no matter how much you deny the connection between you and jungkook, time and place binds you both together with a red string. after an argument, you believed it was all over – yet what if, within the hush of an old wine cellar, you found yourselves closer than ever?
genre : smut, frenemies to lovers, light angst.
warnings | tags : mdni! unprotected s£x (wrap it up), handjob, creamp!e, playing with pu&sy, lowk childhood sweethearts, avoidant oc, s£x inside a wine cellar, oc pretends to hate jk, mutual pining, jk is a loser in love, making out, mild argument, confessions, past flashbacks, t!tty sucking, nicknames, dirty talking etc.
word count : 4.7k+
you had absolutely no intention whatsoever to mend things with jeon jungkook. you hated his guts and seeing his face right now didn’t seem like a good idea either.
mentally, you made a list of cuss words that you could use on yourself because you had agreed to visit the jeon family’s estate earlier this week.
“i already talked to jungkook’s father. it would be very disappointing if you bail out right now”
your parents sat with folded hands on either side of the couch while you stood still near the staircase, that rounded up three storeys high in the house.
“your parents are asking for you downstairs miss”, earlier in the morning you weren’t particularly elated when your househelp knocked on the bedroom door while whispering cautiously.
“—now would you stop rolling your eyes y/n?”
you stopped yourself from clicking your tongue as a response to your annoyed mother’s words.
“i can guarantee that you won’t see jungkook! just go down to their winery and you’ll find mr. jeon waiting in there as promised!”
“—yes absolutely. so just take the wine from him with a polite smile and come back home. that’s it! and moreover i don’t understand your problem with jungkook?” your father added.
the moment jungkook’s name left your father mouth, a sour taste engulfed on the back of your tongue.
you painfully recalled,
last week at a charity dinner organised by one of your father’s business associate, you had way too much wine to drink (because of jungkook) and quote unquote apparently had ranted a few tons about the aftertaste of the bitter liquor that was served in there to mr. jeon out of all people!
everybody knew that the jeon’s family owned the country’s largest wine domaine and out of good relations with your parents, he instinctively had invited you over to present some of their finest creations, after a round of wholesome laughter.
“you should stop by sometime next week y/n dear, it’ll be my pleasure to give you a tour of my wine collection!”
and that is how you had landed in this messy situation where you were supposed to go for wine tasting and pick up some authentic bottles from the jeon’s.
your father being a wine connoisseur himself chimed in with joined hands and murmured something about respecting the elders but however, this whole scenario wouldn’t be a pain in the ass if it weren’t for the fight that happened between you and the youngest son of the jeon family.
from whatever you could recapture, you always remembered that jeon jungkook was annoying as hell. you knew him from your childhood days since your parents were bosom friends, and belonging to the same clique you had to be around jungkook regardless, without a choice.
“—i think you’re overreacting”
you weren’t even supposed to attend this party in the first place but nonetheless, now, you were stuck inside a random supply room with jungkook infront of you, suited in a tailored tuxedo.
he was the one who had pulled you inside to ‘talk things out’ and when you followed him in, he had the audacity to call it overreacting??
“what the hell is wrong with you? you think you’re all that?” you refused to tone down as you glared right back into his shiny doe eyes.
“you will never get what you want from me!” you said strictly as you tried to suppress the clenching feeling inside your heart.
“yeah? and it takes barely two minutes for you to melt right back into me” he paused momentarily to lazily smirk at you “which brings me to my point that, i’m starting to think you’re in love with me”
you flushed red at the choice of his words and wanted to slap the sly smirk off his pouty pink lips.
it was literally your fault to involve yourself with a person like him.
you couldn’t stand jungkook’s nerve from the very beginning but somehow his teasing remarks and fluttering touches left you craving for more.
that is also how you ended up in a strictly ‘sex only’ relationship with him earlier this year.
“i cannot give what you’re expecting from me and the sex isn’t even that good either to be honest” you lied through your teeth knowing no one else had you undone better than him,
and your heart twisted as you looked at his neat hair which was pulled back from his forehead with some hair gel.
for some reason, jungkook knew exactly how to make your eyes roll back and legs shake in pleasure.
his expression shifted slightly, with pain visible in his eyes, “that’s not what you said last night” he replied softly.
yeah no, you were actually screaming the exact opposite, begging him, god, karma, everything else in presence as he bent you over on his desk while brutally slamming his cock inside your squelching cunt.
you did not want to give jungkook the satisfaction of winning but your heart clenched as you knew that his accusations were true.
“i’m so over this, i don’t even want to see your annoying face ever again” you whispered the last bit hoping he didn’t hear it but it was far too late,
“well if that’s what you want!” he leaned close just enough to make sure his breath was touching your face, “then that’ll be it” he straightened back up again and with that he left the room, the door closing behind him and leaving you oh so overwhelmed with everything.
you felt your eyes getting glassy because you knew deep within you were far too gone. way too invested in this arrangement, and it wasn’t just sex for you anymore. you were afraid of losing him.
growing up in a different world you were always surrounded by selfish men who only liked you for what you brought to the table. they knew that your parents ran a well known family business which had years of goodwill and recurring profits in the market.
you were used and discarded by many but none of them left a hollow feeling like jungkook. he made you see stars, noticed every small shift in your mood, every little detail that you yourself weren’t aware of.
you hated how he knew exactly what to say and how he was always there for you when your life was going downhill.
he never failed to put a bandaid over your wounds with his stupid uncool jokes and random surprises.
you did not like how much control he had over your emotions and maybe slowly along the way, it also made you sort of dependent on him for stability.
but, jeon jungkook was the most spontaneous and unserious person you’ve ever met.
you knew deep within that he would never settle down for something serious.
hence you decided to put some distance between you both, so as to ‘fix’ your feelings and get over him as soon as possible.
but without even realising you let him into your closeted heart and maybe that turned out to be your biggest mistake.
you didn’t do relationships well because you struggled alot with expressing your emotions and neither did jungkook.
whatever you both had was complicated but that didn’t stop neither one of you from slipping into eachother’s arms at every given opportunity.
the mixed signals, unresolved feelings were sending jungkook off the roof, and therefore he decided to communicate for once,
but he realised you had shut him off already.
you stepped out of your sleek black mercedes which dropped you infront of the jeon’s property.
the driver shut the door while you prayed for not confronting jungkook anywhere. it almost felt as if you were sneaking in like a thief, looking cautiously here and there before adjusting the humongous sunglasses on your face.
while walking through the garden, you tried to hide behind every bush which lead you to the front door.
you couldn’t afford to see his face at any cost.
“i’m so glad you made it dear” a soft voice echoed in the space as mrs jeon (jungkook’s mother) smiled warmly at you.
you entered their living room with a slow cautious motion and returned her smile back politely, just like you were taught since childhood.
‘pretty’ would an understatement to describe the cream wallpapers, soft gold chandeliers, the vintage fireplace, spotless tiles and the million dollar artefacts which were scattered throughout their living room.
they also had a generously cushioned sofaset sitting in the middle, similar to the one you had back at home which added perfect homely notes to the rest of the elements.
next, your wandering eyes reached up to the couple of picture frames kept neatly on top of the fireplace, and if you were to look more closely you’d be able to see two cute kids sitting under a cherry blossom tree with shy smiles adorned in their faces.
you remembered the common children’s park where your mother used take you when you were little.
you were an introvert growing up, and being such a quiet kid didn’t help at all because all the other children disliked your presence,
but however, jeon jungkook was the only one among them who made sure to include you in every silly game of his.
he would pull you along, call you his best friend and scold other kids when they tried to bully you.
“she’s always this quiet because she’s an angel and angels don’t talk” — that’s what he used to say.
you wondered how much you both had changed after growing up.
“you both looked so cute with eachother” jungkook’s mother probably had noticed you staring at the picture.
“it’s a shame you aren’t together now…”
your expression shifted visibly and cheeks turned pink at her words, only out of embarrassment because you knew you were the one who pushed jungkook away. you couldn’t accept how perfect he was in everything without even trying.
you spent days and nights isolating yourself from him.
it’s not like your parents were hard on you either. it’s just that, it bothered you so much because he had everything done so effortlessly like — be it balancing his emotions, or scoring perfect grades, or winning school tournaments, or making you smile at the worst times,
you tried looking for him in other men but you were left with nothing but disappointment.
you knew that it was wrong and unfair, but you still drew a unrecoverable boundary between you both.
the irony was that you were scared of losing him, but you still kept pushing him away.
“sorry i shouldn’t have brought that up” the older woman sympathised with a small smile.
“why don’t you sit here for a moment while i go look for someone who can take you downstairs?” she gestured at the couch and sweetly grinned again.
you brushed your hair out of your face and took a deep breath to convince yourself that whatever you both had, was in the past and now the damage was already done.
“thank you” letting out a fake smile and sat yourself down on the soft surface, all while hoping this predicament to end soon so that you can finally go home and grab an unfinished fantasy book to escape from this world.
“—miss y/n? i’ll assist you to the basement. mr. jeon has been waiting for you”
a middle aged househelp politely bowed at you and motioned you towards the grand hallway, which lead to the staircase.
you mentally thanked all of divinity for letting you not run into jungkook.
as far as your knowledge went, you knew that his father stored some of their finest wine bottles down in the basement.
you also knew that there was a different property all together consisting of their infamous vineyard and a common cellar, located a little far from where their house was situated at.
it was the place where you and jungkook would mess around after school.
the kind woman opened the door for you and you were immediately hit with a strong sweetish-woody aroma.
“i’ll leave now miss, please feel free to call me if you need anything else” she bowed before leaving.
the dimly lighted room consisted of several racks, each filled with dark liquor bottles along with some large casks. it also had a few wooden tables scattered here and there on top of a reddish brown colored carpet which reflected a shade similar to that of the liquor stored above.
however, the room was very private and secluded altogether with no windows or doors other than the main entrance.
it felt cool, quiet, dark, but yet soothing enough.
“hello?” you called out as you treaded carefully down an aisle, “mr jeon? its me y/n”—
you stilled halfway through, pausing to look at the tall shadowy figure infront of you.
you recognised it immediately.
“j-jungkook!?” you screeched.
it was freaking jeon jungkook, standing with an unreadable expression while inspecting a bottle of red wine.
he glanced at you as though he was already expecting your presence,
“took you long enough” he said and went back at scrutinising the label of the bottle on his hand.
you were already feeling sick after looking your childhood pictures with him, and the overwhelming amount of sweet grape fragrance was adding more to that misery.
“what–what are you doing here?” you felt so dizzy that you didn’t realise what exactly was coming out of your mouth.
“good question” jungkook smirked iconically and kept the bottle down on the table infront of him.
the lighting was very dim but you could still make out his shirt sleeves being rolled up to reveal the dark ink lines of tattoos on his hand, each one of which you’ve memorised by now.
obviously! it was HIS house, HIS winery, HIS cellar, HIS basement.
you were the freaking outsider…
“dad had to go out for something urgent” he scanned you up and down and paused at your glossy lips to take your form in properly before adding, “—told me to show you around and give this to you” he pointed at the bottle which he just kept down on the wooden surface.
you sighed and accepted your defeated fate, “i’m going home” you turned back on your heels to walk out but were stopped abruptly by a warm hand grabbing your wrist,
“wait! you need to try out this noir atleast”
honestly the last thing you needed was wine on top of your growing misery. the room already felt so much smaller than it actually was.
“let me go jeon…” you pushed your tongue against your cheek.
“don’t wanna”
if you were to turn back right now, you’d find jungkook with a cheesy half smile on his pierced lips.
you tried to yank back your wrist but jungkook overpowered your strength and pulled you backwards to hit his muscular chest.
you let out a gasp and stumbled on his buffy pecs while he encircled his hands around your waist, to hold you super tightly against him.
“you’re always so stubborn hm?” you felt his mouth lean down near your ear which was warming you up every passing second.
“leave me alone you asshole” you tried a failed attempt to free his hands from your waist.
“still mad at me?” jungkook glanced down at your flushed face and a satisfied grin broke into his lips.
“shut up” you were pressed against him, down in the basement, where no one could hear you!
it was just you both, and an overwhelming amount of liquor.
you tried your best to keep up with the nonchalant persona but jungkook’s big arms which cuddled your frame, didn’t help much.
you hated to admit how much you liked it.
“…’m-sorry” you whispered almost inaudibly after a moment, “i didn’t mean whatever i said last weekend at the dinner”
something shifted in the air as jungkook loosened his arms around you.
you thought that this was it, now he would probably just kick you out with a bottle of their wine and never see you again anymore.
just like you had wanted (not really).
“princess” he sighed,
“you have no idea what you do to me”
you gasped loudly when he turned to lift you on the wooden table beside, by grabbing the softness of your thighs.
“huh?” you cluelessly looked at his face.
while parting your thighs he stood between them.
your small skirt rose up rapidly as he held you in place, and it was as though you couldn’t get a word out of your mouth.
“don’t you know?” the relentless tension between you both was sucking the air out of the room,
“know what?” you looked at him through your lashes with a small voice.
“that i’ve loved you since forever” jungkook moved his fingers to grab your jaw, “i cannot imagine a second without you baby. please don’t ever shut me off like that” he leaned forward to press a few kisses in the corner of your mouth.
your heart was beating so rapidly upon hearing his honey like voice. you recalled all the nights you cried relentlessly for hearing this from him.
you spent so much time denying your heart and in the process, it hurt him more than it did you.
“i’m such a horrible person kook. i’m sorry” your eyes filled up with moisture.
“i won’t do it again” you reached out to brush his soft hair covering half of his eyes. your heart was beating crazily against your ribcage. “i was so scared…”
“i know” he replied softly, “i should’ve made things easier”
“i also couldn’t stand you being near other girls”
“mhm right” he quickly smooched you directly on the lips as you glared at him with narrowed eyes,
“you better focus on me” the doe eyed boy nodded at you listening to whatever you had to say. “only me”
“and i need you to cook for me every night from now onwards as a punishment” jungkook nodded again as though he was discovering your traits for the first time.
he knew all that very well— what you disliked, what you liked, what pushed your buttons, what made you happy or sad.
he adored you too much and spent all his time learning how to be the perfect man for you.
“i’m sorry i kept pushing you away” you toyed with his lip piercing. “i thought you didn’t want me…”
“you didn’t say it back though” he pouted against your fingers as you cracked a wide teasing smile. “say what?”
he whined loudly.
“i love you so much” you whispered,
“—you have no idea you idiot”
you let your lips softly mould on his while pulling him closer by the collar of his shirt.
you should’ve said this long back. you should’ve given jungkook the chance he was always deserving of.
you had no idea why it took you both so much time.
jungkook let his lips immediately mould with yours before pulling you closer, if that was even possible and let his soft lips travel down the column of your neck where an adorable red flush danced across your skin.
“jungkook” you gasped again his mouth, “we— we can’t. not here” jungkook’s mom or the house help could walk in any moment and see you both indecently engaging in such activities.
“it’s my house. no one will come inside without my permission” jungkook’s face was equally flushed as he breathed heavily.
“now let me taste my girl” he rubbed your inner thighs soothingly before parting your black lacy panties aside to brush his fingers along your wet slit,
collecting the moisture from near the hole and the circling the ball of nerves on top with his thumb.
“you wore these for me baby?”
“yes k-kook” you nodded and threw your head back in pleasure.
“a-ahh” you moaned loudly as his long fingers teased your womanhood. “tell me what you want princess” he pressed feverish kisses and nipped against the open area of your throat, leaving scarlet marks all over the place.
“you. only you” you were beyond any sense of shame or decency. “hm where do you want me?” he teased your entrance with two of his veiny digits.
“inside me, please” you gasped out loud when he pushed his fingers into your warm walls, slowly scissoring his way inside.
“only sex huh?” he teased. “—your needy cunt is sucking in my fingers so good baby”
“i hate you” you turned your face away from his demanding lips as your body burnt hot with embarrassment and pleasure at the same time.
he suddenly removed his fingers, leaving you all empty. your gaping hole aching for more.
“…nooo don’t do that”
jungkook let out a breathy laugh in turn and pressed a kiss on your swollen lips sweetly. “sorry”
you allowed a teasing hand travel downward to rub on his clothed length.
you could feel him already getting big against your palm so you massaged the hardening length up and down with whatever experience you had gathered.
you still remembered the first time you had given him a blowjob — how gently he had guided you through the entire thing and praised you so well after.
your pussy throbbed with anticipation and you decided to torture him more by latching your lips to the ends of his ear.
jungkook hissed in return when you simultaneously rubbed his length and suckled near his sensitive spot.
“always want you so bad jungkookie” you attempted to pull down his black trousers and free his growing boner.
“yeah?”
“mhm. hate being away from you”
he attached his lips back on yours and sucked on them as though he couldn’t get enough,
you stroked his now exposed cock lazily, fingers stopping at the mushroom head to gather the sticky precum and stroke it again.
his veiny lenght twitched and throbbed with every pull of your hand.
“gonna fuck you so good princess”
you whimpered on his lips when he reached out to pull your top down to reveal your full and juicy tits.
“fuck these are gonna kill me someday” he let his eyes wander on the skin he just freed. your aching nipples hardened under his unwavering gaze and the chill air in the room.
you looked at him with fake innocence, “i think you’re in love with me” you sneakily threw the same words back at him with a small teasing smile as his eyes darkened in realisation,
“we’ve already established that, didn’t we?” he pushed you down to get more comfortable on the table and bent your knees against your chest in a mating press so that his hard on was directly pressing against your weeping pussy.
you moaned uncontrollably and rolled your eyes back at the feeling while he teasingly rubbed himself you.
your panties were still pulled aside, which gave him direct access to your wet entrance.
“you’re such a tease”
jungkook leaned a little closer just to latch his warm mouth on your nipple, sucking and licking the sensitive skin to leave you in a moaning mess.
he enclosed the entire areola inside his wet mouth with his lips tugging on them turn by turn.
“like that?” he glanced up from between your flushed mounds with a small smirk tugging at the corner of his lips,
“you’re so good kook…” you whimpered out and ran your fingers through his short hair.
one of his hands reached down to his aching length as he jerked himself while kissing the soft skin of your breasts.
his fingers kept on brushing on your drenched entrance as he stroked up and down.
“a-a-ah”
jungkook lifted himself up only to tear your thin underwear apart with trained experience and removed all the pieces from you to let his bulging dick deliciously massage your clit.
“mine, all mine”
you gasped loudly at the raw feeling and tried to muffle your moans against your free hand.
“let me hear you” jungkook slapped your hand away and bent you harder, smushing your thighs in the process before teasing your entrance with his mushroom head.
“baby i c-can’t…”
jungkook was enjoying this a little too much, while he was also equally throbbing with stimulation, he liked seeing you in a moaning-crying mess.
“so tight as always” he pretended to push his angry red cock head inside but pulled out again before your wetness could engulf him.
“please k-kook. fuck me. please” you knew that the only way of stopping the bratty man hovering on top of you was to give in and beg sweetly with teary eyes. and luckily this time he finally gave you what you wanted.
your throbbing cunt was messily leaking and it made it easier for jungkook to bully his thick length inside.
your hair was sprawled on the wooden surface and your body jerked with every inch he let inside you.
“a-ahh aagh shit” you moaned defencelessly as he bottomed out completely.
“you good my babygirl?” jungkook brushed a few unruly strands of hair from your face,
the nickname and soft touch of affection made your heart race and pussy clench uncontrollably.
“mhm so good” you nodded, clearly being cock drunk and jungkook rapidly took off his black tshirt before focusing his attention on your sweaty reddened tits,
“taking my cock so nicely” his fisted the plump mounds, with the nipple twisted between his digits, he started to pump in and out of you in an agonising pace.
the table under you creaked with every movement as the entire room filled with roaring slaps of skin.
you gasped loudly with each thrust as if you almost forgot how to breathe.
his dick was oh so thick, veiny and curved towards the end, rubbing your gummy insides with a practiced expertise.
“feel that? only you can get me hard like this” he said before grabbing your waist as an anchor to drill faster into you.
“o-oh my god, kook” you mumbled gibberish and clenched wildly against him.
“i am going to c-come” you held his face, with your fingers haphazardly tracing his features as he furrowed his eyebrows in pleasure.
“come for me princess”
“a-ah a-ah” you let out a whiny pornographic moan before releasing your juices all over his length.
you would’ve slipped off from the table due to the violent impact if jungkook wasn’t holding you so tightly.
however, that did not keep him from slamming into you in an animalistic speed.
he could feel his balls tightening up with a familiar feeling when your creamy cunt swallowed the entirety of his cock.
your warm walls leaked on his hard length and he wished he could have a taste of it.
“always coating my cock like a dirty lil girl and you were trying to avoid me? huh?”
jungkook glanced at your crimson face, with flushed tits and bruised lips, looking so prettily at him. his heart was beating rapidly against his chest as he considered himself to be the luckiest guy in the planet to be able to experience this and planned on reserving this sight for himself, forever.
“i love you so much” jungkook leaned down to capture your sweet lips in a kiss again,
“i love you too baby”
he heard you whimpering ferociously when a guttural moan left his lips.
he buried deep inside your welcoming wetness and finally halted to release his warm seeds inside.
slowly he pulled out his softening dick from your sore cunt after a little while, as you both hissed at the empty feeling.
when you finally calmed down from the intense high, he showered your face, forehead, neck, boobs and lips with kisses all over while you giggled shyly.
“never gonna let you go now” he whispered on your lips
“—you are mine forever” and hugged you close.
★ notes by buzzyjoonie : for all my emotionally constipated/overthinker girlies, this one is for you ‹𝟹 never stop yearning because the right person will always find you!
I’ve wanted to do this for a while, so here it is! It took some time, but it was necessary for me to better organise everything. It will keep being updated. I hope it can help anyone find fics they like. Also, I would like to thank all those amazing authors for giving us such amazing stories! Happy reading🫶🏾
୧ ‧₊˚ everyone knows that garrett graham is great at hockey. he’s great at winning. he’s also great at being a boyfriend...well, at least he thought he was. he never would've expected to fall down to the tier of a 'bare minimum boyfriend', and when he realizes he's done it, he's got one shot at getting you back with the help of his teammates.
pairings & aus: garrett graham 𝑥 fem!reader
warnings: some angst, happy ending. hockey boys being hockey boys. sweet graham because that's who he is (we love him)
gabi's quick thoughts: hello hiii!! this is my first off campus fic and i really hope you enjoy :) i love this series to absolute death, this is ur sign to watch it if you haven't !!!
word count: 4.7k
garrett graham masterlist ‧₊˚ full masterlist
“I’m about to seriously kill my boyfriend.”
This whole conversation, your best friend was only partially listening, but you could practically feel her presence shift from the bathroom next to you, her usual scurrying around and the racket caused by all of her jewelry and beauty products coming to an unsettling halt. Never in her life has she been this quiet.
Your fingers tighten against the counter that you’re leaning across while a defeated sigh emigrates from your throat, passing your trembling lips. You’re beyond the point of irritation, your right hand balling into a fist, softly banging against a CD on Jess’s desk. When the red-head doesn’t respond rapidly enough to your frantic complaining, your banging crescendos, shattering the CD completely in half.
“Jessica!” You screech, upstanding to your full height, “Are you even listening?”
She trudges out the bathroom with a bundle of pink jumbo hair rollers buried in her wrapped arms, one of them imprisoned between her teeth. You grimace as she walks towards you, arms unfurling and setting the curlers down rather harshly. She removes the one expanding her jaw, wiping it on her outfit and setting it on the counter.
Your head droops to your chest in defeat and exasperation, stiffening up when you hear Jess’s phone ring, making you jolt up. You feel your heart shift, a physical display of your desperate hope that she won’t answer. Her eyes meet yours and quickly drift down to the vibrating device, and for a second, she considers, but she thinks slow and moves even slower. The vibrations and the gentle lyricism of a Sade song come to a halt and the phone call ceases, and you almost sigh with relief.
