pairing – garrett graham x nursing student!reader
summary – garrett graham doesn’t do girlfriends. she knows that. but after a heated trip upstairs turns into bruised ribs, nursing-student instincts, and accidental tenderness, whatever they’re doing starts feeling a lot less casual.
warnings – suggestive content, alcohol, swearing, hockey injuries, wound care, casual hookup dynamics.
notes from me – idk i just thought this pairing was cute because what’s better than a hockey boy who keeps getting beat up and a girl who actually knows how to look after him??? requests are open!
word count – 5.4k
navigation – masterlist
By the time Garrett gets her upstairs, she’s already decided she’s going to be normal about it tonight. This is, obviously, a lie.
Normal would be letting him lead her through the party by the hand without staring at the back of his neck. Normal would be not noticing the flex of his fingers around hers every time someone bumps into them in the hall.
Normal would be not feeling the whole noisy, beer-sticky, post-game mess of the house narrow itself down to his thumb moving once over her knuckles as he guides her past a cluster of girls outside the bathroom and two guys shouting about somebody’s fantasy lineup near the stairs.
Normal would be remembering that this is what Garrett Graham does. The easy attention. The grin over his shoulder.
The way he touches like he’s not thinking too hard about it, like putting a hand at the small of her back or catching her fingers in his is just what his body does when she’s near enough. The way he makes a person feel briefly, stupidly singular, even in a house full of people who know his name and want a piece of him.
She knows better than to turn that into meaning. She really does.
She’s a nursing student. She has clinical placement at seven on Monday morning and three half-finished flashcards on cardiac meds shoved into her bag and a lab partner who keeps texting her about their assessment.
She understands symptoms. She understands pattern recognition. She understands that if a man who doesn’t do girlfriends makes you feel like a girlfriend for three to six hours a week, and then smiles at you after like he hasn’t just rearranged your entire nervous system, that’s not necessarily pathology. Sometimes that’s just Garrett.
His hand is warm around hers, and she’s a little drunk, and the game had been brutal, and he’d scored twice, and there are girls downstairs wearing Briar colours and looking at him like he’s something they could win if they stood in the right place long enough. And she’s the one he’s taking upstairs.
So. Normal. Definitely. Totally.
Garrett pushes his bedroom door open with his shoulder, tugging her inside after him, and the noise of the party drops at once to a muffled, bass-heavy pulse through the floorboards.
His room smells like clean laundry, cold air from the cracked window, and him underneath it, that warm boyish mix of soap and deodorant and whatever he uses in his hair when he pretends he doesn’t use anything.
There are textbooks stacked badly on the desk, a hoodie thrown over the chair, tape and a half-empty Gatorade bottle on the dresser. Evidence of a life being lived at full speed and cleaned only when Tucker threatens violence.
She gets half a second to take it in before Garrett closes the door behind her. Then he turns, catches her by the waist, and backs her against it.
The breath leaves her in a soft, embarrassing little rush. Garrett, for all his size and all the speed he carries on the ice, is annoyingly good at knowing exactly where someone’s body is in space.
He presses her back into the door with just enough weight, one hand braced near her head and the other sliding to her hip, his mouth already curving like he knows the sound she just made has ruined any chance of her acting composed.
“Hi,” he says, close enough that the word brushes her lips.
She looks up at him. “Hi.”
His grin deepens. “You’ve said that, like, six times tonight.”
“You keep appearing near me.”
“I live here.”
She tilts her head. “That’s probably part of the problem.”
He laughs under his breath, and then he kisses her before she can decide whether that was too honest to have been funny.
It starts the way it always starts, like he’s going to be patient just to prove he can. His mouth settles over hers slowly, warm and confident, one hand still at her waist, thumb slipping over the soft fabric of her dress.
She can taste beer on him, faint and bitter, and the peppermint gum he’d been chewing earlier because Dean had made some deeply unnecessary comment about post-game mouth and Garrett had thrown a bottle cap at his head.
His lips are soft in a way that always feels vaguely unfair, especially against the rest of him, the broadness of his shoulders and the hard line of his body still wired from the game, and when she opens for him he makes a small sound in his throat that goes straight through her like heat.
Her fingers climb into his hair before she can pretend restraint was ever on the table. His curls are a little damp at the roots from the party, from the shower he must have taken after the game, from whatever warmth still clings to him after the crush of bodies downstairs. She tugs, just lightly, and Garrett’s hand tightens at her waist.
“There she is,” he murmurs against her mouth.
She would like to say something clever to that. Something dry and immune. Instead she sucks his bottom lip between hers and feels him go briefly still. Then he groans. It lands low and rough in the small space between them, and something in her stomach tips clean over.
Garrett’s hand slides from her waist to her back and pulls her in harder, until there’s very little room left between the door and him and her body has to make several immediate decisions about survival. Her hands stay in his hair. His mouth opens over hers, deeper now, less patient, and the kiss turns messy in that private familiar way it gets when they are both pretending this is simple.
His tongue against hers. His thumb at her jaw. The scrape of his teeth, quick and careful, when she nips at his lip again because he’s rewarded it once already and she likes the sounds he makes against her mouth.
He kisses down her jaw, and her head tips back into the door before she can help it. His mouth moves warm over the hinge of it, then lower, to the line of her throat where her pulse is doing something medically ridiculous. He finds it with the kind of precision that feels almost insulting. His lips press there once, then again, open-mouthed and slow enough that her fingers tighten in his hair.
“Garrett,” she breathes, and immediately hates herself a little for sounding like that.
He hums against her skin, smugness practically vibrating off him. “Yeah?”
“Don’t be annoying.”
His smile touches her throat. “Be patient.”
She laughs, which comes out unstable because he chooses that exact second to kiss back up her neck, along her jaw, to the corner of her mouth. He catches her there before she can fully get the breath back, and this kiss is less patient from the start. His hand moves up to her jaw, fingers gentle but sure, thumb resting near the corner of her mouth in a way that makes it very hard to remember that she has bones.
She thinks he likes her.
It arrives abruptly, in the middle of his mouth on hers and his hand spread over her back and his knee sliding between her thighs like he already knows where she’ll make that soft sound for him. She thinks it, and then the thought sits there glowing, horrible and warm.
Garrett Graham does not do girlfriends. Everybody knows that.
It’s practically public information. He has hockey, classes, training, games, and the kind of attention that follows him around campus like bad weather. He’s just been made captain, which means half his life now belongs to the team in a more official capacity than it already did. He spends mornings on the ice, afternoons in class, nights pretending he’s not exhausted while some girl in a mini dress lets him drag her upstairs by the hand and tries not to care when he looks at her like this.
And she’s busy too. She is. She has lectures and placement and exams that make her want to peel her own face off. She has care plans to write and competencies to get signed and older nurses who can destroy a person with one look if they prime an IV line too slowly. She’s not wandering around with free time and delusion looking for somewhere to put both.
But Garrett’s hand’s at her throat, careful and warm, and his mouth is on hers like he has nowhere else to be, and she likes him so much that for a second it’s genuinely inconvenient to breathe.
His knee shifts higher between her thighs. The feeling catches before she can stop it. A little drag of pressure through the thin fabric of her dress and the heat already sitting low in her body, and her hips move once, almost by accident, chasing it.
Garrett’s response is immediate. His breath breaks against her mouth, not quite a laugh and not quite a groan, his fingers flexing at her jaw. “Fuck.”
The word should make her feel powerful. And it does. Unfortunately, it also makes her stupid.
She does it again, on purpose this time, and Garrett kisses her harder, his free hand sliding down her side, over the curve of her hip, to pull her closer against his thigh. The door is cool at her back. His body is hot everywhere else.
The party downstairs has become a distant, irrelevant animal. She can feel the dull beat of music through the wood, the pressure of his hand at her waist, the soft roughness of his lips when he drags his mouth from hers just long enough to breathe and comes right back like leaving was a mistake.
He turns them without really breaking the kiss, one hand moving to her back, walking her backward across the room. It’s smooth for approximately three steps, and then her knees hit the edge of the bed. She drops onto it with a soft, inelegant oof.
Garrett pulls back just enough to look at her. For one second, neither of them says anything. She’s sitting on the edge of his bed with her dress riding higher than she left the house intending, boots planted on his carpet, hair probably already a mess from his hands. Garrett stands between her knees, flushed and grinning down at her like this night has gone exactly where he wanted it to.
God help her, she grins back.
“Smooth,” he says.
“You shoved me.”
“I guided you.”
She has just enough time to roll her eyes before he pulls his shirt over his head, and then the entire mood changes.
The heat’s still there, because Garrett Graham shirtless is, objectively, not a situation a girl can be expected to process with clinical detachment.
His shoulders are broad and strong and his chest is exactly as unfair as she remembers from the other times she’s had the opportunity to lose her mind about it. There are abs. Obviously there are abs. Annoying, well-defined, deeply unnecessary abs that make some extremely unhelpful part of her brain go momentarily blank.
But over all of that, dark and yellowing and fresh and ugly, are bruises. A lot of them. Across his ribs. One spreading along his side in a purple smear that disappears toward his back. Another near his shoulder. Smaller marks scattered over his chest and stomach, some fading green at the edges, some new enough that the skin around them still looks angry. There’s a cut near his collarbone she hadn’t noticed downstairs and another thin scrape along his ribs, red, but not bleeding now.
She knew the game had been rough. Everyone had known. The hits had been loud enough from the stands that one of her friends had flinched into her shoulder and muttered, “Jesus, is that legal?”
She had watched Garrett get slammed into the boards and get back up like irritation was the only possible consequence. She had seen him grin through blood on his lip after the second period and had thought, with equal parts lust and alarm, that hockey players were not right in the head. But seeing it like this, close enough to touch, is different.
“Whoa,” she says, before she can soften it. Her hands come up instinctively but stop short of his skin. “Garrett. Hey. Hold on a second.”
He glances down like he has forgotten his own torso exists, then gives a small frown. “Oh. That.” His gaze lifts back to her, careless in a way that would be more convincing if she hadn’t spent half her week learning exactly how many bad decisions people described as nothing right before they became triage paperwork. “Yeah, you get used to it.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah.”
“Because that looks insane.”
“It’s fine.” He bends toward her, one hand already coming to her jaw, under the impression that his very stupid body can simply be kissed out of the conversation. “C’mere.”
He kisses her, and she lets him for about two seconds because she’s only human and his mouth is still his mouth. Then she makes a small, involuntary squeak of disapproval against his lips.
Garrett pulls back, forehead dropping to hers, jaw tight with the particular frustration of a man who can feel the night slipping out of his control and doesn’t appreciate the medical profession’s role in it. “What?”
She blinks up at him. “Can I at least look at them?”
His eyes narrow. “At what?”
“At your ribs, Garrett.”
“Jeez. They’re ribs. They’re still there.”
“Are we sure?”
That gets the corner of his mouth, barely. “Pretty sure.”
“Are you sure you didn’t break one or some shit?”
He lets out a groan and then, with all the theatrical suffering of a man denied his constitutional rights, flops backward onto the bed beside her. The mattress bounces under his weight. “We’re not gonna fuck, are we?”
She stares at him. Garrett looks over with the aggrieved expression of someone who believes he’s asked a very fair question.
She rolls her eyes so hard it almost hurts. “Can I just look? Please?”
“This feels like a trap.”
“You took your shirt off and revealed a fucking crime scene.”
He gives her a look so flat she nearly laughs at his stupidity. “It’s hockey.”
“It’s bruising over your ribs.”
He sighs, long and dramatic, then lifts one hand and gestures vaguely down at himself like a monarch granting access to disputed land. “Fine. Nurse me.”
“I’m not a nurse yet.”
“Great. So this is amateur hour.”
She shoots him a look, eyes narrowing. “Oh. Would you like me to stop touching you?”
“No,” he says too quickly, and then has the audacity to look slightly offended when she smiles.
She shifts onto the bed properly, one knee tucked under her, trying very hard to keep her attention on the task and not on the fact that Garrett is lying shirtless under her hands with his jeans still slung low on his hips and his hair a mess from her fingers.
The bedside lamp is on, yellowing the room softly, catching over the bruises and the lines of his stomach. Downstairs, someone yells, followed by laughter and a dull thud that neither of them bothers to investigate.
She presses two fingers gently along his lower ribs first. “How’s this?”
“Fine.”
She moves slightly higher. “Here?”
“Fine.”
She pulls her hands back and looks at him. “Garrett.”
“What?”
“Use a word that isn’t fine.”
He looks at the ceiling like she’s placed an enormous burden on him. “Manageable.”
“Wow. Thank you for your courage.” She presses again, lighter this time, watching his face. “Here?”
His mouth tightens before he can stop it.
She catches it immediately. “That hurt.”
“No.”
“Your entire face just did a thing.”
“My face does a lot of things. Girls usually love it.”
“Garrett.”
He exhales through his nose, then gives in by about one inch. “It’s… tender.”
“Tender like sore, or tender like don’t touch me there again unless I’m dying?”
He rolls his eyes.
“Answer.”
“Sore,” he says, then adds, because he’s incapable of letting her have anything cleanly, “but if you wanna touch me there again under different circumstances, I’m totally open-minded.”
She presses her lips together, trying not to laugh, and fails. “You’re actually the worst patient I’ve ever had.”
“I’m your hottest patient.”
She tilts her head. “Mm. Unfortunately.”
His grin flashes, quick and pleased, before she moves her hand higher and finds another spot that makes the muscles in his stomach tense under her fingertips.
Her brain, horribly unprofessional, registers the abs again. A full, useless, warm-body register of the hard give of him under her hand, the smooth heat of his skin, the fact that his stomach jumps a little when her fingers pass too close to the waistband of his jeans.
She’s touched him plenty of times. In significantly less educational contexts. But this feels different because she’s trying to be careful, and careful, with Garrett, is its own kind of intimacy.
“You’re staring,” he says.
She looks up and finds him watching her with one brow raised. “I’m assessing.”
“You’re assessing my abs?”
“They’re in the way of the bruises.”
He grins, head pressing back into the mattress as he adjusts his hips. “Tragic for you.”
“Deeply.” She drags her gaze back to the bruising near his side because if she keeps looking at his face while touching his stomach, she’s going to become useless to both medicine and feminism. “This one’s ugly.”
“Yeah, that guy was huge.”
She glares at him, one eyebrow raising in disapproval.
Garrett huffs. “What? I didn’t just let him hit me.”
“Sorry. I forgot he was supposed to ask for approval first.”
He laughs, then winces, one hand coming toward his ribs before he stops himself. “Ow. Jesus. Don’t make me laugh.”
Her face changes at once. “See?”
“I’m fine.”
She clicks her tongue once in frustration. “You just winced.”
“Because you’re funny.”
“Because your ribs hurt when you laugh,” she runs her hand across his chest again, genuinely concentrating on the damage now.
“Could be both.”
She gives him a look and reaches up to brush his hair back from his forehead, more because she wants to than because it serves any medical purpose.
His curls slip through her fingers, soft and warm, and his eyes do something quieter for half a second. Eyelids dropping halfway. Then the usual Garrett comes back over it, but not quite fast enough.
Her hand lingers. “I’m gonna get you some meds, okay?” she says, voice lower now.
He groans. “Can I get head first, or…?”
She huffs and smacks him lightly on the chest before she thinks. Garrett winces.
“Oh shit.” She jerks her hand back immediately, horror punching through the laugh. “Sorry. Sorry, my bad. My bad.”
He turns his head on the pillow and gives her a look of grave betrayal. “Jesus. Some nurse you are.”
“I said I wasn’t a nurse yet!”
“Yeah, and thank God. Accreditation board dodged a bullet.”
“I hate you.” But she’s smiling when she says it, which rather ruins the effect. She climbs off the bed, tugging her dress down as she stands because it’s migrated during the assessment with absolutely no respect for her professionalism. “Stay here.”
Garrett lifts his head slightly. “Where else would I go?”
“Knowing you? Back onto the ice to get punched again for sport.”
He opens his mouth to object. She points at him from the doorway. “Stay.”
His grin turns slow and irritating. “Bossy.”
“You like it.”
His mouth opens again, probably to say something dirty, but she slips out before he can.
The hallway is louder than his room by several degrees, music and shouting rushing back in around her. She shuts his door behind her and stands there for a second with her hand on the knob, blinking herself back into the party version of the house. Two girls come up the stairs laughing into each other, one of them barefoot, both of them carrying cups. A guy she vaguely recognises from one of Garrett’s classes is sitting on the floor by the wall, looking solemnly into a bag of chips like it might answer something for him.
The bathroom is blessedly empty when she gets there. She flips on the light and starts opening cabinets.
Condoms. More condoms. A suspiciously ancient bottle of hair gel.
“Ew,” she mutters, pushing aside something at the back of the cabinet that may once have been a protein shaker lid and may now qualify as a biohazard. “Men should not be allowed storage.”
More condoms, because this house is prepared for everything except basic first aid. A packet of painkillers finally appears behind a half-used tube of toothpaste, and then antiseptic wipes in a box that looks like it has survived three tenants and a small war. She checks the date, then grabs them along with a clean washcloth from the stack under the sink.
When she gets back, Garrett is still on the bed, thank God, though he’s propped himself against the pillows now and is holding his phone above his face. He looks up when she comes in, and the expression on him changes in a way she wishes she hadn’t noticed.
The grin comes first, of course. It always does. But underneath it, there’s something softer. Something almost pleased. “You robbed our bathroom?”
“You own, like, ninety-three condoms and one bottle of painkillers.”
“Sounds balanced.”
“One of the condoms was in the medicine cabinet stuck to expired hair gel.”
He frowns. “That’s probably Dean’s.”
“Everything disgusting in this house cannot be Dean’s.”
“It actually can.”
She shuts the door with her hip and comes back to the bed, setting the supplies on his nightstand. “Sit up.”
He obeys, but makes it look like he’s doing her a personal favour. She hands him two tablets and the Gatorade from his dresser because hydration is hydration, even if blue sports drink feels questionable as medicine. Garrett takes them, eyes on her the whole time, then swallows with a grimace.
“See?” she says. “So brave.”
“I’ve been through a lot tonight.”
“You almost got laid and instead got ibuprofen. Devastating.”
He presses his lips together in an attempt not to laugh. “Finally, someone understands.”
She sits beside him, half-turned toward him, and tears open an antiseptic wipe. “This might sting.”
“Baby, I play hockey.”
She presses the wipe lightly to the cut near his collarbone.
Garrett hisses. “Fuck.”
She pauses, looking at him. He stares back, offended.
She smiles sweetly. “Baby, you play hockey.”
“Yeah, well, hockey doesn’t usually come in… little wet napkin form.”
She laughs despite herself and keeps going, careful now, dabbing around the scrape rather than dragging across it. He watches her while she works. She can feel it. The weight of his attention moving over her face, the line of her mouth, the way her hair keeps falling forward no matter how many times she tucks it back. The room feels warmer than it did before she left. Smaller, too, with him propped against the pillows and her sitting close enough that her knee presses against his thigh.
For a while, the party fills the places where neither of them speaks. Bass downstairs. Footsteps in the hall. A sudden burst of Dean’s voice somewhere below them, unmistakable even through the floor, followed by what sounds like Logan yelling, No, absolutely not, in a tone suggesting absolutely yes.
Garrett’s fingers touch her hair before she realises he’s lifted his hand. He brushes it back from her cheek, slow and absent, tucking it behind her ear with more care than the gesture needs. His hand doesn’t leave right away. His thumb grazes once near her temple, barely there, and when she looks at him, the grin is gone.
