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Eddie falls out of bed.
Or—
He falls off the sofa, more accurately, and flails around, half awake, trying to escape the blanket that’s somehow ended up wrapped around him. When he finally manages to extricate his limbs he finds himself sitting on the floor of his living room, the bones of it familiar but the furniture all wrong.
It’s been a couple of weeks, but he can’t seem to get used to the dissonance of it. Buck’s sofa in his living room, Buck’s dishes in his cabinets, Buck’s clothes neatly tucked into his closet.
Buck in his house, always. A constant. Inescapable.
Which wouldn’t be a problem, if not for the fact that Eddie can’t seem to stop looking at him. The line of his jaw, the muscles taut under every inch of skin, the droplets of water that still cling to him when he walks out of the bathroom after a shower, wearing nothing but a towel around his waist.
He knows he shouldn’t. He knows it isn’t how friends look at each other.
But every time the thought enters his mind, he wonders if friends is really what he wants to be.
Wonders why he’s asking the question when deep down he already knows the answer.
There’s a clattering noise, and Eddie realises that falling off the couch isn’t actually why he woke up, just what happened right after he did. He looks up, squinting through the dim glow of the streetlights outside, and sees Buck leaning against the doorframe. He looks—wobbly. Not quite steady on his feet.
Eddie gets himself the rest of the way out of his blanket and scrambles to his feet. “Hey,” he murmurs, taking slow steps towards Buck. He doesn’t seem to have seen him yet. “Hey, everything okay?”
Buck turns slightly, and for the first time tonight Eddie can see his face. He’s wearing an expression Eddie has only seen once before, jaw slack, eyes unfocused and a little glassy.
The last time Eddie had seen it, Buck had lost some kind of bet with Chimney and wound up drinking more liquor than Eddie had thought humanly possible.
And Eddie remembers, then, that Buck had gone out for drinks earlier. Something about an old friend passing through town.
He’d told Eddie not to wait up, and Eddie had swallowed a tiny ember of something that tasted an awful lot like jealousy.
“Huh?” Buck asks now, eyes flicking this way and that like he’s trying to focus on Eddie and not quite managing it. Eddie raises a hand, intending to grab Buck’s elbow to steady him, and Buck flinches away.
He mumbles something, and seems to realise it’s incoherent. He tries again, and this time Eddie makes out the words who are you?
“It’s me,” Eddie says, and only realises afterwards how supremely unhelpful this probably is. “It’s—”
But he’d reached for Buck again, and Buck pulls himself away again, harder this time, overbalancing and stumbling into the wall.
“Buck!” Eddie reaches for Buck again, disregarding Buck’s feeble attempts to slap him away and grabbing him by both arms. “Come on, let’s get you to bed. You need to sleep this off.”
“No,” Buck groans, pulling back against Eddie. “I can’t—”
“Yes, you can,” Eddie says. “Come on, you know where the bedroom is. Just a few steps down the hallway. And I bet you Chris is still playing video games with his headphones on, so you’re not gonna wake him up or anything.”
Buck blinks, and Eddie figures he probably said far too many words in one go for the state Buck’s in.
“Bed,” he tries. “Time to sleep.”
“No,” Buck says again, and succeeds in taking a step back this time. “No bed.”
Eddie sighs. “Okay, couch?” he asks. “Is that better?”
“No,” Buck says. “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
Buck takes a moment to think about it, frowning, like finding all of the words and arranging them in the correct order is a puzzle he needs to solve.
“I can’t—bed you,” he finally says, slow and deliberate. “I’m spooky—no. Spoken for.”
Eddie freezes. “You—are you back with Tommy?” Even saying the words carves a pit into his stomach, a yawning chasm that makes him wonder how he could ever ignore this feeling. How there was ever a time he wasn’t aware of this gnawing ache inside.
Buck stares at him, his brows slowly knitting together, then bursts out laughing. “No,” he says, so indignant you’d think Eddie suggested he’s dating a cardboard cutout he stole from the Walmart on the outskirts of town. “Not Tommy.”
“Then—who?” Eddie asks. “New boyfriend? New girlfriend? Did you meet someone tonight?”
“No,” Buck says again, just as emphatic as he has been all night. “No, no, no.” He finally wrestles his shoes off his feet, and for a second Eddie thinks he’ll be able to steer Buck in the direction of the bedroom. But even drunk, Buck is a solid hunk of muscle. Eddie doesn’t want to manhandle him, so he just watches as Buck shuffles over to the couch and collapses onto it.
His eyes flutter closed, and Eddie figures he isn’t going to solve this mystery tonight. But then Buck sits bolt upright again, staring straight at him with unfocused eyes.
“You can’t tell,” he says, the words soft around the edges. “Can’t tell anyone.”
“I won’t,” Eddie promises, perching on the backrest of the sofa. “Just, uh—just so we’re on the same page, what am I not telling anyone?”
He’ll feel bad about it in the morning, he thinks, taking advantage of Buck like this. But there’s time for that later. Right now he just wants to know.
“That I’m—” Buck starts, and his face scrunches into a frown. “Not spooky.”
“Spoken for?” Eddie asks.
“Yeah!” Buck says, and then his face falls. “But you can’t tell. ‘Cause he doesn’t know.”
And for a brief white-hot second, Eddie wonders if—
But no. It couldn’t be. Buck couldn’t mean—
“Who doesn’t know?” Eddie asks, careful to keep his tone level, though he doubts Buck would notice if he didn’t.
“Eddie,” Buck all but wails, and for a second Eddie’s mind goes blank, he tries to convince himself Buck is just getting his attention, but—
When he came in, Buck asked who are you?
Buck doesn’t seem to know who he’s talking to.
And he’s still talking. “Eddie doesn’t know,” he says, his words picking up speed as he goes like a freight train barrelling down a tunnel. “He doesn’t know I want to have his babies—no—” he frowns. “I want him to have my babies—or—babies,” he concludes, frantic. “He doesn’t know. And he’s straight.”
“No, he’s not,” Eddie says before he can stop himself, and wishes he could clap his hand over his mouth and shove the words back in. This isn’t how he wanted to—this isn’t the time—
But Buck’s eyes go wide in wonder. “He’s not?”
“Definitely not,” Eddie confirms. “He’s, uh—” he trails off when talking about himself in the third person gets too weird, but Buck doesn’t seem to notice.
“But he doesn’t know,” he says almost as if to himself.
“No, he doesn’t,” Eddie says softly. “Maybe you should tell him.”
“Can I do it tomorrow?” Buck asks, half the sentence getting lost in a giant yawn. “‘M sleepy.”
“Tomorrow is good,” Eddie says. “Get some sleep, okay?”
He watches for a moment longer to make sure Buck gets settled, that he’s on his side with his back to the back of the couch so he can’t roll onto his back and risk choking if he throws up in his sleep.
Romantic, he catches himself thinking, then chides himself for it. Just because Buck said some things while drunk off his ass doesn’t mean—
But as he heads to the bedroom and climbs into bed—a startling, confounding mix of familiar and not, a strange bed in the room he slept in for eight years, the smell of Buck woven into the sheets around him—there’s a certainty he can’t seem to shake.
Tomorrow is the day their lives change.
Or—tomorrow is the day they catch up to the fact that their lives have already changed.
He’s never been so sure of anything.