Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

GARRET

There are exactly three things in this world that can make me feel genuinely guilty.

The first is thinking about my mother. The second is letting down my team on the ice. And the third — the one I never saw coming, the one currently standing in the middle of the Briar Hawks men's locker room in her camel coat and her green eyes blazing like two furious emeralds — is Hannah Wells.

Let me back up.

We beat Eastwood tonight. Final score, 4-1, and I scored two of those goals. By all accounts, this should be the best night of my week. My teammates are loud and loose around me, towels snapping, someone's terrible playlist bleeding through a cracked phone speaker, steam still curling out of the shower stalls. The locker room smells exactly like what it is — sweat and cheap body wash, that particular brand of masculine chaos that comes after a win. Logan's doing his post-game ritual of eating a granola bar he keeps in his bag like some kind of animal. Tucker's already on his phone. Dean is Dean, which means he's talking to his own reflection in the mirror and telling it it looks good.

I should be happy.

I'm not happy.

I've been not happy since I found out two hours before puck drop that Hannah had a date tonight.

A fucking date.

Hannah. My Hannah. Wells. The girl who has been my best friend since we were seven years old and she pushed me into a mud puddle because I told her the Spice Girls were "okay." The girl whose mother is the closest thing I have to a living parent. The girl who sat with me in a hospital waiting room when I was fiveteen and held my hand and didn't say anything because she knew I didn't need words, I just needed her to be there.

That Hannah had a date.

And she didn't tell me.

She specifically, deliberately, strategically did not tell me. She just... didn't show up to my game. For the first time in four years, her seat in section C was empty. I know because I looked. I always look. It's embarrassing how much I look, but I do it anyway — first thing after warmups, eyes scanning the stands until I find the flash of her dark hair, her ridiculous hand-painted signs (last month's said GRAHAM CRACKERS in glitter letters and I pretended to hate it), her smile when our eyes meet across the ice.

Tonight, section C, row four: empty.

I scored both goals angrier than I've ever scored anything in my life.

And then, afterwards, I did something that even I can admit was — in retrospect — not my finest hour.

I texted three people on this campus who owe me favors. One of them is friends with Jake Whoever-He-Was. And I may have reaffirm — strongly, calmly, and in very plain English — that any guy on this campus who thought he was going to take Hannah Wells on a date while Garrett Graham was alive and breathing was going to want to seriously reconsider his life choices.

I did this. I’ve been doing this, actually.

I'm standing here in the shower, water hot enough to scald, not even pretending I don't know exactly how badly I've miscalculated, when the locker room door slams open with the kind of force that rattles the hinges.

I hear it before I see her. The bang of the door. The sudden hush that falls over twenty-two guys mid-celebration, the way the music seems to get quieter out of sheer instinct. I hear Tucker say "oh shit" under his breath. I hear Dean actually laugh — that startled, delighted laugh he does when something genuinely catches him off guard.

And then I hear the click of her boots on the tile floor.

Fast. Deliberate. Like a woman on a mission.

I turn off the soap in my hair. I don't move. I wait.

She comes around the corner of the shower stalls and there she is: Hannah Julie Wells, five-foot-six, dark hair damp at the temples from the cold outside, camel coat over a burgundy dress I've never seen before — nice dress, the kind she'd wear for a date — and her face is the color of a stop sign.

Her green eyes find mine through the steam like a heat-seeking missile.

I lean against the tile wall, arms crossed, water still running over my shoulders, and I do the thing I always do with Hannah when I know I'm in trouble. I smile at her sideways.

"Wellsy."

"Don't," she says. Her voice is shaking. Not sad-shaking. Angry-shaking. There's a difference with Hannah, and I've learned it over fourteen years. "Don't you 'Wellsy' me right now, Garrett."

Around us, I can feel the audience. Nobody's moving. Kowalski's frozen with a shampoo bottle in his hand. Three freshmen are standing there in their full naked glory like deer in headlights. Someone has the decency to slowly, silently turn off the music.

Hannah doesn't look at any of them. She doesn't even seem to register them. All two hundred and twenty pounds of laser focus is aimed directly at me, and I'd be lying if I said there wasn't some stupid, misfiring part of my brain that noticed — even now, even with the situation being what it is — that she looks incredible when she's furious.

She always has. That's the problem.

"You want to tell me," she starts, her voice low and controlled in the way that means it won't be controlled for long, "what exactly you said? And to who?"

I run a hand over my wet face. "Hannah—"

"Because Jake texted me forty minutes ago," she continues, and now her voice is climbing, cracking at the edges, "to cancel. To cancel, Garrett. An hour and a half into our date, he goes to the bathroom and comes back white as a ghost and says he just remembered he had a thing." She laughs, but it's hollow. Hurt. "A thing. After an hour and a half, he suddenly remembered he had a thing, and I sat there for twenty minutes waiting, and then his friend walked by our table and couldn't even look me in the eye, and I had to ask the waiter for my own check—"

Something twists in my chest. Hard.

"—and I had to walk to my car alone, Garrett. In the parking lot, at night, because the guy I was with evaporated into thin air, and the whole way home my phone was buzzing with texts from people — from people I barely know — asking if it was true that you'd put out some kind of... of warrant on any man who—"

"I didn't put out a warrant, I just—"

"Don't interrupt me."

I shut my mouth.

She takes one breath. Then two. And when she starts again, her voice has changed. It's not just anger anymore. There's something underneath it, something raw and real, and that's when I know I'm not dealing with regular Furious Hannah. I'm dealing with Hurt Hannah, and that's so much worse, because Hurt Hannah is rare, and when she shows up, it's always because someone she trusted put it there.

And tonight, that someone is me.

"You know what's really funny?" she says, and she doesn't sound like she finds it funny at all. "I have never said a single word about the girls you sleep with. Not once. Not when you were hooking up with girls from every dorm on campus sophomore year. Not when you brought someone home the night before my finals and I had to listen to it through the wall." A few people cough. She doesn't care. "I have never — not once — made any move to interfere in your life. Your choices. Your body. Because those things are yours, Garrett. They belong to you. I respected that without even thinking twice about it, because that's what you do when you love someone, when you’re friends with someone."

My throat tightens.

"But the second I decide — I decide, me, Hannah, on my own, in my own life — that I want to go on a date with someone, you blow it up. You blow it up. Before it even got started. And you know what the worst part is?" Her voice catches, just barely, just for a second. She presses on. "The worst part is that I found out the way I found out. Not from you. Not from a conversation. From the look on Jake's face when he came back from the bathroom, and from the whispers, and from—"

She stops.

She presses her lips together.

I watch her try to hold it, and I watch her fail.

