Chapter Text
The day after Memorial Day, a heat wave sweeps across from the central plains into the the mid-Atlantic pushing the heat into the 90s with a low-hanging humidity that makes sweat spring up on Eric’s upper lip at the slightest exertion. He gets up early enough to mow the lawn before breakfast, because he’d promised Coach. Then, after a bowl of cereal and his first cup of coffee, preps the custard for a batch of peach-basil ice cream he’s planning to make for dessert that night. When he’s done with his chores and laboring over the hot stove, he goes back up to the second floor for his first shower of the day.
Coach is still up at the high school through the end of the week -- graduation is on Friday -- and Suzanne has retreated to the relative cool of her below-ground basement workshop to update her Etsy shop and update her accounts based on the sales from yesterday’s fair. Eric has the second floor to himself as he lingers under the cool spray, trying to bring down his core temperature.
He towels off in a cursory fashion and then pads down the hall to his room so he can stand in front of the oscillating fan and dry off the rest of the way -- or try to -- before he just starts to sweat again.
It feels too hot for clothes. He glares into his closet for minute and then retreats to his bed where he lets himself fall back onto the mattress and consider the two plaster cracks that run across the ceiling, intersecting at right angles above his head. He swears they’ve gotten longer since he was in Madison at Christmas.
He checks his phone -- Jack’s taken Charlotte and Helena to the beach -- and wishes he were on the Cape too, where according to his weather app the high today is going to be 73℉.
Jack keeps talking like Eric will be with them next year, folded into what Eric gathers is an annual family reunion. Eric’s trying not to be intimidated by the idea, though it sounds like a very different world from the one he’s used to. Sprawling family gatherings he can handle -- but Jack’s parents own the artsy cottage the three of them are staying in, inherited from Jack’s grandparents, and Alicia’s been “summering” at the Cape since she was a girl. When Eric had asked about their cottage Jack had sent him a link to an article in New England Home in which it had been featured back in 2013. Eric loves every scrap of detail that Jack sends him about what he’s been doing, about his adorable little cousins, about his aunt and uncles -- but he’s worried he won’t be able to measure up. What must Jack’s uncles think of him, for example, a kid from Georgia who can’t even figure out a way to come out to his own parents?
Ugh. He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes, trying to force the worries he knows are irrational out of his head. He just ends up making his eye sockets feel hot and sweaty.
“Eric Richard Bittle,” he says firmly to himself, “Get your act together or else that first kiss is gonna be your last.”
He knows it’s not true, even as he’s saying it, but his breath catches, as it always does, at the thought that The Kiss (it floats around in his brain like that, capitalized) -- that one perfect moment of impossible romance -- is all he’ll ever get.
He pulls his hands away from his eyes and drops them across his stomach with a sigh. It’s not that Jack hasn’t been -- the first week of being Jack’s boyfriend has been pretty amazing. Eric thinks that maybe the thing that surprises him the most is how surprising Jack is. He’s known Jack for two years and spent a lot of time with him, so some ways it doesn’t feel all that different being Jack’s boyfriend, especially long-distance, than it's felt in recent months being Jack’s friend.
Except that something about being together this way has made Jack start unfolding himself for Eric in these gorgeous, heartbreaking every-day ways.
He does things like tell Eric what birds he saw on his morning runs, cracks jokes about the Vector cereal his parents brought with them from Canada, confesses -- in an adorably baffled tone -- that he’d teared up watching Frozen, and gets excited about the box of his old books that he and Bob had unearthed from the back of the crawl space.
They’ve hardly talked about hockey at all -- though Eric knows Jack’s been doing his weight training and other daily exercises, as well as working his way through everything he can find on the Falconers last few seasons -- and the thing is that Eric’s hardly noticed because there’s always something else to talk about. At some point during Eric's sophomore year they went from being teammates who only had hockey in common to being friends who also played hockey together. And now Eric realizes how much he wants to know everything about Jack, and he can’t imagine ever learning enough that his curiosity is satisfied.
And then there’s … the stuff about Jack that Eric’s dying to know and can’t even begin to ask. He lays awake at night, and sometimes like this in the middle of the day, and thinks about Jack. Naked. About having permission to look -- really look -- at Jack, every inch of him. About having permission to touch and taste and smell -- and be touched and tasted and inhaled right back.
Eric hadn’t known, before this summer, that it was possible to miss something that you haven’t actually had. But it is, because he does. He misses Jack’s hands on his skin. He thinks about how Jack’s palms would feel as Jack caressed his chest, his abs, his belly, gently shifted Eric’s hips, pressed open his thighs. He misses the way Jack's mouth tastes, and how his lips would feel pressed against the hallow of Eric's throat, across his collarbone, Jack's tongue and teeth on his nipples, the way Jack's mouth could -- should -- will leave marks on his pale, freckled skin.
Eric doesn’t remember ever being hungry for the touch of another person like he’s suddenly hungry for Jack’s. Eric’s never been a fan of other people getting in his space. He had been the sort of child that adults liked to pick up and cuddle without asking first. Some of his earliest memories involve being grabbed and embraced by the arms and hands of much larger people, virtual strangers, grown-ups at church and members of his extended family. He’d learned early that crying when his grandma smacked a kiss on his cheek wasn’t polite, and that the big boy cousins would taunt him when he avoided playing their rough-and-tumble games.
