SUNNEDBONES&SOFTBARK @cowboyshadows - Tumblr Blog

May 21

Ruin the friendship | John Logan

Summary: Falling for your brother’s best friend is already a terrible idea. Falling for John Logan, while Garrett Graham watches the two of you like a security threat, is even worse.

Pairing: John Logan x Graham!Reader

A/N: hii! this is actually the first thing i’ve ever published, which is both exciting and terrifying honestly 😭 i’ve always been more of a reader than a writer, so this is very new to me, but i had so much fun writing it.

if you end up reading, please let me know what you think! i’d really love to hear your thoughts.

also, im taking requests, so if you have any requests you can send it to me

okay bye, hope you enjoy <3

Garrett and you were born three minutes apart. Only three. You've done the math a thousand times, turned it over like a coin, trying to understand how three minutes could possibly account for the way he acts. The only explanation you've ever landed on is that Garrett must have gone through some Interstellar type of thing on his way out, where those three minutes stretched into three decades, aging him into the world's most exhausting older brother before he even took his first breath.

You two were never the kind of twins people expected. No matching outfits, no finishing each other's sentences, no eerie identical habits. From the very beginning you were sorted into different boxes. Garrett's box had ice skates and early morning practices. Your box had dolls and tea sets and the vague, uncomfortable feeling of being dressed up for something you hadn't agreed to.

It was a common complaint "why does Garrett get to do something while I just sit here?" Your mother would smooth your hair and change the subject. Your father never even registered the question. It took years before you understood that Phil Graham simply operated in a world where the answer was obvious. Garrett got to play hockey because Garrett was his son. You got the dolls because you were his daughter. Feminist icon was not a title Phil Graham was ever in the running for.

Growing up, you and Garrett were close in the way that kids who share a wall and a last name and a particular kind of household tend to get close,out of necessity as much as love. It was a good closeness, mostly. Until high school, when it curdled into something more complicated.

The prom thing was the first real incident. Aaron Michaels showed up at your door junior year with his hair combed and his hands in his pockets, and before he even finished the sentence you said yes. Not because you were swept away by him, you barely knew him, honestly. But you had caught Garrett watching from the top of the stairs with that particular expression on his face, the one that meant he was calculating something, and the thought of letting him anywhere near your prom night was enough to make you say yes to virtually anyone.

You think about that sometimes. How early it started.

In college, things loosened. Distance helped. You found your place in a sorority a house full of girls who were loud and warm and didn't ask you to be anything specific. Garrett found his place off campus, in a house with three teammates that quickly became something closer to family.

You were glad for him. You meant that sincerely. He had always been the kind of person who needed people around him, and for a long time the only person around had been you.

What you were less glad for was the way his protectiveness followed you across town like a second shadow. He knew your schedule. He knew your friends. He had a habit of appearing places whenever a boy seemed too interested. You had once watched him dismantle an entire almost-relationship simply by being in the same room, asking questions that were technically friendly and somehow completely lethal.

The thing was, and this was the part that made it complicated, you understood where it came from.

Growing up, Garrett's protectiveness hadn't been suffocating. It had been necessary. Your father's anger was the kind that lived in the walls of the house, that changed the air pressure in a room when he walked in. For a long time you were almost oblivious to it, the way children learn to not see things that are too large and too frightening to look at directly. But then you got old enough that it became impossible to pretend.

What you remember most is not the sounds. It's Garrett, how he would find you, and sit with you, and press your head gently against his chest without saying anything, his hands patient and steady, turning himself into a wall between you and whatever was happening on the other side of it.

He never talked about it. Neither did you. You're not sure you ever will.

Your mother died when you were young. After that, there was just you and Garrett and your father and a house that felt too big and too quiet. Garrett stayed close to you that whole year in a way that asked for nothing and gave everything, and you never once had to ask him to.

So no you didn't resent the protectiveness, not really, not at its root. You understood it.

You just wished it wasn't currently ruining your love life.

It's college, you thought, more than once, lying on your sorority house bed staring at the ceiling. Why can't I get some?

When Garrett moved into the house off campus at the end of freshman year, the relief was quiet and immediate and guilty enough that you didn't mention it to anyone. You visited often it was an easy excuse to get out of the sorority house, and Dean and Tucker were genuinely funny, the kind of company that required nothing from you.

But there was something about Logan that was different from the start. Something you noticed before you had the language for it.

The first time you really registered him was after the team's first game of the season. You had gone to the arena with Rowan, more out of obligation than enthusiasm, expecting to do your dutiful twin sister routine and leave. You found Garrett near the locker room, already mid-conversation with Logan, still in half his gear, laughing at something.

Logan turned when Garrett said your name. That's what you remember: the turn, the way his attention moved to you. He reached out to shake your hand and said something, something normal, something you have completely forgotten because you stopped processing words the moment his hand closed around yours.

