sure. fine. whatever.

Jack may not have to write essays about what he's reading, but Robby still gets feedback about the books all the same. Dickens isn't a huge hit; Jack turns to the last page in A Christmas Carol and says that eh, he prefers the Muppet version. He works his way through Dracula and his eyebrows keep rising over the tops of his readers and he'll reach over every so often to where Robby is sitting on the other side of the couch and pat blindly at his arm and say, "Listen to this", and he'll read aloud some passage that will have Robby agreeing that yes, Bram Stoker probably needed therapy.

"Or at least some way of coming to terms with the whole repressed gay thing," Jack says, shaking his head. "Were we ever that bad?"

"Well," Robby says, "I don't remember either of us ever scaling the walls of the Pitt like—" and laughs when Jack tackles him, and smiles while kisses him until Robby's entirely lost track of the game he was supposedly watching, and Jack's book lies forgotten on the living room floor.

But Pride and Prejudice is the first book club selection to really grab Jack's interest. Robby gets home from a shift one evening to find Jack stirring a stew pot with one hand and with the other holding up the book while he reads intently.

"Hey," Robby says as he drops his keys in the bowl by the door and shucks off his shoes.

"Darcy is a punk," Jack says, and it kind of goes from there.

Robby has a vague sense of the book's story-line because he sat through that one movie version of it when he was still with Janey. "Oh, it's really not good as an adaptation," she said, reaching for another tissue, "but it does make me misty. Hands!" For Jack, though, it's all new and he revels in it. He says "Shh!" if Robby tries to interrupt him before the end of a chapter, and one night Robby is brushing his teeth in the bathroom and jumps a mile when Jack shouts, "Wickham did what? She's a fucking kid! Jesus Christ."

When he gets near the end, Jack holes up in bed to finish it all in one go. He's got the book, the notebook where he scribbles down things to bring up at the book club meeting, and a large cup of coffee. He's wearing a faded old band t-shirt, he's got his glasses on, and his curls are all askew from where he keeps tugging at them. Robby is pretty fucking fond of him.

Robby sits next to him, laptop propped up against his knees and working through a backlog of admin paperwork. Every so often, he lets himself look over at Jack's profile as a reward. Jack caught up in something is always a beautiful sight.

After a while, Robby decides he needs a refill on his coffee. "You want one too?"

"Wait, what the fuck, Darcy was at Lydia's wedding?" Jack hisses in response, "And it was a secret? What?"

"I'll bring you another coffee," Robby says.

Robby makes them both coffees and sandwiches, and when he carries the tray into the bedroom, Jack looks up at him wide-eyed and says, "What the fuck is Lady Catherine doing at Longbourn?"

"You're going to have to find out and tell me," Robby says, and that's very much what happens. He gets a fits-and-starts recounting of the denouement of Pride and Prejudice that culminates in Jack doing a fist pump and saying, "Yes! That's what I'm talking about!"