Archive of Our Own

“Shit,” Eddie hisses, reaching just a little further, straining against the tension in his arm all the way down to his fingertips. Almost. If he could just—

The tension falls away as he slumps back, defeated, and lets his ass hit the floor behind him. The dirty, faded linoleum floor, to be more precise. He huffs, frustrated, and levels his gaze at the underside of his kitchen sink. It all looks right— at least, it does to Eddie. But it can’t be, because it doesn’t actually work.

The guy at Home Depot, a drawling young man in honest to god Wranglers, had assured Eddie that the part he was buying would solve the problem. Fix you right up, in fact, had been the turn of phrase. He winked and everything. In hindsight, Eddie is not sure that he knew what he was talking about. He’d just said it so confidently.

There are instructions on the back of the part that’s somehow supposed to fix all the problems with his sink, but they might as well be in Greek as far as Eddie is concerned. He can’t even figure out how he’s supposed to reach the old part to take it out without breaking his wrist to get to that tiny space behind the bigger pipe he doesn’t know the name of, let alone how he would manage to switch it out for the new one or how it would help even if he did manage it.

In other words, Eddie thinks from his place on the linoleum, he’s fucked.

He glares at the underside of the sink and debates calling Buck— but a quick glance at the time on his watch confirms for him that Buck will be on shift right now. Buck would still answer, of course, unless he was out on a call. But if he’s on shift then there’s always the chance that there will be other people around, too. And while Eddie can handle Buck’s inevitable teasing, the last thing he wants is Hen and Chimney crowing at him in the background for his incompetence— or worse, for Bobby to see exactly what a fuck-up Eddie is becoming at the moment.

He heaves himself up from the floor, leaving the creaky cabinet doors wide open and the part strewn on the floor with its packaging, and aims for the next best thing.

Google is no Buck, but he figures it’ll do for now. He snatches his iPad from the coffee table that looks admittedly out of place in this house, and slumps down into the familiar worn cushion of the couch. The iPad isn’t locked— Eddie refuses to password protect something that he keeps in his own house one hundred percent of the time, no matter how many times it means Buck picks it up without asking and downloads something Eddie doesn’t bother deleting later. Last he checked, there were three kinds of cooking game on this thing and he’s pretty sure one of them cost real money.

He mostly uses it to FaceTime Christopher with varying degrees of success trending upward recently; to buy things on Amazon in the middle of the night; and to Google things, which is today’s objective. He swipes down easily from the top of the screen and types:

how to replace coupling nut kitchen sink clear instructions step by step

He’s learned, in the two weeks he’s been the official owner of a house, that he needs to be very specific about what he searches. He’s also learned that a lot of household parts have bizarre and suggestive names like coupling nut.

Satisfied that this phrasing will get him where he needs to be, Eddie clicks the little search button at the bottom of his screen and waits. Except that nothing happens, not even when he clicks it again, because apparently it’s not only the coupling nut that hates him, but also every other thing in this entire fucking house including the iPad. He huffs at it, gives it a little shake like that’s going to do anything, and then presses search again.

“You’re from California,” he mutters to it. “The land of iPads. You’re supposed to work.”

The iPad does nothing, so Eddie rolls his eyes at it and closes out of the search page. If the usual method won’t work, that’s fine; he’s not a million years old like Buck and Christopher take turns insinuating he is. He can work around the iPad, if it wants to be stubborn. He navigates to the second page of scattered apps, past two of the three cooking games, and clicks on the primary-colored circle icon of the Google Chrome app. Mentally, Eddie borrows a phrase he’d overheard from a passenger in his Uber who looked like she was thirteen but was probably twenty-four or something, if nobody can get me, Google Chrome can get me. Or something like that.

Greeted with the familiar search bar, Eddie clicks on it, determined to type his query exactly as it had been.

Except that he doesn’t quite get that far. When he clicks, the search history appears beneath the bar, and a quick glance at the purple list is enough to catch his attention, because none of the things on it are things that Eddie has searched. Not ever, as far as he’s aware, and certainly not recently. The last thing he searched, last night when he got back from Home Depot, had been: what is a coupling nut sink part?

But that’s not even on the list. Beneath the search bar, Eddie reads, in descending order:

mutating yogurt bacteria monster movie

mutating bacteria from yogurt???

Do yogurt bacteria survive stomach acid?

Is the bacteria in yogurt still alive when you eat it

how is yogurt made with bacteria

how is yogurt made

By the time Eddie has reached the last result— or rather, the first in reverse order— he understands exactly what has happened. A glance at the corner of his screen is enough to confirm, when he spies the little round icon with a picture of Buck standing in front of a ladder truck with his arms spread all the way out and a truly ridiculous, cheesy smile on his face. Somehow, between the cooking games and the Netflix account that they share, Eddie has ended up logged into Buck’s Google account.

He reads over the list again, the other way around, tracking Buck’s thought process in his own head. It’s easy enough to imagine— Buck hunched over his phone like Eddie is always telling him he shouldn’t be because it’s bad for his back; the frenetic typing of his fingers against the screen; likely, an opened and then forgotten yogurt in front of him, half-eaten and then foregone in favor of a little research spiral. Eddie smiles at the picture it paints, and then he finds that the tension in his shoulders has loosened. He’s relaxed back against the couch now, and sure— the coupling nut is still his mortal enemy, and maybe his kitchen sink will never work and he will never be able to face the Wrangler-wearing Home Depot employee again.

But he feels better. Calmer. He looks at the screen again, and taps on the picture of Buck in the corner. It pulls up a smaller square menu, an array of the accounts that the device is logged into. There’s his own, [email protected] with a picture of himself and Chris that had been taken a long time ago now but which Eddie can’t bear to change. There’s his work email, too— which he never used even when he was employed— [email protected], his official LAFD uniform photo alongside it. And then there’s Buck’s, right at the top— [email protected].

Eddie realizes, all of a sudden, that he should probably log out. The button is right there— it would be quick and easy. Or at least, it should be quick and easy, because the account is not his and he probably should not be logged into it.

He turns this over in his mind. Buck wouldn’t mind that he’s logged into his account— Eddie knows he wouldn’t, like he knows the back of his own hand. Buck doesn’t mind sharing anything. He’s generous to a fault and open-hearted like that, the kind of person who is most often shameless and shining in equal measure. It’s one of the things Eddie likes most about him, how unapologetically himself he is most of the time, the way his enthusiasm rolls off of him in waves like heat off the ground in the dead of summer. Eddie melts beneath it, and he likes that.

But he and Buck— there’s eight hundred miles in between them now. The raw fact of the matter remains that there’s no reason for Eddie to be logged into Buck’s email account. Buck is not going to walk through the front door and pick up the iPad like it belongs to him. Buck is not going to need to check his email on Eddie’s iPad, or use it to buy a cooking game, or open Netflix on it. Maybe not ever again.

Eddie finds that the tension in his shoulders is back again.

He hesitates, looking at the screen. And then, before he can try to force himself to do anything, the screen changes. It goes briefly dark, and then it flashes with an incoming Facetime call and that picture of Buck with Christopher that had been taken on a day Eddie remembers very well— the one where their cheeks are smushed together and they’re both beaming so brightly that either or both of them could be the sun, could power all the electricity in this stupid shitty house in El Paso that Eddie won’t admit he hates.

Eddie answers— of course he does, he always does if he can. And then Buck appears on the screen, standing in the kitchen at the firehouse in his usual uniform pants with the LAFD insignia stretched across his broad chest and that same bright smile on his face.

“Hey!” he says, smiling wider, eyes scrunching a little at the corners. “Sorry if I caught you at a bad time, you didn’t answer my text so I decided to try calling instead in case you were driving or something.”

“Not driving,” Eddie answers. “And not a bad time. Hi.”

“Hi,” Buck replies. He pauses what he’s doing— a lemon in one hand and a zester in the other— and squints a little at the screen. “Your— like, camera thing is weird,” he says.

“Oh, yeah,” Eddie replies. “I picked up on the iPad. My phone is—” he glances over his shoulder. “In the kitchen, I think.”

“Oh,” Buck says.

“What are you making?” Eddie asks, and Buck sort of brightens up a little, that zip of enthusiasm he gets.

“Lemon cake!” he says, all enthusiasm. “It’s been you-know-what here all shift and I needed to do something but Bobby said I’m not allowed to make dinner again because I can’t—”

Eddie watches as Buck looks over his shoulder at something that he can’t see, and listens to the distant sound of a voice whose cadence is familiar, but the words Eddie can’t make out. Buck nods his head, and then turns back to Eddie, rolling his eyes.

“He says I can’t steal his job,” he relays, repeating what Bobby had said to him.

“But lemon cake is allowed,” Eddie says. He sinks back a little further, feels the release deep in his spine as he does, the way the muscles unlock in his lower back and hips. He never notices how tense he’s holding himself until he’s not anymore, and there’s something about the familiarity of this that feels— well, relaxing, he guesses. It definitely beats fighting with the sink.

“Yes,” Buck replies, smiling. “It’s a recipe I found— look.” He ducks half out of frame, reaches for something that Eddie can’t see and exposes a flicker of skin at his hip in the process. It’s there and then gone, as Buck returns in full to the screen and holds up a container for Eddie to see. “Yogurt cake.”

Eddie bites the inside of his cheek. “Yogurt, huh?”

There’s something so reassuring about Buck, Eddie thinks— the way he could practically set a watch by his expressions, knowing without the shadow of a doubt what’s going to cross his face before it does. In this case, it’s that doglike look he gets, eyes lit up, right before he tells Eddie something that really interests him.

“Yeah!” he says. “Actually, last night after I found the recipe, I was like— how is yogurt made? Like, what even is yogurt?”

There’s another voice from behind him, and Buck does a little dramatic half-turn of his body in what Eddie knows to be the direction of the sofa in the loft.

“No, Hen,” he says. “I don’t think Eddie already knows how yogurt is made.”

Turning back to Eddie, he rolls his eyes as if to say— can you believe this? Eddie can. Eddie also knows how yogurt is made.

“Anyway,” Buck says, a little too loud, as Eddie grins at him. “What was I saying? Oh, yeah, bacteria!”

“Bacteria?” Eddie repeats, still smiling.

And from there, Buck is wound up and let go. Eddie leans even further back into the sofa, readjusting, and listens as Buck tells him everything he’d learned on his little research spiral, from cultures to probiotics, and why yogurt is not cheese.

