Archive of Our Own ^beta

When Erica Bittle first introduces herself to Jack she has a blueberry pie in her hands, and uses the word “y’all” apparently unironically. She’s tiny, her long golden hair tied up in a ponytail with a gingham ribbon like she’s on her way to debutante brunch. Her oven mitts have little apples printed all over them, and she smells like vanilla sugar, although Jack isn’t sure she’s even used any on the pie.

She might be an alien.

“Pixie,” Ransom mutters out of the corner of her mouth, clapping a hand on Jack’s shoulder. Jack’s face must look as stunned as she feels. The two of them stare wonderingly up the hall after Bittle, though she drifted out the Haus front door more than a minute ago. Jack can almost see swirls of vanilla sugar-scent lingering on the air, marking her wake. “That’s the word you want.”

Shitty makes a disgruntled noise through a mouthful of pie.

“She’s a person, you cretins,” she says, gesturing forcefully with her fork. It’s lessened somewhat by the trace of whip cream at the corner of her mouth. “Not some MPDG fantasy.”

Jack is aware of a splotchy blush starting at the bottom of her neck. She has no idea what MPDG means – Shitty is really, really fond of acronyms, and Jack has mostly learned to block them out, like hearing words in a foreign language – but she knows ‘fantasy’, alright, and it sits weird with her.

“Sorry, Shits,” Ransom says, holding her hands up, palms out. “All I meant was that the girl must be some kind of magic, if she managed to produce that pie in our kitchen.”

Shitty takes another bite, this one contemplative.

“Fair,” she says eventually. She catches the whip cream with the pointed tip of her tongue. “This stuff is off the hook.”

|

Bittle turns out to be kind of off the hook on the ice, too. It’s obvious that she didn’t grow up playing, but she’s fast, and her feet are sure. She’s easily the best skater on the team. From her position hanging by the side of the rink, ostensibly taking inventory of all the new frogs, Jack tracks Bittle with her eyes, watching as she whirls around the rink, carving out spaces for herself where technically there aren’t any. Jack’s already feverishly thinking of where they’re going to put her, what they could have her do. Once, Bittle skates close enough to her on a pass that their skates almost brush, and Jack catches Bittle’s smile just in time, wide and uncomplicatedly happy.

That excited, buzzed feeling lasts for about fifteen minutes, before Jack notices that Bittle flinches and freezes up any time anyone comes close to making contact with her. She sees it once and thinks it might be a fluke, then sees it twice and knows it isn’t, and before she can intervene Bittle’s curled up on the ice having what’s probably a panic attack.

“Give her some room,” Jack says, because she’s been where Bittle is right now, and for some reason even the nicest, most sensible people in the world seem to get the primal urge to crowd someone who’s panicking.

Jack doesn’t really know Bittle – it’s so early in the year that nobody really knows a freshman at this point – so it’s hard to be sure of what to do. Once Bittle can stand, Jack sends her back to the lockers with Shitty, because Shitty is at least a weird font of calm at times like this. It’ll have to do.

Bittle looks back at Jack like she’s expecting to be scolded. Her face is mostly white.

That night, back at the Haus, Jack hovers over Bittle’s name in her phone.

Checking practice, 5AM next Wednesday. I can come get you 4.45 or we can meet at the rink. Jack.

It’s the first text she’s ever sent Bittle. She leaves her phone face up on the desk beside her, and to stop herself staring at it she gets out her notes for her first history paper, even though it isn’t due until after Hallowe’en.

I’m sorry about today, Bittle texts back, almost an hour later. I’ll get over it myself, you don’t have to do this.

Jack starts typing before she really thinks about it.

You’re not the first player with a difficulty that I’ve rehabbed she starts to type, and then grimaces. No, not that word. She deletes it all and starts over.

I’ve done extra training for other players and I’ll do it for more after you. I’m the captain, she sends instead.

It’s almost another hour before the reply comes through. Jack has the phone balanced on the edge of the sink while she brushes her teeth, and the vibration sends it skittering down into the bowl. Thankfully the faucet is shut off.

I’ll meet you at the rink, is all it says.

|

Bittle is sleep-mussed in the early morning, her usual pony slightly lopsided. She looks at Jack like the first thing out of her mouth is going to be another apology, and Jack doesn’t want to start things off that way.

“You’re late,” Jack says. “It’s five oh two.”

Bittle gapes at her, and then her eyebrows draw together and down, like she’s mad. Good. Better.

“Go stand over there,” Jack says, pointing, because there isn’t any point in wasting time.

Bittle hovers near the boards. Jack pulls back, right to the other side of the rink, and then skates up to her as fast as she can in huge strides, working up as much momentum as possible, the cold air whipping her… and then she kills almost all her speed, and just bumps Bittle’s shoulder gently with her own.

“Oh dear Lord,” Bittle says shakily, but she’s laughing. “You scared me! I thought you were really going to –“

Before she can finish the sentence, Jack rears back and slams into her as hard as she can, knocking all the wind out of her.

Jack waits patiently for Bittle to stop wheezing.

“What –“ Bittle gasps, “you –“

“There,” Jack says, admittedly pleased with herself. “Now you’ve been hit. That’s the first one over with.”

|

The shock tactic doesn’t work. Bittle’s been hit once and survived, but it’s not a rational fear, so that makes no difference. In their next two early-morning practices, Jack manages to successfully check Bittle a grand total of twice: one is so soft it barely counts, and Jack has to talk her through it the whole time like she’s a scared animal.

The second is a real, hard check, but Jack has to sneak up on her from behind to do it, and Bittle is so betrayed afterwards that she won’t take her eyes off Jack for the rest of the hour.

The worst part is that Bittle is getting frustrated with herself, and it’s making her more tense, and that is only going to make any hits hurt more. It’s a whole mess of a self-defeating cycle, and Jack isn’t honestly sure what to do about it. She’s about an inch away from calling in the coaches. If she weren’t so stubborn she would have done it already.

Their third checking practice, Jack tries a totally different tack. They spend the hour just skating. Jack gets Bittle to show her a nifty jump she pulled in general practice the other day. They talk about classes, and about who taught Bittle to bake. Jack stays a few feet from Bittle at all times. Bittle’s clearly confused about what’s going on, but she loosens up enough to laugh, even. She has a louder laugh than that body should be able to contain.

|

When Jack gets home after that third practice, she tries to compose the first non-hockey-related text she’s ever sent Bittle.

Jack has a – probably way off – theory that if she can shore up Bittle’s confidence off-ice, then that confidence will come on-ice. Jack’s not naturally a really empathetic person, but when she finally went to Shitty and despaired about the disaster that is checking practice, Shitty tried to explain that it probably feels to Bittle like walking into a senior-level class, and waiting for the professor to actually attack you.

Jack gets it – she needs to go from ‘scary professor who might attack you’ to ‘friend’. Who still, okay, might attack you, but only for your own good.

It’s a mess in Jack’s head, but this is the best she’s got.

Bittle I need your help with she starts, and then pauses, casting around her dorm room for something she might conceivably need Bittle’s help with. Not something for class, because Bittle is only a freshman. Not something hockey-related, because the whole point of this is that it’s meant to be not hockey-related.

Bittle I need your help with… With what? What is Bittle good at? Baking and knowing the words to songs Jack has never heard? That honestly doesn’t give Jack much to work with.

It’s going to have to be cake. Jack rolls her office chair to the door of her room, opens it, and yells for Shitty. She only has to wait a minute or so before Shitty appears in a sports bra with more than one hole worn into it, and a pair of bright purple boxers.

“You summoned me?” she asks, leaning against Jack’s desk.

