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Oh man, you're taking prompts, I have a mighty need from some Jack/Bitty and French <3

I DIDN’T FORGET ELI!!!! I JUST…. ACCIDENTALLY WROTE… A LOT…. please enjoy my transparent excuses to use metropolitan french whenever possible and also my sister’s brief cameo under a pseudonym about which she knows nothing!

translations provided via hovertext--i'm fsl so it's very possible there are mistakes, but i was pretty diligent about proofreading so *crosses fingers.*

Apprivoisé

“Papa, j’peux pas faire ça.”

Bitty is definitely not eavesdropping.

Ransom is in full panic mode in their bathroom, so he’d had no choice but to use Jack and Shitty’s. Shitty’d told Eric it was alright on his way out the door.

Plus, all those French vowels, so much rounder and more satisfying than in artsy Parisian films, just sort of reach out to the ear. They demand to be heard, if not understood.

Plus, Jack’s voice is so strained, so sad, so terrified that Bitty only manages to stay on his side of the door because his not-eavesdropping probably wouldn’t help.

“Ouais, j’veux jouer, mais—j’suis gay.”

Bitty marvels at the way his heart skips a beat, and then he curses himself. He hates the way some of those Québécois words sound just like English sometimes (faux-amis, Jack calls them).

“Stacose j’peux pas, Papa !” Jack’s voice pitches, warbling on the peaks before breaking on the last Papa fit to shatter Eric’s heart. Bitty has to sit on the toilet and hold a hand to his chest.

“Bittle, bien sûr ! Comme t’sait pas ! … Ouais, Bittle… Desolé…”

There’s a certain moment of not-eavesdropping when you feel the full brunt of the guilt. Hearing his name in that tense, bitten off exclamation is bad enough, but then to have Jack repeat it, defeated and desolate. Bitty’s eyes sting, and lord help him he doesn’t know what he’s ever going to do about this boy.

“J’peux pas jouer ! J’peux pas faire ça !”

Maybe if he texts Shitty with an SOS, he can be back in time to prevent a crisis. He’s a leisurely walker when he’s not on a mission or getting into some kind of trouble, so he can’t have gotten too far yet.

“Je l’aime, Papa. Stacose j’pense que je l’aime,” Jack says heavily.

Jack is on the phone with his dad and there is a lot of very emotional French conversation happening right now. And yelling. Maybe you shouldn’t go to class today??? Please come back?

“J’peux pas, j’peux pas.” Jack repeats the same phrase over and over more to himself than to his father, breathy and tremulous every time. For a hot second, he’s quiet, but then the chant starts up in a whisper, and Bitty guesses Bob’s saying something. He hopes to heaven whatever he’s got to say is good.

omw now. freak out scale 1-Parse?

“Ouais. J’vas t’appeler bientôt.”

The clatter of a phone falling goes almost unnoticed in the wake of the thud of a perky behind dropping to the floor.

Worse than Parse.

stay w him til i get there

Bitty takes a deep breath and stretches out his fingers, releasing the ache in his knuckles from clutching his phone for so long. Calming Jack down is already going to be a chore, so Bitty nudges the door and peeks in to avoid spooking him. With Jack being twice his size, Eric is about as intimidating as Señor Bun on a good day. Hopefully that’ll work in his favor.

“Hey, Jack?”

Wild-eyed, Jack whips his head up from between his raised knees and stares at Bitty with his jaw dropped.

“You—?”

“I was going to use your shower, but you sounded upset. I didn’t understand anything.”

Jack’s huge, sad eyes slide shut with relief. Bitty risks a few steps closer but halts when Jack’s hands clench into fists and tremble faintly against his bare kneecaps

“Um, I heard you say my name,“ he leads. Jack’s whole body shivers and Bitty scrambles to recover, “so I understand if you’d rather not see me right now. It’s just, I don’t think you should be alone?”

“Bittle—“

“Shitty’s coming back from class, so I’ll be out of your hair real soon. I can’t just leave you like this, though.”