If you were being truthful with yourself, you wanted so badly to beat a dead horse with your roommate, just for a minute longer than the six days you already have been-- but it wasn’t like you didn’t have a reason to.
Garrett Graham was on thin ice, and it wasn’t the kind that a puck slides around.
You were running out of patience with him, though you always made sure to try and be the physical embodiment of gentle forgiveness. But at some point it started to make you sick, not physically, but rather emotionally. Men are already dense enough, boyfriend or not, so the time Graham had in order to make it up to you was exponentially running out.
See, he didn’t actually do anything. The problem lied within what he wasn’t doing.
“Okay,” you watch as Jessica moves slow, groaning like an elder, folding herself into her chair as she rests interlocked palms on her jean-clad knees, and she offers you her gaze, “You’ve got my full attention. What did he do now?”
Though her words weren’t exactly inviting, you knew she was open to hearing you complain for the hundredth time, which, even if she wasn’t, you were going to speak anyways.
You rest on the counter of her desk and settle there, taking a deep breath to ensure you don’t say anything you’d heavily regret. A pause finds you and you wait until you think maturely enough to roll into conversation. After a few seconds, the right words fall through your head, and you begin to speak, slowly as you try not to reek of anger.
“I seriously don’t know what his problem is,” you passively roll your eyes, “I mean…okay, it started with the practice thing. I understand I can’t see him everyday, but what the hell could he be doing after he’s done? He goes home and sleeps without even texting or calling.”
Jess huffs, “He doesn’t even--”
“No, he doesn’t. On top of this, he ghosted me at our coffee spot and said he had to practice before a game even though he already did, and said we’d catch up ‘another time.’ Another time? Who do I look like?”
Your roommate stiffens a laugh that manifests itself as an obnoxious snort, “Clearly the girl he’ll see another time.”
“Not funny.”
“Sorry,” she mumbles, “Continue.”
“Right. And most of all, he knows how much I adore when he gets me flowers, yet I can’t remember the last time he has. It’s not a materialistic thing-- like it’s really not-- it’s just something that makes me feel loved, and I don’t think I’ve felt that in weeks. He’s just…” You pause, salt water filling the beds of your eyes, “It feels like he doesn’t really like me. Don’t get me wrong, I know that he loves me, but it feels like he’s just…comfortable. He’s not trying.”
Jess’s hands slide from her chin to her eyes, submerging her cheeks in between both of her palms. She sighs lowly, “I hear you, babe, I really do…but have you told him like, any of this? I’m not sure how much good it’s doing you just to keep telling me about it. I’m not the one who did the shit you.”
That makes you laugh, your hand coming up to rub your nose. “I shouldn’t have to tell him. He should know.”
“Sweetheart, men don’t know anything.”
You nod in agreement, rolling your eyes to banish the last of your tears. Your shoulders rise and fall along with your chest in complete defeat, and you want to say something, but you don’t know how and it’ll just end up being another venting session that had a means to an end, and you’re tired of that. You weren’t quite ready to confront Garrett about this, so the least you could do is take time and distance yourself to think before you got hurt further, and that was the last thing that you wanted.
The ice is cold. It’s much colder when you aren’t on good terms with your girlfriend.
Garrett genuinely can’t focus. The entire time he’s been resting on the bench, he’s had two sips of water and probably fifty interrupted breaths because he’s so anxious, but he almost feels like he can’t be because he brought it on himself.
He’s also unreasonably tired, which isn’t completely unlike himself, but he’s more exhausted than he usually is. If he was being completely honest, there were a lot of things wrong. He was barely catching up with schoolwork, slipping up on the ice (and not because he had bad balance), and damn-near barely alive throughout the day. He felt like he was just good enough to get by.
His thoughts run, and they’re all about you.
It’s like a gut punch when he realizes how he’s been treating you. It sincerely wasn’t his intention, and he knew that he could do better, it was just that he was so overwhelmed with everything but you that it somehow became the one thing he was neglecting. He was doing his best to even keep his head above water, floating in a pool of responsibilities that were borderline too much to handle, which wasn’t a good excuse, at least not to him. He wasn’t sure if there was one that would justify kicking your girlfriend to the curb.
As his thoughts find themselves on another path that led absolutely nowhere, a partially worried Dean nudges the curly headed boy’s shoulder, and Garrett jumps slightly at the unexpected touch. He’s almost irritated and it’s clearly shown on his visage, and the blonde makes a confused face at him.
“What’s up with you?” He aggressively sends his hand up to clap at Garrett’s shoulder, “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” Garrett mutters, because apparently that’s the only answer he knows how to give.
Dean stares at him. “You literally look like you’re about to throw up.”
“Thanks.”
“Anytime.”
Garrett rolls his eyes, but the reaction doesn’t have much weight behind it. Normally, Dean’s teasing would annoy him enough to pull him out of his head, but even that isn’t working right now. There aren’t enough distractions in the world to get his thoughts to deviate from what they are, the ones that keep rolling around in his head and only amplifying in worry. He’s treating you badly, and he feels even worse than you do about it, if possible.
Silence is the only solace Garrett has right now. If he talks, he’ll get emotional, and it’s not really the time to do all that in the middle of practice, as if he’d do it outside of the rink. Sometimes he needs to be pried open and the worst possible moment it could happen is right now, so he stays quiet for as long as he can to avoid any confrontation about how he’s really feeling underneath this seemingly mellow yet content attitude.
Tucker, Logan, and Dean all talk amongst themselves while the others skate around the ice, the sound of piercing frost acting as a mediator between Garrett and his own head. He’s just glad he’s let off the hook for a second, trying to calm himself down before having to go back out there.
Five minutes pass. Then ten, and the brunette doesn’t know how much he can take. As much as he doesn’t want to, he sighs out, because he feels like he no longer has a choice.
“We’re fighting.”
Dean leaves whatever conversation he was engaging in, his eyebrows lifting. “You and her?”
Garrett nods, almost like it hurts. He’s so defeated he doesn’t even know the first thing he should do, especially now, when thousands of things need his full attention. But he does know that he doesn’t want you to be upset with him, so he’s gotta do something.
“Since when?”
Garrett opens his mouth, about to give him an answer, but then realizes that he doesn’t actually know. Has it been since yesterday? A week? Two? Hell, has it already been a month?
He thinks for a second and really tries to pry some sort of timeline out of his tangled head, but he comes up with nothing and shrugs his shoulders to show that. He wants so badly to remember to try and work things out, but he genuinely can’t remember the last time this mess wasn’t actively happening or how it even began. He sighs.
“I don’t know,” he says quietly, and it only makes him feel worse. See, Garrett never forgot things when it came to you, no matter how miniscule it was-- so the fact that he couldn’t even remember the last time you were on good terms was saying something. He felt shitty for it, but the longer it let it simmer, the worse it would get, and he didn’t want to risk losing his girlfriend over something that could be fixed with just a little effort.
“Dude,” Dean huffed, resting his head in his hand as he wiped his forehead that crinkled in confusion, “What did you do?”
“I…I didn’t do anything, I don’t think..”
“Right,” the blonde sat up to look at Garrett, “That’s probably the problem.”
“What’s going on?” Tucker chimes in, leaning forward to eye the two boys, which caused Logan to lean forward to listen in. Garrett immediately rolls his eyes because he didn’t necessarily want to talk about it in the first place, and it didn’t feel like letting them in on the details, but he was left with pretty much no other options.
“Garrett fucked up.” Dean presses his lips together, and Tucker immediately grunts and shakes his head while Logan raises an eyebrow, clearly puzzled. Though nobody knows any actual details yet, the two boys on the end of the bench feel like Dean knows more information than they do.
“What do you mean he fucked up?” Logan finally asks, and Dean leans in while Garrett falls back and rests his head, looking at the ceiling with his eyes glued shut. He literally couldn’t get out of this.
“I don’t know what he did.”
“He didn’t tell you?” Tucker questions.
“No, but why don’t we ask him?”
Garrett shakes his head. “Please do not ask me what’s wrong.”
“Oh no,” Dean reassures with a smirk, “We’re gonna ask. So, what happened?”
Garrett doesn’t speak for a minimum of ten seconds before he realizes that his three knucklehead friends don’t know how to take a soft ‘no’ for an answer. He needs help and even though he’d rather die than talk about it, he’s lost all hope, so he sits up, adjusts his position, and starts talking.
“We were good, okay? But I guess I got so swamped with the games, practice, schoolwork, shit…I don’t know. I’ve been neglecting my relationship I guess, and I think she’s really mad at me. I haven’t gotten her flowers, I haven’t been texting or calling her, I just feel like shit. I need to do something.”
“Obviously you need to do something,” Logan speaks out, raising his hand up, “You can’t just ignore her. She isn’t some hookup, she’s your girlfriend.”
“Right. So do something.”
“Not helpful, Dean.” Tucker sucks in a breath.
The boys think amongst themselves for a minute, trying to conjure up a plan to help Garrett get you back. There’s a two minute brainstorming intermission before Logan decides to give up an idea first.
“I think you need to plan something,” he starts, scooting closer to improve the impact of his words, “Don’t just go to her dorm and talk to her. You need to take her out and text her to be ready, and take her somewhere nice. Y’all’s spot isn’t enough.”
“Agreed.” Dean nods, “Date first, then you talk. Make sure you get her flowers, the biggest bouquet you can find. Don’t slack on a damn thing.”
Garrett’s head drops like a broken hinge, still listening, but his heart is pierced and hot. He doesn’t know how you’ll react or if you’ll want to see him at all, but he has to try and he knows that. The three boys give him more insight on what to do and not to do, and he’s got the gist. Dress up, send you a text, pick you up with the flowers, and explain how he’s feeling. He’s got everything but that last part.
That’s kind of hard for him. He tries to and you usually appreciate it, but he doesn’t know if you’ll be as receptive this time because it’ll come off as an excuse rather than an explanation. However, he knows that if he doesn’t try to fix this, he’s going to be single in about twenty-four hours. So he gets up off his ass, walks out of the rink, and starts thinking of his plan.
It’s 5:47pm and you haven’t eaten all day.
You’re curled up underneath a blanket that generates way too much heat for the spring, but you’re so ridiculed with anxiety that your body feels cold to the touch. You try to distract yourself from what’s the reality around you by trying to read a romance novel, but you’ve been stuck on page sixteen for an hour, and that’s when you finally give up.
Jess is fast asleep in her room, and after your conversation earlier, she pretty much told you that your last and final resort was to just tell Garrett how you were feeling, and that’s what you decided to do.
You were going to give it one more day before finally speaking up. This impromptu silent treatment was meaningless and truthfully quite confusing, and you were at your breaking point. You loved Garrett, but you were restless from worrying about this…whatever ‘this’ even is.
You’re about to try and fall asleep when your phone pings with a text, and you expect it to be one of your friends or a notification from social media, but your eyes widen when Garrett’s contact flies across your screen.
You really didn’t mean to be rude, but you didn’t have any other words to say. You figured you’d talk about it when you got to whatever destination Garrett had planned on taking you, and you prayed that for his own sake, it wasn’t the cafe. You’d probably kill him if it was.
Slightly against your will, you get up sluggishly and start getting ready, rumbling through your closet to find something that’s classified as “nice.” It takes a second, but you finally settle on a little black dress that Jessica bought for you freshman year, and it was a miracle that the thing still fit.
You undress and slip the fabric on, tugging at the ends to bring its length to maximum potential. Padding over to your vanity, you throw on some mascara, lip gloss, and tussle at your hair. Of course, Graham didn’t give you any notice for this, hence this is the first time he’s talked to you in like two days, which was already working you up, because why is this the thing that broke your brief moment of no contact?
At 6:55, Garrett is at the door. He raises his fist up to knock, breathes in, and his arm slaps against his side. He feels stupid-- he’s in a dress shirt with pants that almost seem too formal, his hair is gelled back, and he’s holding a huge bouquet of your favorite flowers that were a little bit too much financially, but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he had a chance to get you back. He was going to. He had to.
He finally knocks softly, but you still hear it. Apparently Jess did too because you see her sleepily waltz out of her bedroom, rubbing her eye with a grunt as she approaches your door, “Who is it?”
“Garrett.” You say bluntly.
“Oh,” she exclaims all sultry-like, “You gonna let dipshit in?”
“We have a date,” you say, and you leave it at that. You slip some kitten heels on and grab your bag, reaching for your perfume. You spray it twice and exit your doorframe, walking up to the wood that separates you and your boyfriend.
You open it slowly, and Garrett’s whole face lights up when he sees you. Unfortunately, you’re not sure if you can say the same. He’s holding your favorite flowers though, so you give him one brownie point for that as you take them out of his hands, “Thank you, they’re beautiful.”
“Hi,” he starts awkwardly, giving you a dopey smile, “Um…I have reservations. At Blackwood Steakhouse. I want to talk to you.”
“Okay,” you nod, “We can talk.”
Garrett’s honestly satisfied at the fact that you even agreed. You leave your flowers behind and remind Jess to throw them in some water and a vase, and then you’re off.
The walk to Garrett’s car was dead silent, and the drive to the restaurant likewise. You assumed he’s saving all the talking for when you’re at the dinner table so you didn’t try to break the silence, instead, you enjoyed it. You sat and thought about how you were going to word things, how you were going to say it, and by the time you start finding your words, you’re pulling into the parking lot.
Garrett backs into a spot with one hand, and as you look over, you can’t deny how handsome he looks. He’s freshly shaven and he smells like something woodsy and a mix of sandalwood, and the mixture makes your nostrils flare. His hair is gelled the way you like and he’s got rings on, which is something that’s rare, but you always appreciate. He looks a little too good right now.
You’re supposed to be mad, but you’re not sure how long that’s going to last.
He puts the car in park and immediately opens the door, absolutely adamant that he wants to save all the talking for the table. He slams his door shut and comes around the vehicle to open your own, and you thank him under the mask of your breath.
The both of you venture towards the door, and this restaurant looks way above your tax bracket. There’s beautiful dimmed lights that hang across all of the ceilings with booths and tables that have ridiculously expensive placemats and silverware setting atop them. You look around as Garrett leads you both to the front desk where he checks in for the both of you, the waitress grabbing your menus and sitting you down at a table near the small stream that they have flowing outside.
The waitress leaves you two, and Garrett pulls your chair out and gestures for you to have a seat. You give him a small smile in thanks and he settles into his chair in front of you, folding his hands and elbows on the table.
“That’s bad etiquette.”
“What?” He exclaims, his eyebrows twitching.
“Setting your elbows on the table is bad etiquette.”
He shifts and rests his palms in his lap. “Sorry.”
You let out a genuine laugh and he smiles at that, and you involuntarily return it. It’s so very hard to be frustrated with him when he’s sitting right in your face, looking like he does with pure genuineness.
“Baby--”
“I’ll start,” you interrupt, “Garrett…I love you. You know this. But I feel like I have no idea what’s going on with you lately. I mean-- first, it was the fact that we stopped calling and texting as much, which was fine, because I figured you had a lot on your plate. Then I noticed I hadn’t gotten my usual flowers yet, and you’ve never forgotten them, but again, it’s a material thing and I wasn’t too worried about that. It’s just…I…I mean, we haven’t had any contact in two days. Why? I didn’t want to be a bother but it’s so abnormal for you to do that. Please just tell me what’s going on.”
He pauses and sucks in a breath, preparing the speech he’s already recited to himself and the boys for the hundredth time. “First off, I just wanted to say that I’m sorry, honey, I really am. I’ve just been…”
There’s nothing that follows. You scoff.
“Are you cheating on me?”
Garrett’s eyes nearly blow out his head. “What?!”
“It’s a simple question,” you shrug, “So answer truthfully.”
Your boyfriend’s whole expression completely drops, and for the first time in a while, you watch him get completely and utterly serious. “No, I’m not cheating on you.”
“Okay,” you drag out slowly, “Then please tell me what the hell is going on, because this doesn’t make any sense.”
There’s another interlude of silence and you nearly lose your mind. Just as you’re about to completely fly off the handle, your boyfriend finally speaks.
“I’ve been going through a lot,” he starts, and you can tell it’s genuine, which makes you lean in and listen, “Mentally, I mean. Um, I’ve been struggling on the ice and with academic stuff. I’m always lagging behind and my dad’s on my ass. I’m sorry, it really isn’t an excuse to treat you badly and I’m sorry. I really am. I just don’t know…how to ask for help sometimes.”
“It’s just me, Garrett.”
“I know.” He nods.
You let him think for a second. “You can’t push me away when things get rough, okay? That hurts. I’m supposed to be someone you can lean on and I don’t want you to feel like you’re by yourself in any of this. I’m always right here, okay?”
“I know,” Garrett agrees, shifting in his chair, “I don’t like talking about this stuff, because every time I do, it comes out wrong. I think I got used to dealing with things on my own. I’m so, so sorry, baby. I do love you and I know you’re there for me, it’s just difficult to try and fix so many things at once.”
You hum. “I understand, and I love you. You’ve gotta learn how to trust me with these things, though. If you run every time something happens, then there’s no way for me to help you. I always want to be there for you, no matter what it is. Okay?”
“Okay, yeah,” he nods, “I know. I’m going to do better, I promise. This won’t ever happen again. I’ll…I’ll be more open next time.”
“You better.”
Garrett lets out a laugh, “No more bullshit. I don’t like hurting you.”
You snort. “I’d seriously hope not. I’m not really into the whole masochist thing.”
A round of giggles fill the air, and you shortly realize that Garrett is just staring at you. No words, no movement, just his eyes glued to you like you’re something foreign.
“Hello?” You question, waving your hand in front of his face as you watch him blink, “Babe?”
“Sorry, you just look so good.”
You roll your eyes, though a smile tugs at your lips. You throw your hand at him, “You’re lucky you’re off the hook now.”
“No, seriously,” he starts, his eyes still darting all over you, “You look beautiful. I missed you, and I missed us.”
You give him a cheeky grin, “Missed you too.”
“Did you like your flowers?”
“I loved them. They’re beautiful.”
Garrett gives you a small nod, “I’m glad you did. It took me forever to make the bouquet.”
Your eyebrows lift. “You made it?”
Garrett’s expression immediately shifts into something almost coy, which is funny considering he’s anything but. This dude can walk on a rink and have hundreds of people cheering for him, but he crosses the line at flowers?
“Yeah.”
“You arranged flowers?”
“I did.” He shrugs, looking at anything but your face.
A laugh slips out of you, “Garrett Graham, you arranged flowers? All for me? Wow, you’ve never done something like that before.”
He finally looks up at you, faux offended. He pretends to grab his chest in hurt, “Why are you saying it like I’m incapable?”
“I mean, you are.”
“I’m not.” He protests.
“When have you ever cared for a plant?”
There’s complete silence after that, but you look up, and Garrett’s trying his best not to laugh, pretending to look at whatever stupidly expensive, pretentious art they have hanging on the walls.
You shake your head with a giggle, “I appreciate the effort, babe.”
“I was trying to make them look all nice,” he says, a small smile pulling at his lips, “I wanted them to be perfect for you.”
You smile.
“I hope you know you didn’t have to go and get some expensive bouquet for me, right?” you say softly.
“I know.”
“Flowers don’t fix all problems.”
“I know,” Garrett looks down at your intertwined hands, then at your face, “I just wanted you to know I was thinking about you and that I really was sorry. I know I haven’t been showing that enough lately.”
Your chest tightens. You don’t respond and Garrett notices that you’re out of words, and that’s okay.
“I missed you,” he admits quietly, “A lot.”
Your expression softens, “I missed you too.”
A comfortable silence settles between you before Garrett clears his throat.
“Also,” he drags out the vowel, “I need you to know that this was not um…entirely my idea.”
Your eyes narrow. “What? What are you talking about?”
“I was at practice and Dean could tell that I was upset, and of course the rest of the guys wanted to be nosey, so I gave in and told them. And um…they made this stupid ass plan, a note, actually--”
You blink, “The guys helped you plan this?”
“Yes.”
“So this wasn’t from the heart.” You fold your arms over your chest, half-serious.
“No, it was!” Garrett assures, “They just helped me out a bit. They were actually helpful.”
“I’m not sure if I consider them to be very helpful.”
He laughs, pulling his phone from his pocket, swiping it open and clicking on his notes app, “They made a list.”
“A list?”
“Yes, but don’t judge.” He makes you promise, and you do as he hands you his phone. You eye the top and immediately chuckle up.
How To Get The Girl (back)
Right.
“Who made this?” You inquire, and Garrett shrugs.
“Dean started it, but the rest of them added things. They were a little too serious about this, but I gave them credit where it’s due.”
You nod, as you keep reading, but your eyes especially pause on rule three.
“Number three: flowers are good, but communication is better.”
You reach across the table for Garrett’s hand, squeezing it gently. You can’t help but smile-- though his friends were usually complete imbeciles, they knew how to lock in when it really was important, and it made you happy that your boyfriend had such supportive friends. “I’m really glad you listened.”
When you decide to ignore Garrett after a painful argument, he finds a completely unexpected way to reach you. A live phone call, a confession the entire campus hears, and five minutes that will change your story forever.
You arrived at the radio station ten minutes before the show was supposed to start. It wasn't because you were particularly punctual; you just needed something to keep your mind occupied. After the argument with Garrett, spending the night alone in your apartment, staring at a phone that wouldn't stop lighting up with his calls and messages, had seemed like a much worse idea than showing up for your shift a little early.
You pushed open the heavy glass door with your coffee still warm between your hands and absentmindedly greeted the few people who were already getting the studio ready. The place smelled the same as it did every night: freshly brewed coffee, electronic equipment that had been running for hours, and that faint scent of warm cables that only seemed to exist inside those walls. Normally, that atmosphere was enough to relax you almost instantly. It was one of the few places on campus where you felt like everything was under control. That night, though, not even that was enough.
"You're early," Alex, the show's host, commented without looking up from the stack of papers he was organizing on the main desk.
You tried to give him a smile as you set your bag down on your chair, but you barely managed to lift one corner of your lips.
"Couldn't sleep."
Alex glanced up for only a second, studying you with that calm expression that always seemed to say he understood more than he asked.
"Too much work or too many problems?"
You lowered your gaze to the coffee cup in your hands before answering.
"A little of both."
He simply nodded and turned his attention back to the show's script. He had never been the curious type, and it was probably one of the reasons working with him was so easy. He knew when to ask questions and, more importantly, when to let silence do the rest.
You took a deep breath and slipped into your usual nightly routine. You powered on the main console, checked the levels on every microphone, tested the studio connections, and opened the program that handled incoming calls from students. Your hands moved almost on instinct. After so many months working there, you no longer had to think about where each button was or which cable to check first. Maybe that was why you liked the job so much: because for a couple of hours, you could focus on making sure everything ran smoothly and forget about the rest of the world.
At least, that was the idea.
Because no matter how hard you tried to keep your mind busy, memories of the night before kept finding their way into every task you did.
You could still hear Garrett's voice with irritating clarity.
"I don't need someone else fixing my life."
The words hurt just as much as they had before.
Not because they'd been especially cruel.
You knew Garrett far too well to ignore the fact that exhaustion had been wearing him down for weeks. You'd watched him stay behind after practice long after the rest of the team had left. You'd watched him come home later and later, sleep less and less, and become obsessed with running the same plays over and over again, convinced they still weren't good enough. That was exactly why you'd shown up at his apartment that night with food and every intention of forcing him to rest, even if it was only for a couple of hours.
You had never wanted to fix his life.
You had just wanted to spend some time with him.
And somehow, you still ended up feeling as though your presence had only gotten in the way.
You hadn't answered him since you walked out of his apartment. The missed calls kept piling up across your phone screen alongside an endless list of messages you still hadn't been able to open. It wasn't about pride. You weren't trying to punish him, either. The real problem was much simpler: you knew that the second you heard his voice, you'd forgive him far too quickly. And a part of you needed Garrett to understand why that argument had hurt so much.
It wasn't because of the words.
It was because of what they meant.
"Five minutes," Alex announced from the other side of the studio as he slipped on his headphones.
