Archive of Our Own

The party is already too loud by the time Hannah gets there.

She can hear it from the end of the block — bass vibrating through the soles of her shoes, voices pitched high and sharp over the music, the particular kind of chaos that only happens when a hockey team throws a party and has the audacity to call it a "low-key thing." She'd been told low-key. Allie had specifically used the words low-key and chill and you'll have fun, Han, I promise, and Hannah had believed her because she was tired and her judgment was temporarily compromised by a week of midterms and two cups of terrible dining hall coffee.

She should have known better.

The house is a Sigma Chi property, which means it's nicer than most of the off-campus options, which means it's packed with more people than it should legally hold, which means the air inside is already that specific combination of cologne and spilled beer that Hannah has spent most of her college career trying to avoid. She stands just inside the front door for a moment, long enough for a guy in a backwards cap to offer her a drink she doesn't want, and takes stock of the situation.

Allie is somewhere in the crowd. Allie's exact location is unknown. This is a problem.

Hannah pulls out her phone.

Hannah: where are you

Hannah: Allie

Hannah: ALLIE

The response takes four minutes, during which Hannah has declined two more drink offers and made her way to the kitchen mostly so she has a wall to put her back against.

Allie: omg hi!! back porch!! come find meeee

Hannah pockets her phone and looks around the kitchen. There are approximately forty people between her and any door that might lead to a back porch. She pours herself a drink — not because she wants it, but because having something in her hand makes her feel less like she's standing in someone else's story, a character who wandered in from a quieter book — and starts moving.

She doesn't make it to the back porch.

She makes it approximately halfway through the living room before she runs directly into the broad, solid chest of Garrett Graham, who is apparently incapable of standing anywhere that doesn't put him in the direct path of everyone trying to get somewhere.

"Wellsy." He grins down at her like she's something he's pleased about, like her running into him is the best thing that's happened to him all night, and Hannah is deeply familiar with that grin by now. It's the one he deploys on everyone. It's the one that makes girls forget things they should probably remember.

"Graham." She takes a step back. "You're in the way."

"I'm everywhere." He spreads his hands, magnanimous. "It's a gift."

"It's an obstacle." But she's not actually moving yet, which is its own kind of problem. "Is Allie on the back porch?"

"Probably? She came with Hollis and I haven't seen either of them in an hour, which means they're either on the back porch or they've disappeared into a room somewhere and we should all respect their privacy."

Hannah makes a face. "That's my best friend you're talking about."

"And that's my teammate. I support him fully." Garrett reaches over and plucks the cup out of her hand, sniffs it, and gives her a look. "Who gave you this? This smells terrible."

"I made it myself."

"From what? Paint thinner?"

"There was a thing of—" She looks at the cup. She honestly doesn't remember what she poured. "It doesn't matter. Give it back."

He does, still looking amused. He's wearing a grey henley that probably cost more than Hannah's entire grocery budget for the month, and his hair is doing that thing where it looks like he just woke up from a nap but in an irritatingly intentional way, and she hates that she noticed either of these things.

"You look like you're plotting someone's murder," he says.

"I'm deciding how hard it would be to get to the back porch."

"I can take you." He says it so naturally that it takes her a second to process.

"I don't need—"

"I know you don't need it." And something in his voice is different for just a moment, just a fraction of a second — quieter, and more genuine, and then it's gone and he's grinning again. "But I'm going that way anyway. Come on."

She follows him because it's practical, not because she wants to. This is what she tells herself. It's completely logistical.

Garrett is, whatever his other qualities, good at moving through crowds. People step aside for him the way they don't for her — partly because he's a head taller than most of the room, partly because he's Garrett Graham and everyone knows who he is, partly because he has a particular way of moving that suggests it wouldn't occur to him that someone wouldn't make space. Hannah stays in his wake and tries not to think about how much easier it is than fighting through on her own.

They make it through two-thirds of the living room before the plan stops working.

"Garrett."

The voice is bright and a little too sharp around the edges, and it comes from a girl Hannah has seen before but doesn't know well — blond, pretty in a very deliberate way, wearing a dress that's losing an argument with the temperature outside. She inserts herself into the space in front of Garrett with the precision of someone who's been waiting for an opening.