Somehow without really knowing it, Eric managed to cover the rest of the space between them and to kneel beside him. Anxiety vibrates from Jack like his poor heart’s a jackhammer gone wild, and he’s struck with the sudden idea that maybe he can keep him still if he just holds him.

He wraps his arms around Jack’s shoulders, and it doesn’t do a darn thing.

“Tell Shits not to come. This is—I mean, you’re not…you can stay, if you want.”

With one hand (Bitty is not going to let go of these shoulders even if his teeth are chattering worse than they were the week of his first cold snap at Samwell), he takes out his phone and tells Shitty to stand down.

take care of my bro for me, will ya?

What a redundant question, Bitty can’t help thinking. As if anything else were an option.

“C’mon, Jack. You can’t sit on the floor.”

Jack’s slumped with his back against his box spring, and Bitty might be stronger than he looks, but he doesn’t like his chances of putting Jack to bed without some measure of cooperation.

“Les fleurs sont faibles,” Jack mutters, chin tucked tights against his clavicle. All this switching back and forth is giving Bitty whiplash. “Elles sont naïves. Elles se rassurent comme elles peuvent.”

“Jack, honey, I’ve got no clue what you’re saying, but you can tell me about the pooves once you’re under the covers.”

The endearment slips out, and Jack blinks up at Eric with searching eyes before he lets Bitty hoist him to his feet and whispers, “Elles se croient terribles avec leurs épines.”

Jack never got dressed for the day, so all Bitty does is pull his blankets over him and—after a fierce internal debate about the nature of altruism—curls onto the edge of his bed so he can watch Jack for signs of distress.

And also so he can see the way Jack’s nose presses into the swell of his pillow when his head turns. Mostly the former, though.

“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t wanna,” Bitty promises, folding his arms in the space like a desert between them. “But I’m listening if you do.”

Jack answers well enough by the way he buries his face in his arms and cocoons himself with his bedding.

“J’suis faible, Bitty. J’suis trop faible et trop naïve. Il n’y avait jamais épines.”

“I still don’t know French.” Eric reels, not sure if he’s ever heard Jack call him anything but Bittle until just now. He takes a cautious hand and pulls back one of Jack’s sheets so he can try to reassure him with an affected smile. “Je veux ton amour, et je veux ton revanche; voulez-vous coucher avec moi; Est-ce que tu aimes le sexe? That’s about all I’ve got, and I don’t know what most of it means.”

“I give you The Little Prince, and you give me that?” Jack’s pillow demands.

“You sound surprised that the only stuff I can say is from my music.”

One wary eyeball peeks up at him, and Jack asks, “Those are song lyrics?”

Huffing, Bitty flicks the folded edge of Jack’s shirtsleeve and says, “I can believe you didn’t recognize Gaga; and even though it breaks my heart, I’ll even forgive you for not recognizing Bey. But how in the hell have you lived almost a quarter of a century without knowing 'Lady Marmalade?'”

Jack’s lips spasm in a pale imitation of what might have been a smile another day. Now, it’s a bloodless grimace.

“Incompatible software,” he says. “Hockey Robots don’t run Pop Culture programs—Holster’s tried.”

“There you go! If you’re feeling good enough to poke fun at yourself, you’ll be back to picking on me in no time.”

“Hopefully,” he scoffs. “Remind me to tell you exactly what you just said when I get there.”

Jack’s rigid forearms curl up around his face, and he pulls his knees up to his elbows. Bitty weasels one hand into Jack’s fist so he’ll have something to hold onto, and the short fingernails of his free hand graze Jack’s side through his cotton t-shirt the way Eric’s mother’s used to when he was a baby.

Jack won’t look at him. His eyes are open, cast unseeingly over Bitty’s shoulder, but he wraps both hands around Eric’s for dear life.

“I’ll hold you to that, Mr. Zimmermann.”

***

Jack only has one final for his last semester, so he takes a long weekend to go to Montreal and give the Habs one last chance to court him before he announces his signing decision. In all the times he’s left campus, Jack’s always either rented a car himself or flown to his destination, so Bitty’s floored when he opens the door for Bad Bob himself.

