#People make me [semi truck comically long honk]. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

stufftippywrote · 7 years

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rescued

"This is not good. Oh, oh Lord, this is not good at all."

Bitty peers through the windshield. The snow is falling in curtains now, thick sheets of white that drift down heavy and soft onto the deserted highway. He runs his wipers a few more times, clears the view, then watches as the snow repaints it dot by frigid dot.

He should have known better than to think he could drive up to Massachusetts with a storm approaching. He should have canceled the trip, postponed it, made other plans. But the promise of a real white Christmas had sounded so intriguing, and Larissa had begged him to make the trip.

"You'll like Samwell," she'd told him. "It's pretty sweet." Which, from Larissa, was the equivalent of singing its praises from the rooftops. And the pictures she sent were so nice -- long flowing river, pond, green spaces on the local college campus coated with a dusting of snow.

What he wouldn't give for a dusting now! But no, now, he's stopped by the side of the highway, Samwell a mere two miles away per the last sign he passed, his own fog lamps the only glare in the sea of white outside.

"Two miles!" Bitty tells the car, empty but for his suitcase and Senor Bun in the passenger seat. "Might as well be a thousand light years. We'll starve to death here, Bun, you and me. Or freeze to death, if the heat gives out first."

He's about to launch into another chapter of the solioquiy when lights appear, dim, in the rearview mirror. Oh, God, it's another car. Another car! He could be saved. Bitty puts on his emergencies. He flashes his brights off and on. He honks his horn, as the lights approach, hoping that whoever it is has at the very least a cell phone that's not hopelessly out of juice.

Whatever's coming toward him is bigger than a car. The back window may be coated with snow, but Bitty can see that much. Maybe it's a truck. Truck drivers are nice, right? Surely a truck driver will take pity on him and scoop him up no out of here.

No. It's not a truck. That scraping as it approaches... oh, thank heavens. It's a snowplow.

It's a snowplow, and it's slowing to a stop. It's stopped. Bitty's saved. Thank the snow gods.

A thud as a door shuts. and a figure rounds the front end of the plow to come knock on his window. Bitty hears a muffled shout. "Hello?"

Bitty rolls down the window a crack. Snow starts filtering in through his window like errant powdered sugar. He ignores it and fixes his gaze on the man outside -- what he can see of him, right now, which is just a wool hat and a pair of eyes.

Nice eyes, though. Blue eyes, maybe?

"Come on," says the stranger.

Bitty was expecting something else. "What?"

"Come on. You're not driving anywhere tonight." And dang it, he's right, Bitty's certainly in no position to move this car an inch, and he shouldn't plan on sleeping here if he can help it. He'll have to come back -- Larissa will have to drive him back -- and he'll have to recover his car tomorrow, after the snow stops.

Bitty grabs his suitcase and braces for the influx of snow to the face as he opens the driver's side door. It's a long, cold, and wet slog across the ten feet of space between him and the passenger side door of the snowplow's cab, and by the time he climbs all the way up there, his socks are soggy even through his boots, and his fingers are nearly numb.

He looks around. The cab is a generous space; behind the two seats, there's a whole host of what Bitty can only imagine is emergency equipment. On the dashboard, illuminated by the light above, there's a picture of a handsome-looking couple with a frankly not-so-cute baby boy between them. Hanging from the rear view mirror is a pair of plastic figures of ice skates.

His rescuer climbs into the driver's seat. Bitty lets himself relax. "Oh, my goodness, thank you so much," he says. "I didn't know if I was going to die out there, just freeze right into a popsicle overnight."

"Where are you headed?" The stranger pulls the scarf back from his face. Bitty takes a good look at him. And such a good look it is. The man's just downright handsome. Sharp cheekbones, chiseled jaw, like he climbed right on out of a superhero comic strip to rescue Bitty from the elements. Despite the chill of his wet clothing, Bitty feels a bit flushed.

"Samwell," he answers. "Isn't that just ridiculous? I'm driving all the way from Georgia and two miles short of my destination, I end up at the side of the road. With my phone drained, no less, and I've never been up this way before! Honestly, I should know better--" At that point, Bitty becomes acutely aware of his own babble. He falls silent with a blush.

