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“As we turned into the driveway he reached into the glove pocket for a remote-control device; at a masterful touch, the garage doors rolled up and away. This is the model I propose. You are arriving home – or think you are – and as you approach the garage you try to work your routine magic. Nothing happens; the doors remain closed. You do it again. Again nothing. At first puzzled, then anxious, then furious with disbelief, you sit in the driveway with the engine running; you sit there for weeks, months, for years, waiting for the doors to open. But you are in the wrong car, in front of the wrong garage, waiting outside the wrong house. One of the troubles is this: the heart isn’t heart-shaped.”
- julian barnes, a history of the world in 10½ chapters
_________________________
Eddie comes home grinning.
There’s nothing unusual about that these days, which is kind of the problem.
If there was a problem, because Buck’s not—God, Buck doesn’t have a problem with his best friend looking happy. Eddie deserves this, after everything he’s been through.
“Sorry,” is the first thing he says, even though he said he’d be back by eleven and it’s barely ten thirty, as he throws his car keys into the bowl by the door with a clang. “Lost track of time.”
And there, tucked up all cozy and familiar in the corner of his mouth, is that grin.
Buck leans against the dining room doorjamb. This is good, he tells himself as he watches Eddie quickly close the door behind him like he’s sneaking in, as he tries and fails to look away when Eddie shrugs out of his jacket and reveals the soft fabric of his shirt clinging to his shoulders.
It’s later, today. Later than the last time, when Eddie’s beautiful girlfriend taught him math, and then he came home and caught Christopher in time to tuck him in.
It’s later, and the hallway is dark, because Buck has been sitting in the kitchen by the light of the overhead lamp and pretending to read. It’s easier with the wood of the chair at this back. Less comfortable, so he doesn’t forget why he’s here.
“How was he?” Eddie asks then, and Buck opens his dry mouth only to realize he hasn’t so much as said hi. “He wasn’t—he seemed a little down when I was leaving.”
“A little,” Buck shrugs, “but he said he was okay and didn’t need to talk about anything.”
Eddie’s eyes spark with something Buck can’t identify, and he’s smiling still, the kind of smile that must be leftover from his date, because Buck can’t remember Eddie ever looking at him this way before.
“What did you do?” he asks, toeing off his shoes. He puts them away right next to Buck’s, their heels aligned. “I’m not going to find any disaster zones, am I?”
Buck’s beginning to realize that he’s kind of a disaster zone himself, but. Eddie’s asking because of that one time they got flour all over the floor, months ago now. He has no idea what Buck’s feeling, because Buck himself doesn’t know. The inside of his chest is tight, but maybe that’s just how it’s going to be from now on.
“See if I ever make an extra homemade pizza for you,” he says, and Eddie’s smile widens again. “Dick.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Eddie says, and Buck steps backwards out of the doorway to let him through, following him to the kitchen.
He goes straight for the oven. When he opens it, the warm light from inside spills over the bridge of his nose. The skin there crinkles with another grin, easy, so easy it makes Buck avert his eyes.
“No way,” Eddie says, over the beeping of the oven as he turns it on. “You didn’t have to, Buck.”
Buck leans against the door again, and tries not to think about the way he seems to need the foundations of Eddie’s house to hold him up today.
“Please,” he rolls his eyes, and thinks his face looks mostly normal, “he did his math homework extra fast so he could put the toppings on it himself.”
A noise and a shuffle. The creak of an overhead cabinet as Eddie gets a plate out. Buck’s looking at his own feet, rubber duck socks on this tile he’s dirtied and cleaned a thousand times before, and turning the same three words over and over in his head.
“I’m starving,” Eddie mumbles, mostly to himself. Buck lifts his chin a little to watch his disembodied hands dig through the cutlery drawer for that specific knife he likes.
He thinks it then – I love you – and bricks it right back up in the little space he’s built for it in the center of his chest, deep enough for it to lean against his spine which twinges with it, unused to the weight.
It’s a recent development, is the thing. Buck didn’t know to look for this; didn’t know to recognize it until Eddie was smiling about his breakfast date and it felt like the bottom was dropping out of the world.
He didn’t know to look for it, and there’s not much he can do about it now.
“Didn’t you go to dinner?” he manages to ask, watching Eddie watch the oven like that will get the pizza warm faster. “How are you starving?”
A grimace. “It was, uh. Definitely a restaurant.”
“Ah,” Buck tilts his head, “what – five courses on a set menu? And the portions were—“
“They were like,” Eddie extends an arm in front of him, “like this small.” He draws a circle around the center of his palm with a fingertip. “And all of it was round? The soup was round, Buck.”
Buck laughs, and it feels the same as it usually does, settled and comfortable and warm in the bottom of his throat as Eddie gets his pizza out and cuts it into triangles, the tendons of his forearm playing under his skin.
“Hey,” he says like an afterthought around a giant bite of dough, with a couple of beers fresh from the fridge held tight between his fingers. “You’re staying, right?”
Powerless, Buck says yes. He might as well start getting used to this, packing a piece of himself away around Eddie when he’s never had to do that before.