"I have been invisible to men on this campus for four years," she says, and now there are tears in her voice, real ones, the kind she'd normally die before letting anyone see, and I feel my chest crack open. "Four years, Garrett. Do you know how that feels? To be the girl that everyone's friends with, that everyone likes, but nobody actually wants? To smile at the hockey game and be nice to everyone and wonder why you're the only person in your friend group who goes home alone? To question yourself what the hell is wrong with me…" Her jaw is trembling. She's not letting the tears fall. She's fighting them with everything she has. "I finally — finally — found someone who seemed interested. Who asked. And I let myself be a little excited, just a little, just for one evening, and you—"

A single tear. She catches it fast, furious at herself for it, wipes it with the back of her hand like it's an enemy.

"You took that from me," she says quietly. "And the whole campus watched it happen. And they're talking about it. They're talking about it, Garrett, people are texting me right now, and I just — I want you to hear me. I want you to actually hear this."

She straightens her shoulders.

"What you did tonight is not protection. It is control. There is a difference, and the difference matters. What you did was take a decision that belonged entirely to me — who I see, when I see them, what I do with my own time and my own heart — and you overrode it. Without asking me. Without talking to me. You went around me, to other people, and you used your name and your status to make sure that no man on this campus would come near me. Because what? Because you decided that was best? Because Garrett Graham decided, on Hannah Wells's behalf, that she didn't deserve to find out for herself whether something could work?"

Her voice is shaking now, but it's not falling apart. It's sharp. It's real.

"That is textbook patriarchal overreach. It does not matter that you love me. It does not matter that your intentions were good. The road to a woman's humiliation is paved with good intentions from men who love her. You do not get to make that call. You never got that call. I am not a child. I am not your little sister. I am not someone who needs to be managed or shielded from her own choices." A breath. "I am a twenty-one-year-old woman, and I sat alone at a restaurant table for twenty minutes waiting for a guy to come back from the bathroom, and then I drove home alone at night, and now I'm standing in a men's locker room — surrounded by penises, I'd like to point out — because I needed you to understand what you did. How it felt. Because you are my best friend, and the fact that it was you who did this to me—"

Her voice breaks.

Completely. Fully. Without warning.

She presses her fingers to her mouth. She breathes. Her eyes are bright and wet and she's staring at a point somewhere over my shoulder because she can't look at me and hold herself together at the same time.

"I deserved better from you," she says. Barely above a whisper. "That's all. That's all I wanted to say. I did really think you were my best friend."

I'm already moving before I can think about it. One step forward, water still running, hand reaching for her — Hannah, come here, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry — but she takes a step back and puts her palm flat against the air between us.

"Don't," she says softly. "Please don't."

I stop.

She turns. She walks back through the locker room the same way she came in — straight-backed, chin up, boots clicking on tile — and every single person she passes looks at the floor. The door opens. The door closes.

The silence that follows is absolute.

I stand under the still-running water for a long moment. I don't move. I stare at the place where she was standing.

Dean is the one who breaks it.

"Bro." A pause. "What the entire hell."

Logan and Tucker appear at the edge of the shower stall a moment later, both wrapped in towels, both wearing variations of the same expression: concern and resignation, with a light note of I can't believe you.

"What happened?" Logan asks.

I reach out and turn off the water. I stand there dripping. "I may have told some people on campus that any guy who went near Hannah was going to get his legs broken."

Three seconds of silence.

Tucker closes his eyes slowly.

"I didn't say legs broken," I clarify. "I just said... consequences."

"By who?" Logan demands.

I look up. "Us four."

Dean points at himself. "I'm sorry — us four? You're involving me in your crimes without consulting me?"

"Garrett," Tucker says, rubbing his forehead. "That was an absolutely catastrophic thing to do."

"I know."

"Like, historically bad," Tucker continues. "Like, put-it-in-a-textbook bad."

"I know."

"She cried," Logan says, and his voice is flat. "She actually cried. In a locker room full of guys. Do you understand how much a person has to be hurting to cry somewhere like that?"

I grab my towel off the hook. I don't answer because he's right and we both know it.

We move toward the lockers. The rest of the room slowly, carefully resumes its business, everyone very studiously pretending the last ten minutes didn't happen. I can feel the eyes anyway.

"Okay but real question," Dean says, because Dean cannot go more than thirty seconds without asking a real question. "Did you think Hannah was just going to be, like, celibate? Forever? Like a very pretty nun?"

"Dean," Tucker and Logan say simultaneously.

"I'm just asking! Because statistically—"

"There is no man good enough for her," I say. I open my locker. I stare at it. My phone has been buzzing for the last five minutes and I already know who it isn't.

"That's insane," Logan says, not unkindly. "That's a completely insane thing to believe."

"I believe it."

"Because no one's ever going to be good enough by your standards, man. That's not love, that's—" He stops himself.

I turn to look at him.

He meets my eyes and holds them, and there's something in Logan's face that goes a little careful. A little deliberate. "That's something else," he finishes. "Is that what this actually is, Graham? Wanting to protect her? Or are you—"

"I'm protecting her."

"Yeah." He doesn't push it. But he doesn't look convinced, either.

Dean has apparently been waiting for a lane to re-enter the conversation. "You know she's gonna freeze you out, right? Like, full Arctic tundra. She is exceptional at the silent treatment." He shudders with what appears to be genuine memory. "Remember when she didn't speak to Tucker for eleven days?"

Tucker points. "I don't want to talk about the eleven days."

"What did you even do during the eleven days?" Dean asks.

"I don't want to talk about it."

...

I drive past her house at eleven-fifteen.

I tell myself I'm just in the neighborhood. My neighborhood is thirty minutes from hers, so that's obviously a lie, but I tell it to myself with conviction. I pull up to the curb across the street and sit there with the engine running for about two minutes, staring at the lights on in the second floor window. Hannah's room.

Then I take out my phone and call her.

It rings four times and goes to voicemail.

Her voicemail greeting is her saying "You've reached Hannah, I'm probably ignoring you right now, so—" and I hang up.

I call again.

Voicemail.

Again.

Voicemail.

I get out of the car.

I cross the street and ring the doorbell.

Nothing.

I ring it again. Then again. Then one long one just to make a point. I'm not proud of it, but I do it. Then two more.

There's a pause, and then a very specific, very dangerous quiet before I hear footsteps coming down the stairs from inside. Not Hannah's footsteps. Too heavy. Too annoyed.

The door swings open and Allie Hayes stands there in an oversized t-shirt, her hair in a very tall bun, holding a Sour Patch Kids bag like a weapon.

Allie likes me, generally. We have a good rapport. She calls me Garrett, not Graham, which is a mark of respect. She laughs at my jokes. She once defended me in an argument I wasn't even present for.

Right now she looks like she wants to pull something off my body.

"Allie—"

"I like you," she says, pointing a Sour Patch Kid at me. "I genuinely like you. I want you to know that so you understand what I'm about to say comes from a place of affection."