“You’re so pretty,” he murmurs.
The words are quiet enough that the party almost swallows them. Almost.
Heat rises immediately under her skin, stupid and quick. She looks down at the antiseptic wipe in her hand like it’s become fascinating. “You’re concussed, I think.”
Garrett shakes his head. “Mm-mm.”
“Garrett.”
“Was thinkin’ it before the game too.”
That makes something in her chest go inconveniently soft. She tries very hard not to let it show. She really does. Unfortunately, her face has chosen this exact moment to resign from service. Her mouth wants to smile. Her skin is warm. Her hands, which were perfectly capable five seconds ago, are suddenly very interested in folding the used wipe into a tiny, useless square.
“That’s probably still, like, concussion-adjacent,” she says.
He laughs, softer this time so it doesn’t hurt as much. “Why do you always do that?”
“Do what?”
“Make a joke when I say something nice.”
She looks up at him then. Her mouth opens, then closes.
Garrett’s expression shifts, not smug now. Curious, maybe. Careful in a way that sits strangely on him because he wears confidence so easily that it’s easy to forget he can be gentle without making a performance of it.
“I don’t know,” she says finally, because it’s the most honest answer she has and still only half of one.
His thumb moves once over the strand of hair between his fingers. “Okay.”
She huffs a small laugh. “Okay?”
“Yeah.” His mouth curves faintly. “I can work with I don’t know.”
“That’s very generous of you.”
“I’m a generous guy.”
“You asked for head while actively bruised.”
The smile comes back properly then, and the room unclenches around them.
She reaches for another wipe, but Garrett catches her wrist before she can open it. “Hey.”
Her pulse gives a small, irritating kick. “What?”
He doesn’t say it immediately. That’s unlike him enough that she notices. His fingers stay around her wrist. “You looked good at the game. You were… you were wearing that little Briar sweatshirt.”
She narrows her eyes. “Are you making fun of my sweatshirt?”
“No.” His eyes flicker across her face. “I liked it.”
The warmth under her skin gets worse.
“You scored twice,” she says, because deflection is now a survival tool.
His grin tilts. “I know.”
“Cocky.”
“You brought it up.”
She rolls her eyes, but her smile gives her away again.
His fingers slide from her wrist to her hand. “You looked pretty in my colours.”
Her heart does one of those hard, stupid beats that feels less like romance and more like a medical event.
She looks down at their hands because his are big and warm and bruised at the knuckles, and because looking at his face suddenly feels like stepping too close to the edge of something. “You can’t just say things like that when I’m trying to, like, provide healthcare.”
“Why not?”
“Um, boundary confusion.”
“You’re sitting on my bed in a tiny dress.”
“And administering antiseptic.”
“Mixed signals all around.”
She laughs, and Garrett smiles at her like he meant to make that happen, like getting laughter out of her is its own private stat he’s keeping somewhere in his head.
For a second, she lets herself stay there. Lets herself sit with the warmth of his hand around hers, the lamp light over his bruised chest, the ridiculous intimacy of painkillers and antiseptic wipes and his hair still messy from her fingers.
The whole night has gone sideways. From heat to something softer without losing the heat completely. From his knee between her thighs to her thumb brushing lightly near a bruise on his ribs. From fuck me to don’t make me laugh, it hurts.
Maybe this is what makes her like him so much. Not the obvious things, though the obvious things are doing their best. It’s that Garrett, who has every reason to stay easy and shallow and wanted by everyone, keeps accidentally becoming specific with her. Specific in rooms. Specific with his hands. Specific in the way he remembers what she wore to his game and says she looked pretty like it’s been sitting in him all night, waiting for somewhere to go.
She clears her throat and reaches for the last wipe. “I still need to clean that cut.”
Garrett’s eyes flick down to her mouth, lifting onto his elbow. “Mhm. After?”
She pushes him back down. “No, before.”
“So strict.”
“Alive men get privileges.”
He sighs and leans his head back against the pillows, exposing the line of his throat like he’s submitting to the terrible injustice of being cared for by a girl in a mini dress. “Fine. Do your worst.”
She shifts closer, half in his lap now because it’s the only angle that makes sense and absolutely not because her body has been looking for excuses since the hallway.
His hand lands at her thigh automatically, warm over the hem of her dress. He doesn’t move it higher. He doesn’t make a joke. He just rests it there, thumb slow against her skin while she dabs antiseptic over the scrape near his collarbone.
This time he doesn’t hiss.
“Good boy,” she murmurs before she can stop herself.
Garrett’s eyes open. The air changes instantly. Her hand stills. His mouth curves slowly, and the bruises, the ibuprofen, the entire attempted medical intervention lose significant ground against the expression on his face.
“Oh yeah?” he says, positively beaming.
She points the wipe at him. “Do not.”
His hand tightens lightly on her thigh, amusement low in his voice. “You’re blushing.”
“I’m warm.”
“And you’re in my lap.”
“For medical purposes.”
“Right.”
She gives him a look, but it’s hard to make it stick when he’s smiling like that and when she is, in fact, half in his lap, one hand on his chest, the other holding antiseptic.
Garrett’s gaze softens again, almost unfairly fast. “C’mere.”
“I’m right here.”
“Closer.”
She should say no on principle. She doesn’t. She lets him pull her in carefully, mindful of his ribs even when he clearly isn’t, until her forehead rests against his. The party moves under them, distant and messy and young. Someone bangs on a door down the hall. Somebody else laughs too loudly. Garrett’s room stays dim and warm around them.
His thumb brushes once over her thigh.
“Are you gonna sleep here?” he asks, quiet enough to make it sound casual and not at all like the question has changed shape in his mouth.
She pulls back a little to look at him. “What?”
He shrugs, but it’s a bad shrug. Too careful. “I mean, you can. If you want. Since you’ve already ruined the original plan.”
She stares at him.
Garrett’s brows lift. “What?”
“The original plan being sex?”
“Yeah.”
Her eyes narrow. “And now your backup plan is… a sleepover?”
“Don’t make it sound lame.”
“It’s incredibly lame.”
His eyes move over her face. “You wanna leave?”
She doesn’t. The answer is immediate and sits in her before she can make it sound prettier.
“No,” she says.
His face shifts again, the smallest flicker of satisfaction moving through it before he reins it in. “Okay.”
“Okay.”
For a moment, they just look at each other. She’s waiting for him to make a joke. He’s probably waiting for her to make one. Between them, the thing neither of them has named sits warm and too close, wearing all the shapes of what this is supposed to be and none of them fitting quite right.
Then Garrett leans in and kisses her. Softer this time. Still warm, still him, still enough to make the room narrow, but without the frantic press from the door, without the urgent slide of his knee between her thighs.
His mouth moves over hers slowly, his hand rising to her jaw, thumb touching the corner of her face. The sweetness of it makes her chest ache in a way that’s frankly rude after everything else he’s already done to her tonight.
When he pulls back, he stays close. “You gonna keep nursing me,” he murmurs, “or am I cleared for kissing?”
She looks down at his bruised ribs, then back at his face. “Light kissing.”
He runs his thumb over her bottom lip. “Define light.”
“Um. No additional injuries.”
“So that rules out Dean joining.”
She laughs, louder now, and he smiles against her mouth before kissing her again, like the laugh is something he can catch if he moves fast enough.
Downstairs, the party gets louder. Upstairs, Garrett Graham lets her press one more cautious hand to his ribs and pretends not to notice when she leaves it there longer than she needs to.
SUMMARY: Jack Abbot is not an overly-neighborly person. He has secret nicknames in his head for most of the people on his floor and actively avoids any and all types of neighbor politics. However, he can’t deny his growing fondness for the single mom and toddler in apartment seventeen. (Nor his burning hatred for your baby daddy).
WARNINGS: this series includes a very chaotic reader with an even more chaotic toddler, mentions of abandonment, Jack's inability to consider anything good and worthwhile for himself, eventual smut, friends to lovers, mentions of previous abusive relationships, mentions of mental health struggles, miscommunication, age gap (reader is around 27 and Jack is in his 40's), medical inaccuracies and more.
A/N: I am very very excited to share this series and bring it to life. It started as a very random idea that quickly transpired into a huge story in my head within a matter of minutes. It does touch on some potentially triggering topics but warnings will be given in each chapter!
PAIRING: Jack Abbot x Single Mom!Reader
STATUS: Ongoing
─── ⋆ CHAPTERS ⋆
PART ONE 𖤓♡ — Jack Abbot values his routine and structure. Work, SWAT, gym... and for the past six weeks, spending his Sunday mornings admiring the enigmatic single mom who's apartment balcony sits across from his. [3k]
PART TWO 𖤓♡ — A scuffle in the hall causes Jack to accidentally take Phoebe’s wallet to work instead of his. He gains himself a new nickname amongst the Pitt and finally learns a thing or two about you and your daughter. [7.3k]
PART THREE 𖤓 — A trip to the ED, a retirement meal, and a phone call with Robby. One leaves you up close and personal with your neighbor, one has Phoebe spilling secrets like it's an Olympic sport, and another has Jack realizing he's got a fucking crush on the single mom in apartment seventeen. [7.1k]
PART FOUR 𖤓♡ — Phoebe's birthday party consists of four sets of eyes ogling Jack from the second he enters your apartment, screaming children, your mom noticing something rather interesting, and a night on the balcony that changes the trajectory of everything. [8.7k]
⤷ PART 4.5 𖤓 — You don't hear from Jack for three days after the kiss. But despite being swamped at the hospital, after he reaches out via text, he doesn't stop. [SMAU]
PART FIVE 𖤓★ — When Jack offers his company in the form of a date to celebrate your book release, he gets to understand the inner workings of your mind a bit more. Unfortunately, it does leave him with an ache he has to tend to using nothing but his own imagination. — June 10th
PART SIX 𖤓★— June 15th
PART SEVEN 𖤓★ — June 20th
PART EIGHT 𖤓♡ — June 25th
PART NINE 𖤓 — June 30th
─── ⋆ EXTRAS ⋆
#APT.17 (a tag for anything related to this series)
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Tag list for this series has grown way too big for me to keep up with so it’s unfortunately CLOSED. You can however follow the #apt.17 tag instead for updates on the series!
summary: You've been filming John Logan for many months. Forty seven saved clips, only eleven of them for work. You know his tells, his angles, his best light. You know him better than you probably should for someone who is just the social media girl. What you don't know is that the night he finally asked you out, there was a check involved. A thousand dollars. And three months of the most real thing you've ever felt sitting on top of a secret that was always going to cost someone.
notes: hii i'm back!! after a week of writing between breaks this one finally came to life and i really hope you guys enjoy it, also i've been informed that puck flying accidents are not very common but we're all going to pretend together, also may contain some hockey inaccuracies, i love the game but i'm definitely not a pro. as always thank you so much for reading and please let me know what you think, your comments genuinely keep me writing!!
warnings: swearing, a bet that was a terrible idea, one thousand dollars, dean being dean, forty seven saved clips, angst with a happy ending.
word count: 12.2k
When you started working on the social media position for the hockey team at Briar U, you didn't understand how it was possible for people to take you even less seriously than you already took yourself. But then there would come the moment that they needed you, and things would change, and you would think oh, how the tables have turned.
You understood this in the first week. The girl who came before you, Liana, had walked you through everything: cameras, angles, schedules, the way the athletics department liked their content formatted. But had failed to mention that the players would not look at you so much as look through you at first. Like you were part of the furniture. A tripod with a heartbeat.
In a way, that was fine. Being invisible was a perfectly good way to do the job. Players acted more naturally when they forgot the camera was there, and natural content was always better than posed content. This was something you had understood instinctively from the beginning.
You had been doing this job since the beginning of fall semester. It had come to you not accidentally but not exactly sought either, you had always followed the team, always been a genuine fan. Liana, the former social media girl, was a friend from a very boring Thursday morning class you had both suffered through together. When she came close to graduating she recommended you for the job. You had been working the library circulation desk before that. When the athletics department called it had seemed like a no-brainer.
A few months in, you knew the inner workings of the team the way you knew the layout of your own apartment. Their training schedule, their game schedule, the subtle social architecture of a group of people who spent most of their waking hours together. You knew which players were camera shy and which ones had a natural appeal and actively enjoyed being filmed — cough Dean cough — and by now you knew everyone's best angle, best light, best moment.
Which brought you to Logan.
You were also, which was a separate and entirely unrelated issue, completely down bad for one of the players.
It had not happened all at once.
You had known who John Logan was before you got the job, everyone who followed Briar hockey knew who he was, which was most of the campus, but knowing of someone and being in the same building as them four times a week were different things entirely.
You had known about his escapades too. His romantic history was the kind of thing that Olivia, your friend and a woman of genuinely exceptional gossip quality, had mentioned more than once with the relish of someone who considered this information a public service. Before the job, you had laughed about it the way you laughed about things that had nothing to do with you.
Now that you actually knew him, not knew knew him, but saw him daily, which was its own specific category, you thought about his former, and hopefully past, escapades and felt something uncomfortably close to jealousy.
The crush had consolidated gradually and against your will, the way water finds its way through things. A practice here. A post-game there. The specific way he looked when he was focused on something, the way he talked to his teammates, the way he sometimes looked directly into your camera with an expression that suggested he had briefly forgotten it was there and was just looking.
And then there was the other thing, which was honestly the worst part: he was so unfairly polite. He said good morning and good afternoon. He smiled when he caught you filming something. He said goodbye when he left and apologized if the puck flew in your direction, which it occasionally did, and each time he said sorry about that with the specific sincerity of someone who actually meant it.
You knew you had a crush on him. Obviously. That part was not new information.
What was new information was the following Tuesday, late after practice, the rink mostly empty, you sitting in the stands with your laptop open and the tiredness of someone who had been on their feet for three hours. The players were filtering out through the doors and you were reviewing footage on autopilot, not really watching, when you looked up without thinking about it.
You were looking for Logan before you had decided to look for him.
When you found him, he was at the boards, removing his helmet and pushing a hand through his hair.
Fuck me, you thought.
And then it seemed like he had heard you, because he lifted his eyes and looked straight at you across the empty rink and smiled.
You smiled back and closed your laptop.
Time to go home and think about John Logan in bed.
You reached for your camera on the tripod — force of habit, you always checked the last few shots before packing up — and opened the gallery.
Logan drinking water. Logan laughing at something Garrett said. Logan tying his skates. Logan high-fiving Tucker after a good drill. Logan making a face directly at the camera, having clearly just noticed you filming him, looking entirely unbothered about it.
You stared at the screen.
Oh.
Oh no.
The real problem came later.
The game was at Harvard, which meant the bus, which meant a situation you had been successfully avoiding for six months. You never took the team bus, too much male energy, too many large people occupying space in a way that made you feel like you had accidentally wandered into someone else's environment. You usually went with the student bus, which was fine, which was your preferred option.
The student bus had a mechanical issue and couldn't make the drive in time.
So you, along with the other team staff, boarded the team bus with approximately forty hockey players and the quiet resignation of someone who had lost a negotiation they hadn't known they were in.
The game itself went fine, nothing groundbreaking, but Briar won, which was all that mattered. You packed up your equipment and joined the line filing back onto the bus, looking for the same seat you'd had on the way there.
You were making your way down the aisle when you spotted Logan sitting alone.
You slowed down. Made the calculation. Gave yourself approximately four seconds of internal encouragement.
A freshman defenseman sat down next to him before you could finish the thought.
You did not pout. You were a professional.
"Aw, look who it is." Dean's voice came from the seat directly behind Logan. He was sitting in the aisle seat, legs stretched out, watching you with the expression of someone who had seen everything. "You can sit with me."
"Sure," you said.
"Geez, don't look so happy about it." He pulled his legs in so you could slide past. "I even let you have the window."
"What a gentleman," you said, settling in and pulling your laptop from your bag.
"Are we watching a movie?" Dean pointed at the laptop.
"No. I'm working."
"Bummer," he said, shifting in his seat to get comfortable. Dean was a broad person and the seats were not designed with broad people in mind, which meant that when you sat down you were immediately, unavoidably in contact, arms pressed together, shoulders touching. You had briefly considered putting the armrest down for some personal space, but Dean seemed completely unbothered by the proximity, which somehow made it easier to be unbothered yourself.
This was the thing about Dean that had surprised you most when you first started the job: there had never been an awkward phase. No stiff introductions, no careful professional distance, no period of working out who you were to each other. He had simply decided you were friends and proceeded accordingly, and somehow six months had passed and it felt like you had known each other much longer than that.
You connected your camera to the laptop and started pulling up photos from the game. Selected the best ones. Started uploading them to the shared drive.
"Uh oh," Dean said, leaning over. "That's not my best angle."
You looked at the photo. He was facing almost entirely away from the camera.
"Shut up," you said, lightly slapping his hand away from the screen. "What do you mean not your best angle? Are you not proud of your very nice backside?"
This was a callback, and Dean knew it. He had said something similarly direct about you at a party two months ago in the shameless way that Dean said most things, and you had decided that the only appropriate response was to give the same energy back.
"I am," he said, "but the front is much better. You should check it out sometime."
"Are you referring to your face as the front of your backside?"
Dean repeated the question back to you in a mocking tone.
You opened the photos and started scrolling through them, and approximately three seconds later you noticed the pattern and began praying, quietly and sincerely, that Dean would not notice it too.
Too late.
"Why do you have so many pictures of Logan?" He was looking at the screen with his eyebrows raised. "There are like ten Logan pictures for every one of anyone else."
"Logan just photographs well."
"He photographs well."
"Yes."
"That's your explanation."
"That's my explanation."
Dean looked at you with the expression of someone assembling a conclusion. "You have the hots for Logan."
"The hots? Dean, what is this, a Disney Channel movie? And no. I don't."
"Yeah? Explain the hundred photos of him drinking water. Sorry, but you can't use those for Instagram." He paused. "Unless you're using them for something else. Like, I don't know. Your spank bank."
You gasped and punched his arm. "Shut up."
"Admit it."
"I plead the fifth."
"That's not how that works."
"I don't want to talk about it."
"You have to. I'm your best friend."
"No you're not. It's Olivia."
"On the team, I meant."
"It's probably Tucker."
"Tucker?" Dean looked genuinely wounded. "Tucker? Don't try to change the subject."
You closed the laptop.
"Go to sleep, Dean."
"This conversation is not over."
"Yes it is."
"No it's not."
"Yes it is."
"No it's not," he said, adjusting himself against the seat with the decisive energy of someone settling in for a nap. You let your head fall back against the window. A moment later his head dropped onto your shoulder with the comfortable weight of someone who had decided this was acceptable.
"Do not drool on me," you said.
"I bet if it was Logan you wouldn't mind," he said, eyes already closed. Of course not.
"Don't be disgusting."
"And by the way —" he opened one eye "— he has the hots for you too."
"Oh my god," you said. "Stop talking like this is iCarly."
He closed his eye again.
The bus moved through the dark and you sat there with Dean's head on your shoulder and the laptop closed on your knees and tried very hard not to look at the back of Logan's head in the row in front of you.
Oh no, you thought, again, for the second time that week.
A couple of weeks later, Dean found you setting up the tripod in the corner of the film room before pre-game interviews.
"So," he said, appearing at your elbow with the energy of someone who had been waiting for the right moment. "I saw that you didn't RSVP to the invitation for mine and Beau's birthday bash. And it's tomorrow."
