no I don’t wanna talk about episode 10 I wanna talk about that scene in episode 6 when Drew’s biceps are too big for his polo and he has to keep pulling the sleeves down the whole scene……………………….
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.
blurb: john logan claims that he doesn’t do jealousy. he thinks he’s above such petty feelings. but what happens when his girlfriend gets hit on at a house party?
warnings: fem!reader, suggestive, established relationship, alcohol
note: smut pt. 2 here
“Cupcake?”
You turned around at the voice, meeting the face of a 6’2” football player you didn’t know personally but recognized from the Briar sports Instagram account.
He was staring at your headpiece; a frosting top with colorful sprinkles. You realized what he was trying to say.
“Oh, no. I’m chocolate,” you said.
He raised an amused brow, “Chocolate?”
You nodded, sipping your beer. “Chocolate.” You confirmed, then pointed across the room to where Kendall was busy making out with one of the hockey players. “She’s vanilla. We’re chocolate and vanilla swirl.”
The football player nodded in understanding. “Ah. I see,” he said before looking over at Kendall. “Though vanilla isn’t very vanilla.”
You laughed at his witty joke, both of you watching Kendall as she did a body shot off of the hockey player she was kissing two seconds ago. She was dressed in the same tube top and bubble skirt set you were wearing, complete with the knee-high boots and matching headpiece; hers a whipped white color, yours a cocoa brown.
From the other side of the room, Tucker and Logan were talking when the former spotted you chatting with the tall football player.
Tucker nudged Logan, “Yo, is that your girl?”
Logan followed his line of sight and it landed on you, leaning against the kitchen counter and speaking to the good-looking stranger with an easy smile on your lips.
Logan looked away and gulped down his beverage. “She’s a big girl.”
Logan wasn’t one of those insecure, pompous boyfriends. He didn’t do jealousy. He’s convinced jealousy was invented by a short dick man with an easily bruised ego. Logan was secure enough in his relationship with you to never have any reason to feel jealous.
You turned to the jock and gave his costume a once-over. Knitting your brows together, you racked your brain’s storage full of pop culture references and iconic fictional characters.
“Timothée Chalamet in Call Me by Your Name?” You tried.
He let out a huff of laughter, “Close. I’m Luca from the Disney-Pixar movie.”
“Ahh,” you nodded. “Practically the same.”
He flashed a charming smile, dragging a sip from his bottle. He extended his hand to you, “James.”
You shook his hand and told him your name.
“Pretty name,” he responded. “Though…” he leaned in closer, “…cupcake fits better, don’t you think?”
Ah. At that, you picked up that he was attempting to flirt with you. Forever loyal to your boyfriend, you opened your mouth to turn his advances down. But before you could, you felt an arm wrap around your waist from behind and find purchase on your hipbone. You knew who it was without even looking.
“Hey, got you a refill,” Logan said, taking the half empty can from your hands and replacing it with a new one.
“Thanks,” you said. As your hand moved to pop the can open, Logan’s deft fingers beat you to it and he cracked the tab for you.
The football player, James, eyed the two of you, biting his lip whilst reconfiguring his whole plan. “You’re both…?”
“Air signs,” Logan teasingly remarked with a straight face, casually drinking from his red solo cup. You elbowed him with a small smirk.
“No,” James shook his head. “I mean—”
“Together,” Logan told him, putting his now empty plastic cup down on the counter. His newly freed hand joined the other by holding onto your other hip and giving it a squeeze.
James nodded to himself. “Got it.” And away he went. Probably off to find his Alberto.
Logan’s eyes followed his retreating figure, not easing up until he was out of sight. Only then did he drop his hands off your body.
You turned around and looked up at your boyfriend with a wide smile. “What was that?”
“What was what?” He returned, pouring himself a new drink.
“That whole thing,” you responded.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?” You repeated.
Logan shrugged. “A normal interaction, no?”
“He was flirting with me before that.”
“Oh so you’re aware.”
Your expression dropped. Oh, is that why—
“Logan.”
“Hm.”
“Logan.”
“Hm?”
You tilted his face down to look at him. “I wasn’t going to entertain it.”
“I know,” he replied.
“I was going to shut it down right before you showed up.”
“I know.”
“I want to make sure you know that.”
“And I know that.”
You squinted your eyes. This was suspiciously too easy. “Okay.”
“Okay.”
You stared at one another for a beat longer than necessary.
“You’re still upset,” you observed.
“I’m not upset,” he answered.
“So what are you feeling?” You asked.
“I don’t like how he called you cupcake,” Logan told you.
“Me neither. Not when I’m so clearly chocolate.”
“I’m being serious.”
“So am I.”
“Y/n.”
You sighed softly, “Okay, sorry. I thought humor would make it better.”
Your fingers curled into the hair at the nape of his neck, hoping to relieve some of his tension. It worked. A little.
“It was a shitty pickup line,” you said. “Wouldn’t work on me even if I was single.”
“I hope so.”
“Oh, please, Logan. Take me out the back and shoot me if you ever see me falling for that,” you commented. He let out a small laugh. That’s progress
His hands returned to your hips and he pulled you closer. Your arms instinctively wrapped around his neck. His large hands rested just above your ass.
“What if I called you that?” Logan said lowly.
