Archive of Our Own ^beta

“You haven’t answered my question, Buck.”

And, well—yeah. There are a few good reasons for that.

First of all, the timing of this particular question isn’t great, considering Buck is a little all over the place at the moment. Not figuratively all over the place—though, yes, he’s definitely that, too—but all over the place in the very literal, physically-ping-ponging-around-Los-Angeles sense of the phrase. 

He’s out running errands today. Running being the operative word, since apparently he thought he could cram a week’s worth of tasks into a single morning, which—granted, he definitely could, given the right circumstances. Working a gig where efficiency is usually the clincher between saving a life and zipping up a body bag has made Buck pretty damn good at managing his time. So long as he has sirens and structure and an actual fire lit under his ass, he’ll tick like a well-tuned watch.

But when it comes to managing his time outside of work, his brain admittedly starts to resemble a junk drawer. There’s a chicken-scratch to-do list sitting in there somewhere, ready to be secured to a clipboard and checked off, but it’s currently buried beneath the usual junk-drawer detritus: dried-out superglue tubes, old Thai restaurant menus, a Schrödingerian mix of used and unused batteries, a questionable surplus of IKEA Allen wrenches. Clutter that’s impossible to sort through without dumping everything on the counter first.

And that’s all fine and good when his day is loose and flexible, when he’s allowed to pilfer through that mental drawer at leisure, but he has plans today. Bonafide, carved-in-concrete, capital-P Plans. Plans he made over a week ago, promised he wouldn’t be late for, and then proceeded to wedge in that drawer between bag clips and empty BIC lighters instead of pinning them to the fridge with one of Eddie’s kitschy magnets. 

Even so, Buck left the house feeling confident he could tackle everything he set out to do before said plans, but somewhere between a long-overdue oil change and needing to visit three separate grocery stores to track down the cereal Christopher likes, the hourglass outpaced him.

Put simply: he has lunch with Maddie and Chimney in less than half an hour, but due largely in part to his aforementioned time-blindness, he hasn’t even reached the back-half of Costco yet. He was only supposed to take a quick pitstop to grab eggs and protein powder, but there was this big display for Global Kabuto knives by the front, and—what, was Buck not supposed to spend fifteen minutes he doesn’t have deliberating whether he should spend hundreds on a professional, chef-grade Japanese knife set? He’s only human.

Put simpler: Buck started off running errands, and now he’s running late. So, again, the timing of this particular question couldn’t be worse.

Second of all, he’s in Costco. Mid-Sunday-morning, fluorescently-lit, sardined-with-the-spatially-unaware Costco. It’s impossible to focus on anything, especially a phone call. Especially Eddie’s question in, well, question. 

To make matters worse, both of Buck’s arms are full—one with a bulk pack of paper towels (he forgot to pick up some at the other three stores), the other with that knife set (yeah, he grabbed it, sue him)—so he has his phone tucked to his ear by the shoulder, but because it’s the tail-end of summer with the worst heatwave Los Angeles has had in years, his face and ears are slick with sweat, and his phone keeps fucking slipping. Not exactly the best circumstances for a Q&A session.

Third of all, Buck isn’t entirely sure he even heard the question correctly. He keeps reopening and rifling through that mental drawer, trying to piece together whatever jigsaw puzzle lies underneath the junk, but… yeah, he’s got nothing. Nothing that makes sense, anyway.

“Can—” Buck readjusts the phone to his ear, nearly dropping it in the process. His voice vacilates between a high-pitched rasp and an engine-deep rumble when he finds it again. “Can you repeat that?”

There’s a fond huff on the other end of the line, followed by the creak of a door opening—and shit, Buck needs to pick up some WD-40 for those hinges at some point today as well—and then: “Do I own too many brown shirts? ‘Cause—” Eddie pauses; Buck hears the drag of hangers on a rack. “I’m looking in our closet right now, and all I see is brown, brown, brown.”

Buck stares blankly at an exhausted employee handing out free samples. Free samples of french fries with plain-jane mayonnaise, apparently. It’s a combination that would usually strike him as a little strange, but it barely registers over the far stranger pairing of the word our with closet.

“No, I…” Buck swallows what feels like several handfulls of sand. Our closet. Our closet. “The other question. The one about—”

“Huh?” Eddie cuts in, voice slightly clipped by a bad pocket of reception. Also by a needle of irritation. “Can’t hear you over whoever’s kid is being murdered.”

Buck also barely registers the screaming child next to him. The youngster is tugging on his mother’s pant leg, tomato-red and leaking snot, pointing helplessly at a shrink-wrapped pallet of Squishmallows. She quickly drags her son away, her face a matching shade of crimson, muttering a sharp, “Birth control, use it,” to Buck as she goes. The screaming subsides.

“Good set of lungs, I’ll give him that,” Eddie remarks, more sympathetic than amused. The drag of hangers resumes. “You were saying?”

Buck blinks and blinks and blinks. “What was your first question?”

“My first…?” A beat. “Oh, right. Wanna come with me to Westfield tomorrow? Do some shopping?”

“Because…?” Buck lets the rest hang in the air, completely checked-out. If his brain were a motel, its neon vacancy sign would be burning serif-shaped holes straight through his skull, its lobby’s CRT permalocked on endless reruns of static played for dusty plastic ficuses.

“Because you’re good at buying stuff?” Eddie chuckles, like, duh. “A little too good. We gotta talk about that credit score, bud. I know I said I’d look the other way, but—”

“That’s not what you said,” Buck blurts, a bit hysterical, nearly dropping his phone again. He has to set down the paper towels and knife set so he can get both hands on it, and—and he’s never owned a corded phone, even when he was a kid, but right now he misses the idea of it. Holding something that’s tethered to something else, if only to feel like he won’t float away.

“What did I say?” 

“You want me to go clothes shopping with you”—Buck’s eyebrows knit together so tightly, he could probably trap a penny between them; maybe even pancake it flat like trainwheels on a railtrack—“because you’re gay?”

He hates the way gay sounds when it leaves his mouth: part uncertain whisper, part schoolyard accusation, like something from another tomato-faced, snot-nosed kid, which is just—obviously he didn’t mean to say it like that, obviously, given that he also likes men. After all, it’d be pretty wild to bat for both teams and then turn around and heckle one from the dugout.

“Sure am.” Buck can hear Eddie’s indifferent shrug through the call’s ambient static, as if his confession is little more than a bon mot on the blistering weather. “Figured I should try something new. Branch out a little, y’know?”

“Are we still talking about clothes?” Buck asks, strained.

More fond huffing. More sounds of dragging hangers. “You switched things up when you came out. Should I start wearing five-hundred dollar cardigans, too? Or is that strictly a bi thing?”

Buck tries to come up with a response other than um or uh, but his tongue feels swollen and useless in his mouth. A display Woozoo behind him blasts a much-needed breeze over the back of his neck, his frustrated exhale cooling the sweat beading on his upper lip. Still, it feels like he’s burning up. Running errands, running late, and now running a fever, so it seems. 

“Had no clue there’s a code to this stuff,” Eddie continues, unperturbed. “Last week, I tried hooking my keys to my pants with a carabiner, but Hen said that’s a lesbian thing. Why can’t it be a convenience thing?” 

“Why do you need new clothes?”

“Alright, maybe not new new clothes, but maybe something with more… I don’t know, color?” Eddie makes a few staccato tuts with his tongue, seemingly weighing his options. “Could probably dye these shirts, actually.”

“Brown’s too dark to dye.” The Woozoo oscillates to Buck’s left. He almost careens over when he lists after it. “You’d have to bleach it.”

“Sure, yeah, we can do that. Forget the mall.”

“No, it’s—it wouldn’t lighten evenly.”

“Got some beige Henleys, too. Are those light enough?”

“Yeah, but—”

“There’s also a few white t-shirts here that we could… uph, nevermind. Those are yours.”

And that’s a whole other can of worms Buck’s not exactly itching to pry open. He never should’ve suggested merging their wardrobes when Eddie moved back to Los Angeles. It was only meant to be a short-term thing, a stopgap to save Eddie from digging through half-unpacked boxes every morning while Buck dug through apartment listings, but Buck still hasn’t found a new place, so now it’s a who-knows-how-long thing. It’s a damn problem is what it is, because the lines between whose clothes are whose have started getting very, very murky. 

Case in point: for the past two weeks, Eddie has gone to bed wearing one of Buck’s t-shirts. He has to know they’re not actually his, because they’re already oversized on Buck as is, and yet—and yet, every morning, Eddie shuffles out of the bedroom and into the kitchen, sleep-mussed and swimming in one of those shirts. One rainy evening right before the heatwave hit, Buck even caught him lounging around in a pair of his sweatpants. 

Which… shouldn’t be a problem, really. Close friends and family borrow each others’ stuff all the time. Chimney has basically annexed Hen’s fleece-lined jacket for three winters running. It’s normal. Unremarkably, unexceptionally normal. Buck knows that.

But seeing Eddie in his clothes has something writhing under his skin, and he hasn’t been able to properly articulate what that something is. He thought it was a weird territorial thing on his part at first, that perhaps the discomfort he’s been feeling has just been the same latent mine not yours mineminemine foible that seems to eventually manifest in everyone, no matter how generous or giving. Then again, he’s never really had a problem with people borrowing his things before, so that’s probably not it. 

Maybe it’s the way Eddie has started to wear Buck’s clothes like they’re his. Maybe it’s the fact that he doesn’t complain about the fit, doesn’t even seem to notice the bit of extra length in Buck’s sleeves or the way Buck’s waistbands hang a little loose. If anything, that should bother Eddie, but it doesn’t seem to. 

“Your clothes are… earthy,” Buck says, unsure. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. I mean, at least I thought so, but I caught up with May the other day at Bobby and Athena’s, and she said my outfit was ‘giving westerncore.’” Eddie scoffs. “The hell is westerncore?”

“I think it means you dress like a cowboy.”

“Huh.”

“Well, uh. Cowboys can be gay. Like Brokeback Mountain, right?”

Buck cringes as soon as he says it. He sounds like one of those overeager allies at Pride who roll through their queer pop culture Rolodex unprompted, trying to prove their credentials. The next words out of his mouth may as well be, “Ooh, I love Ellen! Have you seen Glee?”

“I know, but…” Eddie sighs the way a draft horse might, all heavy and deflated. “If we’re talking gay cowboys, you look at guys like Orville Peck versus guys like Jake Gyllenhaal, and—I mean, that’s the thing. Style-wise, Peck outranks Gyllenhaal, every time.”

“Who?”

“Y’know. Jack Twist? Donnie Darko? The fishbowl guy from Spider-Man?”

“I know who Jake Gyllenhaal is.”

“Just checking.”

Buck can’t believe they’re having this conversation. There was zero build-up to it. This morning over breakfast, they were talking about a documentary they watched the night before on the Titanic submersible, which then segued into a conversation about the movie Titanic, which then segued into an argument over whether Titanic deserved the Best Picture win over Good Will Hunting. Where the hell did this even come from?

Buck checks one of his watches—the one that tells time, not the one that tracks his heart rate; he already knows what number that one’s showing—and it tells him that he’s definitely going to be unfashionably late to his lunch date. So, a bit brusque, he says, “Your wardrobe’s fine.”

“Is it?” 

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

He doesn’t mean to sound so crabby. It’s not even Eddie’s fault, really. Again, Buck’s in Costco. There’s another child throwing a tantrum somewhere nearby, and a forklift is beeping noisily somewhere else, and people keep saying, “Oop, just gonna sneak past ya,” right before they narrowly avoid plowing into him with their carts, and his hands won’t stop fucking shaking. For a myriad of perfectly legitimate reasons, he’s overwhelmed. 

Nonetheless, he does his best to calm himself, his palm damp and sticking to the cotton of his shirt where he splays it flat against his chest. He manages a slightly-less curt, “It’s fine, Eddie.”

There’s a weighted pause, then: “Are we still talking about clothes?” 

“What?”

“It’s just…” Buck hears the gentle click of a closet door closing. The rougher click of a throat being cleared. “Thought you’d have more to say about me… uh, wanting new clothes.”

Buck realizes two things in a single, sickening jolt, and his blood pulses in his temples with it. 

One: Eddie’s obviously not talking about clothes shopping anymore. 

Buck knows this pattern well—Eddie tucking his real feelings under something else, embedding questions inside other questions—because it’s the very same pattern woven into Buck’s own quilt. A tattered, hand-me-down inheritance from parents with award-winning careers in sweeping things under the rug and beating around the bush, stitched together with threadbare deflection and moth-eaten prevarication. Thick enough to hide beneath, but never enough to cover fully, let alone keep either of them warm.

Two: Buck is handling Eddie coming out to him very, very badly. Like, horrendously bad. 

The conversation he had with his parents about being bisexual, a two-minute nothingburger in the hospital parking lot after Maddie and Chimney’s kind-of wedding, went smoother than this. At least Phillip had the wherewithal to offer a tight-lipped, “It’s your life, son,” and Margaret knew to toss in an obligatory, sickly-sweet saccharine, “We’re just happy you’re happy.” 

“N-No, I didn’t mean—” Buck squeezes his eyes shut, his cheeks prickling with the sting of a day-old sunburn and decades-old shame. Mostly shame. “The other thing—the gay thing, it’s—”

“The gay thing?” Eddie laughs, hollow and wrong. “Makes it sound like a disease.”

Buck shakes his head fervently, even though Eddie can’t see it. Fuck. Fuck. “You know that’s not what I—”

“Whenever Helena talks about the pandemic, she calls it ‘the whole COVID thing.’” Another uneasy, forced laugh, like something snaked out of a drain. “Bobby and Chimney better pray mine’s not airborne. They’re the only straight A-shifters left.”

“I didn’t—”

“Not sure about Chim, actually. He ever tell you about the Halloweekend call he had at Akbar back before we joined the station?”

“Eddie.”

“What would the treatment for a gay disease even be?” Eddie sounds less uneasy, more genuinely curious. “Communal wafers? Watching Infowars?”

“Eddie,” Buck says again, firm. At least as firm as the ground feels beneath his shoes, which is not very. “It’s—of course you being gay is fine. Not fine, but, like. It’s good. Really good.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I’m just…” A giggle—a fucking giggle, unbidden and ridiculous and audibly nervous—bubbles out of Buck’s chest. “I’m in the middle of Costco, dude. It’s nuts in here today.”

Eddie laughs for real this time. It loosens the knot in Buck’s stomach, if only a little. “Sorry. Could’ve picked a better time and place to tell you.”

“You think?” Buck shakes his head again, still reeling. “Any last-minute requests while I’m here?”

“Did you grab protein powder?”

“Not yet. The chocolate one’s over ninety bucks now, though.”

“Jesus.”

“But all the vanilla ones suck.”

“Oh, totally. Go with the chocolate.”

“Will do.”

“You grabbing anything else?” Eddie asks, a knowing lilt to the question.

In the guiltiest, caught-elbow-deep-in-the-cookie-jar voice imaginable, Buck replies, “No?”

“Tell me you’re not holding that knife set.”

“I’m not holding it. It’s on a pallet next to me.”

“We have tons of knives at home.” 

“Yeah, dull knives. My credit score’s fine, by the way.”

“Could be better.”

“Anything over seven-forty and you’re cruising.”

“Doesn’t hurt to save.”

“I do save. Did you know I opened a Roth IRA?”

“Did you know we own a knife sharpener?”

“It doesn’t work,” Buck whines, right as the screaming kid from before whines an aisle over in perfect unison, which—yikes, that’s humiliating. He’s pushing thirty-five, not three.

“Then get a different one. Don’t buy a whole new knife set.” Eddie tsk, tsk, tsks. “Gotta learn to appreciate what you have, Buckley.”

“That so?” Buck raises his eyebrows, a grin pulling at the corners of his mouth. This is territory he knows how to navigate. “And what about the clothes you already have, huh? What about appreciating those?”

Eddie snorts. “There’s only so much you can appreciate about flannel before it gets weird.”

“Touché.” Buck picks the knife set back up and tucks it under his bicep. Only to put it back where he found it, honest. “Hey, I gotta jet. I’ll see you later tonight.”

“Sounds good.” Then, just as Buck thumbs a hole into the plastic of the paper towel pack to carry it easier, Eddie adds, “Thanks for being cool about this. The gay thing, I mean.” 

The tremors in Buck’s hands go tectonic, and he nearly drops his damn phone again. He’s not sure if cool is an apt word to describe himself right now. 

And he wants to ask so many questions, like—when did Eddie figure it out? What made Eddie figure it out? Or—and Buck doesn’t love the way his stomach reknots itself when he thinks of it—who made Eddie figure it out? Did Eddie have his own Tommy-shaped revelation recently, or has he been sitting on this for a while? Does anyone else know? Why did he choose to come out over the phone while Buck’s in fucking Costco, of all places?

What Buck decides to say instead is, “Y-Yeah, of course. I… I’m proud of you, Eddie. Thanks for telling me.”

“Thanks for making it easy.” Another audible shrug. “Wanted you to hear it first.”

That’s one of Buck’s questions answered, at least. Pride zings through him, galvanic and tingly, and it makes him shiver a little in spite of his too-warm temperature. Eddie told him first. Eddie wanted to tell him first.

“Well, Frank technically heard it first, but he’s his own thing. Doesn’t really count.”

“His own thing?” Buck echoes. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. He’s like Big Bird. Does that make sense?”

“Not even remotely.”

“You don’t look at Big Bird and go, that’s a bird. He’s his own thing.”

“Are you trying to say Frank’s not human?”

“Sounds mean when you put it like that.”

Eddie sounds like he’s smiling when he says it. Buck knows it’s annoying when people FaceTime in public, but he half-wishes they were, just so he could see it. It’s probably somewhere between Eddie’s three-beers-deep-watching-the-Lakers smile and his leaning-in-the-kitchen-doorway-while-Buck-makes-dinner smile. Something solar bright, weightless, easy. Something Buck could draw from memory, just as easy. 

“You’re ridiculous.” Buck is a little embarrassed with how endeared it comes out. “Seriously, though. I gotta go. I have plans.”

“You sound like Chris.” Eddie sighs, wistful. “Kid’s got a social calendar packed fuller than this damn closet.”

“You raised a good egg. Nothing wrong with that.”

“Yeah, well.” A beat. “I had good help.”

And that’s really not helping Buck’s hands stop shaking. He pulls the phone away from his ear like it’s burned him, managing an equally shaky, “Bye, Eddie, byebyebye.” His thumb resembles a seismogram stylus as it hovers over the end button on the call screen.

“Hey, hang on. You still haven’t answered my question.”

Against his non-existent better judgement, Buck raises the phone back to his ear. “Which one?”

“The first one.” The closet door creaks back open on the end of the line. “Clothes shopping tomorrow. Yay or nay?”

The answer is obvious. Buck, barring a few rare exceptions, habitually agrees to tag along with Eddie for any outing or escapade. He’s the crowned king of yes, and the vassal of it, too. It’s practically reflexive, this urge to please, no matter the cost or consequence of pleasing. It never surprises him when his heart folds, when he shoves every chip into the pot before he’s even had a chance to look at the cards in front of him. That’s just how he plays: stars-in-his-eyes, impulsive, all-in before he knows what he’s risking.

Plus, it’s just clothes shopping. What could go wrong?

“Yay,” Buck responds eagerly. “Definitely yay.”

“Cool. Later, Buck.”

The call ends. Buck pockets his phone, releases a breath through the corner of his mouth, and then just—stands there, motionless, eyes locked onto the free sample table like it might reveal answers to whatever universe he’s just warp-holed into. Any remaining scraps of brainpower are fully committed to reacclimating, readjusting, rebooting. 

He can practically see new pieces of data scrolling across the inside of his skull, details logging themselves in the lower-third of his vision like a planetary scan in one of those low-budget, straight-to-DVD sci-fi movies Chimney loves to hate-watch. The ones that probably had scripts scrambled together in less than a week.

When Buck eventually regains enough mobility in his legs to walk away, with only a knife set and a still-hammering heart in tow, he doesn’t even realize he’s forgotten paper towels for the fourth time that morning.

INT. COSTCO — SOME TIME LATER

SUPER: MULTIPLE ANOMALIES DETECTED

CHYRON: FRENCH FRIES, SERVED WITH MAYO?

CHYRON: EDDIE DIAZ, GAY?

EVAN “BUCK” BUCKLEY (mid-30s, built like a linebacker, sweaty) is waiting in the self-checkout line. He looks troubled.

BUCK

Who the hell is Orville Peck?

“You’re eating hongeo,” is the first thing Buck says to Chimney when he finally arrives for lunch.

“And you’re late,” Chimney shoots back. “What gives?”

Buck waves a hand, some vague gesture meant to convey several half-truths like traffic was bad and Apple Maps sucks ass, but not the full truth: traffic only got bad after I made three wrong turns because I was too busy spiraling about my best friend liking men to pay attention to Apple Maps, which still sucks ass.

“S’fine.” Chimney nudges out a chair with his foot, chin jutting towards a bowl of bulgogi. “Ordered for you.”

Buck all but melts into his seat, breath sibilating out of him like a pinched balloon. He’s sitting directly underneath an A/C vent, which he’d usually complain about, but it’s literally a gift from above today. 

“You reek.” Maddie sniffs, wrinkling her nose. She pokes at Chimney’s fermented skate with her chopstick, her scowl deepening. “Which is saying something.”

“You’re eating hongeo,” Buck says to Chimney again slower, just south of inculpative. “You hate hongeo.”

“It’s a spite thing,” Maddie remarks.

“It is not,” Chimney argues, batting Maddie’s chopstick away. Maddie bats his right back, then swipes some bossam and kimchi from his plate, pointedly ignoring Chimney’s squawk of protest as she pops it into her mouth.

“Mmph—Albert said he likes it,” she explains around the bite, chewing matter-of-factly, “so now Chim has to like it, too. His food pyramid’s built on spite.”

Chimney’s eyes narrow. “Not true. I like plenty of things that have nothing to do with spite.” 

Maddie nabs more bossam. “Then it’s a competitive thing.”

“Also not true. I just happen to like it more than he does.”

“Mmhm.”

“Stop stealing my food!”

