Chapter Text
“Lardo says they have a table,” Eric reports as they stand on the first escalator on their way out of the depths of Harvard Square station. He’s on the step above Jack, both of them standing politely to the right so harried mid-day business traffic can pass them by. As they rise steadily toward the street, Jack presses himself comfortably against Eric’s back. Six inches below Eric on the moving steps, he’s just the right height to hook his chin over Eric’s shoulder and see where he’s reading Lardo’s text on his phone. Jack finagles his arm between Eric and his messenger bag, pulling Eric into a one-armed hug for the five seconds before they reach the top of the first escalator. Reluctantly, then, he lets go as they disembark to skirt the Jehovah’s Witnesses and foot traffic going in the other direction on their way to the second escalator that will deliver them to the surface.
When Jack steps behind Eric’s back on the second escalator, Eric waits for Jack to press up against his spine and then leans back into the touch.
Jack presses a kiss to Eric’s shoulder, through the thin fabric of his t-shirt. “Tell her we’re two minutes away,” he instructs as they step off the top of the escalator and emerge into Harvard Square.
They had left the Civic -- Eric keeps insisting it needs a name, but hasn’t found one that sticks -- in South Attleboro that morning and taken the train in to Back Bay station. They had arrived early enough that Jack was able to take Eric on an abbreviated tour through his uncles’ neighborhood off the Southwest Corridor Park before depositing him at a coffee shop to refuel while Jack kept his appointment with Marci. Then, with an hour to reach their destination in Harvard Square, Jack had continued playing tour guide as they walked through the Public Garden and the Common to Park Street before descending below ground and catching the T toward Arlington.
Eric hasn’t been to Harvard Square before, unless you count driving through on the bus to Bright-Landry for games, so Jack is the one who leads the way across the intersection passed the Coop and down the pedestrian throughway to Border Cafe. Before he can tell the hostess poised to seat them that they’re meeting friends, Lardo’s hand shoots up from a table near the back. “Thanks,” he says, “We’re meeting -- over there.”
“Sure thing,” the hostess says, attention already turning to the family group crowding through the entryway behind.
“You made it!” Lardo says, beaming, from behind her half-finished glass sangria. The waiter’s already brought chips and salsa and Shitty, sitting with his elbow touching Lards’, is looking blissed out on a similarly-depleted drink. He’s dressed in cargo shorts and grey t-shirt that reads “feminist as f*ck” in magenta across the front. Jack knows for a fact the t-shirt had been a Christmas gift from Lardo their Junior year so the message Shitty’s sending today is complex. But trending toward positive if Lardo’s body language is anything to by. She’s looking comfortable in a brightly-patterned sundress with her sunglasses pushed up to the top of her head. Jack realizes as he takes the chair between Shitty and Eric that it’s one of a handful of times he’s seen her in a dress outside of formal occasions.
“Yo, Bits! My man!” Shitty half-lunges across the table to offer a high-five to Eric, who offers his own palm for Shitty to make contact with.
“Hey Shitty. How’s it hanging?”
“Not bad, not bad,” Shitty settles back into his seat. “Lardo’s been helping me plan my décor.” He says it with the accent and a little flourish of the hand that isn’t stabilizing his drink.
Lardo rolls her eyes. “He means he’s taking some of the pieces I haven’t been able to store in my parents’ basement.” Like the nudes for which Shitty posed, Jack thinks, blinking at the thought of displaying photographs of himself on his apartment walls. Naked photographs. He … can’t really picture it. Maybe he’d understand if Eric were the one painting them?
The waiter must have been keeping an eye on the table because he’s there almost before Jack’s bag lands on the floor to take their drink order -- two more Sangrias -- and another basket of chips hot out of the fryer.
“Are you ready to order?” he asks.
“Give us a minute?” Eric’s looking at the menu with the focus he reserves for food, skating, and Jack. “Oh, but -- an order of guacamole first? Thank you.” He smiles winningly at the server. Not that Jack has ever treated waitstaff poorly, but when he goes to a restaurant with Eric he starts to feel positively ashamed for his transactional exchanges.