“Wanna give it a try?” You offered.
He leaned in, his lips hovering right by your ear. You could feel his warm breath fanning over your sensitive flesh. “Would you be into that, cupcake?” He whispered, ending it with a gentle nibble on your earlobe.
You shivered, feeling goosebumps crawl over your skin. “Fuck, I guess you have to take me out back with a gun, Logan.”
He pulled back with a hearty chuckle. You gave a matching smile and he held your face, brushing his thumb across your cheekbone.
As he looked at you, his face turned thoughtful for a moment. You squeezed his hand reassuringly.
He leaned in again. “I didn’t like how he looked at you.”
“How’d he look at me?” You wondered.
“Like how I look at you.”
You stared up at him, biting your lip. “And how do you look at me?” You whispered.
He brought his forehead against yours, gazing deep into your eyes. “Like I want you.”
Oh screw your sexy boyfriend and his even sexier responses. And that’s exactly what you wanted to do now—if only you weren’t in the middle of Beau and Dean’s birthday bash.
You had enough of this game. You raised yourself up and pressed your lips to his. Logan was hungry; he seemed to devour your kiss, swallowing every soft sound you made. His hand strayed down to grip your ass, the other held your waist comfortably. His tongue was already begging to enter your mouth, and you obliged without hesitation.
When you pulled away several moments later, Logan chased your lips with eagerness, gently biting your bottom lip as you separated.
“Mine,” he breathed out under his breath.
You bared a dazed smile, “I only want you.” You mouthed silently.
Logan let out a soft sound of amusement, nodding more to himself than to you. Satisfied and high off your impromptu makeout session, he pressed one last kiss to your forehead before rejoining his friends, this time with a protective hand on the small of your back.
summary: the first time you stay with him until the morning. short fic, smut-implied but mostly fluff. inspired by one of @rebelfell's headcanons, thank you! <3
Logan shifts in his sleep once he feels you trying to slip out the bed.
“Don’t.” He says, voice hoarse from waking up in the middle of the night and arm stretching out to find you. “Don’t move.”
You have been on this same bed before, multiple times. First after one of his team’s winning games, two beers in, both giggling on the stools at Malone’s. Then again the next night, then the next week, always a fun fling before kissing goodbye and each going their own way. You and Logan have never had a talk about how things were moving, but oh, they were moving.
You turn around to face him, his pretty eyes still closed, chest going up and down in a steady rhythm. He looks so… peaceful.
“I think I should go,” you whisper. Logan’s eyes open slightly, eyebrows furrowing before he starts shaking his head, and you giggle, “Before it gets too late.”
“Just stay the night,” he says, like it’s the obvious thing to do, “I’ll take you home in the morning.”
Thing is, John Logan might not reach the same level of whorish fame of his teammates, but you know the guy. Before this all started, you’ve heard through the grapevine of different girls (puckbunnies, if you will) who were once in your position: between his sheets after a good night — but never the morning.
Guys like John Logan don’t do mornings.
Your hands move to his head, fingers fixing his hair off his face. His eyes flutter closed from the tender touch, “Logan…”
“I know. I know, just–” he stops for a yawn, half his face squished on his pillow again while his hand pulls you gently, “Just stay, please?”
You stare at his sleepy face for a second, taking a deep breath before you answer, “Okay.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Logan’s mouth splits in a tired smile, “Cool. C’mere then.”
—
He wakes up before you, nose pressed on the corner between your neck and shoulder, the soft reminiscence of perfume you were wearing last night the very first thing he acknowledges. Then, the morning light, and that’s where it hits him.
You stayed the night.
Logan doesn’t want to wake you, but he can’t help himself. He presses his lips to your shoulder, voice muttering so low, “You’re here.”
“I am.” you mutter back, almost refusing to move and disturb the quietness. Actually, all you do is pull the bedsheets — his bedsheets — closer, bundling yourself under the comfiness of his blankets. Logan lets out a small chuckle, despite feeling the cold reaching his legs. He moves an inch closer, following you under the covers.
Logan moves his lips slowly from your shoulder up to your jaw, placing soft kisses. His arms move around your torso, bringing you closer to his chest. “You’re warm,” he says in a low voice, the low stubble on his face slightly tickling you, “And you’re so soft.”
His lips keep moving over to your behind your ear, then back to your neck, kissing and nibbling. Logan shifts, swiftly pining you to bed and astriding you. His arms are on each side of your body and your hands are moving, fingers brushing his forearms like you’re trying to memorize the shivers on his skin, nails scratching the back of his neck as he kisses you deeply.
It’s all so agonizingly slow — the way he moves, the sun peeking through the white curtains casting a glow over the room, his naked back looking golden under the haze. You close your eyes, and all you hear is a soft chuckle leaving Logan’s lips, trailing down your body again. He presses a kiss on your sternum, “So, so pretty.”
There’s no rush to it, and still, you can’t pinpoint when one movement changes to another, your limbs tangled with his, hips moving together and your quiet moans muffled by his lips. It’s different from all the frantic nights you’ve shared together until now.
Slower, quieter, lovelier.
Logan’s voice whispers soft words in your ear as your chest finds a rhythm again, “You’re good, honey. You’re perfect.”
