Imagine

31-year-old New Yorker with multiple fandom personality disorder. Sorry...

[kooksandpearls]

garrett graham ❄︎ official business.

pairing – garrett graham x nursing student!reader summary – garrett and his brand-new girlfriend make it back from the hospital lockdown with fries, adrenaline, and absolutely no intention of behaving normally. warnings – 18+, explicit smut, oral sex, rough sex, multiple orgasms, overstimulation, praise, dirty talk, no condom/birth control discussed, aftercare. notes from me – oh boy i went overboard. oopsies. but as requested my loves!! our babies are official!!! word count – 15.8k

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The first thing Garrett does after pulling into the driveway is forget the car has passengers. He gets as far as cutting the engine. The headlights wash once over the garage door before going dark, the car settling around them with a mechanical little sigh, heater still ticking warm air through the vents and the smell of salt, fries, cold night, hospital hand sanitiser, and three damp hockey players packed badly across the back seat. 

His hand is still linked with hers over the console, thumb moving over her knuckles in the same restless little sweep it has been doing since they left the hospital, as though he’s been counting her pulse with it the whole drive home and doesn’t intend to stop until his nervous system formally accepts that she was never in danger.

She turns her head to look at him. Garrett’s already looking at her.

There’s maybe half a second where they both remember the boys exist. Long enough for Logan to lean forward between the seats and say, “Okay, so now that we’ve survived the incredibly dangerous medical lockdown where she completed two pages of homework–”

Garrett kisses her. It isn’t a polite kiss. It isn’t even one of those smug, showy ones he occasionally gives her because he knows Dean is watching and hates joy. 

Garrett catches the side of her face in one hand and leans over the console with all the clumsy urgency of a man who has spent the last two hours imagining increasingly horrifying reasons his not-girlfriend might not be answering her phone, then asked her to become his actual girlfriend beside a security booth while all his friends provided live commentary.

Her surprised laugh disappears against his mouth. Then her body catches up. She twists toward him as far as the seatbelt allows, fingers sliding into the front of his tracksuit jacket, dragging him closer across the console until the gearshift presses awkwardly into her hip and someone in the back makes a noise of immediate disgust.

“Oh, come on,” Dean says. “We’re still in the vehicle.”

Garrett’s mouth moves over hers again, warmer and deeper, his thumb sliding under her jaw as her fingers find the damp curls at the back of his neck. 

The kiss tastes faintly like the fries he’d bought her and the mint gum he’d been chewing in the hospital car park, and something about that – something about Garrett’s mouth, his hand holding her steady, the boys complaining behind them, the word boyfriend now sitting legally and emotionally between them – sends a bright, unreasonable heat down the centre of her body.

Her boyfriend. Garrett Graham is her boyfriend.

She makes a small sound into his mouth before she can decide whether it’s dignified. Garrett answers with a rough inhale, his hand tightening at her jaw.

“Jesus Christ,” Logan mutters.

Tucker, wedged in the middle with Garrett’s gear bag between his knees and the exhaustion of a man who predicted this exact outcome before they left the hospital, reaches forward and taps Garrett’s shoulder. “Can you unlock the doors before you guys start a family?”

Garrett pulls back just far enough to glare at him over the seat. His mouth is pink from hers. His curls are a mess. He looks deeply, genuinely offended by the interruption.

“Get out,” he says.

“The doors are locked,” Tucker points out.

Garrett hits the button without looking. All the locks snap up at once.

“Thank you,” Tucker says, gathering his dignity and Garrett’s bag. “We’ll be downstairs, I guess.”

“Way downstairs,” Dean adds as he opens the door and cold air floods into the car. “Like, structurally as far from Graham’s bedroom as this house permits.”

Logan climbs out after him, muttering something about noise-cancelling headphones and tenant rights. Tucker follows with both bags because he is the only person in the group who can be trusted to remember objects while Garrett’s attempting to crawl through the centre console.

She reaches for her seatbelt. Garrett does too, fumbling with the release at her hip while she laughs into his mouth because he’s kissing her again before the belt has even fully retracted. 

It catches briefly against her puffer jacket, then snaps away hard enough to smack the side of the seat.

“Smooth,” she murmurs.

“Shut up.” His hand slides around the back of her neck, pulling her in again. “You’re my girlfriend.”

The words hit differently now that there isn’t a security guard nearby looking actively burdened by them. They settle low in her stomach, warm and heavy and strange enough that she smiles against his lips like an idiot.

“Yeah,” she whispers. “I heard.”

Garrett kisses her once, quick and hard. Then again, slower because he needs to confirm it by mouth. “My girlfriend.”

“You’re going to become unbearable about this.”

“Become?”

She laughs, and Garrett grins against her mouth, bright and relieved and so painfully pleased with himself that she has to kiss him again just to stop looking at it.

By the time they get out of the car, the boys have already reached the front door. Dean holds it open from inside with one hand and shields his eyes dramatically with the other when Garrett comes around the bonnet and catches her by the waist before she’s taken two proper steps.

“Oh, good,” Dean says. “They made it twelve feet.”

“Go away,” Garrett tells him.

“I live here.”

“That’s fixable.”

She barely has time to laugh before Garrett bends and kisses her again, walking her backward toward the porch with one hand spread over her lower back and the other gripping her hip beneath the puffer jacket. 

Her sneakers scrape over the path. Garrett nearly clips the edge of the first step because neither of them is paying enough attention to architecture, and she catches his shoulder with both hands while he steadies them.

“Captain,” she breathes against his mouth. “Excellent spatial awareness.”

“You’re distracting.”

He gets them onto the porch with only one further collision, this time her bag knocking against the railing because Tucker has decided it’s no longer his responsibility. 

Garrett takes it from her shoulder without breaking the kiss, drops it somewhere just inside the door, then presses her back briefly against the wall beside the entryway.

The whole house is warm after the cold. Hockey-house warm, thick with radiator heat and laundry detergent and the leftover smell of whatever Tucker had reheated before they left, a pair of damp gloves drying near the vent and somebody’s shaker bottle abandoned on the hall table. 

The familiar mess of it should make her settle. Instead, Garrett’s mouth drags over hers, his thigh fitting between her legs, and her body seems to interpret the fact that they are indoors as formal permission to lose whatever remained of its judgement.

Her hands slide beneath his tracksuit jacket and over the hard warmth of his stomach. Garrett groans softly into her mouth, one palm flattening against the wall beside her head while the other pulls her hips closer against his. 

The pressure lands exactly where the entire drive home has been collecting, and she breathes his name before she can stop it.

“Okay,” Logan says from the living room. “That’s worse somehow.”

She breaks into a laugh against Garrett’s jaw. He doesn’t move away. His mouth only shifts to her neck, warm and open beneath her ear, while he raises one hand over his shoulder and gives the room behind them the finger.

“Very mature,” Tucker calls.

“I’m having a significant evening,” Garrett answers into her skin.

Dean appears briefly in the archway, looks at the two of them pinned against the hall wall, then turns around at once. “Yeah, no. We’ll be down here, I guess. Please shut at least one door between us and whatever this becomes.”

“Two,” Logan says.

“Every door,” Tucker adds.

Her whole face feels hot, but not enough to stop. Becoming Garrett’s girlfriend has removed the small final portion of her brain that once cared whether his roommates knew they had sex. 

They already knew. The house knew. His headboard knew with more certainty than anyone.

Garrett lifts his mouth from her neck, eyes dark and warm and fixed entirely on her face. “Upstairs?”

She nods before he finishes the word. His grin flashes. He catches her hand and starts toward the staircase, but she only makes it to the third step before he turns and kisses her again, walking backward now, one hand braced on the bannister and the other hooked around her waist. 

She follows badly, half laughing, half trying to stay attached to his mouth while her shift-heavy legs object to being asked for speed after eleven hours under fluorescent lighting.

Garrett’s heel catches one stair. He stumbles backward just enough that she grabs at his shoulders, their mouths separating on a startled breath.

“Holy shit,” she laughs. “Are you trying to kill us?”

“No.” His hands close around her hips, holding her still one step beneath him. “You’re slow.”

“I’ve been at work all day.”

“You had a great shift.”

“I did.”

“Congratulations.” He kisses her hard enough to make the sarcasm irrelevant, then pulls back with his breathing already rough. “Jump, baby.”

Her stomach drops pleasantly. “Now?”

“Jump.” Garrett bends slightly, hands already sliding lower to the backs of her thighs, eyes on hers with that particular easy confidence that makes reasonable thought feel like a hobby for other people. “Get up here.”

She does. There isn’t any deliberation. One second her shoes are on the staircase, the next she pushes up and wraps her legs around his waist, arms locking over his shoulders while Garrett catches her beneath her thighs as though the whole arrangement has been rehearsed. 

His body absorbs her easily, solid and warm between her legs, and the quick lift presses her against him in a way that makes the breath leave her mouth.

Garrett grins. “There.”

“Go,” she says, already kissing him again. “Get me upstairs.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

He takes the stairs with her wrapped around him, one hand beneath her ass and the other sliding along the bannister when he needs the balance. 

It should feel precarious. It probably is precarious, considering Garrett’s mouth is open over hers and her fingers are buried in his curls and neither of them can see more than half the staircase at any given time. She doesn’t care.

Every step moves her against the hard line of him beneath his track pants. Her body is already too warm from the coat and the house and the way his tongue slides into her mouth, but she presses closer anyway, thighs tightening around his hips when Garrett kisses her deeper. 

A soft moan escapes before she can swallow it. Garrett’s grip flexes under her. “Fuck,” he says against her lips.

She smiles, breathless. “Stairs.”

“I know where the stairs are.”

“You nearly died on them thirty seconds ago.”

“You were on the ground then.” He takes another step, lifting her higher with a small adjustment that makes her breath hitch. “Different centre of gravity.”

“That’s not science.”

“You’re not a science major.”

“I’m a nursing student.”

“Exactly. You’re medically hot, not physics hot.”

She laughs into his mouth, which becomes another moan when he sucks gently at her bottom lip and keeps climbing. 

Somewhere downstairs, Dean shouts, “We can hear you doing staircase foreplay,” followed by a dull thump and Tucker saying something about leaving people alone.

Garrett reaches the landing and turns into the hallway with no visible intention of putting her down. His mouth has moved to her throat now, kissing the skin above the collar of her puffer jacket while she tries, unsuccessfully, to help him navigate.

“Your room,” she whispers.

“Yeah.”

“You just passed it.”

Garrett stops. Looks over his shoulder. He has, in fact, walked straight past his own bedroom door. She starts laughing so hard her forehead drops onto his shoulder.

“Don’t,” he warns, though his own mouth is twitching.

“You live here.”

“I was distracted.”

“By your girlfriend?”

His eyes come back to hers. The expression that moves over his face is so openly affected – heat and amusement and something warm enough to ache – that the laugh catches in her throat. 

Garrett adjusts his hold beneath her thighs, turns them around, and kisses her again before carrying her back the four feet he’d overshot.

“Yeah,” he murmurs into her mouth. “By my girlfriend.”

He gets the door open with his shoulder and walks her inside. The room is dim except for the little lamp beside his bed, left on from earlier, throwing warm light across the rumpled navy sheets and the open textbook near his pillow and the hoodie hooked over the back of his desk chair. 

His window is cracked slightly despite the cold, letting in a thin line of night air that moves the curtain and cuts through the close, familiar smell of detergent, hockey tape, shampoo, and him.

Garrett kicks the door shut behind them. For half a second, neither of them stops. He walks her farther into the room with his mouth still on hers, and she tightens her legs around him, already reaching for the zip of his jacket.

Then she catches sight of herself in the mirror over his dresser. Scrubs. Puffer jacket. Hair flattened slightly from being tied back all shift. Hospital badge still clipped near her chest with her deeply unflattering ID photo facing outward like a tiny laminated witness to several workplace violations.

She pulls her mouth away.

Garrett follows for another inch before realising she’s stopped. “What?”

“I’m in my scrubs.”

He looks down between them like this is new information. Her navy scrub pants are bunched slightly where her legs wrap around his waist, the fabric smelling faintly of hospital laundry, antiseptic wipes, vending-machine coffee and an entire day spent in rooms where people had been bleeding, coughing or loudly discussing their bowels.

Garrett frowns. “Yeah.”

“I need to shower.”

His frown deepens in genuine confusion. “Baby, I’m about to get you out of them.”

She laughs, and he kisses her in the middle of it, one hand sliding higher under her thigh. “That’s not–” Kiss. “The point.” Another kiss, deeper this time, enough that she almost loses the argument. “I feel gross.”

“You don’t look gross.”

“You haven’t worked in an emergency department.”

“I’ve been in one.”

“As a visitor.”

“As a frequent flyer.”

“That’s not better.” She kisses him again because his mouth is right there and because they can no longer complete a sentence without physical punctuation. “Let me shower.”

Garrett makes a dissatisfied sound when she tries to pull away. His arms stay locked under her, holding her against the hard front of his body. “How long?”

“Five minutes.”

“That’s not a shower.”

“It is when you’re motivated.”

He kisses her jaw. “Three.”

“Garrett.”

“Four.”

“I need to wash my face.”

“Fine. Five.” His mouth drags lower to the side of her neck, lips warm over her pulse. “But be quick.”

She nods, though the movement only presses her throat closer to his mouth. “I’ll be quick.”

Garrett lowers her slowly. Her legs unwrap from his waist, shoes finding the floor, but he keeps one arm around her middle as she slides down the front of him, the pressure making both of them breathe differently by the time she’s standing. 

He kisses her again immediately, one hand sliding into her hair and the other pulling her flush against his chest like putting her down was an administrative necessity he deeply resents.

“Quick,” he repeats against her mouth.

“I know.”

He kisses her once more. She reaches behind herself for the towel hanging from the hook on the back of his door.

Garrett kisses her again. She laughs, pressing one hand to his chest to get enough room to breathe. “You’re actively delaying me.”

“Last one.”

“That was the last one.”

“No, that was before I said last one.”

“That’s not legally binding.”

“I’m your boyfriend. It’s my law.”

She rolls her eyes, grabs the towel, then gives in when he catches her face and kisses her one final time, slow and thorough enough to make leaving the room feel like an act of personal sacrifice.

When she steps into the hallway, Garrett stays by the door watching her go. She can feel it between her shoulder blades, the fixed heat of his attention following the scrub pants, the puffer jacket she’s still wearing, the towel bundled under one arm.

She glances back. He’s leaning against the doorframe, arms folded now, mouth curved. “Five minutes.”

“Stop timing me.”

“I started when you left my mouth.”

“That’s horrifying.”

“Four fifty-three.”

She flips him off and slips into the bathroom before his grin can do anything else to her. The lock clicks behind her. For one second she stands there in the yellow bathroom light with her back against the door, towel clutched to her chest, heart beating too hard for a woman who’s had sex with Garrett Graham enough times to know the exact look he gets before he puts his mouth between her thighs.

Her boyfriend.

The thought moves through her again, physical enough to make her stomach dip. Her boyfriend is in the next room waiting for her. 

Garrett Graham – the boy who once put his name into her phone for emergencies, who arrived at her dorm in fifteen minutes after a terrible text and then had the audacity to be freshly showered, who let her poke at his bruised ribs while complaining they weren’t going to fuck, who stood beside the hospital bed while Logan asked what day it was, who took off her shoes after bad shifts and held ice to her face after worse ones and disappeared for nine days because wanting her frightened him more than losing her had.

Garrett, who had stood outside a locked hospital asking a security guard whether calling her his girlfriend would get him more information.

Her boyfriend.

“Jesus Christ,” she whispers to her own reflection.

The girl in the mirror looks exactly like someone who has spent eleven hours in an emergency department and the last ten minutes being carried upstairs by a hockey player. 

Hair coming loose around her face. Lips swollen. Cheeks flushed beneath the tiredness. Badge still clipped to her chest with enough accidental professionalism to make the whole image feel deeply inappropriate.

She strips fast. Puffer jacket first, dropped over the closed toilet lid. Badge unclipped and set near the sink where it cannot watch. Scrub top pulled over her head with the faint hospital smell trapped in the fabric, then bra, scrub pants, underwear. 

The relief of getting out of the clothes hits immediately, cool bathroom air moving over skin that has spent the whole day compressed beneath waistbands and practical cotton.

She catches sight of her legs while stepping into the shower and experiences one sharp, private moment of gratitude that she shaved yesterday.

It’s not that Garrett cares. Garrett has never shown any evidence of believing body hair is an issue, mostly because he’s generally too busy trying to get his face into whatever region of her body she’s worrying about.

Still. Thank God.

The shower turns hot fast, old pipes groaning briefly inside the wall before water rushes over her shoulders. She gets beneath it and exhales, the whole day loosening from her skin at once. 

Fluorescent light. Hand sanitiser. The faint tack of old sweat beneath her bra line. The particular hospital-film feeling that follows a long shift home no matter how many times she cleans her hands.

She washes quickly but properly, soap worked over her arms, stomach, breasts, between her thighs, down her legs. Shampoo would take too long and require negotiations with wet hair afterwards, so she settles for pulling her hair up higher and washing around her neck, her face, behind her ears with the concentrated efficiency of someone whose extremely impatient boyfriend is probably staring at the bathroom door like it’s personally wronged him.

Boyfriend.

Her mouth keeps curling every time she thinks it. It’s embarrassing. Nobody can see her, and it’s still embarrassing.

She turns the water off before the five minutes can become six. The sudden quiet makes the bathroom feel smaller, water dripping from the showerhead and running in warm lines down her body while the radiator clicks near the wall. 

She steps out onto the bathmat, dries herself quickly, then wraps the towel around her chest and tucks the corner securely between her breasts.

The mirror has fogged around the edges. She clears a patch with her palm. Her reflection looks softer now. Clean skin, damp at the shoulders. Hair pulled up badly, little pieces curling near her ears. The towel covers her from chest to upper thigh, and somehow that feels more exposing than being naked in Garrett’s bed has ever felt.

Her stomach tightens. Why the fuck is she nervous? This is Garrett.

Her Garrett, apparently. Officially. A title hasn’t altered his anatomy. He doesn’t suddenly have a new penis because they used the word girlfriend. Nothing practical has changed. 

She knows his body. Knows the little scar near his ribs and the sensitive place beneath his jaw and the exact amount of pressure it takes with her mouth before his breathing goes rough.

Garrett knows hers too, probably better than anyone has, not just sexually but in all the tiny humiliating places surrounding it. 

He knows she gets anxious when she’s too tired. Knows she wants food after placement even when she claims she doesn’t. Knows how to tell when her laugh is real and when she’s using it to move a conversation away from something sore.

If anything, it should be better. The thought settles hot and persuasive between her legs.

“Okay,” she whispers at the mirror. “Normal.”

Her reflection looks unconvinced.

She unlocks the bathroom and steps into the hallway. The house has gone quieter downstairs, voices muted under the low sound of the television. She can smell popcorn now, which means Tucker has decided the appropriate response to his best friend becoming official is to provide the other boys with snacks while they wait out the vibrations.

Garrett’s bedroom door is still partly open. She slips inside and closes it behind her, then turns the lock with one decisive click.

Garrett’s sitting on the edge of the bed. He’s shed the tracksuit jacket while she was gone. He’s in a grey Briar hoodie and dark sweats, forearms braced loosely over his thighs, damp curls falling over his forehead. 

His phone is beside him on the comforter, untouched. The way he looks up at the sound of the lock sends a slow, dragging warmth over every inch of skin the towel leaves bare.

His eyes drop. They move from her face to the towel, down the length of her legs, then back up slightly slower. His mouth curves.

“My girl,” he says. “C’mere.”

Oh, fuck.

Her feet move before the rest of her catches up. She crosses the room and stops between his spread knees, the towel held by nothing but friction and optimism, Garrett’s hands finding the backs of her thighs immediately. 

He looks up at her from there, dark eyes warm and bright beneath his curls, and the angle does something frankly unacceptable to her pulse. His mouth presses to her stomach over the towel.

It’s gentle. Warm. A slow kiss just above her navel through the soft fabric, then another beside it while his hands slide upward along the backs of her legs. She puts her fingers into his hair, scratching lightly at his scalp, and Garrett hums against her.

“You good?” he asks.

The question is quiet enough that it changes something in the room. Something steadier clicks into place, the familiar open door between them. A real chance to say stop, slow down, not tonight, I’m tired, I changed my mind.

She runs her fingers through his curls again. “I’m fine, baby.”

Garrett lifts his face. His eyes search hers for a second beyond the answer, then he nods, satisfied enough to kiss her stomach again. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

He kisses higher, mouth dragging over the towel along her ribs, then the centre of her chest as he stands. His hands move with him, sliding from her thighs to her waist, holding her steady when she takes one small step backward to make room for all of him.

Garrett follows. His mouth catches hers, soft at first, and she can feel him smiling for one second before the kiss deepens. Her hands find the hem of his hoodie, tugging impatiently until he pulls back just enough to drag it over his head. 

His shirt comes with it, bunched inside the heavier fabric, leaving his hair standing up messily and his chest bare in the warm lamplight. She laughs.

Garrett drops the clothes onto the floor. “What?”

“Your hair.”

He frowns. “Fix it.”

She wraps both arms around his shoulders instead and pulls him down, kissing him while her fingers work through the disordered curls at the back of his head. Garrett’s hands settle on her waist over the towel. One finds the tucked corner between her breasts.

His mouth pauses against hers. His eyes open, looking down at the place his fingers have caught. He pulls. The towel loosens and falls between them, dragging briefly over her hips before pooling around her feet. 

Cool air touches her damp skin for half a second. Then she presses closer, bare breasts against his chest, arms tightening around his shoulders as Garrett’s breath leaves him in a rough, quiet exhale.

His palms spread over her back. “Fuck,” he murmurs into her mouth.

The sound goes through her like it has somewhere specific to be. She kisses him harder, one hand sliding down the strong line of his back, then lower to the waistband of his sweats. Garrett catches her waist and turns them, walking her backward toward the bed while his mouth moves from hers to her jaw.

Her knees touch the mattress. Garrett lowers her carefully. One hand supports the back of her head. The other stays firm at her waist as he eases her onto the sheets, his body following without dropping its full weight over her. 

His mouth kisses the corner of hers, then her cheek, her jaw, the side of her throat. Slow. Measured. Still carrying the softness he’s been handling her with ever since the concussion, the nine days, the hospital lockdown, every moment where wanting her has made him afraid of getting something wrong.

She understands it. She loves it, probably, which is its own administrative nightmare. She doesn’t want it tonight. Not like this.

She doesn’t want to be handled like something newly official means newly breakable. She wants Garrett. Her Garrett. Smug and attentive and filthy enough to make her forget what floor the room is on. 

She wants to wake up tomorrow with his fingerprints warm in her skin and her body carrying the private evidence that her boyfriend spent the night making extremely enthusiastic use of the title.

Garrett kisses down the centre of her chest. His mouth closes briefly over one nipple, tongue moving slow, and her back arches before she can make a point.

He smiles against her skin. “That good?”

“Yes.” She threads her fingers through his hair as he moves lower, kissing beneath her breast, then down her stomach. “But you’re being careful.”

Garrett lifts his head. “You worked all day.”

“I know.”

“You’re tired.”

“I’m also naked in your bed.”

His mouth twitches. “I noticed.”

She gives his curls a small tug. “Garrett.”

His eyes narrow slightly, warmth darkening toward something sharper. “What?”

She holds his gaze. “I don’t want gentle.”

Garrett’s hand is spread over her hip, thumb still against her skin. His mouth rests near her stomach, his whole body stretched between her thighs and over the mattress, suspended for one quiet second while he makes sure he has heard her properly.

“No?” he asks.

She shakes her head. “No.”

His grip on her hip firms, but he doesn’t move yet. Something thoughtful passes through the heat in his expression.

“I wanna try something,” he says.

Her stomach tightens. “What?”

“Overstimulation.” Garrett watches her face carefully as he says it, all the smugness briefly stripped away by the seriousness beneath it. “I want to make you come, then keep going. See how many you can take before you’re completely done.” His thumb strokes once over her hip. “But you tell me to slow down, I slow down. You tell me to stop, I stop. No questions.”

Heat spreads low and immediate between her thighs. “Yes.”

Garrett’s eyes darken. “Yeah?”

“Yes.” She gives his curls a small tug, pulling him closer. “I want that.”

His gaze drops slowly over her body, then comes back to her face with his mouth curving just enough to make her pulse jump.

“Okay,” he says. “Then you’re gonna give me every single one I ask for.”

He kisses down her stomach again, but the softness has changed. There’s intention under it now, the slow drag of his lips no longer cautious so much as controlled, each kiss placed like he’s deciding exactly how long she’ll have to wait before he gives her what she asked for.

Her thighs part wider around him. Garrett’s mouth reaches the soft skin above her hip. He kisses there, then across to the other side, hands sliding beneath her thighs. She raises her legs before he can ask and settles them over his shoulders, ankles crossing loosely behind his back as his palms move up to her hips.

His grin flashes from between her legs. “Helpful.”

“Shut up.”

He hooks his hands under her thighs and drags her toward the edge of the bed in one quick pull. Her breath catches. The sheets slide warm beneath her back, body moving several inches toward him until her hips are lifted slightly into the angle of his waiting mouth.

“There,” Garrett murmurs.

Then he kisses her. The first touch lands just above where she needs him, mouth warm against the inside of her thigh. Then the other side. His tongue drags once over the crease near her hip, slow and wet enough to make her stomach tighten while his hands hold her open.

She pushes her fingers into his hair. “Garrett.”

He hums against her skin. His mouth moves closer, lips pressing softly over her, then his tongue follows, gentle at first. One long, slow lick through her that pulls a sound from the back of her throat and makes her heels press into the muscles of his back. 

Garrett does it again, unhurried, tongue flattening against her clit before circling lightly around it. The pleasure is immediate but maddeningly measured. 

Warm little waves spreading through her body while he kisses and licks like he has all night to prove he can still be patient even after she explicitly told him not to.

Her head presses deeper into the pillow. She tries to follow his mouth, hips lifting, but Garrett’s hands tighten and keep her exactly where he wants her.

“Baby,” she breathes.

He hums again, lips closing gently over her clit, drawing it into his mouth with a slow suction that makes her thighs tense around his head. Then he eases off. Kisses her once, soft enough that her body jolts anyway. Licks again, light and teasing, and something irritated begins to mix with the heat.

Garrett Graham has always had a deeply annoying relationship with restraint. Mostly, he enjoys proving he has it right before making it everyone else’s problem.

She tugs at his hair. Garrett groans into her, but he doesn’t speed up. She tugs harder and lets a soft, frustrated whine slip out.

His eyes lift to hers from between her thighs. Dark, amused, and no longer pretending he doesn’t know exactly what she wants.

“There she is,” he murmurs.

Then his mouth seals over her properly. The change knocks the breath out of her. Garrett’s tongue moves with all the careful focus stripped out of the pace, licking hard and slick over her clit before dragging down, pressing into her, coming back up with enough pressure that her hips buck uselessly against the grip of his hands.

“Oh, fuck.” Her fingers twist into his curls. “Garrett.”

He groans, the vibration landing directly against her, then does it again. Mouth open. Tongue wet and relentless. He kisses her like he kisses her mouth when he’s forgotten anyone else exists, deep and hungry and listening to every little shift her body gives him.

Her legs tighten around his shoulders. Garrett forces them wider with his forearms, one hand leaving her hip to slide between them. His fingers move through the wetness his mouth has spread, stroking over her once before two press at her entrance.

Garrett pushes both fingers inside her. The stretch pulls a loud, broken sound from her. Her head tips back, throat exposed to the warm room while his fingers curl slowly, finding the place that makes her stomach draw tight beneath his arm.

Garrett smiles against her.

“Any louder, baby?” he asks, mouth close enough that the words brush over her clit.

A laugh escapes her, thin and breathless and already half ruined. “Jesus– oh my God–”

“Thought so.”

He lowers his mouth again before she can insult him. There’s no gentleness left to complain about now. Only control, which is worse in the best possible way. 

Garrett works two fingers in and out of her at a pace that builds with horrible accuracy, curling them each time his mouth sucks over her clit, then easing the pressure only when her thighs start shaking hard enough to tell him she’s close.

She doesn’t know when her free hand moves to the sheet. One second it’s in his hair, the next it’s gripping a fistful of navy cotton beside her hip while Garrett’s tongue circles fast and firm and his fingers drag over that spot again.

Pleasure gathers low and tight, too much of it fitting into too small a place. Her breathing loses any sensible rhythm. Soft moans turn rougher, spilling into his room without any attempt to keep them from travelling through the walls.

The boys know. The whole fucking house knows. Her boyfriend is eating her out after she got home from an emergency-department lockdown and signed up for the official position beside a hospital security desk. 

There are worse reputations to have.

“Garrett,” she gasps. “Fuck, baby, I’m–”

His free hand slides over her lower stomach, pinning her gently but firmly to the mattress when her hips try to lift. His mouth doesn’t stop. His fingers don’t stop. 

He only groans against her as if the warning has made him hungrier, tongue working over her with the exact pressure that makes the heat pull painfully tight. Her orgasm breaks hard.

She cries out, body arching beneath the weight of his arm, legs locking around his shoulders as pleasure rips through her in bright, shuddering waves. 

Her hand pulls his hair. Her thighs shake against the sides of his face. Garrett stays there through all of it, fingers curling slower now, mouth easing from hard suction into soft, wet licks that stretch every pulse until she’s squirming beneath him and making small, helpless sounds she will absolutely deny later.

“Fuck,” she breathes. “Oh my– Garrett.”

He doesn’t stop. His fingers slide out slowly. His tongue takes their place for one lazy, filthy stroke that makes her jolt so hard her knee nearly clips his ear.

“Garrett?”

He kisses the inside of her thigh, mouth wet, breathing rough. Then the other side. His hands smooth over the muscles still trembling around him like he’s calming a frightened animal he chased into traffic.

“One more,” he says.

Her chest is moving too fast. She looks down at him through the soft blur of the aftermath, his curls crushed beneath her hands, cheeks slightly flushed, mouth shining in a way that sends fresh heat through a body that should have filed for medical leave.

Garrett presses a gentle kiss directly over her clit. Her whole body jerks. A broken sound catches between a laugh and a whine, legs trying to close around him on instinct. 

He holds them apart and does it again, barely any pressure, only the warm brush of his mouth over oversensitive skin.

“One more,” he repeats, smiling now. Another kiss. Her hips twitch.

She swallows, tries to gather one functioning thought, and nods.

“Words?” he asks.

“Yes.” Her voice comes out rough. 

Garrett’s smile goes warm for half a second. Proud, almost. Then he lowers his mouth.

The second one starts differently because her body is already too open, too sensitive, every touch arriving sharpened by what came before. 

The first slow drag of his tongue makes her thighs tense. The second makes her gasp. By the time he seals his mouth over her clit again, she’s gripping the sheet with both hands because putting them in his hair feels unsafe.

Garrett crosses his fingers, and then slides them inside her, changing the angle before curling them upward.

“Oh.” Her whole stomach tightens. “Oh, fuck.”

He watches her face while he moves them, slow at first, testing the angle. The next curl makes her mouth fall open. Garrett’s eyes darken. “Right there?”

She nods frantically. “Yes.”

His mouth comes back down. It’s too much immediately. Too much and nowhere near enough, her body caught between trying to squirm away from the overwhelming pressure and chasing it harder every time he eases up. 

Garrett holds her hips through both impulses, fingers pumping steadily inside her while his tongue moves fast over her clit.

She loses track of her hands. One catches the pillow behind her head. The other reaches blindly toward him, finding his wrist, his forearm, then his hair again because pain is worth the structural support.

Her mouth won’t stop either. Little pieces of words fall out without order. His name. Baby. Please. Fuck. Yes. Something that might be don’t stop, except the sentence breaks when his fingers curl and his mouth sucks and her entire body lifts uselessly beneath his hold.

Garrett groans against her like the noise is feeding something in him.

“That’s it,” he murmurs, the words wet and low against her before his tongue returns. “Let me hear you.”

She does. There’s no dignified way through the second orgasm he’s building. No quiet path. The pleasure keeps climbing with nowhere to disperse, stacking over itself until her thighs are trembling against his shoulders and her breathing comes in small, sharp pulls that make her chest ache.

The room has reduced itself to scattered details. Lamplight through her lashes. The rough-soft twist of his curls between her fingers. His forearm across her lower stomach. The slick sound of his fingers moving inside her. His mouth, warm and focused and absolutely determined to make his girlfriend wake everyone in the building.

“G-Garrett–” Her voice catches. “I’m– oh! I’m gonna– ba-baby–”

His fingers curl hard. His tongue flattens over her clit. The second orgasm tears through her before she can finish warning him, deeper and sharper than the first, body locking so tightly around his fingers that Garrett groans into her. 

She cries out, head pressing back into the bed, legs shaking uncontrollably against his shoulders while pulse after pulse drags through her.

Garrett licks her through it. Slower when the intensity starts tipping toward pain, mouth softening into kisses as his fingers ease their pace. He slips them out carefully, then presses his lips to the inside of one thigh, the other, her hip, letting the last spasms pass without abandoning her to them.

Her legs feel completely detached from all normal motor function. Garrett lowers them one at a time from his shoulders, palms moving gently down her calves before settling them onto the mattress. Then he kisses his way up her body.

Her stomach. Ribs. The underside of one breast, then the other. Each kiss warm and slightly damp, his curls brushing over her skin while she lies there breathing like she’s recently ran a marathon.

By the time he reaches her face, she’s giggling. She can’t help it. The sound bubbles out small and dazed, every part of her loose and warm and absurdly happy, Garrett’s body settling above hers while his mouth curves in response.

“Oh,” she whispers, then laughs again. “My–”

Garrett kisses her cheek. “Good?”

She nods quickly. “Uh-huh.”

His laugh is soft and unbearably pleased. “Yeah?”

“Don’t be smug.” She reaches up and pushes the curls back from his forehead, though her hand is still shaking enough that she mostly makes them worse. “I hate you.”