Bitty’s got homemade buttercream frosting on his nose, and he’s wearing one of the aprons the boys had gotten him for his birthday to complement the oven. (Today’s is from Holster: it says “Trophy Wife” in delicate pink cursive, and right up until this moment it was Bitty’s favorite. It might have been more embarrassing if he’d been wearing Shitty’s “Gay Icon” diagonally-striped rainbow monstrosity, but he’d been this close to wearing Nursey’s. “They see me rollin.’ They hatin.’” That would have been classic.)

Bob is nice, but Eric has a lot of experience distinguishing between being laughed with and being laughed at, and when he can’t stop giggling long enough to say hello, Bitty can tell which of the two is going on.

“Jack didn’t say you were coming down. I’d’ve had something ready for you,” he says. He scrambles at the knotted strings behind his back, but they only seem to tighten.

“That’s no problem, son. I’ve heard enough about your sweets that I can wait a while if it means I get to try some.”

He can’t shake the feeling that Bob is sizing him up, but Bitty has more important things to do, like tear off his apron and wipe the frosting from his face.

“Make yourself at home, then, and I’ll just wrap up out—”

“Bitty! You, me, daydrinking. Right the fuck now. I’ve gotta—oh, shit. Hey, Bobby.”

“Justin! Ça va ?”

“Câlisse de crisse, bro. Really with the French?”

Bob’s laughter follows Bitty into the kitchen, echoing through the Haus.

“You only forget as much as you do because you never practice. Jack would love to speak French at home with you boys.”

“Jack aimerait ne jamais parler plus. Ce connard ne veut pas écouter à ma mauvaise française.”

“Ah, régardes-toé. Yé mon fils, t’sais.”

They tumble through the doorway, elbowing each other gamely and grinning.

“Ouai, et il est mon frère. Nous avons son dos.”

Bob tugs Rans into a rough hug, clapping his shoulder blade with a resonant smack and smooching him on the forehead.

“‘On a’ son dos. C’pas Paris icitte, Justin.” Whatever Bob says, it’s a chirp that barely masks his watery chuckle.

“Tu as raison. C’est Les États Unis. Parles Anglais ou GTFO, dude.”

“I see how it is,” Bob sighs, and Bitty thanks the heavens for their return to English. He isn’t sure whether he resents his high school more for the completely wasted years of learning to count to ten in Spanish, or Canada for being better than the US in another heap of ways.

“Y’all have a nice chat about me in your secret code?” he asks once he’s arranged his frosting tools just so. He finished baking his cupcakes last night, so they’re sure to be cool enough to ice by now.

Ransom helps himself to the cake Bitty’d broken to test the crumb. If he’s being honest, Eric’s just happy to see him eating something.

“Only good things, Bits,” he assures him, patting his head.

“I don’t wanna be a bad host, but if I’m not getting turnt, I should probably fucking sleep or something. Want me to tell Jack you’re here?”

Bob drags a chair out from under the table and has a seat, brushing off Ransom’s offer.

“He doesn’t get enough sleep as it is. I’ll be fine with Eric until he—”

“Dad?”

It’s a relief to know Jack’s as surprised as Bitty is. He’s not really sure what it means that Jack’s dad is paying a surprise visit so soon after a certifiable breakdown, but it has to be preferable to Jack (once again) forgetting to warn him that someone whose Bacon number is one would be paying a visit.

“Getting a late start today, eh?”

Jack hasn’t been up before nine since his episode. At first, Bitty’d thought it heralded the oncoming apocalypse, but Shitty told him it had taken Jack about as long to bounce back after Kent Parson visited during their frog year.

“Why are you here?”

His eyes flit between his father and Bitty until Eric sacrifices his buttercream for the greater good.

“I don’t like how this turned out. If you’re gonna be here a while, I’ll pop over to the Stop n’ Shop to get the things for a milk chocolate frosting if that sounds good?”

Jack deflates with relief, and Bitty thinks his nicest thoughts as hard as he can toward Jack.

“I’m sure it’ll be worth the wait,” Bob agrees with a nod, and Bitty shuffles out the door.

***When he’s back with more chocolate than any responsible person should have let him buy, the Zimmermanns have holed away in Jack’s room.