"Hey, Tiff." Garrett's voice is friendly, neutral, giving nothing.

The girl — Tiffany, apparently, which Hannah files away as information — smiles at him with her whole face and then turns to Hannah with something considerably less.

"Oh." A small, musical pause. "Hi."

It's one syllable. Hannah has no idea how someone can put that much into one syllable. It's the hi of someone who is very pointedly not using a name, because using a name would imply that the person is worth knowing.

"Hey," Hannah says, because she's not going to be rude, even if rude is apparently the register they're operating in.

"I didn't know you knew Hannah," Tiffany says to Garrett, in the tone of someone who is genuinely bewildered that these two people could exist in the same social universe.

"Sure." Garrett is already glancing toward the back of the house. "You good, Tiff? Looking for anyone?"

"I was looking for you." She says it like it should be obvious. Like the party reorganized itself around his location and she's just a comet caught in his orbit. "Logan said there might be a bonfire later?"

"Maybe. Check with Hollis."

A small flicker of something crosses Tiffany's face — recalibration, Hannah would call it, the expression of someone shifting their approach — and then her attention slides back to Hannah with the same deliberate brightness as before.

"Sorry," she says, and she absolutely is not. "How do you two know each other? Are you like, a puck bunny?" A little laugh, light as air. "I feel like I'd know you if you came to games."

Hannah opens her mouth.

"Hannah's Allie's roommate," Garrett says, not looking at Tiffany. He's looking at Hannah, and the look says something she can't quite translate. "She's been to games. You probably just didn't notice."

And why would she, is the implication Tiffany is definitely going to hear. But Tiffany's smile doesn't waver.

"So you're a friend-of-a-friend thing," she says, to Hannah, nodding slowly like this explains and also diminishes everything. "That's so sweet. It's nice that you get to hang out with Garrett."

Hannah should leave it there. She knows she should. "It's nice," she agrees, pleasantly.

Garrett touches the small of her back — light, two fingers, barely anything — and it startles her enough that she moves forward again, back into motion. "Back porch," he says, mostly to Hannah.

"Yeah," she says, and doesn't look at Tiffany as they go.

Allie is in fact on the back porch, wedged between Hollis and a guy from the lacrosse team whose name Hannah forgets, and she throws her arms up when she sees Hannah like she's been found after a shipwreck.

"Han! You made it! How did you get through — oh, Garrett brought you." She says this with a specific kind of brightness, a deliberate extra wattage, and Hannah gives her a look that she hopes communicates please do not start.

"Where's the fire?" Hannah asks.

"There isn't one yet. Logan's trying to figure out if we have enough lighter fluid." Allie hands Hannah a different drink, which is marginally better than the one Garrett had critiqued. "Was it a nightmare in there?"

"The usual."

"She ran into Tiffany Caldwell," Garrett says, dropping into a chair like he owns it, sprawling the way tall people do when they're not thinking about their own dimensions.

Allie's face does something complicated. "Oh no."

"It was fine," Hannah says.

"It was not bad," Garrett says at the same time, which is different, and Hannah looks at him, and he's already looking somewhere else.

"Tiffany Caldwell hates any girl who talks to Garrett for more than thirty seconds," Allie tells Hannah, in the voice she uses when she's delivering information she thinks should already be obvious. "She's been attached to him since September."

"I'm aware of my own social ecosystem, thanks," Garrett says.

"She's not attached to me," Hannah says.

"She is now," says Hollis cheerfully, appearing from inside with a beer and the unbothered energy of someone who has opted out of all drama forever. "She was watching you two walk away with a face like she bit into something."

"Fantastic," Hannah says.

The back porch normalizes after that, or something close to normal — Allie pulls Hannah into a conversation about nothing, the lacrosse guy turns out to be funnier than Hannah expected, the lighter fluid situation is resolved and a small, contained fire appears in the backyard pit about forty minutes in. Hannah loosens, incrementally, the way she always does when she stops thinking about where she is and just exists there instead.

Garrett stays. She notices this. He doesn't wander back inside the way she would have expected, doesn't get up to work the room or find someone more interesting. He sits in the chair he dropped into and talks to Hollis and argues about something hockey-related with two of the other guys and laughs a lot, loud and unguarded in a way that's different from the performance of it she's seen inside.