“Sure.” Garrett brushes her damp hair away from her temple, eyes moving over her flushed face with a satisfaction so warm it barely qualifies as arrogance. 

She catches the back of his neck and pulls him down. The kiss starts slow, mostly because her body has temporarily forgotten speed. She tastes herself on his tongue, salt and heat and Garrett beneath it, and something about the intimacy of it – the way he kisses her without hesitation, mouth opening over hers, hand cupping the side of her face – sparks want through the pleasant wreckage all over again.

She rolls him. Garrett lets out a startled laugh when her weight shifts, one hand grabbing her waist as she pushes him onto his back and follows him over. 

The mattress moves beneath them. His head hits the pillow, curls spreading messily, eyes bright as she settles over his thighs.

“Well,” he says. “Recovered fast.”

“Shut up.” She kisses him once, hard, then reaches for the waistband of his sweats.

Her hands are not functioning at full clinical capacity. The first tug catches fabric awkwardly around his hips. The second gets one side lower than the other. 

Garrett watches her struggle for approximately four seconds before his mouth starts twitching. “Need help?”

“No.”

“You’re shaking.”

“I wonder why.”

“Could be fatigue.”

“Could be your ego about to cause a medical emergency.”

He laughs and lifts his hips, helping her drag the sweats down. His boxers go with them after a small, graceless fight around his thighs, and then he’s bare beneath her, hard enough that her mouth goes dry despite everything he’s just done.

Garrett notices the look. His hand slides around the back of her neck, thumb resting lightly against the side of her throat as he pulls her down into another kiss. 

She hums into his mouth, thighs tightening around one of his legs when his palm settles there with just enough pressure to make her aware of her own pulse.

“Still good?” he murmurs.

She nods against him. “Very.”

“Good.”

She kisses along his jaw. The faint stubble there scratches pleasantly against her lips, then the side of his throat, where his pulse is already beating fast beneath the skin. Garrett tips his head back to give her room, fingers threading into her hair as her mouth moves lower.

His chest. The shallow dip between his ribs. The hard line of his stomach tightening beneath each kiss.

Garrett Graham. Her boyfriend.

She smiles against his skin.

“What?” he asks, already sounding suspicious.

“Nothing.”

“That’s not a nothing smile.”

She kisses just below his navel. “Boyfriend.”

Garrett’s stomach tightens under her mouth. “Yeah,” he says, voice roughening.

She glances up at him. “You like that?”

His eyes are dark down the length of his body. “You know I do.”

Good. She’s going to give her boyfriend the best head of his life.

Not that she hasn’t tried before. She has standards. But there’s something newly satisfying about the idea tonight, something bright and possessive sitting beneath her ribs as she wraps one hand around the base of him and watches Garrett’s breath catch.

She starts slowly. One soft kiss to the head, barely any pressure. Then another, lips parting around him while her tongue moves over the sensitive underside with a familiarity she’s earned. Garrett’s fingers flex in her hair.

“Fuck,” he murmurs.

She smiles and takes him into her mouth. Only enough to wet him properly, tongue moving in a slow circle before she eases back and lets spit gather over her lower lip. 

Her hand follows the slick she leaves behind, stroking the length she hasn’t taken while Garrett watches with his jaw tight and his free hand fisted into the sheet near his hip.

She knows what he likes now. Knows that teasing works for roughly thirty seconds before Garrett starts breathing through his mouth. Knows he likes when she looks up at him, when she lets the mess happen instead of trying to keep the whole thing neat, when her tongue presses flat beneath him and her hand twists slightly on the way down.

She gives him all of it. Slow, wet strokes of her mouth. Tongue dragging along the underside. Her lips tightening around him before sliding back, leaving spit shining over his skin and her hand. 

The soft, obscene sounds fill the space around them, mixed with Garrett’s breathing and the occasional rough curse when she takes him deeper.

His hand in her hair stays careful despite the tension in his arm. Gathering it away from her face, guiding lightly when she finds the rhythm he likes.

“There you go,” he breathes. “Good girl.”

The praise moves through her like a touch. She moans around him.

Garrett’s hips twitch before he controls them. His eyes sharpen. “Yeah? You like that?”

She looks up.

He smiles, but it’s strained now, mouth parted and cheeks faintly flushed, the smugness held together by effort. “That’s my girl.”

Her thighs press together. Garrett sees that too. His free hand leaves the sheet and slides down her shoulder, along her side, over the curve of her ass before reaching between her legs. 

She makes a questioning sound around him, but his thumb only brushes gently over her clit, barely enough pressure to hurt through the sensitivity. Her whole body shivers.

“Keep going,” he murmurs.

She does, though the next slide of her mouth is less controlled when his thumb circles again. Slow. Gentle. A soft counterpoint to the way she takes him deeper, saliva gathering at the corners of her mouth while Garrett’s hand moves in her hair.

“Fuck, baby.” His head falls back against the pillow. “So good.”

She moans again. His thumb presses slightly firmer. Her hips rock into his hand on instinct, thighs widening over the mattress while she keeps the pace slow and sloppy, drawing back far enough to breathe before taking him down again.

Garrett’s praise keeps coming, each one pulling another response from her body. “Good girl.” Her tongue flattens under him. “That’s it.” She takes him deeper, eyes watering slightly at the pressure. “My girl. Fuck, look at you.”

Her hand moves faster at the base while her mouth slows, letting him feel every wet drag of her lips. Spit slips over her fingers, down the length of him, and Garrett makes a low, wrecked sound that vibrates through his chest.

His thumb keeps circling her. Keeping her there in the heat with him, every gentle stroke making her clench around nothing while she works her mouth over him.

She pulls back briefly, lips swollen and wet, one hand still moving. “You like that, boyfriend?”

Garrett looks at her. For half a second he seems almost offended by how much the word affects him. Then his hand tightens in her hair and his mouth curves. “Put your mouth back on me, girlfriend.”

Heat burns across her face. She laughs once, breathlessly, then obeys.

The sound Garrett makes when her lips close around him again is worth every bad decision that has led her here. Rough and low, pulled out of him before he can make it prettier. 

She takes him deeper this time, relaxing around the pressure until her nose brushes the dark hair at the base, then pulls back with a wet gasp.

“Jesus Christ.” Garrett’s thumb loses its rhythm for half a second. “Baby.”

She does it again. His hips lift carefully into her mouth, following when she gives it, and she lets him. Her hand rests against his thigh now, nails pressing into the hard muscle while his fingers tighten through her hair and his thumb moves fast enough over her clit to make her own breath break around him.

“Fuck,” he says. “That’s it. Just like that.”

She keeps going until her jaw aches lightly and saliva is everywhere, shining over her lips and chin and hand, Garrett’s stomach tensing hard above her with every stroke. His praise turns rougher, phrases breaking apart under the strain.

“So fucking good.” Her thighs shake. “My good girl.” She whimpers around him. “Fuck, baby, I’m close.”

Her mouth doesn’t slow. 

Garrett looks down at her, breathing hard, his thumb still working between her thighs even while the muscles in his stomach tighten. “You want me to–”

She gives the base of him a small squeeze and takes him deep again.

The question disappears. Garrett comes with a broken curse, hips lifting once beneath her as his hand tightens in her hair. She feels the first pulse against her tongue, then another, warm and thick as she swallows around him. 

His head drops back, eyes closing, mouth open on her name while she keeps her lips sealed around him and takes all of it.

His thumb stops moving only when his whole body goes tense. Then it resumes, slower now, stroking her gently while she draws back and licks the last of him clean with one lazy pass of her tongue.

“Holy fuck,” Garrett breathes.

She presses a kiss to the inside of his thigh.

His hand falls out of her hair and drags over his face. “You’re insane.”

She smiles, kissing up the hard plane of his stomach while his body softens beneath her. Her thighs are trembling again from the steady work of his thumb, clit swollen and sensitive, every small movement dragging a faint spark through her. “You liked it.”

Garrett uncovers his face. “That’s what you got from that?”

She reaches his chest. “I’m observant.”

“You’re evil.”

“I’m clinically trained.”

He catches her waist and pulls her the rest of the way up. Their mouths meet messily. There’s no careful entry into the kiss. Garrett licks into her mouth, one hand at her throat and the other sliding around her back, rolling her beneath him until his body covers hers again. 

She can taste him faintly beneath the mint and herself still lingering on his tongue, all of it mixed into something filthy and intimate enough that she moans and tangles both hands into his curls.

Garrett kisses like he’s still coming down. Loose and hungry and smiling every few seconds because neither of them seems able to stop. Their noses bump. She laughs into his mouth. He pulls back just far enough to look at her, eyes bright and soft, then rubs his nose against hers until she makes a disgusted sound and kisses him again.

“You’re being cute,” she murmurs.

“Don’t ruin it.”

“You’re rubbing noses.”

“Very masculine.”

“Extremely.”

Garrett grins. He kisses her once, then pulls back. Looks at her face. Smiles wider, like he’s remembered something. Then dives back in.

It keeps happening. Kiss, breathe, look. His fingers tracing the edge of her jaw. Her hand pushing his curls back. Mouths meeting again because the small distance becomes intolerable almost immediately.

There’s something absurdly happy under the heat now. Garrett laughing softly when their teeth knock. Her smiling so hard into one kiss that he has to move to her cheek. His nose brushing hers, his forehead resting against her own while their breathing gradually settles.

Her boyfriend. 

She tests the word silently while looking at him this close. Garrett’s mouth pink, curls wrecked, a faint scratch near his shoulder from her nails. He looks exactly like Garrett. Nothing has changed and everything has shifted half an inch into place.

She wraps one leg around his hip and pulls him closer. Garrett’s breath catches. He’s getting hard again against her thigh, enough that she can feel the heat and weight of him returning where their bodies press together.

Her mouth curves. “Fast recovery.”

“Shut up.”

“Sports medicine should study you.”

“I’m twenty-one.”

“You’re smug.”

“You’re naked.”

She kisses the corner of his mouth. “Excellent assessment.”

Garrett kisses her again, slower now, and she realises after another minute that he’s giving her time. Letting her body settle after two orgasms and the relentless touch of his thumb during his own. 

Letting the tremors leave her legs while he works himself back up with kisses and hands rather than immediately turning the whole thing into the rough, mattress-ruining sex she told him she wanted.

It’s thoughtful. It’s also ominous. Good.

Garrett sits up slightly, leaning across her toward the bedside table. His body stretches warm over hers as he pulls the drawer open and reaches inside.

She catches his wrist. “Mm-mm.”

Garrett looks back at her, condom packet already between his fingers. “Oh.” His brows draw together. “You don’t–?”

“No.” She pulls his arm back toward her and kisses him once before he can misunderstand. “No, I want to have sex.”

His expression clears slightly, though the frown stays. “Okay.”

“But no condom.”

Garrett goes very still, like every part of his body has received the sentence independently and is holding an emergency meeting about it. “Baby?”

She feels suddenly, stupidly shy again. Her fingers slide down from his wrist and rest against his forearm. “I’m on birth control.”

Garrett looks confused. “I thought the pill made you feel weird.”

“It did.”

“Like, really weird.”

“Yes, thank you for remembering my emotional collapse.”

Garrett’s mouth twitches, but his gaze stays searching. “So what birth control?”

She lifts her left arm between them and turns it slightly, showing him the faint little mark high along the inside, mostly healed now. “Look.”

Garrett bends closer, squinting at her skin. His fingers slide carefully beneath her arm, thumb moving near the tiny insertion site without pressing it. “What the fuck is that?”

“Implant.” She guides his fingertips lightly over the thin shape beneath her skin. Garrett’s face changes when he feels it, interest and faint horror combining into something deeply male. “I got it the other week. It lasts a few years.”

“There’s a stick in your arm.”

“It’s not a stick.”

“It feels like a stick.”

“It’s flexible.”

“That is not helping.”

She laughs, lowering her arm and bringing both hands to the sides of his face. “It’s birth control, Garrett.”

His eyes return to hers. The humour fades back enough for the real question to show. “And you’re sure?”

She nods. “I’m sure.”

“Like, sure sure?”

“Yes.”

He studies her face. “And you’re good with… everything?”

“We’ve both been tested. I got it inserted. I’m covered.” She brushes her thumb over his cheek, suddenly warm all over for a completely different reason. “So, I don’t want to use one. If you don’t.”

Garrett stares at her for one long second. Then his grin starts. Slow at first, spreading across his face with such naked, disbelieving delight that she begins laughing before he says anything. 

He shoves the drawer closed with one hand, and comes down over her again, catching her mouth in a kiss that’s already rougher than everything before it.

“Oh,” he says against her lips, voice low and wrecked and very, very pleased. “Fuck yeah.”

There’s no careful easing back into it, no last sensible conversation about efficacy percentages or insertion dates or whether either of them should maybe take one full breath before making an extremely enthusiastic decision. 

Garrett’s mouth catches hers hard enough to press her head into the pillow, one hand sliding beneath her jaw while the other grips her thigh and pulls it higher over his hip. 

The grin is still there for the first second, warm and disbelieving against her lips, and then she rolls her hips up beneath him and it disappears into a groan.

The bare length of him drags between her thighs. Every part of her body seems to notice at once. The heat of his skin. The slick mess Garrett left between her legs. The absence of latex where there’s always been latex before, even through the frantic, half-dressed hookups and the planned experiments and the nights where neither of them had managed to get their shoes fully off before reaching the bed. 

It should be a tiny distinction. A clinical one, almost. A material change measured in fractions of a millimetre. Her nervous system receives it like breaking news.

“Oh,” she breathes into his mouth.

Garrett stills for half a beat, forehead brushing hers. “Okay?”

“Yes.” She catches his curls at the back of his head and pulls him down before he can turn this into a risk-assessment interview. “Yeah, baby.”

His mouth opens over hers again, deeper now, tongue sliding against hers while his hips move. It starts slow, the hard line of him grinding through the slick heat between her thighs, catching over her clit on each forward roll and making her breath hitch embarrassingly fast. 

Garrett’s hand tightens beneath her thigh. His other thumb presses into the soft place under her jaw, holding her where he wants her.

She tugs his hair. Garrett bites gently at her lower lip, then along her jaw when she tips her face away to breathe, teeth catching lightly over skin before his mouth soothes the place. The scrape sends something hot through her stomach. She makes a soft, helpless sound and feels him smile against her cheek.

“There?” he murmurs.

She answers by dragging her nails through his curls and rolling her hips harder.

Garrett’s breath catches. “Yeah. Okay.”

He kisses her with more force, all the restraint from earlier finally burning off. His mouth gets sloppy over hers, lips sliding, tongues meeting without anything tidy about it. 

She can taste mint and heat and the faint trace of herself still on him, and the knowledge should be too much after everything that has already happened, but it only makes her thighs tighten around his hips.

Garrett grinds against her again. She whimpers. The sound goes through him visibly, his shoulders tensing beneath her hands, jaw tightening as he drags himself over her once more. 

The head of him catches at her entrance, pressing there for half a second before slipping away through the slick mess between them.

“Fuck,” he says into her mouth.

She tries to tilt her hips higher. Garrett’s hand slides beneath her ass to help, lifting her into the angle he wants, and the next slow grind catches differently. He slips inside.

There’s no warning beyond the sudden hot pressure and the sharp, full stretch of him entering her in one smooth, accidental push. Her cry breaks directly into his mouth, fingers locking at his shoulders while Garrett groans so deeply she feels it through his chest.

They freeze, barely a breath, both of them held in the shock of it, Garrett partway inside her and looking down at her with his eyes gone wide and dark.

“Holy shit,” he breathes.

She can’t answer properly. Her whole body has gone tight around him, every nerve turned toward the place they’re joined, the bare heat of him so immediate and different that her mouth only opens around a small, wrecked sound.

Garrett kisses her. She kisses him back with the same frantic need, one hand sliding into his hair while the other claws lightly at his shoulder. He pushes deeper beneath the kiss, slowly enough to let her body open around him, but there’s nothing gentle about the sound he makes when his hips finally meet hers.

“Oh my God.” Her head tips back. “Garrett.”

“Baby.” His voice is rough against her throat, almost unrecognisable beneath the strain of holding still. “Fuck, you feel–”

She clenches around him before he finishes. Garrett swears, head dropping into the curve of her neck. His mouth finds her pulse and bites softly, one hand gripping her hip hard enough that she knows she’ll feel the shape of it tomorrow.

“Don’t do that,” he says.

She laughs breathlessly. “Why?”

“Because I’m trying not to embarrass myself in the first thirty seconds.”

“Damn. My boyfriend has no stamina?”

Garrett lifts his head. The look on his face should probably concern her. Instead it sends a fresh pulse of heat through her.

“Okay,” he says, very quietly. “You wanna be like that?”

She smiles up at him, flushed and already shaking slightly despite how recently he’d made her come. “Maybe.”

Garrett pulls almost all the way out. The sudden emptiness makes her inhale sharply. Then he drives back inside her hard enough that the mattress shifts beneath her body and the headboard knocks once against the wall.

Her mouth falls open.

“There,” he says, voice low and pleased. “That better?”

She gets halfway through nodding before he does it again. The second thrust drags a moan out of her. The third turns it louder. 

Garrett plants one forearm beside her head and catches her hip with the other hand, holding her steady as the pace sharpens almost immediately, each stroke deep and hard enough to send her sliding upward over the sheets.

This is what she asked for. Not careless. Garrett is never careless with her, not really, even when he’s being rough. There’s still control under every movement, his hand bracing her body, his eyes cutting over her face between kisses, his rhythm adjusting whenever her breathing changes. 

But there’s nothing cautious about it either. Nothing fragile. He fucks her like she belongs in his bed. Like she asked him to stop holding back and he intends to honour the request thoroughly enough that she regrets ever accusing him of gentleness.

The mattress gives beneath each thrust. Her breasts move against his chest. Garrett’s curls fall into his eyes, sweat beginning to gather along his hairline while he drives into her with a rhythm that keeps knocking little broken noises out of her.

“Oh– fuck, baby.” Her nails scrape over his biceps, then his shoulders when she can’t find anywhere else to hold. “That’s– Garrett, that’s so–”

“Yeah?” His mouth catches hers, swallowing the next moan as he thrusts deeper. “Like that?”

She nods frantically against him.

“Words.”

“Yes.” The answer tears out of her. “Yes, fuck, like that.”

Garrett kisses her hard enough that their teeth knock. His tongue slides over hers, messy and hungry, while his hand grips beneath her thigh and pushes it higher along his side. The change opens her further, and the next stroke hits so deep her whole body arches.

“There she is,” he murmurs.

She hates when he says that. She loves when he says that. She scratches down his shoulder in retaliation, and Garrett groans into her mouth, hips driving forward hard enough to move her another inch toward the headboard.

The sheets are bunching beneath her. Every thrust pushes her farther up the bed, until her head nearly meets the pillow wedged against the wall. Garrett notices only when his next movement sends her shoulder into it.

“Shit.” He pulls back just enough to catch both her hips and drags her bodily down the mattress.

She yelps, then laughs because the movement is so bluntly practical and so deeply hot that her brain cannot select one reaction.

Garrett settles himself back between her thighs. “Stop running away.”

“I’m not running anywhere.”

“You’re halfway up the wall.”

“You’re doing that!”

He kisses her once, grinning against her mouth, then pushes back inside with a slow, hard stroke that wipes the laughter out of her. “Stay there.”

She tries. She really does. Unfortunately, Garrett resumes fucking her with enough force that the bed begins shifting again almost immediately.

The headboard knocks. The lamp on his bedside table trembles faintly. Somewhere downstairs, there’s a burst of laughter from the television followed by Dean yelling something that might be, “For fuck’s sake,” though the words are swallowed by Garrett’s mouth and the wet, relentless drag of his body into hers.

She stops caring. Her whole body is wound too tight, pleasure building over the oversensitive ache Garrett left behind earlier. It’s different this time, not the sharp, focused pressure of his mouth and fingers but something deeper and heavier, every hard stroke dragging over the exact place inside her that makes her vision go slightly soft.

Garrett knows she’s getting close before she says it. His hand slides between them, thumb finding her clit in the limited space where their bodies meet. The first circle makes her gasp. The second makes her legs tighten around his waist hard enough to pull him closer.

“Baby,” she says, voice splintering.

“I know.” Garrett kisses beneath her eye, then her cheek, then the corner of her mouth while keeping the same brutal pace. “Come on. I’ve got you.”

The praise hits harder than it should. Her nails dig into his shoulders. Garrett’s thumb presses firmer.

The orgasm catches her almost by surprise, rising out of the deep pressure between her hips and tearing through her before she can shape the warning properly. 

Her body locks beneath him. A cry catches high in her throat, legs clamping around his waist as she comes hard around him.

Garrett’s rhythm stutters. “Fuck,” he groans. “That’s it. Jesus, baby.”

He keeps moving through it, slower for the first few pulses, letting her body grip and release around him while his thumb eases off before she can get too sensitive. 

The pleasure spreads through her in heavy, shaking waves. Her fingers lose their hold on his shoulders. Her head rolls sideways into the pillow.

Garrett kisses her cheek, breathing hard. “Good?”

She laughs weakly. “Are you kidding?”

His grin flashes, smug and wrecked. “Just checking.”

He gives her approximately five seconds. Then he pulls out. The loss makes her whimper before she can stop it. Garrett sits back on his knees, one hand still gripping her thigh, chest heaving while he looks down at her flushed, shaking body.

“What–” she starts.

Garrett turns her over. There’s no inelegant scramble where she has to work out what he wants. One hand catches her hip, the other her shoulder, and he rolls her onto her stomach before sliding both palms beneath her pelvis and dragging her hips up.

She goes willingly. Enthusiastically, actually. Her knees find the mattress. Her chest stays pressed to the sheets, cheek against Garrett’s pillow while she lifts her ass into his hands and tries to recover enough breath to say something devastatingly clever.

What comes out is, “Oh my God.”

Garrett’s palm smooths over one cheek. “You okay?”

“Yes.”

“Still want rough?”

She turns her face enough to look back at him. Garrett is kneeling behind her, flushed and damp and painfully hard, one hand wrapped around himself while the other holds her hip. The sight makes her stomach clench.

“Yes,” she says again.

His eyes darken. “Good girl.”

He pushes back inside her. The angle is completely different and immediately obscene. Her mouth opens against the pillow, a broken moan muffled into Garrett’s sheets while he fills her in one deep stroke and settles his hips flush against her.

“Fuck,” he breathes behind her. “Baby.”

She arches instinctively, pressing back toward him. Garrett’s hand slides up her spine, between her shoulder blades, then into her hair just enough to gather it away from her face. He holds it, keeps her head turned safely to the side while he begins moving again.

The first thrust is slow. The second is harder. By the third, the bed is shifting beneath them all over again. She moans directly into the mattress, fingers clawing at the sheets beside her head. 

Garrett’s hand leaves her hair and reaches forward, finding one of hers. His fingers slide through hers and press their joined hands into the pillow.

Something about it almost undoes her more than the sex. Her hand trapped gently beneath his. His body hard over the back of hers without crushing her. His mouth finding her shoulder while he drives into her from behind with enough force to make her breath break into stupid, helpless little sounds.

Boyfriend. Her boyfriend is fucking her like this while holding her hand.

The thought is so deranged and tender and filthy that she starts laughing, except the next thrust turns the laugh into a moan.

Garrett’s mouth brushes the back of her shoulder. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re laughing at me?”

“No.” She arches harder into him. “I’m– fuck– I’m having a great time.”

Garrett laughs once, low and rough. “Yeah? Great shift, great night?”

“Excellent service.”

“Five stars?”

He pulls almost all the way out and slams back into her. Her answer becomes a cry.

“Thought so,” he says.

She presses her face deeper into the pillow. Saliva gathers at the corner of her mouth because she cannot keep her lips closed long enough to swallow, and the tiny humiliation of it only seems to make the heat worse. 

Garrett’s everywhere behind her: thighs against hers, hand interlocked with her own, other palm gripping her hip, chest brushing her back whenever he leans over to kiss her shoulder.

His rhythm grows harder. She pushes back to meet him, desperate for the deep drag of each thrust even as her legs begin to shake again. 

The pleasure from the last orgasm hasn’t fully faded, leaving her body open and sensitised, every movement landing over nerves already rubbed raw in the best possible way.

“Garrett,” she moans into the mattress. “Baby, I–”

His free hand slides beneath her. The first touch to her clit makes her whole body jolt.

“Shh,” he murmurs against her shoulder, though there’s no real attempt to quiet her in the way his fingers begin moving. “I know.”

She makes a desperate sound. “Too much.”

His lips press to her shoulder. “Talk to me.”

“Slow.” She squeezes his hand beside her head. “There. Slow.”

“Got you.”

His fingers adjust, circles turning gentler, almost maddening against her swollen clit while his hips stay hard and steady behind her. The contrast tears her apart by degrees. Deep, forceful strokes inside her. Soft pressure outside. Garrett’s praise low against her skin whenever her body tightens.

“That’s my girl.” She moans. “So good for me.” Her thighs tremble. “Look at you. Fuck.”

She can’t look at anything. Her eyes have fallen shut, mouth still open against the pillow while pleasure builds until there’s no room left inside her for embarrassment or thought or anything but Garrett’s body and Garrett’s voice and Garrett’s fingers entwined tightly with hers.

The orgasm starts low and spreads outward. Her legs shake first. Then her stomach pulls tight. The sound that comes out of her is muffled and raw, half his name and half something without language, as the pleasure breaks through her all over again.

Garrett slows his hips but doesn’t stop. His fingers keep the same gentle rhythm, dragging the orgasm out while her body clenches hard around him.

“Fuck, baby.” His forehead drops between her shoulder blades. “Yeah. That’s it.”

She comes until her arms feel weak. Until her knees threaten to slide apart. Until Garrett has to catch her hip and hold her up because the muscles in her legs have become jelly.

When he finally eases his hand away, her body slumps forward into the mattress. Their fingers stay tangled beside her face.

Garrett kisses her shoulder, then the back of her neck. “You with me?”

“Mhm.”

“That sounded convincing.”

She tries to lift her head and succeeds only in turning her cheek to the other side. “I’m alive.”

“Barely.”

“Whose fault is that?”

Garrett’s laugh warms her skin. “You said no gentle.”

“I didn’t say murder.”

“You’re very dramatic for someone pushing back on me thirty seconds ago.”

She would argue if Garrett weren’t still inside her and if her brain had retained access to verbs.

Instead she breathes, “Shut up.”

He kisses her shoulder again. “Want to stop?”

The question drags her slightly back into herself. Enough to notice the shaking in her thighs, the pleasant soreness gathering through her hips, the overstimulated pulse between her legs that makes every tiny movement register.

Garrett waits. She turns her head, trying to find him over her shoulder. “No.”

His hand smooths over her hip. “Sure?”

“Yes.” She swallows, voice coming out softer. “Just– turn me over.”

Garrett goes still for half a second, then he withdraws carefully. She whimpers at the emptiness, hips twitching before her body can pretend it didn’t want to follow him. 

Garrett makes a soothing sound and kisses her lower back, one palm moving over the curve of her ass while he gives her a second to breathe.

Then he rolls her onto her back. Her legs fall open with no real assistance from her. Garrett settles between them, one hand braced beside her head while the other cups her cheek.

He looks wrecked. Hair damp and crushed in every direction. Mouth swollen from kissing her. Chest flushed, breathing heavy, eyes darker than she has ever seen them and still impossibly focused on her face.

“Hi,” he says.

She starts laughing.

Garrett’s mouth twitches. “What?”

“You said hi.”

“Seemed polite.”

“We’re a little past polite.”

“I’m your boyfriend now. I have standards.”

Her heart does something soft and stupid beneath the exhaustion. “Right.”

Garrett kisses her. Slow this time. Mouth warm and deep without urgency, tongue brushing hers while he strokes his thumb beneath her eye.

Then he pushes back inside. She gasps against his lips. There’s no part of her that isn’t sensitive now. The stretch burns pleasantly for the first second, her body swollen and thoroughly used, and Garrett notices the faint tension immediately.

He stills once he’s fully seated. “Okay?”

She nods, breathing around it. “Yeah.”

His gaze searches hers. “Too much?”

“No.” She wraps both arms around his shoulders, pulling him closer until his forehead rests against hers. 

Garrett nods. The first thrust is deep enough to make her eyes close. No force behind it now, only the full drag of him leaving and filling her again. 

He keeps the pace measured, rolling his hips rather than slamming forward, one hand sliding beneath her thigh to open her to the angle.

The gentleness should be a relief. Instead, it gets under her skin. Every slow stroke makes her feel the bare length of him, every inch, every shift of pressure. 

There’s nowhere for the sensation to blur into speed. No hard rhythm to climb above. Only Garrett moving inside her while he looks directly at her face.

Her eyes sting. It isn’t sadness. It isn’t pain. It’s too much sensation and too little distance, her body exhausted enough that the pleasure has begun spilling over into everything else. One tear slips from the corner of her eye before she notices it.

Garrett does. His thumb catches the tear before it can disappear into her hairline, his gaze moving over her face with an attention that feels almost indecent while he’s still buried inside her.

“My girl,” he murmurs.

The words make her clench around him. Garrett’s mouth parts on a rough breath, his hips pressing forward instinctively before he catches himself. 

For one second he stays there, deep enough that the pressure makes her thighs twitch, thumb stroking once beneath her eye while another tear slips free from nothing more dramatic than her body being completely, spectacularly overwhelmed.

“So pretty,” he says, and kisses the wet track from her cheek. “You know that?”

She gasps when he rolls his hips, the movement slow but deep enough to drag over everything already swollen and sensitised. “I–”

“I know.” His mouth brushes hers. “I know, baby.”

She doesn’t think he does. She doesn’t think anyone could know what her body feels like right now, pleasure humming painfully beneath her skin, legs too weak to close properly around him, every nerve between her thighs stripped down to something raw and bright. 

She should be finished. Her body has been given several perfectly reasonable opportunities to declare the evening complete.

Instead, when Garrett pulls almost all the way out and pushes back inside her, she arches beneath him and makes a helpless sound directly into his mouth.

His eyes sharpen. “There?” he asks.

She nods too quickly.

Garrett does it again, harder this time. The mattress shifts beneath her. Her breath punches out in a broken gasp, fingers tightening in his curls while the deep impact sends pleasure rolling through the sore, overworked muscles of her stomach.

Garrett watches her face. What moves through his expression is darker, hotter, satisfaction settling beneath the careful attention because he knows her. 

Knows the difference between her body pulling away and her body losing control. Knows she’s exhausted and overstimulated and still lifting her hips to meet him every time he drives forward.

“One more for me?” he asks.

She has no idea which number this is anymore. One more has stopped functioning as mathematics. It’s simply Garrett’s mouth near hers, his body heavy and warm between her legs, his cock filling her so deeply that the possibility feels less like a request and more like something her body has already begun agreeing to.

She nods. Garrett’s hand closes around her jaw to hold her attention. “Words.”

“Yes,” she whispers.

His eyes move over hers. “You sure?”

She drags him down until their mouths almost touch. “Garrett, please.”

Something in him gives. His mouth crashes into hers as he pulls out and drives back inside with enough force to shove her body up the sheets. She cries out into the kiss.

Garrett swallows the sound, tongue sliding hard against hers while his hand drops from her face to her hip. He catches her there and drags her back down the mattress before thrusting again, keeping her exactly where he wants her when the force tries to move her away.

There’s nothing slow about it now. He fucks her hard, hips driving into hers in a rhythm that turns every breath into noise. The bed knocks against the wall. Her breasts move beneath him. 

The soreness between her legs sharpens every stroke into something almost unbearable, the pleasure no longer smooth enough to sink into but rough-edged, overwhelming, dragging through her body faster than she can absorb it.

Her nails scrape over his shoulders. “Fuck– baby–”

“I’ve got you.” Garrett’s voice is rough against her mouth, his own breathing coming hard now. “Take it.”

The words make her whole body tighten. Garrett feels it. His head drops briefly, a strangled groan pushed into the side of her neck as she clenches around him. Then he grips her hips with both hands, pulls her down the bed again, and pounds into her hard enough that her mouth opens around a scream that doesn’t quite arrive.

“That’s it,” he says. “Just like that.”

She cannot decide where to hold him. Her hands move from his shoulders to his biceps, nails digging into the hard muscle there when another thrust knocks the air from her lungs. 

Garrett’s body is slick beneath her palms, chest flushed, curls damp at his temples, every line of him strained with the effort of giving her exactly what she asked for without losing control completely.

The headboard strikes the wall again. Some distant, surviving part of her brain notes that the boys are absolutely awake. Then Garrett changes the angle, lifting one of her thighs higher against his side, and the thought is obliterated.

“Oh!” Her head falls back into the pillow. “Oh my God– Garrett–”

His hand presses beneath her thigh, holding her open as he drives deeper. Each thrust lands in the same devastating place, pleasure striking through her with enough force that her eyes water again.

Garrett kisses the new tears from beneath one eye without slowing. “My girl,” he breathes. “Look at you.”

Her eyes open only halfway, heavy and unfocused, but Garrett is there above her, face tight with need and attention, staring at her like the sight of her coming apart beneath him is doing something violent to his self-control.

“So fucking good for me,” he says.

Her praise kink, already abused beyond reasonable limits tonight, rises from the dead. She moans and clamps around him.

Garrett’s mouth curves, pleased and breathless. “Yeah? You like that?”

She nods frantically, the motion lost when he kisses her hard.

“Good girl,” he says against her lips.

The sound she makes is humiliating. Garrett groans like he loves it. His hand slips between their bodies. There’s no room, barely any space between his stomach and hers, but he finds her clit anyway, thumb pressing down with enough confidence that her whole body bucks.

“Fuck!” Her hand flies to his wrist.

Garrett stills his thumb but not his hips. “Too much?”

She can barely breathe around the hard rhythm of him. “It’s– fuck– it’s so much.”

“Want me to stop touching you?”

She shakes her head at once.

“Slower?”

“No.”

His eyes darken. “No?”

“No.” She tightens her fingers around his wrist, holding it there. “Make me come.”

