Archive of Our Own

“Don’t talk to strangers.”

Eddie unsticks his shirt from where it’s doing its best impression of a suction cup against the carseat. Chris turns away from where his hand is hovering over the door handle, and Eddie tries not to smile like a maniac at the somehow still novel sight of his child in this shitty car. He gives Eddie two slow blinks in response, very generous.

Eddie turns the radio down and squints at him. Chris squints right back, a facsimile of Eddie’s face.

Eddie breaks first. “Y’know, you used to think I was so funny.”

“Babies think everything is funny,” Chris says matter-of-factly.

“Ouch.” Eddie reckons he has a maximum of one more year before he’s completely uncool, unfunny and lame. He’ll have to make it count. “Last day. You excited?”

Eddie watches Chris scrunch his nose up like he’s said something especially unsavory. “Not really.”

“What do you mean? You’ve been excited for summer ever since you could first form a thought.”

Chris shrugs, eyes fluttering to the side like he’s ready to bodily toss himself out of the car if push comes to shove, crutches be damned. “Well, I think I’ll kinda miss it until fall. I missed out on most of the school year anyway.”

Right. That's a true statement. There's not really any malice behind it, it just is. Eddie gets a little pressure in his chest, like someone’s pushing at it.

“Sure.” Eddie clears his throat. “Sure, yeah, well, you’ll be starting high school before you know it. And then one day you’ll blink and be as old as me.”

“100?” Chris asks sweetly.

Eddie narrows his eyes. “Watch it.”

“Bye, Dad.”

Eddie lets Chris make his great escape out of the muggy, shitty Prius-incinerator, watches him amble over to his jam-packed friend group as they descend upon him like a hoard of flies.

See, Chris’s friends don’t even hate him for being gone for so long. They’re probably not at that level of pettiness anyway. Yet. Chris smiles big and bright and unabashed, the one that shows all of his teeth, and Eddie digs his knuckles into his chest.

That did make Eddie feel weird. Eddie can acknowledge that it made him feel weird, and not get weird about it. He’s supposed to be putting all that Texas shit behind him, looking forward.

He turns the radio back up.

“It’s a shed.”

And it’s hot. Buck looks up from where he’s hunched over his box of books. Eddie watches a drop of sweat slither serpentine down the strong slope of his nose.

He tilts his head to the side like a puppy in a kibble commercial. “Huh?”

“You asked me how I like the new apartment,” Eddie clarifies. He shuffles a paperback back and forth in his hands. “But it’s more of a shed.”

“Asshole,” Buck says, not unkindly. He adds the book in his hands to the third pile in a very Buck system that Eddie only half understands, close to toppling over. “Y’know, I think this might be a good thing.” Buck’s voice is cheery, sweet like spun sugar. Eddie can’t say that he feels the same. “Downsizing. Living frugally. Not relying too much on material things. Like—like monks do.”

“You're not a monk, Buck. You’re a firefighter.”

“It's the principle.”

Eddie is sweating in places he didn’t know sweat could even reach. He tries to place the book in his hands on the pile closest to him, but Buck slaps him away with a clammy hand.

“That goes in the nonfiction pile,” he scolds very seriously. Like an asshole.

Eddie tosses the book in his hand, and Buck makes a cartoony little offended noise when it hits him in the chin. “Not my fault I can’t focus. I’m getting cooked in here ’cause of your busted ass AC.”

Buck twists his mouth at him incredulously, hair flopping everywhere and dark with sweat. “They're coming to fix it at the end of the week!”

“I’d hope so.”

Something about it all is making Eddie’s hackles rise, the skin at the back of his neck prickling. He can’t explain it away with the heat.

Buck grumbles something under his breath about betrayal and being supportive of your friends, returning to his old man hunch over the cardboard box. He’s just giving Eddie shit, but. Eddie had been supportive. The most supportive a friend could be, really. So supportive, in fact, that he told Buck he didn’t need to move out of the house right away, the way any best friend should.

They had a good thing going. Why mess with it?

But Buck was adamant. So adamant, in fact, that Eddie almost had half a mind to be offended. But Buck was going about it in a way that said it’s not you, it’s me, soliloquizing about change and claiming to be taking initiative in a very Buck fashion, hightailing it out of Eddie’s house with all the finesse of an escape artist.

And that led them here. One little bedroom, one bath, an AC that busted as soon as Buck moved in. At least he doesn’t have a roommate.

And Eddie asked him. Asked him if he was sure, assured him that he wasn’t imposing or putting him out or whatever other frankly incredible things Buck’s brain might’ve been telling him. He double triple quadruple checked if Buck was sure he wanted to move into a glorified sardine can, to which Buck responded, beggars can’t be choosers, I’m not exactly swimming in it, Eddie! And yeah. Fair. But there was just. There was no reason for him to leave so quickly, that’s all.

Eddie hates this apartment.

“Why are you glaring at my book like you want to kill it?”

Buck is peering up at him in kind of the same way he does when a patient is at risk of fainting, like he’s ready to catch Eddie in case he keels over.

“I’m not,” Eddie says. He untenses his jaw. A beautiful purple book cover stares back at him, taunting. Well, it’s just that—the apartment sucks.

It unsettles Eddie deeply, in a way he’s not sure he’s ever been unsettled before. It started in his hands first, traveling little pinpricks of thorns up his arms, settling over his neck like a dog scruffs its young. He just can’t wrap his head around it. Buck was there, then he wasn’t.

“Well,” Buck doesn’t let up because when has he ever, sliding his books around like Jenga blocks. His voice is measured, the way it gets when he’s trying to be careful with Eddie instead of serving him the casual, earnest bluntness that he needs more often than not. “Clearly something is eating at you.”

Eddie watches Buck’s hands. “You happy?”

Buck’s eyebrows fall down, like he wasn’t expecting Eddie to ask that. Eddie hadn’t meant to ask that, or, well. He hadn’t meant for it to sound so philosophical. Especially given the recent…everything.

“With the new place, I mean,” Eddie clarifies.

Buck’s face clears up as quick as it had turned stormy, so fast Eddie is almost scared he imagined it for a second. “‘Course,” he says, like it’s a no brainer. “Yeah. Yeah, so,” he continues, and then he doesn’t finish his sentence. He does that a lot. Eddie waits him out.

“Of course,” he says again, shaking his head like he’s flicking away water. “Can you help me unpack the kitchen box next?”

When Eddie drives back home that evening, he feels that pulling in his chest again.

The house is quiet as a library when he gets back, vacated of not just his son but Buck now too, the weight of his absence finally settling over Eddie like tide over sand. They weren’t even sharing a space with each other for that long. It’s just that Buck is so excruciatingly bright, larger than life itself. It’s obvious that something was here that isn’t here anymore. It makes sense to Eddie, that he would miss his best friend when he’s gone.

He needs to stock up the fridge. Having a growing teenager and a Buck under one roof is like shopping for a small army, he’ll have to—no, Buck is gone, how did Eddie forget so quickly? He can hear an imaginary Buck in his brain yammering on about brain health. You need to eat more leafy greens, Eddie. It’s all in the antioxidants! One time, not long after the lightning strike, Eddie watched Buck down three whole containers of blueberries to help with his lingering brain fog. Anthocyanins.

Eddie’s chest does a funny little thing at the memory, and he digs his knuckles in right under where his heart is, nudging at muscle.

He needs to get groceries. And an oil change. He was also thinking about making his own outdoor planters for the porch. Something for him and Buck to do together, get their hands dirty. He forgot to bring it up before Buck left. He can do it himself. No, Buck would still help him if Eddie asked, he’d probably brush Eddie’s teeth for him if he asked. Eddie can do it himself, though.

He stares at the wall.

“There were five raccoons in her house, Eddie. Five. Whole. Live. Raccoons.”

Eddie had grimaced as he watched a stupid eyesore of a Toyota Tacoma cut him off, only holding back from laying on his horn as a courtesy to Buck over the line. The sun was blazing that day, setting and burning a brilliant orange-almost-red. “I don’t know what it is with people and raccoons. I mean, they’re cute, sure, b-but why would you want one in your house? Did you know they can open doors?”

Eddie blinked into the retina-destroying rays of Texas sunlight shining through his windshield. “What?”

“Doors,” Buck said passionately, and Eddie felt his lips twitch up. “They have dexterous paws, you know. That’s why they’re always in places they have no business being in. Their hind feet can rotate 180 degrees!”

Eddie hadn’t been in El Paso too long, but it felt like he hadn’t seen Buck in years. They were keeping up a steady stream of communication, talking just as much as they did when they were in the same city, and it was just the same, like nothing had changed. Except it wasn’t the same at all, and everything had changed. And to make matters worse, Eddie was driving a fucking Prius.

“That’s kind of disturbing.”

“Don’t I know it,” Buck agreed. “I think Chimney is traumatized now. He won’t admit it, but he was totally hiding behind me.”

Eddie tried not to let it, but an ugly, unnamable thing always swirled up and down in his chest every time Buck updated him on the 118’s latest calls, as dutiful as ever. A lift assist here, a kitchen fire there, a traffic collision. With Ravi as his partner, no less. At least Eddie liked Ravi. Eddie was just an Uber, and Buck was working alongside someone else, and the house was still kind of falling apart. It didn’t matter, he was doing it all for Chris anyway.

