Garrett got on with the rest of Thursday like nothing unusual had happened, which technically nothing had. She had said yes. That was enough. He wasn’t going to sit there turning it over for the rest of the afternoon.
He mostly succeeded at that until about thre o’clock, when it occurred to him he had genuinely no idea what "hanging out" was supposed to consist of.
He’d never been good at this, the actual planning of a thing, rather than just letting a thing happen to him. He landed, eventually, on the park that cut through the edge of campus, the one with the bench everybody wanted to sit on and a decent bit of grass that wasn’t usually overrun with people running drills or throwing a ball around. Nothing that needed booking.
He wasn’t thinking about the system. He was thinking about whether she’d actually want to just sit there and talk, or whether that would bore her within ten minutes, and that felt like a different kind of question entirely.
He didn’t buy anything for it. There was nothing to buy, no food to bring, no plan beyond a patch of grass and however long she wanted to stay on it. If it went well, it went well because of the conversation, not because he’d arranged anything around it.
That itself felt like a small, deliberate choice. Not trying to impress her with effort. Just showing up.
Raymond was waiting by the bike racks when Garrett left the park towards the lecture hall that afternoon to find Daniel, arms folded, no pretence of coincidence about it.
This wasn’t a look held across a courtyard. This was Raymond walking straight at him, and Garrett understood, before either of them had said a word, that this wasn’t going to end the way the last one had.
"You’re still doing this," Raymond said, no greeting attached. "Her. You."
"Doing what."
"Don’t..." Raymond’s voice stayed level, but there was a harder edge underneath it now "...You know exactly what I mean. You’ve been all over campus with her for weeks now, I told you once already."
Garrett felt the old pull immediately the familiar urge to lower his eyes, mutter something to himself, let Raymond have the last word and be done with it. It would’ve been easy, It had worked before.
He didn’t move.
"Whatever your problem is," Garrett said, "it’s your problem. Not mine." It came out quick
Raymond’s expression didn’t change straight away. It was the pause underneath it that gave it away, a half-second adjustment, like he’d been holding a script and the next line hadn’t come.
"What did you just say Garrett?" He shot back raising his voice a little "...You’re going to regret saying that."
"Maybe but that doesn’t change what I said."
Raymond hadn’t expected that. Garrett could see it in the extra second it took him to find his next sentence, the old version of this conversation would have ended by now, quietly, with Garrett already walking away.
This one wasn’t fearless. His pulse was doing something unpleasant, and his hands weren’t entirely steady in his pockets. But fear, this time, wasn’t the thing deciding what he did next.
"I’ll deal with you," Raymond said eventually, the words quieter now, but no less serious.
Garrett didn’t give him anything for that. No dramatic response, no matching threat. Just silence long enough that Raymond was the one who eventually turned and walked off first.
Once he was gone, Garrett let his shoulders drop about an inch. His heart was still going faster than the conversation strictly justified. His hands still weren’t quite steady.
He hadn’t enjoyed a second of it. But he’d stayed. That was the only part of it that actually mattered.
He didn’t let it eat the rest of his evening. He walked home turning tomorrow back over in his head instead — nowhere fancy, nothing arranged, just a park and however the conversation wanted to go, which had somehow become the more interesting problem to have.
Across town, Emiliana had already made her decision hours ago. There wasn’t a second version of that conversation to have with herself. She’d chosen. What remained was smaller and, in its own way, harder: actually saying it out loud to the person she was turning down.
Her phone rang around eight. Brian, not a text.
"Hey," he said, easy as always. "Still good for tomorrow?"
She paused a second longer than the question needed.
She knew exactly what she was supposed to say. They’d made the plan. She’d said yes to it first, before any of this. There was a version of tonight where she simply confirmed it and let tomorrow happen the way it had always been going to happen.
Instead, what surfaced was the image of Garrett walking straight into that crowd, visibly bracing for it and doing it anyway, and the flat, not so fancy way he had asked her, She’d already decided. This call was just the part where the decision became real.
On the other end of the call, Brian didn’t push. He waited, the way he always waited, with the quiet confidence of someone who’d never once needed to chase an answer out of her.
"I can’t make it tomorrow," she said finally.
"Oh." A beat. "Why not?"
"I’ve got somewhere to be."
Brian went quiet in a way that wasn’t like him. She never cancelled. That wasn’t a thing that happened between them, not in either direction, not in years.
"Right," he said eventually. "Okay then. Some other time, then."
"Another time."
The call ended without him getting anything closer to an actual answer than that.
Emiliana set the phone down on the bed beside her and sat with it for a second.
Friday wasn’t going to happen the way it had been arranged to happen. She’d chosen the other version of it instead.
Somewhere across town, Garrett was thinking about nothing more complicated than a park bench and tomorrow’s weather, entirely unaware that a phone call he would never hear about had just rearranged someone else’s evening because of him.
Chime.
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