At school it just intensified, since he was always one of the smallest boys in his grade. There were always kids -- boys, mostly, but sometimes girls too -- ready to pick on the ones who couldn’t physically put up enough of a fight, who went and tattled to the teachers. Eric had learned to keep his head down and not acknowledge the everyday indignities of being tripped and shoved in the hall, of being pinched during class and held under a cold shower in the locker room.
Eric’s spent years trying to avoid the intrusive bodies of other people. It's a fragile, new, and hopeful feeling to realize how desperately he wants -- needs -- Jack to intrude in every possible way.
He runs his own palm deliberately down the valleys and curves of his abdomen, dipping his thumb into his belly button, letting the tips of his fingers graze the wirey blond hair that springs from his groin. He tips his fingers up and runs the edge of his fingernails down the groove of his hip, where hip meets thigh.
He closes his eyes and imagines that instead of his own hand, this is Jack.
He pulls a knee up, reaches, and runs his palm up the inside of his thigh to his groin, cups himself, still mostly soft, presses down with the heel of his hand, wraps his fingers around and takes measure of himself.
His hand is smaller than Jack’s would be.
Oh.
His body likes the idea of Jack touching him, here, of Jack’s warm, strong hands pulling, pushing, caressing. Eric shifts, restlessly, against the cotton bedspread. He lifts his hips and digs his heels into the mattress, shoving himself across the bed until his head meets the pillows. Now he’s no longer half-on, half-off the mattress but fully supported -- able to concentrate on where he wants his hands, what he wishes Jack was here to do.
He’s panting, just a little.
It’s not like he hasn’t jerked off to fantasies of Jack, before, of Jack doing things. Of being allowed to do things with Jack. Once, Eric remembers, a particular glimpse of Jack clad only in low-slung boxers making his way to the bathroom on a Saturday morning had fueled his shameful fantasies for weeks. He’d imagined following Jack into their second-floor shower and falling to his knees in front of Jack, dragging Jack’s shorts roughly down from the waistband, and just taking what he wanted. Jack, with his fingers digging into Eric’s scalp -- firm but not controlling -- trembling under Eric’s mouth, almost too big to be comfortable, but. But Eric thinks maybe he’d like that, like everything feeling a little too big and a little too hard, that he trusts Jack to play that edge in a way he’s never trusted anyone else before.
It’s Jack after all. And where Jack is concerned, Eric’s been ignoring his own personal boundaries for months.
He’s realized, now, through absence, how much casual physical contact he and Jack have had since the fall. He’d talked himself into believing that it was just because they were friends -- Ransom and Holster cuddled on the couch constantly, right? Shitty sometimes snuggled with Jack in bed -- casual physical contact was just something hockey dudes did, everyone seemed to agree, it was normal.
Except it wasn’t normal for Eric.
Eric didn’t cuddle on the couch or snuggle with friends during sleepovers, drop his feet into his friends’ laps for a foot rub, play footsie under the table, fall asleep on teammates’ shoulders. Eric wasn't in the habit of dropping a hand on just anyone's shoulder as he passed behind where they sat doing homework at the kitchen table. … Eric didn’t accept foot rubs, except from licensed professionals, or feel comfortable under the weight of someone’s dozing head, or the passing warmth of another person’s hand at the small of his back, or the security of another person’s arms around his shoulders as he wept in happy surprise into the folds of their t-shirt.
Eric didn’t do any of these things … except that (in hindsight) he did them all, with Jack.
His hips are restless, now, pressing down into the mattress as if to pull away from the steady rhythm of his hand loosely wrapped around his own dick. He thinks about how it will feel, to touch Jack in this way, feel Jack’s erection filling out under his touch. Tendrils of want wind themselves around his limbs, holding him in this moment, pulling him away from the heat of the day and the familiar surroundings of his parents’ house, the knowledge that his mother is within earshot, the frustration of distance and the terror of certainty. He wants this, with Jack. And he knows -- as much as anyone can know anything about their own future -- that he wants this to be it.
And it’s a little scary how bone-deep that knowledge is. Despite the fact that Jack has never seen him like this: still-damp hair plastered to his forehead, mussed against the pillows, legs trembling, the muscles in his abdomen and belly tight with the orgasm that’s growing under the press and pull of his own fingers. He twists his free hand into the sheet, imagining how Jack might lean over and clasp his hand, hold him gently and relentlessly to the bed as he --
-- and he’s coming, hard and sudden, with a little choking gasp of surprise that rises up in his throat -- a sound he has just enough cognizance left to bite off before there’s a chance his mother will hear.
His first thought is fuck it’s only quarter to eleven and already he’s managed to make a second shower a necessity for the day.
His second thought is how empty the bed feels without Jack actually here beside him.
His third thought is to wonder whether it’s weird to suddenly feel like the bed you’ve always slept alone in is empty.
When he has enough coordination back to do so without falling off the bed Eric reaches for his discarded towel and mops himself up. Then he tiptoes back down the hall to the bathroom for another quick rinse off.
Then he returns to the bedroom and digs out his phone from the pocket of his discarded jeans. He curls up into his papasan chair in front of the fan and types out several versions of the message he wants to send Jack before hitting send. He settles for:
Is it weird that I miss touching you?
Jack texts back almost instantly:
No. I miss that too.
Eric hesitates for a moment and then responds:
You said maybe you could come down to Madison for a visit?
I think I want that
I want to see you
I don’t want to wait until August to kiss you again