“Getting swarmed by illegal raccoons could do that to a person,” Eddie said. He tried to relax his grip on the steering wheel, unclench his jaw.

Buck laughed a little, more of an exhale of breath than anything else. “Yeah. Animal Control should be paying us.” He pauses. “Did you know Calvin Coolidge had a pet raccoon?”

Eddie blinked again. “The…president?”

“Uh huh. Her name was Rebecca. She was sent to the White House for Thanksgiving, like, to be eaten. But the First Lady decided to keep her as a pet.”

“What the fuck,” Eddie said.

“What the fuck,” Buck agreed.

Eddie turned a left, dreading going back to his glorified shed in the middle of nothing the closer he got to it. He listened to the sounds of Buck toiling around on the other line, digging his knuckles into his chest. It was a deep, internal ache he kept feeling, like someone had gotten a hand around one of his ribs.

Eddie cleared his throat. “What are you doing for the rest of the day?”

“I need to clean,” Buck chirped brightly, like he was looking forward to it. Knowing him, he probably was. “And then I have a hot date with the TLC.”

Eddie snorted. “Are you 80?”

“Don’t make fun of me and my trashy reality television,” Buck grumbled, no bite to it.

“Trashy is putting it lightly.”

“You can’t fool me. I always saw your eyes straying when I would watch My Strange Addiction reruns at your—uh.” Buck stumbled over his sentence for a second. “Your house.”

Eddie parked the car, gazing out the window at his little shed. The sun was painting the yuccas fiery orange. “Yours now,” Eddie murmured.

“Subletting.”

“Semantics.”

He listened to Buck breathe on the other end, counted each inhale with his fingers. His house was empty. He didn’t really feel like going back inside. He probably could’ve sat there and listened to Buck breathe forever, counting every single one of them until he stopped. Or maybe if Eddie just kept listening, he would never stop at all.

“Do you remember that episode of Strange Addiction where that guy was in a relationship with his car?”

Eddie laughed again, so forcefully it hurt his throat, and it had hit him very suddenly that the only time he seemed to laugh down there was when he was talking to Buck.

“How could I forget?”

“It was kind of a sexy car,” Buck mused, almost to himself.

Eddie rolled his eyes. “I gotta go.”

“Me too.”

Neither of them hung up. Eddie counted the seconds as the angry red sun finally started to fully set, burnt orange turning to rust.

125 seconds. “Bye, Buck.”

“Bye, Eddie.”

He hung up. Silence set over him quickly, Buck’s absence apparent like a sore thumb. It was just a house. He could go inside. The sooner he went, the sooner he would have gotten it over with. He needed to fix the kitchen sink’s leaky faucet.

So Eddie went inside, tossing his keys on the table, digging his knuckles in right under where his heart was.

He stared at the wall.

“Why are you staring at the wall?”

Eddie blinks back to himself, the kitchen shifting back into focus. Chris is staring at him in mild concern but also disappointment, mouth full of cereal. His glasses are crooked, but he always fusses now when Eddie tries to fix them.

“I wasn’t staring at the wall.”

“Yes you were.”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Eddie chides.

Eddie hasn’t seen Buck in a whole day. One day. That’s normal, of course. Generally speaking. Not really for them, though. Somewhere along the way, Buck became more of an extension of Eddie rather than a separate person. Every time he looks over his shoulder, it’s second nature to expect Buck to be right behind him.

“You should get out more.”

Eddie blinks.

“You used to be so popular,” Chris continues helpfully.

Eddie blinks again. “Used to?”

“Yeah,” Chris continues without missing a beat, still talking with his damn mouth full. “Now you're like.” He makes a vague, floppy gesture with his spoon. “A hermit.”

Well, at least Eddie raised him to speak his mind or something. But that’s not true, it’s—Eddie has always been someone who gets out plenty. But when he came back home, Buck was there. And he’d gone without him for months, he didn’t wanna waste a single second with him. Everything and everyone else could wait.

But Buck’s not living with them anymore. Eddie knew that he was looking for apartments, but. It was just so sudden. It was nice to have him so close, so in reach. Eddie didn’t need to do anything else, or see anyone else, because Buck and Chris were there with him.

Eddie clears his throat. “I am not a hermit.”

“Maybe you should get a hobby,” Chris suggests, unperturbed.

“What the f—heck.” Honestly, Eddie can’t believe his ears. A fourteen year old telling him to get a hobby. Unbelievable. He’s barely even been alive.

“Swear jar.”

“I didn’t even say it.”

“Almost saying it is just as bad as saying it,” Chris says very seriously.

“Shouldn't I get points for catching myself?”

“No.”

“Well, since you’re so invested,” Eddie huffs, “I do have plans for today.”

“Do those plans involve another person?”

“Jeez.” Eddie shovels some soggy cereal in his mouth. “You sure are hard on your old man.”

Sure, Eddie has had tons of invitations to all kinds of things since he got back, but he doesn’t feel up to going to a pickup game or a game night or whatever the fuck else at the moment. There’s nothing wrong with that.

“I just don’t want you to be alone,” Chris says, suddenly earnest, hushed now like he’s admitting something he maybe shouldn’t.

Eddie’s lucky he’s sitting down, his knees going numb with the urge to buckle. “I’m…I’m not alone, Chris. I have—” Eddie clears his throat, nudges his knuckles into that tender spot of his chest. “I have a lot of people in my life. You don’t need to worry about that, okay?”

“Okay,” Chris says, but he doesn’t sound wholly convinced.

Eddie feels a bit wrong-footed all of a sudden. It's been a bit of a balancing act ever since they got back, knowing the right thing to say. Or maybe, not looking for the right thing, but the right way to say it. “If you must know,” Eddie says after a moment, “I was planning on making the porch pretty. Homemade planters.”

“Is Buck gonna help you?”

“Uh.” Eddie rubs at his nose. “No, buddy. He’s busy.”

Suspiciously busy, or maybe Eddie’s just getting all his wires crossed again. Buck’s supposed to be the one with separation anxiety. “You should ask him,” Chris says, “since I’m gonna be gone all day.”

“Now you're trying to arrange some babysitting for me too?”

Chris side-eyes him, and Eddie side-eyes him right back.

The house is empty again an hour and a half later, which is something that is completely fine and normal. Eddie is, quite, frankly, more than thrilled that his son has the social life of an A-list celebrity, already taking advantage of his first summer back in LA. He’s cooler than Eddie was at that age, so much so that Eddie is considering making him a separate Google calendar, one purely dedicated to his hangouts. He just has this thing where he’s constantly getting invited to stuff, fellow thirteenfourteen year olds flocking to him like he’s the sun. Or the pope.

Eddie had done deep, exhausting, soul-searching work to get over his overprotectiveness and paranoia and anxiety and general suffering over Chris’s safety and happiness, and it worked. Kind of. At the very least, he’s way better than he used to be, which is actually an understatement. But better does not mean that he’s above missing someone that is currently about a 20 minute drive away.

He calls Buck.

“Eddie?” Buck asks when he picks up, like Eddie is one of the last people he expects to call him.

“I know you’re busy,” Eddie says, fiddling with the tape measure in his hands. “I just wanted to check in.”

There’s shuffling on the other end. “I’m, uh, trying to get baby vomit out of my favorite sweater right now. So, pretty good.”

Eddie picks up the hand saw and starts cutting his wood. “Sounds like a fun afternoon. How’s the baby?”

“He’s good, um, he’s very talkative today, I think he might make a good lawyer someda—are you building a house over there or something?”

“Planter boxes,” Eddie corrects. “For the porch.”

“Oh!” Buck perks up immediately. He clears his throat. “Uh…oh,” he says at a more normal volume. “That, that sounds fun. What’re you gonna put in them?”

“Dunno yet. Maybe some zinnias. You once told me they’re low maintenance enough that even my black thumb wouldn’t kill them.”

Buck pauses for a second. “Yeah, that’s. I did say that, huh.”

Eddie smiles to himself, trying to ignore the stupid tugging in his chest that won’t seem to let up. “Yeah.”

“Well,” Buck says, and then he’s interrupted by a bloodcurdling baby scream.

“Oh, shit. He’s awake. I-I gotta go. We’ll—we’ll, um, talk later?”

“Yeah. Uh huh. Bye, Buck.”

Eddie sighs. He marks a pilot hole in his first plank of wood and grabs the drill. He tries to switch it on, but nothing happens. Dead.

“Goddamn it.”

Eddie always liked to do stuff with his hands. When Shannon first left and it was just him and Chris, Eddie took it upon himself to build something for him. Back then, Eddie was looking for anything that could make his mind go quiet for a second, something that could cease the trembling in his hands. It was ineffectual, though, because there was nothing that could make it stop. He wondered if he would just shake for the rest of his life.

Nighttime was the worst. Being left alone with his thoughts made him want to stick his head in a blender, and it wasn’t like he really had anyone he could roll over and tell all about it. And even if he did, what would he say? Everybody tells me I’m a hero, but I don’t feel like I’ve done anything worth celebrating. I’m scared the only thing keeping me alive right now is my son. Sometimes I’m convinced I died back in the desert, and none of this is even real. How are you?

