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Eddie can still feel the heat.
The sun beating down on his shoulders; the way the dry air swept across the desert and the particular scent of it. Barely spring, but hot outside anyway. Nashville had felt so far away and so long ago by the time the warmth and the light of a day in New Mexico met him and he watched Buck collapse to a dusty, orange earth.
Things got blurry after that.
Los Angeles is a lot more temperate, admittedly, and Eddie is sitting in the pickup line outside of Christopher’s school with the windows rolled down and the scrapes on his face have mostly healed and faded. But it still feels hot to him.
He reaches for the dial on the air conditioning in his truck and turns it up one notch, tilting his head, seeking out the feeling of the cool gust of air as it brushes his cheek. It feels like fingertips, but it isn’t. Eddie leans into it anyway.
The cars slowly inch forward, and Eddie follows, falls in line like always and tries not to think about it. For the last couple of weeks, he’s been trying not to think about much of anything. He thinks about grocery lists and Christopher and the projects around the house that he doesn’t usually have the time to get to. He thinks about the basketball game on television. He thinks about getting back to work.
He thinks about Buck.
He thinks about Buck so much that it eclipses all the other stuff. So much that the broken shelf in the hall closet has not gotten fixed because Eddie only has so much space to think about it, because so many of his thoughts are occupied by Buck.
He taps his fingertips on the windowsill, the black interior warmed with the light of the afternoon sun. There’s a group of teenagers not far away who are laughing and Eddie follows the sound to a kid with his head back and then sweeps his gaze over the front of the school for signs of Christopher. There’s no glint off of his crutches yet, no familiar mop of curls. Most days— especially lately, after what happened with the bus— Eddie is grateful to be here, and present.
But earlier today, he’d texted Buck.
Part of their new normal since New Mexico, more frequent check-ins which Eddie convinces himself are for Buck more than they are for him, even though he knows that’s not entirely the truth.
If he’s talking about the truth, there are a lot of things that Eddie is not quite owning up to at the moment. Some of them with himself and even more than that with Buck, but it doesn’t feel like the right time. They’re both still hurt— especially Buck, just two weeks out from broken ribs to say the least— and recovering from everything in New Mexico is more important than Eddie’s feelings.
They have time. Or so he keeps telling himself. Reminding himself.
But his text to Buck has gone unanswered today, and something about it crawls under Eddie’s skin and stays there, insistent and prickling. There are so many reasonable explanations as to why Buck might not be answering yet— Eddie has listed them all off and then some in his spiraling mind, so he knows. Buck could be sleeping, which would be good for him because Eddie knows he’s been having trouble getting comfortable enough to get more than a couple of hours of rest at a time. He could be with Maddie, which would also be a good thing. He knows that she’s been gently pushing him to get together with her and see Jee and Nash as he starts to recover. He could be wrapped up in something at home. Maybe even baking again.
And then there are the other possibilities.
All the dark thoughts that pick at the edges of Eddie’s subconscious mind are getting harder and harder to ignore as the minutes pass slowly. They were hard to ignore in the first place, because the feeling of Buck’s pulse against his fingertips and the image of blood on his face is all so fresh in Eddie’s mind with the flames of rage and guilt that followed him out of the desert and back home to California.
He reaches for his phone again, checking the lockscreen where it sits in his console. It comes up bare: no notifications across the picture of a younger Christopher that lights up the screen. Eddie sighs.
His mind is made up by the time Chris makes his way out to the car and gets in. Eddie reaches out to take his crutches and set them safely out of the way in the back, and Chris does the rest. It comes as a habit to check that he’s buckled, even now that he sits in the front seat, a small part of Eddie’s routine just like looking into the mirrors and turning to see his blind spots.
“Good day today?” he asks as he squints into the light and pulls out of the car line.
“Yeah,” Christopher answers, settling his backpack in the floorboard at his feet and flopping back into the seat. He turns his head in Eddie’s direction. “Ellie and Max broke up,” he reports.
Eddie raises an eyebrow. “Already?”
“Mhm,” Christopher nods. “In Earth Science.
Casting him a sideways glance, Eddie says, “That doesn’t seem like the place.”
“Eh,” Chris replies, shrugging his shoulders. “Tectonic plate unit. I was bored anyway.”
Eddie huffs a laugh and flicks his turn signal as he pulls the truck to the stop sign in front of them. “To be fair,” he says, “you have more experience with tectonic plates than most people.”
