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Three months and four days after Eddie drives out of Los Angeles, Buck comes to El Paso. Three days and something like four hours later, he leaves again.
It’s a long weekend. He showed up on a Wednesday and leaves on Saturday, but it measures out to the equivalent of a long weekend. Eddie keeps reminding himself of that, though he can’t quite figure out if he means it like it’s a long weekend or it’s just a long weekend . Three days. Three days of Buck in El Paso, sleeping on Eddie’s couch and making coffee in his kitchen in the morning and looking around at everything that’s making up Eddie’s life now, that made up his life a decade or three ago.
It’s been good. Christopher was over the moon when Eddie showed up to pick him up from school with Buck in the passenger’s seat. He had school and homework and two clubs and a birthday party, but he made room in his busy teenager’s schedule for Buck, insisting on taking him to his favorite pizza place and the new arcade in the mall that he can’t get enough of. It’s a trip, every time Eddie goes out in El Paso with Christopher, the way Chris knows more about what’s in the city now than Eddie does.
When Chris is in school, Eddie shows Buck around. Buck’s interested in everything—the history, the spots he recognizes from Eddie’s stories and the ones Eddie’s never told him about—but it doesn’t really even matter where Eddie takes him. It’s all just background; it’s all just the two of them, finding somewhere to stand while they talk to each other.
It’s funny. There’s not even that much to say, or there shouldn’t be. It feels like barely a day has passed since Eddie left without Eddie seeing Buck’s face on his phone screen. Anything that’s gone on Eddie’s life, he’s told Buck about it. The reverse, as far as Eddie can tell, is just as true. Walking around Texas, they retell stories and neither of them call the other on it. Eddie feels half high just on seeing Buck again, on having him here, walking and talking and grinning and in Eddie’s space; he’s pretty sure Buck feels just about the same.
And then, it’s over. Three days is nothing. Half of Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and then Saturday afternoon is on them before Eddie knows what’s happened. Before Eddie’s gotten used to seeing Buck’s toothbrush in the cup on the bathroom sink or twice the coffee mugs on the kitchen counter. After three months, three days is the blink of an eye.
At two hours on the dot before his flight is scheduled to take off, Eddie finds Buck doing the dishes in Eddie’s kitchen.
Eddie comes up next to him. If there’s one thing he can say about his kitchen here, it’s that it’s got a nice view. It’s nothing special, just the front yard, but it’s a quiet neighborhood. Spread-out. There’s a couple nice trees, some scraggly bushes he needs to figure out how to take care of. It’s the same as the house: scrappy, a little neglected, but with potential. If Eddie puts the time into it, it’s going to be beautiful one day.
“Doesn’t it freak you out?” Buck had asked, last night, when they were sitting out on the patio in the dark after Christopher went to bed. “The quiet?”
Eddie said no automatically. He’d grown up here, in a different neighborhood, but one a lot like this one: out of the city a little, with houses set far apart from each other and a deep, impenetrable dark that descended between them after sunset.
The first night here, when the air conditioning wouldn’t turn on, he lay on his mattress on the floor of the bedroom, windows open, bed frame leaning in pieces against the wall. He listened to the quiet.
The feeling that rose in him was one he hadn’t felt in a very long time. He felt five, or fifteen, or twenty. He felt suspended in time; he felt young. It wasn’t a feeling that had any right to freak him out, when he’d grown up inside it. When it had been waiting inside of him all these years.
It took him a long time to fall asleep that first night.
Buck fumbles a plate, letting it slip between his hands and bang against the side of the sink. He cusses quietly.
Eddie bumps his shoulder. “We need to hit the road, man,” he says. “Flight’s in two hours.”
It’s been…weird, watching Buck in the house these last few days. He insisted on cooking for the two of them on his second night here, insisted on Eddie not helping, and then had to ask Eddie where to find everything in the kitchen: the sauce pans, the spatulas, the blender that was a hand-me-down from Buck himself. Eddie’s not sure what to make of it, looking at Buck in Eddie’s house, in Eddie’s kitchen, and seeing him moving around like a stranger there.
“It’s three plates,” Buck says. “I can finish.”
Eddie upgrades from a shoulder bump to a light elbow to Buck’s side. “I got it. You’re gonna be late.”
“It’s El Paso, not LAX. I won’t be late.”
Eddie reaches across Buck and turns off the water. Buck looks up, his face scrunching in an expression of betrayal.
“I can handle three plates,” Eddie says.
