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It starts out as a nervous habit. Eddie learned how to make them for his sisters on the rare occasion their family went out to eat, or whenever his mother made him look after his sisters for the evening. It was an excuse to keep his head down and not make eye contact with his parents or, God forbid, engaging in actual conversation if he didn’t want to. Eventually, it turned into something to do with his hands to keep himself from freaking out too badly on those awkward high school first dates. But now with the pretense of dating and girls and having to perform, it gave the part of his brain that would be freaking out something else to focus on.
The paper rings were safe. Girls thought it was cute, so he kept making them. One of the bigger, meaner kids at school made fun of him for it once, but he had very little to say after Eddie’s fist connected with his face.
Shannon thought it was funny when he offered her one on their first date. They were at the crappy local multiplex in their crappy local mall; they’d gotten snacks including icees from behind the counter with bright red plastic straws wrapped in paper. During the onslaught of trailers for movies neither of them found particular interesting, he gave her a paper ring. She laughed and immediately put it on her left ring finger, fawning over it between giggles and kisses in the back of the dark theater. They didn’t end up watching much of the movie.
He hates giving her a real ring. Having to double down on what should have just been a quick high school fling that ended with them realizing that they were just better off as friends. But instead, he has a black velvet box with a small diamond ring nestled inside. And now there’s a clock, an expectation. It’s all catastrophically real. A real wife with a real ring on her finger, and a real wedding band on his. A real child that will need to rely on him in only a few short months.
It makes enlisting seem a lot less scary.
***
Eddie stops making paper rings for a while. Who has time for silly childish habits when your son needs physical therapy, when your wife is begging you to support her, when your parents are trying to take your world out from under you. And Sophia and Adriana are growing up and don’t want to be seen with their weird older brother who has to work three jobs to support his too young family and makes stupid paper rings out of straw wrappers.
Shannon leaves, and he’d be lying if he said he hadn’t seen it coming. What they had wasn’t strong enough to endure two tours in Afghanistan and a special needs diagnosis for their baby boy. Maybe it could have been if they hadn’t tied themselves together with a shotgun wedding and the pressure to act like a real husband and wife. She leaves the ring that he always hated on the table next to her note, scribbled out on a torn out sheet of notebook paper.
On a sleepless night not long after, Eddie finds himself sitting with Chris asleep across his lap in the vinyl booth of the same diner where he had all those awkward first dates. He looks over all the papers he has strewn out across the table next to his half eaten stack of pancakes. Job applications, military benefits, medical bills.
His eyes fall on the little paper rings he made for Christopher before he fell asleep. He giggled as Eddie mock struggled and then actually struggled to get them on his perpetually sticky fingers. Below the paper rings is an application to the Los Angeles Fire Academy. A big step, for sure. But he’s been meaning to take a step out of his hometown that wasn’t towards an active war zone for a while now. LA could be just as good a place as any.
***
Los Angeles is exactly what he and Chris needed. A new start with a new job that fits in with the skills he learned in the army, but without the imminent countdown to doomsday. He begins to push himself, not in the way he was before, but in a way that makes him excited and feel joy. A younger version of him would have been shocked to find out he graduated the academy top of his class, but when finds out, he acknowledges it with a smile and a shrug.
It’s not long before his first day working as a probationary firefighter at Station 118. Everyone welcomes him with a smile and warm words. Well, everyone except Buck. But it doesn’t last that long. Turns out the quickest way to get over a one-sided grudge is to assist in the surgical removal of a live grenade from a man’s leg in an ambulance. Then no one in the station has kinder words or brighter smiles for Eddie than Evan Buckley. And that’s even before he meets Christopher after the earthquake.
Being friends with Buck turns out to be incredibly easy. So easy that Eddie finds himself slipping into a new, more authentic version of himself. With Buck, he doesn’t have to worry about the ten thousand things he needs to do in a day because he finally has someone who will figure out how to help him every step of the way. They become attached at the hip even outside of work, trying new restaurants, but specifically going on the hunt for the perfect local diner.
They’re at an eccentric one in the Fairfax District when Buck stops talking and points towards where Eddie’s hands are fidgeting with a paper straw wrapper.
“Whatcha making over there?”
Eddie looks down and sees that he’s made a paper ring. He flushes. “Uh, it’s nothing.”
“You planning on proposing to me, Diaz?” Buck teases.
Eddie rolls his eyes. “Please. This ring is far too nice for you.”
“I can be nice!”
“Sure.”
“And to think I would’ve said yes.”
