pairing – garrett graham x nursing student!reader
summary – between wound reviews, vaccination clinics, asthma education, and stolen lunch breaks, garrett makes sure his girlfriend gets fed and reminded how good she is.
warnings – medical placement, primary care setting, vaccination clinic mention, wound care mention, asthma review, food/eating.
notes from me – MY SWEET DOMESTIC BABIES HOW I LOVE THEM!! based on these requests combined! thank you babes!
word count – 3.1k
navigation – masterlist |
Monday
By twelve-thirty, the medical centre has already taught her three important things: the blood pressure machine in room four lies, children can sense fear more accurately than most diagnostic equipment, and nobody working in primary care gets to eat lunch at the time written on the roster.
She comes out through the side entrance at twelve forty-seven with her scrub top pulling strangely beneath her cardigan, one pocket weighted down by three pens, a folded observation sheet and a tiny glittery sticker she’d found stuck to her elbow after the morning vaccination clinic.
The air outside is cold enough to make the inside of her nose sting. Garrett’s already sitting on the little bench beside the staff car park, one ankle resting over his opposite knee, a paper takeaway bag tucked between his shoes and his phone loose in one hand.
He looks up before the door has finished closing behind her. The change happens quickly, his attention lifting away from the screen and landing fully on her like he hasn’t spent the last twenty minutes surrounded by traffic, bare winter trees and a medical centre sign advertising flu shots. “Hey, baby.”
She makes it halfway across the patch of grass before the smell reaches her. Warm bread, roasted chicken, something garlicky. Her stomach pulls painfully beneath her ribs, reminding her that breakfast had been half a piece of toast eaten while standing over the kitchen sink because she’d misplaced her other shoe. “What did you bring?”
Garrett’s grin starts. “Hi to you too.”
“Hi.” She stops between his knees, and he catches her automatically by the hips, pressing his mouth to the centre of her stomach through her cardigan before tipping his head back to look at her. “What did you bring?”
“Lunch.”
“That’s not specific.”
He tilts his head to the side. “That’s because you’ll start negotiating before I show you.”
“I don’t negotiate.”
“You told me yesterday you only wanted something small.” His hands remain at her waist while he looks up at her, dark curls disturbed by the wind and one faint crease still pressed beside his cheek from whatever lecture he’d spent resting his face against his fist. “You’ve been here since seven.”
“Eight.”
“You left the house at seven.”
“That’s different.”
“It’s worse.”
She tries to look stern, but Garrett pulls her closer until her knees touch the bench and kisses the little strip of skin beneath her scrub top where it has ridden up. It’s difficult to maintain authority while Briar’s hockey captain is kissing her stomach beside a sign asking patients not to smoke within five metres of the building.
“Sit down,” he says. “I brought chicken wraps, those potatoes you like and actual fruit because Tucker said grapes don’t count as a side dish.”
“Tucker’s becoming controlling,” she grins.
“Tucker packed the grapes.”
“Oh.” She sits beside him at once. “Tucker’s an angel.”
Garrett hands her the container with a look of deep personal betrayal. “I drove it here.”
“You’re useful too.”
“Thank you.”
She’s halfway through her first bite when the side door opens again. Janelle, the practice nurse supervising her placement, steps outside with a mug in one hand and a lanyard tangled around the other. She’s in her forties, quick-moving and kind in the specific way of nurses who can reassure an anxious parent while opening six packets with their teeth.
“There you are,” Janelle says, then notices Garrett and smiles like she has been expecting to eventually find the source of the lunches arriving in increasingly respectable containers. “You must be Garrett.”
Garrett stands immediately, because beneath the hockey-house manners and constant obscenity there’s something in him that responds to older women with professional authority like a student unexpectedly called on in class. “Yeah. Hi.”
“I’ve heard about the food.”
She closes her eyes briefly. “Oh my God.”
Janelle laughs, then looks back at her. “You did really well this morning, by the way. Especially with the twins. Vaccinating one four-year-old is hard enough without the other one providing live commentary.”
Heat moves quickly from beneath her collar to her face. The fork in her hand pauses over the potatoes. “Oh. Um. Thank you.”
“You kept both of them calm, and you explained everything to Mom without drowning her in information. That’s good.” Janelle takes a sip from her mug, already turning back toward the door. “Enjoy your lunch. Don’t let us steal you before one.”
The door closes behind her. For a few seconds, Garrett says nothing. That’s worse than if he had immediately started being annoying. She looks down and spears one potato with more concentration than it deserves, aware of his face angled toward her, his knee pressing warmly against hers.
“What?” she asks.
“Nothing.”
“You’re staring.”
“My girlfriend vaccinated twins this morning.”
She rolls her eyes. “I assisted with vaccinations.”
“Four-year-old twins.”
“Under supervision.”
“And one of them was heckling you?”
“She kept telling her brother the needle was going to be enormous.” Her mouth twitches despite herself. “Then she screamed before anyone touched her and scared him so badly he started crying.”
Garrett’s grin breaks wide and bright. “And you handled it.”
She shoots him a look. “I gave her a sticker.”
“Medical genius.”
“She liked stickers,” she mutters.
He nudges his shoulder into hers. “You were good.”
The praise catches in the same difficult place Janelle’s had, somewhere high beneath her breastbone, warm enough to feel almost uncomfortable. She looks down at the container. “I didn’t do much.”
Garrett doesn’t argue immediately. He reaches over instead, takes the fork from her hand and uses it to gather a piece of chicken she had pushed toward the edge. “You’ve gotta stop doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Turning every nice thing someone says about you into something else.” He holds the fork near her mouth. “That nurse was there. She probably knows if you did well.”
“She does.”
“And she said you did.”
She looks at the chicken, then at him. Garrett’s expression is easy, but there’s something steady underneath it, no teasing escape built into the moment. She opens her mouth and lets him feed her mostly because refusing would make this into a larger emotional event beside the staff car park.
After she swallows, she says, “I did do pretty well.”
Garrett leans in and kisses her temple.
Wednesday
By Wednesday, Garrett has been recognised by reception. He discovers this when the woman behind the front desk sees him through the glass doors carrying two containers and presses the release button without making him use the intercom.
He gives her a small wave as he crosses the foyer, and she points toward the side exit with the expression of someone directing a regular delivery.
His girlfriend emerges four minutes later with her stethoscope still around her neck and a smear of something pale across one sleeve. Garrett eyes it as she drops onto the bench beside him. “What’s that?”
She follows his gaze. “Dressing adhesive, probably.”
“Probably?”
“Nothing infectious.”
His nose scrunches. “That’s not as reassuring as you think.”
She lets her head tip onto his shoulder while he opens the first container. Today it’s soup in a sealed thermos, two toasted sandwiches wrapped in foil and a yoghurt Garrett has selected because the label contains the word protein in lettering large enough to appeal to him.
“I only have twenty minutes,” she murmurs.
“You said thirty.”
“Mrs. Patterson’s wound review ran over.”
Garrett unwraps the sandwich and places it into her hand before she can decide she isn’t hungry enough. “Bad?”
“No. It’s actually healing really nicely.” Her voice changes on the last part, tiredness thinning out beneath interest. “She had a skin tear on her shin that got infected, but the redness has come down and there’s way less exudate. I got to clean it and redress it today.”
He’s learned enough nursing vocabulary through forced exposure not to make a face at exudate. “That good?”
“Very.”
“So you fixed her leg.”
She snorts softly. “I didn’t fix her leg.”
“You helped.”
“I helped,” she nods.
The side door swings open before he can improve the claim. Dr. Shah steps out with his phone in one hand and a set of car keys in the other, a slim man with silver beginning at his temples and the permanently hurried posture of someone who’s been running fifteen minutes behind since medical school.
He sees her and slows. “Good work with Mrs. Patterson.”
Her shoulders pull in by less than an inch. Garrett feels it because they’re pressed together from hip to knee, because he’s become embarrassingly fluent in the small movements she thinks nobody notices.
“Thank you,” she says, a little too quickly.
“You were gentle, but you didn’t hesitate. Patients notice when you’re nervous, particularly with painful dressings.” Dr. Shah nods once, like the matter is settled. “She asked whether you’ll be here for her next appointment.”
Her fingers tighten around the foil. “She did?”
“She likes you.” His phone begins ringing. He glances at it and sighs with his whole body. “Enjoy lunch.”
Garrett waits until Dr. Shah has crossed the car park before turning his head.
She’s staring down at her sandwich. The tip of one ear has gone pink. “Don’t,” she warns.
Garrett takes a drink from his coffee and tries, unsuccessfully, to flatten his mouth. “Mrs. Patterson requested my girlfriend specifically.”
“She asked if I’d be there,” she grumbles.
“Requested.”
“She probably just doesn’t want to explain the whole wound history again.”
“Or she likes you.”
“She barely knows me.”
“She knows you don’t rip bandages off her leg like you’re waxing a car.”
“That’s not how anyone removes dressings,” she replies.
“You said one of the nurses at the hospital did.”
She holds up a finger. “One nurse, one time.”
He looks down at her, taking in the tired little shadows under her eyes, the escaping strands of hair around her face, the stethoscope bumping lightly against her chest each time she moves. “You know you’re good at this, right?”
Her chewing slows. Garrett lets the question stay where it lands. He doesn’t push it toward a joke or ask her to say something she cannot yet make fit comfortably in her mouth.
Eventually, she swallows and wipes her thumb over the corner of the foil. “I’m getting better.”
“Yeah,” he says. “You are.”
Her gaze lifts to his, cautious at first, then warmer when she realises he means the answer exactly as she gave it. She’s getting better. At dressings. At talking to patients. At hearing something kind without immediately dismantling it for parts.
Garrett bends and kisses her once, slow and ordinary, tasting faintly of coffee when she kisses him back. Her phone alarm goes off between them.
She groans into his mouth. “I hate employment.”
“You don’t work here.”
“I hate unpaid employment more.”
He gathers the containers while she stands, then catches the back of her scrub top before she can escape and pulls her in for one more kiss. “Text me when you’re done.”
“I finish at five.”
“Text me anyway.”
“You’ll be at practice.”
“My girlfriend always says phones work in locker rooms.”
She narrows her eyes. “I’ve never said that.”
“Pretty sure you did,” Garrett shrugs.
“That sounds nothing like me.”
Garrett kisses her forehead and lets her go. “My girlfriend’s also very argumentative.”
The side door closes on the sight of her giving him the finger.
Friday
On Friday, the bench is wet from morning rain, so Garrett brings a towel. This is apparently the final stage of whatever has happened to him. He arrives with lunch in one hand, a folded beach towel in the other and Dean’s voice still ringing in his ears from the kitchen that morning.
“Do you hear yourself?” Dean had asked while Garrett packed pasta into a container. “My girlfriend likes the pesto. My girlfriend hates raw tomato. My girlfriend says I need more fibre. You’ve become a doll with one phrase.”
“She does hate raw tomato.”
“We know,” Logan had said from the table. “We all know everything about your girlfriend. Against our will.”
Tucker, slicing strawberries at the counter, had quietly pushed a second container toward Garrett. “She’ll need more than pasta if she’s there until six.”
Garrett had looked at Dean. Dean had pointed the knife he was using to spread peanut butter. “Don’t.”
“My girlfriend–”
“I’ll kill you.”
Now she sits on the towel beside him, one knee tucked toward her chest, eating pesto pasta while the medical centre moves through its afternoon behind them. Cars roll in and out of the lot. Someone’s toddler is crying near the pharmacy entrance. Garrett has practice in forty minutes, but his gear is already in the back of the car and the rink is seven minutes away.
She looks exhausted. It’s in the small things: the way she keeps rubbing her thumb over the side of her index finger, the slow blinks, the faint crease between her brows even while chewing.
Garrett puts the strawberries closer to her without mentioning it. “Eat those too.”
She glances at the container. “You sound like Tucker.”
“Tucker packed them.”