You winced. You had been avoiding this topic.
"I have a thing," you said, very casually, adjusting the tripod height without looking at him.
"A thing." He repeated it back with the tone of someone who found this deeply insufficient. "What thing could possibly be more important than my birthday?"
"They painted a new wall in the hallway of my apartment so —"
"Shut up," he said, moving closer. "You're coming. Also —" he said it with the specific energy of someone deploying their strongest argument "— Logan is going to be there."
You kept your eyes on the tripod. "I would assume so. Since you live together."
"You know what I mean."
"I really don't."
"Yes you do."
"I'm working tomorrow night," you said.
"It's a Saturday."
"Content doesn't take weekends off."
"You literally schedule everything in advance and you know it." Dean leaned against the wall with his arms crossed. "Come to the party. Talk to him. He's going to be right there."
"I talk to him all the time. It's my job."
"Yeah, but when you talk to Logan you do the thing."
You looked up for the first time. "What thing."
"The thing." He gestured vaguely at your face. "The thing where you forget to be normal."
"I am always normal."
"You called his assist last Tuesday 'genuinely cinematic.'"
"It was a good play."
"To his face."
"As a professional observation —"
"He smiled about it for the rest of practice." Dean looked at you steadily. "Come to the party."
You turned back to the tripod.
"I don't think Logan has the hots for me, you know," you said. "He's like a hot athlete. And I'm like the social media nerd."
Dean stared at you with the expression of someone who had just heard something that offended him on multiple levels simultaneously.
"Geez," he said. "You're not the girl in every romcom who doesn't know she's pretty." He paused. "Also you may be a nerd but — with all due respect to you and to my buddy Logan — you're pretty hot."
You pushed his shoulder and muttered a low stop.
"I'm being sincere!" He caught himself on the wall, laughing. "Party. Tomorrow. Eight o'clock. Logan will be there." He pointed at you one more time. "You will also be there."
He walked away before you could respond.
You looked at the camera. The camera looked back at you.
Genuinely cinematic, you thought, mortified.
You were definitely not going to that party.
The thing about watching two people be completely oblivious to each other was that it was, at first, entertaining.
Dean had found it genuinely funny in the beginning, the way you would track Logan across a room without realizing you were doing it, the way Logan would find reasons to be wherever you were without announcing that was what he was doing. It was like watching a nature documentary.
It had been funny for approximately three weeks.
It was now week seven and Dean was losing his mind.
It was a Thursday practice, nothing special about it. Dean was on the ice going through drills with Tucker when he caught it, the peripheral awareness of someone who had been watching a situation develop for too long.
You were in your usual spot in the stands, laptop open, camera on the tripod, doing the thing you always did where you looked like you were reviewing footage but were actually, if you knew what to look for, tracking Logan across the ice without moving your head.
Logan, for his part, was doing the thing he always did where he skated past your section of the stands more than was strictly necessary for any drill that had been assigned.
"He's done that four times," Tucker said, appearing at Dean's elbow.
"Five," Dean said. "You missed one while you were talking to the coach."
Tucker watched Logan complete another unnecessary loop near the boards. "Are they ever going to do something about that?"
"Apparently not," Dean said.
On the ice Logan slowed near the boards not stopping, that would have been too obvious, just slowing and said something up toward the stands. You looked up from your laptop and said something back. Logan smiled. You looked back at your laptop immediately, in the specific way of someone using a screen as a shield.
Logan skated away looking slightly more cheerful than he had thirty seconds ago.
"It's painful," Tucker said.
"It's excruciating," Dean agreed.
"Wow, that's a big word" Tucker said mocking Dean and skating away.
After practice Dean was still thinking about it in the locker room.
He was unwrapping his tape when Garrett sat down across from him.
"You have a face," Garrett said.
"I'm thinking."
"About what."
"Logan and the social media girl, or as I call her, (Y/N)"
"So her name—" Garrett replied.
Garrett looked at him with the mild, steady expression he used when he was waiting for someone to either say something sensible or stop talking. "And?"
"And they've been doing this for like seven weeks and nothing is happening and I'm tired of watching it."
"So tell him to do something about it."
"I've told him." Dean had, in fact, told Logan approximately six times in varying tones of directness. "Telling doesn't work. Logan needs a push."
"A push," Garrett repeated.
"A significant push."
Garrett looked at him for a long moment. "What kind of push."
"A financial one," he said.
"Dean —"
"Hear me out."
"I don't think I want to."
"A thousand dollars," Dean said. "I bet him a thousand dollars that he won't ask her out. He needs the money, he likes her, this solves both problems simultaneously. It's elegant."
Garrett stared at him. "It's really not."
"It gets him to do the thing he already wants to do."
"By paying him."
"By incentivizing him."
"Those are the same thing."
"Garrett," Dean said, in the tone of someone who had considered the counterarguments and dismissed them. "They have been doing this for weeks. At this rate they'll still be doing it at graduation. I'm helping."
Garrett looked at the ceiling briefly. "You shouldn't do this," he said finally.
"Noted," Dean said.
He did not change his mind.
Logan came in from the showers to find Dean sitting on the bench across from his locker with an expression that meant something was coming.
Tucker was in the corner pretending to check his phone. Garrett was lacing his shoes with more focus than the task required.
"What," Logan said.
"I have a proposition," Dean said.
Logan looked at Tucker. Tucker looked at his phone. Logan looked at Garrett. Garrett looked at his shoes.
"What kind of proposition," Logan said.
"A thousand dollars," Dean said. "All you have to do is ask her out."
He didnt't have to specify who the her was.
The locker room was quiet.
Logan opened his locker. Got his jacket. "No."
"Logan —"
"No, Dean."
"You like her."
"That's not —"
"You've skated past her section of the stands five times today during drills that don't require you anywhere near the boards." Dean's voice was completely even. "I counted."
Logan said nothing.
"You check her posts before anyone else on the team," Dean continued. "You know her schedule better than your own. You said sorry to her last Tuesday when the puck went near her even though it didn't come close to actually hitting her." A pause. "You apologized preemptively."
"I was being polite."
"You were being in love with her," Dean said, simply. "Which is fine. Great, actually. And fixable. With one conversation and a thousand dollars."
Tucker made a small sound that was not quite disapproval and not quite agreement.
Garrett said nothing, which was its own kind of answer.
Logan looked at his jacket in his hands. He thought about the time that had passed, the practices and bus rides and the specific way you closed your laptop when you were trying to hide something. He thought about his bank account, which was having a difficult semester. He thought about the rent that was due. The equipment he needed.
He thought about asking you out, which he had been meaning to do, which he had been telling himself he was going to do, which he had not done.
I was going to do it anyway, he told himself. The money doesn't change what I was going to do anyway.
"Fine," he said.
Tucker made the sound again, slightly louder.
Garrett looked up from his shoes for the first time. His expression was not angry, not exactly. More like a person watching a decision being made and knowing already how it was going to cost someone.
Dean produced a check from somewhere — written on the back of a receipt, which was so Dean that Logan almost laughed — and held it out.
Logan took it.
He folded it once and put it in his jacket pocket and did not look at Garrett again.
I was going to do it anyway, he thought.
He almost believed it.
The subject of the party was a sore one.
Part of you wanted to go and part of you didn't, and the two parts had been arguing since Dean walked away from the tripod, and by the time you got back to your apartment you had resolved nothing except that you needed to talk to Olivia about it.
Olivia listened to the full recap of the Dean conversation with the focused attention of someone taking notes. When you finished she was quiet for approximately three seconds.
"We're going," she said.
"I said I wasn't sure —"
"I've made up my mind. You were invited so you need to go, and I'm coming with you because—." She looked at you with the expression of someone who had already decided the fun they were going to have and was simply waiting for logistics to catch up. "What's the theme?"
"Dynamic duo."
"Perfect for us." She was already opening her laptop. "I know exactly what we're wearing."
"I don't even know what to wear," you breathed out, dropping flat onto your bed and staring at the ceiling. "What kind of theme even is that? Dynamic duo? That's so vague."
"It's not vague, it's versatile." She turned the screen to face you. "Clueless. Cher and Dionne. The plaid."
You looked at the screen. You looked at Olivia.
"Obviously," you said.
You walked into the party in matching plaid ,short skirt, blazer, the whole thing and felt immediately, objectively, like you had made the right costume choice. Olivia walked in beside you with the confident energy of someone who had never had a bad entrance in her life.
The house was full and warm and smelled like every college party you had ever been to. You did a quick scan of the room in the completely professional way of someone who was not looking for anyone specific.
You found him in approximately four seconds.
Logan was in the kitchen with Dean, drink in hand, laughing at something. He was wearing a sleveless gray shirt with a pair of wings.
You gave a small wave in their direction. Dean spotted you first and his face did something immediately, and then he clapped a hand on Logan's back and pushed him in your direction with the subtlety of a person who had never heard the word subtle.
Logan crossed the room.
"Hey —" His eyes moved over you and something in his expression shifted slightly. "Clueless?"
"Yeah," you said, nodding perhaps a few more times than necessary.
Beside you, Olivia made a sound that she converted, barely, into a cough. She had been documenting your inability to form complete sentences in Logan's presence for approximately three months and found it genuinely hilarious.
"You look very pretty," Logan said.
"Oh — thanks." The blush arrived before you could do anything about it. Compose yourself.
Logan seemed to remember that you were not alone. "You too, Olivia."
"Yeah, right," Olivia laughed. "I'll go get a drink."
She disappeared into the crowd. As she passed behind Logan she turned to face you and mouthed make a move with the enormous unsubtle energy of someone who had been waiting three months to say it.
You looked back at Logan.
"I'm glad you came," he said. "Dean mentioned you weren't sure."
"I had some content to edit," you said.
"This is more important," he said, lightly, like a joke, but with something underneath it that wasn't entirely a joke.
"Yeah," you said.
And then you were both just standing there. Drinks in hand, the party moving around you, talking the way you had discovered you talked when you were alone together, which was easily, which was the specific ease of two people who had been in the same orbit long enough to have figured out each other's rhythms without officially acknowledging it.
"So what are you supposed to be anyway?" you asked, taking the opportunity to look at him properly. The gray shirt. The wings. The arms, which were — you looked at his face instead. "Jacob Elordi in Saltburn?"
Logan laughed — a real one, surprised and warm. "Bird and the bee. I'm the bird. Tuck's the bee."
"Oh," you said. "That tracks."
"Does it."
"The bee has better energy," you said. "No offense to you."
"I'll tell Tucker you said that."
"Please don't."
Dean chose this exact moment to appear between you.
"Hello, you two." He looked between you with barely concealed delight. "What are we talking about?"
"The birds and the bees," you said, and watched Dean's eyebrow go up in real time.
"Oh, I like where this is headed."
"No — I mean his costume," you said quickly. "What are you supposed to be?"
"Maverick." He pointed across the room to where Beau was talking to a very beautiful brunette. "Beau's Goose."
You considered this. "Was there not a dynamic duo where one of them didn't have a tragic ending? You could have been Ice."
"Ice and Maverick hated each other," Dean said.
"No they didn't! In your own words they had the hots for each other."
Dean opened his mouth. Closed it. Pointed at you. "That is actually a fair point."
"Thank you."
"You're insufferable," he said, smiling. He looked between you and Logan one more time. "I'm going to go find Beau. You two —" he gestured vaguely at the space between you "— continue."
He disappeared back into the crowd.
You looked at Logan. Logan looked at you.
"He's not subtle," you said.
"No," Logan agreed. "He really isn't."
The party continued around you. At some point you had moved slightly closer together. Neither of you had announced it. At some point his hand had found the small of your back, briefly, when someone pushed past in the crowd. It had stayed there a moment longer than strictly necessary. You had not moved away.
At some point Olivia had caught your eye from across the room and given you a look of such unrestrained triumph that you had been forced to look at the floor to keep from laughing.
"So —" Logan started. He stopped. Tried again. "I've been thinking. For a while actually." He looked at you with the expression of someone abandoning a rehearsed script entirely in favor of just saying the thing. "Would you like to go out? With me. On a date."
Inside your chest, something that had been very carefully managed for months made a sound like:
YESYESYESYESYESYESYESYES —
"Yes," you said, with great composure. "I'd like that."
Something settled in his expression warm and certain. "Good. I was hoping you were going to say that."
"I was hoping you were going to ask," you said.
He smiled. Not the polite one, not the team-photo one the real one, the one you had forty-seven saved clips of and only eleven of them were for work.
Across the room, completely uninvited into this moment, Dean let out a noise of triumph loud enough that Tucker turned around to look.
You and Logan both looked at Dean.
Dean pointed at both of you, then at himself, then gave two thumbs up with the energy of a man who had absolutely no shame about any of this.
"He planned this," you said.
"Obviously," Logan said.
You looked at Dean, who was now saying something to Beau that was making Beau look confused and Dean look extremely pleased with himself.
"I'm going to delete all his content," you said.
"Probably," Logan said. "But maybe tomorrow."
You looked back at him.
"Yeah," you said. "Maybe tomorrow."
What you did not know — what you would not know for three months — was what had happened two hours before that conversation.
The first date was a Tuesday.
Logan had asked on a Saturday and then spent the intervening three days being completely normal about it, which meant he had checked his phone approximately forty times and suggested three different restaurants to Dean who had not asked for his opinion and had given it anyway.
He picked you up at seven. You had worn something simple and he had looked at you the way he sometimes looked into the camera, direct, unhurried, like you were something worth paying attention t, and said you look great in the specific voice he used when he meant things, and you had said thanks, so do you and meant it, and the evening had been easy in the way that things were easy when they had been building for a long time and had finally found the right outlet.
You talked for three hours. Not about anything important about the team, about your job, about the things you had noticed about each other without ever saying so. He told you about the preemptive puck apology before you could bring it up and looked slightly embarrassed about it, which you found endearing in a way you did not make him aware of. You told him about the forty-seven saved clips and watched his expression do something warm and complicated.
He walked you back to your dorm. He kissed you at the door — soft and unhurried, the specific patience of someone who had been waiting a while and had decided that arriving was enough for now.
You went inside and stood in the hallway for a moment.
Oh, you thought. Not oh no this time. Just — oh.
What followed was three months that assembled themselves quietly and completely, the way good things tended to do when you stopped trying to manage them.
You learned the specific rhythm of being with Logan, which was different from the rhythm of being near Logan, which you had spent seven months memorizing from behind a camera. Being with him was easier. Less careful. The things you had noticed from a professional distance — the way he focused, the way he was with his teammates, the particular quality of his attention when he was genuinely listening were the same up close, just without the glass between you.
He remembered things. That was the detail that accumulated the most weight over three months small things you had said once, in passing, that he filed away and produced later in the specific way of someone who had been listening more carefully than you knew. The coffee order. The fact that you hated the overhead lights in the film room. The name of the professor whose class you had shared with Liana.
You told Olivia about the coffee order detail on a Thursday night and she looked at you with an expression that said everything she was choosing not to say out loud.
"Don't," you said.
"I'm not saying anything," she said.
"You have a face."
"I have my normal face."
"Olivia."
"I'm just glad," she said simply, and went back to whatever she was doing, and you sat with that for a moment and found that you were too.
Logan was also, three months in, still thinking about the check.
Not constantly. Not the way he had in the beginning, when it had surfaced at inconvenient moments, the first dinner, the first time you laughed at something he said, the first time you fell asleep on his shoulder watching something neither of you were paying attention to. Those early weeks it had been a persistent background noise, a low-level static of something he should have said and hadn't.
But the weeks had passed and the static had gotten quieter, the way noise does when you choose not to listen to it long enough. He had paid his rent. He had replaced the equipment. He had told himself, again and again, that he had been going to ask you out anyway, that the money had been incidental, that what they had built in the three months since was real regardless of how it started.
All of that was true.
The part that was also true, the part he didn't let himself look at too directly, was that you didn't know. And not knowing was its own kind of thing, a thing that existed in the space between you without you being aware of it, that he was aware of every time you said something honest to him, every time you looked at him the way you looked at him.
He had meant to tell you. In the beginning. There had been a window, early on, when it would have been a small thing — by the way, Dean made a bet, it's a whole thing, I was going to ask you anyway—. He had rehearsed it. He had not said it. The window had closed, and then it had been a week, and then a month, and then three months, and now saying it felt like dropping something large into a quiet room.
So he didn't say it.
He told himself it didn't matter because it hadn't changed anything real.
He was getting better at believing that.
It was a Saturday afternoon in February, the specific grey-white quality of a winter afternoon that had given up pretending it was going to improve, and you were in Logan's room doing nothing in particular.
This had become one of your favorite things — the doing nothing in particular. You had a tendency, left to your own devices, to fill time with productivity, with scheduled content and edited footage and the general sense that unoccupied time was time being wasted. Logan had, over three months, introduced you to the concept of lying on a bed on a Saturday afternoon and simply existing, which you had resisted and then accepted and now found genuinely necessary.
He was on his back, one arm behind his head, reading something on his phone. You were beside him, legs tangled, working your way through a Cosmopolitan from 2003 that you had found at the thrift store the previous weekend when you had gone with Allie. It had a younger Jennifer Lopez on the cover and approximately forty pages of advertisements for perfumes that no longer existed, and you had bought it for fifty cents because something about it felt like an artifact.
"Listen to this," you said.
"Mm."
"It's a quiz." You held up the magazine. "Is your relationship ready for the next level? I feel like we should take it."
"I feel like that magazine is older than some of our teammates."
"That's what makes it valuable." You turned back to the page. "Okay. Question one. When you picture your future, does your partner feature prominently? Options are: always, sometimes, or only when I'm feeling optimistic."
"Always," Logan said, without looking up from his phone.
You looked at him sideways. He was still reading, expression neutral, like he had answered a question about the weather.
"Okay," you said, and looked back at the magazine, and did not make anything of it, because making something of it would have required acknowledging that it had landed somewhere specific and stayed there.
You worked through several more questions — about communication, about conflict, about shared values — Logan answering in the same unhurried, matter-of-fact way, like the answers had already been decided and he was simply reporting them.
And then you got to the last one.
"Okay, last question." You shifted onto your side to face him. "If your partner made a serious mistake — something that hurt you — what would it take to make things right? Option A: a heartfelt conversation and genuine apology. Option B: time, space, and proof of change. Option C —" you paused, because option C was very 2003 "— a grand romantic gesture. Flowers, candlelight, the whole thing."
You said it like it was funny. You said it with the lightness of someone reading from an old magazine on a Saturday afternoon.
Logan put his phone down.
He looked at the ceiling for a moment. Then he turned his head and looked at you with an expression that was doing something complicated underneath the surface.
"What would you pick?" he said.
You considered it. "Honestly? C, but private. Like not in front of everyone. Just — showing up. With flowers, or peonies, they are my favorite. And meaning it." You paused. "The meaning it is the important part."
Logan looked at the ceiling again.
"Many flowers," he said. His voice was even. Carefully even.
"Like an unreasonable amount," you said. "Like someone made a decision about it."
"Right," he said.
He was quiet for a moment. You looked at him — at the careful evenness of his expression, the specific stillness of someone sitting with something — and almost asked what he was thinking about.
Then he turned back to you with the warm unhurried expression you knew, and kissed your temple.
"Good to know," he said.
You looked back at the magazine. Jennifer Lopez looked back at you, unbothered.
You did not know, lying there on a grey February Saturday, that you had just handed him the exact shape of something he was going to need.
