Chapter Text
Jack wakes up from a nap on Thursday afternoon and blinks, disoriented, at the alarm clock on his bedside table -- the light in the room causing him momentary panic that he’s somehow overslept and will be late for Friday morning practice.
It’s 6:23pm and he’s been asleep for a little over three hours.
He groans and rolls over. He’d come back to his apartment after lunch with Mr. Ames and the suits from TD Bank, Google, and IcelandAir because he didn’t have any other obligations that day and could feel himself running on empty. Apparently, more so than he’d even realized.
He wipes his hands across his face. The lunch had gone better than it could have. Ames -- he’d asked Jack to call him Frank -- was maybe a decade older than Bob and had obviously done his homework on Jack’s career both in the Q and also at Samwell. Jack hadn’t expected otherwise, but it was still reassuring to know that the Falconers were owned by someone who genuinely cared about the game itself and not just the prestige of owning a team. Ames had played himself, it turned out, at Exeter and then his first two years at Yale before a knee injury had ended his career as a student athlete. He was disappointed neither his son or daughter turned out to be interested in sports, and Jack got the impression that in buying the Falconers Ames rather fancied himself as having adopted an entire team’s worth of sons who share his obsession.
The conversation had faltered, though, after it became apparent that only one of the three executives -- the regional loan officer from TD Bank who, it turned out, was from Ontario -- knew enough about hockey to join in the discussion. At that point, Ames had switched gears -- Jack suspected he’d been prepped by his assistant beforehand, because he knows the names of their wives, knows where their children attend school, where they spent their last vacation -- and Jack realized that his role in the conversation was functionally over.
It’s another, not entirely comfortable, reminder that he’s gone from being a student athlete -- whose life is at least somewhat defined by his historical scholarship, his tenancy in the Haus, his keen eye for portraiture -- to being simply an athlete. He hadn’t exactly been looking forward to answering questions about his unusual path to the NHL -- but it also feels dismissive to have these men in their tailored suits talking about their own children’s budding careers in finance or medicine, or their latest vacation on Nevis, with a clear expectation that as a young, unmarried hockey player Jack has no other interests.
He knows some players manage to shift their public persona through charity work, family life, through lending their names to projects they support. A couple of the guys on the Falconers’ team, he's aware thanks to Bitty, have a pretty active Twitter presence and talk about stuff like the family kittens or their kid’s preschool recital. But Jack knows that can be a double-edged sword -- letting the public into your private life. Or what they imagine to be your private life. He’s not ready to go there yet. If ever.
So he’d let the lunch conversation eddy around him and finished his salad and grilled chicken in silence. When the meal wrapped up and Ames signed off on the bill they all stood up, shook hands, and said their polite good-byes. Jack had slid gratefully behind the wheel of his Honda and headed back to Pawtucket.
He gets up to pee and wash the sleep out of his eyes. His phone is still sitting on the kitchen island where he dropped it with his keys after lunch. The message light is blinking so he wakes up the screen and thumbs through his alerts -- an email from his mother, another one from Yannick, a text from Shitty confirming that he and Lardo are going to visit the following weekend. There are a string of short updates from Bitty, who’s been at Camp Oconee since eight that morning.
Reading from the bottom up, it looks like he’s gone to … play pool? … with a couple of co-workers. Skye and Will. Jack tries to remember if he knows anything about them -- Eric had been a torrent of names and anecdotes the night before. Skye was the one who swam for UGA? And he thought Will was the kid Bitty said had spent the year before doing something for AmeriCorps in Tennessee.
Jack’s first impulse is to text Bitty to make sure they have a designated driver. But he thinks maybe that sounds too much like he’s still Bittle’s team captain. And he’s only ever seen Bitty get really drunk when he’s within walking distance of the Haus, so …
… he digs the book he’s been reading out of his bag and goes back into the bedroom with the book and the phone.
He props himself up on his and Bitty’s pillows against the headboard and texts in answer to Bitty’s earlier questions:
Lunch was fine.
Why do people always think all hockey players can talk about is hockey?
I just woke up from a nap. Skype later?
Have fun playing pool.
He’s reading Consider the Fork because he’d heard an interview with the author on NPR. He'd ordered the title for Bitty, then gotten interested paging through the book and decided to read it himself first. But it’s not holding his attention tonight.
He’s still loose-limbed from his nap but slightly restless from sleeping too long. And his mind keeps turning over the idea of Bits in a dimly-lit bar wielding a pool cue with the same assurance he wields his stick on the ice. He imagines Bitty in his tight-fitting jeans and one of his distressed concert tees leaning in to line up a shot …
Jack sets his book aside on the bedside table and slides down his pillows into a more comfortable position.
He folds his hands across his chest, fingertips touching, and breathes. He feels the rise and fall of his chest as the air moves in and out of his lungs.
It’s so blessedly quiet here. His bedroom looks out over the river so the building insulates him from the traffic of the street and the parking lot. There’s a violinist in the apartment above him who practices occasionally, and the ambient sounds of tenants moving through the corridors, dogs taken out to be walked, the flush of water down the pipes. But it’s all much less raucous than living in a house full of college boys, surrounded by a campus full of eighteen-to-twenty-two year olds. Jack had grown up an only child, traveling a lot with his parents, used to long uninterrupted stretches of time with his mom reading or working through grant applications or answering emails while nearby he'd played solitary games or drawn or read in contented solitude. He’d mostly loved his teammates, living in the Haus, but on some level he’d always felt braced for someone (likely Shitty) to come bursting into his room.