You open your eyes and find he’s intently watching you, and you press a quick kiss on his lips, then a couple more over his nose and face. He relaxes his body, arms faltering beside you, whole weight now resting on top of you.
“I’m assuming you’re not taking me home now, are you?”
Logan lets out an amused chuckle, “No, you stay as long as you want.”
You don’t see yourself leaving his bed anytime soon.
notes: thank you for reading! first time writing for off campus <3 requests are open! likes/reblogs/thoughts are appreciated!
summary: the first time you stay with him until the morning. short fic, smut-implied but mostly fluff. inspired by one of @rebelfell's headcanons, thank you! <3
Logan shifts in his sleep once he feels you trying to slip out the bed.
“Don’t.” He says, voice hoarse from waking up in the middle of the night and arm stretching out to find you. “Don’t move.”
You have been on this same bed before, multiple times. First after one of his team’s winning games, two beers in, both giggling on the stools at Malone’s. Then again the next night, then the next week, always a fun fling before kissing goodbye and each going their own way. You and Logan have never had a talk about how things were moving, but oh, they were moving.
You turn around to face him, his pretty eyes still closed, chest going up and down in a steady rhythm. He looks so… peaceful.
“I think I should go,” you whisper. Logan’s eyes open slightly, eyebrows furrowing before he starts shaking his head, and you giggle, “Before it gets too late.”
“Just stay the night,” he says, like it’s the obvious thing to do, “I’ll take you home in the morning.”
Thing is, John Logan might not reach the same level of whorish fame of his teammates, but you know the guy. Before this all started, you’ve heard through the grapevine of different girls (puckbunnies, if you will) who were once in your position: between his sheets after a good night — but never the morning.
Guys like John Logan don’t do mornings.
Your hands move to his head, fingers fixing his hair off his face. His eyes flutter closed from the tender touch, “Logan…”
“I know. I know, just–” he stops for a yawn, half his face squished on his pillow again while his hand pulls you gently, “Just stay, please?”
You stare at his sleepy face for a second, taking a deep breath before you answer, “Okay.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Logan’s mouth splits in a tired smile, “Cool. C’mere then.”
—
He wakes up before you, nose pressed on the corner between your neck and shoulder, the soft reminiscence of perfume you were wearing last night the very first thing he acknowledges. Then, the morning light, and that’s where it hits him.
You stayed the night.
Logan doesn’t want to wake you, but he can’t help himself. He presses his lips to your shoulder, voice muttering so low, “You’re here.”
“I am.” you mutter back, almost refusing to move and disturb the quietness. Actually, all you do is pull the bedsheets — his bedsheets — closer, bundling yourself under the comfiness of his blankets. Logan lets out a small chuckle, despite feeling the cold reaching his legs. He moves an inch closer, following you under the covers.
Logan moves his lips slowly from your shoulder up to your jaw, placing soft kisses. His arms move around your torso, bringing you closer to his chest. “You’re warm,” he says in a low voice, the low stubble on his face slightly tickling you, “And you’re so soft.”
His lips keep moving over to your behind your ear, then back to your neck, kissing and nibbling. Logan shifts, swiftly pining you to bed and astriding you. His arms are on each side of your body and your hands are moving, fingers brushing his forearms like you’re trying to memorize the shivers on his skin, nails scratching the back of his neck as he kisses you deeply.
It’s all so agonizingly slow — the way he moves, the sun peeking through the white curtains casting a glow over the room, his naked back looking golden under the haze. You close your eyes, and all you hear is a soft chuckle leaving Logan’s lips, trailing down your body again. He presses a kiss on your sternum, “So, so pretty.”
There’s no rush to it, and still, you can’t pinpoint when one movement changes to another, your limbs tangled with his, hips moving together and your quiet moans muffled by his lips. It’s different from all the frantic nights you’ve shared together until now.
Slower, quieter, lovelier.
Logan’s voice whispers soft words in your ear as your chest finds a rhythm again, “You’re good, honey. You’re perfect.”
You open your eyes and find he’s intently watching you, and you press a quick kiss on his lips, then a couple more over his nose and face. He relaxes his body, arms faltering beside you, whole weight now resting on top of you.
“I’m assuming you’re not taking me home now, are you?”
Logan lets out an amused chuckle, “No, you stay as long as you want.”
You don’t see yourself leaving his bed anytime soon.
notes: thank you for reading! first time writing for off campus <3 requests are open! likes/reblogs/thoughts are appreciated!
pairing – garrett graham x kitty!reader
summary – garrett graham doesn’t do girlfriends. unfortunately for him, the entire hockey house has ears, opinions, and very strong evidence to the contrary.
warnings – suggestive content, implied smut, post-sex intimacy, arguing, strong language
notes from me – oh to have make up sex with garrett graham. based on this request! thank u anon xx
word count – 5.1k
navigation – masterlist | taglist
The downstairs of the hockey house had entered that specific late-night stage of male occupancy where every surface had acquired either a controller, an open bag of chips, a damp ring from a beer bottle, or a sock that absolutely did not belong in a shared living space and yet had been accepted by the ecosystem.
The TV threw blue-white light over the room in sharp, violent flashes while some first-person shooter none of them were pretending to understand strategically anymore barked gunfire through the speakers. Logan was sunk so low into the couch he was practically part of it, one socked foot hooked under the coffee table, thumbs moving on instinct and jaw working around the last of a slice of cold pizza.