“Of course he did.”
A nurse comes out carrying an empty mug, sees them and smiles. She’s younger than Janelle, maybe late twenties, with bright blue glasses and a name badge that says MELANIE, RN.
“There’s our lunch visitor.”
Garrett lifts his hand. “Hey.”
Melanie looks at her. “I meant to tell you before you disappeared– you were excellent with Noah this morning.”
She straightens slightly. “The asthma review?”
“Mhm. His mom said nobody’s ever explained the spacer properly without making her feel stupid.” Melanie shifts the mug between her hands. “You gave her time to ask questions. That’s harder to teach than people think.”
Her fingers curl lightly around the plastic fork.
“Thank you,” she says.
No apology attached. No immediate reason it didn’t count. Just thank you, quiet and a little pink around the cheeks.
Melanie grins. “You’re welcome. See you inside.”
When the door shuts, Garrett looks down at his own lunch because he knows better now than to turn every moment into an audience. Beside him, she takes another bite, chews, then says, almost carefully, “I was good with them.”
His whole chest seems to shift forward. He keeps his eyes on the container for another second so he doesn’t frighten her by looking as pleased as he feels. “Yeah?”
She nods. “The little boy wasn’t using the spacer right, and his mom thought she’d been doing something wrong, but nobody had actually shown her. So I demonstrated it, and then I got him to teach it back to me with his teddy first.” Her hands start moving as she talks, fork drawing small shapes through the air. “He kept putting the mask over the teddy’s whole face, which was, like, completely ineffective, but he got it eventually.”
Garrett watches her now. He cannot help it. The tiredness is still there, but something brighter has pushed through it, colour high in her cheeks and the words coming faster because she knows this, because she had been useful in the middle of somebody’s confusing morning and knows exactly how.
“You taught a teddy bear how to use an inhaler,” he says.
She gives him a look, but her mouth has already betrayed her. “Technically.”
“That’s huge.”
“It’s a bear.”
He shrugs. “Could’ve died.”
“It was stuffed.”
“Still. Brave work.”
She laughs, leaning sideways until her head rests against his shoulder. Garrett puts his container down and slides an arm around her, his hand settling over the soft cotton at her waist. She smells like hand sanitiser, rain caught in her hair and the faint medicinal sweetness of whatever soap sits beside the clinic sinks.
For a minute, neither of them speaks. She eats one strawberry from the container in his lap, then another. Garrett watches a leaf drag along the wet pavement near his shoe and thinks, with an intensity that would make Dean genuinely ill, that there may be nothing better than this.
Her weight against him. Food packed by Tucker. Practice waiting. A plastic fork balanced crookedly across her container. The knowledge that people inside that building see what Garrett sees when she talks about work with her whole face.
She nudges her nose into the shoulder of his jacket. “What?”
“What?”
“You’re doing that thing.”
“What thing?”
She smiles up at him. “Looking pleased with yourself.”
“I’m not pleased with myself.”
“No?”
Garrett turns his head and presses his mouth to her hair. “I’m pleased with my girlfriend.”
She groans, but her body folds closer, one hand slipping into the pocket of his jacket like it belongs there. “The boys must hate you.”
“They’re jealous.”
“They’re exhausted,” she sighs.
“Tucker supports me.”
“Tucker feeds you so the rest of the house survives.”
He takes a moment to consider this. “That’s still support.”
Her break alarm sounds from inside her cardigan pocket. She doesn’t move immediately. Neither does Garrett. They sit through the first three beeps with her cheek against his shoulder and his thumb moving slowly over her side.
Then she sighs and lifts her head. Garrett catches her chin before she can stand and kisses her, gentle at first, then a little firmer when her fingers curl into his jacket and pull him closer.
When they separate, she keeps her forehead against his. “Thank you for coming all week.”
“Course.”
She presses her forehead against his harder. “You don’t have to come every day.”
“I know.”
“You have classes and practice.”
“I know.”
“And Dean said you missed lunch with them yesterday,” she murmurs.
“Dean was offended because nobody wanted to hear his story about a girl from his economics class.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. I was having lunch with my girlfriend.”
She closes her eyes. “There it is.”
Garrett grins and kisses the corner of her mouth. “Go be good at your job.”
“Placement.”
“Mm. Go be good at that.”
She gets up, gathers her stethoscope and starts toward the side door. Halfway there, she turns. Garrett’s still sitting on the towel with the empty containers stacked beside him, watching her like he plans to keep doing it until the building physically removes her from view.
She lifts one hand. “Bye, baby.”
“Bye.” He waits until her fingers touch the door handle. “Hey.”
She looks back.
Garrett’s grin spreads slowly, helplessly, all bright teeth and curls and entirely too much feeling for a staff car park at one-thirty on a Friday afternoon. “Proud of you.”
She rolls her eyes so hard it should hurt, but she’s smiling when the door closes behind her.
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pairing – garrett graham x nursing student!reader
summary – after sex, garrett and his girlfriend talk through old wounds, hospital fear, and what it actually means to show up for each other.
warnings – references to controlling ex, past emotional abuse, garrett’s family trauma, hospital injury, lockdown mention, anxiety.
notes from me – hi babes!!! as requested here!!
word count – 5k
navigation – masterlist |
The room has gone soft around the edges. It’s partly the lamp on her desk, the little warm one, and partly the rain pressing quietly against the window, blurring the glass until the campus lights beyond it look melted and far away. Mostly, though, it’s Garrett.
Garrett naked beneath her in a bed technically designed for one person and currently holding two with the sort of optimism usually reserved for temporary bridges. Garrett with one arm folded behind his head, the other heavy around her waist, his skin warm and slightly damp everywhere their bodies are still pressed together.
His chest rises slowly beneath her cheek, no longer the hard, uneven movement from ten minutes ago, though his heartbeat hasn’t entirely committed to acting normal yet. Neither has hers.
The duvet is tangled around their legs. One of her pillows is on the floor, along with Garrett’s jeans, her underwear and a pharmacology flashcard that had become a casualty of sex despite being several feet from the bed when they started.
The open window has let enough cool air into the room that her bare shoulder should be cold, but Garrett’s palm keeps moving over it in long, lazy passes, warming the skin each time.
She traces one finger through the faint line of hair below his navel, then up again, over the ridges of his stomach and the centre of his chest. His skin moves beneath her fingertip with each breath.
There are little things here she knows now without having deliberately learned them: the pale scar near his ribs, the place beneath his left pec that makes the muscle jump when she drags her nail over it, the tiny freckle near his sternum she once spent an entire morning insisting looked like a malignant melanoma until he threatened to ban her from examining him unsupervised.
Her fingertip circles it now. Garrett’s arm tightens faintly around her. “That still cancer?”
“Mm.” She gives it the grave attention of a specialist delivering devastating news. “Terminal.”
“Shit.”
“You’ve got hours.”
“Better make ’em count.”
His hand slips lower beneath the duvet, palm flattening shamelessly over her ass. She laughs into his chest, the sound still a little loose and breathless, and gives his side a weak pinch that does absolutely nothing except make Garrett’s mouth curve against her hair.
“Greedy,” she murmurs.
“You climbed on top of me.”
“You were being annoying.”
“Yeah, and you handled that very professionally.”
She lifts her head enough to look at him. His curls are completely wrecked, flattened at one side and damp at the roots where her hands have spent most of the last half hour. His lips are pink, his cheeks faintly flushed, the arrogant little satisfaction on his face softened by sleepiness and the fact that he’s currently looking at her like she’s done something much more impressive than have sex with him in a dorm bed.
She nuzzles her nose gently into the roughness along his jaw. Garrett’s fingers still at her waist. “You good?”
The question comes automatically now. Before, after and sometimes during, when her breathing changes or her face does something he cannot immediately translate. He still asks it with the same quiet attention, though. Like no number of previous yeses can answer for the current one.
She nods, nose brushing his skin again. “Very.”
“Good.” His hand resumes its slow pass along her back. “Was worried.”
“You frequently are.”
He huffs a laugh through his nose, but it doesn’t fully settle into the room. Something in his face stays elsewhere, his gaze drifting briefly past her shoulder toward the rain-dark window before returning.
She watches him for a moment. Garrett has several different kinds of quiet. There’s tired quiet, which usually means he’s three minutes from falling asleep with his full weight on some part of her body. There’s pissed-off quiet, all tight jaw and nostril breathing and shoulders that look like they have been raised two inches closer to his ears. There’s the rare studying quiet, distinguished mostly by an open textbook and Garrett staring through the same paragraph while pretending he’s not become distracted by her existing nearby.
This is none of those. She pushes herself a little higher against him, then smooths his curls back from his forehead with the flat of her hand. They immediately fall forward again at the edges, soft and impossible. “What’re you thinking?”
Garrett’s eyes return properly to her face. “Nothing.”
She pinches his side again.
“Jesus.” His stomach tightens beneath her. “Violent.”
“You’re a terrible liar.”
“I’m a great liar,” he huffs.
She brushes the curls back again. This time she keeps her fingers there, threaded gently into the hair at his temple. “What’re you thinking, Graham?”
His mouth presses together for a second. He breathes out slowly through his nose, the exhale moving warm over the top of her head. “Just thinking.”
“Compelling.” She settles her chin on his chest. “About what?”
“A lot.”
“Okay.” Her thumb moves once over his hairline. “Fill me in.”
Garrett’s gaze drops to her shoulder. His fingers trace the curve of it without seeming to notice what they’re doing, following the same path again and again until the touch begins to feel less lazy and more like counting.
“About Nathan, mostly.”
The name lands in the room without doing much to her. Only recognition and a very mild irritation, like someone has mentioned an assignment she thought she had already submitted.
She studies Garrett’s face instead. “What about him?”
His jaw moves once beneath the stubble. “He knows we’re together?”
“I don’t know.” She thinks about it, then shrugs as much as she can while half lying on him. “Probably. People talk. Especially people who have nothing interesting happening in their own lives.”
“Is he gonna be pissed?”
She lets out a quiet breath. “Maybe.”
Garrett’s hand stops moving.
She looks at him. “I don’t know, baby. Probably, yeah. Nathan was pissed when I got a haircut without asking whether he liked bangs. His emotional range was not… especially selective.”
“That’s not funny.”
She lifts her shoulder. “It’s a little funny.”
“It’s fucked.”
“It can be both.”
Garrett doesn’t answer. The tendon in his neck has gone tight beneath her hand, a small, visible line disappearing toward his collarbone.
She smooths her thumb over it. “I’m not worried.”
“No?”
“No.” She rests her cheek against his chest again, listening to the slow beat underneath. “He doesn’t get to me anymore. Not like that. He hasn’t for a long time.”
Garrett’s fingers flex against her back. “I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.” His answer is immediate enough to sound defensive. He looks toward the ceiling, then back at her. “Yeah, baby. I know you don’t want him. That’s not what I’m asking.”
“I didn’t think it was.”
His eyes narrow faintly. “You were about to reassure me.”
“I was about, like, to provide context.”
He huffs a breath through his nose. “You were using your calm nurse voice.”
She blinks. “I don’t have a calm nurse voice.”
“You do,” he murmurs. “It’s the one you use right before telling someone something’s gonna sting.”
“That’s because it’s going to sting.”
“Exactly.”
She presses her lips together around a smile. Garrett catches it, because Garrett catches everything her mouth tries to hide from him, but his expression only softens for a second before returning to the place it has been.
“I worry about you,” he says.
She rolls her eyes. “You worry when I take the stairs too fast.”
“You fall up them.”
“I’ve done that once.”
Garrett’s mouth twitches. His hand slides to the back of her neck, thumb resting beneath her ear. “I’m serious.”
“I know.” She turns her face and kisses his wrist. “But you don’t have to worry about me. I’m okay. Nathan and I are so over it’s, like, actually embarrassing he still comes up in conversation.”
Garrett shakes his head. “Not worried like that.”
