Chapter Text
Eric wakes before sunrise to the sound of a horny blue jay in the chestnut tree outside his bedroom window. The shadows in the room and the dimensions of his bed and the close, humid air feel all wrong for a disorienting moment or two before he remembers where he is, back in Madison, and the way his life has just swooped dizzyingly off the course he’d expected it to take this summer.
He’s fallen asleep on his phone. He extracts it and then has to lean over to rummage through his duffle bag because the battery’s run down and he hadn’t plugged it in the night before.
Southwest had delivered him to Atlanta shortly before seven the evening before, and then there had been waiting at the luggage carousel and the hour’s drive to Madison. But even before texting Coach, waiting in the cell phone lot, that he’d arrived Eric had stopped in an out-of-the-way corner of the arrivals concourse to listen to the voicemail from Jack.
“Hi, Bittle. It’s Jack,” he’d started -- awkwardly introducing himself like he’d forgotten that Eric would be able to see what number the message was from. “I just, um. We’re here. At the cottage. And I know you’re still in the air but I’m -- I just wanted to call and tell you. That I miss you already and. Call me? When you get this. I’m pretty tired and I might be asleep but -- I’ll wake up if you call I just want to say goodnight. And maybe figure out when we can talk again? Okay, I should go. I hope you had a good flight. Bye.”
He’d followed it up with a text, as if he was worried Eric wouldn’t check his voicemail:
I left you a voicemail.
Just checking in.
Call me when you get there?
Eric’s thumb had hovered over the “call” button for several long seconds before he had sighed and texted instead:
I’m here
Coach is waiting so I can’t talk now but
Maybe later?
He’d hesitated, then added:
Thanks for leaving the vm
It was nice to hear your voice
Seconds later, as he was shouldering his backpack and looking around for the exit signs, his phone had vibrated the incoming text alert and Jack had responded:
I’ll be here.
They’d texted during most of the drive down I-20, in the silences between Coach’s questions about the flight, Eric’s final exams, graduation, the start date for Eric’s job at Camp Oconee. They’d texted while Eric was standing in the kitchen eating a plate of leftover supper and talking to his mother. They’d texted while Eric brushed his teeth, dug out a clean pair of boxers, and crawled into bed with Señor Bun. And finally Eric had pressed the call button and Jack had picked up at the other end and it’s possible Eric, in his exhaustion, had let slip a “sweetheart” and signed off with “don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
Six hours later, thanks to the damn blue jay, he’s awake again.
He lets the phone charge for a few minutes and then powers up the phone and makes himself catch up with the team’s group text before opening up the conversation with Jack and texting:
Good morning
Thanks to the blue jay outside my window I’m up early enough for practice
But it’s summer so I’m gonna stay in bed
Again, Jack responds before Eric’s screen goes dark and Eric wonders if he actually bothered to sleep.
No excuses Bittle.
Eric grins.
You’re not my team captain any longer, Mr. Zimmermann :-P
Jack responds:
Thankfully.
In more ways than one.
There’s a pause, and then before Eric can decide whether Jack is waiting for a response the phone lights up with an incoming call. He answers and puts the phone to his ear.
“Hey.” He snuggles himself back against the pillows, hugging Señor Bun to his chest.
“Hey,” Jack says back, softly, and Eric wonders how much privacy he has.
“So what y’all doing today?” Eric asks, like this is the sort of conversation he has with Jack all the time. He closes his eyes and tries to imagine they’re sitting at the kitchen table back in the Haus. The last time they’d sat together sharing the remains of a blackberry pie, Eric had been achingly conscious of the way Jack’s knee kept bumping against his under the table, warm and familiar. He wonders now if Jack had felt the same way, if they’d sat there bumping knees while each of them pretended to be studying for finals and not desperately reminding themselves (certainly Eric had been reminding himself) that they weren’t allowed to touch.
Now he is, apparently, allowed to touch.
And Jack was over a thousand miles away. For the next ten weeks. Fuck.
