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In For A Penny
“Hi,” a male voice said, at the same time as a male body half-crashed into Tommy, patiently waiting for the bartender to stop flirting with the blonde woman at the other end of the bar and actually bring back his order.
“Hi,” he offered back as the man – tall, dirty blond hair, puppy dog energy and a bright grin – disentangled them and leaned on the bar, still too close for Tommy to be entirely comfortable.
Before he could ask if they knew each other, the man said, “How would you feel about kissing me right now?”
Even in gay bars, Tommy was used to a bit more lead in; being as he was in a badge and ladder bar, he was used to not just more lead in but also that question only really coming from women.
On the other hand, it wasn’t like men were offering to kiss him everywhere Tommy went. “Can I at least ask why?” he asked, because Tommy was, when it came down to it, much better at sabotaging himself than anything else.
The man looked over his shoulder, some of his energy dimmed when he looked back. “Because there’s a woman who won’t take a hint and I’m hoping kissing you will do it?”
Tommy really shouldn’t have asked.
“You want to pretend you’re gay instead of just telling a woman straight-up that you’re not interested?”
It was hard to tell – Smith’s didn’t spend a lot of money on high quality lighting, possibly so the patrons wouldn’t be able to see how infrequently they mopped the floors – but Tommy was pretty sure the man blushed. Which was interesting.
“I could be pretending I’m bi,” he said.
Tommy’d heard plenty of horror stories about straight people and bi people (to go with the ones he’d hard about gay people and bi people). Since the man didn’t seem to actually be bi, he didn’t bother sympathizing. “I don’t think that would necessarily have the effect you were going for.”
The man made a considering face, then shrugged. “Can I kiss you anyway?”
For a fleeting moment, Tommy wanted to ask why he’d picked Tommy, out of the handful of guys leaning against the bar. The moment passed in a spiral of all the answers he might get, and the strong sense that he didn’t want to hear any of them.
“I usually get a guy’s name first,” he said instead.
The man’s eyes flickered over him – apparently Tommy didn’t have a giant flashing “queer here” sign over his head after all, which was reassuring, in a way – and he held out his hand. “Evan Buckley.”
Tommy, not above being a little bit of a prick, raised the offered hand to his mouth and kissed the back of it. “Charmed.”
Evan Buckley blinked, said, “Um,” and didn’t remove his hand.
There was a long, drawn out moment in which Tommy felt like both of them were waiting to see what Evan Buckley would do next.
Before either of them could find out, the bartender thumped a tray of beers down by Tommy’s elbow and said, “Here,” in a tone the implied the blonde woman at the end of the bar hadn’t, in the end, been all that receptive to his flirting.
Evan Buckley said, “Oh,” then, “um,” again, and blinked at him, again, and finally withdrew his hand. “I should, um…”
He was cute. If they hadn’t been in the middle of a badge and ladder bar, Tommy might have gone for it, at least kissed him on the cheek. He’d asked, after all, even if Tommy was very sure he wouldn’t have known what to do if Tommy had taken him up on the original request.
Instead, Tommy hefted his tray of drinks, said, “Nice to meet you, Evan Buckley,” and left him standing at the bar. From the feel of it, Evan Buckley watched him all the way to the corner of the bar that Harbor had holed up in.
“Make a new friend?” Cabrera asked as Tommy started distributing glasses.
Tommy checked; Evan Buckley was still watching him. He resisted the urge to wave, mostly because he wasn’t actually sure what had stalled Buckley out, and didn’t really want to deal with it when they only had an hour before three of the four of them had to get home for their kids’ bedtimes. “Nope,” he said firmly.
*
Tommy, by virtue of seniority-granted ability to choose his assignments, didn’t spend a lot of time flying the med-evac chopper. Not that he minded it, exactly, but he’d learned to fly in a warzone – setting down in wide open fields and on hospital helipads couldn’t really compete with flying S&R or hovering while people rappelled down to rescue hapless hikers from cliffs they’d fallen off of.
Sometimes, though, he didn’t have a choice, like when half the pilots made bad choices about takeout sushi for lunch and were too busy throwing up in the station toilets to fly anywhere.
Which meant, when a call came in before the on-call crew did, that Tommy found himself setting the med-evac chopper down in a wide open field, not too far from the cliff that yet another hapless hiker had gotten too close to the edge of and inevitably fallen off of.
Once they were down and the flight medics had run off to deal with whatever was wrong with the hiker that necessitated a flight, there wasn’t that much to do. Tommy couldn’t leave the helicopter unless there was an emergency with the patient, and most of the crowd of interested hikers were too busy gawking at the engines to have even noticed the helicopter in the field behind them. Not that he minded – way too many people thought a polite opening for a helicopter pilot was, “Wow, cool, have you ever crashed?”
Whatever was wrong with the hiker seemed pretty urgent – within twenty minutes, Cabrera and Travis were bundling him (her? Tommy hadn’t actually asked) onto a gurney and commandeering a couple of firefighters to help wheel it over the bumpy grass back to the chopper.