The smile leaves her face, because of the way he says them. Quiet and frustrated, like the thought has been grinding against him for a while and he cannot find an angle that makes it less sharp.
“What, then?”
He looks at her for a second. “I don’t want him to hurt you.”
Her hand stills on his chest.
“Because of me,” Garrett adds, and the last part comes out rougher. “Or because he finds out you have a boyfriend and decides to prove he can still get to you, or because I hit him and now he wants to even the score, or whatever the fuck goes through his head.”
“Garrett.”
“He’s already shown up here and run his mouth about you to people. He knows where you live. He knows where you have placement. He knows your friends. I don’t–” His fingers tighten gently at the back of her neck. “I don’t like it.”
She watches the anxiety work through him in visible little movements. His thumb tapping once against her skin. The muscle shifting in his jaw. His other hand resting flat over her lower back as if he can keep her safe from a man who’s not in the building by making sure there’s nowhere between them for air to pass.
“Baby,” she says softly, “he can’t hurt me more than he already did.”
Garrett’s face changes. His eyes sharpen, his brows pulling together while his mouth goes flat. Still, she feels the words strike him in the exact place she probably should have anticipated.
“That’s not…” He swallows. “That’s a really fucked-up way to reassure me.”
“It was accurate,” she murmurs.
“I hate when you do that.”
“Do what?”
“Say something horrible… like– like it’s a weather update.”
She considers the criticism. “Cloudy with a high chance of unresolved male entitlement.”
Garrett gives her a flat look. She fights the smile for three seconds, loses and lets her forehead drop against his chest. His hand comes up automatically to cradle the back of her head, fingers sinking into her hair even while he mutters, “You’re impossible.”
“I’m making a point.”
“You’re making jokes,” he sighs.
“Both can occur simultaneously. That’s actually a key feature of my personality.”
“I’ve noticed.”
She lifts her head again. “What I mean is, Nathan already took what he was going to take from me. Time. Confidence. A deeply unreasonable fear of being asked where I am when I’m literally at work. He doesn’t have access to any of that now.”
“He can still say shit.”
“Let him.”
Garrett’s eyes flash. “You say that because you don’t hear half of it.”
“No, I say that because I know exactly what he sounds like.” Her voice stays easy, because the truth is easy now. It has edges, but they don’t cut her when she picks it up. “Nathan runs his mouth because he needs people looking at him. He needs me upset. He needs you angry. It’s the only way he can still stand in a room with me and feel like he has something.”
“He called you–”
“I know what he called me.”
The words come out firmer than she intends. Garrett goes quiet immediately, watching her.
She smooths her palm over the centre of his chest, once, then again. “I know what he says. I know what he thinks. I spent a lot of time thinking his opinion was– was everything. It isn’t. It’s just noise from a deeply unimpressive man in a button-down.”
Garrett’s mouth shifts faintly. “Hate that shirt.”
“I know you do.”
“Looks like he asks professors whether the homework’s due.”
“He did that once,” she smiles.
“Of course he fucking did.”
She laughs, and the tension in his body gives by a fraction beneath her. She takes advantage of it, sliding her hand upward to his jaw, smoothing her palm over the rough line of it before cupping his cheek.
“He can run his mouth,” she says. “Who cares?”
“I care.”
“You care too much,” she whispers.
“He hurt you.”
“Yeah.” She says it plainly, without making the room bow around it. “He did.”
Garrett’s eyes search her face like he expects to find evidence she has hidden from him. A twitch. A crack. Something that says she’s performing wellness for his benefit. She lets him look.
There was a time the memory of Nathan’s voice could make her body rearrange itself before she had understood what was happening. Shoulders lifting. Stomach tight. Words becoming harder to reach because some old part of her believed silence might make the moment pass faster. There was a time hearing his name could stain an entire night.
Now there’s only Garrett beneath her, warm and worried and entirely too naked to be conducting threat assessments. “You didn’t rescue me from him,” she says.
His brows pinch together. “I know.”
“No, listen.” She strokes her thumb over his cheek. “You met me after I’d already left. I’d already decided he wasn’t allowed to keep doing that to me. I was already putting myself back together.”
Garrett holds her gaze.
“You made things better,” she continues. “You make a lot of things better. Food. Sex. My understanding of how many grown men can share a bathroom before it becomes a public health issue.”
“Four’s apparently too many.”
“Correct. But you didn’t save me from Nathan. I did that.”
“What’s within reason?” Garrett asks, his thumb moving once over the curve of her shoulder.
“Not committing another felony in your living room.”
His brows pull together immediately. “It wasn’t a felony.”
“Multiple people had to physically remove you from his body,” she reminds him, watching the corner of his mouth twitch like he’s already preparing an appeal.
“Allegedly.”
“I was there.”
Garrett’s expression turns thoughtful in the deeply unconvincing way it does whenever he’s about to misuse information. “You were concussed recently. Memory’s unreliable.”
She stares at him.
Garrett lasts perhaps half a second before his mouth twitches. “Too soon?”
“Yes.”
“Sorry.”
Her fingers move from his cheek to the shell of his ear, tracing it absently. “If Nathan says something, I’ll ignore him.”
“And if he does something?”
“Then I’ll deal with it.”
His jaw tightens again.
She sighs softly. “With my friends. Campus security. The police, if it actually gets that far. Not by personally challenging him to, like, single combat.”
“Okay.”
“And I’ll tell you.”
Garrett’s eyes narrow. “Immediately?”
She rolls her eyes. “Fine.”
“Promise?”
“Garrett.”
“Promise.”
Her hand softens against his face. “I promise I won’t hide it if Nathan does something that actually worries me.”
“Thank you.”
She raises her eyebrow. “But you don’t get to put him through a wall.”
Garrett exhales through his nose. “What if it’s a weak wall?”
“No.”
“Drywall?”
“Garrett.”
“I’m asking about limits.”
She tilts her chin and kisses him before he can continue negotiating materials. Garrett takes the kiss immediately, one hand sliding up into her hair while the other captures the wrist resting on his chest. His fingers wrap around hers and hold her there, palm pressed over his heartbeat.
The kiss is softer than the ones before. No hunger left to chase, only warmth and the slow drag of his mouth over hers. She kisses the corner of his lips when he starts pulling back, then his cheek, then the line of his jaw.
Garrett’s thumb moves over the back of her hand. For a few seconds, the conversation seems to have settled. The rain continues its faint tapping against the glass. Somebody down the hall shuts a drawer, followed by the muffled sound of a girl saying, “That’s not mine,” with such personal outrage that it must be about underwear.
Garrett turns her hand over and kisses the inside of her wrist. Then his gaze moves up to her face. He lifts one hand slowly, his thumb passing over the bridge of her nose with such little pressure she barely feels it. The touch is careful out of habit now, even though the swelling has disappeared and the bruising beneath her eyes has faded into the last thin yellow shadow near one cheek.
“Nearly gone,” he murmurs.
She knows what he means. “Mhm.”
His thumb moves once more, tracing the place that had been purple and tender. “Does it still hurt?”
“No.” She scrunches her nose experimentally. “Feels good.”
Garrett’s face changes at once, tension cracking enough for amusement to come through. “Do that again.”
She looks at him. “What?”
“The nose thing.”
She scrunches it again, more dramatically this time.
Garrett laughs. It bursts out warm and surprised, his whole chest moving beneath her. “Oh my God.”
“What?”
“That’s so fucking cute.”
Her face warms. “Shut up.”
“No, do it again.”
She giggles, cheeks red. “I’m not performing.”
“Baby.”
“No.”
He catches her around the waist when she tries to hide her face in his neck, rolling them just enough that she ends up half beneath him, half pinned by the solid heat of his body. The dorm mattress gives a warning squeak.
She starts laughing before he even touches her nose, because Garrett is grinning now, properly, curls falling over his forehead and every trace of the worried crease between his brows temporarily gone.
“Come on,” he says. “One more.”
“You’re making it weird.”
“You made the cutest fucking face I’ve ever seen.”
“I’ve seen you try to use chopsticks,” she giggles. “My face isn’t winning that competition.”
“That was one time.”
“You stabbed the dumpling.”
Garrett kisses her before she can continue, mouth smiling over hers. She makes the mistake of scrunching her nose when his own bumps it, and he pulls back laughing again.
“There,” he says, delighted. “That.”
“You’re deeply embarrassing.”
“You love it.”
She doesn’t answer. Garrett’s grin goes softer anyway, like maybe he heard something in the silence she doesn’t intend to say yet. He kisses the tip of her nose, then the bridge of it, then the fading bruise beneath her eye.
The last kiss changes the air. It settles more heavily, his mouth lingering against her skin while the hand holding hers goes still between them. She studies his face when he lifts his head.
The question has been sitting somewhere inside her since the hospital. Since the doorway of the hockey house and the way all the colour left him when he saw her. Since he stayed awake beside her, staring at her breathing as if he didn’t trust the room to keep doing it without supervision.
Since the lockdown, when she stepped out after an excellent shift and found Garrett looking like the two hours outside had taken years off his life.
She hasn’t asked because he’s told her enough already. Because there’s a difference between making room and digging. Because Garrett’s history isn’t a locked medication cabinet she gets to open simply because she knows where he keeps the key.
Still, his thumb is resting beside the place her bruise used to be. She clears her throat. “Were you…”
Garrett waits.
“I don’t want to pry.” She looks down briefly at their joined hands, then back at him. “And you can absolutely tell me to fuck off.”
“Promising start.”
“I’m serious.”
“Okay.” His mouth softens. “Ask.”
She slides her hand free of his only so she can touch his face, fingertips tracing the edge of his jaw. “Seeing me like that. After the hospital.”
Garrett goes very still.
“And then the lockdown,” she continues more quietly. “That brought up stuff with your mom, right?”
His gaze moves over her face with an attention that feels different from before, no longer looking for injuries but trying to decide whether this is a place he can put something. The lamp catches the dark brown in his eyes. His chest rises beneath her hand, then lowers slowly. Finally, he nods.
“Yeah,” he says.
She doesn’t fill the silence. She only lets her thumb stroke once over his cheek.
Garrett looks past her toward the window. “Seeing you at the door was…” His throat works. He stops, presses his lips together, tries again. “I knew it was you,” he says. “That sounds stupid, but I knew. I wasn’t confused or anything. I knew you’d been at work and something happened with a patient. Maria was standing there. Logan was talking. I heard all of it.”
She nods faintly.
“But you had blood on your face.” His eyes return to hers, and there is something raw beneath the steadiness now. “Your shirt was fucked up. You were holding your shoulder weird. You looked at me and tried to smile like you were worried I’d be uncomfortable if you didn’t make it less bad.”
Her fingers pause against his cheek.
“I just…” He breathes out, but the exhale catches near the end. “I couldn’t breathe. For a second. I could see you standing there, but I was somewhere else too.”
She feels his pulse beneath the heel of her hand, faster now than it was minutes ago.
“It wasn’t one memory,” Garrett says. “That would almost be easier. It was… all of it. Every time I heard something from another room. Every time she told me she was fine before I even asked. Every time I knew she was hurt and couldn’t–”
His voice cuts off. She moves closer beneath him, her knee fits along his hip and his body has somewhere to settle if he needs it.
“I couldn’t do anything then,” he says, quieter. “And with you, I got there after. Again. You were already hurt. You’d already been scared. Everyone else had already helped you, and I was just standing in the fucking doorway.”
“Baby.”
“I know.” His eyes close for a second. “I know it wasn’t my job to stop it. I know I wasn’t there. I know you work in an emergency department and things happen and I can’t–” His mouth twists. “I can’t stand beside you every second in case somebody loses it.”
“That would violate several hospital policies.”
“Yeah.”
She strokes her thumb beneath his eye. “But knowing it and feeling it aren’t lining up yet.”
Garrett opens his eyes. He gives her a tired, crooked look. “There’s the nurse voice.”
“That wasn’t the nurse voice.”
