scrap #1
i’m almost certainly never going to go any further with these, so here they are. feel free to add on.
The press of warm bodies, and the scent of beer and cloying sweet coolers surrounding him, and the music so loud it’s almost as if his heart has adjusted to its beat, should be enough to send him up to the Reading Room for some air or even to bed. But instead Jack’s here, in the living room, condensation from a can of beer running down his hand, talking to Bittle. Somehow the rest feels far enough away that it doesn’t matter.
“Why did you take so long to come to college?” he asks.
Jack knows all about Wicks’ favourite songs and about Ollie’s brief foray into cheerleading back in the tenth grade, and any number of other things but Bittle -- well. He would be the first to admit he didn’t take as much an interest as he should have into Bittle, last year and in the months since. Maybe they had too much in common, what with Bittle being the oldest in his group of frogs by nearly four years, and then of course gay thing, which no one at all but Jack’s therapist knows about...
“Well,” Bittle says, eyes unfocused and staring ahead, “Mama got sick a few months before I was supposed to move away and then we needed me to work. And then when eventually she got better I suppose I just got comfortable.”
Bittle’s mouth is blooming red where he’s bitten it.
“What made you decide to leave, then?”
“I got a message,” Bittle says, “from someone I’d met at an NCAA prospect camp my last year of high school. Asking me what I had been up to, what I was doing. And I thought, you know, what am I doing?”
“I’m,” Jack says. He looks down into brown eyes and smiles. “I’m. I’m glad you came here.”
“Yeah, Jack,” Bittle says, and he smiles back, “I am too.”
“Hey Bits,” someone says, close enough to be heard above the music.
“Oh,” Bittle says.
Jack looks up to see, though he can’t quite believe it --
“Didja miss me?”
Kent Parson.