You nodded automatically and took your place in front of the console. You adjusted the last few controls, made sure every line was working properly, and put on your headset just as the red light above the window began to flash. The show had officially started, and for the first time since you'd arrived, you managed to focus entirely on your job.
The first phone rang barely thirty seconds into the broadcast.
Out of pure habit, you reached toward the console while your eyes remained fixed on the audio levels. It was a movement you made almost on instinct after so many months working there. Answering calls, checking that the line was working properly, and deciding which ones would go on air had become such an automatic routine that you usually didn't even have to think about it.
That night was different.
The moment the caller ID lit up on the screen, you felt the air leave your lungs all at once.
You knew the number by heart.
You'd seen it appear far too many times over the last twenty-four hours.
Garrett.
You froze, your hand hovering above the console as the phone continued to ring over and over again. You didn't have to do anything. If you let the call end on its own, the system would automatically move on to the next one, and no one would notice the difference. Alex was still introducing the show as if nothing were wrong from the other side of the glass, and on any normal night, the students' calls never stopped coming in. One more or one less wouldn't change a thing.
It was the easiest option.
It was also the most cowardly.
Because even if you refused to admit it, you knew exactly why Garrett was calling.
Ever since your argument the night before, he'd tried to reach you every way he could. Missed calls, text messages, even a couple of voice notes that still hadn't been played because you hadn't even found the courage to open the conversation.
The phone rang again.
You glanced at the clock.
Then at the studio.
Alex would need the first call of the night to kick off the segment. If Garrett kept insisting, sooner or later the call would end up coming through your console.
You let out a slow breath.
And answered.
"Radio Briar, good evening."
There wasn't an immediate response on the other end of the line. All you could hear was a deep, restrained breath, as if the person on the other side was gathering the courage to start speaking. For a second, you thought maybe he'd dialed the wrong number or the call had dropped, until you finally heard a voice that was far too familiar.
"Hey."
Just one word.
A single word.
And somehow, it was enough to unravel every bit of resolve you'd built since the night before in an instant.
You closed your eyes for a brief second before opening them again.
"What are you doing calling here?" you asked quietly, lowering the volume in your headphones slightly so no one else would overhear the conversation.
Garrett let out a tired laugh, so brief it almost sounded like a sigh.
"You've been ignoring my calls since yesterday. I was starting to run out of options."
You didn't answer right away.
What were you supposed to say?
That yes, you'd seen every single one of his calls, that you knew exactly how many messages were still waiting for you, that you'd almost answered him at least five different times before setting your phone face down again.
All of that was true.
But it was also true that it still hurt to remember the way he'd pulled his hand away when all you were trying to do was convince him to get some rest.
"I'm working right now, Garrett," you said at last, trying to sound far more professional than you actually felt.
"I know."
He fell silent for a few seconds. When he spoke again, his voice sounded different, calmer, more certain.
"I don't want to talk to you over the phone."
You frowned, confused.
"Then what?"
You heard him take a deep breath on the other end of the line.
"I want to go on the air."
Your heart lurched so violently that you found yourself looking away from the console for a moment and toward the studio.
Alex was already wrapping up the show's opening segment. In less than three minutes, he would ask you to put through the first caller of the night.
You looked back at the screen.
Then closed your eyes for a brief moment.
"Garrett... don't do anything stupid."
He let out a quiet laugh. It didn't sound amused.
It sounded resigned.
"Trust me. I've spent the entire afternoon trying to come up with another way to apologize."
Your hand trembled for the briefest second over the console.
It was almost imperceptible, but enough to make you pull your fingers away from the button that would connect the call to the studio. On the other side of the glass, Alex had already finished the introduction and was waiting for your signal to bring in the first student caller of the night. He always did. He never chose the calls himself. He trusted you completely to decide which ones deserved to go on the air and which ones didn't.
For the first time since you started working there, you wished you didn't have that responsibility.
Because you weren't choosing between one dedication and another.
You were deciding whether to give Garrett the chance to talk to you after you'd spent an entire day avoiding him.
"You can still hang up on me," he said with a calmness that, for some reason, only made you even more nervous. "I won't blame you if you do."
You lowered your gaze to the screen where his number was still displayed and felt a knot slowly settling in your stomach. You'd spent the last twenty-four hours convincing yourself that you needed space, that the best thing to do was let both of you calm down before talking again. And yet, hearing his voice now was making every one of those decisions begin to crumble much sooner than you'd planned.
"I don't understand what you're trying to do, Garrett," you murmured, glancing at the studio clock out of the corner of your eye. Every second that passed made it harder to delay the show's first call.
He took a moment before answering, as if he were searching for the right words.
"The truth is... I wasn't exactly sure what I was doing when I dialed the number either. I just knew I couldn't let another night go by without trying to fix this."
You closed your eyes for a moment.
Because that was exactly the kind of answer that made it impossible to stay mad at him.
"You didn't have to call here."
"Yeah, I did."
His voice was firm for the first time since you'd answered.
"I called your phone all night. Again this morning. I sent you more texts than I'm willing to admit in front of Dean because he'd make fun of me for months. And when I realized you weren't ready to talk to me... I started thinking about where I could find you."
A small smile found its way onto your lips before you could stop it.
It was so Garrett.
The kind of person who would come up with a ridiculous solution simply because giving up had never been an option for him.
"So your brilliant idea was to call the radio station?"
You heard him let out a quiet laugh on the other end of the line.
"When you put it like that, it sounds a lot worse than it did in my head."
"Because it's insane."
"Probably."
There was a brief silence before he spoke again.
"But it's also the only way I could think of to make sure you'd listen to me for five minutes."
The words lingered between the two of you.
Five minutes.
That was exactly how long each call on the show lasted.
Five minutes.
After that, the line would automatically disconnect to make room for the next caller.
Five minutes were all Garrett was asking for.
Not a reconciliation, not an answer, not even forgiveness—just five minutes to say what you'd spent the last day refusing to hear.
You looked back toward the studio.
Alex was already filling the time with one of his usual jokes while he waited for you to send through the first call. From the other side of the glass, he shot you a quick glance and discreetly raised a hand, silently asking if everything was okay.
You nodded on pure instinct.
You lied with an ease you didn't even know you possessed.
Because nothing was okay.
Your heart was pounding so hard you were starting to hear it over your headphones.
"If you do this..." you whispered at last, lowering your voice even further, "the entire campus is going to hear you."
"I know."
"Your teammates will, too."
"I know."
"Dean is never going to let you live this down."
That earned a much more genuine laugh.
"Trust me, that's the least of my worries right now."
You fell silent again.
And that was when he said something that finally shattered the little pride you were still trying to hold on to.
"The only thing I'm really worried about... is you thinking I meant what I said yesterday."
You felt your chest tighten.
"Garrett..."
"Just let me say it once," he interrupted, with a calmness that didn't sound desperate, only completely sincere. "If, after you hear me out, you still don't want to talk to me, I'll respect that. But I need you to know the truth. Even if I have to say it in front of everyone at Briar."
The music faded out, the studio light came back on, Alex raised a hand as he waited for your signal, and you realized you couldn't put the decision off any longer. All you had to do was press one button, and Garrett Graham was about to apologize to you in front of the entire university.
You took one last deep breath before pressing the button that connected the call to the studio.
The small indicator light changed color immediately, and you knew there was no turning back now. Garrett had officially become part of the live broadcast, and for the first time since you'd started working there, the entire studio suddenly felt far too small to contain everything that was about to happen.
It didn't take Alex long to receive the signal through his headphones.
He smiled toward the microphone with his usual ease, completely unaware of the hurricane you'd just let into the studio.
"And we've got our first caller of the night. You already know how this segment works. If there's something you've never had the courage to say, a dedication you've been meaning to make, or you just need to get something off your chest... now's your chance. Good evening, who are we speaking with?"
For a second, there was only silence.
You felt your fingers unconsciously tighten around the edge of the console as you kept your eyes fixed on the glass separating you from the main studio.
You knew that silence far too well.
Garrett always did that whenever he was nervous.
"I'd rather not give my name."
Alex smiled knowingly.
"Alright, we'll keep you anonymous. So, what would you like to share with us tonight?"
Silence settled over the line again, shorter this time. When Garrett spoke, his voice was much steadier.
"I want to apologize."
Alex nodded as naturally as if he heard confessions like this every week.
"I hope the right person is listening."
Garrett let out a quiet laugh.
"Oh, trust me... she is."
You felt your heart begin to race again, because he wasn't improvising.
He'd thought through every single word before dialing that number.
"A couple of days ago, I had an argument with someone," he continued, keeping a calm tone that contrasted far too much with the chaos raging inside you. "Honestly, the argument didn't even start over anything important. It started because I was convinced I could handle everything on my own... and I ended up making the only person who's always wanted to help me feel like I didn't need her."
Alex waited a few seconds before speaking again.
"Was that true?"
Garrett answered immediately.
"No."
There wasn't a trace of hesitation or doubt.
Just an answer so certain it left a knot in your throat.
"It never was."
You lowered your gaze to the console, trying to focus on anything else. You checked audio levels that were already perfectly balanced, pretended to read through the list of incoming calls still waiting in the queue, and even adjusted a couple of controls that didn't need adjusting.
Anything but admit your eyes were beginning to fill with tears.
"So... what happened?" Alex asked, using the calm, measured tone he always did whenever a conversation became more personal.
Garrett took a few seconds before answering.
"I guess I forgot that some people try to help you because they love you... not because they think you're incapable of handling things on your own."
The words landed exactly where they hurt the most.
Because that was exactly it.
You had never wanted to fix his life, and you'd never tried to tell him how he should play, study, or train. You'd just wanted him to rest. You just wanted him to be okay.
And he'd finally understood that.
"She showed up at my apartment with food," Garrett continued, a faint smile slipping into his voice before he could stop it. "I don't even remember what she'd cooked. All I remember is that she'd spent the entire week telling me I wasn't sleeping enough and that I was training too hard."
Alex smiled.
"Sounds like she was worried about you."
"She was."
He paused.
Just for a moment.
"And I was enough of an idiot to mistake her concern for pressure."
The entire studio fell silent.
Even Alex.
No one spoke for several seconds.
Neither could you.
Because for the first time since the call had begun, Garrett wasn't trying to justify what had happened.
He wasn't explaining why he'd been stressed.
He was simply taking responsibility.
And somehow, that hurt even more than the argument itself.
Garrett took another breath before continuing.
"I think the worst part wasn't what I said. It was the look on her face after she'd heard me. Like, for the first time... she'd started believing that being with me was a mistake."
You felt a tear slip free before you could stop it. You wiped it away quickly with the back of your hand, grateful that no one in the main studio could see you.
Only you knew this story wasn't anonymous.
Only you knew the boy on the other end of the line wasn't trying to impress anyone.
He was trying to win back the person he loved most.
And for the first time since the call had started, you began to realize that maybe Garrett hadn't called the radio station so the entire university would hear him.
He'd called because it was the only way he could make sure you wouldn't hang up before he had the chance to say everything he'd been keeping inside for far too long.
The silence that followed on the other end of the line lasted much longer than any of the others before it. Even Alex didn't seem to be in any hurry to speak again. He simply remained seated in front of the microphone, listening with the same attention that probably half the campus was giving him at that very moment. You couldn't take your eyes off the console either.
Garrett took a deep breath before continuing, and you recognized the sound instantly.
It was the same breath he always took before stepping onto the ice during the biggest games, when he was trying to organize his thoughts right before doing something that scared him.
"The worst part is that it took me way too long to understand what I'd actually done wrong," he admitted with a level of honesty that made another knot tighten in your throat. "All day, I kept thinking the problem was that I'd lost my temper. I figured all I had to do was apologize for the way I'd spoken, and that would be enough. But the more I thought about it... the more I realized that wasn't it."
He fell silent again, just for a moment.
"The problem was making her feel like she didn't have a place in my life."
You felt your eyes begin to sting again.
Garrett spoke before you could stop the flood of memories gathering in your mind.
"There are people who do huge things to show someone they love them. Trips, gifts, grand surprises... She never needed any of that. She always found a way to make me feel better with things so small that most of the time, I didn't even think twice about them."
A sad smile found its way onto your lips before you could stop it.
You knew exactly what he was talking about.
"She'd show up at my door with food whenever she knew I'd been stuck at practice for hours. She'd make me close my laptop whenever she caught me watching game footage for too long. She'd sit with me while I studied or went over plays, and she could spend an entire hour without saying a single word."
He paused.
"She was just... there."
His voice cracked ever so slightly on those last two words.
So slightly that probably no one else noticed.
You did.
You'd always been able to recognize every tiny shift in his voice.
"And I think I got too used to all of it," he continued after a few seconds. "I got so used to always having her by my side that I stopped telling her how important she was to me. I stopped thanking her when she'd cancel her own plans because I had a game the next day. I stopped noticing that she always brought my coffee exactly the way I liked it without me ever having to ask. I stopped thinking about how much effort she put into being there for me, even on my worst days... because I just assumed she'd always be there."
You pressed your lips together.
Alex was still completely silent. He had leaned back slightly in his chair, staring at the microphone with an expression unlike his usual one, as though he'd forgotten for a moment that he was hosting a radio show instead of listening in on a private conversation.
Garrett let out a quiet laugh.
A bitter one this time.
"I guess you only realize how much you depend on certain people when you wake up the next morning and find out they're not there anymore."
That sentence broke something inside you.
Because it had been your very first thought that morning, too.
Waking up.
Looking at your phone.
And realizing that, for the first time since you'd started dating, you weren't going to stop by his apartment after class, and you weren't going to get one of his ridiculous texts asking what you wanted for dinner.
One single day had been enough for everything to feel strangely empty.
Garrett stayed quiet for a few more seconds before leaning closer to the microphone again.
This time, his voice was much quieter.
Much more personal.
As if he'd completely forgotten there were hundreds of people listening to him.
"If you're listening... I need you to know something."
You made a futile attempt to hold your breath.
"I never wanted you to feel like you were a burden to me."
Your vision blurred completely with tears.
"The truth is exactly the opposite."
He paused.
A long pause.
Long enough for the entire studio to seem to hold its breath with you.
"You're the only place where I stop feeling all that pressure. The only place where I don't have to be the captain, the student, the player who's supposed to get everything right. When I'm with you... I get to just be Garrett. And I think yesterday I was so unbelievably selfish that I forgot to tell you you've always been the place where I love to rest. So I don't just want to apologize for one argument. I want to apologize for making you believe, even if it was only for five minutes, that you weren't exactly that to me. Because there hasn't been a single day when you weren't the best part of mine."
For several seconds, no one said a word.
Not Alex.
Not Garrett.
Not even you could bring yourself to move behind the console.
The entire studio remained wrapped in a strange silence, unlike any you'd ever heard since you started working there. It wasn't uncomfortable.
It was the kind of silence that settles in after the important words have already been spoken, when no one wants to ruin them by trying to fill the empty space.
Alex was the first to find his voice again.
He leaned a little closer to the microphone and smiled with the same calm warmth he always gave his listeners.
"I don't think I'm the right person to respond to all of that," he said with a sincerity that earned a few quiet laughs around the studio. "I just hope that, if that girl really is listening tonight, she'll remember that sometimes people make mistakes when they're most afraid of losing the things they love."
He paused briefly before continuing.
"Thank you for calling."
"Good night."
The line disconnected.
The small red light on the console switched off again, and the call disappeared from the screen as though it had never existed.
And yet, the knot in your chest hadn't moved at all.
The next few minutes passed almost on autopilot. The show continued as though nothing had happened. More calls came in, more songs played, and Alex carried on hosting the program with the same professionalism as always. You did your job the way you did every night, connecting lines, adjusting audio levels, and keeping an eye on the music schedule.
But you weren't really there anymore.
Part of you was still trapped in that phone call.
In every single word Garrett had said.
And most of all, in all the ones he'd never said before.
When the red studio light finally switched off for the last time and Alex announced the end of the show, it took you several seconds to react. You remained seated in front of the console with your headphones still on, watching the monitors go dark one by one as you tried to convince yourself that you needed to stand up.
It didn't work.
It was Alex who finally took your headphones off with an amused smile.
"I think you can stop pretending you're checking the audio now."
You blinked, pulled back into the present.
"What?"
He pointed at the console.
"You've been staring at the same screen for five minutes."
You looked down.
It wasn't even open.
A small, embarrassed laugh slipped out.
"Sorry."
Alex shook his head as he gathered his papers.
"Don't apologize to me."
He headed toward the studio door, and just before stepping out, he glanced back at you over his shoulder.
"Although I think there's someone out there who's been waiting to hear that apology for a while now."
You frowned slightly.
"What do you mean?"
He smiled.
"Go see for yourself."
And disappeared down the hallway.
You remained still for a few more seconds before finally standing up. You picked up your bag slowly, switched off the last of the lights on the console, and took one deep breath before opening the door that connected the booth to the main hallway.
The first thing you saw was a pair of sneakers.
Then a pair of jeans.
And finally, Garrett.
He was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, his elbows resting on his knees. He was still wearing the team's gray hockey hoodie, and his hair was a complete mess, as if he'd run his hand through it far too many times while he waited.
The moment he heard the door open, he looked up.
Your eyes met immediately.
He got to his feet.
For a moment, neither of you spoke.
Then Garrett let out a small smile.
Tired.
Nervous.
And completely genuine.
"Hey."
You felt the distance of the last twenty-four hours disappear with a single word.
"Hey."
Garrett slipped his hands into the pockets of his hoodie and slowly let out a breath.
"Dean said I'd probably need a backup plan in case the call didn't work."
You couldn't help smiling.
"And what was Plan B?"
He lowered his gaze for a few seconds before looking back at you.
"Wait here until you came out."
"And what if I'd taken all night?"
Garrett's smile grew just a little wider.
"Then I would've waited all night."
That answer shattered the last bit of resistance you were still trying to hold on to.
Without realizing it, you closed the distance between you until you were standing right in front of him.
"You're an idiot."
Garrett nodded slowly.
"I know."
"A really stubborn idiot."
"That too."
You shook your head as a laugh escaped through the tears you'd been trying so hard to hold back.
"Do you know what the worst part was?"
He didn't answer.
He simply waited, the way he always did whenever he truly wanted to listen.
"For a moment... I thought you didn't want me with you anymore."
You watched Garrett's entire expression change.
He carefully lifted one hand, as though he still wasn't sure he had the right to touch you, and with infinite gentleness, brushed a loose strand of hair away from your face.
"Don't ever think that again."
His voice was barely above a whisper.
But you'd never heard him sound more sincere.
"Yesterday, I was an idiot. I was exhausted, frustrated, and way too proud to admit I needed help. But not for a single second did I stop wanting you by my side."
You swallowed hard.
He took another slow step forward until only a few inches separated you.
"The next time you see me trying to carry everything on my own..."
A small smile tugged at his lips.
"...do exactly what you did this time. Get mad at me. Make me rest. Bring me food even if I complain. Because I need you to keep doing that. Not because I can't do it on my own... but because I love knowing that, when I get to the end of the day, you're still there."
The tears finally escaped before you could stop them, and this time you didn't even try to hide them.
You simply lifted both hands and rested them against his chest, right over the place where his heart was beating.
"You're terrible at apologizing."
Garrett let out a quiet laugh.
"I know."
"But I guess calling a radio station in front of the entire university earns you a few points."
"A few?"
"Not many."
He smiled.
And that smile—the very same one you'd fallen in love with months ago—finally convinced you that the argument had never been the real problem.
The real problem would've been letting pride speak louder than the love you still felt for each other.
Without another word, Garrett carefully wrapped an arm around your waist, waiting for a sign that he could pull you the rest of the way into his arms.
You were the one who took the final step.
You rested your forehead against his and closed your eyes as a peaceful smile spread across your lips.
Because, in the end, you realized Garrett hadn't called the radio station so the entire university could hear how much he loved you.
He'd called because he was willing to swallow every ounce of his pride just to make sure you would never doubt it again.
You’re Too Nice to Me When I Tell You Things | Love Island!Garrett
SUMMARY In the morning after your fight, Garrett finally opens up to you.
CONTENT love island au, fem reader, this is kinda from Garrett's pov so that's fun! hurt/comfort (reader comforting Garrett—I wanted to show a bit of a different side of their relationship bc our silly yapper girl does take care of him too), love island relationship dynamics, use of pet names (sweet boy, baby), if you recognize a section of this from something I wrote on my old account... no you didn't :) , this probably isn't how the filming of love island works but for Garrett's privacy let's pretend, talks of Garrett's canon childhood (child abuse, domestic abuse, parental death), Garrett cries and has a panic attack (but it's not graphic), there's one line that could be interpreted as suicidal ideation but it's not explicit and very brief, happy ending, barely edited
A/N this is a direct part two to this fic, which I recommend reading first. this got way sadder than I meant for it to, like this is the first time in a while I've actually cried while writing something, but I hope that it's a satisfying reconciliation for you guys and gives you a bit more insight into (this version of) Garrett :) anyway, please enjoy!
love island masterlist
For the few hazy seconds between sleep and wake, Garrett forgets.
He stretches out slowly, searching for the familiar warmth of the body next to him, the feeling of a leg wedged between his own because “I can’t sleep if my thighs are touching” but somehow being sandwiched between both of his is fine. Instead he feels the empty cushion of the daybed, the slightly cool morning air because he kicked his blanket off at some point in the night, and the weight of a stuffed white tiger lodged between the crook of his elbow and his bicep.
And then Garrett remembers.
He sits up with an exhausted breath of air, rubbing two hands over his face. It’s so early that the sun still seems to be deciding on whether it wants to start rising or not, the Villa unusually quiet, like he’s woken up before time has actually started yet.
Garrett’s surprised that he doesn’t feel tired. He thought that he wouldn’t be able to sleep, that he’d be up tossing and turning the whole night, but the day before had left him so exhausted that it took him about as long as it took his head to hit the pillow to slip from consciousness entirely. And now, much more rested and removed from the situation, he’s able to look back on your fight with much more clarity.
He looks down, his eyes landing on the stuffed animal flopped awkwardly next to him.
“I fucking suck, huh?” He laughs hopelessly. And then, because it feels inconsiderate not to, he grabs Snowy and places her on his lap, fixing her limbs until she sits more comfortable.
With a touch lighter than he’s ever touched anything, Garrett traces the fur right above one of her glass eyes. He remembers a day, probably only a few days after you had coupled up for the first time, when you’d been feeling especially homesick. You curled up on one of the couches, Snowy on your chest and your chin resting on her head—which was unusual since you usually never brought her out of the bedroom—a wistful look on your face, your mouth scrunched in the way it does when you’re sad about something but trying to tell yourself that you’re not.
You’d explained it to him then, when he sat down next to you and rested his head on your shoulder, that you’d taken Snowy with you everywhere with you when you were younger. That she was a tapestry of your childhood. Through a bittersweet smile, you showed him the coffee stain on her paw from when your dad had knocked over his mug and you weren’t able to snatch her off the table fast enough. You showed him the blot of nail polish on her nose from when you’d come to your mom crying because Snowy’s nose had chipped. She grabbed one of the small, fancy bottles of expensive nail polish she only used on special occasions and layered on the lacquer until Snowy’s nose was fixed.
You told him about the time you and your sister had watched 101 Dalmatians for the first time and she thought Dalmatians were way cooler than tigers and sharpied black polka dots on the side of Snowy’s stomach. You showed him the small stain of detergent at the base of her tail from the time you’d accidentally spilled foundation on her and an ex-boyfriend had spent the day with a YouTube tutorial and a Dollar Store toothbrush trying to get it out. The sky blue thread just under one of her arms your best friend had used to stitch up a hole that had torn there.
You swore that her left ear smelled like your grandmother’s perfume and your grandad had been the one to get her for you in the first place. You told him that Snowy was a collection of everyone you’d ever loved.
And then you said that you knew it was probably silly, that you didn’t expect things like giant sharpie polka dots and your mom’s expensive nail polish to matter that much to people who weren’t you, but since that day, anytime anyone tried to tease you about your stuffed animal, he’d tell them to shut up in a tone that left no room for misunderstanding.
