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The table’s hideous.
Eddie, truthfully, doesn’t care a whole lot about what the loft looks like. They’ve got four grown men and one ten year old living in a four bedroom, the dining room converted into a fifth with a fake wall that Eddie and Chimney spent an entire forty-eight off building. Eddie’s just grateful to not have any visible mold.
But the table is truly, visibly, undeniably hideous.
It’s long, but narrow, only deep enough for maybe a wallet, made of a dark-stained wood, shaped like a huge bracket on its side. Just three slabs of wood somehow glued together. The top is absolutely covered in massive scratches, like whoever owned this before it found its way to Eddie’s home also owned a wild cat, and the legs on either side are just barely holding onto what’s left of approximately one billion tiny squares of stained glass. Where pieces of glass have been lost to time and possibly a jungle cat, dark splotches of dried glue remain.
It’s a hideous, hideous table. And now it’s in his entry way.
“You know,” Ravi says, only a second after the door to the loft swings open, “I don’t think you know how to play basketball.”
Chimney scoffs, his sunglasses pushed up to rest on the top of his head. They’re both in baggy basketball shorts and jerseys for teams Eddie knows neither of them watch, because they stole both of those jerseys from Buck’s closet, the remnants of a really embarrassing phase he had last year.
Chimney’s knees are skinned, dirty, and there’s a smudge of actual mud under his right eye. Ravi’s completely clean in comparison, only sweaty and vaguely rumpled with a basketball tucked under his arm, like he’s in High School Musical.
“I know how to play basketball,” Chimney says, puffing up his chest.
Ravi’s eyebrows raise, sceptical. “Okay. It’s just that I’ve never seen someone spend so much time on the grass during a basketball game.”
Chimney’s mouth opens, but before he has the chance to argue the point, he catches sight of the — once again, it can’t be stressed enough — truly hideous table and raises his hand. “What is that?”
Eddie adjusts his grip on his mug, leaning against the back of the couch. “It’s a table.”
Chimney’s eyes narrow into a glare. “I can see that it’s a table. What’s it doing here?”
Eddie’s saved from having to answer by Buck making his entrance, armed with pink cleaning gloves and a bucket of cleaning supplies.
“There you two are,” he says, grinning brightly. Eddie’s cool, so he doesn’t consider swooning like a teenage girl in the middle of Beatlemania. “You see my awesome find? Someone was just throwing it out, can you believe it?”
“Yeah,” Ravi says, shaking his head as he steps away, “I’m not getting involved.”
Eddie raises his mug in his direction, inclining his head. “Smart man.”
Ravi squeezes Eddie’s shoulder on his way past, ducking under the bed sheet that operates as the door to his dining room bedroom.
“I can believe that, Buck,” Chimney says. Buck frowns, looking up from where he’s wiping ineffectually at the table with a washcloth. “Because it’s hideous.”
Buck blinks big doe eyes. Eddie, unrelated, considers the pros and cons of moving to Antarctica. “What?”
“It’s the ugliest table I’ve ever seen. I’m personally offended you brought it into this house.” Chimney folds his arms across his chest. Eddie waves a mournful goodbye to rationality. “There is no way that thing is staying here.”
“Why not?” Buck straightens, mirroring Chimney’s stance. On Chimney it was funny, but on Buck the movement stretches the sleeves of his shirt around suddenly bulging biceps. Which is so fine.
“This is a common area, Evan.”
“I live here too, Howard.”
Chim narrows his eyes, leaning closer until his nose is nearly touching Buck’s. In a slow whisper, Chim says, “Do you?”
In the same voice, Buck says, “What does that mean?”
Eddie pushes away from the couch, deciding quite definitively that he wants to be anywhere else but here.
“Buck,” he says over his shoulder on his way out, “we still on for Christopher’s play Friday night?”
Buck doesn’t look away from Chimney, their narrowed eyes locked in some weird brotherly death match that Eddie can’t understand. He has sisters; they would’ve pulled his hair or kicked his shin by now.
“Of course,” he says, and his voice is bright and kind and warm even as everything else about him screams the opposite. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Chimney’s hand slowly edges toward the table.
There’s no warmth in his tone at all when Buck snaps, “Chimney, if you touch that table I will set fire to every single pair of sunglasses you own.”
Eddie’s been to war. Eddie’s a firefighter. Eddie has a ten year old child. He is brave and strong and has weathered more traumas than most people should probably have to face.
And he is not ashamed at all to run away from his roommates.
The apartment very quickly descends into chaos.
Eddie’s not sure what he’s expecting, this long into living with these people. None of them are capable of being rational or normal about anything. Last month he and Ravi spent an entire week competing to see who could avoid using the letter S because of one game of Scrabble. Eddie had to temporarily rename his child. Ravi stopped referring to his boyfriend by name altogether. The month before, they wasted an entire day fighting over a parking spot. Ravi peed behind Eddie’s truck and Buck ate a bug.