Tucker had claimed the armchair like a man with enough common sense to keep his spine functional past twenty-five, one ankle crossed over his knee, controller balanced comfortably in his hands, expression calm in the way that made it ten times more annoying when he killed everyone else. Dean was sprawled half sideways on the rug with his back against the couch, beer loose in one hand, controller in the other, looking like someone had designed a rich boy in a lab and then forgotten to install shame.
Garrett was upstairs. Which, in itself, was not strange. Garrett being upstairs with her was also not strange, not anymore, no matter how many times he said, with the full stubborn confidence of a man lying directly to everyone’s faces, that it wasn’t like that. It was casual. They were hooking up.
He was busy. Hockey, classes, captain shit, the usual revolving door of women who used to come and go before she’d started appearing in the kitchen in his sweatshirts and stealing the last banana off the counter with the lazy comfort of someone who knew exactly which drawer the forks were in.
Garrett denied all of it. Continually. Aggressively, even. Like if he said the words she’s not my girlfriend often enough, the universe would stop presenting evidence to the contrary.
Unfortunately for him, the universe was a petty bitch, and so were his friends. Dean had been killed by Tucker for the third time in under two minutes and was halfway through an appeal to basic human decency when the first noise came from upstairs.
Not a bed thump. Not laughter. Not the usual muffled, morally concerning sounds that made Tucker reach for the remote and Logan yell, “Bro, volume,” without looking away from the screen.
This was a voice, her voice. And it was furious. “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME, GARRETT?”
Every thumb in the living room stopped moving at once. Onscreen, Dean’s character was immediately shot in the head.
Nobody cared.
There was a half-second where the whole downstairs seemed to hold its breath around the TV static and the low hum of the fridge from the kitchen. Logan lifted his head first, slow and delighted. Tucker’s brows went up. Dean turned, beer paused halfway to his mouth, eyes brightening with the reverent attention of a man who had just heard the opening note of live theatre.
Upstairs, something moved hard enough to creak through the ceiling. A footstep. Maybe two. Then Garrett’s voice came down, rough and defensive and very much not using his captain voice. “What? Jesus Christ, I looked at my phone.”
“You were snapping a puck bunny right before you fucked me!”
Dean’s mouth fell open. Logan’s eyes went huge. Tucker closed his eyes once, like a man hearing a disaster he could have warned someone about if anyone in this house respected wisdom.
“Oh, rookie error,” Logan said solemnly, pointing one finger toward the ceiling without taking his eyes off the stairs. “That’s a rookie error.”
Dean nodded, gravely, as if Garrett had failed a sacred code. “Yeah, no. You can’t do that.”
Tucker set his controller down on his knee. “You absolutely cannot do that.”
From upstairs, Garrett snapped, “I wasn’t snapping a puck bunny.”
“Oh, fuck you, Garrett!”
“Oh, fuck me?” Garrett shot back, voice rising now, indignant in that very particular Garrett Graham way where he sounded personally offended that reality had chosen to disagree with him. “Fuck me? Are you shitting me? I go on my phone for, like, two seconds and you freak out?”
“I was straddling you, you asshole!”
Dean made a strangled sound and pressed his fist to his mouth, eyes shining. “God, she’s good.”
Logan leaned forward, elbows on his knees, fully abandoning the game now. His abandoned character stood motionless on screen while someone named xXSlayerBoiXx unloaded an entire magazine into his chest. “Yeah, no, I’m with her on that. That’s insane. You don’t check messages mid-straddle.”
“It’s about respect,” Dean said, sudden and earnest, like the spirit of an Italian grandmother had entered his body. “You gotta keep that shit separate, man. Girls know when you’re mentally in the room. They can feel it.”
Tucker looked at him.
Dean looked back. “What?”
“No, I agree,” Tucker said after a beat, which somehow made it funnier. “I just didn’t expect you to be the one bringing emotional literacy into this house tonight.”
Dean lifted his beer in salute.
Upstairs, her voice came again, closer this time like she’d moved toward the door or maybe toward Garrett, which somehow made the whole thing worse and better. “You literally smiled at your phone.”
“I smile at shit!”
“You smiled like a slut!”
Logan lost it. He folded forward, laughter punching out of him so hard he had to slap one hand over his mouth. Tucker’s mouth twitched. Dean pointed up at the ceiling with the beer bottle, triumphant.
“That,” Dean said, “is a woman with language.”
Garrett barked something they couldn’t quite catch, then louder, “It was a team thing.”
“Oh my God, don’t lie to me with hockey. That’s so insulting.”
“I’m not lying with hockey!”
“You’re always lying with hockey. It’s your little emotional support sport.”
Dean wheezed. “Oh, she’s killing him.”
“She’s not wrong,” Tucker said, and picked up his controller again only to realise no one else was playing. He set it down with the soft resignation of a man accepting that the night had changed shape. “He does use hockey as a legal defence.”
Logan wiped under one eye with his thumb. “Your Honor, I couldn’t text back because we had a power play.”
“Exactly,” Dean said. “And the jury’s like, damn, compelling.”