Saying it out loud seemed like it would be even worse than just keeping it in, but a part of Eddie, the selfish, hurting part, wanted someone he could dump it all onto, someone who could bear the weight and take it all away from him.

But that wasn’t gonna happen. So he made Chris a bus.

Eddie had a bus when he was little—it was a small, wooden toy painted bright yellow with brown wheels. He was given Hot Wheels when he got older, which were much cooler and faster and brighter, but Eddie never really cared much for them. He much preferred his old wooden bus, slowly wearing down month by month with use.

He made a project of it, using the little bits of free time he had in between three jobs to chip away at it. Chris was particularly enamored by the sandpaper, how it could magically make rough things smooth. Eddie asked him what colors he wanted to paint it when it was ready, and Chris told him orange, pink and purple. Absolutely hideous, so it was perfect.

It was the worst when Chris went to sleep. Eddie would sit in his room with him, tinkering away as quietly as he could, and watch him sleep. This is what you have to live for, is what he’d think to himself. Sometimes it was hard to believe that something so wonderful came from him and Shannon. Eddie was scared one day he’d be there across from the bed, watching Chris snuffle in his sleep, and the next moment he’d blink and realize that he was never there at all, just a beautiful figment of his imagination. There was no way Eddie could deserve something that good, was there?

And it was always so silent. Just the sound of Chris breathing, and Eddie dutifully counted each breath, had to make sure that he was still there. Sometimes it’d get to be too much, too real, and the tremor in his hands would come back. He had no one to tell. Certainly not his parents, they’d probably try to lobotomize him in his sleep. And then take Chris away from him for good. There was no one, and there was no good explanation for why Eddie had made it back home while others didn’t. There was no one to turn to, there was just his baby. He almost wanted to shake Chris awake sometimes. Say something, he’d think. Tell me I’m supposed to be here.

He painted the bus orange, pink and purple. It was perfect.

“No, I told you. We made up after that. We’re fine, it’s just, like...”

Hen and Karen blink back at him like a twin pair of owls, scarily in sync. It frightens Eddie a bit sometimes, how it’s possible for two people to almost move as one.

“It’s just, like…?” Karen prompts, casually sliding another snickerdoodle onto his plate.

Eddie clears his throat, feeling like a guilty criminal on trial. “I mean, with everything that happened, it was a lot. But Buck is…he’s…well, you know him. He’s taking it in stride now and talking about shit like accepting change. He even bought a book on minimalism.”

Hen nods sagely, daintily sipping from her mug. “Sounds like Buck.”

“Anyway, we’re fine, he’s just been a little preoccupied. So we haven’t been…” Eddie makes a vague gesture with his cookie. “You know.”

“Being Buck and Eddie,” Hen finishes helpfully.

“Sure. I’m not trying to rain on his parade or anything,” Eddie says, because for some inexplicable reason he feels the need to defend himself all of a sudden. “He wants to move forward. And anything is better than us blowing up at each other. I just like to…keep an eye on him, I guess.”

“You miss him,” Karen decides for him.

Eddie blinks into his mug, staring back at his own tea-flavored reflection. He needs to shave.

“Why don’t you take a page out of Buck’s book,” Hen cuts in, her voice taking on that twinkling quality it gets when she’s trying not to laugh at someone, “and try and occupy your time. Me and Karen are trying it too. Knit a sweater. Go biking.”

Karen waves a cookie at him. “Jump out of a plane!”

Hen squints. “Maybe not that.”

Honestly, what happened to him? Has he let himself go? Eddie blows a raspberry. “Chris also said I need to get out more. It was eye-opening.”

“He cares about you,” Hen smiles around her mug.

Karen keeps it going. “Get into pottery.”

Hen shrugs, “Buy a motorcycle.”

“Learn French.”

“Go canoeing.”

“Adopt a guinea pig!”

“I don’t know,” Eddie cuts in, honestly kind of squicked out at the prospect of having to take care of a furry, squirmy rodent. “None of those are really my speed. I feel like I should do something…deeper?”

“How about therapy?” Hen suggests.

“Fuck no,” Eddie says kindly.

Karen brightens up suddenly, a metaphorical lightbulb popping up over her head. “My book club!”

Hen raises a judgemental eyebrow all the way to the ceiling. “You can’t be serious.”

“Well, it’s a lesbian feminist book club,” Karen clarifies to Eddie. “You know, for lesbian feminists.”

“Uh huh,” Eddie says.

“But you should come pop in one day! We’re always welcoming new members.”

Eddie tries to sit with this. “You want me,” he gestures to himself, “to join your lesbian feminist book club.”

“Well, I guess it’s just queer feminists now,” Karen muses. “Stephanie is bisexual.”

“I see.”

“It's fine! I'll tell them I'm inviting a friend. It’ll be so fun!”

Eddie cannot say that he’s an expert on feminist literature, or lesbian literature, or feminist lesbian literature and anything in between, but Karen is looking at him like she’s just offered him her firstborn or something, black hole eyes trying to swallow him whole, and Hen has that exasperated expression on her face that does nothing to belie the fondness hiding in plain sight underneath it. And Eddie is weak.

“Uh. Sure?”

Shannon liked to read. She always carried a beat up copy of Sense and Sensibility with her around school, which Eddie had found awfully pretentious, but not in a bad way.

She always had her nose stuck between two pages. She was the type to dogear her books instead of using a bookmark, the wrinkled, ripped pages filling Eddie with unimaginable grief. She’d take notes and annotate too, all in bright Sharpie in neon pink and orange.

Sometimes the memories are quite fuzzy, like photographs lost in a storm and damaged and waterlogged, but he remembers that book in brilliant technicolor.

It was the book she was holding when he asked her to junior prom, his heart skipping all the way up to his throat and his fingertips tingling, like his blood would shoot out of him any minute.

Eddie knew that she was gonna say yes.

“Go to prom with me.”

Shannon had slammed her locker shut in a way that could’ve been intimidating, but Eddie could barely hear anything over the sound of the ringing in his ears. She turned to look at him and his tongue got all frozen and sticky in his mouth, the dust motes in the air floating around her head like a halo.

“What if someone already asked me?”

Thankfully, he had covered all his bases and interrogated her friends about who she was going to prom with—a resounding no one—so Eddie had called her bluff.

He smiled. He felt giddy for some reason, even though it seemed like she was gearing up to reject him. Something in him had just told him that she wouldn’t. “What, are you gonna cop out and say you’re going with your friends or something?”

She squinted at him coyly, clutching that damn book in her hands. “So what if I did? I have plenty of friends.”

She wasn’t even lying. Shannon was always much cooler than him—Eddie had only really started to come out of his shell around the time they met, when he first saw her by the lake. He hadn’t been doing bad for himself anymore, but she still had him beat. She was just like that, a person people were always drawn to. He wasn’t sure how she did it.

“Not sure how you keep ‘em with all those books you read.”

She scoffed incredulously at him. “Of course you’d think that being smart makes you uncool, you baseball meathead.”

Eddie tried not to grin like a maniac. He probably failed. But he had liked that about Shannon—she made fun of him all the time, but he never felt insulted. He felt held.

“I told you, I used to dance. Was real good at it too.” He leaned a hand against her locker like something out of a Brando movie, real slick, real cool. “Look, I just meant that you pay more attention to—what is it, Jane Austen?—than your friends.”

She leaned in. “Just being in my company is worth it.”

“So will you accompany me to junior prom?”

She seemed to mull it over for a second, eyes wide and assessing, and even though he may not have looked like it, Eddie was sweating all the way down to his toes. “Sure, Eddie. As long as we can spike the punch.”

Not that it even mattered—they ended up ditching halfway to go lose their virginities in the back of Eddie’s pickup, Shannon's tacky blue discount rack dress hiked up to her chest. Eddie still remembers the feeling of the scratchy frills against his chest, the softness of her hands pushing at his back.

Eddie drove her back home that night, and honest to God, she pulled that damn book out of her clutch. It made him laugh. She finally told him why she always kept it with her, that it was her mother’s favorite.

Eddie never did read Sense and Sensibility.

“Hey, Buck. You busy today?”

It’s weird, asking Buck about his plans. Quite frankly disturbing. Usually, Eddie would know. Because Buck would tell him. Buck tells him everything.

It’s making him feel feverish, almost, the change in routine. It hasn’t been that long since Buck moved out—Eddie hasn’t even been over to see the new place all done up, though it’d probably look something like wrapping a pretty ribbon around a dumpster. A part of Eddie almost wants to storm over there and demand that Buck just. Just what? It doesn’t make any sense. And Eddie doesn’t want a repeat of their last fight anyway, he’s not sure if he’d be able to take another one.

Buck’s barely been gone for that long, but every second feels more like a millennium than anything else. It’s not enough to just see him at work, like they’re the dictionary definition of coworkers. Especially not if Eddie wants to get his paramedic license in light of Chimney's promotion, in which case he and Buck wouldn’t even be—well, it’s fine. He should just focus on the now, that was some bullshit Frank used to tell him when he was spiraling about the future.

“Uh, I have.” There’s shuffling on the other line. “Something in about an hour.”

“Hanging out?” Eddie asks, and it comes out kind of sharp.