So. They’re not, overall, a rational group. Buck and Chimney turning their apartment into a warzone over a table is maybe an inevitability.
That doesn’t mean Eddie has to like it, especially not at six in the morning.
Buck backs away from the table, feeding a thin, nearly invisible line of fishing wire as he does, until he makes it to his usual spot at the kitchen table next to Eddie. Eddie slides his bowl of oats in front of him and Buck digs a spoon into it without looking, eyes on his table.
“Now if Chim tries to grab the table, I’ll be ready,” Buck says, mouth full. Ravi wrinkles his nose. Eddie might find it endearing, but that’s his business. “All I have to do is pull this string and it’ll trip him.”
“You don’t think that’s dangerous?” Ravi says. He’s got an amused grin he’s failing to tuck away, so Eddie knows he’s only saying it because he thinks he’s the voice of reason in the loft. (He isn’t. Christopher is.)
“It better be,” Buck says, because he’s officially lost the plot. In the space of a second Buck straightens in his seat, some kind of realization sliding over his features as he looks around.
“Carla already picked Christopher up,” Eddie says, only half awake but alert enough to tell when Buck’s concerned about corrupting Eddie’s child.
Buck’s shoulders relax, but only for a moment before he’s snapping back to attention, glaring protectively at his table.
Ravi shakes his head, snorting into his eggs. “This is why I’m never introducing any of you to my boyfriend.”
“I’ve met your boyfriend,” Eddie says. He stares mournfully down at his empty coffee cup, and without looking Buck slides his over into Eddie’s pliant hands.
Eddie’s heart gives one pathetic thump in his chest.
“What?” Ravi snaps, voice reaching a pitch high enough to make Eddie wince. It’s too goddamn early.
“I’ve met your boyfriend,” he repeats, deadpan. “We go running together.”
Buck, finally, turns away from his table and sets narrowed, suspicious eyes on Eddie. “You go running?” he says, pointing his oatmeal-y spoon at him. “Outside? In public? Where other people can see you?”
Eddie raises his eyebrows. “Yes. I’m a firefighter. I run.”
Buck’s mouth twitches into a smile, something distinctly amused. Eddie is very, very cool about it, even as he mentally counts backwards from ten. “At what time of day do you do this running?”
“The morning.”
“You are lying,” Buck laughs. The action brightens his eyes, gouges dimples into his cheeks. Eddie counts backwards from twenty. “You are lying right to my face.”
Eddie bites down, hard, on the inside of his cheek to keep himself from grinning like an idiot at six in the fucking morning just because Buck smiled at him.
“Hey, hey,” Ravi says, waving his hand in front of Eddie’s face frantically. He still has paint smudged on his wrist from his and Buck’s tipsy competition to paint Bobby from memory the night before. “What do you mean you go running with my boyfriend?”
He had offers from Chicago stations. Sure, he doesn’t have family in Chicago, and his ex-wife hadn’t run away to Chicago, but he’s pretty sure he wouldn’t be fantasizing about slamming his head against the kitchen table right now if he were in Chicago.
“I run,” he says, dry, as he sets unimpressed eyes on Ravi. “Outside. Your boyfriend is also there. And, sometimes, his dog.”
Ravi blinks, blinks again, and then blinks a third time. His fork hits the edge of his plate with an awful clang of metal against ceramic. Eddie winces, not that anybody cares. “You go running with my boyfriend and his dog?”
“What’s happening?” Eddie asks the universe at large, glancing sluggishly between Ravi’s wide-eyed shock and Buck’s crinkly-eyed amusement. “Where am I?”
Chimney enters stage left with thundering footsteps, waving a wand of actual physical cash in his hand like a Bond villain. “I’m prepared to offer you one hundred American dollars to throw out that table.”
“My boyfriend,” Ravi repeats, “and his dog.”
Buck stands, his chair scraping against the floor and his fist pulling his fishing line taunt as he steps away. His other hand points a single, furious finger at Chim. “I will die with that table,” he hisses. “I will strap that table to my chest and lie down across train tracks.”
Eddie cups Buck’s mug — hand painted by Christopher at a Colour Me Mine, BUCK + CHRIS = BFFS surrounded by hearts and sea turtles — between his hands, pulls it towards his chest and hunches protectively over it. To the too-dark liquid he says, “I should have moved to Chicago.”
Chimney takes a step forward and instantly trips over the fishing wire.
(After Chimney picks himself off of the floor and spends a colourful ten minutes threatening Buck’s life, Eddie finishes the last of Buck’s coffee and reminds everyone present that they have jobs. They file out of the apartment, but Ravi doubles back to grab his phone from where he left it plugged in next to his bed.