She notices this too.

The first real volley comes an hour later.

Hannah is standing by the kitchen counter getting a refill — her third drink, which for Hannah is enough to make her margins soft but not enough to make her stupid — when Tiffany appears beside her like a weather event. She's with two other girls, equally dressed up, equally precise, and Hannah gets the distinct sense that this is not an accidental encounter.

"Having fun?" Tiffany asks. Her voice is warm and her eyes are not.

"Sure." Hannah turns slightly toward her. Polite but not open. She's had enough experience with girls like this to know the shape of where this goes.

"Good!" Tiffany beams. "This is Sophie and Jade, by the way." She gestures at the other two, who smile with slightly varying degrees of sincerity. "We were just saying — didn't you used to date Marcus Elliot? The lacrosse captain?"

Hannah blinks. "No."

"Really? Someone told me you did."

"Someone told you wrong."

"Oh, hm." Tiffany tips her head like she's genuinely thinking about this. "Maybe I'm mixing you up with someone else. It's just — I feel like I've heard your name before, but I can't place it." She laughs a little, sweet and light. "Sorry, I'm terrible with names. I remember faces better, and I just don't think I've seen you around much."

This is the specific art form of it, Hannah thinks. It's not a direct insult. You can't point to anything and call it cruel. It's the deliberate construction of a person as someone unremarkable, someone forgettable, someone who doesn't register, repeated until the person starts to believe it.

"I'm around," Hannah says.

"Right, no, totally." Tiffany pours herself a drink. "I just mean like — in the scene, you know? I feel like if you were around, I'd know you. It's a small school." Another small, musical pause. "Are you a freshman?"

"Junior."

"Oh wow, really?" And it's amazing, the performance of it. The eyebrows up, the slight part of the lips. Complete shock that a person can have existed at Briar for two and a half years without appearing on Tiffany's radar. "That's so funny, I would have guessed younger. You just have like a very..." she waves a hand vaguely, "...wholesome thing going on."

Wholesome. The word lands precisely where it's meant to. The implication: you're not a threat because you're not even in the game.

"Thanks," Hannah says, because she refuses to give anything else.

Sophie laughs, thin and short, like she's been cued. Jade at least has the grace to look slightly uncomfortable.

"I think it's really cute," Tiffany continues, "that you come to these parties. Even if you're not really, like, part of the hockey world or whatever. It's good that Allie brings you." She says Allie's name with faint emphasis, as if Allie is a hall pass and Hannah is a guest with no standing of her own.

"I'll let her know you think so," Hannah says.

"Oh, you don't have to do that." Tiffany smiles. "I just mean, it must be nice. To get a window into all of it, even if it's not really your thing."

Hannah opens her mouth, and then — doesn't say what she was going to say, because what she was going to say is not the kind of thing you can take back.

Instead she says, "Definitely," and picks up her drink, and turns around.

She's mostly fine. She's had worse. She walks back toward the back porch and tells herself that Tiffany Caldwell is not worth the emotional real estate, and she mostly believes it.

She's about halfway across the living room when she realizes she's annoyed enough that her hands are very slightly tight on the cup.

She is fine. She is totally fine.

The second volley comes from a different angle, which is what makes it more effective.

It's maybe twenty minutes later, and Hannah has settled back into the back porch orbit, and things are fine, and then Sophie — the one of Tiffany's satellites with the thin laugh — comes out to the porch looking for someone and ends up gravitating toward the broader group and somehow this becomes a thing that's happening, which is how Hannah ends up standing slightly to the edge of a conversation that now includes Sophie, who talks with the specific confidence of someone who has decided that because she is comfortable, everyone in the room should be grateful.

"It's so weird," Sophie is saying to one of the hockey guys, loud enough to carry, "when people come to these things and they just don't really get it, you know? Like, you can always tell when someone doesn't really belong in the scene."

The hockey guy she's talking to — a junior named Pierce who Hannah doesn't know well — nods vaguely in the way of someone who is not really listening.

Sophie's eyes cut to Hannah. Brief, and precise.

Hannah doesn't look away.

