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Hannah Wells was not here for Garrett Graham.
She was here because Allie Hayes had used the voice — the specific, weaponized frequency that Allie reserved for moments when she knew she was going to win — and Hannah's defenses, formidable as they were, had crumbled inside of thirty seconds.
"It's the playoffs," Allie had said, standing in the doorway of Hannah's room with her Briar hoodie already on and her keys in her hand, like she'd already decided. "You're coming."
"I have reading."
"You have Garrett."
"That's not—" Hannah had stopped. Reset. "He's not a reason."
Allie had given her a look that said sure, babe without a single syllable, and that was how Hannah ended up wedged into the student section of the Briar arena on a Thursday night, a foam finger she didn't remember acquiring somehow in her hand, watching number 77 absolutely dismantle the opposing team's defense like it was personal.
It might have been personal. With Garrett, it was hard to tell.
Hannah had been to exactly three hockey games before tonight, and all three had been under duress. She knew the basics — puck goes in net, that's good, don't stand up unless everyone else is standing up, and if Logan Burnett scores you have approximately 0.4 seconds before Allie's elbow finds your ribs in excitement.
What she did not know, or had not fully accounted for, was what Garrett Graham looked like when he was playing well.
It was different from normal Garrett. Normal Garrett was already a lot — tall and loose-limbed and annoyingly handsome in the way of someone who'd never had to try very hard, with a grin that arrived about three seconds before anything else about him did. Normal Garrett took up space cheerfully, effortlessly, like the world had been built to his specifications.
Game Garrett was something else entirely.
Game Garrett was focused. Every line of him sharp and locked in, all that easy energy compressed into something that moved like it had a purpose. He skated like he'd been doing it since before he could walk, which he basically had — Hannah knew this because Garrett told stories about his childhood with the unselfconscious ease of someone who'd never learned that not everything needed to be said aloud.
She was not watching him specifically.
She was watching the game. The game happened to involve him.
"Oh my GOD," Allie screamed beside her, grabbing Hannah's arm hard enough to bruise. "Did you see that pass? Did you see that?"
"I saw it," Hannah said, which was true. She'd seen all of it.
Third period. Two minutes left. Briar down by one, and the energy in the arena had shifted from celebratory to something rawer — the specific tension of a crowd that wanted something badly enough to be afraid of wanting it.
Hannah's foam finger was crumpled in her fist. She didn't remember doing that.
On the ice, Garrett took a hit along the boards that made the glass shudder and Hannah's stomach drop, but he came up with the puck, because of course he did, and he was moving again before the crowd fully exhaled. Fast and certain and inevitable — that was the word that floated up from somewhere — like watching something that had already been decided.
Forty seconds on the clock.
Garrett cut across the ice, threading between two defenders like they were standing still, and Hannah — against her better judgment, against everything she'd carefully constructed over years of being a person who kept it together — was on her feet.
The shot was clean. The kind of shot that happens in slow motion when you're watching and at full speed when you're remembering it later. Garrett's whole body behind it, and then—
The light went red.
The arena went insane.
Hannah was screaming. She didn't know when she'd started screaming. Allie was hanging off her neck and the foam finger was somewhere on the floor and the sound was enormous, a physical thing, and Hannah was smiling, grinning like an idiot, because Garrett had done it, because of course he had, because he was—
She sat down.
Pressed her lips together.
Picked up the foam finger.
"Okay," she said, to no one.
Allie was still losing her mind beside her, already texting Dean even though Dean was on the ice, and Hannah got herself back into order — shoulders relaxed, expression neutral, the practiced architecture of someone who had her feelings appropriately filed and sorted.
She was fine.
She was completely fine.
She was going to go home and finish her reading and she was not going to think about the way Garrett's face looked when he scored, the way he'd looked up at the crowd like he was looking for someone — she was not going to think about that at all.
She stayed for the whole post-game.
This was Allie's fault. Allie wanted to wait for Dean, which was reasonable and expected, and Hannah had offered to go home — had actually said the words I'll just head back — and Allie had looked at her with those enormous eyes and said please just wait with me and Hannah had no defense against that either.
So she waited.
