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Honestly, Eddie thinks it was just a matter of time before it happened anyway.
He’s sitting at the breakfast table with Christopher when it happens, his forehead pressed to the table, one hand curled around a cup of coffee. Christopher’s sitting in the chair opposite from him, chattering happily about his breakfast plans in great detail.
Eddie’s trying to listen to him, he really is, but it was a late, grueling shift, and he hasn’t even gotten through his morning two cups of coffee. He doesn’t even feel remotely human yet, and there’s still a stretch of three hours to go before he can curl up for a nap, guilt free.
Chris whines out, “Dad, are you listening to me?”
Eddie looks up at that, and breathes in the coffee-scented steam from his mug as if that will magically wake him up. It doesn’t but the illusion is enough for Eddie to perk up a little and at least pretend to be more awake. “Yeah, buddy, I am. You were talking about raspberries.”
Chris still looks skeptical, but he nods. “Right, and the raspberries Buck and I picked last week are weirdly sour, so he puts honey…”
Eddie admittedly zones out a little watching his son talk and talk. Not because he’s stopped listening, but because it always does something to him to see Christopher in his element like this.
Most days, he feels like he’s hurtling towards the teenage years armed with nothing but his friends’ experience with teenagers and the three books he’s practically memorized cover-to-cover on how to parent teenagers.
But days like these, where Christopher talks like he’s still five years old and curled into Eddie’s lap…those are days where the nostalgia makes a home in his chest and he can’t think outside it.
It doesn’t help matters that his kid is going into his first day of middle school, and all Eddie can think about is how small Chris was when Eddie held him for the first time, and how they’re at the point where Chris is as tall as Eddie’s shoulder. The only things that haven’t changed across the years is how earnest his kid’s eyes have always been.
Christopher’s in the middle of a tirade on blueberries and cinnamon when Eddie hears the shuffle of feet behind him.
Like young sunflowers seeking the sun, Eddie turns towards him, another piece of his world shifting into place as he watches a sleepy-eyed Buck walk into the kitchen.
Buck’s lips greet him good morning as his fingers slide into Eddie’s hair, one hand braced on the back of Eddie’s neck, and the other sifting through his bedhead to curve around his ear. They’re gentle, the calluses as familiar to Eddie as his own.
Eddie hums quietly as Buck’s fingers tilt his jaw, pressing a softer kiss to his mouth, then to the freckle under his eyebrow, then to his forehead. He feels marginally awake under Buck’s easy affection, but his hand tightens around his coffee mug anyway.
“Good morning,” he rasps out against Eddie’s hairline, the scent of mint washing over him.
“Morning,” Eddie returns, watching as Buck rounds the table to press a kiss to Christopher’s curls, looking like he’ll fall asleep against the kid any moment.
“Morning, bud. Did you decide what you want for breakfast?”
It’s then that Eddie realizes that Christopher’s fallen stock-still and silent, his gaze jumping between the two of them.
“What?” Eddie asks, taking a sip out of his mug. “Buck asked you something.”
“Oh, waffles, thanks, Buck,” Chris says absently, still looking shocked for some reason.
Eddie’s about to push and ask if he’s okay when Chris visibly shakes it off, shrugging as he turns to Buck to tell him the grand plans for his first day of school.
He studies his son for a minute, then decides it must not be important for him to shake it off so easily.
Buck valiantly tries to listen, but Eddie laughs softly when he makes a beeline to the coffee machine, his ear tilted towards Chris as he nods and responds in all the right places.
For all of Buck’s energy, it takes at least three cups of coffee before he remotely wakes up after a shift like last night’s.
“You didn’t have to get up, you know,” Eddie tells him after Chris goes to brush his teeth, unable to hide the fond tone from his voice this early in the morning. Buck looks sleep-rumbled and exhausted, but there’s a curve to his mouth and crinkles bracketing his eyes from listening to Christopher talk.
In his head, Eddie calls it Buck’s Christopher look — it’s a look he’s never seen on him anywhere else. Not even with Jee-Yun — there’s a different fond look for her.
“Wanted to see Chris before his first day,” Buck grunts out, his voice still hoarse. Eddie ignores the warmth that flares in his stomach for a moment before he lets himself relax into it, sliding back in his chair as he watches his friend perk up with the first sip. “Are you doing okay?”
Buck watches him knowingly over the rim of the mug, despite his eyes still half-shut from his exhaustion. It’s cuter than it has any right being, and Eddie smiles as he answers the question.