“I need a problem Bittle can solve, so she can come over here, save the day, and feel good about herself,” Jack says, fully aware of how ridiculous she sounds. “So as your captain, I’m ordering you to help me come up with a cake-related emergency."

Shitty, to her eternal credit, doesn’t laugh.

“You used ‘as your captain’ last night,” she points out. “I had to order the pizza, remember? That’s your quota for the week.”

“Shits, I’m not kidding around here,” Jack groans.

Shitty drums her fingertips against the desk. Jack lets her think.

“Okay,” she says finally, steepling her fingers underneath her chin. “Bitty is a total romantic, right? She seem that type to you, too? Okay, well, we tell her you just realized that this girl you like, it’s her birthday tomorrow and she really loves cupcakes, and you want help making cupcakes with a really revoltingly cutesy message –“

“No,” Jack says, and her voice is horrified even to her own ears. Something in her screams at the idea of telling Bittle she likes someone. The thought of Bittle getting all excited about it and asking for all the details and cooing and -

Shitty blinks. “Come on, Jack, we’ll use that girl in your war studies seminar, what’s-her-name, you guys worked together on that project… Caitlin?”

“No,” Jack repeats. Her insides are clenching up like she ate something terrible. She has absolutely no idea why it’s so awful, it just is. More to the point, Jack is a terrible liar, and she’d probably get completely rumbled.

Shitty squints at her, but she lets it go.

“Okay,” she says, drawing it out long, “but I gotta admit, I don’t have any other great ideas. ‘Cake-related crisis’ is kind of specific, dude. All I can think of is birthdays. Lardo’s birthday isn’t for months, and Bitty wouldn’t buy that I’d forgotten about it anyway –“

Jack pinches her bottom lip between two fingertips, thinking. Maybe it doesn’t have to be a cake emergency after all. Mixtape emergency? Do people still do the mixtape thing? Well, it wouldn’t be a tape, it would be a playlist…

She’s about to start voicing this to Shitty when all the lights in the room wink out at once.

“What –“ Shitty starts, accidentally knocking something off Jack’s desk in surprise. There’s an outburst of dismayed yelling from downstairs, where an epic Smash Bros tournament has been raging for the last two hours – the power must be gone down there too.

Shitty picks her way over to the door and throws it open.

“What’s going on?” she yells down the stairs.

There’s a pause. Jack fumbles for her cell and pushes a button so the screen lights up. She can just see Shitty’s back, illuminated in the glow.

“…we’re so sorry!” someone – probably a frog, by the sounds of things – yells back. Jack can piece the evidence together far enough to guess that someone probably overloaded one of the outlets in a quest for video game glory.

Shitty sighs and turns back to her.

“On the upside, this might actually solve our problem,” Shitty says. “You know who I bet has candles?”

“YOU’RE WELCOME!” Johnson bellows up the stairs a few moments later, which makes no sense at all.

|

Bittle arrives windswept, armed with a backpack filled with enough candles to light a ninety-year-old’s birthday cake.

“I never even use these,” she says, pulling them out and laying them on the kitchen table. Most are scented. “Mama just keeps sending them… But I guess they’re useful now!”

She also has a flashlight. Unbelievably, it is the only working flashlight in the whole Haus. They keep running the batteries down during hazing rituals, so all they have are corpses. Almost everyone’s cell has a flashlight mode, but since they’re probably not going to get power back tonight to charge them and everyone uses their cell as their alarm clock… Yeah.

“Our hero,” Holster says, pulling Bittle close and giving her a noogie while she wriggles. Jack didn’t even tell Holster to say that. This is perfect.

|

Ransom and Holster took an engineering elective back in their freshman year, which is completely not the same thing as being good at household maintenance, but they won’t listen to any objections. They take Johnson and Bittle’s flashlight with them to look for the fuse box, but Jack isn’t holding out much hope.

“I’ll call someone in the morning,” Jack says to the huddled ring of her team, because it seems like the captainly thing to say.

“We’re so sorry,” one of the frogs says. Again.

“I brought some soup,” Bittle says, which blessedly saves Jack from having to say ‘it was an accident’ for the twentieth time. She pulls out a gigantic thermos from her bag of wonders.

“I pre-heated it. I thought y’all might be hungry.”

There’s a general scramble for mugs, and then everyone is seated around the table in candlelight, sipping hot chicken soup and making appreciative sounds. Bittle is at Jack’s left, drinking out of a mug with a moose on it that Ransom and Holster bought Jack as a gag gift last year. There’s a chip out of the rim.

There’s a candle right in front of her on the table. Where the light catches her hair, it shines so bright it looks like it’s burning, too.

|

Jack says goodbye to Bittle at the door once it’s gone midnight, and even the most penitent frog has been assured that it’s okay to go home, they aren’t going to fix anything now. The Haus is still in stubborn darkness.

“Thanks for coming,” Jack tells her, and means it. “Things would have been an even bigger mess without you.”

Bittle smiles and tucks a hank of her hair behind her ear.

"It was nothing," she says. "You're, um, you're welcome.

|

After that, Bittle is around the Haus all the time. Jack isn’t even surprised to wake up some mornings and come downstairs in her pajamas to find Bittle already baking, or seated at the table listening to Johnson talk about the universe.

So she doesn’t blink when she comes in after her war studies seminar – where she still finds herself basically ignoring Caitlin out of sheer awkwardness – to find Bittle sitting alone at the kitchen table, and a great smell coming from the oven.

“What’s up?” Jack asks, because Bittle’s grinning at her phone. Jack can feel her mouth lifting in an answering, automatic smile at the sight.

“We’re going as the Spice Girls for Hallowe’en,” Bittle explains breathlessly. “It was Ransom’s idea, because, and this is a direct quote,” – she pauses to scroll up on her phone, searching for the exact wording – “‘I have this awful leopard-print skirt upstairs that’s slutty as hell, and this seems like a perfect excuse’.”

“Can’t argue with that logic,” Jack allows, and Bittle giggles like Jack’s said something funny. She might just be high on the whole idea though – Bittle seems like the kind of person who’s really into Hallowe’en, who does full costume dress-runs and stuff.

Bittle puts her phone down and props her chin up on her upturned palm, giving Jack her full attention.

“Guess who I’m gonna be,” she says, completely pointlessly. Jack may be pop-culture illiterate now, but she was a 90’s kid. Bittle’s Baby Spice if anyone was. Jack zones out a little imagining her in bunches and a tiny dress, popping a mouthful of gum. She’s not sure why it’s such a compelling image.

“The whole thing seems a little risky,” is all Jack says, once she realizes she’s gone too long without saying anything. “There’s going to be a crazy fight over who gets to be Sporty.”

Bittle makes a considering noise.

“Probably Shitty,” she says. Jack doesn’t know why exactly, but once Bittle says it that suddenly seems like the only option.

“You know, we still need a Posh Spice,” Bittle says. She sweeps her eyes quickly up Jack in a way that’s probably not meant to make Jack’s skin feel all prickly and too-tight, but it does. Jack doesn’t really like to be the focus of attention, is all.

“And I bet you’d look –“ Bittle starts, and then her face is swallowed up by a ferocious flush, “I mean, you’re so… So…”

Bittle’s hands might actually be shaking slightly. When Shitty rounds the corner into the kitchen it’s a merciful rescue, even if Jack doesn’t really know what’s going on.

“Bits just wants to see the resident Haus hottie in an LBD,” Shitty says, with that grin that spells trouble for anyone around; Jack has just about enough time to get nervous. “And who can blame her?”

She accompanies it with a comically exaggerated leer. Jack at least knows how to deal with that; she rolls her eyes and shoves Shitty on the shoulder on her way to the sink. She runs the cold faucet a little so the water won’t be tepid, and pours Bittle a drink into the first clean mug she can reach.