“And then,” Buck concludes, as he spoons the yogurt in question into a mixing bowl, “I tried to find this movie but it wasn’t anywhere so I just saw the scene of the bacteria eating their way out of the girl’s stomach.”

With something of a flourish, he puts the spoon in his mouth and licks the yogurt off, then flips it and licks it again, his tongue visibly smeared with white.

Eddie should be some level of grossed out, probably. He isn’t, though. It’s just Buck.

“That sounds disgusting,” he answers mildly, and Buck grins.

“It was!” he says cheerfully. “So, now I’m making lemon cake.”

By the time the alarm goes off on Buck’s end, Eddie is feeling so calm that the sound of it doesn’t even scrape out that empty spot in his chest that has felt raw since he left his turnouts behind at the 118. Buck leans in close, rushing through goodbyes, and Eddie says, be safe. And though he still feels bad and wrong about the thought of Buck going out without him, there’s a balm to it.

When Buck ends the call, the iPad screen reverts to the Google home page, Buck’s email still visible in the corner.

Eddie, feeling considerably better than before, closes the window without clicking log out. No harm, no foul. And besides, Buck wouldn’t mind anyway.

The next time Eddie uses his iPad, it’s because he’s on Amazon trying to choose and purchase a box fan. And because his phone is already in use for other purposes.

Eddie sits at his kitchen table, the heat pressing into the house overbearing even in his shorts and tank top. He’s already dreading putting on something else to go to his parents’ place later, and says as much aloud to Buck, who makes a face at him from the small screen of his phone where it sits, propped up against a haphazard stack of books that Eddie had placed there just for this purpose after the shelf he’d tried to put them on fell down three times in a row. They’re serving more of a purpose here, anyway.

“What?” he asks, catching the expression on Buck’s features.

“Nothing,” Buck says unconvincingly. Eddie levels him with a look, and he sighs. “Okay,” he relents as Eddie watches him flip his whole body over so that he’s now hanging upside down off of the couch in what used to be Eddie’s living room. From the new angle, Eddie can see the edge of the doorframe and the wheel of Buck’s bike and the way the light shines on his curls, catching the brighter blonde strands in its grasp. “I just— don’t like that you feel like you have to change everything about yourself around them.”

It’s surprisingly straightforward, and more tender than Eddie quite knows what to do with. He looks down at the iPad again, the screen staring back at him with an array of box fans.

“Yeah, well,” he says, shrugging one shoulder uncomfortably. “It is what it is.”

It’s quiet, and he sneaks a glance at Buck’s face to find him flipping himself over again, now right-side-up once more.

“You should look at something better than a box fan,” he says, choosing— to Eddie’s relief— to move on. There’s something about the topic of his parents, and about himself around them, that makes him feel itchy even on the parts of his skin that are currently bare.

“Mm,” he hums noncommittally, still looking at his iPad. “I don’t know.”

Buck rolls his eyes. “Is this one of your punishment things?” he asks, hauling himself up off of the couch in the small rectangle of Eddie’s phone. Eddie looks away from the iPad to watch him as he moves through the house to the kitchen, the background shifting behind him.

“What does that even mean?” Eddie complains.

Buck snorts unceremoniously, propping his own phone up on the counter as he starts pulling out ingredients for a protein shake that Eddie could recite off the top of his head with ease, he’s watched Buck do it so many times.

“You know what it means,” he answers, gesturing with a carton of oat milk. “You always take, like, the worst road for yourself.”

“I do not,” Eddie argues.

“Yes, you do,” Buck laughs. It’s not degrading. It’s just that— well, Buck finds a lot of things endearing. Eddie doesn’t know why, never really has. But he finds that endearing, too, that easy way that Buck laughs. It could sound like he’s making fun of Eddie, but Eddie knows he isn’t. It just makes things lighter, even when they’re not really light at all.

“Maybe sometimes,” Eddie grumbles as he watches Buck drop a banana into a blender.

“Loud,” Buck says, about half a second before he presses a button and an earsplitting whirring sound takes over the speakers. Eddie rolls his eyes and lets it happen. A moment later, Buck grins into the new silence. “Done!” he chirps.

“Great,” Eddie deadpans, but then he smiles, too. Even from a distance, there’s just something infectious about Buck. “You gotta go?” he asks, glancing at the time in the corner of the iPad screen.

“Yeah,” Buck answers, sounding even a little dejected about it. Eddie wonders how much of a bad person it makes him that he gets a strange twist of delight out of it, knowing that Buck doesn’t want to hang up any more than he does. That he still misses Eddie, too. He pushes the whole bundle of thoughts aside and focuses on the screen in time to watch Buck twist the cap of his shake onto it with a turn of his wrist.

“Is that all you’re eating?” Eddie asks, and Buck rolls his eyes at him.

“Oh, my god,” he groans. “I thought maybe once you were in Texas, you’d go back to worrying about how much Chris is eating instead of me.”

Eddie fixes him with a look. “Chis is fourteen years old, Buck,” he says. “He’s eating my parents out of house and home.”

“And I,” Buck says, “and more than twice as old as fourteen, and actually a grown man the last time I—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Eddie interrupts with a lazy wave of his hand. “Answer the question, Buckley.”

Buck grins, leaning in a little closer. The light catches him there, too. Eddie wonders in the back of his mind if there’s anywhere in his— Buck’s— house where the light doesn’t find him.

“Promise I’m eating all my meals like the big boy that I am,” Buck says, wicked and bright and still grinning as Eddie laughs in spite of himself.

“Don’t die of heat stroke!” he adds, and then has the audacity to follow it up with an obnoxious kiss in the direction of the camera before he’s gone all at once, and Eddie’s left feeling warm and a little bit lost.

Chalking it up to the heat, he leaves both devices on the table and crosses the room to the refrigerator— one appliance he owns that actually does work— where he pulls out a bottle of water. Pausing, he presses it to the side of his neck with a tilt of his head to the side and closes his eyes briefly, then thinks back to what Buck was saying.

The punishment thing. It’s the thing the weird priest was saying, too. That had been easy to brush off, though, because the priest didn’t really know Eddie. He’d followed the advice about doing something joyful— and it had been good advice, and it had felt good, and Eddie had seen the point of it. He’d left it at that, though. Because nothing the priest had said could really hold much weight, because he could have been talking to anyone.

But Buck— Buck knows Eddie inside and out, probably better than anyone else in the world. He glances back at the inside of his open refrigerator and considers the mostly-empty shelves. And— fuck, that’s kind of sad, isn’t it? He cracks open the water bottle and takes a drink, and it’s nice and cool against the inside of his throat and it satiates the faint scratch of thirst and the sticky dryness of his mouth.

But it’s not juice, a voice that sounds really annoyingly like Buck reminds him. Eddie couldn’t choose juice even if he tried to, because he doesn’t have any. Maybe Buck is right. Not that he’s ever going to admit it to his face.

The iPad stays where it is for the time being— Eddie doesn’t have time to finish his research if he’s going to shower before he changes and goes to his parents’ place for dinner. He finds that he can’t stomach the button-up today, swaps it for a t-shirt, and sticks with the jeans.

He does pause, long enough to take a look at himself in the mirror on his way out the door. He doesn’t quite look like himself, but it’s— well. It’s not a button-up.

Before he can think about it too hard, he takes a picture in the cloudy mirror on the back of the closet door that had come with the house, and sends it to Buck.

Will not die of heat stroke, he types, and then painstakingly searches for the emoji of the little guy saluting; locates it; and sends the text.

The little typing dots appear in his chat with Buck immediately, and a second later there’s a text that says:

good but your hair might die of suffocation under the helmet of hair gel :/

Eddie lets out a laugh in the emptiness of his bedroom and types, Fuck you, with a smile still on his face.

It’s not until later— when the heat has died off a little bit with the fall of darkness outside, though it’s still stifling behind Eddie’s open windows— that he returns to the iPad that he’d discarded in the kitchen. Dinner had gone fine; it had torn him open as usual to leave Chris behind when it was over; but now he’s back in his shorts and tank top, and when he opens the iPad he navigates to the Chrome app without really pausing to think about why he’s doing it.

When he clicks the search, his eyes go to the little purple list automatically, and when he looks he finds that the recent searches are— again— not his.

cheapest portable air conditioner el paso texas

are portable air conditioners bad for air quality?

is it cheaper to run a box fan or a portable air conditioner

will a box fan cool a room

pros and cons of box fan vs portable air conditioner

Eddie’s breath catches in his chest as he reads through them, following Buck’s train of thought. It brings another mental picture to the forefront of his mind: Buck, probably at the firehouse, probably slung across the couch taking up most of it with his broad frame; holding his phone above him, that concentrated look on his face; tuning everyone else out in favor of—
In this case, in favor of searching for the best option for Eddie. He’s eight hundred miles away, and Buck is still doing this, this thing he does.

Eddie stares at the screen for a long time— just looking, just breathing, until the display darkens to a muted gray and he taps it to bring it back to life again and looks some more.

There’s a simple truth that Eddie knows about Evan Buckley, and it is that he loves with a ferocity that is unrivaled even by fire. Eddie would know. He’s stood in the face of both. It’s just that— it always comes with a little bit of that startling heat, that shocking flash of disbelief at the sheer force of the thing.

He’s only brought back into the moment when his phone lets out a soft little ding, and he looks over to find that his lockscreen is lit up with a text from Buck.

btw i wanted to send u this earlier but we got a call

Before Eddie has time to open it, it flashes again with an incoming text that nudges the first one down the screen and replaces it with the preview of a link. Eddie knows what it’s going to be before he opens it, and when he does he’s looking at the Home Depot website, the link leading to a plug-in air conditioning unit on sale for sixty bucks less than the original price.

Another text comes in, then.

on sale!!!

And then another: AND in stock at ur local home depot!! u can go see your cowboy again!!

Eddie knew he was going to regret telling Buck about the Wrangler-wearing sales associate.

He types: He is NOT my cowboy.

And then he considers the screen for a moment. Eddie is good at a lot of things— he’s great in a crisis; he would like to believe he’s a good friend, especially to Buck; he makes a great cup of coffee; he’s got a knack for gift-wrapping, for some reason. It’s just that, when it comes to expressing himself in words, Eddie has a hard time. He knows what he wants to convey, but to get the feeling from his heart to his brain to his mouth— or in this case, his fingers— without bleeding it dry of meaning is difficult. He doesn’t know why.

