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When the Samwell Men’s Hockey Team had made Jack it's captain at the end of his freshman year, he hadn’t written a speech or known what to say because he hadn’t really considered the possibility. He’d stammered out many “thank you’s” and a lot of “ums” and had felt the eyes of the entire room on him and known that the vote had been far from unanimous.
He hadn’t asked anybody to make him captain. They’d played a good year, the team, and Jack had ended up in the first line by the end of it and he scored some solid goals. He’d been happy with it, mostly. It had been a strange year for a lot of reasons but he’d played well, he’d learned a lot, he’d met some neat people, even.
But he hadn’t asked anyone to make him captain. And they had, anyway, in a vote that was far from unanimous, picking him over people who had been on the team longer and wanted it more. Jack knows he has the tendency to be fatalistic, but as soon as it had happened he’d had a guess as to why they’d chosen him at all, and it wasn’t because he was better than the rest of the team.
Shitty had cheered the loudest when the coaches had read off his name, and after the ceremony was over they’d walked back towards the dorms together and Shitty had paused in the hallway between their rooms. He’d already been in the process of divesting himself of his tie and white button-up, and his suit jacket was draped over his arm.
He’d reached across the space between their rooms and put his hand on Jack’s shoulder, and smiles. “Proud of you, brother,” he’d said, and his face had been caught in sincerity. He’d cheered and cheered from his seat at the banquet table and his cheering had been infectious, as a lot of things about Shitty are, and other people had cheered too. Even people who Jack hadn’t been all that nice to.
But I haven’t done anything, Jack had thought. He wasn’t a bad captain in the Q by any means, he was alright at it, but he hadn’t done anything worthy of being made captain in the past year other than score a few good goals, show up to practice every morning, have more experience than most of the rest of the team, who’d all played high school intervarsity hockey or something like it. But because he’d done it once doesn’t mean he can do it again, and because he’d done it once doesn’t mean he deserves to do it now.
“I was shit-my-pants scared we’d end up with Cohen with the C,” Shitty had continued, not moving his hand from Jack’s shoulder. “He’s been moaning about wanting it for eons, but he’d be ass at it and everyone knows it.”
“I don’t know,” Jack had said, because Shitty wasn’t wrong.
“Ah, it’s true,” Shitty had shaken his head, laughed. “False modesty does you know favors when you’re shit talking, my friend. Which, seeing as you are in the process of being imbued with captainly wisdom and grace, I understand if you want to transcend.”
“Probably beyond my capabilities,” Jack had said. “You just have to do it on the sly. Or in another language.”
“Ain’t learning French,” Shitty had said. “Even for your pectorals.”
And then Shitty had flung his arms around Jack’s middle and squeezed before Jack could stop him, and they’d wrestled around until Shitty’s next door neighbor had complained, loudly, about being able to walk past them.
Dave Cohen wouldn’t have been a great captain, but he’s considerably worse as a disgruntled player mouthing off to a captain he doesn’t respect, and Jack is in the position of having to handle one and not the other. And it’s been okay so far, the team, considering half of the members have never spoken directly to Jack because they’re intimidated by him and a good handful seem to be on Cohen’s side (which is to say not on Jack’s).
Until last night, anyway.
Shitty’s taken to warbling “Oh Captain, my Captain,” in Jack’s direction when he’s drinking, which makes Jack laugh more than it should, and he’d done that last night before all the trouble.
Jack thinks about that as he’s lying in bed on Sunday morning, and he feels sick to his stomach.
Avoiding one person who lives in the same house (Haus, Jack corrects himself) that you do is tough enough, but it can be done, especially early on a Sunday morning when the rest of the residents had been up late at a party and you aren’t friends with the person you’re avoiding by any stretch of the imagination. Avoiding two people is a lot more work, and when one of them lives on your floor, shares your bathroom and is supposed to be your best friend it becomes just about impossible. Even so, Jack takes a stab at it.
He gets up late enough that people are already making noise downstairs so he can’t simply just leave before the Haus starts to wake. He considers going out onto the roof that Shitty has of this year dubbed the Samwell Men’s Hockey Reading Room (he roped Jack and Johnson into helping him buy a lawn chair for it their first day back on campus), but once out there he’d have to either climb down the tree in the front yard or reach down to get his feet onto the porch railing, which would attract attention.
He settles for just staying in his room with the door locked, which gets pretty old pretty quickly.
