#this drabble is brought to you by Bobby Zimmermann's baby face in the last update

[parvuls]

Eric has been sitting next to Jack Zimmermann for two and a half months before he hears him utter more than three words in a row.

“Can you meet in the library? Tomorrow morning,” his voice is quiet, bland, and his eyes are trained on the paper detailing the assignment outline Mr. Liddell handed out. Eric doesn’t think they’ve ever actually made eye contact, even though they’ve been sharing a desk since the semester started. “I have practice after school.”

“Uh – yeah, yeah, sure,” Eric stammers, nervously fiddling with his own assignment paper, folding the edges inwards and then smoothing them out. Meeting in the morning means he’s going to have to ask Coach to leave the house even earlier than usual, but he’d rather fail the whole class than explicitly remind senior ice-hockey captain Jack Zimmermann that he doesn’t have a driving license yet. Or a car he can drive to school. 

“Okay,” Jack says, but his eyebrows draw together and his mouth pinches in that way that always makes Eric shrink away in alarm. He looks vaguely angry, and since Eric can’t think of a single thing he could’ve done to inspire that, he tentatively assumes Jack isn’t angry at him. Which leaves –

“I’m actually, uh, real good at these – stuff,” Eric says hesitantly, in case Jack’s anger stems from worrying about his final grade in Family and Consumer Science. Jack doesn’t immediately go for the obvious jab (“‘Course you are, Bittle, you’ve always been into all that girly shit, huh?”), so Eric gathers his courage and elaborates, “Well – well, maybe not the personal finance stuff, but the cooking and the sewing. Um.”

He’s opening himself up to a world of pain, here, considering that he’s good at cooking because he spends most of his free time in the kitchen with his mother and he’s good at sewing because up until a few years ago he still sewed the sequins onto his leotards. But either Jack doesn’t care enough to make fun of him, or doesn’t think class is the best time for it. 

“Right,” is Jack’s response. He doesn’t seem inclined to say more, so Eric swallows the flood of words clawing up his throat and grips the edge of the desk to ground himself. There’s a faded J+M engraved in the metal. He traces it with a blunt fingernail while Mr. Liddell drones on in the background.

Class is dismissed with a rush of chairs scraping and voices rising and school bags’ zippers opening. Eric stuffs his creased assignment paper into his bag and stands up, half-heartedly wishing he was brave or cool enough to skip school. He has calculus next period. Facing Coach’s wrath might actually be a better fate than that. 

“I’m alright with finances.”

It takes Eric a very long moment to realize who is speaking, and who they’re speaking to. He turns around, almost certain he’s misheard, and blinks at Jack Zimmermann, who is shoving his water bottle into his bag and folding the assignment paper into weirdly even halves before slipping it in as well.

“So. We can divide the work,” Jack finishes, confirming that he was in fact talking to Eric. 

He looks up then, and for what is certainly the first time, their eyes meet. Jack offers a stilted nod, shoulders his bag, and disappears into the sea of other students jostling out toward the halls.

His eyes are such a striking shade of blue. Eric’s not sure how he could have possibly missed that until now.