Chapter Text
Allie can’t remember the last time she felt this kind of dread. Was it her eighth-grade play, when Mallory Crest, as Mrs. Hannigan, froze and forgot her lines, leaving Allie as a mini-Annie floundering? Was it during her first semester at Briar, when she accidentally walked in on her director making out with one of the understudies and then had to meet with him for a solo coaching session? Was it when she opened the door, still dressed in her lingerie and flushed from their hookup, expecting to find Dean, but was met instead by Sean’s hurt stare?
Those times were nothing compared to this. Those were jitters and butterflies. Right now, she feels an entire flock of birds batting their wings in her stomach.
The team manages to pull Dean off of Hunter, and she has to crane her neck around the crowd to get a better look at him.
He’s still fuming in a way she’s never seen before. His easygoing nature and calm features have twisted into something ugly, something he’s never shown.
The bell above the door clangs violently as he pushes it open, the crowd around them still too stunned to speak.
“Beau,” Allie says, looking at his friend in question. “Should I…”
Beau takes a shot, eyes still wide. Then he nods, and it scares her to see him just as alarmed as she feels.
“Go,” he says.
And Allie Hayes finds herself chasing Dean Di Laurentis.
The last fight Dean got into was on the ice two weeks ago — some idiot from Colton’s fourth line tried to run their goalie and Dean wasn’t having it. They’d all ended up in a pile-up in the corner, and the refs had to separate them, pulling on the back of his jersey until he’d dropped his arms and released number 29 from his grip.
But that’s different. The aggression on the ice is momentary. You hate your opponent for three 20-minute periods and it’s cool by the time the next whistle sounds.
No one would call him a hothead. He’s chill. He’s easy-going. He’s always a good time.
It’s not anger, it’s just hockey.
But there’s something about Hunter fucking Davenport, with his monogrammed Lacoste polos and his impractical loafers, that sends Dean into a rage and turns him into a fighter.
On the ice, he’s not looking to do damage, just ruffle some feathers. In the bar just now, Dean was aiming to hurt. And if his friends hadn’t pulled him off the douchebag, he would have done just that.
He crosses the street in three quick strides, his breath coming out in short puffs. He didn’t bother with his coat when he left, but he’d rather take a puck to the face than go back into Malone’s to get it.
It’s just as well that he doesn’t have his car. He shouldn’t be behind the wheel right now. A walk will do him some good. He has a lot to think about. Like how Allie told him she completed the assignment, and how Beau had looked at him with something dangerously close to pity, and how after three years, Hunter can still get a rise out of him.
He’s almost to the corner of the street when he hears it.
“Dean!”
He stops dead in his tracks, his eyes shooting skywards. When he turns around, her feet are planted on the edge of the sidewalk as if she was getting ready to run after him. She’s looking at him with pleading eyes.
He found out early on during their arrangement that he’s a sucker for her eyes. He sighs, already resigned to going back.
He crosses the street.
It feels so much better walking to her than away from her.
Dean jogs back toward her and Allie feels relief swell in her chest. She can’t tell if it’s the cold making her eyes water or if she’s actually emotional.
“Dean,” she says.
Because what else is there to say?
“Go back inside,” he says, trying to keep his voice steady. “It’s fine. I’m good. Go back inside.”
“It’s not fine,” Allie says. “I— I didn’t know. Are you okay?”
“No, you couldn’t have. It’s okay.”
It’s obviously not fine — she can tell by the tight set of his jaw and the fact that he can’t look her in the eye.
He always looks her in the eye.
He reaches out, and for a moment Allie thinks he’s going to hug her. But then his hands come to rest on her upper arms and she shivers, realizing for the first time that she, too, left without her coat. He steps closer, rubbing her arms, trying to create some friction and get her warm.
“You’re freezing. Go back inside. Please.”
“It didn’t mean anything.”
“You said that.”
She said it.
But she can tell he doesn’t believe it.
Dean knows that Allie blames herself for too much. She feels responsible for everyone’s feelings but her own. She thinks about Hannah and Garrett, about her father, about Sean.