"I need to talk to Hannah, if you could just—"

"If you ring this doorbell one more time," she says, with tremendous, measured clarity, "I will call the campus police. And then I will call actual police. And then I will call my police, which is my cousin Damaris, who does not mess around, and she will make things very uncomfortable for you."

"Allie—"

"Garrett." She leans on the doorframe. "You need to let her have tonight. Okay? She needs to have tonight. You will have your chance to grovel, and it will be humiliating, and she'll let you, but not tonight." Her voice softens by exactly half a degree. "You really hurt her."

I swallow. "I know."

"Good." She straightens up. "Go home."

She closes the door.

I hear the deadbolt turn.

The porch light goes off.

I stand on the dark doorstep for a moment that lasts approximately forever. The street is quiet. Somewhere down the block, a dog is barking. The night is cold and smells like dead leaves and car exhaust and the specific loneliness of standing outside a house where someone doesn't want to see you.

I put my hands in my pockets.

I walk back to my car.

I sit in it for a while, not driving.

Did you really say that to protect her? Dean's voice.

I didn't answer him at the locker room.

I still don't have an answer.

What I have is the image of Hannah's jaw trembling while she told me she'd been invisible to men for four years. Hannah, who is the most— I can't even — Hannah, who walks into a room and it reorganizes itself around her. Hannah, who is so Hannah that there isn't a person on this campus who doesn't know her name and smile when they say it. Hannah, who thinks nobody wants her. Hannah who sat alone at a restaurant table and waited for twenty minutes and then drove home in the dark.

I took that from her.

My head falls back against the seat.

God, I'm an idiot.

I drive home.

I don't sleep.

...

Two days.

Forty-eight hours. Two thousand, eight hundred and eighty minutes. I haven't counted the seconds because I'm not that far gone, but I the thought crossed my mind at approximately three in the morning on day one, which should tell something about the state I'm in.

Hannah Wells has not called me. Has not texted me. Has not replied me. Has not shown up at any of the three places she knows she could find me at any given point during a Tuesday and Wednesday. Practice, the dining hall, this house. Nothing. Radio silence so total and so deliberate that it has its own weight, its own specific gravity. It presses on my chest when I wake up and it's still there when I can't sleep.

It's been two days and I'm losing my mind.

I come downstairs at eight-fifteen on Thursday morning moving like a man who has been repeatedly hit by something slow and heavy. My joints feel wrong. My head is full of static. I'm wearing a Briar Hockey t-shirt with a hole in the collar and sweatpants I've had since sophomore year, and I have not looked in a mirror this morning because I have enough problems.

The kitchen smells like butter and something with cinnamon, which means Tucker is at the stove. Tucker stress-cooks and comfort-cooks and cooks-when-there's-nothing-else-to-do, and living with him means that the kitchen of this house smells consistently better than any kitchen has a right to smell. Under different circumstances, this would be one of my favorite things about my life. Right now I barely register it.

Logan and Dean are at the kitchen island. Logan has coffee and his phone. Dean has coffee and the expression of a man about to say something I won't enjoy.

I pull out the stool next to Dean and sit down.

Dean looks at me for a long, assessing moment. Then he puts his hand on my shoulder and pats it twice with the energy of someone placing flowers on a grave.

"You look like absolute shit," he says.

"Thank you, Dean."

"No, I mean genuinely. Like, cinematically bad. Like a before photo."

"I heard you the first time."

Logan looks up from his phone. "You hear from Hannah?"

The question lands in the center of my chest and sits there. I reach across the island and pour myself a cup of coffee. I wrap both hands around it. I stare into it for a moment like it might have answers.

"I'm giving her space," I say. The words taste like cardboard. Like something I was told to say by a responsible adult and am now repeating without conviction.

What I don't say is that giving Hannah space is the most profoundly unnatural thing I've done since I tried to learn to skateboard at fourteen and wiped out face-first on the driveway. I don't do space with Hannah. Space with Hannah is not something that has ever been part of our architecture. She is in my orbit and I am in hers, and we've never needed distance because we've never been the kind of friends who had to manage each other. We just — exist. Together. Constantly. In the specific, comfortable, unspoken way of two people who have been each other's gravity for so long they've forgotten what it's like to move without it.

She fills up the rooms of my life without trying. She fills up every room she walks into, actually, but mine specifically — she walks through the door and things are just better. Louder in the right ways and quieter in the right ways. She knows when I need to talk and she knows when I need to be left alone and she knows the difference between the face I make when I'm fine and the face I make when I'm lying about being fine, and no one else on earth has ever bothered to learn the difference.

My mother knew the difference. And then my mother was gone, and there was Hannah, standing at the funeral in a black dress that was too big for her because she'd borrowed it from her mom, and she'd held my hand for four hours without saying a single word, and I thought — even then, at the worst moment of my life — at least I still have her.

At least I still have her.

So no. I don't do space with Hannah. I do it now because she asked me to and because I owe her that much, but every hour of it feels like a slow leak in something structural.

"She's really not texting you," Logan says. It's not quite a question.

"She's really not texting me," I confirm.

Tucker turns from the stove and slides a plate of something extraordinary in front of me — some kind of French toast situation with fresh berries and actual maple syrup — and then leans his forearms on the counter and gives me the look. Tucker's look is different from Dean's look. Dean's look is entertainment with a side of sympathy. Tucker's look is just genuine concern, direct and uncomplicated, because Tucker is the most functional human being in this house and possibly in our entire zip code.

"She'll come around," he says. "Hannah doesn't do permanent. She gets mad, she processes, she forgives. That's how she works."

"I know how she works."

"Then you know you just have to wait it out." He pauses. "And not—" He points his spatula at me. "—sabotage her next date, dude."

The table goes quiet.

I take a bite of the French toast.

The French toast is genuinely exceptional. Tucker has done something with vanilla and brown butter that borders on illegal. I eat it and I say nothing and I feel three sets of eyes on the side of my face like individual spotlights.

"Garrett," Logan says slowly.

"Mm."

"That is a serious statement he just made. The not-sabotaging thing."

"I heard it."

"Are we going to address it?"

"I'm eating."

"You can eat and address it."

I set my fork down. I look up. Logan, Dean, and Tucker are all looking at me with variations of the same expression, which is the expression of three people who already know the answer to the question they're about to ask and are waiting for me to catch up.

"I just—" I stop. I pick my fork back up. I put it down again. "I can't picture it. Okay? I just — I can't picture her with someone."

Silence.

"Like, the image won't form," I continue, against my better judgment. "I try to imagine her on a date and something in my brain just — rejects it. Like an error. Like a wrong file type."

More silence.

"That is deeply strange," Dean says.

"What's strange about it?."

Tucker sighs. "You say she's like a sister to you."

"She is."

"And you won't date her."

"I — no. Obviously not."

"But also you can't let anyone else date her," Logan says. He says it evenly, with no particular judgment in his voice, which is somehow more damning than if he'd said it with all the judgment in the world. "Do you hear yourself? Do you see the thing that's happening here?"