“He was literally just this small.” He holds his hands up about a foot apart to accentuate his point. “Now he’s going into to middle school. Next thing you know, he’ll graduate and leave me for college or whatever else he wants to do.”
It’s more emotional than he’d planned on being, but Buck’s expression softens like he’d expected Eddie to say that — and maybe he had. No one tends to be on the same page as Eddie the way Buck does.
“He’s never going to leave you,” Buck says gently, one hand dropping to Eddie’s shoulder. “He’s always going to have his dad in his corner, and he knows that.”
“He’s going to have a lot of people in his corner,” Eddie says, ducking his head as a flush crawls up his ears, like it always does when Buck says anything about his parenting. “Most of all, us.”
“Yeah,” Buck agrees, tipping his forehead against Eddie’s for a quick moment before getting up to make his infamous waffles. Eddie throws the toppings Christopher had been talking about into small bowls to make it easier on all of them, sliding them across the table as his son wanders back in to check on the progress.
The morning crawls by slowly, but also somehow so much quicker than Eddie had anticipated. For all that they’d gotten up early so they would be on time, eight-fifteen finds them rushing out the door with minutes to spare, a waffle still clenched in Christopher’s syrupy hands.
“Have a good first day, bud!” Buck calls out as Eddie gets Chris situated in the truck and climbs into the driver’s seat. He’s still wearing pajama pants with cartoon koalas going down one leg and cartoon penguins down the other but he’s seen worse at school drop-off.
At the very least, he’s in a plain, clean white T-shirt.
He waves to Buck as he reverses out of the driveway, sticking his tongue out as his best friend clearly laughing at him.
“Dad?” Chris asks after Eddie drives out of their neighborhood.
“Yeah?”
“Is something different between you and Buck?”
Eddie’s still-too-slow brain doesn’t process what his son means to ask, because he simply shrugs. “No, why?”
“Because he kissed you.”
Eddie’s about to ask why that’s a problem when it hits him, and the breath whooshes out of his lungs.
He and Buck aren’t together.
Buck kissed him, and they’re not together, and by God, Eddie thought it was real.
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck, he’d fucked up.
“Oh my God,” he whispers to himself, his hands tightening on the steering wheel as his heart hammers wildly in his ribcage.
“Dad?” Chris asks, confusion ringing from his tone. “Are you okay?”
Not in the slightest.
“Uh, yeah, I think. Maybe? I just…don’t know what happened,” Eddie says truthfully, wincing as someone behind him honks. He presses on the accelerator on auto-pilot, trying to focus on the road and not the thoughts racing through his mind, pricking every inch of his skin.
Chris sighs, looking entirely put-out for some reason, but Eddie’s mind is still playing Buck’s tender touch in his head, the softness of his lips against his skin, and the gentle combing of his fingers through Eddie’s hair — things he’s only ever felt in dreams before this morning — and he doesn’t have the wherewithal to question his son any further.
They pull up to his school before Chris can say anything else, and from there, Eddie’s pushed right back into the reminder of his kid growing up as he watches all the parents hug their kids goodbye. He spots Shelly taking a million pictures of her twins — both looking endlessly exasperated — and finds himself grateful that Christopher endured his own batch of pictures at home without complaining too much.
Chris starts towards the school doors as soon as Eddie kisses his forehead, but then stops. Eddie waits by his car door, wondering if he forgot something, but what Chris says next knocks the wind out of his sails completely.
“Can you go home and kiss him for real? Please?”
Eddie’s mouth drops open, and whatever words he could’ve thought of evaporate off his tongue. Chris sees this and comes back to him, wrapping his arms around his waist. Eddie bends to hug him closer.
“You want me to go kiss Buck?”
“I’ve been waiting years for you to get together, Dad,” Chris whispers, his little hand twisting in Eddie’s shirt. “He makes you happy, and I think we make him happy, too. Why can’t it be like that forever?”
Eddie exhales on a rush, pressing his lips to his kid’s head. “Yeah, he does. But it’s not just our choice, you know? Forever’s a long time. I have to talk to him about it.”
Chris nods, pulling away to grin confidently up at Eddie. “Yeah, but I know he’ll say yes.”
He has to laugh at that, smoothing his palm over Christopher’s curls — the ones that look so much like Buck’s as he grows older. Neither Eddie nor Shannon had curly hair, and Eddie thinks that maybe this is Buck’s universe telling Chris how to carry Buck with him.
