pairing – garrett graham x reader
summary – garrett graham can ignore almost anything at practice. a low glucose alert from dexcom is not one of them.
warnings – diabetic reader, hypoglycemia/low glucose episode, dexcom follow alert, mild medical stress, established relationship
notes from me – as requested!! sorry this took a little while – i had to research to make sure it was accurate lmao! let me know if i got anything wrong <3
word count – 4k
navigation – masterlist |
Garrett’s phone goes off halfway through bag skate, which is about as close to a death wish as technology can get inside a hockey rink. It cuts through the scrape of blades and the hard, ugly rhythm of twenty exhausted guys trying not to throw up on fresh ice, a sharp little alarm from the bench where everyone’s phones are piled with water bottles and tape and somebody’s abandoned hoodie.
Usually, Garrett ignores his phone at practice. Usually, there’s no reason to stop in the middle of a drill unless someone is actively bleeding, concussed, or Coach Jensen has decided to experiment with psychological warfare again.
But Garrett knows that sound. He turns his head so fast the edge of his skate catches a little too hard on the ice. Tucker nearly clips him from behind and swears, loud and breathless, but Garrett’s already skating toward the bench with his pulse shifting in a way that has nothing to do with the suicides they’ve been running for the last twenty minutes.
“Graham,” Coach barks, because concern for his girlfriend’s pancreas doesn’t fall within approved training interruptions.
Garrett grabs his phone, glove half off with his teeth because the stupid thing won’t unlock with cold fingers and sweat and the universe personally fucking with him.
The Dexcom Follow notification sits bright on the screen, clinical and calm in the way medical apps always are, like they’re not announcing information designed to put a hook straight through his chest.
LOW GLUCOSE ALERT.
He stares at the number beneath it, then at the downward arrow, then swipes into their messages so quickly he almost fumbles the phone into the stick rack.
Garrett: baby. eat something
Garrett: now please
Garrett: your dexcom’s yelling at me
The little delivered line appears. Nothing else. He waits three seconds. Four. Five. The ice keeps making noise behind him, bodies turning, sticks tapping, Coach’s whistle cutting once through the air so sharply it makes Garrett’s shoulders tense before his brain catches up.
He types again.
Garrett: hey
Garrett: answer me
Still nothing.
“Graham,” Coach calls again, closer this time, irritated but not fully pissed yet. Garrett can feel the whole team’s attention starting to swing toward him in little pieces, because he doesn’t do this. He doesn’t check out mid-practice. He doesn’t stand at the bench breathing hard with one glove off and his hair damp at his temples, staring at his phone like it’s threatened him.
He looks up. “Sorry– my girlfriend– her blood sugar’s low.”
It comes out blunt. Too blunt, maybe, because Coach’s face shifts a little. He jerks his chin toward the locker room. “Text her. Then get back out here if she’s fine.”
Garrett nods once and steps off the ice enough to call her. It rings so long that every second feels stupidly personal.
By the fifth ring, he’s already seeing her dorm room in his head with unpleasant clarity: the lamp on, laptop burning her eyes out, notes everywhere, highlighter uncapped on the comforter, some coffee she definitely shouldn’t be drinking instead of eating, her tucked into one of his hoodies like that counts as a balanced meal.
He can picture her Dexcom stuck to the back of her arm, doing its job, screaming into his phone because she's once again decided that studying until her brain leaks out of her ears is a reasonable use of a human body.
She answers on the sixth ring. “Hi,” she says, tiny and slow, like the word has been wrapped in cotton before leaving her mouth.
Garrett’s chest tightens so hard he nearly gets angry from the relief alone. “Baby.”
“Mhm?”
“Did you get the alert?”
There’s a pause. A soft rustle. Then, distantly, like she has turned her head toward her own phone and found it personally disappointing, she says, “Oh.”
Garrett closes his eyes for half a second. “Yeah. Oh. Eat something.”
“I was gonna.”
“You were not gonna. You didn’t even know it went off.”
“I knew,” she says, with absolutely no conviction and the faint offended dignity of a girl who’s been caught being medically unserious in her own home. “I was just… looking at it.”
“At what?”
“My phone.”
“You just found your phone.”
Another pause. Then, smaller, “Maybe.”