Logan knew.
He stared at the ceiling after you looked away and thought about a check written on the back of a receipt and a conversation in a locker room and the specific, settling weight of something that had been waiting a long time to be said.
Too many flowers, he thought. Private. Meaning it.
He closed his eyes.
I have to tell her, he thought.
He did not tell her.
Allie had not been looking for information.
She had been in the kitchen at the off campus house on a Wednesday evening, waiting for Dean to finish getting ready so they could go to dinner, scrolling through her phone with the patience of someone accustomed to waiting for Dean to finish getting ready. She was not listening. She was not paying attention to anything except the particular injustice of being told seven-fifteen and it being seven-thirty-two.
And then Dean's phone rang on the counter.
She glanced at it automatically. Logan.
Dean came out of the bathroom still pulling on his jacket and picked it up. "Hey. What's up."
Allie went back to her phone.
"What do you mean you need to tell her." Dean's voice had shifted into something lower, more careful. "What's — Logan. Logan, have you not told her yet?"
Allie looked up.
Dean had his back to her, one hand pressed to the counter, the specific posture of someone having a conversation they hadn't prepared for. "It's been three months, man. How have you — okay. Okay, calm down. Just — tell me what happened."
A pause. Dean listening.
"So tell her," Dean said. "Just — tonight. Call her and tell her. It's been long enough, she'll —" another pause "— Logan, I know it's not going to be easy but you can't just — yes I know you actually love her, that's not the — okay, listen —"
Allie set her phone down on the counter very carefully.
"What," she said.
Dean turned around.
The expression on his face moved through several things in quick succession — surprise, recalibration, and then the specific, flattening look of someone who understood exactly what had just happened.
"Allie —"
"What did you do," she said. Not a question.
Dean lowered his phone slowly. On the other end Logan was saying something, unaware.
"Dean." Her voice was very even. "What did you do."
He told her.
He told her all of it — the bet, the thousand dollars, the locker room — and Allie stood in the kitchen and listened with the stillness of someone who was getting progressively more furious in a way that had not yet found its exit.
When he finished she said nothing for a moment.
"She's my friend," she said finally.
"I know —"
"She is my friend and you let her date him for three months without telling her."
"It wasn't supposed to —"
"Dean." She picked up her keys from the counter. "Do not follow me."
"Allie, please just —"
"I have to tell her," she said. "She's my friend. I'm not going to —"
"Please," Dean said, and his voice had lost all its usual confidence, stripped down to something that was just — asking. "Please just give me a chance to fix it. I'll tell Logan to tell her tonight. Just give me —"
"You had your chance to fix it three months ago," Allie said. "And two months ago. And last month." She looked at him for a long moment. "I love you. And you did something really wrong. And she needs to know."
She left.
Dean stood in the kitchen alone and listened to Logan's voice still coming from the phone in his hand.
He put the phone to his ear.
"She already knows," he said.
You were in your aparment when Allie knocked.
She told you everything standing in your doorway, quickly and directly, the way Allie did things — no preamble, no softening, just the facts arranged in order. The bet. The thousand dollars. The locker room. Three months.
You stood very still while she talked.
When she finished you said nothing for a long moment.
"Get your keys," you said.
"(Y/N) —"
"Get your keys, Allie."
The drive to the off campus house took four minutes. You did not speak. Allie drove and you looked at the road ahead and felt cold clarity of someone who had moved past the part where things hurt and into the part where they simply had to be dealt with.
The lights were on when you pulled up. Of course they were.
You didn't knock.
You walked in and Logan was already in the hallway, like he had heard the car, like some part of him had known — and the expression on his face when he saw you was the expression of someone who had been waiting for this and was still not ready for it.
Dean was behind him. Tucker and Garrett further back, in the doorway of the living room, with the expressions of people who understood the room and had decided to stay very still.
"Hey —" Logan started.
"Did you take a bet," you said, "to ask me out."
The hallway was very quiet.
"Yes," Logan said.
The word landed.
"How much," you said.
"A thousand dollars."
You looked at him. This person. This person whose coffee order you knew, whose preemptive apologies you had found endearing, whose smile you had forty-seven saved clips of and only eleven of them were for work.
"You had to be paid," you said. Your voice was very quiet. "Someone had to pay you. To ask me out."
"It wasn't —"
"A thousand dollars," you said. "That's what it cost. That's what asking me out was worth to you. A thousand dollars and someone else's idea."
"That's not —"
"I told you I loved you." The words came out steadier than you expected. "Three weeks ago. In your room. I told you I loved you and you said it back and the whole time —" you stopped. Started again. "The whole time there was a check. There was a check and you knew and you said it back anyway."
"I meant it," Logan said. "I mean it. I love you, that has nothing to do with —"
"It has everything to do with it." Your voice cracked slightly and you pushed past it. "Because maybe you do. Maybe you actually do love me. But I will never know that now. Do you understand that? I will never know which part was real and which part was a thousand dollars because you didn't tell me. You had three months to tell me and you didn't."
"I was going to —"
"When?" you said. "When were you going to tell me? After another month? After a year? Were you ever actually going to tell me or were you just going to keep it and hope I never found out?"
He said nothing.
"That's what I thought," you said.
You turned to Dean.
Dean was standing very still with an expression that had none of his usual ease in it, stripped down, uncomfortable, genuinely ashamed in a way that you recognized as real and that made it worse rather than better.
"I thought you were my friend," you said. Your voice was different now, not cold, something more broken than cold. "I thought — you were supposed to be my friend. I told you things. I told you how I felt about him and you used it. You turned it into a transaction and then you watched me fall in love with him and you said nothing."
"I know," Dean said. His voice was very quiet. "I know."
"I taught you how to use the camera," you said, which was not what you meant to say but came out anyway, and somehow it was the most honest thing — the small specific intimacy of it, the way you had shown him the angles and the settings and he had been genuinely interested and you had thought this is what a friend looks like. "I showed you everything. I thought you were —"
"I was," Dean said. "I am. I'm so sorry."
"Don't." You picked up your bag. "Don't apologize right now. I can't — I need you to not talk to me right now."
You looked at Logan one more time. He was standing in the hallway with his hands at his sides and the open, devastated expression of someone who had run out of words and knew it.
"Please," he said. Just that. Just the word, quiet and without any of the composure he usually wore like a second skin.
"I have to go," you said.
"Please just let me —"
"Logan." Your voice broke on his name, just slightly, and you steadied it. "I have to go."
You walked to the door. Behind you you heard him take a step.
You opened the door.
"You two fucking suck," you said, to the hallway, to both of them, to the three months of Tuesday practices and bus rides and magazine quizzes and I love you said and meant and received by someone who was keeping a check in his jacket pocket the whole time. "Never talk to me again."
You walked out.
Allie was waiting by the car. She took one look at your face and said nothing, just unlocked the doors, and you got in, and she drove, and the campus moved past the windows dark and quiet and entirely indifferent.
You did not cry until you got back to your aparment.
And then you did, for a while, with Olivia sitting beside you saying nothing because there was nothing to say, just being there the way people who actually loved you were there when things went wrong.
You had to be paid, you thought, in the dark.
A thousand dollars.
The house was very quiet after you left.
Tucker and Garrett had retreated to the living room. Nobody was saying anything.
Dean sat on the bottom step of the stairs and put his head in his hands.
Logan stood in the hallway where you had left him and looked at the closed door and thought about everything — the check, the locker room, the first dinner, the magazine quiz on a grey February Saturday, too many flowers, private, meaning it — and underneath all of it, constant and quiet, the thing he had known for three months and had managed to convince himself didn't matter:
You had deserved to know.
You had deserved to know from the beginning and he had chosen not to tell you and you stood in his hallway and said I will never know which part was real and he had had no answer because there was no answer that fixed that.
Garrett appeared in the doorway of the living room. He looked at Logan for a long moment.
"I told you not to," he said. Not unkindly. Just said.
"I know," Logan said.
"From the beginning. I told you."
"I know, Garrett."
Garrett looked at him for another moment. Then he went back to the living room without saying anything else, which was somehow the most devastating response available.
Logan sat down on the floor of the hallway with his back against the wall and stared at nothing.
I have to fix this, he thought.
He had absolutely no idea how.
The email to the athletics department went out the following morning.
It was professional and brief — you cited personal reasons, thanked them for the opportunity, offered to train your replacement, gave two weeks notice. You sent it before you could think about it too hard, before the part of you that loved the job could talk the other part out of it.
You were not going to sit in that rink anymore. You were not going to film those practices or those games or stand in that corridor outside the locker room with your tripod and your equipment bag and pretend that everything was the same as it had been before.
Your phone had messages from Logan and Dean by noon. You read none of them.
The football team's social media coordinator reached back out by the end of the day.
You started the following Monday.
The football team was different from the hockey team in ways that were both obvious and unexpected. Louder, in some ways. Different rhythms, different energy. The guys were nice and the work was interesting and you were good at it, because you were good at this, that had never been in question.
You were fine.
You were getting finer by the day, which was either progress or a very convincing impression of it.
Allie texted. Garrett texted — I'm sorry, for what it's worth I told him not to — which you appreciated more than you could say. Tucker sent a single text that just said I tried to talk him out of it and you believed him and told him so.
You did not respond to Logan.
Logan's days had a new shape to them and he hated it.
Practice was the same, same drills, same ice, same team, but the stands were wrong. The spot where you always sat, third row back on the left side, was empty now, and he knew it was empty without lookin. He looked anyway. Every practice, every morning skate, every film session, he looked, and the spot was empty, and he looked away.
Logan texted you every three days. Not long messages, just checking in, just your name sometimes, just I know you don't want to hear from me right now but I'm sorry. He did not expect responses. He sent them anyway because not sending them felt worse.
He watched your football content. Every post, every reel, every behind-the-scenes clip. He watched the way you filmed the new team — the same eye, the same instinct for the right moment, the same ability to make something look like something worth watching — and felt the specific, particular ache of someone who understood what they had lost because they had been paying attention to it the whole time.
He had always been paying attention.
That was the thing that made it so much worse.
Three weeks after you left, the hockey team got a new social media person.
Her name was Jade. She was a sophomore, enthusiastic, slightly overwhelmed, and she had asked you to walk her through the setup on a Tuesday morning when the team had a late practice, which meant you were in the rink, with your old equipment, showing someone else how to use the angles you had spent seven months learning, when the team came off the ice.
You had not planned for this. You had assumed they would be gone by the time you were done.
They were not gone.
You heard them before you saw them, he familiar noise of the team coming out of the locker room corridor and then Tucker saw you first and stopped walking so abruptly that Garrett walked into him.
"What —" Garrett looked up. Saw you. His expression did something complicated.
The rest of the team filtered out around them, and then Dean, and then Logan, and the corridor went through a specific collective recalibration.
You kept your face completely neutral. "Hey," you said, to the general group. "This is Jade. She's taking over the social media. I'm just showing her the setup."
Jade waved cheerfully, unaware of the atmospheric pressure of the corridor.
"Taking over?" Tucker said slowly.
"Yes," you said. "I moved to football." You said it simply, like it was information and not anything else. "Jade is great, she's going to do a really good job."
The team was looking at you with various expressions. Tucker looked pained. Garrett looked like he was doing math.
Dean was looking at the floor.
Logan was looking at you with the expression of someone watching something leave that they had already lost and were only now understanding the full shape of. You could feel it without looking directly at him. You had spent seven months learning the specific weight of his attention.
"I already left," you said. "This is just the handover."
"But —" Tucker started.
"Tuck," you said, gently. "It's fine. Jade is great."
Jade smiled again.
"We kind of made you leave," Tucker said, in the specific tone of someone who had been holding something for three weeks and had finally said it out loud.
"Tucker —"
"No, like —" he stopped. Looked at Dean. Looked at Logan. Looked back at you. "We made you leave. That's what happened. And I just — I'm sorry. I don't know what else to say but I'm sorry."
The corridor was very quiet.
"You didn't make me leave," you said carefully. "You tried to talk him out of it. I know that."
Tucker nodded. Still pained.
"Right," Garrett said finally, in the tone of someone deciding to be graceful about something painful. "Good luck with football."
"Thanks," you said.
You turned back to Jade and kept going with the walkthrough, and the team filed past, and you did not look at Logan as he walked by even though you could feel him slowing down, even though you could feel him wanting to say something.
"Hey," Logan said. Very quietly. Just that.
You kept your eyes on the camera settings you were showing Jade.
He stood there for a moment. Then his footsteps continued down the corridor.
You exhaled very quietly and kept talking to Jade about angles.
Behind you, fading, you heard Dean say something low and urgent to Logan that you couldn't make out. And Logan's response, quieter still:
"I know."
Logan started showing up.
Not to you, he respected the never talk to me again enough not to push himself into your space. But he started showing up in the ways that were available to him.
He fixed the tripod mount in the storage room that had been broken since October — the one you had mentioned once, months ago, in passing, because it made the camera angle slightly off and you had learned to compensate for it. He left a note on it that said finally fixed it. sorry it took so long. No signature. He didn't need one.
He started showing up to the football team's games.
Not every game. Not in a way that was dramatic or obvious. Just there, in the stands, with the quiet patience of someone who had decided that if the mountain wouldn't come to him he would go to the mountain and sit in the stands and watch from a respectful distance.
Olivia told you the second time it happened.
"He was there again," she said carefully.
You said nothing.
"He's not doing anything," she said. "He's just — there. Watching."
You said nothing.
"I thought you should know," she said.
You knew.
You knew because you had clocked him the first time — third row back, left side,— and you had kept filming and not said anything and thought about it for three days.
He texted you after the third game.
logan: you got a good shot of the QB in the third quarter. the one right before the play call. it was good.
You stared at the message for a long time.
yn: how would you know
logan: i was there
A long pause.
logan: i'll keep coming if that's okay. i won't bother you. i just want to be there.
You put your phone down.
You picked it up.
yn: it's okay
Dean did not sleep the night you found out.
He lay in his bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about the specific expression on your face when you said I thought you were my friend — not angry, which would have been easier, but broken, which was not easier at all.
At four in the morning he picked up his phone.
dean: allie
allie: i'm awake
dean: i know i really messed up
allie: yes
dean: i don't know how to fix it
A long pause.
allie: you start by not trying to fix it. you start by just being sorry.
dean: i am
allie: i know. she needs to hear it from you. not a text. not through anyone else. you.
dean: she said never talk to her again
allie: i know what she said. give her time. and then go.
Dean put his phone down.
He stared at the ceiling until it got light outside.
You took your own sweet time.
Not to feel better, you were not operating under the illusion that time fixed everything, but to feel what you needed to feel without an audience. You went to classes. You went to work. You filmed the football team's Tuesday practice and focused on the angles and the light and the professional satisfaction of a job done well, and you did not think about hockey, and you did not look at your phone when certain names appeared on the screen, and you let Olivia bring you food and watch bad television with you without making you talk about it.
On the fourteenth day Dean was waiting outside your lecture hall.
He looked terrible. Not dramatically terrible — Dean was constitutionally incapable of looking terrible — but tired.
You stopped when you saw him.
He held up both hands. "I'm not here to make excuses," he said. "I know you said never talk to me again. I know. I just — five minutes. And then I'll go and I won't bother you again if that's what you want."
You looked at him for a long moment.
You stepped to the side of the path, out of the flow of people. He followed.
"Say what you have to say," you said.
Dean looked at you with the expression you had never seen on him before, no performance, no charm deployed at the right moment, nothing managed. Just a person who had done something wrong and knew it and was standing in front of the person he had done it to.
"I've never had a friend like you before," he said. "Like — actually. I have guy friends. I have girls I've hooked up, almost dated or whatever. But I've never had a girl who was just — a friend. Who I talked to and who talked to me and who I could be around without it being anything else." He paused. "And I took that and I made it into a scheme. And I told myself I was helping and maybe part of me was but part of me just — didn't think far enough ahead. Didn't think about what it would mean to you if you found out. Didn't think about you at all, honestly, which is the thing I'm most sorry about." He held your gaze. "I thought about Logan being in love with you and I thought about the bet being clever and I didn't think about you being a person who deserved to know the truth. And I should have. You should have been the first thing I thought about."
The path had mostly emptied. A bird somewhere was doing something aggressively cheerful.
"I miss my friend," Dean said. "I know I don't get to just say that. I know. I just needed you to know that it's real. You are actually my friend and I actually miss you and I'm actually sorry, not sorry like I feel bad, sorry like I understand what I did."
You looked at him.
You thought about the bus and his head on your shoulder and on the team, I meant and the way he had looked genuinely wounded when you said Tucker was probably your better friend on the team.
"It's going to take time," you said finally.
Something in his expression shifted — careful, not quite hope yet.
"I know," he said.
"You don't get to just be normal yet. We have to rebuild that."
"I know."
"And you have to actually be different," you said. "Not just sorry. Different."
"I will be," he said. "I already am. Or I'm trying to be." He paused. "Is that enough to start with?"
You looked at him for a long moment.
"It's enough to start with," you said.
The careful-not-quite-hope became something more than that.
"Thank you," he said quietly.
"Don't thank me yet," you said. "We have a long way to go."
"I know," he said. "I'll go as slow as you need."
You looked at the path ahead.
"I have class," you said.
"I know. Go."
You went.
It was a start.
Logan was harder.
Not because you were angrier at him — you were, if you were being honest, angry at both of them in equal measure, just differently. Dean had betrayed a friendship. Logan had betrayed something larger, something that had your name on it, something you had handed him on a grey February Saturday when you said I love you and meant it with everything you had.
You saw him at the football games. Third row back, left side, every time. Not looking at you directly, just there, present, with the quiet patience of someone who had decided that showing up was the only thing available to him and had committed to it without reservation.
He sent you a text after every game. Not about him, not about them, about your work. Good shot in the second half. The one where you caught the receiver right before the snap. The slow motion reel you posted was really good. The timing was perfect. Small specific things that said I was paying attention without saying anything else.
You read them all.
You responded to some of them.
Small things. Thanks. I almost didn't post that one. Nothing that opened a door, just acknowledgment. The acknowledgment of someone who was not ready and was not pretending to be and was also not entirely gone.
He was not pushing. That was the thing you noticed most. He had shown up to three football games and fixed a broken tripod mount and sent careful specific texts about your work and he had not once asked for anything in return. Had not once said I think we should talk or please give me a chance or any of the things that would have made it easier to keep the door closed.
He was just — there.
Being different.
The grand gesture arrived on a Thursday, five weeks after the fight.
You were in the football team's equipment room going through footage on your laptop when someone knocked on the door. One of the managers looked in.
"There's someone outside asking for you," he said, with the specific expression of someone who had seen something and found it notable.
You went outside.
The path outside the athletics building was where you found him — Logan, in the cold, with flowers. Not a bunch. Not a normal amount. An amount that represented a decision — sunflowers and peonies and something small and white, wrapped loosely in paper, assembled with the specific intention of being too many, more than one person could reasonably carry, held in both arms with the careful energy of someone who had thought about this and decided it was not enough and added more anyway.
You looked at the flowers. You looked at him.
He looked tired in the same way he had looked tired since the night you left — not dramatic, not performing it, just genuinely worn down in the way of someone who had been carrying something for five weeks without putting it down.
"You said private," he said. "Too many flowers. Someone made a decision." He paused. "I made a decision."
Your throat did something inconvenient.
"Logan —"
"I'm not asking you to forgive me today," he said. "I just you said meaning it was the important part. And I needed you to see that I mean it. That's all. I'm not asking for anything."