Jack loiters in his room as long as he feasibly can, but he has a pressing to-do list and needs to visit the library and the longer he stays at his desk the more likely it becomes that Shitty will barge through the door that connects his bedroom to their shared bathroom to give Jack a piece of his mind. Jack has seen Shitty angry. He’s pretty quick to it. He gets angry when anyone talks about Harvard, and he gets angry when he sabotages his own sleep schedule, and he always gets angry watching hockey even when his team is winning, and he gets angry when anybody mentions Miley Cyrus. It’s usually harmless, explosive and frankly pretty funny, an expulsion of emotions that Jack sometimes thinks Shitty uses as a way to temper something a lot more self destructive.
He’d been angry last night, in a way that hadn’t been funny and had been verging on scary. And then he’d put his fist into Dave Cohen’s nose.
When Jack hears a door open across the hall he jumps suddenly enough to almost lose balance and fall out of his chair, and maybe half an hour later someone runs up the stairs to the second floor very loudly, in a way that makes his palms sweat and his eyes dart towards his bedroom door. He’s already developing a headache. Probably a migraine.
Jack does jump out of his seat when he hears the bathroom door next to him slam open, then the sound of running water. Shitty’s bedroom closes a minute later (Jack is sure it’s his because he always slams it) and he hears Shitty’s distinctive two-at-a-time jumps on the stairs a minute after that. Once Shitty’s footsteps leave the stairs he loses track of him; he hears the fridge open and then the front door, and there are some voices that he doesn’t recognize from this far away. It’s 10 a.m. on a Sunday morning so that means it’s probably some of the members of the team who don’t live in the Haus.
They’ll probably all head off to breakfast together, looking for bacon or cafeteria pancakes as a cure for the hangovers Jack is sure they’ve all got considering how much everyone (except him) drank last night. They’ll probably all rehash what happened last night, tell each other the details and fill anyone in who missed out, skewing them as they go because a rumor mill works the same regardless of who’s involved in it. The story will play out differently depending on who is friends with who, and it’s bound to create conflict, and Jack is right at the center of it which is the very thing he’s trying his hardest to avoid here.
He shouldn’t have gone to the party at all. He should have known better. Yesterday he’d told himself he was doing it as a favor to Shitty who had tried his hardest to wheedle Jack into it (and Shitty does a pretty impressive wheedle when he really tries), but Jack could’ve said no. It had been nice to let Shitty drag him along, protesting in a way that didn’t actually carry any heat, because it was fun and Shitty had asked and Jack does like most of the members of the team off the ice.
But he should’ve just said no, put his foot down, laid low. And he’s not here to make friends. He’s been at Samwell a year and two month, and he’s realized by now that the people on this team are going to like him as much as the people on any other team he’s ever played on.
He still doesn’t understand why Shitty likes him so much, and he can’t imagine Shitty likes him very much after last night.
The front door of the Haus slams unexpectedly again, and Jack decides that now is as good a time as any to make his escape. He descends the stairs and is headed towards the front door with his sneakers on and his bag over his shoulder, everything he needs to hit the gym and then the library, when someone from the living room shouts his name. He doesn’t need to turn around to know that it’s Shitty, because Shitty’s the only person who can stretch out a one-syllable word for three or four beats, until all the spare “a’s” are tangling over each other and tripping up the consonants at the end.
“Jaaaaaaaaaaaaaack,” Shitty hollers from the living room, and Jack thinks about just pretending he didn’t hear him and going out the front door, but then forces himself to turn around towards the living room. He has to face up to this sometime.
Shitty is draped over the back of the couch, one arm dangling and the other clutching a gigantic bag of frozen corn against his left eye. The bag probably came from the questionable freezer in the Haus basement and looks like it’s older than Jack is. It’s still encrusted with ice in one corner. There’s water dripping down the side of Shitty’s face down his arm, and it’s soaking into the sleeve of his unbuttoned flannel.
Jack isn’t really sure what to say, or what Shitty wants, but he can’t say nothing. So he says, “I don’t think you should put that on your face. No idea where that’s been, man.”
“I know exactly where it’s been,” Shitty pulls the bag of corn back to peer at it, giving Jack a full view of his very puffy black eye. “To the wars, I think. It’s seen some shit.” He grins, which looks lopsided because of how swollen the left half of his face is. Jack’s had a few black eyes in his time, most on the ice and one or two off, and this one is really bad. It’s shiny, purple-black where Cohen’s fist had caught the upper edge of his cheekbone. His eye is swollen to a slit and he still blinks good-naturedly at Jack through the other one. “Where the fuck you sneaking off to?”