“I’ll talk to him,” he says, not committing either way.
Chris seems confident enough for both of them, because he gives Eddie another hug before his attention is lost to a friend excitedly calling out to him. Eddie watches him go, students all around him rambling on about their summer vacations.
He drives back home on auto-pilot, far less careful than he’d been with Chris in the car.
Buck might’ve kissed Eddie first — on accident or not — but Eddie had kissed him back, and had leaned into his touch like he was starving for it. That, at the very least, hadn’t been an accident at all. He can’t plead the fifth on it, no matter how tired he’d been.
He parks in front of his house and stares at the four walls that house Buck’s fingerprints just as often as Eddie’s and Christopher’s. Then, he digs his phone out and flicks through all the pictures they’d taken this morning — the ones that made them late in the first place.
Buck grins up at him, clad in one of Eddie’s old shirts that stretches across his shoulders, and shorts that he’d left here last week. Christopher is wrapped tightly in his arms, and they’re both smiling at Eddie behind the camera as if they know that Eddie is made up of nothing but these two people.
Almost every picture in his camera roll has Buck. Not just the ones from this morning, but almost every memory from months and months ago has Buck written all over it in some capacity. Eddie doesn’t even remember explicitly inviting Buck to some of these things — it’s always understood that they’re a group of three, not two.
That’s the way it’d been last night, too, when Buck had wordlessly taken Eddie’s cue to come home with him, even at four in the morning. They’d only managed to sleep for a couple hours before the shuffle of Chris’ feet had woken Eddie up, and Eddie remembers waking up to see Buck snoring lightly next to him, grateful that he didn’t have to go through this emotional day alone.
There’s a large part of Eddie that seeks Buck out like magnets, turned to let each other connect, and it’s a part of him that he’s tried to reign in for years — years of working through the fear of what could happen if Buck knew that Eddie had fallen in love with him.
Now, he’s content to let the card fall where they may because it feels like an inevitable part of whatever brought them together in the first place. There’s not a part of Eddie that has ever been able to hide what Buck means to him — and especially not to the person who knows him best.
But when he finally climbs out of his truck and swings his front door open to see Buck pacing the living room, still in his pajamas, his hair a scrunched mess of anxiety like he’d spent hours yanking on the ends, Eddie realizes that maybe he hadn’t been as obvious to him.
Buck’s head snaps towards Eddie as soon as he walks in, and Eddie’s heart breaks at the red-rimmed gaze, the clear fear on his face.
“Buck,” he whispers.
Sometime between now and Eddie leaving to drop Chris off, it clearly dawned on Buck what he’d done, and it’d scared him.
Eddie smiles as comfortingly as he can manage, shutting the door behind him and sliding his keys into the bowl on the entrance table.
Buck stands stock-still in the middle of the living room, tracking each of Eddie’s movements like he’ll never see them again, and Eddie can’t have that at all.
“What did you do to yourself?” he murmurs, not expecting a response as he reaches out to smooth some of his curls back in place, his thumb tracing one tear track. Buck’s a hurricane of barely-restrained emotion right now, but Eddie’s standing in the eye of the storm and he knows Buck won’t let any of it touch him.
Some of the stiffness in Buck’s shoulders ebbs at Eddie’s touch, and instead of fear, Buck watches him cautiously. His eyes are wide in his face, twin pools of sea carrying Eddie afloat, and his mouth is downturned.
“Eddie, I’m so sor—”
“Did you mean it?” Eddie interrupts, not wanting to hear apologies for what is probably the softest moment of his life. Buck had touched him as if his edges weren’t battle-hardened, as if Eddie deserves to be touched like one holds a flower, and he’d done it without even thinking.
Eddie doesn’t need more proof of reciprocity than that.
Buck freezes in place, stormy eyes glossing over with hope as he takes in Eddie’s question. “Yeah. Yeah, I did, but I didn’t want to kiss you for the first time like that.”
Relief flutters over Eddie’s shoulders, and he steps closer to Buck, wrapping his fingers around his wrists. Buck’s pulse pounds like it’s trying to reach for him, and Eddie’s pulse responds in kind, beating through his fingers like they could be one in this way.
“Then kiss me like you wanted to.”
The last of the stiffness leaves Buck’s shoulders as he steps the rest of the way into Eddie’s face, his eyes searching every inch of Eddie’s expression across the bare inches that separate them. “Yeah?”