“Quit objectifying me, Shitty,” Jack says, completely tonelessly, just because it will make Shitty bark a laugh and back off.

“My bad,” Shitty says. She picks a mostly-undiseased apple out of the bowl on the counter and gives a little salute with it.

With Shitty gone, the kitchen is oppressively quiet.

“Here,” Jack says, setting the mug – it happens to be the one with the moose again - on the table in front of Bittle, who’s blinking up at her with round eyes, like Jack’s done something bizarre. “I thought you could use –“

It has the exact opposite effect than Jack intended; Bittle gets even more flustered. Maybe she’s coming down with something. A lot of frogs do, at the start of the year.

“Um,” she says, clearing her throat and clearly rallying, ”thank you, Jack. That’s very kind.”

It sounds oddly miserable. Her teeth clink against the rim of the mug as she takes a sip. Jack flounders for something else to say.

“Matching costumes is a little more… involved… than I usually get with Hallowe’en,” she confesses. “But thanks for the offer. You could try Johnson, maybe. I think she’d get a kick out of it.”

Bittle nods into her mug, still sipping. Jack worries she’s offended her, but has no idea how she’d even make it better if she has. When Bittle sets the mug aside though, she’s already reaching for her phone.

“That’s a great idea,” she says, and it sounds like she means it. “I’ll do that.”

For the next few minutes Bittle is completely wrapped up in her phone. Whatever was wrong seems to have passed; Bittle’s color is slowly going back to normal, and Jack feels like she can let the quiet lie without having to say something. It’s probably just a dose of the particular frog-sickness that always goes round in the fall, a few days of rest and fluids will sort it out, especially if she’s feeling a bit better after just one cup of water.

Whatever is baking in the oven smells unbelievable, and when Jack leans forward a little, a shaft of sunlight from the kitchen window passes over her face. She has to stop herself from sighing in contentment.

“You’ll still come to the party though, right, Jack?” Bittle asks a few minutes later. Jack blinks her eyes open, startled to find that she’s almost fallen asleep.

“Yeah,” she promises muzzily. “I’ll come.”

|

Jack’s phone pings at eleven, when she’s just got into bed.

Johnson said something about how Hallowe’en complicates ideas of self-perception, identity, commercialism and art. Does that mean yes???

Probably, Jack texts back, smiling helplessly.

|

But at checking practice the next morning, it’s like they’re back to square one. Every move Bittle makes screams tension. She tries to laugh at Jack’s terrible jokes, but it cracks in the middle. If anything, Jack’s attempt at a restful practice with no checking, just trying to connect with Bittle, has blown up in her face completely – now Bittle is determined not to be lulled into a false sense of security. She’s smart, she’s figured out Jack’s whole plan.

And she’s not just afraid, she’s clearly terrified. Honestly, it makes Jack feel kind of sick, seeing her so vulnerable and knowing she’s going to have to hurt her. The whole thing is a captain’s nightmare, because unlike a forward who’s just too slow, or a d-man who needs to work on anger issues, there’s a whole lot of shame wrapped up in Bittle’s problem. Jack can see it in the slump of her shoulders, the heaviness in her skating.

Lying in bed that night, Jack wonders if checking practice is never going to really work unless Bittle knows one of Jack’s deepest and most shameful secrets, the way Jack knows one of hers.

Here’s a secret: Jack’s dad wanted a boy. Nobody – including Bob himself – has ever said as much, but nobody needs to. Boys play better, stronger, harder. They’re faster. They’re tougher.

They make the NHL. They bring home the Cup.

Jack grew up deciding she’d get Olympic gold, that that would be enough. She’d play for her country. She’d work harder and longer than any of the boys, shooting pucks under the floodlights long after the sun had gone down, long after maman called her in for dinner.

She can’t tell Bittle that. She can’t tell anyone.

She turns over onto her side, and falls into a fitful sleep.

|

Preparation of the Haus for Hallowe’en takes the guts of a week. Lardo does these big glittery spiderwebs and Ransom and Holster hang them everywhere. People run in and out of rooms festooned in orange and black crepe paper, and Bittle takes up residence in the Haus kitchen, trying to figure out the perfect ratio of food coloring to dye her cupcakes the brightest green. Jack starts bringing her homework down to the kitchen, sitting in amongst the chaos of clouds of flour and batter spilling out of bowls everywhere.

“Jack, I’m taking no responsibility if your paper gets ruined,” Bittle says. Her face is flushed and she’s holding a beaker and a pipette, like a mad scientist.

“I’ll take the risk,” Jack says, smiling. Bittle immediately starts fussing with something delicious that’s cooling on a rack, and then turns around too fast and knocks a bowl to the floor; Jack charitably pretends she doesn’t see. Lately, Bittle seems to have been baking in place of sleeping, so. Maybe some clumsiness is to be expected.

Jack’s sad when Hallowe’en night rolls around and it’s all over. Bittle won’t be living in the kitchen anymore (…as much). They won’t have the joy of being able to wrap a snoozing Ransom in crepe paper like a mummy. And of course, after tonight, there’s going to be at least a full twenty-four hours of clean-up, particularly because Shitty is so fond of having neon green silly string ‘ectoplasm’ everywhere.

“You’ve got your captain face on,” Shitty notes, standing in Jack’s room, obviously to make sure that Jack actually puts on her costume and comes downstairs. Which hurts a little. Okay, so she has a World War Two doc queued up on Netflix that she really doesn’t want to leave, but she also made a promise to the entire team.

“You’ve been like, mandated to have fun tonight, brah,” Shitty goes on. She makes, to nobody’s surprise, a great Sporty Spice. She even has a fake bicep tattoo. “So, you know. Ditch the face.”

“I’ll get right on that,” Jack says grouchily.

Jack’s sour mood evaporates when she gets downstairs to see the rest of the Spice Girls assembled in the kitchen. As promised, Ransom’s leopard-print skirt is practically a napkin, and the mangy ginger wig that Holster has on…

“You look like you’ve put a raggedy old cat on your head,” Jack says, and Bittle actually squirts a mouthful of water all down her chin.

“Thanks, cap,” Holster says cheerily. The rest of her costume consists of a dress that might originally have been a shirt, with the arms inexpertly ripped off and an inaccurate Union Jack done on the front in spray paint. The bottom barely covers her butt; thankfully she’s wearing shorts underneath.

Bittle looks… adorable, but Jack had expected that. Johnson is dressed more like Morticia Addams than Posh Spice, honestly, but Jack resolves not to ask.

“Take a group photo, Jack!” Bittle says, shoving her cell into Jack’s hands. They pose, and Jack feels a rush of fondness for all of them (even when the photo is completely ruined by Holster goosing Ransom at the last second).

|

The party is heaving; there are people everywhere Jack goes. She loses track of the Spice Girls as she runs into her war studies group (Caitlin is Catherine of Aragon, and if Jack was at all inclined to fall in love with her, that would do it) and then some mutual friends she shares with Shitty.

By the time she happens across Bittle, she’s clearly at the floaty stage of almost-drunk, full of smiles and so happy to see her captain.

“Jaaaack,” she carols, snaking out a hand and catching the edge of Jack’s plaid overshirt. Jack would have stopped anyway, but it’s nice to have the excuse. One-on-one with Bittle is infinitely preferable to the general party scrum. “You’re here!”

She idly bunches the hem of Jack’s shirt between her fingers.

“You know,” she teases, giving the shirt a condemnatory tug, “I’ve never seen a plaid-patterned cat before.”

“I maybe cheated,” Jack admits. Bittle’s face lights up.

“Cheatin’! And you the captain, and all,” she says. Her accent’s heavier than Jack has ever heard it. It’s stupidly charming.