It’s been a while since he’s done this, but he rolls his eyes good naturedly and holds up the paper ring. “Buck, will you marry me?”
Buck claps his hands to either side of his face and nods so enthusiastically that it seems like his head might just go flying off. “Yes! Yes! A thousand times yes!”
He tries to slip the ring onto Buck’s finger and it immediately rips in half. They make eye contact and both of them have to try their absolute hardest to hold back their laughter.
“Ugh, I thought you knew my ring size!”
“Come on, it’s not my fault you have massive fingers!”
Massive fingers that he bets would feel really good inside of him.
Oh.
That’s a new thought. He’s gonna table that for later.
(So. Never.)
***
It becomes their inside joke. He’ll make a paper ring while they’re talking about nothing and then interrupt the conversation with a mock proposal, which is always met with the same melodramatic, emphatic yes. The wait staff at their regular haunts coo over how cute they are together, which he puts into that box of things to think about later/never.
It happens once when the firefam is all together for a night out. Chim had dared Eddie to order the most obnoxious sounding cocktail on the menu, which ended up being a violently neon green frozen something that probably had enough alcohol to incapacitate half of the table but tasted like candy. And it came with a straw.
“Eddie!” Buck shouts when he sees Eddie pulling the paper off. “Do the thing!”
“I’m not gonna do the thing.”
Buck pouts, eyes impossibly wide. “Please?” He says, dragging out the end of the word in a very non sober fashion.
Eddie rolls his eyes and makes the paper ring anyway. It’s not at all neat in the way he usually makes them, but it’ll do. He doesn’t notice everyone looking between him and Buck, visibly wondering what “the thing” could possibly be.
“Hey Buck?” he says, holding up the ring. “You wanna get married?”
Buck screeches at a pitch that could break glass and nearly tackles Eddie to the floor. He manages to steady the both of them as Buck makes grabby hands for the ring.
“What the fuck?” he hears from somewhere vaguely behind them. A female voice, but they’re both too out of it to really acknowledge or even recognize who said it.
“I thought you would never ask!”
“So how long?” Maddie asks Eddie sometime later, while Buck is off on the dance floor without a care in the world.
“Hmm?”
She looks at him like he’s stupid. “How long have you two been together?”
“Oh, we’re not together.”
Maddie’s expression is unreadable and unsettling, almost making Eddie feel the need to crawl out of his skin. “Does he know that?”
“Yeah. It’s kind of our thing.”
Maddie blinks owlishly at him. “Your thing is proposing to him?”
“With paper rings, yeah.”
“And he acts like that every time?”
Eddie shrugs. “Basically.”
Maddie looks at him like she’s trying to telepathically communicate something that he’s clearly missing. Maybe it’s the alcohol, but her eyes seem intent on baring down on his soul to see what’s written there. Eddie looks away, intent on putting it all into the box of things he doesn’t think about, and takes another sip of the neon candy monstrosity.
***
He’s on a blind first date that someone set him up on, he doesn’t really remember. It’s not going badly, but it’s also not going well. His date is talking enough for the both of them, which shouldn’t be a problem. But his mind is elsewhere. When Buck talks nonstop, it’s like Eddie’s under a spell where he hangs onto every single word he says. Everything, no matter how mundane or boring, fascinates him. They trade barbs and keep each other on their toes, even if he isn’t doing much of the talking.
But here? He has no idea what this woman is talking about. He doesn’t think he can catch up to wherever she’s steered the conversation to even if he tried. And Eddie really doesn’t want to try.
“What’s that?” She asks, snapping him out of his reverie.
A paper ring.
Flashes of diner breakfasts and lunches at work and relaxed evenings on the couch filled with laughter and banter and a warm fuzzy feeling that just screams home nestles deeply in his ribcage. And then he looks up at the person sitting across the table and doesn’t see blue eyes. Instead, he makes eye contact with this perfectly nice woman is staring at him with perfectly nice brown eyes not unlike his own. That warm fuzzy feeling disappears just as quickly as it appeared.
“Oh, um. Nothing,” he says, crumpling the paper into a small ball in his fist. “You were saying?”
She moves on with the one sided conversation as if nothing happened. His heart sinks to his stomach as he checks out of the conversation again. He’s accidentally opened the box filled with things he doesn’t think about, and there’s a lot more in there than he realized.
***
They’re in the car eating burgers in an In n Out parking lot when it happens. Between bites, Buck goes on about a new documentary that he wants to show Chris. How maybe he might be old enough to enjoy “How It’s Really Made,” as long as Eddie’s okay with all the swearing. For all intents and purposes it’s a rather mundane, insignificant moment. They’ve been here a thousand times before.
