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"Oh," Jack said, once he'd peeled back the brown paper wrapping. "Well, it's, uh. It's woollen. Got good thermal resistance. Thanks, Robby."
Jack's ma had raised him to be specific and prompt in his thanks for any gift received, but the unforeseen flaw with that life advice, Jack now realised, was that you had to be able to tell what the gift was.
"Yeah?" Robby looked shockingly bashful for a grown-ass man whom Jack had seen just this past shift float a transvenous pacer as deft and as calm as you like, with all the authority in his voice that came from years of experience. What a difference a couple of hours and sitting down with a cup of coffee in Jack's kitchen could make. "I mean, if you don't like it that's fine, I know I still have a lot to learn. But I thought that yarn was a good blue, it'd go with those cargo pants you wear all the time."
"It's a sock," Jack said, as realisation hit. He looked down at the woollen lump in his hands. He didn't know much about knitting, but he'd had as much general sock experience as the average person for the first 32 years of his life, and continued experience at a 50% rate after that. He didn't think that socks generally had these, well, proportions. His heel didn't protrude quite that much; his foot had the standard factory-install number of toes. And yet, regardless this, apparently, was a sock.
A sock with an incredible number of dropped stitches for something made by a man so good at suturing that Jack wouldn't bet against him being able to do so a perfect running suture on a wound with his eyes closed.
"Well, yeah? The woman at the yarn store said that most people start with making squares because they're easier." Robby sounded faintly bemused, scratched at his cheek. "But I thought, okay, but then what would I do with a bunch of wool squares?"
"So you made me a sock," Jack said. Its appearance and the fact that it looked like it existed in several dimensions beyond the usual three aside, the sock was incredibly soft. It didn't feel at all like it was made from the kind of cheap acrylic stuff that his niece sometimes used, along with an abundance of glitter and glue sticks, in her grade-school crafting projects.This was clearly not bargain bin stuff.
"My therapist told me I needed a hobby," Robby said with a shrug, and it was a testament to how much work he'd been putting in over the past few months that he could now say my therapist without looking like just the shape of the words on his tongue was going to make him puke. "Didn't say it couldn't be a useful hobby."
Of course, there was still lots of work to be done.
"You made me a sock," Jack realised.
Robby flushed. "I wasn't trying to be pointed, or a dick, or... Just, making that one took me a solid month so I thought I'd get feedback from you before I started the second one."
"Feedback?" Jack placed the lumpy quasi-sock down on the kitchen table in front of him, smoothed it out as much as he could with careful hands. He thought about how Robby had worked on this for weeks and weeks, just to give it to him. He cleared his throat. He said, "My, uh, my therapist has also been encouraging me to find alternative hobbies that aren't—"
"Being fucking shot at in the defence of a bunch of cut-price TVs?"
They were not having this argument again, so Jack said, "Only the thing is, I don't think I need a hobby right now. I think what I need is... Well."
"What?"
"Pete says that I'm possibly very service-oriented and my sense of duty is maybe a bit over-developed—"
Robby snorted.
"—so he gave me some homework to do on like, doing something because I want to for me." Jack paused and wiped his suddenly sweaty palms on his thighs. "And, and it took me a few weeks but I realised that TEMS, all of that, I wasn't doing it because I was bored. I was doing it because I was lonely."
People knew what to do with grief better than they did when it came to loneliness. They'd bring you a casserole and tell you how sorry they were the week after a drunk ran a red light and killed your wife, but they wouldn't be there a month later when your house echoed around you at three in the morning. Jack himself didn't know what to do with his loneliness. There was no script to follow for so you've never lived alone in your whole life before but boom, you've got a three-bedroom ranch all to yourself, the perfect size for the kids you'll never have now. His sister told him he had a standing invitation to come visit them in Oklahoma City for the holidays, but there was no one around that Jack felt would ever offer him the same thing for dinner at seven on any random Tuesday. Except maybe—
"But you should know first," Jack said, "this isn't because I'm lonely in general. It's also not because of the sock, although it's not not because of the sock, it's about you and me, and—"
Robby squinted at him. "Jack."
"Fine, okay, whatever, fuck words," Jack said, and he stood, leaned across the kitchen table, and he kissed Robby. His best friend, his confidant, the voice he could always orient himself by in the darkness, and it was weird to kiss someone with a beard but it was hot, too, turned Jack on even before Robby made that little noise in the back of his throat and kissed him back and oh, oh shit, Jack had fucking genius ideas that—
Robby pulled back, eyes heavy-lidded, and said, "Really?"
"Yes, really," Jack said, teetering on the edge of the rest of his life, "yes, you, totally."
Robby reached up and cradled Jack's cheek in one hand and such a simple gesture shouldn't make Jack's eyes sting, but it did. "Bedroom?"
Jack nodded fervently but said, "One condition."
"I'm listening," Robby said, but given that he was already standing, fisting Jack's t-shirt in one hand and towing him out of the kitchen, Jack was fairly sure the agreement here was a mere formality.
"All the socks come off first," Jack said, and Robby laughed, bright and delighted, and walked there faster.