For half a second Garrett only stares at her. Then his grin appears, small and wrecked and almost mean in the way she desperately wants.

“Yeah,” he says. “Okay, baby.”

His thumb starts moving. The first hard circle over her clit makes her cry out and arch off the mattress. Garrett catches her hip with his other hand and holds her down, continuing to fuck her through the jolt, hips striking deep while his thumb works fast and firm over nerves already so sensitive she can feel the pleasure everywhere – behind her knees, in her stomach, along the trembling line of her spine.

She tries to twist away from it. Garrett follows. Her body shifts up the bed. He catches her hips and yanks her back beneath him, thrusting into her the second she returns to the angle.

“Garrett!”

“No, no.” He kisses her jaw, teeth grazing lightly before his mouth soothes the place. “You asked me.”

“I know.” The words dissolve into a sobbing moan when his thumb circles again. “I know, I know–”

“Then stay with me.”

She has nowhere else to go. His body brackets hers completely. His forearm beside her head. His hand gripping her hip. His mouth moving over her cheek and jaw between rough breaths while he pounds her into the mattress, every stroke pushing her closer to a limit she can no longer see.

The pleasure is too sharp to feel good in any ordinary way. It feels incredible. Her legs shake violently around his waist. Her fingers scratch down his biceps, then grip him again when his thrusts make her bounce beneath him. 

Saliva gathers beneath her tongue because she cannot close her mouth long enough to swallow. She’s babbling now, scraps of sound and language torn loose without permission.

“Baby– fuck– Garrett, I can’t– oh, God– I’m–”

“Yes, you can.” His voice is low and relentless, praise threaded through every hard snap of his hips. “You’re doing it.”

She shakes her head even while her body arches toward him.

Garrett kisses her, mouth wet and rough. “Such a good girl.” Her clit pulses beneath his thumb. “That’s it.”

The orgasm begins gathering so hard and fast it frightens her. Her stomach locks. Her thighs clamp uselessly around him, muscles seizing while the pressure climbs far beyond anything she can control. 

Garrett feels the change and fucks her harder, losing some of the clean rhythm now, hips driving forward with a rough desperation that makes the bed slam repeatedly into the wall.

“There,” he groans. “Fuck, there you go.”

“Garrett–” She cries out, but it isn’t enough to release anything. 

The pressure keeps building, suspended at an impossible height while Garrett’s thumb moves faster.

“I can’t,” she gasps.

“You can.”

“It’s too–”

“I know.” He kisses the tears from her cheek without softening anything else. “Give it to me anyway.”

Her eyes roll back. Garrett catches her mouth before the scream fully escapes. The orgasm tears through her with enough force that her whole body lifts beneath him. 

Her legs shake uncontrollably, heels digging into his back, hands clawing at his shoulders while she screams into his kiss. Garrett groans against her, swallowing every broken sound as her body clamps down around him in violent, pulsing waves.

He doesn’t stop fucking her. He drives into her through the first brutal contractions, hips snapping hard while his thumb keeps rubbing her clit until the pleasure tips so far over the edge she makes a desperate noise and grabs his wrist.

“Garrett– Garrett! Fuck–”

He eases the pressure at once. His thumb slides away, but his hips stay deep and rough for another few strokes, dragging out the orgasm while her body convulses beneath him. 

She cannot breathe properly. Cannot hear anything beyond the blood rushing through her ears and Garrett’s voice breaking against her mouth.

“That’s it.” Her thighs tremble. “Good girl.” She whimpers. “Fuck, baby. Look at you.”

Another pulse rolls through her, weaker but still sharp enough to make her whole body jerk.

Garrett finally slows. Changing from the hard pounding rhythm into deep, uneven thrusts while he fights for control. His forehead presses against hers, jaw clenched, breath shaking from his chest.

She lies beneath him completely wrecked. Eyes wet and unfocused. Mouth swollen. Legs still twitching around his hips. Every part of her feels loose except where her body continues to pulse around him, tiny aftershocks dragging rough sounds from Garrett each time they hit.

His mouth moves over hers once. Twice. Softer now, though his hips still push deep enough to make her gasp.

“Baby,” he breathes. She makes a small sound. “Baby, where?”

The question reaches her through layers of static. She knows what he’s asking. She does. But her body is still trapped in the fading waves of the orgasm, brain floating somewhere above the bed while Garrett’s face blurs and sharpens above her. Her lips part, but no answer arrives quickly enough.

Garrett watches her for one beat. Then another. “Okay,” he says roughly. “I’ve got it.”

He pulls out. The sudden emptiness makes her whine, but Garrett’s hand presses warmly against her hip while he wraps the other around himself. He barely manages two hard strokes before he comes across her stomach, head dropping with a broken groan as warmth spills over her skin.

For several seconds, they only breathe. Garrett kneeling between her shaking legs, chest rising hard. Her body sunk bonelessly into the wrecked sheets, every muscle still trembling from the force of the orgasm he’d dragged out of her.

Then Garrett looks at her, and everything in his face changes. He comes down over her carefully, avoiding the mess on her stomach, and kisses her forehead. Her eyelids. The wet skin beneath both eyes. Her cheeks and nose and mouth, every touch so soft it feels almost absurd after the way he had just driven her into the mattress.

“Hey,” he murmurs, brushing her hair back. “My girl.”

She blinks at him.

Garrett kisses her again, slow and warm. “You with me?”

Her mouth moves into a sleepy smile. “Barely.”

He laughs softly, relief loosening his face. “Yeah. I can see that.”

She nods. “Legs are broken.”

He laughs quietly and kisses her forehead once more. “I noticed.”

She makes a sleepy sound when he starts to shift away. Her arms tighten weakly around his shoulders before she can stop them.

Garrett freezes. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“You moved,” she whines. 

“I need to clean you up.”

She frowns at him like this is a betrayal of the highest order.

His thumb strokes her cheek. “Let me get a washcloth, yeah? Nice and warm.”

She doesn’t want him to leave the bed. The idea of the space cooling where his body has been feels suddenly unacceptable, but there’s sweat drying on her skin and warmth across her stomach and between her thighs, and the practical part of her still has enough life left to admit a washcloth would be useful. She nods.

“Okay.” Garrett kisses her softly. “I’ll be right back.”

He pries himself out of her arms with a patience that would be insulting if she had more energy. Then he reaches for his boxers, pulling them on while she watches through heavy eyelids and tries not to fall asleep in the forty seconds he’s gone.

The bedroom door unlocks. She hears Garrett step into the hallway, then the bathroom door open. Pipes run briefly inside the wall. Somewhere downstairs, Dean calls, “You alive, Graham?”

Garrett answers, “Shut the fuck up,” in a voice so calm it makes her giggle into the pillow.

The bathroom door closes. Footsteps return. His bedroom lock clicks again behind him. Garrett comes back carrying a warm, damp washcloth and a glass of water. 

He sets the water on the bedside table first, then sits carefully beside her hip. “This might be cool.”

She squints at him. “You said warm.”

“It’s warm. Your skin’s hot.”

“Flattery.”

“That wasn’t–” Garrett laughs under his breath. “Okay.”

He cleans her stomach first. Gentle strokes of the cloth over her skin, wiping away the cooling mess without any awkwardness or haste. Then he folds the washcloth over and moves between her legs.

She flinches at the first touch, thighs trying to close on instinct. Garrett’s hand settles warmly over one knee. “Sensitive?”

“Very.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Her mouth curls sleepily. “Worth it.”

His grin comes back, smaller and softer now. “Yeah?”

She hums. He cleans her carefully, warm cloth moving over the slick soreness between her thighs while she trembles every time he gets too close to her clit. 

Garrett watches her face, adjusting pressure without needing to be told, one hand rubbing lightly over her knee the whole time. “Almost done.”

She nods, eyes falling shut.

“There.” He kisses the inside of her thigh after the cloth moves away, because apparently he cannot complete a practical task without adding one emotionally devastating flourish. “All clean.”

Garrett drops the washcloth into the laundry basket with a shot that would have earned applause under different circumstances, then pulls the comforter over her body.

The warmth settles around her at once. He slides beneath it beside her, and she moves into him before he’s fully positioned, curling against his chest with one leg draped over his and her face pressed beneath his chin. 

Garrett catches her easily, one arm winding around her waist while the other cups the back of her head.

Her body is still trembling. Small aftershocks moving through her thighs and stomach every few seconds, muscles releasing in confused little increments after being held tight for too long.

She starts giggling.

Garrett’s chest moves beneath her cheek. “What?”

“Oh my God.” She presses her face closer into him. “My legs won’t stop shaking.”

His hand moves down her back to her hip, then along the outside of her thigh, rubbing slow and warm over the twitching muscle. “That sounds serious.”

“Medical emergency.”

“You know anyone medically qualified?”

“I know one student nurse. She’s unavailable.”

“Why?”

“She’s been absolutely destroyed by her boyfriend.”

The laugh that leaves him is so pleased and boyish that it shakes both of them beneath the blanket. He kisses the top of her head, arm tightening around her.

“Yeah?” he asks.

She tips her face up just enough to look at him. “Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

Garrett’s smile changes. It softens at the edges, something bright and almost shy moving beneath the cockiness before he leans down and rubs his nose against hers.

She makes a tired, disgusted sound. “You’re doing that again.”

“You like it.”

“I tolerate it.”

“Liar.”

He kisses her before she can argue, slow and sweet and completely removed from the filthy mess of their mouths fifteen minutes earlier. She lets him, one hand sliding sleepily into his curls, fingertips scratching lightly over his scalp.

Garrett hums and settles deeper into the pillow. “You need water,” he murmurs against her lips.

She groans.

“Baby.”

“I’m horizontal.”

“I can see that.” Garrett reaches back without letting go of her and finds the glass on the bedside table. Some of the water nearly spills when he brings it over because she refuses to sit up properly, so he tucks one arm behind her shoulders and lifts her just enough to hold it to her mouth.

She takes three obedient sips.

“More.”

She glares at him over the rim. Garrett raises his eyebrows. She drinks more.

“Good girl.”

Her thighs clench weakly on reflex. Garrett feels it. His mouth twitches.

She points one exhausted finger at his chest. “Don’t you dare.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“You used the voice.”

“What voice?”

“The horrible one.”

“The one that made you come five times?”

She stares at him. “Five?”

Garrett takes the glass away and puts it back on the table. “I counted.”

“Oh my God.”

“Very responsible boyfriend. You’re shaking.”

“That is not a defence.”

“It’s pretty compelling evidence.”

She hides her face in his chest because arguing requires more support than she currently possesses. Garrett laughs softly and draws the blanket higher around her shoulders, then starts rubbing his palm over her back in long, slow passes.

The room feels different now. His clothes are still on the floor. Her discarded towel is still pooled near the foot of the bed. The headboard has shifted slightly away from the wall, and tomorrow someone will absolutely make a comment about it over breakfast because privacy in this house is more of an aspirational concept than an enforceable condition.

But Garrett’s arm is around her. Her cheek is against his chest. The word boyfriend no longer feels like a question they’re both pretending not to hear.

She traces one lazy finger over the centre of his sternum. “Hey,” she murmurs.

“Hm?”

“You really thought I was trapped in some kind of hospital hostage situation.”

Garrett’s hand pauses against her back. “It was a lockdown.”

“I wrote two pages of an assignment.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“You asked security if calling me your girlfriend would help.”

“I was under pressure.”

She smiles against his skin. “And now look at you.”

Garrett glances down. “Naked?”

“In boxers.”

“Basically naked.”

“Officially attached.”

His hand resumes its slow movement over her back. “That too.”

She lifts her head. Garrett’s already looking at her, expression softer than it has been all night, curls falling across his forehead and the last of the adrenaline finally leaving his face.

She brushes them back. “You good?”

He turns his mouth into her palm and kisses it. “Yeah,” he says. “Really good.”

Her eyes start closing again before she means them to.

Garrett tucks her closer, one hand spreading warm over the back of her thigh as another small tremor moves through it.

“Sleep,” he murmurs.

“I need clothes.”

His nose scrunches. “You absolutely do not.”

“What if there’s a fire?”

“I’ll carry you.”

“You nearly fell on the stairs earlier.”

“I was distracted.”

She smiles, eyes closed now. “By your girlfriend?”

Garrett presses a kiss to her forehead, mouth lingering there while his arm tightens around her beneath the blanket.

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “By my girlfriend.”

to be notified when i post new fics, follow @kooksandpearls-library and turn on notifications! i no longer use a taglist for garrett fics.

[mavari44]

Live On Air

Garrett Graham x Female Reader

Summary:

When you decide to ignore Garrett after a painful argument, he finds a completely unexpected way to reach you. A live phone call, a confession the entire campus hears, and five minutes that will change your story forever.

You arrived at the radio station ten minutes before the show was supposed to start. It wasn't because you were particularly punctual; you just needed something to keep your mind occupied. After the argument with Garrett, spending the night alone in your apartment, staring at a phone that wouldn't stop lighting up with his calls and messages, had seemed like a much worse idea than showing up for your shift a little early.

You pushed open the heavy glass door with your coffee still warm between your hands and absentmindedly greeted the few people who were already getting the studio ready. The place smelled the same as it did every night: freshly brewed coffee, electronic equipment that had been running for hours, and that faint scent of warm cables that only seemed to exist inside those walls. Normally, that atmosphere was enough to relax you almost instantly. It was one of the few places on campus where you felt like everything was under control. That night, though, not even that was enough.

"You're early," Alex, the show's host, commented without looking up from the stack of papers he was organizing on the main desk.

You tried to give him a smile as you set your bag down on your chair, but you barely managed to lift one corner of your lips.

"Couldn't sleep."

Alex glanced up for only a second, studying you with that calm expression that always seemed to say he understood more than he asked.

"Too much work or too many problems?"

You lowered your gaze to the coffee cup in your hands before answering.

"A little of both."

He simply nodded and turned his attention back to the show's script. He had never been the curious type, and it was probably one of the reasons working with him was so easy. He knew when to ask questions and, more importantly, when to let silence do the rest.

You took a deep breath and slipped into your usual nightly routine. You powered on the main console, checked the levels on every microphone, tested the studio connections, and opened the program that handled incoming calls from students. Your hands moved almost on instinct. After so many months working there, you no longer had to think about where each button was or which cable to check first. Maybe that was why you liked the job so much: because for a couple of hours, you could focus on making sure everything ran smoothly and forget about the rest of the world.

At least, that was the idea.

Because no matter how hard you tried to keep your mind busy, memories of the night before kept finding their way into every task you did.

You could still hear Garrett's voice with irritating clarity.

"I don't need someone else fixing my life."

The words hurt just as much as they had before.

Not because they'd been especially cruel.

You knew Garrett far too well to ignore the fact that exhaustion had been wearing him down for weeks. You'd watched him stay behind after practice long after the rest of the team had left. You'd watched him come home later and later, sleep less and less, and become obsessed with running the same plays over and over again, convinced they still weren't good enough. That was exactly why you'd shown up at his apartment that night with food and every intention of forcing him to rest, even if it was only for a couple of hours.

You had never wanted to fix his life.

You had just wanted to spend some time with him.

And somehow, you still ended up feeling as though your presence had only gotten in the way.

You hadn't answered him since you walked out of his apartment. The missed calls kept piling up across your phone screen alongside an endless list of messages you still hadn't been able to open. It wasn't about pride. You weren't trying to punish him, either. The real problem was much simpler: you knew that the second you heard his voice, you'd forgive him far too quickly. And a part of you needed Garrett to understand why that argument had hurt so much.

It wasn't because of the words.

It was because of what they meant.

"Five minutes," Alex announced from the other side of the studio as he slipped on his headphones.

You nodded automatically and took your place in front of the console. You adjusted the last few controls, made sure every line was working properly, and put on your headset just as the red light above the window began to flash. The show had officially started, and for the first time since you'd arrived, you managed to focus entirely on your job.

The first phone rang barely thirty seconds into the broadcast.

Out of pure habit, you reached toward the console while your eyes remained fixed on the audio levels. It was a movement you made almost on instinct after so many months working there. Answering calls, checking that the line was working properly, and deciding which ones would go on air had become such an automatic routine that you usually didn't even have to think about it.

That night was different.

The moment the caller ID lit up on the screen, you felt the air leave your lungs all at once.

You knew the number by heart.

You'd seen it appear far too many times over the last twenty-four hours.

Garrett.

You froze, your hand hovering above the console as the phone continued to ring over and over again. You didn't have to do anything. If you let the call end on its own, the system would automatically move on to the next one, and no one would notice the difference. Alex was still introducing the show as if nothing were wrong from the other side of the glass, and on any normal night, the students' calls never stopped coming in. One more or one less wouldn't change a thing.

It was the easiest option.

It was also the most cowardly.

Because even if you refused to admit it, you knew exactly why Garrett was calling.

Ever since your argument the night before, he'd tried to reach you every way he could. Missed calls, text messages, even a couple of voice notes that still hadn't been played because you hadn't even found the courage to open the conversation.

The phone rang again.

You glanced at the clock.

Then at the studio.

Alex would need the first call of the night to kick off the segment. If Garrett kept insisting, sooner or later the call would end up coming through your console.

You let out a slow breath.

And answered.

"Radio Briar, good evening."

There wasn't an immediate response on the other end of the line. All you could hear was a deep, restrained breath, as if the person on the other side was gathering the courage to start speaking. For a second, you thought maybe he'd dialed the wrong number or the call had dropped, until you finally heard a voice that was far too familiar.

"Hey."

Just one word.

A single word.

And somehow, it was enough to unravel every bit of resolve you'd built since the night before in an instant.

You closed your eyes for a brief second before opening them again.

"What are you doing calling here?" you asked quietly, lowering the volume in your headphones slightly so no one else would overhear the conversation.

Garrett let out a tired laugh, so brief it almost sounded like a sigh.

"You've been ignoring my calls since yesterday. I was starting to run out of options."

You didn't answer right away.

What were you supposed to say?

That yes, you'd seen every single one of his calls, that you knew exactly how many messages were still waiting for you, that you'd almost answered him at least five different times before setting your phone face down again.

All of that was true.

But it was also true that it still hurt to remember the way he'd pulled his hand away when all you were trying to do was convince him to get some rest.

"I'm working right now, Garrett," you said at last, trying to sound far more professional than you actually felt.

"I know."

He fell silent for a few seconds. When he spoke again, his voice sounded different, calmer, more certain.

"I don't want to talk to you over the phone."

You frowned, confused.

"Then what?"

You heard him take a deep breath on the other end of the line.

"I want to go on the air."

Your heart lurched so violently that you found yourself looking away from the console for a moment and toward the studio.

Alex was already wrapping up the show's opening segment. In less than three minutes, he would ask you to put through the first caller of the night.

You looked back at the screen.

Then closed your eyes for a brief moment.

"Garrett... don't do anything stupid."

He let out a quiet laugh. It didn't sound amused.

It sounded resigned.

"Trust me. I've spent the entire afternoon trying to come up with another way to apologize."

Your hand trembled for the briefest second over the console.

It was almost imperceptible, but enough to make you pull your fingers away from the button that would connect the call to the studio. On the other side of the glass, Alex had already finished the introduction and was waiting for your signal to bring in the first student caller of the night. He always did. He never chose the calls himself. He trusted you completely to decide which ones deserved to go on the air and which ones didn't.

For the first time since you started working there, you wished you didn't have that responsibility.

Because you weren't choosing between one dedication and another.

You were deciding whether to give Garrett the chance to talk to you after you'd spent an entire day avoiding him.

"You can still hang up on me," he said with a calmness that, for some reason, only made you even more nervous. "I won't blame you if you do."

You lowered your gaze to the screen where his number was still displayed and felt a knot slowly settling in your stomach. You'd spent the last twenty-four hours convincing yourself that you needed space, that the best thing to do was let both of you calm down before talking again. And yet, hearing his voice now was making every one of those decisions begin to crumble much sooner than you'd planned.

"I don't understand what you're trying to do, Garrett," you murmured, glancing at the studio clock out of the corner of your eye. Every second that passed made it harder to delay the show's first call.

He took a moment before answering, as if he were searching for the right words.

"The truth is... I wasn't exactly sure what I was doing when I dialed the number either. I just knew I couldn't let another night go by without trying to fix this."

You closed your eyes for a moment.

Because that was exactly the kind of answer that made it impossible to stay mad at him.

"You didn't have to call here."

"Yeah, I did."

His voice was firm for the first time since you'd answered.

"I called your phone all night. Again this morning. I sent you more texts than I'm willing to admit in front of Dean because he'd make fun of me for months. And when I realized you weren't ready to talk to me... I started thinking about where I could find you."

A small smile found its way onto your lips before you could stop it.

It was so Garrett.

The kind of person who would come up with a ridiculous solution simply because giving up had never been an option for him.

"So your brilliant idea was to call the radio station?"

You heard him let out a quiet laugh on the other end of the line.

"When you put it like that, it sounds a lot worse than it did in my head."

"Because it's insane."

"Probably."

There was a brief silence before he spoke again.

"But it's also the only way I could think of to make sure you'd listen to me for five minutes."

The words lingered between the two of you.

Five minutes.

That was exactly how long each call on the show lasted.

Five minutes.

After that, the line would automatically disconnect to make room for the next caller.

Five minutes were all Garrett was asking for.

Not a reconciliation, not an answer, not even forgiveness—just five minutes to say what you'd spent the last day refusing to hear.

You looked back toward the studio.

Alex was already filling the time with one of his usual jokes while he waited for you to send through the first call. From the other side of the glass, he shot you a quick glance and discreetly raised a hand, silently asking if everything was okay.

You nodded on pure instinct.

You lied with an ease you didn't even know you possessed.

Because nothing was okay.

Your heart was pounding so hard you were starting to hear it over your headphones.

"If you do this..." you whispered at last, lowering your voice even further, "the entire campus is going to hear you."

"I know."

"Your teammates will, too."

"I know."

"Dean is never going to let you live this down."

That earned a much more genuine laugh.

"Trust me, that's the least of my worries right now."

You fell silent again.

And that was when he said something that finally shattered the little pride you were still trying to hold on to.

"The only thing I'm really worried about... is you thinking I meant what I said yesterday."

You felt your chest tighten.

"Garrett..."

"Just let me say it once," he interrupted, with a calmness that didn't sound desperate, only completely sincere. "If, after you hear me out, you still don't want to talk to me, I'll respect that. But I need you to know the truth. Even if I have to say it in front of everyone at Briar."

The music faded out, the studio light came back on, Alex raised a hand as he waited for your signal, and you realized you couldn't put the decision off any longer. All you had to do was press one button, and Garrett Graham was about to apologize to you in front of the entire university.

You took one last deep breath before pressing the button that connected the call to the studio.

The small indicator light changed color immediately, and you knew there was no turning back now. Garrett had officially become part of the live broadcast, and for the first time since you'd started working there, the entire studio suddenly felt far too small to contain everything that was about to happen.

It didn't take Alex long to receive the signal through his headphones.

He smiled toward the microphone with his usual ease, completely unaware of the hurricane you'd just let into the studio.

"And we've got our first caller of the night. You already know how this segment works. If there's something you've never had the courage to say, a dedication you've been meaning to make, or you just need to get something off your chest... now's your chance. Good evening, who are we speaking with?"

For a second, there was only silence.

You felt your fingers unconsciously tighten around the edge of the console as you kept your eyes fixed on the glass separating you from the main studio.

You knew that silence far too well.

Garrett always did that whenever he was nervous.

"I'd rather not give my name."

Alex smiled knowingly.

"Alright, we'll keep you anonymous. So, what would you like to share with us tonight?"

Silence settled over the line again, shorter this time. When Garrett spoke, his voice was much steadier.

"I want to apologize."

Alex nodded as naturally as if he heard confessions like this every week.

"I hope the right person is listening."

Garrett let out a quiet laugh.

"Oh, trust me... she is."

You felt your heart begin to race again, because he wasn't improvising.

He'd thought through every single word before dialing that number.

"A couple of days ago, I had an argument with someone," he continued, keeping a calm tone that contrasted far too much with the chaos raging inside you. "Honestly, the argument didn't even start over anything important. It started because I was convinced I could handle everything on my own... and I ended up making the only person who's always wanted to help me feel like I didn't need her."

Alex waited a few seconds before speaking again.

"Was that true?"

Garrett answered immediately.

"No."

There wasn't a trace of hesitation or doubt.

Just an answer so certain it left a knot in your throat.

"It never was."

You lowered your gaze to the console, trying to focus on anything else. You checked audio levels that were already perfectly balanced, pretended to read through the list of incoming calls still waiting in the queue, and even adjusted a couple of controls that didn't need adjusting.

Anything but admit your eyes were beginning to fill with tears.

"So... what happened?" Alex asked, using the calm, measured tone he always did whenever a conversation became more personal.

Garrett took a few seconds before answering.

"I guess I forgot that some people try to help you because they love you... not because they think you're incapable of handling things on your own."

The words landed exactly where they hurt the most.

Because that was exactly it.

You had never wanted to fix his life, and you'd never tried to tell him how he should play, study, or train. You'd just wanted him to rest. You just wanted him to be okay.

And he'd finally understood that.

"She showed up at my apartment with food," Garrett continued, a faint smile slipping into his voice before he could stop it. "I don't even remember what she'd cooked. All I remember is that she'd spent the entire week telling me I wasn't sleeping enough and that I was training too hard."

Alex smiled.

"Sounds like she was worried about you."

"She was."

He paused.

Just for a moment.

"And I was enough of an idiot to mistake her concern for pressure."

The entire studio fell silent.

Even Alex.

No one spoke for several seconds.

Neither could you.

Because for the first time since the call had begun, Garrett wasn't trying to justify what had happened.

He wasn't explaining why he'd been stressed.

He was simply taking responsibility.

And somehow, that hurt even more than the argument itself.

Garrett took another breath before continuing.

"I think the worst part wasn't what I said. It was the look on her face after she'd heard me. Like, for the first time... she'd started believing that being with me was a mistake."

You felt a tear slip free before you could stop it. You wiped it away quickly with the back of your hand, grateful that no one in the main studio could see you.

Only you knew this story wasn't anonymous.

Only you knew the boy on the other end of the line wasn't trying to impress anyone.

He was trying to win back the person he loved most.

And for the first time since the call had started, you began to realize that maybe Garrett hadn't called the radio station so the entire university would hear him.

He'd called because it was the only way he could make sure you wouldn't hang up before he had the chance to say everything he'd been keeping inside for far too long.

The silence that followed on the other end of the line lasted much longer than any of the others before it. Even Alex didn't seem to be in any hurry to speak again. He simply remained seated in front of the microphone, listening with the same attention that probably half the campus was giving him at that very moment. You couldn't take your eyes off the console either.

Garrett took a deep breath before continuing, and you recognized the sound instantly.

It was the same breath he always took before stepping onto the ice during the biggest games, when he was trying to organize his thoughts right before doing something that scared him.

"The worst part is that it took me way too long to understand what I'd actually done wrong," he admitted with a level of honesty that made another knot tighten in your throat. "All day, I kept thinking the problem was that I'd lost my temper. I figured all I had to do was apologize for the way I'd spoken, and that would be enough. But the more I thought about it... the more I realized that wasn't it."

He fell silent again, just for a moment.

"The problem was making her feel like she didn't have a place in my life."

You felt your eyes begin to sting again.

Garrett spoke before you could stop the flood of memories gathering in your mind.

"There are people who do huge things to show someone they love them. Trips, gifts, grand surprises... She never needed any of that. She always found a way to make me feel better with things so small that most of the time, I didn't even think twice about them."

A sad smile found its way onto your lips before you could stop it.

You knew exactly what he was talking about.

"She'd show up at my door with food whenever she knew I'd been stuck at practice for hours. She'd make me close my laptop whenever she caught me watching game footage for too long. She'd sit with me while I studied or went over plays, and she could spend an entire hour without saying a single word."

He paused.

"She was just... there."

His voice cracked ever so slightly on those last two words.

So slightly that probably no one else noticed.

You did.

You'd always been able to recognize every tiny shift in his voice.

"And I think I got too used to all of it," he continued after a few seconds. "I got so used to always having her by my side that I stopped telling her how important she was to me. I stopped thanking her when she'd cancel her own plans because I had a game the next day. I stopped noticing that she always brought my coffee exactly the way I liked it without me ever having to ask. I stopped thinking about how much effort she put into being there for me, even on my worst days... because I just assumed she'd always be there."

You pressed your lips together.

Alex was still completely silent. He had leaned back slightly in his chair, staring at the microphone with an expression unlike his usual one, as though he'd forgotten for a moment that he was hosting a radio show instead of listening in on a private conversation.

Garrett let out a quiet laugh.

A bitter one this time.

"I guess you only realize how much you depend on certain people when you wake up the next morning and find out they're not there anymore."

That sentence broke something inside you.

Because it had been your very first thought that morning, too.

Waking up.

Looking at your phone.

And realizing that, for the first time since you'd started dating, you weren't going to stop by his apartment after class, and you weren't going to get one of his ridiculous texts asking what you wanted for dinner.

One single day had been enough for everything to feel strangely empty.

Garrett stayed quiet for a few more seconds before leaning closer to the microphone again.

This time, his voice was much quieter.

Much more personal.

As if he'd completely forgotten there were hundreds of people listening to him.

"If you're listening... I need you to know something."

You made a futile attempt to hold your breath.

"I never wanted you to feel like you were a burden to me."

Your vision blurred completely with tears.

"The truth is exactly the opposite."

He paused.

A long pause.

Long enough for the entire studio to seem to hold its breath with you.

"You're the only place where I stop feeling all that pressure. The only place where I don't have to be the captain, the student, the player who's supposed to get everything right. When I'm with you... I get to just be Garrett. And I think yesterday I was so unbelievably selfish that I forgot to tell you you've always been the place where I love to rest. So I don't just want to apologize for one argument. I want to apologize for making you believe, even if it was only for five minutes, that you weren't exactly that to me. Because there hasn't been a single day when you weren't the best part of mine."

For several seconds, no one said a word.

Not Alex.

Not Garrett.

Not even you could bring yourself to move behind the console.

The entire studio remained wrapped in a strange silence, unlike any you'd ever heard since you started working there. It wasn't uncomfortable.

It was the kind of silence that settles in after the important words have already been spoken, when no one wants to ruin them by trying to fill the empty space.

Alex was the first to find his voice again.

He leaned a little closer to the microphone and smiled with the same calm warmth he always gave his listeners.

"I don't think I'm the right person to respond to all of that," he said with a sincerity that earned a few quiet laughs around the studio. "I just hope that, if that girl really is listening tonight, she'll remember that sometimes people make mistakes when they're most afraid of losing the things they love."

He paused briefly before continuing.

"Thank you for calling."

"Good night."

The line disconnected.

The small red light on the console switched off again, and the call disappeared from the screen as though it had never existed.

And yet, the knot in your chest hadn't moved at all.

The next few minutes passed almost on autopilot. The show continued as though nothing had happened. More calls came in, more songs played, and Alex carried on hosting the program with the same professionalism as always. You did your job the way you did every night, connecting lines, adjusting audio levels, and keeping an eye on the music schedule.

But you weren't really there anymore.

Part of you was still trapped in that phone call.

In every single word Garrett had said.

And most of all, in all the ones he'd never said before.

When the red studio light finally switched off for the last time and Alex announced the end of the show, it took you several seconds to react. You remained seated in front of the console with your headphones still on, watching the monitors go dark one by one as you tried to convince yourself that you needed to stand up.

It didn't work.

It was Alex who finally took your headphones off with an amused smile.

"I think you can stop pretending you're checking the audio now."

You blinked, pulled back into the present.

"What?"

He pointed at the console.

"You've been staring at the same screen for five minutes."

You looked down.

It wasn't even open.

A small, embarrassed laugh slipped out.

"Sorry."

Alex shook his head as he gathered his papers.

"Don't apologize to me."

He headed toward the studio door, and just before stepping out, he glanced back at you over his shoulder.

"Although I think there's someone out there who's been waiting to hear that apology for a while now."

You frowned slightly.

"What do you mean?"

He smiled.

"Go see for yourself."

And disappeared down the hallway.

You remained still for a few more seconds before finally standing up. You picked up your bag slowly, switched off the last of the lights on the console, and took one deep breath before opening the door that connected the booth to the main hallway.

The first thing you saw was a pair of sneakers.

Then a pair of jeans.

And finally, Garrett.

He was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, his elbows resting on his knees. He was still wearing the team's gray hockey hoodie, and his hair was a complete mess, as if he'd run his hand through it far too many times while he waited.

The moment he heard the door open, he looked up.

Your eyes met immediately.

He got to his feet.

For a moment, neither of you spoke.

Then Garrett let out a small smile.

Tired.

Nervous.

And completely genuine.

"Hey."

You felt the distance of the last twenty-four hours disappear with a single word.

"Hey."

Garrett slipped his hands into the pockets of his hoodie and slowly let out a breath.

"Dean said I'd probably need a backup plan in case the call didn't work."

You couldn't help smiling.

"And what was Plan B?"

He lowered his gaze for a few seconds before looking back at you.

"Wait here until you came out."

"And what if I'd taken all night?"

Garrett's smile grew just a little wider.

"Then I would've waited all night."

That answer shattered the last bit of resistance you were still trying to hold on to.

Without realizing it, you closed the distance between you until you were standing right in front of him.

"You're an idiot."

Garrett nodded slowly.

"I know."

"A really stubborn idiot."

"That too."

You shook your head as a laugh escaped through the tears you'd been trying so hard to hold back.

"Do you know what the worst part was?"

He didn't answer.

He simply waited, the way he always did whenever he truly wanted to listen.

"For a moment... I thought you didn't want me with you anymore."

You watched Garrett's entire expression change.

He carefully lifted one hand, as though he still wasn't sure he had the right to touch you, and with infinite gentleness, brushed a loose strand of hair away from your face.

"Don't ever think that again."

His voice was barely above a whisper.

But you'd never heard him sound more sincere.