Still. A valiant effort.

Thank you for this. Really.

Buck, predictably, types back in a matter of seconds: you’re welcome :)

Eddie taps through the website. In a matter of a minute, he’s got an order confirmation sitting in his email and a pickup time at Home Depot for the following day. He searches his chest for that familiar pang of uncertainty, that feeling he gets when he does something that veers a little too close to indulgence.

This time, he comes up empty.

Eddie does not mean to make a habit out of the Google thing.

It just kind of happens that— somewhere between buying the air conditioner and not buying the same brand of hair gel when he runs out of the bottle he has currently— he starts doing it. If hard pressed, he couldn’t really say why he does it, but opening up the Google Chrome app and peeking through the lists of Buck’s most recent searches becomes…soothing, somehow.

It’s not like he does it that much. He’s not sitting at his kitchen table every morning reading Buck’s search history like the morning paper or anything.

Except maybe this morning, a Thursday, when that is pretty much exactly what he’s doing. There’s a cup of coffee steaming invitingly on the table in front of him and the air conditioner is plugged in in the corner, its fans tilting lazily and spilling cool air out into the room around him. And Eddie is sitting back in the chair, tapping the screen of his iPad until the familiar Google search page is looking back at him.

Today, he’s treated with a classic Buck research spiral, which is what he more or less always hopes for when he checks the history. So he cuts his gaze down to the bottom and reads upward, in order to follow Buck’s entire train of thought.

recipe for banana bread

where do bananas grow naturally

are there different types of bananas

homogeneity definition

homogeneity in bananas

extinct banana plant??

can we ever taste the original banana again? :(

Eddie laughs out loud in his kitchen at the inclusion of the sad face at the end of the final query, and then immediately feels bad about it when he pictures Buck’s undoubtedly genuine concern about the original banana plant— which Eddie is kind of curious about now, too.

He doesn’t think he’ll have to wait long to find out, though. In the time that this has become a habit of his, Buck has later told him the details of his searches almost every time. It’s part of the reason why Eddie doesn’t feel particularly bad about doing this— Buck is going to tell him, anyway.

Between the yogurt and the bananas, Eddie has heard about a whole host of topics in Buck’s typical rapid-fire fashion. There had been the phrase “going postal”, after Buck had initially Googled when did stamps become stickers? Then, it had been Koko, the gorilla who could supposedly speak— Buck informed Eddie over the phone that evening that while she could not actually speak, she did have a recorded IQ of 80.

“Is that impressive?” Eddie had asked skeptically.

“For a gorilla,” Buck had assured him.

After Koko, there was an interlude. Buck had been researching restaurants near his new place— Eddie’s place, that was— and it had been bothering Eddie all day, admittedly. He wasn’t sure exactly why, but something about the thought of Buck having a reason to research restaurants got under his skin. He spent half of that day on his back trying to fix the seal on the baseboard in his kitchen where it had come loose from the underside of the cabinet, his mind elsewhere as he inadvertently pictured Buck going out to dinner with—

Well, with anyone. Some nameless, faceless, genderless person who wasn’t Eddie.

It had taken most of his willpower not to mention it when Buck called him that day from the inside of his car in the parking lot of the firehouse— but Buck, of course, had mentioned it first.

“Hey,” he had said. “Do you remember that time we got like— I don’t know what it was called, but it was a dessert, definitely. It had, like— a thin dough.” Eddie watched him hold his fingers a hairsbreadth apart, squinting his eyes for good measure. “And cinnamon sugar? I think? We got them when Christopher was like, eight.”

Something had eased off in Eddie’s chest, then. He remembered the day Buck was referring to, and now all of the questions in his Google search history made sense. He wasn’t looking for a restaurant to go to without Eddie— he was looking for one they’d gone to together. For some reason, that made a big difference.

“Buñuelos,” he supplied, watching Buck’s face light up with recognition. “I’ll text you the name of the place I was getting them from.”

After this diversion, it was back to regularly scheduled programming for a while: the occasional recipe search that Buck would send Eddie a picture of when he tried it; a search for a more durable phone case the day after he’d complained to Eddie via text that his was damaged on a call; a long spiral into what had been known as the satanic panic in the 1980’s. For this one, Eddie received a seventeen-minute voice note recorded at midnight, which he listened to on regular speed and then clicked keep on.

In between, there had been one that Buck had not mentioned. This one was particularly agonizing, but in a really different way from the restaurant situation. Eddie had mentioned to Buck that Christopher needed new orthotics— it was just in passing, like most things. But the next time he pulled up the Google search history, there had been a spiral that spanned from why exactly do people with cerebral palsy need orthotics all the way to how does cerebral palsy change in adulthood?

Eddie had sat with that one for a long, long time. And the next day, he’d made a point of relaying his time with Christopher to Buck in what might have been considered excruciating detail to anyone else. But this was Buck. Eddie had watched his shoulders relax in real time, over the screen of the phone in front of him.

Anyway, now there’s the bananas.

Buck calls in the evening. He’s at home again— sprawled out on the couch, while Eddie is leaned back into the cushions of his own. It sparks something like an ache in Eddie’s chest to look at him like that, a juxtaposition to the empty space on the blue couch beneath him.

“How was the shift?” Eddie asks, knowing Buck’s schedule and remembering that he’s fresh off the twelve-hour he was doing to fill in for someone on B-shift.

Buck shrugs a little. “Boring,” he admits. “Calls were fine. I just hate working B-shift.”

Eddie nods. “Was Collins annoying this time?”

“Ugh,” Buck groans, dropping his head back and exposing his throat to Eddie’s view through the camera. “Always.”

Eddie clears his throat. “Well,” he probes, “I know you Google when you get bored, so— what was it this time?”

Buck perks up at that, and Eddie can’t even feel bad for using what is technically insider knowledge to get him to do it.

“Actually,” he says, “it’s funny that you mention that, because I wanted to tell you about these bananas!” He leans in, all trace of his former irritation melting off of him. “Did you know,” he starts, “that the flavor we use in like, banana candy and other artificial stuff is actually based on a variety of banana that was practically wiped out by a disease in the 1950s?”

Eddie smiles. “I didn’t.”

“Yeah! And that’s why it doesn’t really taste like real bananas.”

“Wow,” Eddie says, thinking back to the little sad face on the Google search. He decides not to risk it— for some reason, the thought of Buck being sad again puts a small knot in the center of his chest.

He wasn’t that curious about the bananas, anyway, he decides. Instead he says,

“You should make banana bread.”

Buck lights up even more at that and says, “I was thinking that too!”

The following day, Eddie’s phone lights up with a text and there’s a picture of a loaf of dark, glossy banana bread on his— Buck’s— kitchen counter, alongside a string of banana emojis. And—

Nope. Eddie doesn’t feel bad at all.

Behind Eddie, the front door rattles in its frame.

Frustration wars with guilt at the sharp, echoing slam in the otherwise empty house as Eddie toes aggressively out of his shoes and discards them haphazardly somewhere in the realm of the door before he storms into the kitchen, stopping only when he reaches the kitchen counter. There, he plants his palms on the very edge of the countertop, where its sharp junction digs into his skin; he drops his head, eyes fluttering shut.

The house is quiet, then. Not even the now-reliable sound of the air conditioner whirring to distract Eddie from the echo of his parents in his head.

Things had been going well. Maybe too well, in hindsight. Eddie probably should have seen it coming, given his parents’ track record. Maybe he got complacent— Christopher has been so receptive lately, opening up to him more and more. He’s even managed to fix a lot of the stuff that needed to be done in the house. There’s Buck, a tether that keeps him from feeling like he’s made a mistake by leaving LA.

Even his parents haven’t been giving him too hard a time, which he figures now probably should have been a pretty obvious red flag.

The issue, when it comes up that evening, involves a parent-teacher conference.

Chris is the one to mention it, offhandedly over meatloaf and mashed potatoes, when he glances up at Eddie and says, “Dad, are you going to my conferences?”

Eddie looks up in time to catch his parents glancing at each other, as his heart sinks stonelike in his chest. Cautiously, he looks between his parents and his son.

“Your conferences?” he asks hesitantly.

He doesn’t miss the flash of vulnerability on Christopher’s face as he looks up. “Yeah?” he says, trailing up like a question. Eddie hates that. The uncertainty. “My parent-teacher conferences.”

In truth, Eddie loves going to Christopher’s parent-teacher conferences. Admittedly, it had taken him a little while to get the hang of those things when Chris was younger, but it was something he’d grown to genuinely enjoy. Christopher is such a good kid— Eddie revels in hearing about that; getting a glimpse into the inner life that Chris has at school; the reassurance that he’s right where he needs to be, and sometimes going above and beyond.

Eddie looks over to his parents. “What are we talking about?” he asks.

Helena hesitates, and Eddie watches her share a dark, secretive sort of look with his dad that makes something sear beneath his skin.

“Well, Eddie,” she starts, half apologetic and half placating in a way that sounds like all condescension to him. “We just thought that with everything you’ve got going on, we could handle this one.”

Eddie puts his fork down. “Everything I’ve got going on?” he asks, skeptical. Because honestly— he’s pretty sure he’s got nothing going on, and hasn’t since he got here, and he’s even more sure that she knows it.

“Sure,” Helena answers, a touch airy in a way that grates. “You know— looking for work. Driving. All the repairs on the house.”

Eddie sighs, shaking his head. “So you thought I would want to miss out on parenting my kid,” he says before he can stop himself, “which is the thing I moved eight hundred miles away from home to do in the first place?” He gives a short nod of his head, jaw clenched. “Makes sense.”

His mom has the audacity to look stricken, but Eddie feels kind of good about it— at least in the moment.

“Edmundo,” Ramon starts, with an edge to his voice.

Eddie holds up his hands. “Don’t,” he says, half pleading. “I— we can drop this, alright? Just let me know when the conferences are and I will be there.”

There’s a brief silence in which Helena and Ramon glance at each other again, just enough time for Eddie to realize that there’s more.

“We think,” his mom says delicately. “That it only makes sense for us to go, Eddie. I mean, Christopher lives with us.”

Eddie is suddenly, viciously not hungry. He pushes away from the table slightly, tilting his head back as he finds himself seized with the urge to cry. He blinks hard, once. He will not cry at his parents’ dinner table.

He gives his head a little shake, reorienting himself, and then looks back across the table at Christopher. He’s looking back— a little wide-eyed, kind of regretful.