Tommy got out to open the patient door and get whatever details he needed for the flight, only to find that his medics weren’t actually done talking to the ground medics, and he was apparently going to be standing there for a while longer.
“Oh, hey,” one of the firefighters – from the 118, Tommy spotted on his helmet, automatically looking around for and not spotting Hen and Howie – said. “You’re the guy from the bar.”
“No, I’m not,” Tommy said, mostly on auto-pilot. He knew, he was pretty sure, all the queer firefighters in the LAFD, and he definitely hadn’t hit on any of them in a bar recently – mainly because he was one of only two out, queer and male firefighters, and he tried not to make the same mistake more than two (maybe three) times. Even if he had sustained a head injury that made him hit on one of the women, none of them were careless enough to say something like that in front of mutual colleagues – the LAFD was getting better, but it hadn’t actually gotten all the way to better yet, and while Tommy wasn’t in the closet any longer, that was a long way from chatting up a hook-up while he was working.
“Yes, from Smith’s.” The firefighter took his helmet off, and damn, he was right – it was Evan Buckley, still cute, even with a harness around his hips and terrible helmet hair. “Like, three weeks ago, you refused to rescue me from a woman who wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
“Maybe you should have tried actually saying no instead of just dropping hints,” Tommy said, before Buckley could say something about kissing. Cabrera got tunnel-hearing when he was working, but Travis had ears like a bat and pitch perfect timing for the worst moment to bring something up.
“I didn’t want to hurt her feelings,” Buckley said, like Tommy was the one making an unreasonable suggestion.
“Humiliating her by kissing a random guy at the bar would definitely have been a much better choice, you’re right,” Tommy said, because he apparently had no sense of self-preservation.
“It would have been more fun for me,” Buckley grumbled, immediately following it up by going red and saying, “Um,” like he had in the bar. Tommy couldn’t remember if Buckley’d looked at his mouth then; he was now.
“We’re set,” Travis said while Tommy was still trying to figure out what to say in response to any of that.
“Right, great.” Buckley put his hand on the open door of the helicopter, like he was going to boost himself in beside the patient, then apparently came to his senses and took a big step back, putting his helmet on.
He didn’t seem to notice it was backwards.
“You need to step back for the rotors,” Tommy reminded him, one foot already on the cockpit lip. Over the comms, Travis said, “First Presbyterian.”
“Right.” Buckley took another big step backwards. He’d just about moved out of the wind range for the rotors by the time Tommy’d strapped himself in, only to take a step forward and shout, “I didn’t get your name.”
Tommy could feel Cabrera rolling his eyes, even though neither one of them was doing anything that suggested the patient was going to bleed out in the three seconds it took Tommy to shout back, “Tommy Kinard.”
*
Tommy was still friendly with most of the people he’d known at the 118, but in the same way he was still friendly with most of the people he’d served with, which amounted to occasionally liking a post on Facebook, promising that they’d get together whenever they happened to run into each other while knowing it probably wouldn’t happen, and knowing who to sit next to when they got scheduled for the same mandatory in person training courses.
Howie was one of the few exceptions – Tommy didn’t tell just anyone about his love for romantic comedies – but even then, it wasn’t like they were meeting up for beers every week or anything.
Which was why Howie’s text: Just home from Boston. Eli says hi. Basketball some time this month? was as much a shock for its existence as for its content. Tommy wasn’t sure he’d even known that Eli had moved to Boston. He definitely hadn’t known that Howie had decided to go visit.
When he poked at his memory, he vaguely remembered something about Howie quitting the 118 and… going on a road-trip with his new baby? That part couldn’t be right.
Saturday? he texted back. It wasn’t often that he had the good gossip, and it would be good to hear how Eli was doing.
Howie turned up with his baby in a stroller, giving Tommy a moment of horror that maybe her mom was gone and he’d missed it – worse, that he’d acted like everything was normal when he definitely shouldn’t have been. He didn’t get a chance to stumble over the apology he was forming before Howie grabbed him in a one-armed bro hug, said, “Her mom picked up a shift last minute,” and dragged Tommy over to meet Jee-Yun.
She slept through the game – including Howie and Tommy’s decisive win over two guys from station 58 – only waking up and starting to cry for her dad as they were wrapping up the game. Howie had some kind of pureed something for her to eat, surprisingly neatly for a kid her age, while Howie mostly didn’t explain why he’d gone on a cross-country road trip with his kid in tow, except that there was a conspicuous lack of mentions of her mom until towards the end of the story, so presumably the two were related.
In the picture Howie showed him of her, she was wearing a Dispatch polo shirt and holding a much younger Jee-Yun. “She started not long after Abby left,” Howie said. They’d never talked about that, not even after Tommy broke it off with her and started quietly joining the queer first responders’ monthly sip and bitch, which Hen had almost certainly told Howie about, especially since Tommy hadn’t told her not to. “I don’t think you’d have met her – Maddie Buckley?”
It rang a bell, but Tommy still needed a second to remember why. Evan Buckley, the firefighter he’d run into twice in a month, then not seen for more than a year.
“Does she have a brother in the LAFD? I think I’ve met him.”
