Chapter Text
Jack watches his parents’ car pull out of the parking lot, his mother’s hand waving out the open window as they start their long drive back to Montréal. They’ll be returning to Providence for his season opener in the fall, but October suddenly feels like a long way away.
He enters his passcode at the side entrance of his building and nods to the guy on duty at the concierge desk on his way to the stairwell. He turns left into the hall on the second floor and then left again into the strange one-bedroom apartment he’s now supposed to call home.
As the door swings shut behind him, Jack realizes that he has absolutely no idea what to do with the rest of his day.
Tomorrow he’s due at the Falconers' morning practice, then has a week chock-full of daunting meetings -- Georgia’s assistant Ben had emailed him the itinerary -- with various administrators, the H.R. department, the P.R. department, the medical staff, the team nutritionist, a photographer for promotional images, some sort of financial advisor. He thinks he even has lunch with Frank Ames, the team owner, and a few of the corporate sponsors on Thursday.
He hasn’t wanted to think about any of that so has let the emails languish in his Inbox without more than a cursory glance to make sure he knows where he needs to be at 7:30 tomorrow morning, and what he needs to bring with him. If he considers his first week, his first month, his first season as a whole the panic starts to set in.
But that chapter of his life starts tomorrow, and it’s still only quarter of ten in the morning today.
He looks blankly around his one-bedroom apartment. Thanks mostly to his mother’s insistence yesterday, they’d unboxed and constructed all of his furniture as soon as the delivery truck had arrived. He now has a sofa and an armchair, a desk in front of the high factory windows that will let slanting afternoon sun into the main living area. Module bookshelves. A kitchen table and chairs. The bed and a chest of drawers in the bedroom, two bedside tables and reading lamps. Tucked here and there are reminders of his life at the Haus -- his desk lamp, several boxes of books, the rag rugs he’d originally brought with him from his parents' house to Samwell four years ago and now here.
Eric’s at church with his parents until eleven thirty, so Jack’s phone has gone quiet. Lardo and Shitty and Ransom are on the group text arguing good-naturedly about whether or not Histoire de Babar is unredeemable white imperialist nostalgia disguised as children’s literature. He scrolls back up the chat and realizes that they’re debating what he should name the little elephant plushie he’d bought yesterday.
“What do you think,” he says, in French, to the little plushie sitting where he’d left it on the island counter in the kitchen. “Are you a Babar?” The elephant is non-committal.
He decides to go for a run, even though he and his father already did a leisurely couple of miles around Swan Point Cemetery before breakfast that morning. Normally when his brain starts to buzz like this, movement helps.
When he and his mother had come down to Rhode Island in April to find Jack a place to live, the real estate agent had shown them a whirlwind of apartments and neighborhoods -- most of them closer to the Falconers' facilities than the Parkman Lofts where Jack decided to live. Something about the sleek new luxury condo developments they’d looked at in Providence made him feel like he couldn’t breathe. Pawtucket is quieter, smaller; its 1920s subdivisions and green spaces remind Jack of Samwell. His building is a little less than half a mile from the entrance to Blackstone Boulevard, a long winding park with a walking trail Jack can jog along.
He’s far from the only runner out this Sunday morning, in addition to dog walkers, cyclists, what looks to be the start of a children’s birthday party. He runs all the way from Linnett Park to Blackstone Park before turning back. The day before, when he and his parents had driven past on their way back from IKEA, the wedge of Linnett Park had been filled with little white tents that remind Jack of the pictures Bitty had sent from the Memorial Day fair down in Madison. He wonders if it was a one-off event or whether there’s some sort of market here he and Bitty could visit when Bitty comes to stay.
Moving makes thinking easier for Jack. He’s always felt the most calm when his body is busy doing and today is no exception. He weaves around eager dogs and runaway toddlers on tricycles and it's almost like being back on campus dodging oblivious students glued to their phones.
As he runs he lets himself think about Bitty, lets himself imagine Bitty as part of this strange new chapter of his life. He’d stood in the IKEA showroom the day before, baffled by the number of options for mattresses and bed frames, and realized the only thing he cared about was having a bed where he and Bitty could sleep comfortably together when Bitty came to stay. After that, buying two bedside tables and two reading lamps had just seemed obvious.
Thinking about Bitty helps clear the static in his mind as well.
He’s been struggling since Friday night with a fierce desire to ask Bitty to come spend the summer in Rhode Island. He wants to get Eric away from Madison where it doesn’t feel like he’s really safe any longer. Jack wants him here, where he doesn’t have to think about Bitty bumping unexpectedly into people who’ve hurt him; wants him here so Jack doesn’t have to listen to the waver in Bitty’s voice as he tries not to run from the memories.