His hands were warm. That's what you thought. Just warm. And large. And you were aware of them in a way that made the rest of the sentence disappear entirely.

You let go. You said something back. You moved through the rest of the conversation on autopilot, smiling at the right moments, and the whole time you were thinking about his hands.

On the drive back, Rowan looked at you sideways and said, you have about five seconds to tell me what that was.

You told her.

She was quiet for a moment. Then: make a move before they get any closer. Because once Logan becomes one of Garrett's people, you're done.

You had laughed at the time. But Rowan was right.

That was two years ago. Logan and Garrett were now the kind of friends that finished each other's sentences and covered for each other without being asked. Which meant that every time you let yourself think about Logan, really think about him, about his hands and his voice and the way he looked at you sometimes when he thought you weren't paying attention ,Garrett materialized in your mind immediately, like a warning, like a wall.

Two years. And you were no closer to doing anything about it.

This morning Logan had texted, and the moment his name appeared on your screen that feeling arrived with it the one that lived somewhere between your ribs and your stomach and had no polite name. You had stopped calling it a crush a long time ago. Crushes were light things, easy things. This was two years old and had roots.

He needed help with an assignment. A professor, a deadline, the usual disaster.

You had started tutoring at the beginning of sophomore year, a natural extension of the waitressing you'd picked up at Malone's when you first realized college was expensive and pride was not a payment method. Tutoring paid better and smelled less like fried food. Logan was the one client you had never once considered charging. You weren't sure what that said about you. Probably something embarrassing.

You got a ride to the house and let yourself in without knocking, everyone did, that was just how it worked here, and followed the stairs up to Logan's room, where you found him on his bed with his laptop open and his reading glasses on.

You took a moment.

"Hey, you," you said, walking in and knocking on the door after the fact, in the way you had trained yourself to do ever since a series of unfortunate incidents involving Dean that you were never going to think about again.

Logan looked up and smiled.

"Hey." He moved to make room. "I was waiting for you."

The assignment was for his sports management elective and it was, structurally speaking, a crime scene.

"Walk me through what you're trying to argue," you said, pulling the laptop toward you.

"That collegiate athletic programs need better mental health infrastructure."

"Say that in the paper."

"I did."

You turned the screen to face him. He read it. He had the grace to look slightly ashamed.

"...that's not what that says."

"No. It really isn't."

You started from the top. Logan sat beside you and explained himself in sentences that were clear and direct and completely unlike anything on the page, which was its own kind of frustrating because it meant the ideas were good. They were just trapped under writing that was trying too hard to sound like writing.

"Stop trying to sound smart," you told him. "You already are. Just say the thing."

He looked at you. "You're kind of mean when you tutor."

"You're paying forty dollars an hour for this."

"You're not charging me."

"Then you're getting exactly what you paid for. Keep going."

He kept going. You kept pushing. Somewhere in the middle of restructuring his third paragraph he had migrated from the desk chair to the bed beside you, and at some point after that the laptop had ended up in your lap, and the space between you had gradually, unremarkably, ceased to exist. His arm was against yours. His knee was against yours. He smelled like cedar and something warmer underneath it, which you were actively choosing not to think about.

Once, leaning over to point at something on the screen, he turned his head and found you already looking at him. Neither of you said anything. You looked back at the screen.

By the time you finished it was late afternoon, the light in the room had gone gold and low, and Logan was leaning against the headboard with his legs stretched out and you were beside him, close enough that moving away would have required a decision neither of you had made.

"Thank you," Logan said, and the way he said it was quieter than his regular voice. "Genuinely. You didn't have to do this."

"I know," you said.

"You're kind of incredible, you know that?"

You laughed, which was the only safe response available to you.

"You are very welcome, Johnny," you said, shaking your head, which brought you even closer than you already were.

The room was very quiet.

You had thought about this moment approximately four hundred times over the past two years. You had imagined it in detail. Talked yourself out of it and back into it and out of it again, and every single time Garrett had materialized in your head like a stop sign and that had been enough.

But Garrett was not here. And Logan was looking at you like that, his eyes dropping, just briefly, to your mouth, and coming back up. And two years was a very long time to wait for a moment that kept almost arriving.

You closed the distance.

The seconds that followed were the slowest of your life. You were aware of everything the warmth of him, the sound of your own pulse, the fact that his eyes had closed, which meant something, that had to mean something..

His eyes opened.

He pulled back, just slightly, and looked at you with an expression you had never seen on him before and couldn't name.

"Oh," he said. "Are we finished?"

The words landed like a door closing.

You heard yourself say yes. You heard yourself say something about studying, about being busy, about having to go. You were already reaching for your bag. You were already standing.

Every embarrassing moment you had ever lived through, every misdirected wave, every bon appétit thrown at a waiter who had not asked for it, every autocorrected text sent to the wrong person, shrank to nothing. Microscopic. Irrelevant. Amateur hour.

