Chapter Text
Jack steps out of the elevator and exits the office building to blink in the midday sunshine. Marci’s office has a window, but she keeps the light soft and the colors deep and mellow. Outside, the light feels harsh and the Boston streets sharp and crowded. His mid-morning appointment -- a holdover from his spring semester schedule -- means he has a couple hours to fill before meeting Shitty at the pub where they’re having lunch. So orients himself on the sidewalk and settles his messenger bag across his shoulders, setting off at a brisk walk toward the Boston Public Garden.
The last day of June is turning out clear with a light breeze that keeps the warm air moving. Although it’s trending toward uncomfortably warm in the sun, the Garden has plenty of shade and Jack picks one of the empty benches by the pond to sit and people-watch. The park on a weekday morning is mostly populated by little knots of tourists -- always present in this part of the city -- and criss-crossed at a steady pace with dog-walkers, joggers, and people in work attire passing through on the way to and from meetings. The regulars are like the grown-up version of students, Jack thinks, making their way from classroom to library to dining hall and back again over the course of the day.
He pulls out his phone and check for messages. He and Eric had texted back a forth a bit while Jack was on the train, but Eric’s been quiet since Jack signed in for his appointment. Camp Oconee started its two-week 4th of July hiatus and Eric’s been busy these last few days helping Suzanne organize for a big arts and crafts expo in Atlanta. Jack takes a picture of the swan boats, and one of the Hancock and Prudential towers rising above the weeping willows, and sends them with a Wish you were here ;-).
Shitty’s texted once about thirty minutes ago to say he was on his way and then again five minutes ago to say that an accident on Route 3 had slowed traffic to a crawl. I’m good. Jack texts back. Done with my appointment and hanging in the Public Garden. Text me when you get here.
Then he slips his phone back in his bag.
He has a book he could read, of course, but it’s peaceful sitting here and not actually focusing on anything that requires the parsing of an argument or the tracking of a narrative. He fiddles with the straps on his bag, watching a little girl feeding a family of ducks at the water’s edge, and lets his mind replay his conversation with Marci like it plays back over the points won or lost in a game.
Overall it had been a good, a calming, appointment. Even if now Jack’s brain feels tired. He’s always anxious before an appointment that he won’t have anything to say, or not say the right thing -- and they had had a lot of ground to cover since his last appointment in early May. But he’s been seeing Marci since he started at Samwell and she knows when to sit and wait for him to gather his thoughts and when to challenge him with a probing question or two.
Pace yourself, Jack, she’d said when he had laid out his uncertainties about coming out.
“One of the things to remember -- and I think you and Eric know this already -- about coming out is that it’s not something you do once and a switch is flipped,” Marci had tipped her head and looked at him from the chair she likes to sit in, cross-legged, while they talk. She’s a marathon runner and a yogi, compact and about Lardo’s size, and manages to give the impression of motion even when she’s sitting still.
Jack’s previous therapist had been a much older, quieter woman who favored cardigans and offered him tea at the beginning of every session. When he first began meeting with Marci, Jack had been slightly alarmed by the energy and focus she brought to each appointment -- but he’s grown to appreciate it over the years. It’s been particularly helpful to have someone who understands the way athletes inhabit their bodies in both healthy and unhealthy ways.
“The story the media likes to tell about coming out is a very simplistic one,” Marci had reminded him, “either you’re closeted or you’re not. But in reality, most of us will ‘come out’ in many different ways to different people over our lifetimes. You’ve already shared this part of yourself with many people who are important to you, Jack, starting with yourself. Your parents, your uncles, a few trusted friends, Eric -- now Eric’s parents. That’s a lot of people who know you and care about who you are and that you’re happy. And it sounds like you have reason to trust your new teammates as well. But it’s okay to let them earn your trust before you share this part of your story with them.”
Marci hadn’t given Jack any more clarity about what he should do. She’s pointed out to him more than once in the past, when he’s grumbled about her lack of direction, that he has enough coaches in his life already. But, as was usually the case when he met with her, Jack left the health center feeling more at peace with not having a point-by-point plan for his life ahead than he had felt going in. She’d even given him a squeeze on the arm as he departed, and Jack would swear she winked as she told him to have a good time in Madison.
On his way out of the waiting room, Jack had screwed up the nerve to stop at the desk and take a few condoms and packets of lube from the fishbowl of freebies they keep well-stocked for anyone who wants them. They’re in his bag now, tucked carefully into an interior pocket, making him feel a little bit excited and a little bit intimidated. Maybe he and Eric won’t end up doing anything that requires lube and condoms in the next week but … this way they’ll be prepared without having to make an embarrassing trip to the pharmacy.