The corridor outside the locker rooms was loud and warm and smelled like arena and anticipation — other girls waiting for other players, a few guys in Briar gear, someone's little brother asleep across two chairs with his hat pulled over his face. Hannah stood against the wall with her arms crossed and her phone in her hand and told herself she was reading an article.
She was not reading the article.
She was watching the door.
It opened in bursts — players coming out in twos and threes, still buzzing, hair damp, that specific kind of loud that only happened after something good. Dean appeared and walked directly into Allie, who wrapped around him like she'd been waiting her whole life, which was genuinely one of the more nauseating things Hannah had ever witnessed and also, quietly, one of her favorite things.
Garrett was not with Dean.
Hannah looked back at her phone.
Three minutes passed. Maybe four. She read the same sentence of the article six times and retained nothing.
The door opened again.
She heard him before she saw him — the specific cadence of his voice, saying something to someone behind him, laughing at his own joke the way he always did, half a second before anyone else got there. And then he was in the doorway, still damp from the shower, his hair doing the thing it did when he hadn't bothered to dry it properly, wearing a henley that was doing him absolutely no favors in terms of Hannah's composure.
He scanned the corridor the way he always did, like he was looking for something. Like he was always looking for something.
His eyes found her.
He went still for just a second — just one — and then the grin arrived, slow and warm and entirely too knowing, and Hannah felt it like a hand pressed flat to her sternum.
She looked back at her phone.
She heard him cross the corridor. Felt him stop in front of her, close enough that she could smell soap and cold air and something underneath both of those things that was just him.
"You came," he said.
"Allie dragged me."
A pause. She could feel him looking at her. She kept her eyes on her phone with the dedication of someone defusing something.
"Hannah."
His voice was quieter. Different register. The one he used when he wasn't performing, when it was just the two of them and he'd decided to be direct about something, which was — Garrett was unexpectedly direct, when it mattered. It was one of the more inconvenient things about him.
She looked up.
He was closer than she'd thought. Or maybe she'd known exactly how close he was and was choosing not to acknowledge it.
"I came," she said.
The grin softened into something that wasn't quite a smile — something more like relief, or satisfaction, or both at once. He reached out and tucked a piece of hair behind her ear with the easy certainty of someone who'd done it a hundred times, and Hannah's carefully maintained composure did something complicated in her chest.
"Good," he said simply.
Allie and Dean disappeared — Hannah noticed them go with the peripheral awareness of someone tracking all exits — and then it was just her and Garrett in the thinning corridor, and Garrett was looking at her with that expression she'd spent a long time learning to decode.
He was happy. Not the loud, performed happiness of post-game Garrett surrounded by his teammates — this was something quieter, directed. He looked at her the way he always did when they were alone, like she was a problem he'd already solved and was still pleased about.
It made her insane.
"Good game," she said, because something needed to be said.
"You watched."
"Garrett."
"No, I know, Allie dragged you." His tone was agreeable, which was worse. "How much of it did you watch?"
All of it, she did not say. Every second of it, she did not say. I watched you take that hit in the second period and I didn't breathe for three full seconds, she absolutely did not say.
"Enough," she said.
He made a sound that might have been a laugh. He took half a step closer, not crowding her, just — adjusting the geography between them, the way he sometimes did, like he was testing whether she'd hold her ground or give it.
She held it.
"You were on your feet," he said. "When I scored."
Hannah's jaw tightened slightly. "A lot of people were on their feet."
"I was looking at you specifically."
This was the thing about Garrett. He said things like that — nakedly, simply, without apparent concern for how they landed — and then he just waited, and Hannah's whole system of deflection was built around people who left her doors to escape through. Garrett never left doors. He just stood there, patient and certain, and let her figure out where she was going.
It was incredibly annoying.
"You shouldn't be looking at anyone specifically," she said. "You should be looking at the puck."
"I can multitask."
"You literally cannot. You're not a multitasker, you once forgot you were making coffee because you started watching a video about—"
"That was one time—"
"Seventeen minutes, Garrett. The coffee was cold."
He was grinning now, the full one, and Hannah felt the corner of her own mouth try to do something treasonous. She pressed her lips together.
"Okay," he said. "Fair. But I still saw you."
The corridor had emptied further while they were talking. It was quieter now — a few voices somewhere around the corner, the distant sound of the arena staff beginning the cleanup, the particular hush of a building winding down after something big.
