Chapter Text
Sometimes, Jack thinks: maybe this isn’t real. Like the only thing he’d ever have to do is reach out and it’ll be pills that he’s reaching for instead of a person. It’s confusing in the way that most things are when you’re riled up with anxiety and wanting to go, wanting to get drunk or lock yourself in, wanting to shut down the world even while you’re burning. There’s always been something distant about reality and the way Jack handles it, how he’s always waiting for a slip-up, a missed pass, a fall on the ice hard enough to break him. Sometimes he wishes that it would be that way, but it also seems a little too inconvenient.
“What are you thinking,” Bitty says. His hand is holding onto Jack—and it feels like a lifeline to him, something that he could clench tighter and ask for a reprieve, maybe for a reason to back out. But it’s not fair to either of them. It’s not fair to hold someone else’s love and ask them to hold your life in return.
“Tell me,” Bitty says, and he leans in to press a kiss to Jack’s lips, something chaste, undemanding. He could feel his fingers shaking; it’s not Bitty’s, he’s certain. Sometimes he doesn’t know how to stop it when it gets there. He wants the desperation to boil over, to roll to a stop. He thinks: Bitty doesn’t deserve this, he never did. It’s just funny how you can never give the world to the ones who should have it, who loves with both their hands wide open and expects nothing back.
Jack breathes out, shaky. “I don’t know how to,” he says, and it’s true. Jack’s never been good with words. He’s good with a hockey stick in his hands, at taking checks, shaking off the weight of someone else’s anger.
There’s a kindness to Bitty when he smiles at him, something small but not tentative, never hesitant, not anymore. “You could try. You could tell me later. I’ll be here.”
Jack sees it, sometimes. The way that Bitty holds him until Jack relearns how to stop trembling. He thinks: maybe everything would be easier if he was around, before. But it’s a dangerous thought process to go back on. Stick your head deep into the past and there’s a possibility that you’ll never get out. It’s cold and trying and difficult to wrap his mind around, this old familiarity of hating yourself.
So Jack wants to repackage all of that. The anxiety won’t go away but the trembling dies down. You could curl up on the bathroom floor trying to throw up the pills you didn’t take but it’s an experience that means that you’re still alive. You could think that you’re not good for someone whose kindness is large enough for the whole wide world and never want to share—but it’s another thing to do them right. It’s another thing to love them back as hard as you can.
He brushes his thumb against Bitty’s mouth. Sometimes all you need is courage.
Jack says, “I never feel like I’m enough. I never feel like there’s time before the world crashes down on me. That they’ll eat me up and spit me back out knowing how much it hurts. But sometimes I wake up and I’d smell your pies, baking in the kitchen—and it’s soothing. It keeps me still enough that my hands won’t shake when I take my Xanax. Perhaps they’d still be shaking but I wouldn’t know. I might not be enough but you always are. I could wake up and still be in the same place all those years ago. But you’re here and I’m dependent on you and maybe it’s less harmful than swallowing all these pills I’ve kept at the bottom of everything, waiting for the day that it goes bad.”
Jack says, “I guess it’s not the future that scares me as much as it’s the past. I want to go back and wallow in misery but that’s not conducive. I want to breathe in the whole world and hold it in my fingers and maybe that’s something good. Maybe it’s not. But I come back from the ice with two broken wrists, with you asleep on the couch and I think—I might be good for something. I want to be good for you. This might not make much sense because you love everyone so quickly and easily and I want to earn that. I want to earn the knowledge that you’re sitting in our apartment waiting for me to come home, that you’re baking for your clients or watching tape or recording your videos.”
Jack says, “I’m thinking that I could try. I’m thinking that if I try hard enough that you’ll stay. I’m thinking that it could feel like the world’s on fire but you never are. Bitty—you make me want to try.”
Jack says, “I love you.”
Bitty smiles at him—it’s wistful, large, and those might be tears in his eyes—and leans their foreheads together. Jack can feel his breath like this. Bitty feels real. It snaps him into focus. The world is quiet and here is the both of them, sharing the same air. Bring yourself forward and kiss him with everything that he deserves to have.
Bitty says, “I love you too, Jack.”