He also wants Bitty here so that when he has to face the players and the journalists and the staffers who all think they know bits and pieces of Jack Zimmermann’s story, he’ll have someone to come home to who doesn’t look at him and see tabloid headlines.
He knows it’s selfish, and unrealistic. He knows Eric is capable of taking care of himself. He just hates that he has to. For now.
Keeping his body in motion helps, like it always does.
He realizes when he gets back to the apartment that he should probably get some food.
His gleaming, brand-new brushed steel refrigerator is humming quietly to itself, empty but for the leftovers from the dinner Bob had picked up for them the night before. So he showers and goes out to his car and drives back down the length of the Boulevard to the Eastside Market to buy groceries.
Eastside Market is smaller than the Murder Stop & Shop but unfamiliar in its layout. He’d been feeling better after his run, but the fluorescent lights and the pop music piped through tinny speakers feels assaulting. The aisles are crowded with people doing their weekly shopping and suddenly Jack can’t think of a single thing to buy.
What do people eat? What should he be eating?
He remembers his first few months at Samwell when the dining halls full of eighteen-to-twenty-two-year olds had felt too much like being back in the Q, always surrounded by people his own age. His parents had helped him secure a single in one of the dorms, so at least he’d had some privacy, but he’d found it hard to be in unstructured public spaces. He knew what to expect among teammates at Faber, or on the road, and he’d settled into the structure of his college classes fast enough. But until mid-October he’d avoided going to the dining halls -- unless Shitty dragged him there -- because they were too chaotic. Instead, he’d kept nutritional drinks in the tiny fridge below his desk and lived off those.
Maybe he’ll just buy a few cases of Ensure and --
He sighs and pulls out his phone to call Bitty.
“I’m at the grocery store,” he says when Eric picks up. “Tell me what I should buy.”
“Jack!” He’s always slightly thrown by how delighted Bitty sounds to be talking to him. “Did you see Shitty’s vetoed ‘Babar’ and now Ransom is pouting? Lardo says that if Shitty’s looking for an anti-imperialist elephant name, ‘Tembo’ means elephant in Swahili. And, let’s see, Holster says --”
“His name is Monsieur Éléphant,” Jack says, realizing as he says it that this is the obvious choice. “And he asks when are you bringing Señor Bunny to visit?”
“Oh my Lord, Jack. You do realize the boys will never stop chirping you for that?”
“Focus, Bittle. I need food.”
“Ah, well, you’ve called the right man haven’t you, Mr. Zimmermann?” Jack can almost hear Bitty settle into the groove of grocery shopping even though he’s not even standing in the store. “So tell me, what aisle are you standing in?”
Jack ignores the glares of shoppers who think he’s being rude shopping while talking on his phone and navigates his cart down each aisle one-handed while Bitty talks him through stocking up on basic ingredients and things he can eat quickly or with minimal preparation. (Even so, when he passes the nutritional supplements aisle, Jack adds a pack of protein drinks to the cart for good measure -- as back-up, he tells himself.)
“So what’s for dinner tonight, Mr. Zimmermann?” Bitty asks, interrupting his own narration of their oddly-joint shopping trip.
“Dinner?” Jack echoes blankly.
“Goodness, Jack! It’s your first night in that gorgeous kitchen! What are you gonna christen it with?”
“Um--” Jack scrabbles around in his brain trying to think of something he can suggest. “What about that egg-tomato thing you make?”
“Egg-tomato thing...” Bitty repeats it, almost like a question, “--oh! Shakshuka?”
“Is that the one with the feta?”
“Yes! Oh, honey, that’s easy. Let me…” Jack can hear Eric rummaging around somewhere. “Here, I knew I’d packed that cookbook -- uh, let’s see.” He pulls his cart over out of the way of the woman juggling an infant and a toddler down the aisle full of tinned foods and waits while Bitty hums his way through the index of whatever cookbook he’s reading.
“Ha -- yes, here. Okay. You’re gonna need -- we were just in the baking aisle, right? You’ll need to go back for a couple of spices.”
Jack smiles as he wrestles the cart back around and heads off in search of paprika and cumin. He’s already thinking about the photo he’s going to take tonight with himself and Monsieur Éléphant sadly sharing a plate of poached eggs, tomato, and warm pita bread, captioned “Wish you were here!” and posted to the group text.
Then he’ll be sending a second, more private one to Bitty later that night: One of Monsieur Éléphant tucked into Bitty’s side of the bed, next to Jack own head, keeping Bitty’s pillow warm.