“I know,” Chris says, grinning. “I looked ahead in the book and there’s a tsunami page right after this.”
Eddie shakes his head as they pull onto the familiar street to their right. “Do not traumatize your classmates.”
Chris rolls his eyes. “Dad, if I didn’t traumatize the other second graders, I don’t think it’s going to be a problem now.”
He has a point. Eddie might still be the one who’s more traumatized between them on that subject, all these years later.
His thoughts wander again, inevitably, to Buck.
“Will you be good at home by yourself for a little bit?” he asks, looking over at Chris.
“Yeah,” Chris replies. “Why? Where are you going?”
Eddie shakes his head. “Just gonna go check in on Buck,” he replies, hoping that he sounds more nonchalant about it than he really feels.
Christopher looks up, frowning in a way that makes Eddie sort of feel like he’s looking into a mirror. “I can’t go?”
“You have homework?” Eddie asks lightly.
These days, the answer is always yes.
Christopher groans. “I can do it later,” he says.
“Uh huh,” Eddie answers, turning his head to glance to both sides as he moves through a green light. “Like last time?”
Chris scowls, but relents. “Okay, fine.”
Eddie smiles a little at that. “You’ll be at Buck’s tomorrow anyway,” he points out. “Friday night, remember?”
“Can we have pizza?”
“Again?” Eddie asks, and receives a look over Chris’s glasses in reply. He sighs. “We’ll see what Buck wants.”
Christopher smiles. “Buck wants what I want,” he says, a touch too smug for Eddie’s liking if he’s being honest.
He laughs, though, as he slows down and pulls the truck into the driveway. In part because Christopher is right and in part because the older the kid gets, the funnier he is.
“You need help with getting your stuff inside?” he offers, watching as Chris unbuckles and gathers up his bag.
“Not if you hand me my crutches,” he says, and so Eddie twists to reach behind him and extracts them, then passes them to Chris where he’s standing in the open passenger door.
“Homework,” Eddie says, pointing one finger at Christopher, who rolls his eyes good-naturedly.
“Snack,” he says. “And then homework.”
“Deal,” Eddie answers, smiling as Chris shuts the car door behind himself. “Love you, bud. I’ll bring dinner home later.”
“Love you,” Chris answers, and even now after all these years of hearing it, something squeezes tight and pleasant in Eddie’s chest. “Say hi to Buck for me,” Christopher adds, and then he’s gone.
By the time Eddie has watched him let himself into the house and shut the door again behind him, the light and warmth of his presence has drained away too. Now that Eddie is alone again, there’s a gnawing anxiety that returns immediately and persistently, and stronger than before.
Because now all that’s left in front of him is Buck.
He reaches for his phone again, not really expecting that anything will have changed and then still managing to feel bereft and lost when the screen lights up and he’s proven right. He huffs, letting it clatter back into the space in his console against the plastic, and grits his teeth until his jaw feels the tension as he turns and backs the truck once more out of the driveway.
When he twists just far enough, there’s a twinge in his ribs— faint but present, a reminder that he had also been out there in the desert, that he and Buck had been in that car together before someone took Buck out of it and left Eddie behind.
It’s not like it’s the worst thing they’ve been through together, but he guesses that’s part of the problem. They weren’t together this time. Not really. Not when it mattered, until the moment that it mattered most. But they got there by the skin of their teeth, by slivers of moments, and Eddie has spent a great deal of time since then trying not to dwell on what might have happened if one single thing had gone just a little bit differently.
If he’d been better and faster. If then, he wouldn’t have to be worried about a single unanswered text. If he’d been slightly slower, or if he hadn’t seen the truck when he did. If then—
That’s the part that Eddie doesn’t want to think about, especially now that he has managed to pry open his own cage of ribs and extract that glowing, sparkling feeling that he gets when he’s around Buck. Since he put his hand on Buck’s face and made a realization that had come just so close to too late. Since he’s turned that feeling over in his palm like a stone worn smooth and got a real good look at it and figured out what it is and what it means.
He hasn’t told anybody yet. Not even Christopher. For now— until they’re past this, whatever that looks like— this feeling and the name for it is all Eddie’s.