But then he thinks about how often he looks forward to the absurd mundanities that Buck has managed to seep into all of the cracks of. It doesn’t matter where or when, but Eddie wants this. Sitting in the car or on the couch, talking about everything and nothing. Arguing over what to make for dinner or figuring out who was going to take Chris to school. Talking softly together as the world changes around them, as circumstances shift and their lives become different with aging. Gray hairs and grandkids. There’s no future that he can think of without Buck in it.
And somehow, the thought doesn’t terrify him at all. It just makes sense.
“Marry me,” Eddie says, unprompted.
Buck moves to look over and commit to the bit when it registers that there’s no paper ring. Just an earnest, vulnerable expression.
“What?”
“Marry me. I don’t want to pretend that this doesn’t mean anything to me anymore. I love you. You love our kid. And I’m pretty sure you love me too. Marry me.”
His eyes begin welling up with tears. “You don’t have a ring.”
He tries to be annoyed, but the huff comes out fond as he takes the paper wrapper from his straw and finds his hands moving in an achingly familiar way. Making sure this one won’t immediately rip once he puts it onto his fiancé’s (fiancé!) finger.
He holds up the finished paper ring up between them and sees tears streaming down his face. “Buck, Evan. You’re my best friend. My partner. Mi alma, mi corazón. El gran amor de mi vida. Quieres casarte conmigo?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
The ring doesn’t rip this time as it slips onto his ring finger and they lean awkwardly over the center console for a soft, sweet, lingering kiss. A last first kiss.
“You’re a jackass,” Buck says with a fond smile on his face.
Eddie blinks at him. “What?”
He opens the driver side glove box and pulls out a startlingly familiarly looking black square box. Inside is a platinum ring with a dark band through the center. An engagement ring. Eddie blue screens as Buck takes a deep breath.
“I wasn’t planning on doing this in the car.”
“Buck.”
“And you’ve kind of already said everything I wanted to.”
“Really?”
“And also said it in Spanish, which is unfair.”
“Are you serious?”
“Except that I also definitely love you. I’ve loved you for so long that I can’t even bring myself to care that we’re doing this in my car in an In n Out parking lot.”
“Oh my God.”
“Edmundo Diaz. Will you have my back forever?”
“No, you have to ask me properly.”
“I have a ring! I’ve had a ring. You had to make yours.”
“I need the words ‘will you marry me’ to come out of your mouth.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Gah, fine. I love you. You’re my second favorite person in the world after Chris. Will you marry me?”
“Of course, you idiot!”
And then they’re kissing again. It’s salty and wet from tears, more urgent and desperate than their first kiss. Their noses bump and it stops really becoming a kiss since they’re smiling too much, but it doesn’t matter. The ring slips onto his finger, fitting perfectly with a cool weight his wedding band never had.
“I’m gonna get you a real ring,” he says. “I’m gonna get you a real ring that costs more than our rent that’s just as gorgeous as you are. You deserve far more than a shitty straw wrapper.”
“Baby, I’d marry you with this paper ring in a dumpster.”
“Gross.”
“No, romantic.”
“Stop talking and kiss me.”
So Buck goes in for their third kiss and Eddie’s hands fly up to cup his fiancé’s face as he realizes that he’s waited his whole life for This. That he wants This so much. And he isn’t terrified at all. Nothing needs to be put in the box to think about later. It’s all out in the open now.
***
Eddie eventually puts a paper ring into a shadow box with photos from their wedding as a gift to Buck on their first anniversary. Because of course the present for the first wedding anniversary is paper. (It would have been adoption papers if Chris hadn’t all but demanded for them the second they told him that they were getting married.) Behind the ring are photos of them in their tuxes next to everyone from the 118 and Chris and the few family members that decided to make the trip out for the ceremony. They would’ve gone to a courthouse directly after their clandestine proposals if they weren’t certain that the women in their lives and their son would kill them for getting married without them.
Sheepishly, Buck pulls out a paper ring of his own during dinner before pulling out a small decorated box full of all the paper rings Eddie had made for him throughout the years. The box is decorated with glitter and Taylor Swift lyrics and silly little photos of the both of them. Eddie doesn’t know how he ended up laughing and crying at the same time in the middle of this nice restaurant they somehow got reservations for.
The ring he ended up buying for Buck was a black band with white stone running through the center, partially because it matched the one on his finger, but also because it looked just a little bit like paper.