Indistinct Québécois trickles down through the rafters, and while Bitty can’t make anything out, he can hear how desperate Jack is.

Bob is earnest, cadences insistent without being argumentative.

Eric knows no family is perfect just as well as he knows Coach loves him with his whole heart, but he aches to hear how much harder Bob tries to show Jack they’re on the same side.

The rapid back and forth gives Bitty an idea that’s not exactly good, but it’s too tempting to pass up.

He fixes up a plate of cupcakes for Bob with a little note attached then arms himself with another handful before he braves the attic. He can hear the spray of the shower going in their bathroom, but when he ducks his head in, Ransom is sprawled in the center of the floor. He’s using his textbook as a pillow, and Bitty hopes he’s not drooling into the pages again.

“Hey, Rans. Did you want a cupcake?” he asks, nudging his ankle with a toe.

One hand swings toward Bitty, palm facing upward, but he doesn’t otherwise move.

“I’ve got three for you here, but you gotta get up first.”

All his meager willpower nearly flees when Rans glowers. He’s sure his knees knock as Ransom lurches onto his behind looking like the girl from The Ring.

He smells like Redbull and regret.

“So, you speak French?” Bitty leads once Ransom’s hands are too full to throttle him.

“‘M Canadian, dude,” he grunts through a bite. “Took eight years of it.”

It’s a testament to his state that Ransom isn’t already suspicious.

“How come I’ve never heard it before?”

“Because not all of us are giant fucking nerds, Bitty.” The rest of the first cupcake vanishes in a brutal display like an Animal Planet documentary. Crumbs gather on the bow of Ransom’s lip, and he’s honestly afraid to point it out before Rans is onto the next one.

“So,” he hazards, “have you read The Little Prince?”

Ransom’s eyes are bloodshot.

“I took French. For eight years.”

“Right, right. So. Uh. You know that part about, um. The pooves?”

Even when he got that concussion last year, Bitty wasn’t so afraid of a defenseman.

“The… pooves?” Bitty would bet Moo Maw’s boysenberry filling recipe that Ransom’s left pupil is bigger than the right.

“Or, the aypeens?” he tries, wincing.

Ransom ignores him.

“The hell is this glossy stuff between the frosting and the cake?”

“Oh! That’s ganache. Another French word!”

Humming, Rans laps at the chocolate, and Bitty mourns that he’s too terrified to appreciate someone's savoring one of his desserts. Ransom is only slowing down because he practically swallowed the first whole, but it's still progress.

“Well, you know, you know how je t’aime means ‘I love you?’”

He changes tacks. He doesn’t remember enough of Jack’s nonsense from his book, but not even his cultural isolation in Madison kept that factoid from reaching him. He’s heard Jack say it on the phone with his mother enough times to have reasoned it out by now, anyway.

“What would it mean if you said je l’aime instead? Like with the l-sound instead of the t?”

“‘I like it,’ usually.”

Somehow, Bitty doesn’t think Jack was translating Enrique Iglesias over the phone.

“It can mean something else, though?” he asks, careful not to sound too eager.

Ransom nods and passes him the third and final parchment cup to throw out.

“'I love him' or 'I love her.' Depends on who you’re talking about.”

I love him.

Jack had said “I love him” to his father right after he’d said Bitty’s name like a man giving confession.

“Huh. Interesting.” Eric’s voice goes up like he’s swallowed half a tank of helium. See him in theaters with his brothers Timothy and Simon, coming December 2015. “So, gay means what it sounds like, right?”

“Bitty, if you’re wheeling a French dude, I’ll be more than happy to be your wingman once I pass my epidemiology final. Can you like, keep it in your fucking pants until then?”

“What? Oh, sure. Yeah, thanks.”

Bitty might be off his rocker, but if he is, it’s only because Jack shoved him off and Ransom swept in behind and ran away with it.

“I’ll leave you alone now,” Bitty promises, but Rans follows him out.

“I’m gonna study in the reading room. Change up the scenery.”

“Um—”

Ransom is hurdling down the stairs, books in hand, and Bitty gapes after him.