“Is that what this is?” Maddie pokes his hongeo again, back to scowling. “Food?”

In a stunning display of maturity, Chimney snatches her chopsticks and tosses them away, sending one clattering across the table and into Buck’s lap. Maddie rolls her eyes.

“This is the first opportunity I’ve had in nine months to eat raw fish, and my reward is more morning sickness.” She pats Chimney’s back, sighing theatrically. “Thanks, honey. ’Preciate it.”

Chimney thousand-yard stares at his once-full plate of samhap, a coroner counting the comatose. “It’s not that bad,” he mutters, and yup—that’s definitely where Jee’s infamous bottom-lip pout comes from. If Buck didn’t know any better, he’d figure Maddie just told him he’s cut off from Bluey and Gerber cookies. “I don’t see what the big deal is.”

And Buck, who has been basically comatose himself this entire conversation thus far, save tracing squiggly lines in the condensation of his soju bottle, finds himself saying, “I do. It’s an adjustment, right?”

Maddie sips her own soju, eyeing Buck curiously. “How so?”

“It’s not something you knew he liked before, and now you know.” Buck’s fingers continue moving, the loops devolving into vertical slashes. Prison bars, maybe, or tally marks, scraped absently into the bottle’s fog with nails freshly chewed to nubs on the drive over. And he should leave his explanation at that, but he just keeps going. “I mean, imagine knowing a guy for eight years, and he’s only ever ordered galbi, so you think, okay, cool, he’s a galbi guy. I’ll take pretty much anything off the menu, but to each their own.”

A San Andreas Fault-sized crease appears between Maddie’s eyebrows. “Chimney never orders—”

“But then he calls you out of the blue one day and goes, ‘Hey, so I’m actually super into bibimbap,’ and that’s—that’s fine. No big deal. Except that people have been telling you he’s into bibimbap, and you thought that was crazy, because you’ve only ever seen him eat galbi. And, like, sure, even though it kinda seemed like he didn’t actually like galbi sometimes, and—and maybe he was just eating it because that’s all he’s ever ordered, you never thought he’d want—”

Buck cuts himself off, scrubbing a hand over his mouth like he’s trying to wipe the words away with it. The sweat on his palms burns his lips where he’s bitten them raw. 

He starts to speak again. “Anyways, it’s—” Stops. Flounders for a beat. Starts again. “There’s nothing wrong with liking what you like, but people have to adjust, y’know? It’s an adjustment.”

The table is pin-drop silent. Maddie and Chimney stare at Buck like he’s sprouted a second head, which—fair. Whatever number he’s working with now, he feels pretty unmoored from all of them. One head seems like it’s a few feet above, watching himself unravel from the ceiling. Another head is probably dunked in the restaurant’s fish tank several yards over. Maybe that’s why everything sounds muffled and warped in his ears.

“Sure, Buck,” Chimney says finally, side-eyeing Maddie. “That’s one way of looking at it.”

Maddie half-smiles at Buck, but the edges of it are downturned in this concerned-big-sister, there’s-something-you’re-not-telling-me kind of way that’s making it even harder for Buck to sit still. 

“I’m mostly concerned about adjusting to his breath, not what he orders for lunch,” she jokes. “You’d be concerned too if you were the one kissing him.”

Buck and Chimney chorus, “Gross,” right as a server floats by their table, dozens of dishes balanced precariously in the crook of his arm. He smirks down at Chimney’s plate.

“Told you that samhap bites back,” he says, already reaching for it, “but I commend your bravery.”

“Oh, no, sorry.” Chimney domes a protective hand over his food, his other hand clapping Buck on the shoulder heartily. He smirks right back at the server, the living portrait of a shit-eating grin. “The gross was for the idea of swapping spit with my brother-in-law.”

Buck chokes on air, a mortified reprimand or a spluttered apology failing to form, but the server hardly seems phased. He gives a slow, knowing nod, like that’s a relatively normal thing to hear from one of his patrons, and—yeah, given the extent of half-drunk overshares and bizarre questions Buck had to field back when he was a bartender, it probably is.

“I’ll be sure to pass that along to the chef,” the server says wryly. “Anything else I can get you guys?”

Chimney says, “Some to-go boxes, please,” and Maddie says, “You’re not bringing that anywhere near my car,” and Buck says nothing at all, because… because. 

Eddie’s gay keeps reverberating in his mind, an endless refrain; practically its own leitmotif at this point, underlying every other thought he has. He feels the revelation in his molars, has to lock his jaw tight around it when his mouth starts shaping the words by its own volition. He does want to say it out loud, just once—just to know how it sounds leaving his own lips, how different it must feel compared to Eddie’s straight—but resoundly not where anyone else can hear it. That’s definitely not his bomb to drop.

And he’s pretty sure he knows how many heads he has now. Just the one, and it’s still sitting fifteen miles back in Costco, right where he left those paper towels. Right at the fault line where his old universe collapsed and a new one detonated. A second Big Bang of sorts, born the same way as the first: out of something extraordinarily dense and unbearably warm.

Buck briefly wonders what the display tag for his head would read. Clearance Slow Cooker, maybe, or Glorified Paperweight.

“How about you, boss?” The server turns to Buck, ice clunking in the glasses on his stack of plates. He eyes the figure-eights Buck is currently looping into the neck of his soju. “Need any crayons? Coloring pages?”

“No,” Buck responds automatically, distracted. Eddie’s gay. Eddie’s gay. “Uh, n-no thanks. I’m good.”

“I’m sure you are.” The server taps the rim of the bottle with his pointer finger once, twice, enough times to snap Buck out of his trance. “Not sure booze is the best muse, though. Unless you’re going for Gogh.”

Buck lifts his head and finally gets a proper look at their server. Mickey, judging by the elegantly-fonted, gold-embossed name tag pinned above his breast pocket. He grins wider at Buck, all dimply and boyish, and—

Look, Buck may be rocking with protozoan levels of cognitive functioning right now, but he isn’t blind. Mickey is really, really attractive. His jaw is broad and sharp in the way Tommy’s was, but the rest of him is softer and kinder in the way Tommy decidedly wasn’t, something that stings a little when Buck clocks it. His pitch-dark hair is finger-combed back into an unkempt shag, and there are several sun-bleached Spider-Man stickers decorating his name tag, and the apples of his cheeks tinge pink when Buck meets his eyes. He’s cute.

And, again, Buck isn’t blind. He recognizes the teasing cant of Mickey’s head and the playful quirk of his brow for what it obviously is, because it’s something pulled straight out of Buck’s own playbook. He’s cute, and he’s making it blatantly clear that he thinks Buck is, too. 

Eddie’s gay.

“That’s, um.” Buck drops his hand from the bottle, curling it into a fist so tight his knuckles blanch. His thumb worries at each finger’s cuticle, hunting for hangnails. “I’ll just take the bulgogi to gogi—uh, to go.”

“Right on.” Mickey leans in a little, close enough that Buck catches a whiff of his cologne. It’s orange-and-cinnamon-scented, sort of Christmas-y in composition, and—well, that might actually just be coming from one of the half-finished drinks he’s juggling, but either way, it smells nice. 

He’s cute, Buck thinks again. Almost stubbornly so.

Mickey then reaches for the bowl, eyes trailing down, down, down Buck’s frame as he does, and he’s already pulling this I’m just fucking around please don’t take this seriously expression, voice dipping into something faux-sultry and facetious when he asks, “Is that a chopstick in your lap, or are you just happy to see me?”

Buck follows his gaze down, and—wow, look at that. Maddie’s chopstick actually is still in his lap. Even so, he’s pretty thrown by the question. A recurring theme today, so it seems.

And something must show on Buck’s face, because Mickey just—freezes. The immediacy with which he pales, every bit of pink draining from his cheeks in an instant, would be kind of hilarious if Buck felt like laughing. 

Eddie’s gay.

“I—sorry.” Mickey scrubs a hand over his mouth nervously, yet another recognizable page out of Buck’s own playbook. He looks like he’d be perfectly fine if God decided to smite him where he stands. Thankful for it, even. “That was gross. That’s—I have no idea why I said that. I’m so sorry.”

Chimney stifles a laugh into a cough, and Maddie mouths, “Wow,” and Mickey nearly drops everything he’s holding when he grabs Buck’s bowl and hurries away, and Buck—frowns. 

Not because of what Mickey said. Buck has stuck his foot in his mouth more times than he can count when he’s flirted with someone, so he’s not going to hold one bad line against the guy. No, Buck’s frowning because—

Because Mickey’s eyes are brown.

“He is so cute,” Maddie whispers, all hushed and leaned-forward like they’re at a sleepover. Like Mickey might overhear, which he won’t. He’s already disappeared into the kitchen, presumably to grab to-go boxes, or maybe to-go find the nearest event horizon. Buck might ask him for directions if he finds one. A black hole sounds pretty Edenic right about now. Maybe it’ll take him back to a universe where things make sense.

“Uh-huh,” Buck monotones, still frowning. “Super cute.”

“And definitely interested,” Maddie adds pointedly.

Buck just sort of grunts to indicate that he’s listening, which he is—at least in the same way a passenger listens to an air steward giving a safety briefing. Sounds are definitely hitting his eardrum. Whether they’re booking a connecting flight to his brain is less clear.

“And you’re… not?” Chimney ventures, a little surprised. Even double-takes back towards the kitchen, eyebrows to his hairline. You saw what he looks like, right?

And Buck is—he’s not not interested. Mickey’s well-defined cupid’s bow and his heavily-tattooed arms and his tree-trunk thighs are all pretty damn interesting to Buck, just to be clear, but…

Buck jerks his shoulders into something barely resembling a shrug. “His eyes are brown.” 

The explanation doesn’t elucidate much, judging by the strange, notably brown-eyed look Maddie and Chimney both give him, but that’s fine. Buck’s more than okay with leaving it at that, because it’s the truth.

Well, half of it, anyway. The rest ricochets through his head like a billard ball, and he has no fucking clue what to make of this particular truth in its entirety, so he keeps it to himself. Lets it bounce aimlessly between truths he already knows—Mickey is cute, Eddie is gay—and truths he’s perfectly fine with never, ever taking a closer look at. 

Mickey’s eyes are brown, but not the right brown is decidedly the latter.

Even though it’s a relatively common thing among drivers, Buck is pretty embarrassed with just how often he switches to autopilot when he’s behind the wheel. He can’t say how many times he’s put the key in the ignition in one blink, only to then find himself at home in the next. Seriously, he can’t say. He might get his license revoked if he does.

But, again, it’s common. So common, in fact, that Buck learned there’s actually a term for it. He stumbled across it during one of his two-in-the-morning Wikipedia deep-dives, something that's become a fixture in his routine as of late, thanks to his bad habit of drinking coffee like it’s water and his worse habit of volunteering for the couch most nights, even though Eddie keeps insisting he take the bed, since Eddie’s not the one who had a damn firetruck fall on him, Buck—

They call it white line fever. It’s a pretty good Motörhead track, a pretty terrible ‘70s neo-noir film, and the trance-like state drivers commonly enter when operating a vehicle.

It’s a little unnerving just how common of a thing it is, because driving is already terrifying enough. See, Buck could do every single thing right—follow every flimsy law, honor every unspoken social contract—but it doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll make it to his destination in one piece, because there’s no way to guarantee other people are abiding by the same laws and contracts. After all, piloting a several-thousand-pound deathbox among thousands of other several-thousand-pound deathboxes only works if everyone is fully present behind the wheel, so if driving starts becoming mindless, and mindless driving happens often enough to become common, it’s—yeah. Pretty fucking terrifying, to put it lightly.

And even though it scares the hell out of him if he thinks about it too hard, Buck’s still guilty of it. Has been for years, no thanks to the monotony of L.A. traffic and the banality of L.A. radio. It’s easy to fork the wheel over to his subconscious after a long shift, especially when his conscious attention could arguably be better spent elsewhere. Some days, it's spent wondering if anyone on the I-5 actually knows how a merge lane works. Other days, it’s spent trying to figure out what the Eagles and Soft Cell have over KRTH-FM.

Point is, Buck doesn’t enjoy that he’s a victim of white line fever—or highway hypnosis, or automotive automaticity, or whatever moniker suits whoever’s fancy—but he’s a victim all the same. And really, he’d love to see anyone try and stay lucid after hearing Hotel California and Tainted Love multiple times per commute.

The beauty of white line fever, however, is that the fever usually breaks. 

When Buck left his lunch date to follow Maddie and Chimney to Bobby and Athena’s place, he felt himself slipping into that trance the moment he pulled out of his parking spot. Again, he knows it’s not a good habit, but whatever. He had a long morning, and he needed a break, so he let himself succumb to the fog. He figured a little sabbatical before his second set of plans for the day couldn’t hurt.

Except the fog doesn’t lift. 

He’s still tangentially aware of everything that happens during their visit. Enough to chronologize all of it, should anyone happen to quiz him. 

Maddie and Chimney thank Bobby and Athena for watching their newborn. Athena says Kevin Daniel Han is the easiest kid they’ve ever had the pleasure of babysitting, second only to Jee-Yun. Bobby jokes that they should name their next kid Robert Nash Han. Chimney tells him that’s the dumbest name he’s ever heard. Maddie has a minor meltdown over the realization that Kevin’s initials are K.D., because some dirtbag kid might call him Kraft Dinner Han when he’s older, Chim, stop laughing. Bobby and Athena go back-and-forth for nearly forty minutes on whether ketchup belongs on macaroni and cheese. 

And Buck is just… there. Not there there, but there in the most basic, meat-and-bone sense of the word. His autopilot is still gripping the wheel, still offering up enough well-timed reactions and responses to stimuli for no one to notice anything’s off, while the rest of him sits locked in the trunk. He floats in that suspended-in-gelatin reverie for nearly six hours. It’s one of the worst disassociative episodes he’s had in months, but try as he might, he can’t seem to reassociate. 

The only thing that snaps him out of it is being literally snapped out of it.

“Hellooo? Anyone home?”

Buck jerks back, blinking hard. Eddie is snapping his fingers inches from Buck’s face, eyebrows quirked in amusement.

“Welcome back, Buzz,” Eddie teases, chin jutting towards the ceiling. “How’s space this time of year?”

Buck doesn’t answer right away. He takes several much-needed seconds to recalibrate, readjust, reboot. 

He’s in Eddie’s living room. His living room, if they’re going by their technically-withstanding sublet arrangement, though it will always feel more Eddie’s than his, historically speaking. On the coffee table, there are a couple half-finished boxes of pizza from Apollonia’s, something Buck doesn’t remember ordering or eating (yikes), and a half-dozen empty bottles of Genuine, something Buck also doesn’t remember opening or drinking (seriously, yikes). Another beer sits between his thighs, cold enough to seep through his thin nylon shorts, to chill his fingers where they’re wrapped around the neck of the bottle.

The television’s playing an episode of Hell’s Kitchen, the show’s usual over-the-top chaos made considerably less over-the-top by the TV’s low volume. Buck is willing to bet one of them set out to queue up something else, only for the menu to roll into auto-play before they could pick something. It’s become their default backdrop lately. Partially because neither of them have bothered to turn off Samsung’s auto-play setting; mostly because they end up talking over whatever they put on, anyway.

His gaze drifts to the window. It’s a quarter-past late. Not late enough for it to be completely dark outside, but late enough that the neighbor’s solar lights have begun an uncertain flicker, seemingly also perplexed by what time it is.

“Sorry,” Buck says, rubbing his eyes. “Zoned out.”

“Maybe chase that beer with some water.” Eddie tips the bottle he’s nursing towards Buck. “Lookin’ a little punch-drunk over there, pal.”

And sure, Buck has evidently drank enough to land several miles past tipsy—Eddie, too, judging by his half-lidded, glazed-over expression, and the rosy flush dusting his cheeks and ears—but that’s not why Buck is so out-of-it right now. He can’t exactly tell Eddie why he’s so out-of-it, though. Mostly because he’s not entirely sure of the reason himself; partially because he might have a fragment of an inkling of a notion as to what the reason may be, and he really, really doesn’t want to put a name to it.

“Sorry,” Buck says again, for lack of anything better to say.

“S’okay.” Eddie taps the rim of the bottle with his pointer finger once, twice, enough times to draw Buck’s eyes towards it. “Just never pegged you for a lightweight.”

It’s probably not meant to be a challenge, but Buck still takes it as one. He raises his own beer to his lips. Gets it far enough for the scent of malt to hit his nose, but not far enough to take a swig before he’s intercepted. Eddie catches his arm, halting him.

“Hey. Look at me.”

Buck does. Eddie half-smiles at him, but the edges of it are downturned in this concerned-best-friend, there’s-something-you’re-not-telling-me kind of way that’s making Buck wonder if Eddie is taking secret lessons from Maddie in the not-so subtle art of prying.

“M’fine,” Buck mumbles.

“I’m sure you are.” Eddie grins wider at Buck, all dimply and boyish. “The slurring’s really selling it.”

Buck squints at him. The lamp behind Eddie’s head smears and blooms in his vision, softening Eddie’s edges. The glow from the television watercolors him in blues and greens and pinks, painting him nacreous.

And for no particular reason whatsoever, Buck is now thinking of art, so apropos of nothing, he says, “Van Gogh drank a lot.”

Eddie squints right back. “Are you comparing yourself to Van Gogh?”

“No, I’m just—he did. Absinthe, mostly.”

“Yeesh. Absinthe and paint fumes. Not a good combo.”

“You ever try absinthe?”

“At my niece’s quinceañera, yeah. Wouldn’t recommend it.”

“The absinthe, or the quinceañera?”

Eddie laughs at that, bright and loose. Practically a giggle, the way it spills out of him. Buck has only heard him laugh like that a handful of times—and truth be told, it’s the kind of laugh that makes a person wish it were something they could actually have their hands full of, if only to feel what it’s like to hold sunlight—so it’s a little disarming hearing it now. Disarming enough that he hardly notices Eddie’s still holding his arm.

Or, at least, he hardly notices it until Eddie clutches his arm a little tighter, thumb gently tracing the raised script of his tattoo. Then Buck very much notices it, thanks.

“C’mon, seriously,” Eddie says, dizzingly soft. “You okay?”

Buck blinks a few times, but the room remains a Gaussian blur. His eyes feel gummier with each blink, his vision smudging and swimming, and—yeah, he probably should drink some water. “I’m fine, Eddie. S’just late.”

Eddie shuffles forward on the couch, knee knocking against Buck’s. He twists Buck’s arm slightly, peering down at his watch. “It’s only seven-thirty.”

Buck doesn’t yank his arm away from Eddie, because that would be rude—and worse, it’d risk spilling his beer over both of them—but he does tense up enough for Eddie to finally let him go. His arm snakes around the couch to rest behind Buck’s head instead. 

Buck tries not to dwell on how close they’re sitting together. He succeeds, mostly. His heart is doing Olympic-level gymnastics in his chest, but that’s probably just from the Hell’s Kitchen episode he’s half-watching. What can he say? It’s an intense show. Lots of yelling. Lots of... tension.

Eddie follows his eyes to the television. “Still bummed about that knife set?”

Buck snorts. “Yup. You got me.”

“Can’t blame a guy for steering you away from sharps.” Eddie lifts his arm to tug on Buck’s earlobe gently, knuckles brushing against his hair. “Unless you’re going for Gogh.”

Let it be said that Buck only shivers because one of the chefs on-screen screws up her pan-seared scallops, and Gordon Ramsey calls her a fucking donkey for it. And because Buck’s a bit ticklish. No other reason. 

“Pretty sure he used a razor to cut off his ear,” he says, voice hoarse. “Not a knife.”

“I said sharps, didn’t I?”

“Gogh’s the last thing I’m going for. Trust me.”

“I read somewhere that he ate yellow paint to feel happy. That true?”

“He ate paint to poison himself. Don’t think he was picky on the pigment.”

Buck isn’t looking at Eddie, because he’s too busy watching the teary-eyed confessional the chef is giving about her ruined dish, but he knows Eddie’s eyes are back on him, because he can feel them. 

“Since when did you become a Van Gogh expert?” Eddie asks.

“There’s an immersive exhibit for his paintings over on Sunset.” Buck pauses to pull from his beer, trying to clear his bone-dry throat. It doesn’t help. “Thought we could take Christopher sometime.”

“Sure.” Eddie huffs a laugh. “Let me know when you find a gap in his schedule.”

“Where is he, by the way?”

“Spending the night at Hen and Karen’s.”

“Right, um.” Buck vaguely remembers Eddie mentioning that earlier, somewhere between their fourth and fifth drink. “Denny got him into Marvel Rivals.”

“Chris said they’re trying to ‘grind to GM.’ Whatever that means.”

“Grandmaster. It’s a ranked tier in the game.”

Another huffed laugh. Another gentle tug on Buck’s earlobe. “That’s why we gotta keep these intact. You’re a good listener.”

Yeah, that’s what Buck is. Good at listening. Good at listening to his pulse thrum in his ears, at least.

“Grabbed coffee with them today,” Eddie says, drumming his fingers against the couch behind Buck’s head. Buck’s heartbeat quickly matches their rhythm. “Hen and Karen, I mean.”

“Did you…?” The question hangs. Buck isn’t sure he should pry.

“Tell them?” Eddie’s fingers stop drumming. “Yeah, I… yeah. I did.”

There’s a strange note in his voice. Buck turns to face him, and—wow, he’s sitting a lot closer than Buck realized. “What’d they say?”

“They already knew.” 

“Really?”

“They didn’t say it outright, but Hen was all, ‘It’s about damn time.’” Eddie smirks, a grimace window-dressed. “So I’m guessing the rest of the team knows, too.”

In Buck’s peripheral, that same chef is still spiraling over her scallops, muttering stupid, stupid, stupid to herself on a loop. Buck’s brain echoes the sentiment.

“I’m sorry. For not knowing.”

“Quit sayin’ sorry.”

“Sor—uh. I just… feel bad. That I didn’t know.”

“I didn’t know, either.” Eddie breaks eye contact, gaze lazily trailing to some indeterminate spot on the wall. “But it was nice having someone else not know, y’know? Besides me.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I mean...” Eddie breathes out a laugh that isn’t really a laugh. “When you spend your whole life thinking you’re one thing, and it turns out you’re something else, and the first response you get from someone when you tell them about it is, ‘Oh, you didn’t know?’, it feels a little…”

“Invalidating?” Buck ventures.