"Yesterday, I was an idiot. I was exhausted, frustrated, and way too proud to admit I needed help. But not for a single second did I stop wanting you by my side."

You swallowed hard.

He took another slow step forward until only a few inches separated you.

"The next time you see me trying to carry everything on my own..."

A small smile tugged at his lips.

"...do exactly what you did this time. Get mad at me. Make me rest. Bring me food even if I complain. Because I need you to keep doing that. Not because I can't do it on my own... but because I love knowing that, when I get to the end of the day, you're still there."

The tears finally escaped before you could stop them, and this time you didn't even try to hide them.

You simply lifted both hands and rested them against his chest, right over the place where his heart was beating.

"You're terrible at apologizing."

Garrett let out a quiet laugh.

"I know."

"But I guess calling a radio station in front of the entire university earns you a few points."

"A few?"

"Not many."

He smiled.

And that smile—the very same one you'd fallen in love with months ago—finally convinced you that the argument had never been the real problem.

The real problem would've been letting pride speak louder than the love you still felt for each other.

Without another word, Garrett carefully wrapped an arm around your waist, waiting for a sign that he could pull you the rest of the way into his arms.

You were the one who took the final step.

You rested your forehead against his and closed your eyes as a peaceful smile spread across your lips.

Because, in the end, you realized Garrett hadn't called the radio station so the entire university could hear how much he loved you.

He'd called because he was willing to swallow every ounce of his pride just to make sure you would never doubt it again.

[blacksailsblr]

BLACK SAILS 2.01 “IX.”

[chvoswxtch]

please don't be mad

pairing: matt murdock x fem!reader

summary: matt’s run in with his ex has you questioning everything about your relationship, and he’s determined to prove himself to you.

warnings: cursing, lots of angst, fluffy ending, matty being a typical dumbass, explicit sexual content (minors dni)

word count: 7.2k

a/n: psa, I am not an elektra anti. I would happily fuck her too. this is once again purely selfish matty content I couldn’t get out of my head. a huge thank you to my darling @yourbucky084 for beta reading, helping edit & providing such helpful feedback.  also a big thank you to @pleasurebuttonwrites for helping me figure out what the fuck is behind matty’s bed for this fic lmao. I appreciate you both so much! as always, feedback is welcomed/appreciated!

[part two]

It felt like I had been staring at the wall in the darkness for hours. My body was aching, begging me to move from my current position lying on my side that I had been stubbornly stuck in for the past forty five minutes, but under absolutely no circumstances would I turn over. I would deal with my body’s stiffness tomorrow. I had tried, and failed, several times to get my brain to just shut off. I silently pleaded for the sweet blanket of unconsciousness to wash over me so that I could get a break from all the noise in my head. Tonight was the worst night to be an insomniac.

“Angel?”

I squeezed my eyes shut when I heard his low voice cut through the silence. Asshole. He knew the effect that his voice had on me, especially at that volume. I tried my hardest to get my aggravated breathing under control to a slow, steady pace. My heart was the one that wouldn’t cooperate. It was still thudding angrily against my chest. I heard a deep sigh cut through the darkness and a rustling of sheets behind me.

“Sweetheart, I know you’re not asleep.”

I felt the bed dip beside me as he turned onto his side to face my back. Despite the coldness of the bedroom, I could feel the heat radiating off his body. Normally, we’d be tangled up together. I always slept best with my head on his chest, leg slung lazily over his hips, completely wrapped up in his arms and warmth. But tonight, I wanted to be as far away from him as possible. 

“Honey, please.”

I grit my teeth and flung the covers off my body, shivering slightly as the awaiting cold nipped at my exposed skin and caused goosebumps to appear everywhere. I gripped onto my pillow and ripped it off the bed, hastily rounding the corner towards the refuge of the living room.

“Goodnight, Matthew.”

Before I had a chance to slide the door open, Matt was on his feet and in front of me in a flash. He gently wrapped his arm around my wrist to halt my movements and firmly grabbed onto my hip to hold me in place.

“Y/N…you’re not sleeping on the couch, come on.”

“Fine. You are.”

I shoved the pillow roughly against Matt’s bare chest, grabbing the handle on the door and sliding it back so hard into the track it nearly made the entire apartment shake. Matt winced at the sound, squinting his eyes and turning his head away from the door. Normally I would have felt bad about the noise considering his sensitive hearing, but tonight I didn’t really give a fuck about his comfort. He sighed deeply as he tossed the pillow onto the bed and took a step towards me.

“Sweetheart, I really don’t want to go to bed angry. Please.”

“Well maybe you should’ve thought of that earlier Matthew, before you hooked up with your ex at a fucking party and tried to lie about it.”

“Y/N that’s...that’s not what happened. I told you, we just kissed…and I explained why.”

“Right, and I’m supposed to just take your word for it? After you’ve told me how many lies tonight Matthew?”

“I didn’t-”

“You blew me and Foggy off because you said you had an ‘important meeting’ with your special ‘client’. And then you come through that door, wearing a disheveled tux, with the collar covered in red lipstick I might add, and I find out you actually went to a gala with her.”

“Because she had a lead about information that could help take down the Yakuza!”

I had been seeing violent shades of red ever since Matt walked through the front door. I was pissed when I saw that he was wearing a tux, which was not what he had left Foggy and I’s company in, but the second I spotted the lipstick on his collar, I was fucking livid. Matt must have sensed the shift in my emotions because he immediately pulled off his glasses and raised his hands up slowly in surrender, quickly spitting out an “I can explain”.

My blood only began to boil at the mention of her name. Elektra. Matt had reluctantly, and very briefly, told me about her one night when we had first started dating. The gaps that he left, Foggy unenthusiastically filled in later on. He very clearly had not been a fan of hers, and I grew to understand why.

The more I learned about her, the more my disdain grew for the way she treated Matt. The way she left him..and what she had tried to do to him..what she had tried to make him do before she disappeared. I couldn’t believe he would actually want to be around her again after everything she had put him through. She had almost ruined his life, and after that night, he said he never wanted to speak about her again. I didn’t press it. I didn’t want to upset him, and honestly I didn’t care if I ever heard her name again. All I wanted to do was make up for her faults, and show Matt how much he deserved to be loved. I promised him that I would always accept him for exactly who he was. I never once tried to change him. Not like her.

I was beyond incandescent when her name so easily rolled off his tongue. I had been seething all night since his earlier confession. I was pissed she’d had the audacity to show up after all these years just to torment him all over again. But mainly, I was outraged at Matt for letting her, and for lying to me about it. When he finally came clean about being Daredevil, he swore he would never lie again, no matter what. While anger coursed through my veins, there were hints of hurt and betrayal that made every rush sting even more.

“And that makes it all okay?”

“No, of course it doesn’t. I just..I need you to understand that’s all it was, okay? A mission. That’s it. The last thing I ever wanted was to see her again, but she had something I needed. Something that could help me actually get rid of them, for good this time. I couldn’t pass that up. They’re too dangerous.”

“Then why did you lie about it? If that’s all it was, why couldn’t you tell me the truth? Why couldn’t you tell Foggy the truth?”

Matt averted his head downwards, placing both of his hands on his hips as he stood there silently. His lips parted slightly, taking in a deep breath as if the words he was searching for would be laced within the oxygen hitting his lungs.

“I don’t know. I just..I didn’t want to start a fight. I’m sorry. Please…don’t be mad.”

That rage that had been brewing inside me ever since he walked through that door was suddenly bubbling like molten lava, and I was about to fucking erupt. I grabbed the closest thing on the nightstand and flung it directly at Matt’s head. I knew it wouldn’t actually hit him, not that I really wanted to, but I couldn’t think straight through all my fury. He dodged the vase just in time as the ceramic shattered in cataclysmic pieces against the wall, shock written evidently all over his features by my uncharacteristic outburst.

“Mad? You think I’m mad? I’m fucking furious, Matthew! There aren’t words strong enough for how I feel right now. You lied. Again. And I’m supposed to, what, just be okay with it? Just be okay with the fact that you’re dressing up and running around New York with your ex to lavish galas because it’s for the greater fucking good?”

“Sweetheart, it was just for information, okay? I swear. Look by the time we found the ledger, they already knew we were there. We snuck a floor down and pretended to be a lost drunk couple so that we didn’t get shot. It was strictly a distraction. If they had found us and figured out what we were actually doing, they would’ve killed us.”

“Well if she’s so fucking impressive, why didn’t she go by herself? She didn’t need you there, she wanted you there. And you willingly went. You could have said no.”

Matt ran a hand through his messy brown hair, clearly annoyed that I wasn’t seeing things his way, and rubbed his palm across the stubble on his right cheek. He dropped his hands to place them on his hips once again and shook his head slowly, pointing his chin in my direction.

“You’re right. I should’ve said no. I should’ve let her go alone, and I should’ve told you the truth from the beginning. I just…I really didn’t want to start a fight.”

“I’m done fighting with you, Matthew.”

I felt completely drained, like all the life had been sucked out of me steadily ever since he walked through that door. Our fight earlier was explosive, definitely the worst one we’ve ever had. One of the only ones we’ve ever had. I thought it had depleted all of my energy, but the way he kept trying to justify his actions kept fueling the fire. I was tired of being lied to. I was tired of him disregarding my feelings about this whole situation, and not even trying to understand why I felt the way I did. I was tired of feeling like I had to fight to keep my place in his life. I don’t even remember why I agreed to stay over at his place tonight. I should’ve just gone home.

“Don’t...don’t say that. Please. Your voice makes it sound like you’re giving up.”

“Maybe I am Matthew. This was a mistake. I’m going home.”

“No…no no no. Don’t say things like that, please. Look don’t…don’t go. Please, Y/N. It’s late and you’re upset and I...I don’t want you out walking the streets alone right now-”

“I don’t really care what you want right now.”

Matt quickly snatched my overnight bag out of my hands as soon as I reached for it and tossed it across the room with annoying accuracy. I futilely shoved at his chest when he grabbed onto my arms and pulled me in close, but it was no use. He was a lot stronger than I was, and on top of that I was exhausted. I didn’t have any fight left in me for tonight, and there was no escaping the cage of his embrace.

“Please let go.”

“I can’t. I can’t, sweetheart. I need you, please. Look I fucked up, okay? I know that. I fucked up and I’m so sorry. I know you’re probably sick of hearing me say that, but I am. Just...please don’t leave. I love you, Y/N. Let me..let me make it up to you. Let me show you how much I love you.”

My eyes widened as the words dripping with suggestion left his mouth. I tilted my head back and stared up at him dumbfounded, a humorless laugh leaving my lips as I managed to find a surge of strength to push as hard as I could at Matt’s chest and finally shove him backwards.

“Are you fucking joking? You have some goddamn balls, Matthew Murdock. Are you seriously asking me for sex right now? You think that’s gonna fix this?”

“I’m not asking, I’m offering. I know you need it.”

“You don’t know anything. What the hell makes you think I want anything to do with you right now? Why would I even want to kiss you, knowing all I’m going to be able to taste is her.”

Matthew Murdock was one cocky son of a bitch, and his audacity never ceased to amaze me. He clenched his jaw slightly as spite flowed from my lips, hands balling up into tight fists at his sides as he let out a controlled deep breath. His features morphed into an expression of distress as he took slow calculated steps closer towards me and inhaled, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment. His eyes were a shade darker when they opened and his tongue quickly darted out to swipe across his bottom lip as he squared his shoulders. I knew that look, and it caused a shiver to cascade down my spine. 

“Then why don’t you let me have a taste, hm? I don’t want you to taste anything else on my tongue except yourself. I don’t want to taste anything else but you.”

Matt tilted his head to the side slightly, his blank honey eyes fixated right in my direction, trying to sense anything that would give me away. He waited silently to taste the effect of his words in the air as they began to seep from my core, and feel the rise of heat that flushed across my chest and the tops of my cheeks. He waited for the anger to dissipate into desire. Matt Murdock was not a very patient man, but the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen was when it came to outsmarting his prey. He set the trap, and waited for me to fall into it. He knew I would. It had been too long, and he knew me too damn well. Matt always knew how to melt the icy barrier I hid beneath, rendering me a needy puddle in his capable hands. The twitch of his jaw and fleeting uptick of his lips let me know he had gotten exactly what he was waiting for.

“I can smell you, sweetheart. Your need...your want. It’s palpable. I can feel it in my own veins. I can practically taste you from here. It’s been what…two weeks? Two weeks since I’ve touched you. I haven’t been paying attention to you like I should have been. I haven’t been very good to you lately. I’ve been neglecting you, and I’m so sorry for that. Please...let me make up for it. Use me.”

Use me.

My mouth suddenly felt dry as it clicked in my brain exactly what he meant. Matt knew what he was doing. I was a sucker for his voice, especially when he used his “devil” voice on me, and he never hesitated to use it to his advantage. He knew it would make me crumble. It always did. He knew exactly how to get what he wanted, how to win. He masked every single one of his sinful words behind that velvet voice, and I loved it. Matt took my silence as an invitation to move even closer, his voice becoming dangerously low as he spoke.

“You don’t have to touch me. You can have my fingers, my mouth, whatever you want. I can feel how frustrated you are. I know how badly you need this. So let me help. Take it all out on me. Use me, sweetheart.”

I felt like I was being pulled in a million different directions in my head. A tiny, logical piece of my brain wanted me to smack him. It was yelling at me to not give in. To instead tell him to fuck off, get my things, and just go. The other part of my brain wanted me to just call it a night. Just let go of all the anger, try to get some sleep, and discuss the future of our relationship in the morning when we were both level headed. But both of those thoughts were completely drowned out by the ache beginning to throb uncomfortably between my thighs.

I was just as sexually frustrated as I was...well...regularly frustrated. I couldn’t remember the last time Matt had kissed me, or touched me, or even told me he loved me. He had been so busy lately, I felt like we only saw each other in passing like forgotten ships in the night. My body yearned for him. He knew it better than anyone, sometimes even better than I did. He always knew what I needed. 

My renegade eyes traveled over Matt’s exposed muscular chest as I got lost in my inner turmoil, paying extra attention to how his sweatpants and briefs hung treacherously low on his hips. I had spent so many moments mapping out every inch of his skin and every visible scar with my fingers and tongue. If I focused really hard, I could feel the tautness of his abs on my fingertips from whenever he got close to releasing in my mouth. I could hear the gravel in his voice as he whispered vivid dirty details of his plans for me into my ear. I could taste the tanginess of my own release on his lips as he kissed me after bringing me to climax with his skilled tongue.

I felt a warm rush of arousal pool between my thighs. The soft groan that exuded from Matt’s lips let me know he had noticed it. He always knew when I was wet for him. I could never hide from him. His tongue swiped along his bottom lip as he stared just above me, his fists tightening at his sides so hard his bruised knuckles were stark white. I know he wanted nothing more than to rush forward and take me, fuck it all out, and beg for forgiveness when he finally sent me over the edge...but he stayed still. Matt had always been the dominant one in our relationship, and I liked it that way. I never knew I could find so much freedom in completely giving myself over to someone. I trusted Matt. I loved when he took control. I craved being submissive to him, so much so that it would have been embarrassing if it weren’t so fucking satisfying. I didn’t know if I had it in me to be the one in control, especially not with the headspace I was in. I was desperately grasping at the frayed edges of my anger, but the way he was staring at me with those ravenous wild eyes had me letting go without a second thought.

“I..I don’t..I’m not sure if I..”

Matt reached out to gently take my hand into his, brushing his thumb over the back of my knuckles and giving it a soft squeeze. Somehow he always understood me, even when I couldn’t get the words out. He just knew. 

“Don’t worry, I’ll help you. I got you, sweetheart.”

Matt slowly sunk down onto his knees in front of me, head tilted back to keep his gaze up towards my face. I felt my breath hitch in my throat as he hooked his index fingers under the seam of my panties, pulling them down my legs carefully as he brushed his fingers tenderly along the back of my knee and the side of my calf. He turned his head slightly to place a chaste kiss to my inner thigh and I felt him smile against my skin when I let out an involuntary whine. He tapped my ankle lightly to signal for me to step out of my panties, balling them up into his hand and shoving them into the pocket of his sweatpants. 

Matt placed several more scorching kisses up the expanse of my legs and over my thighs as he slowly rose up from his knees, towering over me once he stood to his full height. He gestured his head towards the bed and began to walk backwards.

“Come here.”

I watched him in confusion as he took his place on the bed, glancing down at the spot on the floor in front of me where he had just been.

“What…what um...”

“You’re gonna ride my face.”

I nearly choked on my own spit, my eyes widening in shock as I watched Matt move to lay flat on his back on the mattress. Matt Murdock was no stranger to eating me out. Sometimes I think he enjoyed it almost as much as I did. There were times I had to practically pry him away, nearly in tears from overstimulation because he just kept going and going and going. He’d had his face buried between my thighs countless times, but never like that.

“W-What?”

“You’re gonna sit on my face, you’re gonna ride my tongue until you come, and you’re gonna keep going until you feel satisfied. If you wanna go all fucking night, we will. You don’t stop until you get what you need.”

Even though he was offering to let me take control, there was still a dominant edge to his voice that made my knees weak. Matt reached his hand out for me to take, his eyes blankly moving back and forth as he waited to sense my presence come near. I was frozen with apprehension. I wanted it, God did I want it, but I was nervous. I had seen a picture of Elektra once. We looked nothing alike, figure wise. I had a very curvy figure. I had wider hips and thick thighs, and while I knew Matt was very strong, I also knew I would die of embarrassment if I had to explain how I nearly suffocated my boyfriend from trying to ride his face for the first time.

“Don’t.”

“What?”

I blinked a few times as I stared over at Matt, taking a few cautious steps forward until I stood next to the bed. I reached out slowly to grab onto his hand and swallowed thickly when he tugged me closer, pressing a reassuring kiss to each of my knuckles.

“Don’t think so hard. Just come here and let me make you feel better, please.”

I tried to let go of all my trepidation with a deep exhale, capturing my bottom lip between my teeth as I climbed up onto the bed. I let go of Matt’s hand momentarily to pull my oversized sleep shirt over my head so that it wouldn’t get in the way. I swung my leg over Matt’s waist and straddled his chest. He quickly grabbed onto my hips and pulled me up further with impressive speed, causing me to gasp and brace my hands against the wall.

“Jesus, Matt. Slow down.”

“Sorry, I’m sorry. I just...fuck...can you get up here? Please, baby?”

I wasn’t used to Matt sounding so needy. That was usually my role. I was always the one begging for him…begging for more. Hearing how desperately he wanted to taste me sent a tidal wave of lust dripping down my thighs, and Matt growled lowly in his throat at that. His fingertips dug roughly into the soft flesh of my thighs and his hips bucked upwards slightly. I stared down at him in awe, feeling an overwhelming sense of pride and confidence from the way he was reacting. 

“Sweetheart...please...I’m begging you. Let me make you come until you can’t walk. Come on angel...be a good girl for me and come ride my face, yeah? Let me show you how much I want you. Only want you.”

Between his strained begging and the way he moved his head to get closer to where I was soaked, I couldn’t take it anymore. My pussy seemed to have a mind of its own because before I could stop myself, I was settling my knees on either side of Matt’s head and bracing my hands onto the wall to steady myself, preparing to lower myself languidly. Matt however had other plans. In an instant, Matt had a bruising iron grip on my thighs and had roughly pulled my soaking cunt down on his face. One of my hands immediately flew down to grip at his hair as I moaned loudly when I felt his tongue slip inside me. Matthew Murdock was extremely talented with his mouth, which made him an exceptional lawyer, but an even more sensational lover. 

His mouth was so warm as he ravaged me, and I felt myself already having a difficult time staying upright. Matt’s large hand came down hard against my ass and I cried out as it surged me forward, the action causing his nose to bump divinely against my clit as his tongue explored my pussy like it was the first time all over again. It took one more slap for me to get the hint and I slowly started to move my hips against his face. The muffled moan of approval that sounded beneath me only spurred me on to roll my hips back and forth delicately like an easy tide. I gripped tightly onto Matt’s hair and tugged hard which caused a groan to reverberate enticingly against my clit. 

I could feel him moving slightly around on the bed behind me and glanced over my shoulder to see him rolling his hips upwards into the air in time with my own pace. I could see the perfect outline of his impressive cock as it strained against the barrier of his sweatpants. There was already a wet patch forming which drove me even more crazy. He was really fucking enjoying this. It never failed to turn me on even further seeing how much Matt got off to getting me off.

My breaths became more jagged and struggled to be released from my chest the closer I got to the edge. I should’ve felt pathetic about being so close to coming undone so quickly, but it had been weeks. I whined loudly as I began to grind my hips down back and forth on his tongue, welcoming the burn of his facial hair rubbing roughly against my inner thighs. I had gotten so used to his touch that I felt like I was completely starving after two weeks without it. I hadn’t even bothered trying to get myself off because I knew it would be no use. I couldn’t come without Matt, not since the first night I let him touch me and make himself at home between my thighs. Nothing compared to him.

“M-Matty...oh god...please...”

Matt clamped both of his large hands down on my thighs to hold me in place, wrapping his plump lips around my swollen clit to suck on it feverishly. I could feel him moaning against my core and it only brought me closer and closer to where I wanted to be. It was so close...so fucking close. My entire body felt tense with anticipation as I waited impatiently to be tossed over the edge into pure ecstasy. It felt like a rubber band within me was being stretched impossibly thin, and I just needed it to fucking snap already. 

“Maaaatty…please please please..”

I don’t even know what I was asking for, but he knew. He always knew. Matt granted me mercy as he quickened the pace of his tongue, flickering over my clit like a flame trying to withstand the wind. He gently bit down on my sensitive nub, causing me to explode with pure bliss. I rocked my hips against his face messily as I kept my tight grip on his hair. A high pitched whine left my lips when I felt a growl rip through his chest as I finally came into his mouth. I glanced down just in time to see his eyes nearly roll into the back of his head from my taste hitting his tongue, a satisfied primal groan resonating against my core. Matt wouldn’t let me budge until he greedily lapped up every drop of nectar my body had to offer. My thighs shook aggressively as I tried to ride out one of the most powerful orgasms I’d ever had. My body felt entirely too heavy, and the only reason I hadn’t collapsed was because Matt was still holding me up. He detached his lips just for a split second, baring his teeth in menacing snarl.

“Go for another one, sweetheart. I told you…we can stay here all fucking night.”

I glanced down to see the lower half of Matt’s face completely coated in my glimmering wetness. His lips were swollen and red, a sheen of sweat glistening on his forehead, panting as he tried desperately to catch his own breath. His hair was sticking up in odd directions from my hazardous gripping and his eyes were blown open so wide, I could see the devil in them, waiting for me to unlock his chains. I whimpered as I felt his tongue teasing at my folds, trying my hardest to pull away from his eager mouth.

“I..I c-can’t..ah fuck Matty…please…let me down...please...”

Matt grabbed onto my hips and lifted me up gently, helping me onto my back on the spot right beside him. My body was still trembling with aftershocks of pleasure when I felt the warm weight of his body on top of mine. His lips left a burning trail of kisses down the column of my neck, between the valley of my breasts, and along my lower stomach. I whined when I felt his warm breath wavering against my clit.

“Shh...let me take care of you, sweetheart. I’ll do all the work. Just lay back and let me make it better.”

“Matty...please. I just want you, please.”

I hadn’t forgiven him. I was still hurt and angry, and there was so much we needed to talk about. But right now, I just needed him. I needed to feel him. I needed to feel our bodies connected together, like they belonged to one another. I needed him to tell me everything would be okay as he held my hand and made love to me. I needed to know he was still mine. 

I could feel tears pricking at the corners of my eyes as he hovered over me and I grabbed onto his face to pull him down in a searing kiss. I could feel him sigh in content and relief against my mouth, sliding his hand under my back to pull me up closer so that could press our chests together. I could feel his heartbeat thundering against my own in a perfect symphony. As I pushed at the waistband of his sweatpants, he gently grabbed onto my wrist and broke the kiss to lean his forehead against mine.

“Sweetheart, I told you…you don’t have to touch me.”

“I need to, Matty. I need it, please. I need you.”

Matt stilled at my sobbing plea and brought one of his large hands up to brush the scattered tears away with his thumb, cupping my cheek in his hand as he gazed down at me in pure concern.

“Angel, what’s wrong? Talk to me. Was it too much? Do I need to stop?”

“No...no please don’t. I just...I need you, Matty. I need you here.”

“I am here, sweetheart.”

“I need you to stay here. You can’t...you can’t just ignore me for two weeks and then run off with someone else, Matt. You can’t do that to me...especially not with her. So...if this is it, then I want-”

“Hey, no. This is not it. Don’t talk like that. Listen to me...I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’m so sorry. I’ll never do that again, I swear. You mean everything to me, alright? I’m not going anywhere, sweet girl. I’m right here. And I don’t want you to worry about her. She’s on the first flight out of New York in the morning, okay? She’s not coming back. It’s just you and me, my love. I’m right here. I love you.”

“Then show me.”

I didn’t wait for him as I braced my palms against his broad chest and pushed with all the strength I had left, rising up onto my knees as I pushed him down onto his back. I ignored his faint protests, grabbing at the waistband of his briefs and sweatpants to tug them down in one swift motion as quickly as possible. I pressed my palm hard against his chest to keep him down when he tried to sit up, climbing onto his lap and positioning myself over his impatient cock. The tip was swollen with lust and weeping with need, standing proudly at attention above his stomach, waiting for me. I didn’t take my time to slowly lower myself down like I normally did. No matter how many times Matt had been inside me, ruined me, I always had to adjust to his size. 

We both cried out in unison when I sank down completely, and his hands flew up to seize my hips. Being on top always required the most accommodation, but I loved having him like this. I could feel him everywhere. All I wanted was to be completely filled to the brim and consumed entirely by him. I winced as the sting of my walls being stretched to their limits pierced through my lower half. 

“Fuck, sweetheart. Easy easy…don’t hurt yourself. We can take it slow-fuck!”

I ignored every single one of Matt’s words as I sat up straight and began to swivel my hips in purposeful circles. It burned, God did it burn, but I wanted it. I wanted it all. I didn’t know if I believed Matt’s words. I didn’t know if the love he had for me would ever compare to what he had felt for her, what he might still feel for her. I didn’t know that I believed tonight wasn’t it for us. But all that I wanted was a reminder, that this had been real. That Matt had been real, and he had been mine. I would take the pain willingly if it meant I’d be able to feel him for the next few days. I’d happily be haunted by the ache he left between my thighs to remind myself that this was real.

Every drawn out moan of my name that rang in my ears, every breathless pant, every plea of oh my god and every praise of fuck sweetheart kept me moving even though I felt like my legs were seconds away from giving up. I threw my head back towards the heavens, hoping God would understand my prayers and what I needed through the form of Matt’s name. On my knees above him, I prayed. And I prayed and I prayed and I prayed. 

I didn’t know if the tears falling freely down my cheeks were from being pushed to my limit physically, or mentally, but I cried out when Matt sat up fully to wipe them away from my cheeks, reaching farther inside me than I ever thought possible. I whined when I felt his hand wrap delicately around my throat, his thumb and index finger holding my chin in a firm grasp as he captured my lips. 

“Shh…it’s alright sweetheart. I’m here. I’m right here. Doing so well for me, angel. Always so good to me. Let me take care of you.”

Matt brought my arms up to wrap around his neck, grabbing my hips gently to flip our bodies over and lay me down into the sanctuary of silk covered pillows. He pulled my legs tightly around his waist, locking his own hips in place against mine. One hand came up to intertwine our fingers together, squeezing my hand in reassurance as he placed his other forearm directly beside my head. Pressing our foreheads together, brushing his nose and lips against mine, Matt began to oscillate his hips at a tender speed, allowing me to feel every detailed stroke of him against my tight walls.

“My perfect girl. Can’t you feel how perfect we fit together, Y/N? Can’t you feel how perfect you are for me?”

I couldn’t handle the vulnerability in his featherlight whispers. It tugged so hard on the strings of my heart, I thought they might snap. I tried to whisper his name, respond with something coherent, but all I could manage was a needy whimper. Matt let go of my hand for just a second, slipping his own between our bodies to press down on the bulge in my lower stomach.

“You can feel me here, can’t you sweetheart?”

I grabbed onto the back of his neck urgently, digging my nails into the muscle of his upper back to anchor him in place. I tried to nod, tried to hide my face into the refuge of his neck to escape his inexorable gaze, but he wasn’t having any of that. Matt’s hand was quickly covering my throat again, his hold on my chin a little tighter this time, forcing my eyes to meet his.

“I am not going anywhere. Nothing could ever take me away from you. Not her, not Fisk, no one. Not even God himself could keep me from you.”

His caramel coated eyes were staring so hard down into mine, it knocked the breath out of me. For a second, I felt like Matt could actually see me. His stare only grew in intensity as his thrusts became more precise. 

“Listen to me, sweetheart. You are mine. And I am yours. We belong to no one else, but each other. I’m gonna marry you someday, Y/N. Someday soon. I want nothing more than for you to be my wife, my perfect girl. My angel. There’s no one else I want by my side for the rest of my life. No one else who understands me better than you do. No one else that accepts me like you do. No one else that’s as good to me as you are. I will do whatever it takes to prove that to you. I will put a ring on your finger tomorrow. I will put a baby in you tonight.”

A sharp gasp mixed with a breathless moan echoed from my lips at Matt’s words. I knew Matt wanted to get married someday, and I always hoped it would be to me. We had very briefly had a conversation about kids once. He knew that I wanted them, and said that he did too. Someday. While marriage I knew we could make work, I wasn’t sure about the kids part. I didn’t know if I could handle having a child with him when he still needed the other side of him, and I didn’t know if he would ever know when he wouldn’t need that side of him anymore. It was a tricky conversation I wasn’t ready to try and navigate. I didn’t want to risk losing Matt, and I would never ask him to give up something that was so important to him. But the conviction in his voice, the certainty of his words, made me lightheaded. Matt tilted his head to the side slightly, a sense of recognition softening his gaze as a light smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

“That what you want, sweetheart? Hm? That what you need? Taking my last name and growing our baby inside you to remind you every day that I’m yours?”

“Matty…”

“You want all of me, don’t you angel? C’mon, tell me. Tell me you want all of me.”

“I…God, Matty…want all of you, please.”

“I love you, Y/N. You love me, don’t you? C’mon baby, tell me you love me.”

“I love you, Matty. I, oh God, love you so much…”

“Say you’ll marry me. Gonna ask properly, I promise, but I need to hear you say it. Tell me, sweetheart.”

“Yes Matty…yes I’ll marry you.”

I knew Matt was listening intently to my heartbeat with every answer that spilled from me, searching for any falter in rhythm that would tell him I wasn’t telling the truth. That I was just obeying his orders. But I wasn’t lying. I meant every word. I knew that Matt knew that from the mouth splitting grin that took over his entire face.

“That’s my girl. My perfect girl. Now, tell me I can come inside. We can start our family tonight, sweetheart. C’mon, tell me you want it, and you’ll be pregnant before the sun comes up. Let me hear it, angel.”

“Please Matty, please. Please come inside me. I want our family. I want it all. Please Matty, make me yours.”

Matt tightened his grip slightly on my throat, silencing my cries of pleasure with his lips. His pace remained gentle and loving, but his thrusts were powerful and meticulous, relentlessly hitting that spot inside me that had me swimming in constellations that appeared behind my eyelids every single time. It didn’t take much longer for me to plunge from the peak of exhilaration, free falling into uninhibited gratification below that was completely and irrevocably Matt.

I felt tingles sparking throughout my extremities as my body spasmed in rolling blackouts of delectation, causing my walls to clench unforgivably around Matt’s cock. I could feel the rhythm of his hips stuttering into short, staccato bursts as he finally reached his own crescendo. The pure satisfaction entangled in the legato moans of his climax wrapped around me like a warm blanket, lulling me into a state of ease. For the first time all night, joy buzzed in my bloodstream, and I was able to silence the roaring of my insecurity.

Matt was here. Matt loved me. Matt was mine.

I hugged him as close and tightly to my chest as I could, refusing to unlock my legs from around his waist when I felt him start to pull back.

“Don’t, please. Just stay. Just wanna stay like this.”

Matt pressed a soft kiss to my forehead and allowed his lips to linger there for a moment before marking my nose, cheeks, and lips in his adoration. He nuzzled his head into my neck and I felt him inhale my scent deeply before sighing in content.

“Alright, sweetheart. We can stay like this.”

I basked in the comfortable silence for a moment, allowing my brain to process every single one of Matt’s words. I felt a childlike sense of giddiness, like when you were a kid and you knew you were getting the exact gift you wanted for Christmas. You had peeked, and spoiled it for yourself, but still felt unfiltered excitement anyway. The gift itself didn’t matter as much as the feeling of knowing that it was what you wanted and it was yours. 

Matt Murdock was my gift. The one thing I always wanted, the only thing that mattered, that was all mine.

I threaded my fingers lightly through his hair, occasionally massaging at his scalp and smiling at the hums of gratitude that vibrated against my neck. 

“Matty?”

“Hm?”

“You know I’m still on birth control, right?”

“I know, sweetheart. It doesn’t hurt to start practicing though, does it?”

I could feel his smile against my skin. If I closed my eyes, I could see it. I knew exactly which one it was. I couldn’t help but giggle at his response, tightening my arms around his back.

“Well, if that’s the case, then we’ve been practicing for over a year Matty. Sometimes several times a day.”

Matt pulled his head back just enough so that he could face me, bumping his nose against my own as a devilish grin stretched across his soft lips.

“I like to be prepared.”

[kooksandpearls]

garrett graham ❄︎ forty-four.

pairing – garrett graham x nursing student!reader summary – garrett finds out his girlfriend got his number tattooed on her body and reacts about as calmly as anyone could expect. warnings – 18+, explicit smut, oral sex, fingering, rough sex, doggy style, spanking, praise kink, dirty talk, tattoo reveal. notes from me – ANYWAAYYYYYYY!!!!!! as promised, yeah sorry i had to do it. this comes at the most 'recent' end of their timeline!! so i'll be going back and filling in gaps now, i was just desperate to post this! word count – 6.9k

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The second-skin comes off on Tuesday morning in the shower, which is less ceremonial than the tattoo probably deserves. She peels it carefully from one corner beneath warm water, watching the clear film lift away from her lower back in the fogged mirror with the awkward concentration of somebody trying to inspect a body part positioned almost specifically to prevent self-assessment. 