Eddie puts his hand on Buck’s elbow. He pulls lightly. Buck goes with him, looking something between amused and annoyed, letting Eddie swivel him away from the sink.
“Are you packed?” Eddie asks.
“I’m packed. This”—he waves a wet hand at the sink, getting droplets of water on the front of Eddie’s shirt—“was the last thing.”
“Okay, good,” Eddie says.
Eddie could probably let go of Buck’s elbow now. It’s not exactly a giant kitchen. They’re close together, between the kitchen island and the counter, on the little blue rug in front of the sink, the one Eddie found poking around a thrift shop downtown between Uber rushes. Buck, then Eddie’s hand on his arm, then Eddie.
It’s been an adjustment, having Buck here. Physically, in Eddie’s space. Eddie didn’t expect to feel caught off guard by it, but after three months away, the feeling of being close to Buck keeps registering all over again.
They hugged after Buck got off the plane. Eddie spent enough time idling in the damn pick-up lane at the El Paso airport since he started Ubering, so he shelled out the couple of bucks to leave his car in the parking structure and come inside to wait for Buck in the terminal.
It was funny. Eddie put Buck’s arrival date on his calendar as soon as he booked his flights. He looked at it every day, when he checked what Christopher had scheduled after school or what concert was playing at the arena that night. Every day, he checked the calendar and felt the same thing: excitement, anticipation. Happiness, at the prospect of Buck in the same city as him for the first time in months. Then, he pulled up to the airport and was met with a wave of nervousness.
The nerves disappeared as easily as they came, as soon as Eddie saw the familiar outline of Buck’s shoulders coming down the escalator. He saw Buck a second before he saw Eddie and got to watch the moment when Buck found him in the crowd, his face lighting up over the shoulder of a harried mom and her three kids coming back from Disneyland.
Buck ducked around the families crowding the bottom of the escalator. He’d packed light, a carry-on slung over his shoulder. He dropped it when he got to Eddie and pulled him into a tight hug.
He had on a jacket that was too hot for El Paso or Los Angeles. He smelled like the shampoo he’d been using since Eddie met him.
“Welcome to El Paso,” Eddie said into his shoulder.
That—a long hug in the El Paso arrivals lounge—is the closest they’ve been all trip. Eddie isn’t sure when he noticed that, but he did: three days, and they haven’t really touched, not much. They sit on the couch and their shoulders bump. Eddie hands Buck a cup of coffee in the morning and their hands brush. But it’s all been a matter of seconds, not—that.
Eddie’s still hanging on to Buck’s arm. Buck isn’t making any move to stop him.
“Car’s ready,” Eddie says meaninglessly.
“I could’ve called an Uber,” Buck says. “Hear they’re pretty good around here.”
Eddie rolls his eyes. “Funny.”
Buck clears his throat. “You know,” he says. “I’m, uh. I’m gonna miss you.”
There’s this feeling Eddie keeps getting.
It happens on the phone, now and again. In person, he’s been noticing it all the time. This moment—this pause—when Buck goes to say something and Eddie gets the sense that he’s holding back.
Eddie can’t figure out what it is. He doesn’t know what it could be. He knows—he thinks he knows—that he and Buck are honest with each other. Open. Best friends, in the realest sense of the term.
Years ago, Eddie had this thought: I’ve never had a best friend like this . But that was a long time ago, and they’ve only gotten closer since. That much is self-evident. It makes Eddie wonder if there’s a bottom on the way he feels about Buck. If this thing between them is ever going to reach some kind of end, some kind of leveling-out.
“I’m going to miss you too,” Eddie says.
Buck smiles. It’s small. Sad.
It was just Eddie here, that first long month in the house. He would come home late from cashing in on concert traffic at the stadium or at the bars downtown. He would open the fridge, pick through the channels on the TV. Feel the silence.
Sometimes, Buck was there with him. Buck’s voice through the phone speaker or his face on the screen, toting Eddie along with him while he worked or cooked or just sat around the house late at night, drinking a beer. It made the house less lonely, for the minutes or hours that Buck’s voice was there to fill up the space.
It didn’t last. When Eddie hung up the phone, he was right back to being alone. To being just himself, standing still in the dry Texas air.
It changed when Christopher moved back in. Everything changed, having his son back. This house went from being the place where Eddie shut himself up at the end of the day to something like an actual home. Buck was still there, pretty much as often as before, but he wasn’t the only voice in the house anymore. Eddie doesn’t have the words for how much better it is, how much happier he is, now that he’s living under the same roof as his kid.