“The gym,” Jack says, and feels a combination of irritation and relief that Shitty knew exactly what was going on as he tried to slip out the door. The relief is surprising, and it’s mixed in with a rising sense of shame. Shitty shouldn’t be leaning over the couch smiling at him. Shitty shouldn’t want to talk to him at all. It’s Jack’s fault that Shitty is holding a freezerburned bag of ancient frozen corn to his face. “And I’ve gotta--” he gestures with his thumb towards the door.
“Those glutes don’t shape themselves I suppose,” Shitty slides bonelessly back down onto the couch, and then right onto the floor. Jack notices, for the first time, that there are two other people sitting in the living room, with textbooks open in front of them. He coughs.
“We got a ballsack of a group project due next week,” Shitty says by way of explanation, because it’s not really like him to be diligently working on homework this early on a Sunday morning. One of his group project members, a girl with long dark hair, laughs at that, and Shitty glances over in delight.
“That sucks,” Jack says.
“Still wanna get in some library time this afternoon?” Shitty picks up his textbook and is staring at it forlornly. “I gotta hunt for like, four books for that repro politics class. Can’t find ‘em online anywhere so I gotta old-school it I guess.”
“Uh,” Jack says.
“Great!” Shitty says decisively. “I’ll meet you there. Two hours, yeah? Okay, braskis.” He turns around and claps his hands together with the bag of frozen corn between them. “What the fuck do we know about Faulkner?”
“Shit fuck,” the girl with dark hair says, and Shitty honks out a laugh. Jack leaves them to it, shutting the front door behind him as he goes, and Shitty’s good-natured grin follows him as he walks to the gym.
Jack runs a mile and doesn’t feel any better, so he runs another one. Then he runs a third.
He doesn’t understand why Shitty isn’t angry, and the fact that Shitty isn’t angry isn’t any kind of relief. In fact, it makes him feel worse.
When Jack had left Samwell for the summer, he’d gone home with a lot of new knowledge, and a lot of new questions. He’d spent the summer mulling them over and never saying any of them out loud. College is supposed to define who you are and maybe it is doing that, forcing him to force himself into a shape that he isn’t sure he can see from the outside. Everything you go through changes who you are. Now, Jack can say he’s someone who is majoring in history, who lives in a frat house, who likes walking across campus when the sun is rising and there isn’t anyone else around. Who has a best friend named Shitty, of all things. Who’s a college hockey captain.
I’m Jack Zimmermann and I’m a college hockey captain, Jack thinks. I’m Jack Zimmermann and I’m an addict.
He actually makes himself laugh, and a girl running laps next to him glances at him curiously so he stifles it.
Jack doesn’t talk to Shitty about the Q very much, or about rehab very much, or about Parse at all. He talks about his dad in the way that anyone talks about their fathers, their funny habits or tendencies to call with strange pieces of information. He doesn’t talk about his dad like Shitty talks about his own father, but Shitty’s father makes Jack very grateful for his own dad, baggage and all.
But he does talk about things, sometimes. He never used to. His therapist says it’s good for him. Shitty, of course, never shuts up.
Shitty listens to him talk about history, and Shitty listens to him talk about hockey, and Shitty listens to him talk about rehab when he wants to. Shitty had gone so far to grimace at himself and crush his joint in his ashtray when he’d realized he was holding it as Jack mentioned uncomfortable hospital beds, which had made Jack laugh.
Shitty doesn’t hesitate before he does things. He just does them. Or if he does hesitate it never shows in his face, or his hands. He’s not great at hockey but he loves it and he doesn’t care that he’s not great. Everyone likes him anyway, even if they don’t really understand him. Jack thinks he does, sometimes. Close enough anyway. Shitty has opinions, and he has thoughts, and he has rants. They’re about politics, about philosophy and gender and sports and the books he’s reading, newspaper articles and word choice and drugs and academics. Shitty makes Jack want to have opinions too, even if he doesn’t always share them. Shitty’s kind of a mess, but he’s also got shit together in a way that’s as scary as it is admirable.