Because Eddie comes home grinning in the middle of the night, and that’s where everything that hasn’t begun also ends.
*
“Buddy,” Buck says, low and careful, watching where Christopher’s fingers are digging into his crossed arms. “I know you said you’re okay, but—you see how this isn’t like you, right?”
Slowly, he steps around the ruins of the Lego set they’d been putting together, one of the Jurassic World ones that are way too expensive for him to have gotten on a whim, but the entire world has felt like a ticking clock lately, and he could never regret spending money on Christopher.
Except now their atrociraptor containment truck is lying on its side on the carpet with the loading ramp broken off, and the plastic bag with the smallest pieces they’d so carefully opened is halfway under the couch, most of the contents lost.
Not that Buck cares about the fucking Lego, but—but.
He is so out of his depth here.
“It’s okay to be mad,” he says, sitting down on the coffee table to put them at a level. He doesn’t try to catch Christopher’s eye, because he’s looking down at his lap, but he does touch him, just a quick brush of his fingertips over Christopher’s knee, because the tips of his fingers are going pale where they’re pressed into his own upper arms, and the sight of Christopher hurting himself makes Buck want to stop the world until he figures this out. “It’s okay. But I’m really worried about you, Christopher, and I’d like to know what’s going on in your head, alright?”
“You can’t tell dad,” Christopher mumbles, the exact thing Buck didn’t want to hear.
“Chris—“
“Please,” Christopher says, and when he looks up, his eyes are damp. “We already talked about it.”
Buck rubs a hand over his face. “Okay,” he says, nods, looking at the bright orange lightbulb pieces scattered around his feet. “How about this. I won’t tell him anything you tell me, I promise, but you have to let me tell him that he needs to talk to you.”
“We already talked about it,” Christopher says, chewing on his lip.
“Can I sit next to you?” Buck asks, and the second Christopher gives a nod, he lands on the couch. Christopher finally, finally lets go of his arms, and it only takes a few more slow, upset blinks for him to slump into Buck’s side.
“Okay,” Buck says, with his arm around Christopher’s shoulder, feeling infinitely more settled. “Alright. Listen. Are you listening?”
He punctuates his question with a soft poke to the top of Christopher’s head, which receives a huff of breath that might eventually become a giggle.
“If you talked about something, but it’s still bothering you, you can talk about it again. Your dad always wants to know what you’re feeling, Chris. Always.”
Christopher sniffs. “Okay,” he says. Buck’s heart breaks to hear him sound so small.
“Okay,” he replies, and presses a quick kiss into Christopher’s hair. “So what’s bothering you?”
Christopher sniffles again. Buck gives him time, keeping his eyes on whatever fish documentary is playing on the TV with the sound low, because they didn’t want it to distract them as they planned what they were going to do next weekend.
But that was before Christopher swept everything off the table with a terrifying, wounded sound.
Buck is out of his depth. He’s so beyond the edge of where it’s safe for him to swim, but he remembers, still, the way Eddie’s voice had evened out on the phone when he realized Christopher had run away to Buck’s, the quiet calm in his eyes when he showed up at the door not twenty minutes later.
So maybe it’s okay for him to be here for Christopher, for now, while he’s allowed.
He doesn’t usually think about it this way; he’s just bad enough a person to let himself act like he’s doing this as a favor to his best friend, giving up weekday and weekend nights alike out of the goodness of his heart. He’ll feel Christopher nod off on his shoulder halfway through a movie, carry him to bed and tuck him in and position his stuffed penguin in the exact way he likes, and tell himself over and over that any best friend would do this. That this is his job if it helps Eddie get out there again, gets him looking lighter, smiling more.
And then there is, of course, the truth: he’s trying to get as much of this as he possibly can while he still has time.
Because the day will come - and, going by Eddie’s private little smiles, it’s not too far off - when Buck will have to step aside. A day when he won’t be Eddie’s first call when he needs help with Christopher, or when he’s cooking dinner and it’s not working out, or when he’s just come home from and getting groceries and wants Buck’s rambling about his latest Wikipedia deep dive to be the soundtrack to reorganizing the crisper drawer.
A day, maybe, when the spare key to Eddie’s house will have to come off his keyring.
“It’s a Friday night,” Christopher says, finally, and something inside Buck cracks in a way that feels irreparable.
“Of course it is,” he sighs, and pulls Christopher closer. He goes without protest, pressing his cheek into Buck’s chest. “Of course.”
“I want him to be here,” Christopher says, his voice small, like he’s ashamed of saying it. “It’s move night. Every Friday you have off is movie night.”
“I know,” Buck says, and the hurt is visceral, wrapping around every tendon down to his fingers tangled in Christopher’s hair, because this isn’t his, will never be his, and he has to pretend like he doesn’t want it to be, because it’s what Christopher needs. “But it’s—it’s been a while since your dad dated anyone, you know? It’s just new right now, and things might change—“
“I don’t want things to change,” Christopher says, his hand curling into a fist in the fabric of Buck’s T-shirt.
“—but that doesn’t mean anything will be worse,” Buck finishes, around the lump that’s taken up a near-permanent residence at the base of his throat. “It’ll just be new.”
