Chapter Text
A violent band of thunderstorms blows through Georgia on Thursday night, several hours of sheeting rain and lashing wind blowing wet leaves against the glass of Eric's bedroom windows. Eric lays in bed staring sleeplessly at the wild shadows and flashes of lightning that cut across his ceiling and waits. Since he was a child, thunderstorms have made Eric jumpy. He doesn’t cry through them, anymore, but neither does he find them soothing. Even if he’s deep asleep it’s a rare storm that doesn’t wake him in the night, and if he’s already awake he knows enough not to bother trying to fall asleep until it’s over.
Instead, he lays awake and thinks about the fact that a week from tomorrow, Jack will be arriving in Atlanta on the 8:40am flight from Boston. Because of course Jack booked the flight that requires him to get up insanely early. Actually, what he’s doing is going up to Boston on the train the night before and staying overnight in one of the hotels by the airport so he can roll out of bed two hours before his flight leaves. Which still means getting up at 4am.
“Lord, Jack, what were you thinking?” Eric had asked over dinner that evening. The rain, at that point, had been a distant bank of clouds in the western sky and he and Jack were talking like they have been every night (except Wednesdays which have become kitchen crew pool night). He knows Jack can afford the night in Boston, but it still feels scandalous to spend money on a hotel just to make an earlier flight.
“I was thinking if I took the early flight I’d get to spend the whole day with you,” Jack says, raising an eyebrow and quirking a fond smirk that Eric secretly hopes is just for him. He doesn’t want to think about anyone else in the world being on the receiving end of Jack Zimmermann’s rare, sexy smiles.
He’d already been in bed reading when Eric called a few minutes after nine … because Jack is secretly a seventy-year-old man trapped in the body of a twenty-five year old, Eric’s decided. Not that he hadn’t had his suspicions about this back in the Haus, but watching Jack living on his own has just confirmed this five thousand times over. Jack goes to the library and checks out a stack of books each Monday afternoon. Then, he goes to bed at about eight every evening and reads until Eric calls. He wakes up between five and six every morning, even on weekends, and gets up for a run or to go workout at the arena. If the rare selfies he sends Eric are representative of his social life, apart from hockey Jack socializes mainly with Bean, old married couples, and children under the age of ten.
Eric absorbs each of these facts with adoration, obsessively rehearsing them to himself like he memorizes the lyric to each new Beyoncé song, letting the rhythm of the music sink into his body as he listens to each track over and over and over again. Until it feels like it belongs to him.
He never thought he’d be able to do the same with Jack.
Jack had been wearing his glasses tonight and Eric had thought he might expire right there at the kitchen table eating the last of his mother’s plum tart because sleepy Jack in glasses, and his hair tousled against the pile of pillows he’s propped up against to read is Eric’s new favorite thing, possibly second only to the nights when Jack uses his laptop for Skype instead of FaceTime and the screen is big enough that Eric can see Monsieur Éléphant propped on the bedside table or peeking out from behind the pillows, or holding Jack’s place in the book he’s set aside so they can talk. It’s like that book, Where’s Waldo? that Eric remembers vaguely from childhood.
Tonight -- while they were talking about Jack’s plans to go see Billy and Yannick on the weekend, and Dex’s worrying silence on the group chat this summer, and Ransom and Holster’s plans to meet at Niagara Falls on Canada Day and the 4th of July this year, and how ready Eric is for the weekend and the two-week break from Camp -- Eric kept thinking about how in one more week he’s going to be able to reach out and run his hands through Jack’s hair, climb into Jack’s lap and kiss that smirk off his face, push his hands up under the worn cotton t-shirts Jack favors as sleepwear.
One more week and Jack will be in this room, if Eric wants him there, in this bed. He hasn’t broached the subject of sleeping arrangements with his parents yet -- there’s a guest bedroom down the hall and Jack can always stay there. But even if Jack’s officially in the guest bedroom it’s not like they won’t have chances to -- chances to --
Eric rolls over and presses his face into Señor Bunny’s worn tummy with a groan, just as another cloudburst starts pounding against the window.
There have been moments during the last few weeks when Eric has felt like his skin is going to split open, cracking like the desert earth from the absence of Jack’s touches. It waxes and wanes but never entirely fades and something about their conversation tonight -- the dawning realization that Jack really is coming down to Madison, that his boyfriend really is going to be here -- has made his skin twitch, made everything touching his body uncomfortably scratchy, even the soft sheets against his bare skin, the threadbare cotton of his pillowcases.