Garrett's eyes moved over her face, unhurried, the way they did when he was paying attention to her. He was very good at paying attention to her. He'd figured out early on that it was one of the things that got to her — not the big gestures, not the charm he could switch on for anyone, but the specific, deliberate attention he gave her when it was just the two of them. Like she was interesting. Like he was still finding things out.
"You didn't have to wait," he said. Softer now.
"I told you, I was waiting with—"
"Wellsy." Same quiet register as before. "You didn't have to wait."
She met his eyes. This was a mistake — she knew it was a mistake before she did it — because Garrett's eyes up close were deeply unfair, and he had that expression on, the one that said I know exactly what's happening here and I'm not going to make you say it but I want you to know that I know.
"I know I didn't have to," she said finally.
Something in his face shifted. Settled.
"Okay," he said.
He reached out and took her hand — not dramatically, just laced his fingers through hers like it was the natural next thing, like it was nothing, like they did this all the time, which they did and which Hannah had completely failed to build an immunity to. His hand was warm and certain and she did not pull away.
"Walk with me?" he said.
There was a hallway off the main corridor — Hannah didn't know what it led to, probably equipment storage or some back route to the ice — that was quiet and dim and smelled like cold concrete. Garrett led her there without making it a thing, just a slight change in direction, and Hannah went because she was going to go and they both knew it.
He stopped when they were out of the main corridor's sightlines. Turned to face her. The noise from the arena was distant here — muffled and ambient, belonging to somewhere else.
Hannah's back was near the wall. Not against it yet, just — near it.
"Hey," he said.
"You already said that."
"I'm saying it again." He stepped closer, and she took the half-step back, and her shoulders met the wall, and Garrett settled in front of her with one hand braced beside her head, not caging her in — never that, he was careful about never doing that — just being close. Being there. "Hi."
"Hi," she said, despite herself.
He looked at her for a long moment. The arena sounds continued their distant hum. Hannah was very aware of the warmth coming off him and the way his eyes were doing that thing — not the grin, not the performance, but the real version of him underneath all of that, the version that still surprised her sometimes with how much it got to her.
"I kept thinking about you," he said. "During the game."
"That seems like a liability."
"Yeah." He didn't sound particularly concerned. "Probably. But every time I got on the ice I was like — she's here. She's actually here."
Hannah's chest did something she didn't have vocabulary for. She looked at a point past his shoulder.
"Garrett—"
"I'm not trying to make it a thing," he said, which was a lie, but a gentle one. "I'm just telling you."
She looked back at him. He was close enough that she could see the specific way his damp hair was doing — the piece that always fell forward no matter what he did with it, the one she'd pushed back approximately a hundred times now. She kept her hands at her sides.
"You play better when I'm not watching," she said. "Statistically. I've been to three games before tonight and you were—"
"I scored twice tonight."
"I was going to say inconsistent—"
"Hannah." He said her name like it was its own sentence. Like it meant something specific. "I play better when you're watching. That's just a fact."
She opened her mouth.
He kissed her.
Not immediately — there was a moment, a full and deliberate moment, where he tilted his head and waited, giving her the opportunity to lean back or turn away or say Garrett, no, and she did none of those things. She did the opposite of all of those things.
She kissed him back.
His hand came off the wall and found her jaw, tilting her face up, and Hannah's hands found the front of his henley without any input from her conscious mind. He kissed the way he did everything when he was actually focused — with his whole attention, nothing held back, and she'd known since the first time that this was going to be a problem. It had been a problem. It continued to be a problem.
She pulled back just enough to breathe.
"You're smug about this," she said against his mouth.
"I'm really not," he said, which was mostly true. His thumb traced along her cheekbone and his voice had gone rough at the edges in a way that she knew meant she'd done something to him, which was only fair because he consistently destroyed her. "I'm really, really not right now."
"You were going to be."
"I was going to be," he admitted. "Later. When I told the guys."
"You're not telling the guys anything."
"Wellsy—"
"Garrett."
He pulled back enough to look at her properly — that look again, the real one, the one she kept finding herself unprepared for no matter how many times she saw it.
"I'm not telling them anything they don't already know," he said. "Logan definitely already knows. Allie absolutely knows. I think the freshman who does the equipment knows."
