable of being.
One of his hands was tucked under the hem of the shirt she’d stolen off his floor. She swallowed once. Painfully. Then again. Still bad.
She shifted carefully. Garrett grunted and tightened his arm, which would have been sweet if it had not also trapped her in a dehydrated prison.
“Baby,” she whispered.
Nothing.
“Garrett.”
A deeper grunt this time. His face pressed into the back of her neck.
“Baby,” she tried again, softer. “Can you get me water?”
Garrett’s answer was a long, sleep-mangled sound that might have been English in a previous life. She waited.
“Garrett. Please. I’m really thirsty.”
“No,” he mumbled into her hair.
She turned her head as much as she could. “No?”
“M’sleep.”
“You’re talking.”
“Sleep talking.”
She groaned softly. “You’re the worst.”
“Mm.”
She lay there for another thirty seconds, hoping thirst might pass. It did not. Eventually she eased his arm off her waist inch by inch, freezing every time he made a noise, and rolled over to look at him properly.
The sight softened her irritation before she could defend against it. His face was turned toward her on the pillow, hair falling messily over his forehead, lashes low against his cheek. The split in his lip had dried dark at one corner. The bruise near his ribs looked ugly, even in the low light. Another mark curved along his stomach where he’d been slammed into the boards hard enough that the crowd had made a single collective ooooh.
He wasn't getting up. She sighed and climbed out of bed.
The floorboards were cold under her bare feet. Garrett’s t-shirt hit high on her thighs, soft and oversized and smelling like detergent and him. She paused at the door, listening. The house had finally gone mostly quiet. No TV. No shouting. No Dean wandering around half-drunk asking philosophical questions about hot girls and mortality. Only the hum of the fridge downstairs and the occasional tick of the heating.
She slipped into the hall and padded down the stairs, one hand trailing lightly along the wall because the dark made everything look unfamiliar. The kitchen waited at the bottom, dim and blue with moonlight through the window over the sink. Someone had left a pizza box open on the counter. There were three empty beer bottles near the stove and a hoodie slung over one of the chairs. The house smelled like stale chips, laundry, and the faint metallic cold of nighttime.
She found a glass in the cabinet after opening the wrong one twice, filled it at the sink, and drank half of it in one go with her eyes closed.
Then the light snapped on. She spun around so fast water sloshed over her hand.
Tucker stood in the doorway in sweatpants and a faded t-shirt, one hand still on the light switch, hair flattened on one side from sleep. He blinked at her. She blinked back.
For one full second, neither of them moved.
Then Tucker looked at the oversized shirt. Her bare legs. The glass in her hand. The stairs behind her.
“Well,” he said slowly. “Shit.”
Her stomach dropped.
“No,” she said immediately. “Please don’t–”
Tucker rubbed one hand over his face, looking more tired than scandalised. “Damn. I owe Logan ten bucks.”
That derailed her panic so thoroughly that she stared at him. “What?”
He gave her a sympathetic look that somehow made everything worse. “I can’t believe you slept with him again.”
Her mouth opened. Closed. The silence that followed wasn't her best work.
Tucker’s brows lifted. “Dean? Obviously?”
Oh.
The relief arrived so hard it nearly made her dizzy, followed immediately by the horrible understanding that she now had to let Tucker think she had climbed out of Dean’s bed at three in the morning. Her brain, which had been half-asleep and mostly water-focused three minutes ago, scrambled for purchase.
“Right,” she said, too quickly. “Yeah. Dean. Obviously.”
Tucker’s expression softened in a way that made guilt stab straight through the middle of her chest. “Oh. Uh. Sorry. I didn’t mean to make it weird.”
“No, it’s–” She swallowed, clutching the glass with both hands. God bless darkness. God bless Tucker being half-asleep. God bless the fact that Dean’s entire personality was plausible cover for almost any bad decision within a thirty-foot radius. “Please don’t say anything.”
Tucker frowned. “I won’t.”
“No, seriously. Please.” She made her eyes wide because she could, because she had been underestimated by men before and did occasionally enjoy the practical benefits. “It’s so embarrassing. I wasn’t going to. I don’t even know why I– God.” She looked down, shook her head, and gave a small, miserable laugh that deserved an award from whatever committee evaluated female deception in shared kitchens. “Please don’t tell Logan. Or anyone. Especially Dean. Actually, fuck, especially Dean.”
Tucker, who possessed the inconvenient decency of a man who hated watching people feel bad, visibly faltered. “Hey. No, yeah. Totally. Your secret’s safe with me.”
She nodded, still performing devastated shame with one hand wrapped around a stolen water glass. “Thank you.”
“Do you… need anything?”
The kindness almost killed her. “No. I’m good. Just water.”
“Okay.”
Another awkward beat passed. Then Tucker stepped aside from the doorway with the solemn discomfort of someone allowing a ghost to pass through. “Night.”
“Night,” she whispered, and scurried toward the stairs with the glass held carefully against her chest.
She didn’t breathe properly until Garrett’s door shut behind her.
He was still asleep when she climbed back into bed. Useless. Beautiful, bruised, useless man. She set the glass on his nightstand and stared at him for a second in the dark, still buzzing with adrenaline. Then she smacked his shoulder.
Garrett flinched awake with a strangled noise, eyes half-opening. “What– fuck– what?”
“Tucker caught me downstairs.”
That woke him a little more. “What?”
“He thinks I slept with Dean.”
Garrett went very still. Then his face did something fascinating in the dark. Sleep disappeared. Pain disappeared. Every exhausted, post-game softness sharpened into offended disbelief. “He thinks you what?”
“I had to go with it!”
“You had to?”
“Yes, Garrett, because the alternative was saying actually I’m sneaking out of Garrett’s room after cuddling with him because we’re both very normal and secretive and weird.”
He pushed himself up on one elbow, immediately winced, then tried to pretend he hadn’t. “Why the fuck would he think Dean?”
“Because of Dean!”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s kind of the whole answer.” She climbed back under the blanket, still whispering harshly. “You wouldn’t get me water.”
“I was asleep.”
“So I went downstairs and got caught and had to improvise.”
Garrett stared at her, jaw working. Even bruised and half-dead, he managed to look jealous in a way that made her want to laugh and kiss him and maybe shove him a little. “Tucker thinks you left Dean’s room wearing my shirt?”
“I don’t think he was doing t-shirt analysis at three in the morning.”
Garrett dropped back against the pillow with a quiet, pained groan, one hand dragging over his face. “Great.”
She settled beside him, taking a long, triumphant sip of water. “Your fault.”
“My fault?”
“Yes.”
“For being asleep after getting hit, like, forty times tonight,” he said, eyes wide in the dark. Then he groaned. “Fuckin’– Dean?”
She smiled despite herself. “You’re jealous.”
“I’m not jealous.” He was very obviously jealous. His arm came around her waist and tugged her closer with enough care not to hurt himself but enough insistence to make the point. “I just don’t love Tucker thinking you’re sneaking out of Dean’s bed.”
“Technically, he thinks I’m sneaking out of Dean’s bed and deeply ashamed.”
Garrett made a noise of disgust. “Jesus.”
She pressed her face into his shoulder to hide her smile. “Poor Tucker was very sweet.”
“I don’t want to hear about sweet Tucker right now.”
“You’re so easy.”
“I’m injured.”
“You’re possessive.”
He was quiet for half a second. Then, low against her hair, “Maybe don’t make me hear Dean’s name when you’re in my bed.”
She lifted her head. In the dark, Garrett’s expression was harder to read, but she could feel him looking at her. Could feel the tension under the joke, under the jealousy, under the secret they kept pretending was only fun because fun was easier than looking directly at whatever else had started living between them.
“Okay,” she whispered.
His hand moved under the shirt, warm at her back. “Okay?”
“Yeah.” She nudged her nose against his jaw, soft. “No Dean.”
His breath left him slowly. “Good.”
“You still should’ve gotten me water.”
“Go to sleep.”
“You’re mean.”
“You broke into my room.”
“You let me in.”
“Mm,” Garrett murmured, already pulling her closer, careful around his ribs, his mouth brushing her forehead. “I know.”
The fourth time they almost got caught, Garrett took her on a date three towns over and still somehow managed to know someone there.
It was a cute restaurant. Cute in a way that made both of them a little awkward for the first ten minutes because hooking up in secret at parties and sneaking through windows had not prepared either of them for menus with seasonal specials and candles in little glass holders.
The place sat on a narrow street with string lights outside and fogged windows and a hostess who smiled at Garrett for two seconds too long before noticing the girl beside him and recalibrating. Garrett noticed the recalibration. His mouth twitched as they followed the hostess toward a booth in the back.
“Don’t,” she muttered.
“I didn’t say anything.”
She crossed her arms. “You were about to.”
“I was gonna say the soup smells good.”
“You were not.”
Garrett laughed, warm and low, and slid into the booth beside her instead of across from her without asking. They were far enough from Briar that no one should have known them, tucked into the back corner of a restaurant full of older couples and small groups and a table of women laughing over wine near the bar.
It made the whole thing feel suspended, like they’d stepped out of the rules for a few hours and could sit too close without having to perform distance for anyone.
His thigh pressed against hers under the table. Their shoulders brushed every time one of them moved. Garrett kept stealing fries off her plate even though he’d ordered his own, and she kept pretending to be offended while pushing the plate half an inch closer because dignity had left with the appetizer.
At some point his hand found hers on the booth seat between them. His fingers sliding over hers, playing with them idly while he told her about a freshman on the team who had tried to tape his stick with what Logan called the confidence of a man raised by wolves.
She laughed into her drink, and Garrett looked at her in a way that made the restaurant feel suddenly much smaller.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“No, you’re doing the face.”
His thumb moved over her knuckles. “Just like hearing you laugh.”
That shut her up immediately. Garrett’s eyes flickered over her face, and she hated him for noticing the way the words landed. Hated him more for softening instead of making a joke out of it. For a second they just sat there, fingers tangled on the seat between them, candlelight catching along the edge of his jaw and the chain at his throat, his knee warm against hers.
Then she looked down at the table because she had limits. “That was gross.”
“Yeah?”
“You should be embarrassed.”
He sucked at his teeth gently. “I’m not.”
“No. I know. That’s one of your worst qualities.”
He grinned and lifted her hand, pressing a quick kiss to the back of it. “Top five, maybe.”
She was smiling despite herself, leaning in closer, when a voice came from the side of the booth.
“Graham?”
Garrett’s hand froze around hers. A tiny, immediate stillness that went through him faster than any expression on his face could catch. His smile stayed in place when he looked up, but she felt the change in his body first. The slight tightening at his shoulder. The way his hand shifted off hers and came to rest on his own thigh. The casual posture assembling itself a second too late to be real.
A guy stood at the end of the booth, tall and broad, with the unmistakable haircut of a hockey player and a jacket with Eastwood stitched over the chest. Recognition hit Garrett’s face, then something flatter underneath it.
“Parker,” Garrett said, easy enough if you weren’t pressed against him and listening to the mechanics of the lie. “What’s up, man?”
The Eastwood player grinned and held out a hand. Garrett slid out of the booth halfway to shake it, and she sank approximately two inches lower in the seat.
Which was stupid. Very stupid. If she wanted to avoid notice, shrinking into the booth like a child hiding from a substitute teacher wasn't a subtle approach. But the whole night had gone bright and hot behind her ears. She took an intense interest in the remaining fries on her plate and prayed for invisibility.
No such luck. Parker’s eyes flicked to her with polite curiosity. The interest of someone who had stumbled into a scene and wanted to know the category. Date? Hookup? Cousin? Hostage?
Garrett, because his life was apparently a sport in all directions, stood in front of the booth with one hand settling briefly on his hip before moving up to scratch along his jaw.
Nervous.
She noticed it instantly. Garrett Graham didn’t usually look nervous. He looked cocky, amused, focused, pissed off, hungry, occasionally concussed, but not nervous. Yet there he was, smiling and doing all the tiny, useless things his body did when he wanted to seem casual too badly: thumb brushing under his nose, hand dragging through his curls, weight shifting onto one foot and then back again.
“What are you doing out here?” Parker asked.
Garrett shrugged. “Dinner.”
“Yeah, no shit.” Parker laughed, looking around. “Didn’t expect to see you this far out.”
“Had to get off campus for a minute.”
The sentence was true enough to pass. It made something soft and stupid open in her chest, because Garrett had wanted to get off campus with her. Not to hook up quickly before someone knocked. Not to drag her upstairs at a party. Dinner. A booth. His fingers playing with hers beside the cushion. The whole quiet normal shape of it.