He huffs. “That was absolutely the nurse voice.”
“It was the extremely hot girlfriend voice.”
“Right.” His hand moves to her waist, holding her a little more securely. “That one’s new.”
“Still developing.”
His mouth almost smiles, but the heaviness remains in his face. “The lockdown was worse in a different way,” he says after a moment. “Because I couldn’t… see you.”
She goes quiet.
“I had hospital, lockdown, your phone not working and nobody telling me what part of the building it was in.” His fingertips press into her waist, not hard, only enough that she feels the shape of each one. “The last time you got hurt at that hospital, you showed up at the house looking like…” His gaze moves over her nose. “Like that. So my brain decided there were about a hundred things happening to you at once.”
“I was editing an assignment.”
Garrett shakes his head, but his mouth has softened again. “I kept thinking there was a door between us and something bad was happening on the other side.”
She doesn’t need him to explain which door. There had probably been dozens. Bedroom doors. Kitchen doors. A bathroom door pulled nearly shut while Garrett stood in a hallway and listened for his mother because listening was the only action a child had left.
Her hand slides from his cheek to the back of his neck. She draws him down slowly until his forehead rests against hers. “You were a kid then,” she says.
“I know.”
“And you’re my boyfriend now.”
Garrett’s breath warms her mouth. “Yeah.”
“Those are different jobs.”
His eyes close.
“You don’t have to protect me from every single thing that might ever happen,” she continues. “That’s not a boyfriend job. That’s Batman, and he has funding you don’t.”
Garrett lets out a quiet, unwilling laugh. “I have a scholarship.”
She shakes her head. “Not enough for surveillance equipment.”
“Dean probably knows a guy.”
She lets the small laugh fade between them before she speaks again. “I don’t want you thinking being with me means you– you failed every time I get hurt.”
His fingers tighten at her waist.
“Because I’m going to get hurt sometimes,” she says. “I work in a hospital. I’m clumsy. I regularly walk into the open corner of my own desk.”
“You really do.”
“It moves.”
Garrett opens his eyes.
She holds his gaze. “I don’t need you to stop everything before it happens.”
“What do you need?”
The question comes out so direct that her chest tightens around it.
“You,” she says, then makes a face because the word feels dangerously simple for the size of it. “Afterward. Sometimes during, if you’re available and the hospital has not enacted an armed perimeter.”
“It was security tape.”
She narrows her eyes. “Very threatening security tape.”
“I almost crossed it.”
“I know. Dean told me you asked about the roof.”
“I was… exploring options.”
She smiles, her fingers moving through the curls at the back of his neck. “I need you to show up. Turn the lights down. Read the discharge instructions because my brain is leaking out of my ears. Stop Dean from yelling.”
“I cannot do that last one.”
“No. Nobody can.”
“Glad we agree.”
“And I need you to believe me when I say I’m okay,” she murmurs. “Not automatically,” she adds. “You’re allowed to ask. You’re allowed to worry. You’re allowed to tell me when you think I’m being stupid.”
“That’s often.”
“Careful.”
“Sorry.”
“But once I answer you – really answer you – I need you to believe I know what’s happening inside my own body.”
He nods slowly. “Okay.”
“And I’ll try not to say I’m fine when I’m, like, actively bleeding on my shoes.”
“That would be huge for us.”
She strokes the hair at his nape. “You did everything right that night.”
Garrett’s mouth tightens. “I didn’t do anything.”
“You made the house quiet.”
“Tucker did.”
“You stayed,” she whispers
“Obviously.”
“You woke me up. You tracked my symptoms. You helped me change without making it weird.”
“I made it a little weird.”
She smiles. “You didn’t have to save me. You just had to be there.”
Garrett looks at her for a long moment. His eyes have gone bright at the edges, though he doesn’t look away or joke over it. “I can do that,” he says.
“I know.”
“I’ll always do that.”
The words come out before he can make them smaller. They settle between their mouths, unpolished and certain. Her fingers tighten gently in his curls. “I know that too.”
Garrett kisses her. His mouth closes over hers with careful pressure, one hand sliding from her waist to the centre of her back and pulling her flush against him. She lets him. Her arms go around his neck, bare bodies fitting together again without urgency, only skin and warmth and the steady proof of him breathing against her.
When he pulls away, he stays close enough that their noses touch. “So,” he murmurs, thumb tracing the base of her spine beneath the duvet. “You’re really not worried about Nathan?”
She gives the question proper consideration. “I’m worried he might continue dressing like a regional bank manager.”
“Serious.”
“No,” she says again, quieter. “I’m not. Not anymore.”
His shoulders lower with a small, reluctant breath.
“And if he tells people I’m insane,” she adds, “I’ll tell them he cried during sex once because he thought he pulled a hamstring.”
Garrett’s eyes widen. “He what?”
She bites the inside of her cheek.
“Oh my God.” Garrett lifts himself higher over her, suddenly awake in every meaningful way. “Are you serious?”
“I’m not giving you details.”
“You cannot say that and then refuse details.”
“I absolutely can,” she giggles.
“Was it actually a hamstring?”
“No.”
“What was it?”
“Probably a cramp,” she shrugs.
Garrett drops his forehead into the pillow beside her and starts laughing. His whole body shakes against hers, warm and heavy and delighted in a way that makes her laugh too, even while she presses one hand over his mouth to contain it before the neighbouring room files a second kind of noise complaint.
He catches her wrist and kisses her palm. “That’s the best thing you’ve ever told me,” he says into her skin.
“That’s incredibly insulting.”
“Did he stop?”
“Garrett.”
“Did he stretch?”
She laughs. “I hate you.”
“Did you do an assessment?”
She shoves at his shoulder, which accomplishes nothing. He rolls them anyway, catching her around the waist until she’s sprawled over his chest again, both of them still laughing quietly into the warm, messy room.
Eventually, the laughter eases. She settles her cheek above his heart. His hand returns to the back of her head, fingers moving gently through her hair.
“Hey,” Garrett says after a moment.
“Mhm?”
“If he ever does anything…”
“I’ll tell you,” she nods.
“And I won’t put him through a wall.”
She lifts her head.
Garrett grimaces. “I’ll try very hard not to put him through a wall.”
She considers this. “Better.”
“What if he trips?”
“No.”
“Near a wall?”
“Go to sleep.”
He smiles and presses his mouth to the top of her head. She nuzzles closer beneath his jaw, her nose brushing the warm skin there. Garrett’s arm tightens around her.
She scrunches her nose against his neck. His laugh moves through her cheek.
“So fucking cute,” he murmurs.
She smiles against his skin, traces one final slow line over his chest and lets her hand come to rest over his heart.
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pairing – garrett graham x nursing student!reader
summary – the morning after becoming official, garrett tries to make coffee while the boys chirp him, protect their favourite person, and accidentally start planning an away-game hotel situation.
warnings – suggestive content, morning-after intimacy, implied smut, lost voice jokes, hickeys/noise teasing.
notes from me – hi loves!! as requested here!! my sweet babies :') & currently working on the ‘weekend away’ fic and it’s looong and so so cute!!
word count – 4.2k
navigation – masterlist |
Pipes groan somewhere inside the walls of the hockey house. The refrigerator hums with the strained determination of an appliance that has survived too many protein shakes.
From upstairs comes one heavy footstep, a pause, then nothing, as though whoever made it reconsidered the concept of being awake and returned to bed.
She sits on the kitchen counter in Garrett’s jersey and a pair of little cotton shorts, one bare foot swinging loosely above the cabinet door while the other has found its way around the back of Garrett’s thigh.
The jersey hangs nearly to the hem of the shorts and smells like his laundry detergent now rather than the rink, softened from enough washes that the fabric sits warm and loose over skin still carrying a faint, pleasant sensitivity everywhere it touches.
Her hair is tangled down her back, the ends catching against the stitched numbers whenever she moves. There’s a small ache low in her body that makes climbing onto the counter feel like an accomplishment she deserves academic credit for, a softer soreness through her thighs, and the distinct awareness that her voice may not survive any sentence requiring volume before noon.
Garrett’s shirtless in grey sweatpants, standing between her knees with his back to her while the coffee machine makes a series of wet, threatening noises on the counter.
His hair is flattened on one side from sleep and curling wildly on the other, a line from the pillow still faintly visible along his cheek. The thin chain around his neck catches the grey morning light coming through the window above the sink each time he reaches for something, flashing briefly against his chest before settling again.
He’s been trying to make coffee for six minutes. She’s been preventing him from completing any individual step for more than twenty seconds.
Garrett reaches for the mugs. She hooks her foot more securely around the back of his knee and pulls. It doesn’t move him far, because he has the stability of a building designed to withstand coastal weather, but it gets his attention.
He glances over his shoulder, the corner of his mouth already shifting. “What?”
She lifts her brows. “Nothing.”
“Your foot’s trying to climb into my pants.”
“It likes you.”
Garrett turns properly then, abandoning the mugs with the weary acceptance of a man who understands the coffee is no longer the main task. His hands settle on either side of her thighs, palms warm against the cold stone counter, and she catches his chain between two fingers before he can say anything else.
It’s a gentle pull, barely enough pressure to bring his mouth closer, but Garrett follows immediately, chin tipping down until his breath moves warm over her face.
“Needy this morning,” he murmurs.
She studies the chain rather than him, thumb moving over the small metal links. “That’s rich.”
“Is it?”
“You tried to follow me into the bathroom.”
“You were gone a long time.”
“I was brushing my teeth.”
His mouth twitches. She gives the chain another small pull, and Garrett leans in the last inch without making her ask.
The kiss lands soft and warm, morning-slow rather than hungry, his mouth tasting faintly of toothpaste and sleep. His hand slides from the counter to the outside of her bare thigh, thumb passing once along the hem of her shorts while she kisses him again because the first one feels too brief now that she has him there.
The new title hasn’t changed the mechanics of Garrett’s mouth. It hasn’t altered the weight of his hand or the rough-soft brush of his curls beneath her fingers or the way his body fits into the space between her knees like it has been doing so for months without formal permission.
Still, something in her keeps testing it. Pulling him back when he moves away. Touching the chain at his throat. Catching his shoulder when he turns toward the cupboard.
Because he’s her boyfriend now and her body has interpreted that as unrestricted access to his general vicinity.
Garrett seems to have reached the same conclusion. He kisses her once more, then presses his mouth to the corner of hers, her cheek, the warm place beneath her ear where the jersey collar slips wide over one shoulder.
His hand spreads over her thigh as she tips her head to give him room, and the small pull through already-tender muscles makes her inhale differently.
Garrett stops. It’s almost irritating, how quickly he catches it. His mouth lifts from her neck, eyes moving over her face with the immediate focus of someone who’s spent enough time in hospitals around her to believe every bodily sound comes with follow-up questions.
“You sore?”
She looks at him. “You’re smug.”
“I’m asking.”
“You’re asking smugly.”
“Can you answer, baby?”
Her fingers stay looped loosely in his chain. “A little.”
Garrett’s mouth curves.
She narrows her eyes. “Don’t.”
He kisses her forehead, the smile still pressing into her skin. “You want ibuprofen?”
The question comes out so sincerely practical that a laugh slips through her before she can stop it. Her throat objects halfway, roughening the sound, and Garrett’s grin deepens into something unbearable.
“Oh, wow.”
She presses her palm over his mouth. “Don’t.”
Garrett kisses the centre of her hand.
“That’s not an invitation to become worse.”
His fingers circle her wrist, holding her hand against his face as he says, muffled into her palm, “Your voice is gone.”
“My voice is fine.”
“You sound like Dean after a three-day bender.”
She pulls her hand away to glare properly. “I worked an eleven-hour shift yesterday.”
“Mhm.”
“I was tired.”
“Right.”
“The heating dries out my throat,” she argues.
“Baby.”
She catches his chain again, hard enough this time to bring his mouth down before he can finish whatever deeply self-satisfied contribution was coming next.