“Yep,” Eddie says, gathering himself. “But I’m still his dad. It’s kind of there in the name. Parent-teacher, right?”

There’s quiet for a moment, and then Christopher says: “The conferences are tomorrow at four.”

The rest of the evening was pretty much a shambles after that, awkward at best and downright hostile at worst. Eddie hadn’t stayed long, and now he’s here in his too-warm kitchen that feels like clothing that doesn’t fit right, and there’s a sort of longing in his chest.

All in all— he’d won that battle. He’s well on his way to winning the war, he thinks. Christopher is starting to trust him again, to open up to him more. At the end of the night, there’s not really any harm done: tomorrow, he’ll be at Christopher’s school come hell or high water, and that’s a victory.

It’s just—

It all just fucking sucks.

And Eddie— well, Eddie wants to do what he always does when something sucks. He wants to call Buck. He wants Buck to answer, wants to see that attentive look on his face, wants to complain and have Buck tell him he’s in the right. He knows he is. It would just feel better if Buck was the one saying it.

But he can’t call Buck. He knows he can’t, because when he’d checked his phone in the car it had been to a text from him, complaining about going out on a call when they were just sitting down to dinner. Buck sends him a lot of texts like that— just random little updates, complaints, pictures. Anything. Eddie eats them up, normally, but this one put a pit in his stomach the minute he read it. Buck still has location sharing on— they both do— so all it takes is a couple of taps on his screen to confirm that Buck isn’t back at the firehouse yet, his dot stationary on a street Eddie knows to be mostly residential.

He sighs, then pushes off from the counter and taps the button on top of the air conditioning unit. It beeps once, then comes to life, and a gust of cool air brushes over Eddie’s skin and leaves a trail of goosebumps behind.

It’s then that Eddie sees the iPad, lying on the table where he’d left it the last time he used it, which was two mornings ago now. He reaches out to pick it up without giving it much thought and lets himself sink into a nearby kitchen chair, close to the air conditioner. Maybe he can’t call Buck, but a look at the Google search history won’t hurt. Maybe there’ll be something in there about how to handle your stupid parents who think they can steal your kid as a replacement for the kids they barely raised. Or maybe it’ll be something about obscure monkeys that only live in the Himalayas. It could be anything, really.

Except that it’s neither of those things, because Eddie’s entire existence is a cosmic fucking joke.

Because of course today, it’s not another fun fact or mildly deranged research spiral. It’s— something else. Something Eddie realizes pretty quickly he probably shouldn’t be looking at.

where do dreams come from is the search at the bottom. Upwards from there, Eddie reads:

what does a sex dream mean

do sex dreams really mean anything

are sex dreams normal in your thirties

are sex dreams normal for bisexual people

sex dreams about platonic friends

what do sex dreams about platonic friends mean?

Eddie very slowly puts the iPad down on the table and looks at it until it goes completely black.

Okay. So. Buck is having sex dreams, and that’s something that Eddie knows now. Furthermore, Buck is having sex dreams about someone. A platonic friend. That’s also something Eddie knows. And all of that is— completely fine, obviously. Eddie just needs to relay that message from his brain to the rest of his nervous system and get it on board because currently it seems to be getting a different signal.

But it’s fine.

Firstly, Buck has plenty of friends. Eddie can’t actually really think of any of them right now but he’s sure Buck has plenty of friends, because Buck is so much fun and he’s got the biggest heart of anyone Eddie has ever met. There are probably lots of people who see that in him. So— it could be anyone, this platonic friend. And if it’s a platonic friend, that means it’s not Tommy Kinard. There’s a silver lining. And— it could even be someone else’s friend, come to think of it. Buck could have just been asking for a friend!

Eddie pauses, then looks down at his socked feet on the linoleum of his kitchen floor. When had he started pacing?

He takes a deep breath. This is all just completely out of proportion. So Buck had a sex dream; everybody has sex dreams. Eddie himself hasn’t had a sex dream since— well, ever. But that’s besides the point. Lots of people have them, and some don’t, and it’s fine. Even if you’re having them about platonic friends who are not Eddie and who probably live in Los Angeles.

Eddie stops himself there, before his thoughts can spiral to a place that really doesn’t make any sense.

By the time he’s getting into bed a little while later, he’s resolved to put the whole thing out of his mind. He’s got Christopher’s parent-teacher conferences tomorrow, and there’s another part he needs to fix the leaking shower head, and besides— it’s Buck. It’s not like anything is going to change, anyway.

Except that it very much does, swiftly and with breathtaking force.

Deciding to set it out of his mind, Eddie types out a text to Buck before going to sleep that says,

Sorry I missed you tonight. Hope your call went okay.

It’s normal for them, the kind of thing Eddie would send anytime their schedules don’t align. He knows it’s exceedingly normal, because he’d read it through three times before sending it and even scrolled back in their chat until he found an older, similar message to compare it to.

What’s decidedly less normal is the way that Buck responds to it— or rather, the way he doesn’t respond to it, which is to say that he doesn’t at all. When Eddie wakes up the following morning, there’s a read receipt beneath the text and Buck’s little location dot is back at the firehouse again, but there’s nothing else. No reply to Eddie’s message; no reaction on it; nothing.

Eddie feels wide-awake immediately.

It’s so unlike Buck not to reply that it makes him— not only confused, but more than that, worried. He takes a second to remind himself, as he sits up in bed and leans back against the headboard with the sheets bunched carelessly around his bare waist, that if something were really wrong, someone would have called him. If anyone were hurt, or— or anything else like that, someone would have called him.

There’s a little voice in the back of his mind that says— what if they wouldn’t? But he shoves it aside. They would— and besides that, Buck’s location is at the firehouse and not the hospital waiting room that they all know like the back of their hands by now. So it can’t be that— but Buck always responds to him. Eddie can’t even remember the last time his messages to Buck went read, but not responded to.

He toys with the idea of calling, but it’s still so early. On the off-chance that Buck is asleep, Eddie wouldn’t want to disturb him, let alone anyone else who might be in the bunk room with him. So he texts,

You okay?

He’s a little surprised when the text is opened immediately, and the typing bubble appears. Eddie watches as it disappears, too; then appears again right away before a text comes in that says,

all good

He watches the screen for a moment, expecting Buck to elaborate. Because he almost always does— double-texting is too light a term for what Buck normally does, which is more like…maybe burst-texting, often sending five or six messages in a row that could easily have been combined. Today, there’s just the one.

Eddie stares at the screen, perplexed.

You sure?

yep, Buck types right away. And then, in a separate message: got a call, talk to you later.

Except— the seconds tick by, turning into minutes, and Eddie watches the Find My Friends screen as Buck’s location dot remains right where it is at the firehouse. It doesn’t move an inch, and now Eddie feels concerned and like a creep. He’s not— or so he tells himself as he eventually gets up and goes into the kitchen to make coffee just because he wants something to do with his hands.

He leans on the countertop as the coffee pot percolates, slow and steady as it whirs to life and starts to drip. He’s a mirror of the night before— standing in much the same spot, but feeling something very different. The issue with his parents feels sort of distant now, especially considering that it was an issue he and Chris were on the same side of. He’s here for his son, but he cares less and less by the day what his parents have to say.

And when it comes to Buck— well, regardless of anything Eddie may have said to anyone else in the weeks that lead up to the move to El Paso, Buck is undoubtedly the second-most important person in his life. He’s not sure he’s ever said it like that, exactly, but it’s been true for a long time. The thought that something is bothering him, enough that he’s not talking to Eddie about it, makes Eddie feel itchy and strange. Maybe even more so since he’s in Texas— too far away to get a real read on Buck, the way he can when he can look up and see the way he moves, the way he breathes.

This feels— like there’s a chasm between them that hadn’t been there yesterday. It makes Eddie irrational and jumpy, untethered.

He checks the app again. Buck hasn’t moved.

Eventually, he does. Eddie checks between every Uber ride, and eventually Buck goes out on a call, comes back to the station, and then leaves again at the end of his shift. Eddie is watching the app when he pulls into the driveway at home and the dot goes still again. He breathes a little easier after that— Buck may be ignoring him, kind of, and something is definitely amiss; but he’s safe at home, and that’s something.

By early afternoon, Eddie’s thoughts have shifted back to the Google search history. It’s what he’s thinking about when he picks up a fare for someone whose name on the app is Maddie.

Later, he’ll think that maybe that’s why he did what he did. Maddie got into his car for a fifteen-minute drive, and Eddie lost his mind a little, and maybe it was because she had soft blue eyes like Buck or because she was named Maddie, or maybe it was just because he is a little bit insane all on his own. Either way, he glances up and meets her eyes in the rearview mirror and says,

“Maddie?”

“Yeah,” she answers with a smile. “Edmundo, right?”

“Eddie,” he corrects as he pulls out into traffic. She smiles a bemused little smile, one with kind features, and Eddie wonders not for the first time why he didn’t just write Eddie on the damn thing in the first place. Now he’s stuck with a name that doesn’t fit him, like a shell of himself. And— huh. Maybe there’s a metaphor there. He clears his throat, looks at her again, and says, “What about you? Maddie short for something?”

He’s aware, albeit too late, that he could sound like he’s trying to steal her identity or something equally sinister. He’s a grown man with a young woman in his car. But her eyes have found the picture of Christopher on the dashboard and her face has gone soft, so he thinks he’s probably not appearing very threatening.

“Actually,” she says, “it’s not.”

“That’s funny,” Eddie says. “My best friend’s sister is also Maddie, short for nothing.”

“Yeah?” she answers.

And that’s when Eddie takes a sharp turn. The car keeps moving forward, of course— he’s a responsible Uber driver. It’s more of a mental sharp turn when he says,

“Yeah. His name is Buck. That one’s— short for something, kind of. More of a nickname, I guess; it’s because his last name is Buckley, so everyone calls him Buck.” He pauses, just for a second, and then keeps talking for reasons that are truly beyond him. “His first name is Evan, but nobody calls him that,” he says, and then tilts his head. “Except his ex-boyfriend, but that was a big red flag if I’m honest with you. Like, you’d want to call the person you’re dating by the name they prefer, right?”

In his rearview mirror, Maddie is nodding mildly. “Yeah,” she says agreeably. “That seems like basic respect.”

“I thought so, too,” Eddie says conversationally. “But Buck dated the guy for six months. I mean— I didn’t tell him I thought he was bad for him, but—”

“Why not?”