Parker’s gaze flicked to her again. Garrett saw it and shifted half a step, not blocking her, but angling himself between the attention and her face in a way that made her want to press her forehead to the table.
“This is–” Garrett started, and then stopped.
Her heart gave one hard kick, because there was no good ending there. This is my friend sounded insane. This is the girl I’m sleeping with sounded worse. This is the girl Dean hooked up with and now I am secretly, catastrophically gone for sounded accurate but logistically challenging.
So Garrett, genius athlete, captain of the Briar men’s hockey team, man with a GPA that proved his brain did occasionally participate, did the only thing available. He smiled wider and said, “We’re just eating.”
She closed her eyes.
Parker blinked once, then, mercifully, either understood enough to leave it alone or decided he didn’t care. “Cool, cool. Good to see you, bro.” He clapped Garrett once on the shoulder. “See you on the ice.”
Garrett’s grin sharpened into something more familiar. “Looking forward to it.”
“Yeah, I bet.”
They did the aggressive male handshake thing again, all knuckles and shoulder tension and mutual threat disguised as friendliness, then Parker left toward the bar.
Garrett stood for one second after he was gone, watching him go. Then he slid back into the booth beside her, and both of them sat completely still.
She stared at the table. Garrett stared straight ahead. Then, at exactly the same time, they both exhaled.
“Jesus Christ,” she whispered.
“Yeah,” Garrett said. “That was– yeah.”
She turned her head slowly. “We’re just eating?”
His jaw tightened. “I panicked. What was I supposed to say?”
“I don’t know, Garrett. Fuck.”
His hand found hers again, but this time under the table, fingers lacing through hers with a little more urgency than before. “Too close?”
She looked down at their joined hands. His thumb was moving over hers, once, twice, like he was calming himself as much as her. “Way too close.”
“Yeah.”
“And you were nervous.”
He scoffed and shook his head once. “I wasn't nervous.”
“You scratched your jaw like nine times.”
“My jaw itched.”
Her eyebrows raised. “And your nose?”
“Itched too,” he shrugged.
“And your hair?”
“Whole body’s falling apart, apparently.”
She huffed a laugh, and his hand tightened around hers. When she looked up, he was watching her with that softer thing again. The thing that kept sneaking in around the edges of their jokes and making them both go quiet.
“Hey,” he said, lower. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For making it weird.”
“It is weird.”
“Yeah.” His mouth pulled at one corner. “But I like this weird.”
The warmth hit so hard she had to look away toward the candle. “You can’t say stuff like that after calling me an eating companion.”
“I didn’t call you that.”
“You kinda did.”
Garrett laughed, then leaned in and kissed her temple because out of town meant he could do that. Could sit beside her in a booth and kiss her hair and hold her hand under the table and look at her like the secret was starting to bother him not because he wanted out of it, but because he wanted out of the hiding part.
She let herself lean into him for half a second. Just half.
The fifth time, the time they were finally caught, she didn’t think at all, and that was probably why it happened.
Afterward, she would be able to admit there had been options. Reasonable options. Normal options. She could have waited outside the locker room like other people did. She could have texted him. She could have asked Logan if Garrett was okay, which would have been embarrassing but survivable.
She could have done any number of things that didn’t involve slipping past the edge of the crowd after the game and walking straight into the tunnel like she had a right to be there.
But Garrett had been wrong all night. He had played well in flashes because Garrett Graham could probably play well during a natural disaster if someone gave him skates and a reason. But there had been something jagged in him from the first period.
Too sharp on the checks. Too quick to shove back. Mouthguard hanging between his teeth while he stared down some Eastwood winger with a look on his face that made her hands go cold around the railing.
He got sent off twice. Once for roughing, once for a fight that started so fast the crowd seemed to notice it only after Garrett already had a fist tangled in someone’s jersey. The second time, even Coach looked furious in that controlled way that made grown men behave like children caught setting fires.
She watched Garrett in the box with his jaw clenched and blood bright at the corner of his mouth, his chest rising hard under the pads, eyes fixed somewhere across the ice but not really on it.
Logan skated by once and said something. Garrett didn’t smile. Didn’t chirp back. Didn’t do any of the things he usually did to make violence look like part of the game and not something older moving through him.
So after the final buzzer, after Briar won, despite Garrett trying to personally fistfight the entire opposing roster, after the crowd started spilling into the aisles and everyone around her buzzed with post-game noise, she moved.
The tunnel was colder than the stands, all concrete and rubber matting and the damp, metallic smell of hockey gear. Voices echoed from the locker room ahead, overlapping male noise and equipment hitting benches and someone laughing too loudly in that exhausted post-adrenaline way.
She slipped past a staff member who was too busy looking at a clipboard to care, turned the corner, and found Garrett standing alone near the wall.
He was still in most of his gear. Helmet off. Gloves gone. Hair damp and flattened at the sides, curls sticking up where he had run his hands through them. His head hung forward, both palms braced on his knees like he was trying to breathe the game out of himself and failing. Blood had dried at his lip again. His jaw worked once. Twice. The tendons in his neck stood out under the harsh tunnel light.
Her chest tightened so fast it hurt. “Garrett.”
His head snapped up. The second he saw her, everything in his face changed. He came back by inches, like her voice had reached into whatever ugly room he was in and opened a door.
“Hi,” he said, breathless, already straightening. Then again, rougher, like the first one had not been enough. “Hey.”
She closed the space before either of them had time to remember they weren’t supposed to do this where people could walk by.
“Hey.” Her hands went to his face immediately, careful around the split lip, thumbs brushing at the damp edges of his cheeks. “You good? What happened?”
Garrett let out a breath, eyes closing. His hands came up to cover hers for one second, pressing them harder to his face like he needed the contact more than he wanted to admit. “M’fine.”
“No, you’re not.”
His chest was still moving hard, the pads making him look even bigger, all post-game heat and sweat and the raw leftover violence of whatever had been eating at him on the ice. She slid one hand up into his hair, fingers pushing through the damp curls at his temple. His exhale shook.
“You alright?” she asked again, softer now.
He nodded, but it was a bad nod. A nod made out of stubbornness and breath and the fact that he had no idea what to do with her looking at him like this in a tunnel. His jaw shifted. His eyes opened, finding hers, and whatever he saw there made his whole face pull tight for half a second.
“Baby,” he murmured.
That did it. Here, in the tunnel, with the locker room noise around the corner and blood on his mouth and his breathing still rough from whatever fight he had nearly brought home from the ice, the word hit somewhere deeper.
She rose onto her toes and kissed him. It was meant to be small, it really was. A check-in. A reassurance. A brief press of her mouth to his.
Garrett made a low sound the second her lips touched his, and then his arms were around her waist, pulling her in properly, pads and all, crushing the space between them like he’d been waiting the whole night for something solid enough to hold.
The kiss turned immediately. His mouth opened under hers, hungry and rough and not careful enough at first, then careful all at once when she brushed his split lip and he hissed softly into her mouth.
She pulled back half an inch. “Sorry.”
“Don’t care,” he said, and kissed her again.
Everything from the game poured into it. The hits. The fights. The awful, tight look in his eyes from the penalty box. Her hands cold on the railing. The secret they’d been carrying around like something light when it had gotten heavier every time he looked at her across a room and didn’t come closer. Garrett’s fingers dug into her waist. Hers stayed in his hair, tugging lightly. He kissed like he was trying to get back into his own body through her mouth. And she let him.
Then someone behind them said, “Ohhhh shit.”
They broke apart so fast it was almost violent. Logan stood ten feet away with a towel slung around his neck, hair wet, mouth open in the kind of delighted grin usually reserved for a successful prank or Tucker injuring himself in a deeply avoidable way.
His eyes moved from Garrett’s arms around her waist, to her hands still caught in Garrett’s hair, to Garrett’s swollen mouth, and then back again. For one second, no one spoke.
Garrett’s arms didn’t leave her waist. She noticed that through the panic, through the sudden rush of heat to her face, through the knowledge that the entire delicate architecture of their secrecy had just been bodychecked into open air by John Logan and his shit-eating grin.
Garrett kept holding her.
Logan’s grin widened. “Was comin’ to check on the captain, but… shit.” He lifted both hands, backing away already, eyes bright with the kind of joy that meant the locker room was about to become a crime scene. “Guess he’s alright.”
“Logan,” Garrett said, low warning.
Logan only pointed at him, walking backward. “Nope. No. Don’t Logan me. You have been weird as fuck for weeks, man.”
Her stomach dropped and flipped at the same time.
Garrett’s jaw tightened. “Don’t–”
But Logan had already turned toward the locker room, voice rising with unholy glee. “You’ll never fucking guess what I just saw!”
The sound that came from the locker room was immediate. A burst of voices. Dean’s laugh cutting through first, bright and vicious. Tucker saying something too low to catch. Someone yelling, “What?” and Logan answering with, “Graham!” in the tone of a man unveiling evidence at trial.
She closed her eyes. Garrett dropped his forehead to hers.
For a second, neither of them moved. His breath was warm against her mouth, still uneven. Her hands had slipped from his hair to the sides of his neck. His gear pressed awkwardly against her chest.
Somewhere around the corner, the locker room erupted again, Dean’s voice now unmistakable. “No fucking way!”
Garrett exhaled, eyes closing. “Fuck.”
She huffed, because there was nothing else to do. A laugh, almost. A sigh. The sound of a girl watching the secret blow up and realising, somewhere under the horror, that she wasn't as upset as she should be.
“Yeah,” she whispered. “Fuck.”
His hands flexed at her waist. He didn’t move back.
This was the moment he could step away. Where he could put space between them and run a hand through his hair and say something easy, something Garrett-shaped and evasive, something that made the kiss look smaller than it was.
He could make it a joke before anyone else did. He could hide behind Logan’s big mouth and Dean’s inevitable commentary and the whole familiar machinery of the hockey house turning one private thing into public entertainment.
Instead he stayed with his forehead against hers, breathing hard, thumbs pressing into her waist through her coat.
Then Dean appeared around the corner, because the universe couldn’t let them have more than three seconds without sending in a rich boy with terrible timing.
He leaned one shoulder against the wall, grinning like Christmas had come early and wearing only half his gear. Logan popped up behind him, still delighted. Tucker stood a few steps back with his arms folded, looking resigned and not remotely surprised.
Dean’s eyes flicked over the two of them, still pressed together, Garrett’s hands still on her waist. His grin turned wicked. “Well, well, well.”
She groaned. “Don’t.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” Dean said, hand over his heart. “I would never.”
“You absolutely would.”
“I absolutely will,” he corrected. His eyes slid to Garrett, bright with evil. “Graham. Buddy. Pal. Teammate. You’ve been sneaking around with my ex?”
“She’s not your ex,” Garrett said immediately.
Dean’s grin widened. “Oh, interesting. Strong feelings from the captain.”
“She’s not,” Garrett repeated, jaw tightening.
She shouldn’t have enjoyed that. She did anyway.
Dean’s gaze moved to her, faux-wounded. “I thought we had something beautiful.”
“You were sleeping with six other girls while sleeping with me. You’re a pig.”
Logan made a strangled sound. Tucker’s mouth twitched.
Dean pointed at her. “See? This is why I missed you.”
Garrett’s hand tightened at her waist. “Dean.”
“Oh, relax.” Dean lifted both hands, but he was still grinning. “I’m not poaching. I have respect.”
Logan leaned around Dean, eyes shining. “So how long?”
“Nope,” Garrett said.
“How long?” Logan repeated, louder.
She looked at Garrett. Garrett looked at her. For one brief, stupid second they both seemed to consider lying. It was a beautiful instinct, really. Loyal to the end. Completely useless now that Garrett’s mouth was visibly swollen from kissing her and his hands had still not left her body.
“Three weeks,” she said.
Garrett’s head snapped toward her.
“What?” she said. “He was going to keep asking.”
Logan’s mouth dropped open. Dean shouted, “Three weeks?” Tucker just closed his eyes, nodding once to himself.
“I knew something was up,” Tucker said.
Garrett looked at him sharply. “You did not.”
Tucker opened his eyes. “She came downstairs for water in your shirt and let me think she’d slept with Dean.”
Dean turned slowly. “I’m sorry, what?”
She winced. “That was strategic.”
“You were in my house,” Dean said, pointing at himself, “using me as a slutty decoy?”
“Yes.”
Dean looked moved. “Honoured.”
