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“Don’t think I can’t see that!” Chim calls, sing-songy and bright, making his way towards the kitchen.
Eddie tears himself away and immediately tucks his hands under his own arms, face burning. Buck just makes a disgruntled sound—he’s been dozing with his head tilted against the back of the sofa for the past fifteen minutes, now awoken and obviously confused.
“Oh god, what are they doing now,” Hen drops her book down from where she was reading at the table, holding her empty coffee cup up for Chim to grab over her shoulder on his way past. Despite the implication of reproach, her tone is much too gleeful for Eddie’s liking. He narrows his eyes at her. She grins lazily back at him.
“I was literally asleep!” Buck groans—whines, maybe—scrubbing at his eyes, “What did I do!”
“PDA!” Chimney shouts, head in the cabinet where he’s rummaging around, before emerging with a jar of peanut butter and continuing, “PDA is what you did!”
Hen makes a dramatic tsk tsk tsk sound, putting on an air of aloofness and pretending as though she’s already returned to reading her book when she adds, “We did have an agreement,”
“The agreement!,” Chimney echoes, clenching a fist theatrically, “is nothing sacred in this house?”
“Ugh,” Buck pouts, matching Chimney’s energy, “you’re so dramatic. We’re not allowed to sit next to each other anymore?”
Eddie sinks a little into the sofa, absolutely burning with the flush across his face.
“Sitting, I can forgive. But hand-holding?,” Chim says, closing a drawer as punctuation, “I dare say that’s a public display of affection, little brother,”
Buck’s posturing immediately melts into sleepy fondness as his gaze snaps to Eddie, and says, “Aw… You—you were holding my hand?”
Which just causes Hen and Chim to break out into a chorus of gagging and groaning.
“Alright, alright,” Bobby placates from where he’s cresting the stairs to the loft, amusement clearly painted across his put-upon captain’s demeanor, “I think they have a right to a little unobtrusive hand holding,”
“Excuse you!” Chim says with mock affront, pointing with the spoonful of peanut butter he’s just scavenged, “It is my right—nay, my privilege—nay! My duty! My privileged duty, as newly minted brother, to embarrass one Evan Buckley,”
Eddie opens his mouth to argue that Buck is not the only one being embarrassed here, when Chimney directs his peanut butter scepter Eddie’s way and adds,
“And if his boyfriend gets caught in the crossfire,” he pauses for dramatic effect, before decreeing with a lofted spoon: “so be it!”
And the thing is, it’s new.
The boyfriend of it all.
And it just makes his flush blaze anew as something pleased and hungry and elated blooms so strongly and suddenly in his chest that he has to fold over into Buck.
“Ohh, that got you, huh?” Buck coos, teasing and affectionate and full of love as he wraps an arm around Eddie’s shoulders, easily accepting the way Eddie tucks his face into the juncture of his shoulder and neck to hide his red cheeks.
The heckling picks up, Buck shakes with laughter underneath him, and Eddie snakes his arm across Buck’s lap to grasp onto his hand again.