Garrett laughs into the kiss, one hand sliding behind her neck while the other grips her thigh more firmly. She bites lightly at his bottom lip because he deserves it. He makes a rough sound and steps closer until the soft fabric of his sweatpants brushes between her knees.
The coffee machine clicks off behind him. Neither of them moves.
Then a floorboard groans in the hallway, followed by the dragging sound of someone approaching the kitchen with no meaningful interest in surviving the morning.
Garrett pulls back by half an inch. She keeps her fingers around his chain, mostly because releasing him would suggest shame and she’s currently too comfortable for that.
Dean appears in the doorway wearing black sweatpants, one sock and no shirt, his hair standing up at the back as though he’s been electrocuted. He makes it three steps into the kitchen before seeing them.
His gaze moves from Garrett standing between her knees to her hand wrapped around Garrett’s chain, then to the coffee machine like it has personally betrayed him by placing this scene along the route.
“No,” Dean says.
Garrett doesn’t turn. “Good morning.”
“It isn’t.”
She smiles at Dean over Garrett’s shoulder. “Morning.”
Garrett pulls back enough to stare at him. “What the fuck?”
Dean ignores him and crosses to the cupboard, opening it with the careful dignity of a man refusing to engage with something below his moral standards. “There any coffee?”
“I just made it,” Garrett says.
“Great.” Dean reaches for a mug, pauses, then glances at Garrett’s bare back. “Didn’t realise you still had the upper-body strength. Good for you, man.”
Her face warms instantly. Garrett lets go of her thigh and turns around, placing himself between her and Dean as though modesty can be installed retroactively by shoulder width. “Can you not?”
Dean blinks at him. “Can I not get coffee?”
“You know what you’re doing.”
“I’m standing six feet from the kitchen counter because there’s a private event happening near the mugs.”
She presses her lips together.
Garrett looks back at her, catches the beginning of the laugh in her face and points one warning finger. “Don’t encourage him.”
“I haven’t said anything,” she says smiling.
“That’s because you can’t,” Dean says pleasantly, pouring coffee.
Garrett’s head snaps toward him. “Dude.”
Dean brings the mug to his mouth and blows across the top with complete serenity. “What?” Dean’s eyes widen with exaggerated innocence. “I was expressing concern about the house’s dry air.”
She folds in on herself, laughter catching silently in her chest as she presses her forehead to Garrett’s shoulder. His skin is warm beneath her face.
Garrett mutters something that sounds like unbelievable and reaches automatically, one hand settling at the side of her neck to hold her there even while he glares at Dean.
Another set of footsteps sounds on the stairs, quicker and heavier. Logan comes into the kitchen in a backwards cap and a faded Bruins shirt, scratching one hand over his stomach.
He stops beside Dean, takes in the arrangement and looks toward the ceiling. “Huh,” he says. “Still structurally intact.”
Garrett’s shoulders tighten. “Morning to you too.”
“I genuinely thought your headboard was going through the wall.”
“That headboard’s cheap,” Garrett grumbles.
“That headboard’s loud,” Tucker says from the hallway before appearing behind Logan, hair rumpled, grey hoodie pulled over sleep shorts. He carries his phone in one hand and looks more awake than the rest of them. “Or it was last night.”
Garrett turns enough that she can see his face. “Why does everyone keep talking about the headboard?”
The three boys stare at him.
Dean takes another slow drink of coffee. “Did you smack your head?”
She makes the mistake of laughing aloud. Her voice cracks visibly enough that Logan’s mouth drops open.
Garrett points at him immediately. “Don’t.”
Logan shuts his mouth, cheeks puffing as he holds the comment inside. His eyes water with the effort. Tucker looks toward the refrigerator with the strained neutrality of someone witnessing a minor car accident. Dean lowers his mug and bites down on his own knuckle.
“Oh my God,” she groans, putting both hands over her face.
Garrett steps closer at once, crowding between her knees again as he reaches up and catches her wrists. “Hey. They’re assholes.”
“No,” Dean says. “You’re the asshole. We’re witnesses.”
“Hostages,” Logan corrects.
“Tucker made popcorn,” Dean adds.
Tucker’s brows pull together. “I was hungry.”
“You made enough for everyone.”
“You were all downstairs.”
“Because nobody wanted to risk the upper floor.”
Garrett looks at Tucker. “You too?”
Tucker has the decency to appear slightly apologetic. “The vents carry sound.”
“The vents,” Logan repeats darkly. “A design flaw.”
Garrett releases one of her wrists but keeps hold of the other, thumb passing over the inside as he turns back toward the boys. “Okay, why are you all chirping me?”
Dean glances toward her. “Because you’re here.”
“So is she.”
All three faces change. There’s only a small, collective stillness, like Garrett has asked why they don’t kick puppies for sport and the room has to recalibrate around the moral deficit required to form the question.
Dean lowers his mug. “Don’t be dumb.”
Garrett frowns. “What?”
“We’re not chirping her.”
“Why not?”
Logan looks offended now. “Because we have manners.”
Garrett stares at him. “You told a campus cop his moustache looked like a cry for help.”
“He was harassing Tuck.”
“He asked Tucker to move his car,” Garrett argues.
“It was the tone.”
Tucker opens the refrigerator and peers inside. “Also, she’s our friend.”
Dean points his mug toward her, careful not to spill. “She’s basically my little sister.”
Her hands lower from her face. “Basically?”
Dean looks at her with immediate sincerity. “Emotionally. Not biologically. I would’ve remembered you at Christmas.”
“You got Tucker a gas-station gift card for Christmas.”
“He loves fuel.”
“I do drive,” Tucker says, taking the eggs from the fridge.
Garrett’s still looking between them, genuinely bothered by the imbalance. “She was up there too. Louder than me, actually.”
The comment earns him a smack to the stomach.
“No,” Logan says.
Garrett’s brows draw together. “What do you mean, no?”
“I mean I didn’t hear anything.”
“You just said–”
“Heard you,” Logan says. “Loud and clear. Like a fucking podcast.”
Dean nods. “Mostly you announcing relationship updates.”
Her stomach drops with a warm, humiliating lurch. Garrett’s hand tightens reflexively around her wrist.
“What relationship updates?” she asks grinning, though her voice comes out rough.
“Selective hearing,” Tucker says, setting the eggs on the counter.
“It’s a trauma response,” Logan adds.
Garrett looks at all three of them, then back at her. His expression has gone from annoyed to openly betrayed. “You were saying it too.”
The boys look away simultaneously. Dean studies the inside of his coffee mug. Logan becomes fascinated by the magnets on the refrigerator. Tucker opens a drawer and begins searching for a spatula that has lived in the same place for two years.
Garrett’s eyes narrow. “Oh, fuck all of you.”
She laughs again, quieter this time, and lets him step back between her legs. He places both hands on her knees, looking up at her like she has personally failed to defend him in court.
“They love me more,” she whispers.
“Apparently.”
“Maybe I’m nicer.”
“You’re not.”
Her foot hooks around the back of his calf again. “Maybe I’m prettier.”
Garrett’s gaze moves over her face, then drops briefly to the jersey hanging loose over her body and the small strip of thigh above the cotton shorts. His annoyance softens around the edges in spite of himself.
“Yeah,” he says. “That one’s probably true.”
She catches his chain and pulls him in. This kiss is smaller, mostly the press of her smiling mouth to his, but Garrett’s hand moves to her waist like no part of him understands the concept of casual contact anymore.
Dean makes a disgusted sound into his coffee. “See, this is what I mean. She’s being cute. You’re disgusting.”
Garrett kisses her once more before turning his head. “I’m making coffee.”
“You stopped making coffee ten minutes ago.”
“The coffee is made.”
“For her,” Logan says, spotting the second mug near the machine. “You made exactly two coffees.”
Garrett follows his gaze. “Make your own.”
Dean lifts the mug he is already drinking from. “I did.”
“Then why are you still talking?”
“Because your girlfriend’s funny.”
Garrett’s mouth presses together. She can feel the retort building in him before he gets it out, but Tucker interrupts by setting a pan on the stove.
“Eggs?”
“Yes, please,” she says.
Garrett glances at her. “You hungry?”
She makes a considering noise. “Starving.”
Dean opens the bread bag and takes out two slices. “You want toast?”
“Oh– I’m okay.”
He puts the bread in the toaster anyway. “That wasn’t the question.”
Garrett gestures toward her as though presenting evidence to a jury. “There. Chirp her for that.”
Dean gives him a flat look. “We’re feeding her.”
“That’s not chirping,” Garrett frowns.
“She works eleven-hour shifts and thinks crackers are a food group,” Logan says, reaching around Tucker for the orange juice. “There’s no sport in it.”
“It’s actually sad,” Dean adds.
She presses one bare foot against Garrett’s stomach. “Defend me.”
Garrett catches her ankle, palm circling it easily. “Eat the toast.”
“Traitor.”
“Girlfriend.”
The word is quiet, almost absent-minded, but it lands with embarrassing precision anyway. Her toes curl slightly against his skin. Garrett feels it. His eyes lift to hers, and something pleased moves slowly through his expression.
Dean watches both of them and sighs. “I hate that one word has made this worse.”
“You made this worse,” Garrett grumbles.
“You were excited last night,” she reminds him.
“I was excited that you finally made an honest man out of Graham,” Dean corrects.
Garrett snorts. “What does that even mean?”
“I don’t know. It’s what people say when a woman saves some asshole from himself.”
“That’s not what happened.”
Dean looks at her. “Is that not what happened?”
She considers Garrett’s hand still warm around her ankle, the coffee cooling behind him because he has once again forgotten to hand it to her, the way he stood outside the hospital asking whether a title could turn him into someone allowed to know she was safe.
Her chest draws tight around something too soft to expose before breakfast. “Little bit,” she says.
Garrett looks up at her, deeply wounded. “Baby.”
She smiles and draws him closer with her foot until his hips bump lightly against the counter. “But you’re very trainable.”
Logan nearly chokes on the orange juice.
Tucker slides scrambled eggs onto plates while Dean handles the toast with the reckless confidence of someone who didn’t contribute to cooking it. Logan takes bacon from a container in the refrigerator, sniffs it, receives three immediate objections and puts it back.
The kitchen fills gradually with heat and the warm, buttery smell of eggs, coffee and bread, everyone moving around one another with the unspoken choreography of people who have shared too many mornings in too little space.
Garrett finally remembers her mug. He pours in the small amount of milk she likes without asking, stirs it once and places it into her hands. She takes a sip and makes a soft sound of approval.
“Good?” he asks.
She nods, and he reaches up to push a piece of hair behind her ear. The motion is so gentle and ordinary that it catches somewhere strange.
His knuckles brush her cheek. His fingers linger near her jaw for half a second before dropping to her knee, and he looks at her with the quiet attentiveness that usually comes after pain, bad shifts or arguments, except nothing is wrong.
Nobody is bleeding. No doors are locked. His father is nowhere near them. Garrett’s only standing in his kitchen on a cold morning, shirtless and sleep-creased, touching his girlfriend because he can.
She takes another sip to give herself something to do with her mouth.
Garrett’s thumb moves once over her knee. “Away game this weekend.”
Her eyes lift to his.
“You coming?”
The question is casual enough that it could almost disappear into the noise of Dean complaining that Tucker has overcooked one side of the eggs, but Garrett’s attention stays fixed on her face.
She thinks through her schedule first. No placement. Assignment work she can technically carry with her and then absolutely ignore in a hotel room. The drive is manageable. The ticket probably is too. Then the hotel cost arrives.
Her mouth pulls to one side. “I can’t afford the hotel, baby.”
He smiles immediately. It’s the smile of someone who already encountered this problem in his own head and quietly removed it before asking the question. “I’ll sneak you into my room.”
From inside the refrigerator, Logan says, “Whoa.”
Garrett doesn’t look away from her. “What?”