Hannah closed her eyes briefly. "Oh my God."
"It's fine—"
"It's not fine, Garrett, we agreed—"
"We agreed not to make an announcement." His voice was patient and warm and slightly amused, which she would have objected to more forcefully if his forehead hadn't dropped to hers just then, that specific thing he did that turned her arguments to nothing. "We didn't agree to pretend this wasn't happening."
She was quiet for a moment.
His thumb was still moving along her cheek. The arena hummed distantly. He smelled like soap and the cold and something underneath that she'd privately catalogued as home, which was embarrassing, and she was taking it to her grave.
"I came to the game," she said finally.
"I know."
"That's — that means something, okay. That's me saying something."
She felt him smile against her forehead. "I know, Hannah."
"Don't make it weird."
"I would never." He absolutely would, but not right now, she could tell. Right now he was being careful with her, the way he sometimes was, the way that got to her more than any of the other things. "Come here."
He kissed her again, slower this time, one hand in her hair and the other finding the small of her back, and Hannah let herself — for a minute, just a minute — stop holding everything so carefully. Let her hands slide up his chest and curl into the fabric of his henley. Let herself be kissed the way Garrett kissed her, like she was worth paying attention to, like she was the only thing in the room.
Which she was, technically. It was just the two of them.
Afterward — some time later, a duration Hannah was choosing not to calculate — she had her back against the wall and Garrett had his arms around her and her face was somewhere near his collarbone, which was not a position she'd ever intended to be in and which was extremely comfortable and she was going to think about that later when she could think.
His hand was moving slowly up and down her back. She could feel his heartbeat under her cheek.
"Hey," he said.
"You keep saying that."
"It's a good word. Versatile."
She felt the laugh before she managed to suppress it, which she mostly did. His chest moved under her cheek — he'd noticed, she could tell from the way he went briefly, quietly smug. She didn't give him the satisfaction of confirming it.
"You should go back," she said. "Don't they do a team thing after games?"
"They can do a team thing without me for ten minutes."
"It's been more than ten minutes."
"...twenty minutes."
"Garrett."
"Allie and Dean are definitely still here," he said, unconcerned. "We're fine."
Hannah considered this. It was probably true. Allie and Logan existed in their own timeline during and after games, and also Allie would absolutely cover for her if asked, because Allie was a menace who wanted Hannah to be happy, which Hannah was deeply conflicted about.
She didn't move.
Garrett's hand continued its path up and down her back, slow and even, like he had nowhere else to be. Which he did. He had a post-game team thing, and she had reading, and none of this was practical or sensible or fitting into the framework she'd built very carefully around her life.
She'd been in Briar for a year and a half. She'd learned not to want things she couldn't keep. She'd learned to hold people loosely, to not build anything she'd have to leave, to stay interested without getting involved. It was a system. It had worked.
Garrett had walked through it like it was a bead curtain.
"What are you thinking?" he said.
"Nothing."
"Hannah."
"I'm thinking that this is becoming a thing," she said into his collarbone. "That's what I'm thinking."
A pause. "Is that bad?"
She considered lying. Considered the easy deflection, the joke, the pivot. Garrett would let her take any of them — he always did, he left her exits — but there was something in the way he was holding himself still, waiting, that made her not want to.
"No," she said. "I don't think it's bad."
The breath he let out was slow and deliberate, like he'd been holding it without meaning to. His arms tightened briefly around her — just for a second, just enough to notice.
"Okay," he said.
"That's all you've got? Okay?"
"I'm trying really hard not to be annoying about this."
"It's not working."
"I know." She could hear the smile in it. "I scored the winning goal tonight, Hannah. I saw you screaming in the stands. You waited for me. And you just said this isn't bad. I need about thirty seconds to not be annoying about it."
She lifted her head. He was looking down at her with that expression — the real one, underneath everything else, warm and a little stunned and very Garrett — and Hannah felt something in her chest settle, something that had been braced for a long time, something that was tired of holding its position.
"Twenty seconds," she said.
He grinned. It was the full one, the real one, the one she'd been cataloguing since before she admitted she was cataloguing anything. "Twenty seconds."
"Quietly."
"Extremely quietly."
She put her head back on his collarbone.