Eddie stops mid-sentence at the interruption, glancing back at her again in the glass.

“Why not?” he repeats stupidly.

“Yeah,” Maddie replies. “Why didn’t you tell him you thought he was bad for him? If Buck’s your best friend, I mean.” She shrugs her shoulders. “I’ve told my best friend that her last three boyfriends were shit.”

Eddie pulls the car to a stop at a red light and studies the hue of it, the way it glows.

“Huh,” he says. “You would?”

Maddie looks at him in the mirror, and her expression is something kind of— pitying? Eddie feels a little lost, honestly.

“Yes,” Maddie says gently. “That’s what— you know, in my experience, best friends do.”

She’s speaking to him like she understands something that he is fundamentally missing, so Eddie turns the statement over in his head as the light goes green and he accelerates, guiding the car through the intersection.

“Are you saying that we’re— I don’t know,” Eddie muses. “Not best friends? Or not— not normal best friends?”

Maddie shrugs, holding her hands up in a gesture of surrender that catches his eye in the mirror. “I’m not saying anything,” she says. “I don’t really know you. But the way you talk about it makes it sound like you’re— well.”

Eddie frowns. “I’m what?”

“Jealous?” she offers.

Eddie frowns again.

“Like I said,” she tells him, too gently, “I don’t really know either of you. I just know I don’t know anybody else who talks about their best friend like that.”

Those words stay with Eddie well after Maddie has left his Uber and rated him a very kind five stars. She even left a tip. He feels kind of bad accepting it when he looks back on the temporary insanity that had apparently taken over him during the ride.

His guilt about unloading all of whatever that was doesn’t exactly override the rest of the issue, though. In fact, as the afternoon wears on and Eddie watches Buck’s dot in resting position at the house, it only feels increasingly more pressing. He keeps running over it in his head, sitting at red lights and stop signs and coming back to it like the empty space left behind by a lost tooth, pressing his tongue into the absence of—

The absence of Buck, Eddie guesses. He hadn’t known it would feel like this to be eight hundred miles away from him, and he hadn’t known it could feel worse still until Buck stopped answering his messages and he learned that there was more absence to be had. He checks their messages again in the parking lot of Christopher’s school at 3:30 that afternoon. He’s way too early and Buck still isn’t texting him.

It’s not like the morning, he reasons. Buck doesn’t have anything to reply to now— his own is the last message on the screen. In this manner, Eddie manages to talk himself into texting again. After all, Buck can’t be considered ignoring anything if there’s nothing to ignore. If Eddie really wants to see whether Buck will reply, he has to text first. Right?

He thinks back. Are we normal best friends? They are, though. Probably.

He starts with: Hey. Shift okay?

He waits all of six minutes with no response to type a second text. This time it says: Chris asked me come to his parent-teacher conferences.

And maybe Eddie does feel a little bit shitty for testing his best friend like that, but how bad can he really feel when it immediately works?

The mention of Chris has his phone lighting up immediately with a response from Buck that comes so fast Eddie doesn’t have time to watch the typing bubble appear.

wait that’s amazing

man i miss parent-teacher conferences.

Eddie’s chest does something odd, tight and flickery. Buck had attended the parent-teacher conferences with Eddie twice. First, when Chris was in sixth grade and Carla couldn’t make it. Then again last year. They hadn’t talked about it. It had just been on the calendar and Buck had been there and they had gone together and nobody said a word. At the sight of the text in front of him, Eddie’s resolve wavers.

He doesn’t think Maddie from Uber would probably go to her best friend’s kid’s parent-teacher conferences two years in a row. If she had one. She probably doesn’t. Her best friend probably has it together a little more than Eddie, anyway.

The point is— maybe she had a point about him and Buck. If the tightness in his throat is anything to go by.

Before he can stop himself, Eddie types: We miss you, too.

This time, the read receipt never appears.

Eddie loses his mind entirely later that evening. Or at least, that’s how he’ll remember it when he looks back on the day later.

As it happens, the parent-teacher conferences go well. Better than well— Christopher is excelling at school; he’s popular; his teachers love him, even the one who hated Eddie in high school and is still teaching and makes quick work of telling him that Chris is everything that Eddie was not. He’s fine with that. He thinks Chris is better than him in every way, too.

Afterward, Chris confides in him that he also hates Mrs.Terry. His strategy, he tells Eddie as they cross the dusky parking lot toward the car, is to be as nice to her as humanly possible so that she can’t possibly guess it was him when he tears her to shreds in their end-of-year teacher surveys.

Eddie laughs at that. And then he starts thinking about it; keeps thinking about it as Christopher tentatively suggests that maybe he and Eddie could go somewhere for dinner, instead of going back to eat with Eddie’s parents; is still thinking about it as he and Christopher slide into a booth at the pizza parlor that Eddie himself had frequented when he was Christopher’s age— an out-of-date place tucked into a strip mall with faux Tiffany lamps hanging over sticky tables and an unsightly pinball machine dinging faintly in the corner.

He can’t stop thinking about it, actually. And he realizes only as he’s sprinkling parmesan cheese on his pizza from a little glass bottle on the table, that he’s thinking about it because it’s so unlike Eddie. It dawns on him, then, where Chris might have picked up this kill it with kindness approach.

It always comes back to Buck, apparently. Has that always been true? Has Eddie just— missed it, for this long? And if so, how?

Maybe he’s just an idiot.

“Daaad,” Christopher says, shaking Eddie out of his thoughts. Looking at him across the table, he realizes he’s been spaced out enough that he missed whatever Chris was saying and then immediately feels guilty.

“Sorry, sorry,” he says. “What did you say?”

Christopher rolls his eyes. “I wanted the cheese.”

Eddie hands it over to him, and then hesitates, looking at him over the plates of pizza and the spot of grease staining the table between them. Chris sprinkles cheese on his own food, and Eddie considers the question in his head. Christopher is the perfect person to ask, in a way. Nobody else has seen him and Buck together over the years quite as much. Chris has seen them fight; seen them laugh; seen them weather the stomach flu locked in the same house because Chris is the one who brought it home to them both when he was in third grade. There are plenty of people who have been witness to his friendship with Buck— but nobody else has seen it for half of their lifespan, the way Chris has. Up close and personal, in his own home.

“Hey,” he says, tapping his fingers against the table lightly until Christopher looks up at him, pizza halfway to his mouth. “I wanted to ask you something.”

“Yeah?”

“Uh,” Eddie says, cringing a little. “Me and Buck.”

Something flickers across Christopher’s face, there and then gone. Eddie is not sure what that means.

“You and Buck?” Chris asks.

“Yeah,” Eddie replies. “Are we— you know— like. Are we normal?”

Very slowly, Christopher lowers the slice of pizza in his hand back to his plate.

Eddie thinks that probably can’t be a very good sign. And neither can the look on his son’s face— something kind of cautious and a lot incredulous.

“Could you—” Chris starts, tilting his head. “Maybe define what you mean by normal.”

There’s a silver lining here, in that Christopher is talking to him, indulging him, conversing with him the way they used to. Eddie presses on in pursuit of this.

“I mean…” he starts. “Buck is my best friend. Right?”

“Yes,” Christopher answers, with the air of someone backed into a corner.

“Right!” Eddie repeats, gesturing a little wildly. “So— we’re normal best friends.”

“No,” Christopher answers immediately. He shakes his head— emphatically, at that. “You are not.”

“Oh.” Eddie frowns. “Okay. Um—”

Christopher sighs, and when Eddie looks back at him he looks pained, and a little pitying, too. A little like the girl in the Uber earlier, except that this is a lot worse, because it’s his child who’s looking at him like that.

“Dad,” he says, reaching halfway across the table and putting his hand on Eddie’s. He reminds him a little of Pepa, somehow, suddenly? Eddie decides in a split second that he does not like that.

“Yeah.”

Christopher pats the top of his hand. “Is this— have you talked to Buck about this?”

Eddie hesitates, which seems to be enough of an answer for Chris.

“You should talk to Buck,” he says, and then pulls his hand back, shoves a bite of pizza in his mouth, and mumbles around the melted cheese and pepperoni, “Not me, please.”

The thing is— Eddie thinks later that night as he returns once again to his otherwise empty house without his son and with that familiar emptiness in his chest— he can’t really talk to Buck about this. Buck is still kind of ignoring him, and he’s back on shift again for another twelve-hour, anyway. Eddie isn’t going to try to call him and risk total rejection in the form of a denied call or the humiliation of trying to have this conversation where someone else from the 118 might overhear. He’s not sure which option would be worse, but he knows he wants neither of them.

So, it’s just him again. Christopher’s words rattle around like loose, insistent marbles inside his skull. He’s starting to get a headache and he has the distinct feeling that he’s supposed to be understanding something fundamental, but he doesn’t.

So he turns on the air conditioner, and then goes to open the refrigerator as it whirs to life again. Inside, there’s not a lot. But what there is, right on the top shelf, is a container of orange juice in a cardboard carton.

Eddie looks at it for a long moment, long enough that the cool air from the refrigerator starts to chill him.

He had bought the juice four days ago. Since then it’s just been sitting, right there on the top shelf, the seal intact. Eddie isn’t sure why he bought it, just to not drink it.

Okay— that’s not quite true. Eddie knows why he bought it. He wanted to buy it. He likes orange juice; in fact, it’s his favorite kind of juice. He used to drink it all the time in LA, actually. When he and Christopher first moved into the Bedford Street house, they had both been delighted to discover a fruitful, healthy orange tree growing on the property, its blossoms fragrant and its branches slowly growing heavy laden with succulent, delicious citrus. So many mornings in that house, the kitchen had been alive and redolent with the scent, the freshness washing over Eddie’s tongue. It was so bright sometimes that it hurt his teeth in the best way.

And Buck was there, his mind reminds him now. Buck was there, more often than not, slicing oranges and twisting their halves on Eddie’s juicer and laughing. Joking with Christopher. Smiling at Eddie. Taking up space. He misses that so much now. Misses Buck, so much that it’s like an ache.

He looks back at the juice carton. If that’s the case— if he likes orange juice that much, which he does— why is it just sitting there?

