Chapter Text
When the alarm on Eric’s phone goes off at 5:50 he hits the seven-minute snooze without fully waking up and rolls over to pull Jack closer with grabby hands. Jack, Eric has learned -- contrary to all preconceptions -- is a sprawling stomach-sleeper. Apparently, air mattresses are no exception because Jack has kicked the bottom edge of the sheet and duvet askew and has one arm twisted under his torso and behind his back in a position that must be cutting off circulation. More importantly, his position is frustrating Eric in his quest to get as up close and personal as he can to his boyfriend before the alarm goes off again at 5:57.
Eric nuzzles his way over Jack’s exposed shoulder, tugging at Jack's upper body until Jack wakes and realizes what Eric wants. He lifts himself up enough to pull his shoulders back into alignment and curls his spine into an acceptable shape for Eric to plaster himself against with wordless murmurs of approval.
Eric presses his face against the nape of Jack’s neck and inhales, allowing himself the luxury of drifting for another few minutes in the narrow slice of time when he will be awake enough to appreciate Jack’s presence but not awake enough that his brain starts reminding him of everything he has to do today. Reminding him that Jack will be leaving, probably sooner rather than later, and that he won’t have anyone but a melancholy Señor Bun sharing his bed tonight.
At least they can be melancholy together?
Jack shifts his hips, pressing his ass back against Eric in a way what feels more comforting than the start of anything particularly energetic. Jack will be awake enough to remember that Eric needs to be at Faber for the start of morning practice by 6:20 and it’s Jack so obviously he takes practice seriously enough that he won’t try to distract Eric into being late.
Eric tries not to be disappointed by the certainty with which he knows this.
The alarm goes off a second time and Eric groans resentfully at it, peeling himself reluctantly away from Jack and leaning back to fumble for the phone and hit snooze his allotted second time.
“Why do you set it fifteen minutes earlier than you actually need to?” Jack had asked with amusement the night before, as he’d rummaged in his overnight bag for his toothbrush and Eric kicked his desk chair in desultory circles while he programmed in the alarms for the regular morning practices.
“Not all of us can just … leap out of bed bright-eyed and bushy-tailed you know,” Eric had said, grumpily, because he was tired and apparently part of him still kind of sort of resented the fact that Jack had dragged him out of bed even earlier for all of those mornings of checking practice. Even if, in retrospect, checking practice had turned out to be an awkward and mostly adorable Jack Zimmermann courtship ritual.
Eric might possibly have certain fantasies that revolve around Jack and checking practice. Although they’re not so much about checking as they are about the feeling of Jack’s body close to his, protecting him even while they collided on the ice. He snuggles in more firmly against Jack's naked back, enjoying the unadulterated access, rubbing his nose against the bump at the top of Jack's spine. Jack reaches back with his right hand and slides a warm palm down over Eric's bare bum, pulling Eric's leg closer, in along the back of his own thigh. God yes, Eric thinks. Please let's just stay like this forever?
“Anyway,” Eric had pointed out as he saved the settings in his alarm clock app and tossed the phone onto their mattress in the general direction of his pillow. “If I set the alarm for fourteen minutes earlier than I need to get up that’s fourteen minutes during which I get to cuddle your ass. So don’t complain.”
“Seven more minutes of cuddling?” Jack asks, now, hitching onto his back and pulling Eric back in against his side as the alarm goes dormant for a second time. The mattress has lost a bit of air during the night and Eric feels it dip and sway, pushing their bodies together a little like they’re in a hammock or on a water bed. “Do morning cuddles include kisses?”
Eric twitches his nose in annoyed affection. Jack is really lucky that that Eric is so besotted with him because otherwise chirping before coffee would be met with a lot more sass. “Of course morning cuddles include kisses you ridiculous man. On what morning upon which have we woken up together have I not demanded kisses?”