This was the real thing.

There should be a world record for how fast you left that house. You would have broken it.

Arriving home, there was only one thing on your mind.

The almost-kiss.

You prayed on the entire walk back. Prayed that something would take you lightning, a sinkhole, the apocalypse, anything. Because there could not be a world in which you had just tried to kiss John Logan and he had literally swerved. This could not be happening. You felt like you couldn't breathe, and yes, it was dramatic, but how, how could something like this happen to you?

I have to hide forever, you thought.

So hide was what you did. Three days of pretending to be too busy to check your phone, sending texts that said busy, call later to everyone who tried to reach you and yes, that included Logan. He had texted to thank you for the tutoring session and ask how your day was going, which was its own specific kind of torture. It was genuinely difficult to decide which was worse: him not mentioning the almost-kiss, or him not mentioning the almost-kiss.

Your sorority friends decided not to let you sulk indefinitely. You hadn't told them the truth, it was too embarrassing,but they had collectively decided that you needed to go out. Luckily, Dean and Beau's birthday bash was happening that weekend. Rowan had appointed herself costume director. You and her were going as Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen in New York Minute — which was a generous description of what amounted to tiny red shorts and an I ♥ NYC shirt.

Walking into the party, you spotted your brother almost immediately. He was standing with a girl: Hannah, you realized after a second. You had heard the rumors that Garrett was seeing someone but hadn't paid much attention. Garrett with a girl was like rain in the Amazon. Unremarkable. Constant. A feature of the landscape.

You already knew Hannah from Malone's. She was sweet, genuinely, almost confusingly sweet, and you had always had a hard time understanding why a girl like her would give the time of day to someone like your brother. You grabbed a drink and kept glancing at them, and spotted the exact moment Garrett stepped away and Jules moved in with that particular look on their face that meant she was about to conduct a full background check.

Time to intervene.

"Hi, Hannah," you said, inserting yourself smoothly. You turned to Jules with a look of mock severity. "Jules. This is a party. Stop the questionnaire."

They both laughed, because that was exactly what Jules had been doing. Jules threw her hands up and wandered off.

"Hey, (y/n)!" Hannah said cheerfully. "I haven't seen you at Malone's in a while — how have you been?"

"Busy. Tutoring." You shrugged. "How about you? I heard you were dating my brother."

Hannah looked startled. "Oh, not dating. Just a fling."

"Nice. A fling is nice." You tilted your head. "But since when do you do flings?"

"It's new. Experimenting." She seemed to run out of words.

"You can tell me the truth, you know," you said, softening your voice. "I'm not going to say anything. I thought you had a thing for that guy Justin,the one with the band?"

"I did," Hannah said, and then lowered her voice. "If I tell you, you have to promise not to tell anyone."

You made the motion of zipping your mouth shut, locking it, and throwing away the key.

"Garrett is helping me," she said. "He said guys aren't interested in girls who are too available. So he's helping me seem less available so Justin will come around."

You stared at her. "He's fake-dating you to make another guy jealous."

Hannah nodded.

"That's—" you started, then stopped. Actually not the worst plan. "Okay. Solid strategy."

As if summoned, Garrett appeared carrying a can of beer for Hannah, which was objectively cute even if you would never tell him that.

"Hey, (y/n)." He pulled you into a side hug. "Why have you gone MIA? I was getting worried."

Because I tried to kiss your best friend and he dodged me like I was a pothole in the middle of the road.

"Just busy," you said pleasantly. "I'll leave you two lovebirds alone." You winked at Hannah, who turned pink, and made a beeline for the kitchen.

The thing was, you couldn't stop turning it over. What Garrett had said to Hannah guys aren't interested in girls who are too available. Was that it? Was that why Logan had pulled back? Had you made it too obvious, been too present, too easy to read?

It was the kind of question that only one person at this party could answer.

Dean was in the kitchen taking shots with Tucker, Beau, and,of course, Logan. He was dressed as Maverick from Top Gun, which was doing entirely too much for everyone in the vicinity. The navy jumpsuit was one deep breath away from falling off his shoulders entirely, to the visible appreciation of roughly half the party.

Your heels announced you before you got there. All four of them looked up.

"Dean." You used your most businesslike voice. "I need to talk to you."

Logan, who until that moment had been carefully avoiding looking at you, looked at you.

"In private," you added.

Beau and Tucker made a coordinated oooooh sound. You took Dean by the hand and led him to a quieter corner, and from the edge of your vision you could feel Logan watching the whole way there.

"Do you think guys go for girls who aren't available?" you asked, skipping any kind of introduction.

Dean blinked. "What?"

"Just answer it. Do guys prefer women who are harder to reach?"

He studied you for a moment with the particular expression of someone who was not fooled even slightly.