“I know that,” says Christopher. A car passes outside, illuminating the walls for a moment; Buck only realizes then how late it’s gotten, and Christopher should probably be in pyjamas and brushing his teeth already, except not a single thing in the world could get him to move off this couch before they’re both ready. “That’s what dad said. I want him to be happy, but I don’t want him to skip movie night. Movie night makes him happy too, right? He’s always laughing when you do the thing with the popcorn.”
“Yeah,” Buck says, and has to clear his throat to get his next words out. “I’m sure movie night makes him happy, too, buddy.”
Christopher nods against Buck’s chest, a little painful, but Buck relishes the pain when it lingers.
“Then that doesn’t have to change,” he says, his head turned toward the fish on the screen, swimming away from the camera in huge shimmering swathes. “I’ll tell him.”
Buck lets himself breathe – lets both of them breathe – for a few more minutes, trying to get his lungs to expand properly, but it feels like breaking his ribs from the inside. When he suggests going to bed, Christopher shrugs and doesn’t protest, still a little sad around the eyes.
Eddie comes home when Buck is sitting on his living room carpet, hunting for stray Lego pieces under the couch and disassembling what they’d already put together, so they can take the set out next time and try again from the beginning. He has one ear tilted toward the news playing on the TV, and is turning the smaller dinosaur over in his fingers when keys jangle in the door.
He tenses, expecting a greeting, and tries to shape something as difficult as a simple hello in the dip of his tongue so it’s ready to go.
And when the door opens, he hears Eddie, but—but he also hears someone else.
“Are you sure?” Ana says, probably standing on the threshold. “It’s Saturday tomorrow, we could—“
“No, I know,” Eddie says, with a chuckle that rings a little fake. He must be nervous. “It’s just—Christopher’s surfing lesson tomorrow is pretty early, so he’ll be up, and I’m just not sure—“
“Oh, of course,” Ana says, her voice soft, lilting, polite. Buck closes his fingers around the piece of plastic in his palm, and focuses on where the bumps and ridges dig into his flesh. “We could still have a drink, at least?”
And a laugh, soft enough that it barely carries. It makes the hair on the back of Buck’s neck stand up.
“I’m, uh,” Eddie says, and Buck can picture him exactly, shuffling his feet in the entryway, scratching the back of his neck, that dark green button up he wore stretching over his chest. “I’m not sure I’d be good company, we didn’t get a lot of sleep on shift last night, and—and Buck’s here, so—“
“No problem,” Ana interrupts, with a little more spine behind it this time. “Don’t worry, I get it.”
Buck wonders if she does. He’s not so sure he gets it, because he doesn’t always stick around, and he’ll get out of Eddie’s way so he can invite his girlfriend in like any best friend should, but—Eddie’s making the decision himself.
“Thank you,” he says, on a big, relieved rush of breath. “Text me when you get home, alright?”
“Course,” Ana says, and Buck imagines she’s smiling. He’s never actually met her, but he’s seen pictures, and she’s usually wearing the same expression, the corners of her mouth curled up, the slightest hints of smile lines by her eyes. Pretty and put together and restrained and—everything Buck isn’t, probably.
He hasn’t really thought about it that way until just now, sitting on the ground with his legs folded up under him surrounded by Lego, feet away from where she’s probably standing all breathtaking in Eddie’s doorway, haloed by the streetlights.
Feet away from where she’s probably leaning forward and kissing Eddie with a sound that feels like it reverberates through Buck’s bones long after the door has shut.
“Hey,” Eddie says, quiet, and it takes Buck a few tries to focus on him. “What’s all this?”
“Oh,” Buck shrugs, and his body settles, because it’s Eddie, “just, uh. Brought some Lego. Don’t be mad.”
“Buck,” Eddie says, arms crossed over his chest, a soft light in his eyes. “Stop spoiling him.”
Buck looks at him, then, really looks, and the realization settles over him easy and inevitable: he’ll never be able to let this go. Even if he has to give his key back, has to settle for being an uncle who’s around a couple of times a month, has to watch Ana carve out a place by Eddie’s side as effortlessly as she seems to do everything else. No matter what he has to put himself through, no matter how minuscule the scraps he’s left with, he can’t let go of Eddie and Christopher unless Eddie asks him to.
His whole life has been dashing himself to pieces on the rocks of things he can’t have anyway. And Eddie – he might actually be worth it.
“Buck,” Eddie says again, and Buck catches himself staring at his socked feet, one crossed over the other as he leans against the wall. “Everything okay?”
Half the set, probably two hundred-odd pieces, is still strewn on the carpet around him. And he has to clean it up, can’t just leave Eddie to deal with the mess, but the idea of staying here so Eddie can close the distance between them feels especially dangerous right now.
“Yeah,” he says slowly, gathering a pile of beige two-by-two pieces in his palm, the sharp corners cutting. “Yeah, we, um. Chris got a little upset.”
Eddie perks up immediately. He untangles his arms, crosses the room to sit on the edge of the couch, his knees in line with Buck’s eyes.
“What happened?” he asks, chasing Buck’s gaze, all of his attention directed there.
