#jtnm

nm x jt

The lights of the house opposite are warm postage stamps in the dark. The bulb out here on the porch broke months ago and nobody got around to changing it, so the outline of Nolan’s face is hazy. They’re back-lit, at least, by the lights of the house leaking through the blinds; Phil and Grano in the living room watching a hockey game. Nolan’s posted herself up on the railing, swigging on a beer, while Jacob sits on the chair they dragged out from the kitchen.

She immediately regrets the question she asked. She would never usually pry, but they’ve been out here a while and Jacob’s usual self-control has been loosened by the alcohol and the soupy unseasonable warmth of the early spring evening. Nolan’s in cut off jeans shorts and a shirt she must have cropped herself, jagged hem and roughly scooped out deep arm holes. Jacob’s eyes keep catching through the dark on the way the loose material moves when she does; the flashes of warm skin dipping in and out of shadow as she talks. 

Nolan’s bark of laughter echoes down the quiet street. 

“I mean, sure, the intention bothers me, when they’re flinging it around on the ice like that. But the word? No.”

She doesn’t sound offended—just amused at Jacob’s question. Jacob feels like a kid, trying to navigate awkward conversations with her parents again after her first sex-ed lesson at school. Only they never covered any of this.

She wishes they had. 

“It doesn’t?”

Jacob sees the way Nolan smiles—wide and sharp. If she didn’t know better, she’d call it predatory.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she says, after another swallow of beer, shaking out her shaggy hair. Jacob watches her throat flex. “They need to keep it out of their mouths. It’s not theirs, and they’re fucking homophobes. But I’m not afraid of using it. I’m a dyke. Dykiest dyke around. They’re not wrong. Just don’t appreciate the sentiment, you know?”

When Jacob struggles to think of a good reply, Nolan jumps in again. “You’ve wanted to ask me that for a while, haven’t you?”

Jacob flushes at the teasing in her voice. There are a lot of things she’s been thinking about for a while now.

---

kj x nb

Kent has her phone propped up against the cereal box. 

Owen’s already in the gym in Buffalo, talking to Kent from the exercise bike. She’s got Kent in the cupholder. Kent would prefer to have this conversation not in public, but she’s got a limited time window before practice and a pressing issue to discuss. 

“It happened again,” she announces, when Owen’s stopped fucking around with her headphones and is actually paying attention. 

“Again? I thought you said it was a fluke? 

“Well it fucking wasn’t, I guess.”

Owen reaches up to tighten her fluffy ponytail—her hair always looks perfect, even mid-workout. Of course. “Like. The same thing?” she asks, sounding curious. “Or, like—different?”

“Worse,” Kent huffs. “It was—Jesus it was like something out of those 80s romance books you’re always reading. The ones with the fucking princesses.”

“Duchesses,” Owen corrects, even as she blushes nearly scarlet. Kent found her secret stash of them the first year of college and read one out of curiosity. Lots of virgins being devirginized in castles and ballrooms and dimly lit libraries. And the guy was always some respectful but also dirty, built dude who was god’s gift to sex, apparently. Kent must have internalized that book harder than she first thought. 

“Sometimes countesses, and—” Owen continues, but Kent cuts her off. 

“Yeah, one of those. Whatever. It was a whole thing.”

Kent woke up covered in sweat, with her hand creeping towards her pajama waistband, and a giddy, unbalanced feeling that stopped her from going back to sleep for hours. 

“Do you think it means anything?”

Owen’s eyes are wide. Kent would love to be able to scoff and say no, but there’s a reason she’s having this conversation over breakfast. She’s a little panicked, maybe.

“I wish he’d stop fucking wandering around shirtless all the time,” she says instead. “Maybe that would help. Like. So I don’t have the visuals.”

“You play hockey together. I don’t think that’s possible,” Owen supplies, just as Kent’s phone buzzes with a text. Nick’s outside to drive her to practice. 

“I gotta go,” she tells Owen, jamming her thumb on the end call button unceremoniously. 

Nick’s waiting on the drive for her. When she slips in beside him, he hands her an iced coffee he bought on the way over, Her heated seat is already on. Nick’s shoulders look great in the hoodie he’s wearing. 

“Good morning,” he says, smiling at her—like he always does. 

Kent groans.

