Chapter Text
Garrett
2:03
I never see this time of night before a game. Especially not before a game as big as the one against St. A’s tomorrow—today. But I can’t sleep. In bed since 11:45 and still not a wink.
The thing with Logan earlier…I think it fucked with my head a little more than I want to admit.
Hannah thinks I should tell the guys about my father. And I get it. Maybe if I said more than just, “My dad’s a dick,” the kind of shit that went down tonight wouldn’t happen.
But Logan doesn’t always make it easy to say anything about my dad. My best friend has envied my DNA since the day we met. And that’s not me bragging. I don’t envy my own DNA. It’s just becoming super clear that Logan thinks I should just shut up and be grateful.
And now, maybe he’s envious of something else? My relationship with Hannah, or maybe not envy? Maybe a crush? On Hannah.
I don’t know. Something is going on there. I’ve noticed the way he looks at her for just a beat too long. I mean, she’s gorgeous—a lot of guys look. But I expect my friends to at least be discreet about it.
Then again, maybe I’m imagining the whole thing. Not the crush, pretty sure I’m dead on about that.
But maybe this insomnia problem has nothing to do with Logan at all.
It’s the first night in almost a week that Hannah hasn’t been pressed up against me in that way that makes everything about the world feel simultaneously less horrible and somehow more of everything else.
So much more.
Shit. I think suddenly. Is that what’s going on?
Am I already this cooked in just a couple of months? So much so that a night without her eliminates a REM cycle?
Great. Hate that for me.
Only, actually, maybe I kind of love that for me.
Fuck. Not maybe.
I do.
I’m smiling up at the ceiling like an idiot when I catch the flicker of my phone from the corner of my eye.
It’s 2:05.
It’s always on Do Not Disturb this time of night.
It wasn’t until just a couple of weeks ago, when someone at a random football party Beau invited us to started an equally random conversation about emergency contacts, that I added Hannah to a now two-person list of those permitted to breach the DND.
Two because “Put Allie in a shoe!” was what Hannah yelled as she leaned toward me, music blaring too loudly for normal volume.
I frowned. “Put Allie in a shoe?”
Hannah rolled her eyes and curved one hand around the side of her mouth so I might hear her better. “No…Put Allie on the list too!”
I put my beer down on the cluttered coffee table. “What?”
Hannah leaned even closer then, her breath tickling my ear. She’d been warm and soft against my arm, and I’d wondered, for at least the 10th time that night, why we’d decided to come to this thing.
“Add Allie to the list of people who can breach the DND!”
“Why?”
My girlfriend glanced over at where Allie stood talking to Dean in a corner. Allie was saying something in his ear. Then he smiled and reached for…I don’t know…her hand? But she moved away, and the smile on Dean’s face dropped. He plastered it on again almost instantly when a tall blonde walked by.
Huh…
“Because she’s not with Sean anymore,” Hannah was saying. “And sometimes when she’s out late, I worry about her.”
I smiled at her, because how could I not?
“You’re a good friend, Wellsy.”
She shrugged and said, “She’d do the same for me.”
So, now, weeks later, when Allie’s name pops up on my screen at 2:05, I pick up.
“Hayes?…Everything ok?”
It’s awkward. I’ve never spoken to Allie on the phone, let alone in the middle of the night.
“Garrett? Jeez. Sorry, of course it’s Garrett. I called you…” She said quickly. “Hey, Hannah’s with you, right? She texted like two hours ago to say she was coming home, but then I—I fell asleep. Could you two please unspoon long enough for her to text a best friend who worries?”
“Allie, she’s not here.”
“What?”
I sit up. Because, yeah. What?
If Hannah isn’t at home with Allie and she isn’t with me, then where is she? She didn’t mention going anywhere else tonight.
“She said she needed to help Della close, and then she was gonna go straight home to work on her song…I mean, did you try calling her?”
I say the last, more sharply than I would under any other circumstances. But when fear sneaks up on me, it often arrives anger-adjacent.
“Yes, of course,” Allie snaps back. Then we both go silent for a beat before she adds. “When Hannah didn’t answer, I just thought she was with you…Garrett, it’s really not like her not to let me know if she changes her plans. It’s like our one non-negotiable house rule. We always text each other.”