“No,” Buck says, kind of questioning, and then he clears his throat. “I, um. I started going to a grief support group.”

Kneejerk, Eddie almost wants to say, but you and I could talk about it, but who is he to think that he's better than mental health professionals? Buck's just been so slippery. Maybe Eddie hadn’t given him enough.

Truthfully, since he moved back, Eddie hasn’t been thinking about it. It's been sort of floating there in the back of his mind, but there were so many other things in front of it he had to focus on. Death has always been like that for him, a peripheral kind of thing until it’s not.

But what else is he supposed to do? A world without Bobby was never even supposed to exist.

“Oh,” Eddie says lamely. “How’s that?”

“Good,” Buck says automatically. There’s a pause. “Weird,” he says more honestly. “I think it’s just—well, it feels kind of strange because. I-I’m surrounded by all these people who, like, lost their spouses, or their mom or their dad, or a sibling. And it’s not like Bobby was my-” Buck clears his throat. “Yeah, it’s weird. But I’m sure I’ll…I’m sure I’ll get used to it.”

Eddie shakes his head even though Buck can’t see him, wishes he could reach out and touch his shoulder. “It’s not a competition. You still lost someone.”

Buck takes a big, painful sounding breath. “Yeah. Uh huh. Yeah, you’re—you’re right.”

“I think it’s good.” Eddie sets his mug of coffee down on the counter and hangs his head, rubbing his knuckles over his chest. “The group, I mean. It’ll be good for you.”

“Y-yeah, I hope so. You could always come with me one day, if you’re up for it.”

Well, that’s what Eddie wanted, right? To stay by Buck’s side, to keep him in his line of sight always. They made up after the fight and then didn’t touch it after, the proverbial elephant stinking up every room they found themselves in together.

“Maybe,” Eddie says, and his chest starts to hurt real bad. “I’ll think about it.”

The first unfinished planter box stares back at him. It’s not even that hard of a project, but he hasn’t been able to bring himself to touch it since he first started it. Maybe it’s not even a good idea. Maybe he’d end up killing all the flowers anyway.

“Okay,” Buck says quietly, and then the kitchen counter starts wobbling.

Eddie has more to say, in fact, he has a lot to say. He needs to tell Buck that he can talk to him about anything, even though he already knows that. He needs to grab him by the ankles and just get him to stay still for a second.

“Uh, Buck, I gotta go. I’ll call you back later.”

He’s half-aware of Buck saying something in response, probably expressing concern, but blood is rushing to Eddie’s ears. It happens suddenly, in the breadth of a second. He hangs up and grabs the edge of the counter and sinks to his knees, hand to his chest. Eddie’s aware in the back of his mind that Chris could come out of his room at any moment and see him like this, but he can’t really move.

There’s this ringing. It’s grating in his ears, makes his brain feel like it’s being split in half. His heart is rattling in its cage, trying to slide its way up and out of his chest.

Eddie thinks of Bobby.

There was a barbecue at the old house, not too long after Eddie rejoined the 118. It was nice and cool out in the yard, and he and Buck and Chris had eaten their weight in sliders, and then Eddie’s chest started caving in.

Eddie doesn’t even know what happened. One moment he was laughing with his friends and family, and the next he was dry heaving into Bobby and Athena’s toilet.

It must’ve taken him a while to come out, or long enough to notice his absence, because Bobby was waiting for him when he left the bathroom.

“Sorry,” Eddie had said, ducking his head. It still felt raw sometimes, being around Bobby. Eddie had been so mad at him for not letting him come back to work, except he wasn’t really angry at Bobby at all. The damage had been done anyway, but Bobby was more forgiving than the Pope himself. “I guess something didn’t agree with me.”

Bobby levelled him with a kind look.“Panic attack?”

“Uh.”

Bobby had set a firm hand on his shoulder and ushered him away from all the noise to the master bedroom, which made Eddie acutely feel like he was intruding, and then he sat him down on the edge of the bed.

“You can stay here for however long you need.”

That was good. Eddie wanted to be alone. At least, he thought he did. But then he said, “I didn’t even-” and stopped.

Eddie didn’t finish his sentence, but Bobby seemed to understand anyway.

“There isn’t always an obvious reason.” Bobby sat next to him and smiled. Eddie tried to smile back, but it felt more like a wince. “Sometimes it just happens. It still happens to me too, occasionally.”

Somehow, Eddie had been taken aback by that, even though it made perfect sense. Bobby had always just been so steady in Eddie’s mind, an unmoving pillar. “Really?” he asked, and he felt like a child.

“Really,” Bobby assured him.

Eddie dug into the muscle of his chest with his knuckles, his heart rate still not quite back to normal, and burst into tears.

Bobby rubbed a warm hand up and down his back, and Eddie tried to let the touch tether him back to reality. He didn’t deserve grace, or forgiveness, but Bobby’s had no bounds. He always wondered how he did it. “That’s alright,” Bobby said. “That’s alright.”

“I told you to go to hell,” Eddie laughed through all the snot.

“It’s okay,” Bobby had smiled. “I’m trying really hard not to.”

Eddie takes a big breath in.

He’s still alone, thankfully, and for once Eddie is grateful for the existence of addictive gaming consoles. He stands back up, grabs the power drill, and gets back to work.

“I thought the narrator was a total asshole.”

“That was the point!”

“I personally couldn’t understand why he treated Giovanni like such shit. Like, oh woe is me, I’m an American expat in Paris. Get over yourself!”

“Come on, guys. David’s problems were deep-seated and internal. It was, like, so poetic.”

Eddie’s in the middle of inhaling a blueberry muffin the size of his head, and he’s thinking about Buck. Which isn’t an uncommon occurrence by any means, but he’s supposed to be focusing.

Eddie hasn’t read the book they’re discussing, so it’s not entirely his fault, but it’s definitely Karen’s.

Buck had attempted to make blueberry muffins when he was in his little slump after the breakup, with his frankly concerning case of birdnest hair and depression beard. He left them in the oven too long because he got distracted by God knows what, so they were really more like edible hockey pucks than anything else. He had watched Eddie like a snake descending on prey, demanding that he tell him how bad they really were, and Eddie said, they’re fine.

“What do you think?”

Karen stomps on his shoe in not really a subtle way at all, and Eddie realizes someone must have asked him a question.

Eddie clears his throat. “I’m sorry?”

Well, he thought everybody else would be doing the talking, but clearly he was mistaken. The leader of the club, Tori, stares back at him, a very kind smile on her face. Her hair is gelled into bleach blond spikes, not dissimilar to the white boys he went to high school with that really wanted to be the sixth member of NSYNC. “Morally gray protagonists,” she clarifies. “How do you feel about them?”

“Oh,” Eddie says. “Well, I really liked Fight Club.”

Nice one. That really gets a laugh out of everyone, even though he wasn’t really trying to be funny. At least he’s off the hook.

There’s more talk about burning books, societal norms and expectations, and how James Baldwin’s depiction of Hella was progressive for the 1950s. Eddie is three muffins deep by the time the discussion is over, mildly considering a fourth. Tori tells him she loved having him there and he’s welcome back any time as their one exception, and then he gets six extra phone numbers in his contacts list. It’s mildly confusing, as he didn’t contribute much to the conversation, or do much of anything, really, but he’s flattered.

As Eddie stalks back to the dessert table, Karen follows him and says, “I will definitely be forcing you to come back, by the way.”

Eddie rolls his eyes good-naturedly. “Lucky me,” he jokes.

“You needed a hobby, the stars are aligning.” She gives him jazz-hands. “You’re here for a reason!”

“I’m here because my son thinks I’m a loser,” Eddie corrects.

It’s Karen’s turn to roll her eyes. “He doesn’t think you’re a loser.”

“The jury’s still out on that one.”

She slaps him in the side with her book, and then shoves it in his hands. “Here. You should read it.”

Eddie examines the cover, an impressionist painting of a man sitting down amidst swirls of chunky paint, his gaze somewhere off to the side. “D’you want me to write an essay too?”

“Yes. Times New Roman, 12 point, double-spaced, MLA format.”

“You got it, professor.”

Eddie takes the long way home that night, dreading walking into an empty house. Still, he gets there too soon, and he’s got about an hour before he needs to pick up Chris from his friend’s house. He opens the book and flips to a random page, zeroing in on the first sentence he sees.

"Tell me,” he said, “what is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. What are they waiting for?”

“Well,” I said, feeling myself being led by Giovanni into deep and dangerous water, “I guess people wait in order to make sure of what they feel.”

“In order to make sure!” He turned again to that invisible ally and laughed again. I was beginning, perhaps, to find his phantom a little unnerving but the sound of his laughter in that airless tunnel was the most incredible sound. “It’s clear that you are a true philosopher.” He pointed a finger at my heart. “And when you have waited — has it made you sure?”

Eddie closes the book.

There was this call back in 2020, real brutal. Eddie had seen a lot, but it wasn’t that often that bodies on scene were completely mangled to the point where it was difficult to extract them—bones sticking out of places they shouldn’t, faces completely unrecognizable, vehicles so destroyed they looked like nothing more than random spare parts on the freeway.