"Papa and I are going for a run at six,” Jack says. “And I’ll probably do some weight training.”
“Jack,” Eric says, “aren’t you supposed to be on vacation?”
Jack laughs, weakly. “Yeah, but -- I don’t want to get behind, you know? I mean, it’s gonna be hard enough as it is...” there’s an undercurrent of tight, familiar tension in his voice and Eric realizes he’s anxious about living up to expectations.
“Oh, honey,” Eric says. “You’re gonna be fine. And if they give you a hard time, you just let me know and I’ll bake up some fresh chocolate chip cookies to airmail up to Providence.”
“So you’re suggesting I bribe my way into the Falconers’ good graces?” Eric can hear the smile in Jack’s voice.
“You make that sound like a bad thing,” Eric grins in response.
There’s a silence between them that isn’t an awkward pause but something -- something contented. When Eric calls home from Samwell and there’s dead air on the line it’s usually because either Eric or his dad have said something to which the other can’t formulate any meaningful response. This silence feels different. Companionable. Eric wants to sink to this silence and fall back asleep -- except then he’d have to stop talking to Jack.
“It’s -- it’s hard. Not being able to touch you,” Jack says, after a pause, as if he’s apologizing for something.
“That's good, right? That sounds good.” It sounds more than good to Eric actually. “I mean, not that we’re not touching, but that you want to touch me? I want to touch you, too.” Oh god he sounds like such an idiot. He pauses. “Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“Are we ... are we dating?” He hates how small his voice sounds, tinny and hesitant in his own ears. He’s imagined how this might go a hundred different ways and while more than a few of them had involved Jack reaching out and pulling Eric in for a kiss -- not unlike what had actually happened the day before -- he’s fairly certain none of them had featured him asking tremulously for clarification of their relationship.
In fantasies you always just ... knew.
Jack’s silence feels a little less comforting and a little more frightening this time around. “Jack?”
“I’d -- I’d like us to be,” Jack says. “If you want--”
“I want. Yes. God.” Eric presses his forefinger and thumb against the corners of his eyes, where tears are threatening to leak out. “God. I just -- I thought --” he drags in a ragged breath.
“I’m sorry I’m -- I’m sorry it took me so long to figure out --” Jack pauses, sighing. “I don’t have much experience with --”
“Me neither. I’m not used to --” Eric swallows around the lump in his throat, feeling he owes Jack honesty but also burning with shame at having to say it out loud. “I’m not used to people wanting me back.”
“Me neither,” Jack laughs, and Eric hears the harsh note that Jack can’t quite conceal.
“Did you --” he stops, not sure what he’s allowed to ask. “Have you ever --”
This time the pause feels deliberative, like Jack is formulating his response with care.
“There was Kent. Parson. You probably guessed. Before he went in the draft. I’ll -- I promise I’ll tell you about it sometime but. It’s complicated and --”
“No, no, it’s okay,” Eric’s mouth feels dry.
“Okay.” Jack draws a slow breath. “I promise I’ll -- just not today, okay?”
“Okay,” Eric echoes.
“And I went out with Camilla a few times but we never -- we hung out and let people gossip about us, but. It wasn’t -- it was an easy fiction. We both had our reasons to let people think we were dating, at the time. People saw what they wanted to see and we never corrected them. So it’s really only been Parse. Before you.”
“Before me,” Eric breathes, tasting the shape of the words on his tongue. Jack ... and me.
Then he realizes Jack is waiting. “Oh! Uh,” he sighs. “Well, you know everything there is to know about my relationship history already, Jack. I was in the closet until I got to Samwell and I haven’t -- I never found anyone who turned my head, before you. So.” God, he’s blushing. In the dark. On the phone. Clutching Bun. He sort of hates himself right now even though it feels like such a relief to say it out loud, to Jack. “So I’m. I’m a virgin. I guess.”
Jack snorts. “I’ve been friends with Shitty long enough to know this is where I tell you that virginity is a social construct.”
