Chapter Text
Hannah
Parties are loud and chaotic and full of people who think swaying gently counts as dancing.
My eyes go to the door the second we walk in, then to the window past the kitchen, then back to the door. I clock the guy on the porch who's already slurring at nobody in particular. I notice the girl by the stairs shifting her weight away from whoever's got a hand on her shoulder, half a step at a time, like she's hoping he won't notice her leaving.
Garret's hand lands on my back as we come through the door, not steering, just resting there, and something about that one detail rearranges the whole equation for me. I can do loud tonight. I can do the guy on the porch railing yelling about beer pong rules nobody agreed to.
"HAN-HAN." Allie's got my arm before I've even cleared the doorway, hauling me two steps deeper into the house like she genuinely suspects I might reconsider and bolt for the car. "You made it."
"Yes, Allie. I did."
Garret's already laughing at her, at the specific chaos of Allie three drinks into a party that started less than an hour ago, her eyeliner already slightly smudged in a way she has no idea about yet and will be furious about tomorrow.
"I am offended," she announces, apparently hearing the exact shape of Garret's laugh even over the bass shaking the floorboards, "by the implication that I'm chaotic."
"You didn't even hear what I said."
"I know what you were thinking."
"That's somehow worse."
She gasps, hand pressed to her chest, fully committing to the bit, and behind her Grace appears out of the crowd with two red cups and an expression that says she's been monitoring Allie's trajectory for a while now.
"She's been like this since we got here," Grace says, handing one of the cups off to nobody in particular before deciding it's actually for her. "I want it on record that I tried to slow her down."
"You did not try very hard," Allie says.
"I said, and I quote, maybe pace yourself."
"That's not trying. That's saying words."
"I'm gonna go grab drinks," Garret says into my ear, close enough that I actually catch it over the noise. "Beer, water, your call."
"Sure. Thanks, baby."
"Anything for you." He says it easy, automatic, like it costs him nothing at all, and a year into this, it still does something soft and stupid to my chest every single time, a reaction I've stopped trying to talk myself out of.
He disappears toward the kitchen, and Dean appears in the space he just vacated, already talking before he's fully arrived.
"Wellsy. You look like a woman who's had exactly one thought tonight and that thought was regret."
"That's oddly specific."
"I contain multitudes." He surveys the room like he's assessing property values. "This party's a six out of ten. Maybe a seven if somebody breaks something valuable later."
"High bar."
"I have standards."
He wanders off toward Logan and Beau, already loud about something before he's even reached them, and I turn back to Allie, who is very obviously not built to survive this party at her current pace for more than another hour.
"How long have you actually been here?"
"Define long."
"That answer tells me everything I need to know."
She smiles at me, entirely too pleased with herself. "I've been here an appropriate amount of time."
"Allie."
"Okay. Forty five minutes."
"And?"
She lifts her cup like it's a trophy she's earned through discipline and hard work. "Exactly the right amount of tipsy."
"That's not a real measurement."
"It's science if you believe in yourself."
"I'm fairly sure that's not how any of this works."
"You're fairly sure. I'm certain."
We stare at each other for a second, and then we both lose it at the same time, and she loops her arm back through mine, and we wade further into the noise together, past somebody's badly organized flip cup tournament, past a couch that's already lost a cushion to the floor, past the kitchen doorway where I catch a glimpse of Garret leaning against the counter, laughing at something with his arms crossed.
I have bad days still. Days where something small, a smell, a certain angle of light, the wrong stranger standing too close, drops me straight back to fifteen without any warning at all. I have things I do automatically that other people would probably find strange if they ever actually noticed, which mostly they don't, because 6 years is a long time to practice making something look like nothing.
The difference now is I don't have to hide any of it from the people who actually matter. Garret knows. Allie knows. Neither of them has ever once made me feel like something fragile that needs handling with gloves on. They just learned the shape of me the way you learn which stairs creak in a house you actually live in, quietly, over time, without ever making it a whole production.
Garret finds me again a few minutes later, threading back through the crowd with two drinks held up like some kind of offering.
"Delivery."
He holds out a can. Unopened, obviously, seal intact, the same way it always is, because he's never once handed me a drink that wasn't sealed.
I hook a finger under the tab myself. The crack of it gets swallowed almost entirely by the music. Almost.
"You good?" he asks, watching my face the way he always does when he's checking, not because he doubts me, just because he's learned the difference between my good and my good, and he likes to be sure which one he's getting.
"I'm good."
His eyes stay on mine half a second longer than the answer strictly requires, and then, apparently satisfied, he lets it go.
We find Logan in the living room, mid-argument with Beau about whether shots count as a competitive sport, both of them red faced and completely serious about it in the specific way only very drunk men can be serious about something this stupid. Grace watches them from a safe distance with an expression that's half amusement, half genuine concern for Logan's liver.
"He's going to regret this tomorrow," she tells me, not lowering her voice at all, apparently unconcerned about Logan overhearing.
"I heard that," Logan says, not looking over.
"Good."
Dean materializes at Garret's elbow a few minutes later, already mid-sentence. "Come on."
"That sounded suspiciously like an order."
"It was one."
"I just got here."
"And now you're leaving again. Life's full of these little tragedies." Dean looks at me. "I'm borrowing him. Ten minutes, tops."
"Take your time," I say.
Garret glances back at me anyway, checking, the same look from a minute ago. "You good?"
"I'm good. Go."