You looked at the flowers. Peonies. He had gotten peonies specifically.
"You remembered the peonies," you said.
"You mentioned them once," he said. "A long time ago."
"You were paying attention," you said.
"I was always paying attention," he said quietly. "That was never the problem."
You stood there in the cold outside the athletics building and thought about I will never know which part was real and the third row left side and the texts about your work and five weeks of him being different without being asked to prove it.
"This isn't enough," you said.
Something flickered in his expression.
"I know," he said.
"I need more than flowers."
"I know," he said again, steadily. "Tell me what you need. Whatever it is. I'll do it."
You looked at him for a long moment.
"I need time," you said. "Real time. Not rushing. Not us going back to how things were because it was comfortable and we missed each other. Actually starting over and doing it right."
"Okay," he said.
"I need you to keep showing up," you said. "Not just when it's easy. When it's hard and uncertain and you don't know if it's working. You keep showing up anyway."
"I will," he said.
"And I need you to understand that I might get angry again," you said. "Even after I've forgiven you. It might come back and I might need to say something and you have to let me say it without shutting down."
"I will," he said. "I'll listen. Every time."
You looked at him.
"The texts," you said. "About my work."
"Yeah."
"You were at every game."
"Yeah."
"Third row back. Left side."
He looked at you quietly.
"I know," you said. "I noticed."
Something in his expression shifted.
"I was always going to ask you out," he said. "I need you to know that. Not as an excuse. Just as a true thing. The money didn't change what I felt. It just — it gave me a reason I shouldn't have needed and I took it and I'm sorry. But what happened between us was real. Every single part of it was real."
"I know," you said, which surprised you slightly, because you hadn't known you knew until you said it. "I know it was real. That's what made it hurt so much."
He nodded.
"Give me the peonies," you said.
He carefully extracted the peonies from the arrangement and held them out. You took them.
"The rest you can take home," you said.
"Okay."
"And Logan —" you paused. "The showing up. Don't stop."
Something broke open in his expression — not dramatically, not loudly, just quietly and completely, the expression of someone who had been holding something for five weeks and had finally been given a place to put it down.
"I won't," he said. "I promise."
You looked at him for one more moment.
"Slow," you said.
"As slow as you need," he said. "I'm not going anywhere."
You went back inside.
You stood in the equipment room with the peonies and thought about everything — the check and the bet and the fight and five weeks of third row left side and too many flowers on a Thursday afternoon in the cold.
You were not okay yet.
But you were standing with peonies, which was somewhere.
It was enough to start with.
The getting back together did not happen all at once.
It happened the way the crush had happened — gradually, against nobody's will this time, the way things did when they had been building for a long time and had finally found the right conditions.
The first time you went back to the rink it was not for work.
It was a Saturday game, mid-March, the kind that mattered for standings, and you had told yourself you were going because Allie and Hannah were going and Olivia was going and it was a group thing and had nothing to do with anything else.
You brought your camera.
Not the work camera your personal one, the smaller one you used when you were filming for yourself rather than for a content schedule. You told yourself it was habit. You told yourself you just liked having it.
You sat third row left side.
The thing about watching hockey when you actually knew what you were looking at was that it was a completely different experience from watching hockey when you were just there for the atmosphere. You knew the plays. You knew the patterns. You knew which moments were about to become something before they became something, the specific pre-motion stillness that preceded a good play, the way certain players telegraphed their intentions without knowing they were doing it.
You knew Logan's tells better than anyone.
Which was why you had your camera up and ready when he got the puck in the second period the slight shift of his weight, the way his head came up a half second before anyone else's, and then the play unfolding exactly the way you had known it would, clean and fast and entirely worth watching.
You got the shot.
Forty-three seconds of it, actually.
You lowered the camera and looked at what you had captured and felt something settle in your chest that was warm and quiet and entirely familiar.
Genuinely cinematic, you thought, and smiled at the ice.
Briar won.
The team filtered out of the locker room in the usual way in ones and twos, loud and post-game, spilling into the corridor where the usual group had gathered. Allie found Dean. Hannah found Garrett. Tucker found someone to complain to about a call in the third period.
You were reviewing footage on your camera when you felt someone stop beside you.
You looked up.
Logan was still in half his gear, hair damp, and he was looking at you with the expression you had forty-seven saved clips of — the real one, the one that had nothing managed about it — except that now you were allowed to look at it directly, which was still something you were getting used to.
"You came," he said.
"I came," you confirmed.
"You brought your camera."
"I brought my camera."
He looked at it. He looked at you. "Did you get anything good?"
You turned the camera around and hit play. The second period play unfolded on the small screen — the weight shift, the half second of stillness, the clean fast movement of something that knew exactly where it was going.
Forty-three seconds of it.
Logan watched it. Something in his expression went soft in the specific way it did when he was actually feeling something and had decided not to manage it.
"That's —" he started.
"Genuinely cinematic," you said.
He looked at you.
You looked back at him.
And then he kissed you right there in the corridor.
It was warm and certain and tasted like relief of something that had been a long time coming and had finally, simply, arrived.
When you pulled back he was smiling the real one, the one you had been filming without quite admitting why for seven months.
"So," he said.
"Yeah," you said. "We're back together." You pointed at him. "Don't fuck up."
Logan laughed a real one, surprised and warm, the kind that carried down the corridor and made Tucker laugh too without knowing why.
"I won't," he said.
"I mean it."
"I know you mean it."
"Good." You tucked your camera back into your bag. "Buy me food. I've been at a hockey game for two hours and I'm starving."
"Done," he said immediately.
You started walking and everything was different from before, which was the whole point, which was exactly what you had asked for.
Better. Not the same. Better.
Behind you, fading, you heard Tucker say something to Garrett.
I said "I love you". You say nothing back | John Logan
summary: the arrangement was simple: keep it casual, don't catch feelings, don't ask for more than what's on the table. 338 days later, you're starting to think simple was never really an option with john logan.
notes: hii, i'm back!! i was genuinely so overwhelmed by the response to my first one shot. you guys are so kind and it inspired me to keep writing. so here we are, back with more yearning, more angst, and more logan being an idiot about his feelings. my requests are open if you have any ideas or characters you want to see i'd love to hear from you. thank you so much for reading and enjoy ❤️❤️
warnings: swearing, alcohol, light angst, situationships, a puck bunny accusation and a confession in the rain.
word count: 8k
The thing with Logan had started exactly 338 days ago. Almost one year. One full lap around the sun. You knew because you had been counting, the days and the hours and even the minutes since this situationship from hell, as your dear friends had taken to calling it, had installed itself in your life like an antivirus app you hadn't downloaded and couldn't figure out how to delete.
It had started on Halloween, and at the time it hadn't seemed like a bad idea. It was just past eleven and the house off campus that your friends had dragged you to smelled like dry ice and weed, and you were tired and ready to leave, which was an anomaly. You were usually the last one standing, your friends had given you the nickname ending antagonist for a reason. In hindsight, that probably should have been a warning sign. The one night you wanted to go home early was the night everything started.
Though to be fair, things with Logan are not bad. That's the thing people don't understand when they hear situationship from hell. On the contrary, things with Logan are very good. Too good. Too good to look at directly without feeling something inconvenient shift behind your ribs, which is precisely why it's bad. Because he had been so genuinely, almost aggressively nice about the whole thing. He had found you at the edge of that party and sat next to you and talked to you for hours like you were the most interesting thing in the room, and he had made a real effort not to look at your boobs while you were talking, which in that particular environment was either extremely respectful or a sign that he was raised correctly, and either way it had done something to you.
And then you had woken up on his chest the next morning. His warm skin and steady heartbeat, the sort of light that meant it was too early to be awake, and done the awkward post-hookup shuffle of words, and heard: I'm not really looking for anything serious.
A bucket of cold water dropped directly on your head would have been less effective. More merciful, probably.
What else could you have done except agree? For god's sake, he was sitting there in black boxers holding a cup of coffee, extending it toward you like a peace offering, brown eyes looking at you with an expression that was genuinely, unfairly soft for seven in the morning. You took the cup. He readjusted against the headboard and looked at you with those eyes and said, simply: "So?"
So. So what? What were you supposed to say?
"Sure," you heard yourself say. "I'm interested in that too."
Sure. I'm interested in that too. Your internal voice repeated it back to you with the tone of a younger sibling trying to get a rise out of you. That was, objectively, the least true thing you had ever said out loud. You had been raised on Bridget Jones and every famous rom-com ever committed to film. You believed in love, in its inconvenience and its necessity and its complete refusal to be reasoned with. Casual did not cut it for you. It never had.
But god. If Bridget could have seen John Logan in that particular light, with that particular bed head, she would have understood completely.
So you agreed. And after that came the encounters.
At first they were private, almost secretive, you telling your friends you were going for a run and then actually running, just in the wrong direction entirely. Logan telling his that he was going to study somewhere, which was technically true, depending on your definition of anatomy. It gave everything a specific kind of thrill, the pleasant urgency of something that existed slightly outside the normal rules, and for a while that was enough.
But time has a way of dissolving things like that. Gradually, without either of you deciding to, you stopped hiding. And that was when the real problem arrived.
You and Logan became friends.
Not the convenient, surface-level kind, the real kind, the kind that builds without you noticing until one day you look around and realize that this person has become load-bearing in your life. You were always at the house. You knew the full taxonomy of Dean's recent romantic encounters, the specificity of Garrett's current problems, the ongoing narrative of Tucker's various endeavors. You didn't just know about them, you helped. You were involved. You had opinions and history and context, and they knew it, and they came to you with things.
And it went the other way too. Logan had gotten so close to your friends that he would voluntarily drive Marissa to her therapy appointments in Boston without being asked, would send Benny reels about topics they'd talked about the week before, remembered details that even you sometimes forgot. He had threaded himself into the fabric of your life so completely and so quietly that you could no longer locate the seam.
And finally, finally, things had started to feel like they were moving in the right direction. The direction they probably should have been heading since the morning after Halloween. Maybe the casual arrangement had just been a detour — a scenic route to the same destination. All's well that ends well.
And then you and Logan would go to Malone's, and a waitress would glance between you with a smile and say what a nice couple you made, and Logan would laugh in that easy, noncommittal way of his and say: we're just friends.
And there it was. Bucket of cold water. Every time, without fail, like a reset button neither of you had agreed to keep pressing.
Every single time.
Which brings you to now.
You are sitting on Logan's couch, draped over him, legs intertwined, peppering kisses down his neck while he makes a valiant and increasingly unsuccessful effort to tell you about the new episode of some reality show he has gotten inexplicably invested in. Something about traitors in a castle. Who cares. Not you. Not when Logan smelled like that and the house was quiet and his hands were doing that thing where they moved without him seeming to notice.
You sank further into him. The kisses started to linger. His words got sparse.
"Are you even listening to me?" Logan murmured, his voice coming out considerably less steady than he had probably intended.
You hummed against his pulse point by way of answer.
The front door opened.
You both startled, pulling apart with the practiced efficiency of people who had been interrupted before, but the moment you registered it was Dean you settled back into exactly the position you'd been in. Dean didn't care about PDA. He actively encouraged it.
He dropped onto the opposite couch, looked at the ceiling briefly, then at you.
"Okay, I have a question," he said. "Logan, dude, this is for science, please don't be weird about it."
At this point you were sitting upright, Logan's arms still looped around you, his chin finding your shoulder, using you as a very comfortable shield against whatever Dean was about to say.
"Shoot," you said.
Dean took a breath with the energy of someone preparing to say something they had already decided to say regardless of the response. "Do you think I should buy a vibrator for a friend of mine?"
Logan laughed against your neck. You shivered slightly at the warmth of his breath.
"Are you the friend?" you asked. "Are you buying a vibrator for yourself?"
"What? No. I'm a man."
"That doesn't mean anything. Men are allowed to have vibrators."
"I know that. It's not for me."
"I really think you should get one though. For yourself. If you want to be the Samantha of the group you have to commit to the bit."
"I am the Samantha," Dean said, with genuine offense. "And it's not for me."
"Have you even watched Sex and the City?"
"Yes. I'm from New York, for god's sake and you're being such a Carrie right now."
You settled back against Logan's chest, his arms tightening around you automatically, like a reflex, like something he did without thinking about it anymore.
Yes, you thought. And my own Mr. Big is currently holding me on this couch.
Garrett and Hannah came down the stairs in what you assumed were their stay-at-home outfits: sweatpants, hockey jersey, the specific comfort of two people who had stopped performing around each other. The moment they came into view you felt Logan's hand still. Not move away just still. And then he shifted from behind you to sitting beside you, technically still touching but the warmth of it had changed completely. It was less person you are tangled up with and more person you happen to be sitting next to on public transport.
You knew that shift. You had felt it before.
The first time, you had told yourself you were imagining things.
It was a Tuesday, nothing special about it, the kind of evening that had become completely ordinary, you at the house, Logan beside you on the couch, his thumb making absent circles on your knee while Dean argued with Tucker about something that didn't matter. Hannah had stopped by to pick up something she'd left there the week before, and the moment the door opened Logan's hand had stilled. Not moved away. Just stilled. Like an animal that had heard something.
You hadn't said anything. You'd filed it away in the part of your brain reserved for things you weren't ready to look at yet.
The second time was at one of Garrett's games. You had been standing with Logan at the edge of the rink afterward, his jacket half around your shoulders the way it always ended up, and Hannah had appeared through the crowd. Logan had straightened. Subtly, almost imperceptibly, but you felt it the slight shift in his posture, the way his jacket had slipped back off your shoulders without him seeming to notice he'd let it go.
You'd picked it up off the floor and handed it back to him without a word.
The third time you stopped counting.
Malone's on a Friday night had a particular energy loud enough to feel festive, familiar enough to feel like home. Your usual table was in the corner, the big one that fit all of you without anyone having to pull up an extra chair, and the evening had been good. Genuinely good, the kind that reminded you why you had agreed to this arrangement in the first place, Logan's knee against yours under the table, his arm finding the back of your chair sometime around the second round of drinks, the easy warmth of being somewhere you belonged.
You were mid-story , a good one, the kind that had the whole table leaning in and you could feel it landing, the timing was right, and Garrett was already laughing before you got to the punchline and Dean had that look on his face that meant he was going to steal this story and tell it as his own later, and Tucker was—
You glanced at Logan.
He wasn't laughing.
He was looking across the table at Hannah with an expression you recognized because you had spent the better part of a year learning every single detail of his face, and what was on it right now was something soft and slightly helpless the expression of someone watching something they had decided they couldn't have.
The story finished without you. Somewhere far away, the table laughed.
You picked up your drink. Set it down. Picked it up again.
"I'm going to step outside," you said. "Just — smoke a bit."
"You don't even smoke, (Y/N)!" Tucker replied, laughing, and it killed you because all of Logan's friends had come to know you so well.
"You okay?" Garrett asked.
"Fine. Just air."
You were already standing. Already reaching for your jacket. Logan was on his feet before you made it two steps.
"I'll come with you," he said.
The parking lot outside Malone's was cold and poorly lit. You got about twenty feet from the door before you stopped walking. The noise from inside filtered out muffled and distant, everyone still laughing, completely unaware.
Logan stopped beside you. Waited. He had always been good at waiting, which was one of the things you had loved about him and one of the things that had slowly, quietly driven you insane.
"Don't," you said.
"Don't what?"
"Don't do the thing where you stand there and wait for me to calm down." You turned to face him. The cold air hit your face and you were glad for it. "I'm not going to calm down. So just talk to me. Tell me the truth. Please. Don't bullshit me right now, Logan, I am asking you to not bullshit me right now."
"Baby—"
"Don't baby me, Logan. Not right now"
He looked at you with that steady, unhurried patience of his, which tonight felt less like a quality and more like a weapon.
"What do you want me to say?" he asked.
"I want you to tell me if you have a crush on Hannah." The word crush felt absurdly small for the moment but you couldn't bear the weight of the more accurate alternatives.
Something shifted in his face. Not guilt exactly, something deeper than that. The specific expression of someone who had been quietly hoping a question wouldn't arrive and had known, somewhere underneath the hoping, that it always was going to.
"It's not—" he started.
"Logan."
He exhaled. Looked at the ground briefly. Looked back at you.
"It's not serious," he said. "It's nothing. She's with Garrett. It's not like I would ever—"
"Oh my god." The laugh that came out of you had nothing to do with anything being funny. "Oh my god, you actually do. You actually have a crush on her."
"It's not a big deal—"
"You have a crush on your best friend's girlfriend and it's not a big deal." You repeated it back to him slowly. "I have been right here, Logan. For almost a year I have been right here, and you have a crush on Hannah."
"It's just a feeling. It doesn't mean anything." His voice had an edge to it now, something defensive sharpening underneath the calm. "And you don't get to be mad at me for it."
"Excuse me?"
"You don't get to be mad at me for having feelings." The words were coming faster now, the composure cracking in a way you almost never saw from him. "We said casual. That was the agreement. I can't be accountable to you for things I feel when you are not my girlfriend."
The word landed like a slap.
Girlfriend.
"Right," you said. Your voice had gone very quiet. "I'm not your girlfriend."
"That's not what I—"
"No, you're right. I'm not." You looked at him. Really looked at him — this person whose coffee order you knew by heart, whose nightmares you had talked him through at two in the morning, whose hand had reached for yours in his sleep so many times you had stopped counting. "Can I ask you something? And I need you to actually answer me. Not just wait until I stop talking."
He said nothing, which you took as a yes.
"What did you think this was?" Your voice was still quiet. Controlled. "Not what we agreed on in the beginning. What did you think it was last week? Last month? What did you think it was tonight when you had your arm around me at that table? When you picked me up from my house and kissed me in your truck?" You took a breath. "Because I need to understand how you look at what we have been doing and see something casual. I genuinely need you to explain that to me."
"It's complicated—"
"It's not complicated. It's actually very simple. I just need you to say it out loud."
"You knew what this was when we started—"
"I know what it was when we started. I'm asking what it is now." You crossed your arms against the cold. "Because from where I'm standing it looks a lot like a relationship. It looks like you drive my friends places and remember things about them they never told you twice, and I know every single thing about your life, and we spend more nights together than apart, and you reach for me when you're asleep like I'm something you don't want to lose." Your voice cracked slightly and you pushed past it. "So you'll have to forgive me for being confused about the casual part."
"I can't—" He stopped. Started again. "It's not about not wanting to. It's about what I can actually give right now. Hockey takes everything. My family, my mother, I don't have money, I don't have stability, I don't have any of the things that—"
"I'm not asking you for stability. I'm not asking you for money." Something in your chest had cracked open and you were past the point of closing it. "I'm asking you to admit what this already is. That's all."
"I am being honest—"
"Then be more honest." Your voice broke on the last word and you kept going anyway. "Because I'm in love with you."
The parking lot went completely silent.
Logan stared at you. The words sat between you in the cold air like something that had changed the temperature.
"What?" His voice came out barely above a breath.
"I'm in love with you." Steadier the second time. "I have been for a long time. And I know that's not what we agreed on. But I can't stand here and pretend I don't while you tell me it's not a big deal that you have feelings for someone else." You looked at him. "We are already a couple, Logan. In every single way that actually matters, we already are. The only thing missing is you admitting it."
Something moved across his face — something large and unguarded and almost frightened.
"It's not that simple," he said, quieter now, the defensiveness gone out of it.
