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“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Eddie looks up from the puzzle he’s helping Christopher with on Buck’s living room floor.
Well, he says helping…but Christopher had retreated to the sofa an hour ago and fallen asleep there waiting for dinner, leaving Eddie alone as he tries to force an edge piece to fit.
“Tell you what?” he asks as he looks back down, tossing the piece away with a scowl. “I swear this thing is defective,” he mutters.
Buck sighs.
“You know what, Eddie,” he says tiredly.
And Eddie does. Of course he does.
That doesn’t mean he wants to talk about it.
“I didn’t tell you because it wasn’t important,” he says, trying to play it off. “It was just a blip, and it’s taken care of already.”
“A blip, huh?” Buck questions. “That why you almost froze trying to do CPR?”
Eddie stiffens, forces his limbs loose again. He knows Buck saw when a heavy hand lands on his shoulder, and squeezes once.
“Sorry,” Buck says, softer. “None of my business.”
It is, Eddie wants to say. You’re my friend, it’s all your business.
“Ana freaked out,” he says instead, as an olive branch. “I don’t think she knew what she was getting into, with me.” His eyes drift to the sofa, where Christopher sleeps with his mouth open, a wet spot on the pillow Buck had tucked under his head.
“With us,” he corrects, remembering her reaction to being called Christopher’s mom. The quickness with which she had corrected the clerk.
The distance she had kept at his bedside.
Buck walks past him, settles on the floor opposite.
“Well,” he says, not bothering to ask why. “That sucks.”
Eddie laughs, quiet.
“Yeah,” he agrees. “It does.”
Buck smiles, and Eddie returns it. There’s something easy about it, something right. The way he sees Buck look to Christopher, his smile gentling as he does, before turning his attention back to Eddie. The way he seems to understand that Eddie needs to put it behind him, for now, at least for the night.
Buck reaches, leans across the incomplete puzzle to pick up the piece Eddie had discarded in frustration. He lifts it, places it down an inch to the left of where Eddie had tried.
“This piece isn’t defective,” Buck says, fitting it in place easily. “You just hadn’t found where it belonged.”
The doorbell rings, and Buck gets to his feet.
“That’ll be the pizza,” he says. “I’ll get that, you wake up the kid.”
Eddie stares at the now-completed corner of the puzzle for a moment as Buck goes, hearing low voices as the door opens for their delivery. Wonders how Buck always manages to make things fit. In puzzles, in his life.
In their life.
Then he gets up, and does as he’s told.