The little forty-four underneath is darker than it will be once it settles completely, the skin around it faintly pink and shiny, but the numbers are clean. No leaking. No angry redness. No warmth beyond what she would expect from a healing tattoo and a hot shower.

She pats it dry with a clean towel, applies a thin smear of unscented moisturiser and spends the next two days pretending she hasn’t developed a habit of turning sideways every time she passes a mirror.

Garrett still doesn’t know. That part becomes funnier with time.

He spends Wednesday night in the hockey-house kitchen complaining that she’s been suspiciously affectionate since the weekend, as though her sitting sideways across his lap is evidence of organised crime. He pulls her closer each time she tries to stand, mouth finding the side of her neck while Dean watches from across the island with the hollow expression of a man being punished for sins committed in a previous life.

“What’re you hiding?” Garrett murmurs against her skin.

“Nothing.”

“You said that too fast.”

“You ask stupid questions.”

His hand slides under the back of her sweatshirt, warm palm settling over the curve of her waist less than an inch above the tattoo. She goes still for one sharp second, then catches his wrist and drags his hand around to her stomach before his fingers can wander lower.

Garrett narrows his eyes. She kisses him before the investigation can advance.

By Friday, the secret has begun to feel hot, because it’s his. A tiny private mark resting beneath her clothes while Garrett walks beside her across campus with one hand hooked through the strap of her bag, completely unaware that forty-four is inked into her skin. 

He complains about practice. She complains about an exam question that used the phrase most appropriate intervention despite three answers being clinically reasonable. His thumb finds the bare strip of her wrist where her sleeve has ridden up. All the while, his number is sitting just above the waistband of her jeans.

The thought stays with her when he arrives at her dorm that night.

Her roommate has gone to visit her parents for the weekend, and Garrett appears just after nine in grey sweats and a black hoodie and cheeks pink from the cold. He has a backpack over one shoulder, though she doubts it contains a single item remotely connected to studying. The last time he brought a textbook to her room, it remained unopened beneath her desk for three days while Garrett insisted proximity counted as academic effort.

“Hi, baby,” he says when she opens the door.

She barely gets the lock turned before his hands are on her. It begins with one kiss, which is how most of their poor decisions begin now. Garrett catches her waist and pulls her into him with the deep, satisfied exhale of someone who’s spent the whole walk across campus anticipating exactly this. 

His mouth is cold from outside and warm beneath it, lips moving over hers slowly while she hooks both hands into the front of his hoodie and walks him backward toward the bed.

“You missed me,” he murmurs.

“I saw you this morning.”

“Exactly.”

“You slept in my bed.”

He shakes his head. “Not long enough.”

The backs of his knees hit the mattress. Garrett sits and draws her down with him before she can pretend she intended anything else, her legs opening around his hips as she settles over his lap.

The first press of him beneath her is enough to strip whatever remained of the evening’s patience. He’s already half hard through the soft fabric of his sweats, heat and shape caught between them when she rolls her hips forward. 

Garrett’s head tips back slightly. The smile that moves across his mouth is slow and knowing, his hands spreading over her hips beneath the oversized hoodie she’s stolen from him so many times it’s practically transferred ownership.

“There she is,” he murmurs.

She catches his curls at the back of his head and brings his mouth to hers before he can become any more pleased with himself. The kiss turns wet and deep almost immediately, Garrett’s tongue sliding over hers while she grinds down again, a little harder, friction catching warm between her thighs through the thin cotton of her sleep shorts and underwear.

He groans against her mouth. His fingers tighten. “Fuck, baby.”

Her hoodie is too warm suddenly. The dorm room is too small, too dim, the little lamp beside her bed throwing everything into soft amber while rain ticks faintly against the window. Garrett’s shoulders fill the space beneath her hands. His thighs flex under hers every time she moves, and she can feel him becoming fully hard beneath her, thick and insistent and still separated from her by several deeply unnecessary layers of clothing.

He kisses across the corner of her mouth, along her jaw, down the side of her neck with the greedy familiarity of someone returning to a favourite argument. His teeth scrape lightly beneath her ear. 

She inhales and tightens her fingers in his hair. “Garrett.”

“Mm?”

“That feels good,” she breathes.

“I know.” His mouth drags lower. “You’re humping me like you’re trying to start a fire.”

She rolls her hips again because Garrett’s smugness has always been more effective encouragement than he understands. His hands guide the movement, pulling her forward over the hard line of him and then back, slower on the return so the pressure catches exactly where her body has already become embarrassingly sensitive.

Her next breath breaks against his cheek. Garrett smiles into her throat. “Yeah?”

“Don’t.”

“Wasn’t saying anything.”

She tugs hard enough on his curls to lift his mouth back to hers. Garrett laughs into the kiss, low and rough, then grips her beneath the thighs and stands. The movement steals a startled sound from her. Her legs tighten around his waist on instinct, arms locking behind his neck while Garrett takes one step, turns and lowers her onto the mattress. The bed gives beneath their combined weight, springs creaking a small complaint that neither of them acknowledges.

He comes down over her immediately. Their mouths meet badly at first, teeth knocking, her laugh caught between them while Garrett braces one hand beside her head and uses the other to drag her higher beneath him. Then the angle settles and everything goes hot again. His body fits heavily between her thighs, hips pressing down until she can feel the full hard length of him through his sweats.

She arches into it. Garrett’s breath catches. “Jesus.”

His hoodie becomes an obstacle. He sits back just long enough to grab the hem and strip it over his head, hair coming up with it in a dark, disordered mess. The shirt underneath follows, both pieces dropped somewhere near the foot of the bed while she pushes herself onto her elbows to watch.

Garrett catches her looking. His grin flashes. “See something you like?”

“Not especially,” she grins.

“Liar.”

He climbs back over her before she can improve the insult, one hand sliding beneath her hoodie and over her stomach. His palm is hot against her skin, callused fingers spreading over her ribs while he kisses her again and starts working the fabric upward.

She lifts her arms. The hoodie catches briefly around one wrist. Garrett frees it with a sharp tug and tosses it toward the chair, where it lands halfway over a clean pile of scrubs.

The air moves cool over her bare stomach and the little green lace bra she chose that morning with absolutely no ulterior motive. Garrett stills above her. His gaze drops. His eyes travel slowly over the lace, the soft rise of her breasts above the cups, the way her nipples have tightened beneath the fabric from cold air and attention.

“Fuck,” he says.

Her face warms. “You’ve seen this bra.”

“Don’t remember.”

She tilts her head. “You took it off with your teeth.”

“Must’ve been distracted.”

He bends before she can answer, mouth closing over one breast through the lace. Her head drops back. The thin fabric turns damp and warm under his tongue as he mouths her through it, one hand slipping beneath the other breast to lift it while his thumb presses over the sensitive peak. He sucks harder. Pleasure catches bright and immediate low in her stomach, dragging a helpless sound from her throat.

Garrett hums against her, he likes this part too much. Seeing the change in her breathing. Feeling her thighs shift more restlessly around his hips. Learning which pressure makes her voice climb and then repeating it with the focused persistence he brings to anything he has decided matters.

“You’re so fucking pretty,” he murmurs, mouth moving across the centre of her chest. “Know what you looked like all week?”

She swallows. “What?”

“Like you were thinking about me.”

“I was doing other things.”

“Mm.” He slips one finger beneath the edge of the bra and drags it slowly along the skin there. “Didn’t say you weren’t.”

His mouth finds the other breast. One hand reaches behind her, and the clasp opens with the efficient little flick he’s far too proud of having mastered. Garrett pulls the straps down her arms, drops the bra beside them and immediately puts his mouth back on her.

His lips closing around one nipple while his hand covers the other, squeezing and rolling it between two fingers until her whole body pulls tight beneath him. She grabs at his curls. “Oh, fuck.”

Garrett looks up at her without lifting his mouth, dark eyes warm and wicked beneath the hair falling over his forehead. He gives one slow suck, then releases her with a wet little sound. “Sensitive tonight.”

“It’s been days,” she whines.

“Four.”

“That’s days.”

“My poor baby.” His voice drops into false sympathy while his thumb circles the damp nipple he has left behind. “Been walking around all needy because her boyfriend had practice?”

“I’ve had exams.”

“Those are over.”

“Exactly.”

His grin presses against the skin beneath her breast. “So now you’re mine.”

The words send a hot, liquid pull through the centre of her body.

Garrett feels the way she shifts against him. His hand slides down her stomach, fingers hooking into the waistband of her shorts. “These off?”

She lifts her hips. He drags the shorts and underwear down together, impatient once they catch around her thighs, his mouth following the movement over her stomach and hip. The clothing disappears over one ankle and lands somewhere beyond the bed.

Garrett spreads her knees. The air touches her first. Then his eyes, and his face changes.

There’s something shamelessly gratifying about Garrett looking at her like this, the same boy who can stand beneath arena lights in front of thousands of people without blinking now visibly losing the thread of his own breathing because she is naked on a dorm bed. He presses one palm against the inside of her thigh and opens her wider. “Baby.”

She covers her face with one arm. “Don’t make it weird.”

“Make what weird?” His thumb skims along the crease where her thigh meets her body, close enough that her hips lift toward it. “How wet you are?”

Her entire face heats behind her arm.

Garrett laughs softly, then kisses the inside of her knee. “That’s not weird. That’s hot.”

“Garrett.”

“Been like this since I got here?”

She lowers her arm just enough to glare at him.

His mouth curves. “Longer?”

“Come here,” she groans.

“I am here.”

“Higher.”

“No.” He presses another kiss farther up her thigh, then another, slow enough to make every inch between his mouth and where she needs it feel deliberate. “Like it down here.”

She knows that. Everyone in a three-mile radius may know that.

Garrett Graham treats getting his mouth between her thighs less like foreplay and more like a personal calling. He’s arrived late to parties because he refused to stop. He’s missed the beginning of a movie, let Tucker’s dinner go cold and once remained there long enough that she had to pull him up by the hair and remind him she possessed other body parts.

Now he settles onto his stomach like this is where he intended to spend the evening, one arm hooking firmly around her thigh while the other hand spreads her open.

His first lick is slow. It moves from low to high with the flat of his tongue, collecting the wetness already gathered there before pressing deliberately over her clit. Her hips lift from the mattress. Garrett keeps her there with his forearm and does it again.

“Fuck,” she breathes.

His mouth closes over her. There’s nothing tentative about the way Garrett eats her out. He licks like he’s hungry and has never been embarrassed by appetite, tongue circling and flattening and flicking until her legs are tense around his shoulders and the fitted sheet has begun to twist beneath her hands. He kisses her between strokes, wet open-mouthed presses that feel obscene in the quiet room, then drags his tongue lower and pushes it inside her.

Her breath punches out. Garrett groans into her. The sound vibrates through her body, low and rough, while he fucks his tongue into her with one hand still holding her open. She reaches down blindly, finds his curls and pulls, to keep him exactly there.

He understands. His fingers tighten around her thigh. “Missed this,” he murmurs against her, the words broken by another slow lick.

“You saw me yesterday.”

“Didn’t do this yesterday.”

His mouth closes over her clit again before she can argue, sucking with enough pressure to make her legs jump. She gasps his name. Garrett answers by pressing two fingers against her entrance.

He pushes one in first, slow only because her body is already clenching around the intrusion. The second follows quickly, stretching her with the familiar pressure that makes her thighs fall wider even as the rest of her pulls tight.

His fingers curl. Pleasure strikes deep and sharp, the angle exact enough that her back arches from the mattress.

“There,” Garrett murmurs.

She makes a sound that has no language left in it. His fingers begin moving properly, pumping into her while his mouth stays fixed on her clit, the rhythm deliberately uneven at first as he listens to her breathing and watches the twitch of her stomach. Then he finds it. The pace that makes her hips start chasing him, makes her fingers clench in his hair and her other hand grab uselessly at the pillow beside her head.

The room has narrowed to wet heat, the sound of Garrett’s mouth and the steady drag of his fingers and rain brushing softly at the window like the whole campus has agreed to look away.

“Oh my God,” she whimpers. “Baby, I’m–”

Garrett moans against her, his fingers curling harder. He knows. The fact that he knows makes it worse. She comes with her thighs clamping around his head and his name breaking high out of her throat. Pleasure rolls through her in hard, pulsing waves, stomach tightening beneath the drag of his forearm while Garrett keeps licking her through it, slower only when her body begins jerking away from the sensitivity.

By the time he lifts his mouth, she’s breathing like she’s run somewhere.

Garrett wipes the lower half of his face against the inside of her thigh with no dignity whatsoever and starts kissing his way back up her body. Her skin feels loose and over-warm beneath him, every place his mouth touches sparking faintly in the aftermath.

He kisses her stomach, between her breasts, the base of her throat. Then he comes over her and catches her mouth.

She tastes herself immediately. Garrett doesn’t ease her into it, tongue sliding between her lips while one hand wraps around the side of her neck, thumb resting beneath her jaw and fingers spread gently along her pulse.

The hold is firm without pressure. Familiar. Enough to keep her face angled exactly where he wants it while he kisses her slow and filthy, swallowing the little post-orgasm sound she makes when his hips settle between her thighs again.

He pulls back by half an inch. “Hi,” he murmurs.

Her mouth curves before she can stop it. Her body is still humming, muscles heavy against the mattress. “Hi.”

Garrett kisses her once more, quick this time, then brushes his nose over hers. “Roll over.”

His eyes are dark, cheeks flushed and mouth still wet from her. Whatever version of Garrett arrived smiling at her door has disappeared beneath something rougher and hungrier, the easy confidence sharpened now that he has her naked and loose beneath him.

She turns. The movement exposes the tattoo before she remembers it exists.

For the last twenty minutes, she’s been too occupied by Garrett’s mouth to think about anything except Garrett’s mouth. Now she settles onto her stomach, forearms folding near the headboard while the cool air brushes over her back.

Behind her, the mattress shifts. Garrett stands long enough to shove his sweats and boxers down, fabric dragging over his thighs before landing somewhere near the edge of the bed. 

Then his hand slides over the back of her thigh. He lifts one knee onto the mattress, catches the pillow near her head and says, “Up a little, baby.”

She raises her hips obediently. Garrett tucks the pillow beneath them, adjusts her with both hands and goes completely still. Every muscle in her body remembers at once.

Her eyes widen into the pillow. “Baby–”

Garrett’s hands close over her hips before she can turn. Firm enough that the message is immediate. Stay.

She swallows. The room is silent behind her.

Garrett’s thumbs rest on either side of her lower back, just beneath the small square of skin where the tattoo sits. She can feel him looking at it. The attention is almost physical, a line of heat dragging across the freshly settled numbers.

“Fuuuck,” he says eventually.

The word leaves him slowly, low enough to move through the mattress. She tries to glance back over one shoulder. His grip stops her from twisting too far.

“Is that real?”

The disbelief in his voice makes her want to laugh, though her stomach has gone tight beneath the pillow. “Mhm.”

“Is that…” He trails off. His thumb moves closer, hovering beside the tattoo without touching the healing skin. “That’s forty-four.”

She presses her face into her forearm. “Yeah.”

“When?”

“The other night.”

“What other night?”

“The girls’ night.” She bites her lip. “When we went out to the bar.”

Garrett says nothing. The silence stretches long enough that the heat in her body begins rearranging itself around nerves. She had imagined Garrett shocked. She had imagined him smug, turned on, maybe insufferable enough that she would have to threaten to remove his number with a vegetable peeler.

She hadn’t imagined silence.

She pushes herself onto one elbow. “Baby, are you… are you mad?”

“Mad?” His hands tighten and release against her hips. “I mean– shit. It’s…” He breathes out hard through his nose. “Baby, that’s a tattoo.”

“Yes.”

“That shit’s permanent.”

“I know how tattoos work,” she breathes.

“I’m just saying.” He sounds dazed. “You put my number on you.”

She turns her face enough that she can see part of him over her shoulder: broad chest, flushed skin, curls fallen over his forehead, eyes fixed helplessly on the tiny forty-four as though it's altered the known structure of the universe.

“Well,” she says, and the laugh caught in her voice makes it softer than she intended. “I love you.”

Garrett’s gaze lifts to her face.

She shrugs carefully beneath his hands. “And I think it’s hot.”

His mouth opens. Closes. Then his hand slides over her ass. The touch is slow, almost absent at first, his palm following the curve of one cheek while he continues staring at the tattoo. His thumb presses into the soft flesh. His fingers spread wider.

“Hot,” he repeats.

“Mhm.”

“You think this is hot.”

“I did when I got it,” she nods.

Garrett bends. His mouth lands on the curve of her ass, one open kiss followed by another. She gasps softly when his teeth catch the lower edge of one cheek, biting just enough to sting before his tongue smooths over the mark.

“Garrett.”

He kisses higher, across the small of her back, careful when he reaches the tattoo. His mouth stops just beneath it, breath warm over the healing skin without touching.

“No liquids on this yet, right?” he asks, voice rough.

A giggle slips out of her before she can stop it. “Not yet.”

Garrett closes his eyes. She feels the exhale against her lower back. “Fuck.”

His hands move suddenly. One catches beneath her hip and pulls her higher over the pillow. The other spreads firmly between her shoulder blades, pressing her chest down as Garrett shifts closer behind her.

She feels the blunt heat of him at her entrance. “Baby–”

He pushes in. The first thrust is controlled only in the technical sense that Garrett doesn’t injure either of them. He fills her in one hard, steady drive, stretching her around him so quickly that her mouth falls open and the sound tears out before she can soften it.

“Oh, fuck, Garrett.” His fingers dig into her hip. “Holy shit.”

He withdraws nearly to the tip and drives back into her. The force sends her forward against the pillow, breasts dragging over the sheets while pleasure catches deep and hot through her body. She reaches blindly for the headboard. Garrett catches her other hip and sets a rhythm before she has finished taking the second breath.

Hard. Fast. No adjustment period because her body is already wet and open from his mouth, already clenching around him with every rough stroke. The bed knocks softly against the wall. Her dorm mattress squeaks beneath them with increasing distress.

Garrett’s breathing turns ragged behind her. “This is…” Another thrust drives the sentence out of him. “Shit. This is the sexiest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.”

She whimpers into the pillow. His palm comes down against the side of her ass – a sharp, hot smack that makes her body jerk and tighten around him.

Garrett groans. “Fuck, baby.”

Her hands lose their grip on the headboard. One slips back toward him, finding nothing but his thigh for half a second before Garrett catches her wrist and pins it against the centre of her back. The position lifts her shoulder slightly and arches her deeper over the pillow. Garrett looks down at the curve of her ass. His cock disappearing into her. His number sitting neat and dark above all of it.

Something in him breaks. He fucks her harder. There’s no uncertainty left in the movement now. Garrett’s hips slam against her with enough force that the bed shifts beneath them, one hand holding her wrist while the other grips her hip and drags her back to meet every thrust. 

The room fills with the wet slap of their bodies, her broken moans and the low, filthy things Garrett keeps saying every time the sight of the tattoo seems to hit him again.

“My fucking number.” She nods into the pillow, though he cannot see it. “On this ass.” His hand tightens around her hip. “Jesus Christ. You’re insane.”

The laugh that tries to leave her turns into a cry when he changes the angle, lifting her slightly higher and driving in deeper. “Oh God!”

“That it?” Garrett’s voice is rough and breathless now, all the usual smug control fraying at the edges. “Right there?”

“Yes.” She twists her pinned hand beneath his palm. “Baby, yes.”

He gives it to her again. Same angle, harder. Her whole body pulls tight. The pleasure is building too quickly, dragged out of the soft aftershocks of the first orgasm and sharpened by every deep stroke. Her thighs have begun to shake against the mattress, knees slipping wider while Garrett keeps her exactly where he wants her.

“Look at you,” he murmurs. “Pretty girl can’t even hold herself up.”

She presses her forehead harder into the pillow, voice breaking. “You’re fucking me too hard.”

“You want me to stop?”

She shakes her head so fast her cheek drags against the pillowcase. 

Garrett’s hand leaves her wrist only so he can reach around and catch her jaw, turning her face enough that he can see it over her shoulder. “Use your words.”

“Don’t stop.” Her eyes meet his badly from the angle, vision already blurred at the edges. “Please, baby. Fuck me.”

His expression goes wrecked. “Good girl.”

He pushes her hand back to the mattress and drives into her hard enough that the next sound comes out of her as a sob. The orgasm hits before she has time to announce it. Her body clamps around him, hard pulsing contractions that make Garrett swear and lose the rhythm for one brutal second. Then he keeps going, fucking her through it while her legs tremble and her fingers claw at the sheets.

“Garrett,” she cries.

“I know.” His hand spreads over the side of her ass, holding her open. “I know, baby. Give it to me.”

She comes apart around him, hips jerking beneath his grip. Pleasure rolls through her so hard that her ears ring faintly, body suspended in the bright, breathless place where everything hurts in exactly the right way.

Garrett doesn’t stop. He slows for perhaps two strokes, just enough to let her breathe, then pulls her hips higher again.

“Baby,” she gasps, oversensitive and loose beneath him.

His palm slides gently along her spine, avoiding the tattoo, while his hips continue moving. “You good?”

“Yes.”

“Still want me?”

“Yes,” she breathes, the answer comes without hesitation.

Garrett bends and kisses between her shoulder blades. “Then take it.”

His pace builds again. The third climb is different. Messier. Her body is already shaken open, every nerve sparking too close to the surface while Garrett keeps driving into her with the relentless focus of somebody who has discovered a new reason to lose his mind and intends to study it thoroughly.

He reaches beneath her, a two fingers find her clit. She squeals.

Garrett laughs once, breathless and filthy against her shoulder. “There she is.”

“I can’t,” she whines.

“Yeah, you can.”

His fingers circle faster while his hips maintain the same punishing rhythm. She tries to close her legs, but Garrett’s knees are between hers, keeping her open. The pressure builds with nowhere to go, every thrust feeding it higher while his number burns invisibly at the base of her spine under his fixed attention.

“My girl,” Garrett says. “Look so fucking good with my number on you.”

She nods helplessly.

“Whose good girl, huh?”

Her mouth opens. Nothing useful comes out. Garrett’s fingers slow. The loss is immediate. She whines and pushes back against him.

He catches her hip. “Asked you something.”

“I am,” she gasps.

“Yeah?”

“I’m your good girl.”

The words hit him like contact. Garrett groans and drives into her, his fingers returning to the exact pressure she needs. “That’s right.”

Her third orgasm catches at the edge for one impossible second, body stretched between too much and not enough. Then Garrett’s thumb presses harder.

She comes with a sharp little cry that turns into a squeal halfway through, legs shaking so violently the mattress trembles beneath her. Her arms give out completely. Garrett catches her by the waist before she collapses awkwardly, holding her up while he keeps moving through the contractions with short, desperate strokes.

“Fuck.” His forehead drops between her shoulder blades. “Fuck, baby.”

She’s barely inside her own body now. Everything feels warm, loose and distant, Garrett’s hands the only clear edges left. He slows. His breathing is rough against her skin. His cock is still hard inside her, every small movement enough to make her twitch.

She swallows, trying to rebuild language. “Lemme…”

Garrett stills. “What?”

She turns her head toward him, cheek against the sheet. “Want you to finish… in my mouth.”

The words come soft and dazed. She tries to roll. Her body responds in pieces, thighs trembling beneath her and arms gone soft enough that Garrett takes over almost immediately, pulling out with a low, wrecked groan before catching her hip and turning her carefully onto her back. 

He snatches the pillow away before it can drag across the tender skin at her lower spine, tosses it somewhere toward the wall and hooks both hands beneath her arms to draw her upright.

For a second, she only sits there between his knees, naked and thoroughly ruined, hair tangled around her flushed face and lips parted around breaths that still haven’t found a sensible rhythm. 

Her thighs keep giving tiny, involuntary tremors against his, the room blurred pleasantly at the edges while Garrett kneels in front of her with his chest heaving and his cock hard, wet and flushed between them.

He looks at her like she’s done something genuinely dangerous. The tattoo. His number sitting permanently above her ass, still hidden from this angle and branded into the centre of his brain now that he knows it exists.

His hand comes to her face, thumb dragging slowly over her swollen bottom lip. “Look at you.”

She turns her mouth into his palm and kisses it, then reaches for him. Garrett’s breath catches when her fingers wrap around his cock. He’s slick from her and from himself, hot and heavy against her palm, and the first slow stroke makes the muscle jump visibly beneath his stomach.

“Baby,” he groans.

She looks up at him through lashes still damp from everything he has already done to her. Her body feels boneless, loose and warm enough that even lifting her chin requires concentration, but wanting him is simple. Wanting to give something back after he has spent the last hour pulling pleasure out of her until she could barely remember her own name feels simpler still.

She loves him. Stupidly. Completely. Enough to put his number into her skin and kneel there afterward with her legs shaking, wanting to watch his face when she makes him lose whatever control he has left.

Garrett cups the back of her head. His fingers sink into the tangled hair there, holding without directing her, his thumb moving once near the base of her skull. “You don’t have to, baby.”

“I want to.” The answer comes quiet and a little hoarse.

Something in his face shifts. His jaw tightens, eyes dropping briefly to her mouth before finding hers again. “Yeah?”

She nods and leans forward. The first drag of her tongue along the underside of him tears a rough sound from Garrett’s chest. She feels it more than hears it, low and helpless above her while she kisses the tip, lips closing softly around him before taking him into her mouth.

Garrett’s head falls back. “Fuck.”

His hand tightens in her hair as she works him deeper, tongue flattened beneath the hot weight of him while her fingers curl around the base. She’s sloppy from exhaustion and want, mouth already wet, movements slower than they usually are because her whole body is still recovering from him. 

Garrett seems to like that more. The soft mess of it. The way she has to pause for breath with her lips still brushing him. The way she looks up at him like there’s nowhere else in the world she has any interest in being.

“That’s my girl,” he breathes. “Fuck, you’re so good to me.”

The praise moves warmly through her, settling somewhere lower than the soreness and higher than her ribs. She takes him again, deeper this time, cheeks hollowing as her hand follows the rhythm her mouth sets. Garrett looks down, and his expression breaks open.

She can see the tattoo still living behind his eyes, the disbelief of it layered into every filthy, affected look he gives her. His girlfriend kneeling between his thighs with his cock in her mouth and his number newly inked above her ass. The thought appears to have stripped away the final useful part of his brain.

“Jesus Christ,” he says, voice catching when she swirls her tongue around the head. “You put my number on your fucking body and now you’re looking at me like that.”

She hums around him. Garrett’s stomach jerks. His hips push forward on instinct, not enough to take over, only enough to slide him deeper across her tongue. Her eyes water faintly. She keeps looking up at him through the blur, one hand braced against his thigh and the other stroking what she cannot fit.

His thumb brushes gently beneath one of her eyes, catching the dampness there. “So fucking pretty.”

Her thighs tighten beneath her. She takes him again, eager despite how tired she is, mouth moving wetly over him while Garrett praises every little thing she does as though he cannot stop the words now that they have started.

“Good girl. Just like that.” She sucks harder. “Fuck, baby, your mouth.” Her nails catch lightly against his thigh. “Love when you look at me.”

She does. She watches every part of it: the tension sharpening his jaw, the rise and fall of his chest, the way his curls cling slightly at his temples, the hard flex of his stomach each time she takes him deep enough to make his breathing fail.

Garrett’s fingers spread more securely over the back of her head. “You know how fucking crazy you make me?”

She pulls back just far enough to breathe, her hand continuing its slow movement over him. A thin line of saliva connects her bottom lip to the flushed head before breaking, and Garrett watches it disappear with an expression bordering on pain.

She kisses him there once. “How crazy?”

He gives a breathless laugh that contains no real humour. “You tattooed forty-four above your ass.”

“Mhm.”

“Then let me fuck you until your legs stopped working.”

She smiles, dazed and soft. “They still work.”

“Barely.”

His thumb passes over her cheek. She turns and kisses it, then takes him into her mouth again before he can say anything else. Garrett groans her name.

The sound makes her try harder, because she loves hearing him come apart for her. Loves that Garrett, who carries entire games on his shoulders and makes confidence look effortless, cannot hide a single thing when her mouth is on him. Every rough breath belongs to her. Every flex of his hand in her hair. Every broken piece of praise dragged out of him while she strokes and sucks and watches him lose control.

“That’s it,” he murmurs. “Fuck, baby. Don’t stop.”

She doesn’t. Her hand slides lower, fingers tightening around the base as she takes him deeply enough that her throat works around him. Garrett’s hips jerk once. His free hand braces hard against the wall beside her bed, forearm flexing while he tries to hold himself still.

“Gonna come,” he warns, voice wrecked.

She looks up at him and keeps moving. Garrett says her name again, rougher this time, but she only tightens her lips around him and strokes faster, wanting it. Wanting all of him. Wanting the moment his face finally loses every trace of control because of her.

His eyes drop to hers. That does it.

Garrett comes with a deep, broken groan, hips pushing forward once as his hand tightens helplessly in her hair. She takes him, swallowing around the first hot pulse while his whole body shudders above her.

“Good girl,” he breathes. “Fuck– such a good fucking girl.”

The praise turns even rougher as she keeps her mouth around him through every pulse, swallowing everything he gives her while his fingers stroke shakily through her hair. She doesn’t pull away until he has gone sensitive, easing him gently from between her lips before pressing one last kiss to the tip.

For several seconds, neither of them speaks. Garrett stands over her panting, one hand still cradling the back of her head while she kneels between his thighs with flushed cheeks, wet lips and the loose, pleased smile of someone who has been fucked far too thoroughly to experience shame.

His eyes move over her face. Then past her shoulder, toward the lower half of her body as though he can somehow see through her.

“Fuck,” he says again, apparently the only word left available to him. “Roll over. I need to see it again.”

She starts laughing. “Garrett.”

“Please.”

“You’ve seen it.”

“Not enough.”

Her legs are not especially reliable, so Garrett handles most of the repositioning. He lowers her carefully onto her stomach, makes sure the sheet beneath her is smooth and then shifts down the bed until his face is level with her lower back.

He doesn’t touch the tattoo itself. He only rests one hand across the top of her ass and stares at the little forty-four with the solemn concentration of somebody studying an artefact behind museum glass.

She folds her arms beneath her head. “You’re being weird,” she mumbles.

“I’m having a moment.”

“You’ve been having a moment for, like, an hour.”

“Yeah, because my girlfriend got my number tattooed above her ass.”

“Lower back.”

Garrett looks up. “Baby.”

She presses her smile into her forearm.

His thumb strokes the skin beside the tattoo. “You really did this.”

“I really did.”

“For me,” he murmurs.

He kisses one cheek, then the other, his mouth soft now, all the feral heat of ten minutes ago settling into something heavier. His chin rests briefly near her hip.

“You won’t regret it?” he asks.

The question is quiet enough that she turns her face toward him. Garrett’s still looking at the tattoo, but the thought behind his expression has moved farther than the bed. Farther than tonight. Permanent isn’t an easy word for him, no matter how hot the evidence looks above her underwear. Permanent has always carried too many promises made by people who didn’t know how to keep them.

“I might regret letting Paige choose the bar,” she says. “I might regret wearing jeans to get it done. I’m almost definitely going to regret whatever you tell Dean tomorrow.”

Garrett’s mouth twitches.

“But not the tattoo.” Her fingertips move gently along her own forearms. “Even if something changed one day– and I’m not saying it will– I’d remember how I felt when I got it. I was happy. I love you. You’re my favourite thing in my life right now.”

“Right now?” he asks, because he’s still Garrett.

She groans. “Don’t ruin it.”

His laugh presses warm against the side of her hip. Then he kisses the skin just below the tattoo again, careful, lingering there without touching the ink. “My girl,” he murmurs.

She closes her eyes. Garrett stays behind her for another minute, one hand moving lazily over her ass while he continues looking at the number like he expects it to disappear if he blinks incorrectly.

Then he says, “Can I take a picture?”

Her eyes open. “Absolutely not.”

“For me.”

“No.”

“Baby,” he argues.

“You’ll show the boys.”

Garrett starts laughing, forehead dropping against her lower back. She can feel the effort he makes to avoid the tattoo.

“Fine,” he says. “No picture.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m memorising it.”

“You’ve been staring for ten minutes,” she giggles.

“Need another ten.”

She sighs into the pillow, but her body goes softer beneath his hand. Garrett kisses her hip once more, then crawls back up the bed and folds himself around her without asking her to move again. His chest settles against her back, one arm sliding beneath the pillow and the other wrapping around her waist.

His mouth finds the back of her neck. “You’re the sexiest person alive,” he says.

“Mm.”

“Objectively.”

“Garrett.”

“And fucking insane.”

She smiles into the pillow. “Yeah, well, you match my freak.”

His arm tightens around her. “Yeah,” he murmurs, laughter warm against her skin. “Definitely.”

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[kooksandpearls]

garrett graham ❄︎ six shifts.

pairing – garrett graham x nursing student!reader summary – six shifts are more than enough to love someone, and one devastating loss leaves garrett holding his girlfriend through the worst night of her placement. warnings – infant death, premature birth, neonatal intensive care, detailed medical procedures, neonatal deterioration and resuscitation, parental grief, emotional distress, guilt, panic, nightmares, crying notes from me – um well u guys asked for angst but i am never breaking my babies up so 🧍🏼‍♀️ here we are. but based on these requests combined! word count – 6.9k

navigation – masterlist | nursing student!reader masterlist

The NICU makes medicine feel like magic performed by people with lanyards.

It’s breast milk measured into syringes instead of bottles, skin protected with dressings cut into pieces barely wider than her thumbnail, medication doses containing enough decimal points that she checks them three times before showing the nurse and then watches the nurse check them twice more.