Garrett made a sound under his breath. “Jesus Christ.”
Logan clapped Dean on the shoulder. “Come on. Let the lovebirds emotionally process before Coach catches Garrett making out in a tunnel like a freshman.”
Garrett finally looked over. “Dude.”
“What? That was supportive.”
Dean pointed at her as Logan started dragging him backward. “We’re talking later. I have questions. Boundary-respecting questions, but questions.”
“No, we’re not,” she called back.
“We absolutely are.”
Tucker gave her a small, sympathetic nod as he turned. “Congratulations. And good luck.”
“Thanks,” she said, because honestly that seemed appropriate.
The three of them disappeared back toward the locker room, taking the noise with them in pieces. Logan already yelling something that sounded like, “Three weeks, boys!” Dean making wounded noises. Tucker telling someone to put on pants.
Garrett laughed, low and real, and the sound loosened the last tight thing still sitting under her ribs. She looked up at him, at the bruise on his cheek and the split in his mouth and the ridiculous, beautiful, inconvenient boy who had somehow gone from secret bad idea to the person she walked into tunnels for without thinking.
“So,” she said, brushing her thumb carefully under the cut at his lip. “Guess we’re blown.”
His grin came back slowly, cocky at the edges and warm all the way through. “Yeah.”
“And you still have to explain why you were trying to fight half of Eastwood tonight.”
The grin faded by a fraction, but he didn’t look away. “Later?”
She studied him for a second, then nodded. “Later.”
His arms tightened. “Okay.”
“Okay.”
Then Garrett kissed her again, because being exposed to the entire hockey house hadn’t cured him of bad timing. She kissed him back anyway, smiling into it when the locker room erupted once more at whatever Logan had just announced.
This time, when Garrett’s hand slid openly to the small of her back and held her there, neither of them moved away.
➷ summary: after plowing down john logan during one of your volleyball games, you catch the man’s eye. and, to be totally honest, he caught yours, too. but you know you can’t give in that easily; you’ve got to make him earn it, and during that process, you discover that through getting to know and understand john logan, you’ve unlocked a whole new chapter of your life that you didn’t even know was possible to exist.
pt.2 of plowed down
➷ word count: 5919
➷ warnings: cursing, little bit angsty during one part (just about family stuff, nothing to do with their relationship so don’t worry), you’re the main character (sure me, idc), definitely inaccurate volleyball references. also, i know that with ncaa championships, they’re typically like a few days after the semifinals BUT FOR THE PLOT, we’re gonna pretend it’s like two weeks after (again, sorry, just bear with me).
omg also guys thank you so fucking much for the love that i received on plowed down!!! like it was genuinely bonkers waking up to all those notifications, so thank you so much!!!!
ˏˋ°•*⁀➷
You weren’t exactly sure what you had going on with John Logan.
It had been two weeks since you plowed the man down– two weeks since you made out against your apartment door, since you told him you didn’t do casual; that you didn’t do hook-ups.
Two weeks since the guy started practically worshipping the ground you walked on.
You aren’t sure what you did to warrant this; you had quite honestly been playing hard to get after making out with him. Partly because you were maybe a little bit embarrassed by how easily you gave into his charm, but also partly because you knew how guys like John Logan worked. They were athletes who had sex with different girls every few days, who were texting multiple girls at once. Guys like John Logan were players, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing when they were honest about it.
But you didn’t like to engage with players more than once, because, again, casual didn’t work for you. It was just something you swore off on in your sophomore year of college because for you, flings and hook-ups came with too much emotional baggage.
It was your own fault, quite honestly.
To you, intimacy was much more than a quick fuck. It always meant more to you. It had to be with someone you trusted, someone you had gotten to know over a certain amount of time. You learned that through a messy situationship, which is what created your personal rules.
That is why you tried to let John Logan down the easy way. With a playful grin, you had whispered the words, “I don’t do hook-ups. Or casual.”
And John Logan had fucking grinned.
Like he understood– like he was on the same page, which you knew he wasn’t.
Or, at least, you thought you knew.
But apparently you didn’t, because after you had said those words, he backed off you, his fingers lingering on your hips. He had still been smiling as he looked at you with gentle eyes and nodded, “Okay. Nothing casual, no hooking up. I can do that.”
“What?”
You blurted out the question, and you’re positive your face revealed how fucking shocked and baffled you were, because John had laughed, the sound warming your chest in the scariest way for a man you had only known for a few hours. He was dangerous, and yet you still felt the urge to dip your fingers into his flames.
He shrugged, and then said, “I can do that.”
“Okay, no.”
“No?”
“No! Isn't it your thing, to like, hook up with girls at parties?”
“I haven’t done that for weeks now–”
“Oh, how tragic,” you drawl, but you’re still smiling despite yourself. You let your hands trail up his arms and to his shoulders. You give them a quick squeeze, and then nod, “Well, this was fun.”
Now he looks baffled.
“So we’re done?”
“I don’t do hook-ups.”
“I won’t either.”
“That’s a lot of commitment for a girl you just met.”
He sighs, and he looks down at you, as if he’s searching your eyes for something, anything– and, you don’t know how, but the motherfucker seems to find what he’s looking for, because he nods, grins, and says, “Can I get your number, then? You should get to know me before you decide to get rid of me completely.”
“We’re following each other on Instagram now.”
“This is different.”
You’re slightly shocked by his words, but you’re watching his face, and you can’t help the way your lips quirk up. But you don’t nod, and you don’t give in. You smile and watch as his eyes glimmer when you respond.
“You’ve gotta earn it, Logan.”
As you said those words, you figured he’d get bored of you within a couple days. Forget about you completely, be a failed sexual encounter in the back of his mind, who he would forget about in a few months time.
Yeah, that absolutely did not happen.
Not even two days later the man somehow found your practice schedule– you had deep suspicion Jade was his source– where he had waited outside for you to finish up, standing on the cold with not even an ounce of exasperation.
“... You waited for me to finish practice?” You question, your practice bag slung over your shoulder. You stared at John Logan, dumbfounded. He was standing outside of the Briar gymnasium where your practice was held, hands shoved in the pockets of his Carhartt jacket, a happy smile on his face.
“You said if I wanted your number, I’d need to earn it. Here I am, earning it.”
“You’re being serious?” You question, and you look back to your teammates, all of whom had stopped in their tracks, watching the scene with a mixture of expressions. Some shocked, some giddy. The only part of the expressions that stayed consistent was how everyone was smiling from ear to ear.
“Yes.”
You falter– stammer, quite honestly– and you feel like your head is about to explode, because you never expected that John Logan would take you to your word. You stand there for about thirty seconds, baffled into silence, when Louisa finally nudges you in the ribs, knocking your thoughts back into your head.
“I mean, a deal’s a deal,” you say after leaving the poor guy standing in silence for far longer than necessary. You don’t miss the way his face lights up, and you watch as he hurries over to you, digging out his phone from his pocket.
He unlocks it, passing you the phone, and you go to his contacts, creating your own.
You look back up at him, face held with faux seriousness, “What number should I be? Girl thirty-five? Thirty-six?”
“Number one works.”
You snort, “Number one? Be serious.”
“I am,” he says with a playful grin. “I’m not a total player. Anymore, at least.”
“Mhm,” you nod. “Well, you’re number fourty-seven in my phone, so–”
He snorts at that, a loud laugh escaping him, and his smile is still wide on his face as you hand him his phone back. He looks down at the screen, clicking onto your contact. You’ve written your name and put a little volleyball emoji next to it, which has him looking up at you with a raised eyebrow.
“Just so I won’t get lost in your sea of girls,” you elaborate.
“It’s more like a plastic fair bag now, but okay.”
For whatever reason, that had you seeing hearts because holy shit he was funny. But you compose yourself enough to not tackle him to the floor with a frenzied kiss.
In fact, ever since that encounter, you’ve learned to compose yourself in many ways. Basically whenever you guys hang out. Because, despite wanting to kiss the ever-loving shit out of him every time you guys were together, you had composed yourself with major difficulty. In the two weeks he’d had your number– the two weeks that you guys had been doing random, stupid shit together– you had only made out with John Logan three times. And each time, it had only been making out. Nothing more.
As it turned out, John Logan really was a man of his word. He had no expectations for whatever the fuck was going on between you two. During the three times you two had made out, it had caught him by surprise each time. Not that he wasn’t into it; he was extremely into it. He just hadn’t been expecting any kissing.
You had been the one to initiate it each time, and he was there to happily oblige.
Which, unfortunately for you, only made him hotter.
Still, most of your hangouts would be what many would deem as boring. He’d pick you up from your practice most nights, and then you guys would get food; always your choice, even when you tried to make him choose. You’d sit in his car and talk about whatever– you had even gone on a rant one time on how a block of cheese was technically a loaf of milk, and the guy had nodded along with full seriousness as if you had just said the most logical thing he’d ever heard.
You’d also gone over to his house a few times, gotten to know the teammates that he lives with (his best friends). And their girlfriends, of course. As it turn outs, Allie and Hannah were fun as fuck. The number of times you guys had played Just Dance on the guys’ TV was astronomical for the limited amount of time you’d known the group; you had become fluent with the Rasputin dance. And, God, you didn’t even want to calculate the number of late nights you had stayed at the house, beating the absolute shit out of Tucker and Dean in Mario Kart with Allie.
You swore sometimes you had more fun with John’s friends than him.
You had even told John that to his face once; his response was to give you the most dramatic pout he could muster, which, in turn, caused you to make out with him for the third time. He was smiling after that.
Out of all your hangouts, though, most of them were dedicated to you doing something of importance while he just sat beside you and watched.
Such as right now.
You were in the Briar U library, flipping through one of your textbooks as you took notes for an upcoming midterm. You weren’t all that worried about it since the class was relatively easy, but you still wanted to study. Just in case.
You would’ve been nearly done with studying had a little leech not been bothering you the entire time.
You side-eyed Logan as he flipped through your stack of notecards, watching as he let out a bored breath of air. He then reached over, grabbing your pencil pouch, where he opened it, grabbing an orange sparkly pen from inside.
Instantly, you snatch it from his grip.
“Absolutely not.”
“What?” He asks, eyes wide in a playful manner. His boredom was swept away in a matter of seconds, and he straightened up, leaning closer to you.
“That’s my lucky pen, and I swear to everything if you took away its luck with your grubby hands–”
“Grubby?”
“– I will kill you.”
He smiles, something he can’t seem to stop doing around you, and sinks back into his chair. “Fine.”
“Good,” you say, returning to your notes. But not before you lift your eyes to look at him, where you mutter, “Just sit there and look pretty.”
“You think I’m pretty?”
“Why else would I have kept you around?”
He laughs quietly, “So my looks are all I’m good for?”
“That and your friends.”
“Wow.”
This time it’s you who smiles and you can’t stop yourself as you lean over, pressing a soft kiss to his cheek.
You’re quick to get back to the task at hand– studying– because if you don’t, you know you’ll see the dopey expression on John’s face. If you see that, you know that three make-out sessions will immediately turn into four. And you know that can’t happen in the middle of a fucking library where people are studying, so you distract yourself instantly, flipping back through the pages of your textbook.
It’s silent for a couple minutes as he watches you, completely content with where he’s at. But he sits up suddenly, seemingly remembering something, and then he says, “You should come over tonight.” His fingers were tapping against the wood of the table as he spoke, his eyes watching your hands as you paused on a page, a flash of confusion corrupting your expression. His eyes soften as a result, “Tucker said he’s trying out a new dish. You’d like it.”
“I can’t,” you respond without much thought, furrowing your brows as you flip back a few pages in your textbooks, and then in your notes. You’re trying to find a specific concept that you remember reading, but for some reason, you can’t find it anywhere; it’s the pure source of your confusion and it will stay that way until you find what you’re looking for. “The fuck?” You mumble, and then you look at John when he lets out a little snort, “Sorry– what’d you say?”
“You should come over,” he repeated, this time with a soft grin as he watched you. His eyes flickered over your face, scanning. It was something he always did when you spoke, like even the tiniest change in your facial expression was a portal to something holy.
“Oh, right,” you nod. You shake your head immediately after. “Can’t.”
“I heard.”
“Sorry,” you apologize, but your tone isn’t very sincere. Not as you flip a few more pages in your textbook, looking for the concept that seems to have vanished off the face of the earth. John doesn’t seem to care, his pretty smile still on full display.
“Why can’t you?”