I pull my phone away from my ear to check the time again. Like I don’t already know.
Two hours.
It’s been two hours since Malone’s closed. On Thursdays, the lights go off at midnight. But after a big event like tonight, it’s feasible that Hannah didn’t lock up until 12:30 or 12:45 even. Maybe it actually hasn’t been two hours since she left…
But still.
Allie’s right. She would have checked in.
Wellsy was always stopping mid-makeout to text Allie that she decided to stay over at my place. I’d groan and say, “Can you please, for the love of God, Wellsy, tell her you’re staying over before we’re in the middle of…this…”
She’d laugh and say, “But we're always in the middle of this...”
She wasn’t wrong.
But something was wrong now.
I’m pulling on my shoes in the closet when I say the next words, “Call Della. Maybe it took them longer to close tonight. I’m leaving now.”
Not ten seconds go by before I’m jogging downstairs.
Yanking keys from the dish that Tucker keeps on our kitchen island.
Breathing foggy puffs of air into the night sky.
Starting the Jeep.
Allie is saying something about it going to voicemail as the engine rumbles to life beneath me.
“Della’s?”
“No. Hannah’s.”
“Allie, call Della,” I say again, this time with intentional force because it’s late and I don’t know where Hannah is. And Allie is worried and struggling to reconcile that Hannah isn’t just hanging out at the hockey house.
“Fuck,” I say, then. Because some asshole parked too close, and reversing takes work. Gotta be some drunk kid at the party going on down the block.
Reverse, pull forward, reverse, pull forward.
“Not you. Just some drunk fuck parked too close,” I say into the phone.
“Garrett, I’m worried.”
“Call Della…Wellsy probably hit her writing stride and decided to stay at Malone’s to finish it or something. I’m headed there now.”
The only thing is, if I really thought any of that was likely, my pulse wouldn’t be racing.
“Hannah explicitly said she was coming home though. Like, she texted to ask if I was up for a girls’ night. Then Sean came by, and we got into like…a fight…and then he left and I just…I needed to lie down and…Garrett, I fucking fell asleep. I’m the worst friend…”
Finally on the road, I inhale sharply. “Allie. She’s ok. Call Della, ok? And then call me back.”
Allie says “ok” one final time before disconnecting. But her “ok” felt unconvincing.
The one time I needed Allie Hayes to pull out those acting skills, she didn’t.
I’m scrolling to Wellsy’s contact a second later.
It rings and rings and rings again.
“Hi, This is Hannah. You can leave a message if you want, but you’re better off texting! Thanks! Bye!”
The chipper sound of her outgoing message cuts through the silence and opens the door to the feeling I’ve been trying to keep at bay since the moment Allie said Hannah wasn’t home.
I should have stayed. I should have walked her home.
“Wellsy, are you ok?... Allie called and said you aren’t home yet. I’m headed to Malone’s. I don’t know…maybe clean up was a nightmare? Or you’re on some writing roll? In which case…amazing. Just please call me back.”
Improbable miscommunications and sitcom endings are the only possibilities I want to entertain right now, but self-recrimination lodges itself in my chest, and it isn’t going anywhere.
You should have waited. You should have walked her home. You knew she didn’t ride her bike to Malone’s tonight because the original plan was for her to come back to your place. And you left her there.
You left her.
What’s the matter with you?
Hannah is always saying that the dorms are too close to Malones for me to hang around and wait for her shift to end. That it doesn’t make sense.
And technically she’s right. Malone’s isn’t on campus, but it may as well be. It’s just outside, on the main road leading back to Hastings; it’s about a seven-minute walk. And that’s if you’re walking slowly.
I always argue with her about this, though, and I always win unless she pulls the “Allie is getting off at the same time” card. Then I let it go. I don’t like it, but I let it go.
Seven minutes is not a long time. And after a night like tonight—a fundraiser at Malone's, with lots of people out and about, there would have been other people walking back to campus with her, even if she got out late.
Thursday night in a college town is like a Friday night anywhere else. People go out. They drink. They walk.
Even still. Even, fucking still. I should have waited. I should have walked her home.
But tonight there’d been Logan.
There’d been his finger in my chest.
There’d been my need to get home and get enough sleep to face Saint A’s and their new center.
There’d been the pressure to step up more as captain.