"It's not — I just want to protect her."

"From what?" Logan presses. "From having a relationship? From being happy with someone? From sex?" He pauses. "From things you also won't give her?"

The word sex in relation to Hannah does something to the inside of my ribcage that I choose not to examine. I instead take a very large sip of coffee and focus on a neutral point in the middle distance.

"It's toxic, man," Logan says, not unkindly. "Like, I love you, but what you're describing is genuinely, technically toxic behavior and I think you know that."

I know that.

I bring my forehead down and make deliberate contact with the surface of the kitchen island. The granite is cold. It is not comforting but it is something to do with my face that isn't responding to any of the things being said to me.

"You need therapy," Dean says cheerfully.

"I do therapy," I say into the counter.

"Then your therapist needs therapy."

"Dean."

"I'm just saying! Whatever they're doing in there isn't—"

The doorbell rings.

We all look up. Logan cups his hands around his mouth from his stool and shouts toward the front of the house: "It's open!"

We hear the door.

We hear footsteps.

And then Hannah Wells walks into the kitchen, and my heart does the thing it's been doing for forty-eight hours — the lurching, off-rhythm thing, the thing I keep telling myself is just relief at seeing that she's okay, just the natural response of a person who has been worried about their closest friend — except that she walks in and the kitchen rearranges itself around her the way rooms always do, and the light is different with her in it, and I feel the specific loosening of something in my chest that has been clenched since Monday night, and I think: okay. okay. she's here.

She looks good. She always looks good, that's just Hannah's factory setting, but she looks deliberately pulled together in the way she does when she's using her exterior as armor. Dark jeans, a cream-colored knit top, her hair down in soft waves. Small gold earrings. She's put herself together carefully this morning, which tells me she knew she was coming here and she wanted to feel like herself when she did it.

She also looks tired around the eyes, which she's covered mostly but not entirely, and I feel a fresh wave of guilt about that.

"Morning," she says, to the room. Then her eyes find mine.

They hold.

I don't say anything. There's nothing to say that covers the distance between what I did and where we are right now, not in a kitchen in front of an audience. Her chin lifts by a fraction of an inch — that particular Hannah tell, the one that means she's made a decision and she's seeing it through — and then she looks away from me and toward the stairs.

"I'm going to go wait in your room," she tells me. Her voice is neutral. Controlled. "You should come up when you're ready. We're going to figure out whatever this is." She pauses. "Because this is stupid and I don't want it between us."

Then she turns and walks up the stairs, and her footsteps go down the hall, and I hear, distantly, the familiar sound of my bedroom door.

The kitchen is very quiet.

Logan raises his coffee mug in my direction. "Good luck," he says.

Dean nods gravely, like a man sending another man into battle.

Tucker points his spatula at me again. "Don't be an idiot."

"I'll try."

"Try hard."

…

My room smells like laundry detergent and hockey gear. I make a mental note to open the window at some point and then I remember Hannah is sitting in my window right now, and I abandon the thought.

She's exactly where I expected her to be. The window seat — the one with the view of the street below, the one that catches the morning light — has been her default position in this room since the first time she ever came over to this house, freshman year, when I gave her the tour and she sat down in that window and said I'd never leave this spot with so much sincerity that I didn't have the heart to tell her to move even though I'd been planning to keep my hockey bag there.

She's sitting sideways, back against the wall, feet tucked under her, looking out at the street. She's got her hands in her lap and her jaw is set in the way that means she's organized her thoughts and she's ready to say them.

I close the door behind me.

I sit on the edge of the bed.

The distance between us is maybe six feet. It's the most six feet has ever felt like in my life.

I breathe in. I breathe out.

"I'm not going to make a speech," I say. My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to. "I'm not going to try to justify any of it, because there's no justification that holds up and I know that. I knew it when I did it and I did it anyway, and the fact that it made you cry in front of half the team is something I'm going to feel terrible about for a long time." I look at my hands. "You are the most important person in my life. You have been for a long time. And I would never — consciously, willingly — do something to hurt you. But I did. And I'm sorry. Genuinely, Hannah. I'm sorry."

She's quiet for a moment. Still looking at the street.

"Why did you do it," she says. It's not really a question. It's the kind of sentence that already contains an expectation.

I pause.

The real answer is something I haven't found the shape of yet. It lives somewhere in the space between my ribs, warm and uncomfortable and entirely without a name I'm willing to say out loud. So I give her the answer that lives just next to it, the one that's true without being the whole truth.

"Because I don't think there's a guy on this campus good enough to handle you," I say. "Because you're — Hannah, you're you, and I've watched guys on this campus for years and most of them are idiots, and the idea of some idiot having access to you and taking you for granted or making you feel small or—"

"So you decided the solution was to make sure no idiot could ever try," she says.

"Yes."

"Which also meant no non-idiot could ever try."

I open my mouth. I close it.

"Which means you weren't actually protecting me from the bad ones," she continues, and now she turns from the window and looks at me, and her eyes are clear and direct and a little bit devastating in the morning light. "You were just preventing all of them. Categorically. As a class."

"I—" I exhale. "Yes. I know."

She looks at me for a long moment. Reading me the way she always does, looking for the thing underneath the thing I said, because Hannah has always been able to do that. See through the structure of what I'm presenting to whatever's underneath the scaffolding.

I wonder, for one very uncomfortable second, how much she can see.

"I just want to have sex, Garrett," she says.

I blink.

In fourteen years of friendship, across every conversation we have ever had, Hannah Wells has not said that sentence to me before. I would remember. I am certain I would remember.

"I—" My brain reboots itself slowly. "What?"

"That's it. That's the whole thing." She says it with a kind of exhausted, matter-of-fact clarity, like someone explaining a very simple concept to a person who has been unnecessarily complicating it. "I'm not looking for love. I'm not looking for a relationship. I am twenty-one years old and I have spent my entire college experience being invisible to men, and I've decided that I'm done with that. I want to have sex. Good sex, ideally. Sex with someone who isn't going to make it weird. That's the whole agenda."

Something is happening in my chest. I would describe it as a small controlled fire. I would describe it as the distinct and specific sensation of a feeling I do not have a clean name for, moving through me at a speed that is making it very hard to maintain a neutral expression.

"What the hell does that mean," I say, and my voice comes out wrong — too tight, too fast. "You just want to — what, sleep around? That's—"

"I don't want to sleep around," she says, and now there's an edge in her voice, the one that appears when she thinks I'm being deliberately obtuse. "I want to find one person, have a casual, honest, physical—"

"You don't need to say more words."

"You're the one who asked—"

"I know, I know what I did, I'm asking you to stop doing the thing—"

"Why, are you uncomfortable?"

"Hannah."