Bittle has a really short attention span when she’s been drinking, apparently. She drops the shirt hem and reaches up to brush away a strand of Jack’s hair where it’s curling up under her jaw.

“Gosh, you know, I wish I could pull off hair like yours,” Bittle says, biting her lip. She looks up at Jack through gold eyelashes. Jack shifts, uncomfortable.

“Like mine?” she says. She resists the urge to pull a hank of it into her mouth. It was pin-straight when she was young, but since she took kitchen scissors to it a couple months before the overdose, it has a spring to it. When she was a kid it was almost long enough to sit on, and she had a terrible habit of lifting the ends up and sucking on them. It’s getting long enough now that she has to stop herself from starting again.

“All short an’ cute,” Bittle says, nodding eagerly. She’s so intent she sways forward slightly on her feet; Jack considers and then discards the idea of reaching out a steadying hand to her shoulder. “But you have this great face, you know? Your face has so much… Impact.”

Bittle gets a little put-upon expression and squeezes her own cheeks with her palms. Her lips make this ridiculous blowfish shape.

“My face is so round,” she complains. “It’s all soft, got no definition. I couldn’ carry off a short cut.”

Jack considers saying the words “I think your face is fine”, and then wonders where on earth she is, and how she got here, because even she can tell that would be weird.

“If you want to, you should cut it,” she says instead.

Bittle nods seriously, like Jack has said something profound.

“Been thinkin’ about it,” she says. “Think about it every time I see you.”

There’s a strange quality to Bittle’s voice. Confessional, maybe. Either way, just as Jack is thinking of how to respond some guy accidentally steps on her foot on his way to the bathroom, and it’s only that which reminds Jack that she and Bittle are not actually the only two people in the world. Or even in the hallway.

“Maybe we should –“ Jack begins, but then Bittle’s short attention span strikes again.

“Oh wait, I love this song!” she exclaims, and grabs both of Jack’s hands in her own, tugging her towards the lounge. “Let’s dance, come on!”

Normally Jack’s answer to that would be a big, fat, huge no, because she can’t think of anything worse than dancing around her living room where people she knows can actually see her; Shitty has lowered the lights a lot, but it’s not club-dark or anything. That said, there are so many people crammed in and moving to the music that probably nobody will actually notice her, and Bittle’s hands are warm in her own, and she kind of – she wants to? Someone help her, but she wants to.

She lets Bittle lead her into a thicket of people. The music is something mid-tempo, bass-heavy and almost grimy, not something she would have thought Bittle might like. Everyone around them is moving with a very specific kind of slow intent, but by the time Jack notices that it’s already too late to stop or do anything else.

Bittle gives a playful little shimmy and turns her back to Jack, sweeping her long hair forward over one shoulder. Jack has a whole second to feel relieved that she won’t have to look into Bittle’s eyes the whole time, because the idea makes her insides squirm unpleasantly, but then it occurs to her that this might actually be worse.

Bittle reaches back with one hand and takes hold of Jack’s wrist, pulls her a little closer. It seems like an odd way to dance together until Jack realizes that this way, Jack is a pretty effective barrier at Bittle’s back, and Bittle can watch everyone in front and to the sides of her. If they were facing each other, Bittle would be vulnerable to having her ass grabbed.

(Jack’s still at risk of it this way, but Bittle is in a short dress with a lot of bare skin available, and anyone who grabbed Jack would mostly get a handful of denim. Jack’s willing to take one for the team, if it comes to that.)

Bittle’s right hand reaches back to grip Jack’s other wrist. She rubs the pads of her thumbs back and forth along the tendons there; it’s maddeningly distracting. Jack takes a fraction of a step forward, and Bittle moves back. There’s basically no distance left between them.

It’s a bad idea, it’s such a bad idea, but Jack lifts her hands and puts them to Bittle’s hips. Oh god, yeah, this is worse, this is so much worse. She has to work to keep the pressure light when Bittle backs fully up into her, and the backs of her thighs rub up against the front of Jack’s jeans. Her dress, so white it’s almost glowing, rides up. The song slows a little, gets heavier, becoming a seedy throb.

Bittle’s still holding on to her. One of her hands slides up the length of Jack’s forearm to the ditch of her elbow. The surprise of the sensation makes Jack grip Bittle’s hips too hard, she knows it does, but Bittle just cranes her neck back and gasps, “sorry, it’s just so crowded in here!”

“Yeah,” Jack agrees breathlessly, though she has no idea what Bittle’s even apologizing about. She squeezes her eyes shut. This is – Bittle is a frog, and she's more than slightly tipsy, and Jack is her captain, and this isn’t… It’s just… it’s not because it’s Bittle that Jack’s getting all tangled up, it’s just that there’s a pretty girl in something short up against her. She and Bittle are teammates.

This is the longest song in the world. Jack starts praying for another sudden power cut.

Bittle leans her head back again, resting it on the front of Jack’s shoulder. Her eyes are closed and her mouth is shaping the words; she looks completely blissed out. Jack concentrates on moderating her grip and thinking of something neutral. Like baseball, or math.

Finally, thankfully, the song is over, so Jack can get away without making a scene.

“I need a drink,” she tells Bittle quickly, and Bittle nods, smiling, and waves her away.

|

It’s a blip. Just a blip. Hallowe’en is weird, and it makes people different, they can get all crazy and start doing things they’d never normally do if they weren’t in costume. The next day, Jack feels paranoid that someone on the team might have seen her and Bittle dancing, but nobody says anything.

Eventually Jack realizes she’s being ridiculous, that it isn’t a big deal – Bittle doesn’t know that Jack dates girls, has dated girls. Girls who are friends dance like that all the time. Or at least, they do on TV, on that ridiculous show Shitty likes where all the teenagers are clearly played by twenty-five-year-olds.

It’s nothing, it’s fine.

Bittle even comes over around midday to help with cleanup, her face pale with her hangover, hair jammed up in a hat.

“Listen, I didn’t do anything embarrassing last night, right?” she asks Jack when, despite Jack’s best efforts, they’re left alone to pick empties off the porch. “I don’t owe any of y’all any apologies or anything? I remember talking to you about hair… But not much else. I’m not really used to that. I drank too much, it was pretty dumb.”

Jack turns her face away in case her guilt is written all over it.

“Oh, uh, no, not at all,” she says quickly. It sounds so stiff and unnatural. “You were just… You’re a happy drunk. You didn’t do anything bad.”

“Oh, thank goodness!” Bittle says. There’s the rustle of another can going down into her garbage bag. “I knew you wouldn’t let me do anything embarrassing or awful anyway. You’re my captain!”

Jack has a hysterical urge to yell I let you rub yourself up against me! I liked it!
For some reason, that voice in her head sounds exactly like Shitty.

“Ha ha,” Jack says. “Yeah.”

So that’s excruciating, but at least Jack gets confirmation that Bittle doesn’t remember anything, and nobody else saw, and so basically it’s like it never happened. Jack can’t really be weird about it any more if nothing even really happened.

She hasn’t got time to be weird about it anyway. Checking practice needs to go on, full steam ahead, because now they’re playing actual games and it’s a much bigger problem. Bittle can’t continue on the team if they don’t fix it, and Jack’s never given up on a player yet.

“What’s on your mind?” Jack asks, as soon as they get on the ice. It’s another one of Shitty’s training tips. “What are you thinking right now?”

The sky outside the rink is dark, so the ice feels even more like its own private world. It’s Jack’s favorite place to be.

Bittle blows out a big breath and does a neat little turn on the ice, quick and precise.

“I go blank when I skate,” she says. “In a good way. It’s like baking – all my problems go away.”