Eddie laughs quietly, pressing his thumb into where the divot that curves around Buck’s laugh lines deepens, right at the corner of his mouth. “Yeah, Buck.”
He feels stripped naked under the blazing intensity of those blue eyes, but it’s a feeling he embraces as the hope in Buck’s gaze shifts into determination — a look that burns itself in the back of Eddie’s mind.
It’s all he gets out before Buck’s mouth is on his, the space between them evaporating into this intensity where Buck’s hands are cradling his jaw, one large palm holding Eddie’s head in place. Eddie’s hands fall to where Buck’s pulse flutters in his throat, cupping the sides of his neck as they kiss.
Buck tilts his head to deepen the kiss and it’s all Eddie can do to not press himself from head to toe against him. Buck tastes like maple syrup, coffee and blueberries but Eddie tastes home and the future all in one, and he tastes the years that stretch between them from what’s your problem, man to yeah, Buck , and he tastes the reasons Chris was as confident as he was that Buck wouldn’t let him shatter at the end of it all.
Eddie feels the cards falling exactly where they should be as they kiss right in the middle of Eddie’s living room, Buck’s arms curving around his waist to hold him closer, then up his back to press him closer still.
By the time they separate, their lips have gone dry, but Eddie doesn’t let Buck go far regardless.
Buck’s sigh ghosts across Eddie’s skin as his temple rests against Eddie’s. “I thought I’d messed up forever.”
“Why’d you think I’d ever let you fall alone?” Eddie whispers, one hand twining into Buck’s curls. They’re pressed as close as two people standing can be, but it doesn’t feel like enough — it never does.
Buck doesn’t reply but Eddie knows the answer.
Instead, he pulls Buck closer by the back of his neck, pressing a kiss to the same divot he’d been tracing. “Everyone in my life knows how much I love you, and I thought you did, too. I couldn’t hide it even if I tried, and honestly, I’m tired of having to hide it.”
Buck pulls back with his eyes wide, trembling hands coming up to cup Eddie’s face. Buck kisses him once, then twice, a tremor of a laugh cutting under his voice as he says, “I love you, too. I don’t ever want you to hide from me, Eddie, I love you.”
Eddie grins widely at him, because even though he’d been sure, something in him needed the words, too. “Chris is going to be so smug when he gets back home.”
Buck groans, laughing lightly. “I didn’t mean to kiss you for the first time in front of your son.”
“Well, he thought it was real. And until he told me, I didn’t even realize that it was an accident.” Eddie recounts his conversation with Chris to him, and the look of awe that takes over Buck’s expression when Eddie tells him that Chris wanted them to kiss for real — and has apparently been waiting years for it — makes Eddie fall in love with him all over again.
“It was real,” Buck murmurs quietly. “It was an accident, yeah, because I was still half-asleep and stuck in the middle of a really good dream where we do all of that, but it was still real.”
Eddie tugs him that last half-inch closer until he can press their mouths back together. “Now, we can do all of that when you’re awake.”
Buck smiles and it’s the best thing Eddie’s ever tasted.
But he laughs a few minutes later when Buck’s yawn breaks their kiss, and is reminded that they’re both still coming down from two hours of sleep after an exhausting shift, and an even more emotionally-exhausting morning. “Okay, I get the hint. Want to go nap?”
“Thought you’d never ask,” Buck grumbles good-naturedly. He looks happier than he had ten minutes ago, and that’s what Eddie focuses on as Buck slots their fingers together to tug him into his bedroom.
The sheets are still rumpled from both of them climbing out of bed this morning, but Eddie has to laugh as Buck slides into his side of Eddie’s bed. “You think we did any of this backwards?”
Buck’s quiet amusement washes over him, and Eddie comes to life under the fondness that shines in his expression. “Not sure I would’ve figured it out even after all of this.”
Eddie had always been content with staying in love with his best friend without letting him know, but for months, there’d been a sense of inevitably blooming right alongside the hope in his chest. He knows that he wouldn’t have been able to keep it a secret forever, but he’d dangerously begun to hope that maybe, it was the same for Buck.
It’s Eddie’s turn to yawn, but he drags Buck into his arms, turning him over until Eddie can press his forehead to the nape of Buck’s neck. “You would’ve, eventually. We would’ve gotten here.”
Buck’s hand comes to interlace with where Eddie’s is pressed against his chest. Eddie can’t see him like this, but he can hear the smile in Buck’s voice as they drift off. “Yeah, we would’ve.”