Shitty had gotten mad enough to throw a punch at Cohen, and then a second for good measure. Jack and Johnson had almost had to drag him off to stop him from throwing a third. He’d been drunk, and Cohen had been drunk, and maybe that should explain the whole thing but it doesn’t. Jack feels like he knows Shitty pretty well by now, and he doesn’t understand this.
The thing is that Jack has heard it all before. Variations of it, sometimes more clever and sometimes downright stupid, but always along the same theme. Since the-- since the draft they’ve taken on a new edge, but Jack is familiar with those things now, too. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, doesn’t make him angry. But there isn’t anything that Dave Cohen can say to him that hasn’t already been published in Sports Illustrated, or said on ESPN, or written hundreds of times in hundreds of different variations in gossip columns and sports blogs and magazines.
The thing is that Jack has heard it all before, and it hurts, but he knows that he deserves to hear it. He’s said it to himself, hundreds of times, every variation of anything anyone can come up with. Sometimes it’s almost a relief to hear other people say it, as much as it digs the knife in, because the knife is one he stuck there and every time it gets twisted it's a reminder of what he did, what he has to overcome, what he needs to prove.
He understands how people can be mean, that it’s easy for them, that it makes you feel better. He does it himself. It isn’t something he likes about himself very much, how easy it is to be petty and hard, but sometimes he cares about other things more.
He never asked for anyone on this team to like him, just to play with him. That’s the most important thing.
So what he doesn’t understand is why Shitty would put himself in a position where Dave Cohen could slam his fist into his eye, put himself into a position where he’d have to spend the next day carting around a freezerburned bag of frozen corn, put himself in a position where he’s probably never going to talk to Cohen again but will still have to play with him, live with him.
But, of course, Jack has never understood why Shitty likes him so much to begin with.
Shitty had crowed out “Oh Captain, my Captain!” when Jack had decided to drop in on the party for a little while, flinging himself in Jack’s direction and planting a kiss on the side of Jack’s face that smelled like jungle juice. And Cohen had heard it, and had gone off with his own nickname for Jack that he’d been using behind Jack’s back all year.
He’s not positive, but Jack guesses that Shitty broke his nose.
The thing is that Jack has heard it all before, and honestly it’s only a matter of time before he does let the team down as it’s captain, so he doesn’t understand why Shitty took it so personally. Cohen and Shitty always got along fine, before.
Sometimes Shitty does things without thinking them through. Maybe that’s all it is. He’s still got the right to be angry at Jack.
Jack loiters at the entrance to Founders for ten minutes and begins to think he should just go inside and get his own studying done on his own and that Shitty is really mad at him after all. For the first few minutes he doesn’t mind it. It’s a nice afternoon, the edge of a New England autumn beginning to seep into the air and the colors of the trees on campus and the late summer warmth. It’ll be cold at night in a week or two, jacket weather during the day. There aren’t many people around either, which increases the appeal of standing around by himself. Even so, Jack is bracing himself for the moment when someone unknown comes up to him and says “Hey, Zimmermann right? I saw you at that party last night--”
When ten minutes pass with no sign of Shitty Jack starts to feel a bit testy, a little anxious, and he almost does turn to go into the building when someone plows into him from behind. He doesn’t have to turn around to know it’s Shitty, and he manages to step out of the way to avoid him catching him around the elbow. On another day Jack might retaliate and catch Shitty in a headlock until Shitty begs uncle, but he doesn’t. Shitty almost trips over the library steps, but he straightens up and laughs. He’s wearing the red flannel he had on that morning, now buttoned up and rolled over his elbows, and jeans with holes at the knees, and an extremely stupid pair of sandals. He looks like he’s about to go spend some time in a cabin, or play hackeysack. Both, really.
“How’s Faulkner?” Jack asks.
“Very boring and very dead,” Shitty says, and Jack turns towards the library front doors without waiting to hear more. Shitty keeps talking anyway, undeterred. “Serves me right for signing up for a fucking literature class, man. I sat in on a few of my Mom’s before, right? So I thought it couldn’t possibly be that bad but shove a cactus in me I was wrong. A cactus, Jack.”