He flips his sun visor down against an onslaught of golden, bright late afternoon sunshine and navigates easily out of his own neighborhood. He knows the route to Buck’s house by heart, if a little less intimately than he used to. The turns to get to Buck’s loft were deeply ingrained in Eddie’s memory, but the way to Buck’s house will prove that way soon enough, too. It’s been less than a year since Buck moved out of the South Bedford Street house and into this one, but already Eddie doesn’t have to think too hard about where he’s going when he sets off between the two.
Today, his mind wanders more than usual. And by the time he’s turning onto Buck’s street, the earlier flickers of anxiety have sparked into something more resembling dangerously hot embers, the beginnings of a true fire if he’s not careful.
Slowing down as he approaches Buck’s house, he thinks about wet blankets and hose protocol. Buck’s truck is parked outside where it belongs, which should be a good sign. He should be feeling relieved already, putting his own truck into park and getting out into the still warm day. Strangely, he doesn’t. He feels just as on-edge and keyed up as before, and none of it is eased by the hollow emptiness that he’s met with when he knocks twice on the door.
He stands there, waiting in the shade just outside of Buck’s house as nothing stirs inside. Beneath the wall of his chest, something twists anxiously and he reaches out to knock again, listening to the sound as it echoes.
Nothing.
Eddie hesitates, glancing back at the street and at Buck’s truck like it might will him into appearing in front of him. It doesn’t— everything stays picturesque and quiet on Buck’s corner lot, except for Eddie shifting his weight and biting lightly into his lip.
He reaches into his pocket, extracting his keyring and flipping it mindlessly until his fingers land on the key to Buck’s house. He slides it into the lock with just as much ease, distantly thinking of the first time Buck pressed a key to his place into Eddie’s hand. Like so much else, he’d handed that power over to Eddie as if it was nothing at all. He’s been doing that ever since— handing over pieces of himself to Eddie like bloody offerings, like things that don’t matter.
But they do. More than Buck knows— more than Eddie had known until recently. Everything looks just a little bit different to him now, cast in the morning glow of the day he’s found himself in.
“Buck?” he calls, stepping over the threshold into the hallway of Buck’s house. It’s all quiet here, and as he glances around and listens closely for the familiar sounds of Buck moving around a sense of unease creeps over him. It only strengthens as he moves deeper into the house— peeking down the hallway to Buck’s apparently empty bedroom and rounding the corner into the kitchen to find it empty, too.
He doubles back and stands at the glass of the doors between Buck’s dining room and his backyard, hoping that he’s going to find Buck on the patio— but there’s nothing.
Buck isn’t here.
There is a version of Eddie who is rational. The version who, at nineteen, had gone off to war and held his own in the face of blazing gunfire and the kind of danger that he doesn’t see even now, even with the life that he has. He holds onto that Eddie, a lot of the time.
Maybe, he thinks a little wildly as he turns in a helpless circle in Buck’s dining room, he’s held onto that Eddie a little too tightly, for a little too long. Maybe it was inevitable, getting here. Overall, he’s been doing better: going to Texas and getting his son back; learning how to grieve without blowing up his whole life; trying his best to be calmer and focus more on what matters. It’s all been feeling like it leads to something for the last year— but now, New Mexico and Buck and the feelings that have been set free in Eddie and all the things that are beginning to make sense to him.
It would be a lot for anybody, probably. It’s a lot for Eddie anyway.
“Buck?” he calls again, his voice bouncing back at him. It’s useless— he knows it is, but there’s a part of him that just hopes he’s wrong, hopes Buck is going to appear around the corner as Eddie walks back through the hallway, back into the living room.
He reaches into his pocket, heart sinking, and pulls out his phone. Of course, there’s no text back from Buck. He bypasses texting altogether and clicks the favorites button; one more tap and he’s dialing Buck’s phone, but it just rings. He tries it again, and this time hears a faint buzzing, barely audible. He pauses to listen to it, and then follows it: down the hallway, around the corner, into Buck’s bedroom.
His phone. It’s lying on the bed, connected to the charger, face-down. Unattended, of course.
Something familiar, its touch like an old friend that Eddie never meant to get into business with, climbs into his throat. A vinelike encroaching. Fear: the kind that had followed him out into the desert of Afghanistan once and then followed him all the way back home and even found him not so long ago on his knees in a different desert altogether. Eddie and dry ground know each other like brothers.
Buck isn’t here. Eddie is looking at the space where Buck should be and he isn’t in it for the second time in as many weeks, and all of a sudden he might as well be seeing bright blinding light and the face of a doctor who told him he was confused, concussed. He was concussed, and his head was pounding for days afterward, but he had woken up and turned to look at Buck and found that he wasn’t there.