“Yeah, well.” Eric bites his lip. “It might be a social construct but it’s still, you know. True.”
“Mmm,” Jack responds, noncommittal. And then: “Can I tell my parents?
“You want to do that?” Eric startles at the question. He’d assumed --
“I’d like to,” Jack confirms. “I think they suspect already. I don’t want them to think we’re hiding it from them. I don’t -- I try not to keep secrets from my parents anymore.”
Oh, right. Eric swallows. Fuck. He’s going to have to figure out how to come out to his own parents now. If Mr. and Mrs. Zimmermann know …
“--Bitty?”
Eric blinks. Jack must have said something he missed. “Sorry I just -- yes. Yes of course you can tell your parents, Jack. I’m just not … I’m not looking forward to telling my dad, is all. He’s going to be so disappointed.”
“I’m sorry,” Jack says quietly. “I know how that feels.”
Oh. Right.
“Do you want me to be there?” He asks like if Eric said yes Jack would be on the next flight out of Logan.
“I … I don’t know.” Eric hasn’t thought about this. “I’ll -- let me think about it?”
“Okay.”
“Who did you come out to, first?” Eric asks, after another silence that doesn’t feel awkward. Just hearing Jack say do you want me there makes Eric feel like he’s that much closer. A tangible presence in the room. As if, were he to roll over right this moment and open his eyes Jack would be lying there with his head on Eric’s pillow, watching him with the same serious, solemn gaze he used when considering how to frame his next photograph.
“Kent,” Jack says, immediately. “Or, well. We never really -- it wasn’t something we talked about exactly. But he knew. I didn’t tell my parents until after I overdosed.”
“Did you --?” Eric thinks of the kids they lost to suicide in high school, three of them, at least one of whom he knew had killed herself because she couldn’t imagine how it would ever get better.
“It wasn’t -- technically, I was never suicidal,” Jack clarifies. “I never thought about deliberately killing myself. I just -- I couldn’t get the anxiety to stop and I was desperate.”
“How did your parents react? When you told them?”
Jack laughs, dryly. “To be honest, I think I could have told them I wanted to become a Buddhist monk or ... go into musical theatre instead of play hockey and they wouldn’t have blinked because I was alive.”
“Fair enough, but --” will my parents still love me? Will they still look at me and see their son? is the question Eric really wishes he knew the answer to.
“My uncle Billy is gay,” Jack says, “my mother’s brother. So I wasn’t the first person in my family, which I think made it less of a shock.” Eric can almost hear the Gallic shrug.
“Yeah,” Eric sighs. No one in his sprawling, extended family is gay.
There’s a muffled exchange on the other end of the connection and then Jack is back, sounding apologetic. “Papa’s ready to go out for our run. I gotta go. Talk to you later?”
“Oh -- yeah. Sure.” Eric doesn’t want to let Jack’s voice go. Jack’s voice is wrapped up in all of Eric’s memories of Samwell, the Haus, the past two years during which he’s built a mostly-separate life for himself in Massachusetts -- a life where he’s a very different person than he was in high school. He’s feeling the weight of the long weeks of summer stretching out before him, who he was in this place lurking in every shadow, threatening to creep back under his skin.
“I’ll call later, Bitty. Or text. Or we could use FaceTime or Skype?”
Eric takes a careful breath. “Yeah, I’d -- yeah. I’d like that.”
“Okay." Jack hesitates, almost imperceptibly, and then finishes, "--Bye.”
“Bye,” Eric says back, and then hears Jack disconnect.
He listens to the silence of solitude for awhile. The jay outside has quit its yammering. The sun is up, now, and starting to make its slanting way through his cupcake-print curtains across the yellow walls. He hears the hiss of the neighbor’s sprinkler system go off. Down the hall, one of his parents enters, then exits the bathroom and there are light footfalls (his mother, then) on the stair.
Before he can fall back asleep, Eric kicks off his sheets and rolls out of bed to go take a shower and find out what’s for breakfast.