Not a single person in the accident made it, the youngest one only three years. Eddie was well acquainted with dead bodies, but this one was hard to shake. Maybe it was because of the latent fear that always sat in the back of his mind for his son, exacerbated tenfold by the pandemic. She was just a child.

He tried to hit the bunks when they got back to the firehouse. It was almost midnight by the time his head hit the pillow, and he tried to close his eyes, but that only made it worse. It acutely reminded him of years before, after the bullets in his body and the helicopter going down down down. Every time he tried to close his eyes, there was a gun in his hands again, there was searing, blinding pain, there was sand in his mouth.

Eddie tried to sleep for two hours and gave up.

He stalked up to the loft in the godless hours of the morning, everything dim and liminal. Buck was on the couch.

He had his nose in a book. He looked very tired. Eddie sat down next to him, their knees brushing. Buck didn’t unglue himself from the page, but he made a vague noise of acknowledgement.

“What are you reading?” Eddie asked.

“It’s about carnivorous plants.”

“Will you read me some?”

“Sure.” Buck bumped him with his elbow, a grounding little touch. “Venus flytraps are native only to the coastal plain of southeastern North Carolina and extreme northeastern South Carolina, in roughly a hundred-mile radius from Wilmington…”

“Do you want pancakes?”

Buck stops in his tracks like a deer hypnotized by headlights, quite fitting for his nickname. Gotcha, Eddie thinks. Try and worm your way out of this one. He imagines a sturdy lasso tugging Buck forward by the neck, a cowboy to a bull.

Buck closes his locker. They’re just coming off a rough 12, but he looks wide awake suddenly. He blinks rapidly, his lashes fluttering with the movement, so fast Eddie is scared he might take off and fly away. “Uh, sure. I could eat.”

“Great. Follow me.”

There’s a cafe off Fairfax with pancakes bigger than your head. Literally. Buck had taken him and Chris years ago and treated them. Chris was very delighted by it all, and Eddie has a picture in his phone of Chris pretending to shove Buck’s face into a pile of pancakes, smiling so wide you could count all of his teeth if you wanted. They haven’t been back since—it’s not often any of them crave pancakes that taste like Fruity Pebbles or whatever.

When Buck sits down across from him at the booth, Eddie gets a bad feeling. It starts in his hands first, traveling little pinpricks of thorns up his arms, settling over his neck. Looking at Buck, what he’s been deprived of, makes him feel indignant. Eddie’s not quite sure who he’s mad at. He barely notices a waitress come over and set water on the table.

“How are you?”

Buck looks up from where he’s chewing the shit out of his straw, eyes impeccably blue. Eddie gets the urge to make fun of him for destroying his straw like he always does, but it’s an incidental thing.

“So formal,” Buck jokes, setting his cup down. It’s too casual to actually be natural.

Eddie’s just gonna get right to it. He’s never been one to beat around unnecessary bushes anyway. “Yeah, it feels weird, right. But I have to ask because you're so goddamn slippery lately. So, I'd really like to know.”

Buck looks taken aback, like Eddie’s just opened his mouth and started speaking in tongues and not English. He kind of pouts, and it seems to be completely subconsciously, and Eddie can’t help but almost laugh at him. “S-slippery?”

“You're fleeing me.”

“I’m not.” Buck’s eyebrows try to hit the floor, and he gnaws at his bottom lip like he’s trying to tear right through it. “I'm just. It's been a lot, with the new apartment and the baby, and.” Buck doesn’t need to say Bobby. “I’m doing what I have to do,” he says after a moment, more hushed, like an afterthought.

Eddie blinks. “What you have to do.”

“I’m trying to grow up.”

Eddie rubs at his temple. He suddenly has a terrible pain in his stomach, and he’s not sure how he’s supposed to swallow anything down. “Growing up means running away from me?”

“I told you, I’m not-” Buck looks around, self conscious, and lowers his voice back down. “I’m not running from you.”

Eddie leans back in his seat. “Coulda fooled me.”

Buck scowls at him, and Eddie can feel the heat of it hit his skin. “That’s not fair.”

They’re on a merry-go-round. Eddie’s not sure how he can make things go back to normal between them, back to the way things were before, or at least some facsimile of it. But he’d do anything for it.

The selfish barbarian that lives inside of Eddie’s body wants to say what about me? Even through the bad feeling, the thorns in his hands and arms and neck, he just wants Buck to look at him.

“So talk to me then.”

“What do you want me to say, Eddie?”

“Anything. Everything. Isn’t that the whole point?”

“The point of what?”

“You and me. Us.”

“You and me,” Buck parrots back.

“It’s always been you and me," Eddie says, his heart in his throat. “Hasn't it?”

Buck looks pained at that, features scrunching up like Eddie’s just raised a fist and is about to sock him in the face. He runs a hand through his hair, fingers getting caught in a tangle. “I-I need to go.”

Eddie wants to dig his claws in so that Buck can’t go anywhere, he wants to keep going until he draws blood. So Buck can tell him why. Eddie barely even knows what question he wants to ask. How is he doing this?

“You’re doing it again,” Eddie says. It hurts more than anything else has in a while, and Eddie feels a lot of hurt in general. It’s become a default state of sorts.

Buck stands up, almost stumbling over his own feet before catching himself. “I don’t feel well.” Bullshit. His eyes ping-pong around Eddie’s face before settling somewhere off to the side, the morning light turning them almost transparent blue. “Look, I’m sorry, Eddie, I just—I’ll see you later, okay?”

Buck leaves, and Eddie should follow. His feet stay planted to the floor.

He really doesn’t like pancakes that much anyway.

Sometimes—more often than not, really—Eddie still wakes up with a scream caught in his throat. There's this recurring dream where he’s buried in the sand, and it’s slowly pouring inside of him. It gets packed inside his throat, fills up his lungs, clogs his bloodstream, grits his eyes up. There's so much that he becomes it, earth where flesh and blood used to be.

He always tries to call for help, even though he knows it’s never going to come.

Eddie takes a page out of Buck’s book.

“Why don’t you introduce yourself?”

Hi, I’m Eddie, and I’m an alcoholic, he wants to say, even though it’d be a very inappropriate joke to make.

Eddie doesn’t even know why he’s here. Or, he knows why, but he’s kind of regretting it anyway. Flaying himself open for multiple strangers to see would probably be even worse than doing it in front of a licensed professional. At least Frank had a comfy couch. If nothing else, he’ll power through for free donuts.

“I’m Eddie. My, uh, my captain died. I’m a firefighter, I mean. His name was Bobby.”

Everyone says Hi Eddie at the same time like some kind of hivemind, and Eddie swears the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. They go around the circle and everyone reintroduces themselves for Eddie’s sake, and he’s acutely reminded of those horrible icebreakers they used to make him and the other kids do in elementary school.

Then Eddie sits there for however long and listens to people talk about death, which is definitely his idea of a fun Friday afternoon off work. If anything, other people’s grief momentarily distracts him from his own. There’s a woman who lost her husband in a car accident a year ago. A teen whose mother is dying in the hospital, preparing himself for the loss. A dead sister. Three dead wives. One dead best friend, and also a boyfriend.

Eddie’s not sure how he expected to feel, but it is kind of weird, just like Buck said. Obviously, Bobby was important to him, but it feels strange, in the face of all this grief, to say it. Which is the exact opposite of what he told Buck. It’s not a competition. You still lost someone. Do as I say, not as I do, or whatever.

“Jess has been gone for two years,” the woman with the dead friend is saying. She’s fiddling with her hands, thumbs turning over each other again and again and again. “And it feels like I haven’t healed at all. One day I’m fine, and the next day I break down crying. I think about her all the time. Eating breakfast. Taking my kids to school. Doing laundry. It feels like.” She pauses and looks down. “It’s like nothing will ever be normal again.”

Eddie takes a deep breath. The group leader, a very kind-looking older woman named Terri, assures her that what she’s feeling is completely normal. One step forward, two steps back. Nothing is linear. These are all things that Eddie has heard hundreds of times over, and things that he knows are true, logically. He’s lived it.

Pretty much everyone feels the same way. I broke down crying in the grocery store parking lot the other day out of nowhere. I can’t even eat foods my husband used to like. I have no idea how I’m supposed to keep moving forward like nothing happened.

They commiserate. Eddie’s not really being forced to talk, but it feels rude to not say anything when he’s finally asked if he’d like to talk about Bobby.

Eddie takes a deep breath in.

“Well, he was…” What can Eddie even say to describe what Bobby was to him? What can he say that would even do him justice, that would even give them a slight picture of who the man was? “I wouldn’t say a father figure, necessarily. But he was some kind of figure, I guess. We experienced a lot of the same things, so I could relate to him that way. And he’d talk with me and sit with me, and it was—he made me feel less alone, I think. And now he’s…”

Eddie doesn’t really feel like he’s gonna cry. It’s more like someone invisible is trying to smother him with a pillow. He clears the prickling out of his throat. “He’s dead. He’s dead, and he’s not coming back.”

Terri nods in understanding. Eddie thinks he’s finished, but then his mouth keeps talking without his permission.

