bootycap:
one time, when bitty is visiting jack in providence and jack is in the shower, bitty steals jack’s phone and hooks it up to his computer to transfer over a playlist called ‘bootylicious: an ode to hockey butts’ as a joke
a few days later, when jack finds it, he laughs to himself but doesn’t mention it to bitty. he spends the weeks leading up to their next visit cultivating his own playlist (‘bittle on my mind’–full of some of his favorite country songs)
he manages to sneak it onto bitty’s phone by waking up a few minutes earlier than normal for his morning run, bitty still passed out and snoring softly into his sheets
after that, stealing each other’s phones just to transfer over silly playlists turns into a game, into a thing they do. neither of them acknowledge it out loud but they both know about it.
jack leaves a lot of classic rocks songs on bitty’s phone, the titles of which sometimes end up spelling out a message (bitty is impressed by the amount of effort jack puts into this tbh) and bitty usually leaves a mixture of the most lewd music he listens to intermixed with things that make him laugh (once, bitty changed the title and artist in the metadata of nineteen mp3s of ‘never gonna give you up’… in return he got a playlist full of dolly parton and patsy cline)
but one time bitty goes through his entire music library to pick out the absolute sappiest and ridiculously cheesy love songs he owns and sneaks it onto jack’s phone when jack had run down to the corner store because bitty had run out of butter. (bitty barely manages to put the phone back in time, setting it down just as the front door opens.) he laughs to himself when he thinks about the face jack will make when ‘your body is a wonderland’ starts playing over his headphones.
but, as bitty sits on the train the next day, halfway to samwell, he gets a text
jack: i get it now.
bitty: what’s that?
jack: the music you listen to.
bitty’s confused, they’ve never really addressed the game they’ve started, outside of the faux-suspicious glances here and there. he’s about to ask ‘why now?’ when he gets another text.
jack: i guess it’s easier to enjoy the songs when you finally understand what they’re singing about
bitty’s heart does a complicated flip in his chest, and he feels his face burn. the woman sitting across from him gives him a worried look.
jack zimmermann, grade-A sap and closet romantic, just made bitty swoon from over thirty miles away.
bitty wonders at his luck.
he also spends the rest of the trip trying to hide his grin, no amount of dubious looks from across the aisle able to stifle it in the slightest.