Eddie shrugs. “It’s like watching a movie with some big twist, but everybody else already saw it coming. Makes a guy feel dumb when he’s the only schmuck in the room that didn’t.” His eyes roll back over to Buck, glassy and unfocused. “But you didn’t see it coming, either.”

Buck smiles, sheepish. “It’s a pretty big twist.”

“M’not mad at them for knowing, obviously. Just wish I got the memo, too.” Eddie shrugs again, his head lolling. He lets it rest on his outstretched arm, cheek smushing against his bicep. “Prob’ly just making a big deal out of nothing.”

Buck thinks back to the night he told Eddie about him and Tommy. How nervous he’d been, how afraid he was of messing everything up. He remembers the way his stomach somersaulted when Eddie looked a little surprised, but he also remembers the odd sense of relief it gave him, seeing that surprise. It made Buck feel less like he was catching up to a mystery the world had already solved, and more like his revelation about his sexuality was exactly that: a revelation.

“Coming out is—” Buck falters. Drags in a breath. Tries again. “It is a big deal. Like—yeah, sure, maybe it’s nice to not have it be a whole thing, and it shouldn’t change anything between you and the people that matter to you, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t… it’s not…”

Eddie peers up at him through his lashes, eyes softening. “It’s not nothing.”

Buck swallows thickly. “Y-Yeah. Exactly.”

Eddie stares at Buck for a long moment. His hand eventually drifts back towards Buck’s ear, but he doesn’t tug it this time. Instead, his thumb settles into the hollow just behind the lobe, fingers idly carding through Buck’s hair. 

“See?” Eddie murmurs, low. “You are a good listener.”

Nearly all of Buck’s partners figured out pretty quick how much he likes this: nails dragging against his scalp, fingers raking through his curls. It’s a simple intimacy that always feels nice, chaste or otherwise.

And having Eddie do it—play with his hair, call him good—doesn’t make it any less nice. It just makes it impossible for Buck to think about it too hard without getting his chaste wires and his otherwise wires crossed. 

Thankfully, the level of alcohol in his bloodstream makes it pretty damn easy to not think about much at all, so he doesn’t. He just lets his mind drift, falling back into that same trance from earlier. Even leans into Eddie’s palm a little, because he can’t help that his head feels so, so heavy, and Eddie’s skin is so, so warm—

“Can I ask you something?” 

“Mm?” With a considerable amount of effort, Buck opens his eyes. He doesn’t even remember closing them. “Sure.”

Eddie’s eyes dart around Buck’s face like he’s already spotted an answer, lost sight of it, and is now just tracking it down again. In the few seconds Buck was dozing, they’ve somehow drifted even closer. Close enough for Buck to feel the ghost of Eddie’s breath on his face, to see all the little marks and lines he wouldn’t normally notice, and—and Buck must’ve legitimately left his head behind in Costco, because he starts leaning forward, instinct bulldozing reason, and—

“How do you feel about bell bottoms?” Eddie asks.

Buck freezes. “What?”

“Bell bottoms. Y’know, the jeans that”—Eddie retracts his hand from Buck’s head, using it to mime a flare at his calves—“bell out at the bottom. Any thoughts?”

If someone pointed a gun at his temple right now and asked him the same question, Buck still wouldn’t be able to form a coherent thought on the subject. He can barely form a coherent thought, period. 

“I don’t—uh.” Buck chuckles, delirious. He’s losing it. “How do you feel about them?”

“I like ‘em,” Eddie replies. “Got a pair in El Paso, actually. They’re all… embroiled.”

“Embroiled?”

“Em—embroidered.”

“Who’s punch-drunk now?”

“Shhh.” Eddie presses a finger to Buck’s lips. “Quiet.”

And Buck is—drunk. He’s drunk, and he’s been fumbling with the mess of crossed wires in his skull, trying to defuse whatever bomb inside keeps ticking louder and louder, but Eddie shushing him cuts the last chaste wire clean through, and now he’s—

Standing. Buck is standing. “I, um—gotta pee. Be right back.”

Eddie calls out an amused, “Don’t break the seal,” but Buck is already halfway down the hall. He stumbles blindly into the bathroom, nearly braining himself on the door frame as he does, and shuts the door behind him far harder than he means to.

He doesn’t actually need to pee. What he does need is a shower. A very, very cold shower.

Unfortunately, he’s been around enough paramedics to know how bad of an idea that is when he’s not sober, so he settles on splashing cold water against his face over and over, again and again, until his skin starts to go numb from it. Until the ticking ebbs. Until he can breathe without feeling like he’s about to fucking explode. 

It takes several minutes to get there, but he does. And when he finally shuts the tap off, he even laughs to himself a little, because again, he’s drunk. He’s drunk, and he hasn’t slept with anyone in a while, and—besides, it isn’t like this the first time he’s felt weird around Eddie after a few drinks. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t change anything. It’s nothing. 

He opens the door, still chuckling like a madman, and—

And Eddie is standing right outside the bathroom, holding one of Buck’s shirts. 

It’s a simple white button-up with thin black vertical stripes, one that Buck vaguely remembers buying on sale at the mall a few years ago. He can count the number of times he’s worn that shirt with a single hand. Hell, he could do it with two fingers.

The first time he wore it was during a bar crawl with Hen and Chimney a few months after joining the station. He laughs whenever he thinks about it, because Hen was also wearing a striped button-up that night, and Chimney kept saying, “Well, one of you has to change,” until Hen had to beg him to stop.

The last time he wore it was the day Eddie got shot.

Buck’s stomach drops.

“I was, uh.” Eddie looks down at the shirt. Back up at Buck. Back down to the shirt. “I was looking for those bell bottoms.”

“Eddie, I—”

“There was a box at the top of the closet. Thought they might be in there.”

“E-Eddie, I swear, I-I didn’t—”

“Why do you still have this, Buck?”

For a moment, Buck considers lying. Considers laughing it off, considers saying something like, “What, this old thing? This is my spaghetti shirt. Those aren’t your bloodstains, silly. It’s just bolognese!”

Instead, in the most humiliated, literally-caught-red-handed voice imaginable, Buck replies, “I don’t know.”

Eddie’s expression is alarmingly, horrifyingly unreadable. “You don’t know?”

Another half-truth. Buck kind of knows why he still has the shirt, much in the same way he kind of knows why he’s been having such a hard time finding a new place to live; in the same way he kind of knows why he hasn’t slept with anyone in a while.

“I don’t know.”

Eddie looks back down at the shirt, stuck there for a long moment. Buck is thinking about black holes again, praying to otherworldly forces he kinda-sorta believes in to foster one out of this bathroom, to mercifully swallow him whole.

“I do,” Eddie murmurs, right as a cliché waterphone sound effect plays from Hell’s Kitchen in the living room. Buck’s eardrums ring with it.

And Buck is just about to ask Eddie what the fuck he means by that, but Eddie turns to the bedroom and moves inside before he can. Buck, for all his humiliation, is helplessly pulled along into Eddie’s gravitational field. He wordlessly follows.

The room is dark when they enter, save a streetlamp through the window casting sallow-gold hues against baby-blue walls. Enough light to halo Eddie’s still-unreadable face, save the ghost of a frown pulling at his mouth. 

“Don’t laugh,” Eddie starts, humorless, setting Buck’s shirt down on the bed. He then approaches the closet, pushing the door further open with an aching creak, and rummages around the top shelf for a moment. Pulls out another box, a dusty black one with a silver trim, and gingerly removes the lid, revealing its contents to Buck.

A see-through plastic bag with blue labeling. A printed Los Angeles Hospital document itemizing the valuables and belongings of the deceased. A marigold-yellow blouse, mosaicked with pink hibiscuses and long-dried bloodstains.

If Buck’s stomach could sink any further, it would breach the Asthenosphere.

“Meant to toss this a while ago.” Eddie’s ghost of a frown fully materializes. The dust from the box falls in slow motion to the floor. A cinereal snowfall, all aglow under the night’s ambience. “Almost did in El Paso.”

Buck really has no right to ask, all things considered, but he does. “Why haven’t you?”

Eddie smiles now. It’s nowhere close to meeting his eyes. “I don’t know.”

Buck supposes this is Eddie’s means of assuaging Buck’s embarrassment; an olive branch of sorts, intended to draw comparison between their strange manifestations of grief. The problem is that this particular comparison—Eddie keeping the bloodied shirt of his late wife, Buck keeping a shirt bloodied by his very-much-alive best friend—kind of makes Buck want to throw up from the implications of it. It’s not the same thing at all, but the connecting threads are there. Enough for Buck to sew together another shirt out of said threads and reach a long-overdue conclusion, if he so chooses.

“I’m sorry,” Buck whispers.

“Quit saying sorry.” Eddie’s smile now reads as genuine, though it’s tinged with an understandable discomfort. He closes the box and returns it to its place in the closet with a sigh. “Ain’t no sorry.”

Buck wrings his hands, if only to have something to do with them, and is rather displeased to find that they’re shaking again. He turns to go, feeling an odd mix of unbearably intoxicated and overwhelmingly sober. “I should… I’ll go make the couch. I’m wiped.”

Eddie catches his arm before he can even take a single step.

“Hey. Look at me.”

Buck does. Eddie’s eyes are still glassy from his drinking, but they’re unnervingly focused where they meet Buck’s own, too. His thumb rubs against the raised script of Buck’s tattoo, cartographing it, mapping the ridges and valleys between ink and skin. His mouth forms around a word he can’t seem to get out, but Buck immediately understands.

Stay.

Buck nods wordlessly, his hands stilling, his lungs airless. 

After several glasses of water, an Advil, and a shower—precisely in that order, lest he slip and brain himself on the tile during said shower before sobering up a little—Buck reenters the bedroom. Eddie is already half-tucked under the covers, already hydrated and showered himself. Already wearing one of Buck’s t-shirts to sleep in. 

And after a blistering, unforgiving day of heat, the levee has broken. Through the open window, Buck can hear the gentle patter of rainfall, the gentler hiss of cicadas. A full-bodied shiver tumbles down his spine, a rolling thunder. Eddie somehow notices it without looking up from his phone, already moving to stand and shut the pane. 

“Here, I’ll—”

“It’s okay,” Buck interjects. The velvet-soft breeze slipping through the window screen is a welcome chill. It overshadows the unwelcome chill he feels now, approaching the bed. “Leave it. It’s fine.”

Eddie sinks back into the mattress with a chuckle, just as velvet-soft, then pats the space on the bed next to him. “Always forget you run cold.”

“No, you don’t,” Buck replies, because Eddie doesn’t. Every outing or escapade they’re on together, Eddie always brings along one of Buck’s jackets, just in case he needs it. The tremor in his frame settles into his hands at the thought.

“You know what they say about elephants.” Eddie pulls on his ear to make it appear larger. It’s an objectively hilarious thing for him to say, considering it feels like there’s one in the room now.

“What were you looking at?” Buck juts his chin towards Eddie’s phone, desperate for any kind of diversion.

“Just, uh, some clothes,” Eddie replies, characteristically reticent, uncharacteristically shy. Perhaps without meaning to, he cants his phone screen away from Buck’s line of sight, and hello, that peaks Buck’s interest tenfold.

“Whoa, hang on.” Buck all but dives onto the left side of the bed and into Eddie’s bubble, nerves momentarily forgotten, and tries to catch a peek. “Lemme see.”

Eddie reveals the screen, glancing at Buck warily as he does. “Don’t laugh.”

Buck rolls his eyes as if to say, why would I? He scoots a little closer, peering down at Eddie’s phone.

There are dozens of Google images, all picturing the same man. In most, he’s dressed in full cowboy attire: broad-brimmed hat, fringed jacket, leather chaps, spurred boots—the whole works. In some, his outfits are a bit less extravagant, but still orbit the same western mythology. What’s striking is the guy’s propensity for bright colors and bold designs. Every one of his outfits are bedazzled or embroidered in some fashion, every accessory splendent and unique. Most salient of all is the long-tasseled mask he wears in nearly every photo. The anonymity doesn’t conceal him so much as concentrate him. It’s alluring. He’s alluring.

The search bar at the top of the browser simply reads: orville peck fashion.

And, well—yeah. Why would Buck laugh? Imagining Eddie wearing any one of these outfits puts laughing near the very bottom of his list of possible reactions. 

“You were right,” Buck says. He’s glued to one image in particular, one that pictures the singer in an ivory fishnet polo. “Peck definitely outranks Gyllenhaal.”

“You like it?” Eddie asks, still oddly wary. 

Yes, obviously. “Doesn’t matter what I think. Do you like it?”

Eddie scoffs. “You sound like Frank. C’mon, be honest.”

Buck can’t vocalize his honest opinion in its entirety, unless Eddie is prepared to handle the equivalent of a retriever presented with an entire rotisserie chicken. 

“I like it,” Buck says, relatively even-toned. “Are these the kind of clothes you want to start wearing?”

“Wasn’t really picturing myself wearing—” Eddie abruptly stops short, stiffening. He locks his phone with a click and sets it face-down on the nightstand. “I mean, sure. Somewhat, yeah.”

Buck’s brows corrugate. “You shouldn’t feel embarrassed, Eddie. That style would suit you. It’s—”

Eddie cuts him off with an inordinate yawn, leaning over to switch off the sconce to his right. “We should get some shut-eye, dude. I’m wiped.”

Buck shakes his head, bemused, and mirrors the action with the sconce to his left, plunging the bedroom into darkness. They both pull their respective halves of the duvet over themselves—Buck’s half over his shoulders, Eddie’s half over his stomach. Their breathing evens out until their chests rise and fall in cadence together.

That same lone streetlamp illuminates inky pockets of the room in amber, aureate ripples in a tenebrous sea. Buck turns over on his side instinctually, trying to get comfortable. As his eyes adjust, Eddie’s features slowly resurface in the dusk. He remains on his back beside Buck, arms straight at his sides. A stream of light weaves through his eyelashes, fanning long shadows across his cheeks.

There’s something to be said about the dark and pretending, how the latter almost always feels easier when coupled with the former—but the funny thing is, Buck doesn’t have to pretend to relax or pretend that the two of them in the same bed feels normal. It just does, like it’s something they do all the time. Like it’s something they could do all the time, if Buck could only—

“You sleep like a corpse,” Buck blurts, far too loud. 

“Dick.” Eddie laughs, fond, stiffening his arms at his sides as if entering rigor mortis. His eyes remain closed, but they crinkle at the edges with his grin. “Blame the military.”

“Must be good for your back.” Buck grins himself, poking Eddie’s ribs. “Old man.”

“Dick.” Eddie pulls out one of the pillows behind his head and thwaps Buck with it. “Put this between your knees. Helps with pain.”

“I’m not in—”

“Save it,” Eddie interrupts around another yawn, a real one this time. He relaxes his body, wiggling in place a little to settle in, and sleepily adds, “Your left leg always hurts when it rains.”

There’s also something to be said about being deeply, inexplicably known by someone, and the strange, paradoxical feeling it engenders—being terrified to accept that marrow-deep knowing, while being just as terrified to lose it. What’s even stranger, even more self-contradictory, is that the only thing Buck has ever wanted in his miserable, miraculous life, as much as it scares him, is to be seen. Not just chosen or wanted, but understood. It’s something that has felt forever out of reach, forever an impossibility. An ocean always damned too vast, a mountain peak eternally fated too distant. A foregone conclusion.

And now, without much pretense or warning, the impossible has become possible. Buck is capable of being known, and the realization crushes him like a second ill-timed firetruck. Yet another Big Bang of sorts, born the same way as the first: astronomically improbable, yet somehow cosmically predestined all the same.

Buck tries not to dwell on it. He succeeds, mostly. Partially because his left leg actually does ache now that Eddie has mentioned it; mostly because his heart aches far worse. Both are unwelcome distractions, but distractions nonetheless. He maneuvers Eddie’s pillow between his knees as carefully as he can, mindful of the near-sleep body next to him.

Buck’s eyelids are lead-heavy, his frame weighed by fatigue, but he can’t shut his brain off, because… because. Eddie, on the other hand, is far nearer to sleep than Buck realized. His arm twitches, a hypnic jerk, his elbow a breadth away from connecting with Buck’s forearm. Even in the darkness, Buck can see every line and crease in his face even out as he approaches sleep.

And maybe Buck really isn’t that careful or mindful at all, because he blurts, again far too loud, “Can I ask you something?”

“Mm?” Eddie blinks his eyes open blearily. He turns and smiles at Buck, gentle and somnolent. “Sure.”

Buck has, give or take, several thousand questions pinballing around in his skull that he could flip over to Eddie. What did you mean when you said this whole thing between us has been messy and hard, or, did you really not remember anything after you got shot, or, can you please wear those bell bottoms tomorrow please I’m just curious please please please, to name a few.

What he settles on instead is, “What happened to Chimney at Akbar?”

Eddie squints at him. “What?”

“You mentioned Chim had some awakening during a Halloweekend call. This morning when I was in Costco, remember?”

This morning during our phone call, remember? This morning when you casually dropped a hydrogen bomb on me, remember? This morning when the world capsized on its axis, remember, remember, remember?

Eddie exhales a laugh through his nose, head turning back towards the ceiling, hands folding over his diaphragm. “Can’t believe he hasn’t told you about it yet.”

“What happened?”

“Grease fire in the kitchen. Some bartender panicked and dumped water on it.”

“I meant what happened with Chim.”

The corner of Eddie’s mouth pulls upward, dimpling his cheek. “That bartender was dressed like sexy Aragorn.”

“Sexy Aragorn?” Buck echoes. “Isn’t that a given?”

“Obviously,” Eddie agrees. The casual ease with which he says it does something funny to Buck’s chest, like someone’s jabbing a feather duster through each of his ribs. “But this Aragorn was sexy like, booty-shorts-with-a-lacey-garter sexy.”

“Wow.” What else is Buck supposed to say?

“Hen couldn’t tell which was redder,” Eddie mumbles. “The guy’s second-degree burns, or Chim’s face when he was treating him.”

Buck, despite himself, is fighting to keep his eyes open now. “Can’t believe he hasn’t told me about it, either.”

“You hear about his Joey Graziadei phase?”

“Say more right now.”

Eddie does, words slurred by imminent sleep. He murmurs his way through Chimney’s months-long obsession with The Bachelor, how Chimney justified his boycrush on Graziadei with excuses like, he’s an active listener, and, I just think he’s interesting, that’s all, and, he’s objectively dreamy, Maddie, stop laughing. Buck would kill to have been a fly on the wall at the time, just to hear what Maddie would’ve said about it. She once said to him that Chimney is about as straight as Lombard Street, which apparently rings true.

And right before he finally, mercifully falls asleep—Eddie still mumbling away beside him, onto another story of Chimney making goo-goo eyes at some guest actor on HOTSHOTS that kinda-sorta looked like a young Richard Gere—Buck thinks of something else Maddie said to him once, just a few months ago. Back in a universe where things made sense.

It wouldn’t be so crazy.

So, here’s the thing. 

Eddie knows Buck perhaps better than anyone in the world. Perhaps second only to Maddie—a hairs-width close second to be sure, but still. He’s light-years ahead of anyone else who has claimed to know Buck. He’s parsecs ahead, frankly.

In retrospect, Buck can’t help but wonder when and where that knowing began; how that knowing took root, how it grew into a giant fucking California redwood right under Buck’s nose. It must have started somewhere between the tsunami and the collapsed well. If Buck were a poet, he’s sure he could craft some kind of metaphor out of those two incidents. Buck fighting against an unstoppable current, Eddie fighting against the immovable earth, both breaking their own respective surface in turn to find each other again.

It’s a good thing Buck isn’t a poet, because he can’t write metaphors for shit. That much he knows to be true.

What he doesn’t know for certain, but suspects to be true all the same, is that Eddie has probably known him from the moment they met. Long before they agreed to have each others’ backs in a parking lot, before they disarmed a grenade in a cramped ambulance, before they sized each other up in a firehouse gym—and long before Buck, albeit very briefly, hated Eddie’s guts. Buck has a feeling that Eddie knew him for who he was, could piece together his stained-glass mosaic even from shards ground to sand, the moment Eddie stepped foot into the station. Perhaps even before they locked eyes for the first time, as if Eddie Diaz somehow found a way to absorb all that there is to know about Evan Buckley via the atmosphere itself, via an unexplainable osmosis. 

Perhaps it’s the kind of knowing that can only come from being made of the same particles eons ago; that Eddie knowing him is just stardust reacquainting itself with stardust.

All that said, Buck knows Eddie plenty, too.

He knows that Eddie can’t stand orange pekoe tea unless the leaves steep for just under a minute. He knows that Eddie sneaks twenty-dollar bills in the pocket of Christopher’s winter jacket before it’s stowed away for next year, and acts just as surprised as his son when Christopher finds them later. Knows that Eddie has a soft spot for run-and-gun video games like Metal Slug 3 and Sunset Riders. Knows that he has a penchant for wearing socks until they fall apart. Knows each and every one of his tells: the way he shakes his head sharply to stop himself from crying, the way he squares his shoulders when he’s tense, the way he blinks a bit too slow when he has a good hand in Texas hold’em. Knows what he tells everyone his favorite song is (The Fire Inside by Bob Segar), and what his actual favorite song is (Contigo Quiero Estar by Selena). Knows what makes him laugh, what scares him, what makes him tick. Truth be told, Buck knows just about everything there is to know about Eddie Diaz.

What he didn’t know, at least until now, is that Eddie Diaz is a cuddler.

Buck awakes abruptly, but not startlingly. In one moment, he’s senselessly floating between one dream and the next—each of them rather mundane, most of them involving Eddie and Christopher, some just Eddie—and then, in the very next moment, he’s staring at the bedroom wall. He doesn’t even remember blinking his eyes open. The transition from being asleep to being awake is unceremoniously seamless. 

His senses return to him in fragments, the weight of sleep lingering, thick and glacial. The room is still steeped in darkness, the world outside still tucked beneath the crepuscular hush of night. He hears the heavy patter of rain on the roof, the rumble of thunder above. The smell of petrichor is strong when it hits his nose, sharp enough to taste.