Logan straightens with a yoghurt in one hand. “Your room?”
Garrett’s thumb continues moving over her knee. “Yeah.”
“Our room,” Logan corrects.
There’s a brief silence.
Garrett glances at him. “You can stay with Dean.”
Dean’s head lifts from his toast. “Why am I being volunteered?”
Garrett turns back to her as the argument begins widening behind him. His hand slides from her knee to the outside of her thigh, warm and steady beneath the jersey hem. “Come.”
The single word moves through her more softly than it should. She looks past him at Logan, who has now begun negotiating room compensation in the form of Garrett paying for all road snacks.
Dean’s objecting on principle to having his sleeping arrangements treated like a public utility. Tucker’s trying to determine whether the hotel beds are doubles or queens, believing accurate dimensions may restore order.
Then she looks at Garrett. His hair still flattened strangely from sleep. The faint scratch she left near one shoulder visible when he turns. The chain she’s been using as a personal retrieval system all morning lying warm against his chest.
He’s watching her without trying to hide how much he wants the answer to be yes. Her foot catches around the back of his leg again.
“Yeah,” she says, smiling before she can stop it. “I wanna come.”
Garrett nods once, like something has settled exactly where he wanted it. His hand squeezes her thigh. “Good.”
She lifts her brows. “Good?”
“Yeah.” He steps closer, fitting between her knees again despite having never moved especially far. His free hand comes up to her face, thumb passing lightly over her cheek. “Want you there.”
There’s nothing polished in the way he says it. Only the plain, warm weight of want you there, spoken while Tucker scrapes eggs from a pan and Logan tries to extort minibar privileges in exchange for losing his bed.
Her chest tightens anyway. She curls two fingers into Garrett’s chain and draws him in, kissing him slowly enough that his hand slides from her cheek to the back of her neck.
Behind them, Logan says, “Okay, but I’m serious. Where exactly am I sleeping?”
Garrett’s mouth stays against hers when he answers, “Not my problem.”
“It becomes your problem when I climb into the other bed at three a.m.”
She laughs into the kiss. Garrett pulls back enough to glare over her shoulder. “You do that and I’m locking you in the hallway.”
Dean picks up one of the plates Tucker has made and brings it toward her. “Here, sweetheart.”
Garrett turns back. “Why are you serving her?”
Dean sets the plate carefully beside her on the counter. “Because you made coffee and then spent fifteen minutes letting her lead you around by the necklace.”
She looks down at the chain still curled around her fingers. Garrett looks down too.
Dean gives a small, vindicated nod. “Exactly.”
Tucker hands Garrett another plate. “Eat.”
Logan takes the final one and leans against the opposite counter, yoghurt abandoned. “I still think I deserve compensation.”
“You’re getting a whole room with Dean,” Garrett says.
“That’s not compensation.”
Dean points his fork at him. “You’re lucky I’m taking him at all. What do I get?”
Garrett looks at her. “Privacy.”
Dean follows his gaze, then closes his eyes briefly as though receiving spiritual guidance. “Right. Yeah. Fine. Separate room. Far end of the hall, ideally.”
“Different floor,” Logan says.
“Different hotel,” Tucker adds.
She hides her smile behind her coffee. Garrett catches it anyway, his hand returning to her knee beneath the edge of the counter.
“See?” he says quietly. “They’re assholes.”
“They’re helping you smuggle me into a team hotel.”
“They’re still assholes.”
Dean points his fork toward Garrett without looking up from his eggs. “And yet we’re not the reason she can barely talk.”
Garrett throws a dish towel at his head.
Dean catches it one-handed and places it politely beside his plate. “Violence won’t restore your dignity.”
“I have dignity.”
Logan looks around the kitchen. “Anybody seen it?”
Tucker shakes his head. “Not since last night.”
Garrett mutters something beneath his breath and turns toward her, clearly expecting support. She takes another bite of toast, chewing slowly as if considering the available evidence.
“Sorry,” she says once she swallows. “Selective hearing.”
For one beat, Garrett only stares. Then his hand tightens around her knee, and she laughs as he leans in, crowding her back slightly against the cupboard.
His mouth finds her cheek first, then the corner of her smile when she turns her face, the kiss warm and full of the grin he’s trying not to give her.
“My own girlfriend,” he murmurs.
She hooks her heel behind his thigh and keeps him there.
Across the kitchen, Dean groans so loudly the refrigerator hum briefly loses the competition. Logan throws a crumpled napkin at Garrett’s back. Tucker moves the pan off the warm burner.
Garrett kisses her anyway, one hand sliding into her hair and the other steady on her bare thigh, while coffee cools in her mug and the boys complain around them and plans for the weekend form in pieces across the kitchen: tickets, rides, room keys, Logan’s threatened exile.
The house is loud again now, properly awake, full of cupboards shutting and forks scraping and Dean insisting he never consented to becoming part of anybody’s romantic logistics.
She keeps Garrett close with two fingers in his chain. He lets her.
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SUMMARY: Connor loves you. You know he does. But somewhere between road trips, late practices, interviews, recovery days, and the endless demands of hockey, loving you becomes something he assumes you’ll always understand instead of something he actively shows. On your birthday, when he promises he’ll be there and doesn’t show, you finally realize the worst part isn’t that he forgot you. It’s that you expected him to.
WC: 6.6K
WARNINGS: Angst, emotional neglect, missed birthday, breakup, groveling, hurt/comfort, no cheating, eventual reconciliation, Connor realizing he messed up badly.
For years, you had been proud of being easy to love.
At least, that was what you told yourself.
You were understanding. Patient. Flexible. The kind of girlfriend who never made a scene when plans changed last minute, who smiled through phone calls that started with I’m so sorry, baby, who learned the difference between a optional skate and mandatory practice before most people even learned the names of Connor’s teammates.
You knew what his life demanded from him.
You knew hockey wasn’t just a job for Connor Bedard. It was the thing he had chased since he was old enough to hold a stick. It was early mornings, aching muscles, ice baths, media scrums, flights at ungodly hours, trainers, coaches, expectations, pressure. It was the sound of an entire city placing its hope on his back before he was even old enough to rent a car.
And you loved him for it.
You loved his dedication. You loved the boyish focus that came over his face when he watched game tape on the couch, one arm wrapped around you like holding you was muscle memory. You loved the way he lit up after a win and the quiet, hollow way he folded into himself after a bad game. You loved that hockey was part of him.
You just hadn’t realized, until much too late, that you had started becoming the part he could afford to forget.
At first, it was little things, dinner reservations canceled because practice ran long, movie nights delayed because he wanted to get extra shots in, your calls going unanswered until close to midnight because his phone was buried somewhere in his stall, his mind still stuck on a bad shift from the second period.
He always apologized.
That was the thing.
Connor was never cruel. Never dismissive on purpose. Never the kind of boyfriend who snapped at you for wanting his attention or made you feel stupid for missing him. When he remembered, he loved you with this almost startling softness. He brought you coffee without asking. He memorized your comfort shows. He kept your favorite blanket on his couch even though it didn’t match anything in his apartment. He kissed the top of your head when he passed behind you in the kitchen, like his body naturally looked for yours.
So you forgave him, again and again and again
“It’s okay,” you would say, even when it wasn’t “I understand,” you would promise, even when the disappointment sat heavy in your chest “After the season, things will be calmer,” you told yourself.
Then the season ended, and training started, then summer came, but there were sponsorship shoots and charity events and skills work and development camps.
Then the new season began, and everything repeated, you became good at making yourself smaller inside his life, you stopped asking for Saturday mornings because those were for recovery, you stopped suggesting dinners on game days because he liked to keep a routine.
You stopped calling when he was on the road unless he called first, you stopped telling him when you were upset because he always looked so tired, and there was something guilt-inducing about adding your hurt to the weight already on his shoulders.
The worst part was that Connor never noticed the difference, he still thought you were happy because you were still kind, he still thought you were fine because you were still there.
Your birthday fell on a Friday that year.
Connor had known about it for weeks. Months, technically, since your birthday had been marked in his phone calendar since the first year you dated. He had asked you what you wanted to do in that sweet, distracted way of his, chin resting on your stomach while you played with his hair on the couch “Nothing big,” you had said. “Just dinner. Maybe cake with everyone after.”
He had looked up immediately. “Everyone?”
You smiled. “My friends. My parents. A couple of your teammates if they’re free. Nothing crazy.”
“I’ll be there,” he said, you raised an eyebrow. “You sure?” His face softened like the question hurt him. “Of course I’m sure. It’s your birthday.”
And because you were still trying, because some tired, hopeful part of you still wanted to believe that all you had to do was wait for the right moment and Connor would come back to you fully, you believed him.
You bought a new dress.
Not an expensive one. Not flashy. Just something soft and pretty that made you feel like yourself when you tried it on in the mirror. You made a reservation at a restaurant you loved, the kind Connor always said he wanted to take you to but never found time for. Your friends offered to help decorate your apartment afterward for cake and drinks, and your mother called twice to ask whether Connor needed her to save him a parking spot.
“He’ll be there,” you said, you said it so easily the first time, the second time, when your best friend Maya glanced at Connor’s empty chair fifteen minutes after the reservation started, you said it with a laugh.
“Practice probably ran a little late.”
At thirty minutes, you checked your phone under the table, No message, at forty-five, your dad leaned toward you and asked quietly, “Everything okay, honey?”
You smiled so fast your cheeks hurt “Yeah. He’ll be here.” at an hour, the waiter asked if you wanted to wait a little longer before ordering dessert.
Your friends looked at you, your mother looked down at her lap, Maya looked angry enough to break something, you looked at Connor’s empty chair and felt something inside you go terribly still.
Because you weren’t surprised.
That was the moment, not the missed dinner, not the unanswered texts, not the fact that your birthday candles were waiting at your apartment and your boyfriend was nowhere to be found.
It was the quiet, devastating realization that some part of you had expected this.
Some part of you had known, from the second you put on the dress, from the moment you fixed your hair in the mirror, from the second you told everyone he would come, that there was always a chance Connor would forget to choose you.
And you hated how unsurprised you were, you hated that your heart didn’t even break loudly anymore, it just sank, like it was tired.
When dinner ended, everyone tried too hard to be cheerful, your friends sang loudly. Your dad hugged you longer than usual. Your mom kissed your forehead and whispered, “You deserve to feel special today.”
You almost cried then.
But you didn’t.
You waited until everyone left your apartment after cake. Waited until Maya lingered by the door, holding her coat in her arms, staring at you like she knew you were one soft word away from falling apart “Come stay with me tonight,” she said.
You shook your head. “I need to talk to him.” Maya’s mouth tightened. “He doesn’t deserve a conversation tonight.”
“Maybe not,” you whispered. “But I deserve one.”
She hugged you hard before she left, the apartment was quiet afterward, too quiet.
There were balloons tied to the backs of chairs. Half a cake sitting on the counter. A bottle of champagne unopened because you hadn’t been able to pretend that much. Gifts stacked neatly near the couch. Your shoes abandoned by the door after your feet started aching.
You sat on the sofa in your birthday dress and stared at the clock. 23:47. your birthday was almost over.
Connor arrived at 00:18.
You heard his key in the lock first, then the door opened slowly, carefully, like he already knew.
He stepped inside with his hair still damp from a shower, a black hoodie thrown over his shoulders, and a bouquet of flowers in his hand. Not gas station flowers. Not something thoughtless. They were your favorites. The exact ones. The kind you had once pointed out at a market two years ago, surprised he had remembered.
His face crumpled when he saw you sitting there “Baby.”
You didn’t move, Connor shut the door behind him, the flowers trembling slightly in his hand “I’m so sorry,” he said immediately. “I’m so, so sorry. Practice ran late, and then media wanted extra stuff, and my phone died, and I swear I thought I could still make it. I was going to call you from someone else’s phone, but then—”
“Don’t.”
The word came out soft, that made it worse, Connor stopped like you had shouted, you looked at him then. Really looked at him.