"I know it's not simple. I know about hockey. I know about your mom. I know all of it, Logan, because you told me, because that's what we do. But none of that changes what I just said." You took a breath. "So just tell me. Do you have feelings for me? Yes or no. That's all I'm asking."
Logan looked at you.
And said nothing.
The silence stretched between you, long and terrible. His jaw was tight. His eyes moved across your face like he was looking for something he either couldn't find or couldn't say, and the longer the silence went on the more clearly you understood that the silence was itself an answer.
"Wow," you said finally. Very quietly. "Okay."
You picked up your bag. Straightened your jacket. Looked at him one more time this person you had spent 338 days loving in whatever form he would accept.
"Don't follow me," you said.
He didn't.
You walked back toward the warm light spilling out of Malone's windows, past your friends still laughing, past the table that an hour ago had felt like home, and you kept walking. Past the door, past the window, down the street, into the cold.
Too angry to cry. Too tired to pretend. Too done to look back.
Behind you, in the parking lot, Logan stood very still and said nothing which was the thing he was best at, and the thing that had finally cost him everything.
It had been a hard couple of days. But the upside of a not-breakup in college was that you didn't get to wallow, no watching rom-coms until the wee hours, no doing the Bella, watching the months pass from your bedroom window. Life was as it had always been, minus the space Logan had occupied in your weekly schedule. Not a metaphysical space, a literal one. When you opened your Google Calendar you found his game days still blocked out in blue, his training days still marked, everything still there like a calendar that hadn't gotten the news yet.
Pathetic, you thought, and deleted them.
Your days now belonged entirely to yourself, which should have felt like freedom and mostly felt like a lot of unscheduled Tuesday afternoons. No more disappearing in the middle of the day, no more make-out sessions in the library during lunch break. Just you and your own company and the slow, unglamorous work of being fine.
You weren't fine. You were something adjacent to fine that required daily maintenance and the careful avoidance of certain songs.
Marissa had noticed, she called it being under the weather, which was such a specific and old-fashioned way of putting it that in the beginning you had found it strange and now found it completely endearing. Your own personal nanna, showing up with iced coffee and terrible ideas at exactly the right moments.
The terrible idea this time was an underground bar in Boston she had found, which was a surprise since Marissa was fundamentally a sports bar person. You had a strong suspicion the entire excursion was engineered entirely for your benefit and the benefit of your appetite for expensive, colorful drinks, and you loved her for it and didn't say so.
The drive took exactly long enough to hype yourself up.
I'm pretty. I'm smart. I'm a catch.
The bar was dimly lit in a way that felt intentional rather than neglected, all low ceilings and good music and the general atmosphere of a place that didn't need to try. You, Marissa and Benny settled into a corner booth and approximately ninety seconds later Benny's elbow was in your ribs.
"Cute guy. Nine o'clock," he said, in what he apparently believed was a whisper.
You glanced toward the bar. Tall, white jacket, the kind of easy posture that meant he wasn't thinking about his posture at all.
"I'm not really looking for anything," you said.
"You're single. He's cute. The bar has drinks. What exactly is the problem?" Benny tilted his head. "Go order our drinks and make some poor decisions. You've earned it."
"I didn't bring my ID."
Benny stared at you. "You came to a bar without your ID?"
"I forgot." You shrugged.
"(Y/N)." His voice had the specific tone of someone choosing their words carefully. "What is wrong with you. Go. Drinks. Now. The ID thing is a you problem, figure it out."
You slid out of the booth before he could say anything else.
The guy at the bar was, up close, even more irritatingly attractive than he had been from across the room. He glanced over when you appeared beside him, and then glanced again in a way that was not subtle and didn't try to be.
"You look like you're deciding something," he said.
"Whether to admit I forgot my ID at a bar."
He looked at you for a moment. Then he smiled easy and genuine. "Hunter," he said, and held out his hand.
"((Y/N))."
"I'll vouch for you," he said. "If you tell me what you're drinking."
You told him. He ordered both without being asked, which was either presumptuous or exactly right, and you decided it was exactly right.
By the time you made it back to the booth with four drinks and Hunter's number in your phone, Benny was looking at you with the expression of someone who had orchestrated something and was very pleased about it.
You didn't tell him he was right. But you didn't have to.
The thing about Hunter Davenport was that he was genuinely, irritatingly likeable.
You had not been thinking about Logan when you said yes to Hunter's suggestion of getting coffee. You had not been thinking about Logan when the coffee turned into a walk, and the walk turned into two hours of easy conversation that asked nothing from you and gave something back.
That was the point.
You had gotten very good at not thinking about Logan in the weeks since Malone's. It was a skill, like any other, it required practice and the occasional forcible redirection of your own brain, but you were nothing if not disciplined when the situation called for it. You had been showing up to things. Laughing at the right moments. Sleeping through the night, mostly.
You were fine. You were getting finer by the day, which was either progress or a very convincing impression of it, and right now you weren't examining the difference too closely.
Hunter was easy. That was the thing about him. He was warm and uncomplicated and he looked at you like you were worth looking at, which was something you had apparently needed more than you realized.
It was nothing serious. You had been very clear about that with yourself. You were not ready for serious. But his hand was warm when it found yours walking back from the coffee place, and you let it stay there.
You were almost believing it.
The team was at the rink for an open practice, one of the informal ones that sometimes drew a small crowd of friends and the generally affiliated. You had come with Marissa, which gave you plausible deniability about why you were there, and you had sat in the third row and watched without watching, which was a skill you had also been practicing.
Hunter had waved at you from the ice. You had waved back.
You had not looked at Logan. You had been extremely disciplined about not looking at Logan, which meant you were also extremely aware of exactly where he was at every moment without technically looking at him, which was its own kind of exhausting.
After practice, Hunter had come off the ice still in half his gear and found you immediately, easy and unhurried, and said something that made you laugh. Your hand had gone to his arm the way hands do when you're laughing at something someone said, and it had stayed there for approximately four seconds.
Four seconds.
You knew it was four seconds because you had counted them, which meant some part of you had been paying attention to something you were pretending not to pay attention to.
The locker room door swung shut behind Logan without him looking back.
You found a quiet corner of the rink lobby while Hunter went to get his bag. You were looking at your phone, not reading anything on it, when you heard footsteps and looked up.
Logan.
He had changed out of his gear. His jaw was doing the thing: the tight, controlled thing that meant something was happening underneath the composure that the composure was working very hard to contain. His eyes moved from your face to the door Hunter had gone through and back.
"Hey," you said carefully.
"You and Hunter," he said. Not a question.
"That's not really your business."
"You're spending a lot of time with him."
"Logan—"
"I'm just making an observation." His voice was very even. The voice he used when he was the least controlled.
"Make it somewhere else."
He laughed short and humorless. "Right. Okay." He looked at the floor. Looked back at you. "I just didn't think you were the type."
You went very still. "The type to?"
"To go after a guy because of who he plays for." Quiet. Measured. Like he had chosen this version of the sentence carefully. "I didn't think that was your thing."
The lobby was very quiet.
You looked at him for a long moment. Long enough to make sure you had heard what you thought you'd heard. Long enough to see something flicker in his expression, the immediate, unmistakable recognition that he had gone too far.
"Say that again," you said softly.
"I didn't mean—"
"No." Your voice was calm in a way that had nothing to do with being calm. "Say it again. I want to make sure I understood you. Are you calling me a puck bunny?"
Logan said nothing. The flicker had become something closer to horror.
"Because that's what you just said." You tilted your head slightly. "After everything. That's what you went with."
"I didn't — that's not what I meant—"
"Then what did you mean?" You took a step toward him. "Because I have been patient, Logan. I have been so patient with you. I said the most honest thing I have ever said to anyone in that parking lot and you said nothing back, which I am trying. I am actively trying to make my peace with. But you do not get to say that to me. You don't get to do that."
"I know." His voice had lost all its evenness. "I shouldn't have—"
"Why did you say it?"
He looked at you.
"Tell me why." Your voice cracked slightly and you kept going. "Because it wasn't an observation. So tell me why."
Something moved across his face the composure fracturing in a way you had only seen once or twice in all the time you had known him.
"Because I can't—" He stopped.
"Can't what?"
"Because I can't watch you with him and not—" He stopped again. Pressed his mouth shut. Looked at the ceiling briefly.
"Not what?" Your voice was barely above a whisper.
He looked at you. Right at you. And for one unguarded, terrible second you could see everything, all of it, the whole enormous weight of everything he hadn't said in the parking lot outside Malone's, sitting right there on his face with nowhere left to hide.
And then he looked away.
"I'm sorry," he said. "It was wrong."
You looked at him for a long moment.
"Yeah," you said. "It was."
You picked up your bag. Hunter had reappeared at the far end of the lobby, jacket on, easy smile, completely unaware of the wreckage he had wandered back into. You walked toward him and did not look back at Logan.
But you heard him the sharp exhale of someone who had just watched something leave that they weren't sure was coming back.
Good, you thought.
And hated that you thought it.
Here was the thing about being called a puck bunny: it wasn't the word itself that got to you.
Puck bunnies weren't the worst thing a person could be.
Men were allowed their types, allowed to prefer blondes or brunettes or redheads, to only date younger women, to have a thing for accents, to announce their type to anyone who will listen like it’s a personality trait, to want someone tall or short or with a specific laugh, or say things like "I have never been with a Brazilian before". They were allowed to say these things out loud, to Tinder-filter by height, and if it was possible they would do by weight too, to have opinions about bodies that they shared freely and without apology.
But god forbid a woman had a type. God forbid a woman found hockey players attractive or musicians, or academics, or anyone with a specific quality she was drawn to. Then she was something to be named and categorized and looked down upon. Then she was a bunny.
You were not offended by the word.
You were offended that Logan, who had been silent while you poured your heart out in a cold parking lot, who had said nothing when you asked him the most direct question you had ever asked another human being , had found his voice again specifically to say that. That of all the things he could have finally said to you, after all the silence, this was the one he chose.
That was what got to you.
Not the word. The timing. The source. The specific, devastating irony of a man who couldn't say I have feelings for you finding it very easy to say something that small.
You didn't tell anyone what he said.
That was the first decision you made, walking out of that rink lobby with Hunter's hand in yours and Logan's exhale still somewhere in your chest. You were not going to tell Dean, who would say something devastatingly accurate about it. You were not going to tell Marissa, who would want to talk about it for three hours. You were not going to tell anyone, because telling someone meant turning it over, examining it, and you were not ready to examine the specific shape of what Logan had said to you and what it meant that he had said it.
You knew what it meant. That was the problem.
You had known the moment you saw his face, that flicker of something before the composure reassembled itself, the way his eyes had moved to Hunter and back to you with an expression that had nothing casual about it. You had spent 338 days learning the map of Logan's face and you knew exactly what that look was. You had just also heard what came out of his mouth immediately afterward, which meant that what Logan felt and what Logan was willing to do about it were, as always, two completely different countries.
You were done trying to travel between them.
The week that followed was quiet and it felt different from the other times you had gone quiet. Before, the silence had always been temporary, a held breath. This felt more like an exhale. Like something had finally, after a very long time, finished.
You went to class. You had coffee with Hunter on Tuesday, which was easy and warm and asked nothing from you. You went to Marissa's on Thursday and watched something forgettable on her laptop and fell asleep on her couch, and she put a blanket over you without waking you up, which was the kindest thing anyone had done for you in recent memory.
You did not go to the house off campus. You did not text Logan. You did not check if he had texted you, which required leaving your phone face-down on your desk for approximately four days straight, which was its own kind of discipline.
You were fine. You were getting finer.
You were also absolutely not fine.
Dean found you on a Wednesday.
Not dramatically, he just appeared at the coffee shop near your building where you went on Wednesday mornings, which you had mentioned to him exactly once four months ago, which meant he had remembered it and filed it away and was now using it, which was such a Dean thing to do that you almost smiled.
He sat down across from you without asking if it was okay and stole a sip of your coffee before saying anything.
"He told me what he said," Dean said, without preamble.
You looked at your coffee. "Okay."
"He feels terrible."
"Good."
"I mean genuinely terrible. Like, I've known Logan for three years and I've never seen him—" Dean stopped. Seemed to decide something. "He's not sleeping. He's barely eating. He showed up to practice yesterday and coach pulled him aside after because his head wasn't in it, which has never happened, not once in three years."
"Dean." You looked up at him. "Why are you telling me this?"
"Because you deserve to know that it cost him something." His voice was straightforward, without manipulation. "I'm not asking you to forgive him. What he said was awful and he knows it. I'm just, you spent a long time showing up for him and I don't want you to think that none of it landed. It all landed. It's landing right now. It's just landing a little late."
You were quiet for a moment.
"A little late," you repeated.
"Okay, very late."
"Dean." You wrapped your hands around your cup. "He called me a puck bunny."
"I know." Dean had the grace to look genuinely pained. "He said it because he was jealous and scared and he handled it in the worst possible way and there is no defense for it. I'm not here to defend it."
"Then what are you here for?"
Dean looked at you across the table, this person who had been in your corner since before you had any idea how much you would need someone in your corner, and his expression was very honest.
"I'm here because he's my best friend and he's falling apart," he said. "And you're also my friend. And I hate watching both of you be miserable when I know exactly why you're miserable." He paused. "I'm not asking you to do anything. I just wanted you to know."
You looked out the window. The street outside was grey and unremarkable, the specific flatness of a Wednesday in November.
"How long has he known?" you asked quietly. "That he has feelings for me. How long has he actually known?"
Dean was quiet for a moment.
"A while," he said carefully.
"How long is a while, Dean."
Another pause. Longer this time.
"Since pretty much the beginning," he said.
You closed your eyes briefly. Opened them.
"Okay," you said.
"(Y/N)—"
"I'm not angry." And you weren't, which was almost surprising. You were something quieter and more tired than angry. "I just needed to know." You picked up your coffee. "Tell him I said he needs to sleep."
Dean looked at you. "That's it?"
"That's it." You met his eyes. "I'm not ready for anything else right now. But tell him to sleep."
Dean nodded slowly. He finished stealing your coffee and stood up and put his jacket on, and then he stopped with his hand on the back of the chair.
"For what it's worth," he said. "The Hannah thing. It was never real. He told me that too. He said he thinks he latched onto it because it was safer than admitting what was actually happening."
You didn't say anything.
"Okay," Dean said. "I'll see you around."
He left. You sat there with your cold coffee and the grey Wednesday street outside and the specific, exhausting weight of loving someone who had known the whole time and chosen, over and over, to say nothing.
Since pretty much the beginning.
338 days. And he had known since pretty much the beginning.
You sat with that for a long time.
It had been raining since noon.
Not the dramatic, cinematic kind of rain that arrived with thunder and purpose, just the steady, grey, unrelenting kind that soaked through your jacket in the first thirty seconds and didn't apologize for it.
You were on your way back from the library, hood up, head down, thinking about nothing in particular, which you had gotten very good at recently. The art of thinking about nothing. Occupying your own brain with the immediate and the logistical the paper due Thursday, the coffee you were going to make when you got home, the question of whether you had remembered to charge your phone.
You had not been thinking about Logan.
You were almost at your building when you heard him.
"(Y/N)."
You stopped walking.
He was standing at the bottom of your building's front steps, which meant he had been waiting in the rain for some amount of time, which was evident from the state of him soaked through, hair flat, jacket dark with water. He looked like someone who had arrived with a plan and abandoned it somewhere on the walk over and was now operating on something more basic and less manageable.
He looked, for the first time in all the time you had known him, completely unguarded.
"Logan." Your voice came out carefully. "What are you doing here?"
"I need to talk to you."
"It's raining."
"I know."
"You're soaked."
"I know." He took a step toward you. "I've been standing here for forty minutes trying to figure out what to say and I still don't know, so I'm just going to say it badly and hope that counts for something."
You looked at him. The rain came down steadily between you.
"You have two minutes," you said.
He exhaled. Ran a hand through his wet hair. Looked at you with the expression of someone stepping off a ledge they had been standing on for a very long time.
"I have been in love with you," he said, "since pretty much the beginning."
The rain was very loud suddenly.
"I knew it when we agreed to casual. I knew it when we stopped hiding. I knew it every time I reached for you in my sleep and every time a stranger called us a couple and I laughed it off, and I knew it in that parking lot outside Malone's when you told me the truth and I stood there and said nothing back." His voice was steady but only barely, the steadiness of someone gripping something very hard. "I said nothing because I was terrified. Not of you. Never of you. Of what it meant. Of what I would owe you if I said it out loud. Hockey takes everything I have and my family situation is a disaster and I don't have money or stability or any of the things that a person is supposed to have before they ask someone to—" He stopped. "But Dean said something to me last week. He said that I was losing you anyway. That all my careful management of the situation had achieved was losing you slowly instead of all at once, and somehow I had convinced myself that was the better outcome."
You said nothing. The rain soaked through your hood and you didn't move.
"And then I said what I said to you at the rink." His jaw tightened. "I have replayed that moment every day since it happened. There is no version of it that I can make okay. I said it because I saw you with Hunter and something in me just broke. Not a good break. Not the kind that leads anywhere useful. Just — I broke, and I said the cruelest thing I could think of, and I aimed it at you, and I have hated myself for it every single day since." He looked at you. "I'm not telling you that to make you feel sorry for me. I'm telling you because you deserve to know that it was never about you. It was never about who you are. It was about me being terrified and handling it in the worst possible way, and I'm sorry. I am so sorry."
The rain fell between you, steady and indifferent.
"You knew since the beginning," you said finally. Your voice came out quieter than you intended.
"Yes."
"A year."
"Yes."
"And you said nothing."
"Yes." He didn't flinch from it. "I said nothing, and I let you carry it alone, and I told myself I was protecting you from the complications of my life, but I think I was just protecting myself. From having to be as brave as you were in that parking lot." Something moved across his face. "You were so brave. You said the true thing and I just stood there. And I have thought about that every day since. About what it cost you to say it and what it cost me to say nothing back."
You looked at him. This person. Soaked through and unguarded and finally, finally saying the thing he had been not saying for 338 days.
"The Hannah thing," you said.
"Wasn't real." Immediate. Certain. "I think I needed it to be real because it was safer than admitting what was actually happening. She has what you and I have, what you and I were and I think I confused wanting that with wanting her. It was never her." He held your gaze. "It was always you. It has only ever been you."
The rain had soaked through your jacket completely now. You were cold in a way that had stopped being uncomfortable and become simply the condition of the moment.
"I'm not asking you to forgive me tonight," Logan said. "I'm not asking you to do anything. I just needed you to know that I heard you in that parking lot. I heard every word. And I should have said this then, and I'm sorry that I didn't, and I'm saying it now because Dean was right, I am losing you anyway, and I would rather lose you having finally told the truth than keep you at a distance by staying silent." He paused. "I love you. I have loved you for a long time. And I'm sorry it took me this long to be brave enough to say it."
The street was very quiet under the rain.
You looked at him for a long moment. Long enough to turn it over. Long enough to feel the full weight of 338 days, of every almost-conversation and loaded silence and reset button and bucket of cold water. Long enough to remember his hand going still when Hannah walked in, and the parking lot, and the rink lobby, and the specific sound of his exhale when you walked away.
Long enough to remember, underneath all of it, a Halloween party and a wall and two people waiting out the night from the edges of it, talking like they had nothing to prove to each other.
The beginning, before it got complicated. Before it got careful.
"You're an idiot," you said.
