Chapter Text
Jack wakes to pre-dawn light filtering into his bedroom from over the three-quarter wall that separates the sleeping area from his living room. He’s been dreaming about checking practice in Faber, with Bitty, of skating with him in lazy circles on the otherwise-empty rink. About the sensation of picking up speed and gaining on Bitty as he flies across the ice, letting the momentum of his body weight carry him and Eric together into the boards.
In the dream, they aren’t wearing helmets, or any of the usual bulky gear, and part of Jack knows this is okay because it’s a dream so no one can get hurt. Which means when he skates into Bitty and pushes him to the edge of the ice he has Bitty trapped warm and breathless against his chest, can bracket Eric’s head and shoulders with his forearms, can lean in for a kiss … and then, in that way that dreams have of blending and bleeding and shifting like a Dali painting, they’re on the ice but not on the ice. They’re up against the boards kissing, limbs entangled, Eric lifting himself up with his arms wrapped around Jack’s neck … and then everything shifts again and he’s actually laying on the ice … only the ice is also his bedroom, his old bedroom in the Haus, and Bitty is warm, warmer, hot, naked skin against Jack’s also-naked skin and their making out still wrapped around each other, Eric’s mouth all over Jack’s skin, teeth sharp against his collarbone, dragging lower, his whole body dragging down and across Jack’s until --
-- but of course Jack wakes up, heart racing, chest heaving. He’s gotten tangled in his duvet at some point in the night so that his front is overheated and his naked ass is cold where the circulating air from the fan he left running is blowing over exposed skin.
And he’s hard. Achingly so.
Which is … unusual. For Jack. Not, he’s given to understand, for many guys his age. God knows, you live in a hockey house for three years and you learn more than you ever wanted to about the erections of men with whom you have no plans to become sexually intimate.
But unusual for Jack. Jack is not accustomed to waking up a hairsbreadth from orgasm. Jack’s barely had a chance in the last twelve years to get to know his own unadulterated libido. There were the anti-anxiety meds, the anti-anti-anxiety meds, the better anti-anxiety meds, finally followed by a tapering off to the smallest possible dosage that kept his brain from convincing him none of the things he actually likes doing are worth the effort. He’s been on the same dose for a little over two years now but by the time he’d taken a breath and looked around it felt like everyone -- Crisse, even the first-years who get younger every year -- had long ago worked the sex thing out.
How do you tell a guy -- probably several years your junior, whose sexual history is probably exponentially more extensive than yours -- that you got off a handful of times with your best friend but never actually talked about it? That you spent years ignoring everything your stupid body thought it wanted because that had taken you to dangerous, life-threatening places and safety was in following the rules other people gave you to follow? That the only place your body has felt right in recent years has been on the ice?
He hadn’t known how to have that conversation, and wasn’t willing to let alcohol do the talking for him, so there it was.
And here’s the thing … he hasn’t felt like this since before. Since before the overdose. He’d forgotten what this feels like, the sudden prickly awareness of arousal, the desperate neediness of desire that floods into his body without being coaxed out of hiding. Eric might as well be here in the room with the weight of wanting that’s keeping Jack’s heart rate elevated, pooling sweat along his breastbone, tightening his pelvic muscles in ways that make him turn his face deeper into the pillow pressed under his cheek.
He bites his lip, hard, and fumbles with the tangle of sheets and feathers until his left hand connects with the flesh of his belly, the rough curls damp with sweat that curl below his navel. his dick, like his dream-addled mind, is still more than half-convinced that Eric is pressed up against his front, that Eric will be sliding slicked-up fingers down and around his balls, pressing in.
Jack hasn’t thought a lot about what he might like beyond Eric and what he’s learned from his own touch to be reliably good. But this newly-active part of his brain is apparently trying to make up for lost time by invading his dreams and suggesting activities and positions he’s only ever seen performed with dubious veracity at Haus porn viewing parties. He kind of hates Holster and Ransom right now for the fact he even has these scenarios in his head at all except that some of it is clearly speaking to him because here he is barely awake and jerking off to the thought of Bitty’s fingers inside him, of Bitty telling him so good you’re so good and you’re gonna come for me, sweetheart, don’t fight it, so good --
Jack feels the orgasm gather seconds before it slams through him, arching his spine from his scalp to the curl of his toes as he comes in a hot, sticky mess against his hand and into the knot of bed sheets still tangled around his torso.
He drifts for a few minutes, maybe more, after that, because the next thing he knows he’s still sticky and tangled in the bedclothes and the radio has clicked on to let him know that it’s six o’clock. His lips are dry, and slightly sore from where he was biting them.
“...by the way, the Confederate flag is still flying at full-staff outside the capitol at Columbia, while the U.S. flag and the state flag are at half-staff. And that’s because that is the law in South Carolina…”
One of the NPR reporters is talking about Charleston again, and Jack wonders how Jersey and his family are doing. Maybe if he followed the guys on Facebook or Twitter he’d know. He considers asking Bitty is he follows any of the Falconers on social media, then files this away for later in the summer. Now it’s Monday, and his weekly schedule is back in gear which means -- has meant, the past few weeks -- hitting the ice at the Falconers’ complex and then the gym, followed by breakfast and anything else he’s expected to show up for. But today, he thinks, maybe he’ll just go for a run instead, eat breakfast at home. Maybe he’ll try making waffles.
He pushes himself up to his elbows and then swings his legs over the edge of the bed. Waffles. Waffles and laundry. And then maybe he’ll see about unpacking some of his photography books and hanging a few pictures on the still-bare living room walls. Maybe Eric can Skype in and help him decide what will look best.
He thinks again about Bitty warm and pliant against his chest, and feels the flush roll across his skin. Ten more days. Ten more days, and he’ll be off to Logan for the Atlanta-bound flight and Bitty will be waiting for him at the other end.