There’d been hockey.
Fuck.
I am fully aware of how fast I’m driving when I tap on her name again.
It rings again. And again and again.
“Baby I’m about nine minutes out from Malone’s now. If you’re not there…Listen, I’m doing my best not to freak the fuck out, but you gotta call me in like the next two minutes, ok?”
Deep breath. Relax Graham. Relax. When she hears this later, and everything is absolutely fine because she just decided to hang out with Dex or somebody else from the theater department, she’s not going to want to hear your epic crash out.
I force humor that I don’t feel. “Wellsy, if you’re in some back booth at Malone's with your big ass headphones on, you and I are gonna have our first big fight as a couple…That’s like a rite of passage, right? Be advised, we will also fight if you just fell asleep. So, I hope you’re ready.”
But the light and playful tone I’m going for won’t stick.
Fear is all that clings.
“Hannah. I need you to stop whatever you’re doing and call me back. Now.”
2:20.
I inhale and focus on the road, mentally fighting the dark images that try to sneak their way into my thoughts. They’re images I’ve seen before. Not often, thank God. Likely because Hannah is so steady all the time. But the images do show up now and then.
In the quiet. Often on the heels of a news story or a guy saying something immature or truly fucked up in the locker room.
Thoughts and images that I’ve disciplined myself not to linger on.
But the really irritating thing about my brain is that when it doesn’t know a complete story, it sort of just constructs one; shifting pieces of a thing around until the unthinkable comes into vision.
Hannah hasn’t told me everything, and she doesn’t have to. I don’t actually want her to. Because the pieces that I do know are awful enough to make my skin crawl.
A 15-year-old girl.
Too young to have ever heard of Rohypnol.
Drugged at a party.
A party she was excited to get invited to because she was “such a nerd.”
A shitty-ass town called Ransom that decided to rally around a rapist.
A rapist who mercifully remains nameless to me.
But the mayor's kid.
The Mayor of Ransom, Indiana.
A hockey player.
Ransom High School.
Six years ago.
It had taken simple math to figure out the year the assault occurred. It had taken heroic discipline to stop myself from googling the name of the Mayor of Ransom back then. Who her son is.
The truth is I could find out his name and likely his address in just a few clicks.
Twice, I’ve come close. Both times, I felt the urge after a tight smile from Hannah. Once while sharing a high school memory. Once when her eyes had gone misty while talking about her parents.
Each time I reminded myself that if Hannah wanted me to know who the guy was, she would’ve tell me.
Doing any research at all would be a betrayal of her trust.
Also, I do understand that knowing that asshole’s name would be brain-glitching information.
Absolutely bad for me.
Infinitely worse for him.
But, as I drive through the streets of Hastings, getting closer and closer to campus, the pieces of the story that I don’t know and the pieces that I do, co-mingle with all the things I’ve ever heard about girls walking alone in the dark.
Pepper spray, mace, an air horn, an alarm…
Does Hannah have any of those? I’ve never asked.
How have you not asked? What kind of boyfriend lets his girlfriend—a girlfriend who this horrible thing has happened to, no less—walk home in the dark by herself without knowing the answer to these questions?
The kind of boyfriend who has a girlfriend who this horrible thing has happened to - that’s the kind, my rational brain gently reminds. The kind of boyfriend who knows his girlfriend doesn’t like feeling managed, treated differently, or like control is slipping from her grasp.
Hannah would never put up with me not “letting” her do something.
I glance up at the rearview mirror to make sure there aren’t any patrol cars because I’m currently breaking a thousand traffic laws. Speeding? Yes. Red lights and stop signs treated as recommendations? Yes and yes.
But I can’t outpace the images. The only thing that could stop the spiral would be hearing Hannah’s voi-
My phone rings.
Wellsy.
I punch the answer button like it personally offended me.
“I - Garrett, I’m so sorry.”
The relief is instant. My fingers let up on the wheel and my foot eases off the gas so much that I feel myself lurch forward. “Wellsy, thank God. Baby, where are -
“I’m so sorry,” she says again.
“It’s ok,” I breathe. “As long as you’re ok.”
But then I hear it. Sniffling.
“Wellsy?...Where are you? Are you ok?”
“I–I didn’t mean to make you worry.”