"Because you sleep with people constantly, Garrett. You have slept with—"

"Don't—"

"—a number of women that I've been too polite to quantify—"

"Please do not quantify it—"

"And nobody has said a single word about your choices," she says, and there it is — the real thing, sharp and clear and absolutely correct. "Nobody has sabotaged your dates. Nobody has warned women away from you. You get to just — do whatever you want, with whoever you want, and it's fine, it's normal, it's just Garrett being Garrett. But the second I—"

"That's different."

"How is it different."

"Because you're—" I stop.

She waits.

The sentence I almost said was because you're mine, which is accurate but explains nothing and opens seventeen doors I'm not prepared to walk through. I run a hand through my hair. I stand up, because sitting feels wrong, and then I walk to the window and then back to the bed and then I stop in the middle of the room because I don't actually know what to do with my body right now.

"Because I—" Another stop. "I can't—"

"You can't what?"

The small controlled fire in my chest is not small anymore.

"If you want sex," I hear myself say, "I can give you."

The room goes absolutely silent.

Hannah stares at me.

I stare back.

"I'm sorry," she says carefully. "What did you just say?"

"If that's what you want. If it's just about that." The words are coming out in a register I don't entirely recognize as my own voice — low, serious, the kind of voice I use when I mean something completely and there's no performance in it. "You trust me. I know you. We're not going to make it weird because we don't do weird. And I'd — I would make it good for you, Hannah. I'd make sure of it."

She blinks. Once. Twice.

"You are an idiot," she says.

"Hannah—"

"That is the single most—" She's already standing. She's already moving toward the door, and her face is doing something complicated that I can't fully read — anger, yes, but something else under it, something she's putting away fast before I can see what it is. "I don't know why I came here. I don't know what I was thinking."

"Hannah, wait—"

"Goodbye, Garrett."

She's out the door. Her footsteps go down the hall — fast, faster than usual — and I'm already moving after her because that's what I do, that's what I've always done, I don't let Hannah walk away from me without following. It's not a decision. It's physics.

I take the stairs two at a time hearing some quiet noises and I know for sure that Logan, Dean, and Tucker definitely had their ears pressed to Tucker's wall for the last ten minutes.

Hannah is already at her car. She's got her keys in her hand and she's not looking at me and I take three more steps and say her name again, and she turns.

She looks furious.

She looks — something else. Something she's covering under the furious.

"Listen. If you want sex," I say, because apparently I've decided to commit fully to the worst idea I've ever had, "I'll give you that. No feelings, no weirdness, no history in the way. Just—" I hold my hands out, absurdly, like I'm presenting a reasonable business proposition in a parking lot on a Thursday morning. "Just us. Knowing each other. Actually knowing each other. Isn't that better than some guy who's going to be weird about it?"

"We are friends," she says.

"That's literally why it works."

"That doesn't—" She makes a sound of pure frustration. "You can't just offer yourself like—"

"I'm not offering myself like anything. I'm saying I'd rather it be me than someone who doesn't know you."

"Why."

The question hangs in the air between us. Simple. Direct. Four letters.

Why.

I have a lot of answers to that question and none of them are the right one to say in a parking lot at eight-thirty in the morning. What I have — what I can give her right now, in this moment, standing in the cold with my hands open and the car keys between us — is the version that lives on the surface, the one that doesn't require me to look at anything I'm not ready to look at.

"Because I'm not going to let someone else screw this up for you," I say. "Because if it's going to be casual and honest and no strings, then at least I know I'd do it right. At least I know I'd give a damn about whether you were okay." I hold her gaze. "And we keep it exclusive. You don't see anyone else, I don't see anyone else. And it stays between us. And the second either of us wants to stop, we stop, no questions."

She's staring at me.

Her jaw is tight. Her keys are in her fist. The morning light is doing the thing it always does with her hair, finding the warm tones in the dark, and she's looking at me like she's trying to determine whether I've lost my mind or whether I'm the sanest I've ever been, and I genuinely don't know which answer is correct.

"You're serious," she says. It's not quite a question.

"I have never been more serious about anything in my life."

The silence stretches.

A car goes by on the street behind us. Somewhere in the house, I can hear Dean saying something and Tucker telling him to be quiet.

Hannah looks at me for a long, measuring moment. Something moves through her expression — complicated, layered, the kind of thing she's had practice at keeping below the surface. Then she looks away. Then back.

"You're an idiot," she says again. But her voice is different this time. Quieter. Less like a verdict.

She gets in her car.

She doesn't say yes. She doesn't say no. She just — drives away.

And I stand in the driveway in my sweatpants with the hole-collar t-shirt, watching her go, replaying the last twenty minutes on a loop, trying to figure out when exactly I stopped making rational decisions.

I can't find the moment.

I think maybe it was fourteen years ago, in a mud puddle, when a seven-year-old girl pushed me and then helped me up and then dared me to do it again.

I think maybe it was then.

The walk back to the front door is approximately fifteen steps.

I know this because I've walked it approximately eight thousand times in the two years I've lived in this house. Fifteen steps from the edge of the driveway to the front door, up two porch steps, handle, push. Simple. Automatic. A thing my body could do in complete darkness without any involvement from my brain whatsoever.

Today it feels like a walk of shame at a parade.

I already know what's waiting for me on the other side of that door. I knew before Hannah's car turned the corner. I knew, actually, the moment I heard Tucker tell Dean to be quiet from inside the house, which means they were at a window — or the window, the one in the living room that looks directly onto the driveway, the one with the curtain that doesn't fully close on the left side — for at least part of that conversation.

Probably all of it.

I open the door.

The three of them are standing in the hallway. Not sitting. Not casually positioned around the kitchen pretending to have been doing other things. Standing. In the hallway. In a loose cluster, like a receiving line, like they've been waiting for a guest of honor to arrive. Logan has his arms crossed. Tucker has a dish towel over his shoulder. Dean is eating a piece of the French toast directly with his hands and has maple syrup on his thumb.

None of them say anything.

They just look at me.

"I hate all of you," I say.

"What happened," Dean says immediately. Not a question. A demand.

"Were you at the window."

"We were absolutely at the window," Logan confirms. "The whole time. We saw everything. We need the audio."

"The curtain doesn't close all the way," Tucker adds, not even slightly apologetic. "We caught pieces. There were raised voices. Hannah's face did several things."

"Her face always does several things."

"More than usual."

I close the front door. I walk past them into the kitchen. I pull out my stool at the island and sit down and pour myself a second coffee because I have a feeling about this conversation and the feeling is that I'm going to need it.

They follow me. Of course they follow me. They arrange themselves across the island from me like a panel — Logan on the left, Tucker in the middle, Dean still eating the French toast with his hands on the right — and they wait.

I drink my coffee.

"She said she just wants to have sex," I say.

The panel reacts.

Logan's eyebrows go up. Tucker blinks twice. Dean's piece of French toast stops halfway to his mouth, suspended in midair, as his brain processes the information.