And Buck is—warm. Unusually so. It’s muggy and humid in the bedroom, sure, and the ceiling fan above is currently doing more harm than good by pushing that muggy, humid air directly onto Buck, but that warmth isn’t just stemming from the—

Something shifts behind him. 

Buck then realizes two things in a single, sickening jolt, and his blood goes gelid in his veins with it.

The first realization is startling, yes, but not entirely unexpected. He’s not too out of it to forget that he didn’t exactly fall asleep alone, so it’s not too surprising when Buck reaches the conclusion that the something behind him is actually someone. 

At some point in the night, Eddie wrapped himself around Buck—a foot slipped between Buck’s calves, an arm slung over Buck’s side, his sternum against Buck’s spine. That, Buck’s brain rather unhelpfully supplies, is why he feels so warm. He’s currently wearing a space heater as a makeshift Jansport.

The second realization is far more startling. So much so that every single nerve in Buck’s body pulls taught when he reaches said realization.

Eddie is hard.

His hand is curled around Buck’s stomach, calloused fingers an inch away from connecting with skin where Buck’s tank top is hiked up just so. His breathing is a steady tide, each exhale landing soft and damp at Buck’s nape, each inhale cooling the spot immediately after: a flood, a retreat, a flood again. 

He’s dead asleep, furnace-hot against Buck’s frame, and he’s hard. Dead asleep, hips slotted up against Buck’s ass, and hard.

And Buck is—not going to freak out. 

Really, he’s not. There’s a few horrifying moments where Buck just sort of bluescreens, where he’s on the precipice of freaking out—but then his brain comes back online several moments later, and he thinks about the situation objectively. Let it be said that he’s more than capable of being rational about this, because contrary to what some may believe, he’s a competent guy. He’s hypercompetent, honestly. Give a man Excel and he’ll spreadsheet for life, as the saying goes.

So, after a minute of deliberating and debating and deconstructing and—and yes, alright, fine, freaking the fuck out—he comes to a few perfectly objective, rational explanations. All of them vary in composition (morning wood happens to every person with a dick at some point, and, Eddie must be pent up, because he hasn’t exactly slept with anyone in a while either, and, a person can hardly be blamed for what happens when they’re sleeping) but, in turn, all of them have the exact same sequitur: it doesn’t mean anything. 

They’re going to laugh about this later, really. Buck is going to politely wake Eddie up and make some stupid joke—something a la, “Next time, scout the campground before you pitch a tent,” or, “Dock’s closed, cap’n,” or, “Hey, isn’t it funny how you came out to me and showed me your dead wife’s bloody shirt and now your dick is basically in my ass?”—and they’re going to laugh and laugh and laugh, because it’s objectively funny. And, more importantly, it means nothing. They’ve survived far worse situations, far more embarrassing circumstances. Buck doesn’t need to turn it into a big deal, or think about it too hard, or worry too much about the heady pool of heat that has started swirling low in his stomach, because it’s meaningless. It’s nothing.

Or, at least, it’s nothing right up until Eddie gently but perceptibly grinds against Buck, a soft noise pulling itself from Eddie’s throat with the motion. Then all of Buck’s rationale and objectivity cannonball straight out the fucking window.

His rolls are slow and measured at first, not unlike another steady tide: a swell, an ebb, a swell again. At some point, though, Eddie finds a rhythm—a stilted, eager rhythm—and picks up speed. His fingers clench around Buck’s tank top, clinging to the fabric for purchase, and—and Buck really would love to remain rational and objective about this, he really would, but Eddie is making all of these soft, soft noises near Buck’s ear, noises Buck has never heard Eddie make before,  not once, not ever, and Buck is—

Human. Buck is woefully, humiliatingly human. Made of skin and bone and blood, just like everybody else.

So, when the breaths against Buck’s nape hitch and quicken, when Eddie’s soft noises become punctured, wanton, desperate, all of the aforementioned blood in Buck’s body plunges south, and he stops breathing, stops thinking. The heady pool of heat in his stomach morphs into a tide, a wave, a maelstrom—gnawing and erosive where it pits and dissolves the lining—and he’s helpless to stop the unconscious cant of his own hips, the interested twitch of his dick in his boxers. 

He’s decidely not thinking about the fact that his closest friend in the world is getting off on him. Not thinking about how he’s unabashedly aroused by it. Not thinking about how it will undoubtedly and irrecoverably fuck everything up between them. Not thinking about much at all, except Eddie, Eddie, Eddie.

And, well, it bears repeating: there’s something to be said about the dark and pretending. How easy it is to imagine he can come out of this unscathed and scott-free in the safety of nightfall.

He’s back in that same fucking trance from earlier, physically awake but mentally asleep-at-the-wheel, his head an eat-your-heart-out-Decartes level of unmoored from his body. And he’s still not thinking—nothing high-level, anyway, just instinct bulldozing reason again—when he bites his fist to stifle a moan, his other hand drifting lower to palm himself through his boxers. Buck is completely lost, utterly mindless, when he curls in on himself to bring the pillow between his knees in reach; when he tugs it towards his already-hard cock, aching for something to grind against, and—

And his eyes flit over to the dresser by the window, towards the striped shirt neatly folded on top.

In the moonlight, Eddie’s bloodstains look like ink, pitch-dark and blotchy. Under the rain, Buck swears he can smell asphalt and sulfur, taste iron and gunpowder, and he just—stops, a spinning coin slammed flat. His fever breaks just as he awoke, rather suddenly and unceremoniously, and now he’s—

Fleeing. Buck is fleeing. 

He shoots out of bed, tearing his legs free from the vice-like grip of the duvet and the velcro-like hold of Eddie’s hands, and just about trips ass-over-kettle in his retreat to the door. He doesn’t stop and check if he alerts Eddie awake in his haste—just stumbles blindly into the hallway and shuts the door behind him with a grating creak. 

Buck then pads into the bathroom, closing that equally-creaky door behind him as well, his eyes wide and unseeing. He’s stock-still, hardly breathing, mind now very much moored to his body as he listens, waiting to hear if Eddie will stir.

Eddie doesn’t. 

It’s just Buck, alone. Alone with his thoughts, alone with his violently-shaking hands, alone with the churning-crashing-eroding flood in his stomach. 

His eyes skate over to the mirror. He barely recognizes his own reflection in the near-darkness. Hardly any light filters in from the bathroom window, but it’s enough for Buck to see the crimson flush in his cheeks, the frenzied, wild look in his eyes. He looks feral.

Then, without meaning to, his gaze trails down, down, down, until it settles on the still-tented front of his boxers.

Things get fuzzy after that.

Even so, Buck is tangentially aware of everything that happens. Enough to chronologize all of it, should anyone happen to quiz him.

He strips, then runs a very, very hot shower—hot enough to burn his flesh raw, to make every second under the spray nothing short of agony. He takes his time under that spray scrubbing himself clean, a real silk-purse-out-of-a-sow’s-ear endeavor, until he feels his skin beginning to slough off under fingernails bitten to nubs. Until the fog clouding his head is inseparable from the fog clouding the shower glass, until his left leg aches with this half-volcanic, half-voltaic pain that, lucky him, feels like there’s an electric fence coiled around his calf. He even reads every single chemical from the shampoo and conditioner bottles littering the shower rack, as difficult as it is to do so in the dimly-lit space; even tries committing them to memory, silently mouthing them by rote—panthenol, sodium lauroyl methyl isethionate, amodimethicone—just to avoid thinking about how royally, magnanimously fucked he is. An ingredient creed—increedients, his stupid brain offers stupidly—to help him pretend for a little longer that he hasn’t totally kiboshed everything.

But, again, it bears repeating: there’s something to be said about the dark and pretending. How futile the latter is when paired with the former. How the night begets what the day shelves. How truth in all its repulsive, prepossessing glory is inescapable in shadow. 

And after an unknowable amount of time in that dark, dark shower, after he finally gives in and takes himself in his still-shaking hand, after he strokes himself once, twice, enough times to teeter over the cliffside before nosediving over the edge, Buck finally stops pretending.

The truth should feel like relief, like respite—a second coming, in more ways than one. It shouldn’t feel like weeping and gnashing of teeth, like sackcloth and ashes. The truth, in all fairness, also shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to Buck, or anyone with a working set of eyeballs, because it’s been a cymbal-banging monkey toy in the back of Buck’s brain, chattering and screeching at him with red-rimmed eyes for nearly a decade now. 

The truth is finally within reach, suddenly a possibility. A crossable ocean, a climbable mountain. A foregone conclusion.

In its wake, Buck’s stomach is a tsunami.

Buck doesn’t go back to sleep, obviously. Couldn’t if he tried. 

Instead, he parks his ass in the dining room on the most uncomfortable, worn-in chair of the set—some kind of inadvertent punishment for himself, he’s sure—and sits there, leaned forward and motionless, his right elbow perched on his left thigh like something out of the goddamn Musée Rodin.

When Eddie wakes up a few hours later—notably sleep-mussed, notably swimming in Buck’s t-shirt, notably scruffed with a five o’clock shadow, how did Buck not put two and two together sooner—he shuffles and stands in the doorway, face scrunched from the light of the window like a flashbang’s gone off, even though it’s still fairly dark and storming outside. Voice thick with sleep, he asks, “Had another shower?”

“What,” Buck responds, hoarse, automatic. Hardly a question.

Eddie, for some reason, decides to pointedly ruffle Buck’s still-damp curls as he shuffles past him into the kitchen. Buck’s heart, for obvious reasons, does a perfectly-executed triple-gainer into the lower-rung of his ribs.

“Couldn’t sleep?” Eddie ventures. 

Buck hears him spooning coffee grounds into a filter, hears his own pulse thumpthumpthump at the base of his skull, and he’s—not going to freak out, cross his acrobat heart, he’s not, but he does go statue-still at the question. Does Eddie know precisely why Buck couldn’t sleep?

“Buck?” Eddie asks, poking his head around the corner. “You okay?”

Buck startles. Makes a noncommittal noise, like, oh, y’know, Mondays. “You?”

Eddie hums, face unscrunching as his eyes adjust to the overcast. Cute, Buck thinks helplessly. He’s cute. “Haven’t slept that good in years.”

Either Eddie is doing that thing he often does where he, rather than catastrophize, makes something that should be a big deal or a larger conversation into a shrugged-shoulder, blip-on-the-radar nothingburger—or he’s wholly unaware that he was drilling into Buck’s ass last night in search of oil. Buck isn’t sure which is worse.

“Buck?” Eddie presses, levelling him with that patented Diaz sit-tight-I’m-trying-to-X-ray-you stare, and boy, Buck sure understands why Christopher always complains whenever he’s on the receiving end of it.

It takes one, two, seven seconds for Buck to settle on, “I’m good, just need some coffee,” even though he’s already nursing a lukewarm mug of the stuff in his still-shaking hand, because it’s not like he’s about to tell Eddie, “Well, since you asked so nicely, I’m actually not good this morning, go figure, haha, because I popped a boner after you tried to get off on me in your sleep, and I almost got myself off, too, but then I saw that button-up shirt covered in your blood, except I didn’t necessarily lose the boner when I saw it, haha, isn’t that hilarious, no time to unpack all of that, and then wow, surprise surprise, I actually did get off later in the shower, which is directly on the other side of your bedroom wall, because, oh, I don’t know, I’m a perverted freak?”

There are a few terrible, horrible, no good, very bad moments where Eddie’s just watching him, anatomizing him, with this eerily indecipherable expression, and—really, Buck has to wonder when the guy became so damn unreadable, considering the venn diagram between Eddie Diaz and Saturday-morning-cartoon-level macroexpressions is frankly a circle. But, thankfully, Eddie doesn’t press further. 

“Want a top up?” Eddie asks, gesturing to Buck’s mug, like absolutely nothing is out of sorts. 

Buck feels like he just half-assed his way through a heist and somehow came out unmarred with a full attaché briefcase. Hard to say if the proverbial jig is finally up, if his case is actually filled with baby Aspirin instead of cocaine, but—whatever, forget it. He doesn’t need to press further, either. If Eddie really doesn’t remember last night, then no harm, no foul. Buck can just drop it, pretend it never happened. Easy peasy.

Better, of course, to let sleeping dongs lie.

I need a favor

what happened to good morning?

Good morning! ☀️

I need a favor

if the favor has anything to do with moving into one of my studio apartments then the answers no.

I promise it doesn’t.

Can’t afford the arm or the leg anyway

1800 a month is reasonable

To who?

Scrooge McDuck?

what do you want?

A buffer

for who?

Me and Eddie

Can you be at Westfield Century City in 30 minutes?

???

I thought you guys were good

what’s wrong?

Nothing’s wrong! We’re good

then why do you need a buffer?

I’ll tell you later.

Please?

youre buying me lunch.

Deal 👍

Thanks Rav.

😐

If Buck had to name the single worst part about realizing he’s rather hopelessly, and frankly humiliatingly, head-over-heels for his best friend, it wouldn’t be any of the obvious offenders.

It isn’t the fact that the realization struck him stupid twenty-four hours after Eddie came out to him—though, yes, that’s certainly a next-in-line, toe-on-the-top-podium runner-up, but light was bound to dawn on Marblehead at some point. Plus, Buck has been praying, albeit in a halfhearted, warding-cross-sloppily-drawn-over-his-chest kind of way to The Powers That Might Be to ever-so-kindly explain why he’s felt so weird around Eddie as of late, so he can’t really complain about the way in which that realization came about. Beggars and choosers, never the twain shall meet.

It isn’t Maddie being right about him being in love with Eddie, either. Frankly, his sister’s almost-otherworldly ability to unravel even the world’s largest ball of twine, to untangle embedded knots without necessarily seeing them firsthand, is far from a bad thing, especially in her line of work. The LASC can thank every lucky star on their planisphere that they have someone so eerily perceptive parked in dispatch. That level of perception has saved many a life. So what if it occasionally ruins Buck’s?

It isn’t even the possibility that this little hiccup could destroy everything between them if Eddie ever were to connect the dots, if the other shoe ever were to drop. Truth be told, Buck has spent thirty-odd years as a downstairs neighbor, living in the pause between removed shoes, forever waiting for the thunk of his upstairs neighbor’s second Oxford. He’s terrified of Eddie finding out, yes, but perpetual trepidation is Buck’s baseline, so. He’s used to it.

No, the worst part about Buck realizing he’s in love with Eddie, by far, is that it happens in a shopping mall food court.

South Coast Plaza’s food court is above above-average, as far as food courts go. So is Westfield’s, but a good chunk of Century City is outdoors, and it was still pouring rain when Buck and Eddie left to go shopping, so they took a detour. A fifty-mile detour, just for a decent indoor mall. And yes, the additional hour-or-so it took to drive to Costa Mesa had Buck panicking at first.  He’s a silence-filler by nature, an endless-questions-asker by trade, and something about cruising the 405 for an extended period of time in a ludicrously capacious Nissan Frontier naturally makes a guy want to clear the air. 

He preemptively panicked so hard, he briefly considered the logistics of simply popping open the door and ejecting himself from the vehicle. Just fully Ladybird-ing himself out of the situation entirely. Doesn’t really shake out to a net positive when he’s the one driving, though, so that was a quick nonstarter.

Fortunately, Eddie queued up Selena’s debut and set the volume to loud three minutes into the trip, which gave Buck an easy out. A welcome out, actually. It’s a great album.

But there’s only so long Buck’s mind can go without poking a bear. 

It’s a quarter after twelve when they get to South Coast, and they’re both starving, so they decide to start with lunch. Eddie then decides to remove his jacket because, quote, “This mall’s a sauna, Buck, don’t look at me like that.” Eddie also decided to wear a faded Nick Drake shirt today, which—hey now, Buck is one-hundred-percent sure that’s actually his old shirt (a gift to him from Maddie shortly after she moved to L.A.) and two-hundred-percent sure that it’s nowhere close to Eddie’s size (the fabric is stretched so taught against his chest and middle that it should really be categorized as a corset). 

Which would usually be fine, and normal, and, most importantly, fine. Buck has already been dealing with Eddie pilfering his wardrobe for months now. 

Except that shirt is just one of many rapidly-compounding catalysts that come together within Buck’s mind, all at once. The resulting explosion—this one more Chernobyl than Big Bang, more unsalvageable devastation than grand genesis—not so much pokes the bear as it completely eviscerates its cave, leaving said bear completely out in the open, long-hibernated and feral.

The precursors to the detonation are as follows.

Eddie is sitting at this sticky food court table in that shirt—which, by the way, has had its sleeves snipped off at some point, so his shoulders and biceps are out on full display, hurray, lucky Buck—and his hair is all tousled and slightly wet from the rain, and he’s also wearing those embroidered bell bottoms he bought in El Paso, and he’s putting back a chicken waffle breakfast sandwich roughly the size of a football, and there’s a bunch of fairy lights dangling from the ceiling that catch and dance in Eddie’s brown, brown eyes just so, and boom, off goes the bomb, and Buck thinks, oh, fuck. I’m in love with him. I love him.

Did Buck mention Ravi is here, too?

He’s watching Eddie eat this ridiculous Bruxië sandwich lovingly dubbed the Super Cluck! with barely-concealed disgust, his mouth downturned into a Kermit-like scowl. He side-eyes Buck’s untouched BLT, also stupidly hammocked in a waffle, then fully-eyes just Buck.

“So,” Ravi starts. Stops. Doesn’t finish.

“So,” Buck echoes, plastering on his patented very-normal-human-being smile. It probably lands somewhere closer to coked-out-gameshow-host. “Great to see you, Rav. Thanks for coming.”

Ravi gives him a weird look, like, dude, you saw me two days ago, before turning to Eddie instead. “What are we doing here today, exactly?”

Eddie’s chewing slows. Around his mouthful, zero tact, he asks, “We?” Then he hastily swallows, a glob of sriracha mayo dotting his lower lip, Buck loves him, fuck, fuck, and backpedals: “Sorry, I mean—I thought you were just here for lunch.”

Ravi glances at Buck, pointed. “Am I?”

“Um.” Buck didn’t think this far ahead. Buck doesn’t think very far ahead on principle. Wile E. Coyote-ing off the cliffside before he checks where the road ends is kind of his memo. “Well, you don’t have to stay. Past lunch, I mean.”

“Right.” Ravi takes a beat. Sips his pho tai. “So, I drove for over an hour to meet you guys here”—another sip—“in Monday morning rush-hour traffic”—another sip—“on my day off”—another sip—“for lunch. No other reason?”

Buck tries to avoid staring at the dollop of mayo on Eddie’s lip. “Eddie’s just, uh.” Why hasn’t Eddie noticed the mayo? Is Buck the only one noticing the mayo? “Eddie wants to…”

“I’m buying new clothes,” Eddie finishes. He spares a glance at Buck, precisely the nanosecond his tongue darts out to lick away the mayo, which is what Buck wanted, hurray, and adds, “Also, I’m gay, by the way.”

Ravi, to his credit, is pretty unflappable and rarely loses his composure. The same is true now, minus the minute twitch of his eyebrows in surprise. “Oh. Alright. Cool.”

Ravi, also to his credit, is pretty quick on the uptake, so it takes him precisely a nanosecond for two and two to equal four. He slowly turns back to Buck, a gameshow-host grin of his own stretching his face wide. Oh. Alright. Cool. “You sure there’s enough room in your guys’ closet for new clothes?” 

Buck isn’t a killer, but he could be. If provoked.

“Now that I’m no longer in it, definitely,” Eddie jokes, polishing off the rest of his sandwich. Sucks his fingers clean, too. Buck isn’t staring, hand to God. “You’re welcome to tag along with us if you want.”

Ravi’s still staring at Buck, still Cheshiring. Asshole. “Yeah, I’ll hang for a bit. As long as that’s cool with you, Buckaroo.”

This is what Buck wanted. A buffer. He asked for this. He can’t make a wish on a monkey’s paw and turn his nose at the curled finger.

“Sure.” Buck imagines disintegrating his good friend into ash with his mind, as good friends do. “Fine by me.”

“Sweet.” Eddie smacks his hands down on the table, pushing himself to a stand. “Gotta take a leak. Be back in five.”

Buck doesn’t watch him go. Doesn’t notice how he seems to carry himself lighter, or how he walks with a newfound confidence, a spring in his step. Doesn’t notice the way his bell bottoms seem like they’re custom-molded to his ass, or the embroidered yellow poppy on the right back pocket.

“So,” Ravi starts. Stops. Doesn’t finish.

“Don’t,” Buck warns, face heating.

“All I was gonna say,” Ravi continues, “was that I can dock the rent for one of my studios. If you’re still on the hunt for a new place.”

“Don’t.”

“Just saying. Offer’s open.” Ravi leans in close, chin propped on his fist, eyes twinkling. “You are still looking for a new place, right?” 

Buck doesn’t respond. Instead, he plucks a few ketchup packets from Eddie’s food tray and stuffs them into his quarter zip’s pocket.

Ravi frowns. “What are you doing?”

“Oh, nothing,” Buck says, blithe. “Hey, unrelated—where do you keep your work boots at the station?”

In Dante’s Inferno, Hell is subdivided into nine layers. The ninth and final rung, collegiately known as Cocytus and colloquially known as Lucifer’s shitty basement suite, is described as a frozen-over, inhospitable nightmare exclusively reserved for humanity’s most treacherous. In other words, the worst possible place a person could ever find themselves in.

Which, to Buck, is a load of crock. There’s a worse place that exists by a wide margin, and he doesn’t even need to crack the Earth’s crust to find it. Conveniently for him, it’s only forty-five miles from South Bedford Street.

He is, of course, referring to the Nordstrom at South Coast Plaza.

“You look constipated.” Ravi is sitting next to Buck in the fitting room, sporting a thin, pitying grimace. A commiserating expression reserved solely for pileups on the freeway, or Buck in his day-to-day. “Quit brooding, man.”

Buck isn’t brooding. He’s just a little uncomfortable at the moment, and rightfully so. This fitting room is deserving of an ancillary semi-circle of Hell just below the ninth.