“I don’t advise it,” Jack climbs a flight of stairs and goes through two rooms, Shitty trailing after him. He’s aiming for the room at the back of the library that contains old magazine and journal editions along with a lot of really old biographies and the Z’s of some encyclopedias, because it’s always the room that the fewest people bother to study in. Jack figured out pretty quickly that the library is a good place to study but a bad place to get trapped by anyone wanting an autograph. The room is completely empty though, the library quiet in general, and Jack picks a table in the middle and sets his bag down. Shitty throws himself into a chair opposite and starts pulling a pile of books and a handful of crumpled grocery receipts and the jacket of a CD with no case to go with it out of his bag. He frowns at the trash and shoves it back in, then props his elbows on the table.
“Chick I’m working with’s chill though. For a freshman. Dude’s an idiot but he’s pretty hot. Track team, I think? I’m thinking about it. Won’t lie.”
“Does your face hurt?” Jack asks.
“It’s not pleasant exactly, no.”
“You should keep icing it.”
“Whatever, man,” Shitty says. He flips open his planner and scowls down at it. Jack can see a big highlighter circle around the due date for his group project, and another at the due date for the essay he’s supposed to be working on right now. He snaps the planner closed and looks up and grins. “Maybe I did it on purpose! The look I’m going for is roguish, right? Kinda Han Solo. Someone’s gonna dig that. Alternatively, the ‘half a pathetic panda bear’ look is really in vogue right now.”
Jack stares at him.
“Zimmermann,” Shitty says, his voice filled with an exasperation Jack isn’t entirely sure he deserves considering he didn’t actually say anything. “C’mon. Your mom was on the cover of Vogue, like, four times.”
“Why are you looking at pictures of my mom?” Jack asks.
“It was before I knew who the shit you were,” Shitty says. “And I actually read Vogue for the articles, sometimes. I’m not just saying that.”
At least one of the Vogue covers is framed in their living room and it’s a great picture of his mother, but Jack doesn’t say that because that isn’t what this conversation is about.
“Shits--” he starts, but Shitty is flipping open his laptop and frowning at it, rubbing one hand along the growth of stubble on his upper lip.
“What you working on?” he asks. “I’ve got a sources list for this paper that’s as long as my leg, and half of ‘em are old as shit newspapers I need to track down.”
“That Empires and Nations class,” Jack says. “I need to start an essay.”
“When’s it due?”
“Next Friday.”
“Then you don’t need to start until Thursday, man.”
“Do I need to start a tally of how many all-nighters you pull this year?” Shitty makes a face. “Shitty,” Jack tries again, and again he doesn’t get a second word out before Shitty interrupts him. To Jack’s surprise, Shitty holds up both his hands and looks very serious, almost apologetic.
“I know what you’re gonna ask,” he says, “and I wanna let you know that I took care of it already, so you don’t have to worry about it. Yeah?”
Jack stares at him, taken aback. “I’m sorry?”
“Cohen,” Shitty says earnestly.
“You didn’t hit him again, did you?” Jack asks quickly.
“No!” Shitty sits backwards in his chair suddenly, frowning. “I talked to him, brah.”
“You did?” Jack feels like he’s two steps behind in this conversation, and he sometimes feels that way around Shitty but usually he doesn’t mind it. He does now. He also feels the creeping edge of annoyance, prickly against his palms and his hairline. “When?”
“Last night,” Shitty says. “Well, this morning, to be technical. Probably shoulda done it before I clocked him one but he was asking for it, yknow. We had a little chat about his attitude prob, and I apologized or whatever, so did he. More or less. Can’t guarantee he’s gonna be nicer to you but we’re good. So you don’t have to worry about it, cool?”
Jack can’t think of any possible way that Shitty could have talked his way out of any of this. Even he isn’t that good. “Worry about what?” he says, and it comes out like a bite.
“Y’know, the team dynamic,” Shitty leans forward again, looking back at his computer. “I figured you’d be worried about it. Some people have been kinda a pain in the ass and Cohen tops that list. But there’s no beef because of last night, we’ll jive just fine.”
That had been on Jack’s mind and there isn’t any way that he can tell himself it isn’t, but it makes him irritated to hear Shitty spell it out so plainly, as if it’s the only thing Jack would care about.
“I could’ve talked to him,” he says sharply. “You didn’t-- you didn’t have to do any of that.”
“Eh,” Shitty shrugs, and it’s so nonchalant that Jack wants to hit something. “It’s cool, brah. I’ve gotten a lot worse for worse reasons before.”
“Well don’t,” Jack snaps, and it comes out mean and hard.