Something shifted in his expression. Not quite hope. Something more tentative than hope.
"I know," he said.
"You made everything so much harder than it needed to be."
"I know."
"I carried that alone for a very long time, Logan."
"I know." His voice broke slightly on it. "I know you did. I'm sorry."
The rain came down. You looked at him this soaked, unguarded, finally honest person standing at the bottom of your steps and felt something in your chest that had been braced for a very long time slowly, carefully release.
"You should have just said it," you said. "In the beginning. You should have just said it."
"I know." He took a step closer. Close enough that you could see the rain on his face, the wet dark of his hair, the expression underneath all the composure that had finally run out of places to hide. "I know. I'm saying it now."
You looked at him.
"Say it again," you said quietly.
"I love you." No hesitation. No composure. Just Logan, standing in the rain, finally saying the true thing. "I love you. I have loved you since pretty much the beginning and I am done pretending I don't."
The rain fell between you and neither of you moved and the street was quiet and everything was very still.
Then you closed the distance.
You kissed him in the rain, which was cold and slightly impractical and nothing like the careful, managed version of Logan you had spent 338 days trying to navigate. This was different. This was him kissing you back with both hands and no hesitation and none of the holding back, and it felt finally, finally like the true thing. Like the version of this that had been waiting underneath all the other versions the whole time.
When you pulled back you were both soaked and breathing slightly unsteadily and his forehead dropped to yours in the rain.
"I'm still mad at you," you said.
"I know." His arms tightened around you. "I know you are."
"The puck bunny thing is going to take a while."
"I know. Whatever it takes."
"And you have to tell me things." Your voice was muffled against his jacket. "When you're scared, when it gets complicated, when your brain does the thing where it decides silence is the safe option. You have to tell me instead."
"I will." He said it simply, without qualification, which was how you knew he meant it. "I will."
You stood there in the rain outside your building, soaked through and slightly ridiculous, and you thought about Halloween and 338 days and parking lots and rink lobbies and all the long, complicated distance between the beginning and right now.
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c/w ᝰ.ᐟ jealousy + insecurity, ex mentions, crying (both), drunkenness/intox, miscommunication, possessive!dean, pet names (princess, baby, angel, baby doll + no y/n), angst with comfort, party setting + language
“There you are, princess.”
You smile before you can stop yourself as Dean presses a rough kiss against your cheek, his body sliding in behind you, big and warm against your back while the crowd moves around both of you.
“Havin’ fun?” He asks, mouth brushing your neck while his hands settle on your hips.
“Mhmm,” you giggle.
“You drunk, baby doll?”
“Mhmm…”
His laugh rumbles against your skin. “Yeah? Are you askin’ me or tellin’ me?”
You laugh harder at that, turning your head slightly when he nudges his nose against your cheek. Dean catches your mouth, kissing you deep and slow before pulling back with a grin still spread against your lips.
“You wanna dance?”
“Okay,” you say, and the second that word leaves your lips he’s pulling you away.
The dance floor is packed by the time the two of you push your way into the middle of it. Bodies crowd tight around you beneath flashing lights, Dean’s hand tightening on your waist, pulling you against him.
The two of you start dancing, your body moving easily with his while the crowd shifts around you.
“You look so fuckin’ good,” he mumbles, low and deep against your ear, making you press into him a little more.
His hands hold your hips again, turning you and pulling you close, your arms wrapping loosely around his neck while a smirk tugs at his lips and his hands move lower.
The chain around his neck glints beneath the lights as he dips in, pulling you closer by the small of your back, his lips on yours, sending a wave of warmth rushing through you.
A smile breaks across his lips as the music changes—something slower—putting you right where he wants you. Your back hits his chest, breath catching in your throat.
His hands wrap around your body, his face tucked so close you can feel every warm breath, the two of you grinding slower now.
Your eyes flutter open and a wave of unease rushes over you as you lock eyes with a few people you recognize from the rink. The second you catch them staring, they look away, one of them muttering something into his red SOLO cup while the other nods in agreement.
Dean starts singing along to the music, his deep voice vibrating against your neck. You focus on that, the corners of your lips trembling as they pull into a smile you wish wasn’t so weak.
You try to let yourself fall back into him, focusing on the heat of his body and the smell of his cologne. His hands drag you closer, but it doesn’t stop the unease this time. When you open your eyes again, the insecurity hits harder.
Wellsy… She gives you a small smile, tight around the edges just like yours.
You close your eyes again before the doubt can settle too deep, Dean’s head tucking back into your neck. His lips move slow against your skin beneath the pounding music, his grip firming on your waist instinctively.
He turns you around again, one hand sliding over your waist while the other curls loosely around your throat, pulling you back against him before kissing you so deep your thoughts scatter for a second.
His mouth moves against yours, slow and messy, warm from beer. Dean kisses like he gets distracted by it—like he forgets there are people around once he gets ahold of you.
Your fingers tighten in the front of his shirt, as a lump forms in your throat, your breathing tightening in your chest as the thoughts come rushing in.
Maybe if she called, it would be over.
What if he wishes he were kissing her instead?
What if he wishes you were someone else?
“Dean,” you whisper softly, your voice breaking against his lips.
“Angel,” he murmurs, kissing you again.
You swallow hard, collecting yourself for a moment. “Do you wanna go upstairs?”
Dean grins so boyishly it makes the hurt worse.
He grabs your hand, pulling you through the crowd so fast you barely have time to keep up with him. He drags you through the packed house, still glancing back at you with that stupid excited smile.
And when you reach the steps he hooks an arm underneath your thighs and lifts you clean off the floor, starting up the stairs with you. A startled laugh slips out of you, but he swallows it, not catching the way it waivers on his lips.
Your fingers slide into his messy blond hair as he carries you farther upstairs. You close your eyes tighter, stomach sinking as you become all too aware of the sting building behind your eyes—tears balancing dangerously along your lashes.
You’ve felt weird all day. Ever since this morning when you opened Instagram and saw Dean’s name underneath one of Allie’s posts.
One stupid comment. Congratulations!
That was it. Nothing flirty. Nothing inappropriate.
Nothing that should latch on and refuse to let go, but it does.
Allie was standing on some giant stage in New York smiling beneath bright lights while thousands of people flooded the comments underneath her post and somewhere in between all of them was Dean.
And now, those weird looks and whispered conversations downstairs suddenly feel loaded. Every glance feels like the people around you know something’s going to happen, and you don’t, and they don’t want to miss the chance to see when he finally finds his person again.
Like you’re temporary.
Just the girl standing in the middle of whatever unfinished thing still exists between Dean and the girl everybody thought he’d end up with.
Dean shoves the bedroom door open, and kicks it shut, the bass downstairs making the pictures in his room rattle against the wall, the hum of the party seeping through the bottom of the door.
You reach for the ties of your top, trying to pull yourself together as he tears the t-shirt over his head, the both of you stripping between messy kisses before he’s dragging you down onto the mattress with him.
You crawl toward him slowly, knees sinking into the comforter while Dean watches. “Fuck, baby…” He lies down on the bed, guiding you on top of him as he brushes his hair off his face, biceps flexing with it. “Been waiting for this all day.”
Those six words heal something in you for a moment. Inching you back to that place you had been before you woke up this morning.
He reaches his arm up, hooking his hand around the back of your neck, lowering you toward his lips. “I love you—”
“Allie?”
You blink down at Dean once, thinking you heard him wrong, but it sounded like he said her name. Dean’s head snaps toward the door—all the color draining out of his face.
A person from behind the door tries again. “Allie, Dean? You in there?”
Dean goes completely stiff beneath you. “No—” The word flies out of him. “No, dude, what?”
Your stomach drops so hard it makes you sick.
Dean’s already trying to recover before you can even think straight.
“You need something?” He calls quickly, voice tighter now.
“Just wanted to say ‘hi’, man. Sorry.”
You shove off him, knee catching in the comforter as you stumble toward your discarded clothes on the floor, heart shattering so hard it aches.
“Hey—hey.” Dean catches your wrist, fingers wrapping around you fast enough to stop you mid-step. “Baby.”
“Let me go,” you whimper, and he does, his hands drawing back but he follows after you anyway as you struggle back into your clothes.
“What—what’s goin’ on?” He asks breathlessly. “I’m sorry about the Allie thing, alright? I’m sorry, baby.”
The room around you swims with the tears waiting to fall from your eyes, trying not to blink because you know once they fall there’s no stopping them. But you break anyway.
“That’s just Cooper,” Dean says quickly, words starting to trip over each other now. “I haven’t seen him in forever, he just—he’s fuckin’ dumb, alright?” He laughs nervously, but there's nothing funny about it and he can feel that.
Your fingers shake so badly fumbling with the zipper of your jeans it takes three tries to get it up.
“Baby, c’mon.” Dean’s voice whispers over your shoulder, his big hand coming down to rest on your hip. “Just talk to me.”
You lift the sleeve of your top, brushing away your emotion. You can feel him staring at you now, looking over your shoulder, but he can't see enough—not yet.
“Oh, fuck,” he breathes, turning you toward him, hands gripping your arms. “Baby—hey, hey.” His blue eyes search your face desperately. “No, no, no. Don’t cry. Please don’t cry.”
You try to look away from him, but Dean pulls you into his chest before you can, his arms wrapping around you tight. One hand cradles the back of your head, the other pressed against your back, trembling with adrenaline.
“Baby,” he says again, softer now. You can feel his heartbeat pounding underneath your cheek, suddenly sober, that loose buzz he’d been feeling downstairs long gone.
He pulls back just enough to look at you, big hands cupping your face while his thumbs swipe beneath your eyes trying to catch the tears.
“Baby… I—That. That can’t just be because of that, right?” He asks, voice stumbling over itself now. “I mean—yeah, okay, wait. That—that was insensitive as fuck…” His brows pull together harder the longer he looks at you. “What aren’t you telling me?”
Your lip trembles, and Dean’s entire expression shifts, his thumb brushing along it too like he's trying to stop that from happening. The panic on his face gets worse, blue eyes moving frantically over your face, trying to figure out how this got so bad.
“Talk to me,” he whispers but you bite your lips instead to keep from crying, complete whiplash from the girl laughing and wrapped around him downstairs twenty minutes ago—but you were putting on an act for the both of you.
Allie’s name breathing into the room at the same time that Dean was telling he loves you was just it… the breaking point. The moment you couldn't keep up with the lie that you were okay, because you're not.
His hands tremble as he holds your cheeks, leaning in to kiss you, gentler than he ever has, like he thinks he can soothe this out of you if he’s soft enough.
He draws back a little, the air between you tight and heavy, as you whisper.
“You’re not over her, are you?”
“What?” He asks, not angry or defensive, just hurt. “Allie? I am. I promise you, I am.”
“I don’t think you are,” you whisper. “Or…” Your voice cracks a little and you look away from him, embarrassed the second more tears start slipping loose. “Maybe you are, I don’t know.” You laugh, but it sounds miserable. “I just—”
“Talk to me,” he says quickly, following your face when you turn away, trying to catch your eyes again. One of his hands slides down your arm, rubbing nervously while he watches you unravel. “Please.”
You stare down at the floor for a second before finally whispering, “I saw the comment… On her post,” you continue quietly. “It sounds so stupid out loud. Oh my god,” you sigh heavily, burying your face in your hand.
“It doesn’t—”
“And, people…” You swallow hard, trying to get the words out confidently but they sound so small. “I know they were talking about us downstairs.” Your throat tightens harder.
His brows pinch in confusion, stepping a little closer. “What people?”
You shrug defeatedly, shaking your head. “It doesn’t matter. It’s so stupid,” you whisper.
“It’s not,” he stops you from brushing it off as his hand slides down your arm, fingers threading through yours. “Seriously, who?”
“People expect you to be with her.” Your eyes finally lift back to his. “They do, Dean.” You wipe a few tears away, watching your hand tremble out of the corner of your eye. “I mean, she’s Allie. She’s beautiful and everybody loves her—”
Dean’s face softens. “Hey,” he says quietly.
“I just feel like—” Your throat tightens before you swallow. “I don’t know. Like maybe I’m just the girl in the middle of all that.”
He looks down at you, his lips pulled tight, the pink flush in his cheeks deepening, blue eyes shimmering now with tears of his own.
“Allie is a good person,” he says honestly. “She is.” He squeezes your hand in his. “She’s funny and she’s kind… I cared about her for a long time.”
Your stomach sinks hearing those words leave his lips. His forehead presses against yours, breathing deeply with you.
“But she’s not you.” His voice comes out low and certain this time. “She’s not the girl I’ve been thinking about nonstop for months. She’s not the first thing I think about when I wake up or the last person I talk to when I go to bed at night.”
He steps a little closer, wrapping his arms around your waist, pulling you into him. Dean blinks and a tear rolls down his cheek. You reach up, cupping your hand against his face, brushing it away and he leans into it, looking down at you.
He grabs your hand, kissing your palm, then your wrist, guiding you to wrap your arms around his neck.
“She’s not the girl I dragged upstairs tonight because I couldn’t stop looking at her downstairs,” he continues, his voice gentle and broken. “And she’s definitely not the girl making me panic because she thinks I want somebody else.”
“Okay,” you whisper, nodding your head.
“It ended. We both knew it was ending before it actually did. I moved on,” he says softly. “And then I met you. Not the other way around. I swear.”
You nod up at him, feeling guilty for even bringing it up in the first place, maybe because he’s making you feel the opposite of what any guilty person would make you feel. There’s no defensiveness. No twisting it back on you. Just honesty.
“I just…” Your voice breaks, fingers twisting weakly in the front of his shirt again. “I don’t want to be the placeholder. The girl that’s here until you get your girl back.”
“Holy shit,” the words trip out fast. “How can you think that?” You can hear the hurt in his voice now as he buries himself in your neck. His breath comes out shaky as a few warm tears fall on your shoulder, seeping through your shirt. “You’re perfect,” he mumbles against your skin. “You’re mine.”
Your fingers slide in his hair, holding him closer and he exhales.
“I hate seeing you cry,” he whispers.
“I hate seeing you cry too. I’m sorry,” you answer, your voice just above a whisper.
“Please believe me, alright?” Dean asks as he pulls back and matches your gaze.
“I believe you. I do.”
“I’m sorry, baby. I should’ve caught this sooner.”
“You’re okay,” you whisper.
He inhales sharply through his nose, an anxious laugh slipping through his lips with your own. You rub the little rivers of wet off the apples of his cheeks, embarrassment crawling warm up your neck now after seeing his reaction.
“If it helps,” he says softly, “everybody downstairs already knows I’m crazy about you. I’m serious.”
“I’m crazy about you too.”
“I am obsessed with you.”
“Stop,” you laugh weakly, rolling your eyes while he bends suddenly, lifting you again.
“I mean it,” he mumbles as he nuzzles into your neck before dragging back. “You gotta promise me something, though.”
You look back at him and nod.
“You gotta promise me you’re not gonna sit in your head thinking shit like that by yourself. Because I swear to god, baby, I’m gonna prove to you that I got you. You have nothing to worry about.”
“I promise—”
“I can’t lose you,” he pushes out before you can even finish.
“You won’t,” you whisper softly.
“Me and you,” he says quietly.
“Me and you.”
dividers @uzmacchiato
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✶ you attempt a prank on dean—wiping off his kisses—until his pouting is too much for you to bear.
002. WARNINGS !
✶ really old tiktok trend & a lot of kissing.
word count : 1,4k
gif by @alliecathayes
You had been sprawled across Dean’s bed, lazily scrolling through TikTok while he was downstairs preparing breakfast, courtesy of Tucker’s cooking and Dean’s determination to steal half of it before anyone else could.
You barely paid attention to most of the videos until one caught your eye. It was of a girl wiping off her boyfriend’s kisses. The poor guy got more offended with every attempt, eventually following her around the room demanding affection like a neglected golden retriever.
Which, honestly, reminded you a little too much of Dean.
Especially the pout he got whenever he thought you were ignoring him.
So, much to your unsuspecting boyfriend’s future dismay, you decided you would be wiping off every kiss he tried to give you. It would be fun to see just how long you could keep the prank going.
A few minutes later, Dean came back upstairs, opening the door before quickly closing it behind him again. A habit your previously exhibitionist boyfriend had been forced to learn after his roommates walked in on the two of you in compromising positions one too many times, and you finally refused to endure the embarrassment anymore.
He walked in carrying two cups of coffee carefully balanced on a tray alongside eggs, fruit, and toast.
“Breakfast is served, m’lady,” he announced, setting the tray down on the bed before giving an exaggerated bow afterward.
You let out a snort, grabbing your coffee.
Dean sat down beside you, leaning over to grab a piece of toast and pressing a soft kiss to your cheek in the process. Casually, you scratched at the spot and wiped the kiss away.
For a brief moment, you thought Dean hadn’t noticed. Then he frowned and pressed another kiss to the same spot.
Just like before, you rubbed it off.
He let out an offended gasp, staring at you like you had personally betrayed him, but begrudgingly let it slide. Still, he sighed dramatically while chewing on his toast and eggs, already beginning to pout.
“Are you going to the gym with Garrett later?” You asked after a moment of silence, chewing on a strawberry.
Your boyfriend only hummed in response, quietly eating his breakfast.
“Okay…” you dragged out, an amused smile tugging at your lips at the sight of his puppy eyes, like you’d just insulted his entire bloodline. “Is there something on my face?”
You already knew there was. You could feel the strawberry juice dripping from the corner of your mouth.
It was practically catnip for Dean. He immediately leaned forward, pressing a tentative kiss to the spot, his lips brushing yours for a second before ultimately settling at the corner of your mouth instead.
The moment he leaned away, you rubbed at the spot and simply said, “Oh, thank you.”
You caught the way his lips parted in pure disbelief, and had to fight to keep your laughter from spilling out.
This time, Dean’s response to what he clearly considered a personal betrayal was far more aggressive.
He kissed you properly, lips parting against yours, warm and insistent enough that for a brief moment you considered throwing the prank out the window altogether and spending the rest of the day hidden away in his bedroom.
But instead, you leaned back and aggressively smudged at your lips, watching his entire face twist in horror.
“Did I get all the juice?” You asked innocently, still rubbing at your mouth and the skin around it.
“Why are you doing that?” Dean asked, sounding genuinely baffled.
“Doing what?” You finally stopped rubbing.
“You’re wiping off my kisses,” he whined. “Did I do something?”
“Dean, I’m not doing anything,” you said sweetly, smiling at him. “Just don’t want strawberry all over my face, you know?”
He held your gaze for a few long seconds before standing from the bed and disappearing into the bathroom.
For a moment, guilt crept in. If Dean had pulled this prank on you, it would’ve earned him at least a few hours of the silent treatment.
But you were too far in now. You had to see it through.
Or maybe just until he left for the gym.
While your boyfriend sulked in the bathroom, you pulled on a pair, and then headed downstairs, deciding to wash the plates and mugs. Tucker had cooked breakfast, after all. It was the least you could do.
A few minutes later, Dean came downstairs with damp hair and a pair of low-hanging sleep pants slung dangerously low on his hips.
This was undoubtedly payback for your antics.
You kept washing dishes when he walked up behind you, wrapping his arms around your waist and burying his face in the crook of your neck.
“Done messing around?” He murmured against your ear, the deep timbre of his voice making a shiver run through you.
“I didn’t do anything.”
You turned your head to look at him, and his eyes immediately dropped from yours to your mouth. A second later, he leaned down and pressed a quick kiss to your lips.