“We didn’t just work together, he was also…he was my friend.” Eddie’s not sure if he’d ever told Bobby that before he died. That Eddie didn’t just consider him a captain or a mentor, but a friend. He’s sure Bobby knew, but he never said it out loud. He should’ve said it out loud. Eddie should know better, the value of saying things out loud. When he does, it’s always too late.

“It sounds like he was very important to you.”

Understatement of the fucking century. Eddie has no idea why it’s only just hitting him now. He already knew it, but it’s hitting harder, more pointedly now.

“I’m sure you both being firefighters only served to deepen that bond,” she continues sympathetically. “The life of a first responder is a deeply unique one.”

Eddie nods. “Of course. Yeah, that helped. But it wasn’t just that—” Eddie’s saying too much. There’s a can of worms—it’s more like a can of brain-eating parasites—that he doesn’t want to open, but everyone’s looking at him so expectantly. Not talking about it is what got him into the whole Texas mess, isn’t it? He takes another deep breath, and it doesn’t really help. “But also my….uh. He lost his wife and kids. And I lost my wife. Ex-wife. Or, she was about to be my ex-wife before she died.”

He rubs at his temple and chances a little glance around. Everyone looks so sad. Maybe Eddie has won the Grief Olympics after all.

“Anyway, what you guys were talking about earlier. About progress. It’s still fresh, but I feel that way about Bobby. And my wi—Shannon’s been dead for 6 whole years and I'm still.” Eddie doesn't finish that thought and bites his tongue instead. Someone puts a gentle hand on his shoulder, but he doesn’t look up.

He wonders what Shannon would say if she could see him now. She’d probably make a joke. Wow, she’d say wryly. Am I really worth all of these crocodile tears?

After the lawsuit, it was good to have Buck back close. He was groveling, just a little bit, and Eddie was kind of enjoying it. Just a little. Eddie was quietly greedy for his time and attention, and it scared him how much he wanted—needed—to see Buck all the time so he could have a steady heartbeat.

Buck took him out to dinner one night, some nice Mediterranean place, and it was—there were a lot of couples there, was all. Which was normal, of course, it was dinner time on a weekend.

“I feel like I could eat about 3 entrees right now,” Buck was saying, rubbing his stomach with two hands like a fucking cartoon character. “Or 4. Or 5.”

“Maybe if you stopped skipping meals,” Eddie said.

Buck frowned. Pouted, more like. “I don’t do it on purpose. You know I have the short-term memory of a goldfish.”

“Or a senile old man.”

Buck flipped him off just as a waitress came over to take their order, and Eddie suppressed a snort into his shirt collar.

“Hate you,” Buck said once their orders were taken and she was out of hearing distance, flipping Eddie off a second time for good measure.

“Hate is a strong word, bud.”

They had a good night. Admittedly, it was the best night Eddie had experienced in a while. His shoulders weren’t tense, he wasn’t on guard, he was just there. With Buck. It was easy, like nothing had ever changed.

Eddie tried to commit every minute detail of his face to memory, just in case. He knew that Buck wasn’t going anywhere, not anymore, but he just—it was just in case. The close crop of his haircut, his birthmark, the striking slope of his nose, his full mouth, the razor-sharp cut of his jaw. Eddie probably could’ve drawn him from memory alone.

Once Eddie got his fill, he turned away, his skin on fire. He couldn't look at him anymore.

Buck left a blanket at Eddie’s house.

It’s shoved into the corner of the hallway closet, blue and worn and frayed at the edges from use. He should go and return it, but then he remembers that he doesn’t even have a key to Buck’s new place. How is that possible?

He slams the closet shut with more force than he meant to, the door making an ugly creaking sound that resounds throughout the hall. Chris is standing there now, and Eddie nearly jumps out his skin. It’s usually impossible for him to sneak up on Eddie because he can hear his crutches against the floor, but Eddie is—he doesn’t know what he is. Distracted doesn’t even seem to cover it. Experiencing divine punishment, maybe.

“Jesus.” Eddie folds the blanket up against his chest. “Hey, kid, you scared me.”

“Can I go to Jeremy’s house?” Chris asks in lieu of a greeting.

Eddie blinks. “Right now? I was hoping me and you could do something today.”

Chris purses his lips in a move very reminiscent of Shannon. “We can do something tomorrow. He got a new game I wanna play.”

“What game?”

“You don’t have to baby me. What do you even care?”

It’s too early in the morning for whiplash. Eddie frowns. Chris is not really the typical moody teenager, which Eddie has thanked his old friend God for many times. So when he gets in a mood, Eddie knows it’s usually something specific that’s pushed him over the edge, something he’s been holding in and letting fester like a wound.

“Hey,” Eddie says carefully. “Where is this coming from?”

Chris frowns and it makes him look much older, his expression stormy, and it reminds Eddie of another time. Not that long ago. Not long enough. “I’m your dad,” Eddie continues. “It’s my job to care, of course I care.”

“Do you?”

Eddie tries to think of all those deescalation tactics they use in hostage situations. His mind draws a blank. “Have I done something to make you think I don't care? Is that what you're telling me?”

“I didn't see my friends for months,” Chris insists, completely bulldozing past the question, “because I was in El Paso, and now I’m back and I can't see them?”

“That’s not what I’m-” Eddie rubs at his temple. He tries to remember how to breathe correctly. What was it called? Box breathing? 4-7-8? It’s all so insane. He imagines having a panic attack in the middle of all of this. That’d be fucking rich. “Chris, I don’t have a problem with you seeing your friends. I know you were in Texas-”

Chris squints at him. “Don’t say it like that. I was there because of you-”

There it is. Eddie was sure something like this would come up sooner or later, he just didn’t know when. He was bracing for it, but he doesn’t even feel prepared. “I know I let you go, but I gave you space, and I moved back to be close to you, and I-”

“I didn't ask you to do any of that!”

It’s rare that Chris ever raises his voice, similar to Eddie. Eddie blinks. “I didn’t ask,” Chris continues, “and you—you never asked.”

“Chris.”

“And now—it's weird being back after all that time, I feel like I missed everything. That’s why I need to do everything. Don’t you get it?”

Eddie takes a big breath in. “I didn't know, Chris.”

Chris turns around and stalks away, and Eddie trips over his feet so he beats Eddie to his room. He locks the door before Eddie can open it, before he can fix it and make things right again. The last time this happened, Eddie called Buck.

Eddie buries his face in the blanket.

The auditorium was packed.

There wasn’t really anything Eddie hated more than being around other kids' parents, unfortunately, but at least Buck was there with him.

“He’s totally gonna win,” Buck was saying, bouncing on his heels excitedly like a puppy dog. “I’m telling you, he’s the smartest kid in the world. And I helped, of course we’ve got it in the bag.”

Eddie remembers exactly how the use of the word we made him feel. It was too big to look at, too all-encompassing. “Yeah, we got Einstein Jr. over here.”

Buck flashed all of his teeth at Eddie even though he was making fun of him. “Exactly.”

They watched Chris talking animatedly to his teacher in front of his science project—his very own model seismograph. Eddie didn’t wanna know anything more about earthquakes after the 7.1 two years prior, but Chris wasn’t like him in that way. It only made him more curious. Eddie smiled to himself.

“Were you any good at science as a kid?” Eddie asked.

Buck made a considering noise. “I think I could've been good at it. But no one expected me to be good at it. So then I wasn't. Does that make sense?”

Eddie had yet to learn all the unsavory things about Buck’s childhood back then, but he was starting to get it little by little. Buck shrugged it off like it was no big deal, a little self-deprecating grin on his lovely face, and Eddie wanted to squeeze him to death.

“Makes sense to me,” Eddie said.

“I think it’s-” Buck paused like he hadn’t meant to speak out loud, but then he kept going. “I think it’s nice that you believe in him so much,” he said, a little uncharacteristically shy, looking even more boyish than usual. Maybe it was because he needed a haircut.

“Of course I do.” Eddie smiled again as Chris started to explain his project to one of his friends. “He’s the greatest kid in the world.”

Buck was right. Chris won the science fair.

“I think I'm in love with my best friend.”

Buck still hasn’t been gone for that long. But the strength of his absence is something Eddie can’t rationalize or try to explain away. A new apartment. Something as simple as a new apartment feels just like a lawsuit, or a PTSD-induced mental breakdown causing distance, or 800 physical miles between them.

“No, I don't think, I know. It's been there the whole time, it’s just in the front of my mind now instead of the back. I can see it now, clearly. And there’s really nothing shocking about it. Not at all.”

The world doesn’t end. There’s no horrible ringing in his ears, no bullet, no mud or sand. There’s still breath in his body. He’s still in this room, filled with death and grief and free donuts.

The back of his neck gets a little hot, but he doesn’t take it back. “Sorry, it just hit me recently, and you said we could talk about anything. But it’s also…relevant, I think.”

Terri smiles at him. Annie with the dead best friend even has a hand over her heart, God have mercy on Eddie’s soul. “Exacty how long have you known?”

“5 hours. I guess a part of me knew for a while? I didn’t know, but. Well, I guess I knew there was something there, and that’s where it ended.”

Eddie is in love with Buck. It’s the answer to all the unanswerable questions, the reason for all the unexplainable. And it feels monumental, but it also feels…correct. Like, of course Eddie is in love with Buck. Why wouldn’t he be?