Shitty looks up from his computer and stares at him for a long minute, green eyes fixed on Jack’s. Then he stands up. “I’m gonna,” he jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “Do some newspaper reconnaissance. Lemme know when you ready to go, I guess.” He turns and walks off towards the stacks. It’s only when he’s spun the wheel on one of the shelves to slide it out so there’s space for him to walk that Jack realizes his jaw is aching because of how tight his teeth are clamped together.
Jack understands how people can be mean. He’s pretty good at it himself. But--
But Shitty’s his best friend.
He takes a deep breath in, counts to twenty and then to fifty, and then gets up to follow Shitty.
Shitty isn’t in the section of shelving that he’d vanished around, and Jack walks from one end of it to the other before sticking his head around the back end to see where he’s gone. The shelves are the kind that slide in and out when you spin a metal wheel on either end, and most of them are bumped up tightly together. It’s all dimly lit and dusty, because so few people come back here. There are two shelves, two more rows back, that have space enough in between them for a person to fit, and Jack walks over to them because either Shitty’s in there or he’s climbed up the shelves themselves and is watching Jack from up on top of them.
He can’t stop himself from glancing up just in case. Which means he isn’t looking where he’s going when he does turn into the next section of shelving, and he walks right into Shitty’s elbow, and then his side. Shitty, absorbed in rifling through the books in front of him, shrieks and almost falls over, tossing the books he’s holding into the air. Jack makes a grab for them at the same time that Shitty does, and they knock elbows, and Shitty winds up with a fistful of Jack’s shirt as he tries to stop himself from toppling over backwards into the shelf behind them. Somewhere in all the chaos their heads knock together, and when Jack tries to stand up again he hits his head on the shelf.
He rubs at the back of his head and scowls and Shitty glances at his dropped books but doesn’t pick them up, glances up at Jack. Jack can’t read his face and he doesn’t like that because Shitty’s usually expressive all over. There isn’t a ton of space in between the shelves so Shitty leans his left arm against one shelf and Jack’s shoulder is bumping up against the other one and their knees are almost touching.
“Feeling like you’re either gonna deck me or kiss me,” Shitty says. “Either way, too much like the start of a bad porno.”
Jack doesn’t really want to laugh, but he can’t help it. It’s so unexpected. He tries to cover his mouth with his hand but it can’t cover his snort, and Shitty stares at him for another half a second before his own inscrutable expression cracks. Just like that. He tosses his head back and cackles, which makes Jack laugh harder. He leans his head back against the books behind him and laughs, and Shitty buries his own face in his hands for a second before straightening up, a little red in the face. He wipes at his eyes, which are bright again, then winces when he touches the bruise on his face.
“Feel better?” he asks, and his voice wavers a little bit in a way that suggests laughter's still right under the surface. Jack knows it’s two questions in one, but they’ve both got the same answer.
“Yeah,” he says, the laughter dissolving a little to be replaced by shame. Shitty deserves to be mad at him, twice over now. And he’s not. “I-- yeah. Sorry.”
“I know,” Shitty says. “Don’t worry about it. It’s been a weird weekend.”
“You keep saying that. Not to worry about it,” Jack says. It’s funny because he has absolutely no idea how.
Shitty sighs, leans more solidly back against the bookshelf. “Yknow, it was almost like fate. My fist in Cohen’s face, I mean. Don’t give me that look, alright, hear me out. He’s got a face that’s just begging to be punched. Someone was gonna do it sometime. Serendipity aligned so that it could be me. Didn’t even really hurt my hand doing it, so I think that’s a sign that I did the right thing.”
Jack has had his fair share of torn and beat-up knuckles, and Shitty’s right hand does have the shadow of some bruising but no torn skin.
“I’m sorry about your eye,” Jack says.
“Hurts like a motherfucker. But okay, I meant what I said. One time I got a black eye from walking into a tree. One from falling off a bike. One from an ex’s brother. Punching Cohen was a lot more fun than any of that shit.”
“You didn’t have to do that,” Jack says again, because he feels like he has to. “I can take care of myself.”
Shitty looks up at Jack and his mouth twists at the corner. “I know,” he says. “Doesn’t mean you have to.” He runs his hand through his hair and then puts his hand on Jack’s wrist, where Jack’s arms are folded in front of him. He has calluses on the ridge of his palm and Jack can feel them, and he can see how Shitty chews his fingernails short. There’s a little residual glittery purple polish on his thumbnail, leftover from a party two weekends ago. His hand is warm. “Did cause I wanted to.”