“Late practice tonight,” you say, and then you turn to look at him, finally smiling at the softness in his eyes. “Y’know, for the championship in a couple days.”
“After, then. Come over. I’ll pick you up.”
“I won’t get out of practice until after 9. I’ve been sloppy with my saves these past few practices, and Coach Peters is really getting worried, so–”
“God, I love it when you talk volleyball to me,” he interrupts, to which you lose your smile and shoot him a harsh look because he knows what that does to you.
It was the reason for the other two times you had made out with him. And, fuck, it was about to be the fourth, because the man was unreasonably hot. You shake your head, deciding to scoot your chair away from his. Your self-restraint is quickly wavering, especially after you glance him over, allowing you to really absorb how good he looks in the sweatshirt he’s wearing. And, watching as you scoot away from him, he lets out a small sigh, scooting his chair closer. You give him a look, and he grins, scooting even closer, the side of his knee pressing against yours. Your eyes turn annoyed, and he innocently asks, “What?”
“You’re distracting me, and you know it,” you answer. “You do this on purpose.”
He hums, “So you’ll come over?”
“Yeah,” you say, as if it was the most obvious answer. When he smiles, you quickly add on, “only for the meal, though.”
“Obviously,” he nods with fake seriousness. “Why else would you?”
“Don’t get any ideas.”
“No ideas are coming to mind.”
“Good. Because I’m just coming over to eat.”
“Yep.”
“So no kissing.”
“No kissing?” He whines, completely dramatic and not at all serious. You can see him fighting to keep the smile from his face, “Why not?”
“Keep it in your pants, Logan.”
“Oh, it hasn’t left my pants. My pants have remained perfectly intact, thank you.”
You laugh, covering your mouth with your hand before you piss off the librarian. You shake your head, and you look at him with a level of affection that is far stronger than it should be with how little time you have known the hockey boy.
“You’re insufferable,” you whisper with a big smile.
“I think you love it.”
ˏˋ°•*⁀➷
You get out of practice at 9:34 p.m.
It’s later than you had been expecting, and you’re absolutely exhausted as you trudge over to John’s truck. You pull open the passenger side door, and he looks up from his phone with a soft smile as you toss your back to the floor, pulling yourself into your seat with a long sigh.
“You okay?”
“Sleepy,” you mumble, rubbing your eyes before turning your head to look over at him.
“You want me to take you back to your apartment?” He asks, his tone gentle as he watches you buckle your seatbelt. “You don’t need to come back to mine if you’re too tired. We can hang out another time–”
You shake your head, “No, I’m starving, and all I’ve been imagining for the past two hours is Tucker’s food.”
He laughs softly and nods, “Okay.”
When you finally get to the house that’s situated off campus, John cuts his engine, exits the vehicle, and walks around the front of his truck. He opens the passenger side door before you can even unbuckle, and you smile softly as he reaches over you, unbuckling the seatbelt for you.
“I could’ve done that myself, y’know?” You say, taking the hand that he held out for you. “I’m perfectly capable.”
He gave your hand a short squeeze as you hopped out of his truck, and he nodded, “I know. But you’re tired.”
Your eyes follow as he grabs your practice bag and slings it over his shoulder, using his foot to shut the passenger. His hand remains threaded with yours, and you him softly, “You’re playing gentleman tonight?”
“I’m always a gentleman. Get it straight.”
You laugh softly, giving him a slight nudge with your shoulder as you guys reach the front door. John opens it, and you walk in alongside him, instantly greeted with the delicious smell of whatever the hell Tucker cooked. Your stomach growled as a result, and your hand– still linked with John’s– squeezed his as you tugged him along to the kitchen, where his entire friend group was gathered, hanging out casually as they usually did.
Hannah notices you first, and she smiles softly, “How was practice?”
“Tiring,” you respond, finally releasing John’s hand. You slip into one of the island chairs next to Allie, and you thank Tucker quietly as he slips a bowl of fancy looking pasta in front of you. You grab your fork, twirl some pasta onto the prongs, and bite into it with a satisfied hum, “This is so fucking good, Tuck.”
He grins happily, “Logan said you would like it. It has parsley!”
“It’s delicious,” you nod, taking another bite. And as you do, you feel Logan come up behind you, his arms snaking around your front, his chin resting on the top of your head. You promptly ignore the warm feeling that flutters in your chest, eating more of the amazing pasta dish.
After finishing up the food, you and the rest of the group somehow migrate to the living room. You’re sitting on the couch beside Logan, tucked beneath his arm, your head resting against the crook of his shoulder as you watch Dean and Garrett play the worst game of silent charades that you had ever seen. Allie seemed borderline aggravated as she yelled out words that she thought aligned with the movements of the men only to then be pissed off because ‘Dean, what the fuck even was that?’.
You had to admit, it had been the funniest thing you’d witnessed in awhile.
And, you’re not sure when you fall asleep, all you know is that you’re woken sometime later in the evening by the soft touch of Logan, his eyes gentle as he carefully shifts you awake. You blink your eyes open, only to realize that all the others are heading to bed, and reach over Logan, grabbing his phone from his lap. You tap on the screen, checking the time; 12:17 a.m.
“Want me to drive you home?” He asks, using his thumb to swipe an eyelash from your cheek.
You groan in response.
“No?” He laughs, the hand that’s around your shoulders rubbing up and down your arm.
“Can I just stay here tonight?”
“Absolutely.”
He says the words immediately, and you’re caught entirely off guard as he stands from the couch, scooping you up in his arms with a scary amount of ease. Your eyes widen, arms scrambling to latch around his shoulders as you let out a quiet sound of panic, voice rushed as you breathe out, “John, what the fuck–”
“You’re tired.”
“Yeah, but I can still walk, you idiot. Oh my God, put me down–”
“We’re half way up the stairs and you want me to drop you?”
“If you drop me I’m never speaking to you again.”
He laughs again, this time filled with pure amusement as he continues scaling the stairs with you in his arms. Your arms stay hooked around his shoulders as he walks in the direction of his room, and carefully opens the door, stepping inside. Still, he doesn’t bother to put you down just yet. He holds you as he shuts the door behind him, his grip on you steady while he walks over to his desk, switching on the lamp.
When he finally sets you down, he plops you onto his mattress, not giving you much time before he’s draping himself over you with a satisfied sigh, and you can’t help the smallest giggle that leaves your chest, your hands pressing against his front.
“You’re crushing me.”
“Whoops.”
He makes no attempt to move, and again, you push against his shoulders, “You’re comfy, but I’m still in my volleyball clothes, and I want to change–” You stop suddenly, groaning with dismay.
Instantly, he pushes himself off you.
“What’s wrong?” He asks, eyebrows furrowed with concern.
“I have no clothes to change into.”
“Just wear my stuff,” he says, pulling himself from you completely. He stands with a stretch, and you watch as the bottom of his sweatshirt rises just enough for you to see a sliver of his stomach. Fuck, you were going to go feral.
You clear your throat, and clap your hands once, “Then chop chop, hockey boy.”
It only takes him a few seconds to grab you something to wear; he comes up with a pair of plaid boxer shorts and a Briar hockey sweatshirt with the number 22 on the back. As you take the clothing, you raise your eyebrow, “No other sweatshirts?”
“Nope, that’s my only clean one. Sorry.”
And the man’s a fucking liar because behind him, where is closet is just partially open, you can see at least four more regular sweatshirts hanging, completely clean.
“Huh,” you mutter. “You must be blind.”
“That’s the only clean one,” he repeats. “So, better go ahead and change into it.”
You laugh, shaking your head. Standing, you clutch the clothing in your hands, and as you pass him, you press a soft kiss to his lips– which, holy shit, it’s the first time you’ve ever done that as if it were second nature– and you mumble, “You really are insufferable, Logan.”
He hums against your lips, his hand going to your jaw as he presses a couple more soft kisses to you. You can’t help but smile, and you lean back, gazing up at him. You don’t say anything, just run a hand through his hair, and your smile turns giddy as you pull back fully, your bottom lip tucking beneath your teeth as you try to bite back your grin.
You point to the bathroom that’s connected to his room, “I’m gonna go change.”
He nods with a happy smile, responding in that soft voice that you realized he only uses with you, “Okay.”
Once changed, you exit the bathroom, finding John already in his bed, wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt. You walk over to his bed, not saying a thing as you plop down on his mattress, stretching out across his mattress.
“Cozy?” He asks as he turns on his side to face you.
“Yeah. It’d be better if we were cuddling, though.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. Not that I expect you to do that, though,” you say the words playfully. “I mean, I’ve never watched you play, but I assume you’re the same on and off the ice.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re not good at taking the shot, if you get what I mean–”
“Shut up,” he laughs, and he grabs your arm, gently tugging you to him. You grin, getting situated against his body, one of your legs draped across his while your arm rests over his torso, your head settled comfortably on his chest with your ear pressed right over the beating of his heart.
And you stay like this for a while, just until you’re on the brink of falling asleep. But before you can slip into that peaceful state of bliss, a question you had been meaning to ask– a question you had been too nervous to ask– comes to mind.
You’re not able to stop yourself from asking it.
“You wanna come to the championship and watch me play?” You question from where your head is still tucked against his chest, your voice whispers into the fabric of his sweatshirt and against his skin that lies beneath it. “It’s a three hour drive away.”
You feel him let out a soft breath of air, his fingers dancing gently along the fabric of his sweatshirt that covers the dip of your back. His voice is low and gravelly as he speaks, coated with a layer of sleepiness, “I want to, and I tried to find tickets, but they’re all sold out. Even Allie tried to find some and she couldn’t, which means I’m shit out of luck.”
“I’ve got tickets,” you say. “My teammates and I each got six tickets. Thought you might want them. You and your friends can go. They’re good seats.”
You can practically feel the frown in John’s expression as he asks quietly, “You’re not gonna give them to your family?”
“No,” You swallow thickly and do your best to keep your eyes shut because you know John’s looking at you now. His fingers stopped trailing along your spine as a result of the change in your tone and your body language, and you sigh against him. Might as well get it out of the way. “I just– I did everything I could to get out of my house as a teenager. To get away from my parents and the rest of my family. I don’t really feel like giving them a straight ticket back into my life, y’know?”
He’s quiet for a second before he nods, speaking softly, “Yeah, I know. I get it.”
“I’ve never had anyone in any of the seats during my games,” you continue. “I just thought it would be kinda nice to have that for once. You don’t need to, though. I know it’s really last minute, and–”
“No, I’ll go,” John interrupts you before you can finish. “We all will. Me and the guys. And Hannah and Allie. The six of us will go.”
“You sure?”
He laughs softly, tiredly, and nods, “Yeah, baby, I’m sure.”
Oh my God, you were going to fucking implode. But you hold in the desperate need to squeal like a dumbass, and instead bite the inside of your cheek to fight against the wide grin that wants to break out on your face.
After composing yourself enough to not make a complete and utter fool of yourself, you nod, and tilt your head up, pressing the softest kiss to his jaw.
He smiles as a result, the smallest shade of pink flushing his cheeks.
“Okay,” you whisper. “I’m excited.”
“Me too.”
ˏˋ°•*⁀➷
John Logan was your goodluck charm.
The guy had to be, because this was the best fucking game you had ever played in your life. Sure, the first set wasn’t the best for Briar U, but that was okay given you guys were playing against Penn State. The team had won every single game so far this season, so, in short words, they were good as hell. They’d also won the NCAA Championship for the past five years, which was devastatingly nerve wracking knowing you were against the best team D1 volleyball currently had.
Still, tonight, you and your teammates came with a mission; you were going to win.
And, fuck, was it looking promising.
Despite Penn State winning the first set, Briar U had won the other two.
They weren’t wipeouts, but that didn’t matter, because you had won them.
That meant that if you and your teammates somehow managed to win this fourth set, you’d place Briar as the fucking NCAA Women’s Volleyball Champions for the first time in over ten years. It’d be an insane feat, and you had to fight from getting too excited about the possibility, especially because right now, it was looking very likely.
So far, you’ve saved every stray ball, hitting it back to your teammates or over the net with ease. As you played, your smile never left your face. Not even as you dove for the ball, saving it as you slid across the polished wood floor.
That didn’t mean Penn wasn’t doing good, though. Because they absolutely were.
They were playing with a fierceness of a team who wanted this win just as badly as you did; it felt like an even playing field, and while that could be fun, tonight it was terrifying.
Right now, the score was 22 to 23. The set was almost over, and it was in Briar’s favor. If you guys got two more points, you were winning the match. If you won, you’d be the first captain in over ten years to lead Briar to a volleyball victory and that’s exactly what you were planning on doing.