Garrett presses the heel of his hand to one eye and breathes out. Behind him, the team is still skating. Someone laughs. A puck hits the boards hard enough to make the glass jump. The whole rink smells like ice and sweat and rubber and old adrenaline, and all he wants, suddenly and viciously, is to be in her stupid little dorm room putting sugar in her hand himself.
“Okay,” he says, forcing his voice down because she gets embarrassed when people fuss too loudly and because snapping at her when her brain is running on fumes would make him the kind of asshole he’d like to punch. “Do you have your hypo stuff?”
“Mm.”
“Words, baby.”
She sighs. “Yes.”
“What do you have?”
“Lollies.”
“Where?”
“My drawer.”
“Which drawer?”
“The drawer drawer.”
Despite himself, a laugh punches out of him, short and disbelieving. “Jesus Christ. The drawer drawer. Very helpful.”
She makes a small sound, half whine, half laugh, and he can hear how thin it is. How tired. How not fully her. “Don’t be mean. I’m low.”
“I’m aware, since your robot tattled on you.” He shifts his phone to the other ear and looks toward Coach, who is watching him now with a patience Garrett suspects has a hard expiry. “Get the lollies. Right now.”
She whines softly. “I’m comfy.”
“Baby.”
“I know.”
He huffs. “Move.”
She grumbles something under her breath that sounds a lot like bossy hockey bitch, and Garrett would enjoy that more if he wasn’t currently imagining her trying to walk across her room with low blood sugar and the coordination of a newborn deer.
There’s a shuffle, then a thump soft enough to be a drawer and not a person, thank fuck. Plastic crinkles near the speaker.
“Got them,” she says.
“Good. Eat some.”
She groans softly. “How many?”
“Enough for fifteen grams.”
Another silence.
Garrett looks at the ceiling. “The packet, baby. Read the packet.”
“I’m doing it,” she mutters, and then the line fills with the sticky little sounds of a packet being opened badly by someone whose fingers are probably trembling. Garrett hears one fall, hit the desk, roll somewhere. She sighs like it has betrayed her.
“Don’t chase it,” he says immediately.
“I wasn’t gonna.”
“You absolutely were.”
“I’m eating the other ones.”
“Good girl.”
It slips out before he thinks better of it, softer than the rest, and the line goes quiet in that particular way that means she’s heard it and tucked it somewhere warm even through the fog in her head.
Coach blows the whistle again. Garrett’s whole body twitches. “Stay on the phone with me,” he says.
“I’m fine.”
“Didn’t ask.”
“Bossy.”
“Yeah. Eat.”
She does. He listens. It should be boring, standing half-off the ice while his girlfriend chews gummy lollies into the phone like a mildly annoyed possum.
It’s, objectively, not a romantic moment. There’s nothing cinematic about glucose tabs or jelly snakes or Garrett Graham in full gear with one glove hanging from his teeth, telling a girl in a dorm room to keep chewing while his coach considers whether love is worth disrupting defensive drills.
Still, his hand stays tight around the phone until the Dexcom number nudges up a little and her voice starts coming back from wherever the low had dragged it. Enough that when she says, “You’re breathing like Darth Vader,” there’s a faint smile in it.
“Because I’m at practice.”
“Hot.”
“You’re hypoglycemic.”
“So sexy that you know that word.”
He laughs then, low and relieved in a way he tries not to let her hear too clearly. “Recheck in fifteen.”
“I know.”
“Text me the number.”
“I know, Garrett.”
That sounds more like her, annoyed and soft and there. It loosens something under his ribs by a degree. He looks back at Coach again, then at the ice, then at his phone. He should go back. She’s eaten. She’s talking. The number’s not beautiful, but it’s moving.
This is the whole point of the app, technically, to know and respond and then not act like every alert is a national emergency. She has diabetes. She handles this all the time. She has handled it before him, will keep handling it after every practice, every class, every exam week, every stupid stretch of time where Garrett cannot physically be within arm’s reach putting food in her mouth.
That’s the rational version. The other version is that his girlfriend answered the phone sounding small and floaty and alone, and now every cell in his body is pointing toward her dorm. “Alright,” he says. “I’m coming over after practice.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know.”
“Garrett.”
“I’m coming over after practice.”
She sighs, but it turns into a little pleased hum at the end, the kind she probably doesn’t know she makes when she’s too tired to pretend she doesn’t want him. “Fine.”
“Text me in fifteen.”
“Mhm.”
“Promise.”
“I promise.”