Jack knows that Shitty doesn’t like to do things that he has to do. If he knew Shitty less he’d say Shitty doesn’t think about consequences, but he knows him well enough to know that’s not true.
“That’s your motto, I get it,” Jack says. Easier said than done.
“ Carpe the fucking diem ,” Shitty says slyly. He hasn’t moved his hand from Jack’s arm. “And look, okay, maybe I was being rational about the whole thing.”
“Rational?”
“Someone had to punch Dave Cohen, right? And out of the two of us, it’s less of a shame that I’ve got a shiner. Cause out of the two of us, my face has a lot more character and a lot less symmetry.”
“Your face is fine,” Jack says.
“Yeah, but it’s not pretty. It would be like punching the Mona Lisa. Just as sacrilegious.”
“The Mona Lisa wouldn’t punch back.”
“That’s a damn shame.”
When Shitty grins the left half of his face looks ridiculous and painful, but he grins anyway. All canines. His hand is still on Jack’s arm and his face does look fine, even with the black eye. Maybe he’s not the Mona Lisa but then again neither is Jack.
“Still not very rational,” Jack shakes his head. Shitty’s grin grows half an inch wider.
“Alright, Scully.” He pauses like he’s waiting for Jack to say he doesn’t get it, but Jack spent the few months after rehab watching a lot of television with his mother, and his mother’s favorite show is the X Files.
“But,” Jack says, then unfolds his arms to catch Shitty by the wrist. His fingers fit all the way around Shitty’s wrist in a circle, and they both look down where their hands meet. “Thanks.”
“I would say ‘anytime,’ but I gotta wait for my eye to heal up first,” Shitty winks with the other one, and Jack feels better than he has all day, all week even. An idea had crossed his mind as soon as they’d found themselves on steady footing again, anger dissipated, and Jack lets it. Jack knows a thing or two about what happens when you do what you want without thinking about the consequences, but he’s also learning that the consequences don’t always have to be bad. Something else he’s figuring out in college, how to weigh the pros and cons. How to consider the pros at all. Nobody’s going to stop him and the library is quiet and dusty and his hand fits all the way around Shitty’s wrist. He can feel how the bones move under the skin when Shitty moves his hand a little.
Jack leans forward in the space between the two bookshelves and between them, and he doesn’t think about the consequences, and he kisses Shitty on the mouth.
As soon as he does Shitty starts laughing, and Jack starts to pull away a little but Shitty’s fingers are already sliding through his hair. He can feel Shitty’s laughter against his mouth and in the set of his jaw, even with his eyes closed, and Shitty is trying to pull it together until he can’t and he leans back a little. When he talks Jack can feel the words against his mouth as clearly as he can hear them.
“You’re something else, yknow that? What the hell is this?”
“Exactly what it looks like, eh?” Jack looks down at him and Shitty’s got what can only be described as a shit-eating-grin plastered on his face, the kind of look he only really gets when he’s considering doing something ridiculous and wild.
“You are a--” Shitty keeps laughing, shaking his head, and it’s infectious, because most things about Shitty are. Jack goes to kiss him again but his laughter gets in the way. “You’re a fucking--” Shitty doesn’t seem to know what word he wants to use. “A damn miracle, man. Yeah?” His fingers are creeping up Jack’s shirt. “But we’re in the fucking library.”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it,” Jack says, and the fact that he’s saying that at all surprises him. Shitty laughs again, delighted.
“Fuck,” he says, and then he stops talking because he pushes Jack back up against the shelves, pushing up on his toes a little so they’re closer to the same height. He traces Jack’s jawline with his mouth and then kisses him, firm and insistent. Jack can still feel his laughter at the corners of his mouth, and the pressure of his teeth underneath his top lip and he kisses back, slides his tongue along the crease of Shitty’s bottom lip, because sometimes it’s okay to not think about the consequences.
When Shitty slides his knee in between Jack’s knees Jack can tell he’s hard in his jeans, and he’s not pushing for it to go anywhere beyond his mouth on Jack’s mouth and his fingers warm up the back of Jack’s shirt, but Jack decides that he wants it to. He slides his hands to Shitty’s waist and pushes him backwards until Shitty runs into the shelf behind him, and Shitty looks up at him when Jack braces his arms on either side of Shitty’s head and smiles.