The blood-pressure cuffs look like toys. The nappies seem physically impossible. The first time she changes one, she holds it between both hands and laughs because surely no human being is small enough to require something that could comfortably fit around her wrist.

Then she looks through the incubator wall at the baby waiting inside it, one pink foot no longer than the top joint of her thumb, and stops laughing.

The entire unit exists in a strange, permanent half-light. Curtains pulled around expressing mothers. Small lamps glowing beside incubators. Sunlight softened through blinds because some of the babies have not developed enough to tolerate the ordinary brightness of a hospital corridor. 

There are alarms constantly, but never the same brutal chaos as emergency. Here, every sound seems to mean something specific. A heart rate creeping too high. Oxygen saturation dipping. A feeding pump finished. A sensor losing contact because somebody has kicked one astonishingly tiny leg with enough determination to dislodge it.

She loves it almost immediately. She loves the little name cards clipped to the incubators and the knitted blankets donated in colours no commercial nursery would ever select. 

She loves watching parents learn how to change nappies through the side ports without disturbing six different wires. She loves the careful choreography of nurses turning babies whose bodies are still too fragile to decide their own position for very long.

She loves that a person can be born months before they are meant to be, skin translucent and lungs unfinished, and instead of everyone quietly accepting that the world has made a mistake, an entire team gathers around and says, alright. We’ll help.

There’s something almost obscene about the faith of it. Caffeine to remind an immature brain to keep breathing. Surfactant to help lungs stay open. Nutrition sliding through lines narrower than sewing thread. Warm air, filtered light and hands scrubbed clean moving through plastic doors to give a body weighing less than a bag of flour enough time to become ready for the world.

She has been on placement for six shifts when she decides the NICU might be the closest thing medicine has to a miracle.

For most of those shifts, she has been assigned to June. Not independently, she’s a student, not delusional. 

Every movement she makes around June happens beneath the eye of Claire, the primary nurse who has worked neonatal intensive care long enough to change a line dressing while simultaneously calming an anxious father and reminding a junior doctor that the blood gas result he is searching for has been open on the screen in front of him for several minutes.

But June is hers in the strange, temporary way patients sometimes become yours during placement. She checks the monitors when she arrives. Helps with her cares. Watches Claire draw up medications and follows every calculation on paper until the numbers stop looking like a threat. 

She records wet nappies with the seriousness of somebody documenting matters of national importance and learns which corner of June’s mouth lifts before she begins objecting to being handled.

June was born at twenty-four weeks and five days, weighing six hundred and eighty grams. She has lungs that require constant negotiation, a duct in her heart that has refused to close properly, and a list of complications long enough that her parents keep the consultant’s explanations written inside a small notebook because exhaustion has made memory unreliable.

Maya and Daniel arrive every morning carrying takeaway coffees and looking like they haven’t slept properly since June was born.

By her third day, she knows Maya drinks oat milk and Daniel forgets to eat until someone puts food directly beside him. By the fourth, Daniel starts bringing her a coffee too, despite her insisting students cannot accept gifts from patient families and Daniel pointing out that the coffee costs three dollars and tastes like burnt cardboard, which barely qualifies as a gift.

Maya sits beside the incubator for hours with one hand resting through the port, her smallest finger curled beneath June’s palm.

“She squeezes,” Maya tells her on Tuesday, eyes bright with tiredness and pride. “It’s not a reflex. Everyone keeps saying it’s probably a reflex, but she knows it’s me.”

She looks at the impossibly tiny fingers wrapped around Maya’s. “She probably does.”

“You’re meant to be neutral,” Maya smiles. 

“I’m a student. We’re still allowed a little whimsy.”

Maya laughs quietly so she doesn’t disturb June. Daniel looks up from the notebook and says, “Write that down. Medical confirmation.”

She looks forward to seeing them. That’s perhaps the first mistake, although calling it a mistake feels ugly after everything. 

She looks forward to Maya showing her the photograph of the nursery they finished while June was still meant to be inside her. She looks forward to Daniel announcing every weight increase in grams like a stock market closing figure. 

She looks forward to June’s whole face scrunching when Claire changes the tape near her cheek, fury gathering in a body too small to produce any meaningful noise around the breathing support.

On Thursday, June tolerates an entire skin-to-skin cuddle against Maya’s chest. Forty-three minutes without her oxygen saturation dropping enough to end it early.

Maya cries. Daniel takes twelve photographs. She stands behind Claire with one hand wrapped around the side rail and feels something warm expand beneath her ribs as June settles against her mother’s skin, no larger beneath the blanket than a loaf of bread.

“That’s good, right?” Daniel asks for the fourth time.

Claire smiles. “That’s very good.”

She nods too, though nobody asked her. “She looks comfortable.”

“She likes her mom,” Daniel says.

Maya looks down at the little hat resting over June’s head and begins crying harder.

The following morning, her first observation of June is normal for June. Not normal in the broader sense. Almost nothing about a neonatal intensive care unit fits comfortably within the broader sense. 

But her heart rate sits where it usually does. Her oxygen requirement is slightly higher than the night before but not dramatically. Her temperature is fine. Her abdomen appears mildly distended, though Claire checks it and says they will keep watching.

Maya arrives at eight-fifteen. Daniel follows ten minutes later after moving the car because the parking app had stopped accepting his payment and threatened to make an already impossible week much worse.

June is unsettled during her cares. Her oxygen saturation dips twice while they change her nappy, then recovers with repositioning. 

Claire’s mouth tightens slightly while looking at the monitor, but when Maya asks whether that happens often, she answers honestly.

“It can,” she says. “She’s taking a little longer to come back up today, so we’re keeping a close eye on her.”

Maya nods. The hand holding her coffee tightens around the cardboard cup.

They send bloods. The registrar reviews June. Antibiotics are adjusted while the team waits for results, every decision made quickly but without panic, the people around the incubator speaking in that quiet, clipped rhythm healthcare workers use when concern hasn’t yet become an emergency but is beginning to move in that direction.

She stays close to Claire. She checks equipment. She helps reposition the saturation probe when it stops reading properly and watches June’s oxygen numbers climb again.

Eighty-one. Eighty-six. Ninety.

Everyone exhales without acknowledging they had been waiting.

Maya sits beside the incubator, one hand inside against June’s leg. “She’s being difficult today.”

“She’s allowed,” she says softly. “She’s got a lot going on.”

Maya’s mouth lifts, but the smile barely forms before the monitor begins alarming again. The saturation drops first. Ninety-one to eighty-two so quickly the numbers appear to skip between them. June’s heart rate follows, falling out of the one-fifties.

Claire straightens. “Come on, sweetheart.”

She opens the incubator port and places a careful hand against June’s back while Claire adjusts her breathing support. The numbers continue falling.

Seventy-four. The alarm changes tone.

The sound is sharper now, cutting through every other noise on the unit. Claire’s hand moves to the emergency button. 

The registrar is already turning from the workstation before she calls him. “Heart rate’s ninety.”

Maya stands so abruptly the chair catches against the floor behind her. Daniel is beside her immediately, one hand hovering near her waist without touching.

“What’s happening?” Maya asks.

Nobody answers quickly enough. The consultant comes through the curtain, followed by another nurse and the respiratory therapist. The space around the incubator contracts, bodies filling every available gap while the monitor keeps sounding above them.

“Heart rate sixty.”

Claire looks at her. Focused enough that her voice loses every unnecessary word. “Can you take Mom and Dad to the family room, please?”

She looks at Maya.

Maya has already understood enough to shake her head. “No. No, I’m staying.”

“Maya,” Daniel says, though his own voice has begun breaking.

She moves toward them because Claire has asked her to and because standing still feels like choosing something worse. “I just need you to step outside with me for a minute.”

“What’s happening?” Maya catches her forearm. Her fingers are cold even through the scrub sleeve. “What’s happening to her?”

Behind them, someone says, “Heart rate forty,” and the room changes completely.

The sides of the incubator open. A resuscitation board appears beneath June’s body. Hands begin compressions with two fingers against a chest so small the motion looks impossible.

Maya hears it. She makes a sound that does not belong in any hospital corridor. “Is she dying?” she asks.

She cannot answer that. She cannot lie either. Her whole throat seems to close around every word she knows.

“The doctors need room to help her,” she manages, covering Maya’s hand with her own. “I need you to come with me right now, okay? They’re doing everything they can.”

“I can’t leave her.”

“I know.” Her own voice is shaking now. She forces it lower. “I know. You’re not leaving. We’re going right outside.”

Daniel wraps one arm around Maya and helps turn her away. She walks with them through the curtain, one hand still gripping Maya’s, while the alarms continue behind them.

Maya keeps looking over her shoulder. “June,” she cries. “June, Mommy’s here.”

The family room is less than twenty feet away. It feels like a different building. Two grey chairs. A box of tissues. A painting of the ocean selected by someone who believed blue water might soften whatever was said beneath it.

Daniel lowers Maya into one of the chairs. She doesn’t sit properly. Her body folds toward the door, every muscle trying to return to the room they have just left.

“What are they doing?” Daniel asks.

“Resuscitating her.”

The word leaves her mouth before she can find something gentler. Daniel shuts his eyes.

Maya’s fingers close around hers so hard the little bones grind together. “She was okay yesterday.”

“I know.”

“She was on my chest.”

“I know.”

“I felt her breathing.”

She cannot say anything to that. She crouches beside Maya’s chair because standing over them feels cruel and keeps holding her hand while another nurse arrives to stay with them.

“Go,” the nurse says quietly. “They’ll need you inside.”

She returns through the curtain. For the next several minutes, time becomes a series of instructions.

Bring the medication tray. Open another packet. Move the light. Record the time. Pass the syringe to Claire. Step back. Come closer. Hold this. Move that line. Watch the clock.

She does everything she’s told. Her hands work even while the rest of her body feels several seconds behind them. The doctor intubates. The respiratory therapist checks placement. Compressions continue. 

Medication moves through the line in amounts so small they still require a syringe, even now, even while everyone in the space is willing June’s heart to remember its job.

The monitor remains wrong. A number appears, falls, disappears beneath the movement of leads and hands. The room smells like plastic, sanitiser and the faint sweet trace of milk from the feed that had been stopped earlier.

Someone calls another time. The consultant listens. The compressions stop.

The silence afterward isn’t complete. There are still machines in the room. Pumps running. Ventilation equipment hissing. Another baby alarming from the next bay because the world hasn’t agreed to pause.

But June’s monitor no longer demands anything. The consultant looks at the clock and says the time aloud. Every person around the incubator becomes still.

She stares at June. Without all the hands moving over her, she looks smaller than before. Smaller than a body should be allowed to look. Her knitted hat has shifted upward slightly. One leg rests bent beneath the edge of the nappy she had changed that morning.

Claire turns off the alarm. The quiet sound of the button clicking seems to enter directly beneath her ribs.

Maya’s cry reaches them from the family room before anyone opens the door.

The parents are brought back in. The equipment that can be removed is removed. A blanket appears, soft and pale yellow. Claire wraps June with the care she used when June was alive, supporting her head, smoothing the hat back into place, tucking the blanket beneath her feet even though she can no longer become cold.

Daniel stands near the wall with one hand over his mouth. Maya takes her baby.

She doesn’t collapse dramatically. That might have been easier to witness. Her body only folds inward around June, shoulders curving, cheek lowering slowly against the little knitted hat while a sound keeps leaving her in pieces.

“My girl,” she says. “My beautiful girl.”

She stands near the door because she cannot make herself go farther away and cannot imagine she belongs any closer.

Maya lifts her head eventually. Her face is wet, almost unrecognisable beneath the grief moving through it. Her gaze finds her across the room.

“Thank you,” Maya says.

The words make no sense. She blinks. “I–”

“You looked after her.” Maya tightens the blanket around June. “She knew you.”

Her throat closes. She shakes her head once because she doesn’t know what she’s refusing. Daniel crosses the small space between them and pulls her into a hug.

It’s brief. One arm around her shoulders, his other hand still pressed against his own face, his body shaking hard enough that she feels it through both layers of scrubs.

“Thank you,” he repeats.

She stands there after he releases her, arms hanging by her sides, and understands that she will never forget the weight of being thanked by two people whose baby has just died.

Claire sends her on break.

She makes it to the staff bathroom, locks the door and grips the edge of the sink with both hands. For several seconds, nothing happens. Her reflection stares back at her beneath the fluorescent strip above the mirror. Scrub cap still sitting crooked over her hair. Mask pulled beneath her chin. A faint pressure mark across the bridge of her nose.

Then her mouth twists. She bends forward so quickly her forehead almost hits the mirror. One hand flies over her mouth before the first sob can come out properly, the sound trapped hot against her palm while her shoulders begin shaking.

There’s nowhere for it to go. The room is too small. Her body is too tight around it. She presses both palms against her eyes until colours burst behind them, trying to stop the image of June beneath two fingers, June wrapped in yellow, Maya saying my girl like the words could still keep her tethered.

She cries until her breathing becomes painful. Until her throat is raw and her nose runs and her knees feel unreliable beneath her. Then she turns on the tap, splashes cold water over her face and waits for herself to look approximately employable again.

She doesn’t feel better. She looks less visibly ruined. Hospitals often accept that as an adequate substitute. The rest of the shift passes through her without leaving much behind. 

Claire offers to send her home. She says no because there’s only an hour and twenty minutes left and because the idea of leaving the unit while June’s parents are still inside feels like walking away from a sentence before it’s ended.

So she restocks feeding syringes. Folds blankets. Checks expiry dates on supplies she knows are nowhere near expiring. She documents what she’s asked to document and reads every line three times because the words keep refusing to stay in their correct order.

Near the end of the shift, she helps Claire press June’s foot into ink for the memory card. The footprint is scarcely larger than the pad of her thumb.

At five-thirty, Claire takes the pen out of her hand. “Go home,” she says.

She nods. She changes in the locker room, though she has no memory of removing her scrubs. Her hands put on jeans, a jumper, shoes. Her badge disappears into the front pocket of her bag. Someone says goodbye near the door.

Garrett’s car is parked beneath the far light in the staff car park. He had handed her the keys that morning with the same explanation he always uses now, that she’s not wasting her own petrol driving to unpaid placement when he has a perfectly good car.

She reaches the driver’s door and stops. The keys are already in her hand. She could unlock it. Sit inside. Reverse out. Follow the familiar roads back toward campus.

Her body will not move.

She looks through the window at the steering wheel, and the thought of putting both hands onto it makes something cold slide beneath her skin. Traffic lights. Pedestrians. Lane changes. Braking distances. Decisions arriving one after another while June’s monitor drops from ninety to sixty to forty inside her head.

She sits on the curb instead. The concrete is cold through her jeans. Garrett’s car rises beside her, dark and clean beneath the parking-lot lights, his Briar pass still hanging crooked from the mirror. 

The hospital glows behind her. People come and go through the staff entrance, talking about dinner and rosters and whether the rain will hold off tomorrow.

She takes out her phone.

Garrett answers on the second ring. “Hey, baby.”

The sound of his voice almost undoes the work of the bathroom. She presses her thumb into the seam of her jeans and stares across the car park at nothing.

“Can you come get me?”

“Yeah,” he says immediately. Then, more carefully, “What’s wrong?”

She opens her mouth and discovers she cannot put the day inside it. “I can’t drive.”

The words come out flat. Numb enough that they barely sound like hers.

“Are you hurt?”

“No.” She swallows. Her throat aches. “Physically, yeah. I’m fine.”

Another small pause. She can hear movement now. A cupboard closing. Garrett saying something away from the phone, too muffled to make out.

“Okay,” he says, voice returning close to her ear. “I’ll be twenty minutes, baby.”

She nods before remembering he cannot see her. “Okay.”

“You still at the staff car park?”

“Mhm.”

“Stay there.”

“I am.”

“I’m coming.”

The call ends. She lowers the phone into her lap and waits. She doesn’t check the time. It could be twelve minutes or eighteen or half an hour. 

The light above Garrett’s car hums faintly, attracting small insects that circle it without ever finding what they want.

Dean’s car turns into the lot hard enough that its headlights sweep across three empty spaces before settling on her.

It pulls up beside Garrett’s car at an angle that would probably irritate Dean under any other circumstances. The engine cuts off. Garrett is out before the headlights fully dim, one hand still holding Dean’s keys and his expression already changing as he takes her in.

She gets to her feet. For one second, she only stands there. Bag hanging from one shoulder. Phone loose in her hand. Garrett in grey sweats and a Briar hoodie, curls disordered like he dragged his fingers through them the entire drive.

Then he says, “Baby?”

Her body moves. She reaches him fast enough that her bag slides from her shoulder. Garrett catches her as it hits the ground, one arm wrapping around her back and the other coming up behind her head as she throws herself into his chest.

The first sob tears out of her without warning.

Garrett’s whole body tightens around it. “Hey. Hey, I’ve got you.”

She grips the back of his hoodie in both fists. Her face presses beneath his jaw, breath catching against his throat while the crying comes harder now than it did in the bathroom because nobody is waiting outside the door, because she doesn’t have to return to the unit, because Garrett’s arms are around her and her body has finally decided it’s safe enough to stop pretending.

“What happened?” he asks, his palm moving over the back of her head. “Baby, what happened?”

She tries to answer. The first attempt disappears into a gasping breath. Garrett holds her tighter, one hand smoothing down her hair again and again even though it has already come loose around her face.

“Take your time,” he murmurs. “I’m here.”

“The baby.” Her voice breaks completely. She presses her face harder into him like she can force the words back inside. “June.”

Garrett goes still. He knows June through every story she brought home. June gained twenty grams. June hated cares. June held her mum’s finger. June did skin-to-skin for forty-three minutes and didn’t desaturate once.

“June?” he asks quietly.

She nods against him. “She died.”

Garrett’s breath leaves him. The whole sentence is outside her now, but it doesn’t make the weight of it smaller. Her knees weaken. Garrett adjusts without comment, one arm dropping lower around her waist to take more of her weight while the other keeps her face against his shoulder.

“Oh, baby.” His mouth presses into her hair. “I’m so sorry.”

“They did everything.” The words begin coming in broken pieces, each one dragged through another sob. “They were there, and her numbers just– they just kept going down, and Maya wouldn’t leave. She kept saying June’s name, and I had to take them out, and then we–”

Her breath catches too sharply to continue. Garrett rubs one hand between her shoulder blades, slow and firm.

“I’m sorry,” he says again. There’s nothing else sensible to say, and Garrett does not try to improve it. “I’m so fucking sorry, baby.”

“She was so little.”

“I know.”

“She was fine yesterday.” Her hands tighten in his hoodie. “She was on her mom’s chest. She was breathing.”

Garrett shuts his eyes. His cheek rests against the top of her head while she cries into him beneath the hospital lights.

“I couldn’t drive,” she gasps after a while. “I’m sorry. I tried to– I looked at the car, and I couldn’t–”

“No.” Garrett pulls back only far enough to hold her face between both hands. His thumbs move beneath her wet eyes, catching tears that are replaced almost immediately. “Don’t apologise.”

“It’s your car.”

“I don’t give a fuck about the car.”

“I made you come all the way here,” she mumbles. 

“Baby.” His forehead presses to hers. “You called me because you needed me. That’s it.”

Her mouth trembles.

Garrett’s hands slide from her face, one returning to the back of her neck while the other holds her at the waist. “I’ve got you,” he says quietly. “I always have you.”

She closes her eyes. June is still dead. Maya is still inside the hospital holding a body that had been warm beneath her hand that morning.

But Garrett is here. His hoodie is damp beneath her cheek. His fingers are moving through her hair. His heart beats steadily against the side of her fist.

“I know,” she whispers.

The words break in the middle, but Garrett hears them. His arms tighten around her again, and she clings harder, letting him hold everything her body cannot keep upright alone.

They stay that way until her breathing begins to slow. Lengthening enough that each inhale stops scraping on the way in.

Garrett kisses the top of her head. “Let’s get you home, yeah?”

She nods against him.

“We’ll leave my car.” His hand moves down her back. “I’ll get it tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.” He eases away carefully, keeping one hand around her arm like he doesn’t trust the ground beneath her yet. He picks up her bag, hangs it over his own shoulder and walks her toward Dean’s passenger side.

She stops when he opens the door.

Garrett looks at her. “What?”

“Nothing.” Her eyes burn again. She wipes beneath one with the heel of her hand. “Dean let you take his car?”

“Didn’t exactly present a balanced argument.” Garrett guides her down into the seat. “I said hospital and he threw me the keys.”

A small sound catches in her throat. Not quite a laugh, but close enough that Garrett’s face softens.

“There she is,” he murmurs, then seems to regret asking anything more of her expression. His hand cups the side of her head instead, thumb smoothing once over her temple. “You want the seat back?”

She shakes her head.

“Heat?”

“Mhm.”

Garrett reaches across and pulls the seatbelt over her because her hands have gone useless in her lap. The belt clicks into place. 

He tucks a piece of hair behind her ear and looks over her face once more, not searching for an explanation now, only making sure she is still with him.

“I’ll get you home,” he says.

She curls one hand around the sleeve of his hoodie before he can move away. Garrett stops immediately. “Don’t go yet.”

His expression changes so quietly it hurts. “I’m just going around the car, baby.”

She nods, but her fingers don’t release him. Garrett leans in and presses his mouth to her forehead, staying there for several seconds while one hand rests warm against the side of her neck.

“I’m right here,” he murmurs.

Only then does she let go. Garrett closes the passenger door gently and walks around the front of Dean’s car, his shape briefly passing through the headlights still shining over the empty parking spaces. 

He climbs into the driver’s seat, turns the heat high and reaches for her hand before starting the engine. She gives it to him.

His fingers close around hers, warm and sure over the centre console, and when the hospital begins disappearing behind them, she doesn’t look back.

The hockey house has never been good at being quiet. Even asleep, it produces noise with the restless commitment of something built over old pipes and occupied by four men. 

The radiator beside Garrett’s desk clicks every few minutes. Someone turns over in the room across the hall and makes an entire bedframe complain. 

Downstairs, the refrigerator begins one of its long mechanical groans, followed by the soft clunk of the ice maker dropping three cubes nobody asked for.

Tonight, though, the house is trying. 

Dean had turned the television off without being told when Garrett brought her through the front door. Logan had taken one look at her face and moved the shoes blocking the stairs instead of asking what happened. Tucker had reheated soup, set it in front of her and accepted without argument when she managed only four spoonfuls before staring into the bowl like she had forgotten what it was for.

Nobody made a joke when Garrett carried the bowl away. Nobody complained when he closed his bedroom door before nine.

She had showered because hospital smell had become something she needed off her skin immediately, though Garrett had stood outside the bathroom the whole time after she went silent beneath the water for long enough that he nearly knocked. 

She emerged in one of his shirts with her eyes swollen and her hair damp against her shoulders, climbed into bed without speaking and let him arrange himself around her.

Garrett had stayed awake longer than she did. He watched the back of her head against his pillow and kept one arm locked around her waist, palm spread beneath the shirt over her stomach. 

Her breathing had taken a while to settle. Every few minutes, it would snag and her body would tense faintly against him, like some part of her had remembered where she had been and needed to check whether it was still happening.

Eventually, exhaustion took her properly. It takes Garrett too, one second he’s watching the shadows from the blinds sit across his wall; the next, the room has gone black and shapeless around him, his face pressed into the back of her hair and one leg trapped between both of hers.

The noise wakes him sometime later. It’s small. Barely enough to reach through sleep. A soft, breathy sound from somewhere directly in front of him, followed by another that catches strangely at the end.

Garrett’s eyes stay closed. For one slow, profoundly unhelpful second, his half-conscious brain decides she’s moaning.

His hand shifts instinctively at her waist before the rest of him has agreed to become involved. His mouth presses sleepily near the back of her neck, and he’s somewhere in the process of thinking that this is inconveniently hot for what feels like the middle of the night when she makes the sound again.

It breaks this time. Not pleasure. Not even close. Garrett’s eyes open.

The room is dim enough that he can only see the pale outline of her cheek against the pillow at first. Her body has gone stiff within the curve of his, shoulders pulled tight and both hands gathered near her chest beneath the blanket. 

Another little sound leaves her, thin and frightened, while her head moves once against the pillow as if she’s trying to turn away from something that keeps following.

“Baby?”

She doesn’t wake. Garrett lifts himself onto one elbow. Sleep falls away from him all at once.

There are tears running across her face. They have collected at the bridge of her nose where her cheek is pressed sideways, slipping steadily over the skin and darkening the pillow beneath her. 

Her brows are drawn together. Her mouth opens around another broken breath, and the sight of it makes something cold move through his stomach.

“Fuck.” Garrett reaches for her face, then stops himself before grabbing her too quickly. “Hey. Baby.”

He slides one arm beneath her shoulder and rolls her gently onto her back. She comes without resistance, still asleep, head tipping toward him while another tear slips into her hair.

Garrett moves over her, one knee pressing into the mattress beside her hip. “Baby, wake up.”

His thumb catches the wetness beneath one eye. More replaces it immediately. He wipes that away too, then cups the side of her face, keeping his touch steady even while his pulse begins kicking much too hard beneath his ribs.

“Come on, sweetheart.” He says her name, quietly at first, then again with more force when her breathing stutters. “Wake up for me. You’re dreaming. That’s all. Wake up, baby.”

Her face twists.

Garrett’s stomach drops. “Hey. Hey, you’re okay. Come on.”

He strokes his thumb over her cheek and says her name again. Once. Twice. A third time, close enough that his breath moves over her mouth.

Her eyes fly open. She jerks upright with a sharp gasp, nearly catching Garrett beneath the chin. Her hands come up between them without direction, fingers grabbing at the blanket, his arm, the front of his shirt, anything they can find while she drags in another breath that seems to stop before reaching the bottom of her lungs.

“Hey.” Garrett catches both sides of her face. “It’s me.”

Her eyes move around the room too quickly. The lamp he had left on low beside the bed. The dark window. The jersey hanging over his desk chair. Garrett above her, hair flattened from the pillow and heart trying to punch its way through his chest.

For a second, she only stares, then recognition reaches her and her whole body comes forward.

Garrett barely has time to sit back before she throws both arms around his neck and buries her face beneath his jaw. The force of it knocks him against the headboard, one shoulder striking the wood with a muted thud while her hands knot in the back of his shirt.

He folds around her immediately. “Okay.” One hand cups the back of her head. The other closes around her waist, pulling her tight enough that there’s no room left between them for whatever she woke from. “You’re okay. It was just a dream.”

She nods against his neck, though her breathing says she hasn’t entirely returned to the room yet. Each inhale comes fast and shallow against his skin. Her fingers grip harder, pressing into the muscles along his back until it starts to hurt.

Garrett doesn’t loosen them. “Just a dream,” he repeats, quieter. His palm moves slowly over her hair, smoothing it down the back of her head despite the pieces already sticking damply to her cheeks. “You’re here. You’re with me.”

Another shudder passes through her. It starts near her shoulders and moves through the rest of her body, small enough that somebody not holding her this tightly might have missed it.

Garrett presses his mouth to her temple. “What happened?”

She doesn’t answer at first. Her face turns farther into his neck, nose cold against his skin, lips moving once before any sound emerges.

“June,” she whispers.

Garrett shuts his eyes. The name sits differently now than it had when she used to say it over dinner. No amused little story attached. No update about grams gained or oxygen tolerated or the knitted hat somebody had donated in a colour she claimed made June look like a tiny retired golfer.

Only June.

“Just–” Her breath catches. “Nightmare.”

“Oh, baby.”

Garrett’s hand spreads more firmly over the back of her head. There’s nothing useful he can do with the picture his mind supplies. A monitor falling. A baby small enough to fit along his forearm. Her standing in the middle of it while two parents begged her for an answer she couldn’t give.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs. “I’m so sorry.”

She shifts suddenly, trying to get closer despite already being wrapped completely around him. One knee moves across his thigh. Then the other. Garrett adjusts before she can lose her balance, sliding both hands beneath her hips as she climbs into his lap and settles astride him with no trace of anything sexual in the movement.

She only needs more of him. Her arms lock behind his neck. Her face returns to the same place beneath his jaw, and her whole body folds against his chest as if sitting over his hips has finally removed the last unsafe inch between them.

Garrett leans back against the headboard. The wood is cold through his shirt. He draws the blanket around her shoulders with one hand and keeps the other broad over her back.

“Got you,” he says into her hair. “You can stay right there.”

She gives a tiny nod. He begins scratching lightly along her spine, up beneath the loose fabric of his shirt and down again, his nails barely catching against warm skin. It’s something she usually likes after sex, or when she’s pretending not to be tired on the couch and needs help losing the argument. 

Tonight her back remains tense beneath his palm for several passes before the muscles start to soften.

Garrett keeps talking because silence feels too much like leaving her alone with whatever is waiting behind her eyes.

“You did everything right, baby.” Her fingers tighten faintly at his nape. “You stayed. You helped them. You did what Claire asked you to do.” His hand travels down the centre of her back, then up again with the same slow pressure. “You got her parents somewhere safe while everybody worked. You went back in. You helped.”

A breath leaves her into his neck, warm and uneven.

“There wasn’t something you missed,” Garrett continues. He doesn’t know if that’s the exact shape of the thing hurting her, but he knows her. Knows the brutal little inventory she will already be taking through the whole shift, checking every number and movement for evidence that a better nurse might have changed what happened. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

He feels her swallow.

“She was too sick,” he says softly. “That’s not the same as you not doing enough.”

The words sound almost too neat once they leave him. Garrett hates neat explanations for things that have torn somebody open. He presses his mouth to her hair and tries again.

“Her mom thanked you.”

Her body goes still.

“You told me that in the car,” he says. “She thanked you because you looked after her baby. Because she knew you cared about her.”

A wet breath catches against his throat.

“They loved you,” Garrett murmurs. “Her parents did. June probably did too.”

He can practically hear her objecting to the scientific integrity of that claim on any other night. Telling him premature babies aren’t capable of filling out student evaluations. Asking whether he has conducted a peer-reviewed study on neonatal affection. Nothing comes.

Garrett strokes his hand over her back again. “You’re such a good nurse.”

Still nothing. 

His brows draw together. He tips his face down toward the top of her head, trying to see whatever portion of her expression is not hidden against his neck. “Baby?”

She remains heavy against him. For one brief, stupid second, alarm tightens beneath his ribs again. Then a soft little breath warms his throat.

The next one carries a faint snore. Garrett goes still. He waits. Another tiny, congested snuffle escapes her nose, followed by the slow release of her whole body as sleep takes the final tension from her spine. 

Her fingers are still tangled loosely behind his neck, but the grip has gone slack. Her cheek rests warm against his skin, mouth parted slightly near his collarbone.

Garrett looks toward the ceiling. A quiet laugh leaves him through his nose, too soft to disturb her. “Okay.”

He shifts carefully, testing whether he can lower them both without waking her. The second he moves, her arms tighten on instinct and one dissatisfied noise catches in the back of her throat.

Garrett stops immediately.

“Right,” he whispers. “Here it is.”

The headboard isn’t especially comfortable. One of its narrow wooden edges is already pressing into the centre of his shoulder blade, and her full weight has begun settling over one of his thighs in a way that promises circulation will become a future concern.

He doesn’t care. Garrett reaches behind himself one-handed, drags the pillow upright against the headboard and wedges it between the wood and his spine. 

The movement earns another sleepy sound from her, but she doesn’t wake. She only nuzzles closer, nose brushing once against his neck before her breathing evens out again.

He pulls the blanket higher around her. The clock on his nightstand says 2:43.

Across the hall, somebody gets out of bed. A door opens with unusual care, followed by the quiet pad of feet toward the bathroom. Garrett listens until the pipes begin groaning in the wall, then looks down at the girl asleep in his lap.

Her face is mostly hidden. He can see the damp curve of one cheek, the swollen edge beneath her eye and the lashes still clumped slightly from tears. One hand lies loose at the back of his neck, palm warm against his skin.

Garrett slides his own hand into her hair and holds her there. He doesn’t know how to make tomorrow better. June will still be dead when the sun comes up. Her parents will still wake somewhere without the monitors they have been listening to for weeks. 

His girlfriend will probably open her eyes and begin taking herself apart over a baby she had known for six shifts, because six shifts had apparently been more than enough to love somebody that small.

He cannot fix any of it.

The thought presses against an old, ugly place in him. The part that still believes love should make him capable of getting through every locked door before something happens on the other side. The part that hears pain and immediately starts searching for something he can hit, carry, stop or solve.

There’s nothing here for his hands to fight. Only her. Her breathing against his neck. Her knees tucked around his hips. The soft weight of her asleep on his chest because, even after the worst day she has had in a hospital, some exhausted part of her still knows exactly where to go when she cannot hold herself up anymore.

Garrett lowers his cheek onto the top of her head. His leg starts going numb ten minutes later. He stays exactly where he is.

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[kooksandpearls]

How You Get The Girl ❀ 02

pairing – Petal!Reader x Garrett Graham summary – Garrett Graham has a ten-step plan to get his girl back. warnings – Exhaustion, forgetting to eat, fainting, head injury, mild concussion, medical clinic, academic stress. word count – 12k

navigation – Masterlist | « Chapter One | Chapter Three »

Chapter Two. Stand There Like A Ghost.

The audition is six days away. Six days is nothing. 

Six days is also long enough to ruin every choice she’s made about the scene, rebuild it from scratch, ruin the new choices, and arrive at the audition carrying six incompatible versions of the same woman in her body.

She wakes before her alarm with one cheek stuck to the corner of her audition packet and the yellow highlighter still uncapped beneath her hand. 

Grey morning sits flat against the dorm window. Her neck hurts. The inside of her mouth tastes like the coffee she drank at eleven-thirty and the mint she chewed afterward in a failed attempt to convince herself this counted as dental care.

For several seconds, she stays folded over the desk and watches the circulation return to her fingers. The memory of Garrett’s hand slips in with it. 

His pinky beneath hers on the hockey-house couch. The cautious little curl when she touched him. The way he had stayed completely still while she laced their hands, as though even breathing too differently might turn the moment into something she had not offered.