"Back in a bit." He kisses my forehead and lets Dean drag him toward the kitchen, and I watch him go for exactly as long as I feel like watching him go, which is longer than I'd ever admit to Allie, who has told me on multiple occasions that I look at him the same way he looks at me, an accusation I deny every time and she never once believes.
I drift toward the kitchen myself a few minutes later, mostly because standing still at a party makes my brain start running inventory whether I want it to or not, and moving helps, or I've told myself that enough times over the years that it's become functionally true regardless of whether it was ever actually true to begin with.
Someone shoulders past me hard in the doorway, some guy I don't recognize, cup in one hand, phone in the other, muttering a distracted sorry without actually looking at me, already three steps gone before the word's even fully out of his mouth. My can jostles. Something sloshes slightly over the rim and onto my hand. I don't think anything of it. People bump into people at parties. That's basically the whole design of a party, several hundred bodies packed into a space built for a fraction of that number, all of them slightly too loud and slightly too confident in their own coordination.
The kitchen itself is somehow even more crowded than the living room. Someone's sitting on the counter, legs swinging, narrating a drinking game that involves increasingly complicated hand gestures nobody else seems to fully understand. Someone else is searching the fridge with the specific desperation of a person who has decided, incorrectly, that there might be real food in a house full of college students.
A guy from my performance history class flags me down near the sink.
"Wait. You're Hannah, right?"
"Yeah."
"Knew it."
"That's a weird way to say hi."
"No, I mean, I recognized you. From class."
"Okay. That makes more sense."
His name, I eventually remember, is Marcus, and we end up talking for a while about nothing in particular, the specific misery of Professor Chen's grading curve, the group project none of us wanted, the sheer indignity of every single class somehow getting harder in the exact same week. It's the kind of conversation you only have at parties, both of us pretending we came here for some reason other than standing in a kitchen complaining about homework to somebody we barely know.
I take a sip of the beer while we talk and rember a conversation in which Dean claimed that there are too options for drinking in collage. One, learn to like shitty beer or two, don’t drink,
At some point I decide I'm actually done with the beer, so I trade it for water instead, twisting the cap myself, drinking most of the bottle in one go. I don't set the can down. I never set it down, not once tonight, not ever really, not since I was fifteen. It isn't even a decision anymore, hasn't been for years. It's closer to locking a door before bed, something your hands just do without consulting the rest of you.
The conversation with Marcus keeps going. I laugh at something. Answer a question about the midterm. And keep my hand ontop of the cans opening Somewhere in there Allie appears at the edge of my vision, deep in conversation with Grace, both of them gesturing at something on somebody's phone screen, and I catch her eye and she grins at me across the room, and everything, for one more minute, is completely, boringly normal.
Then my tongue goes strange first. That's the actual first thing, before I even register it as wrong, a kind of thickness at the back of my mouth, like I've bitten it and it's starting to swell, except it doesn't hurt. I stop mid-sentence to Marcus and have to consciously reassemble the next word before I can say it.
"Sorry, what?" he asks.
"Nothing. Lost my train of thought."
My own voice sounds slightly off to my own ears, the consonants softer than they should be, like I'm talking through a mouthful of water. I set the water bottle down on the counter, actually set it down this time, because my hand doesn't want to hold anything anymore, a heaviness settling into my fingers that has nothing to do with tiredness.
The room tilts. Not dramatically. Just a slow list, like the floor's been replaced with the deck of a boat, and my body corrects for it automatically, weight shifting to my left foot before my brain's even caught up to why.
Marcus is still talking. I can see his mouth moving. The words arrive a half second later than they should, some delay opening up between his lips and the sound actually landing in my head, and underneath that gap my heart is doing something fast and hard and completely disconnected from anything happening around me.
"Are you okay?" he asks, and this time I catch the words clearly enough, but by the time I try to answer, I've already forgotten what he asked.
"I think I need to sit down."
It comes out slurred. Not slightly. Actually slurred, the s dragging too long, need coming out closer to neee, and I hear it happen and feel a spike of real fear cut through the fog, because I know this. I know exactly what this is, even through the thickening haze settling over everything, some old, precise memory surfacing on its own without my permission.
I try to take a step toward the doorway and my legs don't fully cooperate, my knee buckling slightly before catching itself, and I grab the edge of the counter instead, my fingers not gripping it quite the way I tell them to.
Marcus says something else. I don't catch any of it this time.
I need Garret.
The thought is the only clear one left, cutting through everything else with total, singular focus, and I push off the counter and start moving, though moving is generous, my feet dragging slightly, my vision starting to narrow at the edges like I'm looking through a tunnel that's slowly closing. Faces blur past, none of them his. The music seems louder and further away at the same time, some strange doubled quality to the sound that makes my stomach turn.
My knees finally give out properly somewhere near the hallway, and I grab the closest solid thing in reach without thinking, which happens to be somebody's shirt, which happens to be Dean.
"Hey, Wellsy." Relief flickers across his face for half a second before it rearranges completely, his eyes actually landing on mine instead of past me. "Whoa. You okay?"
I try to answer. My mouth moves. Nothing useful comes out, the sentence collapsing somewhere between my brain and my tongue.
"Find Garret," I manage, finally, the words thick and slow.
Whatever's in my voice kills whatever joke he was about to make instantly, his whole posture changing. "Yeah. Of course. What's going on."
I don't have an answer that will come out right, so I just grip his shirt tighter, and he gets an arm around my waist, taking most of my weight without making it a whole conversation, and the room keeps tilting, slow and steady, the edges of everything going soft and distant, like the party's happening on the other side of glass now instead of around me.