Now, Eddie thinks he’s always going to be looking for Buck, no matter how many empty rooms he wakes up in.
He leaves Buck’s phone where it is and goes back out into the living room. By the time he gets there, his chest is physically tight: feeling like the vine in his throat is also winding mercilessly around his lungs, digging in thorns and growing healthy and strong with broad leaves and heavy fruit that sinks down into Eddie and turns his stomach. He’s taken over by it before he can pause to think; and then, he can’t think at all because of the cotton in his head, and dread drips over his spine in thin icecold rivulets. He stands in Buck’s living room and spirals, one thought into another with no space between until the words break into letters and dissolve to nothing coherent beyond Buck.
As it has been with much of Eddie’s thoughts lately, it begins and ends there. His throat closes up and he runs a shaking hand through his hair and isn’t sure when he started shaking or why. There’s an insistent tug at the base of his spine that tells him he has to go and find Buck but the vines have grown down along his knees, over his ankles, rooting him in place and he isn’t sure he can go anywhere.
He’s going to have to stand here, be stuck here, while Buck is somewhere else. Isn’t there a limit on this stuff? Eddie wonders. How many times can Buck get out safely before he doesn’t anymore? How many times can Eddie find him? And if Eddie doesn’t— who will? If Eddie is stuck here, and Buck is out there—
The door opens.
Sunlight pours into the room in the form of Buck’s body where it takes up space in the room, in the way he looks up and the way he holds himself and the way his eyes light up— just for the barest fraction of a second— at the sight of Eddie. This sunlight burns Eddie’s eyes and makes them sting, and wilts the leaves and withers the fruit to dust and Buck is standing in front of him and suddenly Eddie is furious in a way that he doesn’t usually allow himself to be anymore.
“Hey, Eddie,” Buck says too casually, too easily, warm from the sun and seemingly safe and okay with fading bruises painted over his skin. But Eddie hears it as it had been: weak and wheezing in the dusty air outside of a house that could have swallowed him up and kept him forever, should one thing have gone wrong.
When words come, they slice his tongue with their sharpness.
“Where the hell were you?” he asks.
Buck blinks, the easy expression breaking and falling to disrepair on his features. Eddie hates that, hates himself for it, because it’s his words and his tone of voice that are doing that but he can’t stop himself either.
“I was—” Buck starts, tilting his head and taking a tentative step in Eddie’s direction. “What’s wrong?”
“Where were you?” Eddie demands, heating up all over.
“At the neighbor’s,” Buck answers, gesturing vaguely over his shoulder. “She asked for my help with something, so—”
“Your help?” Eddie repeats. “You’re injured, Buck, or did you forget that?”
Buck’s eyes flash and some deep, wrong, bitter part of Eddie that speaks like Texas thinks: good. It’s what he wanted, for Buck to get mad back at him, because he’s the one who deserves for someone to be mad at them in the first place. Not Buck.
“No, Eddie,” he retorts. “I didn’t forget that. What’s wrong with you, why are you being like this?”
The words keep coming and Eddie’s cottonsoft composure is no match for them, tearing to shreds and giving way to their sharp corners. Eddie unravels slowly, and then all at once.
“Why am I—” he scoffs. “You can’t ignore my texts and expect me to—”
“I didn’t ignore you,” Buck interjects. He’s studying Eddie now and his blue eyes are so bright, and he looks so alert, and if that’s the case why is it that all Eddie can see is the fluttering of pale lashes beneath the blazing sun?
“That’s the definition of ignoring me,” Eddie says. “I texted you and you didn’t—”
“I didn’t have my phone,” Buck says. “That’s different.”
Eddie huffs, shaking his head. “After all this, you still don’t even get—”
“Get what?” Buck asks, exasperated.
Eddie hates this. Everything about it feels wrong, like all the other times he’s ever tried to fight with Buck. It’s worse now, because he knows that the unmoored feeling in his chest is a kind of love he’d begun to doubt himself capable of, while it was living beneath his ribs all along.
He looks at Buck, standing whole and safe across the living room, and is so desperately in love with him that it blurs his vision and strips him of rational thought. It washes over him so fully that it renders him helpless against it and wild, like something caught in a trap. His heart, thrashing. Having the words for it doesn’t make it easier or better to feel it.