"(y/n)."

"Dean."

"It's Logan."

"It's not…"

"It is literally Logan." He glanced over his shoulder and back at you. "He's been staring at this corner since you dragged me away from the shots he was pouring, by the way. So I hope this is worth it."

You opened your mouth. Closed it.

"He swerved me," you said finally, quietly, in the tone of someone confessing a crime.

Dean's eyes went wide. "He what—"

"Don't make it a thing."

"I'm not making it a thing, I'm just" He stopped, visibly recalibrating. Then something shifted in his face. The confused expression dissolved into something far more dangerous. A Dean I have an idea smile. "Okay. I know exactly what to do."

"That face terrifies me."

"Let me make him jealous."

You stared at him. "What."

"Think about it." He leaned against the wall, warming to the plan in real time. "You and me, rest of the night, very cozy, very close. Logan spends the whole party watching. By midnight he either says something or he implodes. Either way you get your answer."

"That is insane."

"That is genius and you know it." He held out his hand. "What do you say, Graham?"

You looked at his hand. You looked across the room at Logan, who was very deliberately not looking in your direction, which meant he was absolutely looking in your direction.

You took Dean's hand.

"If this blows up," you said, "I'm telling everyone it was your idea."

"It is my idea." Dean grinned and pulled you back toward the party. "Come on. Let's go be very convincing."

Dean was, it turned out, an excellent co-conspirator.

He had led you back into the main room with his hand on the small of your back, a small gesture, casual enough to be deniable, obvious enough to be noticed, and steered you toward the couch where Tucker and Beau had set up camp. You settled in close to him, closer than you normally would, and let the conversation wash over you while you tracked Logan from the corner of your eye.

It took approximately four minutes.

Logan had migrated from the kitchen to the edge of the living room, arms crossed, drink in hand, wearing an expression you had never seen on him before. Not angry exactly. Something tighter than that. Something controlled, but only barely.

Dean said something in your ear something about Tucker's costume, and you laughed and leaned into him, and across the room Logan's jaw tightened.

Good, you thought, and then immediately felt terrible about it, and then thought good again.

The night continued like that. Dean was committed to the bit in the way that only someone who was genuinely enjoying himself could be his arm around your shoulders, finding excuses to tuck your hair back, laughing at everything you said like you were the most interesting person in the room. It wasn't entirely unpleasant. Dean was funny and warm and completely unthreatening, which made it easy.

What was not easy was Logan.

He didn't leave. That was the first thing you noticed he had every opportunity to drift to another room, another conversation, and he didn't take a single one. He stayed in the periphery of wherever you were, a fixed point, his drink barely touched. He had stopped pretending to talk to people. At some point Tucker said something to him and he responded without looking away from you, which Tucker clearly clocked because he glanced between the two of you with an expression of dawning comprehension and wisely said nothing.

Once, you made direct eye contact with Logan across the room. Neither of you looked away for a long moment. Then Dean said your name and you turned, and when you looked back Logan had moved closer.

He was close enough now that you could hear him when he spoke, which he had started doing small insertions into the group conversation, technically friendly, with an edge underneath them that you recognized because you had never heard it from him before.

When Dean refilled your drink, Logan was suddenly beside him. "I'll get it."

"I've got it," Dean said pleasantly.

"I said I'll get it."

Dean looked at him. Logan looked back. The silence lasted exactly long enough to be uncomfortable.

"She likes more ice than you think," Logan said finally, which was such a specific and unguarded thing to say that Dean had to look away to keep from smiling.

He brought you the drink himself. Set it down in front of you without a word and went back to his position across the room, jaw tight, arms crossed, watching.

You picked up the drink. You took a sip. You did not look at him, which cost you more than you were prepared to admit.

Okay, you thought. So it's working.

The makeout was a decision.

You made it around midnight, when the party had gotten louder and the lights had gotten lower and Dean had pulled you onto the makeshift dancefloor with the easy confidence of someone who had committed fully to a plan and intended to see it through. You were dancing close, and it was working you could feel Logan's attention like a hand on the back of your neck and then you looked up at Dean and he raised an eyebrow, a question, and you thought about Logan swerving you on a quiet October afternoon and something in you made a decision.

You kissed Dean.

He kissed you back, because he was Dean and he was committed to the bit, and for a moment it was just that a kiss, warm and uncomplicated, Dean's hands steady on your waist.

You didn't hear Garrett coming. Nobody ever did.

"What the fuck?" His voice came from directly behind you, loud enough to cut through the music. You pulled back from Dean and turned around.

Garrett was standing there looking like he had just witnessed something that had personally offended him on a cellular level. Behind him, a few feet back, standing very still, was Logan.

"(y/n)." Garrett's voice had dropped into that register the one that meant he was trying very hard to be calm. "What is happening right now."

"I'm at a party, Garrett."