He disappears behind his bed sheet wall and, barely a second later, let’s out a very high pitched squeak.
He stumbles back through the sheet to the living room, his phone clutched in one slightly shaky hand. “Guys,” he calls, “there’s a — there’s a really fucking big spider! Guys?”
The apartment is empty. Ravi stares mournfully at the front door, and then even more mournfully at his room. He left his charger behind.
The spider was really big.
Ravi turns his back on his room. He’ll just borrow a charger from Hen.)
The rest of the week follows in similar fashion.
On Tuesday Chimney waits until four o’clock in the morning to sneak out of his room. The second he puts his hands on the table Buck shoots him with a water gun from where he was lying in wait, sitting on the couch in the pitch dark. Chimney denies having screamed, but something wakes Ravi up enough to witness the event and relay the information back to the entire A shift.
The next day Buck covers the entire thing in mouse traps.
The day after that Chimney offers him two hundred dollars, and then three hundred dollars, and then his room with the slightly bigger closet.
At that, Buck pauses, considering, but only long enough to turn to where Eddie’s lying on his back across the couch with a warm dish cloth over his eyes, trying to remind himself that he loves these people, insanity and all. “Does Chris want Chim’s room?” he asks, and Eddie’s heart auditions for So You Think You Can Dance? inside of his ribcage.
“No,” Christopher shouts from down the hall, because when he hit the double digits he also gained super hearing. “Chimney’s room smells weird.”
Chimney sputters uselessly for a moment before he shouts back, “That’s cologne!”
Ravi snorts from the end of the couch, where he’s got Eddie’s feet in his lap because this apartment does not have nearly enough seating for the illegal number of tenants it has. “It is so not cologne, dude.”
Silence and then Chim admits, tone defeated, “I don’t know what the smell is. It was there when we moved in.”
Eddie shifts, lifting the cloth from his eyes to inspect the pillow he’s just pulled out from between the couch cushions. His life took a terrible turn at some point in the last four years, because he instantly recognizes it as Ravi’s.
“Dude, did you sleep on the couch last night?”
Ravi, for some reason, looks over his shoulder towards his room with wide, scared eyes. “No,” he says, but it comes out like a question.
Eddie narrows his eyes at him, considers posing a follow up, and then ultimately places the cloth back over his eyes. The darkness is comforting.
“No, Buck,” Eddie says, long-suffering and desperate to get the conversation back on track even if that track is the most insane, longest running fight about a piece of furniture Eddie’s ever bore witness to. “Chris doesn’t want the room.”
“Then no deal.”
Eddie needs a vacation. Distance, he thinks, might make him normal again.
Chimney groans like he’s being tortured. “Okay, what about my car?”
So, the war continues. They try to rope Ravi and Eddie into it with varying levels of success: Ravi pretends he can’t hear and disappears to his boyfriend’s apartment for twelve hours; Eddie makes direct eye contact when he deadpans, “No,” and then ends up helping Buck stick mouse traps to the table at two o’clock in the morning anyway.
“I swear I raised him better than this,” Maddie says on Friday, after Buck pauses mid-sentence to cheer about a notification on his phone and then runs full speed out of the kitchen.
Eddie looks up from the cupcake he’s warily slathering with icing. The differences between his cupcakes (topped with sad mounds of uneven white icing), Maddie’s (even swirls of white to blue ombre icing), and Buck’s (similar swirls topped with fondant circles indented with the phrase SEUSSICAL 2022) would be comical if it weren’t so sad.
It was Buck’s dumb idea to volunteer to make cupcakes for the opening night of Christopher’s play. Eddie shouldn’t be blamed for it.
“It’s not your fault,” Eddie assures her, scowling back at his cupcake. No matter how many times he swipes his butter knife over the icing it refuses to smooth out. “There’s something wrong with this apartment. It sucks the rationality out of you.”
“Believe me,” Maddie says, pointedly, though Eddie has no freaking clue which direction she’s pointing in, “I know.”
Eddie sets down his failure of a cupcake so he’s free to dedicate all of his narrow-eyed attention on Maddie. She shifts in her seat, suspicious. “What is it that you know?”
“Nothing,” she promises, eyes a little wide.
“Madeline.”
Maddie’s eyes narrow into a defiant glare as she leans across the kitchen island towards Eddie. “Do you really want to do this with me, Diaz?”
Buck returns, clutching a small box in his hands, before Eddie and Maddie can start a secondary war. He’s got a manic gleam in his eyes that spells trouble, but also kind of makes Eddie hot under the collar.