She straightens before her mind can do anything embarrassing with that.

The audition packet is still open to the second scene. Mara stands alone in her mother’s kitchen, speaking to a half-dead houseplant because everyone else in the house has become too frightening to tell the truth to. 

On paper, it’s funny. It’s supposed to be funny, at least at first. Mara threatens the plant with eviction, accuses it of emotional manipulation, gives it a better childhood than her own through three tablespoons of tap water and an increasingly unstable monologue about sunlight. 

Then the scene turns by degrees until the audience understands she has been talking about herself the whole time.

The production itself belongs to Briar, technically. It will rehearse in the same black-box theatre where someone has been promising to fix the backstage sink since her freshman year, and the department will still use student volunteers to sell programmes and direct confused parents toward the bathrooms. None of that makes the audition small.

Once a year, the department brings in an outside director for the spring industry production, chooses a play that can travel cleanly between theatre and screen, and fills the invited performances with every person whose job title makes undergraduates briefly forget how to breathe. 

Alumni agents. Regional artistic directors. Casting associates from New York and Boston. A manager who had found one of last year’s seniors in the lobby afterward and signed her before graduation. 

The official department email described them as industry guests, which was the sort of neat, bloodless phrase universities used when they didn’t want students throwing up in public.

If she gets the role, and if she is good enough, and if the right person happens to be looking in the right direction at the exact second she becomes impossible to forget, something could happen.

Something was a safer word than Broadway. Safer than television, film, representation, meetings in rooms with bottled water she would be too nervous to open. Something didn’t make her sound like a child standing on her bed with a hairbrush microphone and a belief system built largely from cast albums.

She closes the packet, showers in six minutes, and leaves with wet hair pressed dark against the back of her coat.

Her week begins running before she does. By nine-fifteen, she’s delivered a presentation in Professor Martin’s class while privately trying to release the tension in her jaw. 

At ten, she’s across campus in the movement studio, lying on a floor that smells faintly of dust and other people’s feet. 

At eleven-thirty, she buys a coffee large enough to qualify as an organ and forgets it on the windowsill outside Studio B until the ice melts into a pale, undrinkable soup.

At twelve-oh-seven, her phone buzzes inside her bag.

Garrett: Did you eat?

She stares at the message while standing in the costume shop with three safety pins between her lips and a measuring tape looped around her neck. She removes the pins carefully.

coffee.

His reply comes almost immediately.

Garrett: Not food.

it had milk.

Garrett: Deeply compelling defence.

She smiles before one of the first-years drops an entire box of buttons behind her and the room fills with the sound of several hundred tiny plastic objects escaping toward freedom.

By two, she’s forgotten the exchange. By four, she’s also forgotten the cereal bar in the side pocket of her bag and the fact that she agreed to meet Allie outside the library before rehearsal. 

Allie finds her halfway across the quad, walking while reading the audition scene and nearly colliding with a campus tour.

“You’re going to kill a prospective student,” Allie says, catching the back of her coat and steering her away from a family looking nervous beneath a Briar admissions umbrella.

“She should’ve committed to the bit.”

Allie takes the pages from her hand. “You’re not allowed to read while crossing roads anymore.”

Her phone buzzes again while Allie’s still carrying the packet above her head like confiscated contraband.

Garrett: Drive tonight?

Then, before she can answer. 

Garrett: Twenty minutes. No destination. Minimal chance of murder.

Her chest loosens so quickly it feels almost suspicious. She pictures the Jeep warm and dim, Garrett’s hand loose over the steering wheel, the road passing black beyond the windows while neither of them has to decide what the time means. 

She wants it with a sharpness that briefly makes the rehearsal building ahead of them feel like an obstacle placed there personally.

“What?” Allie asks.

“Nothing.”

Allie reads her face with insulting ease. “Garrett?”

She types before Allie can begin making noises.

i can’t tonight. rehearsal until nine and then i need to work on my audition.

Garrett: I could come read with you after. Garrett: I’ve improved. Promise.

debatable.

Garrett: I can be extremely boring and helpful.

The smile comes again, smaller this time. She can almost see him saying it, eyebrows lifted, committing himself bravely to an evening of being uninteresting. She types, deletes, then types again.

i want to. i just really can’t lose the time.

There’s a pause long enough for Allie to hand back the pages and open the rehearsal-room door.

Garrett: Okay, baby.

Another message follows.

Garrett: Kick its ass.

She reads both twice before locking the screen.

Garrett doesn’t argue. He doesn’t offer to sit silently in the corner or appear outside rehearsal with the confident assumption that she will be happy once he’s already there. 

He doesn’t tell her she needs a break, though he’s clearly begun considering himself an unlicensed medical authority on her sleep schedule and nutritional intake. He says okay and lets the no remain exactly where she put it.

The absence of pressure should make it easier to return her attention to the scene. It doesn’t.

By Wednesday, Garrett has started appearing in the small spaces around her life without physically appearing much at all.

A coffee waits at the events-office desk when she arrives for her shift, the order correct down to the syrup she changes depending on whether the day feels cold enough to justify it. The receipt has her name on it and, beneath that, a note written in the special-instructions box.

ACTUAL FOOD NEXT. THIS IS NOT A LOOPHOLE.

She sends him a photograph of the cup beside a packet of vending-machine crackers.

Garrett: I’m reporting you.

to who?

Garrett: Tucker.

She pauses.

you wouldn’t.

Garrett: Try me.

At rehearsal, there’s a fresh packet of throat lozenges tucked into the front pocket of her bag. She assumes Allie put them there until Allie sees the box and says, “Oh, Jesus. He’s fully courting you.”

“He’s not courting me.”

Allie picks up the box and reads the label. “Honey and lemon. Intimate.”

“Give me those,” she mutters. 

“Do you think he asked the pharmacist for the sexiest flavour?”

She snatches them back, but the laugh gets out before she can prevent it, landing bright and brief in the dim hallway.

Garrett’s busy too. She knows because the group chat never permits mystery when it could provide public harassment instead. Extra skate at six. Film review. Classes. Weights. A captain’s meeting. 

Still, he texts between them.

Garrett: How’d rehearsal go?

Garrett: Logan says plants don’t count as scene partners because they can’t feed you energy. Dean says Logan has never fed anyone energy in his life.

Garrett: I said you’d probably hit both of them.

She answers when she can. Sometimes three hours later. Sometimes after midnight, when the building has gone quiet and the light from her desk is the only one left beneath the dorm-room door.

badly. and tell dean he’s right.

Garrett: Screenshotting this.

do and i’ll deny it.

Garrett: Theatre has taught you nothing about integrity.

By Thursday evening, the humour takes longer to reach her. Her temples have developed a low, persistent ache. 

At the campus café, she asks for the chicken thing and has to gesture helplessly toward a sandwich sitting eighteen inches from her face. During rehearsal, she misses an entrance she hasn’t missed once all semester and stands in the wing for a full second while Allie hisses her name through a fixed stage smile.

Dexter calls a break and finds her near the prop shelves, pressing both thumbs into the muscles beneath her eyebrows.

“You’re thinking too loudly,” he says.

“I’m not thinking at all, actually. I think something has died.”

Dexter considers her face, then softens by one degree. On anyone else, it might not be visible. “Go home after this.”

“I have work.”

“You have an audition.”

“I also have expenses. I have to live.”

“Babe.”

She looks away first, toward the rehearsal room where someone is moving a chair three inches downstage and immediately moving it back. “I’m fine.”

Dexter exhales through his nose. Her phone buzzes in her coat pocket.

Garrett: Let me steal you for half an hour tonight.

She shuts her eyes.

Garrett: Drive. Food. I’ll return you to your audition spiral before anyone notices.

Her body wants to say yes before the rest of her can begin listing reasons. She wants his car, his warmth, the stupid old guitar music he keeps low enough for conversation. She wants him looking over from the driver’s seat with that small, private smile he has started giving her instead of the full campus version. She wants thirty minutes in which nobody asks her to be open, grounded, bookable, emotionally available, or off-book.

She also has a shift until nine, rehearsal notes to rewrite, the scene to run, and a monologue that has begun feeling less true every time she touches it. Her thumb hovers over the keyboard.

i want to.

She watches the words sit there for a second, too naked on their own, then adds:

but i can’t. i’m sorry.

Garrett answers quickly.

Garrett: Don’t be sorry. Garrett: You sure I can’t come by later?

She looks at the packet folded and refolded inside her bag. She types with both thumbs.

no no. i really need to focus tonight.

Garrett: Okay.

That’s all. She locks the screen and returns to rehearsal.

At nine-forty, she leaves the campus events office with a tote bag cutting into one shoulder and the strange, papery feeling of having moved through too many fluorescent rooms without seeing daylight. Her dinner has been half a packet of crackers and three sour candies Allie found beneath the seats in the black box and claimed were probably recent.

The dorm is overheated. Somebody on the second floor has burned microwave popcorn so badly the hallway smells like electrical grief. She drops her bag beside the desk, pulls off her coat, and opens the audition packet before taking off her boots.

For forty minutes, she works. Or she tries to. She reads the first line six times and hears none of them. Marks a beat, erases it, marks it again half an inch farther down as though emotional truth might be hiding in the margin. She records the monologue on her phone, plays it back, and hates the deliberate break in her voice so much she deletes the file before it finishes.

At ten-thirty-two, she checks her messages. Nothing from Garrett.

That’s normal. Garrett’s allowed to possess an evening. He has practice in the morning. He’s already asked twice to see her and been told, with increasing clarity, not to come. The reasonable part of her understands this.

Something lower in her body doesn’t.

The silence sits oddly after several days of him occupying every small pause. No ridiculous update from the hockey house. No photograph of Logan doing something concerning. The phone remains dark beside her elbow while she runs the first page again.

She makes it four lines before looking at the screen. Still nothing.

Her stomach pulls inward, though that may simply be hunger finally becoming articulate. She presses the heel of one hand beneath her ribs and reads the next line aloud.

“I’m not avoiding you,” she tells the imaginary plant on her desk. “I am giving you the dignity of privacy while you die.”

The line lands dead.

“Great,” she mutters. “Good. Broadway’s calling.”

Her phone stays quiet.

Maybe she’s been too careful. Maybe every time Garrett steps toward her, she moves the boundary another inch and calls it caution. Dinner, but not upstairs. His hand, but only in the car. The hockey house, but no conversation about what any of it means. Come for a drive. No. Let me help. No. Can I see you? No, no, I really need to focus.

She had wanted him to listen when she said no. She had needed that from him. She hadn’t considered how quiet the room might become when he did.

The knock at her door makes her jump hard enough that her knee hits the underside of the desk.

“Fuck.” She pushes back from the chair, rubbing the sore spot above her kneecap. Her roommate is spending the night at her girlfriend’s, and nobody sensible visits a dorm room after ten-thirty without first sending a warning.

The knock comes again. Two quick taps. She approaches with all the confidence of a woman carrying a highlighter as her primary defensive weapon and opens the door three inches.

A guy in a red delivery jacket stands in the hallway holding a large brown paper bag. “Uh, delivery?”

She stares at him. He checks the receipt. Says her name.

“That’s me.”

He offers the bag.

“I didn’t order anything.”

The delivery guy looks down at the receipt again with the exhausted patience of someone whose job routinely places him between hungry people and their own memory. “It’s paid for.”

“Oh.” She still does not take it. “Are you sure it’s this room?”

He reads the number aloud.

“That’s this room.”

“Cool.”

“Sorry.” She accepts the bag at last. It’s warm against her forearms, heavier than expected, and the smell reaches her immediately through the folded paper. Garlic, chilli, fried dough, something sweet and sharp underneath. Her stomach contracts so suddenly it’s almost painful.

The delivery guy gives her a nod that suggests his role in this mystery has reached its limit, then walks back toward the stairs. She closes the door with her hip and carries the bag to the desk.

Inside are dumplings from the Thai restaurant near Hastings. The good ones, thin-skinned and crisp at the edges, packed beside the sauce she likes. There’s curry, rice, and the cucumber salad she had stolen most of from Garrett’s plate at dinner despite insisting she didn’t want her own. Enough food for tonight and tomorrow, possibly the entire theatrical department.

She looks for a receipt. Her name is printed across the top. Beneath it, folded once and tucked between the containers, is the receipt and small delivery note.

Her mouth changes before she can stop it. It settles first at one corner, then warms slowly across the rest of her face until she has to press her lips together and look down at the note again.

He had listened. He hadn’t come over. Hadn’t turned food into an excuse to stand in her doorway looking handsome and wounded until she invited him inside. He hadn’t asked for thirty minutes in exchange, or a phone call, or proof that the care had landed where he wanted it to.

He had only fed her.

She sits cross-legged on the rug because the desk is buried beneath pages and there is something too formal about eating this food at a chair. The paper bag stays beside her knee. She opens the dumplings first, steam lifting faintly against her face, and bites into one before locating a fork.

Her whole body seems to recognise food at once. Heat moving down into the empty, sour space in her stomach. Salt and garlic waking her mouth up. The ache beneath her ribs loosening enough to reveal how tightly she’s been carrying herself all evening. She picks up her phone.

thank you.

The message delivers. Three dots appear almost immediately.

Garrett: Eat.

She looks down at the open containers around her.

bossy.

Garrett: You like it.

Her thumb pauses.

sometimes.

Garrett: Oh yeah?

She can see his face too clearly. The way his eyebrows would lift, hope trying to disguise itself behind amusement. She takes another dumpling and lets him wait exactly twelve seconds, because she may be exhausted and emotionally compromised, but she still has standards.

sometimes, graham.

Garrett: I’ll take it.

Her fingers smooth once over the folded delivery note where she’s placed it beside the audition packet.

you ordered too much.

Garrett: I know you.

The answer presses somewhere tender. She looks around the floor at the curry, the rice, the dumplings she has already eaten too quickly, and the cucumber salad she is absolutely going to finish despite its alleged status as tomorrow’s food.

debatable.

Garrett: Eat the dumpling, baby.

She laughs under her breath, picks up another one, and returns to the scene with the warm container balanced over one knee. The next time she reads the opening line, it sounds a little less like an actress trying to prove she understands pain and a little more like a girl making a joke because the truth is still too large to say directly.

Beside her, Garrett’s note rests against the page.

At least eat, baby.

Four days before the audition, her alarm goes off at four in the morning. Vibrating until the sound drags her out of sleep with one cheek pressed into the pillow and her heart already behaving as if she’s missed something.

The dorm room is dark except for the thin green light of the charger beside her bed. Her roommate is still away, leaving the other mattress smooth and undisturbed beneath the window, and for several seconds she lies there beneath the duvet with one hand curled near her face, trying to remember why any person would choose to be conscious at this hour.

Then the audition arrives fully formed in her mind. Four days. The scene. The monologue. The director whose previous production transferred from Boston to New York. The casting associate whose name had appeared on the guest list circulated through the department yesterday afternoon. 

The role waiting somewhere beyond a room she hasn’t entered yet, existing or not existing for her depending on what her body does with twelve minutes under fluorescent lights.

She sits up. Her head feels packed with cotton, her shoulders stiff, but the exhaustion is still young enough to be bullied. She pulls on leggings and a sweatshirt in the dark, twists her hair into something technically off her face, and drinks half a bottle of water while standing beside the desk.

Garrett’s delivery note is tucked against the edge of the mirror.

At least eat, baby.

The containers from last night are stacked neatly in the little dorm fridge. There’s curry left, rice, two dumplings she had protected from herself through an act of restraint she now considers misguided. 

She looks at them while tying one shoe, already calculating whether she can eat cold rice in the gym car park without creating a new low point in the human experience. She will eat after.

The thought arrives cleanly. Reasonably. It has no visible connection to every other after that will replace it before the sun comes up. She leaves with coffee in a travel cup and the audition packet folded into her gym bag.

At four-twenty, the campus fitness centre belongs to insomniacs, athletes, and people conducting private wars against themselves. Most of the overhead lights are still dimmed. The treadmills hum in a row beneath silent televisions playing overnight sports recaps, the closed captions moving over footage of men celebrating goals she’s too tired to identify. 

A cleaner pushes a wide mop across the basketball court. Somewhere near the weight racks, metal strikes metal with the ugly, disciplined clang of someone who’s never once mistaken sleep for a priority.

She starts on the treadmill. The first five minutes are awful. Her calves feel heavy, her lungs insulted by the hour, the coffee moving too warm and acidic in her empty stomach. 

Then her body catches the rhythm. Feet landing. Belt turning. Breath in, breath out. The room narrowing into repetition until there is finally nothing to solve except the next step. She runs Mara’s monologue silently while she moves.

I’m not avoiding you.

Three breaths.

I am giving you the dignity of privacy while you die.

Four breaths.

By five-fifteen, she’s on the floor beside a bench, stretching one hamstring while reading the second page. Sweat cools beneath the back of her sweatshirt. Her phone lights up inside the open gym bag.

Garrett: Why are you awake?

She looks at the time beside his name and almost laughs. Five-sixteen.

why are YOU awake?

Garrett: Practice. Garrett: Your turn.

gym.

The three dots appear immediately.

Garrett: At five in the morning?

technically i got here at four twenty.

Garrett: That’s not better.

She smiles down at the screen while rolling her ankle slowly.

Garrett: Did you eat first?

Her thumb stills.

She considers lying in the loose, automatic way she considers moving a chair onstage when the blocking begins to feel wrong.

coffee.

Garrett: Baby.

it’s early. food feels illegal.

Garrett: Food has no business hours.

She can see him somewhere across campus in the rink corridors, curls still flattened on one side from sleep, gear bag over his shoulder, already frowning at his phone with the full disapproval of a man who had ordered enough Thai food to feed her for two days and expected his logistical work to be honoured.

i’ll eat after.

Garrett: Pinky swear.

She looks at the words for a second.

pinky swear.

The lie feels small enough to forgive when she sends it.

At six-thirty, she’s showered, dressed, and walking into Professor Martin’s lecture with damp hair freezing at the ends beneath her coat. At seven-forty-five, she’s in the library with three articles open across her laptop and no memory of opening the third. At nine, she gives up her seat to a girl waiting nearby, carries her coffee down two flights of stairs, and reaches the bottom before realising the cup is empty.

Breakfast, she thinks. Then her professor stops her outside class to ask whether she’s considered applying for the spring research placement. The conversation lasts eleven minutes. By the end of it, she’s late to movement lab and spends the entire walk eating two mints from the bottom of her bag because they’re the first thing her fingers find.

Her phone buzzes twice during class. She feels it through the canvas of her tote where it rests against the wall, but doesn’t look. They’re doing partner work, and Dexter has already accused her of keeping part of her attention on a little electronic leash, which is rich coming from a man who checked a dating app during notes yesterday and then announced that desire was part of his process.

At eleven-fifteen, she opens the messages while crossing the quad.

Garrett: Practice done. Alive. Garrett: Logan got hit in the throat with a puck and says his voice sounds sexier now. Garrett: It doesn’t.

There’s also a photograph. Logan sits in the locker room with an ice pack held against the front of his neck, middle finger raised toward the camera, his expression deeply offended by both hockey and documentation. Dean’s blurred in the background, laughing hard enough to require assistance from a bench.

Her mouth twitches. She begins typing a reply, then somebody calls her name from the theatre-annex steps. It’s one of the costume assistants asking whether she can cover an extra hour before rehearsal because a zipper has broken, three hems remain unfinished, and the phrase dress emergency has been used with complete sincerity.

She locks the screen. The reply stays unfinished.

At noon, she sits at a sewing machine with the audition packet open beside the presser foot, repeating lines beneath her breath while guiding pale-blue fabric beneath the needle. 

At one, she runs to the events office and spends three hours answering emails, printing lanyards, correcting a room booking, and explaining to a student society president that no, the university cannot provide a live falcon for a medieval-themed fundraiser regardless of how central it is to the vision.

At three-twelve, her phone lights again.

Garrett: How’s your day?

Then, fifteen minutes later:

Garrett: Alive?

At three-fifty:

Garrett: Send proof of life please.

She sees all three while standing beside the printer with forty-eight name tags warming beneath her palm. She means to answer. She even opens the conversation, but her manager asks whether she can stay an extra half-hour, and then the printer jams, and then one of the theatre first-years texts that Dexter has moved the rehearsal call fifteen minutes earlier.

By four-thirty, her phone is back in her bag, unanswered. The first rehearsal lasts just under two hours and feels like six.

Dexter stops the same transition nine times. Allie loses a shoe during a movement sequence and performs the next thirty seconds in one heel out of spite. Someone knocks over the prop lamp. She runs her scene three times and hates a different thing on each pass.

“Stop protecting the end,” Dexter tells her after the third run, standing in the centre aisle with one hand pressed over his mouth. “You know where she ends up, but she doesn’t.”

They run it again.

At six-fifteen, she leaves rehearsal, changes shirts in a bathroom stall, and returns to the events office because somebody has called in sick and the evening supervisor needs help setting up a faculty reception in the alumni hall.

There’s food at the reception. Small sandwiches with the crusts cut off, fruit arranged in geometric little rows, cheese on slate boards with handwritten labels informing guests which region had produced it. She carries three trays from the service corridor into the hall and doesn’t take anything because the guests haven’t arrived yet and eating the display feels criminal.

She will grab something before she leaves. Then someone spills sparkling water over the sign-in table. A lecturer cannot connect his laptop to the projector. The keynote speaker arrives early and wants the chairs rearranged. 

By the time she takes her coat from the staff room, the catering trays have been cleared and the few remaining sandwiches are already sealed inside plastic tubs being carried toward the kitchen.

Her stomach gives one tight, hollow pull as she walks back toward the theatre annex. She mistakes it for nerves.

The second rehearsal begins at seven.

The studio has become too warm during the break. The mirrors are clouded faintly near the bottom, the air carrying that specific rehearsal-room mixture of dust, sweat, old wood, and the artificial citrus of the cleaning spray used badly between classes. 

Bags lie open along one wall. Water bottles cluster near the door. Somebody has left a banana on top of the speaker, growing softer by the minute beneath the heat.

She sits cross-legged on the floor with her script spread across her thighs. Her body feels oddly distant below the neck, legs heavy, fingertips cold despite the warmth of the room.

There’s a faint sourness at the back of her throat that she keeps swallowing against. Every few lines, her eyes lose their place and return half a paragraph higher, forcing her to trace the text with one finger like a child learning to read.

Allie lowers herself onto the floor beside her with a quiet grunt, tugging one knee toward her chest. She studies her face for a second too long.

“Babe.”

She hums without looking up.

“You okay?”

“Mhm.”

Allie doesn’t move. She can feel the stare against the side of her face with the uncomfortable clarity of stage light. “You don’t look great.”

“Thank you,” she murmurs. “That’s exactly the feedback an actress needs four days before an industry audition.”

“I don’t mean ugly.”

“Excellent clarification.”

“You look…” Allie pauses, searching for a word. “Grey.”

She lifts her head. “Grey?”

“Like, pretty grey.”

“That’s not better.”

“It’s a flattering grey.” Allie reaches over and presses the back of two fingers briefly against her cheek. “You’re cold.”

“The room’s cold,” she mumbles.

Allie’s brows draw together, humour losing ground around them. “Did you sleep last night?”

“Some.”

“How much is some?”

She looks down at the script again. The words have started swimming slightly near the edges, though she can still force them still by narrowing her eyes. “Enough.”

“That means no.”

“I slept.”

Allie exhales through her nose. “Have you eaten?”

The question reaches her through several layers. Her finger stops beneath the third line. She tries to remember. The morning has become disconnected little rooms in her head. Gym. Coffee. Lecture. Library. Costume shop. Work. Rehearsal. Work again.

Coffee. The mints. Nothing else arrives.

“Oh,” she says.

Allie goes still. “Oh?”

She looks up slowly. Her stomach seems to recognise the answer at the same time she does, giving another tight, unpleasant twist beneath her ribs. “I think I forgot.”

“You forgot to eat?”

“I was busy.”

“It’s seven o’clock.”

“I know what time it is,” she grumbles.

“You’ve eaten nothing since yesterday?”

“I had coffee.”

Allie’s eyes close. “I’m going to kill you.”

“Get in line.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. The department’s very competitive.”

Allie doesn’t laugh. She leans closer, voice lowering while the rest of the cast moves around them, people stretching, laughing, running bits of dialogue beneath their breath. “Do you feel sick?”

She presses her lips together, checking the inside of her body as if it belongs to somebody else and she’s only now been asked to assess the damage. Her head aches behind the eyes. There’s a greasy little wave moving through her stomach. Her skin feels too tight over her face.

“Just…” She rubs one palm over her sternum. “Yuck.”

“Helpful.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re obviously not.”

“No, no. I am.” She shifts the script higher on her knees and forces her eyes back onto the page. “I just need food.”

Allie gives her a long look. “I have a protein bar.”

“Great.”

“In my bag.”

She nods, though the motion makes something inside her skull lag half a second behind. “I’ll get it.”

“I’ll get it.” Allie plants one hand on the floor and pushes herself upright, then pauses when Dexter calls her name from across the studio.

He’s standing beside the lighting lecturer with both arms folded, gesturing toward the taped marks near centre stage.

“One second,” Allie says. She points two fingers at her own eyes, then toward her face. “Do not move.”

She lifts the script in a weak little salute. “Go.”

Allie crosses toward Dexter, already asking what he wants before she reaches him.

For a few seconds, she stays exactly where she is. She breathes through her nose. The room seems too loud now, every separate sound arriving at once – the scrape of a chair leg, a bottle hitting the floor and rolling, Dexter’s voice, the lighting lecturer answering, somebody laughing near the mirrors. Her pulse has become noticeable in her throat.

She looks toward Allie’s bag. It sits near the opposite wall, black canvas, one strap folded beneath it. Not far. Fifteen feet, maybe.

The protein bar will help. Sugar. Something dense and artificial and capable of getting her through another hour.

She places the script on the floor and uncrosses her legs. Pins and needles move down both calves. She puts one hand beside her hip and pushes herself up.

The room changes before she gets fully vertical.

Heat rushes over her face and chest in one hard wave, immediate enough that sweat breaks cold beneath the back of her shirt.

Her vision tightens. Black gathers softly at the edges, the mirrored wall narrowing into a bright strip in front of her.

She catches the floor beneath one foot and cannot seem to locate the other properly.

“Hey, Al,” she says.

Her own voice sounds strange. Too quiet, coming from somewhere several feet behind her. Allie turns.

She reaches one hand vaguely in her direction. “Can I–”

The rest of the question disappears. Every sound in the studio pulls away at once, voices thinning into muffled shapes at the end of a long corridor.

The air feels both freezing and unbearably hot against her skin. Her stomach drops, though she’s standing still. Or believes she is.

Allie says her name. The floor rises fast toward her. Or she goes down. There’s no useful difference by the time everything goes black.

Consciousness returns badly.

First there’s light, white and flat through her eyelids. Then sound: the soft electronic pulse of something nearby, rubber soles moving over vinyl, paper rustling. Then pain arrives behind both, a thick, ugly throb beginning near the back of her skull and pushing forward until it sits behind her eyes.

She groans.

The sound scratches at her throat. Her mouth is dry enough that her tongue feels too large inside it, and when she tries to lift her head, the room tips sharply to one side.

“Oh, no, honey.” A woman’s voice comes close immediately. Warm, brisk, real. A hand settles carefully against her shoulder. “Stay down for me. Don’t sit up yet.”

She opens her eyes.

The ceiling is made of white acoustic tiles, one of them stained faintly yellow near the corner. A fluorescent panel glows directly above her with the specific cruelty of medical lighting.

She turns her face away from it and discovers she’s lying on a narrow exam bed with crinkled paper beneath her, a thin blanket pulled over her legs and a blood-pressure cuff wrapped around one arm.

“Where…” Her voice catches. She swallows and regrets it. “Where am I?”

“Student health clinic.” The nurse comes into view beside the bed, middle-aged with silver threaded through her dark hair and a pair of purple glasses resting low on her nose. Her ID badge swings slightly when she leans closer. “You’re alright. Just take it easy.”

She frowns, trying to force the last thing she remembers into a shape. Rehearsal. The floor. Allie turning toward her. Her head pulses harder.

“Ow,” she whispers, lifting one hand toward the back of it.

The nurse catches her wrist gently before her fingers reach the sore spot. “Careful. You took a nasty fall.”

She lets her hand drop onto the blanket. “I did?”

“You fainted, honey. Smacked your head pretty good on the way down.”

“I passed out?”

“You sure did.”

She stares at her. There’s something almost insulting about having lost an entire section of her own evening. One second she had been asking Allie for food, the next she’s horizontal beneath institutional lighting while a machine squeezes her arm.

She closes her eyes again. “Ouch.”

“I bet.” The nurse releases the pressure cuff with a soft hiss and checks the reading before reaching for the little pulse monitor clipped over her finger. “Any nausea?”

“A little.”

“Blurred vision?”

“When I tried to sit up.”

“Any neck pain?”

She tests it carefully without moving. “Just my head.”

“Mhm.” The nurse picks up a small penlight. “I’m going to check your pupils again. Look at my nose for me.”

The light moves across one eye, then the other. She tries not to flinch and fails.

“Sorry,” the nurse says. “I know it’s unpleasant.”

“That light is evil,” she grumbles.

A small smile pulls at the nurse’s mouth. “That’s a common review.”

She sets the penlight aside, makes a note on the chart, then adjusts the blanket where it has slipped beneath her knee.

There’s a little carton of apple juice on the counter beside a packet of crackers and a plastic cup of water. The sight of them makes her stomach turn and tighten at once.

“Your blood sugar was low when they brought you in,” the nurse says, following her gaze. “Your blood pressure wasn’t too impressive either. Your friend said you hadn’t eaten today.”

She looks toward the opposite wall.

“Coffee isn’t breakfast,” the nurse adds.

“I’m learning that.”

“Bit of a harsh lesson.”

She gives a faint, miserable laugh. It immediately worsens the throbbing in her skull, and she shuts her eyes again.

The nurse rests one hand lightly against the rail of the bed. “Because you lost consciousness and hit your head, you’re not going back to your dorm alone tonight. We need somebody to come collect you and stay with you for a while. Keep an eye on you.”

Her eyes open. “I have an audition in four days.”

The nurse gives her a look over the top of the purple glasses. It’s not unkind, but it’s clearly survived many students attempting to negotiate.

“Your audition can remain in four days while you lie still for the next five minutes.”

“But rehearsal–”

“Is finished for you tonight.”

Her mouth presses thin. The room feels suddenly smaller around the bed, the paper beneath her loud whenever she shifts. “Can Allie take me?”

“She’s here, but she told us she lives in another dorm and has rehearsal again first thing tomorrow.” The nurse glances down at the chart. “We need someone who can take responsibility for you tonight. Preferably your emergency contact.”

She stops moving.

The nurse runs one finger down the page. “Let me see here…”

There is a pause while she adjusts her glasses.

“Garrett Graham,” she reads. Then she looks up. “Is that still right, honey?”

For a second, she only stares at her.

Garrett.

His name is printed there in whatever university system has carried it quietly through the breakup, through the months of not touching and looking away and pretending they had both found other people interesting.

She must have entered him during their first relationship, probably sitting at his kitchen table while he stole whatever snack she had brought and told her to put him down because who else was she going to call if she broke a leg doing theatre.

She had never changed it. She hadn’t even remembered there was something to change.

The thought of him arrives with enough force to make the room soften at the edges for an entirely different reason. Garrett walking into the clinic with damp curls or his Briar jacket half-zipped, face already tight with worry.

Garrett’s hand finding hers before he remembers to ask and then stopping, because now he does remember. Garrett saying baby in that low, steady voice he uses when he’s scared and trying not to make the fear hers.

Her throat pulls tight. She wants him. She wants him here now with an immediacy that leaves no room for pride to make itself useful.

She nods once, carefully because her head punishes even that.

“Yes,” she says, voice small and rough. Then, after a breath, “Please.”

“No worries, honey.” She gives her shoulder one gentle pat and turns toward the door. “I’ll go call him now.”

She nods again and lets her head settle back against the pillow, listening as the nurse’s footsteps cross the room and the door opens into the bright clinic hallway.

The door doesn’t close properly behind her. It catches against the frame and remains open by an inch, enough for the light from the corridor to cut a thin white line across the floor and for every sound from the little office beyond to travel with irritating clarity into the room.

A chair rolls. Paper shifts. The nurse says something to somebody at the front desk, then there’s the hollow click of a receiver being lifted.

Her head throbs in time with her pulse.

Whatever she struck on the way down has left a deep, concentrated ache at the back of her skull, the kind that seems to have roots.

Each beat presses outward beneath the skin, heavy and hot, then moves forward behind her eyes until even keeping them open feels like unnecessary labour.

She closes them.

The nurse’s voice carries through the gap in the door, softened by distance but still recognisable. “Hi, is this Garrett Graham?”

A pause.

“This is the Briar student health clinic. Don’t panic, honey, she’s alright.”

Another pause, longer this time.

“No, no, she’s awake. She fainted during rehearsal and hit her head when she went down.”

The silence on the other end must be doing something impressive, because the nurse’s tone changes immediately, growing firmer beneath the kindness. “Garrett. She’s conscious. She’s speaking. Her observations are stable. I need you to take a breath for me.”

Despite everything, the corner of her mouth shifts faintly. Of course he’s panicking so hard a medical professional has begun coaching him through respiration.

The movement pulls at something behind her eyes. Her smile disappears into a wince.

“She needs somebody to collect her and keep an eye on her tonight,” the nurse continues. “Yes. Student clinic, east building. We’re here until ten.”

A pause.

“No, you do not need to run.” The nurse’s voice becomes more distant as she presumably turns away from the open door. “He hung up.”

Someone near the desk laughs.

She would too, except her skull feels as though it has been fitted with a second, much angrier skull inside it. She exhales through her nose and sinks farther into the thin clinic pillow, the paper beneath her head crackling softly with every tiny adjustment.

She means only to close her eyes until the room stops pressing so brightly against them.

The next thing she hears is Garrett’s voice. “Where is she?”