“That you can’t act like this!” Eddie insists. “You can’t— after what just happened, you can’t wander off without your phone or ignore your texts, Buck, it’s—”
“It’s what?”
“Irresponsible!” Eddie says.
Buck shakes his head. “Eddie, I was next door for like an hour,” he says. “What am I supposed to do? You want me to-to look around every corner for kidnappers for the rest of my life?”
“Oh, my god,” Eddie scoffs. “Of course you’re not taking this seriously.”
“Eddie,” Buck sighs.
Eddie flickers back, flamelike reels of seconds trapped in moments coming to him with vividity. Everything from as recently as two weeks ago to years earlier: images of Buck in and out of his life and in and out of his house and in and out of consciousness. Buck, absent, rooms empty without him. Buck asleep in front of him but vacant. Buck covered in blood and dirt but never backing down for an instant. Buck’s chest caving, ribs splintering, beneath Eddie’s hands.
How is he supposed to forgive himself, he wonders— for this onslaught of love and tenderness and marrowsoft guilt? Everything feels twisted up suddenly. Buck is angry at him and should be, because Eddie is angry at himself, but he wants to take it all back and hide somewhere soft, and if that makes him a weak thing then maybe he is.
“Why are you mad at me?” Buck asks.
“I’m not mad at you!” Eddie answers instinctively.
“You seem mad at me.”
“No,” Eddie growls. “I’m not mad, I just—”
“You just think I’m irresponsible,” Buck says, like he can’t help himself. “Like always, right?”
“Yes,” Eddie says, then shakes his head. “No.”
“I’m irresponsible for going outside for an hour? Eddie, I’m not a prisoner!”
Anymore, Eddie thinks distantly. His chest tightens at the thought of it, at the memory of Buck’s raw inner wrists and the coiling feeling that had turned hot and painful beneath his own lungs at the sight of their red shiny blisters which have faded to nothing now, not even a scar.
“I just think it’s reckless,” he says.
“Reckless?” Buck repeats incredulously. “This stuff happens to me, Eddie! I wasn’t doing anything and it still happened.”
Eddie flinches. “But after everything that—” he starts.
Buck throws his hands up, visibly frustrated now, and Eddie can’t really blame him for that with the way they’re going in circles over nothing. He wishes he’d never said anything. Wishes for softness.
“I wasn’t even the one driving,” Buck snaps.
Eddie spins out to a stop: like tires screeching, like loss of control, like losing the thing that matters second-most to him in the world before he ever gets a chance to realize it. He spins like he’s beneath the scattered stars over the desert, like there’s nothing but dry ground beneath him, like there’s nothing, nothing anywhere except the crash and then the quiet.
They look at each other: Eddie with his eyes wide and Buck with something familiar dawning over his face, an instant regret breaking through on features. Eddie remembers the light in the car, the morning, brief snatches of confusion and the feeling of wanting.
No. Eddie had been driving.
Like the crash, it happens when you least expect it. He’d thought he had the wheel in his grasp, thought he was handling it, and then he wasn’t. He’d also thought he had himself held firmly, until he was standing in front of Buck’s blue gaze and bursting into tears.
His vision blurs and he feels himself start to shake and it’s not like it’s the first time he’s ever broken down in front of Buck but he’s the one who got out of all this safely and Buck is the one who should be crying, and there are words creeping into his head from bright Texas evenings that he doesn’t want to hear, that he doesn’t believe. He’s supposed to be stronger than this, and better, and—
“I’m sorry,” he sobs, his chest heaving. “I’m sorry, I’m—”
“Oh, hey,” Buck says, and his voice is so different now, full of all the softness that Eddie had been selfishly wishing for. “Eddie.” And then he’s in Eddie’s space and all Eddie can think to do is step back.
He retracts, pulls away from the fingertips offering him everything he wants, and shakes his head violently.
“I’m sorry,” he chokes. “You’re right, I— I was—”
“No,” Buck soothes, his voice sort of distant. Eddie can’t look at his face, so he looks at his hands instead: and they’re good hands, strong and familiar and outstretched and steady. Eddie wants to fold into them, to let Buck smooth his palms over his shoulders, to let Buck’s still-faintly scraped knuckles brush against him.
He’s always wanted so many things that he doesn’t deserve.
But Buck is still there, with his steady hands, still standing in front of him and speaking softly.