He ignores Maddie and Eddie completely as he tears open the package, lifting up a second, slightly smaller box branded with some tech company’s logo, a picture of an iPhone displaying an app on the side. Eddie preemptively scowls. When the item in question is finally freed, it’s barely the size of Buck’s thumb, a flat black rectangle with a series tiny lens on the edge.
“What,” Maddie says, “is that?”
“A spy camera,” Buck says, “duh.”
He holds it out on the palm of his hand, allowing Maddie and Eddie to lean forward and inspect it with raised eyebrows and a sceptical glare, respectfully. “I’m gonna plug it in under the table so I can make sure Chimney isn’t up to any funny business while we’re at Christopher’s play.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Maddie says.
Eddie gestures at her with his hand as if to say yes, thank you, exactly. Buck rolls his eyes and Eddie’s shoulders slump, defeated.
“No, it’s smart.” Buck taps a finger against his temple, eyebrows high on his head as he grins at Maddie. Eddie’s just — his life is just so hard. “Chim knows we’ve got this play. He’ll be waiting for me to leave to make his move and I’ll be one step ahead of him.”
Maddie shakes her head, even as she bites her lip against a laugh. “Buck, you have to know the table’s hideous, right?”
It’s a question Eddie had, too, but he knows the answer even before Buck says it.
“Obviously,” Buck says, pointing his phone at a strange symbol on the side of the camera’s box. “I like that it’s ugly. And it’s about the principle of the thing, anyway.” He jabs in Maddie’s direction with his phone once he’s finished with the strange not-barcode-thing and glares. “Why are you on his side, traitor?”
Maddie sputters uselessly for a moment, blinking. “His side? I’m not on Chimney’s side. I don’t even like Chimney. Ew,” Maddie squints her eyes, sticking out her tongue in a blah gesture, “gross. I hate Chimney.”
“What is happening right now?” Eddie asks the universe at large. Buck narrows his eyes at his sister.
Maddie reaches forward, grabs Eddie’s wrist in her hands and twists until she can read the face of his watch. “Look at that,” she crows, ignoring the awkward bend of Eddie’s arm, “it’s almost six.”
Eddie lets out a steady stream of curses, frantically shoving cupcakes into boxes as Buck scrambles to set up his camera and Maddie sits back with a relieved smile.
(After Eddie and Buck cart away half a dozen boxes of cupcakes between the two of them, Ravi returns home with an armful of brooms. He makes a beeline for the kitchen, ignoring Maddie where she’s sitting at the kitchen island and frowning at a book Buck insisted she read. He tears through the drawers, mumbling nonsensically under his breath until he eventually resurfaces with a roll of tape.
“What are you doing?” Maddie questions, eyebrows raising higher and higher as Ravi starts taping the end of the brooms together with a single-minded intensity.
“There’s a spider in my room.”
Maddie laughs, setting Buck’s book down (there’s no chance she’s finishing it; she’ll just look up the SparkNotes later). “A spider? Ravi, you fight fires.”
Ravi glances up from his contraption with a haunted look in his eyes. “It’s a really big spider.”
Maddie rolls her eyes, sliding off of her stool and plucking a tissue from one of the many boxes Buck keeps all over the apartment. She’s commenting idly over her shoulder about the spiders she used to kill for Buck, promising him that they’d go to spider-heaven, as she ducks under Ravi’s sheet.
A second later, she reappears, something haunted in her expression. “We’re gonna need the oven mitts.”)
The entry hallway of Christopher’s school is set up with two parallel lines of folding tables. PTA Chair Beth Ackerman’s teenage daughter is manning a popcorn machine, and a pair of teachers are selling last minute tickets, and a pair of high school students in stage-crew black are handing out playbills, and Eddie and Buck are trying to sell freaking cupcakes.
“I can’t believe you signed us up for this,” Eddie hisses under his breath after Amira Adem’s mom spends ten minutes flirting with Buck, ignoring Eddie’s glare, and then doesn’t even buy a cupcake.
“Come on, Eds,” Buck grins, looking up from their cashbox to pin Eddie’s poor unsuspecting heart to the side of his ribcage like a butterfly display. “Where’s your school spirit?”
“What about me makes you think I ever had school spirit?” Eddie returns, doing a fantastic job of sounding normal, thank you.
Buck’s grin grows; Eddie is super chill about it. “Oh, right,” he says, tone slow and teasing, “I forgot you were so cool, mister chess club.”
Eddie narrows his eyes, stern. “You need to stop talking to my sisters—”
“Mr. Diaz,” a horrifically familiar voice interrupts, “and Mr. Buckley. How nice of you to take time out of your busy schedules to volunteer.”
Eddie doesn’t hate people often. He’s very often annoyed by people, but he doesn’t truly hate them often, and he’s trying to teach Christopher to be kind and understanding. But he hates Deborah Browning, five feet and seven inches of passive aggression and pure evil.