The argument upstairs hit a sharper pitch then, the words overlapping enough that downstairs only fragments came through: Garrett saying her name in that strained, warning way; her cutting over him with something about half the campus knowing exactly what your stupid little smirk means; Garrett snapping back that she didn’t get to act like he’d done something when he hadn’t done anything; her laugh, sharp and humourless enough to slice through the floorboards.
The thing was, from downstairs, it was hilarious. It was the kind of fight you listened to with one hand over your mouth and the other hovering near your beer because you didn’t want to miss a word.
But even through the ceiling, even with Dean’s face lit up like Christmas, there was something hot and real in it. Garrett could say casual until his voice gave out. The guys had seen him check every time the front door opened on a Friday night in case it was her. They had seen him turn down girls without making a production of it and then act like he didn’t know he’d done it. They had seen him stand in the kitchen at nine in the morning holding two mugs of coffee, one black and one with the stupid oat milk she liked, and still somehow insist he was not, under any circumstances, doing relationship shit.
Upstairs, something thudded, like someone had shoved a door or dropped a shoe or Garrett had knocked into his own dresser while gesturing too aggressively for a man who claimed to be calm.
“Don’t walk away from me,” Garrett said, clearer now.
“Oh, now you care where I am?”
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“That– that thing where you make it sound like I don’t give a shit.”
There was a pause after that. Barely a pause. Downstairs, all three of them went quieter without meaning to.
Then she said, voice still furious but lower now, scraped around the edges, “You were smiling at another girl with my thighs around your waist, Garrett.”
Logan’s face changed first. The grin softened out of it by a fraction. Tucker looked down at his beer. Dean, for all his many sins, at least had the sense to stop laughing for a second.
Garrett didn’t answer right away. When he did, his voice had lost some of the heat. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Then what was it like?”
“Baby–”
“Oh, do not baby me right now.”
Dean inhaled through his teeth. “Tough room.”
“Deserved,” Tucker murmured.
Garrett said something too low for them to make out, then louder when she clearly answered over him, “I’m not trying to make you look stupid!”
“You don’t have to try, you’re doing great.”
Logan made a tiny, appreciative noise. “Goddamn.”
Dean leaned back against the couch, eyes narrowed in thought now, as if evaluating odds at a racetrack. “I got ten bucks on Kitty.”
Tucker turned his head slowly. “Kitty?”
“Yeah.” Dean said it like this was obvious, like the naming of women based on their probable combat style was an established household tradition. “Kitty.”
Logan frowned. “Why Kitty?”
Dean looked offended by the lack of memory. “Because she scratches the shit out of him. You didn’t see his back last week?”
“Oh shit,” Logan said immediately, pointing at Dean. “That’s right. In the locker room. I thought he got attacked by a raccoon.”
“Exactly.” Dean spread one hand, pleased with his own case. “Kitty.”
Tucker’s brows drew together. “Nah. She’s hotter than a housecat.”
Dean tipped his head, considering. “I didn’t say housecat.”
“You said kitty. That implies housecat.”
“She’s not a housecat,” Dean said seriously.
Logan leaned back, very invested. “Cheetah?”
“No,” Tucker said. “Cheetahs are too sleek. She’s got more… attitude.”
“Mountain lion,” Dean said, snapping his fingers.
The room went quiet in collective consideration.
Logan nodded first. “Mountain lion works.”
Tucker lifted his beer. “Yeah. Respectfully.”
Dean tipped his bottle toward the ceiling. “Ten bucks on Mountain Lion.”
Upstairs, Garrett’s voice rose again, but not in the same way now. “You think I’m sitting there trying to get with somebody else while you’re literally in my room?”
“I don’t know what you’re doing, Garrett, because you keep telling me this is nothing.”
That hit the downstairs like somebody had turned down the TV and let the actual room in. Logan’s mouth went a little flat. Dean’s eyes flicked toward Tucker, then away. Tucker exhaled through his nose and leaned back in the chair.
Garrett said nothing. She laughed again, quieter this time, and it was worse than the yelling. “Right. Yeah. Exactly.”
A door creaked upstairs. A floorboard shifted.
Garrett’s voice came out rough. “That’s not fair.”
“No, what’s not fair is you acting like I’m insane for being embarrassed when you keep making sure I know I’m not allowed to be anything else.”
“Jesus. That’s not–” Garrett stopped, frustrated enough that they could almost see him dragging a hand through his hair. “That’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean?”
Another silence. Dean, who had somehow turned from smug spectator into anxious civilian in under thirty seconds, whispered, “Say something good, dumbass.”
Tucker shot him a look. “You whispering isn’t helping him.”
“I know, but, like, he can sense my spirit.”
Garrett finally spoke, lower. They couldn’t catch the first part. Only the end. “…don’t want you thinking I’m messing around with other girls.”
“But you are.”
“I’m not.”
“You were.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You were smiling at your phone like–”
“I was smiling because Logan sent me a video of Dean eating shit in the driveway.”
Tucker stared at both of Dean and Logan, disgusted. “This house is an ecosystem of idiots.”
Upstairs, there was a beat of silence. Then her voice, much flatter now. “What?”
Garrett said, louder, with the rushed relief of a man finally locating evidence in his own defence, “It was Dean. It was the video of Dean slipping on the ice by the cars. I was laughing at that.”
Dean pointed to himself, touched. “I saved his situationship.”