And yet, at the end of the night, he finds himself feeling just as alone as ever. When Christopher goes to bed and Buck hangs up the phone with a half-asleep talk to you tomorrow . Eddie is still just as miserable, in the quiet dark of his bedroom.
Buck’s visit was supposed to help. Before Christopher moved in, Buck was the one thing that got Eddie through the day. A text between Ubers, a call over a lunch at the diner where Eddie’s sisters broke a tray of plates playing hide and seek two decades ago, a Facetime while Eddie killed an hour parked by the side of the road, waiting for a show to end downtown. It got him through. If hearing Buck’s voice was enough to give Eddie the strength to get through another day driving around his hometown, seeing Buck in person is supposed to be enough to buy him, what, another three months? A year? Of this life he’s been living.
It hasn’t worked.
Buck isn’t even gone yet and Eddie can already tell it hasn’t worked. The last three days were the three best days Eddie’s had in Texas yet, plus or minus the day he took Christopher back to his house permanently, or the day after, waking up and remembering that Chris was still there. It’s been everything Eddie wanted—needed—and here he is anyway, standing inches away from Buck and feeling the misery building in that spot behind his sternum again.
“I’m gonna text you,” Buck says. There’s a bright, forceful cheer in his voice. It hangs in the air between them. “As soon as I’m landed, I’m going to be planning the next trip. Bobby’s always on my ass about not using my PTO. Now that I know you’re not living in an active hazard waste zone, you’re not going to be able to get rid of—”
Eddie kisses him.
There’s a fleeting moment when Eddie thinks he might have ruined his life, Buck frozen and unmoving against him. Then, Buck is kissing him back and Eddie’s not sure how he’s been doing anything but this his whole life.
Buck presses in on Eddie and Eddie takes a step back, then another, Buck moving with him, until Eddie’s backed up against the kitchen counter with nowhere to go. He has the fleeting thought that he isn’t going to be able to get the aluminum foil out of the drawer again without thinking about this.
Buck makes a quiet noise against Eddie’s mouth. His hands come up to cup Eddie’s face. They smell like Eddie’s dish soap, lemony and clean.
Eddie closes his eyes and they could be anywhere. Texas, Los Angeles, the fucking moon—all that Eddie can feel is Buck. His hands, his mouth, the weight of his body against Eddie's.
Eddie’s not sure how long it is before they separate. When they stop kissing, Buck drops his head to Eddie’s chest. He presses in for one long moment, taking a slow breath. When he straightens up, he retreats half a step. Eddie stays where he is.
“Eddie?” Buck says, uncertainty laced through his voice. Like he has to check. Like it might have been someone else who kissed Buck in Eddie’s little Texas kitchen, against the chipped paint and the drawer that still sticks and the countertop he’s been thinking of replacing.
“Sorry,” Eddie says.
It’s the wrong thing to say. Buck flinches. He retreats another step, putting the yellow linoleum between him and Eddie.
“Hang on,” Eddie says. He combs a hand through his hair. The clock on the stove is staring back at him, perpetually two minutes slow. “You have to leave, Buck. I wasn’t…I’m not trying to make this any harder.”
“Yeah,” Buck says. There’s a frown line digging in between his eyebrows. “I know.”
Eddie didn’t plan this. He didn’t mean to do this. But—
He’s thought about it. He’s poked at the outlines of this inside his head. He isn’t sure how to tell Buck that, in the same spot where they made breakfast for his kid three hours ago, where Eddie made coffee surrounded by boxes three months ago. It feels too big for this room. For this city. For this life Eddie’s been living since he left Los Angeles—small, survivable. Improving.
Lonely.
Eddie’s thought about it. About a world where the two fell into a line, Eddie’s want and Eddie himself, in the same place as Buck instead of three states and eight hundred miles out of sync. They could talk about it one day. Eddie broaching the subject some morning out in the sun, or in another kitchen eight hundred miles away, or one of those evenings that felt like they stretched on forever, Buck and Eddie and the couch in front of the TV.
In his imagination, Eddie knows what he wants. He knows how to say it. The Buck in Eddie’s head looks back at Eddie like he’s been waiting for this, too.
The Buck standing in front of him in the Texas kitchen looks like he’s thinking about crying.
“I didn’t mean,” Eddie says, voice rough, “to do it like this.”
Buck makes a small, wounded noise. “What does that mean?”