He looked exhausted. Guilty. Panicked. Younger than he usually did under the harsh kitchen light. His eyes flicked around the apartment, taking in the decorations, the cake, the gifts, the proof of everything he had missed “I messed up,” he said. “I know I did. I’ll make it up to you. Tomorrow. Anything you want. We can go away on the next break. I’ll take you wherever you want. I’ll—”
“This isn’t about my birthday.”
His brows pulled together. “What?”
You swallowed, your throat hurt “This isn’t about tonight. Not really.”
Connor took one step closer. “Then what is it about?”
You let out a shaky breath and finally said the thing you had been avoiding for months “I don’t feel chosen by you anymore.”
The flowers lowered slightly in his hand, the apartment felt colder “I choose you,” he said quickly. “Of course I choose you. I love you.”
“I know you love me.” Connor looked thrown by that, as if he had expected the fight to be about whether he loved you or not, you wished it were that simple.
“You love me,” you continued, voice trembling. “But you don’t show up for me. And I have spent so long telling myself that those are the same thing because I didn’t want to be unfair to you.”
His face went pale “I know hockey matters,” you said. “I know your career matters. I’ve never asked you to choose between me and the thing you’ve worked your whole life for. I would never do that to you.”
“I know,” he whispered.
“But somewhere along the way, you started acting like because I understood, I didn’t need anything. Like because I’m patient, I don’t get hurt. Like because I’m always here, you don’t have to make sure I still feel loved.”
Connor’s eyes filled, he shook his head once, almost violently. “No. No, that’s not what I think.”
“But it’s how you act.” That silenced him, you looked down at your hands because looking at him made it harder.
“I kept waiting for it to get better. After the season. After the road trip. After the next game. After the next stressful week. But there’s always something next, Con. There’s always going to be hockey. There’s always going to be pressure. There’s always going to be someone who needs you.”
You forced yourself to look at him “And I can’t keep being the person who gets whatever is left.”
His lips parted, but nothing came out, the flowers slipped lower until they hung uselessly at his side “I’m sorry,” he said, voice breaking. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”
You nodded, tears finally spilling over “That’s the problem.”
Connor flinched, you stood slowly. Your legs felt unsteady, but your voice stayed calm, and somehow that made his panic worse “I think we need to end this.”
“No.”
It came out instantly, he dropped the flowers on the table and crossed the room so quickly you stepped back on instinct. He noticed and stopped, hands lifting slightly like he wanted to reach for you but knew he had lost the right “No,” he said again, quieter. “Please don’t say that.”
“I’m tired, Connor.”
“I can fix it.”
“You always say that.”
“I mean it this time.”
Your laugh was tiny and broken. “I think you meant it every time.”
That hurt him, you saw it land, Connor dragged a hand through his hair, breathing hard, eyes shining. “Tell me what to do.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. Tell me and I’ll do it.”
“I have been telling you,” you whispered. “For months. In every way I knew how without begging you to love me properly.”
His expression collapsed.
“I don’t want to beg,” you said. “I don’t want to compete with your career. I don’t want to spend every important day wondering if you’ll remember that I matter too.”
“You do matter.”
“But I don’t feel like I do.”
Connor’s tears finally spilled over, he wiped at them quickly, almost angrily, like he didn’t have the right to cry when he was the reason you were breaking.
You walked toward the bedroom, he followed one step behind, voice cracking “What are you doing?”
“Packing a bag.”
“No, baby, please. Please don’t leave tonight. We can talk. We’ll talk all night. I’ll call the guys, I’ll call Coach, I’ll—”
You turned around “Connor.”
He froze, the way you said his name destroyed him. Not Con. Not baby. Not the soft, familiar version of him that lived only in your mouth.
Connor.
“I’m going to Maya’s,” you said. “I need space.” He looked like he wanted to fall to his knees, maybe he almost did.
“Can I call you?” You wiped your cheeks. “Not tonight.”
“Tomorrow?”
“I don’t know.”
His jaw trembled, you packed in silence while he stood in the doorway, helpless and shattered, watching you fold pieces of your life into a bag.
When you walked past him, he whispered, “I’m sorry I made you feel alone.”
You stopped for half a second, then you kept walking Connor didn’t try to stop you, but when the door closed behind you, you heard the broken sound he made through the wood.
And that almost made you turn back, almost.
But not enough.
The first night without you, Connor didn’t sleep, he sat on the floor of the apartment surrounded by birthday decorations and stared at the bouquet he had been too late to give you.
He kept replaying your words.
I don’t feel chosen by you anymore.
At first, his mind tried to defend him, practice had run late, his phone really had died, media had been unavoidable, he hadn’t meant to miss dinner.
He loved you.
He loved you so much that he had imagined every version of his future with you in it. He had saved money for a house one day and pictured where your shoes would go by the door. He had thought about rings more than once, quietly, nervously, scrolling through photos and then closing the browser because he was terrified he’d pick the wrong one. He had imagined kids with your eyes. He had imagined summers away from the city, mornings where hockey wasn’t screaming for his attention, a future where everything was calmer and he could finally give you all the time you deserved.
But then your voice cut through every excuse.
Love isn’t the same as showing up.
By three in the morning, Connor understood the ugliest part, he had been loving you in the future, someday, he would buy you the house.
Someday, he would propose, someday, when the schedule got easier, he would take you on the trips he had promised, someday, when the pressure settled, he would be more present.
Someday.
Someday.
Someday.
And while he was busy building a future in his head, he had left you alone in the present, the next morning, he texted you once.
Not a paragraph, not a desperate flood.
Just:
I know you asked for space. I’m going to respect that. I’m sorry. I love you. I’m here when you’re ready.
Then he put his phone down and cried in the shower where no one could hear him, at practice, everyone knew.
Connor wasn’t the kind of person who could hide devastation well. He was quiet on normal days, but this was different. His face was hollow. His movements were sharp and mechanical. He missed a pass he could have made blindfolded and slammed his stick against the boards hard enough that Nick Foligno skated over and stared at him “What’s going on?”
Connor shook his head. “Nothing.” Nick’s expression didn’t change, Connor lasted three seconds.
“She left.”
Nick didn’t ask who, he already knew.
After practice, Connor sat in his stall with his gear half-off and told him everything, not dramatically. Not with excuses. Just the truth, stripped raw “I missed her birthday,” Connor said, voice low. “But it wasn’t just that. I’ve been missing everything.”
Nick leaned forward, elbows on his knees “You love her?”
Connor looked up, offended by the simplicity of the question “More than anything.”
“Then stop thinking love is something she’s supposed to just know.”
Connor looked down, Nick’s voice gentled. “You’re young, Bedsy. And you’ve had hockey demanding everything from you since you were a kid. But relationships don’t survive on intention. You don’t get credit for the version of yourself you planned to be later.”
Connor shut his eyes “She said she got whatever was left.”
Nick sighed “Then don’t try to win her back with big gestures. That’s not what she asked for.”
Connor swallowed hard. “What do I do?”
“You become someone who doesn’t make her ask twice.”
So Connor tried, at first, you didn’t answer him, he didn’t blame you, for one full week, he sent one message a day. Not begging. Not pressuring. Not asking when you were coming home.
Just small, accountable things.
I spoke to the team about adjusting my post-practice media when possible. I should’ve done that before.
I started using the shared calendar again. Not because it fixes anything, but because forgetting things that matter to you can’t happen anymore.
I passed the bakery you like today. I didn’t stop because I know showing up uninvited isn’t respecting your space. But I thought of you.
I’m sorry for all the nights I made you feel like you were waiting for me to remember you.
You read them, you didn’t respond, Maya hated him on principle for a while “He sounds miserable,” she said one night, sitting cross-legged beside you on her couch while you stared at your phone.
“He is.”
“Good.” You gave her a look, she shrugged. “What? I’m on your side.”
“I know.”
“But?”
“But I miss him.” Maya softened, of course you did.
Missing Connor was the worst part. The apartment smelled like him when you went back to collect more clothes. Your favorite mug was still in his cabinet. The blanket on his couch still held the shape of every night you had curled into him after games. His hoodie sat in your overnight bag, packed by accident, and you cried into it so hard one night that Maya quietly took it and washed it because she couldn’t stand seeing you break over cotton.
You missed him but missing him didn’t erase the ache of being forgotten.
Two weeks after you left, Connor called your dad, your father told you because he had never lied to you, not even when you were little and asked if the family dog was going to die “He asked if he could come by,” your dad said carefully.
You stiffened. “What?”
“Not to see you. To talk to me and your mom.”
Your stomach twisted “What did he want?”
Your dad paused “To apologize.”
You almost laughed because it hurt too much “He apologized to you?”
“And your mother.”
“For what?”
“For making us watch you make excuses for him.” you went quiet, your dad’s voice softened “He cried, honey.”
You closed your eyes.
“I’m not telling you that to make you feel bad,” he said. “I’m telling you because I think he finally understands that love doesn’t just hurt the two people in it when one of them stops showing up.”
Your mother told you later that Connor had stood in their living room with shaking hands and red eyes, looking nothing like the confident young man the world praised every night “He didn’t ask us to convince you,” she said. “He didn’t ask what he should say to get you back. He just said he was sorry for making your birthday a night you had to survive.”
That was the first crack in your resolve, not because it fixed anything, but because Connor had gone to the people who loved you and taken responsibility without making himself the victim.
The second crack came three days later, you had a terrible day at work.
The kind of day where nothing catastrophic happened but every small thing scraped against your already bruised heart. By the time you reached Maya’s apartment, you were exhausted and cold and trying very hard not to cry in the elevator.
There was a paper bag waiting outside the door, your favorite soup with your favorite bread next to a small container of the chocolate mousse from the restaurant Connor had missed.
No note asking you to call him, no dramatic apology, just one sticky note.
You forget to eat when you’re sad. No pressure. Just dinner.
You stood in the hallway and cried, Maya opened the door, saw the bag, and sighed “I still hate him,” she muttered.
But she took the soup inside and warmed it up for you, Connor kept showing up in careful ways, not loud ones.
Not ones designed to be seen.
When your car needed an oil change, he didn’t offer to take it in like he normally would have. Instead, he texted you the number of the place you trusted and said he had already checked they had an appointment open Saturday, but he wouldn’t book it unless you wanted him to.
When your younger cousin had a school play, Connor sent a message the morning of.
Good luck to Lily tonight. I know she was nervous about her solo.
You stared at that one for a long time, you had told him about Lily’s play weeks before your birthday back when you thought he wasn’t listening.
He had been listening, he just hadn’t acted like it mattered, that realization hurt in a different way because it meant the love had been there.
It meant the problem had never been absence of feeling, it had been absence of effort, a month after the breakup, you finally agreed to meet him.
Not at his apartment.
Not at yours.
A coffee shop in the middle of the city, during the afternoon, when there was no risk of the conversation getting blurred by nostalgia and soft lighting.
Connor was already there when you arrived, he stood too quickly, nearly knocking his knee against the table “Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
He looked thinner. Tired. Still beautiful in the unfair way that made your chest hurt. His hair was hidden under a beanie, his hoodie plain, his eyes fixed on you like he was afraid you might disappear if he blinked.
There was a cup waiting across from him, your order, he noticed you looking “I asked before ordering,” he said quickly. “They said they could remake it if you came later and it got cold. I didn’t want to assume.”
That almost undid you, you sat down, for a moment, neither of you spoke, then Connor said, “Thank you for coming.”
You nodded.
He took a breath. His hands were wrapped around his cup, knuckles pale “I wrote a whole speech,” he admitted. “Then I realized it sounded like I was trying to talk my way out of something I acted my way into.”
Your throat tightened “So I’m not going to do that,” he said. “I’m just going to tell you the truth.”
