Chapter Text
On his second day, Jack isn’t even sure he should be driving as he navigates Providence rush hour on what is likely not at all the most efficient route back to Parkman. He turns the radio on in the rink’s parking garage and then has to turn it off again because even at a burble it’s an unbearable distraction from the tangle of street corners and bumper-to-bumper traffic and unfamiliar signals.
He’s relieved when he pulls into his parking space at the lofts and can cut the engine. He drags his messenger bag out of the passenger seat and goes in without even checking his mail because then he’d have to say “hi” to the Ralph, the guy who does the evening shift at the concierge desk, and that’s beyond him right now.
Once inside his apartment, he considers his options and decides it’s okay if dinner is a protein shake.
He’d had a meeting with the team nutritionist that afternoon, Kristen, and she’d been mostly enthusiastic about his responses to her battery of questions. She’d obviously looked at his file and spent more time than he’d anticipated asking about how anxiety and stress affected his behavior around food. She’d been professional about it, but the questions had felt intrusive and he’d left feeling paralyzed about making any decisions at all about what to put in his body.
So he falls back on a the safe option and drinks it down standing in the kitchen looking out over the river and enjoying the blessed silence that is having an apartment with a door that shuts and locks.
It’s only barely six, and will still be light outside for several hours. But he can’t think of anything he wants to do, and the large main room of the apartment is making him anxious with its unpacked cardboard boxes and unfamiliar furniture. So he brushes his teeth and changes into a pair of flannel boxers and his favorite hoodie from Samwell, impulsively tucking Monsieur Éléphant into the front pocket, before he retrieves his laptop from his desk and retreats to the bedroom.
He’s relieved to see that Bitty’s online with Skype logged in when he opens his laptop and connects to the building’s WiFi. His phone is still in his messenger bag and now that he’s in bed the thought of getting up again sounds impossible.
“Hey Jack!” Bitty’s face lights up in a smile as the video feed connects and they can see each other. Bitty’s in his bedroom, sitting with his computer in his lap, with a halo of evening sunlight around his head from the window behind his chair.
“Is this still a good time?” Jack asks automatically, even though they had made plans to Skype when he got home via text earlier in the day.
“Oh, I was just scrolling through Twitter and talking to Lardo,” Eric waves away the question. “I knew you were gonna call. How was day two?”
“Exhausting,” Jack says, honestly. “Being on the ice is good, and I think I’m gonna learn a lot, but. But it’s -- right now it’s harder than I thought it was going to be. And then there’s everything that isn’t playing hockey, you know?”
“Not really, I guess,” Eric admits. “Like what?”
“I had to spend three hours this morning with the P.R. team. They’re all … good? At what they do? But I’d forgotten …” he trails off, losing the words. He’s watched his parents work with enough publicists, and worked with a few himself, to know that the Falconers have some excellent people. He trusts them. But a huge proportion of their job is to pick and choose ways of sharing information about the players -- players who now include Jack -- that Jack doesn’t want to share with anyone whom he doesn’t know personally. They’d walked him patiently through the ins and outs of what type of information they would release about players, been reassuringly firm about the personal details they would not discuss unless he specifically requested they do so -- or did something incredibly stupid.
Jack had felt included as a decision-maker at the table, rather than someone whose life was being talked about, and that had felt good. It had also been utterly draining. He’d left the conference room feeling like he would never be able to dredge up enough syllables to form even the simplest of sentences for the rest of the week.
And yet he had a physical in the morning, after conditioning, and then a money management seminar in the afternoon.
Hockey. He’s here to play hockey. He pulls in a breath and concentrates on the pleasant ache in his muscles from the day’s physical exertions, remembers the keen satisfaction that comes from learning how to play with his new teammates. He’s watched so much tape at this point, since signing, and even been on the ice a few times with the team during contract negotiations, that he feels like he already has a sense of how they work together and where he might fit in as part of that whole. It’s a challenge he feels prepared, and even excited, to take on.
It’s just everything else that he wishes would just … take care of itself so he can play.
“Can we talk about your day instead?” He asks Bitty, curling over on his side to pillow his head on one forearm, and sliding his other hand into the pocket of his hoodie to cuddle Monsieur Éléphant against his belly. “I’m not -- I’ve spent a lot of time today talking about me. I’d like to just -- not. For awhile.”
“Oh, honey,” Bitty presses his fingers to his own lips, then pushes them outward toward the screen. “You look wiped. You make yourself comfortable and I’ll share all the gossip, okay?”
“Okay,” Jack smiles, letting his eyes drift shut. “That’d be nice. So what did you do today?”
“Well, Coach wanted to repair the fence in the backyard, where the woodchucks have been burrowing under to get at Mama’s vegetable garden. So I helped him pick up the chicken wire from Home Depot yesterday, and then I got up early this morning so we could dig the trench and bury the fencing before the sun was too high in the sky…” Jack lets Eric’s voice wash over him, the way he used to in the Haus kitchen. Sometimes, when he was ostensibly doing homework and Bitty was baking, He'd catch himself just drifting pleasantly on the soft lilt of Bitty’s accent, always more pronounced when he talked about food -- and, Jack now realizes, when he's particularly happy and unselfconscious. It’s also gotten stronger again now that he’s back in Georgia.