Maybe he’s lying to himself a little bit, when he says that he doesn’t know. It’s just that— whenever Eddie thinks about opening it, he becomes viscerally aware of the fact that then it will be open. Like this, it can sit in his fridge for over a year, and it’ll be fine. He checked the date, so he knows that to be true. Cracking the seal, taking even a little bit— it sets the orange juice on a stopwatch, a countdown, a path toward something inevitable. It will rot if he opens it. That’s just a fact. He’ll have two options: one, to drink all of it himself in this empty house; two, to allow it to rot and sour and eventually to have to pour it down the sink that he recently fixed with a coupling nut from Home Depot.

He’s not sure why it bothers him so much, but it does. He finds himself wanting it anyway, and then feels some kind of bad that he doesn’t know how to describe.

He closes the refrigerator again. Maybe tomorrow.

Tomorrow comes, and with it Eddie’s phone rings.

He’s in the middle of a staring match with the iPad when it happens, and then he looks over and it’s Buck’s name, Buck’s picture, flashing over the screen of his phone where it’s sitting next to his usual coffee mug on the kitchen table.

Eddie’s heart leaps into his throat, and he reaches for the phone, sliding the answer icon over so quickly that the call picks up before it even finishes ringing twice. The FaceTime connects, and Buck appears on the screen, and something unnamed eases off in Eddie’s chest. It’s replaced quickly by a headrush of concern, though, because Buck looks—

Tired, Eddie’s mind supplies. Really tired.

“Hey,” he says. “You alright?”

Buck looks at him through the screen a little cautiously, almost like Eddie is the one being weird. Is he? Eddie doesn’t think he’s being weird, but then again he had been sure until yesterday that everything between him and Buck was very normal— and apparently that’s not true, so maybe he is being weird.

“Yeah,” Buck replies. “You keep asking me that.”

“Uh,” Eddie says ineloquently. Maybe he’s being weird in some way he doesn’t know about, but that doesn’t negate the fact that Buck is also, most definitely being weird. “Well, you’ve been avoiding me.”

Buck blinks. “No,” he says, with that evasive tone that he gets. Eddie knows it, knows him. He’s heard it a thousand times, though usually not directed at him.

“Yes,” he counters certainly. “You barely texted me yesterday.”

Buck looks away. He’s sitting in the kitchen at the firehouse, Eddie realizes, but he must be alone because his eyes wander the room and don’t settle.

“I was busy,” he says. Still evasive. It sparks something— not angry, exactly, but close to it, a kindling thing in Eddie’s chest.

“No, you weren’t,” he says without thinking. “I saw your location, you were home all day.”

It occurs to him then that he sounds—

Jealous. Like Maddie the Uber passenger had told him. Huh. Maybe that’s something to consider, too. Buck’s eyes widen a fraction, turning back to him as his eyebrows draw together in genuine confusion.

“Why were you looking at my location?” he asks.

Eddie rolls his eyes, holding one hand up in a questioning, exasperated gesture. “Why were you not texting me?” he bickers back.

“Becuase I was—”

“Not busy,” Eddie fills in, firmly, stubbornly. Buck sighs, audibly annoyed for some reason. The real kind, Eddie realizes suddenly with a shock of cold. Eddie doesn’t get it— this is what they do, what they’ve always done— but he softens, anyway. He’s not trying to hurt Buck, not ever.

“Hey,” he tries instead, ducking his head out of habit only to find that it doesn’t really work that way through a video call and he can’t quite get Buck to meet his gaze. “I’m just messing around,” he adds uncertainly.

Something in his tone seems to get through to Buck, because he nods a little and looks down, that familiar abashed expression flickering over his features.

“Yeah,” he says, leaning back and scrubbing his hand over his face. “No, I know. Sorry. I’m just tired, I think.”

Eddie takes a moment to look at him. Something in his gut tells him there’s more to it than that, and in the back of his mind he circles back to the Google search history. The sex dreams. He doesn’t want to dwell on it— in fact, he’s been actively trying not to— but now Buck is half-ignoring him, then calling him only to act strange and cagey and… well, Eddie isn’t sure how he’s supposed to not make the connection.

He assembles, mentally, the facts as far as he has them. Lines them up in his mind, a little like search results chained together by their fragile train of thought:

Buck had a sex dream.

Buck had a sex dream about a platonic friend.

Buck was panicked enough about this to Google things about it.

Buck started ignoring Eddie, except when it came to Chris.

Chris told Eddie that he and Buck are not, in fact, normal best friends.

Buck called Eddie, like he always does.

Buck looks exhausted.

Buck is acting different. Distant. Uncertain.

Eddie is sure he’s supposed to get something from all of this. He knows he is. He just can’t quite see what that might be, what he’s missing in all of it.

“Have you…not been sleeping well?” he ventures hesitantly. Buck had said he was tired— that’s not going to give him away or anything. It’s a reasonable, contextualized question. Still— maybe he’s imagining it, but he would swear Buck looks suspicious.

“I mean,” he says, gesturing vaguely around him.

Right. He’s at the firehouse. Of course he hasn’t slept well, or maybe at all.

“Yeah,” Eddie says lamely. “I just meant— you know. Generally.” And, okay, now Eddie knows he’s being weird. But in his defense, Buck had been weird first. He sighs, shakes his head, and tries very hard to get it together. This is Buck— and maybe they’re not normal best friends, but they are some kind of best friends. If something is wrong, Eddie wants to know about it. Maybe a little less so if it has to do with sex dreams, but— it probably doesn’t. The two things are likely unrelated, so he plows on with a new tactic.

“Buck,” he says, sort of painfully. “Did I— have I upset you, somehow?”

Buck looks outright panicked at that, which is not the reaction Eddie expected.

“What?” he says. “No! Why would you think that?”

Eddie blinks. “Okay,” he says slowly, holding his hands up. If he were in the room with Buck, he would touch him— a hand on his shoulder, probably, a grounding gesture that Buck is currently looking like he could really benefit from. As it stands, Eddie just lets his hands drop and says, “It’s okay, Buck. If— if I did do something, you know, you can tell me.”

Buck shakes his head, adamant.

“No,” he insists. “You didn’t do anything. How could you have done anything to me, in— in any way? You’re in Texas.”

Eddie stares at him.

“I…am in Texas,” he agrees. “Yeah. But, you know— we talk. Maybe I said something that upset you.”

“I’m not upset,” Buck replies too quickly. He’s still not looking at Eddie, and the whole thing is getting weirder by the second. “Not at all. Not with you or— or anybody. For…anything.”

Eddie nods. “Okay.”

“Okay.”

There’s silence for a long, painful, stretching moment. Eddie feels a little bit like he’s drowning now, because something is obviously wrong but he has no idea what it is or even what half of the words Buck has just said were supposed to mean. It’s all very confusing. He’s beginning to think maybe he has bigger concerns than whatever Christopher and Maddie from Uber seem to know that Eddie doesn’t. Buck could have joined a cult, for example. He could see that as a possibility. A sex dream cult, maybe, if that’s a thing. Though, probably not— if he had, they probably would have had all the answers and he wouldn’t have needed to Google it. That makes Eddie feel a little better, honestly.

Anyway— there is a problem here, somewhere, even if Eddie doesn’t know what it is.

“Okay,” he says again, cautiously. “Just— if there were something wrong. You know you could tell me, right?”

Buck gets a strange look on his face for a second, and then he swallows hard enough that Eddie can see the way his throat moves, even through the video feed. And then, impossibly, Buck softens all at once.

“I know, Eddie,” he says, and he sounds— heartbreakingly, confusingly, like he might cry.

Before Eddie can dig any deeper into that, no matter how much he may want to, the familiar sound of the alarm sounds out on Buck’s end of the call and his face shutters.

“Gotta go,” he says unnecessarily.

“Hey,” Eddie says, catching his attention at the last second and getting a glimpse of his blue eyes in a flurry of motion. The sight makes him feel softer, warmer. “Be safe out there, okay?”

And Buck softens, too. “I will. Bye.”

Just like that, the call ends and plunges Eddie into the usual silence again. He gets up, goes to the refrigerator, and looks at his juice— feeling like he has even fewer answers now than he started with.

Eddie has sworn off the Google search history.

He had to— after the sex dreams thing, it was too invasive. Buck wouldn’t mind that Eddie was logged into his account— that was still true— but it wasn’t fair or right that he had access to it and Buck didn’t even know. Especially if Buck is going through something— with someone— Eddie shouldn’t be invading his privacy like that. It isn’t good best friend behavior.

Except that it’s now Monday, and Eddie has heard nothing from Buck in a day and a half, and he is going absolutely out of his mind.

He paces the length of the kitchen with the iPad in his hand around midmorning. His cup of coffee has been abandoned on the table for so long that there’s no longer any steam lifting off its dark surface, and he’s checked his phone so many times that he’s worried he might have made it freeze up. He’s forcing himself to leave it alone now, because the truth is that he doesn’t know how to fix it if it does freeze up and the thought of asking Christopher about it fills him with deep humiliation.

He’s beginning to accept that he and Buck are not normal best friends. That’s sounding increasingly true. He thinks that normal best friends probably can go a day and a half without speaking and not descend into complete insanity. Probably.

It follows then, Eddie reasons on what must be his hundredth lap around his kitchen table, that he is within the realm of whatever normal is for them to check Buck’s Google search history again.

This makes sense to him, because it wouldn’t be something normal best friends could do. But if he and Buck are already not normal— which he’s been told by reputable sources they are not— then he’s in the clear. Kind of. At least when combined with the extenuating circumstances currently present wherein Buck has been ignoring him and Eddie is worried. It comes down to this, ultimately: Eddie is doing this because he is worried about Buck, and if he has the resources at his disposal to understand what’s wrong with his friend, he is within his rights to use them. Spy now, ask forgiveness later. Or something like that.

Also, Eddie is pretty sure he could kill someone and Buck would forgive him.

It’s in this way that Eddie ends up sitting at his kitchen table and opening the Google Chrome app. Beneath the search bar, there’s a list just like always. Except that this time, Eddie’s throat closes up at the sight of it.

can sex dreams mean you’re in love

how do you know if you’re in love

what to do if you’re in love with someone straight

why long distance relationships don’t work

why it’s bad to fall in love with your straight best friend

in love with straight best friend reddit

Eddie stops breathing. For several agonizing seconds, his lungs seize beneath his ribs and his heart struggles against the binds that hold it in place in his chest and his throat ceases function and then— just before his brain loses oxygen, probably— something washes over him so viscerally that he’s surprised when he blinks and finds the world around him unchanged.