"Hannah said that," Logan says.

"Hannah said that."

"Those exact words."

"More or less those exact words, yes. The whole — she's not looking for love, she's not looking for a relationship, she just wants a casual physical situation with someone who's not going to make it weird, and apparently she's been feeling invisible to men for four years—"

"She has not been invisible," Tucker says immediately, with a firmness that surprises me. "She has been protected. By a six-foot-two crazy person who told the entire campus to back off."

I open my mouth.

I close it.

"...I did not tell the entire—"

"Garrett."

"I told some key people—"

"How long?" Logan asks. His voice is very careful. "How long have you been doing that?"

The silence that follows is answer enough.

Dean puts his French toast down. He puts it down slowly, with both hands, the way you set something down when you need your full attention for what happens next. He looks at me with an expression I have never seen on Dean's face before, which is an expression of something resembling genuine awe.

"You've been running interference on Hannah's love life," he says, "for how long exactly?"

"That's not — I wasn't running anything, I was just—"

"For how long, Garrett."

I look at my coffee. "Since sophomore year."

The kitchen is very quiet.

"Sophomore year," Logan repeats.

"It wasn't — look, there were guys who were interested in her for the wrong reasons, and I just — I mentioned to a few people that she was off-limits, it wasn't a whole—"

"You have been single-handedly cock-blocking your best friend," Dean says, with the reverence of a man encountering a natural wonder, "for two years."

"I was protecting her."

"FROM WHAT?"

"From guys!"

"She likes guys, Garrett! That's — that's the whole—"

"Not all guys are good guys, Dean—"

"You know who else isn't a good guy right now?" Dean points at me. "You. Currently. This is your villain arc."

"It was not a villain—"

"Two years," Logan says again. He sounds less amused than Dean and more like a man doing quiet math in his head. "And she never figured it out until now."

"She figured it out Monday."

"Hence the locker room," Tucker says.

"Hence the locker room."

Tucker nods slowly. He has the expression of someone putting together a puzzle they didn't know they were working on. "Okay. So she came here this morning to clear the air. You apologized. And then—" He tilts his head. "What happened after that? Because she looked — when she got to her car, she looked—"

"She looked like she was trying to decide something," Logan supplies.

"She looked like she wanted to be angrier than she actually was," Dean says, which is unexpectedly precise for Dean.

I drink my coffee. I set it down. I look at the three of them and I make the only decision available to me, which is to tell the truth, because I tell these three idiots the truth about everything eventually and the only variable is how much coffee is involved.

"I told her," I say carefully, "that if she wants a casual, no-strings physical situation... she could have that. With me."

The panel does not react.

This is because the panel has temporarily ceased to function.

Logan's mouth opens slightly. Tucker's dish towel falls off his shoulder. Dean stares at me for a full three seconds and then turns to look at the wall, then turns back, as if checking that the wall is still there and reality is still structurally sound.

"You—" Logan starts.

"I know."

"You offered yourself—"

"I know."

"To Hannah—"

"I know, Logan—"

"Sexually," Dean says, like he needs to say the word out loud to confirm it exists.

"I made a rational, well-considered—"

"When was any part of that rational?" Tucker asks. He sounds genuinely pained.

"Because—" I sit up straighter, because I did think about this, on some level, in the approximately four seconds between Hannah saying I just want to have sex and my mouth deciding to participate in the situation. "Because she trusts me. We know each other. There's no weirdness between us normally — we make the rules, we make it exclusive, I make sure she's — I make sure it's good for her, and nobody on the outside gets to be an idiot about it. It's — it's actually a very clean solution."

"It's the least clean solution I've ever heard," Tucker says.

"I know it sounds insane," I say, "but if you actually—"

"It is actually insane," Logan says. "Garrett. You understand this would change everything between you two."

"It doesn't have to."

"It absolutely has to."

"Not if we're both—"

"It always does," Tucker says quietly, and something in his voice stops the conversation for a moment. "It always changes things. That's just how it works. You can't put rules on it and expect the rules to hold."

I don't say anything to that. Because he might be right and I don't want him to be right right now.

"How did she react?" Logan asks.

"She called me an idiot and left."

"But she didn't say no," Dean says immediately.

I look at him.

He looks back at me with the expression of a man who has been paying attention to much more than anyone gave him credit for.

"She didn't say no," he says again. "Right?"

"...She didn't say no."

Dean points at me. "Then this isn't over."

"Dean—" Tucker starts.

"I'm just observing! The woman said idiot, not never! Those are different words with different meanings!" He pauses. "Also — and I want to be extremely clear that what I'm about to say is the truth and you need to hear it—" He leans forward on the counter. "Just admit that you're into her, man. Like, just say it. To us, right now, in this kitchen, with no consequences and no one recording anything. Just say: I am not actually looking at Hannah like a sister. Three seconds. You can do it."

"That's not—"

"Because brothers don't do what you just did. Brothers don't offer to — " He gestures with both hands. "You know."

"She's my best friend."

"She can be both," Tucker says quietly. "That's kind of the whole problem."

Logan shifts on his stool, and I see him deciding something, and then he says: "Have you ever kissed her?"

"No."

"Never? Not once? Not even like a—"

"No, Logan."

"Okay." He pauses. "Do you want to?"

The question sits in the air of the kitchen and I look at it and it looks back at me and I decide, in the privacy of my own skull, that I'm going to answer the question around the question because the question itself is a door and I'm not walking through it right now.

"I think Hannah is beautiful," I say. "That's not — that's just a fact. It's not some big revelation, she's objectively—"

"Here we go," Dean murmurs.

"It's a factual observation, Dean—"

"Sure."

"She has—" I stop. I start again. Because here's the thing about Hannah's face: it's not the kind of face you can describe quickly. It's not a simple face. It's a face that does things, that moves, that is somehow completely different depending on what she's feeling but recognizable as hers from every angle, in every light. "She has great eyes. Everyone knows that. Those green eyes are—" I shake my head slightly. "They're not just green. They're like — there's gold in them when the light hits right, and when she laughs they crinkle at the corners, and when she's angry they go this specific shade of dark that's—" I realize I'm using my hands. I stop using my hands. "That's just — I'm describing them accurately."

"Mm-hm," Tucker says.

"And she has—" Against my better judgment, I continue, because something has been loosened in me this morning and it hasn't fully re-latched. "The way she carries herself. She doesn't know she does it, that's what gets me. She walks into a room and she's not trying to — she just has this presence, this thing where you know she's there without looking, and she wears whatever she wears and it always looks — she has tits that I — that anyone would—"

I stop.

I become aware that I have been talking for approximately four minutes about Hannah's physical attributes like someone who is not, in any meaningful sense of the word, describing a sister.