She looks up at him. “We need to talk.”
He’s not going to be one more person she has to think about — not when she should be thinking of herself.
“It can wait.”
She shakes her head, and if this were any other day, if this night had gone any other way, he would find her stubbornness adorable.
“How do you know Carter—”
“Who the hell is Carter?” he explodes. “Did that prick give you a fake name?”
“No,” she stammers. “Well, not intentionally. It’s a stupid joke. It—”
He really is too late. She already has jokes with Hunter Davenport. She must see his face fall and she’s quick to respond.
“That’s how little it meant, Dean. I don’t even know the guy’s name! You can’t be mad at me for that!”
“I’m not mad at you!” he snaps, aware of the fact that he sounds mad. He takes a deep breath and exhales, long and hard. She does the same, only her breath doesn’t cause quite a disturbance.
“Dean, what you said in there…”
“We can forget it,” he says quickly.
The thing is — he doesn’t want to forget it. He doesn’t want to let her go. He wants to tell her all the things he told Beau when his friend had leaned back in the booth, smirk on his face, and said, “So what’s she like?”
And Dean — bashful smile creeping on his face, head hung low to avoid being made fun of for the pink tint of his cheeks — had told him all about her. About how she snorts when she laughs, and that she combs her hair with both hands when she’s reading a script, one lone strand between her thumbs and forefingers. How she mouths words dramatically, testing out different emphases on different syllables and making faces when she’s practicing a monologue. How she gets excited over the silliest shit — like the goldfish crackers he brought her after he saw a few empty wrappers in her trash can, and the two black squirrels she’s convinced are a couple running around the drama building.
Of course, there were things he couldn’t tell Beau, even though they were definitely on his mind. Like how when she blushes, she blushes all over. Like how her thighs are particularly sensitive. Like how she loves to be praised.
It’s all the things he never got the chance to tell her.
It’s all the things she deserves to hear.
It’s all the things he would have told her if tonight had gone differently.
“Let’s just forget it, Allie,” Dean says. “We can go back to the way things were before I ruined everything. We can be friends.”
They were never friends. He went from an annoyance to an acquaintance, to a distraction and then a fling. And finally, she realizes, to someone she cares about.
“You didn’t ruin anything,” she says softly, and she almost regrets her words when she sees him perk up, when she sees a seed of hope being planted. “And we can’t just forget it. I just need—”
The door to Malone’s opens, bringing with it the sounds of the music and the cacophony of voices. Dean and Allie both look up to see some girls that she vaguely recognizes, casting curious glances their way. She takes a step back and hears Dean sigh, then laugh — one solitary, humourless chuckle that leaves her reeling.
“Look. Go back inside, get warm, celebrate with Hannah. I have to get out of here.”
“You can’t leave,” she says, even as her eyes dart around the street to see who is watching them.
“You don’t feel the same way. It’s fine.”
She thought it was fear — the fear of jumping into something too soon and being someone she’s not. But maybe it’s anger — anger at everyone for telling her who she is or who she should be, and anger at herself for being so unsure.
“Don’t tell me what I feel!” she says, the anger now making itself known.
She almost feels bad for him, being caught in her line of fire.
Dean raises his eyebrows in surprise.
“Well, you’re not telling me what you feel!” he responds, a little louder than she’s expecting.
“That’s because I don’t know what I feel!” she yells back.
People sidestep them on the sidewalk as they stare at each other.
This isn’t their usual banter. They’ve lost their playful edge.
Dean nods once and takes a step back, putting even more distance between them.
“Well,” he says. “Call me when you figure it out.”
This time she doesn’t chase after him.
He’d walked away from her feeling so sure of himself. He was weirdly smug about his parting line.
He’d said “call me” thinking she would. Within the hour. Before he even got home. Tonight, at least. But now, sitting at his desk, moving his bishop and taking the queen, he’s not so sure.
She doesn’t call. No missed calls in the morning. His phone stays stubbornly dark as he sulks around the house, his teammates avoiding him. There’s no call the next day as Logan apologizes for inviting Hunter onto the team, or later that night when Tucker places a plate on his dresser and backs out of the room slowly. He’s still staring at his silent phone when Beau walks into the house and tells him they need to go out, to get his mind off things.