"That's quite a road trip," his rescuer says as he eases the plow into motion. "I'm Jack."

"Jack." It's even a superhero name. Bitty's cheeks stay hot. "I'm. Bittle. Eric Bittle."

"Bittle." Jack gives him a bit of a smile, lips just turned up. "That's an interesting name."

"Interesting? It's a perfectly good name." Bitty is immediately ready to defend his Southern pedigree. "It doesn't--" And then he remembers his own nickname. "Does this have anything to do with my height?"

"Your height?" And oh no, now he's gone and called attention to it. Bitty sits up just as tall as he can in the passenger side seat.

"I-- never mind." Bitty turns to peer out the window, watching the white-covered husk that is his car disappear slowly behind them. "Anyway. If you could drop me off at a hotel?"

"I can take you into town." Jack's words are low and easy. "Where were you headed?"

"My friend's house." Bitty fumbles in his pocket for the address. "Well, she's an online friend. We're meeting for the first time, face to face, you know."

"Oh. So like a Tinder date? Is that what it's called?" Jack looks briefly confused that such a thing even exists.

Bitty sputters. "No! She's... I..." Well, he's in Massachusetts now, isn't he? He can say it. "I'm gay." And oh goodness, he just up and said it. Every time Bitty thinks he can't become any more flustered, he proves himself wrong.

"Oh." Jack glances at him briefly, but doesn't give any further response.

Bitty hastens to explain himself anyway. "It's just that I can't really be gay where I'm from. But people online are a lot more understanding. So she's been a friend. And she invited me to come up for Christmas. So I thought I'd go. That's all."

Jack's eyes are kind. "That's nice."

There's a bit of silence. The CB radio wedged in near the gear shift crackles. Bitty glances at Jack, wondering what drives any man to willingly go out in a storm like this. Lord knows if he lived up here, Bitty would be huddled inside with hot chocolate if he had any say in the matter. But Jack -- Jack really is a kind of superhero, Bitty thinks. A handsome hero that's rescued him from an icy death. That's downright romantic.

The exit for Samwell comes up, and Jack eases the plow into the right-hand lane. "What's your friend's address?" he asks. Bitty reads it out loud. Jack nods. "I know the street."

"You have an accent," Bitty ventures.

Jack breaks into a laugh. "I have an accent?"

"Well, okay, I know that is pot-and-kettle territory, but--"

"No, it's okay." Jack's smile is dizzying, his profile sharp as a streetlight illuminates him with diffuse orange light. "I'm from up north. Montreal."

"Oh." Bitty gestures up toward the rear-view mirror. "That explains the hockey skates."

Jack glances at him again, this time a little more curiously. "You know they're hockey skates?"

"Of course! I know my skates."

"I didn't think they had ice skates in Georgia."

Is he making fun? Bitty bristles. "I'll have you know that junior regional figure skating champions can indeed be born and bred in Georgia, and you happen to be sitting next to one." Jack's lips twitch, and Bitty's immediately self-conscious. "Well. All right, that was a decade ago. Now I coach the next generation."

"You're a skating coach?" Jack turns a corner.

"Mm-hm. Do you skate?" Bitty glances at the skates again. "I suppose you play hockey."

"Sometimes," Jack says. He peers through the windshield. "This looks like the address."

"Oh." Bitty looks out the window. It's a nice house, if a bit dilapidated, but more importantly... "It's all dark."

Jack nods. "The power's out. Looks like it's the whole block."

And oh gosh, he's right, aside from a few dimly orange streetlamps the entire block is dark. Images dance through Bitty's head. Poor Larissa, stuck in the pitch black, freezing to death, because who could survive a night this cold and snowy? Bitty turns to Jack with hands clasped. "Oh, no. She'll be trapped in there! What do we do?"

Jack gestures toward the back seat of the cab. "I have a generator. If we can shovel our way in, we can get her set up with it for the night."

"Oh!" Bitty lights up, but a moment later he's crestfallen again. "But you have to go plow streets, don't you? You can't take the time to shovel out one person's yard." Jack catches his gaze. "Bittle," he says. "I do this job to help people. You and your friend count."