Because he wanted those things to matter to him too. And he wanted to maybe—hopefully—one day be one of those things that mattered to you.
The air shifts suddenly when the quiet of the morning is interrupted by the sound of someone leaving the bedroom. Garrett’s breath stutters when he sees you walk out, wiping sleep from your eye with one hand as the other holds on to your empty water bottle. Your gaze gravitates to the daybed you know he’s sleeping on and when you realize that he’s awake—and watching you too—you freeze in surprise.
For a moment neither of you moves, you just look at him, eyes flicking down briefly to your stuffed animal in his lap. And then you turn away and walk to the kitchen to fill up your water bottle. Garrett looks down defeatedly, letting out a quiet breath as he tries to calculate how many more hours he has to just sit and get lost in his head before everyone else wakes up and the day actually starts.
He hears you finish in the kitchen, the sound traveling over the silent dawn, but your footsteps don’t immediately retreat back to the bedroom. Instead you walk until you’re a few feet away from him before you stop.
“I, um, I’m ready to talk about yesterday if—If you need more time, that’s okay—I’ll just… I’ll be here whenever you’re ready.” You can’t meet his eye and Garrett hates it, that ugly feeling sinking into his chest again.
You turn to go.
“Now,” he says suddenly, his voice cracking from lack of use. “I’m—I’m ready to talk about it now.”
You nod slowly and move to sit down on the daybed across from him. It’s probably the most privacy the two of you will have, it’s too early for either of you to have your mic packs on and no one’s awake to make sure that they have multiple cameras at multiple angles filming a spot as inconsequential as the daybeds. Garrett thinks he realizes this at the same time as you and he rolls his shoulders out before letting out a breath.
“I’m sorry.”
It doesn’t feel remotely enough and you must know that because you stay silent.
“I shouldn’t have—I said a lot of stuff that wasn’t true and… And I took something out on you that isn’t your fault and that wasn’t fair. I, um, I do need you and you do take care of me and I promise I never thought that you didn’t. I mean, I spent one night without you and I fucking hated it, I just—That scares me more than anything, honestly.”
He swallows, one of his hands wrapping around the other as he squeezes his knuckles. “But that’s not a good reason—I don’t have a good reason. But I…” He looks up and you’re finally looking at him, worry heavy in your gaze as you watch his hands start to shake. “I have to tell you something about… About me.”
You nod again, your voice a soft whisper. “Okay.”
Garrett takes a deep breath.
“You know what I’ve told you about my dad? How he—Well that wasn’t—That wasn’t all of it,” he squeezes his hand harder, fingers curling into a fist.
His mouth opens, but the words get clogged in his throat, like suddenly every thought is impossible to articulate. You don’t rush him though, or interrupt to push him through it. You listen, like even his silence matters enough to listen to.
“My… My mom died, when I was 11, and my dad wasn’t… He was never a good dad. Or husband. He, um—,” Garrett lets out a humorless, uncomfortable chuckle. “Sorry, I don’t really know how—,”
You reach out for him slowly, like he’s a stray dog whose hackles could raise if you move too quickly—or maybe that’s just what he feels like. Whatever it is, it doesn’t scare you out of wrapping your hand around his.
“That’s okay.”
He runs a frustrated hand through his hair. “No, it’s—I should be able to just say it.”
“It’s okay if you can’t,” you tell him gently.
It feels like a lie to Garrett, but you’re looking at him in such earnestness that he has to believe you. He nods, letting out a shaky breath.
“She never really talked about it. I know—I know that she was just trying to protect me, but I wasn’t stupid… I knew she was miserable. I knew he made her miserable. And I kind of… Fuck—,” He looks up as his eyes water, sniffing loudly to push through it. “I, um, I kind of resented her sometimes? For not leaving. For… For not taking me with her when she did.”
He’s biting the inside of his cheek so hard he can taste copper in his mouth. Your hand leaves his suddenly, the warmth of your palm replaced by cool air. You get up before he can question it and for a sinking, devastating second he thinks you’re going to leave. But then you’re crossing the short distance to his daybed, curling up on the cushion next to him.
You grab his hand again, tracing soothing strokes across the bones of his fingers as you gently coax them out of his curled fist and tangle them with your own. Wordlessly, you squeeze—though not as forcefully as he had been—like you know he needs the pressure to ground him. He’s not quite sure how you know, but somehow you always do.
He stares at your interlocked fingers as he continues, “I—I don’t feel that way now, I know it’s more complicated than that. That it’s not as simple as I thought it’d be when I was a kid. I know that it was hard for my mom. Taking care of a kid is a lot and, even if she did leave, courts suck, and my dad had money, and there wasn’t really anywhere we could go. It’s… It’s harder when you have to take care of someone. And maybe if my mom didn’t have to take care of me, it would have been easier for her to leave him. Like, if I didn’t need her so much, she could’ve—Maybe she would’ve been happier.”
“And sometimes it scares me because what if one day you’d be happier? Or—,” He clears his throat, though it doesn’t really do anything. “I do think in some dark, fucked up way, my dad needed my mom too and what if—What if I need you the way he did and you care about me too much to leave?”
“Garrett…” Your voice breaks in understanding, your arms wrapping around him tightly.
He melts into your chest and something about the way you’re petting his hair and letting him hold onto you like a lifeline—even after everything—has the tears streaming down his face before he can stop them.
He shakes his head fervently. “I don’t look at you like you’re a ‘damsel in distress’. I wish I—You’re not scared to—Feel things. Even the bad stuff. And you know how to—How to tell people so that they understand and I don’t—I can’t—I—I got mad and I threw it in your face—And I’m so sorry!”
Each breath feels like it’s cracking open his ribcage, causing each one to be more short and shallow than the last, puffing raggedly against your arm.
“Garrett. Hey.” You cup his face gently, your voice calm as you force him to look at you. “I need you to breathe, sweet boy. You’re okay.”
“No. No.” Garrett pushes away from you suddenly, wiping uselessly at his eyes. “I—I’m not saying this to—To guilt-trip you into forgiving me. I fucked up—You’re allowed to be mad at me—You should be mad at me—!”
“I know that’s not what you’re doing, baby. I’m not mad at you.” You reach for him again, but he’s still fighting it.
“How can you say that?”
“Garrett, you made a mistake,” you tell him firmly. “I did too. But that’s not—Look, if you won’t do it for you, then… Do it for me please because I really need a hug right now.”
Your lips curl into a sad smile, your eyes glassy. And maybe if Garrett were a stronger man, he’d refuse, because he knows he doesn’t deserve it. But he isn’t a stronger man. Just like every other time, he takes one look at your pleading eyes and complies instantly.
He’s wrapped in your arms just as quickly as you take on the full force of his body weight without complaint—if anything, you’re insisting that you do, hugging him tightly as you rest your chin on the top of his head.
“I’m sorry too,” you whisper through the kiss you press to the crown of his head. “I shouldn’t have said what I said and I shouldn’t have accused you of not caring about me. I was just hurt and wanted you to feel hurt too and that was wrong. You didn’t deserve that.”
Garrett’s arms tighten around your middle and when you clear your throat, it sounds congested.
“And I… I am so sorry that you went through that, and that—You never should have had to experience that. You or your mom. But, Garrett... I promise you that your mom would choose this life with you over every life where she couldn’t have you.” He feels one of your hands move to stroke gently at the side of his neck as you cradle his head.
“And I know that because, even though I never knew her, I know you. I know there’s nothing I wouldn’t do if it meant I got to have you and I know your mom feels the same because… Because you’re better than everything, Garrett.”
It’s somehow the worst and best thing Garrett’s ever heard in his life. His shoulders shake as you run your fingers through his curls. The tank top you wore to bed is probably covered in wet patches and he’s sure he’ll feel embarrassed about it later, but right now, Garrett just needs you. And he needs you to hold him, and run your hands through his hair, and take care of him, and do all the things he’s tired of pretending he doesn’t.
“I, ugh, I feel like such an asshole.” You let out, what sounds like, a mix between a wet chuckle and a sniffle. “I shouldn’t have said any of that. You’re literally always so good to me, I should’ve known that something bigger was bothering you.”
Garrett shakes his head against your collarbone. “You didn’t know. I could’ve just talked to you.”
“Yeah, maybe.” You gently work through one of his tangled curls with your fingers. “But I’m not going to hold it against you that you weren’t exactly jumping at the opportunity to talk about it directly into a microphone and camera.”
When Garrett finally tilts his head, so that his cheek is pressed against your clavicle, he finds that you’re already looking at him knowingly.
You smooth a thumb tenderly against one of his brows. “Look, this isn’t exactly a normal situation people find themselves in. I don’t know about you but, usually, if the guy I was seeing was also kissing my friends every other day, that would kind of be a dealbreaker for me.”
You smile when Garrett makes a slight face at your words—he’s never exactly been subtle about the fact that, if it were up to him, you wouldn’t be doing that in here either.
“So I think it’s okay for us to be understanding,” you continue your point. “And, yeah, if this is something that keeps happening then we’d need to have a bigger conversation about it, but it happened once. And you messed up and you know it and I messed up and I know it. And I know now that it wasn’t really about me, you needed me to be more understanding in that moment and I wasn’t—,”
“No, you didn’t do anything wrong. I should’ve—,”
You smush your palm against his mouth with a playful groan. “Oh my god, would you please put aside your Atlas complex for five seconds—I feel like I’m talking to Batman. How about we both could’ve handled it better? Can you accept that?”
“Batman’s cool.” Garrett ignores your questions to pout against your palm.
He watches as you move your hand from his mouth to his cheek, drying his tear tracks with your fingers as you look at him fondly.
You reach up with your other hand to push a loose curl away from his forehead. “He also needs an SSRI and a court-mandated therapist.”
In the quiet air of the morning, with the rising sun lighting you up in a golden angelic glow, Garrett finally laughs.
“Yeah, you’re right. I think Nightwing’s cooler anyway. He’s like if Batman had more hope.” When your eyes suddenly darken, Garrett cocks his head slightly. “What?”
“That was actually the hottest thing you’ve ever said.”
Garrett’s eyes widen in amused disbelief. “That was the hottest thing I’ve said?”
“Uh-huh,” you nod, lids dropping as you lift your neck. Garrett takes the hint and drops his head to press his lips against yours. “Talk nerdy to me, baby.”
Garrett lets out a loud, surprised laugh against your mouth. “Okay, you’re done. You’re done.”
“What?” You’re giggling when he pulls away.
He just shakes his head endearingly, letting his body drop back on top of you as you stretch out on the daybed. Your fingers make their way back to his hair, carding through it gently as you both watch the sunrise.
After a few minutes of silence, you let out a quiet laugh. “Our fight didn’t even make it to sunrise.”
“You say that like it wasn’t the longest day of my life,” Garrett grumbles and tightens his arms around you.
“How much do you wanna bet that the producers are gonna make us re-enact making up when they realize they missed it?”
Garrett grunts against the strap of your tank top. “They can get the version where I drop to my knees in front of everyone and beg you to take me back.” He presses a chaste kiss to your shoulder when you laugh. “Also, we’re never fighting again.”
You raise your brows in amusement. “We’re gonna fight, Garrett. That’s just how life works sometimes.”
“...Fine.” He relents. “But we have to take a nap first. Together.”
“Yeah, okay.” You have that fond look on your face again as you look at him. “And then we make up.” You hold your pinkie out for him.
Garrett shifts so he can wrap his pinkie around yours, your smiles practically identical as you look at each other.
“Yeah, then we make up.”
please don't copy, repost, or feed my work into ai, thanks!
I wrote this over a year ago, kind of nervous to share this one but I you know what it's a Friday so why not double post.
The Motherlist
Summary: a dare at Rita's leads to an unexpected conversation with the Shadowsinger. One drink turns into an entire night, and by sunrise, neither of them is ready to say goodbye.
Content warnings: explicit sexual content, alcohol, fluff
★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★
Rita's was loud enough that conversations had to be shouted and laughter disappeared beneath the music almost as quickly as it was born. The dance floor was crowded, glasses clinked against polished wood behind the bar, and somewhere in the corner someone was singing along to a song they clearly didn't know the words to.
It was exactly what she'd needed after a long week.
"So," her friend Daphne announced over the rim of her drink, "are you finally going to tell us when the last time was that you actually talked to a male you didn't already know?"
A beat of silence followed, quickly filled by Daphne’s grin widening. "And I don't mean one of the shopkeepers you politely nod at on your way to work. I mean a stranger."
She frowned. "I talk to people."
"You order coffee and say thank you," Elia supplied helpfully.
"I have conversations."
"With us," Daphne said sweetly. "And your plants."
She opened her mouth to protest, but Daphne wasn’t finished.
"Honestly, I think the last time you spoke to a man you didn’t already know was-what? Two years ago? Three?"
"That is not true."
"It is absolutely true."
She huffed, crossing her arms. "I just don’t see the need to talk to strangers all the time."
"That’s not what we’re saying," Lysa replied, leaning forward. "We’re saying you’ve built an entire life where the only males you interact with are strictly platonic relations."
A reluctant smile tugged at her lips. "That’s a very specific category."
"It’s accurate."
She rolled her eyes, but before she could think of a proper retort, Daphne tilted her head. "You know what I think?"
"I’m afraid to ask."
"I think you’ve forgotten how to flirt."
"I have not-" She opened her mouth to say something else when the atmosphere inside the bar shifted.
Not dramatically. No one stopped dancing, the music didn't falter, and conversations continued uninterrupted. But heads turned all the same. The Inner Circle had arrived. It happened every time. Some people offered nods of greeting. Others simply watched them pass, curiosity lingering for a heartbeat before returning to their own evenings. They weren't loud or demanding, but they carried themselves with an effortless confidence that naturally drew attention.
Rhysand walked beside Feyre, their hands brushing as they moved through the crowd. Cassian was already laughing at something someone had said, his voice carrying above the music. Amren looked as though she'd rather be anywhere else.
And then there was him. She found him before she realized she was looking. He walked a pace behind the others, hands tucked into the pockets of his pants, his expression unreadable beneath the dim amber lights of Rita's.
Azriel.
She knew his name only because everyone in Velaris seemed to.
The shadows came first. Not because they announced him, but because they refused to obey the rules of ordinary darkness. Wisps of black drifted lazily around his shoulders before disappearing altogether, only to reappear near one of his hands a moment later. One curled around his wrist like smoke before slipping away again. They moved as though they had minds of their own.
She couldn't stop watching them. Or him.
He wasn't handsome in the obvious way Cassian was. He was... drop dead gorgeous. The thought arrived so suddenly it caught her off guard.
Sharp cheekbones softened by the warm lighting. Dark hair that looked perpetually windswept. Broad shoulders filling out his shirt. There was something restrained about him, something almost lonely despite standing among people who clearly loved him.
She wondered (briefly and entirely against her better judgment) what it would feel like if one of those shadows brushed against her skin.
Her stomach flipped. Gods. Get a grip.
She took a very determined sip of her drink.
"What are you looking at?"
She nearly choked.
Daphne was watching her with far too much amusement.
"I wasn't looking."
"You were absolutely looking."
"And smiling," Elia added.
"I was not."
Both of them slowly turned to look toward the table where the Inner Circle had settled. Then they looked back at her.
"It's the shadows, isn't it?" Elia grinned.
Her silence answered for her.
"I knew it."
"They're interesting," she defended weakly.
"They're attached to the most attractive male in Velaris."
"I didn't say that."
"You didn't have to."
She buried her face in her glass. "I hate all of you."
"No, you don't." Daphne leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table. "You should ask him to dance."
She laughed so hard she nearly spilled her drink. "Absolutely not."
"Why not?"
"Because..." She gestured vaguely toward Azriel. "Look at him."
Two heads turned. "What about him?"
"He looks..." Dangerous. Untouchable. Like someone who would politely decline and somehow still make her want to disappear into the floor. "He looks busy," she finished instead.
"He looks single," Daphne corrected.
Elia smirked. "I dare you."
She stared. "...You're serious?"
"Completely, Come on."
"No."
"You're never going to see him again."
"I could see him again."
"But you won't ask him then either."
She hated how accurate that sounded. Her gaze drifted back across the room before she could stop it. He was listening to Cassian now, though only half-heartedly if the faint, absent look in his eyes meant anything. One of his shadows curled lazily around the stem of his glass. He looked impossible to approach.
Absolutely not. She had no business walking over there. She didn't know him. He didn't know her. He'd probably think she'd lost her mind. Exactly, the sensible part of her agreed. Stay exactly where you are.
Another, far more reckless part of her whispered that she'd regret it the moment she walked out of Rita's. She sighed. You're a grown woman, you're capable of asking someone to dance. If he says no... he'll say no. Life would continue. She'd survive the embarrassment, probably.
Elia nudged her shoulder. "What's the worst that could happen?"
She looked toward Azriel once more. He hadn't noticed her. Or maybe he had. Either way... She smiled despite herself. "You're right."
Before she could lose her nerve, she slid from her chair, smoothed the wrinkles from her silk dress, took one steadying breath, and crossed the room toward the table occupied by the most intimidating group in all of Velaris.
𖤓𓂃 ོ𓂃°⭒₊
The distance between their table and his suddenly felt much longer than it had looked from across the room. She resisted the urge to turn around. Keep walking.
By the time she reached the table, every ounce of confidence she'd managed to gather had all but evaporated. No backing out now.
She cleared her throat. "Excuse me?"
Six pairs of eyes lifted toward her. Well. This was somehow worse than she'd imagined. Rhysand regarded her with quiet curiosity, Feyre offered an encouraging smile, Mor looked as though she already knew exactly why she was there, and Cassian... Cassian looked positively delighted. Amren barely spared her a glance before returning to her drink.
Then there was Azriel. Up close, he was even more unfairly attractive. The warm glow of Rita's softened the sharp planes of his face, though not enough to hide the quiet intensity in his hazel eyes. One curious shadow drifted lazily over his shoulder before disappearing somewhere behind him.
He looked at her expectantly. His attention was so unwavering that she nearly forgot why she'd come over.
"I..." Brilliant start. She forced herself to smile. "I was wondering if you'd like to dance."
Silence. It wasn't necessarily uncomfortable. Just unexpected.
Azriel blinked once, as though the question genuinely surprised him. Beside him, Cassian's eyebrows climbed so high they nearly disappeared into his hair. Mor pressed her lips together, clearly fighting a smile.
She'd made a terrible mistake. "I'm sorry," she said quickly. "You don't have to answer that. My friends dared me and I thought-"
"I don't like this kind of dancing." The words were gentle, matter-of-fact rather than dismissive.
"Oh." Of course he didn't. She laughed softly at herself and nodded. "Right. Well... thank you for letting me interrupt your evening."
She had just begun to step back when he spoke again. "I would, however..." She looked back. "...be happy to have a drink with you."
For a heartbeat, she simply stared. "...Really?"
The corner of his mouth lifted ever so slightly. "Really."
Complete silence settled over the table. She could practically feel the astonishment radiating from everyone around them. Cassian looked as though someone had punched the air from his lungs. Mor's eyes widened before an unmistakably smug smile spread across her face. Even Rhysand's expression shifted ever so slightly, amusement flickering behind his calm composure as he reached for his whiskey.
She glanced between all of them before looking back at Azriel. "I feel like I've interrupted something."
"You have," Cassian answered immediately.
"Cassian," Feyre warned, though she was smiling into her glass.
"What?" he said innocently. "I'm just saying this is unexpected."
Azriel didn't take his eyes off her. "Ignore him."
She laughed, the last of her nerves easing from her shoulders. "I'll do my best."
He rose from his chair in one smooth motion. He was tall. She'd known that already, but standing this close to him drove the point home. She found herself tilting her head to meet his eyes. It made her stomach tingle.
"Come on," he said quietly.
She nodded.
As they walked toward the bar together, she couldn't shake the strange feeling of half the room watching them. Maybe they were. Or maybe it was just the five people they'd left behind.
She had the distinct impression she'd be the topic of at least one conversation before the night was over.
𖤓𓂃 ོ𓂃°⭒₊
They ended up in one of the quieter booths tucked into the far corner of Rita's, just far enough from the dance floor that they could hear each other without shouting.
It wasn't exactly quiet, but more secluded. She slid onto the bench first, smoothing her dress beneath her before Azriel settled beside her rather than across from her.
Close enough that their shoulders almost touched.
A server appeared almost instantly. "The usual?" she asked Azriel.
He nodded before glancing at her. "What are you having?"
"I’ll have same as whatever you're having."
One dark eyebrow lifted. "Brave."
She laughed. "I've already walked over to ask a complete stranger to dance. I feel like I've committed to making questionable decisions tonight."
A quiet chuckle escaped him. "I'll try not to disappoint you."
When the drinks arrived, she lifted her glass toward him. "To questionable decisions."
He touched his glass lightly against hers. "To courage."
She wasn't sure why that made her smile as much as it did. For a moment, they simply watched the crowd. "You come here often?" she asked.
"Occasionally."
She looked at him expectantly. "...That's all you're giving me?"
A corner of his mouth twitched. "You asked a yes-or-no question."
She laughed. "I suppose I did."
He turned slightly toward her. "What about you?"
"My friends drag me here every few weeks."
"And if they hadn't dared you?"
She groaned, covering her face for a second. "We're pretending that part didn't happen."
"So you weren't planning on talking to me?"
"I was planning on admiring you from a safe distance." The words slipped out before she could stop them. Her eyes widened. She considered hiding beneath the table.
Azriel's expression softened into unmistakable amusement. "I appreciate your honesty."
"I blame the alcohol."
"You're not drunk."
"...I blame my friends."
"I suspected as much."
She smiled into her glass.
"So," he said after a moment, "what do you do?"
"I work at a daycare."
Something changed in his expression. Not dramatically. Just enough that she noticed.
"You do?"
She nodded. "I spend my days surrounded by tiny people who think finger paint belongs on the ceiling and that every bug they find absolutely has to be shown to me."
His eyes warmed. "And you enjoy it."
"I love it." There wasn't a second's hesitation. "They're exhausting." She laughed. "By the end of every day I swear I'm going to find a quieter career."
"But?"
"But then one of them decides I'm their favorite person in the world because I tied their shoe or remembered they like the blue cup better than the green one." She shrugged. "It's hard to stay grumpy after that."
He was watching her with an expression she couldn't quite place. "You must be very patient."
She snorted. "You've clearly never seen me trying to convince young ones that crayons aren't food."
That earned a genuine laugh. Low, warm, and far prettier than she'd imagined.
"There was one little boy," she continued, smiling despite herself. "Every single morning he'd run into the classroom, point at me and yell, 'You're back!' like he'd been convinced overnight that I'd disappear forever."
Azriel smiled. Not the polite sort she'd seen him offer moments ago. This one reached his eyes. "You mattered to him."
"I think I mostly reminded him where the biscuits were."
"I'm not convinced that makes a difference."
She laughed so suddenly she nearly spilled her drink. He was already looking at her. The smile was still there. For the briefest moment, it seemed he'd forgotten to hide it. Then, almost as if catching himself, he lowered his gaze to his glass. She found herself smiling too.
Conversation shouldn't have been this easy.
Yet somehow, with a male she'd met less than fifteen minutes ago, it felt as though neither of them had to try very hard at all.
𖤓𓂃 ོ𓂃°⭒₊
At some point, she realised they hadn't touched their drinks in several minutes. She couldn't have said when it had happened. Only that somewhere between talking about the children at the daycare and him telling her about the bakery that made the best cinnamon rolls in Velaris, the conversation had stopped feeling like one between strangers.
"So they really made you wear a paper crown?" Azriel asked, a hint of amusement lingering in his voice.
She groaned. "It was Princess Day."
"And you were the princess."
"I was appointed princess. One of the little girls informed me my crown was 'acceptable.'" She used her fingers to make exaggerated quotation marks. "Acceptable, Azriel. She was five."
A quiet laugh escaped him. "And did you recover?"