"You're…" He gestured at Dean, who had the presence of mind to take a small step back. "That's Dean."

"I'm aware of who it is."

"He lives in my house."

"Also aware."

"(y/n)"

"Garrett." You crossed your arms. "I am an adult at a college party. I don't need your commentary right now."

"I'm not — I'm just—" He stopped. Dragged a hand through his hair. Then, with the particular tone of someone who had not thought through what they were about to say before saying it: "Thank God. Logan went to get me — I thought something was actually wrong—"

The sentence landed in the middle of the room like something dropped from a height.

You went very still.

Logan went to get him.

Logan, who had been standing across the room all night with his arms crossed and his drink untouched and his jaw tight, had watched you kiss Dean and gone to get your brother instead of coming over himself.

You turned, slowly, and looked at Logan. He was looking back at you with an expression that was carefully, completely neutral, which was somehow the most infuriating thing you had ever seen on a human face.

"Garrett." Your voice came out quieter than you intended. "You want to talk about boundaries? Let's talk about boundaries. Let's talk about the fact that you have spent the last three years treating me like I'm something that needs to be managed. Like I'm a problem to be solved. I am your sister, not your assignment."

"I know that—"

"Do you?" You were properly angry now, the kind of angry that had been looking for a door for a long time and had finally found one. "Because from where I'm standing it looks a lot like you don't trust me to make a single decision about my own life without you swooping in to fix it. I kissed someone, Garrett. At a party. Like a normal person."

"I just—"

"You sent Logan to get you." Your voice cracked slightly on his name, which you hated, and pushed past. "Like I was a child who had wandered too close to the street. I'm twenty years old."

Garrett opened his mouth. Closed it. He looked, for the first time in the conversation, genuinely uncertain.

"I need some air," you said, and turned and walked toward the door.

You made it to the front porch before you heard footsteps behind you.

"(y/n)."

Logan's voice. Of course.

You kept walking down the porch steps, arms wrapped around yourself against the cold, and didn't turn around.

"Hey." He was closer now. "Can we—"

"Logan." You stopped walking but didn't turn. "Please don't."

"I just want to—"

"I said please." Your voice was steady, which surprised you. "I can't do this right now. I need you to leave me alone."

A long pause. The sounds of the party filtered out through the walls of the house, muffled and distant.

"Okay," Logan said quietly.

You heard him stop. Heard him not follow you. Stood there in the cold for a moment with your eyes closed, and then kept walking.

The week after the party, you became a ghost.

Not dramatically, you didn't make an announcement, didn't post anything, didn't give anyone the satisfaction of knowing they had gotten to you. You just quietly became unavailable. Texts went unanswered for hours, then days. You skipped the house visits. You stopped showing up to things you normally showed up to.

Garrett called twice. You let it ring both times and sent a voice memo that said I'm fine, just busy in a tone that made it very clear you were not interested in discussing it further. He texted after that, a long one, full of run-on sentences and no punctuation, and you read it three times and didn't respond.

Logan texted once. Just your name. A single word, no punctuation, no follow-up. You stared at it for a long time, lying on your bed in the dark, and said none of it. You set your phone face-down on the desk and went to sleep.

Or tried to.

The only people you talked to with any regularity were Hannah and Dean. Hannah because she never pushed, never pried, just showed up with iced coffee and terrible reality television and the quiet uncomplicated warmth of someone who liked you without needing anything from you. Dean because he was the only person who knew the full story and had the decency not to turn it into a conversation every time he saw you.

He did try, once.

"You can't hide forever," he said, sitting on the edge of your bed one afternoon while you stared at the ceiling.

"Watch me," you said.

He watched you for approximately eleven more days before he stopped saying anything about it at all.

The car situation came to a head on a Tuesday, which felt appropriate. Tuesdays had always had a particular talent for making things worse.

You had always known, in a vague and carefully unexamined way, that the car thing was unfair. Garrett had gotten one junior year of high school a practical, slightly dented Honda Civic that Phil Graham had handed over with a clap on the shoulder and a speech about responsibility that lasted four minutes. You had gotten a lecture about how young women didn't need to be driving alone at night, delivered in the measured, reasonable tone your father used when what he actually meant was something he knew better than to say out loud.

In college it hadn't mattered much. Campus was walkable, rideshares existed, and you had quietly become very skilled at organizing your life around other people's cars without ever quite admitting that was what you were doing.

And then the interview came up and the system collapsed.

The position was tutoring coordinator at a learning center in Boston — real money, flexible hours, the kind of thing that could genuinely change the shape of your year. Friday at nine. Boston. Forty minutes away on a good day.

You needed a car.

Which meant you needed to call your father.

Phil Graham suggested lunch, because Phil Graham always suggested lunch. It was his preferred format for any interaction he wanted to feel like generosity rather than transaction, a restaurant, a table, the performance of a normal family.