No way did you fight this hard only to lose.
You were hovering near the back of the court, watching as Jade surged forward, tapping the ball over to the right of the court. Instantly, your teammates rallied toward the ball, leaving the left side of the court completely unguarded, and your eyes lingered on the ball, watching as Louisa sprinted forward, feet fast as she jumped up, spiking it over the net.
The middle hitter on the Penn State team hurried forward, blocking the spike with a bump of her arms, and you watched as the ball practically hovered over the net.
Right to the spot that was unguarded.
You’re not sure how you moved as fast as you did– one second, you were at the back right of the court, and the next, you were flying in the upper left, body in the air as you threw yourself forward, your right hand bumping the ball back to your teammates just before it hit the ground on your side of the net.
Your body hit the floor with a thud, but you couldn’t find it in yourself to care, because the moment you had successfully executed the move, your side of the room erupted in loud cheers. It shook the floor as you stood up, and you didn’t waste any time as you sprinted back to the center of the court.
Just in time, too, because the setter of Penn State sent a lethal spike in your direction, and you dropped to a knee, forearms out as the ball bounced from your skin and back over the net. Two saves in a matter of seconds, and you could literally see your coaches losing it from pure happiness in the corner.
You probably looked like a cocky motherfucker, your lips upturned in the smallest of smiles as you shuffled backward, and then dove sideways, saving yet another ball from being spiked into the ground.
And yeah, you were definitely right– John Logan was totally your lucky charm tonight because holy fuck, you were even impressing yourself.
More cheers sounded throughout your side of the room, increasing tenfold as Liliana jumped, spiking the ball down to the back corner of Penn State’s side, earning Briar U their 24th point of the fourth set.
It was an exhilarating sound, and you laughed with pure joy as you ran over to Liliana, the rest of the girls on your side of the court meeting halfway. You huddled with pure glee; one more point, and you guys were winning.
All you needed was one more point.
Leaving the huddle, you guys got back into your positions. You watched as Macey served the ball, starting what would hopefully be the final round of the night.
The Penn girls were quick to rally on the ball; they moved it over the net with ease, and you watched as Jade ran, hitting it back over the net. It went back and forth for a bit, the round intense. It felt like it was purely silent save for the cheers from supporters that erupted when either side had a good save or hit.
You watched as the libero for Penn bump the ball with her wrist, causing it to go over the net. And then you see as the entire team moves away, going near the back of the court, like they knew what the next play was going to be; a spike ball.
Except it wasn’t that at all.
No, it’s the complete opposite, because you’re in the exact spot that you’re meant to be in for this current play. You’re close enough that the ball clearly belongs to you at this moment, and you run up, arms carefully bumping the ball over the net.
It barely catches the top before it topples over to Penn State’s side.
The girls hadn’t been expecting it; they’re unable to move fast enough from where they had migrated to the back of the court with the expectation that Liliana or Louisa were going to spike the ball over the net, a move that had earned you guys many wins this season.
They hadn’t been expecting you to run up and hit the ball with your forearms in such a way that it only just made it over the net.
You watched as the volleyball hit the floor on Penn’s side.
Holy fuck.
You’d scored the winning point.
You can’t even process the fucking thing, because you’re instantly bombarded by your teammates– ones both on and off the court– as they swarm into a pile around you, the deafening cheers of the crowd blocking out the cheers from your own teammates who stood around you.
You guys are jumping up and down, and you’re not even sure when you stop, because one moment you’re celebrating with your teammates and coaches, and the next you’re following after your teammates, running towards the people who had come to watch you in the stands.
And you find him instantly.
John Logan is standing in the front row– because, yes, the seats were great– with his friends next to him, all of them grinning ear to ear as they cheered for you.
Your feet moved like they had a mind of their own; you’re sprinting to John like he’s the only thing you’re even capable of thinking about at the moment, and that’s because he is.
When you finally reach him, you practically leap into John’s arms, your hands threading around the back of his neck with a tight grip, and you have the widest smile on your face as you press your lips firmly against his.
He reciprocates the kiss instantly, hands clutching your waste as he leans down to match your lips.
It’s soft, not anything over the top, but fuck does it have you wanting more.
As you pull away, you stare up at John with an excited spark in your eye.
“So kissing’s a thing we do regularly now?” He asked, the happiest grin you’d ever seen on his face. “That’s okay now?”
“Yeah,” you nod, your grin matching his. “I’d say so.”
summary: dean will do anything to win you back, but winning you over proves harder than why he bargained for. (5.9k)
pairing: dean di laurentis x reader
content warning: relationship dysfunction, dean di laurentis is a mess, yearning, jealousy, language, alcohol, hurt/comfort.
authors note: this is for everyone who wanted to see how taking him back would play out. this may be the longest piece i’ve wrote on record but i couldn’t let this man get off so easily…
part one.
the tail-lights of suni's honda civic bled into the darkness of the gravel driveway, leaving nothing behind but the exhaust fumes and a hollow, ringing silence.
dean stood frozen under the dim glow of the porch light, his hand still half-raised in the air as if he could somehow catch the car and pull it back.
the cold night air slapped against his face, a brutal contrast to the suffocating heat of the house behind him, but he couldn't feel it.
his mouth was slightly open and his throat was completely dry.
i am officially withdrawing my terms.
the words repeated in his head, sharp and clinical, cutting right through the lingering buzz of the alcohol in his system.
dean di laurentis didn't get left hanging on driveways.
dean di laurentis didn't get tongue-tied.
he was the guy who always had the perfect pivot, the effortless laugh, the smooth reassurance that smoothed over any wrinkle.
but as he stared at the empty space where you had just been standing, a sickening wave of realization crashed over him.
he hadn't been playing a game.
you had just seen right through the defense mechanism he had been using his entire life.
the heavy front door thudded open behind him, letting out a brief burst of blaring music before closing again.
two sets of footsteps crunched on the gravel.
"hey, man."
a heavy hand came down on his shoulder.
dean flinched, snapping his head around to see tucker standing there, his face tight with a mixture of pity and disappointment.
right next to him was beau maxwell. his arms crossed over his chest and his usual laid-back energy completely gone, replaced by a rare, dead-serious frown.
"i told you, dean," tucker said quietly, looking down the empty road. "i warned you that she doesn't do the whole half-in, half-out thing."
"i wasn't half-in," dean snapped, his voice suddenly raw, a dangerous edge cracking through his usual easy-going demeanor.
he ripped his shoulder away from tucker's grip, running a frantic hand through his blonde hair. "i was going to tell her tonight. i was waiting for the house to clear out so i could ask her to stay. permanently."
beau let out a low, heavy sigh, shaking his head. "then why didn't you say it in front of everyone? why did you let her watch you flirt with some sophomore if she's the one you wanted? you can't treat a girl like a secret and then expect her to treat you like a priority."
tucker nodded in agreement. "beau's right. you let her think she was just another hookup that half the campus has already been with. you can't blame her for cutting you off."
dean quickly opened his mouth to defend himself.
he wanted to explain that the girl by the keg meant absolutely nothing, that it was just muscle memory.
it just the casual persona he put on so nobody looked too closely at how much he actually cared.
but the words died in his throat.
i know when someone is just trying to win over a crowd.
you had called it.
every single bit of it.
he had been so terrified of admitting, even to himself, that he had finally found the right girl. the one he had been passively waiting for his entire life.
but he had treated her like a secret and in doing so, he had completely destroyed the only real thing he had.
"i fucked up, guys," dean whispered, his voice dropping into a register they had never heard from him before.
it was entirely stripped of pride, heavy with a terrifying, sudden desperation. "i really, really fucked up."
beau looked at tucker, then back at dean, his expression softening into something deeply sympathetic. "yeah. you did. and if i know her? she's not the type to give you a second chance just for the sake of it. you're going to have to actually work for this one."
dean didn't go back inside the party.
he walked straight up the stairs to his room, locked the door, and sat on the edge of his bed in the dark.
the scent of your coconut shampoo still lingered faintly on his pillow.
.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.
the hum of the tires against the asphalt was the only sound inside suni's car for the first three miles.
after the oppressive, vibrating bass from earlier, the silence inside the sedan felt less like an absence of noise and more like a physical weight, settling deep into your bones.
you blankly stared out the passenger window, watching the streetlamps bleed past in long, blurry streaks of amber.
"do you want me to say it?" suni asked quietly, her brown eyes fixed on the dark road ahead.
her hands were gripped tight on the steering wheel, still vibrating with that protective adrenaline.
"say what?" you murmured, your forehead resting against the cool glass.
"that you are an absolute fucking badass," she said, a small, fierce smile tugging at the corner of her lips.
"i mean it. people don't just walk away from dean. girls usually dissolve into a puddle when he looks in their general direction, and you just destroyed him on his own driveway."
you let out a breath that was half-laugh, half-sigh, feeling the tight knot in your chest loosen just a fraction. "i don't feel like a badass. i feel hollow."
"that's just the detox," suni promised gently, reaching over to give your knee a supportive squeeze before putting both hands back on the wheel.
"it's the sugar crash after two months of eating nothing but empty calories. it'll pass."
she was right.
it was a crash.
but as you pulled up to your apartment building, the relief you expected to feel was shadowed by a lingering, dull ache.
you had drawn the line. you had won the argument.
so why did it feel like you were the one recovering from a blow?
.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.
four days passed in a tense, quiet limbo. you stayed away from the standard student hangouts.
you kept your head down, and entirely avoided the athletic side of campus.
which was much easier said than done.
it was actually hannah wells who broke the radio silence when you bumped into each other at work.
you two weren't particularly close outside of your shifts, but you had always been good coworkers, and she gave you a sympathetic look the second she saw you.
she admitted right off the bat that garrett had practically begged her to feel you out and see if you would be willing to hear dean's side of things.
but hannah made it clear she wasn't actually pushing his agenda.
you let her know, gently but firmly, that you just didn't want to hear him out right now.
she nodded immediately, completely understanding.
.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.
you were halfway through your shift at malone's when the bell over the front door chimed and beau maxwell walked in from the cold.
the dinner rush hadn't started yet, leaving the restaurant washed in a warm, lazy quiet.
soft music drifted through the speakers. behind the bar, hannah was busy polishing glasses, while allie was sitting in one of the booths near the window. she was seemingly looking over her homework but clearly tuned into the room.
you looked up from the hostess stand and immediately narrowed your eyes.
beau rarely came here unless dean dragged him.
and judging by the guilty, deeply uncomfortable look on his face, this definitely wasn't a social visit.
"it's that bad, huh?" you asked dryly before he could even open his mouth to speak.
beau blinked. "what?"
"you drew the short straw." you crossed your arms. "dean sent you to talk to me."
hannah stopped wiping her glass, an amused smirk spreading across her face. the fact that beau's expression instantly gave him away nearly made you laugh.
"oh my god," you said, an incredulous smile finally breaking across your face. "he did."
"to be fair," beau said carefully, raising his hands in surrender, "i volunteered. mostly because i couldn't take another night of him pacing the living room floor like a caged animal."
allie leaned out of her booth slightly. "wait. dean di laurentis is sending representatives now?"
hannah leaned her elbows on the bar, looking entirely entertained. "please tell me he at least prepared a speech."
beau groaned, rubbing a hand over his face. "you people are evil."
"no," you corrected lightly, grabbing a stack of menus from the counter beside you, "he's pure evil."
that earned you a reluctant laugh from beau. he shoved his hands into his pockets, looking both amused and slightly helpless.
"okay," he admitted. "maybe this does look a little pathetic."
"a little?" allie echoed from her booth, shaking her head. "beau, i don't know why you're doing this for him."
hannah pointed a bar towel at you. "his approval ratings are in the toilet."
you pressed your lips together, fighting another smile.
it was ridiculous.
dean was apparently moping around because you stopped answering his texts.
a month ago, the idea would've satisfied you.
now it mostly just felt surreal.
beau's expression softened as your smile faded slightly. "i've known dean a long time," he said quietly. "and i've honestly never seen him like this before."
you focused on straightening the menus in your hands even though they were already perfectly aligned. "beau—"
"no, seriously." he leaned against the hostess stand, dropping his voice. "the guy is a disaster. garrett says he's playing like crap at practice because he's distracted all the time. coach yelled at him so hard yesterday his face literally turned purple.”