Bitty's dizzy for a moment. Jack's a presence like hot chocolate on a winter's day. Warm, strong, comforting. Sweet. Bitty wants to drown in him. If only he weren't just making a road trip from down south. If only he had the luxury of being local. Imagine living here, being able to be himself. Meet an attractive man and actually entertain the idea of getting to know him better. Yes. Bitty wishes that was his life.

Several minutes later, though, he's ready to take it all back. Who in the hell would want to deal with this all the time?

"Put your back into it!" Jack hollers from a few paces away. He's working tirelessly to clear Larissa's front walkway, bending his legs and heaving shovelful after shovelful to his left. Bitty follows, and tries to do his part, but dear Lord, snow is heavy!

"Look," Bitty hollers back at him, "just because you're the size of a semi..." and, from a few steps back, Bitty's got a view of Jack's rear that bears up that comparison. That is definitely the ass of a hockey player. He shouldn't be staring, but how can he help it?

"No excuse. Come on." Jack bends his knees and takes a heaping scoop out of the walkway. Bitty tries to ape his movements, but it's still not easy. His fingers and toes are numbing, and even though the snow that's still floating down is pretty, it's getting into his face and making it hard to see. He wipes his eyes and cheek with one sleeve of his parka and gets back at it.

There's a kind of serenity out here, even though Bitty's now soaked from both sweat and snow. The scrape of the shovels against the snow is a soft, irregular percussion to a night that's otherwise amost unnaturally quiet. Bitty is used to Georgia nights, with the buzzing of mosquitoes and the chirps of crickets backing up the sounds of distant traffic on the freeway. But here, with the streets abandoned and with the only motion the slow steady rush of snowfall, Bitty feels like he and Jack are lone explorers in a foreign world. Methodically, stubbornly, clearing away the hush of an alien landscape to uncover something familiar. Together.

Warmth in his belly rising at the image, Bitty glances up at Jack--

--and immediately gets pelted in the face with a clump of snow.

Any thoughts of warmth vanish. Bitty shakes it off and stares now simply in incredulity at Jack, who has this tiny, impish smile on his face that says he's far too pleased with himself.

The smile is cute enough to melt over, but Bitty tries to summon up some rage anyhow. "Really, Jack? A snowball fight? Now?"

"Is there a better time?"

Bitty does his best to fume. "Honestly! This is serious! Lardo could be frozen solid in there for all we know."

"Not if that's her in the window," Jack says, hooking a thumb toward the house.

Bitty turns, gaping. There she is -- holding a candle in one hand and waving with the other -- there's Larissa! His heart leaps, and he grins and waves back. They've been exchanging emails and Skype sessions for so long, and now they're just a few scoops of shoveled snow away from meeting in person. Jubilantly, Bitty turns back to clearing the path.

"Did you call her Lardo?" Jack asks over his shoulder.

"Oh!" Bitty laughs. "Screen names, you know. She's Larissa, but her name online is Lardo. Mine is Bitty."

"Screen names, huh?" Jack leans on his shovel, resting. "But 'Bitty' is nice. I like that."

His smile is sweet and fond. Something leaps in Bitty's chest, and he has to swallow it down. He takes a step toward Jack, boots scuffing against the newly cleared walkway. "Sometimes people even call me Bits," he volunteers.

"I like that even better," Jack says.

A tiny dot of falling snow finds a perch right on the tip of Bitty's nose. Jack lifts a gloved hand and brushes it off. The night is very still.

"Bits!"

The door bursts open. Lardo, shivering in a sweater but with a face full of delight, opens her arms wide. Whatever moment had been building with Jack is gone, but here's a new moment ready to be made, and Bitty runs up the steps to the porch to give Lardo the biggest, wettest hug of her life.

"Jeez, you're soaked," Lardo declares, holding Bitty at arm's length. "Did you pull up in that plow?"