“We’re so glad we could,” Buck gushes, before Eddie can leap over the table and get himself arrested (...again). “Want a cupcake? All the money’s going to the school’s new accessibility fund.”
“Oh,” Deborah says, derisively, as she glances down at their spread. “Some of these are quite…interesting.” Her mouth bends into an amused little curve, dripping condescension.
There’s only a couple of Buck’s cupcakes left, a few more of Maddie’s, but not a single one of Eddie’s has been sold. And Eddie doesn’t care, really, or at least he didn’t until Deborah fucking Manning showed up. Eddie curls his hand into a fist at his side and Buck’s hand lands on the middle of his back, a warning.
“I live to please,” Eddie bites out through clenched teeth.
Buck’s hand presses firmer into his back for only a second before he’s plucking one of Eddie’s hideous cupcakes from the table. “It is interesting, thank you so much for noticing, Debs.”
Deborah’s eyebrows twitch at the nickname. Eddie considers the pros and cons of bending Buck over this table in the middle of his child’s school. Like, as friends.
“It’s actually a super biting commentary on the dangers of enforcing ideals of perfectionism onto children in education. But I get how that message would have just, woosh,” Buck’s free hand carves an upwards arc through the air, landing by his neck, “right over your head.”
Buck thrusts one of Eddie’s hideous cupcakes in Deborah’s direction. “That’ll be one dollar.”
Deborah looks pointedly at the handwritten sign Ravi made for them the night before with his odd collection of calligraphy pens. It says, quite clearly, cupcakes! $0.50/ea. Buck’s smile becomes slightly scary. Deborah narrows her eyes, but dutifully hands over a single crisp dollar bill and walks away with her ugly, ugly cupcake.
There’s an I love you sitting under his tongue that he swallows around, that he’s been swallowing around for weeks or months or several lifetimes. He won’t spit it out for the first time surrounded by teachers and elementary-aged students.
“Hey,” Buck says suddenly, staring at something over Eddie’s shoulder, “isn’t that the teacher you went on a date with?”
Eddie closes his eyes instead of following his gaze. He knows that it is, in fact, Ana Flores, because he saw her at the ticket table the second he walked in and immediately considered fleeing the country. “Buck,” he says, long-suffering, “please.”
When he opens his eyes, Buck’s looking back at him, grinning. “That date where you did math homework?”
Eddie regrets so many things. “I — Christopher needed help,” he defends. “I was helping my son.”
(Several months earlier, Eddie had stood in front of his roommates in the living room, blocking their nightly watch of Love Island with his body and ignoring their chorus of complaints to wave around two sets of papers. “Do I bring math homework or science homework with me on this date?”
Ravi had put his head in his hands while Chimney and Buck stared at him, blankly. “Homework,” Chim had repeated, aghast.
“She’s an English teacher,” Buck reminded him.
Chimney held up a hand, raised his eyebrows, and turned to Buck. “Why do you know that?”
Buck’s eyebrows raised. “Why don’t you know that?”
“Buck’s CC’ed on Christopher’s school emails,” Eddie said, halting what would definitely be a three hour argument in its tracks.
“Of course he is,” Chimney said.
“You people are so weird,” Ravi said.
Eddie waved the papers more vigorously. “Math or science?”
“None,” all three of his traitorous roommates said at once.
“Why would you bring any homework to a date?” Chimney asked, in a tone not dissimilar from the one he used on their more idiotic patients.
“I don’t know,” Eddie said, throwing his arms up. He had spent the better part of four hours freaking out about this, and the better part of three hours trying not to hope that Buck would tell him not to go. “I haven’t been on a date in ten years. What the hell do people do on dates?”
Chimney and Buck exchanged a glance, eyebrows equally high up on their foreheads, before turning back to Eddie.
“Cry,” Chimney said.
“Have sex and then also cry,” Buck said.
“You guys need professional help,” Ravi said.
Eddie pinched the bridge of his nose. “What do you do, Ravi?”
Ravi blinked, opening and closing his mouth for a moment before leaning back and folding his arms. “No comment,” he mumbled.
Eddie sighed. “Math or science?”
Reluctantly, three voices chorused back, “Math.”)
In the present, Buck’s grin twists into something that sets off a series of alarm bells in Eddie’s brain. “Does math turn you on Eddie? Is that why you get all flustered when I calculate a tip for the bill?”
“I get annoyed,” Eddie corrects, “because you don’t know math and you just say a random number.”
Buck straightens, eyebrows set into harsh, serious lines. “They are not random numbers, I just care about waitstaff, Eddie.”
“Hi Edmundo,” Ana says, appearing at their table with a polite smile. Eddie avoids groaning out loud by sheer force of will. Maybe Eddie’s mother can show up next and round out this evening of awful interactions. Ana turns her smile on Buck, holding out a hand. “And you must be Evan, I’ve heard so much about you.”