"Barely." She smiled into her glass before taking another sip.
The music shifted to something louder, the steady rhythm carrying across the room as more people crowded onto the dance floor.
"What?" Azriel asked.
She frowned. "What?"
"You said something."
"I didn't."
"I thought you did." He leaned closer, just slightly, as if testing the space between them. Only a little. Just enough that she could make out the flecks of green in his hazel eyes.
Still, he paused. Listened. Then exhaled once, quiet.
"Oh," she said. "No."
He nodded once.
Neither of them moved away. For a moment, it seemed like neither of them quite knew whether they were supposed to.
Eventually, the conversation continued as though nothing had happened. A few minutes later, she was telling him about a little boy who had insisted worms were "just tiny snakes with confidence" when he tilted his head again.
"I'm sorry," he murmured. "I missed that."
She repeated herself. This time, he didn't just lean in. He shifted closer properly, closing the distance until there was no longer any question of space between them. His shoulder brushed hers, then stayed there. Intentional now, even though it was the lightest contact imaginable.
But it didn't move away. He didn't apologise. He didn't move away, either. Instead, he stayed exactly where he was, close enough that she could catch the faint scent of cedar and night-chilled air clinging to him beneath the warmth of Rita's.
"...and then he tried to put the worm in my pocket," she finished.
Azriel laughed. "A future naturalist."
"A future menace."
"I imagine there's a fine line."
"There really is."
Again, neither of them acknowledged that they hadn't put any space between them. She certainly noticed. She was acutely aware of every inch. His knee angled toward hers beneath the table, the warmth radiating from his arm, the way one of his shadows drifted lazily between them before curling around the back of the booth, as though even it had settled in for the conversation.
"What made you choose a daycare?"
She answered, and halfway through explaining how she'd always loved working with children, he inclined his head toward her once more. Close enough now that if she turned, she'd be looking directly into his eyes.
"I'm sorry," he said, voice low enough that it was nearly lost beneath the music. "It's difficult to hear you."
She blinked. It wasn't, not really. They were tucked away in one of quieter corners of Rita's. The music reached them, certainly, but she'd had no trouble hearing a single word he'd said all evening.
Besides… He hadn't asked her to repeat herself once. Not until he'd found another excuse to move closer. The realization settled over her slowly, and then all at once.
A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth.
He wasn't leaning in because of the music, he was leaning in because he wanted to.
And, judging by the almost imperceptible curve of his lips when he noticed her smile, he knew she'd figured it out.
*****
She let the silence linger. Not because she didn't know what to say. Because she wanted to see what he would do. He held her gaze for another heartbeat before taking an unhurried sip of his drink.
Completely composed. At least on the surface.
The corner of her mouth lifted. "You know..."
"Hm?"
"I don't think it's the music."
He tilted his head ever so slightly. "What isn't?"
"The reason you keep leaning closer."
For the first time that evening, she caught him off guard. It was almost imperceptible. A brief stillness. One of his shadows, lazily circling the back of the booth, paused with him.
"I've heard every word you've said," she continued, unable to stop smiling. "We haven't had to repeat ourselves once."
His eyes searched hers. "So either your hearing comes and goes very selectively..."
She leaned in just enough to close the last fraction of space between them.
"...or you're using it as an excuse."
Another beat of silence. She waited for him to deny it, but he didn't. Instead, his gaze drifted briefly to her lips before returning to her eyes. "So you've noticed."
Her heart gave one traitorous thump. "I have."
"And yet," he said quietly, "you haven't moved away."
Heat bloomed in her cheeks. "I suppose I haven't."
"No." His voice had dropped lower somehow, nearly swallowed by the music surrounding them.
"You could."
She knew what he was offering. An out. A chance to reclaim the space between them.
Instead, she found herself smiling. "I could." She didn’t move.
One of his shadows floated curiously between them before settling around the back of the booth again, as if deciding to leave them to it.
She glanced toward it. "Do they always do that?"
His eyes followed hers. "They're curious."
"About everyone?"
A small shake of his head. "No."
She smiled, watching one curious tendril drift cautiously nearer before retreating again. "I think they're deciding whether they approve of me."
"I think," Azriel murmured, unable to hide the faint amusement in his voice, "they decided that a while ago."
She looked back at him. He was already looking at her. The air between them had changed. The teasing had faded into something quieter, something warmer.
She became suddenly, acutely aware of how close they were. Her pulse quickened. Neither of them seemed interested in discovering what would happen if they created distance instead. Neither reached for their drink. Neither looked back toward the dance floor.
The rest of Rita's continued around them. Music, laughter, glasses clinking somewhere beyond their little corner. It all felt impossibly far away.
The silence stretched between them. She couldn't remember the last time she'd sat beside someone she'd only just met and felt so completely at ease.
Azriel hadn't looked away. Neither had she.
His eyes drifted to her lips again for the briefest moment before returning to meet hers. It was enough. Enough to send her heart racing. Enough to make her wonder if she was imagining the whole thing.
She swallowed.
Say something.
Nothing came.
The corner of his mouth was still curved into that faint smile she'd come to realize was rare. Reserved. Given rather than offered. She liked that smile. Gods, she liked him.
The realization landed with startling clarity. She liked the quiet way he listened. The way he'd asked questions instead of trying to impress her. The way he'd smiled every time she laughed, as though he hadn't meant to. The way he'd been inching closer all evening under the flimsiest excuse imaginable.
A laugh almost escaped her. If you don't do this now...
She would spend the next week wondering what might have happened. Wondering if she'd imagined the way he'd looked at her. Wondering whether she'd been brave enough to find out.
Her pulse hammered in her ears. What's the worst that could happen?
The words floated back to her, accompanied by Elia's smug grin. She smiled to herself.
Before she could think better of it, she leaned forward. Only an inch. Maybe two.
She paused just long enough that he would have every opportunity to stop her. He didn't.
Her lips brushed his. Soft, tentative.
Barely more than a whisper of a kiss.
It lasted only a heartbeat before she pulled away again. Heat flooded her cheeks the instant she realized what she'd done. "Oh." A nervous laugh escaped her. "I..." She shook her head, smiling despite herself. She searched his face, suddenly terrified she'd misread everything. "I'm sorry," she murmured. "That was probably incredibly presumptuous."
For one impossible second, the only thing she could hear was the pounding of her own heart.
Azriel didn't answer. He simply looked at her. His expression hadn't hardened, if anything it had become unreadable in a way that made her breath catch.
She resisted every instinct telling her to fill the silence.
So she waited and hoped.
𖤓𓂃 ོ𓂃°⭒₊
The kiss had lasted no more than a heartbeat.
It should have been easy to dismiss.
It wasn't.
Azriel’s thoughts, so often ordered and disciplined, scattered the moment she'd closed the distance between them. She had kissed him. Not because she'd expected anything. Not because she'd demanded anything. She had kissed him because she'd been brave enough to take a chance.
The realization settled somewhere deep in his chest.
His shadows had gone utterly still. Usually they whispered, fidgeted, darted through every room before he entered it. Now they hovered quietly behind him, as if even they were waiting to see what he would do.
She was apologizing. He barely heard the words.
His attention had narrowed to the flush spreading across her cheeks, the nervous smile tugging at her lips, the uncertainty she'd tried so hard to hide.
She thought she'd made a mistake. Gods. She'd done the opposite.
He'd noticed her the moment she'd walked into Rita's. Not when she'd asked him to dance. Before that. She'd been laughing with her friends, completely unaware that one of his shadows had drifted across the room out of idle curiosity.
It had returned. Then wandered back again. The shadows had liked her before he'd even spoken to her, whispering in his ear that she liked him. That alone should have made him suspicious. Instead, he'd found himself watching.
Wondering why someone with such an easy smile looked so hesitant to use it. Wondering why she kept glancing toward him before immediately looking away. When she'd finally walked over, he'd already known what his answer would be.
Not the dance.
A drink.
A conversation.
Just long enough to satisfy the curiosity he'd felt the instant he'd noticed her. Except somewhere between her stories about children wearing paper crowns and laughing over worms with confidence... Curiosity had quietly become something else.
Something infinitely more dangerous. He hadn't realized how close he'd been sitting until she'd pointed it out. Hadn't realized how transparent he'd become. Then his gaze dropped, almost involuntarily, to her lips.
She’d kissed him so light he could almost convince himself he'd imagined it. Except he hadn't. He could still feel it, a soft tingling sensation where her mouth had touched his.
She shifted almost imperceptibly beside him. Not away. Just enough that he caught the flicker of uncertainty in her eyes again.
She was waiting for him to speak. To reject her. To laugh. To politely tell her she'd misunderstood.
Instead, Azriel lifted one scarred hand.
Slowly.
Giving her every opportunity to stop him.
She didn't.
His fingertips brushed a loose strand of hair away from her face before his palm settled gently against her cheek. He was aware of his scarred hands, but she leaned into the touch without thinking.
His breath caught. "There is," he said quietly, his thumb stroking once across her cheekbone, "absolutely nothing to apologize for."
He held her gaze for another long moment. Then, with all the patience in the world, he closed the distance between them.
His lips met hers with a tenderness that stole the breath from his lungs.
Slow and unhurried. As if he was asking the same question she'd asked only moments before.
May I?
She answered almost immediately.
The hesitation she'd worn after her apology melted away as she leaned into him, her hand lifting almost shyly to rest against his forearm.
Relief bloomed somewhere deep in Azriel's chest. She wanted this.
He let himself savor the moment. The warmth of her lips. The quiet sigh she breathed between them.
The way she instinctively leaned closer until there wasn't an inch of space left between their shoulders. She tasted like her sunshine and whiskey, and he couldn't get enough.
His thumb continued its slow path across her cheek, the movement absentminded now. It was comforting.
When they finally parted, it was only by a fraction. Just enough to breathe. Her eyes remained closed for a heartbeat longer before fluttering open.
She smiled. Not the nervous smile she'd worn after the first kiss. A softer one. "I was beginning to think I'd imagined that." The words escaped her in little more than a whisper.
Azriel felt the corner of his mouth lift. "You didn't."
"No?"
A quiet shake of his head. "I was deciding how to answer."
"And this..." She glanced briefly at his lips before meeting his eyes again. "...was your answer?"
"I thought it was clearer than words."
A laugh bubbled out of her, light and utterly genuine. "I'll admit," she murmured, "it was."
He found himself laughing with her. It was quiet. One of those laughs Cassian was forever insisting he was capable of but seldom offered.
She looked at him with unmistakable delight. "You've been hiding that laugh all evening." "And I like it."
Something in his chest tightened. He couldn't remember the last time someone had looked at him with such uncomplicated warmth. There was no expectation in her eyes.
The moment lingered, soft, suspended, until a familiar voice cut through it.
“Well,” Mor drawled, appearing at the edge of their table with a knowing smile, “I hate to interrupt whatever this is.”
Azriel didn’t look away from her. He didn’t need to, the faint tightening in his shoulders giving him away.
Mor’s gaze flicked between them, amusement sharpening. “We’re heading out,” she continued, as if she hadn’t just stepped directly into something delicate. “Cassian’s already arguing with the bartender about one last round, and Rhys is pretending he isn’t enjoying it.”
A pause.
Then her eyes landed fully on her. “And I was wondering…” Mor’s smile turned just a touch bolder. “Would you like to come with us?”
Azriel finally looked at Mor then. A subtle but unmistakable warning in his eyes.
Mor only lifted a brow in response, utterly unbothered. “What?” she said lightly. “You don't look particularly ready to say goodbye just yet.”
Azriel’s gaze shifted to her, quiet and searching. A question without words. She understood it immediately. A small nod. “Okay,” she said softly.
The decision seemed to ripple through the table at once. Mor’s grin widened like she’d been waiting for exactly that answer. “Perfect,” she said brightly. “Then let’s get you out of here before Cassian actually convinces the bartender to start a second round of bad decisions.”
Cassian, from somewhere across the room, shouted in protest. Rhysand only laughed.
Within minutes, the group began to gather their things, chairs scraping softly, coats being pulled on, the easy chaos of friends who had done this a hundred times before. Azriel stayed close to her side the entire time, a quiet, steady presence that made it impossible to feel anything but anchored.
When she spotted Elia and Daphne near the edge of the room, she slipped away for a moment.
“I’ll be right back,” she murmured to Azriel. He gave a slight nod, shadows curling once at her departure before settling again.
Elia was the first to notice her, eyes lighting up immediately. “Well, well,” she teased, leaning an elbow on the table. “Look who finally decided to rejoin the living.”
Daphne’s grin was just as sharp. “We were beginning to think you’d been stolen away.”
“I-” she started, then huffed a small laugh. “I just got distracted.”
“Oh, we noticed,” Elia said, glancing pointedly over her shoulder toward Azriel.
Daphne leaned in conspiratorially. “He looks like he’s been distracted for a while too.”
Heat rose to her cheeks. “Stop it,” she muttered, though there was no real bite to it.
Elia only smiled softer then, bumping her shoulder gently. “Go on, then. Don’t keep him waiting.”
Daphne waved her off with a mock shooing motion. “And try not to break anything important on your way out.”
“I make no promises,” she called back over her shoulder, earning a chorus of laughter as she returned to Azriel.
He was already waiting. As if he’d never moved.
The others were gathered near the exit now, the night winding down around them. Mor gave her a final knowing look as they passed through the doors of Rita’s, the cool night air washing over them in a quiet wave.
Outside, the city stretched around them in soft, glowing lines of light and shadow.
The group began to disperse with easy goodbyes - Cassian still arguing about something entirely unimportant, Rhysand and Feyre already half-turned toward Velaris’ rooftops.
Azriel stepped slightly closer to her and lifted his hand. A silent question. She didn’t hesitate and took his hand. The world shifted. Wind, light, and shadow folding in on itself - and then unfolding again.
The noise of the city vanished. Cool stone and open air replaced it. The House of Wind balcony stretched out beneath them, high above Velaris, the city glittering like scattered stars below.
Azriel released her gently, though he didn’t step away. Not even a little.
𖤓𓂃 ོ𓂃°⭒₊
By the time the city had fallen quiet, they'd shared a pot of tea in the House of Wind's kitchen with Mor and Cassian, who had spent far more time exchanging knowing glances than actually drinking it.
Mor had eventually risen with a theatrical sigh. "I suppose we'll leave you two."
Cassian had looked between them, grinning. "You know," he'd said, stretching as he stood, "the sunrise is beautiful from Az's balcony."
"Cassian," Mor had warned.
"What? I'm encouraging appreciation of nature."
Azriel had pinched the bridge of his nose. "They're impossible," he'd muttered.
"They seem to enjoy it."
"They do."
When Mor winked at her on the way out, she'd laughed so hard she nearly spilled her tea.
A few seconds later, the kitchen had fallen quiet. Azriel had cleared his throat. "I know a place with a better view." He grinned.
She'd looked up.
"My balcony."
A beat. Then she laughed. "Really?"
"It's just..." He'd glanced toward the windows overlooking Velaris. "It's a nice spot to talk a little more."
She'd smiled at the faint blush on his cheeks. "I'd like that."
𖤓𓂃 ོ𓂃°⭒₊
Hours later, they were still talking. Or at least… they tried to.
Conversation had become something wonderfully inconsistent. She would tell a story, only for it to dissolve into a comfortable silence as he looked at her a little too long. He would start explaining something about the constellations above Velaris, and she'd find herself distracted by the way the moonlight caught in his eyes.
Somewhere between discussing childhood memories, favorite places in the city, and whether cinnamon rolls counted as breakfast, they'd discovered that every conversation eventually gave way to another kiss. Stolen moments between conversations. As though neither of them could quite help themselves.
She'd begun to lose track of who started them. Sometimes she'd glance at him and find him already looking at her. Sometimes he'd pause halfway through a sentence because she'd smiled. Sometimes there was no reason at all.
Just the quiet certainty that another kiss felt as natural as finishing a thought. Eventually she'd laughed into one of them, making them both pull back.
"What?"
"You forgot what you were saying."
He frowned thoughtfully. "I did."
"You were explaining something."
"I was."
She waited. "So?"
"I don't remember."
She laughed again. "I think that's my fault."
"I think you're right." His smile had become easier over the course of the night. Freer. She wondered whether anyone else noticed how much it transformed him.
She let herself take in the absurdity of it for half a second. She was in his lap, on a chair he’d dragged out onto his balcony, the city of Velaris glittering below them like it had the decency to pretend it wasn’t witnessing this.
And she’d completely lost track of time. Lost track of everything, really. He didn’t seem to be doing much better.
She kissed him again before she could think too hard about it, the conversation they’d been having dissolving into something far less coherent. One of his hands slid up her leg as the kiss deepened, his touch slow and deliberate, like he was testing how much she could take before she broke.
She answered him with a soft sweep of her tongue against his lower lip.
He let her in immediately. His arm tightened around her waist, pulling her closer, while the other hand continued its unhurried path up her leg, as if he had all the time in the world and intended to use every second of it.
Something in her snapped - quietly, decisively. She broke the kiss just long enough to shift, moving with a confidence she didn’t bother questioning, until she was straddling him properly.
His breath hitched. He pressed his forehead to hers, eyes darkened and filled with desire, lips parted and slightly swollen from her. “You’ve been driving me crazy all night,” he murmured, already leaning in again like he couldn’t help himself. “You have no idea what you’re doing to me.” His words brushed against her mouth as he spoke, and she felt them more than she heard them.
That did something to her. She glanced at him, at the way he looked at her like she was the only thing anchoring him to anything at all. “Why don’t you show me,” she whispered.
That was all it took. Azriel didn’t hesitate. His kiss turned sharper, hungrier, less restrained, like whatever control he’d been holding onto had finally slipped through his fingers. He stood with her in his arms as if she weighed nothing, not breaking the kiss once as he moved them inside.
Her legs found his waist almost without thinking, holding on as he carried her through the doorway.
The room was dark save for the first hints of dawn spilling through the open balcony doors. Cool morning air drifted inside, carrying the scent of jasmine from the gardens below, but it barely reached him. He lowered her onto the bed with a care that felt entirely at odds with the urgency building between them. Even then, he didn't rush.
His hands lingered at her waist for a heartbeat, searching her face instead of reaching for more. A silent question.
She answered by slipping her fingers into his hair and drawing him back to her. The kiss stole what little restraint he had left. A quiet sound escaped her as he settled against her, soft enough that he almost wondered if he'd imagined it.
He hadn't. His breath caught. Gods. He wanted to hear it again.
He trailed slow kisses along the line of her jaw, unhurried, letting his lips linger against the warmth of her skin until he found the place just beneath her ear. The moment his mouth brushed there, her breath caught. A soft, involuntary whine slipped past her lips.
He stilled for the briefest heartbeat.
His scarred hand tightened almost imperceptibly at her waist before he kissed the spot again, more carefully this time, committing every tiny reaction to memory. Every shaky breath. Every quiet sound she couldn't seem to hold back.
"Az..." she whispered, his name dissolving against the silence of the room.
The sound settled somewhere deep in his chest.
Gods.
He'd heard his name spoken countless times over the centuries, but never like that. His cock strained painfully against his pants. "I know," he murmured, the words barely more than a breath against her skin.
He pressed another lingering kiss beneath her ear before drawing back just enough to meet her eyes. His fingers found the delicate silk resting on her shoulders. Slowly, giving her every chance to stop him, he eased the straps down. The fabric whispered over her skin before pooling at her arms, her breasts spilling out.
His breath caught. The cool morning air drifted through the open balcony doors, brushing over her bare skin. She shivered, a quiet breath escaping her lips, and he couldn't tell whether it was the breeze or the way he was looking at her.
Beautiful. The thought came so suddenly it stole every other word from him. His scarred hand skimmed lightly along her side, slow enough that he felt the warmth of her skin beneath his fingertips. She leaned instinctively into the touch, her breath hitching again.
His gaze lifted to hers. "Still alright?" he asked quietly.
She answered with a small nod before reaching for him again, her fingers curling into the back of his neck and drawing him closer.
That was all the permission he needed.
He lowered his head, pressing a lingering kiss against the underside of her breast. She arched into him with a soft, involuntary sigh, and a low sound escaped his own chest before he could stop it.
Gods. She was undoing him far more thoroughly than she could possibly know. The sound he made seemed to loosen her last thread. Her hands found the back of his shirt, fingers fumbling with the buttons before giving up entirely and gripping the fabric instead. She laughed softly at her own impatience. "This is your fault," she murmured.
A rare smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. "I know."
His wings shifted behind him, forcing him to pause. With an almost embarrassed huff of laughter, he slipped the remaining buttons free around them before shrugging the shirt from his shoulders.
She didn't look away. Not for a second. Her gaze wandered over the planes of his chest, the scars crossing his skin, before returning to his face.
One curious shadow drifted between them, brushing lightly against the silk gathered at her arms. Another joined it, and together they coaxed the fabric lower with almost playful patience.
She let out a surprised laugh as the cool wisps skimmed over her skin.
The silk slipped free at last, settling in a soft heap beside the bed. His shadows lingered only long enough to make certain she was comfortable before moving towards her lace panties, pulling them down her legs with the same curiosity they'd shown all evening before retreating to his back.
Azriel's gaze found her once more. He'd spent centuries mastering discipline. It deserted him with alarming ease whenever he looked at her. For a long moment, neither of them moved. They simply looked at one another, as though trying to memorize the person in front of them before the night slipped away with the dawn.
He finished undressing with none of the confidence he'd carried through the rest of the evening. If anything, he seemed almost self-conscious beneath her gaze, as though centuries of composure had deserted him somewhere between the balcony and the bedroom. He immediately gripped the base of his cock out of habit, pumping once. Twice.
She simply looked at him, breathing quickening. The breadth of his shoulders, the scars etched across skin that told stories she couldn't begin to imagine, the powerful lines of him softened only by the uncertainty in his eyes as they searched her face, his hand wrapped around himself. She rubbed her thighs together in response.
He was Godlike. The thought arrived before she could stop it.
His breath caught when he realized she wasn't looking away. She smiled, slow and unguarded. "So..." Her eyes met his again, warmth dancing in them. "That's what you've been hiding from me all night?"
The words startled a quiet laugh out of him. It was brief, almost disbelieving. One corner of his mouth lifted as he shook his head. He closed the distance between them once more, bracing himself carefully over her, his forehead brushing hers for the briefest moment before he found her lips again.
"Where'd all that confidence come from?" He teased back before capturing her lips in another kiss. He hissed as his cock made contact with her slick. She impatiently started bucking her hips. "Easy." He murmured.
He slowly started pressing kisses down her body again, licking her nipples along the way and teasingly sucking just above where she needed him. She moaned out desperately.
He chuckled, and then promptly buried his face in-between her legs. The sound she let out was pornographic, and for a second he worried about the others in the house. But then she squeezed her thighs around his head, and he forgot all about them.
She tasted like strawberries and sin, and he couldn't help the groans escaping him.
"Az- please, need more." She wove her hand into his hair, and he took a brief pause from devouring her to take her in. She was perched on one elbow, looking down at him with big, wild eyes. Her hair was a tangled mess and a thin layer of sweat lay above her brow.
He slowly moved his hand up her inner thigh, earning a small encouraging sound from her. When he entered a single digit into her, his eyes shut. She clenched down on his finger, and he could only imagine how she would feel wrapped around him.
He could feel her nearing her high. He sucked harshly on her clit, letting it go with a loud sucking noise. "That's it." A pause. Another quiet, almost disbelieving breath came from him. "Devine…" Another suck. "You undo me." Me mumbled against her sex.
Her head was swirling, she didn't know where to look, where to grab. She felt herself sprinting towards euphoria. He reattached his mouth to her clit and started a pace of hard quick strokes with his tongue.
Her orgasm overwhelmed her. She cried out his name and Azriel swore he never wanted anyone else to breathe his name ever again. She let her body fall back against the pillows, hips jerking involuntarily as she felt wave after wave of pleasure overcome her.
He let her ride out her high, before pressing a final kiss to both of her thighs and moving his body back up, pressing his mouth back to hers.