"Oh, my God!" Bitty goes into animated storytelling mode."My car is still sitting somewhere on 95, but Jack here rescued me and..." He gestures in the direction of where Jack was a few seconds ago, but he's absent. Another look up the path clears that up. "Oh, he's prolly gettin' the generator. He said he'd set you up with it for the night so you wouldn't freeze to death."

"Pff. There's heat in the house. So get inside." She ushers him in through the front door, then closes it behind them. "Gimme your coat."

"But Jack--"

Lardo fixes him with an are you stupid? look. "I'm not leaving the door open for the heat to escape." She extends her hand again, and this time Bitty shrugs off his parka and offers it to her, taking stock of the house around him as he does. It's not a bad little house, and thank goodness, it is warm, warm, warm. Through an open doorway, Bitty spies a comfortable-looking couch suffounded by lit candles. He wants to collapse right onto it and pass out.

But by then, Jack's knocking on the front door. Lardo lets him in, closes the door. "Hi," she says. "You're Jack."

"Uh. Yes." There's a note of confusion in Jack's voice.

"Thanks for shoveling. And for that." She gestures at the generator Jack has in hand. "I'm Larissa."

"Lardo, I hear." Jack's eyes dance in the light of the candles lining the entryway.

Lardo grins. "Yep."

"Nice." Jack nods.

And Bitty has never seen two people instantly become friends before, but there's a first time for everything.

Lardo takes Jack's coat, then leads him down a darkened hallway toward the basement. Bitty makes a beeline for the couch. Settling down into it, with candles flickering all around, he feels something inside him relax and unspool. He made it. No more freezing or shivering or wondering when the snow is going to stop. He's here.

A motor starts somewhere in the depths of the house, and a moment later, the lights come on all at once. Bitty hears Lardo and Jack coming back up the stairs. "Sit down," Lardo admonishes Jack, "I'm putting on hot water for tea or cocoa. Or whatever."

Jack appears in the doorway, ambles over to the couch. Without his coat on, Bitty can see better the shape of his body, the lean sprawl of his limbs. His legs stretch out forever in front of him as he leans back on the couch, tipping his head so his chin juts toward the ceiling. He makes a soft noise of contentment, and Bitty's imagination goes everywhere with that noise.

"Thanks for helping us out," Bitty says gently.

Jack tilts his head toward him. "No problem." He pauses. "You did a good job, too. For someone who's never shoveled snow before."

"And I'm gonna feel it in the morning." Bitty stretches out, raising his arms over his head, then extending them wide.

And come to think of it, this pose is actually good for something.

"C'mon," he tells Jack, a tad reproachfully.

"Huh?"

"You helped me get here," Bitty explains. "I have to at least hug you."

Jack's eyebrows shoot up. "At least?"

"Well." Bitty turns red. "Anyway, I have to hug you."

Jack eases closer on the couch. His expression is quizzical for an instant, but then it relaxes, and he stretches out his arms to pull Bitty close.

Oh. Goodness. This is ... a lot of warmth, and a lot of man, and Bitty's overwhelmed. He's dreamed about, fantasized about something like this more often than he can count, but he's never had it, and having it might just kill him. Oh, he wants this closeness, he wants this warmth, for longer than a moment. Longer than a night. Longer than a Christmas vacation up north can allow him. But if this is what he gets, he'll take it. He lets his head bob aginst Jack's chest, curls his fingers around the curve of Jack's shoulder, and sighs.

It's maybe another minute before he realizes Jack isn't pulling away. That Jack's hand on his waist is cinched as tight as Bitty's own hands are pressed to Jack's sweater. Full of questions, unable to come up with the words to any of them, he lets Jack guide him gently into a comfortable sitting embrace against the couch cushions, his weight on Jack's chest, Jack's arm bent posessively around his shoulders.

It's so warm. So good. Bitty has to remember to breathe.

"So," Jack says in a soft voice. "I probably have to go back and plow some more tonight."

Disappointment sinks like a cold stone in Bitty's gut. "Yeah."

"But I have to come back to pick up my generator when the power goes back on."

"Oh." That sounds like an opening, but Bitty can't quite find the words to fill it.

Jack's arm is tense around Bitty's shoulder, and his voice is halting. "I could ... take you back to pick up your car."