I become aware that Logan is smiling. That Tucker is smiling. That Dean has picked up his French toast again and is eating it with the satisfied expression of a man watching a nature documentary arrive at the part he predicted.

I look down at my coffee.

"Her hair," I say, quietly, almost to myself, because apparently I've lost all control of my own mouth. "When it's down and she hasn't done anything to it yet, in the morning, it does this thing where it — anyway."

Silence.

"Anyway," Dean repeats back to me, in a voice of pure delight.

"I'm just saying she's a beautiful. That's all I said."

"That's not all you said—"

"Dean—"

"You said tits, man. You used the word tits while talking about someone you see as a sister—"

"I didn't mean it like—"

"You absolutely meant it exactly like—"

"Her eyes have gold in them," Logan says pleasantly, "when the light hits right."

I put my face in my hands.

Tucker puts a consoling hand on my shoulder. He pats it twice, the same way Dean patted it this morning, except Tucker's version feels less like a grave and more like someone putting a warm blanket on a man who's been standing in the rain.

"Hey," he says gently. "It's okay."

"It's not okay," I say into my hands.

"It's a little bit okay."

"I have been telling myself for three years that I think of her as—"

"A sister," Dean supplies.

"—a family member—"

"And yet," Dean says.

"Dean," Tucker and Logan say.

"I'm just going to ask one more time," Dean says, and I hear the grin in his voice, wide and unstoppable, "because I think clarity is important. I think we should all be operating with full information. I think the truth is a gift." A pause. "Do you, Garrett James Graham, see Hannah Wells as a sister?"

I lower my hands.

I look at Dean across the kitchen island.

Dean looks back at me. He's smiling with his whole face, the way he smiles when he already knows the answer and he's just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. Logan's quiet beside him, watching me with that careful look he gets when something matters. Tucker's hand is still on my shoulder.

The morning light comes through the kitchen window.

Somewhere in my chest, behind the part I've been keeping carefully managed and organized and named correctly for three years, something shifts. Just slightly. Like a thing that was facing one direction, slowly, almost imperceptibly, beginning to turn.

I don't say anything.

Which is, of course, its own answer.

Dean grins.

"Yeah," he says softly. "That's what I thought."

...

The fashion department smells like fabric sizing and fresh chalk and the faintly metallic bite of industrial sewing machines that have been running all day. It's a smell I now associate entirely with Hannah, which is new, because three weeks ago I didn't know what this building smelled like and now I could find my way to her atelier blindfolded.

I've been her fitting model for six weeks.

This happened because Hannah asked me in October with the combination of please and those sweet eyes, and I said yes before she finished the sentence, which is something I do reflexively when Hannah asks me things. She could ask me to drive four hours to pick up a specific type of thread and I would be in the car before processing the request. This is not new information about myself. What is new is that I'm standing in the middle of her atelier on a Friday afternoon in a half-constructed jacket I can't fully extend my arms in, and I am experiencing an awareness of Hannah Wells that I have absolutely no prior framework for.

The class is called Menswear Construction I. I know this because it's written on the door of the atelier and because Hannah has explained the project to me twice — a fully realized menswear look, constructed from scratch, fitted to a live model, presented at end of semester as a wearable garment. The jacket is structured, dark charcoal wool, with a collar she's been reworking for two weeks. There are pins involved. Many pins.

Hannah is currently standing behind me with a measuring tape, and she has been standing there for approximately four minutes, and neither of us has said anything.

This is unusual.

Hannah and I do not do silence. We do talking over each other, we do comfortable noise, we do the ambient presence of two people who have been in each other's company so long that silence, when it comes, is the easy kind — the kind that doesn't need to be filled. This silence is not that kind. This silence has a texture. It has a temperature. It sits between us and hums at a frequency I've been trying to identify for four days, ever since the driveway, ever since I watched her drive away without saying no.

The measuring tape pulls taut across my shoulders. Hannah's fingers are cool through the thin muslin pinned over the jacket lining, and she's moving with her usual precise efficiency — measuring, noting, adjusting — and I am standing very still and thinking about absolutely nothing.

That's a lie. I am thinking about everything. All of it. At once.

"Thank you for coming," Hannah says.

Her voice cuts through the silence cleanly. I exhale something I didn't realize I'd been holding.

"Of course," I say.

Another silence. The measuring tape moves to the length of my sleeve. I hear her write something in the small notebook she keeps on the table beside her.

"Garrett."

"Mm."

"Did you mean it?" A pause. "What you said. The other day."

I don't answer immediately. I look straight ahead at the large mirror mounted at the end of the atelier — the one all the fitting models use, the one Hannah positioned me in front of when we started. In the mirror, I can see her. Dark hair pulled up today, a few pieces falling loose at her temples. She's wearing an oversized cream shirt tucked into wide-leg trousers, sleeves rolled to her elbows, a pincushion strapped to her wrist like a strange bracelet. She looks like she belongs here among the bolts of fabric and the dress forms and the afternoon light coming through the long windows.

She's looking at the back seam of the jacket, not at me.

"Yes," I say.

Hannah stops moving.

In the mirror, I watch her look up. Her eyes find mine through the reflection — just for a second, just a flash — and then she drops her gaze back to the seam.

"Are you serious," she says. It doesn't come out like a question.

"I was serious when I said it and I'm serious now."

She makes a small sound that isn't quite a laugh and isn't quite anything else. She steps around me to check the front of the jacket, and now she's in my direct line of sight rather than the mirror, and this is worse, actually. Significantly worse. Because when she's in front of me, studying the lapel she's been reworking, her lower lip caught slightly between her teeth in concentration, there's nowhere else for my eyes to go.

I've always known Hannah was beautiful. That was never the question — I covered that comprehensively in the kitchen on Thursday morning while my friends watched with varying degrees of entertainment. But knowing something and feeling it land in your body are entirely different things, and somewhere between the driveway and this atelier, the thing that lived in my head migrated somewhere lower, and now it lives around my sternum and it has opinions.

It's not even one thing. That's what's disorienting. It's the composite of her — the way the trousers sit on her hips, the way she tilts her head when she's concentrating so her cheek nearly touches her shoulder, the way her hands move when she works: sure and quick and unhesitating. The way she smells from three feet away, that light warm perfume she's worn for years, the one I've always liked without ever filing under why. The way she looks in this light, the late-afternoon gold of it catching in her hair.

The way she looked when she almost cried in the locker room and refused to let herself.

The way she looked in the driveway before she drove away without saying no.

What is happening to me.

She reaches up to adjust the jacket's shoulder seam and her wrist passes close to my jaw, and the pull of her perfume hits me at close range, and something in my nervous system processes it completely differently than it ever has before. Like a frequency it's been receiving for years that it's only now bothering to actually hear.

She steps back again. She makes another note in her book.

"Hannah." My voice comes out lower than I intend. She goes still at the table. "Aren’t you curious?"

The chalk in her hand stops moving.