Buck thinks about watching Christopher fall asleep between one downcast blink and the next, about sweeping hair off his forehead and pressing a kiss there, about leaving the night light on and the door just cracked open. He aches with it, when he picks up the box and puts the dinosaurs away first.
He just—aches.
“I can’t tell you what he said,” he says, smiling a little, watching a frown settle between Eddie’s eyebrows. “But I’m allowed to tell you to talk to him.”
Eddie leans back, hissing out a breath toward the ceiling.
“It’s about Ana still,” he says. “Isn’t it?”
Buck swallows his first response, which goes something like I think it might be about me.
“Just talk to him, man,” he says, tucking the bags of Lego away and hoping they won’t spill everywhere as soon as he closes the box. Finally, he throws in a few handfuls of the bigger pieces that will be a bitch to sort next time, and then he’s leaving it on the coffee table and getting up, brushing nonexistent dirt off his knees.
“He wants you to be happy,” he says, stepping out into the hallway, searching for his shoes as if they aren’t in the exact same spot as always. “So just—don’t worry. Talk to him.”
It takes Eddie a second to realize Buck’s not in the room anymore, and when he appears at Buck’s side, he’s frowning again.
“Anyway,” Buck says, running a hand through his hair, messing it up, “I’m gonna head out.”
“Oh,” Eddie tilts his head. “I thought—“
“Tired, you know?” Buck says, patting down his pockets. “I wouldn’t be good company.”
He makes the mistake of looking straight at Eddie, and finds him looking back, still, unblinking. He looks all strange, rigid, wrong-footed, like he’s the one who’s done something wrong, and Buck—
Buck will hold on to him for as long as he’s allowed, but tonight he says “see you at work” and disappears before Eddie can say something to make him stay.
*
The next week, Eddie doesn’t smile coming in.
He looks a little freaked out, actually, which makes Buck sit up straight where he’s withering away watching 90-Day Fiancé, and by the time he’s opening his mouth to ask what’s wrong, Eddie’s crashing onto the opposite end of the couch with enough force to jostle Buck on the other cushion.
He puts his elbows on his knees, and turns his hands palms up. His jaw tics, and there’s a long line of tension stretching from the top of his spine and through his shoulders all the way to his fingertips that are closing into loose fists and uncurling again, compulsively repetitive.
Buck thinks if he moved closer, he might feel Eddie trembling with whatever has him this stiff.
“Hey,” he says, soothing before he knows if there’s anything to soothe. “Eddie. You okay?”
Eddie looks at him, and the answer becomes immediately obvious when he tries to smile. It looks painful, the way his face tries to fold into the correct shape but falls halfway.
“Hey,” Buck says again, careful. He moves a little closer, and Eddie stays where he is. “Are you hurt?”
Eddie lets out a mangled sound. He looks back at his hands, at his fingers still curling, in and out and back in, like he’s trying to remember how to use them.
Buck lets him, for a while, waits him out the way Eddie always does for him, quiet and steady when it’s what Buck needs, but—Eddie won’t start talking on his own. Won’t start moving on his own. Will probably sit here for as long as it takes for the TV to turn off by itself and darken the living room.
So Buck waits him out, and after he’s stopped moving quite so much, after he’s settled into that terrifying stillness that means he’s lost in his head about something, Buck reaches out and puts a careful hand on his forearm.
He’s not sure what he expects, exactly. But it’s definitely not for Eddie to—melt under his touch.
The tension seeps out of him almost tangibly, so sudden Buck imagines it evaporating into the air around them. He makes a sound in the back of his throat that Buck has never heard before, and slumps backwards with a cut-string suddenness.
He blinks once, twice, three times, chasing away something only he can see.
“Buck,” he says, into the room, and then turns his head, his eyes clearer. “Buck.”
“Yeah,” Buck says, with Eddie’s forearm warm under his palm, the underside of his wrist pressing his heartbeat into Eddie’s skin. “You okay?”
Eddie’s nod is slow, measured, like he’s not convinced. He pulls his arm close, so Buck lets him go, and watches as Eddie turns it over in front of his eyes like he’s looking for some invisible mark Buck left.
He stays that night.
*
“Buckaroo, how about you?” Hen says, frowning at her phone. “Please. If I can’t get you to come out with us, I think I’ve officially lost my touch.”
Buck stops in the middle of pouring a handful of M&M’s into his mouth. “You saying I’m easy?”
“I’m saying,” Hen raises her eyebrows, “that you’re one of the only people here who’s still young enough to function the day after drinking, and you’re fun at parties.”
“Oh,” Buck says, definitely not pleased and flushing about it. “Thanks. I’d love to come to your gay bar—“
“It’s not our gay bar, it’s just our favorite spot to—“
“But,” Buck says, putting his elbows on the table, “I have plans.”
“Eddie has a date,” Chimney says, walking past. He doubles back when he notices the bag of candy on the table.
“That’s Buck,” Hen says, pointing a finger. “You good, Chim?”
“Hilarious,” Chim says, putting his fingers all over Buck’s M&M’s to fish out the blue ones, cradling them in his palm. “I mean, Eddie has a date. Three guesses where Buck is going to be.”
