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When Bitty had been smaller—okay, younger, because honestly, he hadn’t grown in years—he’d asked questions. Too many questions, his dad had told him.
“Just settle down and learn as you go,” he’d advised a seven-year-old Bitty who’d wanted to know how far away the sun was. “Ain’t no one gonna wanna answer that many questions, kid.”
That had seemed impractical. Bitty wanted to know about the sun right now, because later on he’d want to know about the moon, and then before bed he’d want to learn about the trees, and then he’d want to learn about why his mouse wasn’t allowed to eat meat. And, well, how was he supposed to learn what vegetarian meant if he wasn’t allowed to ask?
His mom always talked about how big the world was, and Bitty had wanted to know everything about every inch of the whole planet. There would never be enough time to learn it all if he just settled down and learned as he went.
His mom bought him a library card that summer, saying, “go on and let the books teach it to you, Dicky,” whenever he asked a question after that.
There was a lot that he learned from the library card. Owls sleep during the day, dogs don’t like hugs, light speed is really fast, and some fish eat other fish.
And then—oh, and then, there were the books about baking. He learned about baking, then, too, and sometimes on a really good day his mom would bake with him. Bitty noticed, sometimes, that she’d only let him bake while his dad was at work.
His dad signed him up for football when he found out.
The books had their fair share of things to say about football. Such as, knee injuries are the most common injuries among football players— especially those to the anterior or posterior cruciate ligament (ACL/PCL) and to the menisci (cartilage of the knee). Concussions make up 7.4 of all football related injuries. 1 out of 5 football players will face injury every year, as almost every move in football can result in serious injury.
And Bitty—well, Bitty got scared of football.
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Tackling wasn’t allowed for the littlies playing, so Bitty figured he’d be alright playing just so long as nobody was allowed to ram him halfway across the field. And he was fine, for a while. His dad and mom got into the games more than Bitty did, but his mom liked that he was running around and his dad liked that he was playing sports.
The older Bitty got, the more he seemed to dislike the things that his dad liked. The things that his dad liked, though, tended to be safe. Safe in the sense that the things that his dad liked—football, cars, and girls—were things that Bitty would never get teased for liking. Other things—baking, figure skating, and the word darlin’—were not popular among boys his age.
The first time that Bitty talked about figure skating was the last, because while he didn’t mind the way that the other kids looked personally offended at the thought, he wasn’t entirely fond of the bruised feeling that the lockers gave his ribs after class.
For the first time, Bitty had to agree with his dad. Some things couldn’t be learned in books—some things had to be learned from getting shoved into lockers.
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There were words that kids said about Bitty. Words that Bitty hadn’t heard before, and words that he’d never seen in books before. They were words that Bitty had to Google at the library at night, and they were words that drove shivers right down his spine.
Because he wasn’t—he didn’t like—he wasn’t like that, right? Just because the other boys thought—it didn’t mean—he didn’t—he didn’t like boys.
In the car the next day, Bitty said, “Mama, I’ve got a question,” and though she sighed, she agreed.
“Am I gay?”
His mom had spluttered, casting him the widest, most owlish eyes that Bitty had ever seen.
“What on Earth—no, Dicky, you’re not gay, why would you even think to ask?”
“That’s what the boys at school are saying,” Bitty had replied, voice growing smaller and smaller as he realized that maybe, perhaps, gay was not a good thing to be.
“Well, I’d never--,” his mom spluttered some more. “I’ll be giving the school a talking to about that. Don’t let those boys bother you, alright, Dicky? Why, I know you’ll get the prettiest little catch out there someday, and we’ll see who’s laughin’ at you then.”
There was a part of Bitty that had wanted to say, I wasn’t bothered, but another part of him was saying to shut up.
His mom told his dad, and Bitty was moved up to tackle football faster than he could blink.
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Tackle football wasn’t scary. Not until he got tackled.
The other boys seemed to love having a reason to tackle him at any given circumstance, which didn’t really surprise him anymore. His dad started coaching the team halfway through the season, and when he seemed ashamed of having to say yep, that’s my kid, the one who’s scared of the ball, Bitty wasn’t surprised either.
Sometimes, when the boys were particularly pumped with adrenaline, they’d smear insults into the tackles, and Bitty would hit the ground to the soundtrack of how’s the dirt taste, fruitcake?
“I don’t want to play football,” he had said to his parents over dinner.
His mom had looked sympathetic. His dad had looked enraged.
“Why? ‘Cause you’re scared of the ball? ‘Cause you’re scared to be around other boys?”
“You listen here, now--,” his mother had began.
“My son’s actin’ like he thinks he’s my daughter, I’m not gonna listen here,” he’d snapped, and the anger, anger, anger was making Bitty’s throat dry and his chest beat, beat, beat. “The damn boy’s actin’ like some kind of queer, Suzanne.”
That word—whatever it had been—had shut his mom up. They’d eaten dinner in silence after that.
Bitty googled the word queer later on.