“Yes!” Howie said, over-bright as he focused fully on Jee-Yun, instead of the eighty percent he had been while they were talking. “Did you know that Uncle Tommy knows Uncle Buck?”
Jee-Yun said something that sounded a bit like “Buck!” while Tommy mouthed, “Uncle Tommy?” to himself – presumably one of those things people did with their adult friends to teach their kids politeness or respect or something.
“That’s actually how we met,” Howie said, half-turning back to Tommy as he dug a sippy cup out of his bag and offered it to Jee-Yun. “He’s at the 118 with us…”
Howie ended up telling him his and Maddie’s origin story in way more detail than Tommy was used to, or entirely sure he wanted, though it was cute, and Howie clearly loved her a lot, so he nodded and smiled through it the way he didn’t always bother with straight people’s love stories.
It wasn’t that he wanted to ask about Evan – or Buck? Howie called him that, but maybe it was a family nickname? It wasn’t like he’d spent the last year thinking about him, or looking out for him, or even expecting to run into him – not after the first month or so, anyway, and that was only because things usually happened in threes.
It was just that he was curious, a little bit, about Evan and the way he got all tongue-tied when either of them said anything particularly queer – not like he was homophobic, but like there was something else going on, and Tommy remembered being younger and terrified, as well as he remembered Hen half-joking about being an elder queer and how precious the baby queers were.
He and Howie didn’t have that kind of friendship, anyway.
At least they had the kind where Tommy got to cuddle little Jee-Yun when she fell asleep in his lap after one too many spoonfuls of what turned out to be pureed mango.
*
Tommy had missed the last couple of queer sip and bitch sessions, and when he finally checked the groupchat, he found they’d moved to a diner on the beach that he didn’t recognize. After multiple years at the same coffee shop near the 118 – Hen had started the group, and said that meant she got to pick the easiest location for her, even though they’d moved location twice since Tommy had joined – he thought they’d settled on a place where they’d stay. Apparently not.
His shift ran over, because man made plans too close to the scheduled end of shift and God laughed, every time, so by the time he found the place, the group was large enough that they were easy to spot. There were enough of them now that they tended to meet on a weekday morning, when their chosen venue would be quiet enough that they wouldn’t be in the way; a good thing for the diner, which was small enough that even with less than ten of them, they took up a third of the available tables.
Hen, like always, had kept the seat on her left free for Tommy to slide into, coffee in hand so he had something to hide behind for the minute or so it always took him to feel ready to look at the faces of people who knew him like no-one else did.
This time, there was a new face, sitting directly opposite Hen and chatting excitedly to Officer Ferguson about, as far as Tommy could hear over the diner’s background music, surfing.
Evan Buckley. He didn’t even know why he was surprised.
Hen caught him looking. “It’s his second time,” she said quietly. “Howie mentioned seeing you, and it took one conversation to go from that to him following me here.”
She rolled her eyes but she was also smiling, so presumably she didn’t mean literally.
“Apparently he asked you to kiss him and you turned him down?” Hen said, definitely fishing. Tommy gave her back his best poker face. She shrugged. “Well, whatever happened, you made an impression.”
She turned to talk to Frankie from Dispatch before Tommy could ask any more questions, cruelly abandoning him to Jenni Stevens from 27, who seemed to think he couldn’t talk about anything other than helicopter engines and had long ago run out of new questions to ask him about that.
He did his best, asking her about the trip to Hawai’i he vaguely remembered her talking about last time, and then about her dog, but she wouldn’t be deterred, not even when he said that he didn’t want to talk about work – she just asked him what kind of helicopter he’d buy if he could pick any, as though, even on a firefighter pilot salary, that would ever be something he could even contemplate.
He made a break for it when she got up to visit the Ladies, beelining for the counter and studying the milkshakes menu with more concentration that strawberry-vanilla-chocolate-banana warranted.
After a few seconds, someone came to stand next to him, just a little too close.
He wasn’t at all surprised when it turned out to be Evan Buckley, biting his bottom lip and watching Tommy with the same intensity Tommy was giving to the milkshakes.
“Hi,” Tommy offered, when Evan didn’t say anything. Evan’s eyes definitely dipped to his mouth this time.
“If I offer to kiss you so Jenni can’t ask you about helicopters again,” Evan said, carefully like he’d rehearsed it, “Will you say yes this time?”
It wasn’t a bad line, though given that Evan had apparently workshopped it, Tommy expected a little better. “No.”
He didn’t really understand what was happening – how Evan had gotten from “I could be pretending to be bi” to sitting at a table with the queer first responders like he maybe belonged there, even though whatever had happened, Tommy had obviously missed most of it.
Evan was sitting at a table with the queer first responders like he maybe belonged there, though, and Tommy remembered being Evan’s age and pretending he was straight, as well as being much older than Evan was now and only barely managing to admit that he might not be. Evan was what Hen would call a baby queer, and Tommy was probably, worryingly, what Hen would call a queer elder, and that meant something.
Also, Evan was still cute.
“But buy me a milkshake, and we can see how things go.”