Logan leaned over and slapped his shoulder. “Your pain had purpose.”
“I told you I’m important to this team.”
The floorboards creaked again. Upstairs, she said something too low for them to catch. Garrett answered, also too low, his voice doing that thing it did when he was trying not to sound soft and failing just enough for people who knew him to notice.
Then she snapped, suddenly audible again, “That still doesn’t fix the fact that you’re weird about me.”
Garrett’s answer came immediate and defensive. “I’m not weird about you.”
All three guys downstairs went still. Then, as one, they looked at each other. Dean’s face went blank with disbelief. Logan’s mouth opened. Tucker’s eyebrows lifted toward his hairline.
“He’s so weird about her,” Logan whispered.
“Incredibly,” Dean agreed.
“He once made me Venmo her for mozzarella sticks because I ate the ones she left in the fridge,” Tucker said.
Logan turned to him. “He made you Venmo her?”
“She didn’t even ask. She was asleep.”
Dean nodded solemnly. “That’s husband behaviour.”
Upstairs, she said, “You got mad at Tucker for eating my leftovers.”
Tucker lifted both hands as if personally vindicated by God.
Garrett shouted, “Because he knew they weren’t his!”
“They were in a communal fridge!”
Dean clutched his chest. “Oh my God.”
Logan dropped his head back against the couch. “He’s cooked.”
“Burnt,” Tucker said.
Upstairs, the argument blurred again into movement, voices crossing, Garrett’s frustration and her hurt colliding in the messy, intimate rhythm of two people who knew each other well enough to know exactly where to press and not enough to stop themselves from pressing there anyway.
There was another thud, softer this time. Something fabric-heavy hitting the floor. Maybe the edge of a comforter. Maybe one of Garrett’s hoodies being launched with intent.
Then she said, sharp but trembling around it, “I’m not asking you to marry me, Garrett. I’m asking you not to make me feel stupid for liking you!”
The living room went dead silent. Even Dean didn’t joke.
For a second, there was only the muted TV, the distant rush of heat through the vents, the soft electrical buzz of the lamp beside the couch. Tucker looked away first, because there were some things a man wasn’t supposed to witness even through drywall. Logan rubbed a hand over his mouth. Dean’s face did something strange, caught between sympathy and the reflexive horror of sincerity arriving without warning.
Garrett’s voice came low enough that they had to strain for it. “I don’t think you’re stupid.”
She answered, quieter too. “You act like I am.”
“I don’t mean to.”
“Yeah, well.” Her voice wavered, barely. “You’re really good at it anyway.”
There was another pause, longer this time. Then Garrett said her name, and it sounded so unlike the way he said it when he was teasing her downstairs, so stripped of performance, that even Logan stopped breathing loudly.
“I’m busy,” Garrett said, and immediately Dean made a face like he wanted to climb through the ceiling and tackle him. But then Garrett kept going, rougher, faster, like if he didn’t get it out in one rush he’d lose the nerve. “And I’m not– I don’t do this shit. I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“I want you to stop hiding behind that.”
“I’m not hiding.”
“Garrett.”
Silence. Then, quieter, from him: “Maybe a little.”
Dean’s eyes widened.
Logan whispered, “Progress.”
Tucker nodded once. “Huge.”
Whatever she said next didn’t reach them. It was softer, swallowed by the ceiling and the old pipes and the house settling around all of them. Garrett answered in the same register. For a minute, the boys could hear only the shape of it: his voice low and trying; hers still hurt but no longer slicing; a murmur, a footstep, another smaller sound that might have been a laugh or might have been her telling him he was an idiot in a tone that had lost most of its blade.
Dean leaned slowly toward the ceiling, listening so hard his beer tilted dangerously in his hand.
“Are they making up?” Logan whispered.
Tucker held up one finger. “Wait.”
The upstairs went very, very quiet. A bedframe creaked once. All three of them froze.
Then, clear enough to cut through the entire house, came a high, breathless little squeal that immediately dissolved into a muffled laugh and Garrett saying something low that none of them could make out but absolutely did not sound like an apology anymore.
Dean nodded once, satisfied. “Yup.”
Logan picked up his controller. “They’re fucking.”
Tucker reached for the remote and turned the TV volume up three notches with the resigned precision of a man who had lived in this house too long. “Good for them.”
Dean lifted his beer toward the ceiling. “Mountain Lion won.”
“You don’t win a fight by sleeping with Garrett after,” Tucker said.
Dean considered this. “Depends on the fight.”
Logan unpaused the game and immediately got shot. “I still think Garrett lost.”
“Oh, he definitely lost,” Tucker said.
Dean grinned, settling back against the couch as the game roared back to life and the upstairs became, blessedly, a problem the TV volume could mostly handle. “Yeah, but he’s not gonna know that until morning.”
From above them came another muffled thump, followed by Garrett’s laugh, low and pleased and stupidly gone.
Logan shook his head, respawning. “He’s so fucked.”
Tucker’s mouth curved faintly as he lifted his controller again. “Yeah.”
Dean, eyes on the screen now, smile still wide, said, “But in his defence, did you guys see her in that little skirt earlier?”
Tucker killed him instantly in the game.
Dean stared at the screen. “Wow.”