Above his head, ceiling panels fixed to the coldest, most forensic, series-premiere-of-The-Pitt end of the Kelvin scale. Beneath his feet, gaudy blueish-greyish tartan-patterned carpet tile. Beneath his ass, a waxed wooden bench in this awful, awful shade that, if it were an official Pantone color, would be aptly christened as Primordial Porridge or Old Bandage. 

Aesthetics aside, Buck is also stuck with the lingering remnants of every single scent ever in his nose, a lovely souvenir from the perfume section that they spent, give or take, several thousand lifetimes in. Reason being, one of the employees kept shamelessly batting her long, long eyelashes at Eddie, insisting that he has to smell the new Miss Dior Essence, like seriously, he has to, it’s the perfect gift for the missus, if he has a missus that is, wink wink.

Buck is also stuck with the lingering remnants of their conversation, because Eddie, casual as anything, told her, “Thanks, but no thanks, not really my department,” to which she asked, “What, giving?” to which he responded, somehow both goofy and smooth as all hell, “Oh, I’m definitely a giver, but just for misters,” to which she responded, “Then you have to smell the new Dior Homme, like seriously, it’s to die for.”

And now Buck has the beginning fragments of a cluster headache forming. Not really from a rep chasing commissions like a sales-thirsty shark or from top notes of powdery iris. Mostly from I’m definitely a giver.

“Told you to sniff the coffee beans,” Ravi says, smug, but also like it pains him to say it. I told you so, regrettably. 

“That’s a myth,” Buck replies, automatic. Never too miserable to deploy a well, actually when the opportunity presents itself. “You’re supposed to just smell unscented skin.”

“Then why do perfume stores put out coffee beans?” Ravi asks, immediately followed by: “Isn’t skin always technically scented?”

“I don’t know. Ask Grosofsky.”

“Who’s…” Ravi trails off, gaze flicking down to Buck’s lap. “Whoa. Ease up on the picking.”

Buck follows Ravi’s line of sight to his own clasped hands. Without realizing, he’s been shredding his thumb’s cuticle with the other. Blood haloes the nail, cherry-red under the stark light.

“Everything okay?” Ravi’s grimace has entered sole-witness-to-a-fatal-car-wreck territory. He leans over, lowers his voice to a whisper. “If something happened between you and Eddie, then—”

Buck cuts him a look, eyes flared wide. Ravi reels back and holds his palms up in surrender. His expression reads a little frustrated now, like the fatal car wreck in question is blocking his daily commute, and man, that really rubs Buck the wrong way. It makes him miss the days when Ravi was a probie. When Buck could put the fear of God in him just by entering a room.

Buck doesn’t get much time to wax nostalgic, though—or to consider what other personal effects of Ravi’s could feasibly accommodate ketchup packets, beyond just his work boots—before a sigh from a nearby stall derails both trains of thought.

“Almost done in there?” Ravi calls out. “Solve cold fusion yet?”

“Real funny.” There’s the sound of a fly being zipped up, the rustle of fabric. Another deep, long-suffering sigh. “Not my fault you guys were zero help out there.”

Buck and Ravi chorus an aggrieved, “Hey.” Buck tacks on, even more aggrieved, “What about that cardigan I picked out? It’s cool.”

“Yeah.” Eddie snorts. “For a guy ten years younger than me, maybe.”

“You said you talked to Hen about”—Ravi makes a vague, conjuring gesture, even though Eddie can’t see it—“all this yesterday, right? She dresses the best out of all of us. You should ask her for fashion advice.”

“I tried.” Eddie huffs. “She said, verbatim, ‘I’m not your gay Yoda.’” 

With that, the fitting room stall’s lock finally clicks open, the door swinging open with a muted groan. Eddie steps out, arms spread wide. “Alright. What do we think?”

From an objective standpoint, he looks good. The red-navy-tan striped cardigan Buck picked out for him is cool: oversized and loose over his frame, but in a chic, intentional way. It hangs open over a ribbed, bone-white tank, paired with a new set of fitted brown bell-bottom pants that stretch his legs about six miles long. As an added bonus, somewhere in the process of changing in and out of the pile of clothes he got shooed into the stall with, his already-tousled hair has achieved new heights of tousledness—several dark strands falling over his forehead in soft waves. He looks really good. Objectively speaking.

From a subjective standpoint, he looks like someone Buck wants to pin against the nearest surface and fuck until they’re both stupid.

“Handsome, you are,” Buck croaks.

Eddie barks a laugh and rolls his eyes, but he also ducks his chin to his chest and the apples of his cheeks color crimson, so. At least the compliment lands. 

He then spins on his heel to face the mirror in the fitting room stall, giving himself another once-over, and—look, Buck hasn’t given religion much real estate in his mind, at least beyond the treacly residue of his Episcopalian upbringing, but staring at Eddie now, he can start to see the appeal. Granted, he doesn’t hear any strummed harps or see any chubby, cherubic angels beaming down at them from above, but he does understand why someone might look at something as seraphic as Eddie’s smile and decide, with absolute conviction, that it must be the work of something holy.

Buck catches his reflection in the corner of the mirror behind Eddie. He’s just as flustered, just as red in the face, though decidedly less sunkissed and glowy about it. 

It’s funny, the juxtaposition between them. In the foreground, Eddie it’s-like-God-repurposed-an-angel Diaz. In the background, Evan it’s-like-God-spilled-a-person Buckley. Match made in Heaven.

Also in the background, Ravi please-God-strike-me-dead Panikkar, who looks like he’d rather accompany Dante himself across the river Acheron than spend another minute in this Nordstrom. He offers an unenthused, “Looking sharp, brother,” to Eddie before rising to his feet. “Listen, guys, hate to bail, but I need to hit the road here soon, so—”

“Wait,” Buck cries, shooting to a stand. Both Eddie and Ravi whirl around to him, startled by the outburst. Buck attempts to hone in his hysteria accordingly. Attempts. “J-Just wait a minute. You can’t…”

Ravi can’t what, exactly? Enjoy the rest of his day off? Leave Buck to his own devices?

“Can we sidebar for a sec?” Buck thinks his expression reads nonchalant. The thinking is definitely wishful. “Please?”

Ravi peers over Buck’s shoulder at Eddie and raises an eyebrow, like, you’re the boss, and—okay, rude. Fair, but rude. Buck’s ego isn’t necessarily bruised by Ravi not-so-subtly anointing Eddie as the literal pants-wearer, but it’s not not bruised. Pinched, maybe.

“Go ahead,” Eddie says with a chuckle. He glances at the mountain of clothes in the stall. “Still gotta Messner this mess.”

With permission granted, Buck leads the way out of the fitting room. Ravi, reluctant but reliable as ever, follows. 

The moment they’re out of earshot, Buck immediately braces for an earful. Prepares for an onslaught of questions or a barrage of I-told-you-so’s. Maybe even more ribbing, given that the line between Ravi the Begrudging Coworker Slash Begrudging Friend and Ravi the Annoying Little Brother that Could gets blurrier and blurrier every day.

Buck gets none of the above. Outside the fitting room, Ravi simply leans against the wall with his arms crossed and nods once at Buck, prompting. It eerily evokes being called into a principal’s office. Like Ravi knows Buck’s been pulling pigtails on the playground, but he wants Buck to admit to it first before it goes on his permanent record.

“I haven’t…” Buck shifts his feet uncomfortably. There’s really no use in pretending the cat’s still in the bag at this point. “I haven’t told him anything.”

Silence. 

“He doesn’t—he can’t know.” Buck stares at literally anything that isn’t within Ravi’s general vicinity. Oh, look at that, a chip in the alabaster floor tile by his own feet. Hey, neat, a display rack hosting a gradient of fuzzy sweater vests. Wowie, an elderly man in a chartreuse-colored trenchcoat ruminating over a chartreuse-colored handbag, that’s compelling. “He just came out, and he’s dealing with a ton of stuff already, and—look, he just can’t, alright?”

Silence.

“A-And I know what you’re thinking. ‘Well, Buck, what if he feels the same?’” He has to laugh, mordant and a bit deranged, at the thought. “Well, he doesn’t. It just isn’t—he wouldn’t.”

Silence. 

Buck exhales roughly. “Good talk.”

“You wanted the floor,” Ravi deadpans.

Again, fair, and Buck really shouldn’t give into the urge to argue, to lash out like he always does, but: “I wanted a sidebar.”

“Fine. Here’s my legal advice. Just talk to him.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Why?”

Buck’s eye twitches. “Are you even listening?”

“Harry and May wanted to go to Universal Studios with me today.” Ravi shakes his head, bemused. “I could be on Revenge of the Mummy right now.”

“You haven’t even seen The Mummy.”

“Neither have you.”

“I can’t ‘just talk to him,’” Buck air-quotes, fighting the urge to scream, “because I don’t want to mess things up between us. I can’t risk losing him as a friend. I just—”

I just got him back. I thought he’d never come back to Los Angeles, because he bought a house and finally fixed that one cabinet that kept falling apart, and everyone I love seems to leave the minute they get the chance, but by some miracle he didn’t leave for good, he didn’t, and keeping things the way they are now is better than not having him at all.

“Is that what you want?” Ravi asks, oddly gentle. His tone betrays his blasé exterior, and it makes Buck’s eyes burn. Here’s his friend making a considerable effort to be kind to him, and Buck knows it shouldn’t, but it pisses him off. Makes him feel like he’s being coddled. Like he’s a fucking child. “To stay friends?”

“When has anyone ever cared about what I want?” Buck spits. 

He knows it’s not a fair question. He knows that, at least on a pseudo-technical level, and he’s not even entirely sure what answer he wants back: to be told that he’s wanted, just so he can strike it down as a nonstarter, or to be told that he’s right, that no one cares, just so he can hear someone else say his worst fear out loud.

“Just spitballing here”—Ravi tilts into Buck’s vision, forcing eye contact—“but do you think maybe you feel that way because you don’t usually tell people what you want?”

Buck huffs. “You sound like Dr. Copeland.”

“Who?”

“Forget it.” Buck turns to head back into the fitting room, that same tsunami from before brewing in his gut. Just a lump of intestines inundating with something coastal, steadfast broaching twelve on the Papadopoulos-Imamura scale. “You don’t have to stay. Sorry for wrecking your day off.”

Ravi holds an arm out, blocking his way. Buck resists the urge to push himself past it. He might be able to limbo underneath, if it comes to it. He’s bendy.

“Let me get this straight. You can’t tell Eddie how you feel because you want to stay his friend, but you don’t want to stay just friends because of how you feel.” Ravi throws up his hands, exasperated. “You’ve Catch-22’d yourself, dude.”

Buck makes a face. A stop-putting-me-on-blast, go-kick-rocks visage. “That’s not—”

“No, you know what this is? It’s that white bear thing you were telling me about a few shifts ago.” Ravi makes a face in turn. “What was that guy’s name? Dosko-something?”

“Dostoevsky.”

“Yeah, him.”

“What about him?”

“This whole thing with Eddie?” Ravi, to his credit, is pretty unflappable and rarely loses his composure. This moment is a rare deviation from the norm, judging by the tension in his jaw and the flare of his nostrils. “That’s your bear.”

Dostoevsky’s theory goes that if a person tries not to think about a white bear, they’ll end up thinking about the fucking thing constantly. Ravi’s not wrong to apply it to Buck’s particular conundrum.

Buck remembers hearing from an L.A. Zoo rep once that the color of a bear’s coat can be considered synonymous with a bear’s age. The way Buck feels about Eddie, at first blush, seemed like a fresh horror to him. A young black bear, one so dark it throws blue in the light. 

But if Buck is being really, truly honest with himself—if this is the proverbial bear he’s been trying not to poke, trying to keep sedated in some mental cave until spring—it’s not young at all. It’s weathered and oxidized and long past black now, well into its cinnamon phase. Maybe drinking Celestial Seasonings tea in a rocking chair, or complaining that its cubs never visit enough.

“Did you know the best way to tell a bear’s age is by cross-sectioning its tooth and counting the cementum rings?” Buck asks wearily.

Ravi turns to leave. “You’re impossible.”

“Wait.” Now it’s Buck’s turn to block Ravi’s exit. “I-I don’t know what to do.”

“Yes, you do,” Ravi says, like Buck does. “Talk to him.”

“Or?” Buck pleads. Always a beggar, rarely a chooser.

“Or figure out what to do with the bear.” Ravi weaves around him, throwing a bored flick of the hand over his shoulder as he goes. “Send it to Yosemite or something.”

Buck watches him disappear into a maze of shoppers and display stands. His stomach twists and twists and twists.

Seconds later, Eddie enters stage right. Ravi’s exit, pursued by a bear. Buck keeps his eyes fixed straight ahead, but his peripheral betrays him. In it, he sees Eddie sporting an amaranth-pink turtleneck and these cream-colored jeans that are just the right mix of baggy and fitted. 

He’s rocking major bedhead right now, too. Not the slept-in-till-noon kind. Emphatically the messed-around-till-late kind.

“Did Ravi head out?” Eddie asks, then: “What was he saying about a bear?”

Buck stills. Exists in a horrible purgatory of not knowing if Eddie overheard everything for a few beats, wholly encased in dross, until Eddie follows his two questions with a third. “You okay?”

If Buck gets asked if he’s okay or good one more time, he’s going to end up doing something that’ll land him on the six-o’clock news. Mercifully, he doesn’t get the chance to answer any of Eddie’s riddles three before he gets lobbied with a far-easier fourth.

“You seeing this guy’s coat?” Eddie whistles, low and laudatory, eyeing the old man in the chartreuse trench. “That’s a nice coat.”

Eddie then walks over to the man to ask him about his nice coat, that same spring in his step as before—eyes off his ass, Buckley, come on—leaving Buck in the archway of the fitting room.

Fitting place to be. Caught in the threshold between the first and the second circle of Hell. Both their own unbearable perdition.

They tear through South Coast Plaza pretty quickly, crossing off the A-B-Cs of fashion-forward men’s clothing stores: Amiri, Bottega Veneta, Celine, etcetera etcetera.

The problem is two-fold. Three-fold, if Buck’s recent proclivity towards imagining his best friend in increasingly unholy contexts is taken into account. The other two predicaments are even harder to ignore, believe it or not.

Dilemma number one: all of these fashion-forward stores are ridiculously expensive. Buck is probably the worst possible person to shop with in this regard, because he keeps egging Eddie on with proclamations of, “If you like it, just buy it,” and, “Think about the cost per wear, not the full price,” and, “Yeah, it might go on sale later, but what if it doesn’t?” But no matter how compelling or cogent Buck’s arguments are, Eddie doesn’t push go on anything. As stubborn as a mule and as penny-wise as the clown, that one.

Dilemma number two: the longer they browse, the more visibly discouraged Eddie gets. Everything he ends up trying on looks great, objectively—though, it should be said that Eddie could saunter out dressed as an actual clown and still make it look sexy, because he’s Eddie—but every time he comes out of a fitting room, he looks dissatisfied in some way. A real this-bed-is-too-firm, this-bed-is-too-soft conundrum.

It puts a real downer on the day, especially because Buck can’t crack what the issue is. Eddie’s proclivity to pillbug when he’s upset, to lock it all down and soldier on, isn’t helping. Worse, it’s contagious. Buck is already at his wits’ end today, which makes it harder to keep himself outside of Eddie’s ever-expanding storm cloud.

After a long, unsuccessful visit to Loewe and a long, uncomfortable silence between them, Buck tries to come up with something to say to fix things. He’s pretty good at fixing things, generally speaking. Maybe not when it comes to his own psyche, but he’s great with his hands and with his brain when he needs to be.

Unfortunately, the only conclusion he comes to is that Eddie is probably just hungry, and the resulting attempt at a fix is to tell him, flat-out and a little terse, “You need to eat something.”

“Why.” Eddie doesn’t pose it as a question. 

“Because you haven’t eaten in hours.” Buck makes worse matters worser by tacking on a dry chuckle. “And you get cranky when you don’t eat.”

“Man, you and Tía Pepa.” Eddie chuckles, just as arid. “Two sides of the same coin.”

He would usually say something like that all fond and endeared, but it comes out pejorative. It tells Buck that he should just keep his damn mouth shut, and yet—

“Sorry for caring,” Buck says, icy. He walks a little faster, outpacing Eddie slightly.  “Forgot you have a complex around that.”

Eddie catches up to him fast. Catches Buck’s elbow as well, tugging him around to face him. “Complex around what, exactly? Eating? Or having people care about me? ‘Cause last time I checked, you’re the guy with the martyr complex. All self-sacrificial, everybody-else-comes-first, woe-is-me. It gets old, pal.”

That hits Buck like a knife to the chest. He wants Eddie to twist it, to push it deeper until he hits an artery. “My martyr complex beats your Superman complex, pal.”

Eddie lets go of Buck’s elbow, shouldering past him. “Always a telenovela with you, Buckley. Twenty-four-seven, three-sixty-five.”

Buck tries to hold himself back, his jaw working. He can’t get worked up like this. He can’t, not in the middle of a crowded mall with the eyeballs of a dozen curious passerbys on them, and yet— “Last time I checked, you’re the guy who threw himself off a bridge.”

“Yeah, I did.” Eddie whirls on him, eyes dark. “So you wouldn’t do it first.”

Buck is thrown. He actually takes a step back, invisible knife unsheathing from his chest. Something there really does ache. If he looked down, he might actually see red spilling from his quarter zip. 

Instead, he looks around them, jaw still working. Those dozen curious eyeballs skitter away when Buck meets them, back to busying themselves with whatever they were doing before the soap opera.

And Buck just—deflates. His usual hot-and-cold-stove-top demeanour switches quickly to lukewarm. Any lingering heat stays in his cheeks, embarrassment coloring them rosy, because what are they doing? Why do they always end up arguing when they’re alone long enough together, and why do they always argue over the same fundamentals?

“I’m sorry,” Buck says, immediate. “For calling you cranky.”

Eddie hesitates briefly, like some part of him is stuck in the scene, but then the tension in his shoulders releases, just as quick. He slouches a bit with it, gravity pulling him back to the ground. “Yeah, well. Sorry for calling you a martyr.”

“It’s fine.” Buck can’t say there isn’t some truth to it. “Maybe we should just head back. I promised Chris I’d make him alfredo for dinner.”

At that, Eddie’s stomach audibly growls. They both freeze. Then they crack up laughing.

“Qué cabrón eres,” Eddie says around his laughter, all fond and endeared. “You weren’t wrong. I am hungry.”

Buck’s own stomach does something funny, but not because he’s hungry. Not for food, anyway. “Wanna grab a bite before we go?” 

“Sure. Not here, though.”

“Sucks that we didn’t find anything.”

Buck not so much sees a lightbulb appear over Eddie’s head than he feels its fuzzing static. “We didn’t find anything here. What if we tried, like—a Goodwill or something.”

“Who’s credit score are we actually worried about here?” Buck grins, teasing. “That new Denali really set you back, huh?”

“I’m not broke, Buck. I’m frugal.” Eddie places his hands on his hips, cocking his head. Cute, cute, cute. “Besides, thrift stores always have the cool stuff, anyway. El Paso had this one called Barrio.” He hooks his thumbs into the belt loops of his bell bottoms. “That’s where I got these.”

Right, so. Buck has Barrio to blame for the boner he’s been battling all day. Noted. 

“May always talks about some vintage place on Orange Ave,” he says, pulling out his phone. “I’ll text her and ask.”

Eddie claps his hands together and smiles, all canines and creased eyes, the storm cloud from before nowhere in sight. He then spots something behind Buck that makes his eyes honest-to-God sparkle, which—come on. Buck’s cardiac chart is already touch-and-go at the best of times. Seeing this shade of joy on Eddie isn’t helping steady the lines.

“You do that.” Eddie claps Buck on the chest. Holds his palm over Buck’s heart a second too long before he walks away, making said heart stumble down a flight of ribs. “I’ll be right back.”

Eddie’s destination is a Sugarfina. Buck has to laugh again. 

“You and your sweet tooth,” he calls after him. “Don’t forget I’m making dinner!”

“Relax,” Eddie calls back, patting his back pocket for his wallet. Stop looking at his ass. “This ain’t dinner.”

“Exactly! Don’t ruin dinner!”

“I’m pregaming dinner!”

Buck is so in love with him, his own teeth ache with it.

Hey May! What’s that thrift store you go to?

Starts with a C I think?

hey! it’s called clubhouse

it’s in costa mesa though 😔

All good! Me and Eddie are at South Coast Plaza today

oh fun!! what are u guys doing there??

Helping Eddie pick out some new clothes

He’s got a solid career in modeling if firefighting goes under

Moments later, Buck’s phone vibrates. May’s sent him a picture of a beady-eyed white dog.

Aww cute! Is that yours?

I thought you wanted a cat

no it’s a meme

?

What does it mean?

lmao nevermind

have fun you two! tell the cute guy that works there i sent you

Said cute guy, rather serendipitously, is someone Buck has already met. 

“You’re kidding,” Buck says when he waltzes into Clubhouse, just behind Eddie. Then, louder: “Mickey?”

Mickey pokes his head up from the cash register, a customer-service smile already plastered on. It falters slightly when he spots Buck, his brown eyes flaring with panic.

“H-Hey, boss,” he stammers. Several coins slip from his fingers and fall to the ground, tinging on the cherry wood below. “Long time, no see.”

Mickey’s coworker—a teenager with a bleached buzzcut and just about every piercing a person could reasonably accommodate on one face—shoots Mickey an inquisitive look. Buck sees Eddie shoot him the same in his peripheral.

“Welcome to Clubhouse, gents.” Mickey straightens out, remembering himself. His smile goes kilowatt. “Anything I can help you find?”

Buck approaches the till, taking Mickey in from top-to-bottom. His unkempt shag is a bit more kempt today, tucked and curling behind his ears. His gold-embossed nametag is swapped out for a classic Hello, My Name Is pin, tacked to his tacky-yet-tasteful Hawaiian button-down. The sleeves are rolled up high to the shoulders, revealing a polished American traditional Doberman on his right bicep and a terrible stick-and-poke Queen of Spades on his left. Buck smells faint notes of something Christmas-y, something orange and cinnamon in composition.