She felt his cock move against her belly button and moved her hand down his back towards his front. His breath hitched as her hand found him. He closed his eyes for a heartbeat. "Fuck." The word escaped him before he could stop it.
She moaned sofly, wiggling underneath him so she could drag him through her slit, grinning at the way Azriel's breath hitched.
"Why don't you do something about that?" She teased, moving her head slightly back so she could look at him. He almost looked like he was in pain, eyes watery and mouth still shimmering from the mess he made between her legs. His brows were slightly furrowed and his lips apart, small breaths coming from them and crashing against her mouth in warm waves.
He unwrapped her hand from him, instead pulling it over her head and intertwining her hand with his. "Gladly." He grinned.
He sat back on his knees to take her in for a moment. She looked gorgeous like this, spread open wide for him, slick running from her hole onto his sheets. They would smell like her for days. Azriel didn't mind that thought one bit.
He moved slightly forward so that the tip of his cock nudged her entrance. He leaned forward again, opting to look her in the eyes as he slowly pushed inside. He drew back every now and then, just to slide in a little further every time.
Once he was fully seated inside her, he let his head fall into her neck. "Fuck..." He groaned. "I can't- I can't hold back." He panted.
She didn't respond, she only tightened her legs around his hips, urging him even deeper. "I don't want you to."
The quiet certainty in her voice unraveled what little composure he still possessed. He moved again, slower this time, giving them both a heartbeat to adjust before finding a rhythm that felt as instinctive as breathing.
A low, involuntary groan escaped him. He'd tried not to imagine this. Not on the balcony. Not while she'd been laughing over tea. Not while she'd smiled at him across the table in Rita's.
Nothing had prepared him for the reality of her. He closed his eyes for the briefest moment, every measured breath threatening to come undone as she met each movement with one of her own. She wasn't simply following him - she was with him, closing every bit of distance he tried to create.
His forehead found her shoulder. Another quiet, disbelieving breath left him.
When he finally lifted his head, he looked at her as though seeing her all over again. She was watching him with flushed cheeks and bright eyes, her hair spread across the pillows beneath her. Soft moans escaping her lips. He couldn't stop looking at her, listening to her, breathing her.
His hands settled gently at her waist, his thumbs pushing into her skin as if reassuring himself she was really there. Every small reaction she gave him, every hitch of her breath, every subtle shift toward him, only deepened the wonder settling in his chest. His pace quickened, and she cried out his name.
He found himself committing it all to memory. Every expression. Every laugh from earlier that still echoed in his mind. Every glance she'd stolen across Rita's. He wanted to remember this version of her, too. All of it.
The sound of her voice undid him some more.
One of his shadows drifted into the edge of his vision, lingering uncertainly beside them. It hesitated, almost asking. Azriel gave the smallest nod.
The shadow responded, brushing against her swollen clit with featherlight care. She gasped, her body tensing before melting back into him.
His forehead fell against hers. "Gods..." he breathed, the word more prayer than curse.
He kissed her then. Not carefully, his tongue messily entering her mouth. Every kiss stolen between breaths, every inhale shared, every touch speaking for the words he'd long since forgotten. When he pulled back a line of spit from his mouth connected to hers.
He felt her unravel before he saw it. The rhythm she'd matched so effortlessly faltered. Her fingernails dug into his back. She buried her face against his shoulder with a broken little sound that seemed to travel straight through him. He held her through it, murmuring her name against her skin as though it were the only thing he knew how to say.
The sound of it on his lips seemed to push him over the edge. His own release followed close behind, a quiet groan escaping him as he buried his face in the crook of her neck, holding her as if letting go wasn't an option.
For a long moment, neither of them moved. Only the steady rise and fall of their breathing filled the room, Azriel still slowly moving in and out of her even though he had nothing left to give.
The first rays of morning had begun to spill across the wooden floor, painting soft ribbons of gold through the open balcony doors. Eventually, Azriel rolled onto his side, never straying far enough to lose contact with her. She was already looking at him.
A slow, tired smile spread across her face. He answered with one of his own, that rare, unguarded smile she'd spent the entire night coaxing from him.
Neither of them spoke.
After the night that had passed between them, words somehow felt far too small.
𖤓𓂃 ོ𓂃°⭒₊
They lay beside each other silently, save for the distant sounds of Velaris slowly waking below the balcony and the steady rhythm of her breathing beside him.
She was still smiling, sleepily, contentedly. Azriel wasn't sure he'd ever seen anything more beautiful. Carefully, so carefully she barely stirred, he slipped from the bed. One of his shadows followed him toward the adjoining bathing room, returning moments later carrying a warm, damp cloth. Another hovered nearby, almost proudly, before disappearing again.
He couldn't help the faint smile that tugged at his mouth. "Show-offs," he murmured.
They ignored him. When he returned, she blinked up at him through half-lidded eyes. "What are you doing?" she asked, her voice thick with sleep.
"Come here." There was no command in it, only quiet gentleness.
She shifted closer without question. He brushed a loose strand of hair behind her ear before taking the cloth, his scarred hands impossibly gentle as he cleaned away the traces of the night they'd shared. She watched him the entire time, hissing when he went over particularly sensitive spots. "You don't have to do that."
"I know." His eyes lifted to hers.
Something softened in her expression.
When he finished, he set the cloth aside and reached automatically for the blankets, pulling them over her before climbing back into bed beside her.
She curled against him almost immediately, resting her head beneath his chin as though she'd done it a hundred times before. His arms found their place around her without thinking.
Outside, the first true rays of sunlight spilled across the bedroom floor. He stared at them for a long while. Then cleared his throat.
She tipped her head back to look at him. There was something almost endearing about the uncertainty on the Shadowsinger's face. "I..." He looked away for the briefest moment before meeting her eyes again. "You don't have to go."
She smiled. "I wasn't planning to."
Relief washed over him so quickly it almost made him laugh. He shook his head. "That's not what I meant."
"No?"
He rubbed the back of his neck, suddenly looking remarkably unlike the male who could face monsters and torture people.
"I was wondering..." His voice was quieter now. "If you'd stay."
Her smile grew impossibly softer.
"Maybe we can have lunch after we get some sleep." His cheeks warmed.
She chuckled, the sound light enough to make one of his shadows peek curiously out from the corner of the room. "I'd love that."
He searched her face for a heartbeat, as though making sure she truly meant it. Then one of those rare smiles spread across his face.
She reached up, pressed a lingering kiss to his cheek, and settled back against his chest. Within minutes, her breathing evened into sleep.
Azriel remained awake a little longer, one hand absently tracing slow circles against her back while his shadows settled quietly around the room. For the first time in longer than he could remember, the House felt less empty.
⤷"mini" one-shot!! in which....The perilla leaf debate in general is supposed to be nothing more than a stupid internet argument, until Jungkook nearly starts a war at dinner over Jimin helping you separate yours.
pairing: bestfriend!jungkook x fem!reader
warnings: friends to lovers, jk is down horrendous, jealousy over vegetables, mutual pining, lovesick idiot behavior, perilla leaves almost ruin a friendship, secondhand embarrassment, yearning, jimin stirs the pot for fun, kissing, tooth-rotting fluff, jk loses the perilla leaf war but gets the girl
word count: 1,5k
masterlist
The group chat has been blowing up since 4 p.m.
taehyung: pls tell me someone wants to go have dinner tonight. i'm dying of academic boredom
hobi: literally same. i haven't seen sunlight in 3 days
namjoon: i found this place downtown. it's called "korean fusion." wait, i'll send the address.
jimin: i hope everyone is coming... unless i might have to delete a certain someone's animal crossing save files
you: threats??? really???
jk: she's coming
you: umh??? i didn't even answer yet
jungkook: you're coming
The restaurant is the most Instagrammable place you've ever seen, and you would have gotten there faster if your roommate hadn't been in desperate need of moral support over a situationship. You see Jungkook look up at you the second you enter his peripheral vision.
"Finally," Taehyung says.
"Sorry, sorry." You slide into the booth, and there's only one spot left, wedged between Jimin and the wall, directly across from Jungkook. "Emergency friend duties."
"More important than us?" Hobi asks.
"You'll live," you say, but you're not paying attention because Jungkook is still staring at you. Your eyes meet. He doesn't look away. Your stomach flips, and you wonder if you should have done this another day because emotional rollercoasters don't sound like a great idea on an empty stomach.
"Hi," he says.
"Hi," you say back.
A few minutes later, the drinks and the banchan arrive. Jungkook is laughing at something Taehyung is saying, beer in hand, but he keeps glancing at you every time you reach for the banchan. You don't notice as you are trying your best to separate the stack of perilla leaves.
"Oh my God," you mutter, trying to separate them with your chopsticks. "Why are they like this?"
"Here," Jimin says, and his chopsticks slide in from your left, holding the stack steady while you pull one free.
"Thank you," you breathe, relieved, and you don't see the way Jungkook's knuckles go white around his glass.
You look up, and Jungkook is staring at Jimin, and it's nothing like the soft, longing looks he's been throwing your way all night. Jimin, oblivious, or perhaps not, hums as he sets the separated leaves on your plate.
"Jungkook-ah," Namjoon says from across the table. "Pass the garlic?"
Jungkook passes it without looking up.That's when you realize he's staring at the perilla leaves.
Oh.
Oh no.
You know about the perilla leaf debate. Everyone knows about the perilla leaf debate. It's a stupid thing where people argue whether it's okay to help someone else's partner separate their perilla leaves, whether it crosses a line, or not. Usually, usually, it's just internet debates and topics for variety shows.
Jungkook, however, looks like he's about to flip the table.
"So," Jimin says, "how's work been? Did you finish that powerpoint presentation?"
"Yeah, finally," you start to say, but Jungkook cuts in.
"She finished it yesterday," he says, pouring soju into your glass without asking.
Jimin's eyebrows lift. "Did she?"
"Mhm. She texted me at three in the morning," Jungkook says.
Namjoon looks up from his phone. Hobi pauses with his mouth full.
"Jungkook, that's not-" you say, blushing.
"Do you want some meat?" he asks instead, grabbing the kitchen scissors and carefully cutting the grilled pork belly into bite-sized pieces before placing them on your plate.
"Thanks..." you say slowly.
Jimin watches with his head tilted. He looks between you and Jungkook, then back to the perilla leaves.
"Ah," Jimin says softly.
"Ah what?" Taehyung asks.
"Nothing," Jimin says with a grin. He reaches for the perilla leaves again. "Do you want another one? These are really good." His chopsticks hover over the stack.
Jungkook's chopsticks hit his plate with a clatter.
"You don't have to. I'll do it," Jungkook says quickly.
"It's fine," Jimin says sweetly, separating another leaf. "I don't mind."
"I said," Jungkook replies, enunciating each word, "I'll do it."
He takes the leaf from Jimin's chopsticks and places it on your plate himself. Then he looks at Jimin with an expression that makes your stomach flip.
"Jungkook..." you say quietly.
"Eat," he tells you, looking at you with those soft eyes that could kill you.
Jimin leans back, studying Jungkook.
"What is it?" Hobi asks, looking between them.
"Just... perilla leaves," Jimin says. "You know the debate, right? Whether it's okay to help someone else's person with their leaves?"
The table goes absolutely silent and you want to disappear into the floor.
"Guys, seriously, it's not-"
"Some people think it's too intimate," Jimin continues, looking at Jungkook.
"And what do you think?" you ask.
Jimin shrugs playfully. "I think intention matters."
"What's your intention?" Jungkook asks.
Jimin holds his gaze for a long moment. Then he laughs, breaking the tension, and reaches over to pat Jungkook on the shoulder.
"Relax, maknae. I'm just teasing."
The rest of dinner passes quickly. Every time Jimin speaks to you, Jungkook finds a reason to touch you or get your attention. For the first time, it's not meant to be subtle. It's almost like a competition to see who hands you your coat when you leave or who walks closest to you on the way out.
Everyone agrees to walk to the Han River, grab some ice cream from a convenience store, and sit on the benches by the water. None of you are ready to go home yet.
You hang back, letting the others drift ahead. Jungkook stays beside you, his hands tucked into his pockets.
"You didn't have to do that," you say quietly.
"Do what?"
"Mark your territory."
He stops walking. You stop too, turning to face him.
"Is that what you think I was doing?" he asks.
"I don't know what you were doing, Jungkook. You acted like Jimin committed a crime by helping me with dinner."
He looks away. "You don't get it."
"Then explain it to me."
"The perilla leaf thing is stupid. I know it's stupid. But...I always want to be the one helping you. And I know I don't have the right to feel like that, but I do."
"Jungkook..." you say softly, trying to get him to look at you.
"Don't say whatever you're going to say. Let me just... let me have this one moment where I pretend it's okay that I feel this way, even though I'm your friend and I'm supposed to just be cool with Jimin flirting with you."
"He wasn't flirting."
"He was," Jungkook insists, finally looking at you. "Maybe he didn't mean it like that, but he was, and I hated it. I hated it so much. I wanted to be the one helping you, even with something as stupid as perilla leaves."
"You know," you say softly, "you could have just said something instead of starting a silent war at the dinner table."
"I don't know how to say things," he admits. "I only know how to... want... from a distance."
"That's the problem," you say as you reach out, your fingers finding his. His hand relaxes, and he threads his fingers through yours. "You think you're being subtle, but you're not. Everyone at that table knows exactly what's happening."
"Did you?"
"Yeah." You smile. "I know... and I think I've been waiting for you to help me with my perilla leaves for a pretty long time now."
"Don't joke."
"I'm not joking."
"Jimin was testing you, Kook."
"Testing me?"
"Yeah. He was messing with you. It was so obvious he was challenging you. He wanted to see if you'd finally do something about it." You smile. "He's not stupid. He saw it before either of us did."
Jungkook groans. "So I played right into his hands."
"And you were very dramatic about it," you say with a sigh.
"Shut up," he says, smiling.
"I liked it. I really like it when you stop being quiet about wanting."
He takes another small step closer. "So... can I help you with your perilla leaves next time?"
"Only if you're not doing it just to be polite."
He smiles nervously "I'm doing it because I want to be the person you reach for."
You look at him, at the tiny chocolate-chip mole beneath his lip that you've wanted to kiss for months.
Then you do.
You have to.
He's standing there with his heart in his hands, offering it to you like it's nothing.
His hands come up to cradle your face, his thumbs brushing softly along your jaw as he kisses you back.
When you finally pull away, his forehead rests against yours.
"Does this mean I won the war?" he asks, breathless.
"You were the only one fighting it, you idiot," you laugh, giving his chest a light shove. "Jimin wasn't actually interested. He has a crush on the barista at his coffee shop."
Jungkook blinks. "What?"
"Namjoon told me last week."
He stares at you, dropping his head to your shoulder. "I made a fool of myself for nothing."
"Not for nothing," you say, running your fingers gently through his soft hair. "You finally stopped being quiet."
He lifts his head.
"I can be loud," he says. "If you want. About this, about you."
"Show me."
"Gladly."
And he does. He kisses you again, deeper this time, and you smile against his lips.
Then Taehyung's voice carries over from farther up the path.
"Finally! Took you long enough!"
You laugh into his mouth and pull him even closer.
Billy hitting Stu with the phone in anger was unintentional, as the phone accidentally slipped out of Skeet Ulrich's (Billy's) hands due to the fake blood. Subsequently, Stu screaming "Fucking hit me with the phone, dick!" was Matthew Lillard's (Stu's) actual reaction.
There is nothing but love and deep gratitude whenever I think of you. Through highs and lows, through change, through losing myself and finding my way back—you are and have always been there. May love and happiness always accompany you, wherever you might be. 🪽
summary. You learned to bottle your feelings for John Logan, ever since junior year of high school. Because you knew you would always be just friends, and out of fear of not ruining your friendship, you kept these feelings on ink and paper, locked in a box, first in your room, and now in your dorm, hidden away until you would put another letter in.
It was supposed to be a secret that you would take to the grave. Until a mistake has your box of unsent letters, spanning from your high school days to present college years, tumbling right in front of him, and now his curiosity is piqued.
pairing. John Logan x Reader
tags. Hurt/comfort, angst (it’s not really angst) with a happy ending, yearning, yearning, yearning but its reader yearning SO bad
ice time. 10k (woops)
notes. @ladynaviamin hi babes.
The first letter was on the day you realized you liked him.
It was a messy jumble of words, ink stains obvious on the fading paper, the emotions spilling out before you could even register what you were writing. All you knew was that you needed the whole thing out of your system and onto the only thing you knew what to do and that was to write.
Before you could stop, or be smart about it, everything was poured on the paper. Lengthy, descriptive, and full of the things you wanted to say, and things you know you can’t say, because even at that age, you knew that liking John Logan was a beautiful terrible idea.
Because he was your best friend. And you aren’t supposed to like your best friend. At least, in your head. Who are you to ruin the friendship, you know?
You remember folding it in half. Then again, then for a third time, like you were trying to make it as small as possible. Like diminishing it physically would diminish what the words on the paper meant.
You'd been looking for somewhere to put it. The trash felt too final, too much like admitting it had existed, and you were halfway on just stuffing it under your pillow when you'd found the box. Your grandmother's, handed down at the end of summer with a kiss on your forehead and the words for letters you mean to send someday. Wooden, old-smelling, with a brass latch that stuck a little if you didn't press it just right.
You'd tucked the letter in and shut the latch.
That was the beginning of it.
-
It had been a random tuesday, back in junior year of high school.
John – he had always been John to you before he became Logan – had after school hockey practice. You'd been draped over the boards for the past ten minutes, watching from the bleachers the way you always did when you had nowhere better to be, which was most days— something you'd never quite admitted to yourself until recently. Because the walk home was shorter from this direction. You had a whole catalogue of reasons, and not one of them was true.
John had been the last one off the ice.
That in itself was not unusual. John Logan was always the last one off the ice. The coach was nice enough to lend him that extra time, considering that he had always been the kid that loved hockey more than anything else.
And you would always wait in the bleachers. Sometimes on your phone, most times watching him as he skated. You count the amount of times he circled it, especially when you felt bored but didn’t have the strength to look away. Because something about him was magnetic to you. You wondered what it was, every time you stay that extra ten minutes in the rink.
Then after his usual rounds (at most, seven rounds), he looked up, and caught your gaze.
John grinned. The stupid, lopsided grin that suddenly made your heart skip. Then he skated all the way over to the boards, where you were, and leaned on them as he grinned. His helmet was tucked under his arm, hair damp at the temples, “You just got here?”
“Yep. Passed by after practice.” You tried to keep your tone as casual as possible, like the sight of him didn't make your heart skip.
“You really didn’t have to come by, you know. It’s late.”
“I wanted to.” You smiled. You didn’t say anything else as follow up. Because adding something else after that would mean that you were admitting something that you weren’t ready to admit. And you would have to explain everything else that you didn’t name yet.
He looked at you for a second, searching for something in your face, and then he looked down and smiled again. It was softer this time, private, the one that felt like it wasn't for anyone else, the one he wore when something surprised him in a way he found pleasant, and tilted his head.
"Sure. Thanks for that.”
You just shrugged.
John nods over at the locker rooms. “Give me ten minutes. I’ll get you hot chocolate at the cafe nearby.”
You huffed, lips curling in amusement. “There? Really? Last time we went there, you said you didn't like the hot chocolate they made.”
John just grinned at you. “Yeah. But you like it.”
He skated away after that. Like those words didn’t make you freeze, your eyes trailing after him, heart stuttering and your brain finally naming that warmth that spread on your cheeks.
And that was it. That was the whole thing. That was the moment that broke you open.
You'd gone home that day and picked up the closest paper and pen, and the words just started coming, because they didn't have anywhere else to go. You wrote about how his smile was the most disarming thing he could have. You wrote about the way he'd leaned on the boards and looked at you like looking at you was just a natural extension of breathing. You wrote about how his curls fell perfectly on his face.
You wrote about how the hot chocolate from the machine in the convenience store nearby had been terrible, watery and too sweet for him, and even when you told him he didn't have to drink it, he'd laughed and drank it anyway and said that it was fine with all the cheerfulness of someone who genuinely didn't mind, and how that had somehow made everything worse.
You wrote, hesitantly, but filled with everything in your chest— I like him.
You folded the paper into thirds, tucked it into your grandmother's box, and pressed the brass latch shut.
You didn't open the box for three weeks after that. Not because you were over it, but because you were hoping, very determinedly, that if you didn't look at it, the feeling would dissolve on its own.
It didn't.
-
The letters accumulated the way all things do when you are trying not to notice them: gradually, and then all at once.
By the end of junior year, there were ten. By senior year of high school, fifteen.
They were not all long. Some were barely a paragraph, dashed out on notebook paper in the middle of class when something happened that you had no one to tell except him, which was the problem, because he was the person that you would usually go to about these things… so you tell the paper instead.
Junior year, you wrote about how naturally John seemed to do things for you. Carrying your bag, buying things in the cafeteria when you didn't want to get up from the bench. But at the same time, it was always the question if he liked you, or if he was being nice
You remembered I hate raisins in things. You picked them out of the muffin before you gave it to me. You've been doing that since seventh grade and I only just noticed today that it's something you do on purpose.
Jealousy would often seep into your letters, as well. Because you knew he was well liked. That John had a future of having girls that would throw themselves at him, and he would always entertain it with his smile and pretty curls and—
— but you act like I’m special, and that they don't matter. But I don't have the right to even stop them from liking you, so all I could do is watch and wish that you would instead look at me.
You kept those folded five times.
--
Senior year, anger would sometimes seep into them.
I should tell you. I should tell you that I lie in bed until 3 am wondering if anything would happen between us. I should— but you are so unfair. You act like you care, and then I'm left hanging again.
I still have your jacket. That stupid, gray jacket that you gave me. The damn gray jacket that was your favorite and you don't let anyone wear but you handed it to me when I was cold. And at the same time, you turned and smiled at Kaia like she mattered and.
I hate that I like you and I hate that it feels like you do too— but then you turn around and act like you don't.
Some were the soft, bewildered variety, written in the margins of homework you’d never turn in, about something small he'd done that shouldn't have meant as much as it did.
You know how everyone else talks over me when I'm telling a story and moves on before I'm done? You always wait. You just… wait. You wait until I'm finished, and then you respond to what I actually said, not what you were going to say next. I don't know if you know you do that. I don't know how to tell you that it matters.
When you both got into Briar University, John on a hockey scholarship, you on a Merit Scholarship— you celebrated together in the parking lot of the ice rink, his arms around you, lifting you a full two inches off the ground, and you laughed and said “John, put me down!” even if you knew that deep down, you didn’t mean any of it, wanting him to keep his arms around you longer.
You'd gone home that night and written four pages.
I keep telling myself I'm not following you. And I'm not. I worked for this, I studied late into the night and doubled my efforts whenever I would fail because I wanted Briar before you got in.
But some part of me is terrified that the reason I want it so badly is mixed up with the reason you're going, and I can't separate them cleanly, and that scares me.
What if I didn't want Briar so much as I wanted to be wherever you were going to be? What does that mean? What am I supposed to do with that?
I don't have an answer. I'm going to go to sleep. I'm going to not think about it.
I'm going to go to Briar, even if I can't solidify why I am.
You went to Briar.
You don’t address it after the long four page letter, and somewhere between orientation week and prelims, the box had gone from a strange habit to a necessity, a pressure valve that kept everything from building to critical mass.
You'd gotten good at it. At the translation of feeling into ink, at the sealing away of things that had no business existing in the open air. The box lived under your bed, behind your extra blankets and a stack of Intro to Lit anthologies you kept meaning to donate. The latch, temperamental from the start, had gotten worse with age.
You'd meant to fix it.
You kept meaning to do a lot of things.
The letters still ranged from two lines to four pages, even when you entered Freshman Year in Briar. They still kept the same amount of yearning and thoughts you would never find the courage to say, or even send to Logan– and soon after, you started signing them too.
John – or maybe Logan?