He pulls a sweater over his head and runs his fingers through his unruly blonde locks, his expression in the mirror unreadable even to him.
He’d told her to call when she knew what she wanted.
Maybe she doesn’t know yet.
Or maybe she does, and she just doesn’t want him.
What does she want?
What does she really want?
She paces in the common room she shares with Hannah, grateful her friend isn’t home, trying to figure it out.
Maybe it’s easier to think about all the things she doesn’t want.
She doesn’t want Sean — that much is clear. It’s taken her a while to get here, but she knows now that she’s in the right place.
She doesn’t want to jump into another relationship with the first guy she sees.
But she’s also pretty sure she doesn’t want to keep having casual sex. At least not because someone told her to.
She doesn’t want to feel this way, confused and disoriented, unsure and miserable.
She doesn’t want to keep hurting people. She doesn’t want to hurt Dean.
It’s clear to Allie that she has no idea what the fuck she wants.
The door bursts open and Hannah appears, Garrett right behind her. Allie stops in time to see them smiling at each other, carefree and in love, oblivious to anything and anyone but each other.
That’s what she wants.
Dean’s on his fourth shot of the night, at his second party of the night.
He’s a little sloppy, ego still a little bruised, heart very much broken. But with the music thumping and the alcohol flowing, he can distract himself enough to not feel any of that.
“I don’t know why I thought dragging you to a party was going to make things better,” Beau says, placing a hand on Dean’s shoulder as he stumbles back.
They’re in the kitchen of some frat house, surrounded by beer and girls. It’s a scene he’s found himself in many times and he’s always thrived here.
“Let’s just go home,” Beau insists, tugging him toward the hallway.
“Why?” Dean asks, shouting over the music. “I’m having a great time!”
It’s then that the sea of people parts and he sees the blonde, like some divine intervention commanding him to prove his point to his best friend. It’s the same girl from last week, the one from the rink that was willing. The one he’d tried to use to do what Allie told him to.
“I’m about to have an even better time,” he says, handing his beer off to his friend.
He dances his way across the room, the blonde beckoning to him with a shake of her shoulders and a roll of her hips.
He’s only doing what Allie told him to do.
The worst part of this whole mess with Dean is what it’s doing to her relationship with Hannah.
She’s avoiding her best friend. Lucky for her, Hannah is so in love she barely notices.
It’s been three days since the fight at Malone’s, since her conversation with Dean afterward. She hasn’t called or texted him. He hasn’t, either.
But she has scrolled through all of their messages, multiple times. Not just the flirty ones from their early days, before the lines got blurred — she still gets warm when she reads the words “wet” and “want” — but the gentle ones, the teasing ones. The ones where he wishes her luck before rehearsals and asks how she’s feeling after pulling an all-nighter. The ones where he texts her updates from his games and practices. The ones where he tells her goodnight.
It’s not healthy. She’s just torturing herself. She slams the phone face down on the desk, cringing at the sound and hoping she hasn’t cracked the screen. She fights the urge to turn it over and check.
She’s pulling the covers back, the alarm on her bedside table reading 12:48, when the phone buzzes.
There’s a new message, under the last one about his jacket.
Completd thee assigmet. Followed by a saluting emoji. Like this is a joke. Like they’re still teasing each other. Like her heart isn’t breaking.
There’s giggling behind the door that comes to an abrupt halt when Allie knocks.
“Hannah,” she asks, her voice wet and tentative.
“What’s wrong?” Hannah asks, face flushed but concerned.
Behind her, Garrett is shirtless and barefoot, and Allie feels terrible about the interruption.
Not terrible enough that she doesn’t break down into tears and crumble against her friend.
When Dean was in the fourth grade, his parents got called in for an impromptu parent-teacher conference. He sat in the back of the class and listened as his teacher told his father about his restlessness and his mother about his impulsivity.
They made Dean sit with the school counsellor. Together they came up with a plan, and she walked him through the Stop-Think-Do technique.