The atelier is very quiet. Outside, somewhere down the hall, I can hear the distant hum of a serger, someone else working late. The light in the room has gone fully golden, the kind that makes everything look slightly more vivid than it has any right to look.

Hannah turns around slowly. She leans back against the worktable, arms folded, the notebook pressed against her chest like armor, and she looks at me with an expression I can't entirely read — guarded, careful, and underneath both of those things, something she's actively keeping below the surface.

"And what makes you suddenly curious," she says quietly. "What changed. Why now — and why risk everything we have over it?"

The way her voice catches on everything we have does the same thing to my chest it did in the locker room. It's the voice of someone protecting something real. Something irreplaceable and already fragile.

"I don't think I can go further from where I already am," I say.

She stares at me.

"Whatever is already in my head," I say, "is already there. I'm not putting anything new on the table, Hannah. It's been on the table. I just wasn't looking at it. I was looking somewhere else, deliberately, for a long time." I stop. I try again. "I can't look somewhere else anymore."

She's very still. Her fingers have tightened around the notebook.

"I don't think we should go there," she says. "I think we should—"

"You still haven't said no."

The words land between us. She holds perfectly still.

"In the driveway," I say. "And right now. Both times, you haven't said no."

"Not saying no isn't—"

"Hannah."

She closes her mouth.

I cross the room — not fast, not urgent, just deliberate, steady, the way I move when I've already decided something — and I put my hands on her shoulders. Not tight. Just present. My thumbs along the curve where her neck meets the slope of her shoulder, and I wait for her to pull back, and she doesn't pull back, and I feel it immediately: the shiver that moves through her skin beneath my palms, the small sharp intake of breath she doesn't mean to make.

She looks up at me.

I look at her face. I let myself look at it the way I have not let myself look at anything in fourteen years of misdirection.

"You have this thing," I say quietly, "where your left eyebrow rises before the right one when you're about to argue with someone. I've never told you I notice it every single time." Her eyes go wide. She doesn't speak. "Your top lip is fuller than the bottom one, and there's a spot just below your left cheekbone that flushes before the rest of your face catches up when you're embarrassed." I feel her breath shift. "Your eyes—" I pause, because I've attempted to describe her eyes before and language keeps failing me. "They're not just green. They're every shade of green depending on the light. Right now, in this room, they're almost amber at the center."

Hannah is motionless under my hands.

"Garrett," she whispers. Something unsteady lives in it. "What — what's happening to you?"

"I genuinely don't know," I say.

And I don't. I truly don't understand the mechanics of what's reshaping itself inside me — how fourteen years of she's family, she's my constant, she's the person I don't function without is reconfiguring into something that also includes the back of her neck, the way she smells, the top lip that's fuller than the bottom one. I don't have a map for this. I'm not sure one exists.

What I have is my hands on her shoulders and the knowledge that she's trembling slightly and hasn't moved, and the undeniable physical reality of her being closer to me than she has ever been without the fourteen years of unconscious, careful distance we've always built into how we exist near each other.

I move my right hand from her shoulder. Slowly. I bring my thumb to her mouth and trace the edge of her lower lip — just the edge, the barest pressure — and her breath comes out in a rush against my skin.

Her fingers find the front of my shirt. They close around the fabric — not pulling, not pushing. Just there. Holding.

I lean forward and press my lips to her left cheek. Slow. Unhurried. I feel her jaw tighten with the effort of keeping still. I pull back a fraction and do the same to her right cheek — same weight, same intention, nothing accidental about any of it.

"Garrett—" Just breath. Just my name inside it.

"I know," I murmur against her cheekbone.

I pull back just enough to see her face. Her eyes are closed. Her fingers are still wound in my shirt. Her lips are parted the smallest fraction, and everything happening in my body right now is neither subtle nor complicated and cannot be filed under family with any credibility whatsoever.

I bring my face back to hers and let my mouth trace just beside her lips — not landing, not yet — and then I drag my tongue slowly along the bow of her upper lip, and I hear the small involuntary sound she makes low in her throat, and every organized thought I have leaves the room entirely.

I close my teeth very gently on the tip of her nose.

She makes a sound that is half outrage and half something else entirely.

"That's good," I murmur.

"That's—" She sounds wrecked. "Yeah," she breathes. "Yeah."

And that's the last thing either of us says for a while, because I close the remaining distance and kiss her.

It starts soft. I mean it to be questioning — is this okay, are we doing this — but Hannah's hand tightens in my shirt the moment our lips meet and any question dissolves in the same instant it forms. I bring my hand up from her shoulder to the side of her face, my thumb along her jaw, and she tilts into it like she's been waiting for exactly that angle, and then the kiss deepens and the softness gives way to something with considerably more momentum behind it.

She kisses the way I should have known she would — completely. Without reservation. Our tongues tangled. The way she does everything, with that Hannah quality of total commitment once she's decided, and she has decided, I can feel it in the way she kisses me back: not tentative, not testing, just present, her mouth moving against mine with a sureness that sends something hot and electric down my spine and back up again.

I back her gently into the worktable and she goes without resistance, her hands moving from my shirt to my jaw, holding my face with her palms the way you hold something you want to look at and never let go of at the same time. She tastes like the coffee she was drinking when I arrived and underneath it something that is just her, and I have kissed a number of people in my twenty-one years and none of them have ever made me feel like I've been late somewhere. Like there was a place I was supposed to arrive and I only just now found the address.

I pull back for air. We're both breathing harder than the situation technically warrants. Hannah's eyes open slowly, and in the late afternoon light they are, in fact, amber at the center, exactly like I said, and she looks — she looks like she's been caught off guard by herself. Like she said yes to something before consulting the part of her that makes decisions, and now both parts are looking at each other across a very short distance wondering what comes next.

"So," she says. Her voice is impressively steady given the circumstances.

"So," I say.

A beat.

"Your jacket," she says, "has four pins in it and if you move too fast you're going to stab yourself."

I look down. There are in fact four pins along the side seam, two of which are now slightly displaced from when I backed her into the table.

"Right," I say.

"I have to fix those."

"You should fix those."

She looks at me. I look at her. Something passes between us — warm and complicated and slightly terrifying for both of us, and underneath all of that, the first honest thing we've acknowledged about each other in fourteen years.

Her mouth curves. Just barely. Just at the corner.

"You bit my nose," she says.

"You didn't seem to mind."

"I minded a little."

"You said yeah."

"I said yeah to something else."

"Did you."

The corner of her mouth pulls further. She picks up her pincushion and turns back to the jacket with the practiced composure of someone determined to behave as though her hands aren't slightly unsteady, and I stand perfectly still and let her fix the pins, and outside the atelier windows the afternoon light moves from gold to amber to the first dark edge of evening.

Neither of us talks about what just happened.

We don't need to yet.

It's already the loudest thing in the room.