“Oh,” Hen says, and puts her phone face down on the table. “Oh. You’re—“
“To be fair to me,” Buck says, staring at the ceiling, because he refuses to look around and see where Eddie is, to see if he’s within earshot, “I also have a date. Afterwards.”
A silence. The only discernible sound is the refrigerator humming as always, and Chim crunching away at Buck’s chocolate that he painstakingly purchased at the gas station this morning.
“You’re dating,” Hen says, eventually. When he hears her tone, Buck redoubles his efforts to stare a hole in the ceiling.
He’s not going to pretend it was a thought-out decision. He’d redownloaded a bunch of apps, put some of his old profile pictures up, and it took all of fifteen minutes to have an invitation for drinks sitting in his inbox from a guy named Trevor, who seems perfectly nice, even if Buck already knows he’s going to find something about him that he won’t like.
It would be much easier to just go out and blow off steam, but. Buck’s not interested in casual, wouldn’t be even if he wasn’t in love with Eddie, and also—also, Eddie came home with lipstick on his collar the other day.
And Buck is going on a date with a man, which hasn’t happened in about half a decade. Those two things have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
“Sure,” is what he ends up saying, to the ceiling. “I’m dating, Eddie’s dating. Just a couple of guys, dating.”
Chim snorts. Buck stretches out his foot blindly to kick him in the shin, but gets the table leg instead.
“Wait,” Buck says. “How do you know that Eddie has a date?”
Finally, he tips his chin down. As expected, Hen and Chim are looking at him with matching forehead wrinkles.
“He asked me for help picking an outfit.”
The chocolate aftertaste lingering on Buck’s tongue goes suddenly, painfully bitter.
“He asked you for help picking an outfit.”
Chimney shrugs. “He wasn’t sure about the shirt color.”
“He wasn’t sure about the shirt color,” Buck says, and thinks his heart might be impaling itself on his ribs. Eddie has never asked him, so this must be—it must be a new thing, extra effort Eddie is putting in to look good for his girlfriend, and he didn’t ask Buck for advice.
“Would you stop repeating everything I’m saying?” Chim says, but doesn’t quite manage to sound annoyed. The wrinkle between his eyebrows deepens. “Yes, he asked me to pick between yellow and red. It’s not a big deal.”
Buck rubs at his chest, the closest he can get to the spot where the pain sits, heavy and insistent, putting down roots between his vertebrae by now, long since impossible to extricate.
“Which one did you pick?” he asks, and remembers a conversation they had once, several drinks deep on a team night out, after Karen had accidentally spilled a drink down Eddie’s front. Chim, the designated driver that night, had a spare gym shirt in his car, and Eddie, tequila-loose, spent the rest of the night uncomfortably picking at it and clucking about yellow not being his color.
Chimney shrugs, crushing the last of his pilfered chocolate between his teeth. “Yellow,” he says, and gets up to help Bobby with lunch.
Hen doesn’t say anything for a minute. Buck’s mind goes straight to the image of Eddie behind some dinner table with a fancy tablecloth, in front of a dish that’s spitting liquid nitrogen or something equally ridiculous into his face, tugging at the collar of his shirt that’s the wrong color.
But before he can turn it over and over in his head, examine it for traces of hope like the fool and terrible best friend he is: “Buck.”
“Yeah,” Buck replies, and is half-expecting it when Hen reaches across the tabletop to squeeze his forearm.
“Why are you doing this to yourself?” she asks, quiet and so perfectly, devastatingly accurate.
He looks up at her, and opens his mouth to ask what else he’s supposed to do, because Hen knows him and loves him and is good at advice—and the bell, of course, cuts him off.
It’s a car accident, two full minivans meeting head-on in an intersection. They lose four people in it, and that night, Eddie leaves the house messing with the buttons on his yellow shirt cuffs, all hunched and fidgety.
Buck bails on his date.
*
He’s not expecting the door to open, this time.
It’s a Saturday, and it’s past midnight, and Eddie had sheepishly cornered him a few days ago to ask if he’d mind staying with Christopher overnight. Buck is, therefore, on the Diazes’ couch under the ratty yard sale One Direction blanket only he uses, bawling his eyes out.
He’s disgusting and snotty and ridiculously overemotional for reasons that slip through his fingers like water when he tries to hold them still to figure them out. There are tissues, but they’re on the coffee table, and it’s too far to reach, and it doesn’t matter anyway because he’s here alone, but—
But he’s not.
“Hey,” Eddie whispers from the pitch-dark hallway, the familiar sounds of him coming home a little muffled as he tries to be quiet. “You still awake?”
Hysterically, the only thing Buck can think as he leans forward and almost falls off the couch in his haste to grab a handful of tissues and clean up his face, is you’re supposed to be having sex right now.
“Yeah,” he croaks, which he shouldn’t have done, because his voice is rough enough to reveal exactly what he’s been doing in here. “Yeah, just watching a movie. Couldn’t sleep.”
Eddie appears in the doorway then, shaded in blues and blacks as the light from the TV shifts the shadows. Buck wipes his face again, uselessly.