“You said it was relevant,” Terri prompts gently. “Why is that?”

“You know, the whole dead wife thing.”

“Mhm,” she says, kind of with a mysterious little smile. It sort of reminds Eddie of Bobby.

“I guess, for a while, a part of me thought it’d be…unfair to her. If I moved on. Even when I was actively dating.”

“Did it feel good?”

Eddie squints. “I’m sorry?”

“Did it make you feel good,” Terri clarifies, “always worrying if you were being unfair to her?”

Shannon wanted a divorce. Sometimes, in the chaos of everything that’s always going on with him, he forgets that one simple fact. She wasn’t happy. Neither was he.

Their marriage wasn’t perfect by any means. It was godawful, actually, but it was theirs. It was hard to let go. If Eddie let go of it, what things would he have to face? “No, but. I had a mindset. Which was like, if I keep thinking about her all the time, I’ll never forget her.”

“But it makes you miserable,” she states instead of asks.

“Yeah. Yeah, it does.”

“Do you think she’d want you to be miserable?”

Eddie sits with that for a second. Shannon was a lot of things, and she could be spiteful and mean and ugly, just like Eddie could. But she did love him, and Eddie loved her, even if it wasn’t in the way she needed him to.

“That’s a good question.”

It’s a good question.

Eddie’s in front of the mirror again.

The last time he was here like this, he had a seventies pornstache on his face. Chris had been gone for so long that his absence seemed like it was close to becoming a physical thing, like a gaping black hole would form in Eddie’s house where a person should’ve been. When he took a razor to his face and made a decision.

And there was before, when Shannon still felt like a wound that would never close and Buck was so far away, right before Eddie started getting beaten bloody and battered every night because of multiple things he didn’t have the courage to name or face. When he took a pair of scissors to his head and made a different kind of decision.

And now, he takes a different pair of scissors and realizes he needs to make another decision.

He grabs a piece of hair and starts cutting.

Eddie has allowed Chris 24 hours of silent treatment. Very generous.

He knocks on his bedroom door. “Chris? We need to talk.”

No answer.

“Chris?”

Still no answer.

“Okay. I know I’m big on respecting your privacy and stuff, but you’re not saying anything, so I’m gonna just open it-”

Chris opens the door.

“Oh. Hey.”

Chris skulks back over to his bed, heaving a sigh as he sits on it like the world’s oldest, tiredest man. Eddie sits next to him and spots an abandoned library book at the edge. “What are you reading?”

“Northanger Abbey.”

Eddie is only aware of that book’s existence because of Shannon. “Jane Austen, right?”

“Mhm.”

“Okay. Look, Chris, I got something to say to you.”

Chris turns an infinitesimal amount, not fully keeping up the indifferent act. Eddie clears his throat. “You were right.”

Chris tilts his head to the side in question, and for no particular reason at all, Eddie is struck by just how much he loves him. It just hits him sometimes, like a horse kick to the chest, a swift kick in the ass, a balled-up fist to his solar plexus.

“About me,” Eddie clarifies. "I didn't do everything right. Well, that’s an understatement. I did most things wrong. But I did one thing right. You know what that is?”

Chris just blinks up at him. “God, you used to humor me. Anyway, I got my head out of my ass and remembered that you belong here with me. Here and nowhere else. I never should've let you stay that long, and I'm sorry for that. I was putting too much on you. I expected you to be the one to come to me, when all of that should've been on me. You’re just a kid. And I’m your dad.”

I’m your dad. Eddie won’t ever get tired of saying that. Chris’s face softens a little. “I know you were…sad ‘cause of Mom,” he says quietly. “But I was mad at you for never coming to get me. I thought I would be there forever.”

Sad ‘cause of Mom is another understatement. That’s one can of worms—no, brain-eating parasites—they still need to get to. “I know you never really wanted to be in Texas now. And it's fine if you’re mad at me. I'm not perfect. I just don't want you to…resent me. You get what I'm saying?”

His face scrunches up like that’s the most preposterous thing he’s ever heard in his life. “I don’t resent you.”

Eddie laughs. “Well, that's good to hear.”

“I just…you try hard. You think too much about doing stuff right.”

Eddie laughs again. “And that's a bad thing?”

“Yeah.”

Eddie tries to sit with that for a second. “I guess you might be right.” He is right. Whenever Eddie focuses too much on doing the right thing, he usually ends up doing the wrong thing instead. Funny how that works.

“Look, kid,” Eddie continues. “We got a lot of stuff to talk about. I think a lot of our stuff can be resolved if we just talk to each other. So we’re gonna talk, okay?”

Chris nods. He seems to be placated for now, his posture softening, his eyes not as hard. There he is. “Okay, Dad.”

“Good.” Eddie scoots closer and squeezes him close, as hard as he can without asphyxiating him to death. Chris grumbles to himself but doesn’t try to get away. “I love you, Christopher.”

“I love you too, Dad.”

“I know you do.”

Eddie listens to Chris breathe, dutifully counting each breath. He’s real, and he’s here. How wonderful is it that he’s here?

“Your hair looks funny,” Chris says after a while.

“Thank you. I know.”

Buck beats him to the punch.

“Hey, Eddie. Look, I um. Do you wanna come over?”

Eddie slows to a stop at a red light. “I’m actually on my way there now.”

A pause. “To—to my place?”

“Uh huh.”

“Oh. Oh. Uh, okay. See you.”

Buck’s apartment now is just like Eddie suspected: a pretty ribbon wrapped around a dumpster. On the bright side, the little touches of Buck around the apartment are almost enough to distract from the…everything else. Almost.

“I’m making dinner,” Buck says in lieu of a greeting when he lets Eddie in, looking a little frazzled. He’s wearing that one blue sweatshirt of his that Eddie is now cognizant enough to realize is one of his favorites on Buck, the one that makes his eyes look electric. “Spaghetti. Because I don’t really have the brainpower for anything else right now.”

“Sounds great.”

Buck stops in his tracks and squints at Eddie for a second. Eddie has half a mind to feel self-conscious. “Oh. Your hair.”

“You hate it,” Eddie says.

“No! No, it’s. It just reminds me of when you buzzed it off that one time.” Buck pauses again. “You didn't join another fight club, did you?” he asks, and he sounds like he’s really only half joking, his wide eyes assessing.

Eddie shrugs. “Yeah. Thought I’d get a summer side hustle.”

“That’s not funny.”

“It’s a little funny.”

“I like it,” Buck ignores him, and he sounds like he really means it. “You look like a teenage boy.”

“I resent that.”

Buck flashes his pearly white teeth and returns to the kitchen. If it can even be called that. Whatever the even smaller version of a kitchenette is, that’s what it is. Eddie makes himself comfortable at his little dining table and feels like he’s at the kiddie table at a birthday party.

He feels a weak but definitely there breeze kiss his face gently. “Hey, your AC works now.”

Buck turns around to give him another brilliant smile, and Eddie’s heart gallops like a star racehorse past the finish line. God, Eddie is so fucking stupid. Idiot. All of Buck’s smiles are so brilliant no matter what he’s smiling for, no matter how mundane or incidental, and Eddie’s always had the same reaction to them from the beginning. 1000 volts to the chest.

“I told you they were gonna come and fix it.”

“Uh huh,” Eddie says. “I like what you’ve done with the place. It’s very…monk-like.”

Buck sighs, not even dignifying him with a response.

“Y’know,” Eddie says. “You used to think I was so funny.”

“That was before I got to know you.”

Buck sets a plate down in front of him not too long after, and only then does Eddie realize he hasn’t been eating much lately. Unless free blueberry muffins and grief-flavored donuts count. He feels ravenous suddenly.

“This looks gr-”

“I’m sorry,” Buck blurts out before Eddie can take his first bite.

Eddie blinks. Buck looks almost grief-stricken in the shitty light of the apartment, his face cast in geometric shadow. He looks like he’s made of marble, painstakingly sculpted, or maybe Eddie’s just being stupid again. “You’re what?”

“Sorry,” Buck says, like that makes any sense. “You’re right, I have…I have been acting a little weird lately, but I didn’t mean—would you believe me if I say it’s not you, it’s me?” Buck ducks his head bashfully like a Disney princess and gets a little self-deprecating quirk of a smile on his face, the one that doesn’t reach his eyes.

“Are you breaking up with me?” Eddie jokes.

Eddie was just trying to get him to stop freaking out, but Buck’s expression goes abruptly frosty at that, like someone’s unplugged his batteries. “So you’re not,” Eddie says when he doesn’t respond, feeling wrong-footed all of a sudden. Buck is bulldozing all of his plans. His half-realized plans, but plans nonetheless.

Buck blinks a couple of times and shakes his head like he’s swiping a thought away. “I’m just saying that. I’m trying to get my life together, but you’re a part of my life too, and I need to act like it. I need you to know that I’m trying here, Eddie.”

“Bullshit.”

Buck recoils in his chair like he’s been slapped, his expression shuttering. “What?”

Eddie takes a big breath in and looks down at his plate. Then the noodles start swimming.

“Eddie?” Buck asks, his voice changing from angry to petal-soft in a breathtaking sort of way. “Eddie, what—what’s wrong? W-why are you crying?”