Too loud. Too close. Frayed at the edges in a way his voice rarely is unless something has gone wrong on the ice or he is trying very hard not to let anger become panic.

“Right through there,” the nurse says. “And lower your voice, Romeo. She’s got a headache.”

His footsteps hit the hallway fast and uneven, the rubber soles of his shoes catching once against the vinyl before he appears in the doorway.

Garrett looks like he’s arrived by force. His jacket is half-zipped over a dark Briar sweatshirt, the hood bunched crookedly beneath the collar. His curls are flattened on one side and pushed wildly backward on the other, as if he has spent the entire drive dragging his hand through them.

His cheeks are pink from the cold, breath still coming too quickly, and there’s something naked in his face when his eyes find her on the exam bed.

“Hi.” The word leaves him almost breathless. He crosses the room in three strides, then slows only when he reaches the bed, as though the sight of her has reminded his body that speed is no longer useful. “Oh– hi, baby.”

He bends over her, one hand reaching carefully toward the side of her face. She frowns and lifts two fingers to his mouth before he can say anything else.

“Shh,” she murmurs. “Too loud.”

Garrett stops immediately. His lips press softly against her fingertips before he draws back half an inch, nodding with exaggerated care.

When he speaks again, his voice has dropped nearly to a whisper. “Course. Yeah. Course, baby. Sorry.”

She lets her hand fall, and Garrett catches it before it reaches the blanket. His fingers close around hers gently, warm enough that she feels the difference through her whole palm.

“You okay?” he asks.

The question is absurd enough that she almost laughs, but she remembers what happened last time and only closes her eyes instead. “Forgot to eat. Fainted.”

Garrett stares at her. “You forgot to eat?”

There’s no judgement in the words yet, only horrified disbelief, but her face tightens anyway.

“Don’t be mean,” she mutters. “I’m concussed.”

His mouth opens, then closes. A breath leaves him through his nose, part sigh and part exhausted prayer.

He lifts their joined hands and presses her knuckles briefly against his forehead. “Jesus Christ.”

“I said don’t be mean.”

“I’m not being mean.” His thumb moves once over the side of her finger, the touch so careful it barely counts as movement. “I’m trying not to have a heart attack.”

“That seems dramatic.”

“You passed out and hit your head.”

She sighs. “I was there.”

“You were unconscious.”

“Then I guess technically I wasn’t.”

Garrett’s eyes close for one second, and when he opens them again, some of the panic has settled beneath the familiar exasperation she recognises.

The nurse returns with a folder tucked beneath one arm. Garrett straightens but doesn’t let go of her hand.

“Is she good to go home?” he asks, voice still low.

The nurse comes to stand near the foot of the bed. “She is, provided somebody stays with her tonight and keeps an eye on her. She’s got a likely mild concussion. No driving, no alcohol, nothing strenuous, and she needs to take it easy. If the headache suddenly gets much worse, she starts vomiting repeatedly, becomes confused, is difficult to wake, has weakness, trouble speaking, anything that worries you, you take her to the emergency room.”

Garrett nods through every instruction with the intense concentration of a man being briefed on how to disarm something explosive. “Okay.”

“And she needs food,” the nurse adds, glancing pointedly toward the bed. “Proper food. Not just coffee.”

“Yeah,” Garrett says. “I can do that.”

She opens one eye. “You sound pleased.”

“I’m pleased someone with medical authority finally told you coffee isn’t a meal.”

The nurse’s mouth twitches. “I like him.”

“Please don’t encourage him,” she murmurs.

Garrett ignores that and takes the discharge folder when it’s offered, opening it immediately and scanning the first page.

“You can read it outside,” she tells him. “The words will remain.”

He glances up. “You’re making jokes. That’s good.”

“I’m deeply brave.”

“Yeah, baby.”

The softness in his answer catches somewhere below her throat.

The nurse removes the pulse monitor from her finger and unwinds the blood-pressure cuff from her arm. “Let’s get you sitting up slowly. No heroics.”

“I don’t do heroics.”

Both Garrett and the nurse look at her.

She frowns. “That felt really mean.”

Garrett slides one hand behind her shoulders while the nurse raises the back of the bed. The change in position sends a dull pulse through her skull, sudden and thick enough that she groans and shuts her eyes.

“Easy,” Garrett murmurs immediately. “I’ve got you.”

Her body folds toward the nearest stable thing before pride can be consulted. Her forehead finds the front of his shoulder, cheek resting against the worn cotton of his sweatshirt while his arm settles carefully around her back.

For several seconds, no one asks her to move. Garrett’s hand stays broad between her shoulder blades, holding her upright while the dizziness passes.

Beneath her ear, his heartbeat is still too fast. She can feel the hard, nervous rhythm through the sweatshirt, every beat giving away how little his lowered voice has to do with actual calm.

“You good?” he whispers.

“No.”

“Okay.”

The answer comes without correction or forced optimism. Only okay, quiet against her hair, as if being unwell is something he can sit beside without needing her to hurry through it.

She keeps her head there until the room stops shifting.

When she finally lifts it, Garrett’s face is close. The panic hasn’t disappeared from his eyes, but it’s been folded down into attention.

He watches every small movement she makes as if her balance is written somewhere around her mouth and he might miss a change if he blinks.

The nurse brings over the plastic cup of water. “Small sip.”

Garrett takes it before she can, holds it while she drinks, then lowers it the second she turns her face away. There’s something humiliatingly easy about letting him help. No instinct to argue. No need to prove she can hold her own cup while the room still feels fractionally detached from the floor.

“Alright,” the nurse says. “Feet over the side.”

Garrett moves first, sliding one arm beneath hers while she shifts toward the edge of the bed. Her shoes have been placed neatly on the floor beneath her. One lace is undone.

She stares at it.

Garrett follows her gaze. “Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were about to bend down.”

“I can tie my shoe,” she mutters.

“Not tonight.”

He crouches before she can protest and ties both laces, even the one that is already secured, pulling the loops snug without making them tight. His curls fall forward over his forehead.

The gesture is so ordinary, so quietly intimate, that something inside her chest goes soft in a way that has nothing to do with the faintness.

When he stands, he reaches for her bag from the chair and slings it over his shoulder. The pink strap cuts across the dark front of his sweatshirt. Three months ago, she might have made a joke about it. Tonight, she only watches his fingers adjust the weight.

“Ready?” he asks.

“No.”

“Great.”

Garrett steps close enough that his side presses lightly against hers. He gets one arm beneath her shoulders, then takes her wrist and guides it carefully around the back of his neck.

“Wrap that arm around me, baby. There you go.”

She does. The first step feels uncertain. Her knees hold, but the floor seems slightly softer beneath them than it should. Garrett tightens his arm around her waist immediately, drawing her firmly into his side without making a comment.

“I’m fine,” she whispers.

“I know.”

“You’re holding me like I’m ninety.”

“I’d hold ninety-year-old you exactly like this.”

She turns her face faintly toward him. “You’d still be alive?”

“Out of spite.”

“That tracks.”

The nurse follows them to the doorway with the discharge papers. “Slowly.”

Garrett nods. “We’re going slowly.”

He does. Painfully slowly. He matches every small, cautious step, letting her put as much weight into him as she needs without making it obvious when they pass the front desk.

The clinic feels long on the way out, corridors stretched beneath harsh lights, doors opening into rooms full of paper-covered beds and humming machines.

Allie sits in one of the waiting-room chairs with both hands wrapped around her phone. She stands so fast when they appear that the chair legs scrape behind her.

“Oh my god.”

The volume makes her wince.

Allie’s hands fly to her own mouth. “Sorry. Sorry.” She crosses the room and stops just outside Garrett’s hold, eyes moving over her face with visible guilt. “Are you okay?”

“She’s concussed,” Garrett says.

“Garrett,” she mutters.

“What? You told me.”

Allie’s face crumples around the edges. “I shouldn’t have left you.”

“You walked twelve feet away.”

“I told you not to move.”

“I don’t respect authority.”

“That isn’t funny.”

“It’s a little funny.”

Allie looks toward Garrett as though requesting assistance from the only other person in the room who understands the futility of arguing with her.

“I’ve got her,” he says quietly.

Allie nods. Relief moves through her so visibly that her shoulders drop. She reaches out and squeezes her hand once. “Text me when you’re home.”

“I will.”

“I mean it.”

“I know.”

Allie’s gaze flicks to Garrett again, protective even through the worry. “You’ll stay with her?”

“All night.”

There’s no hesitation in it. He says it like the clinic has given him a job and he’s already built the rest of his evening around doing it properly.

Something warm presses behind her ribs.

The cold outside hits hard after the clinic’s stale heat. Garrett pulls his jacket open wider and angles his body around her as they cross the car park, blocking the wind as much as he can.

The campus is nearly empty, paths shining beneath the streetlamps, theatre buildings dark except for the one studio window where rehearsal has continued without her. She looks toward it.

Garrett notices. “No.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re not going back.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

She presses her face briefly into his shoulder. “You’re annoying.”

“Good.”

The Jeep waits beneath a tree near the edge of the lot. Garrett unlocks it from several feet away, then opens the passenger door and turns her carefully until the backs of her knees meet the seat.

“Head,” he murmurs, one hand flattening over the top of the doorframe.

She ducks beneath it and lowers herself into the passenger seat. The movement makes her vision pulse dimly, and she leans back immediately, eyes closing against the padded headrest.

Garrett gathers the edge of her coat before it catches in the door, sets her bag on the back seat, then reaches for the seatbelt.

“I can do it,” she says automatically.

His hand stills. She opens her eyes and finds him watching her. The belt is three inches from her hand. She could pull it across herself. It might make her head hurt. It might not.

She lets her fingers drop into her lap. “You can.”

“Okay.”

Garrett draws it slowly across her chest. The buckle clicks. He gives the belt one light tug, then pauses with one hand braced near her hip.

“You alright?”

“Mhm.”

“You gonna puke?”

“No.”

“Dizzy?”

She sighs. “A little.”

His mouth tightens. “I’m driving like Tucker.”

“That bad?”

“That safe.”

“Terrifying.”

He closes the door gently and walks around the front of the Jeep.

The inside is cold at first. Garrett starts the engine and turns the heat on low rather than blasting it, deciding that even air can be too loud now. The dashboard glows blue across his face as he pulls out of the car park with both hands on the wheel.

For several minutes, neither of them speaks.

She rests her head carefully against the seat and watches campus slide past the window in dark, familiar pieces. Brick buildings. Bare trees. Pools of light across wet pavement.

Her body feels hollowed out and overfilled at the same time, limbs heavy, stomach aching with hunger, emotions sitting too close beneath her skin after the fear and the fall and waking up alone beneath medical lights.

Garrett glances at her every few seconds.

“You can watch the road,” she murmurs.

“I am.”

“No, you’re watching me.”

“I can do both,” he argues.

“That sounds illegal.”

“It’s a talent.”

His voice remains soft, almost absurdly so. Even the humour is careful around the edges, built not to demand anything from her.

The gentleness does something unexpected. Something worse than panic would have. Her eyes burn.

She turns toward the window before he can see, but Garrett has always been irritatingly good at noticing the small changes in her face when he is actually looking.

“Hey.” His voice shifts. “What’s wrong? Something hurt?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Baby.”

The word slips beneath whatever weak structure she’s built around herself. Her throat tightens. She presses her lips together, but the first tear moves anyway, hot and immediate down the side of her face.

Garrett’s hands tighten once around the wheel. “Is it your head? Are you feeling worse?”

“No.” She wipes the tear away too quickly. “No, I just feel like shit.”

“Okay.”

“And I’m tired.”

“I know.”

“And hungry.”

“I know that too.”

“And I’ve ruined everything.”

His head turns sharply before he catches himself and looks back at the road. “You haven’t ruined anything.”

“My audition is in four days, and I’m concussed because I forgot food exists.”

“Hey. We’ll figure it out.”

“You can’t figure out a concussion,” she sniffles.

“I can feed one.”

A broken little laugh escapes her, immediately caught by another tear.

Garrett reaches across the centre console and turns his hand palm-up between them. He does not take hers. He only leaves it there, open.

She looks down at it. Then she places her hand in his. His fingers close slowly, thumb settling over her knuckles. He keeps one hand on the wheel and the other around hers while the Jeep moves through the dark.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers.

Garrett’s brow creases. “For what?”

“Everything.”

“No.”

She stares down at their hands. His knuckles are scraped from practice, skin dry near one thumb. “Garrett.”

“You don’t have anything to apologise for.”

“We both…” Her voice catches. She swallows against the ache in her throat. “We both fucked up.”

He is quiet for a moment. The Jeep stops at a red light, its glow moving faintly over the windshield.

“Maybe,” he says. “But you still don’t have anything to apologise for tonight.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“It does to me.”

“I hurt you,” she presses.

Garrett’s thumb moves once over her hand. “I hurt you first.”

“It isn’t a competition.”

“I know.”

“You always make things a competition.”

“I know,” he says again, and there’s no defence in it. No grin trying to soften the confession. “I’m trying not to.”

The light changes. He drives on.

She looks at his profile, the firm line of his jaw, the curls still disordered from whatever he did to them after the clinic called. “I was mean sometimes.”

“You were hurt.”

“That doesn’t make it okay.”

“No.” His mouth pulls faintly at one corner, not quite a smile. “But I understand it now.”

“You shouldn’t let me off that easy.”

“I’m not letting you off anything. I just…” Garrett exhales slowly. “I don’t want you lying here with a head injury trying to apologise for breaking up with me when I was the one who made being with me feel shitty.”

“It wasn’t always shitty,” she says.

“I know.”

“Most of it wasn’t.”

“I know that too.”

Her eyes burn again. “I loved you. So much.”

Garrett’s fingers close more firmly around hers.

The words sit between them in the quiet Jeep. Past tense only because grammar has cornered her there, not because either of them believes the feeling has obeyed it.

His voice comes low when he answers. “I know, baby.”

She waits for him to say something else. That he loved her too. That he still does. That he wants her back.

Garrett would once have filled the silence with every possible declaration, stacked them high enough that she had no room to examine what was underneath.

He doesn’t. He holds her hand and drives.

By the time they reach her dorm, the tears have dried tight against her cheeks. Garrett parks near the entrance, shuts off the engine, then turns in his seat.

“Stay there.”

“I wasn’t planning an escape.”

“Good.”

He walks around the Jeep and opens her door. The cold reaches in first, followed by Garrett’s hands, one taking hers and the other settling at her waist as she steps down.

Her knees feel steadier now, though her head still pulses each time her foot meets the pavement. Garrett keeps his arm around her anyway, her bag slung over his opposite shoulder.

At the dorm entrance, she swipes her card while leaning against him. The scanner flashes red.

“Again,” Garrett murmurs.

“I know,” she mumbles.

The second attempt works. The door unlocks with a buzz, and warm air spills over them from the lobby. Garrett walks her through it, then slows near the foot of the stairs.

She feels the hesitation before she sees it. His arm remains secure around her, but something changes in his posture, a subtle holding back.

His eyes move toward the staircase and then to her face. He hasn’t been inside her room since before the breakup. Not since the boundaries between them became something fragile and deliberate.

He could carry her bags to the entrance. Sit in the Jeep until one in the morning. Hold her hand in public. But the dorm room has remained closed.

He doesn’t ask. That, somehow, makes it harder.

She looks at the stairs. Then at Garrett. “Can you stay tonight?”

The question comes out quieter than she intends.

Garrett’s face changes at once. Something warm and stunned moving through his eyes before he gathers it.

“Yeah,” he says. “Course.”

“You don’t have to–”

“I want to.”

Her throat tightens again. “Okay.”

He helps her upstairs one step at a time, his arm strong beneath hers, pausing whenever her breathing changes. By the time they reach the second floor, she’s exhausted enough that the hallway seems twice its usual length.

Her key sticks once in the lock. Garrett takes it only after she lets her hand fall, opens the door, and guides her inside.

The room smells faintly of last night’s curry, her perfume, and the warm dust of the heater beneath the window. Her bed remains unmade, audition pages scattered across the desk and floor, clothes folded badly over the back of the chair. Evidence of every hour she’s tried to fit inside the week.

Garrett looks at it all without comment.

“Bed or food?” he asks.

“Bed.”

“Wrong. Food first.”

She gives him a tired look.

“I know,” he says. “I’m oppressive.”

“Deeply.”

“Sit.”

He guides her to the edge of the mattress and crouches in front of her. His hands come to the laces of her boots, undoing them one at a time before sliding each boot carefully from her foot.

She watches him through heavy eyes. “You’ve become very good at taking my shoes off without getting anything out of it.”

Garrett’s mouth twitches. “I’m growing.”

“Disturbing.”

He sets the boots beside the desk and stands. “You have something comfortable to sleep in?”

She points vaguely toward the second drawer of the dresser. “Shirts. Top drawer.”

Garrett opens it and immediately looks away when he realises it’s her underwear drawer. The speed of it almost makes her smile.

“Second drawer,” she corrects.

“You said top.”

“My brain is injured,” she murmurs, biting back a smile.

“Right. Of course.”

He closes the drawer with exaggerated respect and opens the one below it, retrieving an old Briar shirt and a pair of sleep shorts.

“These?”

She nods. Garrett places them beside her on the bed. Then he turns his back.

She stares at him. “What are you doing?”

“Not looking.”

“I need help.”

His shoulders go still.

“With the buttons,” she adds, because the fitted blouse she wore to work has somehow developed fourteen fastenings since morning. “My head hurts when I look down.”

Garrett turns slowly, eyes fixed firmly on her face. “Okay.” He steps close and lifts his hands toward the first button, pausing before touching it. “Can I?”

She nods.

His fingers work carefully down the front of the blouse. There’s no teasing in him now, no downward glance, no charged pause where the fabric opens over her skin.

Garrett keeps his eyes on the buttons with the concentration of someone performing a complicated repair, knuckles occasionally brushing the thin shirt beneath.

When the last button is free, he steps back and turns away again while she slides the blouse from her shoulders. Changing still makes the room tilt slightly, and she has to sit for a moment with the old shirt gathered in both hands.

Garrett hears the pause. “You okay?”

“Mhm.”

“You sure?”

“No.”

He turns, sees her sitting there half-dressed and exhausted, then takes the shirt from her without letting his gaze move below her face. He gathers it at the hem and holds it open. “Arms up.”

She lifts them slowly. Garrett pulls the shirt down over her head, careful around the sore spot, then eases her arms through the sleeves. The fabric settles loose around her body, carrying the faint smell of laundry detergent and the dorm drawer.

“There,” he murmurs.

He helps with the shorts in the same practical, careful way, kneeling to guide them over her feet and keeping the blanket across her lap whenever he can. There’s nothing sexy in it. That makes it more intimate than if there were.

Once she’s changed, Garrett folds her clothes over the chair instead of leaving them on the floor. “Food,” he says.

“Garrett.”

“Three bites.”

“Two.”

“Four.”

“That isn’t how negotiating works.”

“It does when you have brain damage.”

She stares at him.

“Mild,” he adds quickly. “Mild brain damage.”

“Get out.”

“No.”

He retrieves the leftover curry and rice from the fridge, heating them in the small microwave near the desk while she sits propped against the pillows. The machine turns loudly enough that she winces, and Garrett stops it before the timer finishes, catching the door before it can beep.

“Very stealthy,” she murmurs.

“I’m adaptable.”

He brings the bowl to the bed with a fork and a glass of water, sitting on the edge near her knees. She takes the first bite because arguing requires more energy than chewing.

Warm rice sits heavily but not unpleasantly in her stomach. Garrett watches until she swallows, then looks away with enough false casualness to make it obvious he has been waiting.

“You can stop supervising my mouth.”

“No.”

She takes another bite. “Happy?”

“Getting there.”

By the fifth, the empty ache inside her has begun easing. By the eighth, her eyelids feel too heavy to hold open. Garrett takes the bowl when the fork starts resting too long between her fingers.

“That enough?” she asks.

“For now.”

He places the leftovers on the desk and returns with the water. She drinks several slow mouthfuls, then sinks deeper into the pillows while Garrett reads the discharge instructions beneath the warm pool of the desk lamp.

“No screens,” he says.

She glances toward her audition packet.

“No.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You looked at it.”

“I need to practice.”

“You need to sleep.”

“The audition–”

“Will still be there tomorrow.” Garrett sets the papers aside and pulls the desk chair close to the bed.

She frowns. “What are you doing?”

“Staying.”

She tilts her head. “In the chair?”

“Yeah.”

“That looks uncomfortable.”

“I’ve slept in locker rooms. I’ll be fine.”

She watches him settle into the chair, long legs stretching awkwardly beneath the desk, arms folding over his chest. He looks too large for the small dorm furniture, broad shoulders nearly touching both sides of the chair back, knees forced apart by the narrow space.

The sight presses strangely against her chest. “You can lie down,” she says.

Garrett’s eyes lift.

“On the bed,” she adds. “Not– I mean, just… there’s room.”

He doesn’t move immediately. “You sure?”

She nods once.

“You want me there?”

Another nod. “My head hurts. Don’t make me write you an essay about it.”

Garrett stands. He takes off his jacket and shoes, then lies down on top of the covers beside her, leaving a careful strip of mattress between their bodies.

His hands fold over his stomach. He stares at the ceiling with the rigid posture of a man trying to prove he can occupy a bed without assuming a single additional privilege.

She turns her face toward him. His profile is soft in the low light. Curls still a mess. A faint crease between his brows even now. He has not relaxed since entering the clinic. Maybe not since the phone call.

“You were scared,” she murmurs.

Garrett looks at her.

“On the phone.”

“The nurse told you?”

“I heard her tell you to breathe.”

His mouth presses thin. “She didn’t open with you’re okay.”

“She did, actually.”

“She said student health clinic first.”

“Monster,” she whispers.

“I thought…” He stops. His throat works once. “Doesn’t matter.”

She knows what he thought. The shape of it sits plainly across his face even without the sentence. Her hand moves over the mattress between them.

Garrett looks down when her fingers touch his. He turns his palm over, but still waits. She threads their fingers. His breath leaves slowly.

For a while, they lie there without speaking. The room settles around them, heater clicking beneath the window, distant footsteps moving through the hallway, somebody laughing behind another closed door.

Garrett’s hand stays warm around hers. His thumb moves occasionally over her knuckles, the same small path each time.

She thinks of every boundary he’s honoured. Every invitation he’s allowed her to refuse. The open palm instead of the grab. The food delivered without him. His back turned while she changed. The chair dragged beside the bed before she told him he could lie down.

She had wanted him to prove that he could hear her.

Somewhere along the way, she had become so focused on watching him work for another chance that she hadn’t noticed how tired she was of standing on the opposite side of it.

Not ready to erase what happened. Not ready to pretend that love makes two people safe simply because it’s large. But tired of acting as though every soft thing between them needs to be rationed.

Her fingers tighten around his.

Garrett looks over. “You okay?”

She shifts carefully toward him until her forehead rests against the warm curve of his shoulder. His whole body goes still.

“Yeah,” she whispers.

Garrett waits another second, giving her every possible chance to change her mind, then lifts his free arm and settles it around her waist. The hold is loose at first. Barely there. When she moves closer, he lets it become firmer.

His cheek rests lightly against the top of her head. “Sleep, baby,” he murmurs.

She closes her eyes. The ache remains, dull and deep beneath her skull. The audition is still four days away. Nothing between them has been repaired neatly enough to name.

But Garrett’s hand is warm against her back, his breathing slow beside her, and for the first time in months, letting him close doesn’t feel like surrendering something she will need later.

It feels like stopping a fight neither of them wants to win.

notes from me – AHHHHHHHHH. i hope the wait was worth it, my loves! so so excited to hear your guys thoughts on this one!

i hope you enjoyed, as always tell me all your thoughts and theories and ideas!! xx

to be notified when i post new fics, follow @kooksandpearls-library and turn on notifications! i no longer use a taglist for garrett fics.

[heartybubs]

honeybee

off campus [john logan x reader]

type — (barely) angsty fluff

in which even when the air is tense, you’re both upset and he’s quiet, he shows you that he loves you.

mins speaking: inspired by olivia rodrigo’s ‘honeybee’ <3 because i just reread ‘the mistake’ and kinda fell in love with logan

words — 1.2k

my masterlist

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

𝜗𝜚⋆₊˚ the door shuts behind you.

"can we talk about this?" you're so scared that your words don't come out as much more than a whisper.

logan's hand is still on the door handle and he's not fully turned away from the door yet as he hesitates. too exhausted to be confronting the heavy feeling that’s been keeping his chest hostage for hours. he takes a deep breath before sighing. the noise makes you wince.

"tomorrow."

"i don't want us to go to sleep angry." your eyes sting a little. you're not even angry, but he has every right to be after falling victim to your bad mood in front of everyone, so you assume he is.

logan frowns. he looks at you like you’re being unreasonable. then, his eyes soften.

"baby, i'm not angry." not at you. never at you.

slowly, almost carefully, he closes the distance between you until he’s standing in front of you. he doesn't touch you, but his proximity alone provides you with enough warmth that you believe him immediately.

you sigh and nod.

logan scans your face and he recognizes every micro expression like a person who’s spent his entire life studying one specific life form. you look so worried.

the corners of his mouth twitch slightly, it's an impulse he can't control, but you don't see anyway. you're biting your lip like you're worried he could actually be angry at you; in any way that mattered. your eyebrows are pulled together like you’re recounting every snippy comment you threw his way, he's sure you're not even aware of it. probably because you're too busy being angry at yourself for getting pissed when he’d made you the butt of a silly, lighthearted joke. you hadn’t even told him about your terrible day, still you’d taken it personally. like he was trying to make it worse.

the little flicker in your eyes — fear and regret— tells him everything he needs to know to act.

"c'mon," his hands come up to hold your face. immediately, you melt into the contact like you’ve been craving exactly that the entire day, which you have. he doesn't stop the small smile from spreading on his face. his heart skips a beat like it always does when you do something small that reminds him why he loves you so much.

"we'll talk, alright?” he presses a reassuring kiss to your temple. “but let's do it tomorrow. get some sleep in first, yeah?" he's not deciding for you, but asking permission. that's how your relationship works. you decide everything together. always.

it's the first time you get a chance to really look at him. you hadn't noticed the way his eyelids flutter from time to time or the dark circles underneath his eyes. the exact expression he wore whenever training ran super late or when he worked extra hours because 'that damn toyota wouldn't stop leaking oil'. he looks so exhausted, that your heart softens at the sight.

“yeah.”

you regret not telling him about your day before malone’s. he’d probably have suggested to stay home and watch your favourite movie like he always did when you were feeling down. retrospectively, you don’t understand why you kept it to yourself; collecting moments to feel bad about yourself until erupting like a volcano that just wouldn’t stop spitting.

𝜗𝜚⋆₊˚

logan watches you change out of your clothes. he doesn’t stare, but he’s taking a moment to take in what’s his. not his in a possessive way, not like he owns you. but like he still has a hard time believing you let him be your partner, let him love you the way he’s always wanted to love.

he strides over to the light switch, meaning to turn off the big light that makes everything feel harsher and every bad moment of today linger like a bitter aftertaste just a little longer than it has to. when he passes you, his hands caress your lower back once, not longer than a second, but it steadies your spiraling thoughts and keeps you in the present with him.

he doesn’t do it because he knows you’re overthinking, he does it because he knows you and loves you enough to minimize every possibility of you feeling bad without having to think about it.

𝜗𝜚⋆₊˚

you brush your teeth at the sink in the corner of the room standing next to each other. your close, almost touching. the only light in the room weakly illuminates your figures from behind.

whenever your eyes lock in the mirror, logan playfully nudges your hip with his. sometimes twice because the first time doesn’t always make you giggle.

𝜗𝜚⋆₊˚

logan’s in bed first, his naked chest peeking out from below the covers. he’s almost sitting upright, fighting a terrible fight against tiredness to keep it from consuming his body — he’s barely winning. over and over again.

when you slip into bed next to him, a part of you is still worried that something’s wrong. maybe, by going to sleep instead of talking, you’re escalating a situation that should’ve been solved sooner. maybe your relationship has already started drowning silently.

the feeling of his warm hands under your shirt calms your thoughts immediately. he touches you and pulls you into him with such certainty and without any hesitation. he steadies you and while he doesn’t necessarily mean to, he knows what he’s doing.

neither of you says anything. you can feel him breathing against your back, where his bare chest is pressed against you. if you focus, you almost believe that you can feel his heart beating. you try. his breathing is steady and you assume he’s fallen fast asleep.

the lamp on your messy bedside table is still on, so you reach over to turn it off. careful not to wake him up, you move slowly. his arms tighten around your waist nonetheless. you blush at the way he clings to you. he always does though.

when you’re sharing a booth at malone’s, he always has an arm slung around your shoulder and his thigh pressed against yours. if he’s walking you to your next class, he likes to hold your hand the entire way — but he loves when you wrap your arms around his. he thinks it makes you look even more beautiful when you look up at him while laughing at one of his stupid abbreviations. even in his sleep, after an evening at malone’s that gave him every right to be at least a little mad at you, he still clings to you like he’d never let you go.

when logan speaks, it catches you off guard. it’s more like a growl at first. he’s slurring his words and his voice is low and raspy already, like he’s woken up from 12 hours of sleep. it takes your brain a few seconds to register his words.

“g’night i love you, baby.”

“i love you, honeybee.”

his last words are mumbled into your hair. it’s a miracle you even decipher them, but who else would. “mhm, you know i love that one.”

moments like this make it feel like the world suddenly shrunk down to your tiny dorm room. nothing else matters. the voices down the hallway, the tires squeaking on the parking lot become white noise to you. this world you and logan built through trust and love is the only thing of importance and it was yours. most times it feels like it could be yours forever.

[gaynehollander]

I just think that if they decided to cast someone who is this far away from the type described in the books, then Justice must have been fucking incredible in the room and I'm excited to see what he brings to Harris's character

[whoneedscanon]

hello, it’s me your certified fat friend/heated rivalry enjoyer. (qualifications for this post: fat my whole life, home baker like harris, troy barrett defender)

i am here to remind you that fatphobia is rooted in racism. fatphobia’s ONLY root is racism. if you are using anti-Black talking points to smear justice smith’s casting as harris drover, you are not being pro fat liberation. You are not being pro fat representation. You are being racist. Do not use my community as an excuse for racism, fat liberation IS Black liberation. (Further reading: the belly of the beast by da’shaun harrison & fearing the black body: the racial origins of fatphobia by sabrina strings)

it is understandable to be disappointed that harris was not cast as someone chubby. It is not understandable to be disappointed that harris was cast as someone Black.

[zukotheartist]

Sad that Harris (a fat character that is treated as more than just a silly gag to laugh at) will not be portrayed by a fat man BUT im already seeing the racist takes start and we're not gonna fucking do that, no using anti-fatphobia as a means to excuse racism. You can be frustrated that a fat role went to a non-fat actor (and i think we should talk about it because it happens constantly) but that's it, period, no "mmm but he's not ginger and pale" or whatever the fuck, no. Justice Smith get behing me

[triassictriserratops]

i put this as a comment in @shanehollandertwentyfour's excellent post, but i think it also deserves its own post because i'm seeing some people's reactions and i need us all to have a little bit of discernment and nuance here.

writers describing characters as "stocky", "thick", or "soft" has ALWAYS been code for "fat" in writing. a lot of writers (and people in general) are scared of the word "fat" and will avoid it as a descriptor at all costs.

(to be very clear, "fat" is a morally neutral word unless the person saying it intends for it not to be. I am a fat person - this is the simplest and easiest descriptor to explain my body and i will continue to use this word to explain my body in a morally neutral way.)

But, to return to the point, this is an existing issue in the literary world - just like there are many writers that use words like "tanned" or "olive toned" when they're scared to clarify the character isn't white. Both situations are problems in literary spaces that we've had for ages.

Soft language is used as a descriptor whenever a character isn't thin, fit, or white. So, no, we're not stupid for "imagining" Harris as chubby or fat

that being said, i am looking forward to Justice Smith's portrayal of Harris Drover. and NO, him being black is NOT an issue and if that is YOUR issue - we are not the fucking same. "Erasing a character's white identity" is in no fucking way the same as removing the precious little fat representation in romance media we already get.

Especially because media is not created in a vacuum and it IS worth mentioning that we're currently in a heightened state of fatphobia and body harming via fashion drugs like Ozempic - removing the fatness from a main romance lead IS a statement that we all get to feel something about.

I'll even go a step further and say that it will be an incredible addition to Harris' character to be a black man who has lived his life as openly gay while being loved and supported by his family. That in itself is so rare in media and I can't wait to see the Drover family absolutely adore their gay son. (and his new boyfriend!)

tl;dr - let people be upset about losing a character that made them feel "normal" in their bodies. and don't be fucking weird about Harris being a black man.

[se7entyrell]

two warning lights appearing on my car dash as i pull into the driveway... please don't be expensive please don't be expensive

[se7entyrell]

lights have disappeared for now so praying it's just a blip

[awfulpunk]

this is insanely racist and I haven't even seen much about this online yet

[checkyourasianbias]

after Bad Bunny won they added a Latin song category and after Rosé got three nominations the grammys added a k-pop/c-pop/j-pop category they have always been afraid of well-performing artists of color challenging white artists in mainstream categories

[nurseleonedeactivated-deactivat]

i think ppl would be a lot happier and better-adjusted on here if they realized that being online on a website is like being in any other casual public space full of people. if u walk into walmart u dont immediately think to yourself “i have to be friends with everyone in this walmart and if not everyone likes me i’m a failure” and u really shouldn’t feel that way online either. likewise if there’s a guy in the walmart parking lot shouting obscenities u probably wouldn’t answer him and that’s literally an exact equivalent to some of the weird stuff that people on here seem to feel they’re obligated to respond to.

[cassiebat3]

superman (2023) #1

omg lois clocked him 😭😭

casually admitting that he focuses his hearing on bruce smh 🤦‍♀️

[makotototallynotnaegi]

Ship so old and so gay it was called "The Premise" as a code to avoid homophobia