Dean wishes he would have remembered that technique before pulling the girl up the stairs, before pushing her on the bed and letting her straddle him.
He types out the text message while she’s still putting on her clothes. He can tell her that he did it, they’re even, they can go back to normal now.
The soft whoosh of the message sending brings him crashing back down to reality, and he instantly regrets pressing send.
“Fuck,” he mutters.
They’ll never be able to go back to normal. Not now that Dean’s fucked everything up.
Hannah doesn’t get it, which fits because Allie doesn’t get it either.
“But you like him?” she asks.
“I don’t know.”
Allie tips the bag of Hot-Cheetos, but all that remains is orange dust.
“Do you want to keep seeing him?”
“I don’t know.”
There’s another bag in the cupboard, but Allie doesn’t dare move. Sean’s words are still ringing in her ears.
Backslide.
“Are you upset that he slept with someone else?”
How can she be? It was her idea. She did it first.
“I don’t know.”
By now he’s sure the whole house knows because Garrett knows. And Garrett only knows because Hannah knows. Which means Allie told Hannah.
So far Dean has resisted the urge to ask Garrett or Hannah about Allie. But it’s been over a week and it’s the longest he’s gone without speaking to her since that night around the fire pit.
It’s good that she told her friend. It’s good that she’s talking to someone and that she’s not carrying all those feelings alone.
What Dean first thought of as secret and sexy was the thing that was eating her alive.
“You gonna be okay?” Garrett asks. Behind him, Tucker and Logan are unloading a keg for their end-of-semester party tonight. Hannah is bringing Allie.
“I’m fine, man.” He throws his arms along the back of the couch, leaning into the cushions and propping his feet up on the table in front of him. “End-of-semester party? One last hurrah before the holidays? It’s gonna be epic!”
Dean tosses him the other Xbox controller and watches as it bounces on the couch. Garrett doesn’t make a move for it, just buries his hand even deeper in his sweatpants, staring at him intently.
“Are you really good?” Garrett asks.
He wants to tell him the truth.
No, Garrett. I’m actually not good. Your girlfriend’s best friend ripped my heart out and stomped on it with her heel, and I can’t even be mad at her because I’m an idiot who told her I don’t do girlfriends and compared my dick to a roller coaster and agreed when she said she didn’t want strings.
He plasters a smile on his face and presses the green button on the controller to start the game.
“I’m great.”
The goal is not to make him jealous. It’s not.
But it definitely helps that Hannah whistles, low and slow, when Allie comes out of her room in a killer red dress and the boots that never fail her.
And if Dean happens to see her and feel something, she wouldn’t be opposed.
“Should we come up with a code word? Just in case you want me to step in?” Allie smiles as Hannah slips into her coat. She’s dead serious. “It could be… Cheetos?”
Allie laughs but shakes her head. “I’m good, babe. Thanks.”
“But if Dean—”
“He’s not a bad person, Hannah.”
That’s the thing that annoys her the most — that it’s not his fault. It would be so much easier to blame him. But there’s no one to blame but herself.
Hannah loops her arm through Allie’s.
“Neither are you, Al.”
It’s a party just like all the other parties they’ve had in this house in their three years at Briar. Good music, good people, good food — thanks to Tucker. It had all the makings of a great night.
Dean nurses the same beer for the better part of an hour, his head turning in the direction of the door every time a new group of people walks in.
Allie walks in at half past nine. He watches as she hands off her coat, as she plays with the sleeves of her dress and looks around the room uncertainly, and the pep talk Dean had given himself at the beginning of the night flies right out of his head.
The plan had been to talk to her right away, to put the awkwardness behind them and move on. But as he watches Mike approach her with a drink in his hand and a smirk on his lips, he realizes he has to move on to Plan B.
Hiding.
He’s not nearly as slick or quick as he thinks he is because Allie sees Dean racing up the stairs without a second glance at the party.
She excuses herself from the small group and ignores Hannah’s curious gaze as she makes her way to the stairs.
