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“You don’t have to do this, you know.”
Buck blinks up from the pamphlet in his hand to see Eddie looking at him with a squint to his eyes that could either be frustration or the beaming sun shining down on both of them. Without thinking, he takes his sunglasses off from his forehead, slipping them over the bridge of Eddie’s nose instead.
“Do what?” he asks, after fiddling with the frame slightly. Eddie’s face is a little pinker when he shifts back, and Buck feels momentarily guilty about how warm he must’ve been with Buck hovering so close to him.
Eddie’s mouth makes a little moue of irritation, his fingers flicking outward in the slightly dramatic way that he does when he’s tired and a little hungry. “This,” he says, looking around them at the throngs of people chatting and making their way over green lawns and stone structures. “You know, coming with us on these tours on you birthday.”
Buck blinks, bemused and bewildered. “I’m turning thirty-five,” he points out. “It’s not like I had a big party planned or anything.”
“You probably had better plans than following a teenager around on multiple college campuses,” Eddie continues, a string of words so incomprehensible that Buck is half-tempted to check him for heatstroke.
“A teenager?” Buck splutters a little. He looks around, catching the back of curly hair, a red frame, a tiny shadow clinging onto an arm of a wheelchair as they hang onto every word a young woman in a lanyard is saying. “It’s Chris. You know, your son?”
Eddie gives him a flat look. “I know who my son is, Buck.”
“Do you?” Buck retorts. “Because you seem to have forgotten that your son is the coolest kid on the planet, and I’d rather hang out with him than do…whatever thirty-five year olds do on their birthday. It’s Caltech, Eddie. I’m not gonna miss Chris considering early admission to Caltech.”
He can’t see the look in Eddie’s eyes, on account of the sunglasses, but his brows furrow and his mouth moves in a way that makes him think that Eddie might be having a Big Moment right now. About what, Buck can’t imagine - it’s approximately ten thousand degrees out right now, which seems too hot to be having any sort of personal revelation - but Eddie has to take a moment before he speaks again. Buck lets him. Buck can always find the time to wait, if it’s for Eddie.
“I thought–” he looks over with Buck, at their two boys. “It’s your first birthday with Theo, I thought you might’ve wanted to do something with him. Chris would’ve understood.”
“Theo loves Chris,” Buck says, a truth he knows to his very core. “We both do.”
The sun beams down on them, the two of them still waiting for Chris to finish asking the tour guide his list of questions about campus. Buck would be there, too, but Chris told him that it was cringe for him to hover, or something, so he’d been banished to the fringes of the campus alongside Eddie. It’s fine, he’ll just email with his fifty-six point accessibility questionnaire.
Eddie’s face turns towards his. “You do, don’t you?” he says, like it’s a surprise.
Despite the sun, the heat, the people milling about, Buck has the sudden and inexplicable urge to tug off those sunglasses, to see what expression is in Eddie’s eyes right now.
“Eddie?”
Buck’s breath hitches when he feels Eddie’s fingertips on his brow, a thumb smoothing over the place where his birthmark is. Eddie’s hand is warm and a little sweaty, and Buck knows that his own forehead must be damp by now too, but neither of them say anything, or move away.
“You know this gets redder when you’re warm?” Eddie says, idle and impossibly intimate. Buck shakes his head silently, and he laughs a little. “It’s a good way to tell when you need some more water, or a little shade. I’ve always liked it for that.”
Buck’s heart flips, just a little, probably platonically, at the thought that Eddie might’ve been checking him for heatstroke the same way Buck had earlier, a silent loop of devotion that they held at either end.
“Just for that?” he asks, and his voice comes out coy, which isn’t what he’d intended. But Eddie’s cheeks are pink, and Buck can taste salt and possibility on his tongue like a miracle, so maybe it’s not so unintentional, after all.
“For that, and because I can tell that you want to have some shade, but you gave me your sunglasses anyways. because it’s ridiculously hot out, and you’re walking in the sun to do a campus tour, because for some godforsaken reason you actually think it’s fun. Because it’s your birthday, and you’re here, with us, because you want to be. and I want you to be here, too. I want you to spend all your birthdays with us.”
Buck cannot believe the nerve of this man. “Are you giving me a romantic speech on a college campus where it’s too hot to make out with you?” he croaks.
Eddie raises an eyebrow. “Is that gonna stop you?”
Approximately ten minutes later, they hear a long teenage groan.
“Oh my god, I need eye bleach,” Chris whines, head falling backwards dramatically. Theo shrieks with giggles, and the tour guide is flushed red as she stutters out an apology.
“Sorry! I, um, Chris just mentioned that you had some questions about accessible parking, and I– um– I thought–”
“Oh!” Buck extricates himself from Eddie, ignoring his pout as he turns her way. “That’s right, I had a few questions about the space available for renting an accessible parking spot close to dorms, if Chris gets his learner’s permit and has to park on campus–”
She nods. “I can show you the dorm parking so you can see the layout, Mr. Diaz–”
Heatstroke, flushed cheeks, Buck is pretty sure he knows exactly what color his birthmark is, right now. “Uh, it’s, um. It’s actually Buckley. Evan Buckley. But I go by Buck.”
A hand slips into his, sweaty and too-warm and Buck would chop his own arm off before letting it go. Eddie nudges their shoulders together.
“I don’t know,” he says, their boys trailing them like sunshine, like family. “I think Mr. Diaz has a ring to it, don’t you?”