“You work here, too?” Buck asks stupidly. “I mean, obviously, but. Bit far from L.A.”

“Serving’s my side hustle,” Mickey replies, giving Buck an elevator look himself. He spreads his arms wide, jazz-handsing. “Clubhouse is my baby.”

The shop’s packed ceiling to floor with vintage attire and paraphernalia. Shabby mannequins, most missing limbs and all neon orange, are adorned with everything from old-timey tailored suits to Y2K streetwear. Wartime coffee tins and non-perishable cans litter the counter and back shelves, hosting bulbous cacti and succulents. All in all, it’s a nice baby.

“Don’t envy your gas bill.” Buck grins. It’s his flirty, tongue-poking-out grin. Not really a conscious choice. “Or your sleeping schedule.”

“Please.” Mickey places his hands on his hips, cocking his head. Cute, cute, cute. “I’m only serving once a week these days. I get plenty of beauty sleep.”

“Oh, I can tell.” 

Mickey’s eyes go wide again, a blink-and-miss-it thing, before he leans against the counter and implores Buck with a sly glance. “Flattery won’t get you a discount, boss.”

“You sure?” A nagging voice in the back of Buck’s brain goes, hey man, what the fuck are you doing? Buck doesn’t really have the answer to that. Maybe it’s something to do with bear relocation efforts. Maybe some part of him wants to put that bear to sleep so he doesn’t have to fucking think about it anymore. “What could it get me instead?”

A throat clears behind them, and whoopee, there’s the bear again, smack-dab in the middle of Buck’s mind’s eye. Big and bold and burned into his eyelids between the phospenes. 

“Mind if I start browsing?” Eddie asks. There might be a weird note underlying his tone. Buck might just be pretending it’s there. “You guys have a change room, right?”

Mickey’s coworker pops their gum with a snap, mirth dancing in their eyes. “I’ll show you around.”

Buck chances a glance at Eddie when he brushes by him. Eddie doesn’t look back. Just pops another Sugarfina-brand licorice stick in his mouth and tails behind the teen, eyes on the display racks ahead. Something ugly rears its head in Buck’s middle, bonks its skull against his sternum.

“Gotta tell you,” Mickey starts. Buck pulls his head back towards him. Right. He’s supposed to be flirting.  “Wasn’t expecting to see you again. Feels a little kismet, if you believe in that sorta thing.”

Buck does. The universe is always screaming at him, especially now. He’s making a rare election to ignore it, lest he develop tinnitus. “Do you?”

Mickey shrugs. “My whole family’s pretty superstitious.  Comes with being raised Catholic. I’m not big on it, though.”

“Catholicism, or superstition?”

“What's the difference?” Mickey scrubs a heavily-ringed hand over his eye. “You should hear how the rest of the staff here talk. Can’t joke about jinxes or say the word quiet without people throwin’ fits.”

Buck feels less like the universe is screaming at him, and more like it’s bashing him upside the chin with a two-by-four.

“Look, uh.” Mickey ducks his head. Spins one of the rings on his middle finger, a nervous tic. “Sorry for the way I acted yesterday. You were enjoying a nice meal, and I was bein’ a creep, and—”

“Dude.” Buck knocks his knuckles against Mickey’s to stop the spinning. “I know you were just messing around. Don’t sweat it.”

“Been sweating it for the last twenty-four hours.” Mickey peers at Buck through his eyelashes. There’s a reddish-brown mole under his left eye, glaring at Buck like a beacon. “Just—I don’t usually make an ass of myself like that.”

“I should be flattered then, right?” Buck hears Eddie laugh about something across the store. His blood hums with it. “Flattery won’t get you a sale, boss.”

Mickey snickers. He stares at Buck for a beat, pausing like he’s psyching himself up for something, then: “Could it get me your number?”

Buck freezes. This was his endgame, and now he’s here, and he just—freezes. “Uh.”

“O-Or at least a name,” Mickey stutters, going a bit rigid himself. It’s sweet, his there-and-gone-again bravado. Buck would usually swoon over something like that. He should be swooning over something like that, and yet, and yet, and yet. “Can’t keep calling you boss, boss.”

“It’s Buck.” He holds out a hand to Mickey. It’s shaking, obviously. He does his best to school the rest of himself back into his usual coquettishness. “But you can call me whatever you like.”

“You got it, bo—Buck.” The apples of Mickey’s cheeks flush. He grasps Buck’s hand, gives it a firm, calloused shake. “That short for anything?”

“Buckley. My real name’s Evan, but…” 

Eddie laughs again, somewhere on the far-end of Clubhouse. Buck loses his train of thought.

“I get it.” Mickey taps his name tag. “Real name’s Michael, but Mickey suits me better.”

Buck can’t resist. “Like the mouse?”

“Like Milkovich.” Mickey pushes a stray strand of hair back. Buck wants that strand to stay hanging against his forehead, for some reason. “What can I say? I’m a shameless Shameless fan.”

“Never seen it.” Buck’s eyes flit back down to Mickey’s pin. Back down to safer territory. “Take it you’re a Spider-Man fan, too?”

Mickey looks at his name tag, caught off-guard, like he forgot about the sun-bleached stickers there. “What? Oh, no. I mean, yeah, who isn’t, but—they’re from my kid. She’s crazy for Spidey.”

“You have a kid?” 

Mickey pulls out his phone and thumbs the lockscreen on. A photo of him with a child dressed as Spider-Gwen appears. “Mom’s outta the picture. Been me and Clementine against the world for eight years now.”

“Wow.” What else is Buck supposed to say?

“S’no biggie. Being a single dad rules.” Mickey twists his forearm, showing off the underside. Tattooed there is a child’s scribble of what appears to be a dog. Maybe a dinosaur. “You get pretty good ink-spiration.”

Again, Buck can’t resist. “Raising the next Van Gogh?”

Mickey purses his lips, amused. It defines his already well-defined cupid’s bow. Buck thinks he should probably be more interested in that than he is. “Hope not. Gotta make sure she keeps both ears intact. Little turd barely listens as it is.”

Buck almost, almost replies, “I know how that is,” but he doesn’t. Not really, because whenever he has to remind Christopher to stop leaving the kitchen lights on or to rinse out his soda cans before he recycles them, Buck’s not actually reminding his kid to listen better. He knows that, but it doesn’t make it sting any less, knowing it.

“So, Buck,” Mickey continues. “What do you do for a living?”

Besides land himself in various Saw traps? “What do you think I do for a living?”

“I dunno. Construction?” 

“Why’s that?”

“You’re, uh.” Mickey swallows. Blinks. Swallows again. “Large?”

Buck forces a laugh. It sounds exactly that. Forced. “I’m a firefighter.”

“No shit?”

Whenever Buck shares his profession with romantically-inclined parties, he usually gets bedroom eyes or bad lines like, “Bet a fire escape isn’t the only thing you like going down on.” Mickey gives him neither. Sure, he’s still rocking Looney-Tunes-level heart eyes to some degree, but the way he’s looking at Buck now reads more admiring or appreciative than anything else.

And maybe that’s why Buck makes a fork-it-over motion with his hand when Mickey goes to pocket his phone; why he ignores the bull in his chest, ramming against his ribcage over and over. 

“You asked for my number, yeah?” Buck’s smile makes his cheeks ache, like some invisible thread is the only hawser holding it wide. “It’s not nine-one-one, unless you actually need mouth-to-mouth. The unfun kind, I mean.”

Mickey looks like he can’t believe what he’s hearing. Buck can hardly believe it, either. Hard to hear much of anything over screaming universes. 

“Y-Yeah. Yeah.” Mickey opens his contacts app, passing his phone back to Buck. “What’re you doing later? I get off at six.” 

Punching in his number with jittery thumbs, Buck replies, “Got plans tonight, but I’m free on Thursday.”

“Cool, yeah. Thursday. I’ll make it work.” Mickey’s smile surpasses kilowatt and moves steadfast into something solar, and Buck nods a bit too quickly, because—yeah. He can make it work, too. He’s going to make this work. He has to make it work, because—

“Hey, Buck. Get a load of this.”

Buck turns. Eddie appears from a hallway with a rusted dressing room sign hanging above it. He’s clad in a cropped Los Angeles 50 jersey, midriff slightly exposed with a forest-green jacket thrown over top. He tips the brim of the ivory cowboy hat he’s wearing at Buck. Even winks at him and smirks, faux-sultry and facetious.

Get a load of this, Buck’s brain echoes wearily. Would if he could, frankly.

Mickey whistles. “That there suits you, pardner.”

Eddie tips his brim at Mickey, too, more brief pleasantry than actual acknowledgment. Then he does a slow one-eighty, giving Buck ample time to stare at the vintage denim sculpting his ass, which Buck doesn’t stare at, he doesn’t. “What do you think? It’s not Orville-grade or anything, but—”

“We’re not here to play dress-up, Eddie.” The words claw free from Buck’s mouth before he can chew on them, break them down, make them less acrimonious. “Find something you’re actually gonna buy.”

There’s a blink-and-miss-it flash of hurt on Eddie’s face before he back-burners it, caps the pot with a lid. He offers a curt nod and spins on his heel, heading back towards the hallway. Near its entrance, Mickey’s coworker gives Buck a dirty look, like, dude, really? 

Mickey coughs. Buck physically startles. He completely forgot he was there.

“Trouble in paradise?” Mickey jokes.

“Just…” Buck’s finger taps one of the cacti on the counter idly, pressing the pad into a dull prick. You are what you touch, apparently. “Just been a long day.”

Mickey sucks in a breath. Releases it through a weighty exhale. “Got a buddy in Sacramento. Love him to death, would kill for the guy, but… God, we bicker like a married couple sometimes. I get it.”

Buck is already boiling over with anger, but everything in him goes torrid, hearing that. Oh, really? You get it? Did you claw through mud to try and save the guy, even though he was over forty-feet below? Did you watch him bleed out in the street? Risk getting yourself shot to pull him to safety? Do you know what your buddy’s blood tastes like? Did you bust his bedroom door down thinking he’d hurt himself, or worse? See him at his breaking point? Help him patch and paint the holes he punched into plaster, help tear down the walls he built around himself, help him unpack everything he boxed up over a lifetime? Did you watch him pack it all back into a U-Haul, watch him through a screen for months, watch him and wonder if he’d eventually stop calling and leave you for good?

“Maybe you should…” Mickey’s mouth works around the end of that statement. It’s probably go apologize, but he doesn’t finish the thought. “I gotta finish counting change. Think I’m missing a few dimes.”

Buck takes the hint. Pats the counter a few times and pushes off, moving towards the fitting room.

He should apologize to Eddie, and he will. It’s all he seems to do these days, anyways. Sorry for snapping. Sorry for sulking. Sorry for making something weird when it didn’t have to be. Sorry said seriously, sorry said sarcastically, sorry dressed as a joke so it doesn’t come off as desperate as it feels.

The problem is one-fold. Apologize for every little thing, and eventually the little things stop looking so little. Truth is, Buck knows Eddie will eventually look at the aggregate of all these minor infractions—every overreaction, every fuck-up, everything—and finally trace them back to their impetus. At the end of the day, that’s what Buck is really apologizing for. Not for being snappy or sulky or weird. For being himself.

He knows what he’s risking every time he apologizes, where every apology starts and ends. Sorry I said this. Sorry I did that. Sorry, Eddie. Sorry that, at the center of it all, the problem is just me. Sorry that this is who I am. Sorry that this is all I’ll ever be. 

But Buck will still apologize, risk considered. Eddie has spent all these years and all this effort painting Buck in a light he rarely feels the warmth of, making him feel like he’s more than what he is. The least Buck can do is give him some kind of return on his investment. 

In for a dime, in for a dollar.

The back of Clubhouse is… strange.

The hallway leading to the fitting room is long and winding, but pretty run-of-the-mill, eclectically speaking. Cherry-wood floors covered in French Aubusson rugs, beryl-painted walls nearly fully obscured with Randy Tuten posters and framed records, some model planes and Tiffany lampshades pendant from the ceiling. Nothing unusual for a thrift store. 

There are a couple odds and ends that might’ve given Buck pause any other day. For one, a Madonna-era cone bra riddled with chrome spikes is mounted on a door labeled Green Room. For two, the missing limbs from the shop’s shabby orange mannequins have been fashioned into a tree-like sculpture at the end of one of the hallway’s bends, most of them adorning retro Swatch watches or daisy-chain anklets. Still, weird as those things are, they’re not the weirdest part. 

To reiterate, the hallway is long and winding, and that’s what strikes Buck as odd. The exterior of Clubhouse looked to be about a thousand square-feet max from the outside, but seems to stretch a thousand miles long from the inside. He keeps turning left, then right, then left again, then right again, but the end of the hallway never seems to come. It’s a real House of Leaves endeavor, finding this fucking fitting room. 

He does find it eventually, after killing what feels like an hour. A single occupied stall at the edge of the world, and beneath the door, a pair of feet wearing alligator wingtips.

“Eddie?” Buck tries, strained.

Silence.

“You find anything else?” Buck checks his watch. The time one, not the heart one, for obvious reasons. It tells him it’s a quarter past four already. Christopher is probably already home. “We should head out soon, man. Traffic's gonna suck.”

Silence.

Buck tips his head back. Releases a spent exhale through his nose. Stares hard at a single sputnik chandelier dangling from the ceiling, willing each of its incandescent bulbs to explode. “Look, I… I’m sorry for being a dick back there. I know you’re just trying some things out, and—and I wasn’t trying to make you feel bad for having fun. I just…”

The stall’s lock unlatches, its door swinging open with a muted groan. Buck pulls his eyes from the chandelier. What he sees comes to him in lagged increments, speckled by cyan-violet afterburn spheres from the bulbs. 

First, Eddie. Then Eddie in a graphite button-down shirt. Then Eddie in a very well-fitted, very unbuttoned graphite button-down shirt with floral embroidery sewn up the sides, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. Then, finally, Eddie in all of the above, plus a pair of high-waisted graphite slacks, all pleated and ironed and professional.

Buck goes incandescent himself. Overheated and aglow, filaments threatening corrosion. A fragile bright that, if left turned on too long, will lead to some kind of explosion.

“What do you think?” Eddie’s voice is easy-breezy, but there’s something between the vowels and consonants that Buck recognizes as pissed. Or not pissed yet, but approaching the merge lane to it.

And Buck thinks—well, that’s a bad place to start. Buck thinks, like, generally, but there’s not a whole lot of thoughts in his head at the moment. His brain’s motel vacancy sign is alight and inviting, but there are no patrons in sight for miles. Just an empty lot riddled with overgrown moss and dirty asphalt that could use a very, very cold pressure wash.

“I…” Eddie’s bare chest and six pack is just—there. That’s a thought Buck is having, singular and unhelpful. “I-I’m, uh.” Six pack is uncharitable. It’s really an eight pack. “It’s. I like the—” Remember when Bobby used to call Eddie Eight Pack? That’s hilarious, haha, super funny. “The suit is. Wow.”

“That’s it?” Eddie’s tone careens into the merge lane, takes an exit onto Audibly Angry Avenue. Barely avoids mowing down a yield sign. “Wow?”

It’s not like Buck hasn’t seen Eddie in a suit before. It’s not like Buck hasn’t seen Eddie shirtless before, either. But this particular suit framing this particular six-slash-eight-slash-whatever pack, plackets draped over his abs like said plackets are window curtains and said abs are a golden summer sunset, is exactly that: wow. It’s simply the most pertinent and apparently only word Buck’s frontal lobe can conjure. 

So he pivots. Sets up two-foot-nothing traffic cones on the sidewalk, tries to course-correct what’s barreling towards him at eighty miles an hour. “What do you think?”

Eddie levels him with a hard stare. Squishes Buck flat into pavement like a bug under a tire. “I think the fabric is too itchy and the pants are too tight. Your turn.”

As if Buck wasn’t already hot and bothered enough. Having Eddie dig his heels in over this makes the little squashed bug in Buck wiggle its cursorial legs in defiance, refusing to die. A cocksure cockroach. “How many times do I have to tell you that something you try on looks good before you start believing it?”

“Dunno. Maybe it’s a quality-over-quantity type of thing.”

A fervent, searing anger kindles in Buck. It mainly manifests in the back of his neck, which he uselessly scratches with blunt, bitten-to-nub nails. “I don’t know what you’re asking me, Eddie.”

“Bull.” Eddie takes a step towards him. A second. The soles of his wingtips thunk against the wood floor with each pace. “You know.”

Buck physically digs his own heels in, rooting his New Balances to the floor. He fights the urge to step back as Eddie approaches him. “I really don’t.”

“I’m asking you.” Thunk. “What you think.” Thunk. “About the suit.”

True as that may be, Buck still feels like there’s a latent meaning here he’s supposed to understand, an overarching thesis he’s expected to grasp. Yet another House of Leaves endeavor, getting there. The conviction that a point exists, but it’s just out of reach. 

Or maybe it is within reach, but it’s just beyond incandescent light, tucked in darkness. Buck wouldn’t call himself darkness-avoidant, necessarily. He’s the opposite. He’s constantly watching that darkness in his mind’s eye, albeit against intent or desire, like a God-unwilling sentry. A universe-drafted sentinel. 

Not because he doesn’t see the light. It’s there in other people, other possibilities, other neat little exits he could take if he wanted to. He just can’t seem to make himself look at any of it for very long. His attention keeps returning to that shadow, that same dangerous and unnameable entity. He studies it with the reluctant, grim focus of someone trying not to be overtaken. As if keeping it under his crosshairs is the same thing as keeping it under control.

Eddie is right in front of him now. Buck’s knees go a little weak, but his spine stays ramrod straight. He stays in place. He stays in place even though Eddie is right in front of him. Maybe that’s the point. 

“I think the suit is nice.”

“Nice,” Eddie repeats in a low register. Buck’s molars thrum with it. “What else?” 

“It’s nice, a-and—” Buck can’t help but stammer, because the light from the chandelier is catching in Eddie’s brown, brown eyes just so, casting shadows on the rest of his face, and Buck is getting very, very sweaty about it, thank you very much. “And smart.”

“Smart.” Eddie’s eyebrows tick up, disappear behind the mess of wavy strands across his forehead. Buck wants those strands kept there. Wants them pushed back. Wants them wrapped around his fingers. Wants them gripped tight in his hand. He wants. “And?”

“And sharp,” Buck manages. It’s muggy today from the rain, and it hangs the air heavy in the fitting room. Buck feels his ramrod-straight spine go soft with it. “And sleek, and smart, and—”

“You already said smart.”

“And sexy, alright?” Buck doesn’t shout, because that would be rude. The volume he uses isn’t necessarily an inside one, though. “The suit is objectively sexy. Is that what you want to hear?”

It doesn’t seem like it is, judging by Eddie’s unimpressed stare. Has he even blinked this entire time? Buck, on the other hand, can’t stop blinking. His eyelids are a damn camera shutter.

“What about the guy wearing the suit?” Eddie asks.

That’s an easier answer. “Annoying.”

“And?”

“Getting on my last nerve.”

“And?”

“Bad at making decisions.”

“Rich coming from you. And?”

Buck caves, physically and otherwise. He shoulders past Eddie towards the fitting room stall, throwing up his hands. A whine—a fucking whine, unbidden and ridiculous and audibly nervous—tears free from his mouth. “And he’s funny, and kind, and smart, and—don’t look at me like that, I’m saying smart again ‘cause it’s true—and he’s on my emergency contact list even though he’s just as reckless as I am, and he’s an amazing dad, and an exceptional firefighter, and incredible at 8-Ball Pool but terrible at playing actual pool, and he’s annoying. Happy?”

Eddie does smile, but it doesn’t read like joy. It reads like a parent about to count down from three. “And?”

“And he’s—he’s sexy, too. Objectively.” Buck’s quarter zip’s fabric is now also too itchy, too tight. “He’s factually nice to look at. L-Like a Van Gogh painting, or those hopper crystals Maddie started collecting, or—or those super high-def YouTube videos of tornados Christopher keeps sending us. He looks nice.”

“So, to review.” Eddie juts up his thumb. “I’m Starry Night”—then his pointer finger—“a square-shaped rock”—then his middle—“a natural disaster”—and finally, his ring—“and nice. Anything else?”

Buck could kill several hours listing everything Eddie is. He could also drop dead right this moment from heat exhaustion. Dealing with the latter is decidedly easier than the former. 

He suppresses another whine and tugs his quarter zip over his head. Tosses it on top of the mountain of clothes Eddie has or will try on and then subsequently won’t purchase. “And sexy. Objectively. And guess what? You’d be even sexier if you buy literally anything from this store, because…”

The rest of Buck’s sentence catches and dies in his throat. Eddie’s gaze is locked somewhere around Buck’s middle, a confusing amalgamate of alert and unfocused. His hand twitches in a falter mid-air, his lips parting.

“That’s my shirt,” Eddie says, mostly to himself.

“Your—” Buck looks down at his own shirt. It’s definitely his own shirt. “What?”

“You’re wearing my shirt.”

Buck’s eyes briefly dart back over to Eddie, who looks—intense? Dazed? Both at once? Who knows? 

Then Buck looks back down to his shirt. Which, again, is definitely—

Tight. Kind of splitting at the seams actually, now that he’s paying attention to it. Definitely a size too small, and—huh. Now that he’s really paying attention to it, definitely not his. 

It must’ve gotten mixed up in Buck’s arbitrarily-designated section of the bedroom closet—something that was designated arbitrarily back when they first combined their wardrobes, a real seat-of-the-pants, hastily-defined, I’ll hang my stuff on the left and you keep yours on the right and this is something normal friends do decree. A ruling that lasted a whopping three laundry cycles before it became a dead-letter law, before the two of them decided, unspoken, I’ll hang my stuff wherever which might mean I end up grabbing your stuff and wearing it but that’s also something normal friends do.

But not once, not until now, has Buck accidentally worn anything of Eddie’s. One, because Buck, while historically heedless in most other avenues, was, until now, abnormally attentive about co-opting Eddie’s clothes. Two, because Eddie, while still large, is not as large as Buck, so it’s been pretty easy for Buck to take a butcher’s at the closet and go, this shirt big but this shirt bigger, bigger shirt it is, and call it a day.