They stood there in the quiet side corridor while Garrett Graham was quietly, privately thrilled about something, and Hannah Wells let him be.
The team party was at the hockey house.
Hannah attended under protest, which was her standard condition for most social events, but the protest was somewhat undermined by the fact that she was standing in the Haulbrook Street kitchen at eleven-fifteen PM with a solo cup of something fruit-adjacent in her hand, watching Garrett be congratulated by approximately forty people.
He was good at this. She'd noticed that — the way he moved through a crowd, easy and warm, making people feel like they'd been seen. He had a version of his charm that was genuine, not the performed kind, and it was the main reason Hannah had taken so long to clock which one she was getting. It had taken her a long time to learn that there was a Garrett who turned it on for everyone and a Garrett who turned it down for her, and that the second one was rarer.
She wasn't sure what to do with that still.
Allie appeared at her elbow with the timing she'd clearly been calculating.
"So," Allie said.
"No."
"I didn't say anything."
"You were about to."
Allie pressed her lips together in the universal expression of someone not saying something extremely loud. She looked at Hannah. She looked at Garrett. She looked back at Hannah.
"He scored a goal," she said.
"Multiple people scored goals."
"He scored the goal."
"I'm aware."
"And you were in the stands—"
"Allie."
"—screaming, I have video—"
"You do not have video."
"I one hundred percent have video, Hannah, I took it specifically because I knew you'd try to deny it later—"
Hannah turned to look at her. Allie had the expression of someone who had planned for every contingency, which she had, because Allie was a terrifying force of nature and also Hannah's best friend.
"Delete it," Hannah said.
"Absolutely not." Allie sipped her drink. "You were happy. It's evidence. I'm keeping it forever."
Across the kitchen, Garrett said something that made the group around him laugh, and Hannah's eyes went there the way they'd been doing all night — magnetically, against her will, with the reliability of something she'd long since stopped being able to control.
She looked back down at her cup.
"Fine," she said.
"Fine what?"
"Fine, it's — whatever. It's a thing." She kept her voice level. "Don't."
"I'm not doing anything," Allie said, radiating satisfaction.
"You're doing a lot."
"I'm standing here, Hannah."
"You're standing here loudly."
Allie took her arm and squeezed it, brief and warm. "I'm happy for you," she said, simply. Not a lot of architecture around it. Just that.
Hannah looked at her. Allie was smiling the specific smile she kept for things she actually meant, and Hannah's chest did the complicated thing again — not the Garrett thing, a different kind, the kind that came from being known and liked anyway.
"Thank you," she said.
"Don't make it weird."
"I would never."
They looked at each other for a second, and then they both laughed, and Allie refilled her cup, and Hannah turned back to the kitchen.
Garrett was already looking at her.
She didn't know when he'd looked — sometime in the past thirty seconds, sometime while she was talking to Allie — but he was, from across the room, with a drink in his hand and his head tilted slightly, that expression he got when he was paying attention.
Hannah held his gaze.
Lifted one eyebrow.
His face did something complicated and warm and she watched him excuse himself from the group with the specific politeness of someone who has somewhere to be. He crossed the kitchen without hurrying.
"Hey," he said, stopping in front of her.
"You're going to use that word until it stops meaning anything."
"It always means something when I say it to you." He said it without apparent awareness of how it landed, the way he said a lot of things, and Hannah breathed through it. "You want to get out of here?"
"I thought this was your party."
"It's the team's party. I've been there." He glanced around — Logan in the corner with Allie, Tuck on the couch with a group playing something on his phone, the general controlled chaos of twenty-something hockey players celebrating. "I've fulfilled my obligations."
"You've been here forty minutes."
"I'm told I made an impression at the game." His mouth curved. "I can coast."
Hannah looked at him — at the easy posture and the warm eyes and the damp hair and all of Garrett Graham, who had walked through her carefully constructed system like it was nothing, who made her feel seen in a way she hadn't budgeted for.
"Yeah," she said. "Okay."
They walked back to campus.
It was cold in the specific way of late New England autumn, and Garrett fell into step beside her with the natural ease of someone who'd done this a hundred times, and he had — they'd walked to and from the library, to and from the dining hall, to and from various places Hannah had stopped pretending were coincidences.