Eddie can’t remember another time in his life where he was so quick to tears like this. Well, he can remember, he just doesn’t like to. “I got some shit going on,” Eddie says through a watery laugh.

“What shit? Eddie, you’re scaring me, w-what’s wrong?”

Eddie looks up. There he is. Wobbly and beautiful in impressionist blue, someone that’s been right in front of him the whole time. “Your apartment sucks.”

“I-” Buck blinks. “What?”

“I said it fucking sucks.” Eddie wipes at his face with his sleeve and steadies Buck with a look. That’s not what he was supposed to say, but now that he’s said it, he realizes just how much he means it. “I hate it. I hate your apartment.”

Buck tosses his hands up, looking at Eddie like he’s grown another head or two. “What the fuck? Okay, well, I like it. It…it’s not much, but it’s mine and I can make it into a ho-”

“Don’t you dare say home.” Eddie leans forward and almost knocks his plate over, putting his hands on the table. “Can’t you see, Buck? You already have a home. You've always had a home. So stop running away from it.”

Eddie feels like he’s spent half of his life missing people. He can’t do it anymore. He refuses to.

Buck’s face turns absolutely murderous, and Eddie would almost be scared if the man had a killing bone in his body. “Don’t fucking say that to me, Eddie,” he says warningly. “I mean it.”

Eddie scoffs. “You think I don’t mean it?”

And then Eddie sees it, in a flash, his vision going crystal clear. The way Buck’s looking at him. The way Buck looks at him. He’s always looked at Eddie like that, hasn’t he?

“I moved out,” Buck says through clenched teeth, his jaw ticking. “I don't know what the hell you expect—it’s your house. You wanna be roommates forever? You wanna keep playing house? Is that your idea of friendship? Because it’s not mine. I won’t do it.”

“I love you,” Eddie says. It feels like being set on fire, a spark catching in the pit of his stomach. “I love you more than I thought I was ever capable of. I love you.”

Buck’s face goes slack, all the fury melting out of his body in one fell swoop like his strings have been cut. He stares at Eddie like he’s never seen him before.

Eddie stands up and walks over to Buck’s side of the table. “Don’t you love me too? Tell me you love me too.”

“I. I…”

Buck abandons his sentence altogether and stands up so fast he sways into Eddie, and then he crashes their lips together.

Eddie’s had his fair share of kisses in life. He reckons he’s fairly good at it, but he was always thinking too hard during them, unable to get his brain to shut off. Never the right person. Never the right time. Never the right circumstances. But this time he doesn’t think. He just does.

Buck tastes like those heart-stopping energy drinks he’s addicted to, but underneath that he’s all Buck, so Buck that Eddie’s knees almost buckle.

“Eddie, wait.” Buck disconnects them, and Eddie has no idea why he would do that when they could still be kissing. “You’ve never even been with-”

“Don’t care. I don’t fucking care,” Eddie says, and he hauls him back in.

Buck wraps an arm around Eddie’s waist to steady himself and finally melts, his tongue making its way into Eddie’s mouth with no resistance, licking inside like he’s trying to make a home in there. Eddie wrenches a hand in his hair to pull him closer and feels more than hears Buck’s muffled moan against his mouth.

“Let’s go to your shitty ass bedroom,” Eddie breathes into his mouth. “Now.”

“My bedroom’s not shitty,” Buck pants, and then he kisses Eddie again before he can come up with a rebuttal.

They manage to make it there somehow, Eddie doesn’t give a fuck, and he falls onto Buck’s shitty new mattress. Buck climbs on top of him, a mess of too-long limbs, and Eddie feels something inside of him wake up as his weight settles over him, 1000 volts to the chest.

Buck pulls away and attaches himself to Eddie’s neck, a warm hand sneaking up his henley and settling over his chest.

“Your heart is beating so fast,” Buck whispers, looking up at him in concern. And lust. Very much lust. Eddie’s gonna be the first recorded case of spontaneous human combustion. “Are you okay?”

“I kind of feel like I'm having a panic attack,” Eddie says. “But a good one.”

“There are good panic attacks?”

“I think I just invented them,” Eddie says, and then he kisses Buck again.

He could probably do this until he died. Eddie has nothing else to compare this feeling to. It’s just Buck. Buck and his soft mouth and his warm hands, his eyes and the kiss above his brow, the tangle of his hair.

“Eddie,” Buck pants against his mouth. “Can I—I wanna taste you. I need to make sure this is real.”

“Jesus.” Eddie’s probably never felt anything realer than this. “I’m real,” Eddie assures him, every part of his body vibrating. “I’m real, Buck. Go ahead.”

Buck perks up at his express permission, pushing Eddie’s shirt up to his neck and making his way down. He presses a featherlight kiss to the mangled skin on Eddie’s shoulder, kisses down his stomach, bites at his navel. He fumbles with Eddie’s belt, feverish with it, and Eddie would help him but he feels like he’s floating in a pool of molasses, his limbs heavy.

Eddie thinks of the first blowjob he ever received back in high school and how he finished in quite literally a minute, and this feels very much like that.

When Buck wraps his mouth around Eddie’s cock, he makes a noise he had no idea he was even capable of making. Eddie is distantly aware of the mattress springs digging into his back, the dull ache behind his eyes from stress, the stinging in his thumb from a splinter from the planter boxes, but none of that matters. He tosses an arm over his eyes and tries not to float up to the ceiling.

Buck digs his tongue into his slit and it punches a moan out of Eddie, which makes Buck moan in turn, a feedback loop of pleasure. Eddie feels the aftershocks shoot up his cock, and he wrenches his hands in the sheets.

“Buck,” Eddie warns, astonished by how gone his voice is.

Buck pulls away, pressing a kiss to Eddie’s thigh. “Look at me.”

Eddie feels himself twitch and obeys, removing his arm from his face and looking down. He feels hot all over, the flame only getting fanned further when he meets Buck’s eyes and he sinks back down on his cock.

“Buck,” Eddie sighs, and then his stomach tenses and he floods Buck’s mouth.

Eddie feels like his strings have been cut now, gasping up at the ugly popcorn of Buck’s ceiling. His brain buzzes in his head, and it takes him a second to register Buck pushing forward, hard as a rock against Eddie’s thigh.

His face is ruddy and his mouth is glistening obscenely, a sheen over his eyes like he’s about to start crying. “Eddie, Eddie, I-I can’t, I need-”

“That’s okay, Buck. Take whatever you need.”

Buck smashes their faces together with little to no finesse, huffing and panting into his mouth as he grinds himself against Eddie’s thigh over and over. Eddie grabs the back of his neck and he feels it when Buck comes with a drawn-out groan, still in his fucking pants.

“Buck,” Eddie says even though he hasn’t caught his breath yet, his vision finally in 20/20. “You were running away from me because you love me.”

Buck peels himself off of Eddie in a show of Herculean strength, collapsing next to him. “Can you…give me…a fuckin’ minute.”

Eddie tucks himself back into his boxers and tries to pull his jeans back up before giving up and just yanking them off, tossing them onto the floor. “I’ve given you enough time.”

Buck scrunches his nose, turning onto his side. He looks a goddamn mess, maybe the most perfect thing Eddie’s stupid eyes have ever had the pleasure of seeing. Buck gave up his queen bed for a modest full-sized one for the move, so his knee bumps into Eddie’s leg. Eddie’s unsure how it didn’t collapse under their weight. “I wouldn't call it running away,” Buck says finally, going even ruddier.

“I think it was.”

“Well.” Buck looks deeply vulnerable all of a sudden, almost half his age. “I wasn't expecting you to…” He gestures vaguely in the air.

Eddie understands. “How could I not?” he asks, turning onto his side to mirror Buck. “How could I not love you back?”

Buck bites at his bottom lip when it starts to wobble, his gaze flickering all over Eddie’s face like he’s still trying to figure out if this is real. “I just didn't wanna lose you. I thought—I thought that was what would be best for us. Me moving on.”

Eddie hums. “Well, it wasn't.”

“Clearly.”

“I don't ever want you to move on,” Eddie confesses. He reaches out and rests his hand over Buck’s heart, feels the way it's thrumming with life. It feels like relief. Eddie remembers restarting it, the way it felt to feel Buck’s life beneath his fingers, the crack of his bones. “I know what I want now. I’m not gonna wait. I want you with me.”

Buck’s eyelashes flutter, the slanting murkiness of the room making them cast spidery shadows on his cheeks. “You mean it?”

“More than anything.”

Buck nods like he really understands this time. He’s looking at Eddie like he’s seeing him for the first time ever, clear and blue. “I want you to be where you belong,” Eddie continues. “With me and Chris.” When was the last time Eddie said what he wanted like this? Easily, assuredly. No shame grasping the back of his neck or nipping at his heels. He wonders.

Buck groans, turning his head to smush his face into the sheets.“You should’ve said that before I moved out.”

“I know,” Eddie laughs, and something settles in his chest. “We’ll figure it out, I’m sorry. But I'm saying it now. I need you. And I know you need me too.”

“Yeah,” Buck says simply. “Yeah, I do.”

Buck and Chris help him finish up the flower planter boxes for the porch the next week. They plant California Giant zinnias, and two months later they bloom into beautiful blossoms—orange, pink and purple.