“Uh, sorry,” Buck says, looking back up. “I didn’t—”

Eddie’s already moving. One, two, several steps until he’s right in front of Buck, and Buck is so caught off guard that he nearly stumbles when he takes one, two, several steps back into the open stall. Eddie follows him in, backs him in, until Buck’s shoulder blades hit the wall.

“Whoa, h-hey.” Buck’s hands go up, a placating thing. “Seriously, I didn’t mean—”

“Tell me to stop,” Eddie interrupts, determined, ragged. “If I’m off-base here, tell me to stop.”

Buck is about to ask him what he means, but the question doesn’t come. Eddie’s eyes pull themselves from Buck’s—Eddie’s—shirt, and proceedingly land somewhere below Buck’s own eyes. Somewhere around his… his—

Right as Buck thinks mouth, Eddie tugs Buck forward by the shirt, surging in until his own crashes against Buck’s. 

And then they’re kissing.

If Buck’s brain was quiet before, it’s soundless now. A vacuous space, a hollow void, home only to the sound of Eddie’s breathing and the absence of his own.

Then, all at once, everything comes into being. A universe is born, unfettered by gravity and ungoverned by time.

The heat comes first, then pressure, then a turbulent spark of recognition at contact. Buck’s whole body goes from hollow to overrun in decimal values. It feels less like senses returning and more like an entirely new epoch—one stage replacing another, a collision fast and hard enough to create entirely new matter out of itself.

Eddie’s hands, one still fisted in his shirt, the other frantically carding through his curls. Eddie’s mouth on his, rough and starved. The sharp knock of his spine against the wall. The air so hot it presents cold and so dense it becomes impossible to separate from the force of Eddie pressing in, in, in. 

Buck feels everything in him augmenting and imploding simultaneously; a relativistic random speed, impossible to grasp. It feels insane and unimaginable, calamitous and cosmic, like whatever body he existed in before no longer contains him. Like it’s broken open wide, and now the whole of him is rushing outward, making room by sheer force.

Buck has the dizzy, shapeless thought that this is what creation must’ve felt like, back when everything began. Scientists have lamented for decades over the not-knowing of it all, how humanity may never fully understand the moment everything started, and here Buck is, simply knowing. Understanding. 

Nothing about creation is clean or gentle. It’s raw and blinding and immediate. The universe must’ve begun then just as it does for Buck now: in a cramped, dark space.

Eddie unlatches himself from Buck’s mouth just far enough to breathe, and it’s just enough distance for Buck to snap back into himself. He reels back as far as he can, which isn’t very far, and manages a shaky, broken, “Eddie.”

Eddie pulls back fully, wide-eyed. His lips are swollen and red, soft from kissing. Buck has seen them thin in restraint, curl around a snarl, stretch with a grin, pale from blood loss, never like this. 

“Am I?” Eddie rasps. Buck has never heard him like this, either. Another beautiful phenomenon. 

“What?”

“Off-base.” His fingers twitch then loosen from Buck’s shirt, his other hand falling from the nape of Buck’s neck. “Am I—did I misread this?”

And Buck has to choke back a laugh. Has to stop himself from going, “You’re definitely on-base, dude,” because Eddie is. He’s just cracked a field-spanning hit and made it to first base with both feet. Actually, scratch that. The hit was a home run, the crowd’s erupted in cheers, and now Eddie’s sprinting a lap around the diamond. 

“No, you didn’t.” Buck thinks about all the other bases Eddie could be reaching, and he does have to laugh a little. How could he not? “I… I’m not gonna tell you how long I’ve been wanting to do that.”

Relief smooths the line that’s formed between Eddie’s eyebrows. He looks really good right now, flushed like this. Like he’s fresh off the bench press or straight out of a structure fire, but different. New. 

“Beat you to the punch, huh?” Eddie asks, with the air of, well, somebody had to do it. He laughs a little, too. “Same here. Took a while to figure out what I wanted. My bad.”

“I’ll think about forgiving you.”

“Oh? You’ll think?”

“Real hard.”

“Bet you are.”

Buck isn’t. Not fully. His dick is Bon Jovi-ing in his jeans, though. Halfway there.

“We should…” Eddie motions vaguely, and Buck’s brain plays a fun little round of fill-in-the-blank for the unfinished suggestion. But then Eddie goes and ruins it with a less fun, “We should go. Traffic is gonna suck if we don’t head out now.”

Buck pauses. Thinks. Nothing high-level, but he thinks. Then supplies a pointed, “Or.”

“Or?”

“Or.” Buck reaches over to Eddie’s right. Hooks two fingers around the stall door and swings it shut. Advances on Eddie until Eddie’s back meets it, the latch clicking closed with a clunk. “We could stay.”

Several emotions flicker across Eddie’s face in quick succession. He tries to suppress all of them. Tries. “And do what?”

Buck splays a hand against Eddie’s chest, pressing him firmer against the stall door. Tries to suppress the thought that his hand is flared over Eddie’s sniper bullet scar, just beneath his gunmetal button-down. Tries. “You know.”

A swallow. A blink. A swallow again. “I really don’t.”

Buck elucidates. Slots a leg between both of Eddie’s. Hooks two fingers in Eddie’s belt loops, tugging Eddie flush against his thigh. Leans in close, close, close to Eddie’s ear and murmurs, “How good are you at keeping quiet?” 

Eddie’s breath hitches, his Adam’s apple bobbing. His hands fly up and cling to Buck’s biceps, nails making crescents in the skin there. 

“I didn’t think”—his hips jerk, taking an experimental, clumsy roll against Buck’s quads—“these pants could get any less comfortable.”

Buck hums, faux-sympathetic. Poor baby. His thumb toys with the button of Eddie’s slacks, circling the button slow. “There are solutions for that.”

A strange noise keens out of Eddie’s throat. Half a giggle, delirious, half a groan, also delirious. His hips shift again, and Buck feels the growing hardness there. It feels like winning a game. Like pocketing a free throw blindfolded.

“We’re in public,” Eddie hisses, with all the urgency of people filing out of a building during a routine fire drill. “Anyone could hear.”

“Exactly. Which is why I ask, again—” Buck mouths along the column of Eddie’s throat, grinning at the tremble he feels under his teeth. “How good are you at keeping quiet?”

“Better than you,” Eddie asserts, impressively confident for a guy that’s hanging onto Buck for dear life right now. “That’s for damn sure.”

“Oh?” Buck pauses and detours to the hollow of Eddie’s collarbone, kissing the skin there. Mapping it. He makes up for years of lost time with his lips and tongue and teeth. “Why’s that?”

“Heard you,” Eddie grinds out, voice already wrecked. “Last night when you were in the shower. I heard you.”

Buck stills, mortified. Eddie seizes the brief window of opportunity to tip the power scale. One of his hands snakes up to Buck’s clavicle, thumb settling at the base of Buck’s throat. He mouths along the bolt of Buck’s jaw, the stubble there hissing against his canines. Heat pools in the bowl of Buck’s hips, and he proceedingly fails to stifle a moan. His there-and-gone bravado is resoundly gone, just like that.

“Shhh.” Eddie presses a finger to Buck’s lips. “Quiet.”

“S-Sorry,” Buck stammers. What for, he’s not sure. For jerking himself off a wall away from Eddie’s head, or for the way Eddie has to stand on his toes a bit so Buck can rut against his thigh once, twice, mouth falling open. 

“Quit saying sorry.” Eddie watches him, rapt, the brown in his eyes nearly fully eclipsed by the black of his blown-out pupils. “Ain’t no sorry.”

Buck feels any semblance of control that he had before quickly float away into the atmosphere, a zero-G thing, and he can’t have that. He has control over very little in his life as is. 

Willing that there-and-gone bravado there again, Buck cants his head forward slightly, granting Eddie’s finger access into his mouth. Lets the tip of his tongue press against the pad for a beat before closing his lips around it, sucking on the skin. Eddie’s reaction to it is picturesque, sublime. Buck wants it made into a shot, wants to gulp it down in one go and get drunk off it.

“What are we doing, Buck?” Eddie breathes. It’s less an ask driven by contrition and more a question over logistics. What are they doing, right here and now?

And, well—Buck can’t speak to Eddie’s motivations, but he wants to do something stupid. Something abso-fucking-lutely crazycakes, and he doesn’t care about the reprocutions or the legality of doing it. He lets his id take the wheel, ego shoved in the backseat, and hopes that Eddie is cool with playing passenger. Hopes he feels it, too, the way the room is shimmering around them. The way consequences feel toothless and slippery.

Maybe that’s why pays little mind to the defiant voice in his head that drones, this is not for you, this is not for you, over and over. It may be the wrong decision, doing it like this, letting himself have this at all, but fuck it, it’s his.

In for a dime, in for a dollar.

Buck sinks to his knees. Eddie’s eyes flutter wide, glaze over with equal parts surprise and arousal. 

“This okay?” Buck settles a steady palm over Eddie’s erection, fingers poised over the button of his slacks.

Eddie just nods sluggishly, words failing. Buck nods in turn, then makes slow work of undoing the button, then the zipper, keeping his half-lidded gaze locked on Eddie’s the whole way. He only breaks contact for a moment, just to glance at the bulge in Eddie’s boxers, the small patch of wet already seeping through the cotton, before he leans forward to mouth the spot.

Eddie does make a small whine, hushed, only a few decibels over silence, but it’s deafening in the vacuum of this fitting room. To his credit, Eddie must remember they’re in a de facto competition, a pretend round of Whose Whine Is It Anyway?, because he quiets himself lightning-fast. Buck eagerly accepts the challenge by taking things even slower. Teases Eddie by continuing to mouth at his boxers, and nothing more.

“Hurry up,” Eddie whispers, remarkably level. He’s good at this, when he needs to be.

“Getting there,” Buck replies. Hums into Eddie’s hardness, honing the vibration directly onto the head. He smiles when he hears Eddie’s breath stutter on an inhale, shudder on an exhale. Buck is also good at this, when he needs to be.

“Get there faster.”

“Working on it.”

“C’mon, dude, I’m—ah—”

Buck presses his tongue flat against the cotton, feeling Eddie’s cock twitch and swell underneath it. One of Eddie’s hands land at the back of Buck’s skull, holding him there. Not forceful, just keeping him in place. Buck wouldn’t mind at all if Eddie forced him. Not even remotely.

Eddie’s other hand flails for a moment, aborting several different landmarks, before clamping itself over his own mouth. Buck’s own hand comes up, tugs Eddie’s forearm down, down, down, until that hand falls from his mouth and into Buck’s curls.

“Uh-uh,” Buck mumbles. “No cheating.”

Eddie goes to protest before he stops himself. He chews on his bottom lip instead, letting his hand fall a little further to cup Buck’s cheek, thumb caressing the birthmark over Buck’s brow. His throat bobs around words he won’t let out, lest he lose the game, but Buck immediately understands.

Please.

Buck nods wordlessly, his hands stilling, his lungs airless. His fingers find the waistline of Eddie’s boxers, and he tugs them down along with Eddie’s pants without further fanfare. Eddie’s dick springs forward into open air, the tip ruddy and shining. Buck isn’t the least bit embarrassed to admit to himself, in the confines of this makeshift confessional booth, that he actually feels himself salivate at the sight.

But Buck isn’t beneath restraint yet, and again: he’s good at this, when he needs to be. He hasn’t had much practice admittedly, at least outside of—well, he doesn’t need to say who he was practicing with, but he’s done this enough times now to be donned an intermediate over a novice. 

For once in his life, he doesn’t let his mouth take the lead. Instead, eyes trained on Eddie like a God-willing sentry, a universe-appointed sentinel, he spits into his hand and wraps a hand around Eddie’s cock. Combines the wetness in his palm with the wetness at the tip to give him one, two, several slow pumps, base to head.

Eddie’s hand tightens in Buck’s hair, thumb digging into his birthmark like he’s trying to brand the spot with the print, but he’s otherwise silent, ever the soldier. Buck is impressed. He proceeds to take that admiration and channel it into a technique he likes to call, cut the bullshit buddy, I want to hear you come undone.

Said technique is tightening his grip—not enough to hurt, just enough for additional friction—and increasing the speed of his pumping, slowing his rhythm only to occasionally tease, drag things out, thumb the spot near the head where the length meets the shaft; thumb the slit to collect more precome and ease his strokes. Said technique also includes pressing his other hand’s thumb into the spot divot of Eddie’s v-line, the sensitive area where hipbone meets stomach. Dusting the fine trail of hairs there with steady, steady fingers.

Eddie sags heavy against the stall door, his head thunking back against the wood, teeth digging so hard into his bottom lip that it starts to blanch, but he still doesn’t make a sound.

“How’s it going up there?” Buck teases, but he’s not above all of this, either. His voice is shot, a scrape. “Any feedback?” 

Eddie shakes his head left to right, prompt. Buck hmphs—not out of frustration, more brief acknowledgment than anything else—and picks up speed again. Even moves the hand over Eddie’s middle down to Eddie’s balls, massaging gentle circles into them with his digits, exploratory. 

It makes Eddie’s hips jerk forward sharply. Makes a labored grunt resonate in his chest, governance over himself momentarily foregone. Then he tips his chin back to the ceiling like he’s asking it for strength, his throat clicking with an audible swallow, and rights himself again. He soldiers on.

If he were a better man, Buck would be a little humiliated by how much he’s getting off on watching Eddie squirm like this. Good thing he’s not a better man. He’s also not above taking the admittedly-welcome break in eye contact to retract his hand from Eddie’s balls to palm himself through his jeans. It’s actually insane how hard he is right now. A little painful, too.

Unfortunately, doing so makes him honest-to-God whimper, unable to control himself. Eddie’s head snaps back down, confusion then realization then gratification flickering across his face. The corners of his lips pull into a smirk, blood flow flushing back to his bottom lip from the release of teeth.

“How’s it going down there, Buck?” Eddie asks, elated. Annoying. “All quiet on the southern front?” 

“Y-Yeah.” Buck’s palm doesn’t budge where it’s pressed against the front of his jeans. He can’t help it. Not when Eddie’s looking at him like that. “Peachy.”

“‘Cause we can always trade places.” Eddie slouches forward, imploring, tipping the scale again. Cards some of the damp curls away from Buck’s forehead before gripping them tight. He pushes Buck’s head back, gentle but firm, forcing more direct eye contact, and lowers his voice to an engine-deep rumble. “Quiero verte perder el control. Haré que te olvides del resto del mundo.”

That should also count as cheating, Buck thinks. He isn’t thinking when he ruts up against his own hand, failing to prevent the resulting gasp he sucks into his chest. 

“Been a while since—hhh—” Another press. Another gasp. Buck’s head spins and spins and spins, like one of those hurricane simulators he saw today at the mall. “S-Since high-school Spanish class. Translation, please.”

“Wanna see you lose control.” It comes out of Eddie in a tremulous rush, almost possessed. He looks like he’s witnessing a theophany. “Make you forget the rest of the world.”

Buck briefly considers it, resolve slipping. It becomes even harder to resist the prospect when Eddie releases his curls to caress his face again. When his thumb drifts to Buck’s mouth, breaching the entrance slow.

Then Buck, in an incredible brush with lucidity, clear as a bell, thinks, this isn’t about you. Stop making it all about you.

And then Buck lists forward, lips sticking before they part, and takes Eddie’s dick in his mouth.

“Oh—” Eddie’s head slams back against the stall door, its hinges creaking from the strain. One hand stays on Buck’s head, fingers raking through his hair restlessly. The other slaps against the stall’s mirror in an attempt to steady himself. It doesn’t really work. His body sags further down the door, his wingtips shifting against the wood. He fails to prevent himself from thrusting into Buck’s mouth.

It almost triggers Buck’s gag reflex, and his eyes sting a bit with tears, but he hums around it, pleased. One hand steadies itself on Eddie’s leg, tapping Eddie’s inner thigh with his forefinger and middle rhythmically, encouragingly. The other reaches up and rests on top of Eddie’s, pushes it deeper into his curls, also encouraging.

Buck is good at this, too. Mostly because he’s had practice—again, not that he needs to say with whom—but also because he knows Eddie. What he likes, what he won’t. Buck doesn’t need experience with Eddie’s dick specifically to know that he’ll love the tip flicked and teased with tongue, the underside of the head sucked hard. Knows Eddie will enjoy the barely-there scrape of teeth just for the thrill of it, the hollowing of Buck’s cheeks as Buck takes him in deeper.

And Eddie does. Slowly, then all at once, he succumbs to the pleasure. He starts fucking into Buck’s mouth, his rhythm shot, his jaw going slack in ectasy. Starts making all of those soft, soft noises Buck never heard before until last night. 

In his watery-eyed peripheral, Buck sees the two of them in the mirror, a painting themselves. It’s nothing short of holy, the juxtaposition between them. Eddie, a religion in and of himself. Buck, devout. 

Heaven isn’t real, Buck is pretty sure, but if it was, it’d be pure. It’d be art. It would be this.

Buck’s hazy gaze darts back up to Eddie, feeling an odd mix of delight and disappointment when he finds that Eddie’s eyes are squeezed shut. He pulls off of Eddie’s cock with a pop, a trail of saliva tethering his mouth to the head.

“You okay?” Christ, his voice is ruined. Razed to gravel. “Look at me, Eddie.”

“Can’t,” Eddie manages. His hips ruck up into air, seeking purchase, his dick nearly bonking Buck in the nose with the motion. Buck chuckles gently, pressing his hand into the meat of Eddie’s thigh, pinning him back against the door. 

“Why not?”

“You ever look in a mirror, man?” Eddie’s eyes remain closed, but the crinkles at the edges soften as he laughs, too. “I’d come in like two seconds.”

Buck practically preens from the compliment. He takes a moment to let Eddie breathe, to catch his own breath. He laughs again, reverent, suddenly cognizant of the fact that in this dim fitting room, Eddie is his own source of light. How some people reflect it, some deflect it, and Eddie, by some miracle, seems to collect it. How, like a moth, Buck is helplessly drawn.

“It’s okay,” Buck says, easy. “Wanna make you feel good.”

Before Eddie can reply or retort, Buck takes him in his mouth again, all the way to the base this time, starved for it. He inhales the scent of Eddie’s hair there, gets soap and skin and sandalwood—the last note stemming from the body wash they share, because Eddie is frugal and never buys his own. The smell of sweat is there as well, musky and a bit sour, but nothing unpleasant. 

Eddie’s thigh muscles jump and spasm under Buck’s palm. Buck’s other hand finds Eddie’s still fisted in his curls, still holding back from pulling too hard. His thumb settles in the divot of Eddie’s wrist, feeling his pulse skip and throb. Buck has to lead him a bit, goad him into fucking his mouth, and it’s finally the green light Eddie needs. The permission to break apart.

“B—uck.” Eddie’s voice catches on the word, dissolves into a drawn-out, uninhibited moan when Buck arcs back, just enough to twirl his tongue around Eddie’s slit before swallowing him down again. The noises Eddie makes are divine and profane, the way they’re so shamelessly loud and needy. His palm slips down the mirror a bit, the sweat there squeaking and streaking against the mirror.

God forbid anyone waltzes into the back room looking for go-backs right now. The hairs on Buck’s nape stand on end with the thought, from the adrenaline of it. 

“S’good,” Eddie slurs, his eyes finally opening to find Buck’s, unfocused and glassy. His hips snap forward over and over, arrhythmic and mindless. “So fuckin’ good at this, Buck.”

It feels sacred, watching a man like Eddie unravel. Watching all his carefully-constructed walls crumble into a heap, the solidity of his framework give way. It’s transcendental for Buck, knowing he’s the impetus of it. That Eddie feels safe enough to fall apart with him. 

Buck groans at the encouragement, prolonging the sound, the vibration of it pulling thready, heavy whimpers from Eddie. Buck bobs his head faster, snaking his hand around Eddie to palm at Eddie’s ass, to bring him closer, deeper. Feels spit and precome collect around the corners of his mouth, dribble down his chin in streaks. It’s wet and sloppy and downright sinful. Buck has never felt so pure in his life.

Eddie is babbling now, endless exaltations of Buck and fuck and please in varying order and coherence filling the thick air between them, suspended in resin. They stop short when Buck makes one particularly skilled maneuver with his tongue, tumble into a fratic, “Buck, I-I’m close—fuck, fuck, I’m gonna—oh, God—”

He’s tugging Buck’s curls back like he’s trying to get Buck to pull off, but Buck stays in place, nodding vigorously, wordlessly begging Eddie for it, and the levee finally breaks. Eddie comes with a choked-off sob, back arching off the door, his release spilling down Buck’s throat. Buck swallows it all down, drunk off the taste of salt and sweet and Eddie; dizzy from the distant realization that Eddie’s blood isn’t the only part of him that Buck knows the taste of now.

Eddie goes boneless, knees wobbling, hips twitching from oversensitivity and the aftershock. Buck lets Eddie’s spent cock fall from his mouth. Holds Eddie steady while he falls back to Earth.

“Guess I lost,” Eddie pants, chest heaving in the aftershock. He huffs a laugh, dazed. “I’m not—it’s never been like that. Seriously, I’m never loud like that.”

“Sure,” Buck says, coy. “Whatever helps you sleep at night.”

Eddie laughs again, more amazed than humored. It sounds a little sad, too. “Is that how it’s supposed to feel? Sex?” 

Buck goes still and a little cold, the gravity of the situation slamming into him. Eddie has never done anything like this with another man. Buck is his first time, his first, and Buck wasted it on sucking his dick in a dingy thrift store stall in Costa Mesa.

Eddie is grown and knows what he wants, and some part of him must have wanted this, but did he really? He should want something roomy, sunlit, weightless, not cheap. Not cramped and dark and heavy and this.

“Buck, hey.” Eddie frowns down at Buck, still eerily perceptive of Buck’s turbulent shifts in mood amidst his stupor. “What’s…”

Eddie suddenly stills as well, stiffening under Buck’s hands. His head jerks sideways, listening, and—shit, Buck hears it, too. The muffled chatter of voices somewhere nearby, the sound of several footsteps getting closer.

One of those voices is definitely Mickey’s.