This is the thing about being quiet: people assume you don't notice. They assume that because you're not performing, you must not be paying attention, and they get sloppy. Sophie isn't being sloppy — she's making a calculation, Hannah can see that. She's not as clean at it as Tiffany, who's had more practice and more finesse. Sophie's version is a little blunter.

"Like, it's nothing personal," Sophie continues, to no one in particular. "Some people just have the thing and some people don't. You know within, like, thirty seconds of meeting someone."

"Have the thing," Allie repeats, and her voice has taken on a very specific quality — level and precise — that Hannah recognizes as the sound of Allie deciding to be a problem. "What thing?"

"Just like—" Sophie waves a hand. "A vibe. Being comfortable in this kind of environment."

"Hannah's comfortable," Allie says.

Sophie looks at Hannah with the expression of someone who has been caught doing something she'd prefer to frame as nothing. "Oh, for sure," she says. "I didn't mean—"

"I know what you meant," Allie says pleasantly.

There's a brief and slightly charged pause.

"I think Sophie was speaking generally," Tiffany says, materializing from inside with the timing of someone who has been monitoring the situation. She smiles at Allie, then at Hannah. "Not about anyone specific."

"Totally," Hannah says.

"It's just conversation," Tiffany agrees. "We were actually talking about how fun tonight is." She directs this at Hannah with the full beam of her attention, which Hannah has learned to understand as a sign that something is coming. "Are you having fun? You seem a little—" she tilts her head— "quiet."

"I'm usually quiet."

"Right, no, I know." Warmth, warmth, warmth. "I just mean — you okay? You look a little out of your depth." A gentle laugh. "Like, not in a bad way. Just like, this is maybe not usually your scene?"

"Tiff," Garrett says.

It's one word. Not sharp. Not loud. Hannah hadn't even realized he'd been close enough to hear, had lost track of him in the shifting architecture of the porch, but he's standing slightly behind and to her left and he's looking at Tiffany with a very level expression.

"What?" Tiffany says, still smiling.

"She's fine," he says. "Hannah's fine."

"I know she's fine, I was just asking—"

"I know what you were asking." And he doesn't say it like an accusation, exactly. He just says it with a lot of information inside it, and he holds Tiffany's gaze for a moment in a way that communicates clearly that he caught it. He caught all of it.

Tiffany's smile doesn't drop, but something underneath it shifts.

"I should check on the fire," Garrett says, and his hand finds Hannah's elbow — brief, just for a second — and then he's moving off the porch and down to the yard, and somehow Hannah is following him, and they're standing twenty feet from everyone else by the bonfire, and the sounds from the porch are slightly more muffled.

"You don't have to—" she starts.

"I know," he says.

"I was handling it."

"I know you were." He's looking at the fire. His voice is different out here — less the performance of easy, more just the thing underneath it. "You're good at the blank face thing."

"Practice."

"I believe it."

She looks at him, which is maybe a mistake because he's backlit by the fire and looking at it with a kind of steady attention and she has the very irritating sense that she is misjudging something about him. Has been misjudging. Past continuous.

"She does it to everyone," he says, after a moment.

"I know."

"It's not—" He stops. "She's got a thing in her head about how things work and anyone who doesn't fit into it is a threat, and she'd rather make them small than adjust the thing in her head."

Hannah considers this. "That's a fairly generous reading."

"No, it's not," he says, and he sounds almost tired. "It's just accurate. I'm not defending it." He looks at her sideways. "I'm saying she's wrong. In case that wasn't clear."

"About what?"

"About you being out of your depth." He says it simply. "You're not. You've never been." A beat. "You're the most—" and he stops again, and she has the sense of someone catching themselves, reconsidering, choosing different words. "You notice everything," he says finally. "You think I don't know that, but I do. You've been clocking this party since you walked in."

Hannah is quiet for a moment.

"That obvious?" she says.

"Only if you're paying attention." He pokes the fire with a stick someone has left for this purpose. "She's not paying attention to you. She's just reacting to you."

"There's a difference?"

"Yeah. Reacting means you scare her a little." He glances at her. "Which you should find more satisfying than you probably do."

"I'll try," Hannah says drily.

He smiles at the fire. "There you go."