“and logan threatened to throw dean's phone into a lake because he keeps checking if you texted him back every thirty seconds. he doesn't sleep. he just... he stares at his phone."
a reluctant laugh slipped out before you could stop it, but it died quickly.
"this is insane," you muttered, covering your face briefly with your hand. "he's literally running a pr campaign."
"that's actually exactly what tucker called it," beau admitted.
the amusement faded entirely after a second, though, something heavier settling back into your chest. because underneath all the ridiculousness... there was still hurt.
a deep, aching bruise left by a boy who thought everything in life came easy.
you slowly lowered your hand. "did he send you because he thinks if enough people tell me he's miserable, i'll magically forget why i left?"
the teasing atmosphere immediately evaporated. beau straightened slightly, his voice turning serious.
"no." he shook his head.
"i came because he knows he hurt you. and because for once in his life, he's too scared to make it worse. he's terrified that if he pushes you, you'll completely erase him."
that caught you off guard.
even hannah went quiet behind the bar, returning to her glasses. you looked down at the menus in your hands, tracing your thumb absentmindedly along the edges.
beau hesitated before continuing. "he's not trying to charm his way out of this anymore," he said carefully. "honestly? i think that's freaking him out the most. he doesn't know how to exist without his armor."
before you could respond, the front door opened again and a group of customers entered, breaking the moment apart. hannah immediately pushed off the bar, professional mode clicking back in. "right, back to it before della catches us."
allie slid back into her booth to give the customers room. beau stepped away from the hostess stand, giving you one last careful look. "i'm not saying you should forgive him," he said gently. "that's your call. but i do think losing you finally forced him to become a person instead of just a personality."
and annoyingly enough, that line stayed with you long after he left.
.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.
by the end of the week, the hurt had hardened into a reckless, heavy spike of anger.
suni practically forced you out the door to the pre-game mixer at the phi kappa house. "you need to show up, look stunning which isn't hard for you, and prove you aren't hiding in your room crying over a some hockey player," she insisted.
the house was a sensory overload—a wall of thumping bass, sticky floors, and sweat-fogged windows.
it took exactly five minutes for the room to feel subtly dialed into your arrival. across the crowded living room, the hockey team was gathered near the back patio.
and right in the center was dean.
he looked exhausted, his gaze drifting aimlessly until logan nudged him, pointing in your direction. the moment dean's blue eyes locked onto yours, his entire posture changed.
his chest rose sharply, and he took an instinctive step forward, completely abandoning his conversation.
his eyes flared with a sudden, desperate hope.
you felt the invisible weight of the room watching, waiting for the classic fallout. a dark, defiant spark ignited in your chest.
dean had spent months keeping your relationship a secret, acting like a casual observer while he entertained a crowd.
two can play that game.
you deliberately tore your eyes away from him, turning your gaze toward liam. liam was a handsome football player who had been hovering in your orbit since the start of the academic year.
he was tall, built, and more than happy to have your sudden, undivided attention.
out of the corner of your eye, you saw dean freeze. the hope on his face shattered.
you leaned in close to liam, letting your laughter trail off into something softer, low and intimate.
you stepped directly into his space, your hand sliding deliberately up his arm to rest against his shoulder, your fingers brushing the nape of his neck.
liam's eyes darkened instantly with surprise and heat. his hand came up, wrapping firmly around your waist and pulling you flush against him.
across the room, dean looked like he had been physically struck.
you could see his jaw clenching so hard a muscle jumped in his cheek, his knuckles turning stark white as his grip tightened around his red cup.
garrett muttered something in his ear, placing a grounding hand on his shoulder, but dean brushed him off as his eyes burned into you with a raw, bleeding agony.
you didn't look back at him. instead, you leaned up on your toes, your eyes dropping to liam's lips.
"you're incredibly beautiful tonight," liam murmured, his voice thick, his thumb sliding beneath the edge of your top, tracing the bare skin of your hip.
"thank you," you breathed out, tilting your head up slightly. "liam?"
"mhm?"
"kiss me."
he didn't hesitate. liam leaned down, slanting his mouth over yours.
he didn't hold back at all. his lips were warm and demanding, his hand pressing firmly into the small of your back to hold you tight against his chest.
you let your eyes close and leaned into the weight of him, wrapping your arms around his neck, deepening the kiss into something slow, deliberate, and deeply sensual.
you made sure it lingered, playing your part perfectly for the crowd.
and for the specific boy breaking apart by the doors.
a low ripple of whispers washed through the immediate room. the kiss was thick with heat, but it didn't ignite that familiar, electric ache you only ever felt with a certain stupid idiot.
when you finally pulled back, liam was breathing heavily, a dazed, smug smile tugging at his lips.
you offered him a quiet, heavy-lidded smile before finally looking past his shoulder.
the satisfaction immediately turned to ash in your throat.
dean looked physically ill. the fierce, possessive anger had completely drained out of him, leaving behind a hollow, entirely defeated devastation.
his face was completely pale, his eyes wide as he stared at you. it was like he was looking at the end of his life.
watching you give someone else that kind of intimacy had entirely undone him.
dean's fingers slacked. his cup slipped from his hand, clattering against the floor and splashing beer across his shoes, but he didn't even notice.
he turned on his heel and blindly pushed through the crowd, fleeing out the back doors into the freezing night air.
beau shot you a heavy, disappointed look before turning to follow him out.
you stood frozen beside liam, the adrenaline completely evaporating, leaving behind a bitter, hollow ache in your chest. you had hurt dean exactly the way he hurt you.
so why did you feel like throwing up?
.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.
dean didn't find you until two weeks later. it took him two full weeks after that party to gather the courage to approach you again. when he finally did, it wasn't at a party, or in his bedroom, or under dim lights where he could press his mouth against yours and make you forget.
it was the middle of the afternoon in the campus library.
you were sitting cross-legged in one of the armchairs near the back windows, a stack of annotated articles spread across the table beside you.
for a long minute, he just stood at the end of the aisle.
god, he looked awful. the sharp jawline you used to trace was covered in a rough, uneven stubble. his signature silver-tongued confidence was entirely absent.
you sensed him before he even spoke. your eyes lifted slowly from your laptop. no warmth or softening. just... nothing.
dean flinched. "hey," he said, his voice raw and stripped of its usual smooth cadence.
you looked back down at your laptop screen, your voice flat. "dean."
he swallowed hard, stepping closer, his hands shoved deep into his pockets as if to keep himself from reaching out. "can we talk for maybe a second? please. just... two minutes. i'll leave right after, i swear."
"i'm really busy right now, dean."
"i know. i know you are." his voice cracked. he hesitated, his eyes flashing with a sudden, sharp spike of residual pain from the party. he swallowed hard, trying to keep his composure, but his voice shook. "are you... are you seeing him? liam?"
you didn't even look up from your screen. "that's really none of your business."
"none of my—" dean let out a bitter, breathy laugh, his eyes swimming. he leaned slightly over the table, his voice dropping to a harsh, desperate whisper. "that was low, you know. even for you. putting on a show like that in front of everyone just to rub my face in it?"
you finally shut your laptop softly, leaning back in your chair and crossing your arms.
you scoffed at him, a cold, mocking sound that cut right through his defense.
"low?" you repeated, your voice slicing through him. "you should worry less about who i'm kissing, dean, and worry a lot more about yourself. you don't get to lecture me about public displays when you practically pioneered them."
the reality of your words hit him like a physical punch to his ribs. he actually took a half-step back, his chest heaving as the hypocrisy collapsed on him.
he was desperate to know if you were talking to liam. he was paralyzed by the thought that you had moved on, but he knew he had no right to ask.
"i'm sorry," he whispered, the defensive edge completely evaporating, leaving him entirely exposed. "you're right. i have no right. i just... i think i genuinely don't know how to handle this."
"i think you genuinely don't understand why you hurt me in the first place," you countered calmly, the honesty of it cutting deeper than your anger ever could.
"you understand that i left. you understand that your bed is empty and your ego is bruised. but i don't think you actually understood what it felt like to stand next to you and constantly feel temporary. to feel like a placeholder until someone better, or flashier, caught your eye."
dean went completely still.
"i liked you so much, dean," you admitted quietly. it made you almost sick to say it. the words tasted bitter and heavy as they left your tongue, but unfortunately it was true.
"it was enough to make excuses for things i normally wouldn't tolerate. i let myself believe you actually cared, and you made me feel stupid for it. you treated my feelings like they were disposable. i'm not doing it anymore. i'm done."
"please," he whispered, his voice dropping to a raw, desperate plea. "don't say it's over. just give me something to fix. tell me what to do."
"there's nothing to do," you said, your heart aching behind the wall you had built, but you forced your voice to remain steady. "i just need you to leave."
he stood there for a long, agonizing beat, looking at you like a man watching his life sentence being handed down.
finally, he closed his eyes, took a shaky, ragged breath, and nodded.
"okay," he sighed, his shoulders hunched in complete defeat. "okay. i'm sorry."
he turned around and walked away, his heavy footsteps fading down the library aisle, leaving you alone with a crushing, heavy silence.
.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.
two more weeks passed. then three.
if dean's initial reaction to the "breakup" was a loud, messy public moping tour, his reaction to the library confrontation was a total blackout.
the campus gossip machine slowed down because dean stopped giving them material.
he wasn't partying.
he wasn't hovering at the edges of your vision.
but he hadn't given up instead he had just changed his tactics.
the loud gestures were replaced by quiet, undeniable consistency.
every tuesday and thursday morning—the days you had an 10.00 am seminar on the opposite side of campus—there was a large vanilla latte waiting for you at the barista counter, already paid for.
no note.
just your exact, complicated order.
when you tried to refuse it, the barista just shrugged. "he said if you don't take it, i have to throw it out. every day."
you left it on the counter the first three times.
by the fourth time, the cold winter air bit too hard, and you took it.
it tasted like an apology.
then came the hockey games. suni dragged you to the friday night game against yale.
you sat twelve rows up, determined to look indifferent.
but the moment the team skated onto the ice, it was clear dean wasn't playing for the scouts or the crowd anymore.
he played with a brutal, self-punishing intensity. and when he scored the game-winning goal in the third period, the stadium erupted.
normally, dean would skate a lap, flashing his devastating smile to the student section, soaking in the god-like adoration.
instead, he skated straight to the center line, stopped, and looked directly up into the stands. right at you.
he didn't smile. he just held your gaze for three agonizing seconds, chest heaving, before skating back to the bench.
"okay," suni muttered beside you, watching him go. "that was... actually kind of miserable. he didn't even wink at the girls."
.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.
the next afternoon, you were heading out of the science building when a shadow fell over you.
you braced yourself, expecting to see blue eyes and a desperate expression, but when you looked up, it was tucker.
he stepped right into your pace, unceremoniously slinging his heavy arm over your shoulders, pulling you briefly into his side to shield you from a sudden blast of freezing wind.
"hey," tucker said quietly, giving your shoulder a firm, reassuring squeeze before letting his arm drop back to his side. "you got a minute? i'm not here on his orders, i swear. he doesn't even know i'm talking to you."
you didn't walk away, but you still kept your guard up. "tucker, if this is about dean—"
"it is," he interrupted gently. he gestured toward a quiet bench under a bare oak tree.
once you both sat down, he leaned his elbows on his knees, looking at you with complete sincerity.
"i'm not here to tell you he's miserable, because you already know that, and honestly, he deserves to be. but he's always been the guy who keeps one foot out the door because he thinks if he doesn't fully commit, nothing can actually hurt him."
you let out a bitter, breathy sigh, looking down at your boots. "so i'm just supposed to wait around while he plays psychologist with himself?"
"no," tucker said firmly, catching your eye.
"absolutely not. you did the right thing by walking away. you forced him to look in a mirror, and he hated what he saw. but what i'm trying to tell you, as your friend he's not trying to trick you back. he's genuinely terrified because he realized his own cowardice cost him the only real thing he's ever wanted."
tucker leaned back slightly against the bench. "i've never seen dean look at a girl the way he looks at you. he's not trying to smooth things over anymore, he's just trying to figure out how to be a man you could actually trust. i'm not asking you to take him back. i'm just asking you not to completely write him off before you let him speak."
you sat in silence for a long moment, the weight of tucker's words sinking deep into your chest.
tucker wasn't an enabler. he was your friend, and he was the moral compass of that friend group.
if he was defending the sincerity of dean's change, it had to mean something.
"thank you, tuck," you murmured softly.
he gave you a brief, supportive nod, standing up from the bench. "just think about it, okay? see you around."
you watched him walk away, your mind a chaotic blur.