Buck accepts the handshake with a slightly strained grin. “It’s Buck, actually.”
“Of course,” Ana says, her smile wobbling just a little. “These cupcakes are…um, great! So creative,” she gushes, sounding every bit the elementary school teacher that she is. “Thank you so much for volunteering to do this, Edmundo.”
Eddie fantasizes briefly about moving to Australia and throwing his phone in the ocean.
“Uh, yeah,” he says, faintly, dropping his hand on Buck’s shoulder for his own comfort more than anything, “it was actually Buck’s idea.”
Ana’s eyebrows twitch upwards, her eyes landing on Eddie’s hand, and something in her expression settles. “Oh,” she says, and then, with more enthusiasm, “oh! You know, I always suspected — I mean it’s a little strange, all of you living in that loft — and all of the other teachers told me I was ridiculous to go after you —”
“What?” Eddie interrupts, feeling very suddenly that they’re having completely different conversations. “What are you talking about?”
Ana shakes her head, waving her hand dismissively. “Oh, it doesn’t matter. I just hope you don’t feel like you have to hide your relationship because of me.”
Eddie blinks. Your relationship. He’s suddenly painfully aware of where his thumb’s pressing into the bare skin of Buck’s neck. His life is a fucking joke.
“Right,” Eddie says, faint. “Yup. Our relationship. Because we’re dating. Me and Buck.” He can’t stop talking. “I just love his…nice lips.”
He feels more than he hears Buck’s choke on an aborted laugh.
“Um,” Ana says.
Buck slides his arm around Eddie’s waist, tugging Eddie firmly to his side and laughing amiably. Eddie’s heart freezes in his chest and then drops to the soles of his feet and rattles like a snake. It’s a very complicated process.
“That’s just a silly little thing we say,” Buck says. “He says I have nice lips, I say he has nice ears, it’s a whole cute little couple thing we have going on.”
Ana stares, her default polite smile twitching into a downward curve. “Okay,” she says, and slides a quarter onto the table. “I’m going to walk away now.”
“But you didn’t —” Ana walks away, and Eddie’s shoulders slump “— buy a cupcake. She didn’t buy a cupcake.”
Buck’s laugh borders on hysterical, taking his arm back and stepping away. Eddie mourns the warmth immediately, like a sad, sad, pathetic man.
“You said I had nice lips,” Buck hisses, the second Ana’s out of ear shot, his voice warbling with poorly suppressed laughter. “Who says that?”
An idiot, that’s who says that. A pathetic, stupid, insane idiot. “I panicked,” he hisses back.
“No shit,” Buck laughs. “If you like my lips so much you could just —”
“Hey, you,” Eddie says, stopping a kid as they walk by, “do you know how to start a fire?”
Buck’s eyes widen as the kid’s mouth drops open, alarmed. “He’s just kidding,” Buck says, grinning too wide and gesturing for the kid to keep walking.
Eddie’s been to war. Eddie’s a firefighter. Eddie has a ten year old child. He is brave and strong and has weathered more traumas than most people should probably have to face.
And he is only a little ashamed to run away from his best friend and their cupcakes before Buck has the chance to turn back to him.
“How’d Christopher’s play go?” Chimney asks, frowning at the inside of their fridge. Eddie sympathizes; he tried to find something to eat twenty minutes ago and ultimately resigned himself to waiting for Buck to come back from the gym and save him, which is starting to feel more and more like the theme of his entire life.
“Fine,” Eddie says, in a tone that very distinctly does not sound fine. Chim’s eyebrows shoot up as he closes the fridge. Eddie sighs. “Ana was there, it was — weird. Whatever.”
There is no way in hell Eddie’s telling Chimney about Ana’s assumption, or about that weird thing he said about Buck’s lips, or the way Eddie nearly proposed marriage when Buck hugged Christopher after the play was over.
Chimney will find out about the first two things eventually, and he could probably guess at the third, so Eddie’s not gonna make it any easier for him.
“Weird,” Chim echoes, leaning on the island across from Eddie. “Weirder than doing math homework on a date?”
“Shut up. You don’t get to lecture me about being normal; I saw the flyer you put up in the elevator to sell Buck’s table.”
Chimney tilts his head with a grin. “Uh, I am not trying to sell the table. I’m pretty sure the flyer stated that I would be paying them.”
Eddie rolls his eyes for maybe the one millionth time that week. It’s starting to hurt. “Right, my bad. Why are you being so crazy about this table, anyway? Sure it’s ugly, but if Buck likes it…”
“Oh, if Buck likes it?”
“Shut up, Chim. You know what I mean.”
“Do you know what you mean?”