No. Not just sniffling. Crying. Like really crying.
“Hey. Hey…It’s ok. What happened? Where are you?” I’m in my car right now…I’m coming to get you.”
“No. You’ve got the game tomorrow—”
“For the love of God, Hannah, are you still at Malone’s?…I’m literally pulling up right now.”
I’m narrating this when my tires screech into an abandoned Malone’s parking lot. I’m about to pull my keys out of the ignition when -
“No. I-I’m at the library?”
A question. She’s isn’t sure?
I glance at my dashboard screen. It’s 2:32 now. The library?
“I thought they only did extended hours during finals week. Are you there with Dex?”
“N-No. I…I-I’m sitting outside.”
A glance at the dashboard again. It’s 40 degrees and dropping.
“Hannah.” Her name leaves my mouth more sharply than I mean.
Again…fear…anger-adjacent.
It’s something I need to work on, but her hiccuping on the other end of the line is making it impossible.
I am afraid.
“What do you mean you’re sitting outside? Were you supposed to meet someone? Are you hurt?”
“Garrett…”
She says my name like a plea, and I instantly stop asking questions.
My girl is alive and breathing, and I have heard her voice. Thank God.
But the relief I felt a moment ago seems like a distant memory because she’s not ok. And I don’t know why. But something is very wrong.
“Baby, don’t move, ok? I’ll be there in three minutes. Just stay where you are. I’m coming to get you.”
Silence.
“Wellsy?”
“Y-yes. Ok.”
—------
Hannah
Somehow I miss the sound of Garrett’s car, but I hear his footsteps when he comes running up the concrete steps.
Loud and echoey in the silence. His comically big shoes stop in front of me before I look up at him, but then he’s sitting down next to me and cussing under his breath.
Something about it being too-
“...fucking cold…
I hadn’t realized it was cold until a few moments ago. But it is. I’d had trouble getting my fingers to work when I called.
Garrett pulls me into his arms, but I can’t hug him back. Maybe my arms have been folded around my body for too long
A body that’s rigid.
Not just from the cold. I know that.
Flight, then freeze. That’s how it goes with me. That’s how I ended up here.
“Wellsy…” He says again, pulling back just long enough to shrug out of his jacket. He wraps it around me and tugs me back into his arms.
I’m cocooned in him. And the sudden warmth of his jacket and his arms make me shiver. My head finds his shoulder. The crook of his neck.
My entire body shakes. He’s so warm.
I’m familiar enough with my own triggers to know what happened, but that doesn’t mean I’m always able to get ahead of it. At least I wasn’t tonight.
Couldn’t get my breathing under control. Couldn’t fight the sensations in my body.
Aaron Delaney is coming. To my school. To my home. Tomorrow. To a game I’m supposed to attend.
My school.
My home.
My boyfriend.
My place.
Not his.
He’s not supposed to be here.
Garrett’s voice is soft and low when he props his chin on top of my head and says, “Wellsy. What ha…” He stops then. Doesn’t ask the question he was going to. “I’m taking you home now. Ok?”
I can only nod.
I don’t know how to tell him that home doesn’t feel safe. That right now nowhere does.
Maybe we can just stay here. Inside the warmth of his jacket, wrapped in the distraction of his voice. Maybe we can stop time.
Because there are no physical locations where Aaron won’t be.
Garrett stands, but I don’t. Even though I want to. Even though the moment his arms are gone, I miss them.
What happens when we get home? What then? He has to play tomorrow. He can’t just not play. But he also can’t know Aaron is on the ice with him. That would be bad.
Something bad would happen. And I’d be the cause.
I can’t be the cause.
But now he knows something is wrong because I couldn’t just hold it together. All I had to do was hold it together for one night. Get through one game…
“Hannah…”
A beat passes.
Then another.
For a moment I am beneath a ceiling fan, and my mom looks worried. And the words I’m about to write down will ruin everything.
For a moment my parents are whispering about bills when they think I’ve fallen asleep.
Only I don’t sleep anymore.
I want to stand, but I can’t.
It turns out my body’s ability to save me from hypothermia is in question tonight.
But Garrett’s body is fully capable.
He scoops me up without a word. One arm slips under my knees and the other around my back.
He carries me to the jeep.
—--