He didn't take her hand right away. He waited until they were off Haulbrook and onto the main path, out of the sight of anyone who might have been watching, and then he reached over and his hand found hers like it had been there before, like it belonged there.
She didn't let go.
"Can I tell you something?" he said.
"You're going to regardless."
"True." He looked up at the sky — clear and cold, the kind of night where you could actually see stars, which didn't happen enough this close to campus. "When I saw you in the stands tonight, at the start of the game — before it was anything — I thought, okay. Whatever happens, it's fine. She's there."
Hannah walked.
"That's very sentimental," she said.
"I know."
"It's not like me not being there would have affected the outcome."
"Objectively no." He glanced at her sideways. "And also not the point."
She looked at their joined hands. His thumb was doing the slow movement across her knuckles that she'd catalogued early on as something he did without thinking, something that was just his default when he was holding onto something he wanted to keep.
"I keep almost saying things," she said. She wasn't sure why she said that. It came out before she'd approved it.
Garrett was quiet for a moment. Not filling the space, which was one of the things about him — he knew when not to.
"You don't have to say them," he said. "I'm not going anywhere."
"I know that." She did know that. It was not the problem. The problem was that she knew it and believed it, which meant she'd gotten there, past the part where she held people at arm's length because she didn't trust them to stay. She was past that part with Garrett and she hadn't been paying attention when it happened and now she was here, walking back to campus in the cold with her hand in his, saying things she hadn't planned to say. "That's sort of the problem."
He processed this. She watched him do it — the small shift in his expression, working through what she meant.
"You're scared," he said.
"I'm practical."
"Hannah."
"Both," she said. "I'm both."
He stopped walking.
She stopped because he'd stopped, because their hands were still linked, and then he turned to face her on the path and he looked at her with that expression — the real one, the underneath one, the one that had gotten her here — and Hannah held very still.
"I'm scared too," he said. Just like that. "For what it's worth. I've been scared of screwing this up since approximately the third time we studied together and I realized I was completely done for."
Something moved through her. She looked at him. "The third time?"
"The one where you fell asleep in the library and I didn't wake you up for forty-five minutes because you looked—" He stopped. Smiled slightly. "Because you looked peaceful. And I just sat there and did my reading and I thought, well, this is a disaster."
Hannah's chest did the thing. The complicated, warm, impossible thing that happened more and more when he did this — when he just said it, nakedly and simply and without giving her anything to deflect from.
"You're so annoying," she said, which was not what she meant at all.
"I know."
"You could have woken me up."
"I know."
"I had reading—"
"Hannah." He stepped forward and tucked that piece of hair back, and his hand cupped her face with the ease of someone who'd done it a thousand times, and she let him. "I know."
She kissed him this time.
Out in the open, on the campus path, where anyone could see — and that was a thing, that was a notable thing, because Hannah Wells did not do that, Hannah Wells had rules about that, Hannah Wells had a whole system and the system had an entire section about public displays and their implications.
She kissed him anyway.
His other arm came around her waist and he made a small sound against her mouth that she was going to be thinking about for a long time, and she kissed him until she was warm all the way through despite the cold and the night air and all the open space around them.
When she pulled back, his eyes were still closed for just a second. She watched them open.
"Okay," he said. His voice was rough and wondering and very quiet.
"Okay," she agreed.
The video Allie had taken — Hannah, in the stands, on her feet, screaming, grinning like she'd forgotten who she was — surfaced at brunch on Sunday.
Hannah looked at it for a long time. Garrett, over her shoulder, watched it twice and said nothing, which was somehow the most Garrett thing he'd ever done.
"Delete it," Hannah said.
"No," said Allie.
"You look happy," said Logan, who was rarely this observant and had picked a poor moment to start.
"You do," said Garrett. He pressed a kiss to her temple, easy and careless, and stole a piece of her toast, and went back to his own plate.
Hannah looked at the video one more time. Herself, in the stands, in the moment before the puck hit the net, face completely unguarded, watching number 77 move across the ice like something inevitable.
She looked happy.
She handed Allie's phone back.
"Fine," she said. "Keep it."
Allie's smile was enormous and completely insufferable. Hannah drank her coffee and didn't look at Garrett and felt, against her better judgment, against every system she'd ever built, completely and quietly fine.