“It was a shit joke,” Shitty says. The green in his eyes is almost entirely eaten up by his pupils, “The line about the porno. I wasn’t being serious.”
“I know,” Jack says. He moves his arms a little so they’re hip to hip and he can’t help smirking a little. He knows it’ll make Shitty laugh, and he’s satisfied when it does, but he’s even more satisfied by the noise Shitty makes when he tugs on his bottom lip with his teeth. The laughter in Shitty’s mouth edges into something fiercer, hot and determined and mischievous because they probably shouldn’t be doing this and there is a chance, however slim, that someone will come into the room. They’ll hear them long before they even get close to the back shelves because of the creaky wood floors. Jack thinks this and then he traces Shitty’s hipbone with his finger. Shitty tugs at his hair when Jack breaks away and then his mouth is on Jack’s collarbone, then his neck, the outline of his Adam’s apple and the underside of his jaw. His mouth is hot, and Jack can feel the blood pulsing in his fingertips, and Shitty’s fingers are warm where they’re tracing his spine.
Jack’s own breathing is ragged when he pops the button on Shitty’s jeans, and Shitty’s chuckle evolves into a gasp when Jack drags his fingers over Shitty’s stomach and past the waistband of his boxers. He digs his fingernails into Jack’s spine and then his shoulderblade, and he curses silently when Jack fists his cock, then pushes up into his hand, the length of his leg pressing against Jack’s, hard and insistent. There’s a certain satisfaction in knowing this isn’t going to last very long.
When Jack kneels he has to shift his feet and legs a little so he’s not flattened against the other bookshelf. Above him, Shitty laughs again, somewhere between disbelief and delight, and that expression hasn’t dropped off his face. Jack isn’t usually the one to put it there, off the ice. His laugh cuts off when Jack pushes the hem of his shirt up, kisses his hipbone, tugs his jeans and his boxers down. And he swears, mostly under his breath, when Jack licks the underside of his cock.
Sometimes Jack worries he’s too clinical about this, about sex, unable to stop worrying about what’s right or wrong or how he looks and feels doing it. He doesn’t feel like that right now. It’s the enclosed space, maybe, the press of dusty bookshelves on either side of them. Shitty winds his fingers into Jack’s hair, tugs when Jack flicks his tongue over the head of his cock. His head thumps against the shelf behind him when he throws his head back, and one of the books next to his face wobbles and then falls over, which makes them both laugh again, Jack’s face pressed against Shitty’s hip.
Shitty grinds against Jack’s mouth a little, his fingers pulling at Jack’s hair so it almost starts to hurt, and Jack can hear him breathing in the quiet of the room, uneven and fast. He’s talking under his breath, cursing mixed in with Jack’s name, and Jack can feel his pulse on top of his own. He arches away from the wall, pressing into Jack’s mouth, when Jack hollows his cheeks and drags his own fingernails at the base of Shitty’s spine. Jack catches him around the waist with one hand to hold him up and jacks him off with the other, matching the rhythm of his hand with his mouth. Shitty’s whole body trembles.
When Shitty comes he does curse out loud, hits his head again on the books behind him and says “Fuck” loud enough that if anyone were in the room with them they’d definitely be overheard. Nobody is. Shitty’s knees practically give out and he doesn’t fall over because Jack’s got him around the waist but he wobbles, and when Jack pulls back he slides down so he’s sitting with his back to the bookshelf, breathing hard. He runs his hands over his face and then through his hair and sighs, and then opens his eyes and laughs.
“You’re fucking chock full of surprises today, aren’t you?” he says. Jack watches as he slides from a seated position to a prone one, and wiggles his jeans back up over his hips.
“Guess so,” Jack says. There’s dust on his knees from the floor and they hurt a little, but he doesn’t really mind. He wipes his mouth and stands up. “Come on. Don’t you have a paper to write?”
Shitty, red-faced and on the floor, stares at him, apparently beyond laughter. Jack laughs for him, just a little.
“Oh, fuck off, Zimmermann,” Shitty manages, and Jack walks back towards their abandoned table. "If you're about to tell me you blew me to teach me a valuable lesson on time management and self control or some shit I'm gonna sock you in the eye."
“You won't," Jack says. "I'm the Mona Lisa, remember? Procrastinator,” he calls over his shoulder, and then Shitty does start laughing, and after a minute Jack joins in for real.