“Buck,” Eddie says, and there’s something dangerous behind it, something so unbearably gentle Buck finds his eyes stinging again. “What’s—why are you crying?”
He sounds a little helpless, looks a little crumpled when he takes a step inside. Buck looks over the hem of his shirt for creases from tugging hands, checks that each button is in its proper buttonhole, and then hates himself for it.
“Movie,” he sniffs, because that was what set him off.
“Movie,” Eddie repeats, one hand on his hip. He’s all tense again, visible even in the dark, even as blurred as Buck’s vision is. His shoulders are up, halfway to his ears like he’s trying to protect himself, and even the way he stands, waiting for an explanation with a hip cocked, looks calculated somehow. Like someone took his limbs and bent them just the way they wanted.
“Yeah,” Buck sighs, picking at where the blanket is fraying. “It’s—the girl said that love is both the seatbelt and the car. Set me off.”
Eddie huffs out something too soft to be a laugh. He stands there for another while, which Buck knows by the comforting shape of his shadow stretching across the floor, falling over Buck’s lap, flickering in and out of existence depending on how bright the screen is behind him.
Buck sniffs.
Finally, Eddie moves, stepping around the coffee table. This time, he doesn’t sit all the way on the opposite end of the couch; instead, he settles on the middle cushion, just shy of where Buck’s feet are curled up under him.
“Come on,” he says, one hand on his own knee, and the other—the other reaching out toward Buck, landing on the backrest right behind him.
Buck doesn’t even have to think about it. That decision was only made once, somewhere between blowing up an ambulance and offering Eddie a ride to Christopher’s school after the earthquake, and it’s one Buck will never go back on, even if the price is this painful ricochet of his heart behind his ribs, hopeful and hopeless all at once.
He leans into Eddie’s side, and Eddie wraps one arm around his shoulders, then two, all steady and certain, and—and it happens again, same as a couple of weeks ago, Eddie’s entire body relaxing when Buck rests his head on the familiar swell of Eddie’s shoulder and exhales.
He breathes, and Buck’s so close he can hear it wheeze a little inside his chest, a sound he’s learned not to take for granted. With every inhale, a little bit of tension seeps away. Eddie stretches his legs out, rests his heels on the coffee table, his fingers uncramp and fan out to rest on Buck’s shoulderblade, holding him close.
“So,” he says after a while, with an exhale so strong it ruffles Buck’s hair, “why is love both the seatbelt and the car?”
Buck tears up again, but he manages to swallow it down this time. On screen, the third act is rushing toward a conclusion, but he’s lost the story in the few minutes he was too focused on Eddie.
“It’s a metaphor.”
Eddie snorts above him. “I know that, smartass,” he says, his grip on Buck tightening, pulling him in. He’s wearing his good cologne, the scent strong in the crook of his neck, and Buck tries hard not to think about who it’s for. “But I’m not smart enough to get it, so explain it to me.”
It’s embarrassing, really – the way Eddie being near sets everything right, the speed at which it happens. Buck feels stripped naked, on display, like a flower turning very obviously to face the sun as soon as it peeks above the horizon. Crying over everything Eddie will never be able to give him; all but throwing himself at his feet to take whatever he’s allowed anyway.
He wonders if Eddie feels it, too: Buck’s heart picking up in his chest, beating right at the base of his throat when he opens his mouth, threatening to beach itself on the coffee table with every word.
“It’s just,” he says, and his voice isn’t so full of tears anymore, at least, “it’s like—love gets you where you need to be, right? Like a car. But it doesn’t change your direction, or change you, it just—it makes the journey easier. And it encourages you to go to new places. Somewhere you’ve never been before,” he takes a breath that is a struggle. “I think that’s what she’s saying, anyway. ”
“Right,” Eddie says, so quiet Buck feels it more than hears it. On TV, the main characters run toward each other in the departure hall of an airport. “And it’s the seatbelt because it keeps you safe, huh?”
Buck swallows and swallows and swallows, a million words with nothing useful to say.
“Something like that,” he finally says, just as Eddie’s hand, apparently absentminded, tangles in his hair.
“Yeah,” Eddie says, even quieter. He rests his cheek on top of Buck’s head. “Yeah, that makes sense.”
The main character throws her suitcase to the ground and leaps into her love interest’s arms.
Buck averts his eyes before he can watch them kiss.
*
“You’re stalling,” Buck says.
Eddie, pushing a nonexistent stray strand of hair into place, frowns. “I’m not stalling. Why would I be stalling?”
“Because you were meant to leave,” Buck reaches over for Eddie’s wrist and turns his watch towards him, “fifteen minutes ago?”
Eddie freezes. Even when Buck lets him go, his hand hovers unsteadily in the air, and it takes him a minute to pull it back. He stuffs it in his pocket, shoulders hunched, still looking at himself in the mirror.
Tonight’s date outfit, uncharacteristically, is a T-shirt, and Buck’s eyes are drawn over and over to the muscles of Eddie’s forearms, the point of his elbow.
He put on cologne again; traces of it are still hanging around in the hallway.
“Eddie,” Buck says, peeking into the living room to make sure Christopher’s still busy with his homework, “are you—okay?”