Not that Shitty would have been fazed by the sight of Jack jerking off.
But Jack doesn’t need performance anxiety in this part of his life.
He brushes his left hand lightly across his chest, feeling his thumb catch on his nipple beneath the thin cotton of his white undershirt. He feels the warmth of his hands seeping through the cloth, rubs a little harder with the edge of his thumbnail and feels how his body begins to respond.
He takes another deep breath and thinks deliberately about Bitty, about the grace with which Bitty moves on the ice and in the kitchen, about the way his expressions are whole-body affairs full of light and energy when he’s happy and dampening an entire room when he’s hurting. He thinks about all of those hours he and Bits have spent on the ice together, in the kitchen together, dozing together on the bus during roadies.
He suddenly remembers one night, on their way back from a game in upstate New York last January, when Bitty had fallen asleep against Jack’s arm and in his sleep (at least, Jack had thought at the time it was in sleep -- now Jack wasn’t so sure) had pressed his hand up against Jack’s belly, fingers curling at the gap where Jack’s shirt had been rucked up by the seatbelt. Jack remembers the warm, reassuring weight of Bitty asleep against him, and how carefully still Jack had sat so as not to wake him. He remembers how Bitty’s fingers had tickled, slightly, but in a way that left him conscious of how much he likes the feel of another person’s skin sliding against his own, how he’s never had the chance to see if he can get his fill of that sensation -- his experiences always too fleeting, over too soon, with too much haste.
Here in his own bed in Pawtucket, Jack doesn’t have to hurry so he lets himself linger. He plays his hand across his chest feeling his nipples tighten, feeling the rest of his body wake up in response. He shifts his hips, just a bit, flexes his quads so his hips rise and the fabric of his boxers pulls lightly against his penis.
He pushes his hands lower, in a sweeping downward motion, then up again under his t-shirt. Skin to skin.
It’s his own hands, which lack the breathtaking novelty of someone else invited to touch, someone else reaching out for him. Jack can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times Kent actually reached for him with open desire -- desire not clouded by alcohol or complicated motives that it had taken Jack years to recognize. And yet more years to understand with something approximating empathy. As long as Parse kept his distance.
He’d managed to ignore how much he missed Kent’s touch for years -- first because nothing had felt like much of anything, good or bad, and then because memories of Kent touching him had begun to feel like a violation. The things he’d done with Kent -- always blurred by alcohol, half-acknowledged, sometimes outright denied -- had made even desiring sex feel dangerous for a year or two.
But he’s been slowly, slowly coming back to desire -- first the desire to touch himself in ways that are more than perfunctory. To really pay attention to what he’s doing and why it feels good, the way he pays attention to his body on the ice: the stretch and burn of muscle and the ups and downs of heart rate, the inhale and exhale of oxygen passing through his lungs, the ringing in his ears when his body reaches and finds that sweet spot he’s aiming for.
Then, when Bitty had reached for Jack, pulling him back for another kiss, in the Haus back in May, Jack had felt something in his gut fall into place.
This is what he’s been missing.
He arches up into his own hands, pressing his palms flat and hard against his chest as he pushes against them, elbows digging into the mattress, hips twisting, fabric dragging against rapidly-sensitizing skin. He drags his hands down his torso and pushes his fingers beneath the elastic of his waistband, lets his thumbs hook over the fabric so he can shove the cloth down toward his knees.
He leaves the boxers mid-thigh, liking the way the elastic pulls tight across muscle. He can imagine how Bitty would feel, straddling him there, the warm back of his thighs and the crease of his ass close against Jack’s legs. He imagines Bitty’s thigh muscles tightening under Jack’s own hands as Bitty lifts himself up to lean forward and down, kneeling above Jack to press kisses to the hollow of Jack’s neck, maybe nipping at Jack’s earlobe.
He finally drags his own hands up between his thighs and palms himself, letting his hips do the work stuttering up into his loose fist. He stretches his neck and turns to press his face into the soft, heavy weight of the eiderdown pillows. He screws his eyes shut and rocks into his hand, thinking about how Bitty will feel warm and alive curled over him, his hand or Jack’s between them, stroking together, hips moving in point, counterpoint, together, apart, then together, together, together in slow, lazy, fast, lazy, never-ending circles of sweat and slick and --
-- Jack comes as silently as he always does, forgetting to breathe for a moment or two as he holds onto the sensation of pure, uncomplicated, unthinking physical pleasure as long as he possibly can before slowly releasing his body (feet, ankles, calves, knees, thighs, abdomen, wrists, forearms, elbows, shoulders, neck, chest, belly, groin) back to the mattress.
He sucks in a deep breath, lets it out, then takes another one, listening to his pulse slow as the orgasm dissipates into the slow molasses warmth of after.
The bed feels achingly lonely, now. The peace and quiet less peaceful than it had felt half an hour ago and more … empty. He imagines Bitty sliding down onto the bed beside him to fill that empty space and discovers that he fits just fine.