The storm makes Eric restless and jumpy, but there’s also something private about being cocooned in his room with the windows closed against the wind and the rain, thunder muffled by walls and double-glazing, his parents presumably asleep -- storms never seemed to bother them unduly -- in the master bedroom. He’s aware that whatever noises he makes in here are covered three times over by the rain and the wind and the sound of the oscillating fans, a summertime constant down here in Georgia even with central air.
He rolls back over and stretches, easing his storm-tight shoulders against the mattress and letting his legs fall open ever-so-slightly to the close air of the room. He lets himself drift back to the image of Jack in his glasses and rumpled Samwell t-shirt, the dorky plaid boxers he was wearing a lot at the Haus this spring as the weather got warmer. Eric thinks about tucking himself in against Jack’s chest, the way he could hide from the storm in the crook of Jack’s neck, let Jack smooth his broad hands down Eric’s spine. He shivers, despite the heat, imagining the way Jack’s fingers might count the bumps of his vertebrae, smoothing, checking, massaging out the knots of muscle, tracing the curve of each rib out and down and back again as they lay there breathing together. Out and in, in and out, Jack’s chest rising and falling even with Eric nestled there atop him. He thinks about the way his knees, calves, thighs would bracket Jack’s hips, his toes tucked under the back of Jack’s knees. He wonders if Jack’s ticklish there, and if he wiggles his toes would Jack laugh.
He smiles, and then catches his own bottom lip between his teeth and bites down, feeling the tension in his jaw as he imagines --
-- his imagination fails him, is the trouble. Eric’s read and watched porn but he knows enough to know not to trust what he sees and reads about. Stories are stories -- what will it actually feel like to have Jack’s erection pressing up against his belly? Porn might give him some ideas of how two male bodies might fit together -- but it can’t tell him what exactly he’s going to like. He wants to try everything but it’s been over a month since Jack kissed him and Eric’s had a lot of time to wonder what his traitorous body might do in response to Jack. He wants, oh he wants, and he knows he wants Jack -- that stopped being a question halfway through last fall semester. He just hopes Jack will be as patient and gentle with him about sex as he was all those early-morning hours on the ice.
I’d just rather learn with you. Jack had said, when they'd talked about kissing.
Eric closes his eyes against the flickers of lightning and skims a hand down over his chest to the over-heated inside of his thigh, then back up, feeling the way his skin prickles at the touch. He scrapes a thumbnail across one of his nipples and bites his lip against the sharp edge of feeling it produces. He brings his other hand up and mirrors the down-up arc on the other side, letting his legs fall open wider, drawing his heels up a little to find purchase on the mattress, pushing down and flexing the muscles in his thighs, feeling everything tighten.
He fumbles for a knot of sheet and fists it in his hand, scrapes his fingers down through the scratchy curls plastered with sweat between his legs. He’s tried not to look at Jack naked in the locker room, and wonders now what color the hair he has down there is -- whether, like Eric, he has lighter and darker strands, whether it gathers low on his belly, whether Eric could run his fingers down through the hair on Jack’s chest in an unbroken path to his groin.
Eric spreads his legs further and reaches, awkwardly far, tracing his fingers down further, palming sensitive flesh, working himself a little roughly. He lets himself moan, softly, imagines he’s letting Jack know just how good his hands feel, how good it is to do this with Jack, how safe he feels in Jack’s hands, how he knows he can let go and Jack will be there to catch him.
It doesn’t take long, even with the distraction of the thunder that tugs at the edge of Eric’s consciousness. All he has to do is imagine Jack pressed to his side, one arm cradling Eric to his chest, the other hand in place of Eric’s pulling and twisting and rubbing while they kiss and kiss and keep on kissing until --
-- Eric curls in on himself, achingly conscious of the body that isn’t there to curl against, the body that he wants so badly to know in this way. He comes hard anyway, almost painfully so, gasping -- a ragged sound lost against the white noise of storm --, feeling the orgasm from the tingle in his toes to the way his scalp crawls as if slightly electrified.
And then it’s over, surprisingly quick, like orgasms always are, and Eric is left panting against the receding tide of desperate wanting. Even while his hand is still fisted in the sheet he can feel the rest of his body letting go into sleep -- and he lets himself drift.
A week from today -- it must be Friday morning by now -- Jack will be on his way to Georgia. And for ten whole days, at least, Eric won’t have to feel quite so parched for touch. Maybe he can figure out how to store up enough contact-time with Jack -- like a long-lasting battery -- that he’ll be able to get through the rest of July and the first few days of August without the same level of hunger that has taken him by surprise this June.
There’s no two ways about it, Eric thinks with a grin as he finally sinks fully into slumber. Jack’s just going to have to suffer through a lot of nudity for the sake of Eric’s health. That’s all there is to it.
He doesn’t think Jack is likely to argue the point.