Eddie blinks at his own reflection. “Huh?”
“Are you okay?” Buck repeats, meeting his eyes in the mirror. “Did something happen with Ana? Are you guys—“
“Oh,” Eddie says, and shakes his head. He runs an awkward hand through his hair, messing up all the work he just pretended to put into it. “I—no, I’m fine, I’m going.”
And he steps around Buck to where their shoes are sitting, still and always with the heels lined up in the bottom shelf of the shoe rack.
“Be good!” he shouts into the living room, to which Christopher responds with a distracted noise, and then he turns his eyes on Buck.
“Be good,” he says again, in a tone Buck doesn’t understand, and is gone before Buck can put together a reply.
Doing this is easy, at this point, endlessly practiced. He makes dinner in Eddie’s kitchen, which is generally organized to Buck’s liking, and helps Christopher with the harder math problems, and tries to suffocate the parts of him that ache at Eddie’s absence, that wish he was here with them even in the most mundane of moments.
After homework, Christopher decides to use his two hours before bedtime to bake cookies instead of playing video games, so Buck helps him put on Eddie’s apron (which says “Firemen never let dinner burn” on the front and was a gift Buck had express shipped after that one time Eddie did let dinner burn) and supervises as Christopher mixes the dough, waving his spoon all over the place while he catches Buck up on fifth-grade gossip.
He’s okay about it. He’s okay as he cleans crumbs off the counter and egg off the wall, as he loads the dishwasher, as he watches Christopher smear chocolate all over his cheek. He’s okay through bedtime, and even when he turns off the ceiling light and says goodnight and emerges back into a quiet house that has always felt like home, except for when Eddie isn’t there.
He’s fine, and ready to settle on the couch and maybe read the butterfly novel he left here for babysitting nights, except he takes all of two steps down the hallway, and then Eddie is there, poking his head in the door.
“Hey,” Buck says, trying to soothe his heart, racing like Eddie caught him doing something wrong. “You’re early.”
Eddie says nothing. He looks up, and Buck gets a glimpse at his face all rippling with tension before he’s stepping through into the dining room, in his shoes, car keys in hand, leaving the front door open.
Buck stops to close it, then turns around to follow into the kitchen, where he knows Eddie is going to be.
He’s standing with his back to the room, looking at the window over the sink. The overhead light casts his own reflection back at him in the glass, dotted with the bright orange points of streetlights from outside.
“Eddie,” Buck says, careful, as he crosses the room. Eddie flinches, and his eyes fall to where a plate heaped with cookies has been waiting for him to come home. “What happened?”
Eddie shakes his head. He turns on the tap, and reaches up to open one of the overhead cabinets, probably for a glass of water. His hand flexes around the handle, and then he just—stops.
Buck does, too. He takes a breath, holds it, waits.
“Eddie?”
“She moved them,” he says. “The other day. I forgot.”
Rationally, Buck knows that Ana has been here. Eddie had told him, sitting in the living room picking at the label of his beer a few weeks ago, that she’s been coming by to spend time with Chris.
And he’s noticed the glasses moving, too. It’s just that—
“Okay,” he says, instead of going down in that particular thought spiral. “You’re upset about—Ana moving your glasses?”
Eddie breathes – the slightest shudder of his shoulders up, then down – but he doesn’t speak. Doesn’t move, only the cabinet door creaks under the force of his grip.
Finally: “I don’t mind it when you move things.”
Buck kind of forgets how breathing works.
“Eddie,” he says again, searching for other words. “I—“
“I never mind when you move stuff,” Eddie interrupts, and lets the cabinet door swing shut. The tap is still running, filling the room with white noise, drumming on the bottom of the sink, and instead of turning it off he crosses to where the glasses live now and takes one out. He rolls it in his hands, back and forth, watching his palms press against it.
Buck goes to take a step closer, and realizes his legs might not carry him all the way to Eddie’s side.
“I never mind,” Eddie says. “You switched the pots with the pans and you put the mugs over the microwave and—I don’t even remember where I put some of these things back when we moved in, but it’s just—it always makes sense.”
He looks over his shoulder. The water rushes into the sink, and Buck’s blood is drumming, deafening, in his ears, and Eddie looks, he looks like—
“It always makes sense when it’s you.”
Buck swallows. His heart thrashes in his chest when Eddie catches his eye and doesn’t let go, hopeless, except it might not be.
“Eddie,” he says.
Eddie puts the glass down, an overloud clunk on the countertop. He closes the tap, crosses the tiles between them in two steps, and stops so close he has to look up a little.
“Touch me,” he says, and from this close, Buck can tell he’s trembling, all of him shivering with something that’s impossible to figure out but so close to the surface.
Buck opens his mouth. “I—“
“Touch me,” Eddie says again. Buck barely thinks about it before he’s raising his hand, and it lands not on Eddie’s shoulder, which he’s going for, but on the side of his face.
Eddie closes his eyes. His eyelashes brush one of Buck’s fingertips, and Buck shivers so thoroughly it leaves him feeling small, vulnerable, brand new.