You started being called Logan after you teamed up with Tucker and the rest. So maybe I should change it up to. Adapt and change, you know.
Though it would be weird to start calling you by your last name.
– With love, and judgement.
You tried to call him Logan. He looked at you then with such offense that you back tracked and went back to calling him John. He said it made him feel better. Special, because John was a name only you could use.
You wrote another letter that night, trying to reason out the butterflies and the implications of what he meant. Because rationalizing it away makes it easier than admitting it out loud.
They kept piling up. Letter after letter.
This sucks. You remembered my coffee order even after I changed it three times in two months. I can’t blame you for how well you treat me. It’s just how you are.
I should just stop putting meaning into things, but the other part of me just wants to believe that maybe it did mean something.
UGH. John Logan you fucking suck. I hope you trip on the ice during practice.
Actually, no. That was a joke.
Maybe.
– With love.
You called the longest ones your pathetic, yearning lovergirl letters. Late-night things, written when the distance between what you felt and what you were allowed to say felt too wide to sleep across. Those ones you sometimes read back in the morning with a kind of horrified tenderness, like finding a diary from a younger self.
They were overwrought.
They were honest in ways you couldn't quite access in daylight.
John,
I've been thinking about the thing you said last week, that you don't know what you'd do without me. You said it so easily. Like it was just true, just a fact of your life, the way you'd say it's cold out or practice got cancelled.
I don't know what to do with that. I've been turning it over and over in my head trying to figure out what it means and I think the honest answer is that it means exactly what it sounds like and nothing more and I need to learn to be okay with that.
I'm working on it.
– With love.
P.S. You should stop handing me your hoodies when I get cold and letting me keep them. It messes with me and my late night 3 am delusional thoughts.
John,
You have this thing you do when you're listening to someone — you get very still. Most people, when they listen, they nod, they mm-hm, they start formulating their response and you can see the moment they stop actually hearing you. You don't do that. You just go still and you look at the person and you listen, like it costs you nothing, like you have all the time in the world. I don't think you realize you do it. I don't think you realize what it does to people.
What it does to me.
I'm going to stop writing now. Before I start turning into the 3 am yearner I was last night. Again.
— With love.
By freshman year of college, there were thirty letters.
Sophomore year is when it all cracked.
Classes started to weigh on you in a way freshman year hadn't warned you about. Rehearsals that ran until midnight, choreography notes bleeding red ink across marked-up scores, tech week for the department showcase bleeding into finals week, the constant ache in your calves and the tape on your feet that never seemed to come off in time — a dance major was not a degree that let up, and you were running harder than you ever had, barely sleeping, more often than not with Logan being the one thing keeping you sane, showing up with food you hadn't asked for and quiet company at your desk — or in the studio doorway — at midnight, watching you run the same eight counts until your body finally understood what your brain already knew.
And then there was the puck bunny thing.
You didn't have the right to say anything about it, not really. You understood why. John Logan was hot. He was charming, easy to talk to, easy to fall for — and there was always a rotating cast of girls finding excuses to linger near him after games. You watched it happen the way you'd always watched it happen, except now you were closer to it, in his dorm, at his games, in the middle of the aftermath. And you had no claim to any of it. He wasn't yours. He'd never been yours. You just got to watch, the way you always had.
So you stopped writing. You shoved the box into the dark crevice under your bed and didn't take it out again. You prayed it would stay there. You told yourself you were moving on.
Meeting Davis was almost spontaneous — a late night out at Malone's, small talk with a guy from your gen-ed class that turned into something steadier. He was easy. Uncomplicated. He didn't make your chest hurt the way John did, and for a while, that felt like a relief instead of a warning sign. The letters stayed buried. Things between you and Logan went back to what looked, on the surface, like normal. Friends. Best friends.
Because that was all it was going to be.
-
"So how are things with Davis?" Logan asked, leaning against the kitchen counter while you hunched over a marked-up piece of choreography notation, notes scattered across the counter in purple and yellow highlighter, counts and spacing diagrams bleeding into the margins. Gen ed notes scatter on top of them, but you seemed more preoccupied with the scrawls of markings for your major.
"Things are fine." You tried to keep the annoyance out of your voice, but Logan had always been perceptive, and it showed in the way his brows drew together.
"Yeah? Then why do you sound like that?"
Your pen dug a little deeper into the page. "Sound like what?"
"Like things aren't fine."
Your head snapped up, an evident frown pulling at your mouth. "It's none of your business, John."
Your voice came out sharper than you meant it to, and you winced, immediately regretting it. "Sorry. That was — sorry."
He didn't push on the apology. Just crossed his arms and softened his voice instead. "What's wrong?"
You hesitated, pen hovering over your notes, and then you let out a long groan and dropped your forehead against your textbook. "I don't want to start venting."
"Vent anyway."
"He keeps asking when I'm free. Wants to hang out constantly, and I get it, I do, but callbacks are in two weeks and I have a showcase piece I'm not off-book for yet, and I told him that, and he just —" You sat up, dragging a hand down your face. "He said it's kind of pathetic that I care this much about a theater degree. That I don’t have a future in this and that I’m only wasting my time."
Logan's jaw went tight. He would also do that when something pissed him off, and you knew him enough to know that he was also pissed off at what you said. "He said that?"
"Basically."
"That's not — " He stopped himself, exhaled through his nose, clearly working to keep his voice level. "You've wanted this since we were sixteen. You used to run your combinations for me in your driveway at eleven at night in the middle of winter because you couldn't get the phrase to feel right, and I stood there freezing my hands off holding your phone so you could film it."
That got a small, watery laugh out of you. "You always came outside, though. Even when it was that cold."
"Because it mattered to you." He said it so plainly, like it wasn't even a decision he'd had to make. "Anyone who makes you feel stupid for caring about the thing you've wanted since we were in high school doesn't get to also get your time. That's not — that's not how it should work."
You didn't have an answer for that. You just nodded at your notes, throat tight, and went back to studying, and Logan stayed leaning against the counter a while longer before he finally pushed off it and went to make you tea you hadn't asked for, the same way he always did.
-
Things ended with Davis not long after that — quietly, without a scene (an irony you did clock, even mid-breakup), the kind of ending that comes less from a single fight and more from a slow accumulation of moments where you'd chosen your scripts, your late rehearsals, your friendship with Logan, over him, and he'd finally said out loud what he'd clearly been thinking for weeks. You didn't wallow in it. It hadn't felt like losing something so much as setting something down.
Allie, your dorm neighbor across the hall, caught you in the laundry room a few days later, sorting a basket of mismatched socks.
"Wait, so you and Davis are actually done?" Allie asked, propping her hip against the dryer.
"Yeah." You shrugged, feeding a quarter into the slot. "It didn't work out." She knew about what he said, and she made the same face as you the moment you told her. She was the friend you made in one of the early collaborations your major did with hers, and she was the one who knew well how taxing it would be on your body and to have someone just brush it off? She had also pushed for you re-evaluating your whole relationship before you even talked to John about it.
"Huh." Allie studied you for a second too long. "You don't seem that broken up about it."
"I'm fine," you said, and mostly meant it, which felt strange enough that you didn't examine it too closely.
Allie didn't push, but she gave you a look on her way out that said she'd clocked something you hadn't said out loud.
Your roommate and best friend in all things best friend, Jai, was less subtle about it. She came in that night to find you cross-legged on your bed, not doing anything in particular, just sort of staring at the wall.
"Okay, what's actually going on with you?" Jai said, dropping her bag and sitting across from you. "You broke up with Davis, which you knew most of us had been telling you to, but usually break ups have the whole grieving process. And right now, you look like you're thinking about a math problem, not a breakup."
"I don't know. I think I just — I didn't care as much as I should have. The whole time. I feel bad about that." You fiddle with your fingers. “That maybe I feel this apathetic because I didn’t care as much in the beginning.”
Jai considered you for a moment, tilting her head the way she did when she was about to say something you weren't going to like. "You know what I think?”
You looked up at Jai, who nodded over at the space under your bed. “You never wrote about him.”
You blinked. "What?"
"The letters." Jai said it like it was obvious, like she'd noticed the box's absence the same way she'd notice if you'd rearranged the furniture. "You've had that thing since I've known you — you disappear into it when something's actually gotten to you. You didn't write a single letter about Davis. Not one, in like four months."
You opened your mouth to argue and found you didn't have anything to argue with.
You hadn't written about Davis. Not once. Every single letter in that box, every one you'd ever written, had one name on it, and it wasn't his.
The realization hit you like cold water.
You hadn't moved on. Not even a little.
That night you pulled the box out from under the bed — dusty, a stray cobweb clinging to one corner — wiped it down, and wrote the first letter in months. You didn't let yourself think too hard about what it meant that your hand knew exactly how to start again, like it had never really stopped.
I dated someone in hopes of getting over you– only to realize that every time I sit across from him, I imagine its you. It’s not fair on him. Or myself.
But though he did deserve the break-up… he didn’t deserve someone who is still hung over a guy she liked since high school, It’s stupid. Terribly so, but I had four months of thinking that dealing with him was much easier than dealing with the constant ache in my chest every time I see you.
Maybe it’s more stupid of me to get back to writing to you and acknowledging the constant hurt i feel.
— With love, reluctantly, again, and always.
By Junior year, the letters slowed but never stopped completely. The program was, if anything, worse than sophomore year — a full-length ensemble piece now, not just technique classes, and you were buried in rehearsal schedules and rep notes, and the only thing that made any of it bearable was Logan, constant as ever, still showing up with food, still sitting on the studio floor with you at 1 a.m. while you both pretended you weren't exhausted, still somehow always exactly where you needed him to be.
Jai, who had appointed herself the unofficial keeper of your feelings since the Davis revelation, was relentless about it.
"You have to tell him," she said one night, apropos of nothing, while you were both supposed to be doing readings for your gen ed classes. "Junior year of high school, senior year, all of freshman and now half of junior year of college. That's — I did the math, that's four years, and you're going to keep writing it down instead of just saying it?"
"It's not that simple."
"It kind of is, though."
You'd relented eventually, worn down by her insistence and your own exhaustion at holding the same shape for four years straight. You told her you'd do it. You'd tell him. Maybe at the house party that weekend, when everything felt looser and easier and less like something you had to plan for.
You didn't get the chance.
You found him in the kitchen of the party, laughing with a girl whose name you didn't know, and before you could process anything, she'd leaned in and he hadn't leaned away.
You didn't wait to see more than that. You turned around and left before he ever noticed you'd been there, walked back to your dorm in the cold without your jacket, and didn't cry, exactly — just sat on your floor and wrote until your hand cramped.
I stopped hoping tonight. I think I needed to see it to actually believe it, because apparently telling myself wasn't enough. I'm not writing this one for you to ever read. I'm writing it so I stop lying to myself about what almost happened this weekend, and didn't, and isn't going to.
I keep thinking about how badly I wanted to walk over there and how I didn't, and how that's the whole story of us, isn't it. Me, standing a few feet away, wanting, and staying exactly where I am.
You told Jai it hadn't worked out. She didn't push for details, just sat with you until you didn't feel like crying anymore.
Things between you and Logan, in the weeks after, went quiet in a way that wasn't quite a fight and wasn't quite normal either — some instinctive retreat on your end that you dressed up as being busy. Eventually it faded, the way most things did when you were both incapable of staying upset at each other for long, and by the second half of the semester you'd settled back into something that looked, from the outside, exactly like it always had. You told yourself that was enough. You tried, in your quiet, determined way, to move on.
There was one more letter before the long silence, written the week after, when he'd shown up at your studio with soup because Jai had mentioned you were sick, and stayed on the floor doing his own reading while you slept on and off on the yoga mats, and woken you gently every hour to make sure you drank water.
You have no idea what you do to me by being like this. You have no idea, or you do, and you just don't care, because it's easier to be kind to me than to explain why you keep being kind to me. Either way, I am so tired of this constant wishing and wanting. I’ll move on. I have to. Or I’ll never get out of this stupid hole.
I love you. But it hurts to keep loving you.
By the second semester of junior year, there were forty-three letters. You left it at forty-three letters.
Ever since that night, where your anger and everything about you spilled into paper and ink– you didn't slip in another letter. It stayed at forty-three.
Forty-three letters, across four years, across the span of a friendship that had become the most important thing in your life and the most carefully guarded secret you kept. Forty-three letters that were supposed to go with you to the grave while you plan out your whole moving on shtick.
That was the plan. That had always been the plan.
The plan, it turned out, was not consulted before Thursday afternoon.
—
It was a fire drill that turned out not to be a drill.
You'd been on the floor beside your bed, hunting for your phone charger, having pulled the mattress out from the wall and tangled yourself in the extra blankets you kept stuffed behind it, when the alarm split the air — sudden, violent, the particular shriek of the Briar dorms that had never once not startled you no matter how many times you'd heard it.
Your elbow caught the edge of the blanket stack. The box, which you'd shoved back into place after re-reading that last letter just the other day, teetered on the edge of the mattress frame. You grabbed for it, fingers catching the corner.
The latch — that brass, temperamental, long-suffering latch you'd always meant to fix and never had — gave.
The box opened.
Forty-three letters, across the floor of your dorm room.
You were still on the ground, staring at them, trying to process the scope of the disaster, when you heard Logan's familiar voice, your name, followed by a quick, "It's me, don't freak out —"
You looked up. Panic set in immediately, your heart dropping to your feet.
John Logan stood in the doorway, your dorm key in his hand — the one you'd given him freshman year for emergencies and never asked back — the opening words dying in his throat as he watched the letters settle.
The alarm was still going. Someone in the hall was shouting about everyone needing to get out. The late-afternoon light came through the window, gold and slanted, landing on the scattered envelopes and the stunned expression on his face and every single letter that bore, in your own handwriting, his name.
For a moment, neither of you moved.
Then you hit the floor on both knees, grabbing at the letters with both hands, stacking them against your chest with no particular order, your mind repeating the same panicked loop — collect them, get them back in the box, get them away from his line of sight.
"These are nothing — they're old, they're just — don't look at those—" You scrambled, but the panic made the ones in your hand slip loose again, and you nearly wanted to just sprawl over the envelopes and pretend they'd never fallen at all.
But John was crouching too. He wasn't reading them. He was just looking at the envelopes scattered across your floor, and you could see the exact moment he registered what they all had in common.
All of them. Every single one.
John Logan.
Your handwriting. His name. Over and over, in blue ink and black ink, and once in green, junior year of high school, when you'd been out of everything else.
His name on the front of forty-three letters you never sent.
He picked one up. He did it with the careful hands he used for things he wasn't sure about — the same way he picked up injured birds on his way to practice, the same way he handled other people's textbooks, and, twice, your feelings, on the two occasions you'd broken down in front of him and he'd gently cradled your face and helped you through the tears. Those were among the ten thousand other things written in your letters. Things you loved him for.
"These are addressed to me," he said. His voice was quiet. Unsure, tentative, like if he spoke louder he'd scare you off entirely.
"They're not —" you stammered. "I didn't send them. That's the whole —" You pressed the stack still in your hand to your sternum. "Please. Just — pretend you didn't see them."
"How many are there?"
His voice was doing something you couldn't quite pinpoint. Low. Careful. Something heavy underneath it, if you read between the lines.
You looked at him over the letters clutched to your chest, not sure what expression was on your face that made him soften even further. Maybe it was the pure panic. Maybe it was something else.
"Twenty — wait, uhm." You paused, blinked. "Thirty-four."
He lifted a brow. "You hesitated."
"...Forty-three."
The silence after that had weight. The alarm had stopped — someone had pulled it, or the drill was over, or building staff had caught up to whatever triggered it — and the sudden absence of noise made everything feel louder. Your heartbeat. His breathing. The soft scratch of the envelope he was turning over in his hands, not opening, just turning.
"How long?" he asked.
You didn't want to answer that. The answer was the part that would make it real. The part that would say out loud what had only ever existed on paper.
"Since junior year of high school," you said quietly.
You watched him absorb it.
He sat back on his heels, and you could see him doing the math. Junior year of high school. The end of the letter stack. The date on whatever letter he was holding. The span of years between then and now.
"You've been writing me letters," he said slowly, like he was learning the sentence as he spoke it, "for four years. That you never sent."
"It's not — it's a journaling thing. It's not —"
"Your journals have my name on them."
You winced and closed your eyes. "Yes."
"Why didn't you send them?"
You opened your eyes. He was watching you with an expression that made it very hard to think clearly, and you needed to think clearly to get through this conversation without losing something you couldn't afford to lose. Carefully, you thought. Be careful. He is your best friend and he is looking at you and you are not allowed to ruin this.
"Because I didn't want things to change," you said, which was the truest and most incomplete answer you had.
"What things?"
"Us." The word landed between you, bare, nothing around it to soften it. "The way things are. The way things have always been. I didn't — I wasn't willing to risk it. So I wrote it down instead, and I kept it, and I was going to keep it forever, and this was a mistake, Logan —"
"John." He interrupted quietly. You ignored the correction.
"— you were not supposed to see these."
"What are they?" he asked. "Just — tell me what they are. In plain English."
You looked at him. Then at the forty-three letters — the ones against your chest, the ones still sprawled on the floor, the one in his hands, the stupid brass-latched box open between you. You thought about every 2 a.m., every bleacher, every game, every borrowed hoodie you'd never given back. You thought about how long you'd been careful not to say a single thing. How much energy you'd spent on the not-saying, and how completely, catastrophically exhausted you were from it.
"They're everything," you said, "that I didn't know how to say to your face."
—
He was quiet for a long time after that.
You spent most of it looking at the floor, cataloguing the letters you could see from where you sat — the corner of the very first one, faded and ink-stained, from that Tuesday in junior year. The familiar blue pen of the one from a few months ago, the night of the game where he'd scored the tying goal in the final minute and looked up into the bleachers and found you immediately, like he'd known exactly where to look, like he always knew where to look, and you'd gone home and written four pages you didn't remember most of the next morning.
Then right by your knees was the latest letter. The one that was lengthy and full of hurt and anger and everything else that you poured out after seeing him make out with another girl– You push down the memory.
The afternoon light had shifted. It was later than you'd realized.
"I want to ask you something," Logan said, "and I need you to answer honestly."
"Okay."
"Is it —" He exhaled through his nose, tried again. You watched the struggle on his face — that particular Logan expression of someone who had something to say and was working out how to say it without saying too much or too little. You'd seen it a thousand times. You'd written about it. Letter fourteen, sophomore year of high school. The way he gets quiet before he says something he means.
"Is it the same thing I think it is?"
"Probably," you said, to the floor. "Unless you think it's a grocery list, in which case, no."
He made a sound that might have been a laugh — hoarse, surprised out of him.
"You've liked me," he said, still careful, "since junior year."
"Yes."
"And you didn't say anything because you didn't want to lose the friendship."
"Yes."
"And you wrote — forty-three letters. Instead."
"I was going to say forty-three seemed excessive, but honestly, given the timeline, I think it's fairly restrained."
"Hey." His voice changed. That made you look at him. He was watching you with something so open on his face it hit you square in the sternum. "Don't do that. Don't make it a joke right now."
You swallowed. "Sorry."
"Don't be sorry either." He set the letter down between you, gently, the way he set down things he didn't want to damage, and ran a hand through his hair — the thing he did when he was thinking hard, when something had knocked him somewhere he hadn't planned to go. "I just need a second."
You gave him the second.
Outside, someone on the quad was playing music, drifting up through your open window without any particular hurry. Late afternoon light cut across the room at the angle it only ever hit in March — long and gold and slanted, the kind that made everything look like it was happening in the last good hour of something. The last hour before whatever came next.
He abruptly brings up Davis. "What about Davis?"
Your brows furrow. "What about him?"
"You dated him last year."
You hesitate. "It was a half-hearted attempt to try and get over you."
"Did it work?"
You deadpan. "Well, I broke up with him, didn't I?"
John laughs through his nose. "Yeah. Yeah that makes sense."
Another beat passes, quieter this time, before he asks if you know why he's shown up to every single one of your performances since freshman year. Not just the winter and spring showcases. The studio showings nobody came to, the ten-minute improvisation pieces you took for the sake of getting better, performed to an audience of six, the Tuesday afternoon rehearsal run-throughs that overlapped with his lift block, when he'd shown up, hair damp, sitting cross-legged in the back corner of the studio so he could leave before anyone noticed a hockey player watching a modern dance rehearsal like it was the only thing happening in the building.
"That's practice, though," you say. "You're always busy."
"Not always." He says it like it's nothing, like it was never a real sacrifice, just a matter of arranging things around each other the way you'd both always done. "I never missed a lift block or a mandatory practice for it, if that's what you're asking. Coach would've had my head, and there goes the scholarship. I'm not that much of an idiot."
"So how—"
"I just used the time I actually had. Free blocks. The hour after morning skate before class. You'd be in Studio B until midnight running the same eight counts over and over, and I'd come sit in the corner with a granola bar and my laundry, because doing laundry at the machines by the dance building was somehow always more urgent than doing it in my own dorm."
You protest anyway, because your brain is still catching up, still trying to file this under good friend the way you have filed every other thing he's ever done for four years running. "You're just — that's just you being supportive. You did that for Summer-"
"I went to Summer's event once, and that was because Dean wanted us to. I have sat through you running the same eight counts eleven times in a row at eleven p.m. on a Tuesday because you couldn't get the turn right, and I have watched you mark a whole solo with a busted ankle because you didn't want to fall behind, and I still came."
"That was one time."
"I know. I counted the limps."
That gets you. Something in your chest cracks open a little wider.
He tells you about the incidents, then — the small things you never clocked because you were always mid-combination or too deep in your own head to notice him in the doorway, or slumped against the wall outside the studio with his bag still packed from practice. The night your partner dropped you a beat early in a lift and you both recovered it so smoothly the audience never noticed, and how he'd told Tucker after, unprompted, that he'd never seen anyone save a mistake like that mid-air, like it mattered to him the way his own game footage mattered.
The way he'd show up straight from morning skate, hair still wet, to walk you back to your dorm after a late rehearsal because he didn't like the idea of you crossing the quad alone at midnight, ice pack pressed to your shin, making conversation about nothing in particular just so you wouldn't have to walk in silence. The stretch of a week during tech for the fall showcase, when you barely left the studio, and he started just bringing his own homework to do on the floor during your five-minute breaks, so you'd have someone there without either of you having to say why that mattered.
"You did that the whole week," you say slowly.
"I did that the whole week."
"You never told me you had a physics midterm that same week."
"Didn't want you to feel bad about it." He shrugs, like this is a reasonable thing to have kept from you for two years. "It wasn't your fault. I wanted to be there."
You're quiet for a second, turning that over, and something about the quiet must give you away, because he tilts his head at you. "What?"
"Nothing."
"You've got a face on. That's not nothing."
"It's just—" You stop. Start again. "If you wanted to be there that badly. If you were doing all of that. Then what was with the girls?"
He blinks. "What girls?"
"You know what girls, Logan." Your voice comes out sharper than you mean it to, two years of swallowed irritation finally finding a door. "The ones after games. Hanging off the boards. The ones who got to walk up to you, because they didn't have some — some rule in their head about not ruining anything."
"That's what this is about?"
"I'm asking."
He drags a hand down his face, and for the first time all night, he looks ashamed instead of careful. "Those weren't anything," he says. "You know that, right? They were never anything."
"They looked like something."
Logan lets out a hoarse laugh — short, not really about anything funny. It's the sound of a person getting cornered by their own bad decisions. "Yeah," he says. "I bet they did."
There's something almost shameful in the way his jaw works before he goes on.
"They were a distraction." He says it plainly, no dressing it up. "You didn't — I thought you didn't feel the same way. I thought I was the only one carrying this, and I didn't know what to do with that, so I did the dumbest possible thing, which was try to feel something for anyone else so I'd stop feeling this much for you. It never worked. Not once. I always ended up back at your door with food you didn't ask for, like an idiot."
"I did care," you say, and it comes out smaller than you mean it to, four years of carefulness still clinging to your voice even now. "I thought you didn't."