They stay by the fire for a while. Long enough that it stops being notable, just two people standing near warmth at a party where everyone has dispersed into smaller configurations. Garrett asks her something about her major and she tells him, and he doesn't do the thing where he immediately pivots the conversation back to himself, and she asks him something back because it's just what you do, and they talk.

It's strange. That's the only word Hannah has for it later, turning it over: strange, because she's been adjacent to Garrett Graham for a year and a half without ever really talking to him, and now she's doing it and he's — different than the performance. Less a poster of himself and more a person. He's funny in a way that's quieter than his party version, more precise and a little drier. He knows when she's making a joke and he meets it.

She doesn't know what to do with any of this information.

They drift back to the porch eventually because the night gets colder, and Hannah finds Allie and they stand together and Garrett ends up three feet away and somehow they are — adjacent, again, but with a different quality to the adjacency, and Hannah would analyze this but she's trying not to.

She's mostly successful until Tiffany comes back.

Third volley, and this one is the one that lands.

It's later — much later, the party in that thinning phase where the people who came to perform have mostly gone home and the people who came to actually be somewhere are still there, a little looser, a little more honest. Hannah is tired in a way that is almost pleasant. She's laughing at something Hollis said when Tiffany appears at her elbow with Sophie and a third girl Hannah doesn't recognize and the bright, determined energy of someone who has been biding her time.

"Hey, Hannah." Big smile. Eye contact that holds just slightly too long. "Having a better time?"

"Good time all night," Hannah says evenly.

"So good that you're hanging around Garrett all night?" And there it is — beneath the warmth, the edge, and it's sharper now than the previous versions, less careful. Tiffany has been watching the fire situation. Has been watching the adjacent conversation. She's done recalibrating. "I noticed you guys have been attached at the hip."

"Have we?" Hannah says.

"I mean—" Tiffany laughs, turning slightly to include Sophie in it. "It's cute. He does that, takes someone under his wing. He's such a good guy." She says it like it means something specific and unflattering about Hannah. Like the conclusion to draw is that Garrett's friendliness is charitable. Pity, maybe, dressed up as warmth. "You shouldn't read too much into it."

"I don't," Hannah says, and she means it to come out neutral, but something in her voice has gone a little flat. She can hear it.

So can Tiffany, because her smile sharpens incrementally.

"I just mean, I know how it can seem, when you're not really used to this whole world. These guys are friendly with everyone." She pats Hannah's arm, light as a feather, the touch of someone performing concern. "You seem sweet. I'd hate for you to get the wrong idea and end up embarrassed. That happens."

And it's —

It's the sweet that does it. It's the same word she used before, wholesome, the words designed to diminish, and then the wrong idea, and the that happens like it's a known phenomenon, like Hannah is the type of girl who mistakes kindness for something else because she doesn't know any better, because she isn't equipped to read the room, and—

Hannah's hand is slightly tight on her cup again.

She opens her mouth.

"Hey." Garrett's voice, and he's there, and he must have caught the last of it because his expression is not the level neutral it was before. It's quieter than that, and cooler. "Tiff."

"Hi!" She turns to him, instantly realigning, and the brightness comes back like she's flipped a switch. "We were just talking."

"I know what you were doing," Garrett says.

Not: I heard you, you were talking. Not a misunderstanding left to be cleared up. He says I know what you were doing with a very calm, very clear specificity, and Tiffany's smile goes slightly frozen.

"Garrett—"

"She shouldn't be careful about reading into things," he says. "She should read into whatever she wants." His voice is still calm. Not a performance of anger, not even anger exactly, just the particular quality of someone who has decided to be completely honest. "I've been talking to Hannah all night because I wanted to. Because she's interesting and she's funny and I wanted to." He says it without looking at Hannah, keeping his eyes on Tiffany, who has gone very still. "That's not me taking someone under my wing. That's me liking someone."

Someone, Hannah notes.

Not liking her as a person. Not she's a friend. Just liking someone, with the emphasis distributed evenly, meaning whatever it means.

"I wasn't saying—" Tiffany starts.

"You said she'd get the wrong idea and end up embarrassed." He says it back to her, simply. Just a receipt. Just: this is what you said. "That's what you said. In front of people." A beat. "So I'm clarifying."