“No,” he says again, gently. His voice is a balm like nothing else that Eddie knows. “I didn’t mean it like that, Eddie; hey. Look at me, Eds.”
Eddie does. He can’t help it. He raises his head before he can even think about it, and Buck is in front of him, his blue eyes so warm and his brows scrunched into an expression of deep, aching concern.
“I didn’t mean that,” Buck pleads with him, still so softly. “I meant— I meant it wasn’t my fault, but I didn’t mean it was yours. Nothing was your fault, Eddie.”
“It was,” Eddie sniffles. The tears keep coming and his throat burns and he feels like he’s going to break with the pressure in his chest. “I should have—”
“Eddie,” Buck breathes. “Hey. Come here.”
Eddie is weak and selfish and needs things that he shouldn’t, and wants things he isn’t sure he should be allowed to have because they might end up broken with the force of his hands, but Buck is plaintive and alive and Eddie goes with all his weakness, because Buck had asked him to.
He steps closer and then Buck envelops him in a hug that is big and warm and encompassing. He scrunches his face against the sob that climbs into his throat but can’t quite manage to stifle it; it ends up muffled against Buck’s shoulder and Eddie thinks about all the things he touches and manages to hurt.
But Buck doesn’t move; doesn’t flinch; doesn’t break at all. Like his hands, the rest of him holds steady as he wraps his arms around Eddie and turns his head, his breath ghosting the sensitive skin behind Eddie’s ear.
“You’re okay,” he whispers. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”
Eddie shakes his head. “I was driving,” he says, his voice wavering.
“No, no,” Buck soothes. His hand is on Eddie’s back, still steady, and warm where his palm presses to tshirt to skin to spine. “It wasn’t your fault, Eddie. It doesn’t matter who was driving, okay?”
Eddie nods, a tiny movement. Buck smoothes his hand over Eddie’s back and Eddie remembers the first night after: the two of them in a dim hospital room with the curtain drawn and enclosing them in just one hospital bed. There was an empty one on the other side and sunset had come and gone and the nightmare day that Eddie had woken up in was over, just like that, giving way to the blackness of night beyond the window. The same one Eddie had climbed out of just that morning.
And Buck was there, and he was banged up and on pain medication but he was there and himself and he laughed when Eddie took his cup of applesauce and said that it was repayment for the one the sheriff had stolen from him that morning. Buck didn’t even know what was funny, and he laughed anyway, and it was like spilling gold all over the floor.
And maybe that was the moment that Eddie had known he couldn’t live without him. Not ever again. And maybe he’s been scared ever since, and maybe none of this was really about waiting until they were better to say something but more about all the ways that Eddie doesn’t want to fuck it up.
The truth is, he knows that Buck loves him back.
He’s not afraid that he doesn’t, but maybe he’s a little afraid of what it means that he does, and what it will mean for them if Eddie turns out to be just as bad at this as he’s always been. He’s afraid that Buck deserves better. He’s afraid of failing. He’s afraid— ultimately, just as he has been for years now— of losing Buck.
But at the moment, with Buck wrapping him in a hug that holds on and covers and warms, Eddie isn’t sure he ever could. Like whiplash, like the car crash, he’s suddenly thinking that it feels like daylight.
He wraps his fingers in the back of Buck’s tshirt and clings to him, a death grip wrinkling the fabric.
Buck hums, a soft incoherent noise, and turns his head until his cheek is pressed against the side of Eddie’s head. They’re so close— and it’s far from the first time they’ve been close like this, but something feels different and new about it to Eddie now.
“I got you,” Buck whispers.
This has always been true. They’ve always had each other.
Eddie remembers the feeling of his pulse against his fingertips and the look on his face. I am the other guy, he’d rasped up at Eddie and Eddie knows, he knows, he’s known in his bones and the cells of his body for longer than he’s been able to admit any of it to himself.
“I’m sorry,” he sniffles. “I just— I was—”
Buck is quiet for a beat. “Scared?” he asks gently.
Eddie nods, and Buck nods back at him, then pulls away a little bit. “I know,” he says, his face close enough to be visible but blurred. “I could tell you were scared. It scared me,” he half-breathes and half-laughs. “You’re never scared.”
“I’m always scared,” Eddie whispers.
Buck’s face softens. “Sit down,” he says. “Let me get you some water.”