“I hear,” Shitty says, sucking down a visible quarter-inch of his sangria, “that you’ve taken over from yours truly the duties of Taddy Tour M.C.?”
“That’s me,” Eric winks. “I even got a playlist to match.” He closes the menu over his thumb, crossing his legs under the table so that his toe can brush Jack’s calf, and leans forward conspiratorially over his menu. “Don’t tell Ransom and Holster but…”
Jack makes eye contact with Lardo as she reaches for a chip and dips it in the salsa. He raises and eyebrow and she raises one back. They haven’t had a chance to talk recently -- or Jack’s been too preoccupied with Eric’s visit to make the time, maybe. He knows she and Shits have been hanging out more since mid-July and -- that they even took a weekend to visit his mother up in Brattleboro.
He still doesn’t know how to read what’s going on between them. He’s asked Eric, but Eric is no clearer. “I’d say they were sleeping together?” He’d said, at one point when they were talking about it mid-July. “But Shitty doesn’t seem like the kind to do … subtle? And if they were sleeping together, I can’t see him keeping it a secret. And Lardo ... “
“She didn’t … she didn’t make it sound like they were … dating?” Jack had said, thinking back to his conversation with her in Boston the day he left for Georgia. “She made it sound like they were really good friends when she was studying abroad, but then whatever she expected when she came back to Samwell didn’t … happen?” He’d shrugged. “It sounded complicated.”
Eric had smiled. “Not everyone lucks into a boyfriend as brave as you were, sweetheart.”
“It wasn’t bravery,” Jack had said, automatically. The back-and-forth already has a well-worn groove to it, and Jack suddenly had a vision of them having this same argument ten years from now when the kiss they’re arguing about is the first of thousands -- hundreds of thousands -- they will have shared.
In the restaurant he reaches without thinking about it and slips his palm under Eric’s hand on the table -- and Eric turns his palm in to accept it, easily, interweaving their fingers and squeezing Jack’s hand without interrupting the rhythm of his conversation with Shitty.
You okay? Jack tries to mouth to Lardo. She just rolls her eyes at him and shrugs. He frowns gently at her, but doesn’t pursue it. He’ll have to catch her sometime when she’s more sober and Shitty isn’t declaiming all over the table.
With the hand that isn’t holding Eric’s he opens his menu and considers which burrito he wants to order. It’s … he fishes around for a word. Marci had been pushing him that morning to use specific words for both the shape of his worries and the things that he values about his relationship with Eric, his work, the other parts of his rapidly-changing life. This afternoon feels nice, he thinks. A tepid word. It feels homey? Better. There’s something enduring about his friendship with Shitty and Lardo, he thinks, and something warm and solid about the way the four of them fit together in an easy quartet of friendship.
Jack doesn’t hang out with many people -- formless social time has a way of kicking his anxiety into high gear. But he’s never been able to not hang out with the force of nature that is Shitty, and Lardo’s always been the uncomplicated best friend he’d always longed for but never found … until this tiny art major marched into the locker room with her clipboard in hand and he knew she was someone whose respect he wanted to earn. But not in the complicated “I want you to like me and suck my cock” way he’d felt around Kenny. And -- miracle upon miracle -- Eric seems to feel much the same way about both Lardo and Shitty, wanting them to be a part of his -- of their life -- not on some sort of sufferance because they’re Jack’s friends but because they’re his friends as well.
The waiter turns up at his shoulder to start taking their orders around the table, Jack folds his menu to hand it up, along with his request for the bean burro, extra guacamole, and lets himself imagine this is the first of many leisurely double dates the four of them will share.
He catches Eric’s eye, and Eric blows him an air kiss before laughing at something Lardo’s said about the incoming Taddies.
Yeah, Jack thinks. Worth it. They’re all three of them worth it.