You took Dean with you without asking permission, which your father noticed immediately and acknowledged with a slight tightening around the eyes that lasted less than a second before his public face reassembled itself. He shook Dean's hand with the particular warmth he reserved for audiences and said it was nice to see one of Garrett's friends, and Dean smiled and you watched them take the measure of each other across the table.

Dean was good at this. You had not known, before today, exactly how good. He had a way of being present without inserting himself filling silences before they became uncomfortable, asking your father questions that were just interested enough to be flattering without being so specific that they required anything real. He ordered the second cheapest thing on the menu, sat up straight, and spent the meal being quietly, almost imperceptibly perfect, and you watched your father recalibrate in real time.

"I need a car," you said, when the food arrived. Straight to it.

Your father looked up from his plate. "A car."

"I have an interview in Boston on Friday morning. I need reliable transportation."

"You could take the train."

"The timing doesn't work for the train."

A pause. Your father cut into his steak with the precise unhurried movements of a man deciding how much something was going to cost him versus how it would look to say no in front of company.

"I'll look into it," he said.

"I'd prefer to sort it out today."

Dean took a sip of his water and looked pleasantly at the middle distance, which was exactly right.

Your father bought you a car three days later. A white Subaru, two years old, clean interior. He texted you the details with no preamble and no sentiment, and you picked it up from the dealership with Dean in the passenger seat reading the car manual out loud in a documentary narrator voice until you were laughing so hard you had to pull over.

It was, all things considered, one of the better days you'd had recently.

The tire went two weeks after the party, on a Friday morning, on a stretch of road so unremarkable it felt like an insult.

You heard it first a dull, percussive thud that traveled up through the wheel and into your hands, followed immediately by the lurch of the car pulling hard to the right. You steered onto the shoulder and sat there for a moment with both hands still on the wheel and the hazards blinking orange into the grey morning air.

Boston was forty minutes away. The interview was in just under two hours. You were wearing your good blazer.

You got out and looked at the tire. Flat. Completely, aggressively, unapologetically flat.

You got back in the car and called Dean.

"Tell me you know how to change a tire," you said, when he picked up.

"Good morning to you too."

"Dean. I have a flat tire and an interview in Boston in less than two hours."

A pause. The sound of someone sitting up. "Where are you?"

You told him. There was a longer pause the kind that meant he was deciding something you weren't privy to yet.

"I can't come," he said finally. "I'm on the other side of town and I don't have the truck. But I'm going to fix this. Give me ten minutes."

"If you send Garrett—"

"I'm not sending Garrett." His voice had gone careful. Deliberate. "Ten minutes. Stay put."

He hung up before you could argue.

You sat on the hood of your car in your good blazer and watched the morning traffic pass and tried very hard not to think about who else Dean might send. You had a short list. The list had one name on it.

Fourteen minutes later, a familiar dark truck pulled onto the shoulder behind you.

You closed your eyes briefly.

Dean, you thought. I am going to kill you.

Logan got out without hurrying, because he never hurried. He was in a worn grey shirt with the sleeves pushed up and dark jeans, carrying a jack and a spare tire with the easy competence of someone who had done this many times before, and the morning light was doing something completely unreasonable to the line of his jaw.

You crossed your arms.

"I didn't ask for you," you said, before he reached you.

"Dean called me." He crouched beside your tire and assessed the damage.

"I know Dean called you. I'm saying I didn't ask for you."

"I know." He ran his hand along the tire. "You've got a nail in the sidewall. It's not patchable."

"Logan—"

"You can be angry at me the whole time." He looked up at you briefly, and there was something in his expression that wasn't quite an apology and wasn't quite a plea but sat somewhere in between. "But you have an interview in an hour and forty minutes, so let me do this."

You looked at the road instead.

He worked quickly and without commentary loosening the bolts, positioning the jack, the methodical progression of someone who understood machines in a way that was almost meditative to watch. You tried not to watch. You watched anyway.

Once he glanced up and found you looking. You looked away first.

"This is a temporary spare," he said, after a while. "It'll get you around town but not highway speeds. Not safely." He stood and wiped his hands on his jeans. Then he reached into his pocket. "Take my truck."

"Absolutely not."

"Your interview—"

"I'm not taking your truck, Logan."

"Why not?"

Because taking his truck meant owing him something, and owing him something meant having a reason to come back, and coming back meant another conversation where you said something you couldn't take back and he looked at you with that expression and didn't say anything.

"Because it's your truck," you said.

"And your interview is in less than two hours." He held out the keys. "Take it. I'll stay here. Come by the house when you're done and we'll swap back."

"I can call a rideshare—"

"(y/n)." Just your name. Just that, quiet on the side of the road, and something about the way he said it made all the arguments feel very small. "Please."