He looks at her for a moment longer, and there's something in that look that Tiffany clearly receives and doesn't like, because she says something thin about needing another drink and moves away, and Sophie follows, and the third girl who Hannah doesn't know gives Hannah a very brief look that might be sympathetic before following too.

There is a brief quiet.

Allie, who has been standing close enough to have caught most of this, looks between the two of them with an expression of aggressive neutrality that Hannah knows means she is internally losing her mind.

"Right," Hannah says. Her voice comes out level. She's good at level. "You didn't have to do that."

"I know." He looks at her now. "She's been doing it all night."

"I know she has."

"And you were handling it."

"Yes."

"And you didn't ask me to."

"Correct."

He nods, like he's confirming something he already knew. "Still did."

Hannah looks at him. He looks back. The fire has burned down some and the party sounds have receded and there is an extremely uncomfortable quantity of honesty sitting in the air between them and she has absolutely no idea what to do with it.

"Why?" she asks.

And Garrett — who is, apparently, a person full of surprises — doesn't smirk. Doesn't deflect. Doesn't do the thing where he turns it into a bit.

He says, "Because she was wrong," like it's the simplest thing. "And you weren't going to say that. And someone had to."

"Someone," Hannah repeats.

"Yeah." The ghost of something in his expression — not quite a smile, something quieter and more intent than that. "Someone."

Allie pulls Hannah inside twenty minutes later under the extremely transparent pretense of needing help finding her jacket, which is sitting in plain view on the kitchen counter.

"Hannah," Allie says, the moment the door closes behind them.

"No," Hannah says.

"Hannah—"

"Not doing this."

"He said he likes you."

"He said he liked talking to me, which is a different—"

"He said," Allie says, with great deliberateness, "that he liked someone. He looked right at you. He defended you in front of Tiffany Caldwell who he has been carefully not engaging with all semester and he said I like someone."

Hannah picks up Allie's jacket and holds it out to her.

"You're deflecting," Allie says, taking it.

"I'm being practical."

"Those aren't the same thing."

"They are for me." Hannah leans against the counter. The kitchen is quieter than the rest of the house, most of the traffic having shifted outside. She turns her cup in her hands. "It doesn't matter."

"Why not?"

"Because—" She stops. Because she doesn't have a good answer. Because the honest answer is something she's not ready to say out loud, which is that she has very carefully not thought about Garrett Graham in any particular way for a year and a half and she doesn't know what to do with an entire night of evidence that she's been missing something.

"He noticed," Allie says, quieter now, less needling and more serious. "He's been noticing. I don't think tonight is—" she waves her hand— "an event. I think tonight is him deciding to do something about something that's been there for a while."

"You don't know that," Hannah says.

"Hannah." Allie looks at her with the specific patience of a best friend who has been waiting a long time. "I live with you. I know you. I know when you notice someone and decide not to deal with it." A beat. "When did you decide not to deal with it?"

Hannah looks at her. Looks away.

"September," she admits. "He said something to you and you laughed and he was — I don't know. Different than I thought." She says it quickly, like if she says it fast enough it doesn't count. "It didn't matter."

"It clearly mattered."

"I didn't do anything about it because it was — it would have been stupid. He's a hockey player, he's got—" she gestures at the general world outside— "all of that, and I wasn't going to be—"

"A puck bunny," Allie says. "You didn't want to be one of the girls who follows him around."

"I didn't want to be Tiffany," Hannah says, and then immediately hates that she said it out loud.

Allie is quiet for a moment.

"Okay," she says. "But you're not."

"I know."

"He knows too. I think that's maybe the whole thing, Hannah. I think that's exactly the thing."

Hannah stares at the counter for a moment.

"This is a terrible party," she says.

"It really is," Allie agrees. "Do you want to go back outside?"

She does. She goes back outside, and the night is fully cold now but the fire is still going, and Garrett is standing beside it with his hands in his pockets looking at something in the middle distance, and when he hears her come down the steps he turns.

"Hey," he says.

"Hey." She stops a few feet from him. "Allie found her jacket."

"Good." He doesn't ask. He's watching her with an expression she can't fully translate in the dark, but she thinks it might be uncertain, which is new for him, or at least new for the version of him she's been watching from the outside.