“Chimney—”
“I’m sleeping with Maddie.”
Eddie blinks. Chimney’s eyes are very, very wide. The sudden silence rings around the kitchen.
“...What?”
Chimney shakes his head. “Dating!” he shouts, “I’m dating Maddie!” He pauses long enough to tilt his head, his hand seesawing in the air. “Well, and also…”
“Chimney,” Eddie sighs, long-suffering. He doesn’t believe in past lives, no matter how many times Ravi suffers a mild inconvenience and blames it on the crimes of a past incarnation of himself, but he might have to change his mind soon. He definitely didn’t do anything in this life to deserve this. “How long have you been dating Maddie?”
Chimney winces, briefly, but it crumbles almost immediately under a giddy grin. In a few hours Eddie will be happy for him, but for now he’s just mildly annoyed. “Like, a month,” he says, laughing a little like he can’t believe it.
“Okay, first of all, proud of you, man,” Eddie says, raising his hand in the space between them. “You managed to almost keep a secret, hell yeah.” Chimney dutifully slaps his palm against his. “But what does that have to do with the table?”
Chimney’s grin finally dims, glancing away with something almost like embarrassment. “Well, at first arguing about the table was a great distraction from accidentally spilling the beans,” he explains, “but then I thought if I acted weird about the table he’d get super attached to it and then I could change my tune and he’d be so grateful to me that he wouldn’t even care about me dating Maddie.”
Eddie blinks several times in quick succession, like maybe the fluttering of his eyelashes will work like an etch-a-sketch and erase the past week from his life. “That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” he says.
“But,” Chim says, raising a pointed finger in the air, “it might work.”
The loft’s door opens with a bang and Buck rounds the corner, all of his too long limbs windmilling through the air like he’s just learned how to walk.
“My live feed went down,” he gasps out, waving his phone in the air as his wide, wide eyes swing back and forth between his hideous table and Chim. He’s panting something stupid, bending over to rest his hands on his knees. “Did he do something to the table while I was gone?”
Eddie and Chim exchange a look: Eddie’s wide eyes say tell Buck the truth; Chimney’s stubborn jaw says that’s a great idea, Eddie, you are so smart and kind, but I’m going to ignore you now.
“Actually, Buck,” Chim says, turning to Buck with an overly kind smile, “I’ve been thinking about it, and I think you should keep the table.”
Buck straightens, his big stupid doe eyes blinking rapidly. “What? Really?”
Chimney grins, shrugging his shoulders easily. “Yeah, really. It’s ugly but you like it, so.”
The grin that splits Buck’s face is blinding, denting his cheeks with dimples that Eddie does not dream about, because that would be embarrassing. “Wow, thanks, Chim.”
“Anything for you, brother,” Chimney gushes, rounding the island with open arms that Buck walks easily into. His arms wrap around Chim’s shoulders and his biceps flex with the movement.
Eddie’s had a hard week, frankly, and he’s so hungry, and he’s physically incapable of keeping anything from Buck, barring the whole being in love with him thing, and also it’s been eight days since he last hugged Buck. So, really, no one can blame him for what happens next.
“Chimney’s dating Maddie.”
Buck jerks away from the hug, pushing Chimney away by his biceps. Chimney’s smile drops with near comedic speed.
“What?”
“Eddie!”
Eddie shrugs, undeterred. “Shouldn’t have told me.”
“You’re right,” Chimney concedes, tilting his head in Eddie’s direction and raising one shoulder in a shrug.
Buck shoves Chim’s shoulder, demanding his attention with a glare. “What the hell, Chim? You’re dating my sister?” Eddie and Chim wince, Buck’s tone reaching a pitch that makes Eddie fear for the integrity of their glassware. “Since when?”
“Hey,” Ravi snaps suddenly, drawing the attention of the entire loft as he peeks over the back of the couch. His hair’s sticking up in all directions, his eyes half-lidded, an obvious pillow crease down the right side of his face. “What the hell is going on?”
“Chimney’s dating Maddie,” Buck shouts, pointing accusingly. Eddie places his head in his hands. He needs to move out.
“Uh, yeah,” Ravi laughs, slinging his arms over the back of the couch as he rests his chin on top of a cushion. “Old news, dude.”
Three voices chorus: “What?”
Ravi shakes his head at them, the movement restricted by his hunched shoulders and the couch cushion. “Do you guys not pay attention to anything?”
Eddie, Chim, and Buck exchange a look, one that alerts Buck to something behind Eddie. He swings his pointer finger away from Chim to gesture towards Ravi’s room.
Eddie swivels in his seat to look, and Ravi’s sheet-door is torn in two, the edges ragged. It’s enough that Eddie can see right into his room, where his nightstand’s on its side, the drawers open and spilling contents across the floor. His bedding’s strewn around haphazardly, and, for some reason, there’s a series of brooms taped together and leaning against his bed frame.