“You said you were talking to Lardo?” Jack murmurs, suddenly remembering he needs to reply to Shitty’s text. He’d asked about driving down from Hyannis to visit, possibly with Lardo. Jack isn’t sure that he’s ready for people from his Samwell life to show up Pawtucket -- it feels, somehow, like having them here would just reinforce the fact that he wasn’t going back to Samwell in the fall. He’s okay with that … mostly. But the Haus has been home for the past four years and he’s not ready to think of it as going on without him.
“Oh, yeah,” Bitty affirms. “She DM’d me to get the recipe for my rhubarb-strawberry tarts? I guess her little sister’s eighth grade graduation is next weekend and Lardo’s mother was looking for a recipe and knew about me -- ‘the recipe guy’ Lardo says she called me!” he laughs.
“That’s what you should call your first book,” Jack smiles without opening his eyes.
“Mmm,” Eric pretends to seriously consider the suggestion, “Maybe. I mean, it kind of makes it sound like I’m one of those reality television chefs who want you to know all about how manly they are? Like, probably the cover photo should be of me in an apron and nothing else, arms crossed--" Jack can hear him make the gesture, "--next to a grill full of red meat.”
“I don’t know about the red meat, but I could endorse the ‘apron and nothing else’?”
“Jack.” Bitty sounds ever-so-slightly scandalized, even though he’s the one who’s conjured up the image. Jack smiles, which he knows Bitty can see through his laptop camera. Like talking in the dark, talking with his eyes closed makes it easier for Jack to flirt deliberately. It also seems to let Bitty be more daring than he is when he knows Jack is looking at him, even if just across the high-speed internet connection.
“So you’re saying, during all those hours we spent in the Haus kitchen, you never once thought about me undressing you up against the counter?”
There’s a pause. Jack flickers open his eyes just long enough to catch Bitty’s considering look, the dart of his tongue as he wets his lips while choosing his response.
“Why, Mr. Zimmermann, are you saying that’s what you were thinking about? And here I thought you had a thesis to write.” he’s trying for a drawl but it comes out slightly breathy instead. Jack’s too tired for his body to do much more than note the response and tuck it away for later, but --
“I did have a thesis to write. No thanks to you and your distracting ass.”
“Jack,” again Bitty protests without any real force, the shy delight in his voice outweighing the embarrassment by an impressive margin.
“Well,” Jack says, “it’s a pretty nice ass.”
“Oh, ‘pretty nice.’ Thank you very much.”
“But no, to answer your question, I didn’t actually realize I wanted to undress you. At the time. That only happened later. I -- I wasn’t paying attention. Then. I am now.”
“Oh.”
" 'Oh' in a good way?" Jack asks, just to be sure.
" 'Oh' in a good way, yeah," Eric affirms, with a catch in his voice that makes Jack wish he could come up with something, anything, to keep it there.
“Sorry,” Jack smiles apologetically, “I’m -- I’m not -- this is probably as suggestive as I can manage tonight. But I just -- wanted you to know. That I think about … stuff like that. Sometimes even when it’s awkward. Like today, when we were running suicide drills, and I suddenly remembered that day? During exam week? When you were baking maple-lemon tarts in those shorts of yours and that red t-shirt that …” he waves pulls his hand out of his hoodie to wave it in a Shitty-like gesture “...clings?”
Bitty laughs, “Oh Lord, Jack, remember what I said about hopeless flirting?”
“Mmm. Is that what it was? ‘Cause I was going to call it something more ‘shamelessly slutty.’ ”
“You know Shitty would get on your case for calling me a slut.”
“Yeah, but you like it.”
Bitty hmmms in a way that is neither approval nor disapproval but manages to convey that at least a part of him likes it, either way.
“Oh, hey,” Jack remembers just as he’s starting to drift again. “It looks like a lot of the guys take some time off around the 4th, to spend time with their families? What if I came down to Madison then?”
“For the 4th of July?” Eric sounds dubious. “There’ll be a big family picnic, and the parade and all?”
Jack feels his pulse jump at the less-than-fully enthusiastic response from Bitty. “Would you rather I didn’t meet your family?”
“No! No, I just -- I know you don’t like people and --”
“I don’t ‘don’t like people’ Bits. I just -- some people want a lot of me. I don’t think your extended family’s going to ask me for autographs. And if they do,” he adds hastily, “that would be okay too -- I mean. I want -- I want to know where you come from, eh? And that means meeting your family.”
“Okay -- maybe? Yes." He hears Eric make the decision. "Yes, the 4th of July. That sounds good. I’ll -- I’ll ask my parents about it tomorrow. Oh! And the holiday will make it easier to explain why you’re visiting.”
Jack notes this and remembers that he and Bitty need to talk about … but he’s too tired to start a conversation about what it might mean for them to be out, together. In Georgia or anywhere else. So he just mmmms his agreement. “I’ll let them know tomorrow I’ll be taking some time off. And this weekend I’ll book a flight.”
“Okay. Hey, you’re falling asleep on me Jack. You should close your laptop and let yourself sleep, sweetheart.”
“Miss you,” Jack murmurs. “Love you.”
“I love you and I miss you too, Jack. Talk to you tomorrow?”
“Talk to you tomorrow,” Jack agrees, and struggles up onto one elbow to end the call and close his laptop. He and Monsieur Éléphant roll over and are asleep before the last of the evening light fades from across the Seekonk River.