“And eat actual food if you can.”
She huffs. “Bossy hockey bitch.”
“There she is,” he says, smiling despite himself. “Text me.”
She does, fifteen minutes later, while he’s back on the ice and only pretending not to check his phone every time he gets within ten feet of the bench. The number's come up. Safe enough that the ugly tight thing in his chest finally stops trying to chew through bone.
She adds a blurry photo of the lolly packet on her desk like evidence in a trial, one thumb half covering the lens.
Garrett: proud of you
Garrett: even though you eat like a raccoon during finals week.
Her reply comes after a minute.
raccoons are resilient
Garrett grins down at his phone so hard Logan skates past and says, “Dude, you’re disgusting.”
Garrett flips him off and gets back to practice.
By the time he gets to her dorm, his hair is still damp from the locker room shower and the collar of his hoodie smells faintly like clean soap and rink, which he's been told is not a scent so much as a warning.
He has his backpack slung over one shoulder, two granola bars from the vending machine shoved into the front pocket because he panicked after practice, and a bottle of orange juice he stole from Tucker, who had looked at him once and decided not to ask questions.
She opens the door before he can knock a second time. For one second, Garrett just looks at her. She’s in his Briar hoodie, obviously, because at some point every item of clothing he owns has become part of her little emotional support system.
The sleeves hang over her hands. Her hair's a mess, half pulled up and half surrendered around her face, and there’s a faint crease on her cheek from what looks like a notebook spiral. Her eyes are a little heavy still, sleepy around the edges, her whole body soft and slower than usual as she blinks up at him from the doorway.
“Hi,” she says.
Garrett’s mouth does something stupid before he can stop it. Fond and worried and annoyed, all at once. “Hi.”
“I ate.”
“Yeah?”
She nods, very seriously, then steps backward to let him in. “I ate the lollies. And half a protein bar.”
“Half?”
“It tasted like shit.”
“Protein bars usually taste like that.”
He shuts the door behind him and drops his bag by her desk, already scanning the room in a way he knows makes him look insane and cannot quite bring himself to stop.
Lolly packet open on the desk. Water bottle half full. Textbooks spread across the bed like she’s been trying to summon a degree through paper-based witchcraft. Laptop still open, screen dimmed. The air smells like highlighter ink, laundry detergent, and the sour little remains of coffee gone cold.
He turns back to her. “What’s your number now?”
She points vaguely toward her phone. “Better.”
“That’s not a number.”
“It’s a vibe.”
He raises his brows at her. “Your blood sugar is not a vibe, baby.”
“It kind of is, actually.”
“Phone.”
She rolls her eyes, but there’s no real heat in it, and hands him the phone. He checks because she lets him. Because they’ve had this conversation before, clumsy at first and then easier.
The line between care and hovering. The difference between him helping and him acting like diabetes is a thing that happened to him because he loves her. He still gets it wrong sometimes. He knows that. His worry has bad manners when it gets scared.
But she’d added him to Dexcom Follow herself, sitting cross-legged on his bed with her phone in one hand and his in the other, saying, “Okay, this is not permission to become extra annoying,” while he’d promised, with a straight face, to be only normal amounts of annoying.
Now he looks at the number and the arrow, watches the trend flatten out, and hands it back with a nod. “Better.”
“Told you.”
“Yeah, yeah. You’re a medical genius.”
“I am, actually.”
“You also forgot to eat.”
She makes a face and immediately looks away, which tells on her more than any confession would have. “I didn’t forget.”
Garrett’s eyebrows lift.
“I… delayed,” she says, which is such a committed piece of academic bullshit that he almost respects it.
“You delayed food.”
“Temporarily.”
“Until your blood sugar dropped and an app screamed at your boyfriend during practice.”
She pulls the sleeves of his hoodie over her hands and rubs at one eye with the cuff. “When you say it like that, it sounds bad.”
“Because it was stupid.”
“Garrett.”
“Baby.”
She looks up at him then, and the argument thins out before either of them can turn it into one. There’s still a little tremor in her fingers when she lowers her hand. Barely there, but enough. Enough that all the teasing in his mouth rearranges itself into something quieter.
He steps closer. “You scared me.”