“Respect women,” Tucker said pointing at Dean, calm as anything.
Logan laughed so hard he missed his next shot, and upstairs, Garrett Graham continued very loudly pretending he didn’t have a girlfriend.
The room has gone quiet in the aftermath, the sort of quiet that arrives after a small, localised weather event has torn through and left evidence everywhere for later people to pretend not to see.
Garrett’s comforter is half on the bed and half dragged toward the floor, one corner caught under her knee. A pillow has somehow ended up near the closet. Her shirt is inside out beside the desk chair. One of Garrett’s socks is on the nightstand, which makes absolutely no sense, but the whole room has taken on that loose, wrecked, airless quality of a place where nothing had been put down so much as flung away in the service of more urgent priorities.
The lamp throws soft gold over the wall and across the pile of clothes at the foot of the bed, and under it all the house is still making noise downstairs: gunfire from the TV, somebody laughing too loud, a dull male groan of defeat that is probably Dean dying in the game again.
She’s sprawled on her stomach across Garrett’s chest, bare skin warm against bare skin, one leg tangled in the sheet and the other hooked lazily over his thigh like she has no intention of giving his body back to him anytime soon.
Her chin rests over his sternum, and she traces nonsense patterns over his chest with the tip of one finger, slow little loops through the faint sheen still drying there, feeling the hard, steady thud of his heart under her cheek when she tilts down.
It’s stupid, really, how quickly the fight has gone soft at the edges now that they’ve burned through it. Her throat still feels a little raw from yelling. Her body feels heavy and loose and humming in places she’s absolutely not going to name out loud. Garrett’s hand sits at the base of her spine, thumb moving every now and then like he keeps forgetting he’s doing it.
For a while neither of them says anything. Which is probably for the best, because words have been historically risky in this room tonight. Then the floorboards creak somewhere downstairs and Logan’s voice carries faintly up, followed by Dean’s laugh, bright and stupid and unmistakably delighted by his own existence.
She stills. Garrett’s hand pauses on her back.
Her eyes lift to his face. “Do you think the guys heard us?”
Garrett looks down at her for half a second, mouth already fighting the kind of grin that means he’s decided honesty will be funniest if delivered without mercy. His hair’s a mess from her hands, curls pushed in every wrong direction, face flushed in that warm, post-sex way that makes him look softer and smugger at once, which should be illegal on a man who already has enough advantages.
“Think the whole campus heard us,” he says.
She lets out an offended little laugh and drops her forehead against his chest. “Shut up.”
“No, seriously.” His voice is lazy now, rough around the edges, pleased with himself in a way that makes her want to bite him. Again. “Pretty sure the women’s soccer team knows you’re mad at me. And now... not so mad at me.”
“Oh my God.” She presses her face harder into his chest, but she’s giggling now, because the alternative is imagining Logan, Tucker, and Dean downstairs, all three of them going dead silent and absolutely listening like the worst little creeps in Massachusetts. “I hate you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I literally do.”
“You’re naked on top of me.”
She grins into his chest. “That’s unrelated.”
“Feels related.”
She lifts her head just enough to glare at him, which doesn’t work at all because he’s grinning at her like she’s the funniest, most inconvenient thing that has ever happened to him.
That look gets under her skin in a way she hates. The part where his amusement goes warm and stupid around the eyes because he’s not just entertained. He’s happy she’s there. Happy she’s still touching him. Happy in the middle of a room that looks like a crime scene made of laundry and bad decisions.
His hand slides up her back, slow and broad, then comes around the side of her neck with the kind of easy confidence that makes her body go annoyingly still. His fingers resting lightly beneath her jaw, thumb brushing once along the side of her throat while he tips her face up.
“C’mere,” he murmurs, and kisses her before she can say something defensive.
It’s quick, technically. Barely more than a press of his mouth to hers, warm and lazy and smug at the corner because he can probably feel the way she melts by half an inch the second his hand settles there.
But it does something ridiculous inside her anyway. Something bright and helpless and fluttering low in her stomach. She kisses him back without meaning to make anything of it, but he smiles against her mouth, and that’s somehow worse.
When he lets her go, she blinks down at him. “You’re very annoying after sex.”
“Before too.”
“True.”
“During, though?”
She pauses, letting her eyes move over his face with theatrical consideration. “Tolerable.”
Garrett’s eyebrows lift. “Tolerable?”
“Mhm.”
“That’s crazy, considering the volume you were using ten minutes ago.”
She gasps and shoves at his chest, but he catches her wrist before she gets far, laughing low in his throat, the sound moving under her palm. “Garrett.”
“What?”
“You’re so full of yourself.”
“Evidence-based confidence, baby.”
She rolls her eyes, but the baby lands anyway, soft and warm and stupidly effective in the middle of all that cocky shit. Which is exactly the problem. Garrett could say something that made her want to smother him with his own pillow and then two seconds later say baby like it belonged in his mouth, like he hadn’t even had to think about it.
He gives her ass a lazy pat and exhales, long and reluctant, glancing toward the clock on the nightstand. “I gotta get up.”
Her brows draw together. “Why?”
“Because I told Coach I’d be at the rink early.”
“It’s nighttime.”
“I'm captain.” He shifts under her, and she makes a small noise of protest before she can stop herself, which makes his mouth twitch again. “Don’t start.”