---

rm x nm

When Rutger had a boyfriend, she had plans for Spring Break. Now Rutger has no boyfriend, and therefore—no plans for Spring Break. It feels kind of shitty, watching all her friends packing their bags to catch flights or go back home (and even shittier to watch Johnny pack her bags to go home with Luca) but now Rutger’s stuck in Ann Arbor for the week. Her parents are away, even if she did want to go back to Nebraska—which she doesn’t—and Braeden already canceled the air bnb and the flights. So. She’s stuck.

She mopes around the first evening, watching early 2000s romcoms in her room under a blanket and letting herself cry at all the swooping, romantic endings. On the second evening, Moyle texts her. 

Heard u were still around So am I Free if u need a friend to hang

When she texts back (immediately) yes, she expects to go hang at the Senior House, or meet him for dinner at Chipotle or something. Instead, Nolan pitches up at her dorm room door an hour later, poking around at her stuff—her pink bed sheets and the mini gallery wall she now needs to rearrange. There are big gaps where all the pictures of Braeden used to be.

“Cute, Roger,” he says, picking up one of the ornaments from her shelf and inspecting it. It’s a little bottle of sand from the vacation she took with Braeden last summer. Crap. She probably needs to trash that too. There’s a little label around the neck. Rutger sees Nolan read the mushy message she remembers neatly writing out, and then slowly put it back down. She expects a comment, but he doesn’t make one. 

It’s kind of awkward, actually. Nolan feels way too big for her tiny dorm room. And it’s not like there’s much to do, other than continue her movie marathon from before. 

When she says so, mostly joking, Nolan shrugs. “Fine by me.”

Which is how she ends up watching How to Lose A Guy in 10 Days, with Nolan pressed up next to her on her narrow loft bed, her laptop balanced on both of their legs. It’s a good job Rutger’s seen the movie a hundred times already, because she absolutely isn’t paying attention. 

Halfway through, Nolan twists his head towards her.

“Roger. Are you watching this?”

“Uhm. Not really?” she admits. 

Nolan slams the lid of her laptop. “Great.”

She squeaks when he rolls towards her and presses her back into her mattress. Rutger blinks up at him, eyes wide. “Nolan?”

“Jesus Christ, this is a really bad idea,” he says, mostly to himself.

Beside her, Nolan’s face down in her pillow. There’s a patch of unmistakable drool on the fabric, his face slack and stupid in sleep. His left arm is still thrown out at an angle, where Jacob had to wriggle out from underneath him to sit up. The faint glow of her phone screen slides over the curves of his shoulder, his rounded bicep, reaching out for her—creating a valley out of the deep groove of his spine, before the line of the sheet pushed down to his waist breaks it up.

She drags her eyes away and back to the email, lifting her thumb up to worry at the hangnail she’s picked at already today. Yesterday. 

“Fuck.”

Her whisper sounds loud in her room; the quiet of the house.

The Canucks are pushing for meetings—want to send reps down to talk to her. They’re getting serious about it, too.

“I don’t know what to do.”

She doesn’t mean to say it out loud, but there’s a tight feeling in her chest, and it escapes anyway, forced out like a bubble bursting, even louder than her whisper from before.

Nolan stirs, shifting under the sheet. Jacob holds very still, but it’s no use. His stupid long eyelashes are flickering, and the even pattern of his breathing stutters. Jacob watches him resurface, waiting until he opens his eyes and squints at her, pulling away from the glare of her phone a half second later, screwing up his face about it.

“Jeez Truss, turn down your fucking brightness,” he grumbles, pressing the heel of his palm into his eye and rubbing. “What time is it?”

Jacob checks. “3:32am.”

Nolan drops his hand, furrowed eyebrows sliding into concern. “Can’t sleep?”

Jacob lets her phone fall to the covers and shakes her head. “No.”

Nolan pauses. Jacob can feel him scanning her face. She meets his eyes and shrugs, small and jerky.

“You don’t have to make a decision now, you know,” he says slowly, because of course he knows why she’s awake and worrying. His voice is still sandpaper rough with sleep. He props his head up on his palm to look up at her, gaze heavy, settling over her shoulders. It makes her bedroom feel small and close and yet Jacob still wants to shiver.

“I know that,” she replies.

Nolan blinks, slow and calm, before he smiles. “I know I make it look easy, and you’re worried you could never live up to my prowess, but you’d make a great baby wolve wrangler. Obviously.”

Jacob snorts. “Yeah right. You’d be dead without me. You always forget to do the headcount. You nearly left Brinds and Shea in that Applebee’s bathroom.”

Nolan’s laugh is husky. “And they would have deserved it. Fuckin’ Applebee’s. Pick somewhere better to get off boys.”