Her face shifts, the soft defensive tilt of her mouth giving way to something smaller, less arranged. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not saying it so you’ll feel bad.” His hand comes up to the side of her neck, thumb resting under her jaw, checking because he can’t help himself, touching because that’s the only language his worry knows how to speak without turning sharp. Her skin is warm. A little clammy still at the edge of her hairline. “I just– don’t do that shit alone if you’re dropping, okay? Text me back. Eat first, be stubborn after.”
Her mouth twitches faintly. “That order seems unfair to my brand.”
“Your brand needs snacks.”
“My brand is very mysterious.”
“Your brand is half a bag of gummy worms and a hoodie you stole from me.”
She leans forward then, slowly, until her forehead lands against the middle of his chest. A soft, tired little surrender into the nearest solid thing, which happens to be him.
Garrett’s hand slides automatically around the back of her head, fingers spreading into her hair, and the rest of him goes quiet around her.
“Still feel weird?” he asks.
“A little,” she says, voice muffled into his hoodie. “Mostly tired now.”
“That happens?”
“Mhm. Sometimes after.” She shifts closer, cheek turning against his chest. “And I stayed up too late. And had coffee. And forgot dinner.”
“Yeah,” he murmurs, kissing the top of her head. “Figured.”
He can picture her last night at two in the morning, hunched over notes, telling herself one more chapter, one more diagram, one more lecture recording, the whole slippery student lie of just a bit longer until suddenly the body that’s been politely asking for basic maintenance starts knocking things over to get attention.
She does that sometimes. Gets so focused the rest of her becomes an inconvenience. Food, sleep, water, all of it demoted beneath whatever exam or paper or assignment has started living behind her eyes.
Garrett hates it in a way that feels embarrassingly tender. He likes her focused. Likes her smart mouth and her colour-coded notes and the little frown she gets when she’s trying to force information into her brain. But he hates the part where she forgets she’s not a machine built for academic suffering and caffeine.
“Bed,” he says.
She tilts her head back just enough to look at him, chin still pressed to his chest. “You’re very annoying when you’re worried.”
“I’m very annoying all the time. You knew that going in.”
“Yeah,” she says, and the tiny smile that comes with it makes something in his ribs unclench. “I did.”
He gets her onto the bed with the kind of careful bossiness she complains about but obeys when she feels like this, all heavy limbs and delayed reactions and stubborn little noises made purely for the dignity of it.
He clears the textbooks first, stacking them onto her desk badly enough that she makes a wounded sound from behind him. “That’s not the system.”
“What system?”
“My system.”
He ignores that and pulls back the blanket. She climbs in, still wearing his hoodie, still with the sleeves eaten over her hands, and watches him from the pillows with that floaty, softened look that would be cute if it didn’t also make the protective part of his brain start dragging furniture in front of doors.
He finds the other half of the violent protein bar and holds it up. “More shit?”
She groans. “Please don’t make me.”
“You need something longer-lasting, right?”
“I had half.”
“Baby.”
She groans. “I hate when you use the reasonable voice.”
“Because it works?”
“Because you sound like Tucker.”
“That’s the worst thing you’ve ever said to me.”
She smiles properly then, small but real, and reaches for the bar with great personal suffering. “Fine. But I’m doing this under protest.”
“Noted.”
She takes two bites and chews with the expression of someone enduring a great injury. Garrett sits on the edge of the mattress and watches her because he’s become the sort of guy who monitors protein bar consumption with the intensity of a playoff game.
If Dean saw him now, Garrett would never hear the end of it. If Logan saw him, he would make a face and call it love in the most annoying possible tone. Tucker would probably approve, which remains devastating.
When she’s done enough that he decides not to bully the rest of it into her, Garrett sets the wrapper on the nightstand and kicks off his shoes. She lifts the blanket immediately, wordless, like she has been waiting for the exact second his hands are free.
“Oh, now you want me,” he says.
She gives him a look from under heavy eyelids. “I always want you.”
She attaches herself to him before he’s even fully settled, curling into his side with her cheek over his chest and one knee sliding over his thigh under the blanket. It’s clingier than usual, or maybe just less disguised.
Her hand sneaks under the hem of his hoodie, palm finding the warm skin over his ribs like she has been assigned a location and intends to remain there.
Garrett lets out a slow breath and wraps his arm around her, hand spreading between her shoulder blades. For a while, he just rubs up and down her back in the quiet, steady rhythm he knows she likes, over the thick cotton of his hoodie and the delicate line of her spine beneath it.