.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.
a few days later, you were sitting on the couch in your apartment, staring blankly at a textbook, when suni dropped a mug of tea onto the coffee table in front of you.
"you're thinking about him," she said flatly, crossing her arms as she leaned against the back of the chair.
you let out a long sigh, rubbing your temples. "i don't want to be. but it's been a month, suni. he's not stopping. every time i turn around, there's a coffee, or he's clearing out of a room the second i walk into it so i don't feel uncomfortable. and his friends are trying to reason with me. it's infuriating."
"why is it infuriating?"
"because it's working," you admitted, your voice cracking. "it's making me remember why i fell for him before he started acting like a coward. but i'm terrified. if i let him back in, what happens when he gets bored of making amends? what happens when the crowd calls his name again?"
suni searched your face, seeing the deep, defensive armor you had built. she slid onto the couch next to you, pulling your hand into hers.
"then you make him earn the right to even ask that question," suni said softly, squeezing your fingers.
"you don't fold just because he's acting like a human being now. that's the baseline expectation, not a reward. if you want to talk to him, talk to him. but don't let him off the hook until you are 100% sure he knows he's lucky to breathe the same air as you."
just promise me you walk away if he slips back into his old habits." she sighed holding onto your hands.
"i promise," you whispered, a sudden wave of clarity washing over you.
.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.
you didn't go to the rink to find him.
it was close to midnight when you found yourself walking toward the athletic center to drop off a borrowed, heavily annotated textbook for hannah.
but as you stepped into the corridor, the muffled, echoing thwack of a puck against boards drew you toward the main arena doors.
armed with suni and tucker's advice echoing in your head and a tug in your chest you couldn't ignore anymore, you pulled open the heavy side doors of the rink.
the stadium was dark, except for the bright, stark floodlights illuminating the pristine white sheet of ice.
dean was alone.
he was stripped down to his practice jersey and skates. there was no crowd to impress, no scouts watching, no teammates to joke with.
it was just him, a puck, and a net.
he was doing suicide drills—skating full sprint to the blue line, stopping hard enough to spray a cascade of ice shavings, skating back, and doing it again.
he was panting, his blonde hair soaked with sweat, his movements driven by a furious, desperate energy.
he was trying to skate away from his own head.
you stood by the player's bench, your arms crossed, watching him coolly.
"you're slacking on your defense di laurentis," you called out. your voice echoed sharply in the cavernous, empty arena.
dean froze.
his skates dug into the ice with a harsh screech, breaking the silence.
he snapped his head around, his chest heaving as he stared at you.
for a second, he looked entirely paralyzed, as if he thought he was hallucinating.
"you're here," he breathed, slowly skating toward the boards. he stopped a few feet away, looking up from the ice.
"i'm here," you said softly, your tone steady, giving him absolutely nothing to work with. no smile or softness. you unlatched the heavy wooden door of the player's bench. "i think you've done enough pacing around campus, dean. come here."
before he could answer, you took a tentative step out onto the ice. you were wearing regular winter boots, completely unequipped for a freshly zambonied sheet of ice.
"wait, wait, hold on—" dean warned, his eyes widening in alarm.
naturally, you didn't listen. your heel hit a patch of smooth ice, and your balance instantly vanished. your arms flailed as you slipped backward, a short gasp escaping your throat.
but you didn't hit the ice.
dean moved with the terrifying speed of a professional athlete. in a fraction of a second, he closed the distance, his strong gloved hands catching you right around the waist. he hauled you against his chest, his skates digging hard into the ice to anchor both of your weights.
you gasped, your hands automatically flying up to grip his broad shoulders. you were pressed flush against him, the cool scent of the ice and his familiar cologne enveloping you completely.
"gotcha," dean whispered, his breath puffing white in the cold air.
he didn't let go.
his hands stayed firmly clamped around your waist, pulling you so close that you could feel the rapid, thumping beat of his heart against your chest.
he was looking down at you like you were the only thing left in the entire world, his eyes intense, wide, and bright with unshed tears.
no armor. just dean.
but even wrapped in his arms, you kept your gaze sharp.
you didn't melt….. just yet.
"you're a fucking idiot," you murmured, your voice level and direct. "you really messed up, dean."
"i know," he whispered, his voice cracking as a tear finally slipped down his cheek, cutting through the sweat on his face. he didn't even try to brush it away.
"i'm the biggest idiot. i ruined everything. the night you left... i sat in my room and i realized i've spent my whole life making sure nobody could ever reject me by making sure i never fully committed to anything.” he continued.
“and then i met you. and i was so terrified of how much power you had over me that i tried to make you small so i could feel big."
he took a shaky breath, his grip tightening around your waist as if you might vanish if he let go.
"seeing you with liam? it nearly killed me. but the worst part wasn't jealousy. the worst part was realizing i was the one who drove you into his arms. i am so sorry. i am so, so sorry for making you feel like a secret. i swear to god, i love you. i don't want anyone else. i just want you."
you stood steady in his hold, letting the weight of his words hang in the freezing air.
your heart was pounding, but you kept your hands firm against his shoulders, maintaining your boundary.
"words are easy for you, dean," you said quietly.
"you've always been good with a crowd. you've always known exactly what to say to smooth things over. i don't want a public spectacle. i care about what this is."
"this isn't a performance," he choked out, his shoulders hunching in complete defeat, entirely exposed to you. "tell me what to do. anything. i don't care how long it takes."
you looked at him for a long moment, watching the genuine, stripped-back desperation in his eyes. only then did you let a very small, guarded smile touch your lips. it wasn't a total surrender, but it was a crack in the ice.
"i'm not ready to give you a second chance," you told him firmly, your voice unwavering.
"and i'm definitely not ready to forget how you treated me. but i am willing to stop running so if you want to try and earn my trust back, you can start by taking me on a real date. next friday. and if you slip back into your old habits even once? i'm gone. do you understand me?"
a breathless, stunned laugh escaped dean's lips. it wasn't his usual confident chuckle.
it was a sound of pure, unadulterated relief, heavy with the realization of just how close he had come to losing you.
"yes," he whispered fiercely, his eyes shining as he looked down at you. "yes, absolutely. whatever you want. however long it takes. i'll be exactly who you need me to be."
you let your eyes drop to his lips, then back to his eyes, finally allowing yourself to relax against his chest. "show me."
dean didn't hesitate.
he leaned down and captured your lips in a deep, desperate, passionate kiss.
it wasn't the smooth, practiced kiss of a guy trying to charm his way into a girl's room.
it was heavy with weeks of longing, raw with the terror of almost losing you, and overflowing with a profound, aching relief.
he poured everything he couldn't put into words into the press of his mouth against yours, his fingers tangling in the hair at the nape of your neck, holding you to him as if he could bind your paths together right then and there.
when he finally pulled back, just an inch, his forehead rested against yours. both of you were breathing heavily, the white puffs of your breath mingling together in the cold air.
dean let out a soft, shaky laugh, a brilliant, breathtaking smile finally spreading across his handsome face—the first real smile he had had in weeks.
"so," dean murmured, his thumb gently tracing your jawline, though his eyes still held that cautious, vulnerable edge. "does this mean my approval ratings are finally going up?"
you let out a genuine laugh, but you didn't let him entirely off the hook. "don't push your luck, di laurentis. you are still on probation."
"i'll take it," he whispered, before leaning right back down to kiss you again, your laughter echoing beautifully in the empty arena.
summary: you’re done being dean di laurentis’ favourite secret. (1.9k)
pairing: dean di laurentis x reader
content: mild sexual references, language, mild gaslighting, angst, alcohol.
authors note: it’s finally nice to write something small outside of the pitt (even though i’m going straight back because i know where home is).
part two.
the sound from the speakers was vibrating right through the soles of your sneakers. it’s steady, rhythmic pounding matched the chaotic energy of the boys’ house.
it was a friday night after a massive home-game win, which meant the place was absolutely bursting at the seams.
the air was a thick, humid mix of cheap beer, expensive cologne, and the distinct scent of sweat and victory. in the living room, a makeshift beer-pong tournament was underway.
logan was standing on a coffee table, a red cup raised high in the air, loudly arguing the rules of "bitch cup" with a group of terrified-looking lacrosse players while a crowd of students cheered him on.
over by the crowded hallway couch, garrett graham had his arm draped loosely around hannah wells. his head was tilted back as he laughed at something she said, completely oblivious to the rest of the party around them.
they looked solid and steady. everything you wished you had.
instead, you leaned against the wall near the hallway, a lukewarm red solo cup dangling from your fingers, watching the kitchen.
next to you, your best friend suni nudged your shoulder with her elbow, taking a sip of her own drink.
"don't look now," she murmured, her eyes darting toward the island, "but your resident heartbreaker is putting on a clinic."
you didn't need to look because you already knew.
dean di laurentis was in peak form tonight. his hair was perfectly messy, the sleeves of his cardigan pushed up to his elbows to show off his toned forearms.
that ridiculously charming, dimpled smile was plastered on his face as he laughed with a group of sophomores.
he looked effortless.
he always looked effortless.
but tonight, it didn't make your stomach flutter. it just made it twist into a tight, painful knot.
because you knew exactly what happened would happen after the party ended.
for two months, you had lived in the quiet, intoxicating orbit of his bedroom.
you knew the exact weight of his body pressing you down into the mattress. the heat of his skin radiating against yours, and the heavy, breathless way he murmured your name into the hollow of your throat when the rest of the world faded away.
he possessed a devastating, patient kind of touch.
his hands that knew exactly how to trace your spine until you were helpless under him, lips that memorized yours like a language only the two of you spoke.
it was addictive, beautiful, and utterly consuming.
but it always happened behind closed doors, in the dark. it left you with the growing, heavy realization that while he was consuming your entire mind, you were just a recurring chapter in his very long, very public book.
your major required you to analyse empty rhetoric and spotting when someone was using smooth talking to hide a lack of substance.
you were literally being graded on your ability to see through an operator.
yet, every weekend, you walked right into this house and let dean do exactly that to you.
.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.
just past dean's shoulder, you caught sight of john tucker standing by the fridge, a bottle of water in his hand.
tucker had become one of your closest friends since your freshman year despite the two you being complete opposites.
the second he noticed you looking, his face softened into an expression of quiet, heavy sympathy.
tucker had warned you. the moment he had noticed dean eyeing you at a different party a few months ago, he had pulled you aside in the hallway of this very house.
"he's a really good guy, i swear," tucker had told you gently, rubbing the back of his neck, his voice laced with a protective streak.
"but he's a rolling stone, alright? he doesn't stay in one place, and he's got half the campus on speed dial. just... watch your heart."
you had smiled, thanked him, and then gone ahead and fallen entirely under dean's spell anyway.
because when dean di laurentis turned his focus on you, it felt like the sun only shone in your direction.
until tonight.
.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.
ten minutes ago, you had watched him flash that exact same dimpled smile at a blonde girl by the keg, his hand lingering just a second too long on her hip as he poured her a drink.
you were done.
entirely, completely done with his bullshit.
"i think i'm gonna head out," you told suni, setting your cup down on a nearby table.
suni followed your gaze to the kitchen, her expression instantly shifting from party-mode to fiercely protective. "do you want me to come with you? we can leave right now. we don't even have to say goodbye."
before you could answer, dean's eyes scanned the room, cutting through the haze of the party until they locked right onto yours.
his smile shifted.
it went from his public, generic "party host" grin to something sharper. simmering.
he excused himself from the group with a smooth nod and made a direct beeline through the crowded kitchen for you.
"go ahead," suni muttered, giving your hand a supportive squeeze.
"put him in his place. i'll be by the front door when you're ready." she gave dean a pointed, icy look as he approached, then melted into the crowd toward the foyer.
dean didn't just walk. he glided, carrying the casual confidence of a guy who assumed he was going to get exactly what he wanted by the end of the night.
across the room, tucker watched him go, letting out a small, worried sigh but staying back, letting you handle it.
"you're hiding in the corner," dean said, leaning his hand on the wall right above your head, effectively trapping you in his space.
the familiar, addictive scent of mint and woodsmoke washed over you, and it took everything in you not to lean into it.
"i don't like when my favorite person hides."
"i'm not hiding, di laurentis," you replied, your voice flat, refusing to let him see how much he was getting to you.