He could probably have just asked Lardo, whom he knows makes it something of a point of pride to be utterly nonchalant in the acquisition of all manner of safer-sex supplies for both her hockey players and her friends in the art department. He even remembers -- with a shudder -- the time she talked Holster into driving a group of players and a few interested others up to Good Vibrations in Brookline to stock up.
(It’s not that Jack hasn’t considered the uses to which he might put some of those accessories. He just cannot picture shopping for them in a public space. Let alone with his teammates.)
So he knows Lardo would have come to his rescue if he’d asked -- but now he doesn’t have to. It had been easier than he’d imagined to just take what he needed. No one in the waiting room had even so much as glanced in his direction, though he knew if they had it wouldn’t have been in judgement. The condoms are there to be taken, after all. And someone -- in honor of Pride, maybe, or just for fun -- has taken a rainbow-colored selection of condom packets from the store and pinned them in a cheerful progression across the top of the pin board behind the desk. Here, he’s not The Guy Buying Condoms like it would have been at CVS but just a patient on his way out the door.
Jack pats his bag gently and smiles to himself.
Down the path where he’s chosen to sit, a large walking tour is coming around the edge of the pond, led by a tour guide in a blue polo shirt and matching cap. It stops a few feet away so the guide can tell the story of Make Way for Ducklings and point out the little parade of bronze statues worn bright and shining by the clambering of many small fans.
The chances that someone will recognize him are low, but tour groups make him feel on display nonetheless, so Jack decides to get up and move on. He walks down to the corner of Arlington and Beacon Street and crosses to bottom of the pedestrian overpass that will give him access to the Charles River Esplanade. The walkway carries him over the busy lanes of Storrow Drive and drops him at the Hatch Shell, bustling with preparations for the weekend fireworks. Jack remembers once, in his childhood, when his father had been invited as the celebrity MC for the evening’s event. He must have been very young, because Jack mostly remembers how he had wanted to go swimming in the lagoon and his mother had finally agreed that they could rent a boat and go watch the fireworks from the water. Jack can see the barge already anchored upriver from the Hatch with its bunting and stars, and pictures the now-empty river filled with bobbing sailboats and row boats and yachts and kayaks as the Boston Symphony Orchestra strikes up the opening bars of the 1812 Overture.
He walks around for a bit taking snapshots for Bitty with his phone, then finds a bench near the sparsely-populated playground and pulls out his book. Since finishing the Olmsted biography he’s working steadily through Rybczynski’s back catalog and just last night began Home: A Short History of an Idea. Two chapters -- and a few text exchanges with Bitty later -- his phone buzzes and it’s a profanity-filled text Shitty announcing his arrival in Boston. Or, at least, that’s what Jack gets out of Shitty’s righteous denunciation of the driving abilities of all goddamn motherfucking Masshole drivers without a shred of common decency among them. Jack raises an eyebrow at the phone and texts back, As I recall you think turn signals “are for wusses”.
Jack, my man, where are you? Shitty responds, choosing to ignore Jack’s critique of his driving abilities.
Down by the Hatch. I can be at Emmet’s in fifteen. Jack slides his book back in his bag and stands up to walk back toward Beacon Hill.
Shitty’s already secured them a table at the back of the restaurant when Jack ducks through the low doorway into Emmet’s, and has clearly been watching for Jack because he shoots up a lanky arm before Jack’s eyes have even fully adjusted to the dim of the interior.
“It’s -- I’m meeting a friend,” he says to the hostess, nodding toward Shitty.
“Enjoy your lunch!” she says with a smile as he sidles past the bar and a table over-full of suits having some sort of business lunch and makes his way to the back.
“Hey Shits,” Jack greets Shitty, taking in at a glance the look Shitty’s chosen for today. Shitty, more than any of Jack’s (admittedly small number of) friends, uses clothing -- or lack thereof -- as a form of communication. Today’s message involves a pair of cargo shorts Shitty’s had since their Sophomore year and a t-shirt from Lardo’s freshman-year performance of The Vagina Monologues which means that Shitty is feeling both nostalgic and in the mood to piss his father and stepmother off. Even if only for the five minutes he sees them between getting out of the shower and leaving the house.
He’s already nursing a beer which Jack raises a pointed eyebrow at.
“Not driving back until tonight, man,” Shitty says. “Lardo and I have a thing.”
“A thing, huh?” Jack realizes this probably adds an added layer of messaging to the t-shirt Shitty is wearing.
“Some sort of jam session-slash-poetry-night at Fazenda that one of her friends from Samwell is in? I gather we’re going as moral support.”
“Have fun, be safe, call me when you get home,” Jack smirks, just to make Shitty reach across the table and smack him on the side of the head.
They’re interrupted by the waiter who takes their order -- Jack gets the shepherd’s pie and Shitty orders fish and chips like he always does when it’s on the menu -- and then Jack has a moment of panic like he always does when faced with a single other person he’s responsible for making conversation with.