"I've been here since September," she says. "If that's — I wanted to clarify. I'm not someone who just got let into the room."

He frowns slightly. "I know that."

"I know you know. I just wanted to say it." She looks at the fire. "I've been watching you since September too, since you said that thing to Allie that made her laugh. I thought you were going to be—" she tilts her head— "a certain thing, and you weren't."

"What thing?"

"I don't know. Shallower." She glances at him. "No offense."

"None taken." His mouth curves. "I've been watching you since you gave Hollis that look at the dining hall in October. He was explaining something incorrectly and your face did — a thing." He demonstrates, briefly, and it's accurate enough that she laughs.

"He was wrong," she says.

"He was completely wrong. You were so polite about it." He turns toward her slightly. "I thought you were going to be colder than you are."

"I am cold."

"No you're not." He says it simply, like correcting a fact. "You're careful. There's a difference."

She looks at him. He's close enough that she can see his expression clearly now, and it's the version she only caught in glimpses before tonight — the quieter version, the one that lives underneath the grin.

"Tiffany was going to make tonight very small," she says. "You know that, right? That's what she does. She was going to make me feel like I was a guest in a room I wasn't supposed to be in."

"I know," he says.

"And you didn't let her."

"No." He holds her gaze. "I didn't want that for you."

She doesn't say anything, and he doesn't say anything, and the fire makes its sounds between them.

"I still didn't ask you to," she says finally.

"I know you didn't." He shifts his weight, something about his posture more honest than his usual ease. "For what it's worth — that's part of it. The not asking. Most people ask. You just handle it."

"And?"

"And I've been thinking about you since September," he says, "and tonight seemed like a reasonable time to stop just thinking about it." A beat. "If that's—" and he stops, and for a second he's just a person who has said something real and is now waiting.

Hannah looks at him. Thinks about being careful. Thinks about what Allie said — you're not Tiffany, he knows that too — and then looks at the fire for a moment, and then looks back at him.

"Ask me to get coffee," she says.

He blinks. "What?"

"Tomorrow. Ask me to get coffee tomorrow, when we're both sober and it's not—" she gestures at the party, still going in the house behind them— "all this."

"And you'll say yes?" he asks, and he sounds like he's mostly certain and also like the small percentage of uncertainty is meaningful to him.

"I'll say yes," she says.

Something in his expression settles. The smile comes back — but it's the quieter one, the one she's been watching all night. Not the performance. The thing underneath.

"Okay," he says.

"Okay," she says.

They stand by the fire for a while longer, and the night is cold, and the party continues without them, and Tiffany Caldwell is somewhere inside being Tiffany Caldwell, and none of that is particularly relevant.

He texts her at 10am.

Garrett: coffee?

She looks at it. Thinks about being careful. Thinks about September, and October, and a year and a half of watching someone from the outside and deciding not to do anything about it.

Hannah: yes

She puts her phone down and Allie comes out of the bathroom and takes one look at her face and says "I KNEW it—" and Hannah throws a pillow at her, and she's laughing, and outside it's a normal Sunday morning and the party is over and something else has, perhaps, begun.

She finds out later — weeks later, when things are different and she can ask — what Garrett had thought when he first noticed her. October, the dining hall. She'd sat across from Hollis and listened to him be wrong about something with an expression of heroic restraint.

"I thought," Garrett says, turning his coffee cup in his hands, "that you were going to be a lot of work."

"Rude," Hannah says.

"In a good way." He looks up at her. "The kind of work that's worth it."

"You thought about it that much in one look?"

"I thought about you that much in one look." He says it simply, the way he says most things that matter, and she's learned that this is how she knows they matter — the absence of performance, just the thing itself. "Then I kept thinking about you."

"What did Tiffany think of all this?" Hannah asks, and she can afford to ask it now, with some distance, with his hand on the table near hers in a way that means something.

Garrett snorts. "Tiffany will be fine. Tiffany is always fine. She finds someone new to orbit every month." He looks at Hannah. "You're not forgettable, for the record. Whatever she was trying to do."

"I know," Hannah says, and means it. "I know I'm not."

He smiles at her. The quiet one.

"Yeah," he says. "That's part of it too."