“You leave in two hours,” Eddie says.
“I know,” Buck says. “I know that.”
Eddie’s been missing Buck since the second he got in his truck on that rainy Los Angeles morning. He thought, for a while, that that was all it was. Buck was in another state. Eddie wished he wasn’t. It was that simple.
It took until Buck was here, messing with Eddie’s car radio and leaving his socks on Eddie’s floor and grinning at Eddie like nothing’s changed, for Eddie to be sure. They’ve spent three days here, playing at being themselves—same script, just new sets—and Eddie’s still wanting. Wishing for something more.
In Los Angeles, it was easy not to think about it. They were just them. Eddie didn’t have a reason to think too hard about it—or, maybe, he didn’t want to think about it. In California, he didn’t worry about what Buck was to him. In Texas, Buck is…
Buck is his lifeline. His connection to home. His sounding board. His sanity. He’s been a voice on the other end of a phone and that’s been everything, the only thing keeping Eddie together since he got here. Now, the two Bucks—the voice in Eddie’s ear and the actual man, the flesh-and-blood Buck—have come back together. Eddie doesn’t know what to make of it.
“I’ve been trying not to,” Buck says into the silence. His voice is low, scraping the floorboards. “For...I don’t know how long. Since you left, almost.”
“Trying not to what?” Eddie says, feeling like he’s missed a step. Because Buck has been in Los Angeles and Eddie in El Paso. He didn’t have to try very hard to stop himself from kissing Eddie from there.
“Trying not to love you,” Buck says.
Eddie always resented when Frank made him talk about pain in therapy. He’d been in pain plenty of times in his life; he’d been shot, drowned, punched, crushed, bruised and scraped more times than he could count. Pain was something he got good at—good at understanding, good at surviving. When Frank asked him to talk about pain like it was feeling—an emotion, not a physical sensation—Eddie’s first reaction was always resentment.
He got better at it. He got Frank’s point, eventually, that the body and the mind—the heart—weren’t as far apart as Eddie liked to act like they were. He’d had enough pain of the kind Frank wanted him to talk about to get it; he just struggled with it anyway, with acting like watching someone die or being shot through the shoulder could be charted with the same language. It doesn’t come easily to Eddie, never has.
This hurts.
“Buck,” Eddie says.
“Sorry,” Buck says. He brings one arm up to wrap around himself. “Eddie, man—I don’t know if that’s how you meant it. But that’s how I meant it.”
They’re in Texas. El Paso. Eddie grew up less than ten miles from this house. He can still half-remember going to a friend's birthday in this neighborhood when he was six, playing t-ball at the park a few blocks away. Eddie—not just the him that moved back here, that bought a house and is standing in his kitchen right now, but the one who went to kindergarten here, first communion, his wedding—they’re all here. He’s everywhere. He, himself, has never been harder to avoid.
He didn’t want this to hurt like this. He doesn’t have much of a choice, when he’s stuck in Texas. When Buck’s getting on a plane in an hour.
Eddie wants the safe way out. He always does. He thrives on being backed into a corner, on having one good choice and a whole bunch of bad ones. He likes to know , to have one option, all action. Move to Los Angeles. Move to Texas. Swim, breathe, move. He blew up the safe option when he kissed Buck.
It’s Eddie’s choice, in the end. Buck’s looking at him like he might cry and yet, Eddie’s pretty sure he could still tell Buck he was sorry. Tell him didn’t mean it. He thinks there’s still a world where Buck lets him get away with it. Maybe, there’s a world where that’s easier on the both of them.
Eddie reaches for Buck. He pulls him in. For a second, Buck’s folded arm is caught between them, before Buck catches up to what’s happening and unfolds himself. Buck’s arms come to rest on Eddie’s back, holding him close.
Giving Buck back to LA after three days of having him in Eddie’s house was always going to hurt. Eddie’s not sure how it’s going to feel, after this, after kissing Buck in his kitchen, after knowing what it feels like when Buck smiles against Eddie's mouth.
Past Buck’s shoulder, he can see the cabinet door he’s rehung three times since he moved in. He can see the toaster on the counter with the sticky note on it warning Chris not to use it, because it keeps blowing the damn fuse. The bananas he and Buck picked up at the grocery store yesterday, the roll of paper towels, the oven mitt neither of them put away after taking the frittata out of the oven this morning.
Eddie closes his eyes. Into Buck’s shoulder, he says, “That’s how I meant it, too.”