How is that possible? How can everything look exactly the same when Eddie has just come to the sudden and ferocious realization that he is not who he’d thought himself to be?

He stares at the screen, blinks, and reaches several conclusions in quick succession. Firstly, the Google searches were about him. All of the Google searches were about him— the sex dreams, and all of these. It’s him that Buck is in love with. He doesn’t know how he didn’t see it before.

And then, that explains Buck’s odd behavior. Eddie is strangely relieved at the thought, because it means that he didn’t do anything to make Buck upset with him. Except for— being straight, he guesses.

Except.

Eddie looks at the screen, at the words in love with straight best friend, and finds that they don’t feel entirely correct to him. He reads them again, and then again, and searches his own chest only to find that something in it has fundamentally shifted. Or maybe the shift is just— in his head. Maybe the thing in his chest has been that way all along, but Eddie is only now for the first time looking at it, seeing it.

There’s another realization that Eddie is having, as he thinks back to the other night and Christopher across the table at the pizza parlor. The way he’d looked at him— that cautious look, the shift of his features. Eddie understands that now, very suddenly.

No, you’re not normal best friends. You should talk to Buck. And a little further back, to the girl in his Uber. The way you talk about it makes it sound like you’re jealous. I don’t know anybody else who talks about their best friend like that.

He thinks of Buck, then. Buck— who has never been anything but a ray of light in Eddie’s life, even when he was being petty or difficult or infuriating. Buck, who has saved his life, and his child’s life, and his life again. Buck, who has been at his side over and over — who never hesitates to show up for him and for Chris, no matter how messy the situation is on their side of the door. Who is there every time Eddie looks up; who keeps coming back even when it’s hard, even when Eddie fucks up, even when he’s the one who’s fucked up. Buck, who was there more times than not, juicing oranges in Eddie’s kitchen and laughing.

All at once, on a Monday morning in his half-derelict kitchen in El Paso, Texas: Eddie gets it.

He gets up, goes to the refrigerator, and takes the carton of juice out. On the countertop, Eddie twists the lid off and listens to the crack of the seal and finds that, miraculously, he feels no sense of dread. He flips a glass over from where it’s drying on the rack by the sink. Before it was washed, he’d been drinking tap water out of it. Now, he sets it upright and pours it full of juice, all the way to the brim.

And then he turns to the sink and empties the rest of the juice into the drain. The dread still doesn’t come; and when he picks up the glass, he drinks the juice down with ease and there’s nothing about it that feels wrong.

He gets it now. It was never about the juice at all.

Pulp clings to the side of the glass, and Eddie holds it up to the light to look at it. The emptiness, the dregs. With the vision comes a sense of peace. He turns it over in his head, once and then twice, and still comes up with nothing but peaceful certainty.

He’s in love with Buck. It changes everything and nothing.

He turns away from the counter and back to the iPad to look at it again as he takes his seat at the table once more. This time, when he reads the list over, he’s prepared for what’s going to be on it. It offers him the space to think about the other side of it— Buck’s side of it.

The peace he feels begins to abate at that. There’s a twist in his stomach as he reads the words, why it’s bad to fall in love with your straight best friend. It’s easy, now that he has the full picture, to understand why Buck has been distant with him. Why he looked so tired. Why he hasn’t been responding.

He pictures Buck, the way he has with each of these lists. Constructs a little mental image of where he might have been, how he might have looked as he typed these words. Where the others had brought Eddie a kind of comfort and sweetness, this one makes him feel vaguely panicked.

Had Buck sat in their empty house, in the dark shadows left by the absence of Chris and then Eddie, typing these words into a harshly glowing screen that hurt his eyes? He has sensitive eyes— he’d told Eddie once that it was scientifically proven that blue eyes were more susceptible to light. Had he blinked against the light? Had he been scared and sad and anxious? If Eddie had been there, would he have been able to read all that anxiety in the ropes of tension marring Buck’s broad shoulders, creeping into his furrowed eyebrows and distracting him so much that he didn’t notice he was twisting his bad leg the wrong way until it was too late, because Eddie wasn’t there to tap the outside of his knee as a reminder?

The thought of it all— the memory of Buck’s exhausted eyes over the phone and the pitch of his voice, frenzied— makes Eddie feel like someone has taken an ice cream scoop to the space beneath his lungs and carved him out.

What follows is a feeling that he’s familiar with. He didn’t know the word for it, maybe, until today. But he knows what this feels like, this urge he gets to smooth out all the lines of tension in Buck. It’s what drives him to press his thumb to his collarbone; what he’s doing when he lowers his voice to that even timbre he sometimes catches himself using with Buck; what it feels like every time he watches him return to safety, in person or on a little screen.

Love. That’s the word.

Eddie gets halfway through reaching for his phone, and then reconsiders. Buck isn’t on shift right now, so he could call— but should he? Is this a conversation they can have over the phone? Does this— does Buck— deserve something more than that?

Undoubtedly, he does. But Eddie is in Texas, and Buck is at home, and the words why long distance relationships don’t work blink repetitively in Eddie’s head like the flashing of the station alarm. He imagines Buck again— at home; alone; scared and sad. It makes Eddie want to cry, and he hates it, and so maybe—

Maybe it’s not what Buck deserves. But like he thought before, Buck would forgive him. He always does. Always will. Eddie is sure of it, and had been even when he was sure of little else.

So he picks up the phone and calls. It occurs to him that even now, he’s sure Buck will answer, and then he does.

He still looks tired, but Eddie notices more now— notices, consciously, the softness around his blue eyes and the set of his jaw and the way his own fingers twitch with the urge to reach out and rub it out until it goes lax. He’s always felt that way, he thinks. It feels like flight, to know and to see it.

“Hey, Buck,” he says.

His voice comes out tender, immediately. He can’t help himself and also finds that he doesn’t want to, but it puts Buck on visible alert right away. His eyes get sharp, focused on Eddie’s face, a little crease between his brows.

“Hey,” he echoes. “Something going on?”

Eddie could say a number of things. The urge to bicker and banter tugs at him like an instinct, but he resists, knowing it’s not the time. Now that he knows what he’s doing— both what he’s been doing, and what he wants— he’s singleminded. He has a mission here.

Step one: come clean.

“Actually,” he says. “Yeah.”

Buck looks immediately alarmed. Panicked, even. “What?” he asks. “Is Chris—”

There goes the twist of Eddie’s heart again. God, has it always been like that? How stupid has he been?

“No, no,” he soothes. “Chris is fine. We’re fine.”

Buck relaxes, but only a little bit. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, Buck,” Eddie chuckles lightly. “I’m sure. I didn’t mean it like that.”

Buck regards him cautiously. “But you said—”

“Yeah,” Eddie says. “I have a confession to make.”

There’s silence, then. It’s unusual in Buck’s presence, but Eddie lets him have it for a second. He’s processing, presumably— and Eddie is, too. Now that he’s looking at Buck, he’s having to try very hard to process the part where Buck is also in love with him. That they’re in love with each other, miraculously, beautifully, sensibly.

One thing at a time, though, Eddie tells himself as a reminder.

“What do you mean?” Buck asks eventually. “Did you, like, get a-a ticket or something, because—”

“No,” Eddie interrupts. This is a mission. As much as he loves Buck’s endless tangents, there isn’t time for that right now. “It’s— not like that. It’s sort of…between us.”

Buck looks blandly back at him. “Us,” he repeats. “As in…you and I.”

“Yep,” Eddie replies. He reaches for the iPad, holds it up in frame and adds, “and this.”

Buck’s face creases into total confusion at that, which is fair.

“You remember,” he starts delicately, “when you logged into your email on my iPad?”

“Um,” Buck replies. “Yes?”

“Yes,” Eddie repeats, putting the iPad down gently on the table and looking back at Buck. “Well, you’re— kind of still logged in.”

“Okay,” Buck says slowly. “So?”

“So,” Eddie says, “in the interest of full disclosure, I’ve known about this for a while and I haven’t said anything but I-I think you’re going to forgive me for that.”

Buck shakes his head. It’s early in the morning and his hair is still wild. He’s caught in the light again, in the kitchen where Eddie had thought he would be. The movement shakes a curl loose and it drifts as Eddie’s fingers twitch again.

“I don’t understand what you’re saying, Eddie,” Buck says, frustration bleeding into his tone.

Eddie will get on with it.

“You know when you go to Google dot com?” he asks. “Like— not when you just search, but when you actually go to—”

“No?” Buck says, semi-hysterical. “I don’t do that, Eds, what year do you think it is? Who does that?”

“Ah,” Eddie replies. “Well, um— people who aren’t very good with technology. Especially when the regular search isn’t working for some reason and you really need to know how to install a coupling nut.”

Buck stares at him. “You asked me how to install a coupling nut.”

Eddie has to fight very hard against the wild urge to laugh, then. He wonders— distantly— what the guy in Wranglers from Home Depot would think of him now. And then he says,

“Yes. That was because when I tried to search it, I got— distracted?”

“Eddie,” Buck groans. “What the fuck are we talking about?”

“Okay,” Eddie replies, leaning in a little. “Just— I don’t want you to freak out, okay?”

Buck, looking unimpressed, throws himself backwards in his chair and holds his hands up. “That’s a pretty good way to get me to freak out,” he says.

“Yeah, but don’t,” Eddie stresses.

“About what?” Buck says hysterically.

It’s a disaster. There’s nothing for Eddie to do now but rip the Bandaid off.

“I’vebeenlookingatyourGooglehistory,” he says, all at once.

Buck blinks. “You’ve been what?”

“I’ve been—” Eddie breaks off with a huff, and then forces his eyes back up to Buck’s. “I went to the Google home page,” he starts again. “To search the thing about the coupling nut. But then when I clicked on the search bar, the recent history was not mine, because—”

A look of comprehension has begun to dawn on Buck’s face, suddenly.

“Because I was logged in on the iPad,” he says slowly.

“Yeah,” Eddie says. “So. I didn’t log out, and I’ve been looking at your…at your search history.”

It goes quiet, so quiet that Eddie can hear the hum of the open line. A second later, there’s a look on Buck’s face that could very well be described as freaking out. It’s all wide-eyed and wild and flushed, and Eddie wants to kiss him so badly that nothing could have stopped him if they were in the same room.

“Buck—” he starts instead.

And then, all at once, the call ends.

The phone keeps ringing. Buck keeps ignoring it. Eventually, it stops.