“Yeah,” Eddie says, his breath cradled in Buck’s palm. His shoulders loosen; he sways a little where he’s standing. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
Buck doesn’t dare inhale for fear of breaking this – of his ribs expanding past the edge of this bubble they’re in and popping it.
“What did you think?” he asks, his voice barely there.
Eddie reaches out. His hand, big and warm and steady, lands on Buck’s waist, and Buck almost flinches from the way it feels. Eddie’s touched him before, is always touching him, but it’s never this, it’s never—
“That it’s supposed to feel this way,” Eddie says, watching where his fingers curl into Buck’s shirt. “When someone touches you. When you want them to, when—“ and he looks up at Buck then, still trembling, with golden lamplight tangled in his eyelashes and his eyes wide, terrified, “when you love them.”
Buck takes a step closer, unsteady, the whole room swaying. He’s imagining things, he has to be, because he doesn’t get to keep this, it doesn’t get to be his, and Eddie’s just come back from a date—
“I broke up with her,” Eddie says, like he knows exactly what Buck’s thinking. Buck can’t see past how scared he looks, like this isn’t where he expected to be tonight. At least they’re together in that, now as always. “Tonight, I was—I was going to just go over to her place and end it and come back home, but she wanted—“ he presses his lips together. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters,” Buck croaks, and he gets his other hand to move so he can cradle Eddie’s face, hold him close. “Tell me.”
Eddie shakes his head, only just.
“I just—I hated her touching me,” he says, quiet, just into the sliver of space between them. “I thought maybe I just wasn’t used to it anymore, that—that it’d be fine down the line, but—God, Buck,” he says, and brings his other hand up to touch Buck’s face, running a careful finger over the point of Buck’s eyebrow. “I think you could slap me and I’d enjoy it more than I did anything with her.”
“I’d never slap you,” Buck replies, without thinking, and both of them break off on a laugh that feels a little like the birth of something brand new.
“I know,” Eddie smiles, just this side of wobbly. He tugs on Buck’s shirt until they bump into each other, a dozen little touches that light up Buck’s skin. “And I feel so stupid, because I want to be around you all the time, and you’re always running home so I only keep seeing you in the doorway when I go on these ridiculous fucking dates, and I—I don’t want them, I tried, I’ve been trying, but you’re just—I want you,” he says, his fingertips tracing Buck’s jaw, still shaking. “If—I mean. If.”
Buck almost laughs again. He lets himself sway forward, touch his forehead to Eddie’s, lets out the sound that threatens to choke him, kind of a sob, except it morphs into something else by the time it comes out of his mouth.
“If what?” he asks, burning, burning.
“If you kiss me,” Eddie says, a ghost of warm breath over Buck’s lips, “and it feels as good as I think it’s going to feel.”
Buck pulls away. He holds Eddie’s face in his hands, makes sure Eddie’s looking him in the eye, and just—takes. Takes what Eddie’s offering, because he did promise himself he’d keep doing that for as long as he can.
“I love you,” he says. He only gets to see the beginnings of Eddie’s smile, but he tastes the rest of it, and awkward press of teeth against teeth until they manage to stop grinning. Until Eddie pulls him in like a starving man, his hand firm on the back of Buck’s neck, pulling him backwards until Buck has him caged in against the counter.
His chest is heaving when Buck pulls away, and he looks—scared, again, still, but in a brand new way. Buck puts a hand on his chest, just to remember what Eddie’s heartbeat feels like in this moment, in this specific spot in Eddie’s kitchen, with the cabinet that used to hold the glasses right overhead.
To remember the first moments in which he knows, beyond doubt, that Eddie will never ask him to let this go.
“So?” he asks, much more confident than he feels, even as Eddie wraps an arm around his shoulders, pulls him in, kisses him again.
“Yeah,” he says, with their lips still touching, moving against Buck’s in a way that shouldn’t make him weak in the knees. “I think—I think I’m done with dating. If that was good enough for you.”
“Don’t think you’re getting out of romancing me,” Buck laughs, but he’s so happy his tongue feels clumsy with it, awkward around the words. “But I’m—I mean, God, Eddie, you have no idea—“
“I love you,” Eddie says, one of his fingers threaded through Buck’s belt loop, and then he’s turning them around and walking backwards in the direction of the living room. “So I think I have some idea.”
And Buck definitely didn’t plan to end tonight making out with his best friend like a couple of teenagers, but—well, it’s a hell of a lot better than the alternative. Better than watching the door and never quite allowing himself to feel hope.
They both step on stray Lego pieces on the way. They knock Buck’s book off the table on their way to the couch, and there’s a movie on TV that might be a sequel to the stupid seatbelt romcom – but Eddie’s laughing into his mouth and pulling him close and wrapping his legs around Buck’s waist, and he can’t bring himself to care about anything but this: Eddie, with the collar of his T-shirt askew and his shoulders loose.
Eddie, with his hair a mess, grinning like Buck hasn’t seen him grin in months, unabashed when he tilts his head and asks for a kiss Buck is utterly, deliriously happy to give.
Eddie, who will be here to help with the next ill-advised Lego set Buck buys, and for whatever movie Christopher picks on Friday night.
Eddie, home.