You looked at him. He looked back, steady and patient, keys extended, and you were so tired of fighting things that weren't worth fighting anymore.

You took the keys.

"I'm paying for the tire," you said.

"You're not."

"Logan—"

"Go." The corner of his mouth moved, almost. "You're going to be late."

The interview went well. You thought about Logan the entire time.

You drove back in his truck, which smelled like cedar and old coffee and something else you couldn't name, and you sat in the driveway of the house for a moment before going in.

Logan was in the kitchen, leaning against the counter with a glass of water, and he looked up when you came in.

"How'd it go?" he asked.

"Good. Really good, actually." You set his keys on the counter. "Thank you. For the truck."

"Of course."

A silence settled. The television murmured from somewhere in the house. Tucker's laugh, distant and easy.

You should leave. You had told yourself on the drive over that you were going to return the keys and go clean and simple, no openings.

But you were so tired.

Tired of the almost-conversations and the loaded silences and the two years of carrying something that got heavier every time he looked at you like that and said nothing.

"I like you," you said.

The words came out quieter than you intended. Steadier than you expected. You watched them land.

Logan went very still.

"I know that's complicated," you continued. "I know about Garrett. I know that's why. I'm not asking you to do anything about it." You paused. "I just needed to say it out loud. I've been carrying it for two years and I needed to put it down somewhere."

Logan looked at you with an expression you had never seen on him before — open and unguarded and almost pained. His mouth opened.

"(y/n)—" he started, and his voice was different, lower

The back door opened.

Garrett came through it pulling off his jacket, mid-sentence about something to Tucker, and nearly walked into you before he registered you were there.

He stopped. For a moment he just looked at you. Then something cracked open in his expression relief and guilt and two weeks of missed calls all arriving at once.

"(y/n)." His voice was careful. "Hey. I didn't know you were here."

"Just returning the truck," you said. Perfectly normal. You were getting very good at it.

"Okay." He nodded slowly. Then, quieter: "Can we talk? It's been weeks and I—"

"I'm kind of in the middle of something," you said.

Behind you, almost inaudible, Logan said: "It's okay. Go."

You turned.

He was leaning against the counter with his arms crossed and his expression carefully arranged into something neutral, and he met your eyes for exactly one second before he looked at the floor.

"Logan—"

"Go talk to your brother." His voice was even. Controlled. "It's fine."

You stared at him. The word sat in the kitchen between you like something neither of you wanted to pick up.

Fine.

"Okay," you said. And turned away.

The conversation with Garrett lasted longer than ten minutes. They always did.

He sat across from you on the couch with his elbows on his knees and said: "I'm sorry about the party."

"Okay," you said.

"I didn't mean to embarrass you. I was worried."

"I know."

"I know you're an adult. I know you don't need me to—"

"Garrett." You looked at him. "I know you know. That's never been the question."

He was quiet. In the kitchen, the low sound of Tucker and Logan talking, the refrigerator opening and closing.

"Then what's the question?" he asked.

You thought about it. About his hands pressing your head against his chest in the dark. About the house that felt too big after your mother left. About the whole year he had stayed close without ever being asked.

"I think you learned to protect me at a time when I really needed it," you said carefully. "And I think you don't know how to stop. And I think—" your voice went slightly unsteady "—I'm always going to love you for the first part. I just need you to work on the second part."

Garrett looked at the floor. His jaw worked.

"Yeah," he said finally. "Yeah, okay."

It wasn't a resolution. It wasn't a fix. But it was the most honest thing you'd said to each other in years, and when you stood up to leave he pulled you into a hug that lasted long enough to mean something.

Logan was in the hallway when you came out.

Not waiting, exactly leaning against the wall with his phone in his hand, doing the convincing impression of someone who just happened to be there. He looked up when he heard you.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey." You picked up your bag. "I should go."

"(y/n)—"

"I meant what I said." Your voice came out gentler than you intended. "I'm not asking you for anything. You don't have to—"

"I know." He said it quickly. "I know you're not. I just—" He stopped. Something moved across his face. He pressed his mouth closed and looked at the ceiling briefly. "I heard you. What you said in the kitchen. I need you to know that I heard you."

You stood there with your hand on the door and the cold night air coming in.

"Okay," you said quietly.

And you left.

The guy's name was Eric.

He was in your economics lecture tall, easy smile, the kind of person who made friends without trying. He had asked to borrow a pen three weeks ago and somehow that had turned into sitting together, and sitting together had turned into coffee after class, and coffee after class had turned into texts that had nothing to do with economics.

You liked him well enough. He was uncomplicated in a way that felt, after everything, like something you might need.

You mentioned him to Hannah on a Thursday. Hannah mentioned him to Garrett on a Friday. Garrett mentioned him to the house on a Saturday, in the way Garrett mentioned things casually, as information, with the studied neutrality of someone who had learned to deliver news without editorializing.