He called his dad ‘Coach’ after that.
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A lot of things happened when Bitty was thirteen. The first of which being: his dad gave up. Bitty dropped out of football and neither of his parents so much as commented on the matter. Coach didn’t seem to comment a whole lot on Bitty anymore as a whole. He joined figure skating, and he felt so very young when he hid behind his mom for days afterward.
Coach didn’t say anything about it, and there seemed to be a mutual understanding that nobody outside of their family even had to know about it.
Bitty had accepted a lot of things that year. His dad saw his only son as a failure, his mom pitied him, and he may have been—he just may have been—exactly what everybody seemed scared of him being.
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When Bitty was younger, he’d wondered why boys in books never felt the same way that he did about other boys. He’d wondered why boys in books never wanted to know if other boys’ lips were soft, or if they wanted to hold hands with boys.
The older he got, the more he understood.
It was because other boys didn’t wonder what other boy’s lips felt like.
Other boys didn’t like boys.
Bitty was so, so very alone.
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When Bitty was seventeen, a girl in his maths class flirted with him. When his mother found out about her crush on him (because nothing was ever a secret in that town), she’d cooed for days on end about the sweet little belle with a crush on dicky.
When Coach found out about her, he’d looked at Bitty long and hard. It had felt like a dare, like the last test Bitty was going to get.
When Bitty was seventeen, he dated a girl from his maths class.
When Bitty was seventeen, he hooked up with a girl from his maths class in her parents car. His parents knew, of course, because Bitty was a terrible liar. They tried to act like they were exasperated with him, they really did, but Bitty could see clear as day the relief that flooded out of both of them that their son liked girls.
Bitty, on the other hand, spent the night with shaking hands, feeling like he was going to get sick if he thought too hard on it.
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Samwell college was…not Georgia.
Bitty learned that slowly, and he didn’t learn it from books. Bitty was eighteen when he realized that Georgia was just a tad slow when it came to new-age thoughts, and Bitty was eighteen when he took the time to try and learn to get over his terrible, shaky fear.
Samwell wasn’t Georgia at all, and there weren’t any parents at Samwell to scare anybody into having sex in a station wagon.
Bitty learned to love, love, love at Samwell. He could feel it pouring out of his ears—he loved baking, and he loved hockey, and he loved the Haus, and he loved Shitty’s bad jokes, and he loved being a frog.
Bitty learned to love, love, love Jack Zimmerman later on. And love, love, loving Jack Zimmerman came with learning how to love—or, at least, be okay with the fact that loving boys in those times was a hard thing to do.
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Bitty wanted very, very much to not be scared.
He wanted to be able to talk about loving Jack the same way he could talk about the girl he knew when he was seventeen. But, for whatever reason, people were fine with hearing about gross station wagon sex in a way that they weren’t fine with hearing about how Bitty really, really wanted to hold Jack’s hand.
So he started small.
“I want to hold your hand,” he said to Jack over dinner.
“Uh,” Jack replied. “Okay?”
“No,” he rested his fork on the side of his plate, teeting back and forth in his chair while he spoke. “I want to hold your hand literally, because you have nice hands, but I also want to metaphorically hold your hand. It’s a metaphor, Jack, because we should be able to hold hands anywhere and in front of anyone, right? Except we can’t, and so I can’t just tell anybody that I want to hold your hand, even though it’s not a bad thing to want to do, and—,”
“Just hold my damn hand, Bittle,” Jack said, looking just a little bit lost in the midst of Bitty’s rambling.
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“I think…I probably love him,” he said to Shitty, months afterwards. The cool thing about Shitty, see, was that he held the capability to talk about the way that Bitty loved Jack the same way that any other guy would talk about Bitty loving a girl.
“Is the sex that good?” He said, to prove exactly what Bitty was just thinking.
I love him,” Bitty continued. “Like, I want to be with him. I want to hold his hand.”
And it felt good, talking to a straight dude about the way that Bitty loved his boyfriend. It felt good to talk to somebody about the boy he loved and have it feel normal.
That good feeling surged up in Bitty, he supposed. It made him want more, more, more of it. Bitty wanted to take a never-ending bath in the feeling of being normal.
Samwell was not Georgia, because not once in Georgia had Eric Bittle ever felt this in love and this loved. The Samwell boys liked his baking, and they thought his figure skating was cool, and they didn’t care if he liked boys, and they didn’t care if he wanted to like his boy right at the dinner table any more than they cared if Shitty and Lardo wanted to make eyes at each other from opposing ends of the table.
Samwell made Bitty feel good in a way that Georgia hadn’t.
____
“Kiss me,” he said to Jack, right on the ice rink while the whole world watched. The adrenaline of saying I want to hold his hand hadn’t quite worn off in the months since, and there was a piece of Bitty that wanted to give the whole world one big screw you! for making him feel wrong for so long.
The whole world could watch, and the whole world could suck it up, too, because Bitty would be damned if he didn’t love a boy.