Buck doesn’t move, though. It’s not that he doesn’t want to— actually, he would like to move a lot. He would like to run, right out the door of this house and all the way to the edge of the earth, where he will hopefully be able to fling himself into the oblivion of space and never return to the mortal coil ever again.

He just can’t. He’s frozen, stuck to this chair in Eddie’s kitchen that’s supposed to be his now but still doesn’t feel like it at all.

The crash course of Buck’s life recently goes something like this:

First, Christopher moved to Texas. Secondly, Eddie moved to Texas. Thirdly, Buck descended slowly into possibly inevitable madness over the course of a night at a bar; an ill-advised hookup with his ex who he kind of hates; and a series of conversations with various people in his life who implied that he might be in love with Eddie.

Then, one morning in the sundrenched bedroom that Eddie used to sleep in, Buck woke up wet.

Damp with sweat and sticky between his legs, he’d risen gasping and breathless from a dream in which someone— not just someone, but Eddie, definitely Eddie who vividly looked and sounded and smelled like Eddie even in his subconscious— had been saying, come for me, baby.

And Buck had. Eddie had asked him to. Apparently, he’s as pathetically inclined to listen to anything Eddie wants in every shade of consciousness and probably every parallel universe, should they be proven to exist.

He caught his breath first. And then he panicked.

Things were weird from there. He found nothing on the internet that was particularly helpful about what it might mean to have sex dreams about your platonic friend. All the advice he could find seemed to think if you were having sex dreams, it was inherently no longer platonic. That wasn’t helpful.

So he went to Maddie. He always goes to Maddie, except when he goes to Eddie, and he couldn’t go to Eddie about the fact that he was getting half-hard every time he thought about the sound of Eddie’s voice for too long.

Maddie, as it turned out, was tired of his shit. She told him this in no uncertain terms and urged him— threateningly, if he’s honest— to consider the fact that he might be an idiot.

Then he’d spoken to Eddie on the phone, and he’d been unable to stop thinking about his lips and there had been a humming beneath his skin that was somehow even more than the thrum of arousal. And in this way, Buck discovered that he was in love with his best friend.

This incited further panic, more Google searches, and a conversation that he’d had on Hen’s front porch that he’s pretty sure she’s going to hold against him for the rest of eternity. And it had been for nothing, anyway, because her advice was to talk to Eddie about this, which he definitely couldn’t do.

Because Eddie is straight. And Buck is in love with him. And they’re best friends— just normal best friends, the kind of best friends who log into each other’s accounts on multiple devices and apparently spy on each other with some level of frequency. Or at least one of them is doing that, and it’s not Buck.

So he’s frozen in his chair while Eddie keeps calling him, and he’s wondering whether there’s still anyone he knows in Peru.

Eventually, the ringing of the phone stops. Buck sits there for a long time— long enough that the light has shifted on the floor, stretching out with the turning of the hours.

Buck takes stock of his body. Slowly, he unsticks his cramped bad leg from the position he’d been holding it in for too long, wincing as he adjusts it to stretch out beneath the table. That’s as far as he gets for a little while, though, other than just sitting there and thinking about how he’s going to have to disappear from his whole entire life.

The thing is, he’s probably been in love with Eddie the whole time. He didn’t know he was— and there are a lot of jokes he probably wouldn’t have made if he had known, because he wouldn’t want to make Eddie uncomfortable. That’s the advice the internet had given, too. Overall, none of that was helpful because apparently—

Apparently, Eddie knew everything. Buck feels like he might actually be sick, and immediately after that he feels the familiar grasp of panic in his chest because this— this could ruin everything. He could lose Eddie over this. Like, really lose him. Not just to the eight hundred miles between LA and El Paso, but for good.

Don’t freak out.

That’s what Eddie had said. Don’t freak out. Buck tries to reorient around that, and finds that virtually nothing makes any sense anymore. What is he supposed to think about this? What did it mean that Eddie was even telling him this?

That’s the thought that stops him in his tracks, eventually.

What did it mean that Eddie was telling him this? Buck really, truly doesn’t know.

But he does know that he has to look at his phone eventually. He braces himself, and then picks it up. When he does, there are seventeen missed calls from Eddie, but there’s only one text.

The words in front of him take Buck’s breath right out of his lungs.

I know you’re freaking out, it says. But if you see this, really don’t. I want you to know that you’re the juice. You always were.

After that, there are three little orange emojis.

The thing about Buck is, he really, really listens to Eddie Diaz.

So he remembers what Eddie had said on the couch that night, when Buck showed up unannounced to commiserate over being left again, and Eddie let him into the house dressed for Risky Business. Buck had asked him, eventually. The obvious question.

Eddie had picked at the label on his beer and offered a small shrug. “I met this priest today,” he had said, and Buck had looked over sharply only for him to wave him off. “Relax, I’m not like— coming to Jesus or anything. I just met him. And he said I deny myself juice, because it’s joy. I deny myself joy.”

Buck remembers this moment clearly, because it had put a lump in his throat.

“You do that,” he’d said.

And Eddie had snorted. “Yeah. The juice is joy.”

In the present, Buck reads the text again. You’re the juice. You always were. You always were. You always were.

There’s something dangerously resembling hope that flares, then, in his chest. He doesn’t want to get ahead of himself, but— maybe—

He hesitates, then reaches for his laptop. It’s sitting innocuously in front of him on the table where he’d left it a while ago now, and he flips it open to type in the password, then physically types Google dot com into the browser. It pulls up the home page, and Buck’s eyes flicker to the corner.

He was right in thinking— due to the fact that Buck does a lot on his phone— that Eddie had been the last person to log in on his laptop. His profile picture is right there in the corner, a little circle.

Buck clicks on the search bar. Underneath, there’s a list of mostly uncorrelated things. But the most recent one.

The most recent one says, Direct flights El Paso to Los Angeles today

Buck’s heart leaps into his throat, throws his pulse against the back of his teeth, begs desperately for an escape. When he breathes out, it’s like butterflies all over.

Hope, Buck thinks as he frantically checks Eddie’s location only to find him last seen at the airport and currently untraceable, is a thing on which he thrives. It doesn’t entirely make sense— he knows he should probably be more jaded, more guarded with his heart. He’s been hurt and left and disregarded so many times. But he’s—

Well. He likes to hope. He likes to believe in something good and golden. He likes resilience and the underdog and coming back up swinging.

He likes joy. He likes juice. He likes Eddie.

And more than that, he trusts Eddie. He’s not completely sure that he’s gotten this right, at least not yet, but he has hope and he has trust in Eddie— that if he’s wrong, they’ll figure it out. He’s afraid of the alternative, yes, but he doesn’t believe in it. Not really. Not deeply.

So, Buck does what Buck does best and jumps headfirst.

And that’s how he ends up standing at LAX baggage claim holding a juice box and feeling ridiculous two hours later as the afternoon sun streams in through the glass and American Airlines Flight 4487 from El Paso appears on the baggage claim screen.

He’s alight with nerves, but there’s something else there, too. He can’t help thinking back over the whole thing— has been since he hung up on Eddie in a panic earlier— and what he keeps coming back to is the sound of Eddie’s voice on the phone.

Before he got into the whole thing— in the first moments, when Buck had picked up the call because he always will even when he’s out of his mind— there had been a moment.

Eddie had said, Hey, Buck. And it had been different. Buck knows it was different, because he knows all the shades of Eddie’s voice like the back of his hand and this one— this one was different. That’s where the seed of hope had been planted, where Buck waters it now.

Ahead of him, there’s an escalator leading from arrivals to baggage claim. And as Buck watches it, people start to appear on it. His heart climbs a steady, increasing pace in his chest and Buck watches the escalator some more and he thinks— fleetingly— that his life is about to change. It’s the first time in a long time, or maybe ever, that Buck has thought about that and felt like it might mean something good.

And then Eddie Diaz appears at the top of the escalator.

Buck lays eyes on him for the first time in weeks and the breath leaves his lungs at the sight of his white t-shirt and the duffle bag on his shoulder and the dark hair that flops loosely over his forehead, soft and shiny beneath the lights. There’s a set of determination to his shoulders, but his face is relaxed. He looks—

Calm.

He looks calmer than Buck thinks he ever has before, and then he turns halfway down the escalator and Buck watches as his dark eyes find him. He couldn’t look away if he tried, aware that the world is slowing to a stop like one of those movies that always make him cry. He watches, transfixed, as Eddie’s expression shifts into one of recognition and then—

And then.

Eddie’s face breaks into a smile. The honest to god sunshine kind, the kind that has Buck’s breath catching in his chest and had been since a long time ago, way before Buck knew himself well enough to piece together what it meant. The kind that casts warmth and light over the whole room, the kind that brings out Eddie’s dimple, the kind that is real and relaxed.

The one he pulls out for Christopher. The one that is, sometimes, for Buck. The one that is all Eddie.

Buck is halfway to tears before Eddie makes it off the escalator and crosses the remaining space in a few short strides.

And then— all at once like a sunshower, Eddie is standing in front of him close enough to touch and smelling familiar, and then, and then—

“Buck,” he says, with a dangerously soft tilt of his head. And then he reaches out, and Buck’s cheeks are warm and warmer with the press of Eddie’s broad palms to his face. Dark eyes find his, searing and focused and warm.

“Eddie,” he breathes. “I— um.”

Eddie keeps smiling. “Yeah?”

“I brought you juice,” Buck says. He holds it up between them, breathless and blinking. And Eddie—

Eddie laughs, head thrown back and open. Eddie laughs, and Buck’s chest glows with it. And then, Eddie is laughing into Buck’s mouth and their teeth are clashing and he’s pressing his soft warm lips against Buck’s. It’s messy and uncoordinated, but Buck melts into it and he hears the distant drop of the juice box to the floor beneath their feet as his hands find whatever of Eddie they can reach— one braced on his ribs, the other on his waist. He draws him closer without pausing to think and Eddie lets out a soft, warm sound into the kiss as his whole frame knocks into Buck’s sturdy chest, and—

Buck thinks, this. This is it. The culmination of every fear and ache he’s ever had comes down to this moment and Eddie’s grip on his face; Eddie’s mouth warm against his; Eddie’s fingers pressing gentle, absent circles into the hinge of his jaw.

And Eddie thinks, caught in the best kiss of his life with the best friend he’s ever had with Buck holding him fiercely close and Buck’s chest against his: this. This is the juice. I get it now.