Dean watched Logan's face when Garrett said the name.

Later, he would describe it as watching someone step on a piece of glass they hadn't seen coming.

Logan lasted four days.

Four days of being completely normal. Of practice and class and the house and dinner and conversations that had nothing to do with you. Four days of his phone on the table, not checking it, of going to bed at a reasonable hour and lying there for a long time.

On the fifth day, Dean knocked on his door.

"You have about forty eight hours," Dean said.

Logan looked up from the bed. "What?"

"Before she decides Eric is actually a good idea." Dean leaned against the doorframe. "She's not in love with him. She's barely interested. But she's trying, and she's good at trying, and if you wait much longer she's going to try herself right into actually meaning it."

"She deserves to be happy—"

"She deserves to be with someone who's been in love with her for two years, actually." He said it simply, without drama, the way you said things that were just true. "But that's just my opinion."

The word landed in the room and sat there.

In love.

Logan didn't correct him.

"Garrett—" he started.

"Talk to Garrett first if you need to," Dean said. "But do it tonight. Because forty eight hours is generous and I'm not known for being generous."

He left the door open when he walked out.

Logan found Garrett in the kitchen an hour later.

It was the conversation he had been avoiding for two years the one that lived in the back of his head every time you walked into a room, every time he had talked himself back from the edge of doing something about it.

"I need to talk to you about (y/n)," he said.

Garrett turned from the refrigerator. His expression moved through several things quickly before settling into something careful and still.

"Okay," he said.

"I like her." Logan held his gaze. "I've liked her for a long time. I should have said something to you before now and I'm sorry I didn't. But I'm saying it now because I can't not anymore."

The kitchen was very quiet.

Garrett looked at him for a long moment. Long enough that Logan had time to fully contemplate what losing his best friend would feel like, to turn it over, to decide that he was going to say it anyway.

"I know," Garrett said finally.

Logan blinked. "What?"

"I've known for a while." Garrett set his drink down. "I was waiting to see if you'd do something about it or if it would just go away."

"It didn't go away."

"No," Garrett said. "I can see that." He was quiet for a moment. "She's not easy to know. You know that."

"I know."

"And if you do this and it goes badly—"

"It won't."

"Logan—"

"It won't." He held Garrett's gaze. "I promise you it won't."

Garrett looked at him for one more long moment. Then he picked his drink back up and said, in the tone of someone changing the subject entirely: "She's probably at the sorority house."

You were on the porch when he pulled up.

You had come outside for air, just that, and you were sitting on the steps with a mug of tea going cold in your hands when you heard the truck. You knew the sound of that engine. Your stomach did the thing it always did.

He got out. Crossed the front path. Stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked up at you with an expression that had nothing careful about it — no composure, no distance. Just Logan, standing there looking like he had driven over without thinking it all the way through and wasn't sorry about it.

"There's a guy," he said. "Eric."

"I know who Eric is," you said slowly. "He's in my economics class."

"I know." His jaw worked. "I know, and I have no right to say anything about it. But I've been sitting in that house for four days and I can't—" He stopped. Tried again. "I can't watch you choose someone else because I was too much of a coward to say something."

You were very still.

"I talked to Garrett," he said.

"You—" You stared at him. "When?"

"Tonight." He took a step up, closing some of the distance. "I should have done it a long time ago. I should have done a lot of things a long time ago." He looked at you with an openness that was almost difficult to look at directly no walls, no distance, just the thing underneath all of it, which was apparently enormous. "I like you. I have liked you since the first time Garrett introduced us and you shook my hand and looked at me like you were trying to figure out what I was. And I have been handling it badly ever since and I'm sorry."

The street was quiet. The mug in your hands had gone completely cold.

"Eric is fine," you said. Your voice was slightly unsteady. "He's a perfectly nice person."

"I know."

"I'm not in love with him."

"I know that too." Logan's voice dropped slightly. "Is it too late? Because Dean said—"

"What did Dean say?"

"That I had forty eight hours."

You looked at him.

"Dean gave you forty eight hours," you said.

"He said it was generous."

"He's right, it was." You stood, which put you on the same level as him, close enough that you didn't have to look up anymore. "I was going to give you until the end of the month."

Something broke open in his expression. "Yeah?"

"Don't make it a thing," you said, and kissed him.

He kissed you back immediately, no hesitation, one hand coming up to the back of your neck and the other finding your waist, and it was nothing like October — none of the uncertainty, none of the held breath. This was certain. This was two years of accumulated patience finally running out, from both directions at once.

When you pulled back he was smiling — a real one, unguarded, the one you had always liked best on him.

"For the record," he said, "the first time you shook my hand I thought about it for three days."

"I know," you said. "I could tell."

He laughed. You smiled. Down the street a light came on in someone's window, and the night was cold, and two years of almost finally became something else entirely.

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