She winces.

“Or at least, they used to. What am I thinking right now? That I might get kicked off the team, and that I’m letting all of y’all down. And as well as that… you’re going to say this is silly, but this is making me feel like, I don’t know, a bad woman or something. It’s supposed to be great that women’s hockey has checking again. It’s all very not-Beyonce of me. I feel like Shitty’s disappointed in me.”

“Because you don’t want to get hit?” Jack asks. She works very hard to keep her tone completely neutral.

Bittle glides to a stop, sending up a few flakes of ice. Neither of them say anything. Bittle stares out at the stands, and she looks very small, the line of her back vulnerable even under her jersey. Jack wonders if she’s picturing a game-day crowd, all judging her from up high.

“You know, I’m not scared of you, Jack,” Bittle says. It’s surprising, because Jack didn’t realize that Bittle knew that was one of Jack’s theories. “Not even when we’re out here. I haven’t been for weeks.”

Jack clears her throat. This isn’t working. Shitty’s normally full of good advice, but this just seems like it’s making everything worse. Bittle seems so down.

“Check me, then,” Jack says. Her voice comes out raspy. Probably just the early hour. “That’s how we’ll do it today. You check me.”

This is Jack’s version of talking. Bittle nudges her against the boards at first, not quite hard enough, just crowding Jack with her body. Eventually it gets better, harder, until it’s a slam. Jack can almost feel the bruises forming on all the corners of her body. She gets hit enough times that the adrenaline resolves itself into a constant, pleasant buzz.

“Oh Lord, sorry, sorry,” Bittle breathes every time, but she keeps doing it. They’re getting somewhere.

“Go on, again,” Jack says, bracing herself. “I can take it. Come on.”

Afterwards, they’re quiet. Something indefinable has changed. While Jack gets a drink and wills her heartbeat to settle from fight-or-flight mode, she asks why Bittle switched to hockey from skating in the first place. Positive visualization, it’s something the coaches use a lot. If Bittle can remember what brought her here, maybe it will help her get over the problem that might stop her from staying.

“I wanted to play a team sport,” Bittle says. “I wanted… I wanted other people out there on the ice with me. I didn’t want to train alone anymore. I wanted…”

“This?” Jack asks, and she means Samwell in its entirety, all the girls, the Haus. But she thinks maybe it comes out more like she just means the two of them, here, on the rink at six AM on a cold, dark morning.

Bittle nods.

“Yes,” she says. “This.”

|

Jack doesn't see Bittle for a couple days after that. She has a group project due, so she's living in the library, apparently.

When Jack does eventually next see her, it’s through the coffee shop window, while she’s standing in line waiting for whatever sugary sludge she’s into this week. Just as Jack is hovering, trying to decide if she has enough time to duck inside before her class, Bittle looks up and grins.

Jack can make time.

When she gets inside, she can see that Bittle’s hair has been cut up to her shoulders, and pinned in a deep side-part. It’s still long enough to catch in the scarf wrapped around her neck, newly-shorn ends poking out from the bottom. It makes her look even younger than usual.

“Jack!” she says, her face lighting up as she beckons Jack over.

“You did it,” Jack says. She doesn’t think her voice reveals how much she likes it, but Bittle still gets a little flushed wash to her cheeks that’s exactly the same as when someone compliments her baking.

“Ah, sorta,” she says, poking her tongue through her teeth ruefully. “I wasn’t brave enough to go all – all Ziegfeld girl like you, of course.”

She pauses for a second, and an expression crosses her face that Jack could only describe as mischievous.

“I have a little secret, though,” she says. “Watch this.”

She reaches up and slides the barrette out of her hair, then makes a new part with her fingers, exposing a small shaved patch just in front of her left ear. It changes her whole face – makes it sharper, somehow. Makes her look like she’s on the ice, even though they’re not.

“Looks good,” Jack says, mostly because it’s true, but at least partly just because Bittle seems so damn pleased with herself. Jack wants to reach out and touch it, the new peach fuzz there.

Bittle flushes even deeper with pleasure.

“You really think so? Lord, but my heart was going a mile a minute when she took out those clippers! My mama would kill me if she knew, you know,” Bittle rambles, twisting her gloved fingers around each other.

“It suits you,” Jack says.

It’s true. It suits Bittle, with how she is now, with how she’s been changing, almost atom by atom, since Jack met her. The ponytail-ribbons have been retired (though that makes Jack sad in this indefinable way – it used to be yellow on Wednesdays for the start of the slide to the weekend, sky blue on Sunday mornings when she came over to make pancakes) and Jack has actually seen her in sweatpants on movie night. The girls had wolf-whistled at the sight of her because they were obnoxious, and because the tank she was wearing was washed thin, cut low enough in the sides to show the lacy edge of her bra.

“Are you heading to class too?” Bittle asks, pinning her hair back into the barrette. “Want to walk together? I mean, I know it’s different buildings, but part of the way…”

“Sure,” Jack says, just as the barista calls Bittle’s name.

|

Jack googles ‘Ziegfeld girl’ when she gets back to the Haus. She spells it wrong the first time. The second time, google returns old photographs showing beautiful girls with huge doe eyes and full mouths, their hair in waves around their faces. It’s such a strange thing, to imagine that Bittle looks at Jack, over six feet and awkward in her skin everywhere but on the ice, and sees them.

|

November in Mass is long and dark and cold. Jack mostly likes it, honestly, partly because it’s just like home, and partly because long nights curled up inside don’t bother her, but Bittle is struggling. Every time Jack sees her, she’s wearing more clothing. She’s convinced that Bittle will eventually just start waddling around wrapped in the comforter off her bed.

“Y’all,” she says, appearing in the doorway of the Haus lounge in two sweaters. Just two sweaters, pulled on top of one another. She’s all lumpy. “I’m in a delicate place. I think I have rickets. And scurvy –“

“Uh, Bits, weather has nothing to do with scurvy –“ Ransom starts to say, but Holster reaches slowly over and fits a hand across her mouth. Bittle nods her gratitude.

“Anyway, I also just found the two bikinis my poor mama packed for me in the bottom of my underwear drawer, and I just can’t believe how naïve and hopeful she was. I think she had visions of me lounging around a pool with a bunch of debutantes, drinking drinks with umbrellas in, waited on hand and foot by the football team. Not stuck in the middle of Siberia.”

She heaves a big sigh and plonks herself down into the space between Ransom and Jack, which isn’t really big enough to accommodate an extra person. She’s warm all down Jack’s side.

“Okay, I’m done now,” she says, leaning back.

“It will eventually be warm again, you know, Bits,” Shitty says, with a definite defensive note.

“We could totally get into bikinis for next movie night if you want,” Holster offers blithely. “Just whack the heat up in here.”

“I could probably hustle up some football players, too,” Ransom says. Jack can’t work out if it’s a joke. The idea makes her feel vaguely nauseated.

Bittle just laughs though, waving a dismissing hand quickly.

“No, no!” she says, squirming in mortification. “Lord, I didn’t mean I actually wanted any of that to happen. I just wanted to complain about the cold.”

Shitty’s suddenly sitting up straighter, though. This is going to end badly. Jack can already tell.

“Ladies, I have a better idea,” Shitty says.

Yep.

|

The Haus Holiday Party is always themed, is the thing, but the team is inherently lazy. Bittle is lauded as a genius for coming up with such an easy solution (though she spends a good couple minutes completely confused while everyone else speaks over her head in half-sentences).

The 2014 Haus Holiday Party is a poolless pool party.

“Which is really, really hard to say,” Holster points out as she wobbles on top of a chair, tacking up one end of the WELCOME TO THE POOLLESS POOL PARTY 2014!! banner that Lardo painted. It has a metric tonne of glitter on it.