“So, brah, like, I’m curious,” Shitty says, hunching forward, and Jack remembers with Shitty he never needs to worry about carrying the conversation forward past awkward silences. “What’s it like?”
Jack’s mind goes to the condoms and lube in his bag and he stares at Shitty blankly for a moment. “Uh.”
Shitty makes a complicated gesture over the pint glass, indicating Jack’s presence at the table. “Having this whole grown-up thing, you know, worked out.”
Jack understands underneath Shitty’s posturing that it’s a serious question so he takes a moment to consider a serious answer. “I, uh, wouldn’t say I have it all worked out.”
“C’mon, man. You’ve got a job that pays six figures, your own apartment, a boyfriend,” Shitty turns his beer on the coaster, takes another sip. “You’re getting paid six figures to do what you love man. What does that feel like? To know what you want and then, you know, to achieve it?”
Coming from anyone else, Jack thinks he would probably be offended. But it’s Shitty so he just says, mildly, “It’s not like that. You know it’s not like that.”
Shitty sighs. “I had a fight with my old man last night. He still thinks I should have gone into finance. Fucking finance. I can’t believe I get into Harvard fucking Law and he still finds ways to imply that I’m not the son he would have hoped for.”
Jack takes a sip of his iced tea. “I’m sorry man.” He thinks about what it would be like if his father hadn’t wanted him to go into professional sports, or had wanted him to go into a different sport. Eric and his dad seem be wrestling with this, too, although in a much less combative fashion than Shitty and his father.
Shitty shrugs. “I’ve been in school for sixteen fucking years, Jack, straight through without a break, you know? And, like, part of me is still goddamn proud to have gotten into law school but part of me is scared I’ve done it just to prove to my father I can go to Harvard and not turn out like him.” He scrubs a hand over his face. “But what if I do turn out like him?”
Jack understands this, a little. Like Shitty he’s in a weird liminal space this summer: his future laid out before him but not actually begun. And in the hours of free time he has between working out and all the other activities he’s found to fill his summer days Jack finds himself wondering when he actually decided to go pro.
And he can’t actually remember.
Hockey, as a game, he keeps coming back to. He never gets tired of lacing up his skates and getting out on the ice with the other guys on his team. He loved it in the Q, he loved it with the kids he coached, he loved it at Samwell, and he’s been growing ever-more comfortable with the Falconers he’s been skating with every time they share the ice.
But the decision to make hockey his job? It’s been troubling him, lately, that he can’t explain to himself how and why that happened. It’s on the mental list of things to talk to Marci about. But it’s also all very theoretical when his first professional season hasn’t even properly started.
Which puts him in a very similar position to the one Shitty’s in.
“I get it,” he says, leaning back as the waiter returns with their food. “It all feels a bit like … like another summer break right now, eh? When August comes and we don’t move back into the Haus … I think that’s when it will really start to feel weird.”
“Bits is coming to visit you in August, right?” Shitty asks as he pours salt and vinegar on his chips.
“He finishes at Camp on the first of August,” Jack affirms, “and he’s flying in on the second.” Bitty had been alarmingly happy when he realized that with his flight rescheduled he would be in Pawtucket for Jack’s birthday. “You and Lardo should come down -- we could all hang out.”
“You don’t think that would be awkward?”
Jack frowns at Shitty, “No, why?”
Shitty rolls his eyes. “Dude. You and Bits spent all last semester in serious sexual deprivation mode. I am not getting anywhere near the fine state of Rhode Island while he’s staying with you for fear of spontaneous impregnation.”
Jack snorts. “I don’t think it works like that.”
“Well I’m not taking any chances.”
“Fine. We’ll just have to come to Boston then. When are you moving to Somerville?”
Shitty licks the grease from the fish off his fingers. “Lease starts August 15. I scored this place off a guy who’s subletting because he’s on a Fulbright to Egypt all next year. Lardo says she’ll help me with temporary decorations.”
Jack wonders what version of this story he’ll get from Lardo when they have lunch the day after tomorrow. He’s spent three years, now, watching the two of them bounce off each other and he only knows it’s complicated.
“I’ll look forward to that,” is all he says for the moment, “when Bitty and I come up for a visit.”
"I'll be holding you to that," Shitty says, saluting Jack with his nearly-empty pint.
"I expect you to," Jack says firmly. He may have less of a grip on adulthood than Shitty imagines, but he does know that whatever happens in the coming year, he doesn't want to lose Shitty as a friend. Shitty's been there when Jack's needed him in the past and -- Jack files this whole conversation away for later contemplation; maybe Bitty will have some insights -- now Jack has an inkling that it might just be time to return the favor.