"and i'm pretty sure i'm not your favorite person. i think that title belongs to whatever woman stands closest to you."
dean let out a low, delighted laugh, his chest brushing slightly against your shoulder. he thought you were just playing hard to get.
he thought this was part of the game. "ouch. cold. and here i was, about to tell you that that color looks absolutely devastating on you." his voice dropped an octave, smooth as silk, his head tilting down so his lips were dangerously close to your ear, cutting out the blaring music.
"seriously. i've been waiting all night for everyone to leave so i can get you upstairs."
you didn't blush and you most definitely didn't smile.
you just raised an eyebrow.
it was textbook dean.
meaningless, sweet, and addictive words that he handed out like candy to you, to the girl by the keg, and to half the women on campus.
"wow. that was really good," you deadpanned, pushing your palm against his chest to create some distance between you. "did you practice that in the mirror, or do you just keep the same script for all of us?"
dean blinked, a flicker of genuine confusion crossing his features before he recovered, his grin turning playful. "what's that supposed to mean?"
"it means it's all sweet, dean," you said, your voice dropping, sharp and laced with all the frustration you'd been bottling up for weeks.
"it tastes good in the moment, but there's nothing actually there. i spend forty hours a week studying empty campaigns, dean. i know when someone is just trying to win over a crowd. you have a lovely way with words, but i'm officially full. i'm not buying what you're selling anymore."
the playful, cocky smirk finally faltered on his face.
the casual warmth in those vivid blue eyes tightened into something tense and alert as he realized you weren't joking.
he grabbed your wrist, not tightly, but firmly, his thumb brushing over your pulse point.
"hey," he murmured, stepping closer, trying to shut out the rest of the noisy, crowded house. "where is this coming from? come upstairs with me. let's just talk."
"no, dean. that's the fucking problem," you said, pulling your wrist out of his grip.
"we don't talk. you just say exactly what you think i want to hear so you can keep me in your rotation. and i'm not doing it anymore. find someone else to fill your bed tonight."
turning on your heel, you started walking toward the front door where suni was waiting.
"wait—hold on" dean called after you, but you didn't stop. you pushed past the heavy front door, suni right at your flank, stepping out into the crisp, cool night air.
the relative quiet of the gravel driveway was a sharp shock to the system compared to the roaring house.
"suni, let's just get to the car," you muttered, picking up your pace.
before you could even reach the edge of the lawn, the heavy front door thudded open behind you.
"hey" dean's voice cut through the darkness, completely stripped of its usual smooth, unflappable charm.
you stopped, closing your eyes for a brief second to gather your strength, before turning around.
he jogged down the porch steps, the golden light from the house framing his silhouette. he stopped a few feet away, chest heaving slightly, his messy blonde hair tossed by the breeze.
for the first time since you'd known him, dean di laurentis looked entirely unsettled, his striking blue eyes wide and fiercely locked onto yours in the dim light of the driveway.
"what are you doing?" dean asked, his voice raw, gesturing back toward the house. "you're just going to walk out? because i smiled at someone at a party? it was nothing. you know how i am."
"yeah, dean. i do know how you are," you said, your voice terrifyingly calm, the cool wind whipping your hair across your face. "that's exactly why i'm leaving."
"come on," he stepped closer, reaching a hand out, his tone shifting back into that desperate, persuasive rhythm he used so well. "you know it's different with you. when it's just us... you know it means something."
you looked at his extended hand, then looked him dead in the eyes.
the spell was completely broken.
"no, it doesn't," you said, your voice steady, cutting through the night. "if it meant something, you wouldn't make me feel invisible the second the sun comes up. i know exactly what a bad deal looks like, dean. and i am officially withdrawing my terms."
dean froze, his hand dropping back to his side. the utter finality in your posture seemed to hit him like a physical blow.
he opened his mouth to speak—to throw out one last charming line, one last sweet promise—but for the first time in his life, the campus's greatest talker couldn't find a single word.
you didn't wait for him to try.
you just gave him a small, sad nod of closure, turned around, and climbed into the passenger seat of suni's honda civic.
as suni backed down the driveway and pulled onto the main road, you looked at your side mirror. dean hadn't moved an inch.
he was still standing under the dim glow of the driveway lights, looking smaller than he ever had, watching the tail lights of suni’s car disappear into the dark.
for two months, he had been the one calling the shots.
but as the house faded into the distance, you finally breathed a sigh of relief, knowing the game was over.
Just Peachy. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁ Dean Di Laurentis x Reader
You had always been, for better or for worse - more often than not, for worse, if you were completely honest with yourself - a very analytical person when it came to your feelings. You liked to take your sweet time over-scrutinizing and overthinking them, staring at the rocky geode of your sentiments from all angles, picking apart at the crystalizing corners of it, holding back the urge to smash it to the ground when it all got too much for you. You only knew peace after finding 5 different synonyms for what you were feeling, a 90’s rom-com that most closely related to it and the perfect Taylor Swift to go with it.
You were careful, considerate, cautious. So you could not for the life of you figure out how you had gotten yourself in that situation.
Or, better yet, situationship.
How could you not see the signs, so glaringly neon, aggressive as pop-up in a dodgy website? How had you not jumped off the caboose before the train wreck? How was it, you wondered in quiet and externally impassive desperation at the corner of the kitchen at yet another house party you had no interest in being at, that you had let Dean Di Laurentis sweet talk you into giving everything and receiving very little back?
It started with simple touches and whispered flirtations at the back of a classroom and you decided then that it all felt innocent enough to entertain, as long as you did not let it fester.
It evolved into his bedroom on a weeknight, sheets smelling like the both of you and his hand heavy on your hip where it drew abstract shapes. Your eyes were open many hours before his as you dissected every interaction you shared to see if it all could still fit inside the casual box.
Your inability to decide that night should’ve been the first clue that it was time to step back. But Dean matched every retreat of yours with two steps forward, confident and careless like a brakeless race car. Every time you said you couldn’t come to his place, he showed up to yours with takeout and the password to all his streaming services. Every time you felt out of place between his friends, he draped his jersey on your shoulders like a patriotic flag and dragged you into the conversation until you were privy to all their inside jokes. And every time you felt unseen, he pulled you into his arms and whispered into the crook of your neck until you felt achingly seen, arguably too seen and from every angle you overanalyzed your circumstances they all pointed towards the same conclusion: this was something real. It had to be.
Needless to say, you got run over.
“You’re doing okay over there?” you heard Logan ask over the pounding music, leaning close to where you stood with a beer in his hand and an arched, inquisitive brow.
“Peachy” you answered with the sort of aloof tone you always assumed when your emotions got the best of you, when you didn’t have the needed amount of time to properly understand them, so you deflected them. “Why do you ask?”
Logan shrugged. You always thought that out of all the boys, he was the best at picking up on your moods and dealing with them in the quiet and detached manner you needed. A kindred spirit, an overthinker himself. “You’re looking at Dean like you want to snap his neck and hide the body in our backyard.”
“That’s ridiculous. I’d never be stupid enough to hide the body in your backyard.”
Logan smirked. “Yeah, Dean has always been the stupid one out of the two of you.”
“I don’t know about that”, you took a sip out of your own lukewarm beer, no longer cold after holding it for too long without taking a sip. “I think he’s smarter than I gave him credit for.”
While you were too busy stuck in your own head, praising yourself for how careful you had been, Dean had sidestepped your every defence and lodged himself inside your ribcage while avoiding the titles and labels you got so used to having for every aspect of your life. And now, weeks later, he seemed to have decided he had had his fun. It was time to leave.
And once more, he had been much more clever than you assumed he would be, diluting his absence in many tiny actions, slowly taking longer and longer to text back, spacing out invitations to see him until you found yourself at a frat party only to see him instead of hiding under your covers.
And saw him you did, unable to look away from where he was pressed against some girl’s body on the far side of the living room, her hips leaning against the air hockey table. From the outside, one would think you were staring at an equation you could not solve, head tilted sideways like you were confused. On the inside, things were much more catastrophic than that.
But your thoughts were only yours and you liked to keep them that way, so you took another sip of your warm beer and blinked away from Dean and What’s-Her-Face. You’d get to feel sad for yourself in the privacy of your own dorm, where his friends were not all looking at you with the pity you hated like they expected you to start crying. No, crying would only come with the right soundtrack, the perfect TikTok edit and the correct low-lighting.
Too focused on your after-party plans, you did not see Tucker elbowing Dean and pointedly gesticulating at you with his head as if to ask “Dude, what are you doing?”, but you did hear Dean’s answer of “What? It’s not like she’s my girlfriend or something.”
And thank God for that answer! It had just the right amount of inattentiveness for your feelings to push you to the other side of the Fuck You precipice, replacing any sadness with resentment and any tears with a purse of your lips that had Logan wincing at your side. And Dean must’ve seen something in your eyes, a gleam of sorts or the threat to shave his head in his sleep, because before your next blink he had side stepped his Tucker and walked towards you and Logan, who seemed unable to look away from the car crash about to happen, wondering about Dean’s sense of self-preservation.
“Y/N” he said, soft in a way that had you clenching your teeth. “We good?”
A hundred different ways to get revenge flashed before your eyes, from Dean’s gleaming bald head to his number leaked to unsavory websites. We good?, he asked after showing all the ways in which there were no we. She’s not my girlfriend, he says after somehow mind tricking you into doing things you would only do for a boyfriend, after caring like only a girlfriend would for months.
But you had always been, for better or for worse, a very analytical person. And in the second it took you to answer, you had written over every good memory with all the ways he had let you down in the past few weeks and developed your exit strategy.
You smiled pleasantly. Logan winced again. Tucker hid behind a pillar. Dean looked deliciously uncomfortable. “Of course. Actually, I’m glad you came all the way here to ask because I really needed to apologize.”
“Apologize?”
“Absolutely. I can’t stop thinking about how uncomfortable I must’ve made you this past few months.”
Tucker peaked out of the pillar. Logan looked at you like you had grown a second head. Dean shifted, looking more and more unsettled.
Great.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I’ve been inserting myself in your life in a way you did not ask for. I mean, having lunch here with your friends?” he asked you to. “Wearing your jersey?” he begged you to. “And, oh my God, the matching costume for your party and all that sleeping over here?” he whined until you accepted both times. “Those are all things that I only do in, like, a relationship. And you made it clear that we are not in one” he certainly did not.
He knew all of that. His friends did too.
You held his hand, eyes wide, teary and sincere in a way that should’ve won you a fucking Oscar. Dean’s face paled at your expression. “I’m not your girlfriend. I’m sorry for acting like I was. I can’t imagine how I must’ve made you feel. I feel like such an asshole!”
Dean stammered, nervous and uneasy and you breathed in his distress. It fueled your fire, pyre fed with bitterness, indignation and the newest Olivia Rodrigo album you could not wait to listen to after this shit-show. “You’re not- I mean-”
“But don’t worry!” You smiled and patted his shoulder gently. Behind you, Logan whispered something that sounded a lot ‘psychopath’. “It won’t happen anymore. I’ll step back and give you all the space you need. No more hanging around. No more sleep overs.”
Dean had the nerve to look upset. As if he still expected you to stay after all of the stunts he pulled. As if he could have his cake and eat it too. “C’mon, Y/N, you know that’s not what I-” he started, but you did not let him finish.
The head shaving idea seemed more and more enticing. But no. He wanted to be single. Free. He wanted space. Well, you were about to become fucking NASA.
“Hey, it’s fine. We’re good, right? So good. So go have your fun”, you let your smile harden just enough for him to see you didn’t mean a single word that came out of your mouth, ending with what was just ambiguous enough to pass as a threat: “I will too.”
And with that you turned around, ready to leave despite Dean’s voice calling after you with the slightest hint of panic. You felt good about your exit, but Fate was a woman and suddenly she had your back, deciding you deserved an even better one, sending you slamming straight into someone’s body. Big, muscular arms wrapped around you to keep you from flying back and you looked up into the only smiling face that could add salt into the wound you happily created.
“Are you okay?” asked Hunter Davenport and you smiled, feeling the exact place behind your back where Dean was staring daggers at.
˚⁎⁺˳ . ⊹ cliff marleau's older brother, who majored in literature in college, is a self-proclaimed nerd. when cliff realizes that ilya's having trouble answering some interview questions in english, the solution is obvious: put him in contact with his older brother. what starts as the occasional request for help with a word tumbles into something undefinable.
˚⁎⁺˳ . ⊹ male!reader, ilya x reader. smau. ilya is 23, reader is 26. i tripped i have literally no idea what just happened. also this will make more sense after you read but totally my bad i think "spurious niceties" totally works i am just delusional my apologies to ilya rozanov
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