She pouts. “I didn’t say anything.”
“You made a sound.”
“I’m allowed to make sounds.”
“Clearly.”
She narrows her eyes at him, but Garrett’s already moving, careful and slightly awkward with the sheet and her limbs and the fact that she has absolutely no interest in helping.
He sits up, easing her off his chest and onto the mattress, and she flops onto her back with the kind of boneless indignation only a girl who has just been thoroughly ruined and then abandoned for hockey can really commit to.
The air cools instantly where his body was, and she hates that too. Hates the little absence of heat along her side. Hates, more than anything, the fact that she notices.
Garrett gets out of bed naked, completely unbothered by the fact that he looks like that in lamplight and has the audacity to walk away from her with broad shoulders and hockey-built thighs and his back scratched to hell.
She hadn’t realised she’d done quite that much damage. There are red marks dragged down over the muscle beside his spine and along one shoulder blade, bright against his skin, some already fading, some very much not. The sight sends a hot little pulse through her, equal parts pride and embarrassment and something so pleased it probably needs to be medically reviewed. She bites her bottom lip to stop the grin. It doesn’t work.
Garrett bends to grab his boxers from the floor and pulls them on, then glances back over his shoulder because he feels her looking. “What?”
She shrugs against the pillow, still grinning. “Nothing.”
His eyes narrow slightly. “That face is obviously not nothing.”
“It’s nothing.”
“You look way too proud of yourself for nothing.”
“I’m just lying here.”
“Yeah,” he says, turning enough that she gets the full benefit of his expression now: amused, suspicious, a little too aware of his own effect on her and absolutely not above using it. “That’s the problem.”
She lets her gaze drag over him again on purpose this time, slow enough to be rude, from the messy curls to the bare chest to the low waistband of his boxers, then back to his face. Garrett watches her do it.
His mouth parts like he’s about to say something, then closes again. His jaw shifts. He looks briefly toward the ceiling, as if appealing to God, Coach, or whatever patron saint governs self-control in sexually compromised hockey players.
She giggles. “What?”
Garrett exhales through his nose. “Nothing.”
“No, what?” She props herself lazily up on one elbow, sheet slipping down just enough that his eyes drop despite his clear attempt to be a disciplined athlete with somewhere to be. “What did I do?”
He gives her a look.
She widens her eyes, all fake innocence and bare shoulders and hair messy around her face in ways she knows are not helping him. “I’m not doing anything!”
“You look like that,” Garrett says, accusingly.
She glances down at herself like this is new information. “Like what?”
“Like that.” His hand moves vaguely in her direction because apparently language has left him. “All…” He stops. Swallows. Drags a hand over his mouth. “Fuck.”
The grin takes over her whole face now, slow and delighted. “Garrett Graham. Are you objectifying me?”
“I’m trying very hard not to.”
“How noble.”
“I’m a good guy.”
“You’re currently staring at my boobs.”
His eyes snap up. “I’m flawed.”
She laughs, and the sound loosens something in his face. For one second he just looks at her, standing there beside the bed in his boxers with scratches down his back and his hair wrecked by her fingers, caught between leaving and crawling right back over her.
The room feels warmer for it. Smaller. The mess of it suddenly not messy so much as lived-in for one strange little slice of time – her clothes with his, her phone on his nightstand, his handprint still warm somewhere on her hip, the argument hanging around but no longer sharp enough to cut.
Then he sighs like she’s personally ruined his life. “I’m gonna be late.”
She frowns immediately, because the words take a second to land in the right order. “No, you’re not.” She rolls onto her side and reaches for her phone on the bedside table, fingers searching blindly until they close around it. The screen lights her face blue for a second. “You have plenty of– oh.”
The oh comes out because Garrett’s moved while she was checking the time. Fast. Smooth. Infuriatingly athletic, even in boxers, which feels unfair given the circumstances.
One second she’s looking at the screen. The next his hands are around her thighs, warm and sure, tugging her down the mattress until her hips slide to the edge of the bed and the phone slips from her hand. She drops it with a soft thump into the sheet, breath catching in a little startled laugh as he steps between her knees.
“Garrett.”
“Yeah?”
“What are you doing?”
He lifts one of her ankles first, then the other, setting them over his shoulders like he has all the time in the world and not a single intention of using it responsibly. His hands settle against her thighs, thumbs pressing in just enough to make her stomach flip.
The lamplight catches on his grin when he looks down at her, all cocky mouth and dark, focused eyes and the kind of heat that makes every smart thing she might have said disappear before it reaches her tongue.
“I’m gonna be late,” he says.
For a second she just stares at him. Then her smile spreads, helpless and bright and already half-breathless. She lets her head fall back against the mattress, laughter spilling out of her as her fingers curl into the rumpled comforter. “You’re gonna be late.”
Garrett’s mouth curves, pleased, and his hands slide a little higher on her thighs.
“Yeah,” he says, like this is simply what the night has decided and who is he to argue with circumstances. “Definitely.”
I swear some of the people I work with have never worked before because when I tell you there’s nothing that will make me dm my supervisor on their day off I mean NOTHING
I’ll probably never get married because my dad had set the bar pretty high when he was still alive but now that he’s dead the man’s basically a SAINT and no one remotely compares
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