“I still don’t believe that, by the way.”

“I’ve seen some shit, Truscott. If you want the C you gotta be prepared. These kids are a mess.”

He waggles his eyebrows, joking, but Jacob’s smile slips off her face. She wants the C. She wants the degree she always thought she’d end up getting anyway, because she was never sure there was going to be another option. And now—

She doesn’t know what she wants anymore.

Nolan spots the way it throws her off, and rolls closer to her, wrapping his palm over her thigh, over the covers, right under the hem of her sleep shorts. She doesn’t know how he can tell exactly where to touch her, but the warmth of his hand presses through the material, making her want to squirm.

He tugs, dragging her down until she’s flat against the bed again, and the sheets are hopelessly rucked up. Her phone clatters onto the floor and Jacob winces but Nolan doesn’t even pause.

“Since we’re awake,” he says, voice lilting.

“Are you trying to distract me with sex.”

“No trying about it.”

He kicks the sheets down further until they’re both free. The room’s cool but Nolan, as always, is running warm, and when he rolls on top of her, propped on his elbows, Jacob can feel the heat radiating from his bare chest. She traces her hands over his shoulders, then down, before tilting her face up, giving in with a smile he’s coaxed out of her.

“Go on, then.”

Nolan grins before he kisses her; long and hot, a hazy middle of the night kiss that feels like it might go on forever, the rub of his scruff scraping pleasantly against her chin. He pushes at the waistband of her shorts and drags his thumb against where she’s already wet, and Jacob whines and opens her legs wider. 

They don’t fuck like this very often, actually. Face to face, pressed close enough to keep kissing through it, even if they’re mostly just breathing into each other’s mouths.

The slats of the bed squeak, and Jacob can’t keep quiet when she comes, burying her face in Nolan’s neck as he groans right after.

Jay gives them a look in the kitchen the next morning. “4am,” he says flatly.

“You should talk to coach if you’re having problems with insomnia, J-Bone,” Nolan says brightly, as he reaches for a mug out of the cupboard. “Get some help.”

Jay flips him off.

Jacob smiles into her coffee.

Repercussion firstly being the fact that Jacob’s still here, when everyone else peeled off ages ago, and secondly, the headache Nolan’s going to wake up with and complain about tomorrow morning.

He’s still nursing a beer, unwilling to admit defeat. Gently, Jacob tugs it out of his fingers, across the table top.

“Alright, enough.”

“Baby, if you wanted me to buy you another drink you should have just said,” Nolan slurs.

Jacob rolls her eyes and sets the bottle aside, out of his reach. “Time to go.”

“You taking me home?” He looks around for a crowd that are no longer there, and then acts up for them anyway, undeterred. “Boys, I think I’ve pulled!”

He’s trying to make her laugh. As usual, he succeeds, but Jaocb doesn’t let it linger for long, before she’s hauling Nolan out of his seat and shepherding him towards the door. Nolan inisists on walking home with his arm around her shoulder. If she’s holding up some of his weight--well, that’s just a bonus.

The other seniors have locked the door behind them, the assholes, so Jacob has to take the key out of Nolan’s fumbling fingers and open it herself. Nolan flattens himself against her back while she struggles in the dark. His hands roam up and down her slides, slipping under her coat and round her middle, squeezing her hips. His breath trickles hot down her collar.

“Easy,” she mutters, when Nolan starts pulling at her hair, trying to drag it aside. “Moyle, back off a second and let us get inside.”

Nolan ignores her. The door gives way and opens, springing free from the latch when Jacob wriggles it just right, and they both tumble through. Nolan has her up against the wall in a second, kissing sloppily across her collarbone and up her neck. She has to fist a hand in his hair and yank--hard--to make him stop.

“Nolan--we are not having sex right now. You are going to bed.”

Nolan blinks at her---big dark eyelashes and a fallen expression. “Alone? You’re not staying?”

Jacob has a perfectly good bed, mere feet away. A bed with a clean bathroom across the hall, in a house where every room isn’t a health hazard. She should get Nolan into his and make her escape. Check on him in the morning.

“Please stay,” he adds.

He so rarely does that--says something without it being some kind of joke, hidden behind a smile, or covered with sarcasm or--something. Nolan tugs on her shirt, like he’s trying to get her attention. 

“Truss?”

It’s enough to disarm her completely. “Alright,” she says, pushing them both away from the wall. “You better have something clean for me to sleep in.”