Eddie watches him walk away and lets it happen even when he doesn’t want to, lets him go and listens to the sounds of him in the kitchen as he sinks slowly down onto the couch. When Buck comes back, he perches himself on the edge of the coffee table and their knees knock together and Eddie takes the glass of cool water from him mutely.
They’re quiet, and Eddie drinks what Buck has given him, and then the clink of the glass on its coaster breaks the silence.
Buck is looking at him, Eddie can feel that he is. He leans forward over his knees, scrubs a hand over his dry face and itchy eyes, and feels Buck’s gaze on his head.
“I’m sorry,” Buck offers softly. “I didn’t mean to scare you, Eddie.”
Eddie gives a small shake of his head. “I wasn’t being fair,” he admits. “You’re not a… a prisoner.”
“Anymore,” Buck says, though his voice is much lighter than the one in Eddie’s head had been.
Eddie looks up, and Buck is looking back at him like always. Steadysteadysteady.
“How do you do that?” he wonders.
Buck shrugs one shoulder a little. “Things happen. I don’t know. Sometimes it’s easier and sometimes it’s harder.”
Eddie’s chest squeezes. He reaches out without thinking and puts his hand on Buck’s knee. “Has it been hard?”
“Not so much,” Buck tells him. “Not yet. I don’t know, Eddie, I— I think you just have to take this stuff a little at a time, maybe.”
His voice sounds bare and stripped back and Eddie comes to realize that Buck is being brave by saying as much; that he’s admitting to Eddie something that may be hard for him to admit to himself.
He gives his knee a light squeeze. “I’m sorry I scared you, too,” he says.
“It’s okay,” Buck answers. “But— uh. Are you okay?”
Eddie wants to rebuke the question altogether, deflect, return. He forces air into his lungs instead, nodding slowly.
“Sometimes,” he says. “Better now.”
“You know,” Buck says, inching forward in that eager way he does, leaning in like he always wants to be closer to Eddie. “If—if you want to talk about it, or if you’re scared, I’m—”
Something comes over Eddie then. Later, he won’t be able to say what it was other than the obvious: an overwhelming truth to the confession that comes out of his mouth well before its time or maybe at just the right moment.
“Buck, I’m in love with you,” Eddie says.
His voice doesn’t shake and the room doesn’t collapse, but he does close his eyes at the sound of the words and squeeze his expression shut tight as his heart takes off racing in his chest.
There’s a golden, shimmering thread of silence and then he breaks it.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Fuck, that is really not how I wanted to say that. None of this is—”
“Not how you wanted to say it?” Buck interjects.
Eddie opens his eyes.
Buck looks—
Beautiful, like always, with the shadow of stubble on his jaw and his pale delicate lashes framing bright, wet blue eyes; the faint remains of healing bruises across his face and a red line across the bridge of his nose that Eddie desperately wants to kiss.
And he looks like he’s hoping for something. One of the many shades of Evan Buckley, all of which Eddie has more or less committed to memory.
It occurs to Eddie all at once that everything is up to him. He gets to choose; if he messes up, he gets to choose what to do next and if he’s wrong Buck gets to choose to forgive him. Once— what feels something like a lifetime ago now— Eddie had held Buck’s gaze and told him with blazing honesty that there was no one else he trusted more with his son.
Somewhere between that time and now, it’s become true of all things. There’s no one else Eddie trusts more with Christopher; with anything else; with himself. Somewhere along the way, Buck grew into his steadiness and Eddie slowly and painstakingly learned to live in his own body and he’s still learning sometimes.
But maybe this, like healing, like recovery— has to be done a little at a time, and then all at once.
“I don’t know what it means,” Eddie admits. “I haven’t even told Chris anything yet or really settled on anything myself. I think—I think I’m probably gay but I don’t know because it’s all still new and—”
“How new?” Buck interrupts, and then bites his lip. “Sorry. I’m sorry. Go ahead.”
Eddie smiles a little. His hand is still on Buck’s knee and he rubs a gentle, absent circle into the joint.
“Since we got back,” he admits. “Or since I woke up and you weren’t there. Buck, I—”
“But you meant to say it,” Buck says. “Right? You, uh, you didn’t mean to say it now but you meant to say it? Because I can forget you said anything, we can— I can wait if you—”
Eddie shakes his head vehemently. “No, no,” he soothes, and then he’s inching forward too until they’re face to face with their knees overlapping. It’s a little like being in the engine, like where they started across from each other. “I meant to say it, Buck. I meant it. And I don’t want to wait. I don’t want to— to take it back.”