“Hey,” Buck says, “what happened to your room?”
“Were you sleeping on the couch?” Chimney asks.
Eddie tilts his head. “What’s with the broom sword?”
Ravi groans and bangs his forehead against the back of the couch. “I hate you guys so much.”
Ultimately, Buck’s the one that gets rid of the spider in Ravi’s room, cupping it between his hands and cooing while Ravi cowers on the couch and Chimney stands on the kitchen counter and Eddie buries his head in his hands.
Ravi insists that Buck throw the spider outside instead of in the hallway, and by the time Buck gets back Chim and Eddie have helped Ravi put his room back in order.
In return for letting Buck keep his table, Buck gives Chimney and Maddie a twenty-four hour reprieve before he interrogates them, and Chimney instantly takes advantage by leaving the loft. Eddie’s stomach growls loud enough that Buck orders food, and later they pick up Christopher from school where Eddie sinks low in seat when he catches sight of Ana and, eventually, the day fades into night.
Eddie puts Christopher to bed — an increasingly tumultuous routine, Christopher beginning to push for more independence and Eddie beginning to ignore the passage of time in earnest — and Buck meets him in the middle of the hallway outside of their respective rooms with a laundry basket tucked under his arm.
“Crazy week,” Buck comments, smiling, and he’s beautiful in a way that hurts.
Eddie snorts, turning to face Buck with a grin of his own. There’s less than a foot of space between them. It would be so easy to close it, to step right into Buck’s space. He resists. “Every week in this apartment is crazy, Buck.”
And the thing is this: Eddie knows he and Buck are inevitable. Eddie — he’s not typically the type to put much faith in things like the universe. He rolls his eyes when Ravi reads his birth chart — providing offhand commentary that makes no fucking sense like, oh you would be a Capricorn Mars — and he groans out loud when Maddie goes on her wine-induced, teary-eyed tangents on soulmates.
But he knows, with a quiet confidence he only ever feels when he has a stethoscope around his neck and someone’s life in his hands, that he and Buck are inevitable.
Over Buck’s shoulder, through Buck’s open doorway, Eddie can see one of Christopher’s drawings pinned above his desk. It’s maybe two or three years old, a stick figure of Buck and Christopher holding hands. Eddie remembers the look in Buck’s eyes when Christopher handed it over. He remembers thinking, I am so fucked.
“That table’s fucking ugly, man,” he says, sliding his gaze back to Buck, whose expression instantly falls into dramatic offence. “But I’m glad you’re keeping it.”
Buck smiles, soft and warm, and it burrows into Eddie’s chest, carefully peeling back barbed wire and scar tissue to make room for its presence. “Yeah? Well, I’ve got all of these DIY ideas I found on Pinterest — I mean, I don’t want to change too much, I really like most of it, but maybe I’ll just fix up the stain glass and…”
Eddie knows he’s grinning like an idiot, entirely too soft and too telling, but he can’t reign it in to save his life.
“Sorry,” Buck says, cutting himself off in the middle of an explanation of DIY stain glass, laughing faintly, “you don’t wanna hear all of this.”
“I wanna hear everything you have to say,” Eddie says.
Buck’s mouth parts, his grin twisting into something Eddie can’t identify as he glances away. “I…well, um, I should deal with this,” he says, lifting the laundry basket, “and you have an early shift, so.” Buck catches his bottom lip between his teeth; Eddie’s stomach twists into a knot. “Goodnight, Eds.”
His eyes seem extra blue in the dimly lit hallway, but it might just be Eddie’s mind playing tricks on him.
The irrational, searing truth of it all: Eddie’s in love with him, has been maybe since the second he stepped into the loft. Maybe even before then, maybe since the second he answered Chimney’s Craigslist ad. Maybe a part of him loved Buck even before he knew him. And they’re inevitable, Eddie knows, or hopes, but it’s getting harder and harder to wait for their future.
Eddie breathes in, breathes out. “Goodnight, Buck.”
Buck’s smile twitches once, something heavy and dark in his eyes, before he turns and starts down the hall. Eddie takes half a step forward, and in his mind he’s grabbing Buck’s wrist, spinning him back around, pinning him to the wall next to his door and kissing him like he’s been dying for as long as he can remember.
He blinks and takes a step back. They’re not there yet. He loves Buck, and most of the time he knows Buck loves him, too, but they’re — not there yet. They’re not ready for forever, yet.
Eddie spares one last look at Buck’s retreating back, his broad shoulders pulling at the worn dark fabric of his LAFD shirt, his somehow endearingly flat ass, his too long legs, and he steps into his room. He can wait just a little longer.