Buck and Eddie spring to life, automatic—Buck scrambling to his feet, Eddie scrambling with the zipper and button of his slacks, both of them scrambling with the lock of the stall door in a blind panic to get the fuck out of dodge. 

“Buck, move,” Eddie whisper-yells, alarmed.

“I got it, I got it. Just—”

“Seriously, hurry, they’re—”

“Just gimme a second, I can’t get it—”

Buck gets it unlatched, puts all his weight into the door before Eddie gets his footing. Eddie nearly lands on his ass when the stall opens; Buck nearly falls on top of him, stumbling on his way out. 

They get, give or take, three seconds to compose themselves before Mickey, Mickey’s coworker, and a middle-aged woman with an armful of business-casual blouses round the corner of the hallway, mid-conversation. 

“The only way you’re gonna normalize wearing jeans at the office is wearing jeans at the office, Sandra,” Mickey declares, forefinger raised to drive the point. “If Massholes keep tellin’ you to wear pencil skirts, you better kick ‘em in the mouth next time, ‘cause otherwise I’ll…”

He trails off when he spots Buck and Eddie standing at the entrance of the fitting room stall, poised like someone just told them to act natural. He takes one, two, too many seconds to take them both in, eyes skirting around their obviously-dishelved states.

“Uh,” he starts. “How’d everything fit?”

“Good, great, not buying anything today, thanks,” Buck replies all in a rush, moving before he makes the conscious choice to walk. He practically sprints past the group with Eddie in tow, adding a breathless, “Really cool store, gotta go, byebyebye,” over his shoulder as they leave.

The strangest thing about the back of Clubhouse, Buck halfhazardly concludes in his hasty exit, is not the mannequin limb sculpture or the spiked Madonna bra or even the fact that there’s a poster on one of the walls picturing Smokey the Bear in assless chaps smoking a joint—though, yeah, that is weird, and something Buck definitely needs to ask if he can buy if he ever ends up back here.

The strangest part, by far, is the fact that the long and winding hallway isn’t long and winding at all. Buck and Eddie take one left, then one right, and then they’re back at the front of the store, just like that. Buck is momentarily taken aback by it, wants to know how it’s possible, how it works. Wants to know how that can possibly work. How something once complicated unceremoniously reveals itself as entirely and achingly simple, since the beginning, since always.

But much like a scientist trying to crack the code of the grand genesis, the catalyst to resulting cosmos, Buck might have to accept the not-knowing of it all.

EXT. CLUBHOUSE — SOME TIME LATER

MICHAEL “MICKEY” SEO (early-30s, built like a tattoo artist in Margaritaville, cute) is standing outside of his thrift store with his coworker, both of them nursing cans of Dr. Pepper. They look troubled.

MICKEY

They didn’t—

COWORKER

They definitely did.

MICKEY

Buck wouldn’t—

COWORKER

You’ve known him for a day. He would. And did.

MICKEY

Huh.

COWORKER

Yeah.

MICKEY

You know who he kinda looks like?

COWORKER

Who?

MICKEY

Orville Peck.

COWORKER

Whoa.

MICKEY

Right?

Buck can’t say how many times he takes his eyes off the road to steal glances at Eddie when they speed away from Clubhouse, the both of them breathing hard. Seriously, he can’t say. He might get his license revoked if he does.

During one of said stolen glances, Buck notices something. He nearly careens off Orange Ave when he does.

“You’re still wearing the suit?” Buck exclaims.

“Hey, screw you, man,” Eddie shoots right back, aggrieved, like Buck is the crazy one. Shifting in his seat with a grumble, he adds, “Need half an hour and the Jaws of Life to get out of these.”

And perhaps Buck really is nuts, just abso-fucking-lutely crazycakes, because he snorts, then chuckles, then fully breaks into laughter. A birthed-from-the-belly thing, loud and unabashed.

“What now?” Eddie asks.

“The guy’s name is Mickey”—Buck giggles like a thirty-four-year old probably shouldn’t—“and he works at a Clubhouse.”

Eddie pauses, takes that in, then sing-songs, “Come inside, it’s fun inside.”

Buck has to pull over after that.

“Okay, okay,” Eddie says after a few minutes, his own laughter finally dying down. “We should—we probably need to talk about”—he flicks his hand between them—“this.”

Buck wipes a tear from his eye, stray snickers still fighting to break free from his chest. “Yeah, I know.”

They then proceed to sit in silence for several beats, not talking about it. Buck taps his thumb on the steering wheel to the click of the signal indicator, taps his foot to the rhythm of Selena singing, “Don’t throw away, don’t throw away my love.” Rain freckles the window, renders the streetlights ahead into bokeh blurs. Rays of sunlight poke through the clouds above.

Eddie breaks the silence first. “I’m sorry.”

“What?” Buck feels his stomach pit. “For what?”

“You got an hour?” Eddie chuckles again, but it sounds wrong. Snaked out of a drain. “Got a lot I need to apologize for.”

That’s rich, considering who he’s sitting next to. “You don’t have to apologize for anything, Eddie.”

Eddie scrubs both hands over his eyes and groans. “No, Buck, I do. I’m sorry for taking this long to figure things out. With myself, with—with you, and… I’m sorry for coming out to you over the phone when you were in Costco, of all places I could’ve done it. You deserved better than that.”

Buck isn’t really too concerned with what he deserves, unless it’s the bad stuff. Things he actually deserves. “Really, Eddie, it’s fine—”

“No,” Eddie snaps, hands flying to the sides of his seat, clinging to the leather as if he’s trying to stop himself from floating away. “No, it’s—just let me finish, alright?” 

Buck does.

“I’m sorry for dragging you out shopping, and I’m sorry I didn’t buy anything, and I’m sorry for calling you a telenovela, and I’m sorry for stealing your clothes, and—and I’m sorry for leaving you to move to Texas. I am.”

Buck’s heart clenches uncomfortably. “You did what you had to do. For Christopher.”

Eddie cuts him a look. “My son is not the only reason I do the things I do. He shouldn’t be.”

Buck swallows. It’s a perspective so wholly different from Eddie’s usual that he feels like he’s toppled into yet another universe. One that makes even less sense.

“I’m just…” Eddie sighs. “I’m sorry for handling things the way I did. Since yesterday, since El Paso, since we met. I’ve failed you more times than I can count.”

Again, rich, considering the guy to his left. “Why are you apologizing?”

Eddie appears visibly overwhelmed with the question. Buck reels for smaller fish first.

“Why did you come out to me over the phone when I was in Costco?”

“I didn’t know you were in Costco.”

“Eddie.”

There’s a weighted silence, only broken by Selena and clicking indicators and rainfall, then: “‘Cause I’m a coward.”

Buck has a laundry list of things he could call Eddie. Coward isn’t anywhere near the page. “No, you’re not.”

“Yes, I am.” Eddie turns in his seat and faces Buck head-on. His eyes are wild and shining, a precursor to tears. “I did it even though Frank told me to tell you in person, even though I had this big speech prepared and a plan to tell you over, like, dinner or something, but I freaked out and just—told you like it was nothing. Like it didn’t mean anything. Like a coward.”

Buck’s hand twitches right on the steering wheel, unconsciously drifting to touch. He keeps it steady. “Does it bother you? Being gay?”

“No.” Eddie chuckles again wetly. “Maybe it bothers the voice in my head that sounds like my father, but… no. I feel good about it. I feel free.”

Buck’s own eyes burn. Joy, brazen and total, is a shade he’s rarely seen color Eddie’s face in big, bold strokes. It paints Eddie nacreous now.

“What, uh—” Buck clears his throat. He’s not going to cry in a Trader Joe’s parking lot. “Who made you figure it out?”

One of Eddie’s eyebrows bumps up. Seriously?

Right. Noted. Consider Buck’s ego thoroughly stroked. “Okay, I… I’m sorry, I gotta ask. The whole thing with your clothes. What’s with that?”

“Dunno.” Eddie wrings his hands, a nervousness Buck rarely sees on Eddie, either. “Something about going through a change and feeling like the rest of me needed to change, too, but nothing’s really changed at all. The whole time, it was just me. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah,” Buck says, because it does. Despite everything, it’s still him.

“Plus, I…” Eddie keeps wringing his hands. “I was kinda hoping you’d try stuff on, too. Not because anything about you needs to change, obviously, but there’s a few things I want to see you wear.” Eddie’s eyes darken a smidge, suggestive. “And not wear.”

“Oh?” Buck feels his face go scarlet. “Like what?”

“Maybe that hat I tried on near the end there.” Eddie shrugs, feigning ease in his sudden bashfulness. “What can I say? I got a thing for cowboys.”

Has Buck mentioned he’s still somewhat hard, despite everything? Heaven isn’t real, and thank whatever’s lounging around upstairs that Hell isn’t, either. He’d have an express, all-season, direct-to-lift pass.

Buck’s still stuck on something, though. It overrides most of the unholy thoughts he’s having. “But, with your clothes, did I—did someone make you feel like you had to dress less…” He winces, scrambling for an adjective. “Earthy?” 

Eddie laughs for real this time. “Nah. Figured I’d try some things out, but none of it fit. I like the things I wear. They’ve always been me.”

“Even the flannel?”

“Even the flannel.” Eddie smiles. Joy looks so good on him, Buck feels every filament in himself glow, trying to feed into that bolide light. “I really do like those new bell bottoms, though. They’re—”

Eddie’s smile drops abruptly. “They’re still in that fitting room. I left them behind.” He squeezes his eyes shut. “Dammit.”

“Don’t worry.” Buck offers him an appeasing pat on the knee. “Mickey has my number. I can ask for them back.”

“After we shoplifted from his store? Good luck with that.”

“We?”

“Yeah, we. You’re my partner in crime, bud.” Eddie bats Buck’s hand away playfully, shoo shoo, and cants his head slightly. “He has your number, huh?” 

Buck can’t resist. “Jealous?”

“No,” Eddie replies, sincere. He looks at Buck like he can see straight through him, down to his marrow. “Can’t be jealous over someone when you know they’re yours.” 

Buck blinks rapidly, going lightheaded. “Am I?”

Eddie’s smile goes kilowatt. “I love you, Buck. You know that, right?”

Buck had an inkling, but only of the love-you-like-a-brother, strictly-platonic sort. Eddie says it in that shrugged-shoulder way of his, but also earnest and wholehearted as all hell. He says it like Buck’s hung the moon and stars, arranged them into a revolving mobile above. Like Buck is the sun itself. 

And maybe if Eddie wasn’t so damn earnest about it, Buck would pay more heed to the nagging voice from the universe that screams, this is not for you, you don’t deserve this, this will never be for you. Once in a blue moon, he lets himself ignore screaming universes. For once, Buck doesn’t think about what he does or doesn’t deserve, because Eddie is a smart man. If he feels like Buck deserves this, then Buck would be remiss not to take it as a universal truth.

“I love you, too.” It feels like Buck is coming up for air after a lifetime of drowning. “If you’ll have me, I… I’m yours, Eddie. You’re kinda it for me, honestly.”

“Evan Buckley, my first and last.” Eddie’s smile surpasses kilowatt and moves steadfast into something solar. “Sounds good to me.”

Buck is going to cry in a Trader Joe’s parking lot, as it turns out. 

“Can’t believe you ran out in that suit.” Buck shakes his head, voice wavering. “You’re not as moral and righteous as I’ve made you out to be.”

“Sounds like an iss-you, not an iss-me.” Eddie bites his lip, giving Buck an once-over. “But if we’re in agreement that I’m not above breaking the law, then…”

“Then?”

“Then.” Eddie’s gaze falls on Buck’s lap. Stays there. “You haven’t exactly gotten your happy ending yet, Buckley.”

Buck briefly considers it, cock twitching to life in his jeans. But some part of him must really be a better man, because he levels Eddie with a flat look. “Yes, I have. And no. Absolutely not. We’re in public.”

Eddie’s hand finger-walks over the middle console towards Buck. He’s embarrassing. Buck’s dick's reaction to it, even more so. “Didn’t seem to bother you fifteen minutes ago.”

“That was semi-public.” Eddie’s hands are really large, Buck notices. Has noticed. Has been noticing since Eddie disabled that grenade in that ambulance, nearly a decade ago now. “This is different. There’s two guys right outside loading groceries into a Fiat.”

“And there’s a guy in a Nissan trying to help you with your load.”

“You’re ridiculous.” Buck bats his hand away, shoo shoo, his cheeks aflame. “No. Not here.”

“What?” Eddie walks his fingers backwards, slow and dejected. Dork. “Worried you can’t keep quiet?” 

Buck’s skin might actually melt off. He cranks the dial on the A/C about it. “Was I really that loud last night? In the shower?”

Eddie’s pupils dilate infinitesimally. “I’m not complaining, just to be clear.”

“Did you, uh.” Buck’s knuckles blanch from gripping the steering wheel tight. “Do you know why I hopped in the shower at two in the morning?”

“Night sweats?” Eddie ventures.

“You were having, um. Dreams. Next to me.” Buck shifts in his seat. A crease in his jeans shifts against his cock, chubbing it up further. “Against me.”

Eddie’s face also blanches. He stills, horrified. “I didn’t—shit, Buck, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know you were… That’s—”

“Fine,” Buck interjects, smiting that train of thought to ash immediately. “More than fine. Awesome, even. I was very much into that, just for the record.” And, well—fuck it. In for a dime, a dollar, the whole bank. “Almost used a pillow. Almost got myself off on it.”

Color returns to Eddie’s face in a flush. His pupils dilate again. “You’re sure I can’t suck you off in this parking lot right now. Positive?”

No, Buck thinks wearily, before he remembers he has a mouth, and he’s good with it, and should use it to speak instead of gaping like a fish. “Not here.”

Eddie immediately reaches for his phone. “I can find a different parking lot. An empty one.”

Buck puts the truck into reverse. “Search for Whole Foods. No one goes to Whole Foods.”

The Whole Foods lot they end up parked in isn’t completely empty. There’s a Toyota a few spots over, a Mercedes yards away. The two of them figure it’s empty enough.

“Promised I’d make alfredo,” Buck gasps into Eddie’s mouth, heavy and needy. “Chris is—”

“Hanging out with Denny again. Already texted him.” Eddie heads southbound to bite at Buck’s pulse point below his jaw, grins wicked when it skyrockets. “They’re still playing that Marvel game.”

“Oh,” Buck manages, woozy when Eddie’s large, large hand finds its way to Buck’s jugular, when he presses it against Buck’s throat, careful but purposeful. “C-Cool.”

“Says he wants to get better at using Spider-Man’s Web-Balls.” Eddie pauses to suck Buck’s skin like he’s bloodthirsty. “Whatever that means.”

“That’s—shit—good for him. Everybody loves Spidey.”

Buck’s hand retracts its grip in Eddie’s hair, grasps Eddie’s hand where it holds him in place. Presses it down harder against his jugular until his breath hitches, until his pulse throbs, until his dick throbs with it. 

“Need it that bad, huh?” Eddie purrs, other hand finding the front of Buck’s jeans, palming him there. Buck sobs, and Eddie’s breathing goes ragged. He skips the pleasantries and makes work of Buck’s fly. “I know, cariño. Know how bad you need it. I’ve got you.”

Eddie seems real eager to break in Buck’s new truck. Buck can hear the commercial reel now. Introducing the new 2025 Nissan Frontier, factory-delivered and disgraced. A top-shelf mix of power, luxury, and a thirty-some guy whimpering like a dog. Don’t worry folks, no need to break the window, the A/C is on and he’s listening to music and he’s got his best friend’s hand on his dick. Dare the impossible, until it’s not. Innovation that excites.

“Still can’t believe you’re still wearing the suit,” Buck croaks, like he doesn’t love it.

Eddie gets Buck’s pants and boxers far enough down for Buck’s cock to jump free, for it to bounce against his stomach. “Get ready for your own five-finger discount, pal.”

Buck groans at the bad joke, like he doesn’t love that, too. “Don’t call me pal while we’re having sex. You’re so annoying.”

“And you’re so…” Eddie finally gets his hand on Buck, thumbing his slit, pupils blown dark and wide. “Wet. Jesus, Buck, you’re so wet.”

He says it amazed, awed. Says it like he might to a girl. Buck thinks he’d need several hours and a stiff drink to unpack the reaction he has to that.

And then Eddie’s head sinks to Buck’s lap, and Buck stops thinking about much at all.

Sometime later, after Buck's had enough time to fall back to Earth and Eddie’s had enough time to run into Whole Foods to use the washroom and that’s all, get your head out of the gutter, Buck, you can pay me back later, Eddie returns to Buck’s truck holding—

“You’re kidding,” Buck says. Eddie climbs into the passenger side and hands Buck the bouquet of roses, lilies, and daisies he’s holding. “You bought me flowers?” 

“From Whole Foods, unfortunately,” Eddie replies, like that’s the reason Buck is about to burst into tears. “But yeah, I did. Figured our kitchen could use some color.”

Buck takes them gingerly, placing them on the center console like they’re delicate, precious. “You’re killing me here, Eddie. You don’t have to be all romantic and woo-y and, like—court me or anything. You already have me.”

“I know.” Eddie buckles himself in, giving Buck a look that’s so fond and endeared it makes Buck’s heart handspring into his throat. “I know I don’t have to, but I want to.”

And, well—Buck has never minded giving Eddie what he wants. He’s not about to stop now.

When Buck wipes a quick hand over his eyes and keys the ignition, setting the car into drive, he realizes that for the first time in a while, he stays fully present behind the wheel. His head is completely moored to his body, totally aware of his surroundings. No fog, no white line fever. His autopilot disengages.

He remembers every second of the ride home.

Buck pays Eddie back three days later after their shift, mid-morning on a sunny Thursday.

“You’re definitely a giver, huh?” Buck ribs, punctuating the tease with a particularly slow, deep roll of his hips upwards. 

“I didn’t—oh, fuck—” Eddie grinds down into Buck hard, hands splayed against the back wall behind their bed for stability. His eyes flutter and his mouth goes lax and his rhythm stutters, presumably because Buck’s just hit his prostate. He’s gorgeous like this, warmer and more beautiful than any mid-morning sun. “Didn’t say I hated receiving.”

Buck goes easy on him. Takes his leaking cock in hand and gives it one, two, several slick pumps, helping him along. “Thank God for that. You’re pretty good at riding, pardner.”

“Y’know what they—hngh—say. Save a horse.”

The bedroom is quiet, save their laughter and moans and breathing. Buck doesn’t hear much outside of it, doesn’t care to. There’s a stray bird chirp from the open window here, the whirr of the ceiling fan above them, and—

“Turn that damn phone off, or I will,” Eddie rasps. 

Buck takes a second to refocus his senses beyond Eddie’s soft, soft sounds. His phone buzzes on their nightstand once, twice, several times.

“Ignore it,” Buck groans, quickening his pace—both the roll of his hips and the stroke of his hand. Eddie loses himself to it for a moment, seems like he’ll listen, seems like he’s about to—

Buck’s phone buzzes again. Eddie growls and leans over, snatching it to thumb the lockscreen on. 

“It’s Mickey,” he says, sounding completely and utterly unjealous about it. Possessive, on the other hand, well. “‘Course it’s Mickey.”

Right. It’s Thursday. Whoops.

“Ignore it,” Buck whines, because he’s close to the finish line and would rather end the race with a tie than with first place. He can be a good sport, when he needs to be. “Eddie, please, please, I’m—”

Eddie’s already typing away a response in one hand, bracing himself against Buck’s pec with the other, still grinding down against him. Buck is a little impressed, and—close. “Don’t know what you saw in that guy.”

Parts of you, Buck wants to reply. Pieces of you but not the whole of you, not you, and that was the problem. “He’s not that bad. He’s—oh, God, just like that, don’t stop—h-he’s cute.”

“He smells like a Christmas candle.”

“You like cinnamon.”

“In your muffins, sure. In your pancakes, definitely.” Eddie finishes whatever message he’s typed out, sending it off with a whoosh, then tosses Buck’s phone to the far-end of the bed, getting back to business. “Was never gonna let you take him home. You hear me? You’re mine.”

Buck comes harder than he ever has in his life.

Later, when he comes to, Buck goes to check Mickey’s messages. Figures he owes the dude a quick sorry, not interested, have a nice life, before Buck officially starts the rest of his.

Hey Buck, it’s Mickey! Still down to hang out today?

This heatwave is wicked 🥵 had to break out the Birks

Clem says wearing Birks with socks is lame. Told her that her loser of a dad bought her a Labubu this morning after my run. Now THOSE are lame

Kinda weirdly cute though

But nothing beats collecting Garbage Pail Kid stickers for 25 cents a pop. Kids today are stuck with overpriced actual garbage. Capitalisms a bitch man

Sorry for all the spam lol. just been thinking about you :)

Hey also, hate to nag, but I think your friend walked out in one of our suits? He might of left some cash at the counter for it but I didn’t see anything

After the wall of texts, there’s three replies from Eddie. 

Hi mickey its bucks friend eddie

Hes not interested sorry

The last message is an Apple Cash payment to Mickey for fifty dollars.

“You haven’t answered my question, Eddie.”

Eddie pokes his head up from the kitchen island where he’s busying himself with a pair of scissors and an old shirt, licorice stick in his mouth. “What question?”

Buck gestures to the knife he’s using to chop bell peppers. A brand new Global Kabuto knife. “Why’d you buy these?”

Eddie smiles. “‘Cause you wanted them.”

“But—” Buck blushes, tipping his chin to his chest. It’s hard sometimes to absorb the bright of that smile, even still. To accept that it’s directed at him. “But I could’ve bought a knife sharpener.”

“Where’s the fun in that?”

“I thought you were frugal.”

“Frugal means a person’s careful and thoughtful with their spending. Not adverse to treating the people they love every now and then.”

“Yeah, but…” Buck is still stuck on this point, for whatever reason. Maybe because he likes to argue. Maybe because he loves when Eddie pushes back. “What happened to learning to appreciate what I have, huh?”

Eddie polishes off the rest of his licorice stick and rounds the island over to Buck. He crowds behind Buck and presses a kiss to his temple, hands snaking around his waist, hand settling over Buck’s heart.

“Don’t worry.” Eddie hums, soft. “Think I got that covered.”