“Oh, demanded. Is that what we’re calling it now?” Jack pushes up on an elbow so he can lean over and brush his lips against Eric’s, tug at Eric’s bottom lip lightly with his teeth, then let go and press in deeper. Eric inhales through his nose so they don’t have to stop and pushes a knee between Jack’s thighs, urging him to roll closer and pin Eric a bit more firmly to the mattress. It doesn’t always feel good, Jack over top of him, but this morning it’s just what Eric needs: the assurance that Jack will hold him, enfold him, will sometimes be willing to keep him still when he needs to stop moving for awhile and just be.
Jack must feel the way Eric goes boneless, pliant beneath him because he stops pressing for more and simply holds himself there with Eric beneath him. Jack presses his face into the crook of Eric’s neck, breathing unhurried and deep against Eric’s skin. In the semi-light of the early morning coming around the edge of Eric’s curtains, Eric stares at the patterns in the plaster ceiling and pays attention to the way Jack’s thumb is drawing tiny soothing circles on the pulse point of his wrist.
They’re still laying like that, breathing together, when Eric’s alarm goes off for the second time.
“Fuck hockey,” Eric sighs, without particular heat, although he sure as hell means it in that moment.
Jack laughs, pressing gentle kisses against Eric’s neck as he stretches for his phone again and silences it. He pulls up his morning practice playlist and sets it to cycle through while he drags himself out of bed to brush his teeth and pull on sweats and a hoodie for his walk to Faber. Upstairs in the attic he can hear Ransom and Holster knocking around and across the hall Chowder’s alarm is squawking. The Haus is slowly but surely waking up.
He doesn’t want to ask, but he makes himself anyway. “When do you have to leave?”
Jack, uncharacteristically, is still in bed with the sheet and duvet pooled over his legs. He’s watching Eric get dressed and shrugs when Eric asks.
“I thought I’d go out for a run in the Arb,” he says. “And then stay so we can do breakfast?”
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to get out of team breakfast,” Eric says, reluctantly.
“Coffee then,” Jack says easily. “I don’t have to be at the Martins until five and the only thing I was going to do before then was swing by the gym for some weight training. I brought my laptop so I can write Papa that email while you’re gone.”
Eric pokes Jack’s foot with the toe of his sneaker. “You better be careful there, mister, or I’m gonna fall ridiculously in love with you. You know that, right?”
Jack smiles. “I got there first,” he says.
In retrospect it takes Eric an embarrassingly long time to realize he’s being handled by his Hausmates. They’re all in the locker room washing up and getting dressed after practice and then Lardo’s talking with Ransom over a shared clipboard and Holster’s pulling Nursey and Dex aside to discuss something in serious captain-y tones, clapping Nursey on the shoulder and giving Dex a little fist-bump to the upper arm, and then Chowder’s laughing at something Nursey says back and then before Eric realizes what’s happening the locker room is emptying of everyone except the five of them.
“I…?” he says, zipping up his hoodie and reaching for his messenger bag. “Shouldn’t we be…?”
“Haus meeting.” Lardo says, snapping the cap of her ballpoint pen back on the barrel with an authoritative snick. “All important. Holster’s deputized Nursey and Dex to make sure all the frogs get to team breakfast.”
“What are we meeting about?” Eric asks, baffled, since no one had mentioned this to him the day before and they’d spent the better part of four hours last night chilling in the living room with the remains of four boxes of pizza and binge-watching episodes of Fringe. It’s true that Nursey and Dex had been there for most of it, before leaving together around quarter of ten to go back to their dorm, but --
“Someone get this boy a latte,” Ransom suggests, smirking, and Chowder digs in his bag and tosses Eric a Gatorade which Eric automatically catches.
“What,” he asks, feeling achey and grumpy and thrown off his game because all he really wants to do is go and spend a couple more hours with Jack before --
Oh. “Guys?”
“Dude,” Lardo says. “Did you think you were gonna get to hog Jack for breakfast all by yourself?”