You didn’t react right away.
Only once you turned back toward the sink did you bring up your driest hand and wipe the kiss away.
“There!” Dean grabbed your waist, spinning you around to glare at you. “You did it again!”
“What did she do again?” Logan asked as he strolled into the kitchen, eyes darting between the two of you.
“She’s wiping off my kisses!” Dean accused.
As if to prove his point, he grabbed your face with both hands and planted a firm kiss right on your mouth.
A second later, you leaned forward and rubbed your lips against his bare chest.
“Okay, didn’t need to see all that…” Logan muttered before setting his dirty mug on the counter and immediately leaving the kitchen again.
“Seriously, do I have some disease I don’t know about, or do you just not want me kissing you anymore?” He asked, his voice sounding more genuinely hurt this time.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” You continued drying off the now clean plates.
“If you say so,” he mumbled with a sigh.
You watched as he leaned forward like he was about to kiss your cheek, only to stop himself at the last second.
That was your final straw. There was no way you were making it all the way until he left for the gym.
“Dean, wait.” You quickly set the towel and plate down on the counter.
“Hm?” He turned around, leaning against the wall separating the kitchen from the living room.
“Come here.”
“Why?” He huffed. “So you can disrespect my kisses again?”
“I’m sorry,” you said, walking over and grabbing his hands to pull him away from the wall.
“Go on,” Dean replied, though there was already a hint of smugness creeping into his tone.
“I saw a prank on TikTok,” you admitted. “I thought it’d be funny to try it on you.”
“I guess I forgive you.” He rolled his eyes, though you could already see the smile tugging at his lips. “But never do it again. I’ll have you know my kisses are a very hot commodity.”
You narrowed your eyes at him. “Yeah, I think half of Briar knows that.”
“Just half?” He joked, though the grin quickly faltered at the murderous look you sent him.
“I’m about to do worse than wipe off your kisses,” you grumbled.
Dean let out a soft laugh before pulling you closer, leaning down to press a gentle kiss to your lips. It was so featherlight it almost tickled.
Then you slid a hand into the hair at the nape of his neck and tugged him back in, kissing him hard enough to make him groan against your mouth.
His hand settled against your lower back before slowly trailing down until he gave your ass a firm squeeze.
You smirked against his lips, slowly lifting a hand toward your mouth again, but Dean immediately caught your wrist before you could do anything.
“Don’t you dare,” he growled, pinning both of your hands in one of his before kissing you again.
Then he lifted you into his arms, your legs instinctively locking around his waist as he carried you upstairs. After kicking his bedroom door shut behind him, he tossed you onto the bed before crawling over you, pressing hot kisses along your neck until his lips finally brushed against yours again.
And as he tugged your—technically his—shirt over your head, you couldn’t help but think smugly that if all pranks ended like this, you’d definitely be pulling a lot more of them in the future.
NOTE : hope you guys are enjoying the dean content because i sure am enjoying writing it! also, i need hannah’s version of ‘cherry pie’ and ‘the bitch is back’ on spotify ASAP.
synopsis – working in the pitt is already chaotic, but do it on the valentine's day week is even worse, especially when a pink box covered in glitter suddenly appears in the nurses' station, inviting everyone to drop an anonymous note. you never expected to write one, not for your attending, jack abbot. what you expected even less was jack writing one too.
c/w – medical inaccuracies !!
fluff
dana and emma had gone completely insane decorating the er.
pink and red heart balloons floated from the ceiling, curling ribbons dangled low enough to brush people's heads when they walked by, paper hearts were taped onto computer monitors, chocolate bowls appeared at every nurses' station. emma had been sticking tiny sticker hearts onto everyobody's id and dana had decorated the wheelchairs with pink bows.
the whole er looked aggressively cheerful against the usual chaos of the place.
and there was also a box.
a pink glittered box sitting right in the middle of the nurses' station that looked at you with guilt every time you walked by it. it shouldn't have been possible for a inanimate object to look judgmental, but somehow dana had managed for it to do so. there was the name written across the front in giant letters:
PAGING DR. VALENTINE
you laughed the first time you read it, and santos looked at you like you had officially lost it. next to the box sat different stacks of heart shaped little papers of three colors. pink for doctors, red for surgeons and white for nurses. underneath the tittle, in smaller handwriting, were the instructions:
pick a color.
write your anonymous love message.
drop it in the box.
half the er pretended not to care yet everyone was always paying attention to anyone that came close enough to the box. people slowed down when they walked past it and lingered at the nurses' station longer than necessary to have an excuse to stay close while someone folded a heart shaped paper and dropped inside the box.
javadi had been its first victim, she was pacing around it like a lost deer when everyone saw her picking a white paper heart and the entire day everyone spent it talking about her and, apparently, mateo. after seeing javadi mortified the whole day, nobody approached the confession box without witnesses which was exactly why you hadn't touched it.
since you first noticed the box, your eyes caught on it, and every single time, dana caught you looking.
—you still haven't put one in, —she accused you behind a chart.
you let out a laugh, leaning against the counter, —not planning on doing it.
—smart girl. this is hr paperwork waiting to happen, —jack appeared behind you, dropping a new chart onto dana's desk without slowing down.
—excuse you, this is team bonding, —she scoffed to him.
but jack was already walking away, barely glancing back, —this is exactly how lawsuits start.
—you still need to participate, abbot! —dana called after him
—hard pass!
you watched him leave. fresh out of trauma one, navy scrubs, sleeves pushed up his forearms, moving through the er with all the confidence in the world. he gave a single nod to a nurse as she passed him, said something to a patient that made her laugh, then disappeared around the corner.
dana looked up from her chart and you realized that maybe you'd been staring at jack too much. she smiled, then slightly pushed the glittery box toward you, —you know it doesn't have to be a love confession, most of these people have written words of encouragement to fellow coworkers...
you hummed like you weren't listening.
—but... —dana continued, moving papers around like she wasn't actively trying to ruin your life, —if you happen to have something to say to someone... —she looked at you over the top of her glasses, —this might be a good opportunity.
you shook your head, trying to ignore the sudden warmth growing on your face, —you can be incredibly nosy, you know?
she hissed through her teeth and nodded, —been spending to much time with perlah and princess. now i notice tension everywhere.
—there's no tension.
dana looked at you dead in the eyes.
—on your way out? —jack asked.
he spotted robby leaning on the counter at the charge nurse's station and assumed he was signing paperwork before living for the night. the er had finally fell into the night shift's pace, the waiting room was almost empty, lena had taken over dana's place and you left not long after the shift change.
but when jack got closer to robby, he realized his friend was writing carefully on a little heart shaped paper next to the glitter box.
—seriously?
robby didn't even look up, —don't distract me now. this is actually turning out beautifully.
jack noticed the color of the paper heart. despite acting like he couldn't care less about the whole valentine's day, he unfortunately knew what all colors meant.
—why's it white?
—well, i appreciate nurses, and dana put a lot on effort on this, i don't want her to not receive any messages.
jack crossed his arms against his chest, —i also appreciate nurses.
robby laughed and jack frowned. he finally folded the heart made of paper and dropped it into the box. robby clapped on jack's shoulder.
—we all know you appreciate residents more. so grab a red one and write something nice, okay?
what if you did it? the thought appeared one afternoon as you helped jack. he had just arrived for his shift and was catching up on cases before the change to the night shift. you stood beside him, updating a chart while he spoke to a patient, asking how he was feeling. jack walked to the check the monitor, grey curls perfectly messy and stethoscope hanging loose around his neck.
your eyes moved to the nurses' station for a second.
it wouldn't even have to mean anything serious, he hated that damn box anyways, maybe he wouldn't even bother reading it. besides, no one would have to know it was you. you could pretend you could pretend you accidentally dropped the stack of red little heart shaped papers and grab one while you picked them up.
what if he did it? no. it was stupid. he was too old for this. he should just ask you out like the grown man he was instead of thinking about anonymous valentine notes like a teenager. and yet, he imagined himself writing something simple, something that would make you smile when you read it. you were focused on the chart in your hands, humming at the patient's words. your eyes looked a little darker, tiredness sitting under them after a long shift and a pen tucked behind your ear because you kept losing it every other hour.
jack's eyes moved from you to the nurses' station.
nobody would have to know he did it. he was sure that you'd receive more than one note and that was why he was so pissed off about that pink glittery box. he noticed how the patients your age looked at you, how new residents followed you around and how nurses and paramedics said something nice while handing over patients.
his note would disappear into a pile of other anonymous notes from people who noticed the exact same things he did. it irritated him more than it should have. he was too old to be jelous.
except, apparently not.
—this is all yours, —you handed jack the updated chart, — and i'm leaving, my shift ended like an hour ago. if you see robby, tell him to not stay any later.
he took the chart from your hands, fingers brushing yours, —you sure you don't wanna stay?
—you asking me to work overtime or hang out with you?
—which answer gets you to stay?
you laughed and jack seemed pretty satisfied with himself for causing it. you shook your head, —goodnight, abbot. have fun.
jack watched you disappear, heard your quiet goodbye to lena at the front desk, caught one last look of you pushing your hair back as you stepped outside. then you were gone and he almost tripped walking to the pink box, as if he hesitated a second long, he'd talk himself out of it.
he left the chart in his hands on top of the red paper hearts and grabbed a couple, even though jack only needed one. he moved to his desk with the chart and the heart shaped papers, quickly, before somebody saw him, or worse, before he came to his senses.
jack dropped onto the chair at his desk and shoved one of the red paper heart from under the chart.
—damn abbot, you took multiple. how many people do you plan to write, —robby slid with his chair from his desk to jack's, —or how many notes do you plan to write to her?
jack didn't look up, pen almost freezing on the paper, —i have terrible handwriting.
—that's the excuse we're using?
—it's the only one you're getting.
what the hell was he even supposed to write?
he could't do a full love confession, not on a tiny piece of paper without his name on it. jack didn't want to say something that could've come from literally anyone in the department. anyone could tell you you were pretty, anyone could say you were kind, and smart, and... jack groaned and dropped his head into one hand. the problem wasn't writing the note, it was that when he started to think about what he truly wanted to say to you, it stopped sounding anonymous.
you arrived the next morning. february 14th.
dana and emma planned to open the box and hand out the notes to their owners during the shift change at 7 pm, when everyone was there, and yet you still hadn't gathered the courage to write something for jack. all week you'd al most done it but every single time, fear won, but today you woke up differently, braver, maybe because after today the box would disappear and everything would go back to normal.
before you could overthink it, you walked straight to the nurses' station and sat at dana's desk. god knows where she was but she'd understand. she's been a pain in the ass about it all week anyway.
you were analyzing the er from the charge nurse's place, half hidden on the spot. everyone was distracted enough for nobody to notice when you slowly dragged the heart shaped red paper from the counter and slid it in front of you. it shouldn't take you long, you knew exactly what you wanted to write, it's not as if you hadn't been thinking about it the whole week.
—i've been replaced as the day shift charge nurse and nobody had told me, —dana said, leaning on the counter, coffee in hand, as you sat half hidden in her station.
you tried to cover the red heart you were writing in as if you'd been caught doing something illegal. dana laughed.
—you know? it's good you decided to finally do it, honey.
—i don't know, i still might throw it away.
—oh, you better not. he's a little grumpy but he's gonna love it.
you lowered your eyes back to the note. the words you wrote felt too vulnerable now that somebody beside you knew they existed.
—breathe. it's cute, —dana's expression softened as she showed you a smile, —and now finish it, give me back my seat and get back to work.
you laughed and mumbled a yes, boss. you read the words on the heart paper one more time, checking that they weren't too cheesy or too obvious they were from you, which felt impossible because every sentence sounded like you. if you could hear yourself in those words, maybe jack would too.
before you folded the paper, you added a tiny heart by his name.
—okay, everyone, just a minute of your precious time!
dana's voice cut through the noise of the er loud enough for half of the department to turn around to look. she stood holding the glitter covered box and emma stood beside her. you came out of a patient room just as everyone stated gathering around them because despite all the mocking, everyone wanted to know.
across the er, jack looked at the scene leaning against a wall, robby next to him, looking far too entertained by what was about to happen.
emma started sorting the little papers by their colors on dana's counter. pink into a plie, white into a another and red...
—oh, —emma said. the entire er watched, waiting to see what caught her attention. she stared down into the box for another second before reaching inside. then, she pulled out two folded red hearts , —there's only two red.
dana exclaimed something about people in the department being boring and then something about nobody being in love with doctors because they are so emotionally exhausting. you wanted to run, preferably straight into oncoming traffic. somehow it felt like every single person in the department had already figured it out. your face burned hot yet you crossed your arms to stop yourself from visibly panicking.
—one is definitely abbot's, —trinity mumbled beside you, —if not the two of them.
—huh?
—abbot. everyone is crazy about him.
you nodded because yeah, you weren't definitely one of them. trinity kept staring across the er toward jack where he leaned against the wall beside robby, looking unimpressed by the entire valentine situation. which, unfortunately, only made him more attractive somehow.
—what do you think? —trinity asked
you swallowed, —i mean... he's cute and always nice, and...
—about the notes, —she clarified, trying not to laugh, —who do you think they're for?
—oh, —you cleared your throat, moving your eyes away from jack across the er, —yeah, one could be for dr. abbot, and the other one...
emma called your name with a smile.
several heads turned immediately to look at you, including dana's who looked moments away from ascending spiritually. you, on the other hand, were moments away from cardiac arrest. your entire body went stiff, heart hammering so hard against your chest.
emma still held the heart shaped note between her fingers, smiling, waiting for you to go an get it.
trinity gave you a little shove forward and your feet obeyed her. you showed emma a small smile back and mumbled a soft thank you as you grabbed the paper from her hands.
—well done, —robby mumbled next to jack side, a little teasing.
jack didn't answer. he just wished he could see your face as you read the note. unfortunately, you went back to your place back to santos and now all he could see was your back, though he wasn't gonna complain. santos had tried to peek once and you'd elbowed her and put the note inside your pocket. jack was trying to keep his composure, he tried not to think about whether if your silence was good or bad.
—dr. abbot, —emma announced next. again, the biggest smile on her face. in her hand sat the last red heart.
he pressed his lips together to everyone looking at him. as he approached emma, dana and robby exchanged a look. dana tilted her head toward you and robby immediately nodded toward jack. and at that moment they both knew, you had written jack's and jack had written yours.
—okay! fun for the doctors is over! now get back to work! —dana said as emma keep calling nurse's and surgeon's names.
you grabbed the note from your pocket as you walked to see the next patient, checked that nobody was paying attention and then you unfolded it:
i don't do valentine's day, but i'd love to take you out for dinner,
it was simple, just a few words, but they made your heart did a little jump after reading it. you stared at the note for another second while walking down the hallway, rereading it and biting back a smile while you tried to regain some professionalism before seeing your next patient. at least this had helped you to ease the panic of being one of the two people that had written to a doctor, to jack nonetheless. you put the note inside your pocket again as you pressed the hand sanitizer dispenser.
—oh! —you said when you stepped into the room, —dr. abbot.
—hi, —he said, turning off the monitor.
—where's the patient?
—robby took her to the scanner
you nodded, —i wanted to check up on her before leaving.
—well, she should be here in... fifteen minutes, —he checked the watch on his wrist.
you hummed. there were a few seconds of silence as you watched him work. you'd seen him like this hundreds of times before but you could never get used to jack abbot doing the most ordinary things because somehow he remained so attractive.
—someone wrote you, —he pointed out.
you pressed your lips together and nodded. you couldn't deny your heart did a little something when jack mentioned it, —yeah, —you murmured, —apparently.
jack frowned a little, —you didn't expected it?
you let out a breath, —well, not really. but let's talk about you, someone also wrote you, it's surprising that only one person did though... —you laughed, —i thought you'd receive like at least twenty of them.
—i don't think it's surprising you received a valentine letter.
you blinked, jack continued rearranging the tray with everything he'd need to treat the patient once she arrive but he lifted his eyes to yours from what he was doing.
—everyone likes you, —he added.
—jack.
—what? it's true. patients ask about you when you're off shift, nurses fight over schedules with you, half of the department looks happier when you walk by.
you shook your head, trying to laugh it off despite the funny feeling in your stomach. did he really notice all of that? —you're being dramatic.
—you also draw little hearts everywhere. on langdon's coffee cup, on kids charts sometimes, on your own name on the schedule...
heat rushed to your face, making your earns burns. god, how could you have been so stupid?
—and on my valentine's note too.
you covered your face with your hands, groaning into your palms as the memory hit you again and it physically hurt you. sitting at dana's desk this same morning, looking around to make sure nobody was watching, carefully writing jack's name on the note and then adding the tiny heart beside it like an idiot. you had literally signed your own crime scene.
when you removed your hands from your face, still visibly embarrassed, you saw the look on his face. jack was watching you with a little sparkle on his eyes. got you, he thought.
—i'm sorry, jack. it was just... some stupid thing i did without thinking. i didn't mean it to come out weird or...
—it's okay, —he made a little gesture with his hand, brushing the apology like it didn't matter at all, —i wrote yours anyways.
you blinked, the words taking a second to register through the panic, —wait. you... what? —you reached inside the pocket of your scrubs and pulled out the note, —you wrote this?
—i do hate the box, i must say, —jack admitted, —and i am way too old to be dropping anonymous notes into valentine boxes like a teenager, but as much as i tried to ignore it, i couldn't stop thinking about you.
you wanted the room to open a hole in the floor and swallow you whole, just because you've been wanting to hear this for such a long time that now you didn't know what to do with the fact that jack abbot was standing just a few feet away from you admitting he thought about you often. your heartbeat was so out of control you swore he could heard it.
—sorry, i didn't mean to corner you with it, —jack said after not getting a response from you, —you don't have to say anything back.
—i'd love to go on a date with you.
jack frowned, a bit confused, and it made your stomach drop. oh no. you looked down at the note in your hands, —the dinner, —you clarified, —oh, i mean... if you didn't think about it like a date, i'd still...
jack didn't let you finish.
—i totally thought about it as a date.
you smiled, relieved, the tension leaving your body finally, —okay, —you laughed under your breath, —good.
—good, —jack repeated, —but now you should probably go home and sleep. i'd inform you tomorrow about your patient.
you nodded. he removed his gloves and tossed them into the trash. jack reached past you, his shoulder brushing yours as he grabbed the handle of the door and opened it, the chaos of the er on the other side of it but neither of you moved. you stood there, trapped in the space between him and the door frame.
with jack standing closer than ever, you could feel the heat radiating from his body, the sexy wrinkles under his eyes, the scruff at his beard matching his salt and pepper hair... your eyes dropped, moving to his lips for just a second. a small smile appeared on them and jack looked outside the room to check if anyone was looking at both of you. after making sure that everyone was busy, he gave you a nod.
you bit your lip and also gave a quick look outside before leaning in and pressing your mouth against his. one of your hands landed against his hard chest for support and his instantly left the door handle and wrapped around your waist, even if the kiss only lasted a couple of seconds.
when you pulled away, you smoothed down your scrub and finally stepped back into the hallway. jack followed you out of the patient room, one hand rubbing his jaw as if he was also trying to collect himself too. he watched you very closely as he walked to the nurses' station. jack actually couldn't stop looking at you as you stopped santos on her way out and told her to wait for you.
jack leaned against the counter, eyes still locked on yours as you disappeared down the hallway to the lockers. dana looked at him over the top of her glasses.