You looked at him, Connor’s eyes were wet, but steady “I thought loving you meant building something for us later. I kept telling myself the hard parts were temporary. That if I worked hard enough now, I could give you everything someday. A house. Stability. A life where you never had to worry. And I convinced myself that made the missed things okay because I was doing it for our future.”
He swallowed “But you were alone in the present. And I didn’t see it because seeing it would’ve meant admitting I was failing you.”
Your eyes burned.
“I don’t want to be the guy who only knows how to love you when it’s convenient,” he continued. “And I don’t want to be the guy who makes you grateful for crumbs because he’s busy.”
You looked down at your coffee, Connor’s voice cracked “I hate that I became that guy anyway.” A tear slipped down your cheek, he didn’t reach for you, that mattered.
“I’m not asking you to come back today,” he said. “I want you to. God, I want you to. But I know I broke something, and I know me being sorry doesn’t put it back the way it was.”
You wiped your cheek.
“What are you asking for?”
“A chance to earn your trust again.” He inhaled shakily. “Slowly. However you want. And if the answer is no, I’ll respect it. I’ll hate it, but I’ll respect it.”
You studied him for a long moment “I don’t know how to trust you anymore,” you whispered.
Connor nodded, tears falling freely now “I know.”
“I don’t want to be someone you schedule because you’re scared of losing me.”
“You’re not.”
“But how do I know that?”
His face twisted with pain “You don’t,” he admitted. “Not yet.” that honesty hurt more than a promise would have, he looked down at the table “I started talking to someone,” he said quietly.
Your brows pulled together. “Like a therapist?”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “A sports psychologist, but also just… about life. About how I treat everything like if I work harder, I can fix it. But I can’t outwork hurting you. I have to actually change.”
You stared at him.
“I should’ve done it before,” he said. “I know that.”
You both sat there in the quiet noise of the coffee shop, surrounded by people living ordinary lives while yours felt split open on the table between you.
Finally, you said, “I can’t come home yet.”
Connor nodded immediately “Okay.”
“And I’m not promising we’ll get back together.”
His breath hitched, but he nodded again “Okay.”
“But…” You looked at him, heart pounding. “We can talk. Sometimes" for the first time in weeks, something like hope moved across his face, not joy, he knew better than to look joyful over the bare minimum, just hope.
“I can do sometimes,” he whispered, so that was where you began, soometimes.
Sometimes Connor called after practice, and when you didn’t answer, he didn’t spam your phone. He left one voicemail telling you about his day, asking about yours, and reminding you that you didn’t have to call back unless you wanted to.
Sometimes you met for coffee, sometimes you walked together through cold Chicago streets with space between your hands where there used to be instinct.
Sometimes it felt easy, and that scared you, sometimes it felt impossible, and that scared him.
Connor learned.
He learned to tell you when his schedule changed before you had to ask, he learned not to make promises until he had checked whether he could keep them, he learned that “I’ll try” meant nothing if it wasn’t followed by action.
He learned that flowers were nice, but remembering your presentation at work mattered more.
He learned that you didn’t need grand vacations as much as you needed him to sit across from you at dinner and not check his phone every five minutes, he learned that choosing you was not one dramatic decision.
It was hundreds of small ones, it was calling you before he watched game tape, not after he was too exhausted to speak, it was telling his trainer he had somewhere to be and leaving when practice actually ended.
It was showing up at your apartment with groceries and asking if he could cook for you, then leaving after dinner because you weren’t ready for him to stay, it was apologizing without making you comfort him.
It was accepting that some days, you were still angry, one night, two months after your birthday, you finally snapped.
He had come over to help you put together a bookshelf. It should have been simple. Domestic. Safe.
Instead, halfway through sorting screws, you looked at him sitting on your floor in sweatpants, tongue caught between his teeth as he frowned at the instructions, and you were suddenly furious.
“Why now?”
Connor looked up. “What?”
“Why now?” you repeated, voice shaking. “Why did it take me leaving for you to become this version of yourself?”
He set the screwdriver down slowly, you stood, pacing because if you stayed still, you would cry “I asked for you before. I needed you before. I was lonely before. And now you’re here, and you’re trying, and that’s good, but it also makes me so angry because you could have done this the whole time.”
Connor’s face crumpled “I know.”
“You could have loved me like this when I still felt safe with you.”
His eyes shone “I know.”
“And now I’m the one who has to figure out if I can trust you again. I’m the one who has to heal from what you didn’t notice.”
He nodded, wiping at his cheek with the heel of his hand “You’re right.”
“I hate that you’re agreeing with me.”
A broken laugh escaped him, wet and miserable. “I don’t know what else to do.”
“Fight back,” you said, crying now. “Make an excuse. Tell me I’m being unfair. Give me a reason to stay mad.”
Connor stood, but kept distance “I can’t,” he whispered. “Because you’re not being unfair.”
Your face crumpled.
He looked destroyed by it “I wish I had a better answer,” he said. “I wish I could tell you I didn’t understand or that I was too young or too busy or too under pressure, but none of that changes what it felt like for you. I did have reasons. But I used them like excuses. And you paid for that.”
You covered your mouth.
Connor’s voice broke “I hate that I hurt you into needing proof that I love you.”
That was the first time you let him hold you again, you didn’t plan to, one second you were crying in the middle of your apartment, and the next Connor was there, arms around you, holding you like he was afraid to hold too tightly but more afraid to let go.
You sobbed into his hoodie, he cried into your hair “I’m sorry,” he whispered over and over. “I’m so sorry. I’ve got you. I’m here. I’m here.”
And for once, he was.
The first game you attended after the breakup was in January, you didn’t sit with the WAGs.
You bought your own ticket because you weren’t ready for the questions, the looks, the assumptions. Connor didn’t know you were coming. You told yourself it was better that way. Less pressure. Less expectation.
Chicago won in overtime and Connor scored the winner.
The arena exploded, you stood with everyone else, heart lodged in your throat, watching him get swallowed by his teammates against the glass.
Then his eyes found you, you didn’t know how, there were thousands of people there, all screaming, all moving, all wearing the same colors.
But Connor found you, for one suspended second, the entire arena seemed to blur, his face changed, not into surprise exactly.
Into something softer, something like gratitude, he didn’t make a scene. Didn’t point. Didn’t turn it into a moment for the cameras, he just pressed his glove against his chest once, small, private, yours.
You left before he could ask you to wait, by the time you got home, there was one message on your phone.
Thank you for coming. I know you didn’t come for me to know, but I’m really glad I saw you. Get home safe.
You stared at it for a long time, then you typed back.
Good goal.
His reply came almost instantly.
Thanks. I was trying to impress this girl.
You laughed, actually laughed, then cried because laughing with him still felt like coming home.
The night things truly changed wasn’t dramatic, no storm, no hospital scare, no grand confession in the rain.
It was a Tuesday, Connor had a rare evening off. Weeks earlier, he had asked if he could take you to dinner. Not somewhere expensive. Not somewhere that screamed apology. Just the little Italian place near your apartment where you used to go before everyone knew his name.
You agreed.
Part of you expected something to go wrong, a late meeting, a surprise interview, a call from the team.
Some reminder that hoping was dangerous, but at six exactly, there was a knock at your door, Connor stood on the other side in a dark coat, cheeks pink from the cold, hands empty, no flowers, no gifts.
Just him “I thought about bringing something,” he admitted when you opened the door. “Then I thought maybe being on time was the thing.”
Your lips parted, then you smiled, it was small but real “Good choice.”
Dinner was quiet at first, then less quiet, then almost normal He told you about a prank in the locker room. You told him about Maya’s disastrous date. He listened with his whole face, laughing in the right places, asking questions that proved he was paying attention.
Halfway through dessert, his phone buzzed.
You saw it, so did he.
His eyes flicked down,for one awful second, your body remembered, the waiting, the empty chair, the excuses.
Connor reached for the phone, your stomach dropped, then he silenced it without looking and turned it face down on the table “My agent,” he said. “I told him I’m unavailable tonight unless something’s on fire.”
You swallowed “You can answer if you need to.”
“I don’t need to.”
“But what if it’s important?”
Connor looked at you “You’re important.”
The words were simple, no drama, no speech, just the truth, your eyes filled with tears, Connor’s expression softened, but he didn’t reach across the table. He waited.
You were the one who slid your hand toward his, he stared at it like it was something sacred, then he took it, his thumb brushed over your knuckles, slow and careful “I’m scared,” you whispered.
“I know.”
“I’m scared I’ll come back and everything will be good for a while, and then one day I’ll look around and realize I’m waiting again.”
Connor’s jaw tightened “That’s my biggest fear too.” You looked at him in surprise.
He nodded “Not because I think I’ll stop trying. But because I know I’m capable of hurting you when I’m not paying attention. I didn’t think I was before. I do now.” He took a shaky breath. “So I don’t want you to just trust me blindly. I want us to keep talking. I want you to call me out. I want to keep seeing someone. I want to make sure I don’t only change because I’m afraid of losing you.”
Your tears slipped over “I loved you so much,” you said.
Connor’s face crumpled “Loved?”
You squeezed his hand “Love,” you corrected softly. “I love you so much.”
His eyes shut, for a moment, he looked like the words physically hurt him, like relief could be painful when it came after starving “I love you too,” he whispered. “I never stopped.”
“I know.”
This time, when you said it, it didn’t feel like an excuse, it felt like a beginning, you didn’t move back in immediately.
Connor didn’t ask you to.
That mattered too, you kept your apartment. Kept your space. Kept rebuilding a life where he was wanted, not required, but slowly, carefully, he became part of it again.
He came over on off nights and cooked badly until you took pity on him and taught him how not to burn garlic, he remembered your friend’s promotion party and arrived with you, not three hours later.
He called from the road before bed, sometimes tired, sometimes quiet, but always present, on nights when he couldn’t talk long, he told you that instead of disappearing.
On days when you felt old hurt rising, he sat with it, he didn’t punish you for needing reassurance, he didn’t rush you into being okay.
He loved you in the present.
And little by little, the future stopped feeling like a place where you had to wait to be happy, your next birthday came quietly.
You didn’t plan a party, part of you didn’t want to give the day that kind of power again, Connor didn’t push, he simply asked what you wanted.
“Something small,” you said. “No surprises.”
“No surprises,” he promised.
That morning, you woke up to a text.
Happy birthday, baby. I’m already grateful I get to show up for this one.
You stared at it in bed, heart aching, then came another message.
Door in ten minutes. Coffee first. Then breakfast. Then whatever you want. My phone is off unless you tell me to turn it on.
You opened the door ten minutes later in pajamas, hair messy, eyes suspiciously wet, Connor stood there holding two coffees and a paper bag from your favorite bakery.
He smiled softly “Hi.”
“Hi.”
He stepped inside and set everything on the counter, no balloons, no crowd, no overcorrection.
Just coffee. Warm pastries. Your favorite flowers already arranged in a vase he must have dropped off with Maya the night before because he knew showing up at your door with a bouquet might remind you too much of the night everything broke.
You noticed, of course you noticed, Connor watched you notice “I didn’t want them in my hands this time,” he said quietly.
Your throat tightened, you walked toward him and wrapped your arms around his waist, he froze for half a second before holding you back “I’m here,” he whispered.
You closed your eyes against his chest “I know.” he breathed out shakily “I’m going to keep being here.”
You pulled back enough to look at him, there were still things to heal. You both knew that. Love did not erase history just because it wanted to. Trust did not return fully grown. It had to be rebuilt, piece by piece, choice by choice, ordinary day by ordinary day.
But Connor had learned the thing he should have known all along, love was not just the future he imagined for you.
It was the morning coffee, in the answered call, in the kept promise, in the empty chair that would never be empty again if he had any power to reach it.
It was choosing you when no one was watching, it was showing up not because he almost lost you, but because you deserved to be loved by someone who came before the breaking point.
Connor brushed his thumb over your cheek “Happy birthday baby” he said softly, you smiled through your tears, and this time, when you looked at him, you didn’t feel like you were waiting for him to choose you.
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