It’s easier, walking back across campus to the Haus, than it was shuffling still half-asleep in the opposite direction. In part because the workout’s woken him up, as it always does, and in part because he feels bouyed by the joyful conspiracy of his friends. It’s not that he expected them to be homophobic or otherwise weird about him and Jack dating. Exactly. (Except for the part of him that always worries about that with everyone.) It’s that he hadn’t expected -- hadn’t thought that they’d take their friendship responsibilities quite so seriously.
In addition to the spreadsheet, he’d learned the night before, there had also been a PowerPoint. And Holster and Ransom had taken turns role-playing sleezy c-string paparazzi journalists, pressing the others to disclose -- or appear to disclose -- juicy tidbits about Jack Zimmermann’s gay love affair!!
He thinks it’s probably overkill. But it still means something that they’re prepared. He could probably use a lesson or two himself -- though he and Jack have already been promised some coaching fielding the relationship questions with Erin’s staff later in September.
Not until they get back to the Haus and he steps through the front door on Chowder’s heels does he realize that the breakfast-with-Jack plan is, in fact, a breakfast by Jack plan.
“Why do I smell sausages and pancakes and maple syrup?” he asks, sniffing the air. Ransom and Holster high-five each other over Lardo's head as Lardo rolls her eyes (you are all being impossible dorks why do I even bother) and Chowder grins, all but points toward the kitchen, bouncing excitedly on his toes.
Eric follows his nose -- and the sound of Ray Lamontagne (through the Pawtucket Public Library’s CD collection -- oh my god so embarrassing -- Jack’s slowly joining the twenty-first century) -- down the hall and through the door of the Haus kitchen where he beholds the wondrous sight of Jack and Caitlin discussing the proper way to flip pancakes on the cast iron griddle Jack had sworn came ready-installed with Betsy II.
“Now just what --” he starts, torn between feeling indignant for being (it appears) the only one left out of this little secret and just a little bit weepy at how kind it feels that they've orchestrated this for him. For him and Jack.
Eric’s good at being kind but he’s never been so sure about how to go about accepting kindness from others.
“Hey Eric!” Caitlin says, turning to wave the spatula at him. “Hey everybody else!”
“Those smell awesome, Cait!” Chowder says, sliding around where Eric is apparently frozen in the doorway temporarily unable to move and snagging a sausage from one of the plates on the table on his way by. He leans in to give Farmer a smacking kiss on the cheek and she smiles benignly at the attention.
“Yeah,” she says, “Well, they’re Jack’s recipe.”
“Papa’s, actually,” Jack corrects her, peering down at the griddle in front of him and gingerly flipping the pancake closest to him. When that one successfully turns in one piece he goes onto the second. “He learned it from a guy who used to play with the Penguins. Oscar. From Sweden originally. Lives in Tahoe now. I picked up the lingonberry jam yesterday when I was at IKEA.”
“Oh my god,” Ransom says in awed tones behind Eric’s shoulder. “Holtzy! It’s like we have our very own hockey wives!”
“I thought I was your hockey wife,” Holster responds.
As one, the entire kitchen turns to look at where Holster and Ransom are standing in the doorway behind Eric. Eric, too, blinks and turns to stare at them.
“What,” Holster says. He crosses his arms and leans against the doorjamb with an eyebrow raised. He’s responding to the entire group but looking smugly at Jack when he says it. “You thought you were the first incredibly gay duo to come out of Samwell Men’s Hockey?”
Eric starts giggling and can’t stop and then Chowder starts sniggering and Caitlin and Lardo are laughing and pretty soon everyone is wiping tears from their eyes -- but in a totally good way. And then Jack (the only one who hasn’t actually laughed aloud because he's concentrating on pancakes, but whose eyes betray how happy he is) waves everyone into the kitchen and urges them to take a seat. As they all settle around the kitchen table, piled high with food, Jack leans over to add the plate of folded, sugar-dusted pancakes to the smorgasbord laid out before them. As he straighens his back and pulls back to pull out the chair beside Eric he brushes a kiss against Eric’s cheek and Eric turns into the touch to whisper his thanks.
Because somehow, miraculously, he thinks maybe his junior year is going to one of the best on record.