It’s the first time she’s gone to his bedroom this way — up the stairs and not up the ladder, down the hallway and not through the window.
“Go away!” he shouts from the other side of the door when she knocks.
She opens it anyway.
He’s sitting on the bed when she walks in, surprised to see her.
“Sorry,” he says. “I thought you were Beau. Or Garrett.”
She closes the door behind her and leans against it.
“Is it okay that I’m here?”
He nods.
She thinks about the last time she was in this room. How his arms felt around her when he caught her, how good he looked smiling down at her, how confused he seemed when she told him to sleep with someone else.
She should have let him kiss her. If she knew what was going to happen, she would have.
“Dean, I—”
“You didn’t call. Or text,” he interrupts.
It’s not an accusation, but still she gets defensive.
“You sure did,” she says with more bite than she should.
She didn’t come here looking for a fight, and Dean looks too drained to start one himself.
She slumps against the door, not knowing what she wants and not knowing what to say.
It should make him feel better, the small spark of something akin to jealousy in her voice and in her eyes.
But he just feels like shit. Again. Still. Since that night.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and he watches her deflate against the door.
She nods, and her eyes flit across the room, taking in the details. Then she pushes off the door and walks toward his desk. He’s momentarily confused, but she picks up the foil and turns to him, small smile on her face.
“You kept it,” she says, hand raised to show him the chocolate turkey.
“Yeah,” he says, standing up and making his way over to her. “Didn’t seem right to eat the little guy, so…”
She looks up at him when he comes to stand in front of her, and he’s not proud to say that her wide eyes and plump lips stir something inside him. She smells the same — like fresh laundry and a hint of mint. The last time she was here, he’d waited all of three seconds after she’d snuck out of his room to bury his nose in the pillow she’d slept on. Last night, when he'd pressed his nose to the flannel, the scent was gone.
She looks at the turkey closely, turning it around in her palm.
“I was thinking about what you said.”
He’d said a lot of things — some better than others. He holds his breath, hoping she gave a lot of thought to his heartfelt speech in Malone’s and not his drunken actions a few nights later.
“And I think you’re right. I think we should go back to how things were.”
“You mean—”
“We should be friends.”
He wants to ask her when the fuck he ever said that? But then that night comes rushing back and he wants to kick himself for suggesting it.
It’s ridiculous to think they could be friends — not when she walks into a room and he can’t take his eyes off her, not when she smiles in his general direction and he has to remind himself to breathe, and certainly not when she’s telling him they have to be and his heart plummets to his stomach.
Allie places the turkey on the desk and juts her hand forward.
“Friends?” she asks.
He doesn’t want to, but he shakes her hand.
Dean takes her hand in his and Allie tries to ignore the electricity coming from her fingers and making its way to her heart.
“Friends,” he says.
It’s a relief. It’s also a punch to the gut.
She holds on to him a little longer than is necessary for their truce. He doesn’t let go either.
“I have no right to tell you what to do, but friends look out for one another, right?”
Downstairs, someone turns up the volume on the music and a cheer echoes through the house. She suddenly wants to get out of this room and disappear into the crowd.
“Promise me you’ll be careful with Hunter, okay? He’s not a good guy. He’s—”
“Dean, I’m not seeing him.”
“If you do, though. Just— Please. Be careful.”
Allie thought Dean was done surprising her.
“Are you going to tell me what he did?”
He finally drops her hand and takes a step back.
“It doesn’t matter what he did. Just trust me.”
She does trust him.
She’s trusted him all along.
It’s for the best.
In less than six months, he’ll graduate. She’ll go off to LA or New York and become a famous actress. He’ll go to law school and follow in his parents’ footsteps. She’ll land a gig instantly — that’s how good she is — while Dean busies himself with torts and ethics assignments. She’ll go to parties, meet new people, live her best life, and forget about him, about his feelings, his confession and everything that came after.
And maybe one day they’ll run into each other, on the streets of New York. And she’ll introduce him to the people she’s with.
And she’ll smile and say, “This is my old friend, Dean.”
And Dean will smile back like that’s all he ever wanted to be.