Her room feels softer now with the lamp low and the laptop finally shut, the whole anxious mess of studying pushed to the edges for at least twenty minutes. Outside the door, someone laughs down the hall. Campus keeps moving with absolutely no respect for the fact that Garrett Graham’s just aged six years over a glucose alert.
He kisses her hair. “Feeling better?”
She nods against him, slow. “Mhm.”
“Less weird?”
“Less weird.” Her fingers flex once against his ribs. “Just sleepy.”
“That’s okay.”
“I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“I know.” His hand keeps moving. Shoulder to waist. Waist to shoulder. Again. “Just text me back next time.”
“I will.”
“And keep stuff by your bed.”
“I do.”
“Stuff you can reach without going on an expedition to the drawer drawer.”
A tiny laugh shakes against him. “The drawer drawer was perfectly clear.”
He smiles into her hair despite himself. “You’re lucky you’re cute when your brain’s offline.”
“My brain’s online.”
“Baby, you called me a bossy hockey bitch and then argued that blood sugar is a vibe.”
“It is a vibe.”
He tips his head back against the wall and lets himself laugh quietly, relief finally loosening properly through him now that she’s warm and fed and heavy against his side. “You’re impossible.”
She hums, pleased by that for reasons that are between her and whatever sugar is currently making its way through her bloodstream. “You love me.”
“Somehow.”
She pinches his side without lifting her head, weak but accurate. “Mean.”
He catches her hand under his hoodie and holds it there, thumb moving over her knuckles where they rest against his skin. “Yeah,” he says, softer. “I love you.”
After a second, she tilts her face enough to press a kiss to his chest through the hoodie. It’s barely a kiss. More a warm little contact. A thank you she’s too tired and too proud to make formal.
“Love you too,” she mumbles.
Garrett looks down at the top of her head, at the messy spill of hair over his arm, at the Dexcom app still open on her phone on the nightstand, the graph inching back into safer territory one small dot at a time.
His body still has the leftover adrenaline in it, the rink alarm echoing faintly somewhere behind his ribs, the ugly little flash of her not answering when he called. But here she is, tucked into him like she has no plans to be anywhere else, breathing warm against his chest, one hand under his hoodie and the other curled into the blanket.
So he stays. Practice can keep its exhaustion. His homework can rot. The rest of campus can do whatever people do when they’re not pinned beneath a sleepy diabetic girlfriend with a talent for making his whole chest feel like it has been bruised open in the best possible way.
He rubs her back until her breathing goes heavier. Every few minutes, his eyes flick to her phone. The number steadies. Climbs. Holds. He lets out a breath he hadn’t realised he was still keeping.
Then, very softly, mostly because she’s almost asleep and because he likes saying things when she’s too tired to make fun of him properly, he murmurs, “Gonna start packing snacks in my hockey bag like a dad.”
Her mouth curves faintly against him. “Hot.”
“Yeah?”
“Mhm. Dilf behaviour.”
Garrett freezes, then looks down at her. “Don’t call me that when you’re half asleep after a medical incident.”
She laughs once, tiny and muffled and pleased with herself, and curls closer.
He shakes his head, smiling despite every effort not to. “Jesus Christ.”
“Snacks are hot,” she whispers.
“Go to sleep.”
“Bossy.”
He kisses her head again, slower this time, and settles his hand warm at the centre of her back. Her breathing has evened out, her body gone loose and trusting against his, the last of the low-blood-sugar fog giving way to real sleep.
Garrett stays awake a little longer anyway, watching the graph, listening to the hallway quiet down, feeling her heartbeat through the layers between them.
When the number stays steady, he finally sets her phone facedown, tucks the blanket higher over her shoulder, and lets his eyes close with his mouth pressed to her hair.
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i've been on and off here for the past few months, but i'm doing well! life's just picking up a lot quicker than i expected it too- i hope you're doing well too <3
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a bit hard for me to admit but I haven't been quite myself lately.. there's a lot going on but I will get back up on my feet soon! to my lovely mutuals, i hope you are all doing well <3
Honestly, I’m very sad that people are no longer learning how to write in cursive. It’s a beautiful thing. Is it frustrating? Yes! But does it look good when you’re practicing consistently? Oh yeah.
i feel like i keep saying that i’m back but every time that i come back i end up going offline again 😭 sorry y’all maybe i’ll be super active and maybe even write one day
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