"I know that now."
You stare at each other for a second, and it lands on both of you at once — the sheer, staggering waste of it. Four years of two people orbiting the same unspoken thing, each one certain the other didn't want it, each one building elaborate, private monuments to a feeling neither of you would say out loud. You almost want to laugh. You almost want to be furious. Mostly you just want to sit in the wreckage of it with him and not move for a while.
That's when he tells you about the texts.
"There's something you should probably know, since, well– I just accidentally saw your very personal letters." he says, and something in his voice makes you go still before he even finishes the thought. "I've been deleting texts to you since October of junior year."
"What texts?" you said.
"The ones I wasn't going to send." A muscle in his jaw moved. "Different medium. Same problem."
You stared at him.
"You," you said carefully, "have also been —"
"Yeah."
"Since —"
"Junior year." He kept his eyes on you. "You did that solo — the contemporary piece, the one set to that stripped-down piano track, for the fall showcase. I only went because you asked me to come, and also promised to buy me free snacks right after. So I came. I sat in the back row not expecting to care, and then the lights came up on you and you just — you weren't you anymore, you were something else entirely, and I remember thinking, very clearly, that I had never seen anything move like that. Not the piece. You. I didn't say anything to anyone. I definitely didn't say anything to you. I just knew, sitting in that folding chair, that something in me had rearranged itself and it wasn't going back." He stopped. Shook his head. "I thought you knew, later, that something had shifted for me. I thought it was obvious. I thought you didn't feel the same way, and I figured I could live with that — be your friend, be fine. And I was mostly fine. I was fine until you and Davis started whatever that was, and I wasn't fine anymore, and that's when I knew I was a lost cause."
"There was nothing with Davis," you said. "It was just — a gen-ed class, and I thought it was something—" The words died on your tongue.
"I know that now."
"John." Something enormous was rising in your chest — too big for any letter, too loud for that box. "We've been — we've both been —"
"Catastrophically stupid," he said, with a short, helpless laugh. "Yeah. I'm aware."
"Four years."
"I know."
"I have forty-three letters —"
"I know, I can see them —"
You laughed, and it came out slightly broken, and he laughed too, and for a moment it was just that — the two of you on your dorm room floor, surrounded by four years of everything you hadn't said, laughing at the sheer, impossible absurdity of it. At how close you'd been the whole time. At how completely you'd managed to miss each other while never once being apart.
Then the laughter faded.
He was looking at you. The gold light had shifted, fallen across him, and he looked the way he always looked when he was done thinking and had arrived somewhere decided. You knew that look. You'd written about it. Letter twenty-one. The way he looks when he's made up his mind about something and nothing in the world is going to unmake it.
"What do we do now?" you asked.
John reached out slowly, giving you every chance to move away if you wanted to. He tucked a loose strand of hair back from your face, hand staying at your jaw, careful. His thumb traced, barely, along your cheekbone.
"I have a practice slot tomorrow morning," he said. "Early. Six a.m., the rink's usually empty." He paused. "You could come. Sit in the bleachers, like you always do. And after — I could buy you hot chocolate. And maybe this time I could actually say what I haven't been saying for four years."
You looked at him. His hand was warm at your jaw, and the room smelled like old paper and cedar and whatever that specific thing was that his jacket always smelled like, because of course he was wearing the jacket you knew best.
"And we're doing it at the rink," you said slowly, "because —"
"Because that's where it started," he said, shrugging. "It should start there too. Not the ratty ice rink back home, but it still counts."
The feeling in your chest crested, enormous and warm, nothing like the quiet ache you'd carried for four years. That ache had been private and careful, kept deliberately small so it wouldn't take up too much room, wouldn't crowd out anything else. This was not small. This was taking up every room you had. This was refusing, loudly and completely, to fit inside a box.
"Okay," you said.
He smiled — the full one, the private one, the one that had always felt like it was only for you. Maybe it had been. Maybe you'd just been too busy cataloguing reasons not to believe it.
"Okay," he echoed.
He let go of your jaw slowly, like he was in no hurry about it, then stood and started helping you gather the letters off the floor, stacking them with surprising care, not reading them, just collecting. You watched him do it and didn't say anything. There was something strange and sweet about watching his hands handle these things that had existed in secret for so long.
He asked a few questions. Simple ones. The things you could admit to. Small rants you'd written. How you didn't read back on some of them, out of fear of what you'd find. You mentioned the one where you'd hoped he tripped, and how the very next day, he actually had.
Logan laughed at that — bright, curls settling around his face. You had to stop yourself from staring too long.
"Which one's your favorite?" he asked, holding the stack against his chest the way you'd been holding it minutes ago.
"I'm not telling you that."
"Come on."
"Absolutely not."
"I'll find it eventually."
"That sounds like a threat."
"It's a promise." He looked entirely too pleased with himself. "I have forty-three letters and the rest of my life. I'll get there."
When all the letters were back in the box, he set it on your desk and looked at it for a moment.
"You're going to have to let me read them eventually," he said.
"I really am not."
"The 'I hope you trip' one. I want to find that one."
"Absolutely not."
"I'm going to find it."
"Get out of my room, Logan."
"I thought I said you could call me John?"
You rolled your eyes. "I'm adapting to Briar. You're either Logan or John. Now get out of my room."
He grinned, the lopsided, lethal one, and you felt it the same way you always had — right in the sternum, like a bell being struck — and went, unhurried, toward the door.
"Six a.m.," he said from the doorway.
"Six a.m.," you agreed.
He left.
You stood in your room surrounded by the afterimage of all of it, then sat on the edge of your bed and put your face in your hands, staying that way for a while — not crying exactly, just feeling the full, enormous weight of something shifting into a new configuration, four years of tectonic plates rearranging themselves into something that finally made sense.
After a while, you got up, took the box from the desk, and put it back under your bed.
You set your alarm for five-thirty.
Hockey rinks always smelled and looked the same, no matter where you would go. It would always smell like ice and rubber and something underneath, though it didn't have the same ratty smell from the old hockey rink at home.
You climbed to your usual spot in the bleachers. Third row, center. You'd been sitting here since the first time you ever came to watch him practice. Even when you moved closer to Briar, you always gravitated to the same spot, before you'd known it was your spot, before you'd known you'd keep coming back. You'd just sat where the sight line was clear and the draft from the ventilation didn't hit as hard. You'd sat there every time after that, out of habit, out of something you'd told yourself was just habit.
John stepped onto the ice.
He didn't look up at the bleachers right away. That wasn't unusual. He rarely did, at first. He had a routine — you knew the routine, had watched it enough times to know it by heart — where he'd take a lap or two before he settled into the actual work of it, like he was reacquainting himself with the ice, reminding himself of the particular quality of this rink on this morning. Then he'd pick up speed. Then he'd look like himself.
You watched him. You were done pretending you weren't.
He skated the way he always skated — like it required nothing, like it was breathing, like the rink was just another place he lived and the ice was simply the ground beneath him. He did a lap, and then another, and then he started working through something, crossovers into a long sweep across the length of the rink, and you watched the way he held his weight, the clean economy of every movement, and felt the thing you always felt watching him, which you'd spent four years filing under aesthetic appreciation, nothing more, and which you were now allowed to call by its actual name.
After a while he came to the boards and looked up at you.
"You're in your spot," he said.
"I'm always in my spot."
"I know." He leaned on the boards, the same way he had the first time, junior year, helmet under his arm, and he looked up at you with that look you were done misreading. "I skate better when you're here. I don't know if you knew that."
"I didn't."
"I didn't either, for a while. I thought it was just that the bleachers were less empty, which helps. But then I figured out it was specifically you." He said it matter-of-factly, like it was just a thing that was true. Like it was weather. Like it was temperature. "Third row, center. Every time."
"You knew the seat."
"I always knew the seat."
You looked at him, and the rink was cold, and the light was just beginning to come in through the high windows, pale and early and new, and forty-three unsent letters sat in a box under your bed, and standing at the boards in front of you — in his skates, in his gear, on his ice — was the person they were all addressed to.
With a smile, you got up and headed down from your seat. The second you stopped in front of Logan, the only thing separating you being the rink’s wall, you smiled wider. "Hi," you said.
"Hi," he said back.
He reached for you, and you reached back, and when his hand found yours over the boards it was easy, the easiest thing, like something that had been waiting a long time to finally happen and was not going to make a fuss about it now that it had. His hand was cold from the ice, and you held it anyway, and neither of you said anything for a moment, because there wasn't anything that needed saying.
You got the hot chocolate from the machine in the convenience store. Different store, same franchise. It was, as promised, terrible. Watery and too sweet, dispensed in a thin paper cup that was already going soggy at the base.
He handed it to you and watched you take a sip and pull a face.
"Still bad," you reported. “It’s surprising how consistent the store is.”
"Still bad," he agreed, leaning against the wall, holding his own cup, looking entirely unbothered. He'd never minded the terrible hot chocolate. You'd written about that once. Letter seven. The way you seem genuinely content with things that aren't good. Like the contentment is the point, not the quality of the thing.
"You said you were going to say what you hadn't said."
"I was getting to it."
"It's been twenty minutes."
"I was working up to it," he said, and there was something almost shy in the way he said it, which was not a quality you'd had many opportunities to observe in him, and which was doing things to you that you weren't prepared for. "I've been working up to it for four years, give me another thirty seconds."
You giggled, but you still waited.
He looked at his terrible hot chocolate. Then he looked at you.
"I love you," he said. "I've loved you since I saw you performing on stage and I thought — I thought, that's her. That's the person. And I didn't say anything because you didn't, and I figured I was misreading it, and I kept not saying anything for four years and I had a phone full of deleted texts and a very long mental list of things I was not going to tell you, and then yesterday I walked into your room and saw my name on forty-three envelopes on your floor and I thought—" He stopped. Something moved across his face, somewhere between wrecked and grateful. "I thought: we are both absolute idiots."
"We really are," you said.
"We really are." He pushed off the wall and set his cup down on the machine and took yours out of your hands and set it next to his, and then he looked at you the way he had yesterday, with that decided, arrived quality, and said, "I'm done not saying it. I love you. Okay? I just — I love you."
You looked at him. This person you'd known since before you knew what it meant to know someone. This person who remembered your coffee order and picked raisins out of muffins and drove forty minutes in the rain and kept nine of your hoodies and showed up to every meet in every kind of weather and had, apparently, been composing and deleting texts to you since junior year of high school.
"I love you," you said. "I have loved you for a very long time."
He exhaled, slow, like something he'd been holding finally let go, and then he smiled — the private one, the full one, the one that had always felt like it was only for you because, you understood now, it had always only been for you — and said, "Yeah. We're definitely idiots."
"Monumental idiots."
"Historically unprecedented idiots."
"There should be a word for it."
"There probably is, in some language we don't speak." He reached out, and you let him pull you in, and he held you the way he'd held you before, the same arms, the same warmth, but with something different in it now, something that had been allowed to be what it was instead of being carefully kept at a certain size. You pressed your face against his shoulder. His chin dropped to the top of your head.
"We wasted four years," you said into his shoulder.
"Nah." His voice rumbled against your ear. "We just took the long way."
You thought about that. About the letters, and the bleachers, and the hot chocolate, and the forty-minute drives in rain, the deleted texts, and the space between what you feel and what you're brave enough to say. About all the things that had happened in the gap.
"The long way," you agreed.
Outside the rink, the morning was getting started. Inside, it smelled like ice and rubber and cedar and something new.
—
The forty-fourth letter was the last one. Written that night, because some habits deserve a proper ending.
John. Logan. Or whatever name you want to be called–
The hot chocolate was terrible. The one near our old school was better (I’m lying, but you know that), but it’s not like you would drive an hour just to get there. Still, you know hot chocolate is always terrible from that machine. You bought it anyway because I said I wanted it and you cannot help yourself.
I've been writing these since high school. I don't think I'm going to write another one. Not because I have nothing left to say — I think I'm going to have a lot to say, for a very long time — but because I'm going to say it to you from now on.
Out loud. In real time. Without a box to put it in afterward.
You told me today that you skate better when I'm in the stands. I wanted you to know that I run better when you're at the end of the finish line. I have never told you that. I'm telling you now.
I love you. I have loved you since a Tuesday in junior year in High school when you offered me bad hot chocolate on an empty rink and smiled at me like I was someone worth skating across the ice for.I loved you through every year after that, through every letter I wrote and sealed and tucked away, through every moment I talked myself out of saying something because I was afraid of what it would cost.
It turns out it didn't cost anything. It turns out you were over there deleting texts.
We were both such idiots. Though I guess it does make sense with our track record.
I'm done keeping it in a box, and I'll say it to your face from now on, and I'm sorry it took me four years and a broken latch and forty-three embarrassing letters, some of which you are never going to read, to get here. But I'm here. And so are you.
That's enough. That's more than enough.
— With love.
'you're the girl in garretts lockscreen' ! garrett graham x childhoodbestfriend!reader
summary .ᐟ you finally meet visit the off campus house and meet garrett's friends, but not in the way either of you imagined.
notes .ᐟ maybe cringe??? idk...
"You're not waiting outside. End of"
His words were stern as he said them, not harsh, no, never harsh when it came to you, but his tone gave no room for discussion.
"G, Please. I'll be fine" You cringed at the slight whine that echoed through your words, pleading to your best friend in front of you
"No"
"Garrett!"
"No."
The lock to the off campus house clicked as his words echoed in your ears, Garrett's hand tight on the doorknob as he pushed it open. The warmth of his shared house flowed out, contrasting sharply with the biting cold of the winter weather outside.
"Get in, it's fucking freezing. You're gonna catch a cold" He sighed, tilting his head towards the door as he turned to you.
He rolled his eyes as you made no effort to move, as stubborn as you had been since elementary school. Garrett watched as you tried your best not to shiver, the cold nipping at your cheeks.
His hand swiftly came down around you, softly resting on the small of your back as he basically pushed you inside.
You hated how much you liked the warmth of the house, the multiple layers of clothes you had thrown on yourself like armour now seeming unnecessary.
Scanning the inside of the house, your eyes drifted slowly over the entrance. It looked exactly like you had imagined. Red solo cups and beer bottles resting on the coffee table, pillows haphazardly strewn across the sofa, a led lit air hockey table standing out against the dark wood floors resting next to a keg.
Your eyes almost rolled out of your head at how predictable it was.
"Happy now?" Garrett teased, closing the door behind him and placing his keys down. "No" You quipped back almost instantly
When you woke up this morning, the last place you pictured yourself was standing in the living room of the house Garrett shared with his 3 friends.
Garrett had waited for you outside your mid-day class, pulling you sideways the second you walked out of the lecture hall like some stalker waiting for his victim.
You let out a gasp as he pulled you into the corner of the hallway, grinning down at you like he hadn't just manhandled you into him. You listened to him drone on and on about hockey and practice, clearly where he had just come from, his dark curls still damp against his forehead as they swayed and his skin sticky from sweat.
It was only when you were dragged up the steps of his house that you realised grabbing lunch apparently meant needing to go home first. A detail Garrett had somehow failed to mention.
Despite being on campus for a few weeks now, you hadn't yet payed a visit to his humble abode. But that was not due to lack of him trying.
Ever since arriving at Briar, he badgered you constantly about coming over to his place, wanting to be in the solace of his room alone with you since you had banned him from staying in your dorm out of worry of making your freshly new roommate uncomfortable with his presence.
It's not that you didn't want to be with Garrett. Never that.
But you would be lying if you said you weren't slightly intimidated by the prospect of meeting his fellow hockey player roomates.
You wouldn't say you were a shy girl, per say, but you had heard whispers around campus of Garrett and his friends constantly since the semester started.
Whispers that clearly indicated that they were far, far from nobodies.
If you hadn't known Garrett since you were practically in diapers, you'd probably be scared shitless of him the most out of all of them.
Garrett didn't mean to trick you into coming over to his house that day. Well, at least not really.
He did truthfully want to grab lunch with you. Just after he showered, changed, and hopefully coaxed you into napping with him.
"Baby, they aren't home. Won't be for a while, don't worry." Garrett whispered into your ear, his minty breath warm against your neck as he dipped his head down behind you. Referencing to the fact his roomates were out discussing plays for their next hockey game with the new rookies, a meetup Garrett was glad he missed out on the planning of.
They may have still asked him to come. Multiple times. He may have declined. Multiple times.
"I'm not worried" You replied, almost too quickly.
He raised his eyebrows at your comment, clearly as convinced as you were by your own words. Which wasn't at all.
"Cmon" Garrett said as he began grabbing your hand before leading towards the staircase.
If you weren't so distracted looking around at his house and dissecting every detail of your new environment, you'd have asked where he was taking you.
However, your non-existent question was answered as he led you through a hallway and into a room.
His room.
You could tell as soon as you entered.
It had Garrett Graham written all over it. Well, literally. The street sign detailed with his name being the same one you had seen in his room from home.
It smelled like him too. Cologne, aftershave and mint.
Of course, it was clean. Bed made perfectly, desk neat, light filtering through his mahogany brown blinds.
A white picture frame stood out against the cool greys and browns hues of his decor, hand painted hearts littering the frame. You remember painting that him years ago, before he left for college. Assuming he was going to fill it with a photo of his friends or high school hockey team, you left the insert blank.
But instead, the picture that lay inside the glass, was you.
You remember the day it was taken. Garrett was fiddling around with your digital camera, promising he wasn't going to break it. He turned the camera around so it was facing the both of you, reaching his hands out and snapping a selfie of you both as he kissed you on the cheek.
As you looked around the room, the door clicked behind you, Garrett immediately taking the chance to wrap his hands around your waist while he stood behind you.
You immediately pulled away, looking back at him with mock disgust.
"You're sweaty" You declared, regarding the fact he had just came back from hockey practice.
"You can't even feel me!" He exclaimed, gesturing to the multitude of layers you had on due to the cold. "Yeah, but i can smell you" You quipped, even though he somehow didn't smell as bad as he should from skating around in a rink all day.
"Ok, rude. I'm gonna go shower then. Happy?" Garrett asked, sarcastic in his tone as he shrugged off his hoodie.
"No, you said you just needed to grab something quickly before we get lunch" You accused, watching as he walked over to his dresser.
"Well, you've made me insecure now" He stated, turning around to look back at you.
"No i haven't. You are never insecure."
"You're right. I'm not" Your breath hitched as he pulled his black shirt over his head, leaving him shirtless a few feet away from you, a bright grin on his face.
It wasn't the first time you had seen Garrett shirtless. Probably not even the hundredth. But it never didn't make you feel giddy inside, especially since his skin was glistening as the fractured light shone into his room.
"Now, can you stop standing there like a deer in the headlights and sit down or something" He joked, the fact that you were still standing right in front of his door reminding you that you hadn't moved since you had entered.
Suddenly, it dawned on you.
"You planned this whole thing didn't you? You didn't need to just grab something, did you?" You accused, wagging your finger in his face as you approached him.
His face then shifted to one struck with mock guilt, teasing. "I'm guilty. Take me away officer. Make it quick, please." Reaching his hands up as if he were about to get handcuffed.
"You're not funny," You replied
"I'm pretty funny"
You rolled your eyes as you made your way to his bed, sitting down on the soft comforter. "Hurry up" You said, placing your book bag onto his floor.
"What, don't wanna join me?" Garrett asked, only him knowing he meant the idea of you showering with him as a little more than a joke.
You ignored his question, facepalming as you groaned.
You heard him laugh across the room, his footsteps echoing towards his bed where you were sat. Your eyes raised, watching Garrett as he approached, clad only in his grey sweatpants.
"I'll be just a minute, bathroom is down the hall. Call out if you need me" You nodded softly at him, his constant need to make sure you're okay apparent in his sincere words.
He gleamed at your nod, reaching down to hold the back of your head softly as he kissed you on the forehead. "Atta girl"
You really tried not to watch him walk away. But the phrase often muttered by your roommate 'hate to see him go, love to watch him leave' echoed annoyingly in your head
The prominent muscles of his back rippled as he reached for the doorknob, his gold chain gleaming as it rested above his tattoo, every movement creating a tidal wave of muscle and strength.
You released a breath you didn't know you were holding as you heard the door close after he had left the room.
The heat from what you were hoping was the warmth of his room and not that interaction began creeping up your spine, causing you to pull off all the layers it took until you were left only in your long sleeve shirt.
As you stood alone in his room, you felt yourself drift over to the photo frame you had been staring at earlier. A smile creeping onto your face before you could register it as you slowly picked up the frame.
You can't believe he had a photo of you framed in his room, standing proudly on his bedside table.
It was only then you began to notice the small reminders of you in his bedroom. A note you had wrote him in middle school you had completely forgotten about tacked onto his wall, a candle sat on his dresser that he always told you smelled just like your perfume, the soft pink blanket you had left in his car months ago thrown over the back of his chair.
The soft chirping of birds outside his window sang in your ears, your head turning to watch as they danced through the branches of the trees. You found yourself smiling at their actions, flying in the air joyful and utterly free.
"G, I'm gonna fuckin kill you for bailing. Those rookies are fucking insufferab-"
Your neck almost broke by how swiftly you turned it, shock and genuine horror struck across your features.
Stood in Garrett's door was a tall blonde, his jaw slack to the floor and looking just as shocked as you were. Your eyes swiftly scanned his frame, a Briar hockey hoodie resting on his body and his hand outstretched to the door knob he had just rattled open.
"Sorry, sorry! Fuck." The boy cursed, his face now painted with guilt as he cringed at himself.
You nearly jumped as he went to slam the door closed, interrupting his movements. "No, no. It's ok. I'm just waiting for Garrett to shower" You explained, walking a few feet closer to the door.
The boy's eyebrows raised at your words, before a look of recognition struck wildly through his face.
"You're her!" He practically shouted, removing his hand from the doorknob to point at you.
You almost jumped at the volume of his voice, confusion washing through you. "Her?" You quizzed
"Yes! You're the girl in Garrett's lockscreen!" He started, what seemed to be excitement lighting up his expression, moving his finger to point to the picture frame on Garrett's bedside table "And the photo, You're her!"
Before you could even conjure up anytime of response to his words, another voice cut through the air
"Dean, bro, what the fuck are you screaming about?" Another boy said, showing up behind the blonde.
"Oh my god" The brunette exclaimed, clearly recognising you as well the second his eyes drifted to you, now standing feeling embarrassingly awkward as you stood in Garrett's room.
"Garrett talks about you all the fucking time, since we've known him. I cannot believe we are finally meeting you" The blonde said, tumbling into the room and wrapping you into a hug, eliciting a laugh from you that finally made you feel the tiniest bit less horrified by the situation.
"Tucker! Bro! Come here!" The brunette behind the boy shouted, smiling as he followed behind the blonde into the room.
At that same moment, steam rolled out from the bathroom door, Garrett's curls tight and dark from the water as he ran his hand through his hair, his body now clad in a dark grey teeshirt and black sweatpants.
Due to the sound of the water cascading from the shower head, the shouts of his roommates hadn't cut echoed through the noise, leaving him completely oblivious to the scene unravelling in his own bedroom.
So, he was utterly horrified as he watched the doorframe of his room now swung completely open and Dean's voiced echoing through the hallway from his bedroom.
"What the fuck are you doing?"
Garrett's voice sliced sharply through the air, his eyes set on the fact that Dean had his arms wrapped tightly around you, fucking hugging you.
Dean jumped as he heard Garrett's voice, turning to find him standing in the door of his room.
"Uh, hugging my new best-friend?" Dean said as if it were obvious, his voice contradicted by the fact he was slowly backing away from you at the sight of his friend's less than happy expression.
As if you weren't overstimulated enough, steps began bounding into down the hallway, gradually getting louder as they reached Garrett's room.
"What! What did i miss?" Tucker exclaimed, out of breath from running up the stairs from the kitchen with a deep fear of fomo.
His face mimicked Dean's exact expression as he noticed you, his jaw dropping in the same shocked way before he shouted
"You're her!"
you do not yield 🗡️ @r0mantasywh0re - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