“Alright, then,” he mutters.

He slips his phone out and opens Twitter. He wants to get this done before he can back out.

French speaker needed for a super secret mission. Any takers?

A tweet like that, even though he’s just baked, warrants some stress cookies. Several dozen, probably. With a thick batter that will require a lot of upper body strength to expend some nervous energy.

“Bits. Do you know anything about the marine biome?”

Holster’s call precedes him downstairs; he should have thrown in a “fee, fie, foe, fum” for good measure.

“Uh, this is a rhetorical question, right?”

Holster, hair still dripping and bare chested from his shower, rests a hand on Eric’s neck as he says, “I know a disgusting amount about the marine biome—including what the word biome means. Ask me why I know so much about the marine biome, bro.”

“I’d rather not,” Bitty hedges. He has to unwrap the butter so it can soften, and while he’s always appreciated everything butter has done for him personally, the excuse to shake off Holster has him considering canonization.

This is Holster, though: tenacious by design and without Ransom here to distract him.

"Um. Why do you know so much about the marine biome?”

“Because Rans talks about it in his sleep, Bitty.”

"That…” Bitty gulps. “That can’t be healthy.”

Too much of the whites of Holster’s eyes is showing.

"Wanna know something cool about coral reefs, Bitty?” he asks. Eric really isn’t comfortable with the manic, tightly coiled way his nickname punctuates Holster’s sentences.

“Can I say no?” The futility isn’t lost on him, but with six feet and four inches of hockey player looming over him, he’s spooked.

“Coral is part of the marine biome. So like, I know a shit ton about coral, too.”

Bitty squeezes his eyes shut and wonders how he didn’t notice the water in the shower shut off.

“This has been a great talk, but I’m already preheating the oven, and—“

“For instance,” he bellows, “when coral is impacted by an outside stressor? It straight up fucking dies, Bits.”

“Uh.” Bitty hopes Jack and his father are too deep in conversation to investigate this little scuffle.

“And here I see this outside stressor coming into the reef and treating the coral like a goddamn pocket translator, and I gotta wonder, is this stressor trying to kill the coral?”

“Hey! Of course not; don’t be silly, I just—“

“You know the rules, dude. Ransom is too fragile for whatever pâtisserie interrogation you just hit him with.”

“Adam Birkholtz,” Eric bites back. “You know I wouldn’t have bothered him if it hadn’t been about something important.”

“You think baking is important.”

“It was more important than baking.”

“Oh." He blinks, flummoxed. "Damn.”

Holster’s always ready for a fight but not with his teammates. His lost, tiny frown and suddenly listless hands soften Bitty plenty.

“Now, look. I’m sorry. I feel just terrible that I tampered with the ecosystem, but it had to be done.” Probably. “I’m gonna make some oatmeal raisin cookies so there’s something filling for him to eat that he won’t have to take a break for.

“Unless you want to keep lecturing me, you can get out of my way.”

“Yeah, sure.” He tugs Bitty into his armpit snugly. It's endearingly disgusting. “Sorry, bro.”

“…”

“…Holster?”

“Yeah?”

“Could you get the rolled oats for me?” He doesn’t use them often, so he keeps them on the top shelf in the cabinet along with his novelty rolling pins and his bread maker. If he keeps his more ubiquitous things on the lower shelves, he can minimize how many times he’s caught climbing on chairs.

Moment passed, Holster grins and does as he’s told, asking, “So, where did Ransom run off to?”

Bitty gulps.

“He, uh, wanted a change of scenery. So he… took his things out onto the roof?”

Just like that, Eric is back in the doghouse. Only the urgency of the situation saves him for now.

“JUSTIN!” Holster hollers, sprinting upstairs, towel firmly in hand. “You aren’t allowed on the roof without at least six hours of sleep!”

Eric considers following him equally as seriously as he considers running away to Mexico when his cell buzzes on the table.

@omgcheckplease !!!! I volunteer as tribute, someone with the handle penseesconstellees replies. After a quick investigation, it seems like they’re not only a real person, but a real person whose account is run almost entirely in French. Bitty sends her a direct message while he holds his breath.