“I’m not sure poolless is a word, or if it is, if we’ve even spelled it right,” Ransom agrees. She’s on another chair, holding the other end of the banner. Lardo is “supervising”.

“Down more,” she says.

By eight PM, the heat is whacked right up, and people are already arriving. Jack wriggles into the plain black one-piece that she wears when she goes for early-morning swims in the campus sports centre before class. Swimming is good exercise, and all the blue everywhere is calming. It’s like still being asleep.

She risks a glance in the mirror, and immediately feels ridiculous. It’s not that she normally dresses up for parties – part of why she turned down Bittle’s Hallowe’en idea is that for her, dresses are for weddings and funerals and nothing else – but this is somehow like turning up to a party in her pajamas. Or with her hair still wrapped up in a towel.

There’s nothing else for it, though. She doesn’t even have a sarong or anything. She shoves her feet into a pair of flipflops and heads downstairs.

|

Shitty is running around in her element – she never usually gets to be this naked around company. Her bikini is miniscule. When she presses herself up against Jack in a hug, Jack actually has a panicky moment where she wonders if Shitty’s boobs are going to pop straight out of her strapless top, and if so, what Jack should do about it.

“Tape,” Shitty says, clapping a hand on Jack’s shoulder and grinning. “I can hear you worrying, Zimmermann, but no need. So. Much. Tape.”

The hallway is already crammed with jocks in boardshorts, and Lardo’s art girlfriends wearing cute vintage reproductions, their hair carefully curled and pinned up. Jack waves at people when she hears her name, but she doesn’t stop.

She’s not trying to find anyone. She just wants a drink.

She runs straight into Bittle in the kitchen doorway with a slap of skin on skin, and then the sound of a distinctly Southern apology. Jack automatically reaches out a hand to steady her, gripping her forearm.

“Oh my lord, Jack, I am so sorry!” Bittle gasps.

Jack takes a guilty second to look. Bittle’s bikini is high-waisted and covered in polka dots. The skin shown in the gap is only maybe the breadth of three of Jack’s fingers, held together. Jack’s heart doesn’t do anything stupid like skip a beat, because she’s seen Bittle in her underwear and less plenty of times, in the locker room. This is no different.

“It’s okay,” Jack says, a fraction too late, and then says, “I mean, I’m sorry, too. I wasn’t watching where I was going. Are you –“

“Oh, I’m fine!” Bittle says. Jack remembers to let go of her then, which is good. “I was actually… I was looking for you? So this kind of works out! Shitty said she hadn’t seen you, and…”

Bittle shrugs.

“Well, you’re here now,” she says.

“I am,” Jack agrees, distantly aware she’s smiling.

|

“No,” Jack says, once Bittle has lead her to the Haus front door and explained that a bunch of people – a bunch of idiots – are daring each other to a barefoot race on the snow-covered ground outside.

Bittle turns up the puppy eyes.

“I’m Canadian, I don’t need to prove that I can handle the cold,” Jack says. It’s only half true – mostly it’s just that even Canadians don’t want to volunteer to run around in the snow in their bathing suits. They’re hardy, they’re not stupid.

“Oh, come on!” Bittle wheedles. “It’ll be fun! And I need someone with me! For courage!”

“No,” Jack says again, drawing it out. She can admit that she mostly does it to see Bittle’s reaction, and it’s worth it.

“Take Lardo,” Jack says over the sound of disappointment, nodding at where Lardo is lounging in the kitchen doorway, watching the queue of people readying themselves at the Haus front door with a mixture of horror and glee.

“N-O,” she says immediately, before Bittle has even managed to spin round fully to face her. Bittle wastes no time giving her up as a lost cause, spinning back round to face Jack. Jack doesn’t know how she isn’t making herself sick.

“Come on, Jack,” she says. “Your feet don’t even have to touch the ground. I’ll carry you on my back!”

Jack snorts.

“Bittle, that’s not going to work,” she says. “I’ve got at least six inches and about sixty pounds on you.”

“I’ve been lifting!” Bittle protests, bouncing on her toes with her force of her earnestness. “I’m strong!”

Jack crosses her arms across her chest, unconvinced. Bittle sighs.

“If you do this,” she says, in tones of deepest suffering, “I will make those awful protein cakes that you like. I will even eat one.”

Jack can’t help it, she’s intrigued. Lardo is watching the entire exchange like it’s a tennis match, eyebrows raised.

“You’ll eat some protein?” Jack says, aware she’s being unbearable, but enjoying herself too much to care. “You? Erica Bittle?”

Bittle nods. Jack pretends to think about it.

“You eat one every day for a week,” Jack says. “And we’ve got a deal.”

Bittle shudders.

“No matter what I do, they always come out so dry and chalky…” she mutters to herself.

And then, louder, “fine, it’s a deal.”

|

When Bittle and Jack get into position on the Haus porch, everyone else suddenly decides that the race should really be a piggyback race. Because everyone they invited to this party loves suffering? Jack has no idea.

The point is, Bittle really must have been lifting, because they almost win. Jack hasn’t been on the receiving end of a piggyback since she was a small child, and it’s hard not to laugh as she’s jostled around on Bittle’s back, complaining mightily about how cold Bittle’s hands are on her thighs and chirping her to go faster in French. Bittle’s so short that Jack has to make a concerted effort to stop her toes dragging on the cold snow, and even that is somehow funny.

“I – don’t – speak French!” Bittle gasps, and lurches them over the makeshift finishing line. One of Lardo’s art friends is serving as the judge, standing wrapped in someone’s Samwell Hockey hoody that is at least three sizes too big for her. Sensible girl.

Bittle turns to Jack, aglow in triumph, her chest heaving with exertion. Despite her earlier protests about the whole thing, Jack has the urge to grab her hand and pull her down onto the snow with her, make snow angels.

Jack is in so, so much trouble.

|

When they get back inside, some jock in Hawaiian print shorts waves Bittle over from the opposite side of the lounge. He’s huge, like unreasonably so, brown-skinned and dark-eyed and honestly built like a statue.

“Oh, that’s Cory, from my intro to US lit class,” Bittle says, waving back at him. “I really should go say hi… I’ll catch up to you later, Jack, okay?”

And that’s a totally normal thing. Bittle has lots of friends, because she is the way she is, and people want to be around her. Walking across campus with her involves being continually interrupted, it’s equal parts annoying and sweet.

But Jack feels completely queasy watching her bounce away. For the first time tonight, she considers escaping to her room.

She only manages to drift as far as the side of the room before Shitty catches her. Something must show on her face, because Shitty frowns, halting halfway through the first sentence of what sounds like a truly ridiculous story.

“You okay? Want to talk about it?” she asks, handing Jack a soda can.

On the other side of the room, through the heaving mass of half-naked bodies, Jack can see the guy – Cory – reach over and gently tap Bittle on the underside of her chin, and then she laughs. It must be some inside joke.

Jack pops the tab and takes a huge swallow.

“What is there to talk about?” she says. She feels drunk, even though she isn’t. Parties have that effect on her sometimes – they’re too much, and by the end of the night she’s always drained, overwhelmed like a small child allowed to stay up way too late. “She’s probably the straightest girl I’ve ever laid eyes on, and I’m an idiot.”

Which is entirely not what Jack planned on saying. Shit.

Shitty is clearly bewildered.

“Wait, wait, hold up,” she says. She reaches out and puts a hand on Jack’s arm. The touch could be too much, but instead it’s just grounding. Shitty’s good at judging those things. “I thought you were just having general party overload, I was going to suggest we go hide upstairs for a bit. What are we actually talking about? Or who?”