“You don’t?” Buck asks.
“Not if you don’t want me to.”
“No,” Buck breathes. “Don’t. I don’t know what— what does this mean?”
Eddie looks into his face and finds everything in the world that matters to him looking back: a future he’s never been able to see before. One that makes sense, with Christopher and the two of them and whatever else comes to them. Like it’s always been, but better because Eddie is seeing it clearly for the first time.
“I love you,” he says, even more steadily. “Everything else, we can…maybe just figure it out together? If that’s what you want. You’ve been through a lot, too, and if you—”
Buck lunges for him, entirely gracelessly.
Bruises and recently broken ribs and all, he throws himself into Eddie and they manage to end up tangled on the couch as Buck puts both hands on Eddie’s cheeks and kisses him. It’s breathless and Eddie is half-laughing and half worried about Buck pulling something but mostly it’s beautiful: Buck’s weight on him and his mouth against Eddie’s and the scent of grass and sun still clinging to him from a time that now feels far, far away, when Eddie had been panicking and Buck had been next door. He tastes like something that Eddie loves, even if he can’t place what it is, and maybe it’s just Buck, the thing that Eddie loves most of all.
His eyes sting with the rightness of it, the first right kiss he’s ever had, and the knowledge that their lives spread out in front of them. For all the time he’s wasted, if he’s lucky, if he lets go— there’s more than that still left.
Eventually, the angle is too much and Buck collapses into him, half-held up by one palm braced at Eddie’s side, and when they pull apart Eddie has to fight to catch his breath.
“Here,” he breathes, and gently lifts the hand that Buck is holding himself up with, bracing Buck’s weight himself until they’re smushed together on the couch; half-sprawled; Buck’s full weight on top of him.
Buck looks down at him and smiles, and Eddie’s breath catches as he looks up tenderly at the rest of his life wrapped up in blue eyes and flushed cheeks.
“Buck,” he murmurs.
“You’re sure?” Buck whispers back.
Eddie nods. “I’m— I’m scared,” he says with honesty that a younger version of himself was not capable of. “But I’m sure.”
Buck’s smile turns soft: like the cotton in Eddie’s head, but so much better, made of sugar out on the boardwalk the next summer after the tsunami when they all went and forgot the bad parts together.
“I love you,” Buck says.
Eddie has never doubted this. It’s the anchor in everything: the truest thing he knows.
“I love you,” he whispers back, reaching up and brushing his fingers over the bridge of Buck’s nose where the remains of bruising have turned nearly invisible.
Buck reaches up, with the air of someone trying something daring, and takes Eddie’s wrist in his hand; sweeping his fingers up, he kisses them lightly and then lets go and Eddie could cry all over again at the tenderness of it.
“I won’t disappear on you again,” Buck says.
Eddie wonders if other people feel like this, or if it’s only him who’s ever loved someone this much, this deeply and vastly.
“Promise?” he asks.
“Mhm,” Buck says. “I promise.”
Eddie does not believe in alternate universes any more than he believes in ghosts, fairies, Santa Muerte, the boogieman, or a punishing God who might send little boys to hell should they ever be led astray.
He hopes he’s right about that, because he hopes that this timeline: this one, where he and Buck keep each other safe and make promises, is the one that’s real. The only one. The one where Buck gets out of New Mexico and they wade through the waters together. The one where Eddie learns who he is and then teaches himself to love that person. The one where they are brave for each other.
“So,” Buck says after a moment. “Now what?”
Eddie smiles. His eyes are still itchy and Christopher is at home waiting for dinner and there are so many hurdles to step over. But there’s a kind of lightness in him that is new and that sparkles and he and Buck are safely across the California state line and smushed together on the couch.
Everything beyond that: the challenges of healing from this and the challenges that will come afterward, from events that neither of them sees coming just yet; the ins and outs of learning to love each other in a new and different way; the stuff that he can’t begin to guess at; the mistakes and the inevitable failures. They’ll come, and sometimes they’ll come in a way that feels impossible.
The future is, and always has been, uncertain. But there’s one thing that Eddie does know, now, in a way that has been right in front of him all along, should he have just looked in the right place to find it.
“Now,” he says, turning his head and leaning forward to kiss Buck on his cheek. “We do it together. A little at a time.”