***Jack is gone for four days. He’s radio silent in the SMH chat except to say on Monday: Didn’t sign with the Habs.

Eric takes advantage of every second, drafting a letter, scrapping it, drafting another, scrapping that one too, and getting drunk with Ransom at noon on a Saturday. He Skypes Marguerite, begging her to write something less cloyingly pathetic, but she just giggles.

Well, she giggles and blushes coquettishly at Ransom. Bitty did not sign up to facilitate any long-term relationship he’s not going to be a part of, thank you.

Apart from being an incorrigible flirt, Marguerite is a godsend. When he finally manages to write something he doesn’t hate, she translates it gamely, and she includes a little phonetic guide.

Even with that, she insists on coaching him through his whole soliloquy until he stops feeling like he’s going to throw up if he loses his place. The syllables start flowing a little more naturally—sometimes he even manages to finish whole words without looking at his paper, if he treats them like the lyrics to a song.

““C’était parfait, Bitty !”

Bitty’s squirreled away a few handy mnemonics, like: parfaits are the most perfect dessert you can make without an oven. He’s so proud that he doesn’t need to check his notes to understand her, he’s giddy, laughing with her until a tremor in the walls makes him jump. Only Jack’s door sticks hard enough to shake the jamb like that without slamming, and Bitty’s heart crawls up into his throat.

“Was that him?” Marguerite asks, wide-eyed.

“Holy hell, it was.”

“Bitty!” she titters. “Allez ! Allez, allez, allez !”

“Marg—”

“Go!”

She couldn’t have been more forceful if she’d been in his room with him.

Eric clutches his little script in a trembling fist and checks his hair one more time in the laptop screen before Marguerite shoos him away and signs off.

Jack calls for him to come in as soon as his knuckles touch the door, and Bitty really would have appreciated some more time to pump himself up. That, or some time to talk himself out of his stupid plan would’ve been nice.

In typical Zimmermann fashion, he’s already unpacking the last of his weekend bag, shoving dirty clothes into his hamper and wrapping the duffel up in itself.

Bitty has a fierce case of the jitters, and once Jack looks up to see why he hasn’t said anything, his insides explode into a flurry of butterflies.

“You okay, Bittle?” Jack asks, a soft frown dimpling the space between his eyebrows.

“I have to say something.”

Eric beacons Jack over to the bed, until, sitting next to him, Bitty realizes how terrible their closeness is for his nerves.

He shuffles into the middle of the room and looks Jack right in the eye.

“Okay?”

“I just,” Bitty hesitates, “I’ve got a lot to say, so can you wait ‘til the end to answer?”

Whether it’s because he just doesn’t know what to say or because he’s taking direction very seriously, Jack rests his elbows on his knees and clasps his hands together, balancing his chin on his thumbs.

A deep, deep breath, and the rasp of well-worn paper. Then, Bitty’s off.

“J’ai entendu ce que tu as dit il y a une semaine,” he begins. He makes the mistake of peeking up from his notes to see Jack’s thunderstruck look. Eric’s lightheaded and dizzy, but he steadies himself with a hand on Jack’s desk chair and presses on.

“J’ai compris seulement une phrase, mais je crois que tu as dit à ton père que tu m’aime.”

Bitty can’t bear to see what face Jack’s making to match the shuddering gasp, but he can hear the beginning of an argument.

“Attends, s’il te plaît,” Eric repeats the way Marguerite had coached him.

“Je ne comprendrai jamais les problèmes que tu auras dans ton futur. Bien que je suis gay, et ceci n’est pas facile avec ma famille, je ne suis pas célèbre comme toi.

“Alors, je m'ai demandé si tu étais si triste parce que tu crois que tu ne peux pas avoir un amoureux et jouer.

“Je ne veux pas d’être un secret, mais je t’aime surtout. Si je dois être caché, je le ferai pour toi.”

He’s at the end of his script and the end of his rope, paper shaking minutely, pinched between his thumbs and forefingers. Bitty hadn’t heard himself over the crash of his pulse in his ears, but now he thinks his heart’s stopped pumping altogether.