Bitty's heart does a few funny things at once. It leaps, because Jack's being kind to him (and stil holding him, Jack's still holding him!), but it also sinks, because Lardo's got her own car and can probably take care of that, so it wouldn't be polite to make Jack go out of his way. The up-and-down motion is making Bitty slightly queasy. "Um," he says, "Well, while I'm in town...."

"And since you're in town--" Jack says at the same time.

They laugh. Jack's chuckle, a delicious low rumble, vibrates into Bitty's body. He straightens up a bit, enough to look at Jack's face.

Oh, goodness. He's so close. A whisper away. Bitty wants to kiss him more than anything else in the world right now. He averts his eyes, knowing he's flushed, heart pounding. "You first," he says shyly.

"I thought..." Jack's picking his words carefully, thinking about them. "Since you're not from here... you might like. Well. Samwell's a nice town."

Dots of color appear in Jack's cheeks. Bitty stares. It dawns on him, then, and it's not like he didn't suspect it before, but now it's clear. Bitty's heart, which has been so unruly over the past few minutes, now feels like it's going to burst.

"And," Jack goes on, still cautious, "I could show you around. Although. I suppose your friend Lardo's going to do that. Um."

Bitty grabs his hand. "Jack," he says with real feeling, "I would love for you to show me around Samwell."

Jack lights up. "Yeah?"

"Yes, sir, Mr. ... what did you say your last name was?"

"Zimmermann."

"Zimmermann!" Bitty laughs. "And here you thought Bittle was a funny last name. That works, though. Jack Zimmermann. It sounds like the name of a celebrity. An athlete, maybe! You could be a--"

And he never gets to finish that sentence, because Jack is kissing him.

It's all the magic of a snowfall and then some. Jack's lips on his like a gift. The candles around them. The cold brush of Jack's nose, the warmth of his chest when Bitty takes hold of the front of his sweater. Jack raises a hand to cup Bitty's cheek. Bitty gasps into the kiss.

Jack pulls back at the noise. "I ... sorry, I shouldn't have."

"Yes, Mr. Zimmermann," Bitty murmurs, still feeling the honey tingle on his lips. "Yes, you definitely should have."

He presses in close to Jack again, dares to lean up and dart a kiss onto his mouth. Jack glows. "I'll come back tomorrow, then?"

"Tomorrow." Bitty murmurs. "Okay."

"Pff."

They both turn. Lardo's standing in the doorway, arms crossed over her chest. Her smile is wicked. "Don't let me interrupt you."

"You're--" Bitty extricates himself from Jack's embrace in a hurry. "You're not interrupting anything! It's just... it's just sometimes you get to shoveling snow with a guy, and one thing leads to another and--"

"Chyeah. I see." Lardo walks over to the couch and pats Bitty's head like he's a puppy. "You're good, Bits. Come into the kitchen when you're ready for cocoa, kay?" She winks and leaves the room, humming.

Bitty looks at Jack sheepishly. "I s'pose we ought to get in there. I did drive up all this way to meet her."

"Of course. And I should go." Jack stands. "I ... it was nice to meet you."

Bitty snorts out a laugh. "Nice to meet me, you just kissed me, dear Lord, Jack Zimmermann!"

"I--" Jack fumbles, then he lets out a laugh of his own. "I guess I did."

"And you owe me one more before you go. Now get your coat back on, Mr. Zimmermann, don't think you're going back out there without being all wrapped up." Bitty fusses over Jack until he's got hat, scarf and gloves all back on, then walks him to the front door. This may be the craziest thing he's done in his life, driving across state lines and into snowstorms and meeting new old friends and kissing strange men. But his heart is glowing with excitement, and he is beyond ready for whatever tomorrow brings. After a change of socks and a night's sleep, that is.

Jack gives him that promised second kiss at the door. Bitty watches, fingers on his lips, as Jack traipses back down the path toward his snowplow. Then he shuts the door and hurries toward the kitchen to tell Lardo absolutely everything.

#stultiloquentia #zimbits #jack x bitty #bitty x jack #stuff tippy wrote #check please #omgcp #cp for ts

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