Jack can’t actually make herself say it, so she’s grateful that Shitty is so good at reading her that she sometimes verges on telepathic. She cuts her eyes over to where Bittle is still standing with Cory, her chin tilted up to him, her nose crinkled up in amusement. His body language is broadcasting the fact he wants to take a bite out of her loudly enough that even Jack can tell.

“Oh,” Shitty says, almost inaudible.

“Yeah,” Jack says, and winces at how self-pitying it comes out. It’s probably too much to hope for that Shitty is drunk enough that she won’t remember this later.

“Damn, Jack,” Shitty says, with a low whistle. “You’re probably the stupidest smart person I’ve ever met.”

Jack accidentally sloshes a little soda out of the hole; it drips down over her fingers.

“What?” she says. Shitty tilts her chin up to the ceiling. Jack has known her long enough that she can recognize Shitty’s “praying for strength” face.

When Jack glances over again, Bittle is wearing Cory’s obnoxious baseball cap, turned backwards on her head.

“We’re not having this conversation here,” Shitty says. She puts a hand on Jack’s shoulder and steers her out of the room, past everyone, and up the stairs where it’s quiet.

“What makes Bitty straight?” Shitty asks, as soon as she herds Jack through the nearest door, which happens to be Shitty’s. She goes on before Jack has a chance to answer. “The baking? The ribbons? How she’s probably the only one of us who doesn’t regularly look like she got dressed in the dark?”

Jack doesn’t say anything, because it feels like a trap. Something must show on her face, because Shitty makes a frustrated noise through her nose.

“Newsflash, Jack, none of that makes a girl straight. And even if it did, since she got here she’s cut her hair and ditched the bows. Did you ever think about the fact that maybe Bitty grew up in an environment where traditional femininity was compulsory, and the alternative might have been getting hurt? Physically hurt, Jack.”

Jack feels like she’s been checked so hard that all the breath has been crowded out of her.

Shitty drags a hand down her face and sighs.

“No, of course you didn’t. You’re just in love with her,” she says, pitched low enough that it’s as if she’s talking to herself.

“I’m sorry?” Jack hazards, because she doesn’t know what else to say, and it seems like the gap where an apology should go. She’s aware that her stance is all crunched up, as if she’s actually taken a hit, but she can’t make herself stand up straighter. Shitty just shakes her head.

“I’m sorry, too,” she says. Her arms are crossed. “I mean, you should be sorrier, coming out with that kind of crap, but. Maybe not the best time for a lecture, I get it.”

Her expression softens.

“She’s not interested in that guy, you know,” Shitty says. “At all. Seriously.”

Jack winces, because it didn’t really seem that way to her, and anyway - “That’s only one guy.”

Shitty shrugs a shoulder. “Yeah, but what I’m trying to make you understand is that you don’t have the whole picture. Just little bits here and there. Until she sits down and says to you, Jack, I’m… whatever, you don’t know.”

Jack’s starting to get confused.

“So is this supposed to be a pep talk, or…”

Shitty huffs a laugh, one that finally sounds genuinely amused.

“That was the ‘do better’ talk,” she says, clapping Jack’s shoulder. “Now comes the commiseration talk. That involves a pint of ice-cream, two spoons, and your room, because it has softer carpet.”

|

“So, Bitty,” Shitty says a while later, when the remaining ice-cream is nothing but a small sad puddle at the bottom of the carton. She wiggles her eyebrows, and Jack groans, turning over onto her front.

“I think I preferred when you were offended and yelling at me,” she mutters.

“Best friend privileges,” Shitty says easily. “I can yell at you and chirp the hell out of you. I’m pretty sure it’s written down somewhere. Ratified.”

She pauses. “I can’t really say I’m that surprised, though.”

Jack rolls back onto her side so fast she’d have carpet burn on her belly, were she not wearing a one-piece suit.

“What?” she blurts.

Shitty waves a hand dismissively.

“I don’t mean you’ve been obvious about it,” she says. “I didn’t know, it blew my mind when you said it, I’m not that good an actor. I just mean, Bitty is cute as hell, and it kind of makes other stuff make more sense. Looking back.”

“What stuff?” Jack asks warily.

“Dude, you talk about her all the time,” Shitty says. She holds the carton up to her eye and squints down into it like she can make more ice-cream appear.

“’Shitty, how am I going to fix Bitty’s checking problem?’ ‘Shitty, what ridiculous pretense can I come up with to get Bitty to come and spend time over here?’ ‘Shitty, I can’t come to lunch with you, I have to sit around in the kitchen and drink up the fumes of Bitty’s presence before she leaves again. Like some kind of Bitty-fueled vampire’.”

“I talk about her a lot because I’m her captain,” Jack protests. She doesn’t know whether she’s more offended or embarrassed. “Also, I don’t sound like that.”

“Nah, don’t even try it,” Shitty says, pointing at Jack with her spoon. “My impression of you is scary realistic. The team took a vote.”

They lapse into silence.

“I just – she’s just…” Jack says, and then wishes for a merciful death so she won’t have to say anything else.

Shitty does her telepathic thing. She reaches out her bare foot and taps it against Jack’s.

“Yeah, I know,” she says fondly. She gives a theatrical sniff. “Oh Jack, it’s like you’re becoming a real girl, right in front of my eyes.”

Jack throws the nearest projectile at her, which happens to be a heavy photography theory textbook. She deserves it.

|

“You could cry a bit about being in love with Lardo,” Jack chirps weakly some time later, turning her cheek to the carpet. Next to her, Shitty is lying stretched out so long that her bare stomach seems to go on forever. Party sounds are still filtering up from downstairs, voices and laughing and the low, steady throb of music. It could even be that song from Hallowe’en again; Jack’s stomach twists on itself. “It might make me feel better.”

“Ha,” Shitty says dryly. “Nobody wants to hear about that.”

“I do,” Jack says, not chirping anymore. She feels sort of high off the back of confessing everything to Shitty, and it’s making her run over with fondness. “If you wanted to talk about it. I would.”

Shitty doesn’t say anything for a while. Jack’s eyelids start to droop.

“I’ll bear it in mind,” Shitty says. “Thanks.”

|

Over winter break, Bittle sends Jack a total of forty-five text messages. Jack sends back a photo of their tree, decorated in all one color with the ornaments all evenly spaced. It’s her maman’s pride and joy.

She sends a photo of the snow outside. She sends complaints about how her dad wants to watch It’s a Wonderful Life before Christmas Eve, which is just not okay.

She sends a bunch of things that amount to I miss you. She even types that out once. She thinks about it for a second, about actually sending it, and then she deletes it.

Eat some protein, she sends instead. Lift something heavier than dessert.

Turkey is protein right?? Bittle sends back, along with a winky emoji.

|

Jack expects it to feel strange or different to see Bittle again in the New Year, after everything. After Jack spent the break hearing Shitty’s voice saying you’re just in love with her most nights before she fell asleep. After she managed to find the song from Hallowe’en online, and listened to it through headphones, feeling hot all over.

But it isn’t. Bittle gets up on her toes and hugs her, and she smells of pastry and vanilla sugar, and Jack has to remind herself to let go after thirty seconds. But that feeling isn’t new; none of it is - seeing Bittle now feels exactly how it felt before. Like coming home.

Which just means that Jack has been being even stupider for even longer than she thought.

|

Her thing with Bittle gets swiftly put on the back burner, though, because they lose their first post-New Year game. Then they lose the second. And the third.

Jack fights the urge to withdraw into herself, to snap at everyone. There’s Jack, and there’s the Samwell Women’s Hockey Team Captain, and there’s what one wants to do, and what the other knows she has to do.