He misses it; it’s too quiet.

“Did Rans help you with that?”

“Not… uh. Not really. Just a little. And he doesn’t know what it was about.”

Bitty considers that Ransom’s last final is tomorrow, and he cringes.

“He might think I’m trying to hook up with a French exchange student.”

“He’s not entirely wrong,” Jack says, a hint of a smirk chasing away the more severe angles of his face. He seems less like he’s been carved from marble than the last time Bitty’d been brave enough to watch for a reaction.

It feels like a minor improvement until, dropping his cheat sheet, it hits him that (unless Bitty’s made a fatal error in his delivery) he just told Jack how he feels. And Jack is smiling.

Teasing him, but smiling.

“Tu m’aimes, eh ?”

Jack’s face always bears a sort of weight. He carries it in his brow, and Eric swears he can see it overflow and drag his droopy eyes down with them, but this might be the first time Bitty can remember Jack looking happy without something else weighing the planes of his face down.

Whenever Jack's smiled before, he’s always looked happy-but-tired or happy-but-focused, but here he is with his chin in his hands staring at Bitty like he’s happy.

“Jack. I don’t think you understand how much rehearsal went into that. I understand basically as much French as I did before you went back to Montreal,” Bitty says. “Maybe less. I have it on good authority that Quebec French is basically its own language.”

“I think I got the picture,” Jack says. Eric takes a half a step forward, and as Jack scoots to the edge of his mattress, he can’t help but notice how conveniently they’d line up if the gap between them shrunk just a touch more.

“Granted, your accent’s pretty bad. I might need you to repeat a few parts.”

“My accent? At least I know how to say ‘pecan.’” By the way Jack’s foot extends, hooking Bitty’s ankle and reeling him closer, he’s ready to call Jack a liar.

When they’re close enough, Jack drops his hands and twists his fingers into Bitty’s belt loops.

“I signed with the Falcs first thing when I came back,” Jack murmurs, “George and I talked. I don’t want to come out my first season, and she understands that, but she told me the team would support me when I’m ready.”

“When you’re ready?”

“I want to try to do both. I want to be happy. With you, if that’s what you want, too.”

“Hmm,” Bitty doesn’t have enough air in his lungs to answer right away, so he stalls.

Jack’s knees knock into the outsides of either one of his, and their calves are snug together. That, and Jack’s drumming fingertips on his waistband serve to keep him unbalanced while Jack says, “That’s a stumper, is it?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Zimmermann. A beautiful boy with as much talent in his pinky as most people have in their whole bodies? Doesn’t give me much to work with.”

His belly jolts when Jack leans in and pressed his nose along the lines of Bitty’s abs. His damp breath heats Eric’s skin through his t-shirt.

“Do you have anything to sweeten the pot? Famous parents? More money than God, maybe? I’m not picky,” he says.

In a smooth lift, Jack glides to his feet and holds Bitty against him.

“Apparently, you love me either way,” he murmurs confidentially into the crown of Bitty’s head.

This can’t be allowed to continue, going forward. Bitty can’t actually melt every time Jack uses the l-word.

“Takes one to know one,” Bitty says. His useless hands finally manage to follow a command—one finger prodding Jack in the chest before the whole arm folds up docilely with the other between their bodies.

Jack’s lips settle on Bitty’s forehead, plush and radiating warmth.

“You should take French in the fall.”

“Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll just get Marguerite to teach me.”

“She’s the one who helped you?”

Bitty nods, relishing the drag of Jack’s kiss on his skin.

“She’s from Geneva.”

Jack snorts. “You should send her a pie.”

“Holtzy, I am fine. I’ll sleep after my exam, I—” Rans passes Jack’s room, and when he happens to look in, he blinks hard and rubs his eyes.

“I… I am hallucinating,” he whispers. Eric has to bury his face in Jack’s chest to muffle his snickering, but Jack doesn’t have any such line of defense.

Suddenly, Ransom’s voice is halfway down the hall again.

“Alright, I will sleep for one hour, but if you don’t wake me by four, I will fuck with your Netflix preferences so hard.”

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