The night they lose the third game, the Falconers lose theirs, too. When Jack gets back – after running around outside until she can barely stand - the TV in the Haus lounge is tuned to their post-game press.

Not long after the rules on contact in women’s hockey changed, the Falconers trialed an eighteen-year-old prodigy named Arlenne Greene. Jack hadn’t been long out of rehab when it was announced. The Falconers’ PR team had obviously cooked up a whole narrative that cast her as a sweet, modest country girl, but it wasn’t quite enough to hide the way Arlenne was clearly always spoiling for a fight. Jack had liked her immediately. The Falconers clearly had too, as the trial became permanent. Three other teams have signed women since, but it’s Arlenne that Jack has tracked most closely.

On the screen now, Arlenne is surrounded by sports journalists like sharks hoping for blood. They’re demanding what happened out there, how she could have missed that opening.

“Everyone played hard,” she insists. “You can’t win ‘em all.”

When it cuts back to studio, it’s to two mustachioed pundits in shiny suits.

You and I did wonder, way back when they signed her, about the wisdom of just inserting a female into an existing NHL team… Just from the perspective of what it would mean for an already well-established game with a set history and tradition. Looking at them on the ice tonight, I have to wonder if the Falconers have a fundamental problem with team cohesion – maybe Greene is just too much the ‘odd man out’. Odd woman out?

They laugh.

Well, Jim, Greene won’t have silenced any doubters tonight, that’s for sure. The Falconers are on a losing streak, and after that display, you have to ask: can Greene really handle the pressure?

Jack walks up and turns off the TV. Shitty, Bitty, Lardo and two frogs are squeezed onto the couch, but none of them says anything.

|

Checking practice is the next morning at five, as usual. Jack honestly feels like pulling the covers over her head and hiding away from the world, but at the same time, Shitty was completely right. She’s a Bittle-fueled vampire.

There are a few flakes of snow falling on the way to the rink. The world is dark, and lovely, and deserted.

They change in the locker room and then skate a couple laps of the rink, side by side, without speaking. Jack didn’t even notice before, but she must have been only using three-quarters of her lungs to breathe for the last solid week. Her shoulders are a mass of knots.

“How do you stand it?” Bittle asks quietly, once they’ve stopped. She’s peeling the end of the tape away from her stick and then smoothing it back down again, over and over, almost compulsively.

“Stand what?” Jack asks. Her voice is so soft she isn’t sure if it’s going to carry all the way to Bittle.

“This is your whole life,” Bittle says. She lifts an arm away from her side in a motion that is clearly meant to encompass everything, the ice, the stands. “You want this to be… Your whole life. And it should be, because you’re great at it, but. I don’t know how you stand it. The things they say. How hard it is.”

To Jack’s horror, there’s a prickling sensation around her eyes.

“You’ve been listening to Shitty’s lectures too much,” she says, in a horrible attempt at levity. It lands like a brick.

“Jack,” Bittle says. It’s just her name, but it sounds like a lot more. Bittle’s accent drags it out, puts warmth in the vowel.

“Things are changing all the time,” Jack says, because they are. She has to believe that.

Here is another secret that Jack could tell Bittle and won’t: after the overdose, she considered doing something else. She considered listening to her maman, coming home. She considered a life in a middling office job, a life where she had weekends to herself, and there were no roadies so she was home enough to have a dog. It wouldn’t have been all bad, probably. That life.

It seemed, for maybe a couple weeks, like she could actually do it. Walk away from hockey in favor of a life where nobody was watching.

(It didn’t work. It was like dying, was the problem; or maybe more like being forced to keep living, but being told you could never have another meal. In the end there was no room to choose, because she wasn’t choosing. Hockey – the cold air in the rink on early mornings, the agony of a loss and the soaring feeling of a win – it had chosen her.)

She doesn’t tell Bittle that. She will someday, but not now.

Instead she says, “things are hard, Bittle, but that doesn’t make them not worth doing. Sometimes it makes them worth doing even more.”

Bittle skates up to her and bumps Jack’s shoulder with her own.

“Where do you get these things from, Jack?” she says. She leans half her weight against Jack’s side, most likely in exhaustion. There are bags under her eyes. Jack hasn’t been sleeping well lately either. “Did you take a captain class?”

It’s a weak chirp, but it makes Jack smile all the same. The Bittle of a few months ago would never have dared; too afraid that Jack would just stare at her, probably, or make her do suicides. That seems like a very long time ago.

“There you go,” Bittle says gently. “You haven’t forgotten how.”

Jack swallows, a huge wave of guilt rolling over her.

“That last loss –“ she starts, but Bittle interrupts.

“I know, I know,” she says. “But it’s been killing me, seeing you so darn sad. I just want you to smile. You should be smiling all the time.”

Jack swallows again.

“It’s not your job to worry about me,” she says. “What does it matter whether I’m smiling or not?”

Really, it’s a stupid question, with several obvious answers. Jack isn’t even sure why she asks it. She expects Bittle to say something about how they’re friends, or teammates, or how Jack is her captain. Maybe that’s enough for Jack now, in this pathetic place she’s got herself into. Maybe she just wants to hear Bittle say I care about you, Jack.

But Bittle doesn’t give any of the obvious answers. She removes her weight from Jack’s side, stands back on her own two skates. Jack doesn’t reach out and pull her back, which is something. Score one for Jack’s dignity, for an overall total of one.

“Oh, you must know by now,” Bittle says eventually. She’s very, very still. Jack has no idea if her voice is sad or angry, which is completely disconcerting. If she had to guess she would hazard that maybe Bittle is sad, but trying to make a joke of it, which isn’t a great combo. “Jack. You must know.”

Jack’s mouth is so dry. She has no idea what is going on, but she also knows that one wrong move could send Bittle bolting. She’s as tense as she was the first time Jack brought her onto the ice one-on-one.

“Know what?” Jack asks, because she can’t think of anything else to say. The words hang between them, suspended in the rink air.

Bittle’s warm brown eyes flick restlessly over Jack’s face, searching for something. She wonders what Bittle can see. She wonders what Bittle wants to see.

She’s suddenly, obscurely glad that she’s in her gear. Grateful for that layer of protection.

“- oh,” Bittle says finally, in the tone of someone who has just had her whole universe inverted. “Shitty said you didn’t know, but I thought you were being polite. Being Canadian about it. Trying not to hurt my feelings, you know.”

“Being Canadian about what?” Jack asks. It’s like there’s a light coming on inside Jack, but it’s just a single bulb. The rest of the room is dark, and Jack has no idea what else is in there. She wants to know.

“About how I have a really inconvenient crush on you?” Bittle says. Her voice raises up at the end like it’s a question, but Jack knows there’s no question. “And how terrible I am at hiding it.”

Bittle exhales. When she smiles again it’s rueful, like telling Jack that she got her hair cut short, but not that short. It’s self-deprecating, the way she’s so good at.

“Because gosh, Jack,” she says, barely more than a breath. "The way I feel about you, it's more than a body can stand."

Light floods the room inside Jack all at once. It turns out there are hundreds of bulbs in there, humming together, all connected to make a sprawling map. She opens her mouth and tries to say so much at once that nothing comes out.

“Lord, Jack, I really wish you would say something,” Bittle says. Her voice is shaking. Her hands are shaking.

Jack is in love with her. Jack is unbelievably in love.

Bittle’s lips are cold, her mouth sweet with surprise. She makes a small sound that Jack has never heard before. The tip of her nose is cold where it slides against Jack’s cheek, but when Bittle drops her gloves, her hands are warm against Jack’s jaw.

Jack never knew before that it was possible to kiss someone through the stretch of their smile. It’s a staggering thing to find out.

|

They win the fourth game. And the fifth.